Song of the Week – Amidinine, Bombino

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I’ve been entertaining the idea to write a post featuring a selection of Tuareg music from the Sahara Desert (e.g. Ali Farka Touré and Tinariwen) for some time now – but I never seem to get around to it.

Then I recently discovered Bombino. Bombino (Omara “Bombino” Moctar) released his third album Nomad this past April. It was produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, adding some discipline to Bombino’s sound without sanitizing or watering down his ethnic roots. In other words, Auerbach polished it up a little for western ears. For instance, many tracks utilize keyboards even though Tuareg desert music traditionally doesn’t.

This is a terrific album that should appeal to anyone that enjoys world music and/or The Black Keys brand of dirty, blues rock. Take, for example, the album’s opener and today’s SotW, “Amidinine.”

Bombino – Amidinine

It romps along a bluesy riff with a solid rock beat and purring organ. But the hand claps, guitar solos, native language lyrics and chanted chorus all work together to provide an authentic Tuareg sound.

The entire album is available to stream on Spotify, so you should check it out.

Enjoy… until next week.

ROCK THE VOTE: Rip It Up or Shake Rattle and Roll?

The original idea was to narrow down the field to the greatest songs and performances of the pre British Invasion era.

Quickly it’s clear that we have an excuse to listen to fantastic tunes that we may have heard on Happy Days. Or maybe not.

Keep ’em coming:

I don’t dislike Big Joe’s coda: Before I get too old…

Rock the vote in the sidebar!

Brooklyn Is In the House.

I was on the west coast and the north coast the last two weeks, so forgive me if I missed something. But I arrived back in Brooklyn yesterday and found the neighborhood around the Barclay Center in lockdown. Television has landed in our neighborhood. The MTV Video Awards were being presented. I didn’t watch.

Upon waking today I discovered that the most important news of the day was Miley Cyrus’s performance on the show of her own excellent desultory party song “We Won’t Stop” and the execrable-y danceable “Blurred Lines.” For a girl in a teddy bear suit who stripped down to a latex bikini, I think Miley did okay for herself. Which is why I post here.

The first point is that Miley Cyrus was a huge child star for the Disney Corp, and she isn’t any longer. She, as she has famously said, won’t be tamed.

I almost certainly wouldn’t have paid any attention to this, except I have a daughter who is 14 years old, and who grew up with Miley. Her first 3D movie was Miley’s concert, with the exploding drumsticks, for what it’s worth. And she, and I, have appreciated an awful lot of excellent Miley Cyrus pop music over the years. Most of the Miley product is not crap at all and I think that’s an important distinction.

But it is product, and because it is product, it is easy to marginalize. Miley is not the Beatles. Or Wire. At the same time, she’s made more money than any performer over the last, um, number of years, except maybe Oprah. And to ascribe her motives to desperate attention seeking, as today’s social commentators seem to be doing, is naive. Or ludicrously cynical. And just plain insulting.

Miley’s job is to entertain, and her performance as a plushie who strips down and actually humanizes Robin Thicke’s and Pharrel Williams’s Blurred Lines seems kind of noble to me. Goofy, antic, like Lucille Ball perhaps, but ultimately noble. Anyone who condemns her for her performance should watch the “unrated” Blurred Lines video. Here. Which is exploitation? Which is satire? You decide.

As a rock fan I love that Miley pissed everyone off. She confused them. She is funny and fun, no matter what the situation, and kind of fearless in her VMA performance. She’s one of the few stars who can do whatever she wants, with no fear of consequence. It’s her party! Unbridled id? Isn’t that rock?

(There is a rather significant aesthetic issue. Miley’s music is way more interesting as social statement than musical achievement. That’s a good reason not to overplay her significance, but not a reason to ignore her contributions to the cultural discussion.)

Here is a link to video of We Can’t Stop.

But there is also this: Miley says: “It’s my mouth, I can say what I want.” I like that, it has always been Miley’s message.

You don’t have to like Miley’s music or even her performance to see the critical outrage about her performance as asinine. Beat her up for bad choices, she’s a fair target for that, but first grant that they are her choices, not some sort of desperate irrational girlish plea.

The Slumlords Find a Drummer

A week after the gig at CB’s, Andy Towns was at a party at our rehearsal studio and he met drummer Nicky D’Amico, who was in a band called the Ultimates (with the fabulous Bernard “B” McDermott on guitar & vocals). Nicky liked Andy’s songs too, and agreed to come and play. Also that week I took my Rickenbacker to the shop for some work, along with a friend of mine who happened to be a thriving dealer. On the wall was hanging a wine red 1959 Les Paul Junior, and I just about shit. “That’s the one guitar in the world I want” I said to my friend, and he replied “So buy it.” I was about as far from $500 as I was from $500k and I informed him of this fact. “I’ll lend it to you, you pay me back in four months.” I said you got it. So I got it and I’ve had it ever since. It’s still a killer, not versatile but man it cranks.

I show up at practice and Andy isn’t there yet but Nicky is. He looks at my guitar and says “You know any Heartbreakers songs?” I said, “Yeah.” He kicked into One Track Mind and we locked in and played together for 15 years. I’d still be playing with him but I moved 2000 miles away. But that’s another story.

Nicky D’Amico. Red Hook, Brooklyn. What can I say, where do I start? Nicky is highly unpredictable but always neat. Always on the money on the drums. He used the biggest sticks I ever saw, they looked like sawed-off nightsticks. He hit so hard that 200-lb. test fishing line would break on his snares. He used piano wire. He once described how he plays: “I think of all these great things to do and I don’t do them.” That’s not quite true, Nicky did do things, he just never overplayed. Nicky was well-known to Jerry Nolan and JT and Walter Lure, stemming from when JT played with us at Max’s. Many tried to steal him over the years but I am extremely proud that he always wanted to play with me.

Writing this got me off my ass to post some Nicky on youtube (actually, my son Gene posted it, such feats are beyond me). Here he is. I chose this song because the drums are mixed loud. This is not The Slumlords but Fun/No Fun, recorded in 1986:

Here’s an earlier one, a demo (now on LP! Rave Up Records!) with The Sinatras (you’ll know soon enough) in 1979:

Nicky on live performance: “I wanna make a movie of me playing the whole set, and then when we play, you guys play, but show the movie of me and I’ll sit in the audience and watch.”

On equipment: “I try to get rid of one piece every year. I wanna get rid of my floor tom but I still use it on a few things. Let’s not do those songs anymore. No wait, I use it on One Track Mind. Shit.”

On his life as a consumer: “When they make a new and improved product, they should still make it the old way, in case you liked it like that.”

1970? Are You Kidding Me?

1) If I’d have heard this back then when I was nine, I’d likely be dead or in jail now.

2) Give me some of whatever Wayne Kramer is on.

3) Kramer’s second guitar solo is probably my favorite cliche rock solo riff of all-time. If every guitar solo had those arpeggios in it, I wouldn’t mind. For you youngsters out there, learn that technique and you will instantly sound HOT!!!

The Real Rock in Roll

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There has been a lot of banter among us about what really constitutes rock ‘n’ roll.

For those of us who have contributed to the site–as well I suspect to those who have been kind enough to read us–we all have our interpretations and definitions of the musical form that ushered our generation into control of the various airwaves.

For certainly no matter what else be said, when Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and even the Beatles Revolution are the sound backing mainstream TV commercials (for the cynics, note that Joni Mitchell has never let a song of hers be used for advertising purposes) then the influence of rock in our culture simply cannot be denied.

But, it has struck me with the first challenge tunes going back to the very early days of the genre Alan Freed so aptly named, the real soul of the music belongs to the African American community.

Not that I am the first to note this, but when we do talk about the music and its roots, and what it really means, Bill Haley always gets a nod. And, that is fine for Haley was a trendsetter, and had a great band and deserves some respect there.

But really it was Shake, Rattle, and Roll, recorded in February of 1954 by Big Joe Turner, five months before Bill Haley covered the same tune and three months before Rock Around the Clock was recorded and released, that probably owns the title of the breakthrough song pushing the then new form to the masses.

Of course, what cannot be denied is that irrespective of the quality of either version of Shake, Rattle, and Roll, it is the Haley version that got the ink and reaction and coverage in those days. It was also a much bigger hit, as was his cover of Rock Around the Clock.

However, it is important to remember the context of why, and the large reason Haley enjoyed more success than his African American counterparts was that in 1954, the civil rights movement was still in its infancy.

So, aside from the fact that Haley reached a bigger market, white America’s attitude to the African American community was such that music, styles, food, hell virtually anything from the rich culture that emerged  from slavery, and to a large degree out of the notion that necessity is the mother of invention (guess whose band grabbed at that one?) was driven by evil dark forces.

It was in May of 1954, that the Brown v. The Board of Education case declared that segregation, and the notion of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. And, that decision, was 15 months before Rosa Parks and her dog tired dogs, after a hard day of work, refused to step to the back of the bus.

Even with that, it was seven more years until James Meredith was granted admission to the University of Mississippi, the first African American to gain entrance to that institution, and one that met with a fair amount of violence at the time (I still remember reading the headlines, and not being able to understand who cared who went to what school as a then nine-year old). Mind you, that was almost a decade after segregation was ruled unconstitutional.

But, as with Pat Buchanan, inexplicably announcing before his dismissal from MSNBC a few years ago that America was built on the backs of white people, the real grunt work of the country–and like it or not, our current music scene–can completely be owned by that same African American community in the same sense that the Egyptians or the Romans can take credit for their great civilizations, but the building of the cities and the pyramids was completed by slaves.

And, while I can give that respect to Haley, for example, I can give none to Pat Boone for bastardizing the true rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard. For, Richard, and Chuck Berry come as true to defining the form for me as anyone (and the truth is, it would not matter to me if they were pink Martians, they still rocked the shit out of what Boone and his ilk turned into pablum).

For Boone’s treatment of Little Richard was sanitized out of the fearfulness that the African American community–particularly their men–simply wanted to get white women drunk and/or stoned and then have sex with them, using music as part of the means to that end. And, if that sounds outrageous, try reading Daniel Okrent’s excellent narrative on Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition(Also remember that the Volstead Act was repealed barely 20 years before the Brown V. the Board of Education decision.)

In fact, in reviewing Okrent’s tome to that troubled period in our history, Publisher’s Weekly notes that ” He unearths many sadly forgotten characters from the war over drink—and readers will be surprised to learn how that fight cut across today’s ideological lines. Progressives and suffragists made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan—which in turn supported a woman’s right to vote—to pass Prohibition.”

If you wonder about this, here is a vid of Boone’s treatment of Tutti Fruitti:

And, now, here is the man, Little Richard showing us exactly how it should be done:

But, essentially the blues form, and rhythm and blues, and Motown, can all be looked to as the seeds of modern rock and pop whether anyone likes it or not, for virtually all modern rock ‘n’ roll stems from that 1/4/5 chord motif that the blues presented.

Further, if you look to the British wave of music, that followed Haley and Richard by ten years, the bands who made a difference–The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, for example–all cut their early chops playing a heavy dose of Motown and Soul music.

In fact, it really was that amalgamation of American rhythm and blues and the Noel Coward sort of tin pan alley that formed the essence of the Brit-pop that invaded America and changed the musical scene around the world forever.

Oddly, despite now being almost 60 years beyond Brown V. the Board of Education and Shake, Rattle, and Roll being released, we are still essentially fighting the same stupid fights, with laws about immigration and diversity (which are the essence of America’s success) and voting rights.

It is easy to get sanctimonious about all of this, but, at the end of the day, as noted by another great freedom fighter, Mohandas Gandhi, “in the end, the truth is still the truth.”

Long live Chuck, Richard, Turner and rock! They started it all (with a little help from their friends).

 

 

 

Nobody: the Early Years

I kinda doubt that anyone is really interested in this but I feel like telling the story.

The first gig I ever played, actually the first time I ever played in front of an audience, was at CBGB, legendary dump of yore. This was 1977. I had been going there since the summer of ’75, when I first moved downtown. CB’s was indeed a dump but I saw some great sets there, above all the Heartbreakers, but also the Ramones, Blondie, Mink DeVille, Tuff Darts (with Robert Gordon), and the Dots, a criminally unknown band with the only girl I ever saw who could really play rocknroll guitar (damn few boys can either). The late Alison East, she deserves to be remembered. I also saw many interesting sets (Talking Heads, Television, Marbles, Testors, Patti Smith) and many terrible sets.

Seeing those bands, and the New York Dolls before them, was a revelation to me. I had fooled around on guitar since I was 12, but I wasn’t very good and I came from a super snob musical town. Felix Cavalliere of the Rascals was from Pelham, NY, and from 1965 on there were bands all over the place, and plenty of high school dances and later bars to play at.

Almost immediately, music in Pelham became all about virtuosity. By 1970, when I was 15, if you couldn’t play Hendrix and Clapton and Page you were nobody. I was nobody. And yet I bought into the zeitgeist, musically anyway. As an aside, this brutal competitive reality was the early tipoff to me and my friends that hippies were full of shit. It was a great advantage to see the Flower Children from the bottom: the guys who regularly beat the shit out of us were suddenly flashing peace signs and mouthing the slogans of equality. We couldn’t afford to be fooled.

My split with the common musical culture came on a summer night in 1970, when there was a TV special called Midsummer Rock. An hour and a half, five bands, nothing like it had ever been done on TV that I know of. The headliners were Grand Funk Railroad, Traffic, and Mountain, all big names at the time. Two other bands appeared (it was all filmed at a festival in Cincinnati), two bands we had never heard of: Alice Cooper and The Stooges. Alice played Black Juju and we were not impressed. We thought he was inane. (I later discovered that Black Juju is by far the worst song on the Love It To Death album.) But then The Stooges came on to do TV Eye. This was the famous peanut butter incident. My friends thought Iggy was hysterical, but not in a good way. All of them. Five or six besides me. I thought the music was fantastic. It took me another year to buy another guitar (my Korvettes Tiesco was long gone), but when I did I knew what I wanted to play. Almost nobody else wanted to play it.

Long story short, I knew that to play the music I wanted to play I would have to hook up in the city, so I did. I answered an ad in the Village Voice for a guitar player, “Dolls/Stones/Kinks” is how I remember it. The ad was placed by songwriter/singer/keyboard player Andy Towns. Andy had come up from Monroe, LA a few months before. He had already made a little name for himself in NYC as “Rent-a-Punk”, singing his songs at parties with a keyboard. He had a shaved head, huge round white glasses, and always wore tight blue jeans with a plain white T-shirt. Always. Andy got 40 responses to his ad and threw them all away, deciding that the one who called him back would get a hearing. I was that guy.
We went to a rehearsal studio on W 30th St (punk Tin Pan Alley). He gave me loose leaf sheets with the chord structures of the songs and we played them. They were good songs, and I immediately came up with some guitar parts. Andy liked them.
He brought a drummer next time, a chaotic fellow named Mark, down from Vermont with his Troggs-like skins. A little slow but he hit hard. So hard that he used to knock his cymbal right into the back of my neck, all the time. It was a small room, I had nowhere to go. We got an audition gig at CBGB.

We did alright. We were raw. Some song I recall: “I’m Paralyzed,” “Love is a Hole,” and “I Bombed the Sistine Chapel.” Halfway through the set my strumming hand felt squishy, so I looked down to see blood all over it and blood all over my strings. I was that nervous and oblivious. Mark fucked up in one song, knocked his cymbal stand over again (missing my neck for once). But overall we got over. Before we got offstage who but Patti Smith came onstage and started playing Andy’s electric piano (which had a unique harsh sound), and I joined her. We played together for I don’t know, a minute or two, then she turned to me, obviously very stoned, and said “You have good songs but you need a good drummer.” Hilly Krystal liked the songs too, and gave us another gig.

I’ll keep going if you ask nicely.

Song of the Week – My Life as a Dog in a Pigsty, The Bitter Springs

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Today’s SotW is by the eccentric British band The Bitter Springs. I had never heard of them until a few weeks ago when I read a review of their latest album, Everyone’s Cup of Tea, in MOJO magazine. It sounded interesting so I listened to it on Spotify.

This band is a hoot. They formed in 1985 as Last Party and changed their name to The Bitter Springs in 1996. Over this period of time they released scores of singles and about a dozen albums. Everyone’s Cup of Tea is their first since 2006, but it’s a double and filled with interesting songs. How this band has escaped me all these years is a puzzlement.

There are many songs from ECOT that I could have chosen for the SotW, but I’ve selected “My Life as a Dog in a Pigsty” for one reason. It contains the funniest lyric I’ve heard in a very long time (at about 2:30 in).

I split up with my fiancée
She caught me in bed with Beyonce
Beyonce was our dog’s name

That was over a year ago
It was so hard to see her go
But the puppies are doing just fine

Sick? Yes. But funny? Hell yes!!!

Enjoy… until next week.

Song of the Week – Don’t Give It Up Now, Lyres

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In Boston, back in the early 70s, Jeff “Monoman” Conolly formed a punk rock band called DMZ. That band was heavily influenced by the 60s garage band sounds that were popularized by Lenny Kaye’s superbly curated Nuggets compilation. After a couple of years, Conolly dropped DMZ and took his garage band strategy up a notch with his next band – Lyres.

Their best song – and today’s Song of the Week – was “Don’t Give It Up Now.”

I remember going to see them at the now defunct Inn Square Men’s Bar in Cambridge, MA with my friend Phil H. in the early 80s. When they played “Don’t Give It Up Now”, the sweat, energy and excitement in the room was palpable; a truly memorable experience
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Their trademark sound comes from Monoman’s hair raising and nearly unintelligible vocals, his Vox Continental organ playing chords with one hand, and his insistent tambourine played with the other. When you add in the vintage sound Danny McCormack draws out of his Danelectro guitar, you’d swear you were listening to an early Kinks cut or something by the 13th Floor Elevators.

Some time ago, when writing about The Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet” I remarked “… I can honestly say I’ve never turned anyone onto this song that didn’t instantly and for always fall in love with it. It’s that good!” The same can be said about “Don’t Give It Up Now.”

Enjoy… until next week.