GEMINI SPACECRAFT

Lowman Pauling & The "5" Royales

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

"5" Royales in hot pink, 1 Lowman Pauling with Guitar Face

This post is largely motivated by the recent circulation on the interwebz of the above photo. I mean, check it OUT! Pink dinner jackets! A black lacquer Duo Jet! Guitar Face! For the full run-down on R&B guitar legend L.P. & The "5" Royales, see the Hound's great post on the subject. Oh yeah, and these two records kill.

Say It - The "5" Royales

The Slummer the Slum - The "5" Royales

Weegee the Famous

2012-01-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

January seems to be month of Weegee (nee Arthur Fellig, June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968) here in New York, with two exhibitions of the fabled photog's work running concurrently, for the next few weeks, at least. The Steven Kasher Gallery, at 521 West 23rd Street, currently features the exhibition "Weegee Naked City," scheduled to show from January 12 to February 25, 2012.

Meanwhile, at the International Center of Photography, at 1163 Avenue of the Americas, another show "Weegee: Murder is My Business," just opened last week. It runs through September 2, 2012.

Each exhibition is extensive and unique. Fans of the original and possibly still the greatest photographer of New York's lost, hard-boiled, nocturnal life ought to enjoy them both.

Jimmy Castor: June 23, 1947 - January 16, 2012

2012-01-16T21:34:00.004-05:00

"Trogolodyte (Cave Man)": My favorite jam at age 10. I wasn't too sure at the time what "sockittome" meant, but I always laughed at the name "Bertha Butt." Now who's Bertha Butt gonna sockitto? RIP Jimmy Castor.

"The Death of Rock and Roll" ...Happy Birthday Elvis, That Is

2012-01-08T12:28:00.001-05:00

Elvis Presley, January 8, 1935 - August 16, 1977. Was he King of Rock 'n' Roll, or its Kiss of Death? Does it matter either way at this point? He cut some fine records and had some mighty cool hair. So happy birthday Elvis. Here's a clip of his version of "I've Got a Woman."

The Maddox Brothers and Rose re-did the tune as "The Death of Rock and Roll" for Columbia Records in 1956, featuring Don Maddox on the lead vocal.

Finally, here's a clip of ol' Don Maddox doing "The Death of Rock and Roll" in 2011 (!!) at last year's Hillbillyfest, supported by Deke Dickerson and Dave Stuckey.

Moon Mullican on the TeeVee!

2012-01-07T12:23:00.001-05:00

Moon bangs out a quick version of "Cherokee Boogie" for the cameras. He's introduced by country crooner George Morgan, on Morgan's television show (anyone know it was called?), from probably 1956-1957.

Charlie Ryan: Of Okies, Arkies, and Hot Rod Rockets

2012-01-02T12:00:00.000-05:00

Our story begins with what is, by now, familiar history: From out of the dust bowl of the 1930’s poured a great, westward moving horde. An entire generation of Okies, Arkies, Linkhorns, and Panhandlers crowded into jalopies, hopped freights, stuck out their thumbs, and wore out shoe-leather—those, that is, who didn’t simply roam the barren barefoot—all bound for the mythical sugar bowl of California. They settled in towns like Fresno, Stockton, Bakersfield, Compton, and San Pedro. These places became the new hillbilly enclaves of the west, booming through World War II and tuning into Town Hall Party.
        Charlie Ryan was not among them—at least, not until later, when his records would land in their jukeboxes and his boots would scuff their stages.
        Ryan was born in Graceville, Minnesota, December 19, 1915, several years and several hundred miles safely beyond the reach of the “Black Blizzards” of prairie dust. Another son of 20th Century American mobility, Ryan likewise moved west, first to Polson, Montana, where the young singer/guitar-picker formed his first group, The Montana Range Riders. He eventually settled in Spokane, Washington, in 1943, according to once source. Another claims that the Range Riders took their first regular engagement at a Spokane joint called the Bell Tavern as early as 1935. One thing we do know is that Ryan was calling his band the Timberlines by the late 40’s. In 1950 he wrote his signature song.
        “Hot Rod Lincoln” was essentially another talking blues in the old Chris
Bouchillon/Woody Guthrie tradition—Guthrie, the original “Do-Re-Mi” man, knew a
little something about Okies and Arkies. More specifically, Ryan’s song borrowed heavily from the work of yet another Arkie, in this case Arkie Shibley, whose “Hot Rod Race” was released in 1950 on the Gilt-Edge label and peaked at #5 on the country charts. What’s more, Shibley had also relocated to Spokane, and as fate would have it, his and Ryan’s tire tracks would cross.

        Arkies, Okies, talking blues, speed,… Shibley’s “Hot Rod Race” was quickly followed by “Hot Rod Race No. 2,” and “Hot Rod Race No. 3." Had the world gained some new thing under the sun? The Arkie Hot Rod genre was born.

The Grapevine Hill

        In typical gear-head fashion, Ryan simply modified the stock version to get his “Hot Rod Lincoln.” The song was inspired, so the story goes, by Ryan’s own experiences, particularly his frequent road-trips to play the Paradise Club in Lewiston, Idaho. Some tell of Ryan’s own ’41 Lincoln one night chasing a Cadillac up the Lewiston Grade—and the telephone poles there looked like picket fences. And yet, presumably in tribute to Shibley’s record, to which he owed a great debt, Ryan likewise set his tale on the Grapevine Hill, in San Pedro, CA, set it, that is, right in the heart of Town Hall Party’s broadcast range.
        And so, it might be said that with a lifted verse and a boogie guitar, Charlie
Ryan joined that westward rushing horde.
        Ryan and his band—now called the Timberline Riders—first recorded “Hot Rod Lincoln” in 1955, releasing it on the Souvenir label. This version pretty much sank without notice, except that it did eventually catch the ear of 4-Star Records, who re-released it near the end of 1959. It became on of the biggest country hits of 1960.
        Billboard Magazine described it: “Hot Rod Lincoln—Charlie Ryan tells the story of the souped-up Lincoln and what happens when it tries to pass a Cadillac. Interesting wax that has a sound and a chance. Watch it.”
        About the record’s sound, Nick Tosches, in Country: The Biggest Music in America (Stein & Day, 1977), wrote “steel guitarist Neal Livingston wrought sounds of speed, sirens, and whiplash behind Ryan’s tough boogie beat and amphetamine vocal. Ryan had been playing, in his phrase, ‘country music with a beat’ since about 1947.”
        What Tosches described was for Charlie Ryan and the Timberline Riders a formula for a string of follow-up singles. “Hot Rod Lincoln” gave birth to “Hot Rod Hades,” “Hot Rod Guitar,” “Side Car Cycle,” et. al. But Ryan and the boys never again achieved the chart success of that first hit. Nevertheless, with that string of singles, the saga of that fabled ’41 Lincoln went serial.
        In October 1960, 4-Star released “Side Car Cycle” b/w “Steel Rock”. Instrumentally speaking, the A-side nearly replicated its predecessor, but this time Ryan’s “amphetamine vocal” told of another joyride, one fueled by Union 76, sure, but also by the singer’s desire to put “the miles between me’n jail.” But, lo, along came some dame “stacked like a sack of barley” riding that side-car Harley. She poked fun, and another race ensued. The Hot Rod Lincoln put her in a hell of a pickle and she quit ridin’ that side-car sickle. The B-side instrumental featured swinging back-and-forth action, with the steel and that “tough boogie guitar” swapping licks. The record made the Billboard Top 100, but ultimately fizzled.
        Around this time Billboard reported that “Charlie Ryan is back in Spokane, Wash., after a two-week tour with Jim Reeves, Ferlin Husky, and Johnny Horton…Most of the trek was spent in Canada…Ryan had his 12-cylinder hot-rod Lincoln with him on tour to promote the song.”
        Formulaic follow-up singles and side-show gimmicks: American Show-biz at work.
        Still borrowing heavily from Shibley, but adding more inventive titles and premises, Ryan took another crack with the serial’s next installment. “Hot Rod Hades,” from 1961, offered a warning about the grim afterlife awaiting the unrepentant speed demon. The flip, “Hot Rod Guitar,” proved again that those B-side instros could hold their own.

        Then, in June of 1963, Ryan released a straight cover of “Hot Rod Race,” a tribute to Shibley, his primogenitor in hot rod boogie. It was coupled with… a re-release of “Hot Rod Lincoln.” Ryan’s hot rod was running out of gas. And this when Rock ‘n’ Roll stood on the verge of being invaded not by Okies, nor even Arkies, but by funny-talkin’ Europeans in need of haircuts. But that’s just more familiar history.
        Charlie Ryan was more concerned with another foreign threat.
        Who could be better suited to whup the Ruskies than a speed-talkin’, boogie-beatin’ hot-rodder, he who embodied American Know-How, that noble virtue that could help rescue a man from a dust bowl, hop up a ’41 Lincoln, milk a show-biz gimmick, and woo a girl “stacked like a sack of barley”? That’s who you want on your side in a tale of Cold War conflict like “Hot Rod Rocket.” Clearly, Charlie Ryan didn’t shy away from topical material. And yet, the tale, like that war itself, remained unresolved by the end of the side.

Countries are bettin' and the stakes are high
on just who is gonna rule the sky.
Now this is not the end of this here race,
cause that hot rod cat's still out in space.

Auld Lang Syne

2011-12-31T12:02:00.000-05:00

Photo by Weegee

Happy New Year! from Gemini Spacecraft. May your '12 play the Dozens not too harshly with you. And steer clear of this guy (below) tonight...

"I Better Get Them Cha-Cha Heels...!"

2011-12-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

Happy Holidays from the Gemini Spacecraft Crew

2011-12-24T17:30:00.000-05:00

Jingle Jangle

2011-12-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

The Penguins -- Jingle Jangle

Christmas in Jail

2011-12-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

The Youngsters -- Christmas in Jail

Happy Birthday Keef

2011-12-18T11:01:00.000-05:00

"Televisions are boring anyway..." Note the camera crew visible in some of these shots. Of "Cocksucker Blues," the documentary of the Stones 1972 tour of the U.S., filmmaker Robert Frank has said that most of the stunts were staged, largely because if he'd simply filmed what was really going on no one would have believed it. Keith Richards, sixty-eight years old today. Believe that.

Turkey Neck Stretch

2011-11-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

Turkey Neck Stretch - Gradie O'Neal and the Bella Tones, 1958.

Lee Harvey Oswald: "They Say He Shot the President"

2011-11-24T10:00:00.005-05:00

Lee Harvey Oswald, October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963.
"Lee Harvey was a Friend of Mine" - Homer Henderson, released 198?.

Hillbilly Hayride #5: Caffeine & Nicotine

2011-11-20T10:00:00.006-05:00

Curtis Gordon - Caffeine & Nicotine, released June, 1954.

Photo of C.G. courtesy Rockin' Country Style

Vernon Green & The Medallions: Of Puppettutes and Pizmotalities

2011-11-12T10:00:00.011-05:00

Vernon Green at 6 o'clock.

Much has already been said regarding the true meaning of “sweet pizmotality” and “the puppettutes of love” as these phrases were uttered by the Medallions on their 1954 single “The Letter.” Many have speculated on their etymology--or should we say "etyzmotality"? Some trace that jive back to the ancients, still others to the label on cans of Royal Crown Hair Dressing.

Of his own enigmatic lyric, Medallions lead man Vernon Green once said, “You have to remember, I was a very lonely guy at the time. I was only fourteen years old, I had just run away from home, and I walked on crutches.” Teener love eluded young Green, whose body had been wracked by polio at an early age. And so, between joyrides and acne creams, he dreamed of other-wordly things. From these dreams he wrought doo-wop gold.

As a single, "Buick 59" b/w "The Letter," on the DooTone label, might perfectly illustrate that old schizoid doo-wop formula, where a revved-up rocker on the A-side was almost always coupled with a ballad, often a sappy one at that, on the B-side.

For more on that let us refer to the September 1954 installment of “Notes from the R&B Beat” (does anyone know the original source for this column?) as compiled in Galen Gart’s incredible serial First Pressings: The History of Rhythm & Blues:

“After seven years of trying to break into the record market with a big hit, Dootsie Williams, prexy of DooTone Records has at long last come up with a big one. His latest waxing of ‘Buick 59’ b/w ‘The Letter’ by the Medallions has cracked wide open here in L.A. and it’s still a toss-up as to which side is the biggest. Spinner Hunter Hancock picked both sides of the disk as his ‘Record of the Week’.”

All of this happened when the imaginative balladeer was just a kid, and that kid knew that nothin’ could shake the heartbreak of frustrated pizmotalities better than a fine set of wheels. The most Cruise-O-Matic of Medallions sides, “Buick 59” and “Speedin,” (there were others: "' 59 Volvo" "Push Button Automobile" etc., etc.,) don’t merely describe so much as they sonically re-enact in full doo-wop glory the thrill of burning a “tankful of ethyl gas.” For these exploits, Green, ever the dreamer, even invented a car that didn’t yet exist. In fact, it would never exist. No Buick 59 ever rolled off the line in Detroit, or anywhere else. But if it had, then you know that bucket would have burned only high-grade pizmotane. Nothing but the best when your puppettutes is ridin’ by your side.

In “Speedin’,” released after “Buick 59,” also on the DooTone label, the premise is simple enough: the singer’s gotta meet that girl, so he’s “Speedin’! Doo-do-do-do-doo.” However, without gas, even a Buick 59 becomes just another hoopdie. Green’s bucket always either runs out of gas, blows a tire, or the cops catch up to it just before it carries him to that dreamed-of Shangri-La.

It’s the classic American bummer: fulfillment of desire remains always just beyond reach. Behind the dream lies emptiness, a lonely crockashit.

After the early singles, as Green’s performances matured, we begin to hear real desolation, as in the ghostly “Sweet Breeze,” from 1956 on the Specialty label, credited not to the Medallions, but to Vernon Green and the Phantoms. Here, Green didn’t have to invent goofy words to say it:

The wind has a feeling and a soul.

I trust in thee, but please don’t be cold.
The sweet, sweet breeze
blows softly through her golden hair.
Tell me, does she really, really care?
It just isn't fair.

Gone is the Clearasil, gone the greasy kid stuff, and the remedial math of matrimony. In the end there’s only the wind, that, and maybe a can of Royal Crown Hair Dressing.

Goin' Instro-Mental #6: Cottonpickin'

2011-11-09T10:00:00.003-05:00

"Cottonpickin'" by The Night Raiders, as in Mickey Hawks & The Night Raiders, originally released on the Profile label in 1959. This is a 60's repro on the HUNCH label, which operated outta Pittsboig, I think.

Carl Gardner of The Coasters: May They Bury Him In Pure, Pure Herringbone

2011-06-14T21:09:00.004-04:00


Classic Coasters line-up, left to right: Billy Guy, Will Jones, Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, and Adolph Jacobs

Carl Gardner, the last surviving member of the original line-up of The Coasters, died Sunday. His NY Times obit can be found here. "May they," as T Tex Edwards said, "Bury him in pure, pure herringbone."

Wanda Jackson on the TeeVee!

2011-04-05T10:30:00.003-04:00

Backed by the early 70s line-up of the Buckaroos on Hee-Haw, performing "Big Iron Skillet."

Sid King & The Five Strings

2011-03-29T10:30:00.001-04:00

Sid King & The Five Strings -- Let 'Er Roll

Rose Maddox on Milk Cows & Matrimony

2011-03-27T10:28:00.001-04:00

Rose Maddox in a detail from Joe Coleman painting "A Doorway to Joe".

On some old hillbilly records, use of the word matrimony underscores the sexual dimension in that “union of man and woman in marriage.” Wayne Raney’s 1949 hit “Haul Off & Love Me,” which went to #1 on the Country charts before crossing over to the Top 40, suggests with a leer that that union is sealed by love, law, and genitals. The singer, lookin’ to score in the only way that good Christian values allow, pursues his object of desire through a proper courtship—about two verses in duration—before reaching that promised land at the altar, and in between her thighs. At that point he proclaims Now I can feel your warm lips on me, hear you breathin’ soft & fine/ I can feel the matrimony crawlin’ up & down my spine!

And this from the same guy who’d later record “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (And a Lot Less Rock and Roll)”!
           But, in “Haul Off & Love Me,” Raney still tows the Christian line, and towing the line never generated much good material for Country & Western songs. For that you need sin, or at least a more hard-bitten realism. Maybe the two go hand in hand.
           Enter “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band,” aka The Maddox Brothers and Rose. Who better to bite hard on reality than a band of Dustbowl Okies? From the late 40s through the mid-50s, brothers Fred, Cal, Henry, Don and sister Rose Maddox cut a slew of sides for the 4-Star and Columbia labels, several of which treat the subject at hand with swing, humor, and occasionally, a big helping of milk & butter.

           “I Want to Live and Love”--Our opener, and sort of the MB&R’s theme song. Rose’ll tell you what this love can do, and with a swingin’ steel guitar break thrown in, to boot. That glad feeling is the working girl’s friend, just ask Friendly Henry, on the friendly mandolin.
           “Milk Cow Blues”—If the word matrimony suggests sex, then the phrase milk & butter waves it under yr nose, then spreads it all over your toast. Lots of acts did great versions of this number, but Rose delivers it with a certain ache, you can tell “by the way she lows.” For lustiness, her version makes those of Elvis and The Kinks seem droopy by comparison. Add the fact that that’s one of Rose’s brothers, probably Fred, volunteering to “drive ol’ heifer in” and, well, you get some pretty colorful hillbilly music, all right.
           “Love is Strange”--The Mickey &Sylvia hit, played pretty straight here. Recorded after the MB&R had split, and Rose had signed as a solo act with Columbia. Raises that eternal question: which came first, the Love or the milk & butter? Or are they one and the same, and inseparable?
           “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again”-- Uh Oh, just goes to show, the wages of fear, in this case the fear of becoming an old maid, is to end up marrying a husband who “chaws tobacca and snores in his sleep.” O Lord, she wishes she was a single girl again. A universal sentiment, applicable to bride and groom, as Fred yells in the background “Sometimes I wish I was a single boy again!”
           “Alimony”--Rhymes with “stale baloney,” upon which her mark, that is, her luckless ex, must feed, since every time he gets a dime she wants that alimony. That monotonous melody is as relentless as her ex’s bad luck. Rose’s unflinching deadpan reflects the chill of a stone cold heart, the flipside, if you will, of a heart in love.
           “Faded Love”-- After the gladness flees, after the milk & butter’s all gone and the alimony too, there are only the stars above, which heaven will miss, like you’ll miss your faded love. Brother Fred Maddox rescues this one again, just when the sad fiddle brings a tear to your eye. “Our love’s not faded,” he says. Then, cracking up, adds “It’s just full bloom!”

Funny, from this somewhat random selection of songs, those about matrimony don’t say much about love, and those about love don’t much mention matrimony. Marriage based on romantic love is a fairly modern concept. And, hey, if you don’t get it right the first time, you can always “Marry Me Again.”

National Sputnik Monroe Day & World Premier of "Memphis Heat"

2011-03-24T09:00:00.001-04:00


Image courtesy Off the Top Rope Productions

March 24th is now National Sputnik Monroe day, commemorating the legendary grappler celebrated in Robert Gordon's It Came from Memphis and elsewhere. In the late 50s, Sputnik effectively put the bionic elbow drop on segregation at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis. Go here to read more about this, or pick up a copy of Gordon's great book.

Coinciding with National Sputnik Monroe Day is the world premiere of the Memphis wrestling documentary Memphis Heat. If you're in Bluff City tonight and want to catch the movie and ceremony for the late, great Sputnik, go here for more details.

"Sputnik Hires a Band" on Peak Records (a label owned by Lansky's clothiers?). Year? Supposedly the first wrestler record, even before Classy Freddy Blassie's "Pencil Necked Geek."

Cramped

2011-03-12T17:01:00.002-05:00

What’s this? A random, non-topical post on The Cramps? That’s right. Maintaining non-topical irrelevance is the very raison d’etre of Gemini Spacecraft. Besides, some pretty ace footage has recently surfaced catching Lux & Ivy and their various cohorts in their prime, back before they trafficked in sorta hokey self-parody, that stuff of middle-aged rock 'n' roll.

The first clip originally ran as a wrap-up story for a local Memphis news show, circa 1977, when the band was there in Bluff City cutting those first sessions at Phillips Recording with Alex Chilton. I first saw it sometime in the mid-90s, when author/documentarian Robert Gordon included it in his collection of Memphis music shorts he called “Banned, Burned, & Forgotten” (or something like that), which he showed during his book tour for It Came From Memphis. Yes, I know the footage is kinda rough. But the band rocks! And check out Bryan Gregory! Dig Axl Chitlin’s effete, southern stoner accent. Then of course, there’s the story's end, when you get to hear the Memphis tv journalist announce The Cramps' show at the Orpheum, all those year ago. Of particular interest is that moment when the news guy mentions the other bands on the bill that night. How often to ya get to here a “The Clits” on TeeVee? Is it just me, or did journalism have more integrity back then?

The second clip catches the band in ’81, with Kid Congo Powers in tow, playing a smokin’ version of their “hit” version of the Ronnie Cook & the Gaylads tune “Goo Goo Muck.”

You're Nobody til Somebody Loves You

2011-02-14T12:40:00.002-05:00

Goin' Instro-Mental #5: The Green Mosquito

2011-02-08T13:01:00.000-05:00

The Green Mosquito -- The Tune Rockers

"C'mon, Who Are You?" - Tura Satana in The Astro Zombies

2011-02-05T21:08:00.003-05:00

R.I.P. Tura Satana

Blues Hangover - Hangover Blues

2011-02-05T12:54:00.034-05:00

Label scan nicked from TheHoundBlog

Now lay aside all worries about chickens and eggs. What we wanna know today is which one do you have, a Blues Hangover or the Hangover Blues? Strung together like so, the titles nearly form a palindrome, or do a figure 8, or make two railroad tracks, one of ‘em goin’ away, the other one comin’ back.


Slim Harpo

“I am the Alpo and the omego,” sez the Alpha Dog. He chases his own tail, but ends up sniffing his own anus. He reads a portent there: Blues was here in the Beginning, Blues will be here in The End. Like most Blues, these two had their antecedents. The Texas Boogie-man Lloyd Glenn, who played piano for T-Bone Walker, among others, woke up with our first hangover, an instrumental version of Blues Hangover released in 1950 on the Swingtime label. Although a fairly low-down number, Glenn still drank pretty smooth hooch. His hangover is a product of an earlier era of big band R&B. Ten years later, Slim Harpo swilled from a much raunchier batch of bathtub gugalug, and he added this lament: I done gave my baby $20 for Christmas, and all I got was a slice of jelly cake. Drink up, Slim, because nowadays, $20 is a pretty fair price for a slice.

Maddox Brothers and Rose

The hayseed hears the cottonpicker’s same three chords, repeated 100,000 times, all the way from Baton Rouge to Bakersfield. Love and theft, that’s the story of American music, at least during the 20^th Century, anyway. Blues in the beginning, blues in the end. Hangover Blues by the Maddox Brothers and Rose borrowed its title from a 1951 b-side by the Johnny Otis Orchestra, a West Coast, Central Ave R&B stalwart. Decca released the Maddox Bros and Rose's newer version in early 1953 amid the vacuum left by a recently deceased Hank Williams. Hank knew about hangovers. While walking in the shadow of death he tipped a few bottles of Wine Headed Baby. Did he ever see his own skull floating near the bottom? While he was busy dyin’, the Maddox Brothers and Rose gave the hangover a few new lines, just like Slim Harpo would later. Walkin’ down the street with my head hangin’ low, my bottle is empty I ain’t got no dough. I gotta go… I gotta go… I gotta go and lose these mean hangover blues.

Blues Hangover - Slim Harpo

Hangover Blues - Maddox Brothers and Rose

Loretta Lynn on the Tee-Vee!

2011-02-02T11:57:00.000-05:00

Shirley Lee -- Bobby Lee Trammell

2011-01-31T13:23:00.000-05:00

Shirley Lee -- Bobby Lee Trammell

Lip-Sync Freakout #1: P.J. Proby

2011-01-30T13:35:00.001-05:00

German television, 196?

On the GS Bookshelf: Alphaville

2011-01-28T13:16:00.003-05:00

Just try talking about the Lower East Side now without using the phrase “back in the day.” Betcha can’t do it. The particular “back in the day” of interest in Alphaville, 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City’s Lower East Side (St. Martins, 2010) is the 1980s. At that time, the storied neighborhood, already prey to encroaching gentrification, still housed lots of working class immigrants and low-rent bohemians, while certain of its streets functioned as open-air drug bazaars. And while the crack epidemic was in full swing, the “D” in Avenue D stood for Dope. Heroin flooded through the Ave D projects, spreading through the Alphabet, and outward from there to the rest of New York City, and the entire country.

Retired New York City cop Michael Codella worked the Lower East Side narcotics beat during this infamous period, first as a housing cop patrolling the massive Riis and Wald Houses on Avenue D, and then as a DEA deputy investigating one of the D’s heaviest street dealing crews. Alphaville tells his story.

Few people are prepared from day one for their chosen vocation. Codella, to hear him tell it, was such an apprentice. He came of age in the 1970s out at the end of the LL line in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood populated, at that time, largely by wise-guys and cops. Codella’s own family tree also reflected this demographic slant. His dad was a housing cop before him. His grandfather, originally from Sicily, had once been on the payroll of Lucky Luciano. These early influences, Codella argues, sharpened him up for duty on the D, where harsh reality often called for a fast-and-loose interpretation of the NYPD Patrol Guide, and conscience demanded some fundamental guiding code. Gramps, it turned out, provided the latter, in the form of an old world ethos, transplanted to Canarsie, of “Behave-a yourself,” meaning roughly a combination of “don’t get caught” and "always have fun."

Codella clearly enjoyed his police work. He makes no bones about having been hung up on the adrenaline pumping thrill it gave him. He and co-author Bruce Bennett—who some readers might recognize as the guitarist for the A-Bones, himself a long-time Lower East Sider from “back in the day”—do a great job of injecting some of that kick into Alphaville. Structurally Alphaville resembles Stanley Booth’s book about the Stones (which changes titles with each new printing—currently it’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones), in that it alternates installments “present time” story, i.e., scenes from the D, with chapters from Codella’s past. This pattern eventually leads to the big payoff, the investigation of the notorious 3^rd and D crew, aka, “The Forty Thieves.” If in Booth’s book the driving question is “what happened to Brian?,” in Alphaville it’s “how did Mikey C end up on the D?”

Reading co-authored books sort of resembles watching a cricket match after a lifetime of baseball. The rules of the more exotic game remain mysterious. Codella describes at length the good chemistry he enjoyed with his old police partner Gio. Howzabout the chemistry with his more recent partner, Bruce Bennet? These two--the hepcat and the narc--would seem to make for an odd combo. In another sense though, their collaboration befits their subject. After all, they did both roam the same streets “back in the day,” in a neighborhood where everyone, in one way or another, felt the effects of the Avenue D dope trade.

Hillbilly Hayride #4 - Don't Drop It

2011-01-06T16:30:00.004-05:00

Don't Drop It - Terry Fell

Crusher on the TeeVee!

2011-01-04T13:30:00.008-05:00

"You Remember the Crusher claw-hold. I'm gonna stick it in his stomach, move a few spaghettis on the side, and meatballs!"

"Chillicothe, You Can Go to Hell!," A New Year's Greeting from Gemini Spacecraft

2010-12-31T15:06:00.025-05:00

Time, once again, to hit the annual reset button on the olde Gregorian calendar. For a lot of folks, the season is rife with vows of personal reform, those proverbial New Year’s Resolutions. January tends to be a good month for gyms, who typically see a spike in new membership, as do Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. This time of year, many resolve to get in shape, lose the gut, put down the bottle, and be nicer to people on the subway.

Society has even created institutions to assist people with such reform, or, in some cases, with “rehabilitation.” These range from the Betty Ford Clinic, to bible camp, to the fat farm, and more. Another such institution is prison. Prison might not have much to do with the New Year, but it’s got everything to do with TIME.

Johnny Paycheck did his time. Back in 1989 Paycheck began serving a 7-year sentence for a barroom shooting that occurred in Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1985. He was incarcerated in Chillicothe Correctional Institute. The interview above took place while Paycheck was in the slammer. The clip contains some great footage--like how the hell did they get Paycheck’s actual sentencing on camera? But check out the typically condescending tone of the TV journalist douche for A Current Affair. Dig the implied “what a low-life” message. And his remark that Paycheck’s career at the time had “all but died” is wholly inaccurate. During the three-year appeals process for his case, Paycheck signed a new contract with Mercury Records, and, in 1987, charted again with the single “Old Violin."

But, for Paycheck, as with any con, the rap sheet came with collateral consequences, i.e., the trouble that persists after the debt’s been paid. The least of these being the disdain of the bourgeoisie. And, as the aforementioned douche says, the shooting was not his first run-in with the law. "In 1982 Paycheck pleaded ‘no contest’ to 4^th degree sexual assault of a 12 year old girl.” Yikes! I mean, how do you reconcile a thing like that? Although it should be noted that there are many reasons to cop a plea, and not everyone who pleads guilty--or ‘nolo contendre’--is actually guilty.

I still like the Current Affair story, despite its admonishing tone. Ironically, Paycheck seems to have been doing pretty good here, like maybe he did get some kind of new start, albeit a costly one. Paycheck ain't languishing in the can. He's workin' on that next platinum record! That indefatigable spirit--that's what you need heading into a new year...year after year after year. Like long-time buddy Chairman Merle said, re Paycheck’s incarceration, “I been tryin’ to help him for a long time. I got him here where he can’t do nothin’ now. Maybe I can get something through to him…I think he’s probably learned his lesson, maybe stay off that dope.”


Image lifted from WFMU's Rock'n'Soul Ichiban

The Old Year is Gone

Keef, The Love Rustler, and David Johansen on the Tee Vee!

2010-12-19T12:09:00.003-05:00

Take Out Some Insurance

Rocket 88

At Tramps, New York City, 1985.

Nashville Radio: The Paintings of Jon Langford

2010-12-14T13:30:00.007-05:00

Originally published in Puncture #43

Hank: Nashville Radio by Jon Langford

Shortly before his final exit, Hank Williams stopped to pose for one more publicity shot. Standing in some fairground hay, he smiled over his shoulder at the camera as he shook hands with a grinning fan. The Fan guffawed and reared back, his hand extended in electrified delight while the camera caught the thousandth back-slapping yuk Hank’s career. Not long afterward, both Hank and The Fan departed and faded away, and of that night only a black and white photograph remained.

Forty years later Jon Langford sees the photo and bases a portrait of Hank and The Fan on it. He adds some color, avoiding the gaudy pastels of a Nudie suit, opting instead to fill in the black and white gradations with dull, earth-toned acrylics. Langford’s brush lends a certain depth to the figures’ features, animating their ticks and twitches with finely etched lines. Serpents emblazon The Fan’s western shirt. A third eye opens in his forehead. These words adorn the picture frame: There is no end I can’t pretend that dreams will still come true/ A slave to a heart of stone I can’t escape from you. The original publicity shot’s suggestion that somewhere there’s a heaven built on the rock of fame gets reversed, and Langford charges it with a sense of mortality as funny as it is grim. The Fan’s grin, the look in Hank’s eye, the secret joke they seem to share: Hank’s made his deal, and The Fan has come to collect his due.

Hank Signs His Contract by Jon Langford

Over the past few years, Lanford has painted roughly 30 portraits of honky-tonk heroes from the golden era of country music. For the most part, these figures now lie in their graves. Following the same approach he sed in the Hank Williams portrait, Langord draws from old publicity shots to render the images of Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland, and others. He fills the surrounding negative space with red, orange, and gold ponies, skulls, guitars, and other cowboy iconography. He finishes the surface in dim lacquer, taking a razor blade to many of them, lending a time-worn effect to the paintings that makes them appear to have hung in some dingy bar for the past 50 years.

These paintings seem to have hung in one particular bar, as a matter of fact: Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville, where the walls are lined with ghostly promo shots of Opry stars who once drank there. “When I first came to the States in 1988,” Langford recalls, “I went to Tootsie’s and saw all those pictures¾photos of singers I knew and others I’d never heard of, staring out of layers of historic snot and nicotine juice. They were all torn¾but all smiling out hopefully.”

If Langford had settled for reproducing old promo shots, then these paintings might simply convey a quaint country music hero-worship. But he almost always pushes the paintings into making greater thematic leaps, often inscribing the frame with fragments of song lyrics or found phrases. Two central themes persist throughout his work: Cowboys and Death.

These pictures look like folk art, but Langford’s work is neither “primitive” or “naïve,” to use the questionable terms that often come up when describing the work of pure folk painters like Joe Light, Mose Tolliver, or Howard Finster. Those painters are mostly self-taught. Often their work looks as depthless as a road sign, thus its charm. But Langford’s, for better or worse, betrays more technical skill.

He also dapples in printmaking and etching¾processes that seem to maintain a dialog with his painting. “The one-off paintings are kind of perverse,” says Langford. “They’re so informed by the process of reproduction,” adding “perverse is good.”

A fairly extensive reading of pop cultural figures (in this case C&W) also informs Langford’s images. Folk artists also love their pop cultural heroes, from blues legends to basketball stars. Howard Finster has his Elvises. Artist Chuckie is completely obsessed with the Jacksons. But where their paintings offer sincere tributes, Langford brings more literacy to bear--how could he not?--and thus more irony.

One portrait of Ernest Tubb, titled “Sleeping on the Bus,” depicts the Texas Troubadour cracking a faded smile somewhere in country music heaven. In the surrounding negative space, a tiny woman, the color of flame, “dances with death in her dollar dress.” Meanwhile a second death angel, clad in western wear, strums a guitar. The inscription at the top of the frame hints and old-time religion’s classic struggle between serving the devil and serving the lord. It reads “Saturday Satin Sunday Saint.”

Whose image and art best embodies this conflict better than Jerry Lee Lewis? Langford bases his portrait of the Killer on the picture sleeve art from the first Sun EP. Here the head of Jerry Lee floats engulfed in hellfire, a golden lock of hair hanging over a face full of holy ghost joy and violence. Once again, Langford replicates the original shot in acrylic, but surrounds the floating head with four skulls, each tattooed with the words Yes! No! Now! Never! By now the story of Jerry Lee Lewis’ personal apocalypse deserves its own Revelations-style chapter: it could be named after the inscription at the top of Langford’s portrait of the Killer: “The Church of the Almost Here End.”

As far as Langford’s favorite subject, Country Music, that “Almost Here End” done already come a long time ago. Travel to the outskirts of his vision, out beyond Hank’s grave, out beyond the spot where Ernest Tubb lies all but forgotten, and you’ll reach that place where that ghostly form dances with death in her dollar dress. She won’t get out of this world alive.

Images borrowed from the book Nashville Radio: art, words, and music by Jon Langord, Verse Chorus Press, 2006.

Etta James on the TeeVee!

2010-12-12T13:30:00.001-05:00

It's Love Baby! (24 Hours of the Day)

2010-12-10T13:30:00.001-05:00

It's Love Baby (24 Hours of the Day)

Joe Coleman: Auto-Portrait

2010-12-09T19:21:00.003-05:00

Auto Portrait by Joe Coleman

If you find yourself in New York City sometime before December 22, you can still catch the latest exhibit of paintings by the Breughel of Brooklyn, the Bosch of Bitin’ off Mouse Heads: Joe Coleman. The exhibit, titled “Auto Portrait,” hangs at the swanky Dickinson Gallery at 19 East 66th Street.

The viewer might not discover too many new surprises here in Coleman’s latest work. Most of the artist's favorite themes—corporeal decay, disease, demons, mommy and daddy, side-show geeks, oedipal hang-ups, serial killers, fire, and violence—remain alive and well in this collection. Coleman’s work is still somewhat autobiographical, as the title “Auto Portrait” suggests. And the eyes at the center of his portraits continue to act as the vortex pulling the viewer into Coleman’s vision of things. However, as the "Auto Portrait" show reveals, his work continues to reach new levels of maturity and mastery.

Goin' Instro-Mental #4

2010-11-29T12:42:00.001-05:00

Johnny's House Party (Part 1) Johnny's House Party (Part 2)

Trivia question: Of the many versions, Jimmy Beasley's, John Heartsman's, and Earl Palmer's Party Rockers', whose came first?

Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the TeeVee!

2010-11-27T13:00:00.001-05:00

Cotton Pickin' Rocker

2010-11-24T13:18:00.002-05:00

Cotton Pickin' Rocker

Jim Jarmusch, Lee Marvin, and Hell in the Pacific

2010-11-21T13:16:00.005-05:00

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Anthology Film Archive in New York City. In celebration, Anthology has planned a series of special events, the first of which took place last Thursday, and featured the great director/writer Jim Jarmusch introducing his most recent film Limits of Control, plus a scene from Coffee and Cigarettes that was filmed in the 80s at the 2nd Avenue Courthouse, in the East Village, while Anthology was in the process of converting the building into their cinema.

So I dashed over there after work, hoping to catch a great New York City personality at a great New York City venue. But, as with most great New York City events, TONS of other people had the same idea, and they had it well before I did. The event sold out while I stood at the end of a long line. So, no Coffee and Cigarettes for me that night. But, while I did miss what sounded like a swell program, my effort didn't go completely unrewarded. While waiting in line to hear the bad news, I struck up a coversation with another unlucky Jarmusch fan. This guy told me about how he’d encountered the director on the street just a few minutes earlier and had a chance to speak with him.

   “You know what he looks like, right?” the guy asked me.
    Yes I did.
    “You know he’s a big Lee Marvin fan, right?” he added.
    Yes again.
    “So, I told him we ought to get together and do a re-make of Hell in the Pacific. You ever see that one?”
    I confessed that I had not yet seen Hell in the Pacific.
    “Oh man!” he said. “With the Japanese actor, y’know, from the Kurosawa films.”
    “Toshiro Mifune?” I asked. “Lee Marvin made a movie with Toshiro Mifune?”
    “Yeah, and it’s as great as it sounds," said this guy, who also happened to be of Asian ethnic origin. "Jarmusch asked me ‘We’ll act in it together?’ I said yes. He liked the idea. But then I told him I wanted Lee Marvin’s part. He laughed. He liked that too.”
    I also laughed. It was a pretty good story. Although we both got skunked as far as getting into the show, my friend could now leave with at least some small consolation prize.
    And I had my own consolation prize now too. I went straight back to my neighborhood and rented Hell in the Pacific and watched it for the first time.
    Directed by John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance, and many others) and released in 1968, Hell in the Pacific tells the story of two WWII soldiers, one American (Marvin), on Japanese (Mifune), marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island. However, this is not your average war movie. It’s more like a Beckett play depicting two doomed characters lost in a meaningless void. It’s tragic and hilarious, and features one of Marvin’s best screen performances. (Mifune was always a genius.) These performances Boorman managed to extract despite a bare minimum of dialog. What little we do get is frustrated by the English/Japanese language barrier unaided by any subtitles or translation. From Hell in the Pacific Jarmusch probably got the idea for the comic language barrier at work in Ghost Dog. Anyway, you can read loads of more in-depth plot summaries of Hell in the Pacific. The web is full of them. Here are a few clips.

Greasy Spoon

2010-11-14T13:10:00.003-05:00

Greasy Spoon

Big Mama Thornton, Doctor Ross, John Lee Hooker, & Shakey Horton On The TeeVee!

2010-11-11T13:04:00.001-05:00

Down Home Shakedown

Hillbilly Hayride #3

2010-11-10T12:59:00.000-05:00

Take It Away Lucky

Jerry Lee Lewis Lost and Found

2010-11-07T13:01:00.007-05:00

Cover art by Jon Langford

"Life" at the Star Club single

Isn’t the currently honored format for carrying on too long about a rocknroll LP the 33 1/3 series of mini-books published by Continuum Books? So what’s all this business about a full-length tome--Jerry Lee Lewis Lost and Found, by Joe Bonomo (Continuum, 2009)--dedicated to, of all things, a LIVE album? Hasn’t Bonomo, author of Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, as well as his own 33 1/3 book on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell LP, gone too far this time?

Before you call overkill, however, keep a couple of things in mind: we’re talking about JERRY LEE LEWIS here, who’s got more rocknroll in his pinky nail than all your Pixies, Stone Roses, and R.E.M.’s--just a few of the subjects in the 33 1/3 book series--put together. Also bear in mind that we’re talking about Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live at the Star Club LP, arguably the greatest live rocknroll record ever made, and possibly the Killer’s own best album. It’s just too big, too loud and raucous and cranked on preludin for some slim, digest-sized booklet to do up proper.

So much story surrounds the making of Live at the Star Club, that the effort to place it in context would seem to require a running start. Smack in the middle of his long exile in the “desert,” that decade, 1958-1968, fraught with plummeting record sales, grueling years on the road, Beatlemania, booze, speed, and public ridicule left over from the Myra Gail scandal, a hardened Killer blew into Hamburg, Germany, backed by another crew of British rockers, the Nashville Teens. On April 5, 1964, onstage at the “fabulous, most beautiful, I mean really swingin’ Star Club,” Lewis would wail out the crowning moment of that exile, captured for posterity by Star Club recording engineer Siggi Loch.

British television appearance, Spring 1964.

In a lucid and sober prose, with the occasional foray into a sort of Reader Response type of crit that personally identifies with the subject, Bonomo tells the story of Lewis’s early 60’s split with Sun Records, his move to Smash/Mercury Records and Shelby Singleton’s clumsy production, the half-filled clubs, the no-shows, i.e., an extended, generally fucked scene for the Killer. It’d be stupid to suggest that the fabled night at the Star Club redeemed the Killer’s exile in the desert. But Loch switched on his machine and began recording, he captured a moment when Jerry Lee Lewis pounded from the piano keys and the crowd the only kind of satisfaction those years would yield.

Now, if the idea of a song-by-song analysis of Live at the Start Club kinda makes you groan, well, er, you have my sympathies. But relax, because, once the rundown gets underway you’ll be rescued by Bonomo’s great writing. The descriptions of “Mean Woman Blues,” “Money,” “What’d I Say,” and so on, not only avoid tedium, but, at moments can be downright exciting. Think about it: the Killer never gave the Nashville Teens a set list. On the fly they had to figure out what song they were playing next, and the key, and they had to get it all quickly, lest they draw The Wrath. Caught on tape at one point is Jerry Lee Lewis yelling at his drummer “Play that thing right, boy!” According to Bonomo, the Nashville Teens had to wait before each song, “clutching their instruments, their balls, and their pride in the leap.” Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live at the Star Club is such a great rocknroll record that it will likewise have you clutching your own balls "in the leap." When leaping you might want to pack along a copy of Jerry Lee Lewis Lost and Found, the hardback edition.

*******

Bear Family Records now makes available both a CD and vinyl edition of Jerry Lee Lewis' Live at the Star Club album.

Goin' Instro-Mental #3

2010-11-02T14:00:00.000-04:00

Thunder Express

Hillbilly Hayride #2

2010-10-26T14:00:00.000-04:00

Just One More

Goin' Instro-Mental #2

2010-10-24T14:00:00.001-04:00

The Night Rider

MC5 on the TeeVee!

2010-10-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

The song doesn't actually start until the :55 point. So you can enjoy the intro, or fast-forward, or you can "run and extension cord to your TV, set it on the hood of your car and pretend your at the drive-in movies." What's a drive-in movie?

Hillbilly Hayride #1

2010-10-19T14:00:00.001-04:00

The New Raunchy

Who can tell the true identity of Shady Walls?

Goin' Instro-Mental #1

2010-10-17T14:00:00.001-04:00

Del-Tone Rock

AGOG: The World of Timothy Carey

2010-10-14T10:37:00.005-04:00

Still from Kubrick's Paths of Glory

The World's Greatest Sinner

This month, October 15 - 25, the Anthology Film Archive in New York City features a tribute to the great Timothy Carey, the legendary "character-actor, madman, poet laureate of flatulence, and gonzo auteur." Highlights of the series include rare screenings of Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, The World's Greatest Sinner, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Poor White Trash, One-Eyed Jacks, plus the recent documentary by Carey's son Romeo, Making Sinner. This really is a rare opportunity to see these films on the screen. How can you go wrong with a guy whose middle name contains the word Agog(lia)?

We Never Learn: Exposing the Gunk Punk Undergut

2010-10-09T12:05:00.002-04:00

In his new book We Never Learn, the Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books, 2010), former New Bomb Turks frontman, and now author Eric Davidson occasionally uses phrases like “the last moment,” and “the end days.” Such phrases usually appear in the context of describing some aspect of now-extinct New York City and its last relevant spurts of rocknroll. For example, according to Davidson, the band Pussy Galore rose from “the very last moment of lower Manhattan as the glorified dung heap at the end of the American empire.” Similarly, the Devil Dogs, who formed in New York in 1989, did so during “the end days of the ol’ Bowery landscape.” These qualifiers get dropped into the copy fairly early on, and seem incidental enough at first. But read on and they begin to take on broader implications. In coining the admittedly silly name Gunk Punk and shaping it into a coherent scene worth chronicling, Davidson might be writing about the “last moment” and “end days” of rocknroll itself.
About that scene: the Undergut stretched way past New York City, reaching as far as the West Coast, Europe, Japan, Detroit, Memphis, even Ohio! For its pioneers Davidson nominates bands like the aforementioned Pussy Galore, plus the Raunch Hands, Lazy Cowgirls, Dwarves, Cynics, Gories, Billy Childish, and Death of Samantha, among others. Somehow, without these antecedents, most of which go back to the ‘80’s, the early aughts wouldn’t have been blessed with goobers like the White Stripes and the Hives. Or so the hypothesis goes. In the middle limbo between the scene’s earliest detectable pulse and its commercially viable culmination, we get pretty much the entire Crypt Records catalog, circa mid-90’s.

Big as the gut was, it still dwelled in the shadow of its contemporaries, Grunge and Indie-Rock. Gunk Punk so-called was largely made up of fellow outsiders who, as teens, grew up unable to relate to the unsmiling formula of hardcore, and who wanted to put sex, comedy, and ass-kickin’ back into the show.

Devil Dogs circa "the last moment"

Davidson here compiles tons of interviews--and some of the more entertaining ones are with Dwarves frontman Blag Jesus, Billy Childish, and Crypt Records empresario Tim Warren--and stitches these together with extended prose passages. Davidson shows real talent with the art of the interview, up there with Lisa Carver for instigating hilarity. At Davidson’s prompting, Blag Jesus remarked that his fellow Dwarf Vadge Moore was “...born a Dwarf. He always fucked up and would sleep with anything that moved. Unless she was unconscious, in which case...she didn’t move!”

The Author as New Bomb Turk

But Davidson's prose--and here it comes, Ladies and Germans: Quibble Time!--can, in places, get kinda tedious. All too often his amped-up, overly alliterative style smacks of the record review section in the back of any of a hundred 90s music 'zines (and, who knows, maybe that's exactly the effect he's going for). For example, about the Cheater Slicks he writes: “their uber-distorted guitar gnash flails like Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster spitting sonic sparks all over the barroom...” And he calls Dead Moon’s sound “an anthemic midnight hooch-lurch through Roky Erickson’s demo demons, grounded by the most base AC/DC riffage swung out with a junky jangle, each song clogged with desperate tales of hardy hearts doggy-paddling the toilet flush of western civilization.” Sometimes this stuff reads like five miles of Byron Coley. If there was just a bit of it then I wouldn’t bitch, but it’s pretty thick throughout. And is all the record label name dropping really vital to the story? No doubt some of it is unavoidable. But it creates an effect not unlike getting cornered at the record store by Joe Underground the New Release Guy while he spins your head with insider minutiae.
Despite these quibbles, let it be said that if you followed any of these bands, bought their records, or went to their shows, then you’ll probably find We Never Learn to be a pretty compelling read. Davidson’s sensibilities are locked on the important things, like putting the sex, comedy, and fun back where it belongs. He gains access to most of the prime movers in this scene and does a great job of blending interviews with much insider lowdown. Plus We Never Learn contains loads of cool pix, and it comes with a pretty shweet downloadable soundtrack.
Speaking of downloads, etc., the Interwebs seems, in so many subtle ways, to have de-balled damn near everything that once was great. And that includes rocknroll. Maybe it has something to with putting everything at our fingertips, within such easy reach, but some vital physical thing seems to have disappeared for good now. Of course, to announce the “last moment” or “end days” of anything is to truck with hyperbole. That said, We Never Learn covers the last moment/end days of raunchy, pre-internet rocknroll, which happened just a short while ago, down on the street.

Mike Edison’s Third Annual Banned Book Party

2010-09-24T11:37:00.003-04:00

Says Mike Edison, author of the memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, former High Times publisher, editor at Screw, etc., about his Banned Book Party: “Beyond the traditional prudishness of America, we are constantly facing new kinds of more insidious censorship born out of media conglomeration and new intellectual pathologies, like the concept of ‘net neutrality.’ We are going to attack all of that, plus I get to read some really filthy poetry with a bongo player. It’s my kind of party.”

Live soundtrack by the Space Liberation Pocket Arkestra, featuring BOB BERT (ex-Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, etc) and MICKEY FINN (Boss Hog).

Joining the party this year will be very special guests, HERALD PRICE FAHRINGER, the pre-eminent free speech attorney who has spent a career fighting for the First Amendment, defending free speech warriors such as LARRY FLYNT, and going toe-to-toe with the enemies of free expression, most notably former mayor RUDOLPH GIULIANI in the Battle of Times Square; and publishing avatar RICHARD NASH, named by the Utne Reader this year as one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World.

Housing Works Bookstore Café
126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-334-3324
Wed, September 29th, 7 pm FREE

Lyres on the Tee-Vee!

2010-09-23T20:13:00.003-04:00

"Don't Give It Up Now" circa '84

Black Cracker by Josh Alan Friedman

2010-09-19T10:26:00.010-04:00

The experts all agree: Josh Alan Friedman’s autobiographical novel Black Cracker (Wyatt Doyle Books, 2010) offers up some of the funniest lit to appear in recent history. The Hound called it “a cultural tell-all that will leave you howling.” Author Joe Bonomo noted that it’s “a very funny and closely observed book about growing up as an outsider — in Friedman’s case as the only white kid in an all-black school in Glen Cove, New York in the mid-1960s.”

Bonomo’s thumbnail synopsis gets to the source of all the comedy in Black Cracker, namely, the protag’s own outsider status and the wonders and conflicts--cultural, economic, historical, & racial--that ensue. Read on as a grade school version of the author, known to his schoolmates as Jock, discovers the bastardized local kidspeak for Aunt Jemimah: Hecha Momma. Bear witness to the nightmarish lesson, delivered at the hands of a brood of drunken black women, that, contrary to delusion, Jock is not just very light-skinned negro. What’s not funny about being the lone, white, Jewish kid enrolled in the last segregated school in the New York area?

To call Black Cracker a coming-of-age tale, or bildungsroman, is not quite accurate. While the main characters do get to contemplate the death of one of their pals, none but the most worldly among them, Bobo, a “held-back,” shark-skin clad, junior pimp in training, gains any first-hand knowledge of sex. By story’s end, these squirts are only beginning to peek up skirts.
What Friedman offers the reader is more like a rich look at a vanished world that was vaporizing just as his memory recorded it. And this is something for which Friedman, author of Tiles of Times Square and Tell the Truth Until They Bleed, has a proven ability. In addition to deftly rendering the inherent tension, humor, drama, and soul of the protag’s milieu, Friedman’s sketches of old Penn Station, Nedick’s hot-dog stand, and Yoo-Hoo billboards bearing Yogi Berra’s mug, lend to Black Cracker some of its most vivid moments.

What about that vanished world? What can we call it? Civil Rights era America? It just so happened that Friedman’s own childhood was well positioned to make that shift from innocence to whatever comes after just when the same was happening to American society (if "innocence" is what you can call white America's willful ignorance toward black America's simmering anger). Jock's experience at South School was but a part of all this. For him the period also marked the heyday of Famous Monsters magazine, the Old Timer’s Baseball Photo Album, and Beatle-boots. And what middle class, white baby-boomer wouldn’t wax a bit nostalgic for that stuff?

Now might be a good point to touch on another, confusing aspect of Black Cracker: Friedman’s handling of the notorious “N” word. What’s that you say? Oh, my, no... ha ha... not THAT “N” word (which the author uses liberally here), but the other "N" word: as in “N” for nostalgia. One could make the argument that in Jock’s day music and baseball were better, hot-dogs had more snap, and New Yorkers still knew how to fold the newspaper right. But how can any progressively minded person feel nostalgic for a period that also included segregated schools? Easy, right? That’s just life in America: old stuff always on the way out, new stuff always on the way in, and, in the so-called "classless society," everything depends on which side of the tracks you live. Friedman makes no bones about the fact that he has plenty to recall with fondness, like a secure middle class upbringing with progressive, artistic parents. Friedman’s father, the writer Bruce Jay Friedman, was the one to insist that Josh attend South School in the first place.

Often in Black Cracker, Friedman’s eye turns to subjects like the black shoeshine boys of old Penn Station, or the back porch chitlin’ eatin’ of his schoolmates’ people. Friedman consistently renders such scenes with an honesty, and thus a hilariousness, from which most modern English departments, and the anaemic lit they produce, would recoil in fear, lest they offend. That fear of offending, which makes of story-telling a lost form much like the popping boogie-woogie rags of the shoeshine boys, does not contaminate Black Cracker.

*******
Go here to purchase a copy of Black Cracker.

Jimmy Reed Bookends - Odds & Ends/Ends & Odds

2010-09-14T12:00:00.003-04:00

Today the GS offers a couple of Jimmy Reed instrumental bookends, reproduced here in glorious Scratch-o-Phonic sound. We spare no expense here to achieve the hi-est of hi-fi. Vee-Jay records released "Odds & Ends" in Oct. 1958, as the b-side to the R&B chart-climber "I'm Gonna Get My Baby." As you listen to this one you might ask who's playing that freaky fiddle? Sugarcane Harris? Papa John Creach? Research reveals that it was played by a one Remo Biondi of the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra.

Later that same year, Billboard announced the release of another Jimmy Reed instrumental, "Ends & Odds": "Reed has two great blues sides that should gather lots of R&B coin, especially in the Southern markets. 'Ends & Odds' is the natural follow-up to his previous click 'Odds & Ends'."

Bo Diddley on the TeeVee!

2010-09-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

On the Ed Sullivan Show, 1955.

Yes, this one's a medley. But check out The Duchess!

Another good one for The Duchess.

Tommy Blake: $F-Oldin' Money$

2010-09-05T13:57:00.010-04:00

The Rhythm Rebels. Carl Adams on the left. Note Adams' mangled pickin' claw and upside-down telecaster.

Tommy Blake: bastard child, juvenile delinquent, radio personality, gifted songwriter, drinker, and born loser: in his corpus gathered all the ingredients for great rockabilly.

Born Thomas LeVan Givens in Shreveport, LA--or was it Dallas? No one seems to know for sure--in 1931, the illegitimate son of an uncaring mother, Blake, as a youngster, took up the guitar, inspired by his love of country music. He quit school and joined the Marine Corps. He quickly left the Marine Corps. He then became a musician and itinerant radio personality, a career path usually overlooked by High School job fairs. Blake landed a regular spot on KRUS of Ruston, LA. Here Blake convinced rhythm guitarist Ed Dettenheim and another tragic talent, guitar wiz Carl Adams, together known as the Rhythm Rebels, to back him. Adams, it turned out, was oddly claw-fingered after a childhood shotgun accident. Said deformity, along with a love of amplifier volume, lent to Adams’ playing a certain craziness which had already been utilized by another Shreveport rocker, Dale Hawkins. Tommy Blake and the Rhythm Rebels were up and running, and made the rounds on the weekly live country & western radio broadcasts like the Louisiana Hayride and Hill Country Hoe-Down. Meanwhile Blake honed his songwriting skills, churning out nuggets like “Honky Tonk Mind” and “Ballad of a Broken Heart” which eventually became hits for Johnnies Horton and Cash, respectively.

All of these sparks caught the attention of Nashville bigwigs Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, who helped the Rhythm Rebels get signed to a deal with RCA records. In 1957 Bradley and Atkins took the boys into the newly constructed Studio B to cut a few sides. Success hovered before them, almost within reach, when it was discovered that Blake had a nasty habit of selling songs all around town. Blake practically gave his songs away if he couldn’t sell them immediately upon writing them. RCA learned that Johnny Horton would also be releasing “Honky Tonk Mind,” and releasing it first, on Columbia Records. Soon after this, RCA dropped the Rhythm Rebels.

Blake, center, flanked by Chet "Countrypolitan" Atkins and Ed Dettenheim.

Bitterly disappointed by the RCA fiasco, Carl and Ed nevertheless hung with the Rhythm Rebels long enough to enter their Sun Records phase. At 706 Union Ave., they cut “Flat Foot Sam” and its B-side, the incredible “Lordy Hoody,” which probably best documents Carl Adams’ “screaming guitar” stylings. But the record sold modestly, at best. Carl and Ed soon packed it in for good. Blake returned to the Sun studio and cut “Ballad of a Broken Heart.” Sam Phillips sat on the song, and probably bought it from a cash-strapped Blake for a pittance, then let Johnny Cash cut his hit version, the sort of syrupy “Story of a Broken Heart.” Songwriting credits on that one go to Sam Phillips.

Finally Blake would cut his last great rockin’ side, “$F-Oldin’ Money$” in 1959 for the Recco label. With its hard luck lyrics about getting close enough to the big score to almost touch it, but losing out in the end, is damn near biographical. Sure, the song’s details aren’t the same as those of Blake’s own life--Blake never had no rich Aunt Bunnie who left behind a sack full of F-Oldin’ Money--but the singer puts a sack full of his own loser-hood into his delivery. When it came to shooting himself in the foot, Tommy Blake knew his subject.

After “$F-Oldin’ Money$” Blake would cut many more records, mostly dismal duds like the 1962 single “Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue” for the 4-Star label. None packed the heat of “Lordy Hoody” or “$F-Oldin’ Money$.” Finally, on Christmas Eve of 1985, Blank drunkenly attacked his wife Samantha in their Bossier City, LA, home. Remorseful after the attack, Blake apparently went out and bought his wife some jewelry to try and patch things up. When he approached her again, holding a jewel box behind his back, she took out a pistol and shot him through the heart.

Every Woman's Dream - Every Husband's Nightmare

2010-07-13T12:20:00.001-04:00

The great Nick Tosches introduces the great Andre Williams at the "Sweets & Other Stories" reading at The Saint Mark's Poetry Project, New York City, February 2010.

Have Blues Will Travel

2010-07-11T10:34:00.006-04:00

Today the GS presents a random sampling of gravel-scratchers, records about gettin' the hell out of town, whether baby done 'em wrong, they can't stand the sinful ways of the big, big city, or they just caught a dose of white line fever.

First up: Eddie Noack's "Have Blues Will Travel." Noack is best known for his 1968 version of the Leon Payne song "Psycho," on the K-Ark label. Long before that, however, he cut many great country records for the Gold Star and 4-Star labels, the earliest of which date back to the '40s. In the late '50s Noack recorded several sides for Pappy Dailey's Starday and D labels. Noack wrote most of these latter songs --spare, mid-tempo numbers like "Walk 'Em Off" and "Take it Away Lucky" noted for their hard-bitten lyrics and ponderous, reverb heavy guitar. On this one the singer's hittin' the road, "Feelin' low, gotta go unravel... long gone, movin' on, scratchin' gravel..."

Next up is everyone's favorite Cherokee bopper, Marvin Rainwater, with "Boo Hoo," recorded for the Warwick label in 1961, after his classic MGM days. The lyrics here speak for themselves: "gonna leave this lonesome town... ain't no use me hangin' around..."

And speaking of Cherokees, we wrap up today's post with something by the King of the Cherokee Boogie, Moon Mullican. Here Moon's kissing off the "Big, Big City" on a single from 1965 on the Hall-Way label. Is that country fuzz we hear oozing from the rhythm guitar? And how frightening is that Hall-Way logo? Like when you inked a deal with the Hall-Way label did your life/career then move down the hallway, beginning the slide toward that final vanishing point? Mood did get his card punched a mere two years after this record.

Roy Hall on TeeVee!

2010-07-10T10:21:00.002-04:00

Well, whaddya know, the Gemini Spacecraft team of crack researchers dug up the following clip of Roy "the Hound" Hall --he of "Flood of Love," "Dirty Boogie," "One Monkey Can't Stop the Show" fame-- performing another classic, "See You Later Alligator." Odds are this originally aired on ABC's Ozark Jubilee country music variety show, where Hall's host Webb Pierce regularly appeared for one brief year in 1956.

The Real Kids

2010-06-19T12:34:00.011-04:00

Every once in a while ya get lucky, even in Beantown. I did a stint there myself from '06-'09, unhappy years for me, for the most part. Wasted years if not for (and you'll probably write me off as brain-dead for saying this) the Lyres--yep, Monoman having temporarily re-assembled one of his best line-ups (with Paul Murphy, Rick Corraccio, & Dan McCormack), they played some incredible shows during this period before the whole mess imploded again. Also, Boston's still got some great record stores, like Looney Tunes and In Your Ear. Then there's the odd occasion when the Real Kids, or what's left of them, play a show. The following footage was shot on one of their good nights, live at the dank old Cantab Lounge in Central Square, in the People's Republic of Cambridge, MA, March of 2009. Sure, John Felice's voice is a little raw, and he's kinda rough around the edges, as always, and the camera mic sounds like, well, a camera mic, but it's still amazingly intimate footage. Give a listen as Felice belts it out with real heart and peels off lick after lick. I was lucky enough to have been there too that night, one night when Beantown seemed all right.

Thanks to Bob Colby for posting these vids on YouTube.

Glen Glenn - One Cup of Coffee (And a Cigarette)

2010-05-30T12:33:00.007-04:00

That's Glenn on the left.

Glen Troutman, better known to rock’n’roll fans as Glen Glenn, might have continued playing country & western music, instead of cutting some of the greatest sides from the rockabilly era, if not for one thing: Girls!

“If you played country, girls might want your autograph,” Glenn has said. “If you did this kind of [rock’n’roll] music, girls freaked out.”

Young Troutman spent his formative years growing up in Joplin, MO, in the Missouri Ozarks, reared on the Louisiana Hayride and Opry radio, young ears tuned to the music of Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Little Jimmy Dickens, and others. At age 14 the Troutman family, like thousands of other midwesterners [read: Okies], packed up and moved to Southern California, settling in San Dimas.

In that era, LA was a jumping musical oasis. The largely Okie enclaves of Compton and San Pedro tuned in to Town Hall Party, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, while Central Avenue wailed with R&B by the likes of Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordan, Pee Wee Crayton and others. Too young for the clubs, Troutman soaked up the sounds of Dick "Huggy Boy" Hugg’s radio show on KRKD, and taught himself to play many of the blues and R&B songs he heard there.

Soon Glen Troutman struck up a friendship with another young guitarist named Gary Lambert. Together they formed the duo Glen & Gary and began to play talent shows and square dances at various spots around the LA basin. Sunday nights the duo hung around the old Riverside Rancho dance hall near Griffith Park at guitar legend Joe Maphis’ regular show there. During set breaks Uncle Joe hung out back, bumming their smokes, and eventually took a shine to the youngsters. Maphis suggested they take a crack at the weekly amateur show hosted by KXLA Pasadena DJ “The Squeakin’ Deacon.” This they did, taking first prize on their first attempt with their rendition of a Joe & Rose Lee Maphis number “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke.”

Despite this victory, Glen & Gary struggled to land a regular paying gig axnd recording deal. Eventually they earned a spot on The Country Barn Dance show, where, among other things, they got to be pals with the young Eddie Cochran. Recording deals remained even more elusive. Their earliest recordings were done live, in the KXLA studios, and featured versions of “That’s All Right Mama”and Glenn claims to have not yet heard Elvis’ version at that point, but rather based his rendition on what he’d heard on Huggy Boy’s radio showin 1955.

Meanwhile, as Glen & Gary kept at the hob-nobbin, rock’n’roll began to shake up the country & western world. Our two young poon-hounds had already noticed how the Town Hall Party groupies hung around seeking autographs out back behind the Riverside Rancho. But they had a revelation one night in April 1956 when they drove from San Dimas down to San Diego to catch Elvis Presley’s first west coast appearance.

“You could barely hear him,” Glenn has said. “The girls were screaming so loud.”

Due largely to these observations, Glen & Gary jumped on the R’n’R bandwagon. Their next KXLA recordings were “Baby, Let’s Play House,” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”

Later in 1956, Troutman, briefly going it alone without Gary Lambert, got on the bill opening for Porter Wagoner, and began to appear on the Ozark Jubilee show. Here he made another live recording, this time it was “Shake, Rattle, Roll.”

Back in California a short time afterward, Troutman reunited with Lambert to cut versions of more rockin’ material, doing Mac Curtis’ “If I Had Me a Woman,” and Sonny Fisher’s “Hold Me Baby.”

Around this time the classic line-up of Glenn’s band began to form around Troutman on vocals, Lambert on lead guitar, and bassist Connie “Guybo” Smith on loan from old pal Eddie Cochran’s band. Fellow Missourian Wynn Stewart, likewise a California transplant who would become instrumental in the formation of Bakersfield honky-tonk, got in on the action and persuaded the band to do a string of demos. Crown jewel in this batch of recordings was their version of Stewart’s song “One Cup of Coffee (and a Cigarette).” These demos eventually landed the boys a contract with ERA records, whose management rechristened Troutman as Glen Glenn. They promptly sent the band to the famed Gold Star studios in Hollywood, where they re-cut “One Cup of Cofee” along with “Everybody’s Movin’”, a couple of the greatest rockabilly numbers ever committed to wax.

And what’s “One Cup of Coffee (And a Cigarette)” all about? You guessed it: Girls! Or really, it’s about the loneliness caused by one particular girl, the Everygirl, if you will. And leave it to Lonesome Wynn Stewart to nail it in a couple of quick verses:

I think I’m gonna cry if she don’t show up
Tears are gonna fall in a coffee cup
Cigarette smoke gets in my eye
That ain’t the reason that I cry
Waitin’ on my baby and she ain’t here yet
One cup of coffee (and a cigarette).

You can really see the poor sap sitting at the diner counter, alone under the harsh lights with his coffee and smokes, midnight in the middle of the big American nowhere, the heart of which, as John Rechy said in City of Night, is loneliness.

"Yeah, You Ain't Heard the Lyrics Yet" - The Sacred Cows on "Get Smart"

2010-05-15T12:56:00.007-04:00

So the Stooges didn't quite corner the market on the "Love is Out, Hate is In" 60s hippie eliminator punk. Check out the Sacred Cows, baby! They dished this number out on the "Groovy Guru" episode of Get Smart! from 1968, starring Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, and Larry Storch in a guest appearance as the Groovy Guru. More evidence that American television programming peaked in that long gone decade?

My old Pittsburgh pals, the Mt McKinleys --the 'burgh's answer to, I dunno, who? The Royal Pendletons?-- once cut an ace cover of the song, almost 20 years ago. Their version kinda takes the song from the realm of television novelty number and turns it into a raved-up blitz. And, AND, it just so happens that the Mt. McKinleys play TONIGHT at the Spike Hill Tavern in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. So, yes, this post has really been just an underhanded, sneaky, shameless plug for my friends' band.

One more factoid: playing bass for the Sacred Cows is Jerry Scheff, session man who also played in the early 70s line-up of Elvis' TCB band.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

2010-05-01T18:50:00.014-04:00

Art by Ralph Steadman

Forty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson attended the classic at Churchill Downs, and here, thanks to Google docs, is his account, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," which originally appeared in Scanlan's Monthly (vol. 1, number 4, 1970). According to the essay, which offers probably the world's first shot at Gonzo sports writing, this was the first occasion when HST worked with British artist Ralph Steadman. Steadman flew in from London, sketchbook in hand, hoping to capture the face of the Kentucky Derby. Or so the story goes.

According to HST, who grew up in Louisville and knew the Derby crowd all too well, what he wanted Steadman to see went something like this:

"It was a face I'd seen a thousand times at every Derby I'd ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry--a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture."

Reporter and artist searched all over Churchill Downs, from among the thousands in attendance, for a glimpse of this face. As they searched, Steadman sketched much of what he saw, and as a sort of British quirk, would share his hideous renderings with his drunk and increasingly belligerent subjects. In this way Steadman risked taking a beating or two himself. Still, the face of the Kentucky Derby eluded them until, toward the end of the debauched weekend, HST saw his own face in the mirror.

"There he was, by God--a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature...like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother's family photo album. It was the face we'd been looking for--and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible..."

International Louie Louie Day

2010-04-11T12:48:00.008-04:00

Cougar Marching Band rehearsing a classic.

On April 11, 1935, Richard Berry was born in Extension, Louisiana. Twenty years later, Berry, fronting his band, the great Richard Berry & the Pharaohs, would cut the original version of "Louie Louie" for the Flip label. Thus, Berry's birthday is International Louie Louie Day. The Louie Louie Advocacy and Music Appreciation Society, or LLAMA, can tell you more.

The following excerpt from an archived story from the LA Times news service, as syndicated in the Anchorage Daily News, May 6, 1988, tells us of the parade, yes, the PARADE, held in honor of "Louie Louie" in Philadelphia that year:

"Philadelphia has hosted 'Louie Louie' processions since 1985...Last year, in fact, nearly 70,000 people turned out to see the parade, which featured 5,000 kazoo playing participants, several zany floats and a string of rock bands all playing 'Louie Louie' in unison."

Philly's "Louie Louie" Parade was the brainchild of WMMR Philadelphia disc jockey John DeBella, who not only organized the event and assembled the kazoo ensemble, but also served as the parade's Grand Marshall on a few occasions. Morning man DeBella had apparently been inspired to organize the parade by the 24 hour "Louie Louie" marathon hosted by another California station. Such a marathon was made possible, of course, by the bazillion and one versions of "Louie Louie" that exist out there. Just try doing that with "Johnny B. Goode." The YouTube clip above features the Washington State University Cougar Marching Band's version.

Meiko Kaji

2010-04-04T21:31:00.015-04:00

Meiko Kaji in Straycat Rock: Sex Hunter

Meiko Kaji, like Tura Satana, managed to use the sexploitation movie genre to portray strong, powerful, and dangerous female characters. Unlike her American predecessor, however, Kaji conquered her adversaries not with cleavage and karate kicks, but rather with bad-ass hats, knife skills, and a steely-eyed stare.

Born Masako Ota in 1947, Kaji might actually be better known as a singer in the Japanese Enka style, a kind of postwar pop ballad known for its embrace of traditional musical influence and socially conscious themes. Kaji began working in the film industry in the mid-60s, playing smale roles and using her real name. In 1970 she first used the name Meiko Kaji, starring in director Yasuharu Hasebe’s Alleycat Rock series. In these films about girl gangs, Kaji first began to establish characters that defied the stereotype of the docile Japanese woman, and kicking more than a few men's asses along the way. Here’s a clip from Straycat Rock: Sex Hunter.

In 1971, after doing the Alleycat Rock series, Kaji began working with exploitation director Shunya Ito, appearing in several of his women in prison films. The wildest of these would have to be Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41. Scorpion has all the trappings of the genre: violence, lesbian sex scenes, brutality at the hands of male prison guards and wardens, etc. But it goes way beyond the usual limitations, adding unique twists like ghost mysticism and surreal sequences, which all probably have to do with the fact that the film’s an adaptation of a style of Japanese comic known as manga. Ito's films exposed Meiko Kaji to a wide audience, and earned her movie status in Japan.

A still from Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41

Sexploitation & Japanese comics? How's that for dorky? Anyway, Meiko Kaji is still around, alive and well and still making records and appearing in films and television. As might be expected, some of her songs were recycled by Quentin Tarantino in his film Kill Bill, Vol. 1.

Zimmerman on Letterman, with the Plugz!

2010-03-16T19:34:00.006-04:00

This clip makes my day. Bob Dylan backed by the Plugz wangin' out a Sonny Boy Williamson tune on Late Night with David Letterman, back in 1983. Not just great Rock 'n' Roll, but maybe the R'n'R pirate headband's greatest moment too.

Sunday Chicken Dinner

2010-02-28T17:22:00.008-05:00

What’s that you say? Pass the chicken? Well, okay. But bear in mind, there’s no way I can give you every piece of the bird, as I’m no doubt missing a gizzard here, a drumstick there. Still, you get a pretty decent poultry platter with the following tracks:

Rufus Thomas “Chicken Scratch”, Joe Tex “Chicken Crazy”, Fuitt Forst “Chicken Bop”, Link Wray “Run Chicken Run”, The Raunch Hands “Chicken Scratch”, Andre Williams “Greasy Chicken”, and the toughest piece of all: Don & Juan’s “Chicken Necks”.

Hasil Adkins knew poultry too. In fact Norton Records put together an entire LP of his chicken songs called Poultry in Motion.

Here chick, chick, chicken... Here chicken...

Arthur Alexander: A Shot of Rhythm & Blues

2010-02-21T13:21:00.010-05:00

Back in 1961, Arthur Alexander, a rhythm & blues singer who dug country music, teamed up with Dan Penn & the Pall Bearers, country boys heavily into soul. Together, at Rick Hall's Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, they pioneered the so-called "country soul" sound. The most famous product of this successful collision of American musical strains was the single “You Better Move On,” an Arthur Alexander original which has been covered by everyone from the Rolling Stones to George Jones.

Alexander had already proven his song-writing abilities before writing and recording that first big hit. In 1959 he co-wrote a single “She Wanna Rock” for Candian C&W singer Arnie Derskin. The following year he wrote and recorded for Judd Phillips’ Judd label his own first single, the amazing double-whammy “Sally Sue Brown” b/w “The Girl that Radiates that Charm.”

During these formative years Alexander struck up a partnership with his manager/co-writer Tom Stafford, who, like Alexander, had grown up in small-town Alabama. It was Stafford who took the “Sally Sue Brown” demo to Judd Phillips, and it was Stafford who helped to arrange those first sessions with Rick Hall at Fame, and Stafford, again, who convinced Alexander leave Muscle Shoals to seek his own undoing in Nashville. In that corporate Babylon, Alexander’s song-writing & recording career was stripped of creative control and publishing rights, setting him up for eventual obscurity.

Conflicting stories surround the sale of “You Better Move On”--was it Stafford or Rick Hall who first peddled it around Nashville? Apparently every A&R man in town rejected it at first, everyone but Noel Ball, that is, a local disc jockey and Nashville rep for Dot Records. Dot agreed to release the record and quickly nabbed Alexander’s contract. Sadly, “You Better Move On” would be some of the last original material Alexander would record for a long time. Under the guidance of Ball, Alexander’s records began to suffer from the usual Nashville trappings typical of that era: cover songs, corny background singers, and string sections. Meanwhile, the big hit made a ton of money for everyone but its writer.

And yet those follow-up Dot records, however tarnished, are killer. To hear Arthur Alexander perform “A Shot of Rhythm & Blues,” “Black Night,” “Pretty Girls Are Everywhere,” “Soldiers of Love,” “I Hang My Head and Cry,” even the Johnny Bond number “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” (set to the same melody as Kitty Wells' “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” which is also the same Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life,” which is, again, the sameRoy Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird”--follow that melody any further back and you begin to wander into the mystical realms of country music’s origins), you wouldn’t think you were hearing a man who was disappointed by his treatment in Nashville. Still, great as these songs are, they're no “Sally Sue Brown.” Imagine the catalog Arthur Alexander might have left if he'd have maintained creative control.

By the late 60’s Alexander ditched Dot Records. In 1972 he recorded an album Arthur Alexander for Warner Brothers, which includes his great version of “Burnin’ Love,” predating Elvis’ version. Still the money was poor and he was forced to play the gut-bucket circuit of small southern clubs. Finally, in 1975, Alexander threw in the towel after getting stiffed for another record, this time for the Buddha label, then quit the business entirely.

One song on the Warner LP, “Rainbow Road,” a sort of hard-luck ballad involving a knife fight and prison time, written by Dan Penn & Don Fritz, helped to surround Alexander’s retirement with fictional mystique. Whatever happened to Arthur Alexander? Didn’t you hear? He’s doing time for knifing a guy! In actuality, he'd settled in Cleveland where he worked as a bus driver for some 15 years.

In 1993 he returned to recording, making the Ben Vaughn-produced album Lonely Just Like Me for Elektra Records. A few months later, in June of that year, Arthur Alexander died of a heart attack.

*****

Post Script: Check the always amazing archive of Radio Hound airchecks, April 17, 1993, for a great interview with the man himself, done a mere few months before his death.

Dale Hawkins: Mrs Merguitory's Daughter... She Don't Love Me but She Really Oughter

2010-02-15T20:43:00.002-05:00

(Repost from Jan. 14, 2009. RIP Dale Hawkins.)

Delmar Allen Hawkins, aka Dale Hawkins, was born in 1936 in Goldmine, Louisiana, just 30 miles from Ferriday, hometown of fellow northern Louisianan Jerry Lee Lewis. Dale's dad, a hillbilly musician in his own right, died when Dale was a kid. This event cast the young Hawk loose to live with various share-cropper relatives around the Shreveport area. Some claim he acquired his early love for black music, those blues, so essential to his "swamp bop" sound, while working in the share-cropper fields.

Then again, he might have just as easily come by this love at Stan Lewis' Shreveport store, Stan the Man's Record Shop. Here Hawkins worked as a counter clerk when he wasn't playing gigs on the Bossier City strip, a blue zone just across the Red River from Shreveport. Stan Lewis happened to be the biggest distributor of Chess/Checker records in the region, and Leonard Chess knew him well.

In '56 the Hawk cut his earliest demos in the studios of Shreveport's KWKH radio late at night, during dead air time. At that point he was trying to get signed to Chess, just like his friend Bobby Charles had with the song "See You Later Alligator." The title of Dale Hawkins' first demo: "See You Soon Baboon." Apparently Stan the Man dug it. And apparently Leonard Chess dug "Susie-Q," which he released in '57 after a bit of a tug-o-war with Atlantic Records over the song. Hawkins went on to record roughly 30 sides for Checker from 1957-1961.

Besides cutting all those classic records for Checker ("My Babe," "Cross-Ties," "Baby Baby," "Mrs. Merguitory's Daughter," "Little Pig," "Tornado," "Susie-Q," "Worried About My Baby" etc.), Dale Hawkins also cut his teeth as producer, working with Johnny Horton at KWKH. Eventually he went on to produce hits for the Uniques, Five Americans, and others. Does anyone know if he also produced the Arena Twins' version of "Little Pig"?

Dale Hawkins also hosted the teen dance show "Big Big Beat" on WCAU-TV outta Philadelphia, which I think was also called "The Dale Hawkins Show" at some point. Couldn't find any youtube action for either of those (which sorta makes me doubt my sources --like if it ain't on youtube by now, did it ever really happen?). But here's a clip from "American Bandstand," Dale Hawkins lip-syncing along to "Little Pig," circa '58. Hey, the guy can dance too!

And if all that's still not impressive enough for you, Dale Hawkins also discovered and/or hired young guitar wizzes James Burton* --that's JB at age 15 playing that unmistakable & immortal lick on "Susie-Q"-- and Roy Buchanan --RB plays lead on "My Babe."

If you'd like to hear a pretty funny interview with Dale Hawkins, check out the Norton Records 20th Anniversary Party special broadcast of WFMU's "Music to Spazz By" with Dave the Spazz.

Buddy Holly's Nashville Sessions

2010-01-27T09:38:00.002-05:00

Ollie Vee, he come from Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee. But Buddy Holly, he come from Lubbock, Texas, home of country western radio station KDAV, where announcer Hipockets Duncan helped Buddy and his early sidekick, guitarist Bob Montgomery, get a regular slot on the Sunday Party live show. Here Buddy and Bob’s popularity grew, and they eventually got a spot opening for Bill Haley when he passed through town. Bigshot Nashville promoter Eddie Crandall heard them that night in 1955, and, like Hipockets before him, also got interested. Crandall got KDAV to cut a few demos, then he arranged a recording contract with Decca for... er, well, for Buddy only. It seems that Decca, in their scramble to find their own Elvis, was only interested in solo Rock 'n' Roll acts. So no Delmore Brothers, Louvin Brothers, Santos & Johnnies, or Johnnies & Jonies for Decca Records. But they did let Buddy record with a crack Rockabilly outfit that included guitarist Sonny Curtis, who wrote “Rock Around with Ollie Vee,” bassist Don Guess, who wrote the great “Modern Don Juan,” and guitarist Grady Martin.

So we’re still talkin’ pre-Crickets here on these songs, which were all recorded in Nashville, in three separate sessions, way back in 1956. Owen Bradley even produced one of the sessions, demonstrating once again that, despite being one of two main architects of countrypolitan shmaltz, he knew how to make a good Rock’n’Roll record, having also produced the earliest sides by the Johnny Burnette Trio, and I suspect possibly those by Donny “Soon to Become Johnny Paycheck” Young. Most of these songs were originally released as Decca singles (although today they come to you by way of MCA LP Buddy Holly The Nashville Sessions, released in 1975), failed to chart. The record company grew restless, and thus began Buddy Holly's fabled departure from Decca. Less than a year later he broke big with "That'll Be the Day." Boy o boy, Decca probably sure wished it had held its mud for a few more months.

And while Bradley was demonstrating all that R’n’R producer prowess, Buddy Holly showed us how gone for the girls he was. Besides the aforementioned “Modern Don Juan,” hear him pant and pine convincingly enough on “Love Me” and “Ting-A-Ling.” Young and free is a real fine thing to be, but, alas, love ain’t free. It left Buddy to sing with equal aplomb about “The Midnight Shift” and “Blue Days – Black Nights” as well.

Big Boy Crudup's Atomic Bomb Blues

2010-01-25T10:00:00.003-05:00

For originating the song that first broke Elvis, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup sometimes got called the “Father of Rock’n’Roll.” For Crudup it was a dubious distinction, one that sure didn’t pay. By the mid-50s, as his young white imitator climbed the charts with his rendition of “That’s All Right, Mama,” Crudup had already quit recording for a spell, tired of getting stiffed for royalties by RCA, Checker, Ace, and Trumpet records.

Of course Crudup eventually came out of retirement. He cut a few singles and a long-player for Bobby Robinson’s Fire label, who released “Mean Ole Frisco" b/w "Rock Me, Mama” and “Katie Mae" b/w "Dig Myself a Hole" both in 1962. The last of these sides, “Dig Myself a Hole,” takes Gemini Spacecraft’s top spot in the category of atomic bomb blues, right up there with Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” from the Arms Race 80s.

These releases placed Crudup in a good position to reap some limited exposure on the folk revival scene then emerging. But misfortune dogged the Big Boy, and none of his records earned him any money. Crudup never escaped poverty, and to the end he earned his meager living as an agricultural laborer and small-time moonshiner.

Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin'

2010-01-11T07:00:00.003-05:00

Once more on the subject of Memphis wrestling: Shangri-La Projects, the same folks who brought you Ron Hall’s great book Sputnik, Masked Men, & Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling, have also produced a documentary film. Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’ is based on Hall’s book, but it apparently delves more deeply into the 80s era than the book does, which focuses more on the 50s & 60s golden age. Hall, Sherman Philpott, and Billy Worley produced the film, and Chad Schaffler directed. Official release date: sometime in 2010.

Willie Mitchell With the 4 Kings: Tell It to Me Baby

2010-01-06T07:11:00.012-05:00

Willie Mitchell, Memphis trumpeter and band leader most famously known for running Hi Records, for cutting a string of great instrumentals in the 60s, and for producing Al Green and Ann Peebles in the 70s, died yesterday. He was 81.

For decades Mitchell worked his magic at his own Royal Studios, in Memphis, TN, often with great session guitarist Teenie Hodges leading the Royal house band. On the Al Green & Ann Peebles records these guys were the Kings of Quiet, achieving a rare level of warmth and intimacy in the studio. Still, great as all that music is, it’s all a little too “suede denim” for me. I prefer the earlier Willie Mitchell, of 4 Kings fame, here performing their first single “Tell It To Me Baby,” from 1958, on Memphis Rockabilly/C&W great Eddie Bond’s Stomper Time label. The song was written by 4 Kings lead singer Don Bryant. In fact, Willie Mitchell wasn’t actually in the band, tho he finagled song credit nonetheless, as he was more like the band’s leader and manager. Anyway, it’s a rocker. Tell it to me baby!

The Weekly BOMP!: The Voxx Rebellion

2009-12-30T07:18:00.011-05:00

Crawdaddys

By now it’s an old story: It’s 1979, the last few spurts of punk drizzle into either the testosterone jockstrap of hardcore, or the twinky commercialism of “new wave.” And to make matters worse, not even the Real Kids can save power pop. Underground R’n’R looks to the past again for inspiration & direction, to what is still a largely bypassed trip, it looks to 60s punk.

Greg Shaw temporarily folded both Bomp Magazine and the BOMP! label in 1979. He then launched the Voxx imprint to “offer a home to bands working in a purist '60s garage/punk/psych tradition.” At least that’s the story (never mind that Bomp continued releasing classics like Stiv Bators’ "Disconnected" and the Taxi Boys mini-LP). So you can credit Voxx for getting the drop on 80s garage revivalism. At first business was slow, with only a few bands answering the call. Still, the label probably reached its zenith with its first few releases, namely two by San Diego’s Crawdaddys, their 1979 LP “Crawdaddy Express,” a veritable slab of ’64 time-traveled to the Year of the Voxx, and their 1980 EP “5 x 4.” Mike Stax, also of the Tell-Tale Hearts, and editor/publisher of Ugly Things magazine, in a short piece on Voxx included in the book Bomp: Saving the World One Record at a Time, tells of hearing these records on John Peel’s show as a lad, then writing a fan letter to Crawdaddys leader Ron Silva. Silva replied by inviting Stax to come to San Diego from England to play bass for his band. Stax hopped the next plane and the rest is garage revival history. Here’s a couple of cuts from “5 x 4”.

Mono Man

If the Crawdaddys took the purist’s approach, Voxx stalwarts DMZ, fronted by Jeff “Mono Man” Connolly, who would go on to lead one of the greatest of 80s garage bands the Lyres, hammered out a crazed hybrid sound, at times made of equal parts Sonics, Stooges, and 13th Floor Elevators. Shaw helped DMZ get signed to Sire records for their eponymous debut, which kicks ass despite a few flaws like closely mic’d, clicky drums, but which flopped on the sales. Shortly after Sire dropped them, Voxx released some truer sounding DMZ tracks, originally recorded in 1977, on the “Relics” LP. Here’s “Do Not Enter” plus their version of the Standells’ “Barracuda.”

Paula Pierce & the rest of the Pandoras

Low-budget recording and packaging was a major part of the Voxx ethos, and Shaw booked cheap studio time at a place called Silvery Moon, in Los Angeles, the city which, with the Cavern Club as its live showcase, functioned as the scene’s ground zero. Unfortunately, it being the 80s and all, the studio featured modern equipment more suited to recording Hollywood hair metal than 60s punk. One of the cuter bands on Voxx, the Pandoras, who came out swinging on their debut LP “It’s About Time,” from 1984, got the Silvery Moon treatment. Then, as if too much of the studio’s effects rubbed off on them, the Pandoras evolved from 60s punk purists to a hair metal band themselves. By ’89 they looked and sounded more like Poison. Leader Paula Pierce died suddenly from some type of brainurism in 1991, aged 31. Here’s their version of the Invictas “Do the Hump,” plus one Paula Pierce original, both from “It’s About Time.” Don’t they sound like nice girls?

So, yes, today’s post offers but a small sampling from the Voxx roster. There were lots more bands, like The Gravedigger V, The Tell-Tale Hearts, The Miracle Workers, The Eyes of Mind, and The Things, to name a few. Also excluded from this post are the great & influential Battle of the Garages comps, just because I don’t own any, and the Acid Visions comp, which, actually, I do have, so maybe down the line I’ll add a couple of tracks from that as an update to this post.

Washing Down the Holidays with Colorado Cool-Aid

2009-12-20T21:01:00.012-05:00

Malcom Yelvington & Band, sometime in the mid 1950s.

Portrait of Red Sovine by Jesse Weidel

Neighbor there's no need to let any holiday give you the blues, whether you're talkin' about Christmas, Hannukka, Kwaanzaa, or the passage of our new compromised health care reform bill. Why, all you gotta do is blow off all any and all of it that doesn't involve bright shiny lights, time off from work and school, and all the free grub you can eat. Then skip out to your local non-Judeo-Christian ethnic restaurant and order up some Aloo Vindaloo, extra spicy. And be sure to wash it all down with a couple of nice, cold cans of Colorado Cool-Aid. Which brings us to the real point of today's post, which is to give you, dear reader, a special holiday gift. Introducing Gemini Spacecraft's Washing Down the Holidays with Colorado Cool-Aid playlist. Just download and play. Not a single Christmas song in the lot. And don't say we never give ya nothin'. Happy Holidays.

Playlist:

1. Lester Roadhog Moran - Intro + Liza Jane
2. Donny Young - Shakin' the Blues
3. T. Texas Tyler - Texas Boogie Woogie
4. Red Sovine - Colorado Cool-Aid
5. Lester Roadhog Moran - Monologue
6. Wanda Jackson - Swinging Doors
7. Delmore Brothers - Hillbilly Boogie
8. Guy Drake - Welfare Cadillac
9. Lester Roadhog Moran - Monologue
10. Malcom Yelvington - Yakety Yak
11. Tommy Blake - F-Oldin Money
12. Glen Glenn - One Cup of Coffee
13. Eddie Bond - Boo Bop Da Caa Caa
14. George Jones - Sparkling Brown Eyes
15. Lester Roadhog Moran - Monologue

Andy Shernoff Solo

2009-12-15T23:28:00.009-05:00

One test of a good song is if it plays well as an acoustic number, or so says Dictators songwriter & mastermind Andy Shernoff. And play ‘em acoustic is exactly what Shernoff did for about an hour last night at the Lakeside Lounge, in New York City, in the final installment of the amazing Monday happy hour thing he’s been doing there for the past few weeks. And play ‘em ain’t all he did. He told a few too--stories, anecdotes, and jokes to introduce the numbers, revealing something new about each song. For example, writer Richard “Jimmy Borneo” Meltzer apparently loved party gags, and would sometimes place a cup of his own piss among a soiree’s snacks & hordy-orvys, and the death of Joey Ramone, for whom Shernoff wrote the great “Stop Thinking About It,” was even sadder than you know.

Something about the interplay of these stories and songs lent extra impact to the proceedings, producing some rare effect that these two elements working separately would never hit. The more he talked and played the more exhilarating and trance-like the set became. When introducing “New York, New York,” a song about a city that no longer exists, Shernoff remarked that “Now New York is one big mall filled with hillbillies.” How ironic to hear him play the song, moments later, and stare through the Lakeside’s window at the street outside, watching the passersby, the bourgeois bohemians and neat bankers who now roam Avenue B. Occasionally these passersby would glance inside at the oddity onstage. What did they see? Just some guy strumming an acoustic guitar?

New Arrival to the GS Bookshelf: Folk Photography by Luc Sante

2009-12-05T21:33:00.020-05:00

Luc Sante, author of that great history of vice on the Bowery, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, apparently collects early 20^th Century picture postcards. From his collection of more than 2500 cards he assembled his latest book Folk Photography, The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (Yeti/VerseChorus, 2009).

Clare County voted to go dry.

Sante distinguishes Real-Photo Postcards from the more widespread photo-litho cards of the day, as the former were printed in darkrooms, on photo paper, and in limited runs. They originally appeared as a result of several key convergences. In 1905 the postal service inaugurated the penny postcard rate, and then Rural Free Delivery the following year. At about the same time photography became more accessible to the layman thanks largely to the advent of simpler developing processes and cheap cameras. Before long every lonesome whistle-stop in Prairieville had its local photog, ready and able, for a fee, to document people and events in sepia tone to show to the folks back home.

A scene from the Mexican border war.

This plain-faced popular form, which Sante reminds us was an essential means of communication during its day, was derided by the guardians of more self-consciously arty-farty photography of the time. Alfred Stieglitz considered the subjects of most photo postcards too banal, and their execution too amateurish. However, in his accompanying treatise, Sante argues for the democratic quality of the real-photo postcard. Borrowing crit-speak from Barthe’s Camera Obscura, he insists that the best RPPCs qualify as art, as they possess both studium and punctum. That is, they both capture something essential about their time and place, the studium, while also “puncturing” the viewer with their emotional power.

Burn K-Doe Burn!

2009-11-27T14:07:00.004-05:00

Ernie K-Doe: The Black Liberace, Emperor of the Universe, and posthumous mayoral candidate for the City of New Orleans. The following WWOZ aircheck gives a good example of his dynamic, on-air personality, while offering useful wisdom for roosters, hens, and charity hospital babies.

Thanks to WFMU’s Rock ‘n’ Soul Ichiban for originally posting this aircheck.

Lucky Wray & Little Walter: Teenage Twin-Pack

2009-11-25T23:18:00.007-05:00

Lucky Wray

“Teenage Cutie,” Lucky Wray & The Palomino Ranch Gang, a/k/a Link Wray in his Stetson-wearin’, cowboy movie-watchin’ days, waxed this one for Pappy Daily’s Starday Records back in 1955. I’m pretty sure that’s Link on the vocals, just before a bout of consumption would claim one of his lungs, which is largely why he played mostly instros for the rest of his career. Doctor’s orders!

“Teenage Beat,” Little Walter (Checker 845). A blazin’ instro from 1956. Basically a looser, improvised work-out on the same groove that drives “My Babe.” But this track--something to get the teenies dancing, no doubt--rocks harder than the big hit, presented here in the same scratch-o-phonic hi fidelity you've come to expect from Gemini Spacecraft.

Roy Hall & Amos Milburn

2009-11-15T15:34:00.016-05:00

The paths of Roy Hall & Amos Milburn may never have crossed in any notable way, except in the annals of Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Nick Tosches, which features excellent profiles on them both. Still, here at Gemini Spacecraft, the Cohutta Mountain Boy and the slick Chicken-Shacker have come to resemble two hands on the same boogie piano.

Both Hall and Milburn cut their earliest sides in the late 40s, back in the days of the 78 single. Both knew the blurry, bleary wonders of the after-hours joint. While Milburn had a string of hits, most notably 1948’s “Chicken Shack Boogie” (Aladdin 3014), none of Hall’s own great records would ever hit, although his most famous song “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On” (Decca 29697) obviously blew the world wide open for Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957.

Like the booze he loved and sang so well about, Milburn’s genius was concentrated, in this case, in the decade spanning 1946 to roughly 1956. During this period, while recording for Aladdin, he cut the aforementioned “Chicken Shack Boogie,” plus the dirty dittie “Walking Blues,” also “Let’s Rock Awhile,” “Good Good Whiskey,” its remorseful inverse “Bad Bad Whiskey,” also “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer,” “My Happiness Depends on You,” and my personal favorite, his version of Don Raye’s “Down the Road Apiece.” Both Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones did their own great versions of "Down the Road a Piece." But where those acts each rocked it as a full combo, Milburn, accompanied only by a snare drum, pumps that piano boogie until it sounds like an entire, crazy band. Not long after, Aladdin Records folded. Milburn migrated over to the King label, and, in the early 60s cut a couple of duets with Charles Brown. Eventually the hard drinkin’ caught up with him, and after several strokes, Amos Milburn died in Houston in 1980.

Put a lascivious, drunk hillbilly behind what is essentially the same twelve-bar boogie, then hit the drums a little harder and crank up the gee-tar, and you get Roy Hall. His first band, Roy Hall and the Cohutta Moutain Boys, were among the earliest on the legendary Fortune label, who in 1949 released “Dirty Boogie” (Fortune 126) and five other sides. After that, Hall returned to Nashville where he ran an after-hours joint called the Music Box, cut a few sides for the Bullet label, “Mule Boogie,” (Bullet 704) from 1950, among them, and played piano for Webb Pierce. Webb helped Roy get a deal with Decca Records, where Hall’s music moved a few steps away its earlier hillbilly blues stylings toward something much closer to rockabilly in songs like “Diggin’ the Boogie,” “Three Alley Cats,” “See You Later Alligator,” and “Don’t Stop Now.” Despite a lack of hits, and music biz rip-offs, Hall kept rockin’, seeming to get raunchier with each new record. By the late 50s he’d returned to Fortune, recording for their subsidiary, the Hi-Q label. Here he re-worked a couple of earlier gems like “Dig, Everybody, Dig That Boogie” and “Three Alley Cats,” while also releasing the great “Bedspring Motel.” Then, in 1960, for his former boss Webb Pierce’s short-lived Pierce label, under the name “The Hound,” Hall made one of the dirtiest records you’ll ever hear, “Flood of Love,” b-side to the great “One Monkey Can’t Stop the Show.”

Both men quit drinking in the last years of their lives, and while those strokes left Milburn an invalid, unable to stomp out that piano boogie thanks to the loss of a leg, Hall kept rockin’ into geezer-hood, until his card got punched in 1984.

The Weekly BOMP! - The Zantees "Out for Kicks"

2009-11-07T10:37:00.007-05:00

Released by Bomp in 1980, the Zantees first long player Out for Kicks is like some old V-8 lunging off the line, building power and speed as it goes. Here at the Gemini Spacecraft archive it gets shelved beside the Blasters’ American Music and Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert, two other great 1980 LPs that helped spark that branch of postpunk that Greg Shaw dubbed “Real Rockers,” rightfully reclaiming the word from “the same creeps who took over new wave,” who were then trying to apply “Rocker” to “that lethargic sludge they worship as reggae.” Shaw asserted that only “records with that frantic beat that makes you want to go hog wild” deserved to be called “Rocker.” And Out for Kicks definitely lives up to Shaw’s criteria.

The Zantees line-up included Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, on the vocals and tubs respectively, then of Kicks Magazine, soon to launch Norton Records, teamed up with guitarist brothers Paul & Bill Statile and bassist Rob Norris in a sort of proto A-Bones, if you will. As for the words to describe their sound, let Shaw say it, “Some folks call the Zantees a rockabilly band, but they’re not. They’re so much more than that. They’re a Rock ‘n’ Roll band in the strongest sense, having grabbed inspiration from all the high points of the past 30 years including not only rockabilly but punk, invasion, surfing, and maniac R&B and bashed it all into a style that’s indefinable.”

On Out for Kicks, dig how the Statile brothers' string-wringin' calls to mind that of Paul Burlison, Cliff Gallup, and others, then mixes it all together, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes even in the same riff! And Billy Miller’s wild vocals here display a spastic youthfulness not as apparent on later A-Bones records. Add Miriam Linna’s “hog wild” beat, and a heapin’ helpin’ of reverb on the vocals, guitars, drums, and, hell, everywhere, and you get a real classic. Now out of print, but not too hard to track down.

Greg Shaw quotes originally from Bomp! Magazine, now reprinted in Bomp! Saving the World One Record at a Time (Ammo, 2007).

Songs:
"Blonde Bombshell," "Big Green Car," and "Gas Up," from Out for Kicks (Bomp! LP 4009).

Print Ephemera #2: WFMU's "Crackpots & Visionaries" Trading Cards

2009-10-31T20:07:00.016-04:00

...Or, WFMU Record Fair Finds Part II: Crackpots & Visionaries trading cards.

Pictured here is Volume I, from 1992. Ya get 36 cards with captioned bios of a wide range of characters from William S. Burroughs to Jesse Helms, each illustrated by some luminary of 1990s underground comics. Artists include Dan Clowes, Roy "Trailer Trash" Tompkins, Julie Doucet, Joe Coleman, and lots of others.

#30 The Patron Crackpot of this blog, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, drawn by J.R. Williams.

WFMU Record Fair Finds

2009-10-31T19:33:00.011-04:00

Last weekend brought the big annual WFMU Record Fair back to New York City. I slogged through the rain and the thick crowd of fellow record hounds at the Metropolitan Pavilion and managed to catch a couple of songs from the Trashmen's very short set, which sounded great and proved they still got it. My only gripe is that it ended so soon. What the hell tho, I guess if I'd wanted to hear more, I could have made the shlepp over to Maxwell's later that night. Anyway, at the record fair, I kept walking past all the Tropicalia and Jandek LPs and managed to snag the following 45s.

From the Filling-Out-the-Collection-with-Much-Needed-Classics Department: Slim Harpo's "Don't Start Cryin' Now," from 1961 (Excello 2194), B-side to "Rainin' In My Heart." I love how LOUD this record is.

From there the fingers did their own walkin' through various 45 boxes to come up with this pair from the under-researched genre of Cow-Milkin songs. First of these two classics is another from the Excello label (Excello 2268), the Blues Rockers' "Calling All Cows," b/w Jerry McCain's "Courtin' in a Cadillac," from 1965.

Next is Red Foley's 1952 country boogie "Milk Bucket Boogie," on the Decca label. I like the milk-in-the-pail percussion effect on that one.

From the Norton table I also picked up a copy of Andre Williams' brand new novel Sweets and Other Stories, recently published by Kicks Books, edited by Miriam Linna. Gemini Spacecraft will post a more detailed review of Sweets shortly. For now I'll say it kind of reminds me of a cross between Iceberg Slim's Mama Black Widow and Babs Gonzales' I Paid My Dues (see previous GS post about that last one).

Greased Griddles & Poodle Dogs: The Raunchy Rock 'n' Roll of Johnny Buckett, Roy "The Hound" Hall, and Others

2009-10-25T23:14:00.017-04:00

“I’m a Griddle Greasing Daddy”... “Let Me Play With Your Poodle,”... “I call her my Eager Beaver Baby,”... Yessir, sometimes singers said a lot more back when they couldn’t come right out and say it all. Sandwiched between the pre-war era of explicitly nasty blues & hillbilly lyrics and the suggestive 70s country music of Tanya Tucker, et al, lies a body of raunchy RnR double entendre. A comprehensive survey of these dirty ditties could, of course, fill an entire book, and to dwell the subject for very long is to expand it beyond what fits neatly into a blog post. So today the GS brings you a quick sampling.

Now, Poodle-owners out there, ask yourselves, would you let Johnny Buckett and his Cumberland River Boys “Play With Your Poodle” “...I mean your little poodle dog”? While considering Buckett's offer, you might recall that it's a sort of two-for-one deal, because when you flip the record, he also promotes further services in “Griddle Greasing Daddy.” Originally released as a single for the Renown label, both cuts reappeared on Fortune EP 1330. Note how Buckett cops song-writing credit for himself, despite the fact that Hank Penny had already cut "Poodle Dog" for the King label back in 1947.

The moniker “Roy the Hound” was but a mask for the boogie pianist Roy Hall, who wrote “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, and whose Coahutta Mountain boys had been doin’ the “Dirty Boogie” since the late 40s. Out there ahead of me somewhere is a more fully fleshed-out post on my main-man Roy Hall--like he says himself in “Bedspring Motel” ...“Boy I sure dig that Roy Hall on the piana”. In 1960 he cut one of the dirtiest numbers you’re likely to find anywhere in the Rockabilly ouvre “Flood of Love”. Personally, I like to think the listener’s shock is anticipated and embodied by the Big-Bopper sounding back-up singer’s shouts of “Now what you say?! A Flood of LOVE?!” Hall’s occasional employer Webb Pierce owned the short-lived label that released this slab o’ salaciousness.

While Johnny Burnette employs the double entendre in “Eager Beaver Baby,” ostensibly a tale of unrequited love interest with obvious connotations, Jerry Lee Lewis dispenses with this device nearly altogether in “Big Legged Woman”. Aside from its clever biscuit dough metaphor, the latter is a raw, unabashed poon-hound anthem. George “Thumper” Jones, on the other hand, sounds like an unwitting accomplice to kink in “Slave Lover,” putting away his paper and pipe with a sigh to go “uptown and downtown” at his master’s bidding.

In RnR, just as in blues, male performers didn’t hold a monopoly on the raunch. Wanda Jackson’s “Cool Love” comes on panting in red lipstick, so don’t’cha be no square. The Miller Sisters offer their ode to variety, in dance partners and lovers, in “Ten Cats Down,” while Barbara Pittman growls for it outright in “I Need a Man,” and Charline Arthur--really more of a western swinger than a rocker--expresses a certain self-sufficiency in “I’m Having a Party All By Myself.”

Marlon Brando, Preston Epps, and Other Bongo Beatin' Beatniks

2009-10-24T12:34:00.016-04:00

The late 50s and early 60s were rife with bongo beaters--with all the bongo-rific riffery seeming to reach some sort peak around 1959. What follows is another scatter-shot round-up of some favorites.

First up, Marlon Brando, making the scene with Jack Costanzo in this 1953 television interview. So, okay, technically those aren't bongos they're playing, but rather congas. Still, check out the old, hep meaning of the phrase "losing his mind." And dig that set! Looks like the Corleone-to-be descends a staircase into some kind of swinger’s grotto.

Joe Hall and the Corvettes “Bongo Beatin’ Beatnik” (Global 751, 1959). This one plays on the beatnik’s reputedly sophistimacated preference for jazz over greasy kid stuff, with Hall chanting “I’m a bongo beatin’ beatnik and I just don’t dig RnR” over and over, ironically enough, to a groovy RnR beat. Can still be found on the Sin Alley volume 2 compilation.

Andre Williams and the 5 Dollars

Andre Williams “Mozelle” (Fortune 827, 1956). What’s left to be said at this point? This is possibly the greatest bongo song of all, while it also rates highly among the Greatest RnR Songs Ever.

Preston Epps' single “Bongo Rock” (Original Sounds, 1959) also appeared on the 1960 LP Bongo Bongo Bongo. After a couple of late 50s – early 60s trips to the top of the Billboard charts, Epps settled into a career as session player. He appears in the 1968 film Girl in Gold Boots, and the following title clip contains not a single Epps bongo beat, as far as I can hear, but I include it anyway for its obvious...uh, cultural/anthropological significance.

Finally, here's Henry Mancini’s title theme to Orson Wells’ classic from 1958 Touch of Evil. Factoid: for the set they didn’t use some Tijuana border town streets, but rather Venice Beach during its late 50s bohemian heyday. Lawrence Lipton gives a detailed account of the Venice Beach of that period in the oft-maligned The Holy Barbarians (J. Messner Books, 1959).

Introducing the Weekly BOMP!

2009-10-18T12:43:00.020-04:00

Pet project of uber-fan Greg Shaw, BOMP! Records evolved from the early-70s magazine Who Put the Bomp--prototype for all Rock fanzines to follow--which in turn grew from its 60s predecessor, that mimeograph monument to San Francisco psych, Mojo Navigator.

Shaw’s obsession for cataloging and collecting, and his admiration for Ralph Gleason’s writing (SF Chronicle jazz crit who was among the first to give “serious” consideration to that newfangled rock music), along with his ability to operate that mimeo machine laid the groundwork for him to eventually become one of the earliest rock critics. Shaw wrote not only for Who Put the Bomp, but also contributed to CREEM, Phonograph Record Magazine, and others, his work appearing alongside Dave Marsh, Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs. Meanwhile he also compiled and released the legendary Pebbles 60s punk series. Shaw’s influence grew during the 70s and he eventually became instrumental in bringing the Flamin’ Groovies, DMZ, and others to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. It’s safe to say that without Greg Shaw the Sire catalog, and thus the whole golden temple of CBGBs NY RnR as we now know it, would look a lot different.

Greg Shaw

Anyway, you can read all about Greg Shaw, who died in 2004, and his various projects in the recently published pair of books BOMP! Saving the World One Re cord at a Time, edited by Suzy Shaw and Mick Farren, and BOMP!2 Born in the Garage, edited by Suzy Shaw and Mike Stax, of Crawdaddys and Ugly Things fame. Both are worth checking out, even if there seems to be considerable overlap between the two. Among the highlights are essays by Bangs, Phast Phreddie, Marsh, the Ig, Kim Fowley, and others, plus lots of great pix and repro’d pages from various past issues.

Gemini Spacecraft would like to offer its own sort of tribute by launching a new series called The Weekly BOMP! Just as the name suggests, the idea here is to turn the GS spotlight on another BOMP! (and BOMP! imprint VOXX) band each week until we run out of records or the game ceases to be fun, whichever comes first. And since BOMP! is still very much in business, etiquette and copyright rules limit use to two or three streaming tracks only. (Thanks Suzy!)

Nikki Corvette

First up is the great Nikki and the Corvettes. Hailing from Detroit, Nikki Corvette cut her teeth on MC5 and Stooges shows, girl groups, and other vital ingredients of good old RnR. She talked long enough about wanting to start her own band that Romantics guitarist Pete James finally booked a show and pushed her in front a microphone. Thus began the career of Nikki Corvette, or so the legend goes, and this during a time when a female’s contributions to the form tended to garner less attention than they would in later years. The original Nikki & the Corvettes LP, from 1980, while something of a forgotten milestone of power-pop, left the singer less than satisfied with vocal mix. “The original LP left us sounding like the Chipmunks,” Nikki has said. So what you get here are a few tracks from the remastered eponymous album released in 2000, twenty years after the original.

Nikki Corvette circa '80 or any of a thousand Williamsburg girls 2009?

Photos:
BOMP! Saving the World One Record at a Time (2007 Ammo Books)
ed. Suzy Shaw & Mick Farren.

Songs: Nikki & the Corvettes LP, BOMP! 1980/2000:
Young and Crazy
Criminal Element
He's a Mover

Soma Records Roundup

2009-09-26T22:39:00.025-04:00

Soma: Ancient Hindus used this word to describe a magical beverage, drink of the gods, or more accurately, the Drink-as-God. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a drug called soma which, when ingested, induced visions. So many dreams. So many visions. Midwestern businessman Amos Heilicher may or may not have had visions, but in 1957 he did think to spell his own name backwards. Then he used the handle for his new record company, Soma Records.

Minneapolis born and based, Soma epitomized the great American independent label. During its heyday, 1959-1966, it thrived largely beyond the reach of national trends, and, thanks to a number of favorable conditions, it functioned as linchpin for a uniquely regional rock ‘n’ roll scene. For one, Heilicher owned probably every juke box and “rack job” (record vendor for dime stores) in Minnesota, and he had the power to sway local airplay in favor of his co’s records. Then the kids themselves, ever hungry for danceable tunes, and living in a region largely crossed-off the tours of big national acts, threw favor at homegrown heroes like the Trashmen, The Accents, Underbeats, et al. In such relative isolation, a taste for rough rockin’ instrumentals developed. Most of the action took place at the dozens of weekly dances held around the region. By playing these dances, many of the bands earned exceptionally good money, even by today’s standards. Such conditions had a way of reversing the usual formula where the show promotes the record. Records became calling cards for the shows. Still, many of ‘em--released by a slew of labels, but especially the Soma discs by the Fendermen, Bobby Vee, The Gestures--charted, and charted big.

What follows is by no means a comprehensive roundup, but it covers the classics. There's a streaming playlist at the end of this post.

The Fendermen “Mule Skinner Blues” b/w “Torture” 1960 (Soma 1137). Jim Sundquist & Phil Humphrey shred the Jimmy Rodgers original, achieving some kinda pinnacle of hickoid mania while landing a surprise spot in the Top 10. Thirty years later, the Phantom Surfers lifted the riff from the instro “Torture” as the basis for their own classic surf stomp “Wave Hog.”

The Fendermen “Don’t You Just Know It” b/w “Beach Party” 1960 (Soma 1142). The cover tune backed by an original instro works again.

The Gestures “Run, Run, Run” b/w “It Seems to Me” 1964 (Soma 1417). Now a classic from the Nuggets comp, this one got released midway through Soma’s great run.

The Gestures

The Trashmen “Surfin’ Bird” b/w “King of the Surf” 1963 (GA 4002). Does this one really need an introduction? On Soma subsidiary Garrett records, named for Soma engineer George Garret.

The Trashmen “Whoa Dad!” b/w “Walkin’ My Baby” (GA 4012). A-side’s a Felice & Boudleaux Bryant composition, and one of the coolest records ever!

The Trashmen

Dave Dudley “Six Days on the Road” b/w “I Feel a Cry Coming On” 1963 (GW 3020). On another Soma subsidiary, the C&W imprint Golden Wing. Immortal trucker classic backed with one of the sappiest titles ever. That’s Dave Dudley for ya, who shoulda steered his big rig wide round the countrypolitan pile-up.

Dave Dudley

Soul City, et al.

2009-09-20T13:00:00.010-04:00

Went to the Millennium Film Project in New York City last night to catch screenings of "Blank Generation" "Punking Out" & M. Henry Jones' 1978 animated film "Soul City," featuring the Fleshtones. That last one, essentially a music vid from the days before the birth the monster MTV, was fucking great--the images of the Fleshtones are actually animated stills! This YouTube version, great as it is, pales next to the actual 16mm print.

All the filmmakers were present to introduce their work. Amos Poe and Ivan Kral talked about making "Blank Generation," essentially an un-synched home movie from the CBGB heyday. Maggie Carson introduced "Punking Out." As a young documentarian, Carson bravely interviewed Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Dee Dee Ramone, and got some of the best live footage of Richard Hell & the Voidoids and the Heartbreakers I've ever seen. And M. Henry Jones detailed the painstaking work that went into "Soul City." Each stressed how radically the world, especially New York City, has changed since they made their films, and how dramatically digital technology has transformed media.

"I Got To Be Drivin' Off Into the Sunset" - Henry Gibson RIP

2009-09-16T20:09:00.009-04:00

Henry Gibson, cast member on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In who also played country star Haven Hamilton in Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, died today of cancer. He was 73. Here's a link to the NY Times obit.

And here's Gibson from an old episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, playing western movie star Quirt Manly. In fact, Quirt even appears to be driving Webb Pierce's old custom Caddie, designed by Nudie Cohen of Hollywood.

Pop Surf Culture: Moondoggie's Short, Glorious Ride

2009-09-13T23:49:00.023-04:00

A somewhat depressing theme begins to emerge from the heaps of great documentary books appearing these days, namely, that ALL THE COOL STUFF IS OVER.

Such is the case with the subject of Pop Surf Culture (Santa Monica Press Books, 2008) by Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore (Priore also being the creator of Dumb Angel Gazette). Here the authors successfully delineate a history and cultural commentary on that brief, early era in surfing--what they term the Bohemian Surf Boom--before it was overrun by the jocks, ugly clothing, godawful music, and corporate sponsorship that now dominate that scene. So what you get here is a great look at the golden years, mainly the period between the mid-1950s to 1970. And, much like modern surfing pioneer Bob Simmons, who for decades combed the California coast on a perpetual search for uncharted surf spots, Chidester and Priore have combed the annals of surf mags, movies, music, and ephemera. In Pop Surf Culture they’ve assembled their findings into the definitive book on the subject, one that’s as entertaining as it is graphically rich.

Among the highlights of Pop Surf Culture is the chapter on Mickey “da Cat” Dora, the original Malibu surf punk, whose story of unmatched surfing mastery, party crashing, media pranks, global lamming from the man, and finally jail time, earns a place in the cool hall of fame. Also, readers would be hard-pressed to find more comprehensive guides to essential surf records, movies, and vintage mags than those presented here.

So yes, another great document about another extinct American scene. Although, on a more upbeat note, the book closes by hinting that a few youngbloods known as the Mollusk Crew (associated with the Mollusk Surf Shop of SF, CA, but there’s even one in Williamsburg!) are currently picking up the “bohemian” torch again.

Pop Surf Culture cover art by Frank Kozik
Surfink sleeve art by --do ya really need to be told?
My Son the Surf Nut sleeve art by Rick Griffin

Playlist:
The Beach Boys - "Moon Dawg"
The Trashmen - "King of the Surf"
Ronnie & the Daytonas - "California Bound"
Jack Nitzche - "The Lonely Surfer"
The Ventures - "The Lonely Sea"

The Possum is Awesome: Happy Birthday George Jones

2009-09-12T00:22:00.003-04:00

Back in the 1970s, odds favored the inevitable and final self-destruction of George Jones to occur before that decade’s end. But here he is today, amazingly enough, still alive in 2009, turning 78 today.

Born September 12, 1931, in the Big Thicket outpost of Saratoga, Texas, Jones came of age during the birth of honky tonk, hearing Al Dexter, Hank Williams, and Lefty Frizzell on beerjoint jukeboxes and Opry radio. The Possum, so named for his flat-top haircut and blank, beady eyes, cut his first sides for Pappy Daily’s fledgling Starday Records. In a makeshift studio lined with acoustical egg cartons--inspiration for the KORN radio booth on Hee-Haw?--Jones cut his earliest hit “Why Baby Why” from 1955. Before that, however, he’d already cut a few sides, including the killer “Play It Cool, Man,” a duet with rockabilly Sonny Burns.

Nick Tosches already wrote the definitive profile on the Possum, “George Jones: The Grand Tour,” the full version of which is reprinted in The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo, 2000). There Tosches describes an essentially unknowable man, a blank spot in possession of one of the greatest voices in Country Music, a mysterious “cipher,” a “prisoner of drink,” and later, prisoner of a bleak sobriety. About him we have only clues; a big one for Tosches is Jones’ rendition of Cindy Walker’s “Warm Red Wine,” included on the 1962 LP George Jones Sings Bob Wills.

The Possum’s career contains so many great chapters...there’s the earliest Starday and Mercury stuff from the 50s, the Musicor stuff from the 60s, when Johnny Paycheck played bass in the Jones Boys and, it is said, lent new direction to Jones’ own singing. (See my April post on Paycheck to hear some of that stuff.) Even much of the lush (pun intended) Billy Sherrill stuff is killer.

About that early, hard-boppin’ Thumper Jones phase, the Possum professes embarassment. “I don’t guess I’m ever gonna live that down,” he once told Tosches. But sides like “Rock It”, “How Come It”, “Maybe Little Baby”, and a slew of others he and Pappy Daily worked up in their attempt to get with that newfangled rock ‘n’ roll then eclipsing country music, now rank as classics.

Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling

2009-09-03T19:27:00.034-04:00

Here’s more evidence that life was better before television. More specifically, life was better before cable television, which, among other crimes, deserves blame for slamming the great American sport of regional professional wrestling into the turnbuckle back in the late 70s/early 80s.

But before it got the final knee-drop, regional wrestling flourished during the 50s, 60s, & 70s in Memphis, Tennessee. In fact, Memphis in those days stood as the biggest, liveliest stop in pioneering promoter Nick Gulas’ territory. Here, at the old Ellis Auditorium and, later, the Mid-South Coliseum, big national names like the Blassie Brothers and Andre the Giant grappled with local heroes Sputnik Monroe, Jackie Fargo, and Jerry “the King” Lawler, while the kinds of characters and story lines that are now commonplace were first worked-up before rabid audiences.

Butch Boyette, the coolest looking of Memphis Wrestlers? That's wife Barbara Galento beside him.

That golden era is now beautifully chronicled in Ron Hall’s book Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets, the Early Days of Memphis Wrestling, published by Shangri-La Projects (the same folks who brought you Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage and Frat Bands in Memphis, and The Memphis Garage Rock Yearbook, as well as the great Shangri-La Records store in Memphis). Thumbing through the wonders contained within the pages of Sputnik, one has to ask whether any greater collection of early wrestling photos, promo shots, clippings, wrestling cards, and records--actually, Sputnik comes with a CD of classics like Sputnik Monroe’s "Sputnik Hires a Band" and Jackie Fargo’s “Champ of Champs”--has ever been compiled. What’s more, Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets gives the reader privileged access to the photos of Robert Dye, Sr., a Memphis entertainment photographer active in the 40s and 50s who also documented the action at Ellis Auditorium. No better vantage point on the figures and faces of this lost world could you hope to find.

Sputnik Hires a Band

SPUTNIK MONROE - SPUTNIK HIRES A BAND

Another interesting story that Sputnik touches on is how segregation lurked over the proceedings. Initially black members of the wrasslin’ audience were relegated to the balcony at Ellis Auditorium. Sputnik Monroe, who boasted a large black fan base, played a key role in changing that rule (a story that gets more time in Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis). The collection of Memphis wrestling cards re-printed in Sputnik subtly illustrates how, in the 50s, any non-caucasian, non-male wrestler would be stuck in some novelty match slot at the bottom. But by the 60s & 70s, Brown Bashers like Sailor Art Thomas, Rocky Johnson, and Bobo Brazil were featured in title matches, while lady wrestlers, midget wrestlers, Bavarian Boys, Tojos, Shieks, and Scufflin’ Hillbillies had all moved up to more prominent spots on the card.

Sputnik Monroe

Thumbing through the pages of Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets makes for hours of fun, whether you’re a true fan of the “King of Sport,” or just another one out for kicks on a Monday night, when the Mid-South league used to hold matches. Sputnik might be as close as you can get now to the real thing.

Doctor Horse and the Coasters: Tales of Sartorial Splendor...And Sorrow

2009-08-22T00:57:00.015-04:00

As inseparable as the two masks of classical Greek thee-ater, so are the highs and lows of the Dandy. One day Beau Brummell's polishing his boots with Champipple, the next he's takin' it on the lam to avoid the debtor's prison.

So it goes, High and Low, with the following two records.

First, former elevator operator made good as one of Doc Sausage's Five Porkchops, Al "Dr. Horse" Pittman tells us about the good life, about a man named Bobo and his fine-as-wine thousand dollar vines in "Jack, That Cat Was Clean," a solo outing recorded in 1958 for Bobby Robinson's Fire label.

Then, in the Coasters' "Shoppin' For Clothes," from 1960, you get more insight into the sorrows of the poor boy surrounded by unattainable luxury than you would from 500 sociology dissertations. Mm-mm, my heart's in pain.

Print Ephemera #1: Sirk Comics

2009-08-19T00:46:00.012-04:00

The following images come from early "picture books" created by Frank Santoro, who's now well-known for Storeyville and Cold Head Comics. These, however, date from an earlier period (early 90s), when Santoro nursed a fixation with the imagery and lingo of Douglas Sirk films and Mezz Mezzrow's great book Really the Blues. The loose look of Sirk comics owes much to the old two-color copiers they were printed on. The machine's inaccurate registration caused a cool randomness, and the multiple passes required to achieve layered color create an effect not unlike that of silk screen printing. The drawings themselves recall the work of Raymond Pettibon and Gary Panter.

Economic Downturns, Garbage Trucks, and the Cheater Slicks

2009-08-18T00:18:00.037-04:00

Despite the economic slump and the dog days of August, I’m really enjoying New York City since my recent relocation. Mind you, it’s no picnic tho. I’m still hunting for a job in a rough market, money’s still tight, and today I got a dizzying noseful of what might have been the rankest, ripest, drippiest garbage truck in the entire city. Still, for these past few days the place seems to be alive with sweat and rank smells and overheated people, just as it should this time of year.

As a consequence of the currently shitty job market, I’ve resorted to trimming a little fat from the record collection. One recently auctioned item was the fairly rare first Cheater Slicks LP On Your Knees. Not everyone’s cup ‘o tea, the Cheater Slicks are known for “reinventing” 60’s punk with their relentlessly brutal, feedback-drenched takes on obscure old nuggets from that era, and for their odes to losers and rejects. Now, the Slicks have long since established themselves as a bassless band, with brothers Tom and Dave Shannon leading the twin guitar attack, and Dana Hatch on drums and caterwauling vocals. However, On Your Knees⎯released in 1989, the year I bounced the last time I lived in NY⎯captures an earlier, more formative phase, with Murder Junkie Merle Allin playing bass. Merle wasn’t even the Slicks’ first bass player, either. Prior to him, they got a little help from the late great Allen “Alpo” Paulino, formerly of the Real Kids.

Before shipping the record to its buyer, I ripped a couple of my favorite tracks, "Bruno's Night Out," and, in honor of my glamorous new life in the big city, "Weirdo on a Train."

The Skidmarks collection of rarities, released by Crypt, also contains much of this first LP. The Slicks released a slew of great singles through the 90s, and really came into their own on the 1993 LP Whiskey, on the In the Red label, particularly on the track "Thinkin' Some More," a 26-minute freakout à la “Sister Ray.” The Cheater Slicks continue to make records and occasionally still play live.

Finally, here's a live clip, circa '88, Middle East Cafe, Cambridge, MA.

Artwork by Dave Shannon