When The New York Times Got Duped into Publishing “The Lexicon of Grunge” in 1992–Words Like “Lamestain,” “Wack Slacks,” “Harsh Realm” & More

in Music | May 16th, 2019

What if every­thing you thought you knew about grunge was a lie? Maybe you’ve sus­pect­ed all along! But even if you were there, or some­where, in that time of abysmal­ly low inter­net lit­er­a­cy and con­nec­tiv­i­ty, when every tra­di­tion­al media out­let was flan­nel, flop­py hair, mopey half-protests, fes­ti­vals, Seat­tle.… When you could save $6-$13 on “women’s grunge” and “$5 on kids’ grunge too!” at major depart­ment store chains…

But we may still remem­ber grunge as a movement—with charis­mat­ic lead­ers and trag­ic heroes. A move­ment to reclaim seri­ous, heavy, emo­tion­al hair rock from the pro­found­ly unse­ri­ous hair bands of the 80s. The first wave of Pacif­ic North­west bands to emerge with Nir­vana, Soundgar­den, and Pearl Jam were earnest and well-mean­ing and “pri­mal,” says Bruce Pavitt, co-founder of the leg­endary Seat­tle record label Sub Pop.

Sub Pop mid­wifed the scene by sign­ing so many of the bands that made it big, cul­ti­vat­ing the sound and look of dirty, angry back­woods­men with gui­tars. “Grunge Made Blue-Col­lar Cul­ture Cool,” wrote Steven Kurutz in The New York Times Style Sec­tion just a few days ago, an implic­it acknowl­edg­ment that the most­ly-white and large­ly male scene sold a par­tic­u­lar image of blue-col­lar that res­onat­ed, says Pavitt, because it rep­re­sent­ed an “ ‘Amer­i­can arche­type.”

Pavitt and co-founder Jonathan Pone­man were diehard fans of the music but they were no star­ry-eyed idealists—they under­stood exact­ly how to sell the region’s quirks to a nation­al and inter­na­tion­al media. “It could have hap­pened any­where,” Pone­man has said, “but there was a lucky set of coin­ci­dences. [Pho­tog­ra­ph­er] Charles Peter­son was here to doc­u­ment the scene, [pro­duc­er] Jack Endi­no was here to record the scene. Bruce and I were here to exploit the scene.”

But what was the scene? Was it “Grunge”? What is “Grunge”? How do you pro­nounce “Grunge”? What do “Grunge” peo­ple eat? After being pep­pered with one too many ques­tions when the shock­wave of Nirvana’s major label debut Nev­er­mind hit in 1992, Pone­man referred a reporter to a for­mer Sub Pop employ­ee, Megan Jasper, then work­ing as a sales rep for Car­o­line records. The reporter, Rick Marin, was call­ing from The New York Times’ Style Sec­tion, ask­ing for help com­pil­ing a grunge lex­i­con. What kinds of things do “Grunge” peo­ple say?

“By then,” writes Alan Siegel at The Ringer, “only out­siders earnest­ly used the term ‘grunge’ as a noun.” It was, says Charles Cross, for­mer edi­tor of alter­na­tive paper The Rock­et, “an over­hyped, inflat­ed word that doesn’t have actu­al mean­ing in Seat­tle.” As for grunge slang, such a thing “didn’t exist.” The only thing to do, Jasper decid­ed, was “react by try­ing to make fun of it,” she says. She had done the very same thing months ear­li­er, when British mag­a­zine Sky made the same request. “I gave them a bunch of fake shit.”

As she says in the inter­view clip at the top, she asked Marin to toss out nor­mal words and she would give him “grunge” equiv­a­lents. “I kept esca­lat­ing the crazi­ness of the trans­la­tions because any­one in their right mind would go, ‘Oh, come on, this is bull­shit.’… but it nev­er  hap­pened because he was con­cen­trat­ing so hard on get­ting the infor­ma­tion right.” Thus, the grunge lex­i­con below, pub­lished in The New York Times in 1992. (“All sub­cul­tures speak in code,” goes the cap­tion. This one would be appear­ing in malls nation­wide.)

  • bloat­ed, big bag of bloata­tion – drunk
  • bound-and-hagged – stay­ing home on Fri­day or Sat­ur­day night
  • cob nob­bler – los­er
  • dish – desir­able guy
  • fuzz – heavy wool sweaters
  • harsh realm – bum­mer
  • kick­ers – heavy boots
  • lames­tain – uncool per­son
  • plats – plat­form shoes
  • rock on – a hap­py good­bye
  • score – great
  • swingin’ on the flip­pi­ty-flop – hang­ing out
  • tom-tom club – uncool out­siders
  • wack slacks – old ripped jeans

It’s unlike­ly Marin ever trav­eled to Seat­tle and tried to bond with fel­low kids, or he would not have pub­lished Jasper’s hoax glos­sary in an arti­cle oth­er­wise crit­i­cal of the main­stream­ing of grunge. Marin com­pared the phe­nom­e­non to “the mass-mar­ket­ing of dis­co, punk and hip-hop. Now with the grung­ing of Amer­i­ca, it’s hap­pen­ing again. Pop will eat itself, the axiom goes.” It’s a thor­ough, well-sourced piece that quotes many of the scene’s founders, includ­ing Pone­man, nev­er sus­pect­ing they might be hav­ing a laugh.

The fake news grunge lex­i­con was a huge hit in Seat­tle, where Jasper was cel­e­brat­ed by her friends and fam­i­ly. “I got a very nice pat on the back,” she says. Peo­ple clipped the lex­i­con to their shirts at shows. Indie label C/Z records then print­ed t‑shirts. “Lames­tain” appeared on one. “Harsh Realm” on anoth­er. Mud­honey spread around Jasper’s slang in a Melody Mak­er inter­view with straight faces. It should have been debunked imme­di­ate­ly “but this was 1992,” writes Siegel, “Snopes wasn’t around yet. Hell, The New York Times was still four years away from launch­ing a web­site.”

Then, writer and reporter Thomas Frank called Jasper and asked, “there’s no way this is real, right?” Imme­di­ate­ly, she respond­ed, “Of course it’s not real.” Frank pub­lished the scoop in 1993; the Times smeared him as a hoax­er to dis­cred­it the rev­e­la­tion. The Baf­fler faxed the Times this note: “When The News­pa­per of Record goes search­ing for the Next Big Thing and the Next Big Thing pid­dles on its leg, we think that’s fun­ny.” These days, we might expect a Twit­ter war.

No one Siegel inter­views seems to have been par­tic­u­lar­ly upset about the whole thing. Marin’s “eye­brow is total­ly raised” through­out his piece, says his for­mer edi­tor Pene­lope Green. (Marin him­self declined to be inter­viewed.) But the sto­ry has far less to do with one cred­u­lous reporter work­ing a dead­line and more to do with his argument—grunge had been rapid­ly pack­aged and sold, and by The Times, no less! But maybe its image was sort of a joke to begin with, one that now gets such straight-faced, rev­er­ent, sealed-behind-glass-cas­es treat­ment that you have to laugh.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

The Pow­er of Eddie Vedder’s Voice: Hear Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks from Three Clas­sic Pearl Jam Songs

A Mas­sive 800-Track Playlist of 90s Indie & Alter­na­tive Music, in Chrono­log­i­cal Order

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Tangled Up in Blue: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

in Music | May 9th, 2019

Dylan’s “Tan­gled Up in Blue” strikes a mid­dle point between his more sur­re­al lyrics of the ‘60s and his more straight­for­ward love songs, and as Polyphonic’s recent video tak­ing a deep dive into this “musi­cal mas­ter­piece” shows, that com­bi­na­tion is why so many count it as one of his best songs.

It is the open­ing track of Blood on the Tracks, the 1975 album that crit­ics hailed as a return to form after four mid­dling-at-best albums. (One of them, Self-Por­trait, earned Dylan one of crit­ic Greil Mar­cus’ best known open­ing lines: “What is this shit?”–in the pages of Rolling Stone no less.)

Blood on the Tracks is one of the best grumpy, mid­dle-age albums, post-rela­tion­ship, post-fame, all reck­on­ing and account­abil­i­ty, a sur­vey of the dam­age done to one­self and oth­ers, and “Tan­gled” is the entry point. Dylan’s mar­riage to Sara Lown­des Dylan was floun­der­ing after eight years–affairs, drink, and drugs had estranged the cou­ple. Dylan would lat­er say that “Tan­gled” “took me ten years to live and two years to write.”

It would also take him two stu­dios, two cities, and two band line-ups to get work­ing. A ver­sion record­ed in New York City is slow­er, low­er (in key), and more like one of his gui­tar-only folk tunes. In Decem­ber of 1974, Dylan returned home to Min­neso­ta and played the songs to his broth­er, who wasn’t impressed and sug­gest­ed he rere­cord. The ver­sion we know is faster, brighter, jan­gli­er, and as Poly­phon­ic explains, sung at a key near­ly too high for Dylan. But it’s that wild, near exas­per­a­tion of reach­ing those notes that gives the song its lifeblood.

And he also reworked the lyrics, remov­ing whole vers­es and chang­ing oth­ers, until the fin­ished ver­sion is, indeed, tan­gled. It jumps back and forth from present to past to wish­ful future, verse to verse, and even line to line.

The pro­nouns change too–the “she” is some­times the lost love, some­times a woman who reminds the singer of the for­mer. The fur­ther he goes to get away from his first love, the more he meets visions of her else­where.

Then there’s the details of the trav­els and the jobs the nar­ra­tor takes on, leav­ing fans to parse which are true and which are not (Sara Lown­des, for exam­ple, was work­ing at a Play­boy club–the “top­less place”–when he met her). And even if we could know who the man is in verse six who “start­ed into deal­ing with slaves”…would it make any dif­fer­ence?

In the end the song feels uni­ver­sal because it is both so spe­cif­ic and so inten­tion­al­ly con­found­ing. “Tan­gled Up in Blue” affects so many of its lis­ten­ers, yours tru­ly includ­ed, because it recre­ates the way mem­o­ries nes­tle in our minds, not as a lin­ear sequence but as a kalei­do­scope of images and feel­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Watch Joan Baez Endear­ing­ly Imi­tate Bob Dylan (1972)

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly-Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics

in Art, Music | May 7th, 2019

Why do David Bowie’s songs sounds like no one else’s, right down to the words that turn up in their lyrics? Nov­el­ist Rick Moody, who has been privy more than once to details of Bowie’s song­writ­ing process, wrote about it in his col­umn on Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day: “David Bowie mis­di­rects auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion, often, by lay­ing claim to reportage and fic­tion as song­writ­ing method­olo­gies, and he cloaks him­self, fur­ther, in the cut-up.” Any­one acquaint­ed with the work of William S. Bur­roughs will rec­og­nize that term, which refers to the process of lit­er­al­ly cut­ting up exist­ing texts in order to gen­er­ate new mean­ings with their rearranged pieces.

You can see how Bowie per­formed his cut-up com­po­si­tion in the 1970s in the clip above, in which he demon­strates and explains his ver­sion of the method. “What I’ve used it for, more than any­thing else, is ignit­ing any­thing that might be in my imag­i­na­tion,” he says. “It can often come up with very inter­est­ing atti­tudes to look into. I tried doing it with diaries and things, and I was find­ing out amaz­ing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going.”


Giv­en what he sees as its abil­i­ty to shed light on both the future and the past, he describes the cut-up method as “a very West­ern tarot” — and one that can pro­vide just the right unex­pect­ed com­bi­na­tion of sen­tences, phras­es, or words to inspire a song.

As dra­mat­i­cal­ly as Bowie’s self-pre­sen­ta­tion and musi­cal style would change over the sub­se­quent decades, the cut-up method would only become more fruit­ful for him. When Moody inter­viewed Bowie in 1995, Bowie “observed that he worked some­where near to half the time as a lyri­cist in the cut-up tra­di­tion, and he even had, in those days, a com­put­er pro­gram that would eat the words and spit them back in some less ref­er­en­tial form.” Bowie describes how he uses that com­put­er pro­gram in the 1997 BBC clip above: “I’ll take arti­cles out of news­pa­pers, poems that I’ve writ­ten, pieces of oth­er peo­ple’s books, and put them all into this lit­tle ware­house, this con­tain­er of infor­ma­tion, and then hit the ran­dom but­ton and it will ran­dom­ize every­thing.”

Amid that ran­dom­ness, Bowie says, “if you put three or four dis­so­ci­at­ed ideas togeth­er and cre­ate awk­ward rela­tion­ships with them, the uncon­scious intel­li­gence that comes from those pair­ings is real­ly quite star­tling some­times, quite provoca­tive.” Six­teen years lat­er, Moody received a star­tling and provoca­tive set of seem­ing­ly dis­so­ci­at­ed words in response to a long-shot e‑mail he sent to Bowie in search of a deep­er under­stand­ing of The Next Day. It ran as fol­lows, with no fur­ther com­ment from the artist:

Effi­gies

Indul­gences

Anar­chist

Vio­lence

Chthon­ic

Intim­i­da­tion

Vampyric

Pan­theon

Suc­cubus

Hostage

Trans­fer­ence

Iden­ti­ty

Mauer

Inter­face

Flit­ting

Iso­la­tion

Revenge

Osmo­sis

Cru­sade

Tyrant

Dom­i­na­tion

Indif­fer­ence

Mias­ma

Press­gang

Dis­placed

Flight

Reset­tle­ment

Fune­re­al

Glide

Trace

Balkan

Bur­ial

Reverse

Manip­u­late

Ori­gin

Text

Trai­tor

Urban

Come­up­pance

Trag­ic

Nerve

Mys­ti­fi­ca­tion

“Chthon­ic is a great word,” Moody writes, “and all art that is chthon­ic is excel­lent art.” He adds that “when Bowie says chthon­ic, it’s obvi­ous he’s not just aspir­ing to chthon­ic, the album has death in near­ly every song” — a theme that would wax on Bowie’s next and final album, though The Next Day came after an emer­gency heart surgery end­ed his live-per­for­mance career. “Chthon­ic has per­son­al heft behind it, as does iso­la­tion, which is a word a lot like Iso­lar, the name of David Bowie’s man­age­ment enter­prise.” Moody scru­ti­nizes each and every one of the words on the list in his col­umn, find­ing mean­ings in them that, what­ev­er their involve­ment in the cre­ation of the album, very much enrich its lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. By using tech­niques like the cut-up method, Bowie ensured that his songs can nev­er tru­ly be inter­pret­ed — not that it will keep gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of intrigued lis­ten­ers from try­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

How Jim Jar­musch Gets Cre­ative Ideas from William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method and Bri­an Eno’s Oblique Strate­gies

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold the Ingenious Musical Marble Machine

in Music | May 2nd, 2019

Could the return of mar­ble-based mad­ness be a reac­tion to our dig­i­tal age? That we must con­struct real fan­tas­ti­cal machines that per­form hum­ble amuse­ments in the face of CGI-filled block­busters? Do we need to know that if soci­ety col­laps­es we can look to mem­bers of the Swedish folk­tron­ic band Win­ter­gatan to help rebuild it? After watch­ing the above video, friends, I say yes to all those (rhetor­i­cal) ques­tions.

The Mar­ble Con­vey­er Belt does what its name implies in a lov­ing series of cranks, gears, “fish stairs,” ratch­ets, pis­tons, curved tracks, and springs, and no real amount of florid descrip­tion will do jus­tice to the visu­al poet­ry of watch­ing Wintergatan’s Mar­tin Molin operate/play what they have dubbed Mar­ble Machine X.

This is not Molin or the band’s first machine. Accord­ing to Wikipedia, between Decem­ber 2014 and March 2016, Molin built the first Mar­ble Machine, that played instru­ments like a vibra­phone, bass gui­tar, cym­bals, and a contact-microphone’d mini drum kit fol­low­ing a pro­grammed wheel that trig­gered mar­ble release arma­tures.

In fact, we told you all about it in a pre­vi­ous post in 2016, just in case this is all sound­ing famil­iar.

When that was a suc­cess, they dis­as­sem­bled the machine and set about work­ing on Machine X.
Each step of the process was doc­u­ment­ed on YouTube, which is per­fect for this sort of thing. The 79 videos can be watched over at this mas­sive playlist. (Watch it below.) This time, Molin worked with a team of design­ers and engi­neers, along with fan input, to build some­thing big­ger and bet­ter.

Molin pro­vid­ed some specs over at the fin­ished video’s YouTube page:

The Mar­ble Con­vey­er Belt is Com­plet­ed and it deliv­ers Per­fect­ly.
— lifts 8 mar­bles per crank turn.
— thanks to it being dri­ven by ratch­ets and pis­tons, it makes a short halt to load and unload the mar­bles, on exact­ly the same spot every time.
— The pis­tons are con­nect­ed to the crank shaft with a 2:1 gear reduc­tion which means that the con­vey­er belt go in time with the music, and in half time. I can even use the mechan­i­cal sounds from the ratch­ets and the mar­bles climb­ing the fish stair to cre­ate parts of the beats.
— I only had one kick drum chan­nel up and run­ning so the kick drum plays on 2–4 like a snare nor­mal­ly would. Sounds a lit­tle strange but I just made this piece of music to demon­strate the con­cepts are work­ing. (no music you hear in the videos are going to be used for the album, its quick and dirty func­tion­al pieces for the videos only)
— Its been a jour­ney but we are now on our way. Again.
— the throw of the pis­tons s 40mm, the pitch of the chain is 15,875x2 mm, an impe­r­i­al val­ue, and it hap­pens to be exact­ly twice the mar­ble diam­e­ter. All this makes it pos­si­ble to lift exact­ly one row of mar­bles per crank turn. The ratch­ets move 40 mm but only grabs onto the chain to move it exact­ly 31,75mm per crank turn.
The car­ri­ers are flame pol­ished cnc:ed acrylic
— The chain was cus­tom made in Japan and I wait­ed 5 months for it to be deliv­ered. haha. Of all the time con­sum­ing dar­lings on the MMX I love the con­vey­er belt /fish stair com­bo the most.
the mar­bles looks like they are stuck over the demag­ne­tis­er wheel, this is by design, as soon new mar­bles come into the pipes from below, the mar­bles are slow­ly pushed over the demag wheel which ensures per­fect demag­neti­sa­tion.

Molin has some kind of mad­ness, the good kind. Where he goes after this achieve­ment is anybody’s guess.

via thekidshouldseethis.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis II: Dis­cov­er the Amaz­ing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinet­ic Sculp­ture by Chris Bur­den

See the First “Drum Machine,” the Rhyth­mi­con from 1931, and the Mod­ern Drum Machines That Fol­lowed Decades Lat­er

200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automa­tons in Action

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Elizabeth Cotten Wrote “Freight Train” at 11, Won a Grammy at 90, and Changed American Music In-Between

in Music | May 1st, 2019

When I first moved to North Car­oli­na, one of the first vis­its I made was to the lit­tle town of Car­rboro. There sits a plaque on East Main com­mem­o­rat­ing Eliz­a­beth “Lib­ba” Cot­ton: “Key Fig­ure. 1960s folk revival. Born and raised on Lloyd Street,” just west of Chapel Hill, in 1893. It’s an accu­rate-enough descrip­tion of Cotten’s impor­tance to 60s-era folk, but the lim­it­ed space on the sign elides a much rich­er sto­ry, with a typ­i­cal musi­cal theft and unusu­al late-life tri­umph.

The sign sits next to a retired train depot con­vert­ed into a restau­rant called The Sta­tion, which adver­tis­es two claims to fame—R.E.M. played their first show out­side of Geor­gia there in 1980, and Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten “was inspired to write her famous folk song, ‘Freight Train,’ in the ear­ly 1900s as a trib­ute to the trains that stopped in Car­rboro, which she could hear at night from the bed­room of her child­hood home.” The song became a stan­dard in Amer­i­can folk and British skif­fle.

“Freight Train” was cred­it­ed for years to two British song­writ­ers, who claimed it as their own in the mid-fifties. How­ev­er, not only did Cot­ten write the song, but she did so decades ear­li­er when she was only 11 or 12 years old. It first made its way to Eng­land by way of Peg­gy Seeger, who had heard it from her one­time nan­ny, Lib­ba, when she was young. “Freight Train” was then picked up by sev­er­al singers and groups, includ­ing The Quar­ry­men, the skif­fle band that would become The Bea­t­les.

Cot­ten “built her musi­cal lega­cy,” writes Smithsonian’s Folk­ways, “on a firm foun­da­tion of late 19th- and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry African-Amer­i­can instru­men­tal tra­di­tions.” She had a keen grasp of her musi­cal roots, with her own inno­va­tions. A self-taught gui­tar and ban­jo play­er, she flipped the instru­ments over to play them left-hand­ed. She did not restring them, how­ev­er, but played them upside-down, devel­op­ing a cap­ti­vat­ing fin­ger­style tech­nique “that lat­er became wide­ly known as ‘Cot­ten style.’”

Per­suad­ed by her church to stop play­ing “world­ly music,” Cot­ten all but gave it up and moved to Wash­ing­ton, DC. There, she might have fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty, the sto­ry of “Freight Train” high­light­ing just one more injus­tice in a long his­to­ry of mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed black Amer­i­can music. But the folk-singing Seeger fam­i­ly worked to secure her recog­ni­tion and relaunch her career.

Cot­ten first “land­ed entire­ly by acci­dent” with the Seegers after return­ing a young, lost Peg­gy to her moth­er Ruth at a Wash­ing­ton D.C. depart­ment store where Cot­ten had been work­ing. The fam­i­ly hired her on as help, and did not learn of her tal­ent until lat­er. After her song became famous, Mike Seeger record­ed Cot­ten singing “Freight Train” and a num­ber of oth­er tunes from “the wealth of her reper­toire” in 1957. He was even­tu­al­ly able to secure her the cred­it for the song.

Thanks to these record­ings, Cot­ten “found her­self giv­ing small con­certs in the homes of con­gress­men and sen­a­tors, includ­ing that of John F. Kennedy.” In 1958, Seeger record­ed her first album, made when she was six­ty-two, Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten: Negro Folk Songs and Tunes. “This was one of the few authen­tic folk-music albums avail­able by the ear­ly 1960s,” notes Smith­son­ian, “and cer­tain­ly one of the most influ­en­tial.”

Cotten’s sto­ry (and her gui­tar play­ing) is rem­i­nis­cent of that of Mis­sis­sip­pi John Hurt, who left music for farm­ing in the late 20s, only to be redis­cov­ered in the ear­ly six­ties and go on to inspire the likes of fin­ger­style leg­ends John Fahey and Leo Kot­tke. But Cot­ten doesn’t get enough cred­it in pop­u­lar music for her influ­ence, despite writ­ing songs like “Freight Train,” “Oh, Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” and “Shake Sug­a­ree,” cov­ered by The Grate­ful Dead, Bob Dylan, and a host of tra­di­tion­al folk artists.

Fans of folk and acoustic blues, how­ev­er, will like­ly know her name. She toured and per­formed to the end of her life, giv­ing her last con­cert in New York in 1987, just before her death at age 94. The record­ing indus­try gave Cot­ten her due as well. In 1984, when she was 90, she won a Gram­my in the cat­e­go­ry of “Best Eth­nic or Tra­di­tion­al Folk Record­ing.” Two years lat­er, she was nom­i­nat­ed again, but did not win.

The recog­ni­tion was a long time com­ing. In 1963, when Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with their ver­sion of “Freight Train,” few peo­ple out­side of a small cir­cle knew any­thing about Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten. In 1965, The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle about her head­lined “Domes­tic, 71, Sings Songs of Own Com­po­si­tion in ‘Vil­lage,’” as Nina Rena­ta Aron points out in a pro­file at Time­line.

But thanks to her own qui­et per­sis­tence and some famous bene­fac­tors, Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten is remem­bered not as a house­keep­er and nan­ny who hap­pened to write some songs, but as a Gram­my-win­ning folk leg­end and “key fig­ure” in both Amer­i­can and British musi­cal his­to­ry. In addi­tion to her Gram­my and oth­er awards, she received the Burl Ives Award in 1972 and was includ­ed in the com­pa­ny of Rosa Parks and Mar­i­an Ander­son in Bri­an Lanker’s book of por­traits I Dream a World: Black Women Who Changed Amer­i­ca.

In 1983, Syra­cuse, New York, where she spent her last years and now rests, named a park after her. And it may have tak­en them entire­ly too long to catch up to her lega­cy, but in 2013, the state of North Car­oli­na rec­og­nized one of its most influ­en­tial daugh­ters, putting up the His­tor­i­cal Mark­er sign in her hon­or.

In the videos here, see Cot­ten, in her spry, pro­lif­ic old age, play “Freight Train,” at the top, “Span­ish Flang Dang” and “A Jig,” fur­ther up, in 1969, and “Wash­ing­ton Blues” and “I’m Going Away,” above in 1965.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Rock Pio­neer Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe Wow Audi­ences With Her Gospel Gui­tar

Pete Seeger Teach­es You How to Play Gui­tar for Free in The Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide (1955)

Down­load Images From Rad Amer­i­can Women A‑Z: A New Pic­ture Book on the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Herbie Hancock’s Joyous Soundtrack for the Original Fat Albert TV Special (1969)

in Music, Television | April 30th, 2019

Mil­lions of kids grew up with the groovy yet edu­ca­tion­al car­toon com­e­dy of Fat Albert, and mil­lions of adults may find it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble now to watch the show with­out think­ing of the crimes of its cre­ator. Such is life in the 21st cen­tu­ry, but so it was too at the end of the 1960s when the first iter­a­tion of Fat Albert debuted. There were plen­ty of rea­sons to feel ter­ri­ble about the cul­ture. Yet the music that came out of the var­i­ous jazz/funk/fusion/soul scenes seemed like it couldn’t let any­one feel too bad for long.

In 1969, Her­bie Han­cock had just been let go from the Miles Davis quin­tet and left his­toric Blue Note. Dur­ing this piv­otal time, he signed on to com­pose the sound­track for the TV spe­cial Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, the pre­cur­sor to the episod­ic car­toon Fat Albert and the Cos­by Kids, which ran from 1972 to 1985 and taught seri­ous eth­i­cal lessons about such sub­jects as kind­ness, respect, steal­ing, drugs, scams, kid­nap­ping, smok­ing, racism, and more with orig­i­nal songs.

The lat­er show’s unfor­get­table theme song (“na, na, na, gonna have a good time!”) was not penned by Han­cock, nor were any of its oth­er tunes. Only the orig­i­nal spe­cial used his music, which is maybe why the sound­track is not bet­ter known, as well it should be. “It’s a deeply soul­ful affair,” writes Boing Boing, “that pre­saged Hancock’s 1973 jazz-funk clas­sic Head Hunters.” The album, Fat Album Rotun­da, had gone out of print, but has now been reis­sued on the label Antarc­ti­ca Starts Here.

After lis­ten­ing to the tracks (hear sam­ples above and below), you might find it dif­fi­cult to resist buy­ing a copy. Whether or not you still enjoy the car­toon, the incred­i­ble grooves here evoke much more than its ado­les­cent char­ac­ters and their junk­yard mishaps. This is such an expan­sive, joy­ous album, one “in which Han­cock,” Supe­ri­or Viaduct writes, “clear­ly had a great time.” So too did the rest of the band, “which by the time of record­ing in late 1969 was both razor-sharp and con­fi­dent­ly loose from rehears­ing and tour­ing.”

The band includ­ed three horn play­ers, “Joe Hen­der­son on sax and flute, Gar­nett Brown on trom­bone and John­ny Coles on trum­pet and flugel­horn.” Hancock’s solos run flu­id­ly through each song, held in place by the rock-sol­id swing of Albert Heath’s drums. The com­po­si­tions are com­plex and catchy, with lilt­ing melodies, mean hooks, and big refrains.

The album is instant­ly clas­sic, whether you heard it fifty years ago or just now for the first time. Warn­er Broth­ers agreed, and gave Han­cock and his band a deal on the strength of the album. So did Quin­cy Jones, who record­ed his own ver­sion of the track “Tell Me a Bed­time Sto­ry,” a mel­low, dynam­ic slow burn that builds to some of the finest Fend­er Rhodes play­ing Han­cock put to tape. Fat Albert Rotun­da was hard­ly his first or his last sound­track album, but while it has fall­en into obscu­ri­ty, it should rank as one of his best.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

Mis­ter Rogers, Sesame Street & Jim Hen­son Intro­duce Kids to the Syn­the­siz­er with the Help of Her­bie Han­cock, Thomas Dol­by & Bruce Haack

How Inno­v­a­tive Jazz Pianist Vince Guaral­di Became the Com­pos­er of Beloved Char­lie Brown Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear Debbie Harry’s Stunning Ethereal Vocal Tracks from “Heart of Glass,” “Call Me,” “Rapture,” and “One Way or Another”

in Music | April 29th, 2019

Punk rock “shocked the world” when it arrived in the late 70s, one main­stream news out­let remem­bers. Bands like The Ramones inspired “a gen­er­a­tion of wannabe rock­ers to buy gui­tars and form their own bands…. They proved that you didn’t have to be the next Jim­my Page or Paul McCart­ney to be a rock star.”

The idea is common—that punk bands’ ama­teur­ish­ness gave license to remake musi­cal cul­ture with atti­tude and style… tal­ent and abil­i­ty be damned. There’s a sense in which this is true, but there’s also a sense in which it’s a gen­er­al­iza­tion that ignores the var­i­ous organs—early met­al, avant-garde art rock, new wave, etc.—that made up the larg­er body of punk.

The scene was built on some seri­ous abil­i­ty, begin­ning with the prim­i­tivist Vel­vet Under­ground, who relied on the tal­ents of clas­si­cal­ly-trained mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist John Cale. In James Williamson, The Stooges had one of the finest gui­tarists not only in punk (or “heavy met­al,” as Lester Bangs called 1973’s Raw Pow­er), but in rock and roll writ large.

Talk­ing Heads had one of punk’s best bass play­ers in Tina Wey­mouth, a huge influ­ence on con­tem­po­rary bass gui­tar. When punk arrived on the radio, it did so in the sul­try, chill­ing tones of Deb­bie Harry’s two-and-a-half octave-range voice: in the icy, high-pitched echoes of “Heart of Glass,” Call Me,” and “Rap­ture.”

Before Blondie, Har­ry was stripped down in the punk band The Stilet­tos. And before that, her ethe­re­al voice ele­vat­ed the work of late six­ties folk rock band, Wind in the Wil­lows. As one of sev­en singers, she honed her instru­ment in the demand­ing envi­ron­ment of a vocal ensem­ble. In her best-known Blondie songs, Har­ry har­mo­nizes with her­self in huge trails of reverb, recall­ing the dreamy psy­che­delia of ear­li­er years.

Hear her mul­ti-tracked, heav­i­ly effect­ed iso­lat­ed vocals in three huge Blondie hits fur­ther up, and her much more stripped-down, raw­er vocal track from “One Way or Anoth­er,” below. There’s a lot of under­ground punk and indie and alter­na­tive music that did aban­don musi­cian­ship, with mixed but often bril­liant results. But when it comes to what most peo­ple remem­ber when they remem­ber the sound of ear­ly punk, the genre was just as much dri­ven for­ward by musi­cal abil­i­ty and ded­i­ca­tion, as evi­denced by the career of Deb­bie Har­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vin­tage Clips

Dis­cov­er an Archive of Taped New York City-Area Punk & Indie Con­certs from the 80s and 90s: The Pix­ies, Son­ic Youth, The Replace­ments & Many More

How the Uptight Today Show Intro­duced the Sex Pis­tols & British Punk to Amer­i­can TV View­ers (1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Meet Freddie Mercury and His Faithful Feline Friends

in Life, Music | April 29th, 2019

Ooh, you make me so very hap­py
You give me kiss­es and I go out of my mind, ooh
Mee­ow mee­ow mee­ow
You’re irre­sistible — I love you, Delilah
Delilah, I love you.
—Fred­die Mer­cury

Next time you meet a cat called Delilah, ask her if she was named for Fred­die Mercury’s #1 Pussy­cat.

Like many child­less adults’ pets, Mercury’s cats loomed large, enjoy­ing night­ly phone check-ins when he was on the road, Christ­mas stock­ings, and spe­cial­ly pre­pared food.

Unlike most child­less adults’ pets, Mercury’s feline friends alleged­ly occu­pied their own bed­rooms in his Lon­don man­sion, and were the main ben­e­fi­cia­ries of his will, along with Mary Austin, his close friend and one-time fiancée.

(Fol­low­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of their romance, she float­ed the idea of hav­ing a child togeth­er, a pro­pos­al he reject­ed, say­ing that he would rather have anoth­er cat.)

Mer­cury must’ve tak­en com­fort in know­ing that it wasn’t his celebri­ty the cats were cozy­ing up to, even if they did take advan­tage of his gen­eros­i­ty where fresh chick­en and cat toys were con­cerned.

To them, he was just anoth­er human with a can open­er, a lap, and a capac­i­ty for rock star-sized melt­downs should one of them go miss­ing. (He chucked a hibachi through the win­dow of a guest bed­room when Goliath, his black kit­ten, went on tem­po­rary walk­a­bout.)

Short­ly before Mer­cury’s death, he paid trib­ute to his favorite, Delilah, in a song his Queen band­mates grudg­ing­ly agreed to record, gui­tarist Bri­an May even acqui­esc­ing to a talk box to achieve the nec­es­sary “meow” sounds.

Around the same time, a thought­ful friend arranged for the oth­er mem­bers of Mercury’s beloved menagerie to be immor­tal­ized on a cus­tom-paint­ed vest, which the singer can be seen sport­ing in the offi­cial music video for Queen’s “These Are The Days Of Our Lives,” as well as his final por­trait.

(I’ll have a thought for Fred­die next time I’m in my home state, where a trip to the mall reveals any num­ber of sim­i­lar sar­to­r­i­al dis­plays, most notice­ably on ladies resem­bling my grand­moth­er and her sis­ters…)

Accord­ing to Mercury’s per­son­al assis­tant, Peter “Phoebe” Free­stone, most of Mercury’s cat babies were even­tu­al­ly farmed out to oth­er homes, though his “princess”, Delilah, remained in res­i­dence with a cou­ple of oth­ers, cared for by Austin.

And because there are sure­ly those among our read­ers burn­ing to know if Fred­die Mer­cury swung both ways, we took a deep­er dive through some of Freestone’s mem­o­ries, and dis­cov­ered that:

Fred­die didn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like or dis­like dogs. He wouldn’t go out of his way to avoid them and he had many friends who had dogs at home. He would play with them and stroke them if they came to him when he was vis­it­ing. He just loved cats. He felt that cats were much more inde­pen­dent than dogs and he was very hap­py that his felines had cho­sen him to be their mas­ter.

Find more pic­ture of Fred­die and his cats over at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bored Pan­da and Vin­tage Every­day–most of which were tak­en by Peter Free­stone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fred­die Mer­cury Reimag­ined as Com­ic Book Heroes

A Stun­ning Live Con­cert Film of Queen Per­form­ing in Mon­tre­al, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored to Per­fec­tion (1981)

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City May 13 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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