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Kamis, 31 Desember 2009

Blue Moon

Tonite is an astrologer's wet dream. Did I just say that? I know very little about astrology, but the moon in our skies is a blue one, or more precisely the second full moon of the month, with a partial eclipse, and it's made of (blue) cheese. It's also New Years Eve. The term, "once in a blue moon" has come to mean seldom, rarely, or perhaps never. Apply this as you wish, to whatever may be your current milieux. A full moon is prone to wreak emotional intensity or mahyem. Wolves howl at them, and singers sing about them.

"Blue Moon" is a Rogers and Hart standard. Lorenz Hart wrote four different sets of lyrics to it for four different Hollywood films. The one that stuck, has been recorded by hundreds of artists, and the Elvis Presley version of 1954, is in my mind, one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever recorded. Sam Phillips summoned up some real magic that day in Memphis. Another beautiful and different song of the same name, was recorded by Big Star, in the same city twenty years later with another shaman producer--the late great Jim Dickinson--at the helm.

Bill Monroe's 1947 hit, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" is also a standard, in bluegrass, country, and rock 'n roll. Elvis recorded it in the same sessions that yielded "Blue Moon." In Monroe's version, it's a sad and plaintive waltz to a lost love, ("It was on a moonlight night/ The stars were shining bright/ and they whispered from on high/ Your love has said goodbye"). The stars are whispering to Monroe and he asks the moon to shine on the one that's gone and left him blue. Bill Monroe was a spiritual man, and made some of the spookiest records I know. In some folktales, a blue moon has a face and talks to those in it's light. Elvis, states the same, but asks a favor of the moon in a new set of lyrics for the introduction, "Keep on shining bright and bring me back my baby tonite."

What does all this mean? I haven't a clue. Consult an astrologer.

Happy New Year, and may the moon shine on you and yours, brightly, tonight.

Download:

"Blue Moon" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1954.
available on Elvis at Sun

"Blue Moon" mp3
by Big Star, 1974
available on Keep An Eye On The Sky

"Blue Moon of Kentucky" mp3
by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, 1947.
available on Bill Monroe: Anthology

"Blue Moon of Kentucky" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1955.
available on Elvis at Sun

Jumat, 24 Oktober 2008

Fluville Gazette Vol. 1 No. 1

I've been getting a little static lately from the readers of this blog about the lack of posting frequency here. This is a blog. It's not my job, but it feels like it. A few months ago I had to explain this to my son. He's kind of impressed at how many people actually read this (and I am too) but confused at how much time his Dad spends doing it. Today, on the phone, he asked me how to download the songs here.

So, rather than compose another one of my long winded and angular diatribes combining conspiracy theories of relativity with songs we love so much and the people who record them, I thought I might bring you all up to speed on some exciting new developments here at the Fluville Chamber of Commerce.

Well, not really. But that was fun to say.

Let's see.

Yesterday, I went to the dentist and left with one less tooth in my mouth. It's a drag, because I really liked that tooth. It reminded me of this song which I saw The Feelies perform last month, it was one the best shows I've seen by anyone in recent memory. It contains the following lines:

Next day I went to the dentist
He pulled some teeth
and I lost some blood

"Sedan Delivery" mp3
by Neil Young, 1979.
available on Rust Never Sleeps

"Sedan Delivery" mp3
by The Feelies, 1986.
from No One Knows EP
out of print

They also played a semi-obscure number by The Modern Lovers.

"I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms" mp3
by The Modern Lovers, 1976.
available on The Modern Lovers

When I got home, a little lighter in the jaw, I saw that I had received a package from the nice folks at Rhino containing the new batch of Replacements reissues. After you listen to these teaser tracks, just go and buy the damn things if you don't have them already. They are that good. I contributed a photograph to the Pleased to Meet Me reissue, and you can see and read all about it HERE and listen to one additional track.

"Waitress In The Sky" (alternate) mp3
by The Replacements, 1985.
available on Tim

"Tossin' and Turnin'" mp3
by The Replacements, 1987.
available on Pleased to Meet Me

"We Know the Night" (alternate) mp3
by The Replacements, 1989.
available on Don't Tell a Soul

"Attitude" (demo) mp3
by The Replacements, 1990.
available on All Shook Down

Okay, so then I went upstairs and and ate some very soft food in my very sore mouth, and watched the very excellent Johnny Cash's America on the A&E Biography Channel produced and directed by friends of Fluville, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. You can buy the DVD next week HERE

In the meantime, enjoy this:

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1975.
from John R. Cash
out of print

Oh, there are some very good interviews in the film by a number of artists including these people:

"Violin Bums" mp3
by James Luther Dickinson, 2006.
available on Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

"Killing Him" mp3
by Amy LaVere, 2007.
available on Anchors & Anvils

"Marching To The City" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Deluxe)

"In The Jailhouse Now" mp3
by Steve Earle & The V-Roys, 1996.
available on Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute

Also featured in the film is 'Cowboy' Jack Clement. He wrote a lot of songs for Sun artists, and produced and engineered a lot of records recorded there.

Here's a few of the songs that he's written:

"I Like It" mp3
by Roy Orbison, 1956.
available on Rocker

"It'll Be Me" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957.
available on All Killer, No Filler: The Anthology

"Guess Things Happen That Way" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1958.
available on The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983

"Miller's Cave" mp3
by Gram Parsons & The International Submarine Band, 1967.
available on Safe at Home

This weekend, I'm going to the WFMU Record Fair. It's a lot of fun, but I'm going to try and practice some restraint and try not to buy too many records. My tooth is not the only thing I'm missing these days, and when I'm not sharing all this fabulous music with you folks, I've been out trying to find another more lucrative gig. You can direct any reasonable offers to me here.

Last year I picked up this one up at the fair:

"Susie-Q" mp3
by Dale Hawkins, 1956.
available on Oh! Suzy-Q: The Best of Dale Hawkins

In related webosphere news, I've been posting mp3's and some of my photographs at East of Bowery, a fantastic new blog that my good friend and writer Drew Hubner (that's pronounced Huebner) and I are collaborating on. Check it out. Drew is posting stories of his misspent early days in New York City. I didn't know him then, but it seems we were in the same place at the same time. Life is sweet.

Also on the Interweb, artist and fellow blogger Steve Roden graciously plugged the Boogie Woogie Flu, at the web version of The Wire magazine last week. You can see it HERE.

And recently, I recieved a letter from a reader who lives on an olive farm in Catalan, Spain, who was so excited by the music here on the Boogie Woogie Flu, that he decided to start a Boogie Woogie Flu listeners page on Last FM. I'm not sure how that thing works, and I'm a little over-saturated with this web stuff, but if you use Last FM, join him, his name is Pault and he goes by the tag r_seven. He's very nice.

Okay, that's it for now. Have a good weekend.

Sabtu, 11 Oktober 2008

The Journey Is The Destination

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love...

-Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

This week Sony unfurled the latest in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series. Volume 8 contains unreleased and little-known tracks from 1989 to the present. In Dylan's sprawling archive of songs, this constitutes the later period, even though some of these tracks are nearly twenty years old. The highlights of the release are the alternate and unused tracks from 1997's Time Out Of Mind, a bitter, dark, and ultimately beautiful record that reflects on loss and alienation. Time Out Of Mind is not a light record. It starts with the following lines:

I'm walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone's distant cry?
I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping

I'm sick of love but I'm in the thick of it
This kind of love I'm so sick of it...

For the next hour or so the singer walks us down dirt roads, paces around rooms, lays around one-room country shacks, rides midnight trains, drifts in and out of dreamless sleep, walks through the middle of nowhere, rolls through stormy weather, is lost somewhere and has made a few bad turns. This is a picture of a man shot out of a cannon, alone and drifting though time and space, wandering a bleak landscape. In the one slightly "lighter" track, the sixteen-minute talking blues "Highlands," based around a repeating Charlie Patton guitar riff, Dylan has a playful conversation with a waitress, yet still he explains:

Insanity is smashin' up against my soul
You could say I was on anything but a roll

It's grim out there. I listened to this record on a road trip - start to finish - last summer for the first time in a few years. I made a conscious decision to leave my iPod (which usually operates only in shuffle) at home and to bring only CDs in my rented vehicle. For whatever reason, this is the one Dylan record I brought and I played it multiple times as I whizzed through the landscape.

In "Not Dark Yet" he gets a letter written "so kind," which got me thinking about another song, "Tryin' To Get to You," best known from Elvis Presley's Sun Sessions, which contains my favorite Scotty Moore guitar part. Sam Phillips erased Elvis's piano track which leaves Scotty playing an alternating lead and rhythm part, start to finish. In "Tryin To Get To You," featured here below in multiple versions, including the original by vocal group The Eagles - no, not those Eagles - the singer also gets a loving letter, and sets out on a journey to find his baby. We never really find out if he gets there. He travels over mountains, through valleys, night and day, trying to get there.

So, allow me to go out a limb here, and consider that maybe these songs from Time Out Of Mind, offer the view of the aftermath and the unraveling of the mind and the soul of a man following a fruitless search - that maybe the letter was just a cruel hoax - and the singer has readjusted his expectations from trying to get to her, to "trying to get to heaven, before they close the door".

Download:

"Tryin' To Get To You" mp3
by The Eagles, 1954.
available on We're Gonna Rock - We're Gonna Roll

"Tryin' To Get To You" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1955.
available on The Sun Sessions

"Tryin' To Get To You" (alternate version) mp3
by Roy Orbison, 1956.
available on Rocker

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

"Tryin' To Get To Heaven" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Million Miles" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Standing In The Doorway" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Not Dark Yet" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Red River Shore" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Can't Wait" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Marching To The City" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

top photograph © Mark Seliger

Selasa, 15 Juli 2008

Jerry McGill

In the mid‑seventies, when he was red‑hot, Waylon played Memphis, and his one‑time rhythm guitar player and road manager, Curtis Buck, a/k/a Jerry McGill, came to the show in drag. McGill, who had a Memphis rock and roll band in the fifties and recorded for Sun Records, was eluding prosecution for various federal crimes. He had developed a problem traveling with Waylon when they put the metal detectors in airports. But there had been times when McGill's guns—he normally carried three, counting the one in his girlfriend's purse—had come in handy, like the time the cop had McGill's boss under arrest at the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, and McGill talked him out of it. It's a scene we'll save for the film version.

by Stanley Booth, from Hands Up! Gadfly, November 1998.

and then there's the film version...

In one scene, the camera follows (Randall) Lyon into Jim Dickinson's backhouse studio, where assorted people are sitting around ... Some of the musicians are jamming - Dickinson is playing an electric guitar, (Jim) Lancaster, is at the piano. McGill, his gaunt and tapered face resembling a cobra's, takes hold of an acoustic guitar and performs a song. When he's done, Lyon starts spouting a soliloquy, holding a bottle of champagne in his hand. The camera surveys the room, but his words are clear. "This is a dis-ass-trous period in our time. We got to respond to what's going ahn or else we got to hang it up with kinder-goddamn-garten." Dickinson accompanies with apocalyptic feedback from his guitar, and it all becomes too claustrophobic for McGill. The camera whips around at the sound of gunfire - McGill has drawn and fired his pistol. He smashes the bottle with the barrel and then puts the gun against Lyon's head. The voices that squealed when the bullets caught them off guard have suddenly stilled. The guitar continues, a soundtrack like the Wild West saloon player who knows it's best to never stop. The camera remains focused on the gun, the gun always, because whoever may say whatever, the subject in that room is the gun.

"I'm gonna whip you with this gun barrel," says McGill, whose eyes shine like B.B.'s. "Be nice, be real nice." Lyon is doubled over at the waist, his head, his life, in McGill's hands. Then McGill, he is no longer McGill, he is Pancho Villa, he is Jesse James, he is completely and totally Lash LaRue - turns to the camera, sees that it's pointed right at him (he's still holding the gun), and he says, for the camera's benefit, "I don't care nothing about that." He'll do it for the world to see! In an instant, the pistol is waved, smashing the bottle in Randall's hand, and following the instant, smashing the light. The guitar feedback stops with the sudden darkness and the scene, take one, the only take, is over.

by Robert Gordon, from It Came From Memphis,1995.

The above is a description of Jerry McGill's scene in William Eggleston's video-verite Stranded In Canton shot in and around Memphis and New Orleans in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak that was rigged to shoot in low light situations. It's a remarkable foray into early video by a great photographer. For years, it sat in a vault at MIT, until Eggleston and Gordon edited the thirty hours of footage into a film in 2005. When I saw a screening of it at Lincoln Center a few years ago, I asked Robert who the guy playing guitar with Dickinson was. His response: "Jerry McGill - the original Rock and Roll outlaw." Below is McGill's entire recorded output - a lone single on Sun from 1959. Billy Lee Riley is on lead guitar. These days McGill's whereabouts are unknown. He is rumored to be serving time in Florida for murder.

* See comments below for updated information. [ed. July, 2009]

Download:

"Lovestruck" mp3
by Jerry McGill and The Topcoats, 1959.
out of print

"I Wanna Make Sweet Love" mp3
by Jerry McGill and The Topcoats, 1959.
out of print

William Eggleston is the subject of a major retrospective coming to the Whitney Museum in November.

Standed In Canton will be available as a Book/DVD by Twin Palms Publishers this Fall.

Top photo: by Randall Lyon from It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon.

Rabu, 13 Februari 2008

For Lovers Only

Happy Valentine's Day folks.

Here's some songs for you and your baby to dance to. It starts out rocking, builds to joyous crescendo, and then it gets nice and slow.

Use at your own discretion.

Download: