I like the song Fever. I’ve heard it punk, country, Americana, jazz, and psychedelic rock and roll, and it holds up. Blackwell wrote it (with Eddie Cooley), along with many other rock and R & B hits: All Shook Up, Daddy Rollin’ Stone, Great Balls of Fire, Don’t Be Cruel, Handy Man, Return to Sender (I love that song), Searchin’, Let’s Talk About Us, Breathless, and Hey Little Girl—those are just the songs on this record. There was a tribute album for Blackwell released in 1994. Among the artists recording a song for it were Dave Edmunds, Kris Kristofferson, Debbie Harry, the Smithereens, Tom Verlaine, Graham Parker, and Ronnie Spector.
Month: February 2024
The Best of the Boston Beat, various artists, Infinity Records, 1979
This compilation features one song each by a dozen bands from Boston. I bought this record used for the song by the Fools. I liked them since I heard their parody of Psychokiller. (I remain immature.) Imagine mocking the Talking Heads in 1979. I found Sold Out in a cut-out bin in 1980 and pick up their stuff as I can. This record has She Looks Alright in the Dark, faint praise. It updates Ben Franklin about how cats look at night. Wikipedia refers to the band in the present tense, so they are still active. The rest of the record is okay.
Canned Heat, Canned Heat, Liberty, 1967
This album was the first time I heard ‘If you don’t like my taters, don’t you tickle my vine.’ It’s cute, but I don’t think anyone really ever said it. This was a pretty impressive group of kids playing blues standards on this LP. The liner notes called the guitar playing of Henry Vestine ‘incendiary,’ which is about right. Larry Taylor probably sold as many records as Muddy Waters—he played bass on Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees. Al Wilson wrote scholarly analysis about Robert Pete Williams and Son House, which help prompt academics to take the blues seriously. He was also good on slide guitar and harmonica. Frank Cook had experience with pop success drumming behind Shirley Ellis and Dobie Gray.
The band sold well. This album made it to #76 on the charts, says Wikipedia. The band played at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967, as well as Woodstock. They had three big hit singles.
Golden Apples of the Sun, Judy Collins, Elektra, 1962
Yeats’ poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, is the source of the golden apples reference. It starts, ‘I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head.’ That was divine inspiration, I’ve always thought. The poem popped into my head the other day and so I dug out this record. The liner notes say Collins has ‘clean, fresh beauty, gamine manner, and vivacious stage presence’ and get more sexist and patronizing from there. I’ll say it: Judy Collins had a wonderful voice. I have five more of her albums to play through to show it.
Great Selchie of Shule Skerry is the strangest story in a song so far. It starts with a woman nursing a baby, wondering where it came from, and ends with a her husband killing a seal that was the baby’s father. This album has a song named Fannerio that so far as I can tell has nothing in common with the Grateful Dead song Dire Wolf that mentions the backwash of Fannerio.
Lonnie Brooks Band, Turn on the Night, Alligator Records, 1982
I saw Brooks twice in the late ‘70s. He was a solid performer—he could play, sing, and entertain. His band did a first-rate combination of Chicago blues, Louisiana blues, rhythm and blues, and swamp music. He was born Lee Baker, Jr., and performed as Guitar Junior for a while in Lake Charles, Louisiana. When he moved to Chicago, he found a Guitar Junior there, so he switched to Lonnie Brooks. Wikipedia says Brooks made friends with Roy Clark at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980, getting an appearance on Hee Haw out of it. Johnny Winter was a big fan.
My favorite song on this record is Mother Nature. The lyrics reminded me a bit of Sonny Boy Williamson—if a man comes to you right/you can turn a winter night into spring. Later: he’ll smell flowers over everything. On the other hand, you can be so cold baby/I’d swear you were soul on ice. That’s the first Eldridge Cleaver reference in this play-through; we’ll get to Country Joe McDonald doing Air Algiers.
Aftermath, Rolling Stones, London Records, 1966
Many people like this album. Its Wikipedia page starts, “Considered by music scholars to be an artistic breakthrough …” I say not so fast. It is the band’s first record of their own work, which is a step on the road to musical maturity. But they had been covering Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Marvin Gaye, to pick a few, so it’s not as if their songs replaced Bobby Goldsboro. Their material includes signs they had toured too much—Going Home is an 11-minute wish and Flight 505 is a first-person report of a plane crash. They needed some home cooking. The songs about women and relationships are high-school exaggerations—her eyes are just kept to herself, while I, I can still look at someone else. Under My Thumb is easy to parody—I thought I remembered Bianca’s Tune that said Mick was under her heel. Lady Jane is a D.H. Lawrence euphemism for genitals. Dontcha Bother Me is two and a half minutes describing vapid behavior; I couldn’t tell whose. Think repeats ‘tell me whose fault was that, babe’—if they don’t know, I can’t help. The songs seem less than I remembered.
Paint It Black, on the other hand, keeps growing. It now represents the chaos of the mid-Sixties. Movies about Vietnam and shooting video games use it effectively. The song is about the devastation of a sudden loss—something we are all very aware of anymore.
My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello, Stiff Records, 1978
For a while in the mid-‘70s there were earnest discussions of punk versus New Wave. New Wave followed punk, and at its best it was as angry and edgy as punk, but the music was better, the lyrics were better, and some of it was funny. My Aim Is True shows all that. In (Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, Costello works in a joke. ‘I said “I’m so happy I could die.” “Drop dead,” she said, then left with another guy.’ In Welcome to the Working Week, the job is for a woman to appear half-naked on Page 3 of a London paper. Miracle Man features the singer cynically offering to crawl around on all fours, unlike the anguish in Clapton’s Bell Bottom Blues. (Miracle Man plays during a seduction scene in Godfather III.) Waiting for the End of the World has the line ‘Dear Lord, I sincerely hope you’re coming, ‘cause you really started something.’ In I’m Not Angry Anymore, Costello uses the word ‘angry’ about 40 times. Trust me, he’s angry. And this is just a small part of what made this album stand out.
Curtis Jones, Lonesome Bedroom Blues, Delmar, 1962
As I prepared to write this one up, I was worried that its age and obscurity would limit how much I could find on-line. Turns out Bob Dylan recorded Highway 51, a tune Jones wrote, so there is plenty about that song on the internet. Yet this record was deleted from Wikipedia because it isn’t notable. Jones lived in Europe, where he was popular, for the last 10 years of his life.
I like piano blues. No one has ever called me sophisticated. Other artists in my collection include Professor Longhair, Blind John Davis, Little Richard, Andy Chatman, and One-Arm Slim.
Bob Seger, Smokin’ OP’S, Palladium, 1972
If one bums cigarettes (instead of buying a pack), one could be said to be smoking the brand OP’s (for Other People’s). This is an album with two original songs and seven OPs. I found out today that the E. Anderson with song-writing credit for Let It Rock was Charles Edward Anderson Berry. For years I thought it was the folk singer Eric Anderson who had perhaps won a bet that he could write a tune that sounded just like Chuck Berry. I love the Innertubes.
Seger doesn’t sing many songs of the ‘I love my baby and my baby loves me’ type. His are more of the ‘failed high school passion viewed 10 or 20 years down the road’ type. So it was a change to hear him sing Love the One You’re With. I like it, but Seger went back to the ‘wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then’ songs.
For years, Seger did everything he could to limit the availability of his first five albums. We’ve all done some things we regret later, but I’m saying Smokin’ OP’S is something to be proud of.
Faces, Long Player, Warner Brothers, 1971
I liked Every Picture Tells a Story and Gasoline Alley, so when I saw this in a used record store I took a chance. I’m always interested in hearing Big Bill Broonzy songs, and I’d heard Had Me a Real Good Time on the radio and hoped it could be part of my philosophy of life. It isn’t bad advice: I was glad to be here, I’ll be sad to go, as long as I’m here I’ll have me a real good time. That will do for retirement. The problem with the album is that there’s nothing as good as Cut Across Shorty, much less Maggie May.
For years I was hoping to find a song about going to Jerusalem I‘d heard in the dorm in 1968. When I saw Jerusalem was on this album, I thought I had a chance. Not close, but I finally found it thanks to the Innerwebs. It was by Hello People, named (As, I Went Down to) Jerusalem. There’s a scratchy version on YouTube.
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