Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Saturday Night Is Partyin' Time

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:18:27 -0800

Around 1979 I was a big fan of the Saturday night radio show on WAVA FM 105, one of the DC area's major AOR stations. The intro music was an a capella piece with a bass ostinato keeping the rhythm, and lead vocals singing "Saturday night" and "Saturday night is partyin' time" repeatedly. I never knew what it was, and just today it occurred to me to Google it. The song is "Saturday Night" from the 1972 musical Don't Play Us Cheap by Melvin Van Peebles, adapted from his novel The Party In Harlem. Here it is:

04. Saturday Night

The verses were cut from the WAVA intro spot, so this is the first time I've heard the whole song (it's still little over a minute long). George McCurn's amazing bass remains the centerpiece of the song, though. I wonder how many other DC suburbanites remember this one.

(Which is worse, that I spent Saturday nights listening to the radio as a teenager, or that as an adult I'm spending a Saturday night writing about listening to the radio on Saturday nights as a teenager?)

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The seventies are the new retro-modern

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:19:36 -0800

It's been a year and a half since my last big post on soundtrack music; after gorging on Ghost Box albums last week, it's time for another one. The Ghost Box label purveys music in the style of "modern" 70s library music, a nouveau retro-futurism to succeed the old retro-futurism that looked back to the 1950s, the era of Mid-Century Modern and a zeitgeist of limitless technological possibilities. By the 1970s space travel was a reality (to the moon and back, at least); a greater cultural awareness of both the difficulties of space travel and the incredible reaches of outer space, coupled with advances in electronic music synthesis, lent "futuristic" music a new tone, both physically (synthesizers replacing big bands) and emotionally (an air of we-can-do-it determination replacing the we'll-all-go-zing-zinging-through-space giddiness of the first wave of Space Age Pop). Going back to my categories of soundtrack music as defined in that first post, here is an example of real library music from the 70s by Alan Hawkshaw, one of the giants of library music, from the 1978 Bruton Music library album Terrestrial Journey:

A5 - Alan Hawkshaw - Wave-Forms

Alan Hawkshaw

Vangelis' "Pulstar" from his 1976 album Albedo 0.39 was not necessarily written as soundtrack music, but it has been used numerous times as theme music for radio and television programs. Indeed, I first heard it as the intro music to the news segments on my college radio station.

Echoes of "Pulstar"'s melody can be heard in "Wildspot" by Belbury Poly, a.k.a. Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp, on the 2004 album The Willows. Ghost Box's interest in 70s futurism extends to their cover art as well:

01 Wildspot

Belbury Poly

Though from 1982 and not technically the 1970s, the St. Elsewhere theme (by soundtrack ~~hack~~ veteran Dave Grusin) contains all the elements of 70s musical futurism and thus belongs in this survey. Would you believe I'd never heard this until my wife played it for me last week? (I wasn't much of a TV watcher in college. Nor am I now, for that matter.)

70s retro-futurism has crept into today's TV programming as well, with two series of the 70s popular-science show spoof Look Around You having been produced for BBC2 in 2002 and 2005. The theme music from the second series could be original to the period:

Interestingly, the program that was the most obvious target of Look Around You's satire, Tomorrow's World, did not use futuristic music in its 1970s opening sequences, but engaged in some retro-futurism of its own, looking back to the sunny, uptempo big band music that accompanied so many "world of tomorrow" featurettes in the 50s:

Welcome back to the future!

Albedo 0.39

Vangelis

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Get It On!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:34:46 -0800

GetItOn_sm

I onIy ever bought one hits album that was advertised on TV--it was so good I never had to buy another one! Ronco's 1974 compilation Get It On! boasted "20 ORIGINAL HITS 20 ORIGINAL ARTISTS", and it is a wonderful cross section of the popular music of the day. That was a time when different genres could still coexist on the same radio station, liking one genre did not preclude liking another, and the most negative emotion expressed was the stylized melancholia of the blues in B.B. King's "To Know You Is To Love You". Since mentioning Get It On! in yesterday's post I thought I'd see if I could recreate the album in a Grooveshark playlist; lo and behold, all the songs were available for streaming, so voila! You can listen to the album on Grooveshark here, or just play the convenient widget below. What a great bunch of songs! Just look at that track list! Don't delay, press play!

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Arranged

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:13:49 -0800

On the other hand, a lavish arrangement (i.e. with lots of instruments) can be very enjoyable, conjuring up classic soul from the 70, sunshine pop of the 60s, and bittersweet areas in between. Platters That Matter Records turned me on to Liam Hayes and Plush, whose "Take A Chance" would be right at home on Ronco's landmark Get It On! hits compilation LP:

Tom M. hipped me to Brendan Benson. I've finally figured out that he is the "other" singer of the Raconteurs, the one who isn't Jack White, the one whose lead-vocal tracks I skip over in favor of the Jack White tracks. On his own, though, he can do the retro trip quite creditably, as on "Garbage Day":

Brent Cash of Athens, Georgia, packed his debut album full of catchy pop hooks and sunny arrangements, with some Bacharachian chord changes thrown in for good measure:

And finally, while synthesized strings and flutes barely count as lavish arranging, Josh Rouse's "Come Back" closes out this set rather nicely, I think:

Bright Penny

Liam Hayes & Plush

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Overprocessed

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:34:05 -0800

Spending seven hours in a car with a broken CD player on Wednesday and another seven hours today gave me plenty of time to survey the contemporary radio landscape, and what a dismal scene it is. There were a few bright spots (every one of them a college or public station), but they were emphatically not the stations playing current hits. I can't decide which is worse, Autotuned vocals (can't call it "singing") that sound like robotic mosquitoes, or country music, which has figured out how to mimic every other genre of music until the telltale plaintive twang of the singer comes in and drenches everything in bathos. But what it all has in common is that it's all overdone and overproduced; like our food, it's been overprocessed until most of the nourishment disappears. The song I happened upon that really pointed out all this excess was Free's "All Right Now." That has to be the cleanest, simplest production I've ever heard on a hit single, ample proof that you don't need 48 tracks and Autotune to make a great record:

Who is the Free of today?

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SLAB! in the raw

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:33:04 -0800

The reactivation of the mighty SLAB! continues; if not as quickly as diehard fans like me would like, at least it's still on. Frontman Steve Dray has just released a zip file of a rehearsal session for the band's final single, "Death's Head Soup", about which he writes:

This is a dirty scuzzy almost Stooge like version of Deaths Head Soup from our rock period heh heh....the song shoulda sounded like this really... wasnt meant to be as clean as the single version

this is a run through from one of the very first rehearsals of the song....

sorry it glitches in a few places...... but anyway... its a document I didnt even know existed...

from late 88 early 89 I guess... I know I wrote it before Sanity Allergy....

line up
Dray -Voice
Jarvis - Gtr
Nick Page - Gtr
Boleslaw Usaresewski - Bass..... ( sorry Bolly I never could spell your name!)
Rob Allum - Drums

See his blog, Darker Than Deep Space, for the download link, or stream it here:

DHS live

SLAB!

Compare to the finished single version:

(See Fantod Under Glass for a download of the single.)

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A Claire Hamill selection

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:57:55 -0800

Paul DiFilippo's recent post on wordless singing brought Claire Hamill's Voices album to mind, which I wrote a post about two years ago (so for background on my adoration of Claire Hamill, see that post). Poking around on the web for more Claire Hamill information, I was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of her performances now online as streaming videos, and her audio back catalog available for free download from her website! Here, then, is a selection of those videos.

Claire's 1984 album Touch Paper appears to be an amalgamantion of new tracks and previously-released singles, several in the New Wave mode; "The Moon Is A Powerful Lover" was one of my treasured 45s in the 80s, and I always thought it should have propelled her to Kate Bush levels of popularity:

"Ultraviolet Light" features Gary Numan on synths, and was another favorite of mine:

Here is the song that first brought Claire to my attention, "Look Over Your Shoulder" from The Steve Howe Album:

I just learned yesterday that Claire had a short-lived rock band called Transporter in 1980, releasing just one single, "Kids on the Run":

And she's still at it! Here's a live clip from December 2008, singing "Londonderry Boy":

And another selection from the landmark Voices, because it's there:

Finally, there is a five-part interview with Claire spanning her whole career, called "The Claire Hamill Story", appropriately enough. Here is the first part; subsequent segements should show up as related selections:

The Minor Fall, the Major Lift: The Best of Claire Hamill

Claire Hamill

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Instrumental Action Soul

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:34:12 -0800

With an album title like Instrumental Action Soul to announce their intentions, how could I not love the Diplomats of Solid Sound? With a Hammond-centric sound courtesy of Nate Basinger, this band from Iowa City delivers a spot-on mix of Booker T. and the MG's, Isaac Hayes, and Lalo Schifrin. Here's the whole album, but if you only have time for one track, make it "Chinese Connection":

Instrumental Action Soul

The Diplomats of Solid Sound

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My cop show theme

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:40:28 -0800

In 1993 a left-hand keyboard exercise I came up with evolved into a full-fledged cop show theme, which I called "Theme from Gunnerman" because that sounded suitably unsubtle for a 70s cop show. I got to play it with the band (Cafe de los Muertos), which was great--I really enjoyed hearing it all fleshed out--but we never recorded it. So that was the first thing I worked on when I started playing around with ACID and VST plugins a few years ago. It was great fun scoring all the parts, adding a horn section, cheesy sound effects, drum fills, cowbell, etc. I never got it near a professional-sounding state, but you can probably tell what I was aiming for in the last mix I did before moving on to another interest:

Theme from Gunnerman

Bill Barnett

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A deep funk travelogue from Breakestra

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:32:05 -0800

Getting back to this year's bumper crop of deep funk releases, I found that L.A.'s Breakestra has done in one song what I attempted to do in blog posts two years ago: give a worldwide overview of the deep funk scene. Many of the acts name-checked in "No Matter Where You Go" have been featured here; just click the "deep funk" tag bring them up.

09 - No matter where you go

Breakestra

Breakestra exhibits a wider range of influences than most deep funk bands, with homages to both the Meters and the psychedelic soul of the early 70s. What is "deep funk", anyway? I know it when I hear it, and here I will attempt to define it. Wikipedia's definition is:

Deep Funk is a genre of funk music which, unlike traditional mainstream funk, has a more soulful, rawer, grittier, and "heavier" sound.

I'll make it simpler: deep funk is funk music that pretends P-Funk never happened. There are no vestiges of Bootsy's Mu-Tron-enhanced bass, Bernie Worrell's squiggly synths, or George Clinton's often-comedic lyrics and vocal arrangements. If it reminds you of Parliament or Funkadelic, it's just funk; if it reminds you of James Brown, it's deep funk. Opposing viewpoints are welcomed in the comments.

(Yes, I am aware that Bootsy played for both James Brown and P-Funk, but his P-Funk Star Bass style is quite distinct from the plainer JB style.)

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