Here's the first post on the subject of my great musical discovery of the last twenty four hours, Peter Ivers. In the words of his Spotify biography 'a Cult waiting to happen,' Ivers early seventies albums are must hears and testaments to a special talent, somewhere between Bowie, Jobriath, Rocky Horror and Pee Wee Herman but also with something all of his own. This is something from his second, self-titled record from 1976, I'll be back with more on his astonishing debut record Terminal Love from two years previously once a vinyl copy reaches me from Germany from an order I've just put in. Astonishingly good!
'Fats Domino put more records on the pop chart than any other rock or R & B star of the fifties, (except Elvis of course) - sixty-five singles in an almost uninterrupted stream from 1955 to 1964. And 1955 is just when the pop charts started making consistent sense. He started scoring on the R & B chart (which usually listed only about ten or fifteen national best sellers) in 1950, and if the charts had been desegregated sooner, his statistics would be even more impressive.
His music could hardly be expected to impress more. It's difficult not to underrate Fats, because his records so often feel the same: rollicking New Orleans piano shuffle exponents of winking lust. But in his case, that's a hallmark of consistent style not formulaic drudgery. Whole Lotta Loving is typical, which makes it very fine indeed.'
Teenage Fanclub are returning shortly with a new album, doing what they do, and have done pretty much since Songs From Northern Britain, almosttwenty years back. It was round about then that they embraced the idea of adulthood and with that in mind concluded that the early Byrds rather than Big Star or Dinosaur Jr. were their overriding template and they've kept with that way of looking at things in the ensuing years. This is the second trailer for the coming record and I assuming that it's Love's composition as it's rich with all the trademarks of his classic work. I have a colleague whose favourite maxim is 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' and sometimes, very, very occasionally she's right, although I don't imagine she was referring to the Fannies. The last twenty seconds of this are particularly glorious.
Angel Olsen is back and on the edge of a hysterical nervous emotional meltdown, involving tears, a whole lot of screaming and probably violence. That's what she's best at and this song augers extremely well for the accompanying album which is out on Friday and which I certainly need to hear!
Sonic Youth goof around in Put Blood In The Music a documentary about the New York City avant gard underground from 1989. It's typical of the film itself, which also features John Zorn and Hugo Largo and is an exercise in the preciousness that characterised that particular scene. Full of talking heads who just exude New York attitood, it's well worth tracking down but should be watched with a slightly cynical eye.
The lost man of Krautrock. Reichmann murdered in a bar room brawl shortly after the making of this in 1978, his debut solo album, had had links with several of the major players of that scene including playing in bands with Michael Rother and Wolfgang Flur before they went on to Neu and Kraftwerk respectively. Wunderbar, of which this is the title and opening track is a smooth ride along golden rails familiar in feel and essence to any fan of either of these bands but worthy of a listen on its own considerable merits.
Chancing upon this, a tribute to Orwell from Datblygu, or perhaps otherwise, (I've no idea seeing as it's sung in Welsh), has led to a morning of listening to more of the band's splendid records and John Peel sessions from the eighties and nineties. Forerunners of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals who both paid fulsome tribute to their influence. Greatly deserving of further investigation to the uninitiated.
The fact that this 1967 album Within Myself was made by an eleven year old girl probably has disqualified it from the credibility it merits over time. It's nevertheless a very fine record. Miller had already recorded sessions for Motown's VIP subsidiary. She's an assured performer and these are two finely arranged and delivered tracks.
The Lovin' Spoonful are well remembered and greatly revered of course for the significant part they played in the history of Rock and Roll. Only not as an albums band, but as a singles one. This is partly because their key years, 1965 to 1967 were played out during the transition in emphasis between those two formats. Partly also because of the sheer eclecticism of their output. While contemporaries such as The Beatles, Kinks, Beach Boys, Dylan, Byrds, Love and Doors focused their energies on the long as much as the short player, (or increasingly towards the former), the Spoonful, (sorry that contraction of their name is unavoidable), churned out a series of LPs between these years that remain great collections of songs while never quite cohering as whole statements in the way that would lead them to find their way into the lists of great albums.
This is a shame but no surprise. The band consistently leap from one vibe and mood to the next on record and while this produced a whole clutch of songs that were the equal of any of their peers, the subsequent lack of a classic album has perhaps precluded them with the passing of time from laying their claim among the true big-hitters of the period.
This though would be a misreading and an injustice, because that's where they belong. In terms of song for song merit their recorded output is fit to stand against anything released from that glorious period. Largely due to the sizable songwriting talent of leader John Sebastian although they were very much a band in the proper sense, the loose, carefree playing is the other genius ingredient in the mix. They seem to embody a certain joy and innocence that surfed its wave most obviously between '65 and '66 and perhaps shifted towards a certain seriousness and engagement with a greater sense of imminent danger during '67 which in turn led to the darker and more obviously politically charged '68 and '69 both in terms of historical events and in the general tone of much of the pop and rock music of the time.
Appropriately, Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful which is the record I've chosen to write about here was recorded in late '66 but released in January '67 just as this gradual transition started to kick in, which would lead to the break up of the band with the crucial departure of Zal Yanovsky, the huge mouthed sparring partner of Sebastian who contributed so much of the madcap joy that made them such a force.
Still, though the Lovin' Spoonful's essentially light touch prevails. In the words of Bob Stanley, who understands these things and fully recognises their greatness:
'The Lovin' Spoonful looked as if they'd turned up stoned at a jumble sale and hastily assembled what they took to be a beatnik Beatles look. All clashing spots and stripes, they were droll, human and a lot of fun. Folk, blues, jazz and rock'n'roll were all thrown into the mixing bowl. 'We call it Good Time Music because we have a good time,' said singer John Sebastian. even more than Dylan, Spoonful were Americana, only with barely a hint of pretence or anger. Every song was coloured in with felt tips; they were cartoons for grown-ups.'
The cartoon quality of their output is immediately evident from a cursory listen to almost any of their records, be they singles, B Sides or albums. The Lovin' Spoonful were free from care in a way that very few of their contemporaries truly were. Their records just float, defying gravity. You might get a similar feeling from listening to Monkees records for whom the Spoonful might well have acted as a template, just as much as The Beatles did. Sebastian generally wrote, sometimes with co-writing credits to his bandmates but they swapped turns at the mic in a loose and happy democracy that didn't seem set to last and sadly didn't.
Hums and its preceding album Daydream are probably interchangeable in terms of quality. Not a bum track anywhere. Even the slightly throwaway stuff, such as Henry Thomas from Hums earns its slot as part of the greater whole because listening to the records you get a sense of the whole immense, spontaneous thrill it must have been to be in the Spoonful in '65 or '66 or as the next best option, to being one of the four, to see them live.
Hums like Daydream is twelve songs long and isn't really an advance as such on the band's sound as everything was pretty much in place from the off. It has a couple of their more reflective songs and two of my own personal favourites in Rain on the Roof and Coconut Grove. It has Summer in the City, their biggest hit and a shining example of how it's possible to get poetry to Number One.
Occasionally, on 4 Eyes or Voodoo in my Basement, things take a bluesier slant and Spoonful show they could have given the Stones or Creedence a run for their money had they chosen that slant. But their's is always a lighter, poppier disposition and they're off to the next track before you know it. It's all tribute to Sebastian's restless happy talent. As Clive James wrote of him, 'Randy Newman is the only man who has outstripped his brilliant lyric technique,' The Los Angeles Times described him as ' One of the very select group of songwriters, including also John Lennon, Ray Davies and Brian Wilson, for which the term genius doesn't seem like a publicist's wild notion.'
So Hums is not an album as such so much as a collection of small, visionary moments. Vignettes. All shots at the Great American songbook .It's all here whenever you need it, whenever you forget what it felt like to be seventeen and need a reminder. In Bob Stanley's words again, (he clearly loves the group):
'John Sebastian favoured steel-rim glasses and worn denim. He was born and raised in Greenwich Village, which made sense: his songs all sounded as if they were composed on a New York fire escape, five storeys up.'
Sadly, they were not built to last. Hums was pretty much their final important statement:
'Then Sebastian wrote Darling Be Home Soon, a fragile daisy chain of a song. 'I've been waiting since I toddled for the great relief of having you to talk to.' It was beautiful enough to make you shudder. But it was not goofy in any way and, to Sebastian's horror, a disapproving Yanovsky gurned and clowned his way through a TV performance of it. Less than two years on from their first single and they were splintering. Worse soon followed: Yanovsky and Boone were caught holding drugs, and Yanovsky was threatened with deportation if he didn't identify his dealer - which he did. A Rolling Stone magazine-sanctioned boycott of the Spoonful followed. Yanovsky was sacked but the damage was done. In late '67 Sebastian wrote a sour, tired single called Money aimed at the band's management, and they wisely split before things got cynical and boring.'
And we're left with the records. Their first three albums are all essential, plus a Greatest Hits. For their peak two years they were as good as any band's been before or since. Maybe not one for the holier than thou hipsters, but they don't always get things completely right!
The last song on Hums is called Never Goin' Back. There's no need for them to ever do so although core members Joe Butler, Steve Boone and Jerry Yester still tour fifty years on in a reconstructed Spoonful that Sebastian sensibly keeps his distance from. They're best remembered as they were in '65, '66 and early '67. Preserved in visionary aspic.
And if there was a seed from which Vivienne, (posted below), germinated, it was almost certainly this. The two songs that Mo Tucker sang for The Velvet Underground, this and I'm Sticking With You have a small legacy all of their own. Yes, she's not singing in tune. Yes, that's the whole point. You get the impression that the Velvets were always having fun. But here they're making no bones about it!
Sydney band who formed in 1984 and are still going which deserves some kind of award for dogged perseverance. This single, which came out five years after their inception, has a brittle, imperfect beauty, which conoisseurs of these things will immediately recognise and appreciate. There's something of the sensibility of the Go Betweens here which is fitting as the band's drummer David Nichols went on to work as a music critic and publish a very fine biography of that particular band.
'Mary Queen of Scots, wasn't very hot. In her wedding gown...'
Eugenius, a fine Scottish band who emerged from the ashes of The Vaselines and then Captain America when they were forced by a possible court injunction to change their name. Eugene Kelly was praised to the high heavens by Kurt Cobain who also covered a couple of his songs. Eugenius returns the favour here as there's definitely a strong flavour of Nirvana to the song. It's difficult to imagine what the actual Mary Queen of Scots might have thought of it all however.
'L.A's baddest sixties group - not necessarily good-bad-but-not-evil, either. Singer Arthur lee had the glare and leer of Jimi Hendrix, and if that didn't give him equal brilliance, he was at least up to making some of the nastiest garage rock going. Before he became an acid visionary that is.
Love's My Little Red Book, a Dionne Warwick melody that had been a British hit for Manfred Mann, probably ranks as the sleaziest job anybody ever did on a Bacharach-David song. The static guitar riff, the rudimentary bass bomp, the tambourine and shakers all do their best to compensate for the lack of a really good drummer while Lee yowls on about losing his girlfriend and getting out his little red book (Hugh Hefner told me those things were supposed to be black but apparently Burt and Hal never got the word - or maybe they were Maoists), and chasing around town like a dog in heat. Which is ridiculous but that's okay because when Lee starts to gabble ' All I did was tahlk, tahlk abo-out' cha,' he's hooked you for life.'
Morrison to Morrissey. One of The Smiths superlative moments, a signature tune, and an alternative national anthem and manifesto.
'Provided The Smiths(the debut album) with some of its most memorable soundbites. Its disparate verses cover a superfluity of Morrissey's fundamental lyrical ideals; droll ennui, comical hypochondria, the anti-work ethic, thorny patriotism and the lamentation over lost loves and times past.'
It's all here. Morrissey, never wrote a better, more explicit lyric. You could write a chapter on the particular emotional state it describes and what it's getting at. If you love this, you'll love The Smiths. If you don't, you surely won't!
This post contains cliches, but given its subject matter that's almost inevitable. New Jersey's Big Eyes play tight badass Rock and Roll the way they used to. The Runaways, Joan Jet and Suzi Quatro are not generally top of my playlist, but this is the well they draw on and they do it impeccably well. Recently released album Stake My Claim, is a thing of needle sharp economy and melody. Ten songs, not one of them breaching the three minute mark. Leader Kate Eldridge steers the ship with unerring determination and conviction. They'd be some band to see live. Here's the title track.
Leftfield British oddballs Be Bop Deluxe who veered throughout the seventies between glam, electronica, pop and heavy metal pay tribute to French maverick genius Jean Cocteau who veered for over half a century between poetry, film, art and the stage. This comes from their 1975 album Futurama.
'The Ronettes once alleged that the best part of breakin' up is in the makin' up but you could never prove it with a jukebox. Second chances apparently aren't within the province of rock and soul. After all you and I could name hundreds, if not thousands of songs about getting together and falling apart, but there are damn few classics about getting back together.
Holland-Dozier-Holland delivered such a song to the Supremes, the first of Motown's many jokes - you know the kind of thing where they put out Someday We'll Be Together and then announce The Supremes were splitting up, or gave Dave Ruffin My Whole World Ended (The Moment You Left Me), as his first single after leaving The Temptations. Here, Diana swears her love affair deserves a second chance because she was swindled out of him the first time through the advice of her (real life) friends and partners Mary and Flo, who it turns out are having their own romantic problems, so who are they to say that Diana's guy is a bum? (since her real life guy at the time was Berry Gordy, the answer should have been as obvious as their last royalty check.
Anyway HDH were so taken with their success here that they used fundamentally the same melody for The Supremes' next single Nothing But Heartaches and paid the price: Back In My Arms had been the group's fifth Number One in a row, and Heartaches broke the string.'
An early calypso song fromTrinidad in the thirties, later covered by Van Dyke Parkes on his 1972 pastiche album Goodbye America. This stuff is very difficult to beat. The lyrics are a joy.
The Belmonts, (bereft of Dion), do George. From their rather wonderful 1972 album of covers, Cigars, Acappella and Candy. Here they throw in She's So Fine into the mix though Harrison may not have thanked them for it. At round about that point he was being taken to court and eventually to the cleaners by The Chiffons' lawyers.
Not a cover of the Michael Jackson song. Instead Ranaldo playing it straighter than he generally does in Sonic Youth. A bit more more vulnerability than we're used to. A beautiful, melodic Rock love song.
While we're on the subject of two minutes without a second wasted. This is on the trailer for Juno but not the final soundtrack remarkably, even though it might have been written with the film in mind.
The time that Carole King spent in the Brill Building churning out song after song in the early sixties was one of the most culturally invaluable periods of nine to five in human history. It's the fact that so many of these tracks sound like pieces straight off the production line that make them fascinating listening. But then there are the melodic twists within the best of them where they force an emotional response from you despite the fact that you might feel at the same time you're being manipulated that transcend them from the ordinary. This happens here during the second melodic shift beginning, 'I got mad at you last night. When you were holding another girl last night' which is so good that it doesn't need to be repeated. The track is two minutes and seven seconds in all. I bet she and Gerry Goffin enjoyed their tea break after that. If only we were all so productive!
Incredibly Post Punk and not a band you'd have anticipated having Number One hits within a couple of years of this. So much going on here. Oh and it namedrops Buddy Holly.
Cliff, despite spending most of his long career sailing straight down the middle of the road in terms of his records had a few, definite golden moments. This was one of them, giving a great impression of what it must have felt like to be young and happy in Britain in 1966, (though it actually sounds as if it should have come out a few years earlier, perhaps an indication that Cliff and The Shadows had become stranded by the incoming tide of beat groups). Still, it sounds just great. A slice of '63 in '66!
Yet another Australian band. The list is really mounting up on here. This comes from their 2013 record Dream Cave and comes accompanied by a great promo, shot in Bolivia.
Sixteenth century Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet and astrologer. Suggested that stars were really distant suns with their own planetary systems. Tried for heresy for questioning central Catholic doctrines, he was burned at the stake in 1600. In general, a remarkable historical figure and I'm grateful to Australian band Sherlock's Daughter for bringing him to my attention with the opening track of their most recent album, 2012's Hunter. The whole record is quite wonderful!
Neutral Milk Hotel and their record Aeroplane Over the Sea get a whole section of the Twee book devoted to them and it. This album has a remarkable narrative. Barely noticed when it came out, its reputation has mushroomed phenomenally ever since until now, almost twenty years on it is something of a modern day Forever Changes. It currently ranksremarkably at # 18 on the Best Albums Ever website. It's not something that touches much of a chord with me personally as o ten as often as I've listened to it, trying to detect why its become such a holy grail to others. Still, each to his own.
'To me this B side of the posthumously released (and markedly inferior) Cousin of Mine constitutes better evidence of how Sam Cooke would have fit into the soul music of the future than even A Change is Gonna Come. A slow ballad of bluesy guitar and surging saxes That's Where It's At smacks of nothing so much as the mid-sixties Stax hits. With his wry 'Ha Ha' and repetitious Oh Yeah and his hints of testifying, Cooke shows that he still remembers all the old gospel tricks and now knows how to deploy them more avidly than he has since leaving the Soul Stirrers. Which is exactly what Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam and Dave wound up doing in his absence.'
From this month's Mojo which arrived on my doormat last night. Lead album review:
'In the third century AD, Pope Fabian sent six missionaries to Gaul, to convert the populace there to Christianity. One of their number Dionysius, made such a good job of it he was ordered as the first Bishop of Paris, but was soon executed by decree of the ruling Roman governor. According to the post-biblical scripture, Dionysius, later canonised as Saint Dennis, was beheaded along with two of his clergy, Rusticus and Eleutherius on the highest point of the city, thereafter known as Montmartre, or 'the martyr's mountain'. It's said that, after they'd lopped off Dennis' head, he picked it from the floor, placed it under his arm, and walked seven miles, all the way preaching the gospel until finally he collapsed behind the Seine.'
Any student of Black Francis's ouevre would surely agree: here was a Pixies song just waiting to happen.'
The new Pixies album Head Carrier is fast approaching arrival. And here are two tracks they've released in advance of its arrival. Their promise is great. Frank Black still has an understanding of his band's legacy and the well it originally it drew on and continues to do. In these two I pick up the spirit of Iggy and The Gun Club. Remarkably, thirty years on, and even without Kim, they still have it!
A quite Friday night at Rosie's watching the football with one of the regulars. I chose this among others from the band's very fine 1967 debut, Electric Music for the Body & Mind.
'Of all Autumn's, (mid sixties San Francisco record label), the best was Laugh Laugh by the Beau Brummels. Aside from the Byrds Mr Tambourine Man, no other California group so close to pure Mersey beat, though the folkish harmonies and harmonica foretell the Bay Area acid rock to come. Sly (Stone) edited the Brummels down to three-minute classicism , focused on the pop song rather than soloing and made sure the lyrics remained coherent, thus establishing a local tradition which almost no one pursued.
A Philadelphia band quite honestly and open to the influence of The Replacements. Pretty much every song I listened to was a not very distant relative of Bastards of Young. Still, in short, sharp bursts they get away with it.
Sarah Vaughan, obviously one of the great voices, does Sweet Gingerbread Man, which was originally on the soundtrack of The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart. Also covered by Sammy Davis Jr. but Sarah's version shades it. A single in 1972. With her take on Imagine on the other side.
As one long-running series on here has just come to an end I might as well get another one going to keep my eye in. This one should be fairly low maintenance. From one of the more interesting books I've read recently, which supplies a playlist at the back of the book of all things Twee which should provide a diverting enough journey into winter. Here's what I initially said about the book a couple of months back.
'A historical and cultural investigation into a particular sensibility taking in all the great writers, artists and musicians who have championed a gentler way of doing things. Taking in Walt Disney, Anne Frank, J.D.Salinger, Truman Capote, Jean Seberg, Jonathan Richman, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Wes Anderson and so on. Every sensitive icon you could possibly want. Wonderfully written and encyclopedic in its scope, it's sure to act as the source for a lot of the music I'll post here over the coming months.'
True enough! Here's the first. Not unnaturally, Belle & Sebastian, who could virtually act as curators of this stuff.
Morrissey chanced upon The Primitives playing in their early days and apparently remarked that they caused his sporran to ignite. Best known of course for their huge UK hit Crash. I personally prefer this, their first single.
'Band of Horses remain a name of band that's achieved something down the years. This is from their latest album, just out this year, a nicely evocative track seemingly about watching time pass by. Neil Young and Crazy Horse as generally are the obvious reference point. They're a link to a time and place where it's forever 1973.
Also posted here a song that's probably thought to be their best. From ten years back. Pitchfork who like to make judgements on things like these, are pretty insistent that they're not as good as they used to be. I'm not sufficiently authoritative on the band to make a judgement on that but I'm grateful for these two moments at least.
Heard on a pub music system and then played at Rosie's within a couple of hours. Reminds me strangely of Love's Forever Changes in a way I can't describe.
So, one hundred days after it's outset we get there. There was really only ever going to be one Number One, this year of all years. A man who changed the world.
