112 posts tagged “70s”
Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler. But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins. Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:
UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:
The Baker Brothers' latest album is Avid Sounds, a collection of covers of 70s funk and soul classics performed with assorted guest vocalists. I especially like their version of "Fly Like An Eagle"; I thought the Neville Brothers had realized that song's fullest funky potential, but I think the Baker Brothers have surpassed them:
After steeping in New Model Army for the last couple weeks (whose show at The Haunt last Friday was just sensational, BTW), I opted today for something lighter: Spies and Dolls, a 1972 album of spy and crime movie themes by The Chaquito Big Band, led by John Gregory. The orchestration of these mostly-familiar tunes is quite imaginative; check out the bassoon in "They Call Me Mister Tibbs"--
Somehow it entered my mind this evening that the pre-chorus marimba ostinato in Japan's "Methods of Dance" sounds a lot like the background ostinato in Peter Gabriel's "No Self Control", then I started thinking about tuned percussion (marimba, xylophone, balafon, vibraphone, or their synthesized equivalents) in Japan's music in general, and how they often used tuned percussion for melodic motifs, and how Peter Murphy used nearly identical licks in some of his songs. So I made a playlist to convey my point, but regardless of my point, they are all great songs to listen to:
One of the funny things about growing up is that you don't always learn things in the right order, which is why I knew Tim Curry as a recording artist before I knew he was an actor. His song "I Do the Rock" was a minor hit in 1979 (reaching #91 on the Billboard chart) and I enjoyed it whenever it came on the radio. What I notice about the song now are (1) the variety of first names in the lyrics are not just random first names (a la "Games Without Frontiers" or "88 Lines About 44 Women") (I think those are random, at least), they refer to actual people, most of whom I can guess and all of whom are explained on this helpful page; (2) the soundstage has a lot of "Virginia Plain" in it, and Curry's vocal cadences may be an homage to, or parody of, Bryan Ferry's (or they may not); and (3) he is not actually singing, it's more like rapping.
Back in the 80s, when Sting first started "acting" in films, an interviewer asked him rather bluntly, "What makes you think you can act?" To which Sting adroitly replied, "What makes Tim Curry think he can make records?" Touché.
As an addendum to yesterday's post of C Cat Trance's cover of The Tymes' "Hypnotized", here is the other cover from their first EP, the Chairmen of the Board's "Dangling On a String". CCT added a hard edge to "Hypnotized", but they change the tenor of "Dangling" entirely, transforming a rather average uptempo Motownesque number into a charging locomotive of desperation with angry outbursts of sax:
(This version included on the 1988 CD release of Play Masenko Combo restores about three minutes that were excised from the original EP with an abrupt fadeout.)
Medium Medium were responsible for what may be the definitive postpunk single, "Hungry, So Angry". Two of their members, Rees Lewis and Nigel Kingston Stone, left the band to form C Cat Trance, a band I hold in such esteem that to even begin to write about them is an overwhelming proposition. They hit upon the perfect combination of rock, funk, skronk, and Middle Eastern music, and while many rock bands who try to incorporate world music into their sound end up with watering down both genres, C Cat Trance kept a sharp edge through the course of several albums and singles. So while I'm still thinking about postpunk bands covering R&B songs, I present C Cat Trance's version of "Hypnotized" from their first EP, a song that I found out just tonight, after 26 years of searching, was originally by The Tymes on their 1976 album Tymes Up. Thank you Google, Discogs, and DISMARC!
More C Cat Trance to come.
Maybe the idea of having Joy Division cover an R&B hit was not so far-fetched after all. It has occurred to me since my July 26 post that JD's fellow Mancunians A Certain Ratio turned out a decent cover of Banbarra's "Shack Up". (Banbarra were from Washington, DC, and I grew up just outside DC, but I never heard their original "Shack Up" until recently, oddly enough. I was nine years old at the time of its release in 1975 and was not yet attuned to anything outside the national Top 40. Shame on me.) Postpunk fellow travellers Siouxsie and the Banshees' version of Ben E. King's "Supernatural Thing" was pretty smokin' as well.
Phil Manzanera was actually Roxy Music's third guitarist. The first, Roger Bunn, left the group before they had recorded anything. Bryan Ferry recruited Davy O'List, late of The Nice, to take his place. O'List was in the band for their first BBC session, recorded in January 1972. He was dismissed from the band by the end of February, for a variety of reasons which may be libellous to repeat here; but to my ears the most important reason is that his bluesy guitar style just did not fit in with Roxy's retro-futuristic sound. Here is "Sea Breezes" with O'List on guitar:
Or, as Simon Galloway puts it on the Roxyrama website, "Although a fluent musician (and not forgetting, the only professional musician in the band) his bluesy style appears sloppy within the Roxy sound, he becomes lost within the songs and drops many a bum note." On O'List's post-Roxy career, Jonathan Rigby writes:
After a period in the doldrums, he would resurface in 1974 via a lacerating guitar break on Ferry's solo version of The 'In' Crowd, soon afterwards forming the short-lived Jet with vocalist Andy Ellison, a band that, if nothing else, confirmed the lingering impact on O'List of his brief flirtation with Roxy Music. "If Jet's first single, an O'List composition called My River, is anything to go by," commented David Fudger in Disc, "they have taken hold of the essence of Virginia Plain and added a dynamism sadly lacking in R Music's current output."
Indeed, the Roxy influence in "My River" is undeniable:
O'List then vanished from the music scene, reappearing with a solo album, Flight of the Eagle, in 1997. (I haven't turned that one up that.)
During his rock-and-roll days Paul McCartney's brother Mike adopted the last name McGear, under which name he was a member of the bands The Scaffold and Grimms. He kept the name for his solo albums as well, the second of which, McGear (1974), was produced by brother Paul who also played on all the tracks, as did the other members of Wings. It is essentially a Wings album with a guest lead vocalist. McGear is of interest to me for the inclusion of a Roxy Music cover, "Sea Breezes":
It's just not the same without the electric piano leitmotif of the original, or Manzanera's noisy guitar freakout, or with the choppy rhythm of the middle session replaced with a cheesy "reggae" beat; and of course no Roxy cover can match Bryan Ferry's unique vocals. But still, Paul McCartney playing Roxy Music is a novelty worth sharing. And it's one of many little revelations contained in Jonathan Rigby's exhaustive Roxy history Both Ends Burning.
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