You're Nobody til Somebody Loves You

Goin' Instro-Mental #5: The Green Mosquito

The Green Mosquito -- The Tune Rockers

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

R.I.P. Tura Satana

Blues Hangover - Hangover Blues

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!

Shirley Lee -- Bobby Lee Trammell

Shirley Lee -- Bobby Lee Trammell

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

German television, 196?

On the GS Bookshelf: Alphaville

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."

Hillbilly Hayride #4 - Don't Drop It

Don't Drop It - Terry Fell