Play Ball!

Say hey, it's opening day.





Download:

"Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)" mp3
by The Treniers, 1955.
available on Best of the Treniers: They Rock They Roll

Jerry "Boogie" McCain 1930-2012

Rest in Peace, Boogie.




"My Next Door Neighbor" mp3
by Jerry McCain and His Upstarts, 1957.
available on Excello Blues: House Rockin' & Hip Shakin'



"Trying To Please" mp3
by Jerry McCain and His Upstarts, 1957.
out of print




"That's What They Want" mp3
by Jerry McCain and His Upstarts, 1954.
available on Excello Blues: House Rockin' & Hip Shakin'



"Courtin' In A Cadillac" mp3
by Jerry McCain and His Upstarts, 1954.
available on Jook Joint Blues: Good Time Rhythm & Blues

What's That Song? (pt. 2)

Today is the second anniversary of Alex Chilton's untimely passing. Last year I posted a handful of the records that Alex covered. Today, I offer a few more of those songs that he lovingly interpreted over the years. Some you know, some you might not, all of them great. For more of these, tune into the archive of my March 14th show on WFMU's Rock 'n Soul Ichiban: HERE

RIP LX

Download:



"Take It Off" mp3
by Groundhog, 1969.
out of print



"Te-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu" mp3
by Slim Harpo, 1968.
available on The Excello Singles Anthology



"Tip On In (part one)" mp3
by Slim Harpo, 1967.
available on The Excello Singles Anthology



"Alligator Man" mp3
by Jimmy Newman, 1962.
available on Cajun Country Music of a Louisiana Man



"Waltz Across Texas" mp3
by Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours, 1965.
available on Definitive Collection



"B-A-B-Y" mp3
by Carla Thomas, 1966.
avaliable on The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968



"Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette)" mp3
by Benny Spellman, 1962.
available on Fortune Teller

top photo: Alex Chilton Onstage, CBGB, 1977. by Godlis

Fluville on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban

Folks, I'm thrilled to announce that I'm now doing a weekly show on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban. It streams to your computer, mobile device, internet radio, as well as the tinfoil you've attached to your skull LIVE on Wednesday nights from 8-10PM EST. Or, you can listen to the ARCHIVE at your convenience anywhere, anytime.

You can hear my first show from January 25th HERE and more as they're added weekly. I'm still working out the kinks and the mic breaks from show #1 are a little rough. It'll get better, I swear. There's great music streaming there 24 hours a day and live shows being added to the line-up soon, as well as the Ichiban overlord Debbie D on Fridays from 3-5PM EST.

I played this record last week...



Download:

"Nobody's Fault But Mine" mp3
by Otis Redding, 1967.
available on Immortal Otis Redding

artwork by Takeshi Tadatsu

Only Women Bleed

by Polly Bresnick

Etta James, who passed away last week, could not only sing with searing soul that simultaneously strikes fear and sorrow and strength into the hearts of anyone who hears her voice, but she also bridged the gap between R&B and Rock & Roll back when people were still impressed by that kind of feat, way back when a band of light-skinned black girls was called the "Creolettes," way back when the song title "Roll With Me Henry" was so suggestive for a fourteen-year-old girl to sing, that the title was changed for the radio. Her songs have helped me muscle through serious heartsickness, and her signature wolf/owl howl/hoot grace notes give me chills even though I know each one by heart. I won't go into her haunting and solemn vocal opening to a performance of "Something's Got a Hold On Me" in 1966 on a television show called The !!!! Beat. And don't even get me started about all her songs about being heartbroken at a wedding and desperately wishing to speak now instead of forever holding her peace.



She was 73 years old, mentally and physically ill, but her death was a strange thing in my mind. Each time I listen to her soul-wringing, tear-salted mournfully lonesome rants it sounds a bit like the intimate sound of someone dying a little death, having a petit mort, an orgasm or paroxysm or all of the above. Her songs so convincingly chronicle her experience of emotional murder by loves who left her — got married or cheated or lied or didn't listen or didn't trust her or just didn't love her back — that in my mind, she died and revived enough times to achieve immortal status. This isn't to say that I didn't feel sad to learn she'd died. I did, a nagging bit of sad, like a pebble in my boot. I hadn't been following her later career very closely. I only knew she'd recently released an album because my father asked for it for his birthday. What she did with her voice and her soul when it was still so street, so raw and ambitious and broad, like her life actually depended on getting the pain out — "W.O.M.A.N.," "I'd Rather Go Blind," "All Could Do Was Cry," "Stop the Wedding," "Something's Got a Hold on Me" — these are the songs that go and put a hurtin' on me. But, when Etta died, a friend pointed out to me a late-career recording of her cover of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed." Admittedly, it caught my ear initially for what I thought to be it's absurdity. But then it lingered.

Maybe I'm being an overly sensitive post-post-feminist, but I hear an interesting note of old-fashioned chauvinism in the opening lines of this track: "Man's got his woman / to take his seed, he's got the power / she's got the need." It quickly becomes clear, though, who's side this song is on. Etta's version is a pained and sweating, R&B/gospel, unsentimental sermon/anthem for abused women, while Alice Cooper's (especially next to Etta's) sounds more like a soundtrack for a domestic violence PSA or a commercial for a charity to help battered women in inner city Detroit. Etta owns the lower register of this song with rumbling force that is bigger and louder and more convincing than any garden-variety "girl power" or feminism, the surface of which Alice Cooper seems to be attempting to scratch with his wimpy and predictable smooth rock growl-harmonize-falsetto-hook-bridge-jam. Etta James breathes life into the song's disturbing subject matter with more bone-rattling truth and with more survivor's spirit than Alice Cooper (or perhaps any other singer for that matter) can.

I like thinking about how in the weird world she ever came across the song. It makes me think she was more open-minded about music than I might have thought. Maybe she heard it on the car radio. Or maybe someone at Betty Ford played it on the boombox in the common room. Or maybe her manager was friends with Alice Cooper's manager. However she found her way to those lyrics, it doesn't shock me that, once she heard them, she understood she'd sing them. Her songs bring you back to times the world opened up beneath you, and you fall in with her, but then her voice finds your hand in the deep darkness and yanks you up to where you find a sturdy stone to grip at the edge of the crevasse. Her voice and that stone save you from falling every time. She was an expert on bleeding women. I'm glad she found this song. She found its truer cry.

I like to believe she succeeded at this because she felt she had sung out so much pain that she'd begun to channel the collective pain of all women. She drank the sorrow and carried it inside of her, bore the burden on behalf of all women who didn't think we were pretty or lovable or didn't think we deserved to be treated like shit and knew exactly how it felt, but didn't quite know how to vocalize those feelings until Etta did it, and we all said, "YES!" and we maybe even said, "YES, GIRL!" and sometimes we whispered, "Sing it," and, "Mmmhhmm," and other times we were without words because our breath had been taken away by the glowing truth bleeding out of the voice pouring out of Etta's lungs and through our speakers and into our ears and deep down into our souls which were healed, if only for a short time, if only until the end of the song.

Download:

"Only Women Bleed" mp3
by Etta James, 1999.
available on Heart of a Woman

Five Years in Fluville

Today we celebrate five years of the Boogie Woogie Flu, and while this strange endeavor may be limping along at a limited capacity, we are, still here. And, what better way to celebrate this miraculous event than to listen to the the b-side of James Brown's 1978 smash hit, "The Spank." JB's own version of "Love Me Tender," because, after all, it's Elvis' Birthday too.

Happy Birthday Elvis from all your friends in Fluville.



Download:

"Love Me Tender" mp3
by James Brown, 1978.
available on James Brown: The Singles Volume 10: 1975-1979

Jerry Ragovoy in the Cathedral Of Soul

by Andy Schwartz

When Howard Tate died on December 2, 2011, most obituaries for the great soul singer mentioned the name of another man who’d passed on in July of this year. Jerry Ragovoy (September 4, 1930 – July 13, 2011) was a songwriter, producer, pianist, and the studio Svengali behind Tate’s career masterpiece, the 1967 Verve album originally issued as Howard Tate and later retitled Get It While You Can.

Arguably, Ragovoy never made a better album in his career. In fact, Rags didn’t make that many albums: Much of his most influential music appeared on singles released before 1967, when Sgt. Pepper broke the “album market” wide open. Howard Tate/Get It While You Can features superb vocal performances by Tate, whether singing church–flavored ballads (the title track, “I Learned It All The Hard Way”) or blues standards (“How Blue Can You Get”); sturdy arrangements by Ragovoy, frequent partner Garry Sherman, or Artie Butler; and tough, committed playing by a cast of NYC session players including pianist Paul Griffin and guitarists Cornell Dupree and Eric Gale.

Finally, Howard Tate/Get It While You Can contains the original versions of some of Ragovoy’s best and most–covered compositions including “Ain't Nobody Home” (B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt), “Get It While You Can” (Janis Joplin), and “Look At Granny Run Run” (Grand Funk, Ry Cooder). Several notable non–LP singles emerged from the Tate sessions including “Stop,” written by Ragovoy with Mort Shuman, later covered by both Sam Moore and Jimi Hendrix.

But if Jerry Ragovoy had never worked with Howard Tate…had never written “Get It While You Can” or “Ain’t Nobody Home”…we’d still be hanging his name in the Soul Hall of Fame. Here are some of the reasons why:

GARNET MIMMS & THE ENCHANTERS – “Cry Baby” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy (as “Norman Meade”) and Bert Berns (as “Bert Russell”) Released July 1963 as United Artists 629. No. 1 Billboard R&B (three weeks), No. 12 Pop. available on Cry Baby

In his liner notes for the 1993 CD Cry Baby: The Best of Garnet Mimms (all 25 tracks produced by Jerry Ragovoy), Robert Pruter wrote that prior to the July 1963 release of this landmark single, the sporadic soul hits of the period were “mainly easily digestible songs by Sam Cooke and Chuck Jackson that fitted well into the pop mainstream of the day, so that nothing seemed alien or new about them. ‘Cry Baby’ was different. The song was a gospelized production so full of the soul–saving, fire–and–brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church that it singularly stood apart…Never had the public heard anything so intense and so emotional on Top 40 radio.”

Ragovoy told Pruter he’d worked on the song “on and off for about two years” and, in his efforts to place the finished master, had been given the brush–off by executives at various labels: “Typically, in the record industry, if it doesn’t sound like anything the record executives are familiar with, they turn it down.” With Jerry as writer and producer, Garnet Mimms placed eight more songs on the Billboard R&B Singles chart. The consistent excellence of their output was such that even Mimms’ commercial misfires later became ideal cover material: “Look Away” for the Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood, “My Baby” for Janis Joplin.



ERMA FRANKLIN – “Piece of My Heart” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns
Released 1967 as Shout 221. No. 10 Billboard R&B, No. 62 Pop.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years

Ragovoy co–wrote this soul classic with frequent collaborator Bert Berns and probably played the piano part that forms the bedrock of the arrangement. One of only two singles ever charted by Aretha Franklin’s older sister, “Piece Of My Heart” is probably Rags’ best–known song thanks to Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), whose cover version reached No. 12 in 1968 and has remained a staple of classic rock radio ever since. Erma’s original was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1968; twenty–five years later, in 1992, after renewed exposure in a British TV commercial for Levi’s, her recording entered the UK Top Ten.



THE ENCHANTERS – “God Bless the Girl and Me” mp3
Written by Samuel Bell & Lorraine Ellison. Produced & arranged by Jerry Ragovoy. Released March 1966 as Loma 2035.
out of print

Garnet Mimms and Sam Bell were members of a Philly vocal group, the Gainors, who left to form the Enchanters. The success of “Cry Baby” pushed Mimms to the forefront, however, and soon the other members (including Zola Pearnell and Charles Boyer) were cutting tracks without him. The Enchanters’ “I Wanna Thank You” struggled to No. 91 R&B in the fall of ’64, but with Ragovoy producing and Sam Bell as a contributing writer, the group came up with two more deep–soul stunners, “I Want To Be Loved” (Loma 2012, released February ’65) and “God Bless The Girl and Me.” I’m pretty sure Sam Bell is singing lead on these sides; if so, then he’s nearly the equal of Garnet Mimms for church–bred intensity and passionate articulation. The combination of piano and organ is another key element derived from gospel music and a trademark of Ragovoy’s sound in this period.

MIRIAM MAKEBA – “Pata Pata” mp3
Written by Miriam Makeba & Jerry Ragovoy. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
Released 1967 on Reprise 0606.
available on Pata Pata

Ragovoy’s biggest crossover hit of the Sixties after “Cry Baby” was also among his least typical. Thanks to the support of Harry Belafonte, by 1967 South Africa’s Miriam Makeba was already established in the US: She had released several LPs on RCA and been nominated for a Grammy the previous year. I’m not sure if Makeba was signed to Reprise at the time she recorded “Pata Pata,” or if Ragovoy independently produced and then shopped the master.

In any case, singer and producer retooled a South African folk song (that Makeba had first recorded in 1956) and the result was a sui generis hit that reached No. 7 R&B/No. 12 Pop in 1967. “Pata Pata” was the first song of South African origin since “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” to make a major impact on American audiences. Makeba’s hit preceded by about a year the Number One success of “Grazing In The Grass” as recorded by her then–husband, trumpeter Hugh Masakela.



LORRAINE ELLISON – "Stay With Me" mp3
Warner Bros. LP 182, released 1969. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
available on Stay With Me

Along with Howard Tate/Get It While You Can, this is the other great Jerry Ragovoy album.

Its creation began with the title single, “Stay With Me,” co–written by Ragovoy and George David Weiss. Sometime in 1966, Frank Sinatra canceled a New York recording session, potentially leaving his label Warner Bros. with the bills for a 46–piece orchestra and no music to show for it. On two days’ notice, Ragovoy, arranger Garry Sherman, and singer Lorraine Ellison (born 1931, Philadelphia PA) hustled into the studio and recorded “Stay With Me” – a towering, operatic ballad that many consider the pinnacle of East Coast “uptown soul.”

“To many people, ‘Stay With Me’ still typifies the basic idea of what real soul music is all about,” wrote UK soul music maven David Nathan in a 1974 article for Blues & Soul. “And there aren't too many soulful people around who don't get that spine–chilling tingle when they hear it, even to this day.”

“‘Stay With Me’ was a song that Jerry Ragovoy had written with Mr. Weiss, and I thought it was going to be a monster smash,” Lorraine Ellison told Nathan in Blues & Soul. “It certainly looked that way – the record had twenty-six national breakouts in the States, and it did make it onto the soul charts and made some headway onto the nationals.

“But at that time, Warners was just not into black music, period. They really had no idea how to promote the record and they had no real way of getting into the R&B market.”

The single made it to No. 11 R&B/No. 64 Pop, and these stats – along with some positive reviews and a certain underground buzz – were enough for Warner Brothers to green–light a full album. Heart and Soul: Introducing Miss Lorraine Ellison was released as WB 1674 in 1966. Produced by Ragovoy but arranged and conducted by jazz man Oliver Nelson, it was an uneven set that found Ellison singing familiar standards (“Cry Me A River”) and other people’s hits pop (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “If I Had a Hammer”). “Stay With Me” was buried in the middle of Side Two, and only one other song, “When Love Flies Away,” bore a Ragovoy writing credit. Heart and Soul did not chart and was soon deleted.

“Then interesting things began to happen,” West Coast rock critic John Mendelsohn wrote in his liner notes for Stay With Me – the second Lorraine Ellison album, unexpectedly issued by Warner Bros. in the fall of 1969. “[Such] diverse musical figures as Laura Nyro and Carl Wayne [of The Move] listed Lorraine Ellison as their favorite female vocalist. And in Harlem...an enterprising pirate tape–duplicating operation found mobs of takers when they offered tapes of ‘Stay With Me’ at the somewhat outrageous price of $5.00 apiece.”

“… Having realized that they had an artist of almost limitless potential, both commercial and artistic, sitting around their house, [Warner Bros.] got Jerry Ragovoy busy producing a straight–ahead album of gospel–based soul, the music that Lorraine had been doing for years with such unrewarded brilliance.”

Indeed, this was the album that should have followed the single. Stay With Me is eleven tracks of pure uptown soul, with an unswerving stylistic focus and the sustained mood of a secular cathedral. Ragovoy arranged and produced the entire set; he co–wrote seven songs with (variously) Mort Shuman, Doc Pomus, Sam Bell, Bert Berns, and Ellison herself. The title song closes Side One with a bang, in a manner analogous to the placement of “Get It While You Can” on Howard Tate.

It was all too little too late, however, and Stay With Me followed Heart and Soul into the cut–out bins. But Janis Joplin must have gotten hold of a copy: She later covered “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)” on Pearl, along with four other songs co–written by Jerry Ragovoy.



LOU COURTNEY – “What Do You Want Me Yo Do” mp3
Written by Lou Courtney. Arranged by Jerry Courtney. Produced by Lou Courtney & Jerry Ragovoy. Released 1973 as Epic/CBS 5–11062. No. 48 Billboard R&B in spring 1974.
available on I'm in Need of Love

By 1973, hardcore Southern soul was pretty much a spent force, commercially if not inspirationally. Otis Redding had been dead for years, Atlantic had dropped Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin was cutting jazz–flavored material with Quincy Jones. Ragovoy hooked up with R&B journeyman Lou Courtney, whose biggest chart record – the quasi–Motown dance novelty “Skate Now” – was six years behind him. Together they came up with a flute–flavored, proto–disco sound that was closer to Johnny Bristol’s “Hang On In There Baby” than to the glories of Garnet Mimms or Erma Franklin. Still, “What Do You Want Me To Do” is a genuinely infectious record with an arrangement that positively pops, and Courtney sings the hell out of it. The single crawled to No. 48 R&B and died, but not before singer and producer managed to squeeze out a pretty good album, I’m In Need of Love, also on Epic/CBS.


***************************




“Open Up Your Soul” mp3
by Erma Franklin, 1968.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years



“I Want To Be Loved” mp3
by Loraine Ellison, 1969.
available on Stay With Me



Garnet Mimms – “Look Away”
by Garnet Mimms, 1964.
available on Warm & Soulful



"Malayisha" mp3
by Miriam Makeba, 1967.
available on Pata Pata



“Ain’t Nobody Home” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can

“Stop” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can