eye of the storm

i've been re-working the 2-cd soul list.

hey brian put up the first bit of the soul list on seeqpod. that is cool. gotta figure out how to use it.

watcha listenin to, mistercrispy?
i'm soaked in, permeated by, classic soul. putting together a definitive 2-cd set (playlist below). my main rediscovery in this sojourn is o.v. wright, an amazing and amazingly underappreciated deep soul singer. "blind, crippled and crazy" is my latest theme song. later in his career, he recorded for hi records, which made the classic soul of al green and ann peebles (who is one my favorite artists ever; you can't seem to get the right stuff on itunes; you want early: "I can't stand the rain," "tear your playhouse down," "feel like breakin up somebody's home.") i finally went back and got early solomon burke. beautiful. my kids vince and sam are skeptical; i think they think it sounds like country music. it's amazing what happens to popular music retroactively! but they're musicians and i at least can say: try to understand the horn arrangements! or just fucking soak up those vocals: the best singers in pop music history, approximately. there's little aretha below, not because i don't love aretha, but because i've heard "respect" and "think" perhaps too many times.

(1) ann peebles, "i can't stand the rain"
(2) bobby bland, "ain't no love in the heart of the city"
(3) purify bros, "i'm your puppet"
(4) solomon burke, "everybody needs somebody to love"
(5) james brown, "it's a man's man's man's world"
(6) otis redding and carla thomas, "knock on wood"
(7) o.v. wright, "i'd rather be blind, crippled, and crazy"
(8) jackie wilson, "am i the man"
(9) clarence carter, "back door santa"
(10) wilson pickett, "634-5789"
(11) betty wright, "clean up woman"
(12) o.v wright, "drowning on dry land"
(13) sam and dave, "i thank you"
(14) otis redding, "fa-fa-fa-fa-fa (sad song)"
(15) solomon burke, "cry to me" ("don't you feel like crying?")
(16) sly and the family stone, "underdog"
(17) al green, "look what you done for me"
(18) patti labelle, "1-2-3-4-5-6-7 (count the days)"
(19) booker t and the mg's, "green onions"
(20) don covay, "mercy, mercy"
(21) ann peebles, "tear your playhouse down"
(22) rufus thomas, "push pull"
(23) o.v. wright, "a nickel and a nail"
(24) sam cooke, "cupid"
(25) solomon burke, "can't nobody love you (like i can)"
(26) bettye swann, "chained and bound"
(27) ben e. king, "supernatural thing"
(28) james brown, "please, please, please (please, please)"
(29) al green, "call me"
(30) aretha franklin, "chain of fools"
(31) tyrone davis, "turn back the hands of time"
(32) ike and tina turner, "river deep and mountain high"
(33) johnnie taylor, "testify (i wanna)"
(34) o.v. wright, "i've been searching"
(35) b.b. king, "thrill is gone"
(36) sam and dave, "soothe me"
(37) solomon burke, "none of us are free"
(38) gladys knight and the pips, "i've got to use my imagination"
(39) otis redding, "i've been loving you too long"
(40) the isley brothers, "shout"
(41) bobby bland "i wouldn't treat a dog (the way you treated me)"
(42) ann peebles, "feel like breakin up somebody's home"
(43) o.v. wright, "eight men, four women (jury of love)"
(44) betty wright "clean up woman"
(45) wilson pickett, "land of 1000 dances"
(46) joe tex, "skinny legs and all"
(47) o.v. wright, "everybody knows (the river song)"
(48) al green, "let's stay together"
(49) the bar-kays, "soul finger"
(50) sam and dave, "hold on, i'm comin'"
(51) otis redding, "(sittin' on) the dock of the bay"
(52) o.v. wright, "born all over"
(53) james brown, "cold sweat"

the great doyle lawson and quicksilver, explaining a funny experience.

 

i got to say i'm looking way forward to walk hard: the dewey cox story. why? well i think "walk the line" and "ray" sucked elephant schlongs. i'm never gonna forgive the singing in walk the line, e.g. but they were incredibly too-big, utterly inert, completely dispiriting. plus i have downloaded one of the wonderful dylan parodies from walk hard: "royal jelly." someone finally figured out that dylan was deeply fullofshit from the getgo. "royal jelly" is from dewey's "political period" and consists of incomprehensible pseudo-surrealist claptrap, switching on the chorus to "so let me touch you": the sixties in a nutshell. ":

here's a snatch of "subterranean homesick blues

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try "No Doz"
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

that this was welcomed ecstatically as the great poetry of the age is just one of those things, like the rise of mike huckabee. who knows how or why?
here's the entirety of "all along the watchtower":

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.


this could have been written by carl jung, had carl jung been a blithering idiot (or: even more of a blithering idiot than he actually was).

watcha listenin to crispy?

i'm working on a book: "political aesthetics, an introduction," which contains various case studies, one of which is punk, which is the chapter i'm working on.

basically, i'm treating punk as an anarchist movement, but i thought for one thing i should include a discussion of some of the racist or anti-immigrant or neo-nazi stuff. i've heard plenty of bands who could be bent this way, such as cro-mags or agnostic front from the nyhc scene. but i went to die hard records, more or less the source. i actually wondered about giving them all my info for an order, but i would like to be on various watch lists, and certainly this one would confuse anyone monitoring my political activities: anarcho-fascism. i bought a cd by skrewdriver: "boots and braces/voice of britain," a reissue of two old lps. the music is pretty ok: waffling between bar-band fast blues and kind of lout punk a la sham 69 or something. only on a couple of songs would the, er, aryan themes jump out at you. and i also got a "rock against communism" patch. surely the best thing about nazis is their anti-communism, as the best thing about commies is their anti-fascism. truly, other than that they're both disgusting idiots. the thing came very plain-brown rapper: a stamped return address but no indication who sent it. it's interesting that you can't get any right-wing punk on itunes, basically, or amazon.

by far the coolest discovery i've made in this particular punk excursion is the great san francisco punk band from the late seventies the avengers, fronted by penelope houston. they sounded like a frightening combination of blondie and the dead boys (which i've realized was one of the great rock bands ever). truly they rock with melody and real punk intensity and also political commitment. they managed to sort of professionally record one sort-of album, known as the "pink album." because of some idiot legal hassle it can't be obtained on itunes etc., but you can get it from penelope houston's website on cdr. but the stuff that you can get on itunes, the live/out-takes collection "died for your sins" will do very nicely.

i've also been re-reading stephen blush's amazing book american hardcore, and i watched the recent documentary version, which is excellent.

i've been exploring progressive/left/anarchist punk en masse, starting out with crass, of course, but also i'm realizing that the stuff is everywhere: the dischord people, mdc, dead kennedys, doa, subhumans, and recent folk-punk versions such as this bike is a pipe bomb. obviously, clash and the (underappreciated) ruts from the first british wave. did you know malcolm mclaren was reading debord when he put out the pistols? one really good find here: the zounds, from the crass complex. they are radically uneven, but the best songs are really dark, smooth, powerful rock and roll with a peace message. interpunk  is a good source for the multi-volume anarcho-punk  series from overground records: anti-war , anti-state, anti-society, anti-capitalism etc, which is filled to overflowing with extremely obscure good and bad political punk .

marion and jane have been exploring the wonderful world of musical theater. recently they rented "grease," and i was finally re-acquainted the absolutely worst lyric in the history of pop music:

Grease is the word
Grease is the word, is the word that you heard
It's got groove it's got meaning
Grease is the time, is the place is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling

sadly, grease is exactly the way i am feeling.

watcha listenin to crispy?

i've been reimmersing myself in the work of dwight yoakam, who i think is the greatest country artist of this era. his early stuff ("guitars, cadillacs") was wonderful, though perhaps a trifle too conscious of its own revivalism. on the other hand, in the mid-eighties, anyone trying to record hard honky-tonk for a major label was bound to be conscious that he was making an unusual set of decisions. but i guess what kills me is a series of amazing albums he produced in mid and late 90s, which i regard as among the greatest country records ever made: "this time" (1993), "gone" (1995), "a long way home" (1998), and "tomorrow's sounds today" (2000). it is worth saying that all of this material was made in collaboration with dwight's producer and guitarist, pete anderson. the songwriting and arrangements are incredibly strong, at  once perfectly contemporary and entirely traditional: an impossible combination until you hear it coming out of your speakers. of course, dwight is known for reviving the "bakersfield sound" of buck owens and others, but it's important to hear in his vocals his native kentucky and the influence of bluegrass tenors.

this is "one more night," from "gone." some people gravitate toward music that defies genres or synthesizes them. i am drawn to music that exemplifies a style in its purity. there can hardly be a purer country song than this:

 

 

i might say that dwight's most recent, "i blame the vain," is a bit disappointing. by comparison with the astronomical standards set by anderson, who apparently has detached (with love, no doubt), the production is sluggish, though the writing remains strong. the previous item, "population me" is excellent, however.

so. tomorrow i am going to give a little talk on american popular music to a group of middle eastern students in harry pohlman's class at dickinson. i threw together a taxonomy, but i would appreciate any help with this in comments, particularly actual important stylistic or genre or format categories i am overlooking so far. obviously this has the greatest possible scope and no specificity.

(African-)American Musical Styles:

Ragtime: Jelly Roll Morton

Blues: W. C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Willie McTell, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, B.B. King [Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin]

Jazz: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bennie Goodman, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis [bop], John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis

Soul: Sam Cook, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Al Green
Funk: James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic
Disco: Chic, Donna Summer
Hop Hop: Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Dr. Dre, Atmosphere

Country (bluegrass): Carter Family, Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, etc
    bluegrass: Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, Emmylou Harris
    honky-tonk: Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam

Rock (rockabilly, rhythm and blues): Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Beatles
    folk: Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen
    rockabilly: Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley
    surf: Dick Dale, Beach Boys
    heavy metal: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, [Metallica]
    southern rock: Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, [Drive-By Truckers]
    art rock: Yes, Pink Floyd
    punk: Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, Green Day, Blink 182
    hardcore: Minor Threat, Black Flag
    "alternative": Nirvana, Pearl Jam, [Weezer]

[Ska/Rock Steady/Reggae: Toots and the Maytals, Bob Marley, Lee Perry, Augustus Pablo, Lady Saw, Sean Paul etc etc [Alpha Blondy]]

i also just digitized about six hours of the kendalls, a great hardcountry act who are also out of print, more or less. it's an astonishing oeuvre, first of all on freudian grounds: they were a father/daughter duo (royce and jeannie) who specialized in, um, cheating songs. they were cheating with each other while i guess their spouses looked on in true disbelief, like kathryn harrison's mom. they recorded many kitschy songs, but also many beautiful ones, charting occasionally in the seventies and eighties. titles you might recognize, but probably not: "my baby's gone" (a louvin bros song), "teach me to cheat," "thank god for the radio," "central standard time.") they invented whole, um, genres, for example the football cheating song (""a dallas cowboy and a new orleans saint," "pittsburgh stealers") and cheating gospel ("cheater's prayer," "heaven's just a sin away"). in my view, jeannie is one of the great country singers, both extremely nasal and breathtakingly pure. royce is gone, but jeannie is still around, recording for rounder.