Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Moldy 70s

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:18:21 -0700

Being first is everything. Bolus gets linked to from everywhere for posting videos of cheesy 70s songs as "Hell's iPod." I've been enjoying this crap for years, unironically, having made two "Moldy 70s" CDs during the Napster years. Here is a video sampler of those fine collections of shamefully seductive pop songs. Let's start out watching some chicks beat the shit out of a cowbell and a tambourine while Gary Wright and crew show you how phallic a keyboard can be:

Gary Wright - Love Is Alive (Midnight Special, 1976)

"Geek the light fantastic!", says Mrs. V.

Gale garnett - We'll Sing In The Sunshine

1964? Well, I heard it in the 70s.

CLIFF RICHARD - Devil Woman (1976)

"She's gonna get you from behind!" Ow!

CW McCall Convoy Mike Douglas Show 1976

You can't beat "Convoy" for the cheeze factor!

Longfellow Serenede

70s video Carly Simon You're so Vain

Andy Kim Rock Me Gently

There's some kick-ass clavinet in "Rock Me Gently."

The Stampeders Sweet city woman

"Sweet City Woman" has one of my favorite gag-inducing lines ever: "And she feeds me love and tenderness and macaroons." Gahhhhhhh!

Coven - One Tin Soldier

Ooh, feel the righteous indignation!

Mocedades..."ERES TU"...

I never knew what this song was until it was in Tommy Boy, so I made sure to watch the credits and finally find out.

Every Mother's Son - Come On Down To My Boat

Ozark Mountain Daredevils - Jackie Blue

Charlie Rich - The most beautiful girl 1974

who loves you

And now for some runners-up:

edison lighthouse - Love grows where my rosemary goes

So Into You (102089) - ARS

Mungo Jerry - In the summertime

Exile - I Wanna Kiss You All Over

Feelings - Morris Albert - Globo de Ouro 1975

Leo Sayer --When i need you

All right, I've got to stop now or I'll be doing this all night. We'll return to our regularly-scheduled programming next time.

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The Doors, funky?

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:11:05 -0700

The Doors were accused of a lot of things, but being funky wasn't one of them. So I am naturally surprised when I hear Doors influences in contemporary funk; who'd'a thunk it? Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators (she's from Brooklyn, they're from Finland) play deep funk, but they stretch out into more soul and R&B styles than most other deep funk bands. Listening to their Keep Reachin' Up album on my way to work the other day, I started hearing the Doors all of a sudden: halfway through "A Perfect Kind of Love" there's an instrumental break with a bassline right out of "Light My Fire," and then Antti Maattanen lays down a Ray Manzarek-like organ solo over it. It's what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had some rebop!

06 - A Perfect Kind of Love

Nicole Willis and The Soul Inv

So then I thought back to another Doors-influenced song that I liked last year, which I always meant to post here but never got around to; isn't this the perfect time for it? The Doors influence in "The Witch" by The Broken Keys is in the Morrison-esque vocal (he even rhymes fire with pyre, just like Jim did), but for the life of me I can't figure out who is actually singing it. The Broken Keys are two English dudes named Nostalgia 77 and Natural Self (whose real name, apparently, is Keno-1); on their own they each make richly-layered hip-hip-flavored jazz with no male vocals (in what I've heard), so it could be either one of them singing here, or someone else altogether. This, too, is what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had any funk:

05. The Witch

The Broken Keys

That is heavy; with those horns it could almost be an Ides of March song. I can hear a Black Sabbath version in my head, too, and the lyrics are right up their alley.

Maybe I'm too hard on the Doors. They did get almost funky once, with "Peace Frog"--

That's a pretty good beat; it would turn up again in Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo" (can't find it right now), and the Charlatans' "The Only One I Know"--

The Charlatans are streaming from Donnaslut.com: a single page with about 300 eclectic mp3's, including many of my obscure favorites, such as Allez Allez, Jerry Harrison, Nico + the Faction, SSQ, and lots, lots more. Check it out! Make sure you have playTagger installed first, so you can stream them from the main page instead of loading each one in a new page.

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Modern Sunshine Part 2

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:26:41 -0700

I've fallen behind on my sunshine pop theme due to spending last night sorting out the dueling MySpace players problem. Solution: no more MySpace players. If they've got it set to autostart, there's not a thing you can do about it by tweaking parameters in the embed code.

In reviewing the tags on today's mp3 files, I realized that I've been conflating sunshine pop with "baroque pop." The archetype of the baroque pop song is Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," but another song on the same album (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme), "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," is certifiable sunshine pop, so the two subgenres are largely intertwined in style, but not mood.

Eric Matthews has been plying his baroque, and occasionally sunny, pop since 1995, when he released his first album, It's Heavy In Here, on Sub Pop, of all labels. In the present decade he has released two albums on Empyrean Records, the most recent being 2006's Foundation Sounds. The sunniest of its 17 songs is "All the Clowns"--

All the Clowns

Eric Matthews

Neil Hannon has flitted from style to style in his enduring career as The Divine Comedy, and he is no stranger to sunshine pop. While true sunshine pop tends toward naively earnest lyrics, I don't think earnesty* has ever been a component of Hannon's songwriting. (Not his best songwriting, at least; while impeccably arranged, Absent Friends sinks under the weight of its bloated Meaningfulness.) Wryness, slyness, archness, satire, ridicule, exaggeration, swagger, irresponsibility--these are the ingredients of his finest concoctions. "Perfect Love Song" may be all sunshine on the surface, but I can hear Neil smirking all the way through:

03-PERFECT LOVE song

The Divine Comedy

And now there is Steve Rinaldi, performing as Rinaldi Sings (thanks to Salty Miss Jill for hipping me to him!):

And that concludes my abbreviated roundup of sunshine, or vaguely sunshiney, popsters. No, wait, it doesn't--here's a repeat of Mike Flowers's blindingly brilliant (like the sun!) "A Groovy Place" (delivered with an even bigger smirk than Neil Hannon's, I imagine):

01 A Groovy Place

The Mike Flowers Pops

OK, now I'm done.

* The spellchecker tells me "earnesty" isn't really a word, but I think it should be, so it stays in.

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Speaking of Dark Cabaret...

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:45:51 -0800

I wasn't speaking of the so-called "dark cabaret" subgenre, but Wild Bill of Ithaca College's Sharp Notes blog was on Monday, writing:

Origin:
Debatable. Many fans consider the first cornerstone of the genre to be Nico’s 1974 release The End.

Surely we had dark cabaret before 1974? I'd point to Scott Walker's Jacques Brel interpretations as the origin, one of the first being "Amsterdam" from Scott's 1967 debut solo album:

12 Amsterdam

Scott Walker

I can't think of Scott Walker without hearing "Montague Terrace (In Blue)," also from Scott:

Scott Walker - Montague Terrace (in blue)

That song seems to be the blueprint for a new type of rock song, the lounge ballad that erupts into a bombastic chorus. Did Bryan Ferry have "Montague Terrace" in mind when he wrote "A Song for Europe"?

06-A Song For Europe

Roxy Music

Or did Lou Reed when writing "Berlin"?

05-Berlin

Lou Reed

Have you ever heard Lou give such an impassioned performance? Usually he delivers his lines half-spoken with an air of cool detachment, but his emotional outpouring in this live setting really brings out the heartache at the core of the song. (I'm not much of a fan of saxophone solos in rock songs--Andy Mackay excepted--but Marty Fogel pulls off a great one here. And keyboardist Michael Fonfara will return in a future "guilty pleasures" post.) Contrast with the lethargic version that opens the earlier Berlin, the album (arguably a work of dark cabaret itself):

01 - Berlin

Lou Reed

Maybe that take is just as emotionally valid, a state of catatonia born of depression. Most of the lyrics heard in the live version are missing here; the entire chorus is gone! But even this version is a reworking of a song that Lou recorded for his first, self-titled solo album in 1972:

10-Berlin

Lou Reed

This first version strikes the middle ground of feeling, somewhere around melancholia. The chorus is present here in a slightly different form:

You're right, and I'm wrong
Hey babe, I'm gonna miss you now that you're gone
One sweet day

Which he later changed to:

Hey baby you was right, and I know that I was wrong
I know I'm gonna miss you now (I know I'm gonna miss you anyhow)
Baby, one sweet day

Not that it's significant, it's just one of those things that I notice and can't help pointing out. I don't want to leave the dark cabaret topic without bringing up the Tiger Lillies, but six songs in one post is quite enough, so they'll have to wait.

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Blues backwards: On the Road Again

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:39:31 -0800

Of course everyone knows that "On the Road Again" is a blues standard made famous by Canned Heat in 1968:

But I didn't know that in the 80s; my first encounter with it was on synth band (or what in retrospect is referred to as "minimal wave") Schleimer K's debut album from 1981:

A5 - on the road again

Schleimer K

I love the stuttering kick drum in this version, you won't hear that beat anywhere else. Probably. The organ noodling by Dominique Brethes is also nice. What does it say about me that my favorite song on this album turned out to be an old blues cover? Obviously my musical tastes were not as esoteric as I once thought they were. I'm fine with that now, but it was a rather embarrassing bit of self-discovery when I finally heard the Canned Heat song for the first time. (And even that is a cover of sorts, based on a much older song by Floyd Jones, which in turn is based on an even older song. I lack the fortitude to track down the whole provenance.) This Schleimer K album is one of the many I sold during the 90s, thinking I would never listen to it again, so why keep it? Ten years later my life is completely different, and I do want to revisit the music I used to like, and thanks to Mutant Sounds and Phoenix Hairpins I can. And I still like it!

Finally, since every song reminds me of another song, I'll mention that Schleimer K singer Michael Wolfen's offhand, half-spoken vocal style was used extensively by Nik Fiend on Alien Sex Fiend's second (and best) album, Acid Bath. The atmospheric quality and midtempo beat of "Breakdown And Cry (Lay Down and Die...Goodbye) make it a good pairing with "On the Road Again"--

06 - Breakdown and cry (Lay down and lie - goodbye)

Alien Sex Fiend

Some other time I'll relate how Alien Sex Fiend almost played in Adelphi, Maryland.

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The Mars Volta reminds everyone of King Crimson

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:21:28 -0800

I'm not the first one to notice that "Goliath" from the new Mars Volta album sounds like King Crimson's 1969 prog-rock classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man," but I did arrive at that conclusion independently. At just after the 4-minute mark they abandon all pretense that they're doing an original song (compare to "Schizoid" at 2:08):

The Mars Volta - Goliath

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

Okay, so Cedric's lyrics and vocal melodies are different. Still, I think "21st Century Schizoid Dude" would have been a better song title.

As happens so often, King Crimson's original song was another I learned about in reverse. In ninth grade I was completely taken by Canadian AOR band April Wine. "Roller" was one of my radio favorites, especially the part in the instrumental break where the three guitarists trade off the descending six-note motif. That was on the First Glance album, their first after adding third guitarist Brian Greenway. I rushed out to buy the next album, Harder...Faster (a little double entendre there, get it?), when it came out in 1979, and played it over and over and over. The last song on the album is "21st Century Schizoid Man," sung by Greenway (instead of bandleader Myles Goodwyn); the jamming and stop-start unison playing on it is far beyond anything else they ever attempted. It took about a year for me to connect the song to King Crimson, which then opened up a whole new world of music to me. Here, then, is April Wine's version:

April Wine - 21st Century Schizoid Man

April Wine

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Prog backwards: Memories

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:08:59 -0800

Cranking up The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute album the first time was revelatory, and it had me jumping around for days. I caught up with their other albums afterwards, but none of them quite did it for me the way Frances did. And now they have a new one out, as you may have heard, The Bedlam in Goliath. They have also released five cover songs as bonus tracks. One of them is "Memories"--

The Mars Volta Memories (cover)

Listening to that the first time I recognized the tune; it took me a minute but I placed it as a song from Material's 1982 album, One Down. It's a nice breather from the electronic funk of the rest of the album, and significant for being sung by a pre-solo-career Whitney Houston:

07 - Memories (Voc. Whitney Houston)

Material with Whitney Houston

I had always assumed this "Memories" was either original to Material or an obscure R&B cover, but The Mars Volta listed it as a Soft Machine cover. And sure enough, the first version of The Soft Machine--Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge--recorded it in 1967 with producer Giorgio Gomelsky. It never got beyond the demo stage, but has been released several times on "Soft Machine early years" albums:

06 Memories

Soft Machine

But wait, there's more! It wasn't actually a Soft Machine song originally, but a song written by bassist Hugh Hopper in the pre-Soft Machine band The Wilde Flowers. The Wilde Flowers first recorded it as an instrumental, then added lyrics for a 1966 recording, with Robert Wyatt singing but not drumming:

03 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

Hugh Hopper joined The Soft Machine after their first (demo) recording of "Memories," and in 1969 the new SM lineup --Hopper, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge--recorded "Memories" once again... but as The Wilde Flowers!

22 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

And that's only a part of the rather amazing history of this little song. Luna Kafé has the definitive article on "Memories," the Dutch Progressive Rock Page has a complete Wilde Flowers chronology, and Richie Unterberger gets some interesting tidbits from Daevid Allen himself about the early Soft Machine. I obviously still have a lot to learn about the swiftly-shifting alliances of those nascent prog rock years.

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Sorcery revisited, or jazz backwards

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:06:49 -0800

More often than not I learn about music backwards, that is, in reverse chronological order. When I posted "Sorcery" by Poland's Big Band Katowice back in October, it did not occur to me to wonder about the song's origin. It was just today, listening to Billy Cobham's 1975 album A Funky Thide of Sings, that I heard the song again:

02 Sorcery

Billy Cobham

The story of how I finally listened to Billy Cobham after 30-odd years of not listening is for another time, but the result is that I wish I had just listened in the first place. So here was "Sorcery" again, in an electrified, more concise but less lively version, but the intriguing part was the media player displaying Keith Jarrett as the composer. Keith Jarrett, the godfather of New Age piano? A little digging and I learned what probably everyone else in the world already knew, that Keith Jarrett did indeed compose "Sorcery" in 1966, when he was 21 and a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet; it was first released on the Forest Flower album:

Keith Jarrett-Charles Lloyd - Sorcery

Charles Lloyd

The title fits, I can easily visualize a bad-ass wizard striding down a lane in time to this tune a la Tony Manero and "Stayin' Alive." And then he stops abruptly, points at me, fixes me with a paralyzing stare, and says (in Alan Rickman's voice) "Gonna getchoo." Help!

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Seeding Pandora: Moondog

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:01:52 -0800

I would love to have good music playing at work all the time, because good music is better than crushing silence, but bad music is worse. Moreover, the music I play must be backgroundable, and not grab my attention away from my work because (1) it's so awesome I have to stop everything and listen, or (2) it's so awful I have to get rid of it immediately. I don't have time to fiddle with CDs, or construct playlists, and most streaming programming on the Internet commits offense #2. But in my initial forays into streaming from Pandora, I've been able to program long stretches of backgroundable music with very little effort. On Pandora you create "radio stations" based on a song or artist, then Pandora plays a stream of music by that artist (if they have the streaming rights) and/or similar artists, similarity being determined by proximity in the Music Genome Project, a huge database of artist and song characteristics as input by "a group of musicians and music-loving technologists." You can give each song in the stream a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (or do nothing if you're busy working); a thumbs-down will stop the song immediately and remove it from your playlist forever. Presumably the thumbs will fine-tune the whole Genome thingamajig, Web 2.0-style. The catch is you can only skip three songs per hour. On the other hand, you can create a "Quick Mix" to combine several stations into a single stream. I've gotten great backgroundable streams with a Quick Mix of Moondog, Michael Nyman, Jon Hassell, Japancakes, Popol Vuh, Herbie Mann, and Bill Laswell. Only occasionally do I have to bring up the Pandora tab on my browser to get rid of some insipid New Age shite like Jim Brickman or David Lanz. So here's a Moondog song, "Bird's Lament," which frequently turns up on TV and radio in advertisements or opening sequences:

03 Bird's Lament

Moondog

Moondog (Louis Hardin, 1916-1999) first recorded this homage to Charlie Parker for his self-titled 1969 album for Columbia, with an orchestra; this version was recorded with just saxophones and percussion for his 1997 album Sax Pax for a Sax. Of all the Moondog information available on the web, the best by far is a 1998 interview of Moondog by Jason Gross at Perfect Sound Forever. Moondog was a fascinating man who led an incredible life, and left behind a nice body of beautiful music unlike any other.

Pandora is promoted as a music discovery tool, but you have to sit there and listen to it. That's fine for protracted listening, but not ideal for sampling and discovery. There are several graphical music discovery tools on the web, all neatly summarized on the Rocketsurgeon blog. I haven't had a lot of luck with those either; finding my favorite bands on MySpace and seeing who their friends are has been much more rewarding, discovery-wise.

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Once a spy...

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:25:25 -0700

Always a spy--I just can't get away from the spy music! Here's another Lalo Schifrin track, from his execrably-titled 1967 album There's a Whole Lalo Schifrin Goin' On:

01 - Secret Code

Lalo Schifrin

I assume that the keyboard solo is a monophonic synthesizer, and since it was recorded in 1967 that would probably make it a Moog. (The birthplace of the Moog synthesizer is right here in Ithaca, where Robert Moog was a graduate student in solid state physics. Or just up the road in Trumansburg, where he had his factory.) One more "Odies" song down!

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