If Fela Kuti was Afro-Jazz, then The Funkees were Afro-Rock. Hailing from Eastern Nigeria, and formed in the late 60s as an Army band after the Biafran War, the Funkees were the band that set the dance floors of Lagos on fire in the 70s. Soundway released an excellent compilation in 2012, but the tracks below come from their incredibly potent (and incredibly hard to find) album entitled become a member or log in.
Of the many, many tribute albums concerning the Dylan catalog, the Lou Adler produced Dylan's Gospel stands as one of the most coherent. Tracked at Sound Recorders in Hollywood, this 1969 set by The Los Angeles Gospel Choir takes the bard's material and works it from the inside out -- from fairly catholic renditions (see the the two tracks below) to the full gospel workout of the 18+ minute versions of "All Along The Watchtower" and "Chimes Of . . .
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There are certain musical landmarks often brought up in conjunction with Athens, Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, R.E.M. But on the road to the Truckers’ excellent new album, English Oceans, songwriter Patterson Hood found himself contemplating a comparison no artist wants to make.
“We’d been through so many damn personnel changes,” Hood chuckles over the phone from Milwaukee. “I thought, ‘Has this become some kind of Spinal Tap joke?’”
Recorded by a leaner, meaner Truckers — Hood and Mike Cooley on guitar and vocals, backed by Brad Morgan on drums, Matt Patton on bass, and Jay Gonzalez on guitars and keys -- English Oceans is their best in a decade, a potent distillation of exactly what makes the band tick: soulful boogie, distorted rave-ups, and the dual wits of Hood and Cooley. The record didn’t come easy.
Following 2011’s R&B-indebted Go-Go Boots, it became obvious that the band had reached a breaking point. Bassist Shonna Tucker departed, following the lead of guitarist Jason Isbell, who’d split a few years earlier. Cooley was in the midst of a terrible bout of writer’s block, and the core band was road worn. Making music requires a sense of humor, Hood says, but beneath the surface of his Spinal Tap reference existed a real fear: “I always said the last thing I want to do is keep doing this past the point that it’s over. To be an embarrassment to what we used to do.”
The band needed some time, so it took the time. The band kept playing shows, but Hood and Cooley played solo, too. Hood released Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, and Cooley issued The Fool On Every Corner, a live album that found the songwriter getting comfortable playing on his own. The band reconvened to pour over the tapes of their seminal 1999 live album, Alabama Ass Whuppin’, which they reissued in 2013. It was listening to those tapes that led Hood to reevaluate what he was after.
“I really fell in love with the rawness of [Ass Whuppin’],” Hood says. “We were so unbridled and sloppy. I couldn’t sing worth a shit, and my playing was out of tune and wonky…but the passion and immediacy was really refreshing to me. We knew when we made another record [we wanted to tap into that]. We’re not that band anymore, we’re not those people anymore -- but there was a spontaneity and immediacy to how it was done, and I wanted to do that.”
The Alabama Ass Whuppin’ tapes served as a reminder, and the time to hit reset worked for Cooley, who contributes about half of the English Oceans tracklist. His songs — like “Primer Coat” and “First Air of Autumn” — are some of his most insightful and tender, and his roaring opener, “Shit Shot Counts,” is among his finest rockers.
“Coming out with a strong rock & roll number to begin with — after all this time off — it was the obvious choice,” Cooley says. “Everything else fell right in behind it.”
For Cooley, the time off was spent writing without the kind of pressure that comes with a schedule. “I spent almost every bit of those three or four years working on the songs. It took almost every bit of it to write those songs. I needed ideas that I knew were good enough to make this record. When the record was near finished, we knew it was gonna be a good one. We were about as excited as we were burned out when we decided to take time off to begin with.”
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Primitive garage blast from the great white north -- The Haunted's first single, "1-2-5", cut in 1965. Two versions, here: the "Amy version" (released via Amy Records) and the Quality Records single/LP version. And while the latter is by no means slick, it's the Amy version I've had in rotation of late. It's rougher, rawer, with the organ buried and vocals slathered in slack.
The Haunted :: 1-2-5 (Amy version)
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By the 1960s, soul music began to influence musicians far beyond its African American roots, here in the States and, notably, across the pond. What started in the 1950s as a watered down, Pat Boone-ification of the genre was really an early development of what would become a full-fledged blue-eyed soul movement a decade later.
Bob Brady & The Con Chords :: Illusion (1968)
Vocalist Bob Brady sounds so damn close to Smokey Robinson that, when hearing his records for the first time, many have had their minds blown to the fact that this isn't Smokey himself. Hailing from Baltimore, Bob Brady & The Con Chords cut quite an impression as a popular live act around the Maryland/ Washington DC area, and seemed poised for stardom when their records received national distribution. Sadly, the group never had that elusive hit, although their records have been massive on the UK northern soul scene since the 1970s.
Lesley Gore :: No Matter What You Do (1966)
One of the quintessential figures of the girl group sound, Lesley Gore released several impressive records showcasing the sweetness of her vocals. However, when she teamed up with producer Quincy Jones, she cut one hell of a tough side in the masterpiece that is "No Matter What You Do". A superb song in and of itself, it's Quincy's production, here, that takes a great song and sends it completely over the top. Over an incredibly dense track full of fuzz guitar, heavy drumming, horns and hypnotizing, downright zombie-like backing vocals, Lesley delivers an outstanding vocal that cuts through the mix and demands attention.
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 335: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The Monks - Monk Time ++ The Monks - I Hate You ++ The Stooges - Down In The Street ++ The Stooges - Real Cool Time ++ The Stooges - Gimme Danger ++ Parquet Courts - You've Got Me Wonderin' Now ++ Ham1 - Clown Shoes Feet ++ Gap Dream - Fantastic Sam ++ Twin Peaks - Irene ++ Modern . . .
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And speaking of Beefheart...here we find the Captain with his Magic Band performing "I'm Gonna Booglarize You, Baby", on German television in 1972. While the studio version that kicks off the Spotlight Kid is great in its own right, this is where the shit just booooglarizes
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There are the kind of completists for whom even the whole discography isn’t enough. After tracking down practically everything the Kinks had to offer, one such collector turned his attention to the Kinks covers from all around the world.
Luckily for us, he decided to share his findings with Kontroversial Kovers: 32 Original Kinky 60's Mod/Garage/Freakbeat From The Six Kontinents Of Planet Davies. The collection bears the logo of . . .
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Psych rock lifers Bardo Pond go back to the beginning with Refulgo, a double LP of previously hard to come by recordings from the mid 1990s. Though essentially an odds-n-sods compilation, the release works just fine as a cohesive whole, thanks to the single-mindedness of the band's intentions -- like Neil Young used to say: "It's all one song."
Kicking off with the band's very first seven-inch, a woozy take on the old gospel chestnut "I Want To Die Easy," Refulgo boils . . .
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"Do you ever... wonder who you are?" A cartoonish voice asks this question on "Aircraft Damage," a track from The Residents' first official release in 1972 called Santa Dog. It's a curious debut EP, a heterogeneous mixture of deconstructoid musical satire and homespun concrî¨te experimentalism. The aesthetic is grotesque and subversive, a spooky pop culture mélange with a heightened sensitivity to music history.
The question of identity has persisted with The Residents throughout the group's 40 odd years of existence. They've . . .
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The Black Swans' Jerry DeCicca returns to AD, this time looking back at Richard Buckner's debut long-player, Bloomed. Originally released in 1994, the remastered album was reissued earlier this month via Merge Records, also marking its first appearance on vinyl. DeCicca, in his own words, below, including his conversation with Buckner, after the jump. - AD
When I was 15, I bought a fake ID from a guy named Spike. It said my name was Thomas Buchanan because I wanted to sound tough. I didn’t smile in the picture. Its out-of-state-ness got me into Ohio clubs all the way to legal. I remember the last time a door guy called me “Tom” because it was the first time I saw Richard Buckner. A few weeks later, I saw Townes Van Zandt. It was a heavy summer.
Buckner’s first record, Bloomed, had just been released, but I hadn’t heard it yet. Back then, I’d go see anyone that wrote their own songs and lived somewhere I didn’t. Buckner was compelling on stage, his voice pretty and slurred, and I loved the way he made his acoustic guitar rattle. He talked a lot about his songs in a way I haven’t heard him do since. “Surprise, AZ”: inspired by a newspaper article about a mother and son that died in a car accident and their bodies were driven back home in boxes beside one another and this song was their imagined conversation. The other stories I don’t recall.
Within the next year I became a superfan, obsessed, and found ways to travel to see him wherever I could. Often times he was opening: Son Volt, Freakwater, Alejandro Escovedo, Kelly Willis. With each album, Buckner made everyone else that was doing what I wanted to do someday sound boring. Greg Brown once wrote a song called “Mose Allison Played Here” about a shithole club in Albuquerque. The last gig there, before it shut down, was The Dirty Three and Calexico. Afterwards, while people were trying to set fire to the walls, I bugged Joey Burns about Buckner. He sat me down in his rented Cadillac and we listened to a rough mix on cassette of Since (RB’s third album) that he then gave to me because he’s a nice person and I was a drunk kid that was annoying him because I couldn’t wait for its release.
Bloomed was originally released in 1995 by Dejadisc, a Texas label that housed other songwriters that believed in albums as art: Ray Wylie Hubbard, Michael Hall (now one of the best music writers in the country), Elliott Murphy, and others. It was produced by Lloyd Maines, a phenomenal pedal steel and guitar player that made Joe Ely and Terry Allen hum, among others. If you haven’t heard Bloomed, Merge is giving you another chance with bonus tracks (demos, live cuts), a greatly improved mastering from the other time it was reissued, and the album’s first vinyl edition.
Richard Buckner isn’t just my favorite guitar/words maker of the last 20 years, he’s my favorite record maker. All his albums, beginning with Bloomed, widen with listens and time. Buckner has never once tried to nudge commercialism or follow a trend. He creates his own world, uncompromising, creating within his means, and pushing boundaries of how we think about sound and song. He also avoids the silly and gross compass that guides most musicians: genre. He’s about the trip, not the destination. And everyone I’ve ever met that loves his music feels the same way.
This reissue has given me the opportunity to ask Richard some questions–things I wanted to know from a long time ago, things I thought then that may or may not be true. As usual, he knows better than to tell you too much. Our conversation, after the jump...
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I'm not a fantasy sports guy, but I do have a short-list of country versions I would have loved to have heard cut of certain material, including the 1964 Dave Berry original, "The Crying Game". I'll share one, here, the late George Jones, and encourage you to leave your own in the comments. Per the original, that's Jimmy Page as session player on guitar, along with become a member or log in.
In his tome It Came From Memphis, author Robert Gordon called Sid Selvidge the city’s “pre-eminent folkster.” Any argument to the contrary would likely be settled by one or two spins of The Cold of the Morning, Selvidge’s 1976 masterpiece.
The record recently has been reissued by Omnivore Records, produced by Sid’s son Steve Selvidge, of the rock & roll combo The Hold Steady. Under his Steve’s watchful eye, his father’s defining album is given a new opportunity to shine. And it shines: His voice is clear and present — sonorous but not affected or pretentious. His guitar work is stunning, its subtle picking demonstrating all the lessons Selvidge gleaned from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and bluesman Furry Lewis. Just to shake things up, Mud Boy and the Neutrons, helmed by Selvidge’s friend and compatriot Jim Dickinson, show up on a few tracks just to hint at the demented blues deconstruction Selvidge and Dickinson would help their friend Alex Chilton get up to.
Selvidge passed away nearly one year ago, in May of 2013. In his liner notes of the new edition of the record, Memphis-based writer Bob Mehr suggests that Cold of the Morning captures the “essence of the man.” Again — anyone looking to dispute should simply put the album on. Steve Selvidge took some time off from prepping for the release of The Hold Steady’s new record, Teeth Dreams, to discuss his father’s classic and his legacy.
Aquarium Drunkard: I want to start by stating that The Cold of the Morning -- just wow. This is a great record, man.
Steve Selvidge:Yeah it is.
AD: How did you hear it? Was it something your father played for you growing up, or was it something you discovered on your own?
Sid Selvidge: It came out when I was three. Early on it was just kind of “what dad did,” you know? I can remember my aunts and uncles playing it, being at my cousins’ house and it being on. And then you know, as I got older it was something I got into.
I’m not sure when it stuck out as being something special. It was just one of my dad’s albums, [but] like any great album, there’s a phase where it’s all you’re listening to. As I got to be in my 20s and stuff, I’d have big Cold of the Morning phases. We’d go back-and-forth talking about it. It was really toward the end of my dad’s life that it became, “Hey, wait a minute. This is ‘the’ record, this is the classic.” Kind of the focal point, I guess. [His] mortality being a part of it, you know? There wasn’t really a winding down [but in the twilight of his life] the context shifted, and it became very apparent where this record’s place was.
AD: That was the case for you and for him as well, right? Did he feel that Cold of the Morning was his classic as well?
Steve Selvidge: Yeah, I think so. He told me that. He certainly was fine with all his records; he put all of himself into them. But yeah, he felt that this was his best record, and certainly his clearest statement of who he was as an artist.
AD: It’s such an interesting record. The tracks with Mud Boy and the Neutrons [the loose cannon roots outfit Selvidge and producer Jim Dickinson performed with], the more unhinged tracks, are really fantastic, but then the rest of the record is sonically sparse. When you compare it to its contemporary records, such as Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert, your dad’s sound captures the other side of the coin of that stuff. Whereas Big Star’s Third and Sherbert draw a lot of emotion out of a very chaotic sound, it feels like Cold of the Morning draws its power from a different place: It’s clean, it’s distilled.
Steve Selvidge: It’s much more elegant.
AD: Yeah, “elegant” is the exact word I’m fumbling for.
Steve Selvidge: It very much is the opposite side of the coin, because the record came out of his residency at the Procapé, and you’re talking about a musical roadmap that is Big Star’s Third. All that was contemporary. It’s interesting, because I’m going through all this stuff and doing a ton of tape transfers for those bonus tracks. A lot of these songs my dad had recorded versions of way early on. I’ve got a version of “Many a Mile,” which I’m assuming was cut by Don Nix around the time of the Portrait album on [Stax subsidiary] Enterprise in the late '60s. The version is pretty transcendent. It was a project of that environment that gave us Third. But it’s much more elegant. My dad was very determined with the way he did things. He was very much an academic, too. I don’t want to say it’s an immaculate record, because that makes it sound bookish or like it doesn’t have a soul, but he was very deliberate with the way he did things. So I think he crafted the record as such.
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That right there is one Lowell George, he of Little Feat, whose discography has just been reissued by Rhino. In 1972 the band released their second long-player, Sailin' Shoes, the final album not swamped in the funky Topanga Canyon cum New Orleans r&b sound that would aesthetically define the rest of their days. As such, Sam Bush's rendering of the album's title track makes perfect sense . . .
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The War on Drugs were born with a sound. When Adam Granduciel’s Philly-bred concern released Wagonwheel Blues in 2008, they were already singular. There were familiar signifiers–woo-hoo-hoos stolen from Born in the USA-era Springsteen, Granduciel’s pinched vocals and turnaround chord progressions nicked from Dylan via Tom Petty–but they were specks in a maelstrom of searing synth patches and controlled feedback, with a tick-tack rhythm doing its damnedest to pin it all together. By the time of 2011’s become a member or log in.