Several years back, we featured an eleven-year-old Björk reading a nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík. In this new find, also dating from 1976, you can hear that same eleven-year-old Björk singing in English, in what marks her first recording. Above, she sings the Tina Charles song “I Love to Love” for a school recital. According to Laughing Squid, the “teachers were so impressed with her voice, they sent the recording to the national radio station where it received a great deal of play.” Soon thereafter (in 1977) came her first album, featuring cover art provided by her mom. We’ve previously explored that here on OC.
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You’re most likely to know Mark’s work from the string introduction to REM’s “Shiny Happy People,” but he’s been a staple of the New Orleans recording scene since he moved there in 1982, producing groups like Flat Duo Jets, Glenn Branca, John Scofield, Marianne Faithful, and the Rebirth Brass Band. He and his studio were also featured on the HBO show Treme. He had a whole lifetime of musical development before then, though, first getting signed as a teenager in Los Angeles and recording a single as a solo artist. He then left to study music in Indiana where he was one of two guitarists and several singers for the very adventurous, theatrical Screaming Gypsy Bandits, who released their one album, In the Eye, in 1973. Following the times, he eschewed progressive rock for a more minimalist but still very arty style in New York City with a band called Social Climbers. He’s released two albums since then under his own name in between production work: A jazz-rock inflected singer-songwriter album called I Passed for Human in 1989, and then a more rootsy endeavor called Psalms Of Vengeance in 2009. He is due for a significant archive release within the next year with something like ten albums of additional compositions.
In this episode of Nakedly Examined Music, we pick four of his songs to play in full and discuss. After a short introduction over the song “Flies R All Around Me” by Screaming Gypsy Bandits from Back to Doghead (1970, but not released until 2009), the first full discussion covers “Pissoffgod.com” (featured in the video link in this post) from Psalms of Vengeance (2009). We then turn to “Ash Wednesday and Lent” by Ed Sanders (music by Mark Bingham) from Ed’s album Poems for New Orleans (2007). We then look back to “That’s Why” by Social Climbers from their self-titled album (1981). We conclude with “Blood Moon,” a group improvisation by Michot’s Melody Makers from Cosmic Cajuns from Saturn (2020). This is a band that plays mostly traditional cajun music that Mark was producing and has now for two albums joined as their guitarist.
Around the country today, along with a food-coma inducing serving of turkey, ham, stuffing and all the trimmings, a great many of you will be following another tradition: listening to Arlo Guthrie’s 1968 song “Alice’s Restaurant.” According to one YouTuber, when her kids were young, she’d “sit them down together and play this/torture them with it from beginning to end.” The replies suggest she’s not alone. Somewhere a child has now grown up and is passing the song down to a younger generation.
“Alice’s Restaurant” is about Thanksgiving in the same way that it’s about a restaurant owned by Alice–very little. Instead, it’s a long shaggy but true tale about Guthrie and his friend Rick Robbins helping their friends out after a Thanksgiving dinner that “couldn’t be beat”. With trash filling up the gutted former small-town Massachusetts church where Alice and her husband were living, the two fill up their VW van with the refuse and illegally dump it in the back woods. Guthrie gets arrested, taken to court, and fined for littering, only to have his new criminal record later disqualify him for the draft.
That’s the destination, but it’s the journey that makes the song, an 18-plus minute “talking blues” that Guthrie would have learned from his dad, folk legend Woody Guthrie. Woody in turn learned it from a 1920s country and Blues musician called Chris Bouchillon, who talked his way through songs because his singing voice wasn’t all that good. And the simple picking style Guthrie traces from Mississippi John Hurt to Pete Seeger and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot all the way back to the motherland: “In its infancy, that’s an African style approach to a six-string guitar and I have always loved it,” he told Rolling Stone.
Guthrie started writing the song, titling it “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” an esoteric word meaning a series of absurd events. He workshopped it in coffee houses and live venues, adding to it, taking bits out that weren’t working, playing with the time, from 18 minutes all the way up to 35. In February of 1967 Guthrie was invited to play live on New York City’s WBAI-FM. The recording became a hit, and helped the non-profit station fund-raise, broadcasting the song when a total dollar amount was hit. When the song got too much airplay, they also fund-raised to stop playing the song.
Then came the Newport Folk Festival, where the daytime crowd of 3,500 loved it so much that Guthrie returned for the evening set to play it to 9,500, joined on stage with a who’s‑who of folk legends including Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand. This was a big deal for an 18-year-old musician. The album came in October of that year, where the song took up a whole side. A movie adaptation appeared two years later, with the actual people from the song–including police chief William Obanhein (Officer Obie in the song) and the blind Judge James Hannon–playing themselves in the movie.
The song might not have its staying power if it wasn’t for its themes of resisting authority and bureaucracy, possibly even more than the anti-war message at its end.
“I’ve remained distrustful of authority for my entire life,” Guthrie told Smithsonian Magazine, “I believe it’s one of the great strengths of a democracy, that we take seriously our role as the ultimate authorities by our interest and our votes. Younger people have always had a rebellious streak. It goes with the territory of growing up.”
Guthrie retired from touring, and had retired the song even earlier than that. But it lives on every Thanksgiving in many households. As he told Rolling Stone, that’s a fine legacy:
“Hey if they’re gonna play one song of yours on the radio one day a year, it might as well be the longest one you wrote!”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
One of the earliest known non-human visual artists, Congo the chimpanzee, learned to draw in 1956 at the age of two. Moody, fiercely protective of his work, and particular about his process, he made around 400 drawings and paintings in a style described as “lyrical abstract impressionism.” He appeared several times on British television before his death in 1964. He counted Picasso among his fans and, in a 2005 auction, outsold Warhol and Renoir.
One wonders if whoever gave the four-headed beast known as the Beatles canvas and paint (“possibly Brian Epstein or their Japanese promoter, Tats Nagashima”) remembered Congo as the fab four bounced off the walls in their hotel rooms in Tokyo during their last, 1966 tour, when extra security forced them to stay inside for three full days. Or perhaps their keepers were inspired by the humane practice of art therapy, coming into its own at the same time in mental health circles with the founding of the British Association of Art Therapists in 1964.
“According to photographer Robert Whitaker,” David Wolman writes at The Atlantic, the Beatles’ manager “brought the guys a bunch of art supplies to help pass the time. Then Epstein set a large canvas on a table and placed a lamp in the middle. Each member of the group set to work painting a corner—comic strippy for Ringo, psychedelic for John.” Paul’s corner resembles an oddly erotic sea creature, George’s the spiritual abstractions of Kandinsky. According to the Beatles Bible, it was Nagashima “who suggested that the completed painting be auctioned for charity.”
Whitaker documented the experiment and later pronounced it an immediate success: “I never saw them calmer, more contented than at this time… They’d stop, go and do a concert, and then it was ‘Let’s go back to the picture!’” Once finished, the lamp was lifted, all four signed their names in the center, and the painting was titled Images of A Woman, which may be no indication of the artists’ intentions. Who knows what kind of scouser humor passed between them as they worked.
The painting then passed to cinema executive Tetsusaburo Shimoyama, whose widow auctioned it in 1989 to wealthy record store owner Takao Nishino, who had seen them at Budokan in 1966 during the same historic tour that produced the painting. Then it ended up under a bed for twenty years before being auctioned again in 2012. It’s certainly true the band, most especially Paul and John, had always taken to visual art, as artists themselves or as collectors and appreciators. But this is something special. It represents their only collaborative artwork, aside from some doodles on a card sent to the Monterrey organizers.
When looking at Whitaker’s photographs of the band at work (see video montage above), one doesn’t, of course, think of Congo the chimp or the patients of a psychiatric hospital. Instead, they look like students in a ‘60s alternative school, set loose to create without interruption (but for the occasional mega-concert) to their hearts’ content. Maybe Epstein or Nagashima had just seen the 1966 National Film Board of Canada documentary Summerhill, about just such a school in England? Whatever inspired the zeitgeist‑y moment, we can see why it never came again. That year, they played their final concert and retired to the studio, where they could lock themselves away with their preferred means of creative distraction.
What made Stevie Ray Vaughan such a great guitarist? If you ask Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, a devoted student of the blues, it’s “his timing, his tone, his feel, his vibrato, his phrasing–everything. Some people are just born to play guitar, and Stevie was definitely one of them.” This may come as disappointing news to guitar players who want to sound like SRV but weren’t born with his genes. Hammett assures them it’s possible to approximate his style, to some degree, with the right gear and mastery of his signature techniques. Hammett lays out the SRV repertoire thoroughly, but there is no substitute for the source.
SRV’s dual education in both the British blues and the American blues of his heroes gave him “less reservations and less reasons to be so-called a ‘purist,’” he says in the video above. He then proceeds to blow us away with imitations of the greats and his own particular spin on their techniques.
You could call it a guitar lesson, but as his student, you had better have advanced blues chops and a very good ear. As he runs through the styles of his idols, Vaughan doesn’t slow down or pause to explain what he’s doing. If you can keep up, you probably don’t need the lessons after all.
Although compared, favorably or otherwise, to his idol Jimi Hendrix during his life and after his tragic death at 35, Vaughan also “incorporated the jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery,” Guitar magazine notes, and was “a keen student of Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Lonnie Mack and Otis Rush.” Muddy Waters, in turn, was a great admirer of Vaughan. “Stevie could perhaps be the greatest guitar player that ever lived,” the blues legend remarked in 1979. But like his hero Hendrix, Vaughan’s talent could be overshadowed by his addictions. “He won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white powder alone,” Waters went on.
The drugs and alcohol nearly killed him, but they didn’t seem to cramp his playing. The video above comes from a January 1986 soundcheck, the same year Vaughan’s substance abuse hit its peak and he entered rehab after nearly dying of dehydration in Germany. He would get sober and survive, only to die in a helicopter crash four years later. While his early death may have something to do with the way he has been deified, what comes through in his albums and performances thirty years after he left us is the brute fact of his originality as a blues player.
Perhaps the the most concise statement of this comes from John Mayer’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech:
There is an intensity about Stevie’s guitar playing that only he could achieve, still to this day. It’s a rage without anger, it’s devotional, it’s religious. He seamlessly melded the supernatural vibe of Jimi Hendrix, the intensity of Albert King, the best of British, Texas and Chicago Blues and the class and sharp shooter precision of his older brother Jimmie. Stevie is the ultimate guitar hero.
If you’ve ever had reason to doubt, see it for yourself above.
When the warm, warbly, slightly-out-of-tune sounds of the early Moog synthesizer met the delicate figures of Bach’s concertos, suites, preludes, fugues, and airs in Wendy Carlos’ 1968 Switched-on Bach, the result reinvigorated popular interest in classical music and helped launch the careers of seventies Moog synthesists like composer of instrumental hit “Popcorn,” Gershon Kingsley; occultist and composer of TV themes and jingles, Mort Garson; and pioneering disco producer Giorgio Moroder. These were not the kind of musicians, nor the kind of music, of which Carlos approved. She was mortified to have her album marketed as a novelty record or, later, as instrumental pop.
The reclusive Carlos’ interpretations of Beethoven and moody originals defined the sound of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. This soundtrack work may be one of the few things Carlos has in common with legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer and creator of the eerie Doctor Who theme, Delia Derbyshire. But where Carlos’ film scores evoke an ominous, otherworldly grandeur, Derbyshire’s soundtracks, made for radio and television, use more primitive electronic techniques to conjure weirder, and in some ways creepier, atmospheres.
The 1971 compilation album BBC Radiophonic Music, for example, contains music from three of the Workshop’s most prominent composers—Derbyshire, John Baker, and David Cain—and features one of her most famous themes, “Ziwzih Ziwzih Oo-Oo-Oo,” which critic Robin Carmody described as “her most terrifying moment, tumbling into a nightmare, the sound of childhood at its most chilling.” The work she did for the Radiophonic Workshop was not intended to be particularly musical at all. Workshop employees were instead expected to be technicians of sound, employing new audio technologies for purely dramatic effect.
“The only way into the workshop was to be a trainee studio manager,” Derbyshire remarked in a 2000 interview. “This is because the workshop was purely a service department for drama. The BBC made it quite clear that they didn’t employ composers and we weren’t supposed to be doing music.” Nonetheless, she applied her tape loops, oscillators, and other musique concrete techniques to at least one classical piece, Bach’s “Air on a G String.” The resulting interpretation sounds entirely different from Carlos’ electric Bach. It is, Carmody writes, “an ice-cold nocturnal rewrite… the stuff of a seven-year-old child’s most unforgettable nightmares.” The piece does not seem to have been made for a BBC production. Derbyshire herself dismissed the recording as “rubbish,” though she admitted “it has a fair number of admirers.”
Soon after its release, in a 1:44 snippet on the compilation album, Derbyshire left the Workshop to pursue her own musical direction. She composed music for the stage and screen, then became disillusioned with the music industry altogether. The availability of the analog synthesizers popularized by Carlos’ record had rendered her way of making music obsolete. But as the many recent tributes to Derbyshire’s legacy testify, her work has been as influential as that of the early analog synth composers, on everyone from the Beatles to contemporary experimental artists. Derbyshire’s playful weirdness has been oft-imitated over the decades, but no one has ever interpreted Bach quite like this before or since.
Last laughs can be sweet, and according to music journalist, Anthony DeCurtis, his friend, the late Lou Reed, “reveled” in the critical drubbing that greeted his 3rd solo album, 1973’s Berlin.
Not immediately, however.
Berlin, which followed hard on the heels of Reed’s widely adored Transformer, had a painful, protracted delivery.
This was due in part due to RCA execs getting cold feet about releasing Reed’s grim concept record as a double album. This necessitated a lot of pruning, a week before deadline.
Producer Bob Ezrin, who had planted the idea for a concept album based on a track from Reed’s eponymous first solo effort, was detoxing in the hospital, and thus not present for the final mastering.
But much of the hell leading to Berlin’s release was a hell of Reed’s own making.
His dependence on drugs and alcohol hampered the writing process, as per Reed’s first wife, Bettye Kronstad, who filed for divorce midway through the process.
If you want a glimpse of what that marriage’s final days might have been like, look to Berlin.
Kronstad was distressed to find many private details from their relationship on display in the tragic rock opera. There was some fictionalization, but Reed also put his thumb on the scales when it suited him, in songs like “The Kids,” which recast Kronstad’s late mother in a particularly unfair way.
Reed once took a shot at the album’s critical reception, suggesting that people didn’t like it because its depiction of a miserable couple, whose union is marred by infidelity, domestic abuse, addiction, and suicide, was “too real”:
It’s not like a TV program where all the bad things that happen to people are tolerable. Life isn’t like that. And neither is the album.
There are people I’ll never forgive for the way they fucked me over with Berlin. The way that album was overlooked was the biggest disappointment I ever faced.
Berlin was a big flop and it made me very sad. The way that album was overlooked was probably the biggest disappointment I ever faced. I pulled the blinds shut at that point, and they’ve remained closed.
In 2006, Reed took centerstage in Brooklyn for a 5‑night theatrical run of Berlin that also featured a 35-piece ensemble, original guitarist Steve Hunter, and dreamy videos by the director’s daughter, Lola, starring Emmanuelle Seigner as an abstract sketch of the doomed protagonist, Caroline.
The resulting concert film, which St. Ann’s Warehouse is streaming for free through November 29, proved far more popular with critics than the 1973 record had been. (Three years prior to the St Ann’s staging, Rolling Stone upgraded its original opinion of the album from career ending disaster to 344th Greatest Album of All Time.)
Stephen Holden’s glowing New York Times review of the film made multiple mention of angels and demons, as is perhaps to be expected when a work combines Lou Reed, a Sid and Nancy-ish romance, a children’s choir, and the ethereal voice of Anohni, late of Antony and the Johnsons.
Readers, see for yourself, and let us know—did RCA’s promotional poster for the original album get something right nearly 50 years ago? Is this “a film for the ears?”
The animated video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” opens on a saxophonist with a familiar story—one so well-known to his bandmates they can read it on his face. But then the perspective shifts, and we follow instead the woman (or “girl”) of his woes, as she comes to see him play, gets ogled and turned into a fantasy by the men in the club, pursues the resident lothario, crushing the hearts of them all, including the saxophonist, who plays his blues instead of collapsing into a drink.
At least that seems to be the story, a typical nightlife scene rendered in a very dynamic, atypical way. The video, from a track off Gilmour’s 2015 album Rattle that Lock, was directed by Danny Madden for Ornana Films, who write, “The music video is made of about 9,000 frames of animation that were touched by several hands to get the layered contours, vibrant colors, and exaggerated character design of old French Lithograph posters. We wanted to create a moving version of that look, as if each frame had all the layers stamped on the page.”
An incredible amount of intensive artistic labor went into creating the boozy, swirling effects in each scene. “We animated with pencil, then contour lines were gone over with a brush tip marker. We used gouache to get nice life in the varying brushstrokes, then we layered the contours over the paint layer in the compositing step so that the colours would do interesting things when they ran together.” Maybe these images could be recreated convincingly with digital effects… but I suspect not.
The song “looks back at [Gilmour’s] earliest musical influence,” writes a Guardian review of the Rattle that Lock. If so, it’s a nascent influence that did not emerge often in his Pink Floyd playing, though the song may also indirectly pay tribute to the jazz-trained Richard Wright, memorialized elsewhere on the album. You can see several more scenes from this extraordinary video at Dezeen.
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