Every Great Song Ever

Juana likes music: Am I the only one who cares about 1994?

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:53:48 -0400

Juana likes music: Am I the only one who cares about 1994?:

juanalikesmusic:

sctttnnnt:

juanalikesmusic:

Lately I’ve been thinking that this blog is exactly the opposite of what anyone would like to read: I write about music from almost 20 years ago, I write really long post with long paragraphs, I have no idea what it’s going on in the current music scene (this is only half true), I write about…

For the record 1994 is arguably the BEST year for music in the 90s. Herein are the classic albums of that year, in alphabetical order. I can’t possibly get into ranking these (other than to say Yank Crime is the greatest rock record of all time, by any artist in any decade).

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works II

Bedhead: Whatfunlifewas

Brise-Glace: When In Vanitas…

Craw: s/t

Dazzling Killmen: Face of Collapse

Drive Like Jehu: Yank Crime

Elliott Smith: Roman Candle

Flying Saucer Attack: Distance

JAKS: Hollywood Blood Capsule

Low: I Could Live in Hope

Palace Brothers: Days in the Wake

Palace Songs: Hope EP

R.E.M.: Monster

Rodan: Rusty

Shellac: At Action Park

Superchunk: Foolish

Tortoise: s/t

Weezer: s/t

And then there are some other capital-C Classics that others would canonize but which I would place below most or all of the above:

Bark Psychosis: Hex

Jeff Buckley: Grace

Pavement: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Slowdive: Souvlaki

And I’m probably forgetting some others—for instance in any other genres of music like hip hop which was having its own heyday at this time.

Listening to Justin Timberlake’s new album, The 20/20 Experience, for at least the 10th time while I still have to listen to an incredible amount of albums released in 1994, makes me feel quite guilty.

A few more for your ongoing 1994 lists!

Hole: Live Through This

Shudder to Think: Pony Express Record

Freedy Johnston: This Perfect World

Brainiac: Bonsai Superstar

Jawbox: For Your Own Special Sweetheart

Still no one has mentioned Suede’s Dog Man Star.

pitchfork: Watch Janelle Monae’s video for “Q.U.E.E.N.”...

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:10:47 -0400

pitchfork:

Watch Janelle Monae’s video for “Q.U.E.E.N.” featuring Erykah Badu.

This is one intense game of rock-paper-scissors.

Just for fun.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:14:03 -0400

Just for fun.

The first copy of The Division Bell I bought was on cassette....

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:08:42 -0400

The first copy of The Division Bell I bought was on cassette. This was the image on the cassette case.

I had a giant poster of this image on my bedroom wall all...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:05:00 -0400

I had a giant poster of this image on my bedroom wall all through high school. It’s my favorite thing Storm Thorgerson ever did, a strangely haunting symbol of human-to-human communication and how it doesn’t always go the way we hope it will.

If there’s a legitimate criticism that could be leveled at most of the work Hipgnosis did over its long run as one of the most in-demand album art companies in the world, it’s that a lot of those cool images don’t really have much to say; they’re to be taken almost as decorative. That doesn’t apply to all of them, of course, but when I look at that Audioslave cover they did, there’s not a whole lot to it. The point is that it’s enigmatic.

The Division Bell is different, though. Communication is a theme running through the album, so it makes sense that the artwork would reflect this, of course, in much the same way that, say Thorgerson’s Wish You Were Here cover reflected the themes of that album back in 1975.

So you have these heads in a field. And they are actually big, metal head sculptures, placed in a field, with Ely Cathedral way in the background. They’re shot in real light, with no matting or computer graphics.

And they’re talking to each other, sort of. Their mouths are open, but they’re both open, as though they’re talking past each other as much as to each other. And then again, the overall expression on their faces suggests that maybe they’re not even talking at all. They’re poised to talk, but they can’t think of what to say. Stand back far enough, and it even looks a bit like a single face, surprised at something you just said.

These blank-eyed sculptures are much more effective ciphers for the difficulties of telling each other how we really feel than two actual people would have been; they don’t have anything about them that suggests class, race, ideology, or any of the other things that artificially divide us. They’re the ultimate equals, and that means they share equal credit for anything they work out and are equally complicit when they blow it.

This is, of course, an example of an album cover made with a real budget. That is increasingly not an option, and people find ways around it. I think a lot of people would default to doing this by computer today, maybe with 3D models. It may not even look that different, but it wouldn’t be quite the same. For one thing, with real sculptures, Thorgerson and his team were able to move these figures all over the place and take photos under different conditions for different effects, effects that they may not have been able to predict. Open air photography is an invitation to serendipity.

There may or may not be a very subtle message about religion being a bell that divides in this image—I’m not sure if they were thinking about that or not when they chose Ely Cathedral’s bell tower as the thing that would be between the mouths of these heads. What the cathedral’s placement does accomplish rather nicely, though, is something that the best surreal images are uniquely suited to do: it reminds us how very strange the world looks on a regular basis.

That cathedral just sticks up over the trees at the end of this winterized field. People take it for granted, but it doesn’t really look like it belongs there when you scrutinize it. I wish there were more images online of the photo shoot for this album cover. I’d rather like to see the staging.

I may do a lot of writing, but I’ve never thought of myself as a great communicator, at least as far as the people in my life are concerned. So when I look at this image—when I looked at it every day, up there on my wall, it reminds me that this is pretty tough for everybody; everyone has his or her own communication problems. Sometimes, they render us mute, other times, they make us talk over or past one another.

In either event, I also think it’s notable that these big head sculptures are missing ears. Half of communication is listening, and when we forget that, it leads to problems.

This is my favorite thing Storm Thorgerson did. I hope he knew how good it was.

George Jones: “The Grand Tour” (The Grand Tour,...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:16:57 -0400

George Jones: “The Grand Tour” (The Grand Tour, 1974)

No one did heartbreak quite like George Jones. It’s hard to think of another songwriter that got dumped so regularly and with such exquisitely detailed emotion.

He did that for about sixty years, and along the way his voice became the prototype for hundreds of other country singers. He had a great voice, but his songs worked as much for his delivery, which felt honest no matter how cleverly the phrase it was carrying turned.

He was 81 when he passed away yesterday. I’ve seen a lot of people express surprise that he made it to such an old age, but what can you say? The man’s liver was stout, and his songs turned the tables on everything awful about life with subtle humor. Let a few tears fall in your beer and raise your glass to him.

Here is Bob Brozman playing “Moana Chimes,” with his...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:46:40 -0400

Here is Bob Brozman playing “Moana Chimes,” with his National on his lap. I could watch this forever.

The Bob Brozman Orchestra: “Lumiere de la Mer”...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:45:00 -0400

The Bob Brozman Orchestra: “Lumiere de la Mer” (Lumiere, 2007)

Yesterday, the extraordinary guitarist and extraordinary person Bob Brozman died at just 59.

Brozman is not a household name, but he was gifted instrumentalist with a curious ear who struck out around the world looking for new sounds and incorporating them into his polyglot playing style. His favored instrument was the National guitar, a gleaming steel-bodied acoustic with a resonance nearly as ebullient as his playing.

What I get most from Brozman’s music is an overwhelming sense of joy. Joy in discovery, joy in making these sounds come out of this beautiful instrument, joy in creation, joy in life. Brozman loved the world and reached out to grab it. He was capable of holding most of it in his fretting and picking hands.

In 2007, he released Lumiere under the name the Bob Brozman Orchestra. The joke of the group name is that the orchestra is all Bob Brozman, playing dozens of stringed instruments, including his beloved National over the top. That picture of the “Bob Brozman Orchestra” is Brozman 27 times, holding each of the instruments he plays on the album, including sax, mallet percussion and hand percussion in addition to all those strings.

“Lumiere de la Mer” is more a controlled explosion than a song, three minutes and thirteen seconds that feel as though they want to burst apart from the sheer amount of energy and happiness inside. It’s like finding out someone you love is in love with you too.

I can’t thank Brozman enough for the music he left behind. I’ll be listening to him all night.

Another example of a Hipgnosis album cover that tells a simple...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:39:39 -0400

Another example of a Hipgnosis album cover that tells a simple but effective story. In this case, you have to unfold the gatefold to get the punchline, though. Things are not what they seem in the house on the hill!

I was down an end-of-semester rabbit hole last week when I...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:10:00 -0400

I was down an end-of-semester rabbit hole last week when I learned that Storm Thorgerson died. Thorgerson’s design and photography work for Hipgnosis, and that company’s work for Pink Floyd especially, made a huge impression on me when I was in high school, and to this day, I have a sort of automatic attraction to a certain kind of surreal image—the unexpected object, sitting benignly in a landscape—that occurs no matter how ridiculous the image is.

Hipgnosis made a lot of other kinds of images, though. Thorgerson wasn’t the only one at the company, of course—he founded it with Aubrey Powell, and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle was among the many others who did outstanding work for them over the years—but with Powell, he was half of its guiding vision.

I don’t like all the work they did—they went through a phase with a lot of illustrated, roboticized images in the late 70s that I find especially puzzling, and those last few rounds of Pink Floyd reissues (immersion sets aside) struggled to find a coherent way to visit with the past and never quite located it—but they have did really fantastic stuff that’s among my favorite album art ever.

The one above is the front and back of the first solo album by Gary Brooker, best known as the pianist and singer for Procol Harum. Hipgnosis did a lot of great covers that told stories, and this is probably my favorite. The front cover especially just perfectly captures the sense that everything is going terribly wrong, and this guy is OK with it. Hey, man, why panic if you’re gonna crash? Might as well go out smiling.

I don’t know if Thorgerson went out smiling necessarily, but I do know he went out working—he kept doing LP art to the end of his life. You can argue with some of the results. When he was called on to work for a band trying to re-live the glory days of 70s rock, he could produce work that looked like an imitation of himself, but I suppose that’s always a potential trap of greatness and innovation. As I get time, I’ll run through some more of my favorite Hipgnosis covers over the next few days.

Hey, so: what's your favorite music from 1977?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:43:00 -0400

jonathanbogart:

(Songs, albums, compositions, whatever. If you have any. If you even consider music in chronological terms.)

‘77 was a pretty outstanding year, so because I haven’t been around here for a while (end of semester craziness), my 35 favorite LPs, alphabetically:

Arvo Part: Tabula Rasa
Ali Farka Toure: Africa & the Blues
Ambassadeurs International: Mandjou
The Ashantis: Ashantis Disco Play
Augustus Pablo: East of the River Nile
Bayon: Bayon
Bebeto: Esperancas Mil
Blue Oyster Cult: Spectres
Bob Marley & the Wailers: Exodus
The Cars: The Cars
Congos: Heart of the Congos
Culture: Two Sevens Clash
David Bowie: “Heroes”
Electric Light Orchestra: Out of the Blue
Erkin Koray: Tutkusu
Errobi: Errobi
Ersen: Dunden Bugune
Fela Kuti & Africa 70: Expensive Shit
Fela Kuti & Africa 70: Zombie
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson: Bridges
Heart: Little Queen
Isley Brothers: Go For Your Guns
The Jam: In the City
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express
Kunnakkudi Vaidyanathan: Violin
National Health: National Health
Neil Young: American Stars ‘n’ Bars
Parliament: Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome
Peter Gabriel: [1]
Pink Floyd: Animals
Surprise: Assault on Merryland
Talking Heads: ‘77
Wire: Pink Flag
VA: Saturday Night Fever OST

Stray tracks:
10cc: Good Morning Judge
Alain Clavier: Metadata
Althea & Donna: Uptown Top Ranking
Amit Kundar & Sulakshana Pandit: Kya Jane Yeh Duniya Kya Jane (composed by Bappi Lahiri)
Bow Wow: Silver Lightning (tip o’ the hat to Nate Patrin on this one)
Caravelli: Metamorphose Demintielle
Dragon: America
Goblin: Suspiria Main Title
Jackson Browne: Running on Empty
Joni Mitchell: Dreamland
Jose y los Reyes: Gitan Poete
Judas Priest: Sinner
Kishore Kumar/RD Burman: Bachna Ae Haseeno
Les Volcans: Edio, part 1
Mohd. Rafi & Asha Bhosle/RD Burman: Hum Kisise Kum Naheen
Nick Ayoub Jazz Quintet: Desert Boots
Procol Harum: The Mark of the Claw
The Prophets: Babylon A Fall
The Soft Boys: Wading Through a Ventilator
Steely Dan: Peg
Tamrat Ferendji & Sensation Band: Antchin Yegegnulet
Tangerine Dream: The Sorcerer Main Title (Betrayal)
Uele Kalabubu et sa Tribu: Sassa Boumbitumba
The Who: Who Are You

clambistro: morefunthanbeingsad: gameraobscura: i like to...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:39:20 -0400

clambistro:

morefunthanbeingsad:

gameraobscura:

i like to google world’s biggest something because it always results in a cool animal or a neat looking food but WORLDS BIGGEST ONION found this guy with his big onion and he’s so happy! thats a really great onion. best world’s biggest thing so far.

The pride and the happiness in this man’s face is inspiring. If only we could all find our own “giant onion” I think the world would be a much nicer place.

I worry that I will never be as stoked as this chap and his onion mate :(

Brings a tear to my eye.

Come to think of it, that’s rather discriminatory....

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:23:20 -0500

Come to think of it, that’s rather discriminatory. Stairs-only on the way to Heaven is definitely not ADA-compliant.

The Temptations: “Law of the Land” (Masterpiece,...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:26:05 -0500

The Temptations: “Law of the Land” (Masterpiece, 1973)

Last week, we lost both Richard Street and Damon Harris of the Temptations. Both were members of the group during the early 70s, when Norman Whitfield used them as one of his vehicles for psychedelic soul experimentation, and they can be heard trading lines on classics including “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Superstar (Remember How You Got Where You Are)” and “Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On.”

Harris was brought into the group to replace Eddie Kendricks, whose distinctive falsetto was a centerpiece of some of the Tempts’ biggest hits, and he stayed for four years, long enough to make a big mark. It must have been amazing for him-he’d started his career singing in a group called the Young Tempts, a Temptations tribute, and he was the kid of the group nearly ten years younger than the rest. He was born Otis Harris, but changed his name to Damon to join the group—Otis Williams wanted to be the only Otis.

Street joined in 1971, replacing Paul Williams, whose deteriorating health and spiraling addiction forced him out of music and to a tragic early death by his own hand. He’d been with Motown for a while by that point as a member of the Monitors and a staffer in Quality Control, and believe it or not, he was the first native-born Detroiter to sing with the Temptations. Everyone else had been born in the South.

While Harris’ tenure with the group was brief but brilliant, Street remained through 1993, staying through some of the group’s leanest years after joining them near their peak.

By most reports, the Temptations didn’t really enjoy singing Norman Whitfield’s message tracks—the longer-tenured members especially preferred singing harmony, and Kendricks left the group over the direction Whitfield took them in. You wouldn’t naturally guess that from listening to the way they attack storming funk numbers like “Law of the Land,” and this phase of the group’s career was arguably more influential than the pre-“Cloud Nine” string of harmony-laden hits they had in the mid-60s.

Harris had some minor success in the late 70s singing with Philly soul outfit Impact, then left music for a decade to go to college. He and Street were reunited in the 90s singing together in a Temptations revue that toured separately from the official group. Harris also founded his own cancer charity after being diagnosed with the prostate cancer that finally took his life last month. He was 62. Street was 70.

Kevin Ayers: “Interview” (Bananamour, 1973) I was...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:36:23 -0500

Kevin Ayers: “Interview” (Bananamour, 1973)

I was sad to hear of the death of Kevin Ayers last month. Ayers was one of the great eccentrics of pop music, the kind of guy who’d make whatever record he felt like making and let it sell if people wanted to buy it. He didn’t enjoy self-promotion and became a sort of archetypal cult figure because of it.

I went back and forth over which song to feature in his honor, and finally decided on “Interview,” a song about hating self-promotion and the rigamarole of life as a professional musician. It’s not bilious like so many songs in this vein, though—Ayers keeps it playful, implying that he’ll give a better interview in exchange for a bribe.

Ayers’ solo career isn’t perfect. His albums have a lot of oddball ideas on them, and they don’t all fly, but they do sketch out a charming vision of a world in which psychedelia never lost its grip on the pop charts and skewed humor was a coin in the everyday currency of rock and roll.

Whimsy was important to Ayers’ music. He came from the so-called Canterbury scene,where he spent the mid-60s playing in The Wilde Flowers, a band that at various points also included the founders of Caravan, Gong, and Soft Machine, which Ayers was a member of for two years before striking out on his own.

These groups played cerebral rock music that drew heavily from jazz for its structures, but for all its up-front virtuosity, it was mostly lacking in the overt masculinity most of the era’s prog and blues rock. It was whimsical and witty, given to abstraction and occasional nonsense, and not afraid to give an album a title like “Bananamour.”

If you can’t see it in the jpg on your feed, yes, the cover does feature two bananas in love in the lower right corner. For a while, Ayers referred to his band as “The Whole World,” as in “Kevin Ayers and the Whole World,” which I always loved as a band name because of the way it includes the listener in the creative process.

Ayers spent much of the 90s and early 00s sequestered in southern France, but came back in 2007 with the poignant farewell LP The Unfairground, which featured old colleagues as well as large cast of younger indie rock musicians. Never much of a touring musician, Ayers let it be the final word. He died in his sleep on February 18th, back in southern France.

The Shangri-Las: “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:59:06 -0500

The Shangri-Las: “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” (Red Bird RB 10-008, 1964)

Writer/producer Shadow Morton died on Valentine’s Day. This is the first song he ever wrote or produced.

Morton wasn’t really a songwriter in 1964, but he wanted to be one, and the fact that he’d never put a note down on paper didn’t stop him from visiting the Brill Building, where his old girlfriend, Ellie Greenwich, worked as part of a very successful writer/producer duo with Jeff Barry. He told them he’d written a bunch of potential hits.

Barry saw through it and challenged him to bring in a demo. I don’t imagine he thought he’d hear anything like this. Barry and Greenwich knew something about teen drama and writing hits. They’d been working with Phil Spector since 1962. They wrote “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “Baby I Love You,” four songs that essentially defined the girl group sound, at least until The Supremes broke big a couple of years later.

So Shadow Morton, still known as George at the time, left the Brill Building and drove to the beach. With seagulls calling outside, he sat in his car and wrote “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” The Shangri-Las were singing in clubs after a couple of flop singles and had no record contract at the time, and he convinced them to cut a demo of the song with him (Billy Joel, working sessions in his pre-Atila days, played piano on the demo).

I’m trying to picture Jeff Barry listening to this in his office the following week. It wasn’t this exact recording, but it must have been clear how great it was, so Barry must have felt odd knowing that this guy who had obviously been bullshitting him a few days earlier had made good on his claims. Regardless, Barry got Morton and the Shangri-Las contracts with Red Bird, a little-remembered but amazingly successful label where Barry and Greenwich were the lead producers.

“Remember” got to #5, and it launched the Shangri-Las to sudden stardom. This song really gets me—it is uncommonly dark for its time. Morton had taken the big drama of the Spector-produced girl groups and twisted it into detailed, harrowing melodrama. The girl narrating this song is distraught over losing her lover, man she has not seen for a year and who has now sent her a letter telling her he’s found someone else. What a jerk.

In Mary Weiss, Morton found the perfect actress to deliver his lines—she nails the desperation of the prechorus, sputtering “let me think, let me think/what can I do” with utter desperation as the chord sequence spirals down three beats at a time.

And then the gulls come.

This would be a brilliant song in almost any arrangement, but the thing that always sticks with me most is the seagulls that creep into the chorus, which is weirdly the quietest part of the song. They start out way in the background, but they get louder as the chorus goes on, and the effect is chilling.

This is not some sunny beach scene—it is pretty much that awful, hot-feeling kind of headache you get when you realize things have gone terribly wrong and there is nothing you can do about it, transformed into music. Possibly, it’s the same feeling Morton had as he left the Brill Building knowing he had no songs with which to answer Barry’s challenge.

What you do with panic makes a big difference to the kind of life you lead. If it swallows you whole, as it appears to do with this song’s poor narrator, it may be the end of you. But if you can harness it to spur creation, as Morton did, it might lead to something great.

Morton rode high for a few years as a writer and producer in the mid-60s, then had a fair amount of success during the 60s/70s transition years producing hard rock and proto-prog bands, including Vanilla Fudge, whose biggest hit was a grotesque heavy rock version of a girl group hit (the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”), and Iron Butterfly, who played their infamous 17-minute version of “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida” at Morton’s urging as he pretended to fix his mixing board (he was actually recording them without telling them).

He left music in the 70s and never really made a comeback. Unlike Phil Spector, he never did any legacy productions with John Lennon or the Ramones, and unlike David Axelrod, he never became a vogue household name or reliable sample fodder. But he did help make some of the best records of the 60s, and this is one of them.

nedraggett: If you’re in Michigan you might want to hold off on...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:37:31 -0500

nedraggett:

If you’re in Michigan you might want to hold off on shopping at Stormy Records this week.

That is terrible, though the truck is actually in the comics shop on the ground floor—Stormy is upstairs.

everygreatsongever: Donald Byrd: I’ve Longed And Searched For...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 08:33:41 -0500

everygreatsongever:

Donald Byrd: I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother (I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, 1964)

For an album called I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, Donald Byrd’s tenth LP as a bandleader is for the most part remarkably celebratory. Like its predecessor, A New Perspective, it combines threads of cool jazz and gospel to create a seamless and singular sound. A few years later, Quincy Jones took this same kind of sound, dragged it further out of church and shot it into orbit on his great Walking In Space LP, but here it still has a strongly organic feel.

In the middle of all this joyous, wordless singing and upbeat jamming, though, is this song, “I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother,” which is… I don’t know what you’d call it. A cosmic funeral march, perhaps. It twists the ebullience of the rest of the LP inside out, and for all its very intentional drama, it’s really a devastating piece of music.

Byrd takes the sound he’d developed and pulls it apart, strand by strand, isolating one female voice and setting her away from the background singers. The others may be there, cooing at the fringes, but she is alone. He has the saxes playing at the very bottom of their range, where the tone is naturally rougher and less even, and he keeps his own trumpet muted at the outset, calling out from the distance. When he finally takes a solo, he doesn’t sing out—he sings inward. His trumpet sounds exhausted but determined.

It’s a modern tone poem. It doesn’t tell a story with a concrete beginning, middle and end, but it does nevertheless tell a complete story, taking you on a journey of ache.

Albums like this make me wonder why I don’t hear more about Byrd as a bandleader. He’s widely respected as a trumpeter, but the LPs he made under his own name aren’t usually considered must-hear entries in the jazz canon unless you’re already in deep. I suspect some hardcore jazz heads never forgave him for the records he made in the 70s with the Blackbyrds, a fusion group he assembled from among his best students as he was teaching music at the university level. It’s also awfully hard to make a dent in jazz’s front line when it’s populated by guys like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans and Dizzy Gillespie.

Regardless, the guy was a fantastic leader with lots of great, creative ideas, and exploring his catalog reveals some amazing stuff, from his hard bop days in the 50s all the way through the Blackbyrds. His roughest fusion record, 1971’s Ethiopian Knights, is a favorite of mine.

I’ve loved this song for years, but there’s a reason I chose to write about it today.

Byrd was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II in 1932. He grew up in Detroit, was a music major at Wayne State University, and went on to a brilliant and prolific career leading his own bands and playing with Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton (while he was still in high school!), Herbie Hancock, Paul Chambers, Horace Silver, Red Garland, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and others. He was one of the last people to play with Eric Dolphy before the woodwind player’s untimely death from insulin shock.

And he taught his craft generously, to students at Oberlin, Rutgers, Howard and half a dozen other schools. He’s still going today at 77, living in New Jersey.

And as for me, I just moved to the Detroit area so my wife could teach at Wayne State. And there is something about this piece of music that matches the journey of Byrd’s home city over the last five decades. Detroit’s population peaked in 1950. Things were already changing by the time Byrd recorded this fourteen years later—the ‘67 riots weren’t the beginning of the end like we’re often told. They were a step along the way.

And of course, you’ve seen the photos of abandoned homes and factories, and the vacant lots, and you’ve heard about the white flight and the hollowing of the city’s core. But I’ve been around this place a little now, and I can tell you it’s not all bad. The suburbs and the city still have their backs turned to each other, and there’s a lot to be done, but the thought of doing it makes Detroit an uncommonly exciting place to be these days.

And that’s the bit I left out of my description of the song above—the edge of hope. It has the ring of a long, exhausting journey that hasn’t reached its destination yet. You don’t know where else it will take you, but the future just might carry you home. And that’s something to look forward to.

Donald Byrd passed away last week, and I’ve been wanting to do a proper remembrance post. Re-sharing this will have to do for the moment.

oneweekoneband: “Nights on Broadway”...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:57:29 -0500

oneweekoneband:

“Nights on Broadway” from Main Course (1975)

I’m aware that I’m breaking my “non-hit” rule by talking about this song, but it’s being brought up for two reasons:

1. This track was the birth of Barry’s falcetto that would soon define the band’s sound. The Bee Gees were obviously not the first group to use falcetto lead vocals, but they became and still are the group most famously associated with it.

Before falcetto vocals took over the spotlight on Bee Gees’ songs and albums, it got its start when Arif Mardin encouraged the brothers to improvise and experiment after the main vocals for “Nights on Broadway” had been completed. As Barry explains:

Arif wanted us to go out and try to scream like Paul McCartney would sometimes scream in falcetto…so I started answering “blame it all” …and in doing so I discovered I had a falcetto voice. I knew it was back there somewhere, because we tried things like that very early on [in our career].

Excited with this new discovery, following “Nights on Broadway” they wrote and recorded “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)”, which would become the first of many songs in their career written specifically for Barry’s falcetto. They would also go back and add falcetto backing vocals to the already completed track “Wind of Change”.

2. As mentioned in my introduction, this is the song that got me hooked on the Bee Gees and remains one of my favourite songs of all time. I am still known to unapologetically crank the volume and sing along at top volume when this shows up on a shuffle playlist.

Don’t judge.

* * *

With the release and success of Main Course, the Bee Gees were now set on the trajectory that would launch their career into the stratosphere over the next five years.

I’ve been enjoying The Vinyl Kat’s One Week One Band on the Bee Gees, a band I know pretty well but not nearly as well as the writer. One thing that really jumps out to me listening to this song tonight that I never noticed before is how strongly the vocal sound on the up-tempo parts of this song anticipates the vocal sound of ELO’s late 70s albums.

The Troggs: “I Can’t Control Myself” (Page One...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:31:00 -0500

The Troggs: “I Can’t Control Myself” (Page One POF 001, 1966)

Troggs vocalist Reg Presley died today after a bout with cancer. He was 71.

Back in middle school, we had a music appreciation class, and there was a program of old songs cut together in a big medley marketed under the title “Rock On!” that we all learned to sing in unison. “Wild Thing” was one of those songs, and I remember even back then thinking that it sounded so much rougher and uglier than the other stuff in the program.

Years later, during college, I was sitting in my dorm room listening to the cut-price Troggs compilation I’d just bought and I realized what the primary difference was: on their early recordings, The Troggs had no cymbals. Check out “I Can’t Control Myself.” The drums are just thudding snare, tom tom and kick. There’s no ride dividing the pulse, no crash for accents, just Ronnie Bond’s raw pounding to back up the basic chords and Presley’s lascivious vocal, which was too much for a lot of radio stations in its day.

The Troggs formed in Andover, England as the Troglodytes, a fitting name for their sound. they got picked up by the manager of the Kinks and shortened it, then joined the Kinks as progenitors of a basic sound you could legitimately call a precursor of punk. Both bands moved on quickly, but once the genie was out of the bottle, it wasn’t going back in.

The Troggs got some cymbals and made the pop gem “With a Girl Like You,” their only UK #1 (“Wild Thing” topped the US chart), then slid sideways into something like psychedelia with “Night of the Long Grass” and “Love Is All Around.” By 1969, they’d fallen to the back of the pack and called it quits.

The members stayed in music, though, and they reunited less than a year later to toil in obscurity, making albums sporadically. The final one was an unlikely 1991 collaboration with members of REM called Athens Andover, which I used to see in used bins, though I’ve never heard it.

Presley had to finally leave music two years ago after his lung cancer diagnosis, but otherwise, he stuck at it his whole life and left some great stuff behind. Press play on that primal yowl one more time.