Doubleshot Tuesday: Hand-Picked/Front By Front

[Today: Laughter and pain...]

The other day I got an e-mail from a very dear friend that read, in part:

we just found out another friend of ours is battling “aggressive” brain cancer. at this point, he’s recovering from surgery and readying himself for the chemo radiation gauntlet.

anyway, i know he’s home a lot these days. he is a HUUUGE bluegrass music fan; he plays standup bass in a number of jam sessions whenever he can.

could you would you mind burning 6 to 10 bluegrass titles that you and the P heartily endorse? i know it would bring him some much needed pleasure.

Gulp.

I have three concurrent thoughts about this request. In no particular order, they are: 1) I’m humbled. The person who sent this is one of the most knowledgeable music fans I know, so it’s a huge compliment to be called on at such a time. 2) I’m terrified. More than all the nasty comments on this blog put together, this request makes me feel exposed as a pretender. I’m no huge Bluegrass fan – I like it fine, but came around to it like many bandwagon jumpers, through the movie and soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? Fortunately my wife knows her Bluegrass, so I leaned on her for a few suggestions (thanks P!) and did the best I could. 3) I’m blessed. Every so often I’m reminded how small my problems are, and how fortunate I am. This is one of those moments.

At the time of his death, Jimi Hendrix was flirting with the notion that pure tones could cure illness and heal the sick. I wish it were so…

*****

On the other side of the coin comes this e-mail from a friend and former co-worker, someone who has been getting my mixes for years:

So a parent at my five year old’s school came up to me this morning and awkwardly asked if I had joined a new church recently. Turns out my youngest boy is running around the playground singing the sampled lyrics from Front 242’s ‘Welcome To Paradise’ (“Hey, poor! You don’t have to be poor anymore! Jesus is here!”). He apparently found that song, compliments of dk presents, on my iPod.

Apparently he likes that track quite a bit.

Thanks? Hope all is well with you and yours.

Much better, thank you…

Listen: I Ain’t Broke (But I’m Badly Bent) [David Grisman]

Listen: Welcome To Paradise (v1.0) [Front 242]

Listen: I’ll Be On That Good Road Someday [Butch Robins]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Ascenseur Pour L’echafaud/Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

[Today: Obscure soundtracks...]

Sometimes a soundtrack is forever tied to the film it was created for, but often, films just drift away and leave us with collections of music that live on. I have plenty of soundtracks for movies I’ve never seen, and two of my favorites in the obscure OST category are Ascenseur Pour L’echafaud, by Miles Davis and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.

The former is moody jazz that provided the atmosphere for a now unknown French film. It contains mostly short, soft pieces, including my favorite Miles Davis track of all-time, ‘Generique’. This great bit of music has always painted a scene in my mind: a crow hops along a telephone wire as heat waves shimmer off a lonely blacktop highway in the middle of nowhere. At 170 seconds running time, it packs a bigger emotional punch than many a symphony.

Because I’ve never seen the accompanying film, I don’t have any images burned into my brain to go along with these songs, and I consider that a blessing. Same goes for Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. This soundtrack features snippets of dialogue, so I assume it’s a dark comedy about gangsters in the UK, but who knows and who cares? This collection of funk, reggae, soul and Stooges is all over the map in the best possible way. Stretch’s funky ‘Why Did You Do It’ is worth the price of admission alone, and tracks from the likes of Junior Murvin, Pete Wingfield and Dusty Springfield make this one a keeper.

Movies need their music, and as long as Hollywood keeps churning out motion pictures by the dozen, there will be an endless stream of soundtracks to keep entertaining us. And I for one couldn’t be happier about it…

Listen: Generique [Miles Davis]

Listen: Why Did You Do It [Stretch]

Listen: Florence Sur Les Champs-Elysées [Miles Davis]

Listen: 18 With A Bullet [Pete Wingfield]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music/Schizophonic!

[Today: Loungin'...]

Like tail-fins on sedans and bee-hive hairdos, Lounge Music is one of those late-50’s accessories that has come to stand as a totem of its time and is dated in the best possible way. Musicians like Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and Juan García Esquivel made exotic, relaxed tunes that combined jazz and foreign rhythms and flew under such day-glo headings as Space Age Pop and Exotica (“Lounge” is a retroactive genre title). If this music is hard for rock fans to take seriously, that’s because it’s intentionally as light and fluffy as Kool-Whip®. Esquivel’s music is full of loony sound effects (BOINNNNNG!) and odd instrumentation, but just when you’re ready to write it off as a silly gimmick (The P claims that “it sounds like little trolls running up and down a staircase”) he drops a song that clearly anticipates the chill-out side of electronica. Esquivel may have tempted derision with boastful album titles like The Genius Of Esquivel and Exploring New Sounds In Stereo, but he delivers more than enough to earn the (some would say dubious) title King Of Lounge.

The early-90’s saw a surprising revival of Lounge Music, spearheaded by nouveau retro bands like Combustible Edison and Love Jones. The polar opposite of grungy beasts like Nirvana and Soundgarden, these Lounge bands dressed to the nines, plunked away on their xylophones, and made Kool-Whip® for the 90’s. If Esquivel and his Space Age cronies are a challenge for modern ears, the new Lounge bands multiply that difficulty by sounding completely derivative. Rare is the music that is simultaneously enjoyable and deplorable, but here we are. Not being much of a hipster, I’m unsure what purpose this music serves for me, although if I ever decide to start riding one of those antique bicycles with the huge front wheel and tiny back wheel, I’ll have my cruising music all sewn up…

Listen: Speak Low [Esquivel - from the album Equivel 1968!!]

Listen: Alright, Already [Combustible Edison]

Listen: Yeyo [Esquivel - The P: "...sounds like little trolls..."]

Listen: Short Double Latté [Combustible Edison]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Love/The Doors

[Today: Battle of the bands...]

A few years back, I happened to find myself in one of my favorite (and now defunct) East Bay record stores one nice Saturday afternoon. This particular establishment resembled the store Championship Vinyl from the movie High Fidelity – a small, cramped place that was loaded with vinyl and had three employees for every paying customer. I made my final selections and stepped to the register, and right into the middle of an intense debate: “You don’t seriously think that The Doors are a better band than Love, do you?” The two employees debating were (on behalf of Love) a be-stubbled, cardigan and glasses wearing music geek who could have passed for Weezer’s lead singer, and (for The Doors) a t-shirt and jeans, jock sort of dude. Dude was obviously in over his head with this music geek hornet, and was hemming and hawing his way out of whatever positive words he had spilled on behalf of The Doors. Meanwhile, I was taking this all in with utter bemusement, when the third employee (a rather attractive female) turned to me and said: “So, what do you think – The Doors or Love??”

Both groups were from mid-60’s Los Angeles, both groups were on Elektra Records, and both groups featured charismatic, enigmatic, and self-destructive lead singers (Arthur Lee and Jim Morrison). When The Doors first started out, their dream was to be as big as Love – the local hot band. But aside from the obvious connections, these two groups are completely different in almost every way, and comparisons between them do a disservice to both. Love played a baroque, psychedelic strain of pop that was loaded with obtuse metaphors and bright colors. The Doors, meanwhile made tough, blues-inflected rock that was heavy on poetic and mythic allusions. The Doors were massively popular and helped define the sound of their generation, while Love slipped through the cracks (in part because Lee refused to tour) and made dense, sonically challenging albums that are manna for music geeks.

“But which one of them do you like better?” cardigan-employee asked me pointedly. And then it was my turn to hem and haw, saying they were both great in their own way, and trying to not piss anyone off until I got my new vinyl safely out of their store. But here’s my real answer and it’s not even close: Love is an interesting band who made some excellent music, but The Doors are one of the great American bands. It’s easy to bash The Doors, because they’re so popular and Jim Morrison was both a first-rate wanker and third-rate poet. Regardless, this group made some of the greatest songs of the 60’s – just off the top of my head, the trilogy of ‘The End’, ‘Riders On The Storm’ and ‘L.A. Woman’ are as monumental as any three songs by any group of that decade. Perhaps it’s true that Love is underappreciated and The Doors are overappreciated, but it’s also true that Love was merely good, while The Doors were mostly great.

Listen: My Little Red Book [Love]

Listen: Break On Through [The Doors]

Listen: Signed D.C. [Love]

Listen: The End [The Doors]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Cahoots/Fleet Foxes

[Today: Falling into Fall...]

We moved the clocks back an hour on Saturday night, always a sure sign that Autumn has us once again in its wooly grasp. The Bay Area enjoys an indian summer each year – October, not July, is the typical month for our sweltering, 100° days. But even here, around about the end of October, once Neil Young’s annual Bridge Benefit concert is in the books and the kids have come by for their Halloween candy, the air gets a nip to it and the trees start to do the color thing. Daylight Savings is when the boom really falls, and all of a sudden it’s F-A-L-L , or more truthfully, pre-Winter – a few weeks of falling leaves, then the rains set in until Spring. Wash, rinse, repeat…

This is the time of year I start reaching for any album by The Band, as well as Josh Ritter’s Golden Age Of Radio, Neil Young’s Harvest, Gary Higgins’ Red Hash, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking, Skip Spence’s Oar, The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, The Peddlers’ Suite London and a handful of other albums that have come to epitomize the season for this old geezer.

After their first two LPs, The Band made a series of sturdy if unspectacular albums that each contributed a couple of songs to their subsequent Best Of compilations. Cahoots has ‘Life Is A Carnival’ and ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, but it’s the stuff off the beaten path that makes this one worthwhile. ‘4% Pantomime’ is allegedly the result of an all-night, drunken jam session (with a certain Celtic singer who’s barred from these premises) and, as the story goes, the song was a made-up-on-the-spot, one-take affair. ‘Smoke Signal’ sounds like something from the world’s best hoe-down. ‘Volcano’ features plenty of horns, and sharp, smart guitar solos courtesy of Robbie Robertson, and is one of their great unsung tunes. Recounting a summer picnic gone by, ‘The River Hymn’ sounds like Autumn itself. But for these ears, so do most of The Band’s songs…

I’ve spent the last year flogging Fleet Foxes like Billy Mays on crystal meth, so I’ll spare you additional exclamations. But here too is an album that sounds like it was hewn from virigin timbers, by the golden light of a harvest moon. Some people dress for the weather – I listen for it…

Listen: 4% Pantomime [The Band]

Listen: Blue Ridge Mountains [Fleet Foxes]

Listen: The River Hymn [The Band]

Listen: White Winter Hymnal [Fleet Foxes]

*****

QUESTION: What album reminds you of Autumn?

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]

Doubleshot Tuesday: On The Road/The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

[Today: Going further...]

“There’s always more, a little further – it never ends,” wrote Jack Kerouac in his classic 1957 novel On The Road, an account of his cross-country adventures with fellow Beats such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. As “Dean Moriarty” (Kerouac’s publisher insisted he fictionalize the names of his friends), Cassady is the one of the central figures of this book – a blur of motion and a speed demon behind the wheel – and the main connection between it and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book tracks the early history of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, one of whom happened to be Neal Cassady, driver of their psychedelic day-glo bus Further. The Beat scene (fueled by speed, booze and jazz) was very different from the psychedelic scene (LSD, marijuana, folk-rock), but Cassady jitters from the pages of one book and into the next without missing a beat.

Music also figures into both books. In On The Road, it’s used as a metaphor for the rhythm of Kerouac and Cassady’s travels. The Beats were inspired in part by the intense Be-Bop stylings of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and jazz features prominently in several passages, including Kerouac and Cassady watching performances by Slim Gaillard and George Shearing. By contrast, even when the Grateful Dead get involved, the music in Electric Kool-Aid… is just one part of the LSD-inspired happenings of The Pranksters. A quick look at the musicians mentioned in both books provides an illuminating primer on the differences between what was hip in the late-40’s/early-50’s and what was groovy the mid-60’s…

Musicians mentioned in On The Road:

Dizzy Gillespie
Charlie Parker
Louis Armstrong
Lionel Hampton
Stan Getz
Wynonie Harris
George Shearing
Slim Gaillard
Roy Eldridge
Hot Lips Page
Thelonious Monk
Billie Holiday
Lester Young
Anita O’Day
Willie Jackson
Lucky Millinder
Perez Prado
Duke Ellington

Musicians mentioned in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

Bob Dylan
Joe Cuba
Ornette Coleman
Martha & The Vandellas
Jimmy Smith
The Beatles
Roland Kirk
The Grateful Dead
Joan Baez
Mississippi John Hurt
Jefferson Airplane
Mothers Of Invention
Big Brother & The Holding Co.
The New Sensations
Slam Stewart

The last scene of Electric Kool-Aid… finds Kesey and company setting up one of their final acid tests, while a jazz trio called The New Sensations plays on stage. The Pranksters loop feedback into the P.A. system, and begin “rapping” over the jazz, causing the trio to stomp offstage in a huff. Tom Wolfe goes out of his way here to mention Slim Gaillard’s bassist, Slam Stewart – a clear homage to (and possible put down of) the sound of the Beat Generation.

In spite of differences in the attitudes, trappings, and music of their respective scenes, both the Beats and Pranksters were driven to grab hold of every minute and live intensely in the present. Kerouac: “Life is holy, and every moment is precious.” Wolfe: “Life is a circle and so it is the going, not the getting there, that counts.”

Listen: Laughing In Rhythm [Slim Gaillard]

Listen: Tomorrow Never Knows [The Beatles]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Black Pearls/Black Sabbath

[Today: It was a dark and stormy day...]

All day yesterday, dark storm clouds gathered around the Bay Area and then just hung there, doing nothing and looking ominous. Around three o’clock this morning, the storm finally broke, and we’ve been in a deluge ever since. When the weather gets really nasty like this, there are two music genres that I reach for – heavy metal and jazz. Motörhead, Slayer, Metallica, and especially Black Sabbath are the right sound for a day like today, when the winds are screaming and the rain is hissing. Sabbath’s debut was the LP I grabbed off the shelf this morning, and it proved to be a wise choice. Side One opens with a bell tolling, followed by a thunderclap and pouring rain, before the group launches into the title track – which like the rest of Black Sabbath, is the perfect soundtrack for staring down black sheets of rain and hilltops shrouded in clouds.

Happy, melodic jazz won’t do for a rainstorm – the occasion requires something with internal discord, something that feels like nature gone awry. John Coltrane fits the bill. He played with a passion that was almost supernatural – the man was a locomotive on the sax. Some of the lines he cuts loose with on his 1958 album Black Pearls – mid-way through both the title track and ‘Lover Come Back To Me’ – are the musical embodiment of being caught in a rainstorm. Notes come down one on top of another, and just when you’d swear they can’t come any faster, they turn into a torrential downpour. This isn’t Coltrane in full squall mode, but Impressions and The Age Of Bronze are on deck, just in case this storm really starts bringing it…

Listen: Black Pearls [John Coltrane]

Listen: Black Sabbath [Black Sabbath]

Listen: Lover Come Back To Me [John Coltrane]

Listen: Wasp/Behind the Wall of Sleep/Bassically/N.I.B. [Black Sabbath]

*****

Six more for a storm…

Andres Segovia | The Segovia Collection
The Band | Music From Big Pink
The Doors | L.A. Woman
Nick Drake | Pink Moon
Slayer | Diabolus In Musica
The Benedictine Monks Of Santo Domingo de Silos | Chant

Doubleshot Tuesday: All Things Must Pass/Tribute To

[Today: Passing it on...]

Cover songs are a tricky proposition. Bad covers are a dime a dozen, but the right artist covering the right material can present new angles on an old song, and remind us of worthwhile music that has been forgotten. My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James does a little of both on his latest EP, Tribute To, which features six George Harrison songs that James recorded within days of Harrison’s death in 2001.

This music was put to tape well before My Morning Jacket found fame (which explains why these songs have been on the shelf for nearly a decade), and as such, it has a less polished, more country sound that’s awash in reverb and echo. James has since outgrown the Neil Young-on-quaaludes vocal stylings that marked MMJ’s early albums, but that voice works for these interpretations of Harrison’s observations on life and death, love and heartbreak. Harrison’s songs had a higher purpose than pop and the stark gravity of James’ versions highlights the spiritual questing at their core. In James’ hands, ‘Long, Long, Long’ is clearly a conversation with God, ‘Behind That Locked Door’ is a meditation on the prison of love, and ‘Love You To’ is a funeral dirge.

“I find comfort knowing that all things must pass, but that as all things do pass their spirits are still out there moving us somewhere… doing what they do, just as real as they ever were in the physical world…” wrote James in the EP’s liner notes, “I can hear them in singing and feel them in my blood.” The dust on these tapes might explain why this was released under the name Yim Yames, but it’s as moving as anything James has done with his flagship band. Tribute To is a fine exploration of Harrison’s music, and a worthy eulogy to a resonant voice.

Listen: My Sweet Lord [George Harrison]

Listen: My Sweet Lord [Yim Yames]

Listen: All Things Must Pass [George Harrison]

Listen: All Things Must Pass [Yim Yames]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Brazilian Girls/Hey Eugene!

[Today: Two exotic, mysterious albums...]

Here are two exotic albums that spend a fair amount of time on our turntable. Neither of these groups is exactly what they seem: Brazilian Girls are three-quarters male and 0% Brazilian, and Pink Martini sounds like an old-time orchestra with a lead singer that belts it out in ten (!) different languages, but they’re actually a contemporary group from Portland, OR. Both groups have multi-national sounds that feature relatively unusual instrumentation like tubas and trumpets. In Sabina Sciubba (Brazilian Girls) and China Forbes (Pink Martini), these groups boast two of the more gifted and unheralded singers on the scene today. And finally, both of these albums are worthy of repeated spins in spite of less than inspired cover art…

Listen: Homme [Brazilian Girls]

Listen: Tempo Perdido [Pink Martini]

Listen: Don’t Stop [Brazilian Girls]

Listen: City Of Night [Pink Martini]