Month: March 2024

The History of …..JOE TEX, Joe Tex, compilation, Pride, 1973

I broke one of my rules of record buying when I got this. I try get at least two songs that I know/like. I didn’t know any of the songs on this record, and nothing stands out. His Wikipedia article talks about his competition with James Brown, Little Richard, and Jackie Wilson, and it’s easy to pick out the similarities in these songs. There even a sound-alike version of the Coasters hit Charlie Brown—Charlie Brown Got Expelled. Yum Yum evokes Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti. Some of the songs are almost gospel.

A fascinating footnote in the Joe Tex Discography in Wikipedia says that some songs that sound like other performers were done by Tex before, say, Little Richard sounded like Little Richard. People say anything, I know, but Wiki quotes people saying that Tex had James Brown moves before Brown did. You can listen to what his work did sound like.

15 Minutes of Elevator Music, New York Times, 1970

It was a demo record given at no extra cost to folks who bought the Times songbook of the Great Songs of the Sixties. I got it from my in-laws; I can’t imagine they bought the songbook. One of life’s mysteries. One side is a piano playing about a minute of seven songs such as Moon River and Both Sides Now. The other side is a guitar playing bits of King of the Road, Leaving on a Jet Plane, and five others.

The most recent record I wrote up included the song It’s the Singer, Not the Song. This record demonstrates that. There is also an interesting juxtaposition. One song that’s included is People, which says that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Another is The Sound of Silence, which says I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain. Give a listen and see who you agree with.

December’s Children (and everybody’s), Rolling Stones, London Records, 1965

This was the first LP I bought. I was in ninth grade and I thought the Stones were the coolest band. I loved the record. Man, playing it now I realized I misunderstood most of the lyrics. When I looked them up on line, I have to say there’s not much there.

Get Off My Cloud–I look out my window/imagining the world has stopped. What does that mean?  I’ve been at the bar on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building, and I couldn’t see anything much. It was really very isolated unless you are standing at a window. If you sit on a sofa and look out or up, there’s nothing. Marianne Faithfull said As Tears Go By is a song about an older woman and having kids—I say Jagger and Richards didn’t have the maturity to imagine speaking for anybody but young men. Blue Turns to Grey is a song about the need for mental health services. The singer’s girl has gone; he thinks he won’t be lonely, but he is. Sadness turns into depression—isn’t that what blue turns to grey means? Nowadays they’d put a hotline number at the end. In a song about how the quality of the singer is important more than the song, the singing is just terrible. When I heard the vocals fall apart at the end of The Singer, Not the Song, I wondered if the Stones were joking. When they covered Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, it was fine.

Roots and Branches, the Dillards, Anthem Records, 1972

Records by the Dillards were hard to come by in used records stores. Folks who had them, kept them. I was glad to buy this one when I saw it. I like bluegrass, and they were said to be good. I was shocked to play Roots and Branches and hear something between the Eagles and the Byrds—people called it a lot of things: country rock, back-porch country, contemporary bluegrass, folk rock. It’s okay for what it is, but given my general lack of maturity, I liked Boogie On Reggae Woman by Dillard, Hartman, Dillard more.

So far in this playthrough I think I’ve identified various trajectories for bands/performers (I’ll call them bands or groups because it’s shorter), typically based on the success of their first two or three albums. One path is for the band to get signed and record an album or two with modest success. The record company that signed the group drops it if it doesn’t have a big hit because they expected the band to be the Beatles. Another label will sign them with more realistic expectations. The band can go for a long time doing what works. Sometimes the group will change a bit to get new fans without alienating their current ones. Steve Goodman, for example, tried to be a crooner. It didn’t succeed, and he went back to Chicago folk singer/songwriter. The Dillards seemed to have settled into a comfortable country rock spot and stayed there.

The James Brown Band, The Popcorn, King, 1969

The James Brown Band was excellent at playing a jazz/soul/protofunk mix when most rock bands struggled to stay in tune (looking at you, Byrds). Brown conducted them when he performed; I believe Alfred Ellis led them in his absence. The liner notes have a King James version joke in them; I guess it wasn’t invented for LeBron.

When I was looking for James Brown records in the mid-70s, they were sadly out of print. The collectors drove the prices out of my range. In 1980 this one was $5 (about $18 today), and it is just the band. Others in my price range (in years of searching) were one record with a big scratch and another with By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Let It Be Me.

I held out against CDs for years. They killed records, which I loved. When my brother thought my resisting had gone on too long, he bought me the Holy Grail—James Brown Live at the Apollo on CD. He knew I’d buy a CD player for it. (As I recall, he threw in Bob Dylan Live at the Albert Hall, which had been the GWW bootleg at an astronomical price.) He was right. I bought a little CD player and still listen to Marvin Gaye’s greatest hits, the complete Robert Johnson, and other compilations on CD. Solid Smoke Records started to bring Brown’s King records back, but a) all the records were sold immediately and so they were still very expensive used, and b) Solid Smoke went broke.

Life in the Foodchain, Tonio K, Full Moon, 1978

I played this record for everyone who would sit still for it when I bought it in 1979. No one liked it as much as I do. They said it was a bit too much, and I said moderation in expression of teenage humor is no virtue. ‘It’s kind of like carving the turkey/it’s kind of like mowing the lawn/everything gets to this certain dimension/winds up on the customer’s plate and then gone’—that’s funny even if I don’t know what it means (but I still look closely at my salad in restaurants.) ‘But if you wake up with your mind on fire/too frightened to even scream’—funny image as long as it doesn’t happen to me. ‘Now they’ve got poison in the water/and the whole world in a trance/but just because we’re hypnotized/that don’t mean we can’t dance.’ Party on.

A song about dating a vampire: ‘How come you start to hiss when I say my prayers/and you wear those stupid capes.’ Multiple bad break-up songs—‘the flames have gone out/let’s extinguish the embers/so you keep the car/and all the passionate letters/they won’t get you too far/but they’ll make you feel better.’ ‘Call it a mistake/call it whatever/let’s just call it off/better late than never.’ A parody of songs that spell out a word such as D-I-V-O-R-C-E—’I’m P-I-S-S ed off/Go to H-E-double L.’ And a joke that made it hard to listen to Running on Empty: ‘I wish I was as mellow/as for instance Jackson Browne/but “fountain of sorrow” my ass [vile obscenity]/I hope you wind up in the ground.’

When I looked the album up in Discogs, I saw that Jean Millington of Fanny played bass and Garth Hudson of The Band played accordion. The things I learn writing up my records.

Karen Lawrence and the Pinz, Girl’s Night Out, RCA, 1981

I’ve had this record 40 years or so. It is quintessential New Wave—detached, intellectual, ironic. Lawrence has a spiky haircut, a ‘50s dress, sings of a Girl’s Night Out, and covers Sealed with a Kiss, which was a hit in 1960. I was shocked to find out, as I write up this last playthrough, that for the last 30 years she has been singing in Blue by Nature, a blues group. The clips on YouTube are wonderful. The artist changes, the fan and the record are forever stuck. (I think Mann said that in Tonio Kroger.) Some advice from Girl’s Night Out: First, don’t look back, you may not like what you see; then, don’t hold back, you may like what you see; last, don’t look, it might spoil it all. Hard to tell. In So Tough: ‘Build that wall up, make it stronger/stone by stone/Raise your shield up, cutting off all contact, till you’re all alone.’ Hold Me Closer is a faux love song: ‘I got your picture taped on my mirror’ is a hint. Then ‘I wake up to find the windows are steaming’ is someone sleeping alone. I love ‘Wheels are turning, making the machine go/Doing our duty, making that cash flow.’ Also good: ‘I’m scared when I realize I got no leverage.’ Those both sound post-neoliberal to me.

Atlantic Blues: Vocalists, various artists, Atlantic Records, 1986 (continued)

The hits and the stars keep coming. Percy Mayfield had a minor hit with I Don’t Want to Be President. Nixon was gone in 1974, and Mayfield says he didn’t want to get stuck with that mess. Next there’s Ted Taylor doing a big Mayfield hit—River’s Invitation. Esther Williams isn’t accusing her man of being a cold fish—she’s just like a fish because she keeps going for his line. She likes what he uses for bait. Otis Clay describes the meanest woman in Pouring Water on a Drowning Man. She pushes him when he’s falling, kicks him when he’s down, stabs him in the back, puts salt in his wound, and leaves him in the cold. Rufus Thomas did Walkin’ the Dog and sang duets with his daughter Carla Thomas. Titus Turner wrote All Around the World, which Little Willie John turned into the immortal Grits Ain’t Groceries. Bobby Bland, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, complains that his baby treats him like a school boy. Johnny Copeland (perhaps best remembered now as Shemekia Copeland’s father) said he’ll cry if he wants to (but not the way that Leslie Gore put it). Johnny Taylor has a bad dream that the only woman he ever loved was leaving. [My nightmare was that the goggle brought back Johnnie Taylor to my queries for Johnny.] Miss Aretha Franklin told her man that if he’s not gonna take care of business then he oughta stop taking up space. Z.Z. Hill (who was Z.Z. before ZZ Top) wants his baby to be home at dinnertime.

Atlantic Blues: Vocalists, various artists, Atlantic Records, 1986

This is the first two-record set that I want to say twice as much about. More tomorrow. Sippie Wallace was the Texas Nightengale. Her recordings inspired Bonnie Raitt to sing and play the blues in the late 1960s. On the record, Raitt sings back up and plays slide guitar for Wallace on Suitcase Blues. Jimmy Witherspoon, whose signature tune was Ain’t Nobody’s Business, does Trouble in Mind and In the Evenin’. LaVern Baker covers Bessie Smith doing Gimme a Pigfoot (and a bottle of beer). Good advice for us all: Check your razors and your guns/We gonna be rassling when the wagon comes. Mama Yancey sang with her husband Jimmy for years, recording with Erwin Helfer in her late 80s. Joe Turner has Elmore James playing behind him, recorded in 1953. I’m glad to have discovered Lil Green, who has fine timing on her two songs. She started out as a blues singer but switched to jazz in the style of Billie Holiday. Wynonie Harris was like Elvis Presley and did songs with lyrics like “Keep on churning till the butter comes.” Wikipedia says that’s double entendre. What—they think those could be instructions for making butter? I’m impressed that in 1946 Harris cut two records with Sonny Blount, after the trip to Saturn and before he was Sun Ra. Ruth Brown, the queen of R and B, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. She was in Hairspray. Atlantic Records had some fine vocalists with impressive accomplishments.

Shades of Deep Purple, Deep Purple, Tetragrammaton, 1968

This was Deep Purple’s first album, containing their hit single, Hush. It is a mix of arty styles—I heard progressive, psychedelic, and classical. The blues and rock songs they covered, such as I’m So Glad, Hey Joe, and Help, are overwrought, I say. I heard a police siren at the start of Hey Joe, which also has some Bolero in it. Help, the Lennon-McCartney tune, is very slow and bluesy. I like the bouncy pop tune more.  Mandrake Root was one of their songs; I couldn’t tell if it was a love charm or hallucinogen. The Wiki article said the band knocked this out in a few days, and it does sound casual and a bit slapdash. The important measure of success for any first album is a big hit, so Shades of Deep Purple set the group up for years. When I bought it used in the ‘80s, I thought it would be more like Smoke on the Water.