Scratchy 45s

by Pete Wingfield

I wrote and recorded "Scratchy 45s" in 1976, as a tribute to the New Orleans R&B that I loved then, and still do. The idea was to cram in as many crafty musical and lyrical allusions as possible, while still ending up with a proper original song! I’m sure fellow BWF-ers, being true cognoscenti, will have no trouble spotting them all. Yeah, I know the tempo is a bit too fast and the groove is hardly authentic, but hey, give me a break - it was 33 years ago, I was still kinda green behind the ears, and we were recording in the cool of the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire, not some steamy Louisiana backwater. At least my heart was in the right place. One thing though - had I known then about Bobby Marchan’s reputation as a female impersonator, I maybe wouldn’t have chosen to rhyme “Marchan” with “he’s my man”!

The track actually came out as a single (in the US only), but sank without trace – one of a number of failed attempts to follow up my hit "Eighteen With A Bullet." However, I have it on good authority (Mac Rebennack himself) that the record was heard and relished by some of the musicians that inspired it – I guess they appreciated any glimmer of recognition at a time when the New Orleans music scene was in the doldrums and the city no longer a recording hub. So this Mardi Gras time, wherever you are in the world, why not raise a glass to the timeless, unquenchable spirit of the Crescent City, and as the song says, ‘to the glory that is gone’…

Thanks to Ted for allowing me in as guest host on his esteemed blog, one year on from 2008’s “Super Fat Tuesday Mix”.

Pete Wingfield
Feb 2009

Download:

"Scratchy 45s" mp3
by Pete Wingfield, 1976.
available on Eighteen with a Bullet: The Island Recordings




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Similar symptoms to the Rockin' Pneumonia - in fact, some doctors find it hard to tell them apart. It'll make you feel so.... unnecessary!



"Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas And The Sinus Blues" mp3
by Huey 'Piano' Smith and the Clowns, 1959.
available on Having a Good Time

Typically idiosyncratic Fess workout, cut in '58 for Joe Ruffino's Ron label.



"Cuttin' Out" mp3
by Professor Longhair, 1958.
available on Fess: The Professor Longhair Anthology

I couldn't resist including both sides of this primeval classic, from 1960 on the original orange Minit label.



"Ooh Poo Pah Doo pt 1" mp3
by Jessie Hill, 1960.
available on Finger Poppin' & Stompin' Feet



"Ooh Poo Pah Doo pt 2" mp3
by Jessie Hill, 1960.
available on Finger Poppin' & Stompin' Feet

I don't have "Barefootin'" on 45, so this lesser follow-up will have to do!



"Everybody's Hip-Huggin'" mp3
by Robert Parker, 1967.
available on The Wardell Quezerque Sessions

Not the original pressing sadly, but still on Imperial in their "Golden Series".



"It Will Stand" mp3
by The Showmen, 1961.
available on It Will Stand

Licensed from Imperial of course, and on the UK London-American label, repository of all things exciting for British baby-boomer R&B fans. This wonderfully languid groove, Fats and Dave Bartholemew's take on a song by Bobby Charles, was on the 'B' side of "Tell Me That You Love Me", from 1960. Haven't I heard those horn riffs before somewhere?



"Before I Grow Too Old" mp3
by Fats Domino, 1960.
available on Walking to New Orleans

An original pressing of the late Ernest Kador's smash from 1961, with Benny Spellman doing the responses. I learnt that piano solo by heart!



"Mother-In-Law" mp3
by Ernie K-Doe, 1961.
available on Here Come the Girls!

From 1961, the only big hit from Harold Battiste's organization AFO (All For One), his ill-fated attempt at establishing a Musicians' Cooperative. What - socialism, yet?



"I Know" mp3
by Barbara George, 1961.
available on I Know

From '66, on the Mojo label, specialist R&B offshoot of UK Polydor - licensed from Atlantic.



"Thank You John" mp3
by Willie Tee, 1966.
available on Teasin' You

Meters keyboard man in early crooner mode, song written by the ubiquitous Toussaint under his 'Naomi Neville' nom-de-plume. Never a national hit, but still by all accounts a local favorite.



"All These Things" mp3
by Art Neville, 1962.
available on The Very Best of Aaron & Art Neville

A charming, little known and punningly entitled 1968 revisit to "Java"-style MOR territory for the ever-saintlier éminence grise of New Orleans music.



"Hands Christianderson" mp3
by Allen Toussaint, 1968.
available on What Is Success: The Scepter & Bell Recordings

The wartime Navy gunner, undefeated lightweight boxer, body and fender repairman, father of 11 and prolific hitmaker with his first national breakout, for Bobby Robinson's Fury label. Again, on Sue in the UK - in '65, a full four years after its US release. No, for once that's not Toussaint on piano - it's one Marcel Richardson.



"Ya Ya" mp3
by Lee Dorsey, 1961.
available on Holy Cow!: The Very Best of Lee Dorsey

Some definitive New Orleans funk from 1970 on Josie, licensed to CBS / Direction in the UK.



"Look-Ka Py Py" mp3
by The Meters, 1970.
available on Look-Ka Py Py

top photo:
Nicholas Hill's Juke Box, Brooklyn New York, 2008.
© Ted Barron

Valentine

Valentine's Day is here, and for the romantic sort (of which I consider myself) I can only say that It's proved time again to be the source of the greatest humiliation and bitterest of feelings in past relationships. Why is this? Great expectations and diminishing returns. I guess that's my problem.

The good news is, I'm single this year, and I don't need to set myself up for any Hallmark induced hysteria. Don't get me wrong. I believe in love, but do we really need to set aside a single day of the year to express it?

Nope. I think not.

Love is a wonderful thing, as the song says, it's "a walk down Main Street," but it's also troublesome and dangerous business. Valentines Day can make matters worse. What do you do when you find out that your true love is a liar? Here's a couple of songs that speak to this problem. Paul Westerberg sings about the age-old dilemma of trying to hit a moving target with Cupid's arrow. It's bittersweet, like a shitty chocolate heart. Bobby Bare Jr. takes a more proactive stance and murders the object of his affection. There's some supplementary listening material here too.

Tell someone you love them today. No, tell someone you love them everyday.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Download:

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"Valentine" (demo) mp3
by The Replacements, 1987.
available on Pleased to Meet Me

"Valentine" mp3
by Bobby Bare Jr., 2004.
available on From the End of Your Leash

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"Love Is Lies" mp3
by The Buzzcocks, 1978.
available on Love Bites

"Love Hurts" (alternate) mp3
by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, 1973.
available on The Complete Reprise Sessions

"Your Love is Like Las Vegas" mp3
by The Thrills, 2003.
available on So Much for the City

"Love Comes in Spurts" (alternate) mp3
by Richard Hell and the Voidiods, 1977.
available on Blank Generation

"L.O.V.E. (Love)" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1982.
available on You Can't Hide Your Love Forever


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"Did Somebody Make A Fool Out of You" mp3
by Beth Orton, 2006.
available on Comfort of Strangers (Bonus Disc)

"O Foolish Heart" mp3
by Tom Verlaine, 1984.
available on Cover

"Nobody's Fool" mp3
by Dan Penn, 1973.
available on Nobody's Fool
out of print

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"All You Need Is Love" mp3
by Echo and the Bunnymen, 1984.
available on Crystal Days: 1979-1999

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True Love / I Smell Trouble

Consider this is a prelude to Valentines Day, or a Friday the 13th post depending on how you feel about it. Little Johnny Taylor on this two sider explores the dichotomy between love, and bad luck and troubles, with the intricacies of canine sensory from a juke-joint mystic.

Download:





"True Love" mp3
by Little Johnny Taylor, 1964.
available on Galaxy Years



"I Smell Trouble" mp3
by Little Johnny Taylor, 1964.
available on Galaxy Years

My 45's

by Will Rigby

My vinyl-to-digital conversion arrangement never worked very well and is at the moment completely nonexistent. However, back in the good old days of 2005 I transferred a handful of 45s to digital.



"Are You Glad To Be In America?" mp3
James Blood Ulmer
Rough Trade (1980)

This is one of the most ferocious and wonderful pieces of music ever committed to tape/vinyl, and is very hard/expensive to find. It pulls off the feat of being joyous, melancholy, avant garde, and danceable all at the same time. I have been unable to find an mp3 of it elsewhere, so this post is a public service. A must-hear for everyone. Amazing singing, guitar, two drummers, arrangement.

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"Talkin' 'bout My Friends" mp3
A. C. Reed (1966)
Nike Records

Reed was a sax player with artists like Earl Hooker and Albert Collins. He appears as a member of Buddy Guy's band in the film Festival Express. I don't know much about him, but this record (that I don't even remember buying) is one of my favorites. Some of the most down-home singing I've ever heard.

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"Tandoori Chicken" mp3
Ronnie Spector
Apple (1971)

Produced by Phil Spector, written by George Harrison and Phil Spector (a chore that couldn't have taken more than a few minutes), and an illustrious member of Phil's tradition of non-LP B-sides (of "Try Some Buy Some"). Sounds like it didn't take very long to record.

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"Uptown Top Ranking" (mono)
Althia and Donna
Sire (1978)

This was a #1 UK hit by a teenage duo from Jamaica. There are other versions of this, one with other instruments added to this version, and a completely different (apparently re-)recording that sounds more 80s. This is the original, mono single version.

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"The Mumbler Strikes Again" mp3
Clark Terry
Mainstream (1966)

Legendary jazz trumpeter Terry made a few of these mumbling tracks, but this is the only one I've heard. Very scratchy—the full 45 experience.

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Not Fade Away

Bruce Springsteen said, "I play Buddy Holly every night before going onstage. It keeps me honest." I don't know if I believe him or not, but I know exactly what he means. Fifty years after his demise, Buddy Holly's records still resonate as no bullshit slabs of purity. Here's a few selections from an impressive body of work made in about a year and a half. Notice, these sides are credited to The Crickets. This was a band, and there's a direct line between these records and what The Beatles and Stones did a few years later. Buddy Holly died fifty years ago yesterday at the age of 22. Rave on Buddy.


Download:



"That'll Be The Day" mp3
by The Crickets, 1957.
available on Buddy Holly Gold



"I'm Looking For Someone To Love" mp3
by The Crickets, 1957.
available on Buddy Holly Gold



"Maybe Baby" mp3
by The Crickets, 1958.
available on Buddy Holly Gold



"Tell Me How" mp3
by The Crickets, 1958.
available on Buddy Holly Gold



"Oh Boy!" mp3
by The Crickets, 1958.
available on Buddy Holly Gold



"Not Fade Away" mp3
by The Crickets, 1958.
available on Buddy Holly Gold

How I Learned To Sing The Blues

Drifting through the town
Drinking up the night
Trying not to drown...

- "The Ballad of Sad Young Men" by Frances Landesman


by Sonny Smith

The way I learned piano was that a kid I knew handed me a demo tape by John Allair who played on some Van Morrison records. On this homemade tape, Mr. Allair was playing old blues covers and something about how simple the renditions were made me give it a try myself. I was already into blues music and played guitar but something about this tape made me want to try singing and playing piano.

As I slowly failed out of my freshman year of college, so did I slowly learn the piano. I was living in a mountain town in Colorado. This was 1991. There wasn’t much culture. I met a very large woman with long hair parted in the middle named Robin at an AA meeting who played Saturday nights at a real chi-chi bourgeois ski-town hotel and bar place with dazzling copper all over the place and rich people in ski boots hobbling around like sunburned retards. She sat on a stool in the corner next to the gimpy little piano and played Eagles covers and Jackson Browne tunes on flute. She played quite well.

She explained to me after a meeting that she didn’t want her gig anymore cause it was tempting her to drink so I showed up on a snowy winters night at the club and told them I was there to take Robin's gig. I had to play three hours and I only knew about four songs: "Key to the Highway" (Memphis Slim), "Mellow Down Easy" (Jimmy Walters), "Bus Driver" (Muddy Waters), and "Corrina, Corinna," a spectacular version I learned from the Taj Mahal record Natch'l Blues.

I played these songs over and over again for three hours. I was horrible. A total farce. Days later the bartender slapped an old sounding blues nickname on me for the add in the local paper: ‘Sonnyland’ Smith it read, “plays and sings the blues every Friday and Saturday night”, and thus my new self was born. I was acutely aware of being white and singing blues songs (so badly)- I wasn’t, I felt, too far away from a minstrel in black face… on the other hand I was so excited by this new transformation into entertainer that I let it go. I severed the ‘land’ part and kept the name Sonny.

At this same time I went and got a radio show on the college station, the blues show on Sunday nights, and methodically stole about seven hundred blues records one backpack full at a time over the course of a year. The station's entire blues section on vinyl. I felt absolutely no guilt or hesitation, I don’t know why. I stole some stereo equipment from a condemned office building around this time so I guess I was dabbling in criminality anyway. Later I returned all the ones I didn’t want. About ninety five percent of them. The most important record I discovered from this dubious campaign was Jimmy Yancey.

A Chicago blues man, Yancey’s left hand is a wonderful display of blues minimalism, completely sparse and un-fancy yet totally driving. That left hand is incomparable. It’s impressive to me, like it has a no-nonsense job to do, like a well-oiled machine, yet it’s also full of grace and nuance and feel. It also liberates his right hand to be totally relaxed with the delivery of the melodies or the responses to the lyrics. He created an illusion for me that the right hand was like a character, a character who could take or leave the whole scene, but since we’re all here perhaps this character will tell you a little story. And then zing, the story is short, economical and marvelous. Mysteriously, every song ends in E flat.

Sometimes his wife sings and sometimes, like on Joseph Spence recordings, you can hear his wife chiming in on vocals from another room as if she’s doing something else (cooking or ironing I imagine…but who knows).

I began making trips into Denver every couple weeks all by myself to go buy records with my new gig money. I bought Jimmy Yancey, Memphis Slim, Sunnyland Slim, Otis Spann, Pinetop Perkins, all the greats. I had a really messed up face in those years, severe acne and other weird dermal issues that kept me totally anti-social and separated from joining any kind of group of people. I was an utter loner. I was so embarrassed by my physical appearance that I didn’t even allow my parents to take photographs around holiday visits and such. To add to this freakish feeling I became obsessed with this unhip music. No one I knew liked the blues. Old blues was kind of a drag to young folks. While they might have respected it, no one sat around and listened to it intently. I should make a distinction here between the sad laments and the barrelhouse boogie. I didn’t really give a shit about barrelhouse boogie and fast played blues. I just liked the really sparse simple sad ones.

I liked to walk around Denver in the old skid row district after my gigs and go to weird bars. I was into the beat writers and I imagined this was where Neal Cassidy or Allen Ginsburg came up (along with the blues I was obsessed with beat writers). Looking back, I can now see, I was more or less a teenage drunk. (Actually I just turned twenty-one by the time I got to Denver.) I got wasted at these shows, and I got into a few fights around town. I guess I was a rather dark young man. Songs like "Mother Earth" by Memphis Slim were really beautiful gothic songs. I suppose they fit my temperament.

Yes, the music was dark and eerie, but it was also funny music to me for some reason. It made me laugh. Professor Longhair, Sunnyland Slim, Cow Cow Davenport, and Yancey with their songs like "Lean Bacon" or "Everlasting Blues." It’s a kind of art that is funny and sad, earthy and elegant at the same time, which is my favorite kind of art. Above all blues is about purging. At least if it’s done right. It's about emotion. You've got to have guts to get the poison out of you. It can be a cathartic transformation if there is some personal truth being bloodletted ("Crossroads" by Robert Johnson) or it can be just stupid pandering bullshit if nothing personal is risked ("Crossroads" by Eric Clapton). Anyhow, for whatever reasons, rock ‘n’ roll didn’t even affect me back then. I didn’t even consider it. I didn’t even register that it existed, while old slow blues songs became a private back room to adjourn to.

Well, pretty soon I moved to Denver and found a couple weekly stints around town playing blues piano. I got a lot better and didn’t feel like such a fake. For no completely conscious reason I stopped drinking too much. I started riding my bike a lot. I took a few classical piano lessons from an eccentric Hungarian pianist. I went to a dermatologist who sold me some super duper high-powered drugs that cleared up my face. I came out of my shell a bit and acquired a girlfriend. It didn’t last, but it changed some things. I made some friends. A neighbor turned me onto Leonard Cohen. After a year or two I began writing my own songs which didn’t come out as blues songs at all, just weird folky fragments full of unripened lyrics.

And presto, after a while I really began to discover music in its entirety, and verily I left that small corner I was living in, the slow dark emotional blues, and ventured into the giant breathing cosmos of music with it’s infinite amount of mysterious solar systems floating inside.

Download:



"I Received A Letter" mp3
by Jimmy Yancey, 1940.
available on Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1939-1940)

"Mother Earth" mp3
by Memphis Slim, 1950.
out of print



"Slim's Blues" mp3
by Memphis Slim, 1950.
out of print



"Thinking Blues" mp3
by Bessie Smith, 1928.
available on Empress Of The Blues Volume 2

"The Ballad of Sad Young Men" mp3
by Rickie Lee Jones, 1991.
available on Pop Pop

"Corrina, Corinna" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1963.
available on The Freewheelin Bob Dylan Outtakes

"This Is My Story, This Is My Song" mp3
by Sonny Smith, 2002.
available on This Is My Story, This Is My Song

photo: © David Fenton

Birds / Byrds / Thunderbyrd

Three singles today:

I was surprised and delighted, when I put on Neil Young's "Birds" to find a totally different arrangement from the the spare piano version on After The Goldrush. This abbreviated take features guitar, bass, and drums - and is probably an early one - with only one verse and one chorus.

Download:



"Birds" mp3
by Neil Young, 1970.
alternate take - non LP B-Side

The b-side to The Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" single is an early Gene Clark masterpiece, that turned up on their box set in a different version. Clark recorded it again later on his Roadmaster LP in 1972. You can hear echoes of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" which was the #1 record in the US, shortly before The Byrds started sessions for their second record. The 12 string sound on "Ticket to Ride" owes a huge debt to the Jim (soon to be Roger) McGuinn. The Byrds, on "She Don't Care About Time," are in turn emulating a Beatles record, or more precisely, a Beatles record that emulates a Byrds record.





"She Don't Care About Time" mp3
by The Byrds, 1965.
available on Turn! Turn! Turn!

The third single of today's selections I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago. In 1977, Roger McGuinn, perhaps a little lost, and looking for inspiration again from those that he had inspired, made his final solo record, Thunderbyrd, before retreating from recording for another 13 or so years. "American Girl" is his take on a Tom Petty song from his debut of the previous year. It's no secret that Petty's early sound was hugely indebted to McGuinn and the Byrds. McGuinn's 12 string sound is large and instantly recognizable.




"American Girl" mp3
by Roger McGuinn, 1977.
available on Thunderbyrd


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"Birds" mp3
by Neil Young, 1970.
available on After the Gold Rush

"She Don't Care About Time" mp3
by Gene Clark, 1972.
available on Roadmaster

"American Girl" mp3
by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1976.
available on Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

top photograph: Alabama Hills, California, 2004. © Ted Barron