httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNNGkybsLUI
For some reason, this damn song was stuck in my head.
Category: Music
Music notes from all over
Rachid Taha Rocks
“Rock el Casbah: The Best of Rachid Taha” (Rachid Taha)
Rachid Taha is great, too bad he didn’t see fit to include Chicago on his recent tour.
An old-school rock star headlined SummerStage in Central Park on Saturday afternoon. Grinning and unshaven, he strutted around the stage, sang in a knowing growl and cued his band for extended, hard-grooving versions of songs using fuzz-toned guitar riffs over a dance beat.
He wore a leather fedora, then switched to a red cowboy hat. He dumped a bottle of water onto audience members — redundant, since it was raining — and onto his own head. He twirled his microphone on its cord, joked about Ecstasy and cocaine and was less than reverent when handed a flag. For his encore the band vamped and chanted, “Get up, get up,” and the star declaimed, “My name is James Brown! My name is Marvin Gaye!” But his other songs were serious: reflections on exile and cultural strife.
The star was Rachid Taha, an Algerian now based in France. Mr. Taha is the most rock-influenced of Algerian rai singers, who mix Arabic and North African elements with Western ones; he has collaborated with British musicians including Brian Eno, Steve Hillage and Robert Plant. At SummerStage his songs dipped into hard rock, reggae, rumba-pop and Bo Diddley, but often they used Arabic-style beats defined by the hand drum called a darbuka, and Mr. Taha’s voice was answered by oud solos.
Rai’s blunt lyrics have made it both popular and persecuted in Algeria, while in France the music has become a voice for Arab-speaking immigrants. (Mr. Taha had a band in the 1980s called Carte de Séjour, or “residence permit.”) One of Mr. Taha’s hits, and an extended centerpiece at his SummerStage show, was “Ya Rayah” (“Party”), an old Algerian song about emigration and the longing for home, which began with an unmetered, tradition-tinged introduction before the beat kicked in.
Mr. Taha has just released a greatest-hits album in the United States, “Rachid Taha: The Definitive Collection (Wrasse), and he sang some of them, including “Rock el Casbah,” his precise Arabic translation of the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” a song about rock as banned but unstoppable music.
We’ve raved about Mr. Taha previously
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Eric K. Arnold is also a fan:
Rachid Taha compares his music to a plate of couscous. Interviewed via translator from his home in France, the 49-year-old Algerian-born singer and global punk icon says he was happy to discover that “Frank Zappa had come to the same conclusion when he said, ‘How to describe my music? Difficult to explain if you’ve never tasted couscous.’ “
Known for playing a modified version of the oud called the mandolute, Taha says he represents a link “between Africa, the Orient and the West. In the same way as Omar Sharif is to cinema,” he adds wryly.
A career-spanning Taha retrospective, “Rock El Casbah: The Best Of,” was released in the United States this month, in time for a four-city tour (which brings him to San Francisco’s Stern Grove Festival July 13). Like couscous, the 15-song CD draws its flavor from many different elements. There’s the punk side, represented by his celebrated version of the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” and the rabble-rousing “Douce France.” Taha’s love of traditional folk music comes through on his covers of Farid El Atrache’s “Habina” and Dahmane El Harrachi’s “Ya Rayah.” A philosophical, existentialist aspect shows up in “Kelma” (“Thoughts”), and “Ida” (“If”). And “Menfi” – which translates to “The Exile” – addresses a prominent theme in Taha’s music, that of identity.
Specifically, the identity of being Algerian, Arabic and Muslim while living in a country that hasn’t always been friendly to immigrants. Coming to France from Algeria at a young age, he says, “I knew what to expect.”
Tradition plays a big role in Taha’s music. Yet he’s incorporated progressive elements into his style, paving the way for such later artists as Natascha Atlas and Cheb Mami. In his solo career, he’s worked extensively with producer Steve Hillage, who, in addition to adding electronic textures to Taha’s sound, “is a guitar-playing Peter O’ Toole,” he says. (Think “Lawrence of Arabia,” not “My Favorite Year.”)
I probably already own most of the songs on the Greatest Hits package1, but I’ll probably still pick it up.
Footnotes:- I’m too lazy to check right now [↩]
Beck Abides
Beck has a hit and miss track record. Some of his albums were an intrinsic part of my soundtrack in those heady late 90s, Sea Change is a great change of pace, Mutations worked as a melancholy Tropicalia, but other releases are prosaic, disposable.
“It is a bit random, what ends up getting released and what stays in the can,” Beck, who is known by his first name, said in his ambling So-Cal drawl. “Some of it’s embarrassing, and some of it’s better than you thought. Some of it should be burned.”
He compared his unreleased songs to planes on a runway, some still waiting to take off and some that never will, and marveled at the many unexplored destinations where his muse might have led him. “There’s so many directions things could have gone,” he said.
The paths taken and not taken have brought him to another valedictory point in his mercurial career. On Tuesday, his 38th birthday, Beck will release “Modern Guilt,” his eighth major-label studio album. It is his first collaboration with Danger Mouse, the D.J. and producer who is half of the funk-rock group Gnarls Barkley, and his final release under the recording deal that began with Beck’s 1994 breakthrough, “Mellow Gold, ”which featured the ubiquitous novelty song “Loser.”
[From Music – In a Chaotic Industry, Beck Abides – NYTimes.com]
Chan Marshall aka Cat Power sings some backup vocals. Worth a second glance at least.
EMI’s New Boss Different Than Old Boss
EMI in the news again (previous discussion from last winter), as more and more high profile musicians decide they would do better negotiating their own deals. The model of music behemoths like EMI holding all the advantages is rapidly changing, and this change is for the better from where I sit.
EMI’s corporate roots stretch back to a pioneer of recorded sound, a German-born American named Emile Berliner, who founded the Gramophone Company. As a result of a merger in the 1930s, it was renamed Electric and Musical Industries Limited.
It was 30 years later that a man named Brian Epstein walked through the doors with a tape from a new band called the Beatles. Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye have all called EMI home.
“EMI and the companies that formed it made London a center for musical culture in a way it never was,” said Peter Martland, a professor at Cambridge University and author of “EMI: The First 100 Years. “There is a lot of history there.”
“Since Records Began: Emi : The First 100 Years” (Peter Martland)But the music business, even in good times, is not welcoming to outsiders. The sensibilities of a financier like Mr. Hands are usually starkly at odds with the folkways of a creative enterprise. Artists’ egos need stroking, and the measurement of success is not the same in music as it would be in running service stations along the autobahn.
“You have to understand the artist’s psyche to make it work,” said Jazz Summers, who manages The Verve, a band signed to EMI, and was present at the dinner last autumn.
The story has even turned comical at times. After Mr. Hands discovered that some employees were laundering costs for things that were illegal (drugs and prostitutes, he said), by itemizing them on expense reports as “fruit and flowers,” he set a strict travel and entertainment policy that required receipts for every expense.
Artists, too, have clashed more openly with Mr. Hands: the band Radiohead has fled and the singer Joss Stone has asked to be let out of her contract. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, have been talking with other record companies about a new label. (If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band’s catalog).
“They hate him,” said Hugh Hendry, a British hedge fund manager and former EMI shareholder who had publicly criticized past management, of artists’ opinions about Mr. Hands. “He’s rude. He’s abrasive. He wants to make money. He’s the first to say to artists, ‘We are not going to pay you too much money. Now get out of my office.’ ”
[From EMI’s New Boss Sees Cracks in Music World – NYTimes.com]
Guy Hands reminds me of Chainsaw Al Dunlap; for EMI’s sake, I hope Hands doesn’t use the Sunbeam model as something to emulate.
Brazilian visionary Gilberto Gil
We’ve expressed support for Gilberto Gil previously1, but the subject of technology and music is still newsworthy:
Artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails recently enjoyed huge publicity windfalls by distributing their music for free on-line, but they’ve got a way to go before catching up to Brazilian singer Gilberto Gil as digital visionaries.
Long before peer-to-peer file sharing turned the music world into a free-for-all, Gil was distributing his songs on the Internet.
He launched his own Web site in 1996, began streaming his music for listeners to audition, and officially released the first song by Brazilian artist through the new medium. It was a stage in a journey that has obsessed him for a half-century. In the ‘60s he wrote the song “Electric Brain,” which presaged his Internet breakthrough three decades later, and his latest album is titled “Banda Larga” (Warner), or “The Broad Band,” in part a manifesto for a more democratic future driven by technology.
“It has been a dream of mine for a long time, this world we live in now,” Gil said in an interview from his office in Brazil. “It is a natural outcome, a world in which technology allows universal access. It makes music and tools available to large parts of society that didn’t have that kind of access before.”
That “natural outcome” is still a few years off from reaching the poorest of the poor in Brazil, a vast country in which many citizens in the remote interior still do not have electricity, let alone computers.
Which is why Gil, in his latest guise as his country’s minister of culture, is spearheading a project to ensure that each child in the country has a laptop within the next few years.
[Click to read more of Turn It Up – Brazilian visionary Gilberto Gil leads a second revolution]
Viva Mr. Gil! Computer technology has been a commodity long enough so that the basic building materials are available for pennies. Why shouldn’t access to computers be a basic human right?
Footnotes:“The electronic culture is our future, and it needs to be open to everyone as quickly as possible,” he says. “I consider it my main goal as a politician.”
It’s not a role one would’ve predicted for Gil. In the ‘60s, he and fellow iconoclast Caetano Veloso were thrown out of Brazil by the dictatorial government for making music that openly questioned the status quo. Gil, Veloso and a handful of young artists led the subversive Tropicalia movement, which melded Brazilian sounds with rock and avant-garde music. Tropicalia embraced hybrids of seemingly incompatible styles, and tacitly celebrated the multiracial makeup of Brazil’s population. It was a time when music played a critical role in pushing a nation forward, at great personal risk.
“Gil himself, with his incredible ear and mastery of the guitar, his pulverizing sense of rhythm, was a constant promise that the limitations of our environment could be overcome,” Veloso wrote in his memoir, “Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil” (Knopf).
- at this blog’s previous address, and one article republished already [↩]
Alison Krauss And Robert Plant, Together
Really wish I could have seen this tour of Robert Plant and Alison Kruass, sounds like it was great.
Both vocalists were in extraordinary voice — perhaps not a surprise given how distinctive and commanding they usually are. But they blended so well together, whether they were singing a tight, controlled Everly Brothers-style harmony in “Rich Woman,” the night’s opener, or letting loose during a soaring reimagining of Zeppelin’s “Black Country Woman” that seemed to rattle the bunker-like Roanoke Civic Center.
[snip]
From beneath a cascading mane, the 59-year-old Mr. Plant was in a playful spirit throughout the evening, joking through song introductions and smiling and glancing out of the corner of a twinkling eye at the reserved Ms. Krauss, who did her best to avoid his distractions. Calling her “the most gifted musician I know,” he made it clear he relished the chance to perform at her side, all but laughing in joy after a song in which their vocals intertwined.
As for Ms. Krauss, who is 36 years old, her voice is so pure and potent that she can control a down-tempo number by holding a crystalline note and letting it build in volume, seemingly without effort. If the evening’s version of Tom Waits’s “Trampled Rose” was maudlin to the point of overbearing, Ms. Krauss wasn’t to blame. She sang it with disarming power.
Which isn’t to say that Mr. Plant was outclassed. The duo’s version of Doc Watson’s “Your Long Journey” was a lovely bluegrass prayer, and in “Killing the Blues” their voices formed a flawless two-part harmony. Despite an evening’s worth of resourcefulness and invention, the most magical moments were when the singers sang, together and without reservation.
Full access to story using this link
João Gilberto’s Pioneering Records In a Legal Limbo
“The Legendary João Gilberto” (João Gilberto)
This is really a shame, I’ve often wanted to hear these albums, and have hoped eventually the copyright issue would get settled.
A NUMBER of notable concerts of Brazilian music around the world this year, including one by João Gilberto next Sunday at Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival, are being advertised with the line “50 Years of Bossa Nova.” Mr. Gilberto is considered by many to have defined the musical form, which was embraced internationally and has never really gone away in Brazil. Yet Mr. Gilberto’s first three albums, some of the best music of the 20th century, have largely been unavailable.
For 10 years or so they haven’t been in record stores, nor on Amazon.com (unless you’re willing to pay $100 or more for used copies) nor on iTunes. The only way you may have found them was through illegal file sharing, or, if you were lucky enough, to know someone who had copies. This is a weird turn of events in an age that keeps valuable cultural artifacts at close reach.
After 1997, when Mr. Gilberto sued EMI, his former record label, the company ceased manufacturing the albums. Mr. Gilberto and his manager declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but according to Ana Trajan, a lawyer at EMI Brazil, the music is still caught in a long legal process. There are no plans for its reissue, despite a 50th anniversary being the obvious moment.
Bossa nova, a subtle, rustling music with jazz harmony, chamber-music dynamics, samba rhythm and close-miked emphasis on voice and guitar, began when the Brazilian recording industry, and the Brazilian economy, was at a high. It may have gestated in 1957 in clubs around Rio’s borough of Copacabana, or even a year earlier in the state of Minas Geraes, in the confines Mr. Gilberto’s sister’s tiled bathroom, where Mr. Gilberto played in isolation for eight months, forming his intimate voice-and-guitar sound.
And then came Mr. Gilberto’s album, “Chega de Saudade,” recorded in 1958 and 1959. The songs on that record, and on his next two — “O Amor, o Sorriso e a Flor” and “João Gilberto” — were very nearly the first examples of a new musical style. More important, they permanently defined that style. Bossa nova is the rare example of a music whose lines of history and influence keep tracing, more or less, to one person — something you can’t say for blues or jazz or country or rock ’n’ roll. It’s rarer still that the person is still alive and performing.
[Click to read more of Music – João Gilberto’s Pioneering Bosso Nova Records Are Caught in a Legal Limbo – NYTimes.com]
Glancing at my iTunes library, I only have one João Gilberto album, a extremely listenable collaboration with saxophonist Stan Getz, that you’ve probably heard snippets from in various films:
“Getz/Gilberto” (Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto)
Originally released in March 1964, this collaboration between saxophonist Stan Getz and guitarist João Gilberto came at seemingly the end of the bossa nova craze Getz himself had sparked in 1962 with Jazz Samba, his release with American guitarist Charlie Byrd. Jazz Samba remains the only jazz album to reach number one in the pop charts. In fact, the story goes that Getz had to push for the release of Getz/Gilberto since the company did not want to compete with its own hit; it was a good thing he did.Getz/Gilberto, which featured composer Antonio Carlos Jobim on piano, not only yielded the hit “Girl from Ipanema” (sung by Astrud Gilberto, the guitarist’s wife, who had no professional experience) but also “Corcovado” (“Quiet Night”)–an instant standard, and the definitive version of “Desafinado.” Getz/Gilberto spent 96 weeks in the charts and won four Grammys. It remains one of those rare cases in popular music where commercial success matches artistic merit. Bossa nova’s “cool” aesthetic–with its understated rhythms, rich harmonies, and slightly detached delivery–had been influenced, in part, by cool jazz. Gilberto in particular was a Stan Getz fan. Getz, with his lyricism, the bittersweet longing in his sound, and his restrained but strong swing, was the perfect fit. His lines, at once decisive and evanescent, focus the rest of the group’s performance without overpowering. A classic.
“Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World” (Ruy Castro)
Oh, and I’ll have to look out for this book:
Ruy Castro’s authoritative history of bossa nova was published here in 2000 as “Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World.” Naturally, its Brazilian title was “Chega de Saudade,” and naturally, a portrait of Mr. Gilberto was its centerpiece
When I make my long-awaited sojourn to Brazil, I’ll have to look for this version, remastered or not:
The three original LPs were collected together on a remastered, three-album vinyl version, called “O Mito” (“The Myth”), released by EMI Brazil in 1988 (a CD version was released in Brazil in 1992). In 1990 the collection was released in the English-language market by EMI’s World Pacific imprint, as “The Legendary João Gilberto.”
Mr. Gilberto sued EMI in 1997, contending that the old music had been poorly remastered. A statement by his lawyer at the time declared that the reissues contained sound effects that “did not pertain to the original recordings, banalizing the work of a great artist.”
There were also other issues. Luiz Bannitz, the legal director at EMI Brazil from 1999 to 2004, said that the royalty rate in EMI’s old contract with Mr. Gilberto, drawn up in the 1950s, was very low by current standards — “less than 5 percent,” he said. The court ruled in 2002 that EMI should raise his royalty rate to 18 percent, but Mr. Gilberto began a series of appeals on other decisions related to the case; the lawsuit is still pending a superior tribunal court decision.
For good or ill, it is the remastered, early ’90s CD version of this music that I keep in my head. I have heard an old, pre-remastering Brazilian LP pressing of the album “Chega de Saudade,” and the remastered version has some perhaps unnecessary reverb and a more spacious sound-picture, a result of turning mono originals into stereo — the standard practice during the early years of CD reissues. As a consequence the balance of instruments sounds slightly reshuffled; the percussion, for instance, is louder.
Levon Helm is back
Levon Helm is cool; his voice is a public resource and a treasure. I wish I could have heard him perform, as I liked his recent album a lot.
What remains of that world-weary drawl is a bit frayed around the edges, but it remains a potent instrument, as evidenced by last year’s “Dirt Farmer” (Vanguard), Helm’s first solo album in 25 years. It contains rural blues and mountain-soul laments that he learned from his parents while growing up on a cotton farm in Helena, Ark., as well as more recent contributions from Buddy and Julie Miller and Steve Earle. It’s done up in low-key rustic colors that evoke Helm and the Band in their “Basement Tapes” glory with Bob Dylan. This is the sound of friends gathered in a room to make music of intense conviction at a relaxed pace, and it feels as comfortable as a well-worn flannel shirt, as heart-breaking as a death-bed kiss, as vibrant as a Saturday-night, moonshine-fueled hootenanny.
The cast of co-conspirators includes Larry Campbell, who has served ably as Dylan’s touring guitarist and now plays the role of Helm’s producer, guitarist and fiddle-player. Campbell’s wife, Teresa Williams, contributes sublime harmony vocals, alongside Helm’s daughter, Amy. But at the center of it all is Helm, who plays drums, mandolin and sings with gusto. He brings a wounded yowl to the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Blues Lover,” a lonesome pathos to Earle’s “The Mountain.” These songs are reminders of a rural way of life that is fast fading, as are singers who actually lived through these experiences.
Helm is 68 and has been paying off his medical debts by playing regularly in his adopted hometown of Woodstock, in upstate New York (Helm doesn’t collect songwriting royalties on Band songs, because Robbie Robertson laid publishing claim to most of the band’s material, so he’s largely dependent on live performances for income). His Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, modeled after the traveling minstrel shows of his youth, have attracted the likes of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John and Donald Fagen.
[From Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap | Chicago Tribune | Blog]
Robbie Robertson screwed his bandmates out of royalties, as far as I can tell, and should be ashamed. The Band were excellent because they were a collaborative effort, not because Robbie Robertson was a genius. Helm wrote a marvelous book on the history of The Band, including the topic of publishing credits, if you haven’t read it, you should.
“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)
His voice doesn’t quite have the range that it used to soar to, but it still contains a lot of power. I don’t know enough about drumming to recognize if his drumming skills are still stellar, but some say his drumming is still good:
Helm survived a bout with throat cancer that was diagnosed in 1998, and his voice is noticeably more weathered than it once was, but in many respects the additional nooks and crannies suit this material beautifully; his interpretations of traditional rural folk songs like “Poor Old Dirt Farmer,” “Little Birds,” and “False Hearted Lover Blues” sound thoroughly authentic but with a bracing sense of force and commitment in Helm’s vocals, and if Steve Earle‘s “The Mountain” and Buddy & Julie Miller‘s “Wide River to Cross” aren’t venerable classics, they sound like they should be once Levon’s done with them. Though Helm adds a touch of boogie to “Got Me a Woman” and a jumped-up interpretation of the Carter Family‘s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” in this context they add some welcome spice to the stew, and Helm’s drumming remains superb. Dirt Farmer is a hard-edged but compassionate and full-hearted set of roots music from a master of the form, and it’s a welcome, inspiring return to form for Levon Helm after a long stretch of professional and personal setbacks.
Liege and Lief
“Liege & Lief” (Fairport Convention)
Liege and Lief has long been a favorite of mine, dating back to the vinyl record era. Still probably in my top 20 favorite albums, if I made a list and checked it twice. Apparently, an “expanded” version is about to come out, with a second disc of crap that wasn’t good enough in 1969, but now will be used to lure suckers like me into repurchasing the album (for the third time!)
John Harris on the story of Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief:
In 1969, reeling from the shock of a tragic car crash, Fairport Convention recorded an album that would change British folk for ever. John Harris hears the story of Liege and Lief.
… The spark for Fairport taking this watershed turn was the Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink, the record that – along with Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes bootleg – brought about a widespread musical volte-face, in which what remained of psychedelia was replaced by a new rootsiness. Among the rock aristocracy, its influence was evident in the Beatles’ ill-fated back-to-basics project Let It Be, the Rolling Stones’ purple patch that began with Beggars Banquet, and Eric Clapton’s decision to call time on Cream.In Fairport’s case, it convinced them that their early dalliance with transatlantic influences was best forgotten. “Music from Big Pink showed us that Americana was more suited to Americans, and we needed to explore Britannicana, or whatever the equivalent of that was,” says Thompson. “They seemed to nail American roots styles so well, and blend them so seamlessly: country, R&B, blues. At that point, we thought, ‘We’ll never be that good at American music. We should be looking at something more homegrown.’”
Just as Big Pink evoked what the writer Greil Marcus later called “the old, weird America”, so Fairport resolved to connect themselves with an arcane, semi-mystical side of the UK’s history that pop culture had left untouched. Regular trips were made to Cecil Sharp House, the traditional music archive near Regent’s Park in north London, where Hutchings in particular spent hours spent sifting through lyrics and sheet music. “You could hear things as well: old tapes, and vinyl – and cylinder recordings, which people like Vaughan Williams and [composer and folk archivist] Percy Grainger made,” he says. “After that, it wasn’t difficult to believe in those songs and kind of live them.”
The result was music full of a drama that oozed from the traditional songs at the album’s core – the Scots ballad Tam Lin, the Victorian press-gang vignette The Deserter – into the smattering of originals. In terms of emotional power, Liege And Lief peaked with Matty Groves, a 17th-century murder ballad in which a female aristocrat goes to church and seduces the titular peasant lad, only to be informed on and find her outraged husband at the end of the bed. The hapless Groves is challenged to a duel that he promptly loses, and his corpse is joined by that of his lover. The song ends thus: “’A grave, a grave,’ Lord Darnell cried, ‘to put these lovers in/ But bury my lady at the top, for she was of noble kin.’” Christianity, sex, class and murder – not many groups, it was fair to say, did this kind of thing.
sort of the anti-Syd Barrett, in other words, though Pink Floyd wasn’t alone in recording twee tunes:
“There was a lot of airy-fairy, very whimsical stuff happening in the late 60s,” says Ashley Hutchings. “We never really felt part of that. When we made Liege and Lief, it was like Bergman was coming in to direct it. It was The Seventh Seal, not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was magical, but the magic was elemental.”
More here, including Richard Thompson saying:
“I haven’t listened to it that much, but I kind of know it. I don’t actually need to rehearse it. I could sit down and play it today – I just remember the whole thing, for some reason. It’s just … locked in.”
No, Johnny, No
Chuck Berry is cool, as we’ve opined before.
For a US presidential candidate, there is nothing better than a rocking anthem to pump up the crowds and project the sort of imagery that could help win the keys to the White House.
The Republican hopeful John McCain may be pushing 72, but his “town hall” events can be as noisy as the stadiums where Barack Obama appears on stage to the strains of U2’s “Beautiful Day.” But the McCain camp is having trouble settling on a suitable campaign anthem. After searching for months, it finally picked “Johnny B Goode” – Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll classic from 1958. The high-power guitar licks and “Go, Johnny, go” chorus put a spring in Mr McCain’s step. When asked why he chose it, he quipped: “It might be because it is the only one [the artist] hasn’t complained about us using.”
Berry, 81, may not have complained about his song being appropriated by Mr McCain, but he has made it clear he would prefer Barack Obama in the White House. “America has finally come to this point where you can pick a man of colour and that not be a drawback,” Berry said. “It’s no question, myself being a man of colour. I mean, you have to feel good about it.”
The anointment of Mr Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate was, he added, “definitely a proud and successful moment for all the people of this country – not just black people, but Americans in general”.
Berry, known as the “father of rock ‘n’ roll”, recounted: “In the Fifties there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in White House.” “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last,” he added, quoting Martin Luther King.
There was a groan at McCain headquarters as it suffered yet another musical derailment. An attempt to use Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” also bombed. “We played it a couple times and it’s my understanding [Abba] went berserk,” Mr McCain said.
Probably because Republicans and artists don’t mix well. I’m hard pressed to think of a prominent rock musician who is a die-hard Republican.
Big Bottom (Lounge)
[Lake Street El to Somewhere Else – probably taken at 1100 West Lake, give or take]
Big Bottoms drive me out of my mind! – [Spinal Tap, if you forgot.] Anyway, of special interest as 1375 W. Lake is stumbling distance from me (or one El stop away if the weather is crappy).
Bottom Lounge (1375 W Lake St.) just opened. No, seriously, I’ve friggin’ been there man. And golly, is it big—well, bigger than I imagined. So impressively large is this new live music venue that ‘lounge’ seems totally inappropriate as a part of the name. Lounges just aren’t of this size, even in truth-stretching clubspeak. Though it’s not quite as deep in the live room, it reminds me of Washington D.C.’s Black Cat (the newer one), in that the bar feels like a rocker hangout that thrives regardless of what is happening in the live room.
The entryway is bigger than some condos I’ve been in, and there’s a spacious high-ceilinged bar there with vinyl booths. The live room (with its own absinthe-serving bar) is well proportioned. The generously-scaled stage looks made to accommodate multiple Mucca Pazzas simultaneously (a scary thought), and the sound system runs through a pro-size (Midas Verona 40×8) mixing board in the front of house. I haven’t heard a band, only DJs, through the system—I was at the final night of the Our Way of Thinking mod festival with Tony the Tyger and The Dust Junkies spinning obscure mod rock and Northern soul. The sound wasn’t overly loud, and it was clear enough to get the mini-dress-and-tight-suit set out on the dance floor and close to the Nexo Alpha speakers.
[Click to see a photograph and more info at Time Out Chicago: The TOC Blog Big Bottom (Lounge)]
Probably not quite as cool as the Lounge Ax (which was also stumbling distance from me, back in the 90s), but still good to note. I can’t say I recognize any of the acts currently listed, but that doesn’t even matter. Just happy something interesting landed at that spot and not another freaking condo building.
Bombay Funk Thrillers
*repost
The Funk is So Rubber
“The Bombay Connection, Vol. 1: Funk From Bollywood Action Thrillers” (Various Artists)
The Bombay Connection showcases the sound of the Indian action film of the late 70s and early 80s. Under the influence of films like Shaft and Dirty Harry a new kind of though Indian action film came into being in 1970s India. To match the loud fights and fast chases Indian composers developed a exciting brand of Bollywood funk. Wah-wah guitars, congas and funky moogs were effortlessly blended with tablas, dhols and Indian melody lines. This album compiles 12 (sic) of the best, incredibly original Bollywood Funk grooves, painting scenes of frantic chases through back streets in Bombay, secret plots conceived in subterarian headquarters by fake-moustached vilains and sexy seductive dances by female spies. The 6 panel digipack comes with a colorful 32 page booklet containing well researched info and a wealth of pictures.
the booklet is cool too, full of stills from the Bollywood Thrillers we’ve never even heard of, and a plethora of details about each obscure track.
In this first volume, we dig into the funky, bell-bottomed sounds of Indian action film music form the 1970s and 1980s. We have selected 13 tracks from the golden era of Indian funk, almost all from films that failed at the box office in their time and that are therefore hardly remembered, even in India. … But all of these films – along with the obligatory family drama scenes, comedy sequences and love songs – contained violent and kinky scenes that satiated the public’s thirst for action and sex and set the stage for the exciting funk tunes presented here.
Fun stuff, especially since the music was apparently recorded live in one take, without over-dubs. An amazing feat, since the tunes often shift tempo abruptly, heading into new directions, presumedly to follow the action projected on the screen.
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Update: a great album. I’ll have to look for Volume 2.
Lou Reed is still a New Yorker
Marrying Laurie Anderson did not dull Lou Reed’s abrasiveness, as Andrew M. Goldstein of New York Magazine discovers:
New York Mag: Sirius’s impending merger with XM is anticipated to boost earnings. Do you own any stock in the company?
Lou Reed: What are you, a fucking asshole? I’m here telling you the truth about music and you want to know if I have stock in the fucking radio? You fucking piece of shit. What did I do to deserve that?NYM: Moving on. You’ve got a film out, you’ve got your radio show, you’ve got a new book of photography coming up — is there a new album in the works?
LR No. Nothing I feel like talking about. Good-bye.
Coveted Bob Dylan Endorsement of Barack Obama
Whew. Glad that’s on record – there’s bound to be a McCain supporter or two who will change their vote now that His Bobness has spoken.
Bob Dylan – who could justifiably claim to be the architect of Barack Obama’s ‘change’ catchphrase – has backed the Illinois senator to do for modern America what the generation before did in the 1960s.
In an exclusive interview with The Times, published today, Dylan gives a ringing endorsement to Mr Obama, the first ever black presidential candidate, claiming he is “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up”.
Dylan, 67, made the comments when being interviewed in Denmark, where he stopped over in a hotel during a tour of Scandinavia.
Asked about his views on American politics, he said: “Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.
“But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama.
“He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”
He added: “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.”
[From Bob Dylan says Barack Obama is ‘changin’ America – Times Online ]
In all seriousness, if McCain wins, I might move to Denmark. Luckily, I don’t think he stands a chance, unless something weird happens.
The Bob Dylan exhibit sounds interesting. I wish I could take a week or so off and go to England.
The haphazard process leading to the London show began nearly 20 years ago when he was approached by an editor at the American publishing company Random House. “They’d seen some of my sketches somewhere and asked if I’d like to do a whole book. Why not, you know? There was no predetermined brief. ‘Just deal with the material to hand, whatever that is. And do it however you want. You can be fussy, you can be slam-bang, it doesn’t matter.’ Then they gave me a drawing book, I took it away with me and turned it back in again, full three years later.”
Published in 1994 under the abbreviated title Drawn Blank, the resultant images had been executed both on the hoof while he was touring and in a more structured way in studios, using models (“Just anyone who’d be open to doing it”) and lights. What was going on in his life during that three-year period to inform or provide a back story to the work? “Just the usual,” Dylan shrugs, fixed in the hunkered-forward, hands-clasped position he will maintain for most of our time together. “I try to live as simply as is possible and was just drawing whatever I felt like drawing, whenever I felt like doing it. The idea was always to do it without affectation or self-reference, to provide some kind of panoramic view of the world as I was seeing it.”
Built up of work that is often contemplative, sometimes exuberant but consistently technically accomplished and engaging, that view is of train halts, diners and dockyards, barflies, dandies and uniformed drivers glimpsed in New Orleans or New York, Stockholm or South Dakota. And of women. We’re left in no doubt that Dylan likes women. “They weren’t actually there at the same time,” he notes quickly, pointing, when his page-turning reveals the painting Two Sisters, its subjects lounging, one clothed, the other naked but for her bra. “They posed separately and I put them together afterwards.”
[snip]
The method used to turn them into the paintings about to go on exhibition in London involved making digital scans of the original drawings and enlarging and then transferring them on to heavy paper ready for reworking. Dylan then experimented with treating individual images with a variety of colours. “And doing so subverted the light. Every picture spoke a different language to me as the various colours were applied.”
Barack Obama’s Victory Soundtrack
Can’t go wrong with George Clinton in his prime…
In a refreshing sign that math and hope can just get along, Barack Obama predictably sewed up the delegate count on Tuesday night and defeated Hillary Clinton in what turned out to be a long, contested Democratic primary. And now, for the first time ever, a black man is on track to inhabit the White House, fulfilling Parliament-Funkadelic’s dream of turning Washington, D.C. into Chocolate City.
Unfortunately for P-Funk’s iconoclastic frontman George Clinton — no relation to Hillary or Bill, for you squares in the house — Reverend Ike Turner and Richard Pryor have passed away, and are unable to fill the positions of Secretary of the Treasury and Minister of Education. (Clinton invented the latter.)
Similarly, Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin will have to forego their positions as President and First Lady, as Barack and Michelle Obama will be handling those duties. Which leaves only Stevie Wonder to fill Clinton’s other invented position, Secretary of Fine Arts.
[From Barack Obama’s Victory Soundtrack | Listening Post from Wired.com]
Obama apparently likes classic 70s soul, that better include funk too. Don’t get me wrong, I like Stevie Wonder, but Parliament/Funkadelic/James Brown are a lot more fun to groove too, with the bonus that (seemingly) nearly half of all hip-hop songs borrowed beats from this trinity. Throw in Sly and the Family Stone, a little Fela Kuti for international flavor, and we’re talking a party, ya’ll! Whoo hoo!