What do you do if you just have to hear a specific song right now?  If you subscribe to Rhapsody, you listen to it there, but if you don't you go to Seeqpod.  Seeqpod will often find the song you're looking for sitting on a website somewhere and stream it for you.  (It won't let you save it, though; for that you need the Jaseeq standalone Java app.)  So the other night Mrs. Veneer and I had to hear Journey's "Separate Ways" for some reason or other (I think whatever I was listening to at the time reminded her of it, but now I don't remember what I was listening to), and Seeqpod brought up this:

Journey_Separate-Ways

It soon becomes apparent that this is not Journey, because that is definitely not Steve Perry singing.  So who is it?  The URL for the song is http://www.aeroventure.com/My_Song_Bios/songs/remove/Journey_Separate-Ways.mp3; browsing to that file's directory, we find a whole slew of classic rock songs and ballads, all sung in the same striking falsetto--enjoy!  There are some cool obscurities there, too, such as Yes' "Release, Release" and "Parallels." Who stored all their karaoke recordings on a web server?  The directory name is "remove;" did they mean to remove it?  We go to the home page and discover that Aeroventure is a flight school.  Is it one of the web designers?  Or is it one of the flight instructors?  We think it's Tom, all the way down at the bottom of the page.  On the other hand, it could be the undisclosed person who runs the office, mans the phones, answers the email, and updates the website.  Whoever it is, it takes guts to put your stuff out there for the world to hear, and I salute you.

(By the way, remember that awful video for "Separate Ways," where the band lurches around playing air instruments down by the docks?  Gag!)

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Still cruisin'--here's one that I would like to be my cruising-the-nightlife song, but it has become my de facto crawling-through-traffic song.  Which is perfect, because it's so upbeat it gives me the illusion of moving even when I'm not.  The Sound Stylistics are a supergroup of UK funksters (though to tell the truth, the only name listed in this review that I recognize is that of Hammond organ guru James Taylor) who recorded an album called The Sound Stylistics Play Deep Funk for a film music library in 2002.  But by popular demand the album was released to mere consumers this year on Freestyle Records (and iTunes).  The high point of the album is track three,  "The Players Theme," which demonstrates what happens when funk players turn it up to eleven, and features a generously long drum break (a category I think I'll explore in future posts).  (What is it about the third track, is that the "power position" on an album?  This is the fourth track three in a row that I've posted!)  At just under five minutes long, it's just right for driving to the grocery store (and then starting over for the drive back):

03 The Players Theme

The Sound Stylistics

The Sound Stylistics apparently like playing together enough to reunite for occasional live gigs; YouTube has a live version of "The Players Theme" from a June 13 performance at the Jazz Cafe:

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Robert Musso's "All Funked Up" isn't fast enough to be a cruising-down-the-freeway song, so it is my official "cruising-down-the-boulevard-with-the-top-down" song (with the same qualifications as the previous entry, plus there is no boulevard in Ithaca).  Musso is a recording engineer, best known (to me) for his work on countless Bill Laswell projects.  He is also a musician, primarily a guitarist for his solo albums and his noise-jazz group Machine Gun, but also a synth whiz for his albums as Transonic.  On this track from his 1992 album Active Resonance, Musso is joined by Bootsy Collins and the JB Horns for an infectious funk workout.

Robert Musso_Active Resonance_03_All Funked Up

Robert Musso

Bootsy may be the funkiest dude ever; all he has to do is say "Aw, yeah" and a song immediately becomes funky before he even touches his Space-Bass (which then increases the Funk exponentially).  What is the Funk?  Where did it come from?  How does it work?  How did Bootsy get it?  What happened to it?  Fans of The Mighty Boosh (the best comedy series of this century, and possibly the most creative ever) will know already, but others should watch and learn from Old Gregg:

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Car-chase music isn't the only good vehicular music genre; simple car driving music can be plenty fulfilling.  "Fried Grease" by the Greyboy Allstars with Fred Wesley (1995) has become my official cruising-down-the-freeway-with-the-top-down song.  Never mind that the top of our minivan doesn't actually go down; this groovy track makes it feel like it's down.  I'm not usually a fan of the "everybody gets a solo" format, but it works in this case because all the players "bring it" (I think that's the correct term today).  After two ensemble runs through the central motif, the soloing begins: first up is legendary JB Horns trombonist Fred Wesley, followed by Karl Denson on alto sax, Harold Todd on flute, Robert Walter on electric piano, and finally Elgin Park on guitar before the ensemble kicks back in to play a completely different riff for the outro.  It's pure gold.  There's no bass solo, but Chris Stilwell's hyperkinetic basslines keep the tune bouncing, and at this point I may as well give a tip of the hat to drummer Zak Najor and percussionist Craig Levitz for pinning the whole thing down so flawlessly.

Greyboy Allstars-Fried Grease

Greyboy Allstars

The Greyboy Allstars formed in 1993 to play the kind of retro funk and acid jazz on the records that DJ Greyboy (Andreas Stevens) was playing at the Green Circle Bar in San Diego.  I first encountered them on the soundtrack to Get Shorty, a pretty good movie with inexplicably great music, most of it by former Lounge Lizard John Lurie.  After some years apart the Allstars reunited this year (all the original members plus Greyboy himself) for a new album, What Happened to Television?  It's fine, funky stuff; there's no "Fried Grease" on it, but "Left Coast Boogaloo" comes close.

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The first album I ever bought with my own money (which excludes earlier gift albums such as John Denver's Back Home Again) was The Who's Who Are You in October 1978.  I listened to it over and over until I believed all the songs were good, but what I especially liked were the synthesizer bleeps sprinkled throughout.  Now I realize how lame most of the songs are, but I still adore John Entwistle's "905," a succinct portrait of a future dystopia which begins (after some cool synthesizer bleeps):

Mother was an incubator, father was the contents
Of a test tube in the icebox in the factory of birth
My name is 905, and I've just become alive
I'm the newest populator of the planet we call Earth

03 - 905

The Who

There is a spark of hope in Entwistle's vision, though:

I have a feeling deep inside that something is missing
It's a feeling in my soul, and I can't help wishing
That one day I'll discover we're living a lie
And I'll tell the whole world the reason why

Which in my estimation places it above such bleak scenarios as, say, Zager and Evans' "In the Year 2525," which dooms mankind to a future of flaccid, inoperable bodies being served by machines.  But that sure is dramatic!

Space poet/Hawkwind frontman Robert Calvert tackled a similar theme in his final album, Test Tube Conceived; I'll have to get another copy of that to see how it panned out, my original copy having gone the way of all vinyl (ebay) in the previous decade.

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I just flew in from England--and boy, are my arms tired!  Ba-dum!  We made several attempts to listen to the radio over there, which was frustrating.  The makeup of British radio is about 70% DJ yammering, 5% listenable music, and 25% crap.  But a pleasant surprise was twice hearing Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now," my favorite (sorry, have to break it out again) track from their 1978 album Jazz.  It's a rollicking celebration of life in general, and hinted-at sexual hedonism in particular, driven by Freddie Mercury's piano playing.  At the same time it's bittersweet, since Freddie's sexual hedonism ultimately cost him his life.  The song got virtually no airplay in the States, but in Britain it was released with "Fat-Bottomed Girls" (speaking of sexual hedonism) as a double-A-side single and, based on my empirical evidence, remains a radio staple.   Love that breakdown!

Queen 12 Don't Stop Me Now

Queen

Jazz was not the first album I ever owned (that will be dealt with here shortly), but was one of the first, received as a Christmas present from my parents in 1978 (eighth grade).  Mom and Dad were shocked at the included poster of a bevy of nude women on bicycles, having missed the big "contains a poster of nude women on bicycles" sticker on the shrinkwrap.  When you have very few records you end up listening to them over and over, so I am intimately familiar with this one.  Other highlights include the hard-driving "Dead On Time" and the sexually-hedonistic "Let Me Entertain You" (whose reference to Cruella deVille perplexed me until I had kids of my own and finally saw 101 Dalmatians; perhaps the longest penny-drop period of my life).  Did I mention the sexual hedonism theme?

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Is there anyone who bought the 1982 Cherry Red sampler LP Pillows & Prayers and didn't fall in love with Joe Crow's "Compulsion"?  If you didn't, you must have been some kind of curmudgeon, but that's cool.  Ridiculously simple (Joe uses the synth equivalent of an Easy-Bake Oven) but amazingly catchy, "Compulsion" marches inexorably forward, oscillating between major and minor chords like our quotidian waverings between hope and worry, joy and pain, attraction and aversion. 

Joe Crow--Compulsion

Joe Crow

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Polyrock's main claim to fame was their association with Philip Glass, who co-produced and played some of the keyboards on their first album (1980).  I was immediately taken by their near-instrumental "Your Dragging Feet" the first time I heard it on WHFS.  Hearing it for the first time was like an act of anamnesis; it felt so completely right, like a song I had known all my life.  (Other examples are "Stairway to Heaven," "Drops of Jupiter," and "Bring Me To Life.")  The synth bass, the wordless choir, the repeating keyboard line, the weird guitar chords, they all fit together and opened vistas far beyond what I was used to from my earlier AOR-listening years; the song dripped with modernity and mystery.  And perhaps it paved the way for Michael Cretu's Enigma project a decade later.

Polyrock - 05 - Your Dragging Feet

Polyrock

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This may be the rarest item in my collection, a 1985 flexi-disc from Terminal! magazine containing "Work the Beat" by Philadelphia-area electronic band Experimental Products.  A simple but catchy layering of analog synths and sequencers, the song is propelled by a positively percolating bassline:

Experimental_Products--Work_the_Beat

Experimental Products

(The off-the-beat bass drum you hear is not supposed to be there: my flexi-disc got folded!  I got it flattened out again, pressed under a dictionary for a year or so, but you can still hear the remnants of the crease.)

I looked through record bins for more Experimental Products records hundreds of times, and turned up a single item, the "Glowing in the Dark" 3-song EP (cover pictured above).  It was good but not as good as "Work the  Beat," and I ended up selling it on ebay about eight or nine years ago.  A whole collectors' cult has grown up around "minimal techno" music from the 80s, and European and Japanese collectors were paying top dollar for the good stuff, and Experimental Products are among the best.

Experimental Products are another band whose history can now be known, thanks to band founder Michael Gross, who has created a Yahoo group and a MySpace page for the band.  So now I know that they did indeed release a full-length album, Prototype (of which I have never seen a copy), and one other 12", "Experiment!"; the band's output was so meager due to the death of co-founder Marc Wilde in 1987.  Now if only I can find a copy of Prototype, or at least a rip.  Anyone?

Update: A rip of Prototype is available at Mutant Sounds!

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Eric Random (Ramsden) had quite an interesting musical trajectory in the 80s.  He was from Manchester, but after hooking up with Cabaret Voltaire he became more closely aligned with the Sheffield scene.  His first recordings for New Hormones consisted of simple drum machine patterns, basic synth noises, and manipulated tapes, but he began incorporating, on one hand, Middle Eastern and dub styles, and on the other hand, more insistent rhythms, especially after adding drummer Graham "Dids" Dowdall.  This musical journey culminated in 1987 in what I think of as "The Great Lost Worldbeat Album," Ishmael, on FON Records; "lost" because it has never been issued on CD, an oversight I find astounding.  Random weaves Middle Eastern modalities with rock structures and rhythms, acoustic instruments with electronics, danceability with meditation.  In short, it's a masterpiece.  Here is the first track, "Cherish":

Eric Random--Cherish

Eric Random and the Bedlamites

I love that bongo/flute jam in the middle!  The album cover doesn't translate well to digital format, it is actually very striking.  "Ishmael" is printed in white-on-white Arabic-style letters using a mask technique, i.e. the cover is glossy except for the letters.  The only thing wrong with this album is its length: only six tracks (one a cover of Collin Walcott's "Hey Da Da Boom") for roughly half an hour of music.  If only there had been more... Eric Random has remained active, sort of, so I suppose I should track down some of his newer material.

I could participate in the Sheffield scene only vicariously, from across the Atlantic, through reading the weekly UK music papers.  I remember reading Amrik Rai's highly enthusiastic review of Hula.  He was so enthusiastic that he founded the FON Records label in collaboration with Mark Brydon of Chakk (coming to the blog soon, maybe).  Hula was already signed to Red Rhino, but FON picked up some closely associated bands (Chakk for one, obviously).  Now that was a label whose every release was a must-buy for me; up until The Funky Worm, that is.  FON records were easy to spot by their distinctive black-and-white-striped spine, which just lapped onto the front cover.  Now that I think of it, and have done a quick Google search, very little of the FON catalog has made it to CD, except what I have ripped from vinyl for myself.  And you!

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