Yo La Tengo :: (Thin) Blue Line Swinger
On a sunny day in March, with a bag of treasures from my first-ever trip to Amoeba Records, I hit play on my discman and walked west on La Brea to get the bus to Beverly Hills. I was taken by the gentle acoustic guitar chords with the swelling Farfisa off in the background. Chills ran my spine and I started grinning. The usually smoggy air had cleared from rain the day before, the Hollywood Hills were as sharp as Technicolor, people were smiling and kids were playing on recess. It was like Pleasantville.
I flew O’Hare to LAX in the middle of a mid-March snow storm. This was a much needed vacation. I’d finally quit a job I should have left long before and I needed a break to truly get away from my life. As Georgia started singing, I felt like I was getting it. “You won’t talk about what you see when the lights are out and I’m willing to hold your hand while you’re lost, while you’re so full of doubt…”
I needed to hear this. I was going to be starting a new job, new people, new opportunities, but that was all in the future. For the time being, all that really mattered were the glorious strains of noise guitar, sun, spring, and this joy I was feeling: the liberation that comes from spring after months of snow and cold. I felt like Yo La Tengo had my back. “Out of darkness, you will come around. I know you will. I know you will.”
I listened to the Camp Yo La Tengo EP over and over and that same euphoria swept over me each time (Thin) Blue Line Swinger came on. I was storing memories in its melodies and harmonies. Memories of time spent with my brother, John, eating vegan pancakes, seeing Tarantino’s Grindhouse festival, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, John’s band at the Knitting Factory, and playing music with him. Now, more than a year later, all I have to do is press play and I’m walking down the same sunny street, and everything is a-okay. “…and I’ll find you. I’ll find you there…”
(Thin) Blue Line Swinger (5.1MB MP3)
Yo La Tengo (homepage)
Led Zeppelin :: The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair
When we got MTV back in 1988, I gravitated immediately toward the hair metal bands of the moment. I ingested it all and had no tools to examine it, taking in the images of female hotness presented in the videos – big hair, red lips, lingerie, big tits. I look back on that 8 year old girl, trying to learn about rock n roll, and the world of adults, and feel endeared by her eagerness, and also very angry about what was available for her to take in. The source material was just shit.
Led Zeppelin came into my life when I turned thirteen. I had a sleepover birthday party, and my uncle gave me the remastered 4 disk box set as a present. I remember waking up before everyone else and listening to my new CDs. I played them quietly so I wouldn’t wake anyone up, leaning in, brushing my ear on the speaker.
Meeting Led Zeppelin then coincided with that interesting time of growth for me: changing from a child into a sexual creature. Don’t think I was making out with boys and getting into trouble, not by a long shot. But sex had been a grotesque mystery informed mostly by the sleazier side of pop culture. At thirteen, the investigation that 8 year old had begun was being stepped up and restructured. Those previously quiet regions of my body started turning up the volume — reaching out spangly, flashing connections to my brain. I was figuring out sex wasn’t just something out there in the world, but scarily, physically close to everything I considered my self.
Led Zeppelin laid out a ballsy, bluesy soundtrack for this investigation/transformation. I picked up their swagger and intensity to cast the mold for how I walk through the world, and what I look for in others.
Robert Plant’s joyful wail, Jon Bonham pounding on those drums with such force, and of course Jimmy Page’s guitar — these guys just make me fucking grin. They reinforce the fervent love I harbor for human endeavor and help me feel who I am: a woman who really really really loves men.
The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair (4.1MB MP3)
Led Zeppelin (homepage)
The Purple Underground :: Count Back
Count Back makes me picture nattily dressed mop-topped teenagers wiggling and jerking around in front of an even more nattily dressed band, shaking out their hormones, feeling their youth, basking in Day Glo angst. On a beach, I hope.
Considering The Purple Underground came out of Winter Haven, Florida, it’s a safe bet this might have happened. Formerly known as The Spades, it appears they were around from about 1964 to 1971; unfortunately information on these dudes is pretty spotty. As far as I can tell from the handful of web pages (pages, not even whole sites) I discovered, they had a fair amount of local popularity and even did a Florida tour (as The Spades) with the Zombies, but never really made it. A label out of San Francisco called Boss put out the Count Back record, but it’s long out of print. Besides the blog where I found it, the song’s on a few compilations: the most common one being Garage Beat ‘66 Vol. 3: Feeling Zero, put out by Sundazed Music Inc. in 2004.
Most of the lyrics are indiscernible, but from what I can hear, these guys seem to be upset/enthralled with a lady. The beat is fast, the guitars are surfy spacey, and the vocal delivery reminds me of Stiv Bators. The singer leaves crooning behind for a growling kind of cant, not often uttered before in popular music. I’m pretty sure they’re shaking a shoebox full of broken glass and spoons too, but that could just be my awful speakers. This isn’t Beach Blanket Bingo, Count Back stuck out like a sore thumb next to the other songs featured on the compilations I waded through. At the end, any semblance of a melody devolves into a creepy psychedelic pile of noise that probably scared the shit out of people back then. Psychedelic creep outs are one of my favorite things; so, to me, that part’s just the cream cheese icing on an already delicious cake.
It’s a shame there isn’t more documentation on this band, but this song is a great example of the derivation and experimentation in rock and roll that gave birth to some of my favorite genres and sub-genres, and of a sound that people are still trying to emulate today.
This is a call to the universe! Somebody find this on vinyl! Re-issue and reunion tour to follow! Or maybe they could play just once on the beach so I can close my eyes and have my mop-topped fantasy for real.
Count Back (3.6MB MP3)
Purple Underground (answers.com), podcast including Count Back, more info
Linda Ronstadt :: Y Andale
Back in the mid 90s I thought it was a great idea to move to Wyoming. I fell in love with the state on a spring break vacation during my college years. Combing the Teton foothills with friends, drinking tall beers and whiskey in wood smoke scented establishments pushed me toward a new found love, the Mountains. I spent some time searching for an internship just so I could get there. I needed an excuse.
I finally made it a couple of years later. Although Jackson Hole was not what I had hoped, I did establish some very wonderful friendships. One in particular was with a fellow Michigander named, oh, let’s say Dave Polito. He was a great drinkin’ buddy, fellow lover of comedy and purveyor of laughs. I was only there for 3 short months but during that time, Dave and I had some great times. We drank in lodges, played cards and enjoying the striking beauty of the Teton mountains. He got me through some rough patches with laughter, and I can’t say enough how much I appreciate it.
One of our favorite activities was to get wasted and listen to Linda Ronstadt. This wasn’t your regular Blue Bayou regalia. We broke out the good stuff. Canciones de me Padre. I love this album so much and it’s only because of Dave. He’d sing his poorly memorized Spanish lyrics with a fervor matched only by Linda herself. It was a true joy to see someone embrace an album so.
Dave has since moved around the country, married and probably had a few kids. He’s really, really bad at keeping contact but deep down we are still close in some other dimension. I haven’t spoken to him in over 10 years. At times I hate him for being so aloof but when it comes down to it, that’s Dave and the time I spent with him was good enough.
So lift a brew with me and sing your heart out to this wonderful tune in honor of Dave and friendships everywhere!!
Y Andale (4.9MB MP3)
Linda Ronstadt (homepage, video)
Don Caballero :: Don Caballero 3
If you’re at work right now, please do not listen to this. Unless your job has something to do with being totally sweet, and kicking a fuckload of ass, while almost dropping something. Or with deterministic chaos.
Like if you’re job involves swallowing a vacuum cleaner, while you necessarily juggle poodles (to keep the bullets from hitting them), in the throes of apprehending and cuffing some evil doer, then by all means put this jam in the tapedeck. It might even give you a needed adrenaline boost for that car chase.
Or, if your job happens to be drumming for Don Caballero, what better music is there to do your job to?
My knack for evenhandedness and linguistic grace aside, that octopus behind the drum kit sets it all in motion, and it’s just a wonderful, rocking mess; a tightly wound, incalculable push down a hill set forth by all four limbs (you can hear it!).
Well wishes getting to the bottom.
Don Caballero 3 (13.1MB MP3)
Don Caballero (wikipedia)
Booker T & the MG’s :: Green Onions
In 1960, prominent civil rights activist and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aid Reverend Samuel Kyles arrived in Memphis and immediately observed a city where “there was not one thing integrated. From the cradle to the grave, everything was segregated in Memphis.”1 Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions created by institutional segregation, guitarist and sound engineer Steve ‘The Colonel’ Cropper worked closely and amicably with both black and white members of the Stax music-making community. In a recent interview featured in the 2004 film Soul Comes Home: A Celebration of Stax Records and Memphis Soul Music he stated:
The word ‘integration’ didn’t even exist in our vocabulary and the segregation of black here and white there, however you want to define it in today’s terms, also didn’t exist. It was just guys gettin’ together. There was absolutely no color in that studio; color never walked through that door.
Cropper’s candid testimony underscores the fact that Stax studio and the music it produced defied America’s ubiquitous segregation orthodoxy. At the same time, Stax’ profitable model of racial collusion offered the promise that black and white citizens could transform a Memphis where civic leaders defiantly shut down schools and pools rather than abide by a federal mandate to integrate them.
With two white members and two black members, Booker T and the MG’s represented a rare collaborative project one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Memphis. Although Stax owners, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, were not necessarily fixated on the fact that they sponsored an integrated band, they maintained that Stax, regardless of the process by which it became integrated, was ultimately an enterprise that fostered “black and white individuals making music for themselves.”2 Stewart further acknowledged the social implications of the Stax phenomenon by stating that “we were sitting in the middle of a segregated city, a highly segregated city and we were in another world when we walked into the studio.”3
If Stewart, Axton, or anyone at Stax had misgivings about reaching across the color line, the explosion of commercial success that Booker T. Jones, Lewis Steinberg, Al Jackson, and Steve Cropper were about to experience eclipsed these concerns quickly. On a steamy summer morning in 1962—before the MG’s had even decided upon a name for their outfit—the musicians arrived at Stax studios to serve as the back-up band for a white rock and roll singer by the name of Billy Lee Riley, whom Stewart believed could deliver a chart-topping hit. As they awaited Riley’s arrival, the MG’s began working out playfully a blues progression. Since Riley never appeared that day and because Jim Stewart liked what he heard coming from the band, Stewart decided to tape the session. The result of this impromptu recording was the single Behave Yourself.4
For the flip side of the record, the band began rehashing a riff that Jones had developed a few weeks earlier. As the rest of the band played along, Cropper realized that something remarkable had taken place. He exclaimed “Shit, this is the best damn instrumental I’ve heard in I don’t know when. I knew we had a winner there.” Because Stewart had recorded Behave Yourself and Green Onions intending fully to distribute it, the MG’s had to decide upon a name for their project on the spot. Jones claimed that the band was named when “Al Jackson said ‘Booker T and the…’ and he looked out the window and saw a little MG car and said ‘Booker T and the MG’s.’ It was all just a little bit more than a joke.”5
Shortly after the newly christened MG’s recorded the track, it would go on to become an instrumental anthem for both black and white America, peaking at Number One on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues chart in 1962 and Number Three on the Pop chart.6 This crossover success fully illustrated that the MG’s sound transcended the lines that divided American tastes into racially distinct categories. Moreover, the commercial triumph reinvigorated Stax by generating some much-needed income and bolstering Stax’ standing in the music industry. While Green Onions was distributed locally through Stax/Volt, Atlantic Records boosted its national circulation to over 750,000 copies. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic co-owner who helped to orchestrate national distribution, returned to the Stax studio in 1963 and sang the praises of the MG’s saying:
Their rhythm was the heart of the matter, the chief reason Memphis mattered. The even racial composition of Booker T and the MG’s became a metaphor in my mind for their extraordinary harmony, in and out of the studio. Booker T Jones, the keyboardist, and drummer Al Jackson were black; guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn were white; and Duck’s predecessor was Jewish (and African American). The results were anything but gray. The boys played in red clay soil, and I was walking into fertile territory. The funkiness of the music – bare-boned, yet razor sharp – knocked my dick in the dirt.7
Green Onions (3.3MB MP3)
Booker T & the MG’s (homepage)
1 Robert Gordin, Morgan Neville, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, 2007.
2 Stax Documentary, unreleased, showing at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
3 Quote obtained from the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
4 Bowman, 38.
5 Booker T Jones, Sound Opinions Interview, April 7, 2006.
6 Ibid, 39
7 Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, New York: Knopf, 1993, pg. 171.
Polaris :: Summerbaby
The Adventures of Pete & Pete episode A Hard Day’s Pete pre-dates the song blog by more than a few (it was originally aired in 1994) but is, nevertheless, a tribute to the Favorite Song and listener ownership worthy of song blog distinction. On his morning bike ride to school Little Pete, whom we are told has never had a favorite song EVER, happens upon a band (Polaris) practicing in a garage (what? at 8am?!?!). He pauses to listen and with a nod from front man, Mark Mulcahy, Pete has his first Favorite Song.
It’s the kind of Favorite Song that invades your brainscape. All the roads in your mind seem to lead there and no train of thought can stop that melody meme from jumping right back into your frontal lobe. For Pete, the song lingers but the band doesn’t: that garage remains empty ever after. The creators of the song are no longer relevant; the song’s fate rests in the hands of its great appreciators. A desperate Pete forms his own band, The Blowholes, to find his song, a feat that requires him to return to ‘the spot where he first felt that feeling’—the spot where the song became his. It’s the sweet story of first love.
This song blog is the product of seasoned appreciators; Casanovas who woo their quarry with one ear open for the next. We write these love letters with expiration dates and share them with all our friends. Each Favorite Song comes and consumes us until we are taken with the next. We offer them no commitment, but we love them all in turn and understand that quality is more than a question of fidelity.
Summerbaby (2.4MB MP3)
Polaris (homepage)
(note — Polaris was most of the members of Miracle Legion come together to record a few songs for the show.)
Johnny Cash :: In the Sweet By and By
For two or three months after the September 11th attacks we weren’t allowed to go to work. Our office was three blocks from the Trade Center, an area of heavy contamination and debris.
The rubble smoked until January, though we were back at work before then. About the time the New York City winter began in earnest—cold, gray, dreary—we were admitted below Canal Street with proof that we belonged there. An address, a pay stub. We’d show it to a guy holding an M-16.
Eventually the checkpoints disappeared. In the meantime, Giuliani’s administration changed the city’s wound back into a tourist destination. Smiling, well-intentioned tourists would stop us on the street to ask which way to the Trade Center. Just walk toward the big hole in the skyline, we’d say.
Those of us who worked in the midst of it just trudged through in a surreal kind of way. We grieved, of course. But somehow the effort of getting on with our days kept a lot of the emotion at bay. We’d shake our heads over lunch, take a walk uptown after work, drink until 5 the next morning. But sooner or later everybody had a breakdown—a desk drawer would slam and somebody was headed for the door. Sometimes you went after them, sometimes you didn’t.
One day in April I had to walk to the Battery Park Post Office—past Liberty Square, past the packed viewing platforms, past the little church whose gate was covered in hand-painted prayers from family members, past tourists posed beside them. It was a beautiful day, and somehow that was killing me. I made it to the post office, mailed whatever I was mailing. On my way back, a women’s choir of old-order Mennonites was singing at the church. As I walked by them, they started on In the Sweet By and By. That was it right there—my breakdown. I have no idea what it was about that song, but in the face of it I fell utterly apart. It was horrible, and cathartic, and really, really overdue.
In the Sweet By and By (3.3MB MP3)
Johnny Cash (homepage)
Nina Nastasia :: Ocean
Chicago in the winter: the sun had died a terrible death: the only warmth in the whole world was emanating from WLUW’s radio tower: traffic and ice slowed the city to a crawl: a song whispered out of my car stereo that all at once soothed and saddened: I pulled into the alley and stopped the car: I listened with my eyes closed: the song ended: I finally let go of my breath: I rattled into the house: “I just heard the most amazing song, but I don’t know what it is or who it’s by”: Ocean: Nina Nastasia: amazing.
Ocean (8.3MB MP3)
Nina Nastasia (label site)
John Coltrane :: A Love Supreme, Part One — Acknowledgement
The muggy dog days of summer are officially here. I’m closing in on the tail end of my 20s, fondly looking back at the retrospective of songs that have been an important part of my life. Specifically, A Love Supreme is a record that I return to again and again. I can’t say if I heard it or Blue Train first, which is also one of my Sunday morning/afternoon favorites. Undoubtedly, I bought A Love Supreme because I’ll snatch up anything on Impulse! and at least give it the once-over twice.
The liner notes of the album reveal a touching religious reawakening for Coltrane himself, as he alludes to overcoming his heroin addiction in 1957. Coltrane was veering towards more of an avant-garde sound by the time A Love Supreme was released in 1965, and hints of it pop up in his uninhibited solos. This was one of the last records with the Quartet, as Coltrane soon began to alienate the other members with his new interests, additional drummers, etc.
Acknowledgment reminds me of what it must be like to wake up before the sun rises completely in Manhattan. You watch it come up slowly with bleary eyes, glancing at its reflection on the buildings and the people stirring below. By the time the musicians begin to meditatively chant “a love supreme,” it’s almost like they’re in the room with you, taking in the whole scene. Everything tapers off to just Jimmy Garrison’s bass, and soon you’re alone again: peaceful in your solitude, and ready to start the day.
A Love Supreme, Part One — Acknowledgement (10.6MB MP3)
John Coltrane (homepage)