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Monthly Archives: April 2012

Rickie Lee Jones

29 Sunday Apr 2012

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Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, The Last Chance Texaco, Tom Scott

The cover of her first album is calculated to make her look tough.  Velvet hat, disheveled long blond hair, she is looking not at the camera, her eyes are hidden, looking downward or inward, smoking a brown papered cigarette.

On her debut album, the prestige of the musicians recruited to back up this neophyte is almost unbelievable.  The names I recognize: Andy Newmark drums, Randy Newman synthesizer, Tom Scott horn, Ernie Watts horn, and bunches of others just as great.  But she is in complete command.

She sings about street corners, and poolhalls, and pinball machines, and she has a song called “Easy Money” that makes you think of “Small Change.”  We thought of her as a secret cousin of Tom Waits when we first heard these grooves.  You can’t really pick up all the words because she kind of slurs and blurs them together.  But the poetry is amazing, even though sometimes you only catch it when you read the lyrics on the sleeve notes.  The sharp slap of her guitar; her voice sailing up up how many octaves.  She glides from jazz to soul and whoops from blues to folk and then she hits you with a showstopping Broadway blaster on the order of “Soliloquy” from Carousel.

She sings her flexuous melodies in raspy whispers, indolent banter, melismatic caterwauls, and melodious purity.  She peoples her songs with characters named Zero, Dutch, Bragger, Cecil, Junior Lee, Kid Sinister, Cunt-finger Louie, Bird, and, of course, Chuck E – the world in which she wanders is not safe.  Her persona is infused with midnight gigs in stinky bars and 24-hour diners and blinking neon through motel windows.

Right now I am listening to “The Last Chance Texaco.”  It is a dreamy waltz.  The scene is late night on a lonely highway, a broken down car stranded at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.  The song’s images transmute into a tale of a person too broken down, too hurt, to love.

It’s your last chance
To check under the hood
Last chance
She ain’t soundin’ too good,
Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
You’ve found the last chance Texaco

The quiet strumming of her guitar.  The exploding crescendos that fade away.  She half speaks the song and the words seem improvised.  She slides around the beat and emits mewling whines, like the Doppler screams of cars flying by in the night.

But this one ain’t fuel-injected
Her plug’s disconnected
She gets scared and she stalls
She just needs a man, that’s all

She sounds rough and drunk and passionate and disappointed and sardonic, her gangrel tunes echoing in alleys.  Then she wails like she’s on stage at the Apollo, and her voice is so sweet and passionate and all the guile and irony melts away.

Rickie Lee Jones, “The Last Chance Texaco,” Easy Money Music (ASCAP) (1978).  From: Rickie Lee Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Warner Brothers Records, BSK 3296 (1979).  Album design – Not credited.

Red Clay Ramblers

21 Saturday Apr 2012

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Bluegrass, Merchant's Lunch, newgrass, Red Clay Ramblers

This is flavored bluegrass, incorporating little tastes of ragtime, blues, and the Holy Modal Rounders thrown in for fun.  Most notably, a muted trumpet adds its doleful Cab Callaway sound.  Furious fiddling, bedizened banjoing, gallivanting guitaring, mellifluous mandolining, canorous keyboarding, and fulsome four-part harmonizing.

This song “Merchant’s Lunch” tells a purportedly true story about a horrifying eatery in Tennessee.  The lead singer’s story is punctuated by comical responses by the background chorus, to which I would apply the term, “suggestion and elaboration.”

I took a walk (he was walkin’ up and down Broadway)
I was hungry (had an eye out for a swell cafe)
I was searchin’ (he was soundin’ for a bite to munch)
I found a spot (he took a table at the Merchants Lunch)
Oh the Merchant’s Lunch, it was an ocean of gloom
It looked like half past midnight in the afternoon

The upshot of the story is that our hero is assaulted by Broadway Brenda, a grisly obese hoyden with green teeth, dishpan hands, and “Krakatoan hips,” who informs him, “It’s the custom here at Merchants Lunch to entertain the queen.”  He instantly absquatulates, bounds into his rig, and roars away at 80 miles an hour, never to return.

(He’s a driving fool) the interstate belongs to me
But I’m never going back (into the state of Tennessee)

Along with all its other influences, this song incorporates country swing, drawing on the happy sounds of Bob Wills.  The vocal harmonies on this album are perfect, but differ dramatically from the resonant acapellas of someone like Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.  The Ramblers are more old timey, more nasal, more floating, more irreverent, piercing through and sailing out over all the exuberant picking, strumming, blowing, and bowing.

Mike Craver, C.W. Thompson, “Merchant’s Lunch,”  Flying Fish Music (BMI) (1977).  From Red Clay Ramblers, Merchant’s Lunch, Flying Fish Records, FF055 (1977).  Album design – Chris Baker; Photography – Cece Conway.

Larry Coryell and Philip Catherine

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by garystormsongs in Music I Love

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acoustic guitar, Jazz, Larry Coryell, Philip Catherine, Twin House

Incredible jamming with twelve string guitar and six string classical guitar, machine gun arpeggios, surprising changes of key, a pastiche of rhythms and time signatures, beautiful slightly out-of-key melodies, jangling noisy chords, adroit counterpoint, seamless shifts from the bluesy to the jazzy to the out-a-here, lubricious leaps up and down the neck, each musician doing the work of four, the first cut on the album, “Ms. Julie,” a triumphant welcome to everything you would expect from unparalleled virtuosity.

Larry Coryell and Philip Catherine, Twin House, Electra Records, 6E-123 ((1977).  Album design – not credited.

Elvis Costello

14 Saturday Apr 2012

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Billy Strayhorn, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Elvis Costello, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Less Than Zero, Mercer, Punk, Rogers and Hart, Saturday Night Live, Stiff Records, Watching the Detectives

So back in ‘77 Louie the Mad Vinyl Junkie gives me a copy of this weird album called A Bunch of Stiff Records.  It’s an anthology of several British rockers and one of them is this odd guy with glasses named Elvis Costello who does a fantastic song called “Less Than Zero.”  I’m the first to broadcast Elvis in this area, maybe in the U.S., maybe almost anywhere.  Pretty soon I’m hunting up singles like “Radio Sweetheart,” “Alison,” and “Red Shoes,” and his first album arrives like the grail many of us rock’n’rollers have been questing for years.

And then in December 1977 we gathered around the TV box to watch him on Saturday Night Live, and there he was, playing the opening chords to “Less Than Zero,” and suddenly he stopped the band, said “Radio Radio,” and launched right into it, and we couldn’t believe it, what an incredible song, and it smacked the whole morbid music industry right in the kisser, just like we always hoped somebody would do, and it got him banished from U.S. television for years thereafter.  It was as important as when Pete Seeger sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers Show ten years earlier.

In the ensuing years it became apparent that Elvis was not merely a great progenitor of punk, a reviver of real rock’n’roll, a grouchy icon of the new music – he was all that, but even the wicked mountebanks of the music industry came to realize he was also one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived.  In the history of popular music his name will be listed along with Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Rogers and Hart, Irving Berlin, Billy Strayhorn, and Duke Ellington.  He’s that great a songwriter.

There was the time Linda and I went to see Elvis in Rochester.  What a great show, and afterwards, as we were making our way to the exit, a member of the stage crew came up and handed Linda a backstage pass.  Cool!  Maybe we can talk to Elvis.  We followed the crew guy to the stage entrance and he turned around and said, wait a minute, pointing to me, he can’t go with you.  Well he’s my husband, said Linda.  Well forget it, he said, and he stalked off to find another cutie for the King’s pleasure.

I flash back to the first time Elvis came to Buffalo and did the song I’m listening to now, “Watching the Detectives.”  The show was at Buffalo State College, in a small restaurant-style room, and Elvis walks right out off the stage and on to the tables, and he crosses the tables until he comes to mine, and he reaches his hand to – Me!  I hand him my pen.  Re throws it down.  My cup. He slaps it away.  My hand.  He pulls me up on the table.  Help!  I’m trying to decide what to do.  I put my hands into the back pockets of my Wranglers, and stare him in the eyes, and wiggle my skinny ass back and forth to the rhythms of the song, as he sings, “It only took my little fingers to blow you away!”  HELP!!!

Elvis Costello, “Watching the Detectives,” Street Music Co. (1977).  From Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “Watching the Detectives/Blame it on Caine/Mystery Dance” (45 rpm EP), Stiff Records, Ltd., Buy 20 (1977).  Sleeve design – not credited.

Bongo Joe

07 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by garystormsongs in Music I Love

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Arhoolie, Bongo Joe, George Coleman, steel drum, street musician

I hate to be the one to tell you, but you have not lived until you have heard Bongo Joe.  Allow me to give you birth.  He’s a street musician and I wonder where he’s gone.  In 1969, some loony brain let him put out an inimitable album on Arhoolie Records.  He played in various Gulf Coast cities in Texas, most recently, as of the time of this record, in front of the Alamo in San Antonio.

His real name is George Coleman and he plays, as the album liner notes say, “a 55 gallon oil drum shaped with a hand ax in a curious series of dents, bulges, cuts and wrinkles.”  His drum sticks are fabricated from hammer handles, small cans rattling with stones and B-B shot, and rubber chair leg caps.  This is not a tuneful ringing calypso steel drum.  The furious complex unremitting rhythms he hammers and clatters out resonate deep in the metal hull of his instrument.

His stories are bitter, whimsical, mocking, sermonic.  “You’d better cool it, and do it right,” he admonishes.  “If you don’t do it right, you’ll end up in a fight.”  He shares a knowing kinship with the lonely stray dogs in his fables.  They squeak, “Arsh, arsh, arsh.”  Listen to the first song on the record.  “I Wish I Could Sing” he intones, he chants, he whines, he hums, he squawks, he grumbles, he squeals, he barks, he shouts, he yawps, he whistles, he warbles, ah!  He sings!

George Coleman, “Cool It,” Tradition Music Co., (BMI) (1968); “Innocent Little Doggy,” Tradition Music Co., (BMI) (1968).  From:  George Coleman, Bongo Joe, Arhoolie Records, #1040 (1969).  Album Design – Wayne Pope; Photography – Chris Strachwitz.

Thanks to Jump Jump Records in Portland for having this album just when I needed it!

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