Spotify Playlist for 27/07 – Scott Walker, Bach, Os Mutantes
A couple of things about today’s Spotify playlist. Firstly, I’m starting to lose track of what I’ve posted before, so if some tracks come up more than once, forgive me. I’m assuming no-one’s listening to *all* of these, anyway, just the ones that sound interesting to them.
The other thing is the notable lack of female artists. This is partly because my record collection is male-dominated, but also a lot of my favourite female performers (Carolyn Edwards and Joanna Newsom to name two) aren’t on Spotify yet. Anyone know of any really good female singers/songwriters I’d like?
Anyway, today’s playlist
Cossacks Are by Scott Walker is the opening song from his most recent (and to my mind best) album, The Drift. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about, but it sounds astonishing. Remember, this is someone who started his career in a boy band doing Four Seasons covers…
The Knife by Genesis is included after reading Gavin B’s post about it – it’s almost good enough to forgive them for Phil Collins.
Pale And Precious by The Dukes Of Stratosphear is XTC in their guise as a fake 60s psych band doing a perfect Beach Boys pastiche, while still managing to be a truly great song in its own right. Gorgeous stuff. Just listen to the “Don’t care what the others might say” section – it’s got *exactly* the same unexpected chord progression – and indeed the same distrust of other people in general and wish they’d disappear attached to an absolute adoration of one person in particular – that would happen in a Brian Wilson song at that point.
At this point, the playlist is a little proggy, so there’s a couple of simpler songs.
I’m Leaving It All Up To You by Don & Dewey is a song I found on a wonderful compilation called Frank Zappa’s Jukebox, which consists of stuff that Zappa listened to as a teenager, and so is a mixture of ‘difficult’ modern classical, skronking jazz and greasy blues and doo-wop. It’s an absolute treasure of a compilation.
Shakin’ All Over by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates is one of those records that was an absolutely massive hit in Britain in the early ’60s but almost no-one outside the UK knows. It’s a shame as it’s one of the great records of that period between Elvis getting drafted and the first Beatles record, which is generally regarded as a dead period in music but in fact produced people like Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and others who were far more influential than people now realise.
Movie Magg by Carl Perkins is a great record in its own right, but also a window into a time that seems a million years ago – this is a song about taking a girl to the cinema, but on the back of a horse. And recorded in the 1950s. The weird juxtaposition of the modern (the electrical kinematograph still seems modern to me, I am afraid) and what feels like the ancient, a song about a lost way of life that is still in the memory of many living, in a song that was a modern pop song at the time my Dad was born, seems very strange to me…
You Don’t Have To Walk In The Rain by The Turtles is from one of the very great overlooked albums of the 60s, Turtle Soup. This was the Turtles’ attempt to make their own Village Green Preservation Society and was produced by Ray Davies, and is a halfway house between the Kinks’ English pastoral and the Turtles’ California pop whose closest comparison is probably Odessey & Oracle. This was the single from the album, and the most conventional track on it, but I love the line “I look at your face/I love you anyway”.
Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball? by Buddy Johnson is for my wife, who’s spent most of the last few weeks watching rounders over the internet rather than talking to her long-suffering husband ;)
Opening Titles by Don Preston is another of Preston’s orchestral pieces. I’m becoming more and more convinced, the more I hear of Preston’s work, that he had the potential to be a true great had he not spent the last forty years in the shadow of his old boss. Shame.
The Prelude to the first Lute Suite in E Minor by Bach is just here because I like Bach’s lute pieces. So should you.
Lady Came From Baltimore by Scott Walker is as different from the opening track as you could get – a cover of a folk-pop song by Tim Hardin – but is still a lovely little track, overlooked in comparison to the darker stuff on Walker’s first few solo albums.
Arnaldo Said by the Wondermints is the only Wondermints track on Spotify at the moment, unfortunately. Weirdly, this is on an Os Mutantes tribute album, even though it’s a Wondermints original. But speaking of Mutantes…
Bat Macumba by Os Mutantes is my favourite track by Brazil’s greatest psychedelic band – not much of a song, but just listen to it as a *sound*, the way the totally different sonic environments are laid on each other…
Everyone Says I Love You by Janet Klein is a lovely little acoustic performance of the Marx Brothers song from Horse Feathers (and if I lent any of you my box set of Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business, could I have it back, please? I’ve completely forgotten who I lent it to…)
Wonderful/Song For Children by Rufus Wainwright is a stunning performance of the first half of the second movement of Smile, and shows that Smile wasn’t just a great record, but the songs were great songs. Wonderful, especially, deserves to be regarded as part of ‘the great American songbook’.
Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair by Bessie Smith is another track by one of the all-time great blues singers, but to be honest I’ve included it for the horn playing.
And Over The Reef by Duncan Browne is a song I’m not even sure I like, but there’s something to it… it’s a very twee, folky thing which could smack of James Taylor, but there’s a sort of Incredible String Bandness about it that makes it work… I think… what do you think?
Anyway, I’m off til a week on Tuesday. Don’t turn this place into a tip while I’m gone…
New Spotify Playlist – All This Is That
This week’s playlist (a day or two early) started out as a ‘what I’ve listened to this week’ one, then mutated slightly. Now it’s *mostly* soft-psychedelia, with a little raw bluesy stuff thrown in. I think it works…
All This Is That by The Beach Boys is from the criminally underrated Carl & The Passions: So Tough, an album I’d put in their top five. This one’s written by Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson, and lyrically is gibberish about Transcendental Meditation, but works just for Love and Wilson’s wonderful vocals (especially Wilson’s soaring ‘jai guru dev’ falsetto at the end). The current touring ‘Beach Boys’ often perform this live, and it’s usually the best thing in the show.
Cross-Hatched World by Chewy Marble is a great piece of 60s-esque pop from Modulations, one of my favourite albums of last year. For those who don’t know, Chewy Marble are led by Brian Kassan, the former bass player for the Wondermints, and are very much the same kind of band.
When The World Is At Rest by Janet Klein And Her Parlor Boys is in here for the delightful tuned percussion. Janet Klein, for those who don’t know, does “Lovely, Naughty and Obscure Music of the 1910′s, 20s and 30′s”, and very well, with a wonderful sense of humour but a respect and love for the material.
Wavestrumental by Tripsitter is from California Son – a very strong album let down somewhat by attempts to sound too much like the Beach Boys (down to quoting Friends and When I Grow Up for no real reason). This track, on the other hand, sounds just like the High Llamas, albeit the High Llamas at their most Beach Boysy, and is all the better for it. A gorgeous little mostly-instrumental, with a lovely vibraphone part.
Where Have You Been All My Life by The Stool Pigeons is a cover of the Mann/Weill song best known as a Gerry And The Pacemakers track. The Stool Pigeons are a band led by Lisa Jenio (also of Candypants and The Negro Problem) who do covers of Merseybeat songs with a punk aesthetic. This one’s one of their few ballads, done as a torch song with loud guitars. Great stuff.
Come And Get It by The Knickerbockers is not, as one might expect from a band best known as Beatles soundalikes, a cover of the Paul McCartney song that was a hit for Badfinger. Rather, it’s a remarkably good bit of blue-eyed soul, sounding very like the Spencer Davis Group or the Small Faces at their most bluesy. This really deserved to be a hit.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Don Preston is not the similarly-named Bonzo Dog Band song, but a really gorgeous Stravinsky-esque piece by the former Mother Of Invention turned jazzman (and, latterly, nostaligia circuit performer). It’s a shame Preston’s so overshadowed by his ex-boss, as he’s very, very talented himself.
No More Hot Dogs by Hasil Adkins is the greatest track by the mad rockabilly one-man band, one of many revolving around his favourite themes of murder and meat. This one’s an invitation to (presumably) his girlfriend to have her head cut off and hung on his wall, so she ‘won’t eat no more hot dogs’.
Electricity by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band is from what I still consider one of Beefheart’s best albums, his first, when there seemed a slight possibility that by compromising just *slightly* he could have commercial success. My friend Tilt once said that another song on this album sounded just like the Monkees, and indeed the ‘sung’ vocals here sound very Mike Nesmith. That said, the spoken vocals and theremin part leave no doubt who this is – Beefheart was trying to put his ideas in commercial form, but still using *his* ideas, rather than the pandering of Unconditionally Guaranteed.
Bubblegum by Kim Fowley is one of several attempts that Fowley, whose metier was novelty records, made to be psychedelic. One imagines it might not be wholly serious.
Kyrie Eleison by The Electric Prunes was, until my friend Blake Jones used it as the theme for one of his albums, the best pop-music Kyrie ever. This is from a time when the Electric Prunes had actually split, and David Axelrod was putting out albums of religious-based psychedelic music under their name, involving one or two original members. The band disown the albums now, but I think they’re rather good.
Cherry Picker by Candypants is a typically funny, observant lyric from Lisa Jenio, but what really makes this for me is the bass part, and the chord progression in the bridge, which sounds very Roger Nichols to me.
And Checkin’ In, Checkin’ Out by The High Llamas is unfortunately one of only three of their songs on Spotify, and not at all typical of them. However, it is a great little pop song, in a sort of middle-of-the-road acousticy way.
Alumni Of Invention
This post will be of absolutely no interest to at least 99% of the readers here – unless you’re far more interested in the music of Frank Zappa than is good for you, you might as well skip this post. I’m posting this because it’s one of those things that someone might stumble across in a year or two and be thankful for.
The death of Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer with the Mothers of Invention, last month got me thinking about various gigs I’d seen him at over the years. I’d seen him as a guest vocalist with the Scouse band The Muffin Men on many occasions, but I particularly remembered him playing with The Grandmothers.
The Grand(e)mothers is a name used by various line-ups of former members of The Mothers Of Invention. The current line-up has Don Preston, Roy Estrada and Napoleon Murphy Brock, but the line-up I saw in 1994 was Preston, Jimmy Carl Black and Bunk Gardner, along with guitarist/Zappa lookalike Sandra Oliva and bass player Ener Bladezipper (possibly not his real name). I decided to have a look on eMusic to see if there was anything by this band I could download as a belated souvenir. There was, but as so often happens I ended up downloading a ton of other stuff by ex-Zappa band members too, just because downloads on eMusic are so cheap. All the albums on this list probably cost me less than £10 in total.
So I’ve decided to provide a quick (and very non-exhaustive) guide to music by ex-Zappa-band-members available on eMusic.
The Grandmothers – Eating The Astoria
This is absolutely fantastic, surprisingly enough. This is a line-up of the Grandmothers similar to the one I saw live, except that by this point Jimmy Carl Black was only singing, no longer playing the drums, and Preston had left temporarily, leaving Bunk Gardner the only original instrumentalist on this.
Despite that, this is the album on this list it’s easiest for me to recommend. There are very few live recordings of the original Mothers Of Invention, and those there are are mostly very poor quality. By the time Zappa started recording his bands regularly, he was playing very different, slicker arrangements when he played these old 60s songs. So hearing these live performances of Peaches En Regalia, Oh No, Mr Green Genes and so on played in their original arrangements is about as close as we’ll ever come to a live album by the original Mothers with decent modern recording quality. Hearing this stuff with the excitement of a live performance but with very precise musicianship (and Bladezipper particularly is a wonderful bass player) is astounding.
There are a few originals on there, too. Oliva’s songs are Zappa-as-genre, and quite good of their type, while Jimmy Carl Black’s R&B numbers about the Trail Of Tears and the Great White Buffalo are worthy but unimpressive.
Don Preston is a more conflicted musician. Before joining the Mothers in 1966 he was a Proper Jazzman, playing with people like Elvin Jones and Al Jarreau, and since finally finishing with Zappa eight years later he’s been so associated with Zappa’s music that he’s never had the respect as a jazz musician he arguably deserves. As a result, he’s alternated between claiming that Zappa ripped his musicians off (a common claim of Zappa band alumni) and trying to make his own Zappaesque music, performing ‘tributes’ to Zappa, and trying to make his own unique music.
Vile Foamy Ectoplasm is a clear attempt to make a record that sounds a bit like Zappa. It’s a compilation of twenty years of Preston’s recordings, including duets with Bunk Gardner and performances with the Grandmothers, and it’s strictly Zappa-as-genre.
The bulk of the album is jazz fusion stuff with tons of semiquaver chromatic runs on the Moog, sounding like at any moment it’ll turn into either Inca Roads or Peaches En Regalia but never quite doing so, with a few percussion-and-electronic bits thrown in in the style of Varese. The whole thing’s clearly an attempt to say “I can make a Zappa album too”, but it never quite coheres properly. One can tell Preston’s exasperation at his old band’s legacy, from songs like The Eternal Question:
What was Zappa really like?
Did he fly into a rage?
I bet he smoked dope all the time
And did he really shit on the stage?
On the other hand, Transformation is startlingly good. A piano trio album, it contains an arrangement of The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue but is otherwise Preston’s own work, in a more traditional bop style. Reminiscent at times of Cecil Taylor, it also has more mellow, melodic patches that sound almost like Dave Brubeck, and it’s an album I keep coming back to. A really nice jazz album – not groundbreaking, but fun.
So Yuh Don’t Like Modern Art by Banned From Utopia is pointless.
Banned From Utopia are an 11-piece band, nine of whom were in Zappa’s last touring band in 1988 (and several of them had been with him much longer – the Fowler brothers off and on since the early 70s). Arthur Barrow, the bass-player, was also a longtime Zappa band member (none of the rest of the band liked Scott Thunes, the 1988 bass player).
This band were Zappa’s slickest, most ‘musicianly’ band, as can be heard on the Zappa live albums Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, Broadway The Hard Way and Make A Jazz Noise Here. In terms of pure musicianship and discipline, they couldn’t be beaten.
Unfortunately, that means that the Zappa covers on this album are so close to the versions we already have by this band as to make it pointless, while the originals, including such tasteful songs as “Jailbait Babysitter”, are soulless hackwork.
The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie/Flo & Eddie by Flo & Eddie is a collection of the first two ‘solo’ albums by the former Turtles Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. The first album, featuring almost all the 1971 lineup of the Mothers (including Preston, ex-Turtle Jim Pons, and drummer Aynsley Dunbar) is a classic of hippie folk-pop, very reminiscent of the better, later Turtles records. You can tell from songs like Goodbye Surprise that these people were also the backing vocalists on T-Rex’s hits, too. It’s recommended to anyone who likes light, funny, melodic late-60s/early 70s stuff like Nilsson, and is an album I’ve loved for years. The second album is patchier, a mix of comedy routines that they used to perform on stage with Zappa (“It’s the next illusion, you guessed it… the horrible sodomy trick!”) that have dated about as badly as Cheech & Chong, cover versions of 60s songs (including quite good versions of Days by the Kinks and Afterglow (Of Your Love) by the Small Faces, both of which were very obscure in the US at the time), and a gorgeous seven-minute orchestrated epic remake of the Turtles song Marmendy Hill. Worth downloading, but more for the first album than the second, and only if you already own Turtle Soup, Volman and Kaylan’s finest hour by far.
Sandy’s Album Is Here At Last by Sandy Hurvitz is an album by someone who was in the Mothers for a few month in the mid-60s, produced by Zappa and Ian Underwood. An uninspiring attempt at a Joni Mitchell sound by a singer-songwriter who later changed her name to Esra Mohawk, all you really need to know is that she wrote True Colors for Cyndi Lauper. Oh, and it sounds like it’s been mastered off an old vinyl copy. Avoid.
There are many more Zappa-alumnus albums on eMusic (several George Duke albums I might get at some point, tons of albums of Jimmy Carl Black doing old R&B songs, Napoleon Murphy Brock albums) but I think I now have more Zappa-bandmember music than any reasonable person needs…
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