Stuck In My Head: Season Of The Witch

Happy Halloween!

Listen: Season Of The Witch [Donovan]

Masterpiece: Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

[Today: Jello Biafra pokes the fat cats...]

“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts,” was how social satirist Will Rogers summed up his line of work. Rogers was a master of one-line barbs that often called out the buffoons and clowns running America. In spite of his pointed criticisms of the country, Rogers was immensely popular during the first third of the 20th century, because he blunted his verbal daggers with an aw-shucks, homespun humor that was both brilliant and disarming.

Even though he’s a spiritual heir of Will Rogers, Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra isn’t widely considered to be either a great American or a generational spokesman. He’s provoked violent reactions from both the left and the right, been stomped in public by punks in Berkeley, CA and successfully sued by the government for obscenity. That’s because, far from softening his witticisms like Will Rogers, he wrapped them in barbed wire and lit them on fire, writing songs that encouraged nuclear annihilation of the poor, compared the California government to Nazis, and advised the rich to vacation in war-torn, Khmer Rouge-infested Cambodia. Biafra took every opportunity to goose yuppies, hippies, bureaucrats, liberals, conservatives, and just about everyone else – and paid the price in jail time and broken bones.

But his inflammatory persona and intensely nasal vocal delivery distract too many people from one of the great American punk songbooks. Released in September of 1980, Dead Kennedys’ debut Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables is one of those rare albums that actually increases in stature as the years pass. While heads of state continue to get crazier with power and more bloated with greed, while the poor grow increasingly poor by the day, the words of Jello Biafra ring out louder than ever.

Listen: Holiday In Cambodia

Listen: Kill The Poor

Listen: California Über Alles

[Happy birthday to my brother, the biggest punk I know...]

Buried Treasure: Youth Of America

[Today: Driving through a dark country...]

Wipers are among the original indie heroes. Group mastermind Greg Sage was D.I.Y. before the term had been invented – he was cutting bootleg LPs for his grade school classmates when he was only 7 years old! He formed Wipers in 1977 with drummer Sam Henry and bassist Doug Koupal, and the group’s second album, Youth Of America, plays out like a blood-curdling scream at the outset of the Reagan years. But Sage claims that the record is actually a positive statement – a call-out to youth to take up arms and take matters into their own hands. “The youth of America are the people who really control the future, can control the future. It sounds really doom-laden in a sense, but it’s actually just the opposite,” he said in a 1983 interview.

The lyrical content of these songs back that contention, but while the message might be positive, the music is intense and ominous. Sage sings with paranoia in his voice, while raw, distorted licks flow from his guitar. Nearly every song on this album has a rhythmic propulsion that puts you behind the wheel of a powerful car, with dark open road ahead. But its edgy atmospherics make this an album most conducive to a night drive through either empty city streets or burned out, barren moonscapes. If one could travel fast enough, it would theoretically be possible to follow the night around the globe endlessly – this is the music for such a drive.

In that respect, Youth In America is the evil twin to The Doors’ 1971 album L.A. Woman. At the outset of the 70′s, Jim Morrison looked around and found America severely wanting, and his search for a lost country on that album was mirrored by the Wipers exactly a decade later. Like the song ‘L.A. Woman’, the title track here is an adrenaline-pumping ride into a cruel, unforgiving, and exhilarating night.

This album has been released with several different running orders, but these songs all bomb along with roughly the same breakneck velocity and awesome intensity. No matter how you stack them, they add up to a great album, but the 2007 Jackpot Records LP re-issue deserves special mention. Its running order runs contrary to Sage’s stated sequencing preference, but it’s pressed on nice 180g vinyl, and features songs re-mastered by Sage himself. A post-punk essential.

Listen: Youth Of America

Listen: Taking Too Long

Magic Moment: Muddy Waters & Sonny Boy Williamson

This clip features great Muddy Waters and his band, along with Sonny Boy Williamson II, lighting up the stage during a TV appearance. This cooled out version of ‘Got My Mojo Working’ shows what a magnetic performer and accomplished vocalist Waters was during his prime…

Round Midnight

This 1986 film stars Dexter Gordon as fictional jazz saxophonist Dale Turner, a hopeless alcoholic who makes beautiful music in Paris and New York City during the 1950′s – when he’s not busy drinking himself into a stupor.

Turner’s character was a composite of the troubled lives of Lester Young and Bud Powell. Young drank himself to death at age 49, and Powell died at age 41, institutionalized after months of erratic behavior. In spite of the destructive path he’s on, Turner finds moments of grace, both on and off the bandstand. Gordon’s portrayal earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor, while co-star Herbie Hancock took home the 1987 Oscar for Best Original Score.

“My life is music, my love is music, and it’s 24 hours a day,” Turner rationalizes late in the film. By alternating remarkable live jazz with scenes of a man losing his struggle with alcoholism, Round Midnight vividly illustrates a grinding lifestyle, and exposes some of the human toll behind the music.

Listen: Round Midnight

*****

Doubleshot Tuesday: Talking To The People/Mutiny On The Mamaship

[Today: A nickel bag of funk...]

It seems like the perfect day to reach into my big bag of funk and fire up something good. Today’s funk nuggets are Black Nasty’s 1973 album Talking To The People, which was their only true funk release, and Mutiny’s 1979 LP Mutiny On The Mamaship. Mutiny drummer and founder Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey split off from George Clinton’s P-Funk empire after disagreements over pay, and named his group and album in open defiance of Clinton. Talking To The People is an album fueled by an angry demand for social justice and featuring a hard-funking, gospel-tinged, almost-Funkadelic sound, while Mutiny On The Mamaship runs on pure spite and hatred, and reflects some of the disco sheen of the late-70′s. Both albums are under-appreciated funk gems, and both have big beautiful bottoms. May the funk be with you…

Listen: Talking To The People [Black Nasty]

Listen: Lump [Mutiny]

Listen: Black Nasty Boogie [Black Nasty]

Listen: Go Away From Here [Mutiny]

Weekend Playlist

“We almost caved the roof in.” ~ George Clinton

Whiskeytown | Pneumonia

Jerry Garcia Band | Cats Under The Stars

The Rolling Stones | Tattoo You

M. Ward | Duet For Guitars #2

Beastie Boys | Check Your Head

Black Keys | Thickfreakness

Dead Kennedys | Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

Zeph & Azeem | Rise Up

Stevie Wonder | Songs In The Key Of Life

Outkast | Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

Toots & The Maytals | Funky Kingston

Pink Floyd | The Wall

Various Artists | Old School Vs. New School

Talking Heads | Remain In Light

Funkadelic | Cosmic Slop

Blue Mitchell | Blue’s Moods

Gerry Mulligan & Chet Baker | Mulligan/Baker

Marvin Gaye | Trouble Man Soundtrack

The Meters | Rejuvenation

Van Halen | Fair Warning

Masterpiece: Endtroducing…

[Today: Digging in the audio graveyard...]

DJ Shadow’s debut album was built entirely from samples that he scavenged from a basement full of forgotten LPs beneath his favorite record store. Using bits of R&B, Jazz, Classical Music, educational albums, commercial jingles, and much more, Shadow (aka Josh Davis) took nine months to sample, loop and process a staggering breadth of obscure noises, and then weave them into a dramatic soundscape that’s alternately soothing and menacing, and layered to the skies.

There are so many diverse genres represented here – the Chaffey College Jazz Ensemble, Metallica, Pigmeat Markham, Tangerine Dream, David Axelrod, Billy Cobham, and a cast of what seems like thousands – that this album crosses over into its own style. If an alien space probe hovered over Earth for a few minutes, gathered together a cornucopia of sounds, and turned them into a haunting audio collage of life on this planet, it might sound something like Endtroducing…

When this album was released in November of 1996, the art of the break beat was just entering its third decade. But there was still much debate about whether a turntable could really be considered an instrument, and if skillful sampling constituted original creation. Endtroducing… made mincemeat of the naysayers, and proved that in the right hands, a stack of old record albums could serve as a palette of sounds for the fabrication of completely new grooves.

But as much as Endtroducing… still seems like a blueprint for the future of music, it’s the kind of album that has proven extremely difficult to imitate. There have been a handful of sublime sample-centric albums over the last dozen years (The Avalanches and The Kleptones both do good work in this area), but none of them touch the moldering atmosphere that DJ Shadow dug out of his friendly neighborhood audio graveyard.

Listen: Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt

Listen: Mutual Slump

Listen: Changeling / Transmission 1

Buried Treasure: 30 Original Recordings

[Today: Martian rock...]

Latino pioneers. Garage legends. Martian rockers?

Question Mark And The Mysterians became the first Latino group to hit Billboard #1 when ’96 Tears’ shot to the top of the charts in October of 1966. Featuring a bouncy, Farfisa Organ-driven rhythm and raw production, ’96 Tears’ is the prototype of the late-60′s Nuggets-style garage rock sound. If you wanted to distill garage rock down to a single song, ’96 Tears’ would do the trick.

Lead singer Rudy Martinez legally changed his name to ?, believes he’s a Martian, and claims that he lived with the dinosaurs in a past life. Among his other eccentricities, ? is never seen in public without wraparound sunglasses. He’s also among the best lead vocalists in garage rock – a sneering, smooth singer who sells some pretty thin songwriting. This Saginaw, MI group formed in 1962 and named themselves after a Japanese horror movie about invading aliens. To be a Latino band in early-60′s middle America must have felt like being a band of invading aliens, and ? And The Mysterians played with a suitably sized chip on their shoulder.

“The thing is, we were real. We had an attitude and look,” explained ? in 1997. “I didn’t want to have neckties and smiles. There’s a different part of life I wanted people to start seeing. That was the whole thing and the attitude in the songs. So, that’s where the edge of our songs comes from.” Sometimes there’s not enough of that edge – their treatment of ‘Stormy Monday’ is too poppy, and ‘Set Aside’ is a wandering instrumental that never really finds its groove. But when this group puts it together, as they do for a good chunk of 30 Original Recordings, they made quintessential garage rock.

Question Mark And The Mysterians’ original recordings have been out of print for far too long – reportedly due to personal differences between ? and ABKCO proprietor Allen Klein, who owns the group’s masters. Klein, the former manager (some might say rip-off artist) of The Beatles and Rolling Stones, recently passed away, providing hope that these classic songs will at last see the distribution and recognition that they’ve long deserved. In the meantime, ? And The Mysterians have continued performing live in various incarnations, wowing crowds at a variety of garage rock festivals, and proving that even Martians know how to rock…

Listen: 96 Tears

Listen: 8 Teen

Listen: It’s Not Easy

Young Folk – The Cover Art

Here’s the cover art for my latest mix, a compendium of artists influenced by the great Neil Young…

[here's the front cover...]

[here's the front inside...]

[here's the back inside...]

[here's the back...]

[and here's the playlist...]

Magnolia Electric Co. | The Dark Don’t Hide It
My Morning Jacket | Golden
Willard Grant | The Beautiful Song
Fleet Foxes | Blue Ridge Mountains
America | A Horse With No Name
Okkervil River | Black Sheep Boy
Will Oldham | A Minor Place
Meat Puppets | Plateau
Hayden | Bad As They Seem
Devendra Banhart | Heard Somebody Say
Beck | Lost Cause
Cowboy Junkies | Tired Eyes
Wilco | She’s A Jar
Pearl Jam | Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
M. Ward | Carolina
Lucinda Williams | Essence
Band Of Horses | Is There A Ghost
Flaming Lips | Fight Test
Bon Iver | Skinny Love
Built To Spill | Carry The Zero

*****

Here’s the cover of Neil’s debut…