Pshaw! As she’s very likely aware, there’s not a thing wrong with her dancing. If there were, I doubt she’d be sporting saucy hot pants in the above video for the first single off of the Plastic Ono Band’s Take Me to the Land of Hell.
Her 80-year-old stems are in fantastic shape. Mayhaps this youthful vibe is a reflection of the company she keeps. A bunch of nifty pals from Generations X and Y showed up to shake their tail feathers on camera—the surviving Beastie Boys (who also produced), Reggie Watts, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, gender-bending performer Justin Vivian Bond, and public radio star Ira Glass, to name but a few.
Apparently, she’s not quite as tight with all her dance partners as the video would imply. Glass describes his involvement thusly:
She’s gracious, has to be reminded by a handler who in the world I am. Then totally acts nice, says something along the lines of “I appreciate the work you do” which either means she’s heard my work or she hasn’t…. The song is called “Bad Dancer” so I’m the perfect participant because—though I love to dance, I have no illusions. I’m a spaz. I stand in front of the camera and 20 handlers and hipsters and publicists and crew and Yoko Ono and I think a reporter from Rolling Stone and I tell myself to pretend I can do this and I dance.
Perhaps declaring herself a Bad Dancer is Ono’s way of encouraging self-conscious wall huggers to drop their inhibitions and join in the fun. It’s an approach to life, and aging, that made a cult classic of Harold and Maude.
Definitely worth a quick mention. For a limited time, PBS is making available its latest film from its great American Masters documentary series. My Train A Comin’traces Jimi Hendrix’s “remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper and as an unknown sideman, to R&B stars until his discovery and ultimate international stardom.” It features “previously unseen footage of the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, home movies, and interviews with those closest to Jimi Hendrix.” From what we can tell, PBS will keep this film online for only a matter of days. So watch it while you can.
Before the Grateful Dead recorded their classic eponymous country psych album, before they were the Grateful Dead, they were the Warlocks, “playing the divorcees bars up and down the peninsula,” Jerry Garcia tells us above. Their booking agent “used to book strippers and dog acts and magicians and everybody else.” Their first few gigs “sounded like hell,” says Garcia, “very awful.” In this Blank-on-Blank-animated 1988 interview with former Capital-EMI record executive Joe Smith, Garcia gets into the origin of their name (a story involving the East Coast Warlocks, who might have sued. What he doesn’t mention is that the Velvet Underground—inventors of East Coast psych—also played at that time as the Warlocks.)
Smith was with Warner Bros. when the Dead were signed in 1967. His relationship with the band then was frustrated, and he went so far as to call the recording of their second album “the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves.” But this conversation is a funny, cordial exchange between two very affable people with surprisingly good memories of the time (Smith also once said the Dead “could have put me in the hospital for the rest of my life”). Jerry tells the story of their invitation to Merry Prankster and psychedelic genius Ken Kesey’s acid test parties in La Honda, California. It’s more or less the history of the West Coast acid rock scene and its apotheosis at Haight-Ashbury, so kind of essential watching, I’d say, but at less than six minutes, you can afford to be the judge.
Club owner Hillel Kristal’s legendary CBGB died a slow death. A long, drawn-out affair that, when it came on October 15, 2006, seemed inevitable. The old venue’s state then was perfectly described by Ben Sisario in the New York Times as “the famously crumbling rock club that has been in continuous, loud operation since December 1973, serving as the casual headquarters and dank incubator for some of New York’s most revered groups.”
But CBGB’s still had some life in it, as did all of the old New York haunts that folded under Giuliani and Bloomberg. CBGB outlasted so much of old New York that it seemed indestructible, and thus slightly annoying until it was gone. Yet it needed to be seen into the next world in real style, and so it was, all thanks to Patti Smith.
On the club’s closing night, Smith and band convened to pay tribute to that “dank incubator” by playing not only the bands it birthed but those who came before. At the top, see their live take on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” It lacks the strange delicacy of the original, but once Smith takes off her glasses and Flea, who sat in for a few tunes, cuts loose, it’s a serious rocker. Smith’s ad-lib at the end is as captivating as her announcement—“Rolling Stones!”—is unnecessary.
Smith’s band also played a Ramones medley (above) more than worthy of the formidable Queens foursome. Sure, anyone could play these songs—that was the point. But not many could so well capture the Ramones’ tuneful enthusiasm in the New York band’s ancestral home.
Lastly we bring you Smith and band’s “Pale Blue Eyes.” Although this footage predates Reed’s passing by seven years, it’s still a poignant tribute to the man who perhaps more than any other musician and writer inspired the ethos of the old CBGB. Without Lou Reed, we would have no… better not to finish that sentence. Enjoy the CBGB tribute above and see more of the final night’s celebration here.
Joni Mitchell turns 70 today. A child of rural western Canada, Mitchell endured a series of early hardships that might have crushed a more timid soul — polio, teen pregnancy, an unhappy marriage — but she always managed to follow her muse.
Mitchell made a lifelong habit of guarding her artistic freedom and turning adversity into advantage. When a childhood piano teacher slapped her on the wrist with a ruler for the offense of playing by ear, Mitchell decided she didn’t want any more formal music education. When she found it difficult to form guitar chords with her polio-weakened left hand, she learned to explore alternative, open-chord tunings that have given her music an extra dimension of richness and variation.
As a folk singer in the 1960s, Mitchell managed to fulfill both sides of the Bob Dylan/Joan Baez dichotomy: In one person she was both the songwriter of genius and the woman with the golden voice. And like Dylan, Mitchell didn’t remain a folk singer for long. “I looked like a folk singer,” she once said, “even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” She went on to explore jazz, collaborating with Charles Mingus, Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and others. “Impossible to classify,” says her biography at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Mitchell has doggedly pursued avenues of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes.”
As a musician, Mitchell is mostly retired now. She continues to paint and write poetry. To celebrate today’s milestone we bring you a pair of great performances from her younger years. In the clip above, from the January 21, 1968 episode of the CBC’s The Way it Is, a 25-year-old Mitchell plays her classic early songs “Both Sides Now” and “The Circle Game.” Even after 45 years, the songs can send a shiver down your spine. And below, from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Mitchell’s evolution as a writer and performer are evident in the lilting, melodically inventive “Big Yellow Taxi.” In a previous post, we have also highlighted Mitchell playing a 30-minute set on British TV in 1970.
The 80s saw a number of hits by mostly UK synth-pop and new wave bands with prominent gay members (whether their fans knew it or not) like Culture Club, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Wham!. One of the most impressively talented singers on this burgeoning 80s dance scene was Scottish musician Jimmy Somerville who defined the tremulous falsetto disco sound of bands like Bronski Beat and the Communards. Somerville’s first hit, 1984’s “Smalltown Boy,” was something of an early “It Gets Better” message coupled with a hard-edged dance-pop sound and a very autobiographical video (below). The song, writes Allmusic, dealt openly with Somerville’s sexuality, “a recurring theme [in his work] that met with surprisingly little commercial resistance.”
Today, Somerville lives in Berlin with his dog, and he’s still got that tremendous set of pipes. A Berlin street musician found this out recently while busking “Smalltown Boy” on an acoustic guitar, and bystanders happened to catch it on video (at top). As the young street performer hits the chorus, up walks Somerville to casually join in. The singer starts over and they finish the song in harmony. The more cynical corners of the internet swear the whole thing’s staged, perhaps for a Somerville comeback, but I like to think it’s genuine serendipity, especially at the end as the German busker suddenly has a flash of recognition: “it’s you?” he asks. “It’s me,” says Somerville, “it’s a hit.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death could not have been more devastating to African American communities across the country hoping to see the civil rights leader live to build on the successes of the movement. Despite King’s painfully prophetic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech the day before his assassination in Memphis Tennessee, most people hoped to see him finish the work he’d begun. Those hopes were dashed on April, 4 1968. After King’s death, embittered and embattled minorities in cities North and South erupted in rioting. Boston—a city of de facto segregation to rival Birmingham’s—seemed poised to blow up as well in the Spring of ’68, its “race relations… already on a short fuse.” As public radio program Weekend America describes the conditions:
The tension had been escalating in the mid-60s as the city began to desegregate its public schools. The mayoral race in 1967 pitted a liberal reformer, Kevin White, against Louise Day Hicks, an opponent of desegregation. Hicks ran under the evasive slogan “You know where I stand.” White won the race by less than 12,000 votes.
In this starkly divided city, James Brown went onstage to perform the day after King’s death, and it seems, whether that impression is historically accurate or not, that Brown single-handedly quelled Boston’s unrest before it spilled over into rioting.
The city’s politicians may have had something to do with it as well. Before Brown took the microphone, the narrowly-elected Mayor White addressed the restless crowd (top), asking them to pledge that “no matter what any other community might do, here in Boston, we will honor Dr. King’s legacy in peace.” After Councilor Tom Atkin’s lengthy introduction and the mayor’s short speech, the audience seems receptive, if eager to get the show on.
The archival footage was shot by Boston’s WGBH, who broadcast Brown’s performance that night. (The clip comes from a VH1 “rockumentary” called, fittingly, “The Night James Brown Saved Boston.”) Not long after the band kicked in, the scene became chaotic after a Boston police officer shoved a young man off the stage. Brown intervened, calming the cops and the crowd. His drummer John Starks remembers it this way: “It was almost at a point where something bad was going to happen. And he said [to the police] ‘Let me talk to them.’ He had that power.” In the clip above, watch concertgoers and other bandmembers describe their impressions of Brown’s “power” to reach the crowd.
Brown’s calming effect went beyond this particular gig. See him in the footage above address an audience in Washington, D.C. two days after King’s death. “Education is the answer,” he says, and sets up his own exceptional boostrapping rise from poverty as a model to emulate (“today, I own that radio station”). And WFMU’s Beware of the Blog brings us the audio below, from the year before King’s death—a time still fraught with sporadic riots and nationwide unrest against a system increasingly perceived as oppressive, corrupt, and beyond reform.
On the record, which was “probably distributed to radio stations only,” Brown makes an impassioned plea for “black people, poor people” to “organize” against their conditions, rather than riot. While the message from “Soul Brother Number One”—a title he accepts with humility above—failed to douse the flames in cities like Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, and Louisville, KY, and over 100 others after King’s murder, in Boston, the audience at his concert and the people watching at home on television seemed to heed his calls for nonviolence. “Boston,” writes Weekend America, “remained quiet.”
The site specific opera Invisible Cities is up and running at LA’s historic Union Station. Location aside, something in this original work demands that I subject it to the New York Magazine Approval Matrix I carry around in my mind. It’s a snarky, quadfurcated rating system for the latest trends and happenings.
The phrase “based on an Italo Calvino novel” should guarantee it a spot in the Highbrow range.
Opera purists might consider the fact that ticket holders must rely on wireless headphones to get the full sound mix as reason enough to send this innovative work to the Despicable end of a “deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.” A philistine myself, I think matching wandering singers to an invisible live orchestra (they’re sequestered in a nearby room) sounds Brilliant. It’s as if a silent disco and a flash mob mated, giving birth to a baby with impervious street cred and an incredible set of pipes. Here, have a listen…
Unlike the typical Improv Everywhere lark, the audience here is in on this gag. Though innocent passersby may wonder why various individuals are mooning around the terminal singing, Invisible Cities is a ticketed performance. Indeed, its popularity is such that the producers have needed to add extra free shows. Approval Matrix suggests it’s time to hop a train to LA.
Ayun Halliday dreams that her opera-hating 13-year-old son will one day consent to attend another free dress rehearsal at the Met, so that she can chaperone. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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