In 2005 we took a family vacation to Moab, Utah. We brought along a bunch of CDs to play in our rented minivan, but The Sleepy Strange by Japancakes fit the surrounding desert landscape so well that we kept it on repeat and never took it out of the player... not even when we returned the minivan. No problem, I just burned another CD, and maybe someone else discovered the languid beauty of this steel-guitar-centric instrumental band from Athens, Georgia. It looks like Lala will let me embed the whole album for your listening pleasure:
I knew of Michael Cox as the editor of some first-rate anthologies of classic ghost stories; it was only upon reading his obituary (he died on March 31) that I became aware of his rather extraordinary career. In his last few years he battled cancer, and one of the drugs he was prescribed was a steroid that gave him incredible amounts of energy, which he used to write two massive and critically-acclaimed mystery novels, The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time. The real revelation, though, was that he had started his career as a musician, recording two albums in the early 70s as Matthew Ellis, and another one as Obie Clayton. There was a bit of intrigue at the time of the first Ellis album; rumors abounded that "Ellis" was actually Procol Harum's Matthew Fisher, a speculation buttressed by the fact that Ellis's album was on the same label as Harum. Cox tells the tale to Claes Johansen here. This new knowledge naturally made me want to hear Cox's music, sparking a search that finally bore fruit today with the posting of a rip of the first Ellis album on the blog Time Has Told Me. It's quite a nice album, mostly dramatic ballads with a folk bent, quite lavishly arranged; the label must have been very committed to Cox and spared no expense in the studio. The tune that really grabbed my ear is "Avalon," which, serendipitously, is a Summer Solstice song (that's today!):
A co-worker said "C'est la vie" during a meeting this morning, reminding me of Greg Lake's haunting ballad of that title which I loved back in my high school days:
My favorite discovery of the last week is the San Francisco band Tussle, whose 2006 album Telescope Mind finally worked its way to my ears. They are solidly in the vein of the great Postpunk Minimal Funk bands from New York in the 80s, Liquid Liquid and ESG, with a bit a 70s Krautrock thrown in. Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones's band Ui, also from New York, purveyed a similar stripped down groove. So I've assembled a little playlist that mixes up Liquid Liquid, Tussle, ESG, Ui, and some vintage British postpunk funk from 23 Skidoo and A Certain Ratio. It all goes together quite nicely, I think.
Unexpected link with a previous post: one of Sasha Frere-Jones's great-grandfaters was Edgar Wallace, the writer whose initials were used as a song title by the Stockholm Monsters.
Last week was a particularly good week for unearthing long-lost songs; here are the two finds I am most overjoyed about. November Group was a synthpop band from Boston fronted by singer Ann Prim. Their self-titled 5-song EP from 1982 had a striking cover photo of Prim as a Weimar cabaretician, and the song "Pictures of the Homeland" evoked a fashionable European grimness over its new wave dance beat. I played that song on my radio show many times, but I never got my own copy of the record, so it's been twenty-some years since I last heard it. Now, thanks to the Systems of Romance blog, I finally have a rip of it (yes, it was posted three months ago, that's how far behind I am on blog surfing), and I have listened to it over and over. You can too:
Then there was the serendipitous rediscovery of Missouri power pop band Fools Face on Wilfully Obscure. That jarred something loose in my mind, and I eventually remembered that they did the gorgeous piano ballad "Public Places" which was a radio favorite of mine in high school (listening rather than broadcasting in those days). I never even saw a record by them, much less bought one. Wilfully Obscure didn't have the album with "Public Places" on it, but had a link to a site that does, along with "tons" of other Fools Face material. I've listened to "Public Places" even more times than "Pictures of the Homeland" in the last few days. Here it is (not a great rip, but for now the best sound you'll get for less than the $150 the album commands):
Why do I hear Roxy Music everywhere? It's not as if I only listen to Roxy Music cover bands. This evening I was reviewing the catalog of a minor player in the Factory Records story, the Stockholm Monsters. Like the label's founding fathers, they were from Manchester, and between absorbing the scene around them and being produced by Peter Hook, it's no surprise that they sound a lot like Joy Division/New Order. They only released one album while they were together, Alma Mater, in 1984. The eighth track, "E.W." (supposedly named for mystery writer Edgar Wallace), threw me for a loop, because the bass and drums sound straight out of Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug"--
Now here is "Love Is the Drug" (which starts for real about 20 seconds in):
Vocals excepted, they are quite similar, no? It would take a lot to convince me it was just a coincidence.
Hearing Bryan Ferry's "You Go To My Head" always makes me want to hear "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart"; they both have a sinuous dreaminess that makes them go together well. I first heard SGHOMH on Marc Almond's The Stars We Are in 1988:
And that's the only version I knew until last week, when I started looking into the song's origins. Here is its concise history per Wikipedia:
Originally recorded by David and Jonathan, and then Gene Pitney in 1967, the song reached #5 on the UK singles chart but failed to chart in the USA. The song was subsequently covered by a number of other acts including Cilla Black, Terry Reid and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their 1986 album of covers Kicking Against the Pricks.
I'd never listened to Gene Pitney before, but YouTube has a vintage TV performance of SGHOMH, and wow, what a voice! He sounds like a cross between Roy Orbison Davy Jones (that's what I meant to write!) and Robin Gibb:
Pitney had a long and successful career (yet another musical avenue for me to explore), and was on a UK tour when he died of heart failure in 2006. But getting back to the 80s, here's where it gets interesting: for Almond's single release of SGHOMH, it was turned into a duet with Gene Pitney; fueled by another TV performance, it went to Number One!
"Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" was actually written, and originally recorded by, British folk duo David and Jonathan, a.k.a. Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. You may be familiar with some of the other songs they penned: "I'd Like to Teach the World To Sing"; the Hollies' "Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)" (which I thought was by Creedence for the longest time); "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again"; and "My Baby Loves Lovin'", to name a few. In fact, in just twelve days they are being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (along with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and I'll just stop there.) The completist in my wants to post David and Jonathan's original version, but the best I can do is the 30-second sample from the online music stores:
Of the other covers of SGHOMH, the only one worth featuring here is Nick Cave's (of course):
I thought I'd strike out on a new path of musical discovery and track down some more of the bands from the Hipgnosis album-cover design book, For the Love of Vinyl. I picked the Winkies, as I had never heard them before. The Winkies were a British pub-rock band (the genre between glam and punk, chronologically if not sonically) led by transplanted Canadian Philip Rambow. Lo and behold, they were Eno's backing band on his first solo tour in 1974 (abruptly ended when one of Eno's lungs collapsed). A concert recording would be a truly wondrous find, and I haven't heard of one of those; but they did record four songs together for a Peel Session, and that is floating around pretty freely on the web. Here is their cover of "Fever" (I've tagged the track with the Winkies' album cover, since that's what brought me to it in the first place):
I still haven't found the Winkies' album, but four songs from it are in their MySpace player. After their sole album tanked, Rambow moved to the US for a moderately successful solo career, which I am still investigating. His biggest claim to fame may end up being co-writing "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis" with Kirsty MacColl.
Speaking of lounge singers (Engelbert Humperdinck, whose guitarist Mick Green was in Bryan Ferry's touring band), Bryan Ferry cultivated a lounge-singer image in his solo career. His 1975 album Let's Stick Together has him reinterpreting Roxy songs in lounge mode, interspersed with a few covers, the best of which is J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie's 1938 standard "You Go To My Head." And there's even a video for it!
1. Be Roxy Music. I'm just using this as an excuse to post my favorite song ever, "The Thrill of it All" from The Fourth Roxy Music Album, Country Life (the one with the infamous nudie cover):
This song has the band firing on all cylinders, as a V12 even. I still haven't seem them do it live! However, Mrs. V. and I did see Bryan Ferry do it with a large band at the the 9:30 Club in 2002. Much as I admire Phil Manzanera's guitar playing, Mick Green proved an admirable substitute and fired off some really hot leads. (I didn't know who he was at the time, I had to look up Ferry's touring band on the web to find out. He had started out with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates in the early 60s, and then was Engelbert Humperdinck's guitarist for years and years. He looked like a mid-level mafioso, but he really brought the rock!) So I am quite satisfied with my Thrill of It All experience.
2. Be members of Roxy Music. That's what Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay did as the Explorers, recruiting Ferry soundalike James Wraith as lead vocalist while Ferry himself was off on his solo career in the 80s. They snuck a Roxy song into their live show, documented on the Live at the Palace (Camden) CD released on Manzanera's Expression Records label in 1997 (but recorded in... well, it doesn't say, it must be 1985 or 1986). "Out of the Blue" is also from the masterful Country Life album:
Could you tell that's not the real Roxy Music in a blind test? "Out of the Blue" is not listed anywhere on the CD packaging; it is the first half of the last track, "Venus de Milo," that song being the second half of the track. Whatever happened to James Wraith? He has faded into obscurity; with that voice and some help from his Roxy mates he could have had a reasonably successful solo career.
4. Imitate Roxy Music's "Mark III" style (Manifesto/Flesh and Blood). See every New Romantic band. (Mark II being the lineup of Stranded, Country Life, and Siren; I know of no band that has even attempted that sound.)
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Jeff L. said:
[this is good]nice post. I always thought Pitney was too falsetto. read more
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Ground Countrol To Major Tom said:
[c’est top]Thanks for the discovery read more
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