Robeson had many talents. He was a consensus All-American in college football at Rutgers. He then graduated from Columbia Law School while playing in the NFL. Robeson decided artists must take sides on social issues; he chose to support freedom. His continuing support for Stalin/the Soviet Union/Communism was very controversial.
In music he is best known for his singing in Show Boat, especially the song Ol’ Man River. He recorded and released nearly 300 songs. This record is spirituals. It is 10 inches in diameter, smaller than typical 12-inch LPs, and probably predates stereo. My in-laws had wide-ranging tastes.
He was the master of twang instrumentals in the 1950s and early ‘60s, with hits such as Rebel Rouser and 40 Miles of Bad Road. He was a self-taught guitar player who didn’t read music, yet he was so successful at what he did that I’ll bet he is among the most frequently-included artists in compilations from the ‘50s. Shangri-Las, Shirelles, Kingsmen, maybe the Righteous Brothers, and Eddy. One of these is not like the others—that twang evokes Eisenhower’s second term very powerfully.
I found out from his obit that Eddy was married to Jessi Colter from 1962 to 1968. He must have been much better looking than his photos. On my Waylon Jennings album ‘I’ve Always Been Crazy,’ Eddy produced the four-song medley of Buddy Holly hits. Jennings played with Holly (and was married to Jessi Colter from 1969 till his death in 2002). Everything touches if you read enough of the small print.
I love Buddy Guy, and I mostly like my Record Store Day purchases, but this sounds like a Buddy Guy tribute band warming up. Sorry I missed Record Store Day. I’ll play one of my other Buddy Guy records soon.
Detroit and Cleveland, after they stopped being famous for producing cars and steel, wanted to be known for rock and roll. Ian Hunter sang ‘Cleveland Rocks’ and Bob Seger mocked Rolling Stone magazine for being so slow to call Detroit’s audiences the best in the world. Poor Cleveland got the Hall of Fame (Electric Light Orchestra? Donovan? really?) and Detroit got this compilation. The MC5, the Stooges, Bob Seger System, one of Mitch Ryder’s bands, and one of Seger’s guitar player’s bands are great or great-adjacent; there are some lesser bands that are still good. SRC covered Cream covering Skip James pretty well. The Rationals decided to record ‘Respect’ after Aretha Franklin—not a good choice. I bought this for just $3 in 1980 in Philadelphia because they didn’t know how good it was. Something on the innertubes said that Mitch Ryder founded the Seeds and Stems label and that it put out a song by Ryder and Ernie Harwell. Learning things like that keeps me going.
He was their keyboard/Mellotron player. It was an innovative instrument, kind of sampler and kind of synth that gave the Blues their lush orchestral sound in Days of Future Past. Pinder also recited the poem in Nights in White Satin. (Me, I thought that was an outtake from Spinal Tap.) Some stories from the innertubes: Their management company took their early earnings and ran to the hills. The band had a hit in France in 1965 with a version of Bye, Bye Bird, a Sonny Boy Williamson tune. There’s a clip from French TV that’s pretty good.
WXRT played a lot of the Specials when this came out, especially A Message to You, Rudy, which I really liked. I got the record and found that the rest of the record was okay. That’s how it goes sometimes. I like ska, I like sticking it to the man, I like unifying the punks, natty dreads, mods, rockers, hippies, and the skinheads. But this didn’t get me going into clubs, much less going into the streets. It was me, not them. The songs do warn of the folks who want to paint the town gray, which is a good line.
Hey—a record released this century. When I saw Friddle in 2019, I thought of John Prine. His songs had depth and maturity. ‘There’s at least two ways a body can drown/getting tossed in the ocean and drinking in a dry town.’ My grandmother lived in a dry town, and my cousins talked about sneaking away on backroads to get a drink. It sounded like prohibition—you’d never learn to moderate your drinking. About going smoothly through life—’a man ain’t a swiss watch, all well-oiled and clean/he’s a lopsided pinball on a tilted machine.’ Reacting to the end of touring circuses: ‘How am I supposed to run away/now that they’ve taken the last place to go.’ He’s skeptical of love: ‘Am I a used car for parts/for sale by the owner.’ There’s a song about Samson and one about the South. In the liner notes Friddle apologizes for the lack of banjo on the record. Isn’t it said that a gentleman is someone who can play the banjo yet doesn’t?
I bet COVID set back Friddle’s career. Here’s hoping it gets back on track.
Dickey Betts died. I don’t have any Allman Brothers records to play or insights about Betts to offer. I did remember that the Allman Brothers made a hit of Statesboro Blues, a Blind Willie McTell song I happen to own a copy of. I noticed the lyrics are a little different. McTell sang that his mother died and left him reckless; his father died and left him wild, wild, wild. That got trimmed a bit by the Allman Brothers Band for a reference to a rock and roll favorite—sister Lucille. McTell complains about a mighty mean woman; he mentions but doesn’t name a sister, brother, auntie, uncle, cousin, and friend. He mentions a classic steam engine that had a ‘colored fireman’ who worked hard, and he asked someone to hand him his traveling shoes.
Elsewhere on the record he sang about a topic dear to my heart—writing paper. By today’s standards I write a lot of letters. For now I’m using up accountants’ forms dating from before Excel that my father brought home from the office and graph paper left from various sources. Maybe I’ll need to buy stationery someday.
Somehow I never realized that Carly Simon’s greatest hits are 40 minutes of unrelentingly cynical disappointment about love and long-term romance. I love it. One reason I hadn’t listened much was the ketchup commercial, and another was her being married to James Taylor. ‘The Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frostin’ is not an honest description of driving in bad weather. That probably wasn’t fair to hold against her, and they are long divorced, so there’s nothing holding me back. In That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be, she says of older married people: Their children hate them, they hate each other, they hate themselves. ‘Silent rooms, tearful nights, angry dawn’—that’s poetry. In The Right Thing to Do, so long as you stay, loving you is right. In Mockingbird, all the gifts to express love might fail. In Legend in Your Own Time, her lover started early by disappointing his mama. In I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain, she lays in on so thick I think she’s trying to kid herself: ‘Open up and drink in the white light pouring down from heaven.’ In Anticipation, these are the good old days for the simple reason that it’s all downhill from here. In (We Have) No Secrets, Simon agrees with Bob Seger: Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
In I Am a Rock, Paul Simon urges us to avoid entanglements. Carly Simon sounds more like Muhammad Ali looking back at long career of engagement.
I bought this used in 2010 because in 1975 I knew a guy who loved King Biscuit Boy. As he heard about King Biscuit Time and King Biscuit Flower Hour, he trimmed the facts to fit with what he knew about King Biscuit Boy. This record isn’t much good if you’ve heard Sonny Boy Williamson, say. However, as I wrote this review, I found that the record is adjacent to some great stuff. For example, Crowbar was Ronnie Hawkins’s band in the late 1960s. One day he fired them all (saying those boys could eff up a crowbar in 15 seconds, giving the band its name as a parting gift), which is the same career path as The Band. King Biscuit Time is the longest-running daily American radio broadcast show, gracing the airwaves since November 21, 1941. Just about all the great blues performers have been on it. Levon Helm (drummer and singer for The Band) said it inspired his career. King Biscuit Flower Hour (a great name, I think) was a weekly rock and roll radio show for 20 years. As Cheap Trick put it, everything works if you let it. My goal is to get everything to touch.
converselyspeaking 