I recently spent a long, productive weekend (that has not seemed to end as of Wednesday evening) working a large function in a very nice hotel in Boston. While working extremely long days, I spent very little time in my hotel room and, therefore, was at the mercy of whatever canned music was playing in the hotel’s meeting, lobby, and other public spaces. The AV producer in the main meeting room was someone I’d worked with before. He’s a major Beatles head and a great guy, so he’s always got good transition music ready to go in the main meeting room of our events: Beatles, early Stones, and he plays a lot of ’70s, funky New Orleans-style stuff, like Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time”, Robert Palmer’s version of “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley”, and Little Feat’s “Sailing Shoes”, all of which are pretty good in small doses when trapped in a large hotel meeting room. He does not, however, control the music pumped into the dining area, the lobby, and the bathrooms, so some of the following queries cannot be attributed to the music my man had programmed. After that long set up, don’t forget that your gut responses to the following questions are requested. Here we go! Continue reading »
Beginning at the 2:15 mark of this new Gnarls Barkley video, which almost wisely features actors talking over the song to which the video is set, tell me what video blast from the past crosses your mind. Continue reading »
On “Hang On”, from Dr. Dog’s latest album, Fate, everyone’s favorite floppy-eared psychedelphians swing Tarzan-like from bearded, cut-out bin Beach Boys to cokehead-era Band, before doing a canonball in the Beatlesque bongwater. Come on in, the water’s lovely! The Dog always seem to front load their albums with these kind of multi-faceted tracks — part homage, part theft — which is right up my alley, and even though the singer’s reedy voice has more in common with Steve Forbert than Danko, I’m always excited to hear more.
A bit like The Byrds in their post-Gene Clark Everyone-Must-Grow-A-Beard Period, this charmingly rickety band is strong on backing vocals despite the lack of a distinctive lead vocalist. Guitarist Scott McMicken and bassist Toby Leaman share lead vocals, but frequently, as on the “The Breeze” and “From”, it’s the pillowy Abbey Road-cum-Surf’s Up backing vocals that take the lead, cueing the dynamic shifts of the arrangements. Neat trick!
This Dog knows lots of old tricks. “The Old Days”, for instance, hangs on a cool ostinato, building to a solo that would sound at home on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. No small feat, that. However, the band’s preponderance of laid-back beats leaves me wanting that elusive “more.” On songs such as “The Ark” and the circular sing-along “Army of Ancients”, I’m waiting for that “goosebumps” moment, the point in the song where a vocal or lyric cuts to the core. Considering that Dr. Dog freely uses arrangement devices of The Band, for instance, I feel justified in seeking a couplet worthy of “This hill’s too steep to climb/And the days that remain ain’t worth a dime” in “Rockin’ Chair.” When Richard Manuel gets to that couplet, I know it’s coming, I know how it’s going to make me feel, yet it still seems as if that emotional wave has taken me by surprise. With Dr. Dog, when the tricks begin to wear thin (and tricks ALWAYS wear thin after a while, even with the best of magicians) I can just sit back and savor that peaceful easy feeling you get from the gentle, rustic psychedelia of “Uncovering The Old.” And yes, a fat piece of smoke helps.
Fate ends with the anthemic “My Friend”, featuring a kitchen-sink’s worth of swirling orchestration: sunbeam harmonies; kaleidoscopic gee-tars; and stomping, extended, oom-pah rhythms. The band take it right back to my “Doubleback Alley,” ending on a Rutles-worthy high note.
It’s funny how we sometimes get introduced to Great things in very pedestrian ways. When I was about 14, somebody played me the first Blues Brothers album. That was the first time I ever heard any music written by Isaac Hayes — in this case, “Soul Man” — and, even in that watered-down form, it blew my mind. My best friend eventually discovered that the original was performed by Sam & Dave, and we went on a furious, pre-Internet scavenger hunt for something, anything, by that duo. (This was especially hard to do because, a.) we were 14 and didn’t know shit about anything; and b.) I was living in Central America at the time.) At last, a trip to the Panama Canal Zone post exchange yielded what I was looking for: a copy of Sam & Dave’s greatest hits, and I was smitten.
As I got older and nerdier about these things, I learned that — as talented as Sam & Dave and the Stax house band were — the real magic in those grooves was the result of an amazing compositional team: Isaac Hayes and David Porter. As I explored their work in the context of everything else that came out of the Stax factory, I realized that — as outrageous as this sounds — those guys didn’t write *one* bad song. Not one. It was all gold. Honest to God, those guys had a batting average better than anybody’s. Better than the Beatles, people!
So Isaac Hayes, at just 65 years of age, is now gone. In trying to write a fitting epitaph for a man I believe to be one of the greatest composers in the history of American popular music, I feel tempted to chronicle his rise from the mean streets of Memphis to global mega-stardom (because his story is a truly compelling one) — but really, that stuff doesn’t mean shit to me, now that he’s dead. What matters to me, obviously, is the man’s music. Like James Brown, or Stevie Wonder, or Duke Ellington, he was a driving force behind a deep transformation in Black popular music, introducing sophisticated, moving (but still funky) chords, riffs and arrangements into a form — in his case, southern Black music targeted at southern Black audiences — that had become paralyzed by the success of soul numbers featuring three chords and time-worn, threadbare melodies.
And speaking of being paralyzed: I have spent the last hour trying in vain to pick the right group of songs to showcase this man’s particular genius. Like so many other great pop composers, you’ve already heard some of his best work: “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “I Thank You,” “B-A-B-Y,” and literally dozens more that made it to the pop charts. But even the outstanding obscurities are too numerous to feature here. I mean, where do I start? The guy wrote more than 100 songs during his stint with David Porter at Stax, and they’re all good! And what should I encourage you to listen for? The arrangements and production touches? The sophisticated melodies and counter-melodies? The deep, righteous groove that permeates everything he wrote in the 60s? I’m truly at a loss here. A great loss. We all are. Isaac Hayes, I thank you. We all thank you. You were amazing.
HVB
Tell you what — let’s do this New Orleans-style. First, the sad, mournful farewell:
Hey everyone, it’s been a while since we’ve discussed a hilariously dorky, minutia-obsessed, Beatles-related issue. Let’s do this!
This is something I used to think about a lot more, for lack of better things to do with my life. But I still think it’s an interesting idea. So much Beatlesque music lazily relies on the same old chord changes, guitar and vocal licks, etc. to elicit a Pavlovian reaction from the fanboys. But who best took the music to new places, to try and express new things? Who was most fearless in their ability to fuck with the form that the Fab Four gave us? I say XTC, specifically Andy Partridge. While I’ve moved on from this band in some ways, I’ll defend their whole catalog to my dying day. I remember an old website, SonicNet.com, where artists programmed streaming radio “stations.” Partridge’s was by far my favorite: Plenty of ’60s psych and pop, yes, but also Charlie Parker, Phillip Glass, and Captain Beefheart. And it all made sense, you could hear how all the artists had informed his sensibilities.
Yes, the band has a slightly scary fanbase, but if you doth protest too much you may need to look in a mirror sometime. Plus, you can’t spend your life following bands who only attract young, good-looking crowds. That way lies madness, and some other maladies I can think of.
In second place for pushing the Beatles’ sound forward, I put Big Star, who upped the anty for bad vibes and emotional intensity.
