[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
21 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 2)*
Spent and Bobcat Goldthwait opened.
benefit for International Relief Teams.
Mix disc by James.
Green Arrow (with Smokey Hormel on guitar)
We’re An American Band (with SH)
The Weakest Part (with SH)
Here To Fall (alt. arrangement) (with SH)
Let’s Be Natural (The Rutles) (with Neil Innes on guitar/keys/vocals)
Ouch! (The Rutles) (with NI)
Democracy (Neil Innes) (with NI)
Under the Evening Sun (Neil Innes) (with NI)
I Want To Be With You (Bonzo Dog Band) (with NI)
Where Has All the Money Gone (NI solo)
Bottom of the Pile (Neil Innes) (NI solo)
Doubleback Alley / Good Times Roll / Another Day / Cheese & Onions (NI solo until “C&O”)
My Heart’s Reflection (with SH & NI)
One of Those People (Neil Innes) (with SH & NI)
Tears Are In Your Eyes (with SH & NI)
I’m The Urban Spaceman (Bonzo Dog Band) (with SH & NI)
Autumn Sweater (with SH & NI)
The Story of Yo La Tango (alt. arrangement) (with SH & NI)
*(encore)*
My Little Red Book (Burt Bacharach & Hal David) (with Gaylord Fields on vocals)
Hanky Panky Nohow (John Cale)
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
20 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 1)*
The Sea & Cake and Jon Benjamin & Jon Glaser opened.
benefit for Roots & Wings of New Jersey.
Mix disc by Bob Odenkirk.
(entire set with Mac McCaughan on guitar, keyboards, and vocals.)
Night Falls on Hoboken
Eight Days A Week (The Beatles)
Nothing To Hide
Stockholm Syndrome
Tears Are In Your Eyes
Did I Tell You?
Upside Down
Noisy Night (Portastatic) (Mac vocals)
Styles of the Times (with John McEntire on drums)
Don’t Say A Word (with John McEntire on drums)
Drug Test
Tom Courtenay (Georgia vocals)
I Heard You Looking (with Sam Prekop & Archer Prewitt on guitars)
Our Way To Fall (with Sam Prekop & Archer Prewitt on guitars)
*(encore)*
Aba Dabba Do Dance (The Tradewinds) (with Todd Abramson on vocals & Archer Prewitt on drums)
Somebody’s In Love (Sun Ra)
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]
The Dead played “Run Rudolph Run” seven times between December 4th and 15th, 1971. Pigpen sang. The tune was a #69 hit for Chuck Berry in 1958, written by Johnny Marks and Marvin Brodie. Unquestionably the best Dead version is the second-to-last, from December 14th at the Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. They played it twice in Chuck Berry’s hometown of St. Louis on December 9th and 10th, and it’s too bad not one of those, but the first night in Ann Arbor has the best mix of any of them. Keith Godchaux’s strident Johnnie Johnson-style piano is full and rich, like the familiar warm balance of Europe ’72, Garcia’s lines darting around it. Besides the following night, where he’s too loud, Godchaux is buried in most of the other recordings, Garcia and Weir’s guitars clanging against each other.
It’s a showcase for Pigpen, returning to the band after sitting out the fall tour, the first sign of weakening for the 26-year old alcoholic, who would die less than two years later. At times on the December east coast run, 11 shows from Boston to Ann Arbor, Pig is spotty. In Boston, the band pulled out his show-stopping “Turn On Your Lovelight,” and he faltered, unable to martial the gang into the weirdly psych-funk nooks they were often able to improvise behind semi-improvised patter about “box back knitties and great big noble thighs,” and they only revisited it one other time on the trip.
But by the end of the run, he seems almost back to form, though the big closers wouldn’t return with regularity until the band shuffled off to New York and then Europe the next spring. One lesson of my Dead listening project–revisiting every show close to its 40th anniversary, #deadfreaksunite, etc.–has been a constant reevaluation of the Dead as a working, aggressively evolving band, often marked by the unrelenting, constant expansion of their songbook. Most lately, this involved an appreciation of Pigpen’s still very active role in ’71 and ’72. Even for Deadheads, Pig is sometimes easy to write off in these later years, so often relegated to un-mic’ed sidestage congas.
While he didn’t exactly crank out tunes like Garcia and Weir, he had two new numbers to do for the December run, “Run Rudolph Run” and a new original, “Mr. Charlie,” which would go along fine with “Empty Pages,” introduced earlier in the year, had he not already abandoned that. Early ’72 would see two more Pig tunes go into rotation, “Chinatown Shuffle” (whose pick-up would get jacked for “U.S. Blues”) and the lost masterpiece “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion).” Even after he left the road following the Europe ’72 tour, he continued to write, producing a set of home demos, which has circulated as Bring Me My Shotgun.
With its “Love & Theft”-like cadences on half-sensical tumbles about some heretofore unknown reindeer named Randolph (?!) and archaic constructions like “girl-child” and “boy-child,” it’s sort of mystifying that avowed Chuck Berry freak Bob Dylan didn’t record “Run Rudolph Run” for his Christmas in the Heart. But it’s a nice little novelty from the Dead’s brief two-keyboard lineup, where Pigpen and Godchaux got a nice Hudson/Manuel-like B3/piano blend on some of the recordings from those tours. Though Pig doesn’t play organ here, Godchaux’s presence gives him the chance to belt over straight-up boogie-woogie piano, a rare pleasure in itself only possible during these few tours.
All of which totally ignores the song’s holidayness, which really has no narrative and is, in an admirably teen-pop way, more about describing the apparent giddiness of the Christmas season in the post-War years. “Shopping is a feeling,” David Byrne said later in True Stories, and there’s maybe some of that in here (infused with holiday spirit, no doubt), with the subtle ’50s consumerism behind lyrics like “all I want for Christmas is a rock & roll electric guitar” and the girl-child’s wish for “a little baby doll that can cry, scream, and wet” (plus perfectly period automotive dreams about Santa speeding down a freeway). Not that Pigpen was signifyin’ or anything. He was–and thanks to the perpetual present tense of the recording is–just singing. The Dead may’ve been hippies, but by late 1971, they were mostly just a rock band.
“Run Rudolph Run”–at least the fifth or sixth Berry tune in rotation–is Pig in his element, and a vibrant little tick in Dead history. But it’s something maybe even more unique than that. In the Dead’s massive unofficial catalogue, it’s one of the very few versions of anything I’d happily call “definitive” with any measure of confidence. And, hey, that’s something to feel good about this holiday season.
1. The Four Populaires – “Holiday Greetings, 1960-1961” – Holiday Greetings, 1960-1961 7-inch (no label)
2. Dustin Wong and Matt Papich – “Blue Moon” – Red Cheeks For Green Grass (no label)
3. Woods – “Christmas Time Is Here” (Woodsist)
4. The Band – “All Creation” – Tombstone: The Lost Album (no label)
5. Sunny Ade – “Akure Nile” – The Master Guitarist, v. 4 (African Songs Ltd. )
6. Lijadu Sisters – “Bobby” – Danger (Knitting Factory)
7. The Heptones – “Sweet Talking” – Sweet Talking (Heartbeat)
8. NRBQ – “When it’s Summertime in the Wintertime” – Ludlow Garage 1970 (Sundazed)
9. Group Inerane – “Ikabkaban” – Guitars From Agadez Vol. 4 7″ (Sublime Frequencies)
10. Branko – “Herr Ved” – Onderliv 7″ (Kill Shaman)
11. Eric Copeland – “The Eyeball” – Puerto Rican 7″ (Post Present Medium)
12. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – “We’ll Be Turned On” – So Many Things (Goner)
13. Crystal Stilts – “Still As The Night” – Radiant Door EP (Sacred Bones)
14. Bobby Bare – “How I Got To Memphis” (Mercury)
15. New Riders Of The Purple Sage – “I Don’t Know You” (Columbia)
16. Tim Buckley – “Phantasmagoria In Two” – Goodbye and Hello (Elektra/Asylum)
17. Arborea – “Phantasmagoria In Two” – Red Planet (Strange Attractors)
18. Minamo – “Bound Letters” – Documental (Room 40)
19. Grasshopper – “Soleas” – Good Night Sweet Prince (Baked Tapes)
20. Robert Hall – “selections of clock bells” (New World Productions)
21. Albert Leskowsky – “A pneumatikus gong esete” – Music for the instruments of an exhibition (Origo)
22. Bernard Parmegiani – “Outremer” – Espaces Sonores No.1 (EMI France)
23. David Wojnarowicz & Ben Neill – “In The Shadow Of Forward Motion (Excerpt)” – The Hissing of Chrome Snakes: Dan Bodah’s 2011 WFMU Marathon Premium (V/A) (no label)
24. Paint Your Golden Face – “Torrents Of Water Subsumed Their Villages” – Community – A Compilation Of Hobart Music (no label)
25. The Soft Collapse – “Loveless” – comm, a (no label)
26. Freddy Fender – “I’m To Blame (at 33 1/3)” (Dot)
27. Okko – “Shiva’s Lullaby” – Sitar and Electronics (Okko)
28. Arpa Celtica Vincenzo Zitello – “Nembo Verso Nord” – Italic Environments (ARMADIO OFFICINA)
29. Nate Wooley – “The Almond (excerpt)” – The Almond (Pogus)
30. Ian Breakwell & Ian McQueen – “Breakwell’s Circus” – Audio Arts Magazine, vol. 4, no. 2 (Audio Arts)
31. C. Spencer Yeh – “Three Synthesizers March 2008” – Zelphabet, Vol. C (Zelphabet)
32. Peter, Paul, and Mary – “Leaving on a Jet Plane (at 33 1/3)” (Warner Bros.)
33. A.M. Gately – “Battle In The City” – Soft Sounds for Gentle People, v. 3 (Pet)
34. Phil Ochs – “The War Is Over” – Tape From California (Collectors Choice)
35. Neil Young – “Albuquerque” – Tonight’s The Night (Reprise)
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And now back to an old occasional project, where I arbitrarily write about the #1 pop song du jour from the perspective of somebody who has only a passing knowledge of current mega-tunes. It doesn’t sound as strange to my ears as it did when I started doing this in 2003, but it still sounds like it’s from another planet.
“We Found Love” – Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris
released by Def Jam
week of 17 December 2011
#1 this week, #1 last week, 11 weeks on chart
To my ears, the most initially attractive bit of this song–at least in that it gives me a little giddy rise–is the swell that happens at :53-1:08 and detonates into a millisecond sugar-rush of generic techno-plink. Later, it repeats the move, possibly with slight variation, and a longer sugar-rush dance resolution. But not really. The chorus comes back almost immediately. And, I suppose, in the case of the modern day global hit, it really is about the chorus, since the rest of the lyrics are a bunch of non-sequiturs strung against the hook, “we found love in a hopeless place.” Narratively speaking, this is very specific: there is a place, and it is hopeless. But while soft-focusing the rest of the words, it’s also the song’s broadest selling point. Something universal if (as made pretty clear by the video) pretty despairing. Hence the techno-swells and sugar-rushes, handy signifiers/call-outs from the international language of untz.
On second listen, the part of the song I actually like is the narrow valley it finds for the bridge, where pretty much everything drops out except a hanging keyboard bounce, whose existence is cheapened when it becomes obvious that its sole purpose is to allow Rihanna and producer Calvin Harris an excuse to get to the second techno-swell. It lasts all of six seconds before a miniature lead-in drops back into yet another iteration of the chorus. It’s funny to me, especially, that Harris gets a “featuring” credit here, given that his only presence on the song seems to be as a producer. Perhaps it is a new custom in this world. I’ve been away for a while.
One of my more half-surprising favorite reissues this year was the Neil Diamond collection, The Bang Years, comprising his first two solo albums, when he was a Brill Building songwriter. It features his original version of “I’m A Believer,” among others. I’ve always abhorred most of Diamond’s later hits that I was familiar with, give or take a soft spot for “Beautiful Noise,” because it appeared in a favorite Mets highlights video when I was a kid.
In fact, there’s one specific section of “I’m A Believer” that belongs to a peculiar sub-set of my memory, a slight turn in the melody in the phrase “the more I gave the less I got” that immediately connects me, via some direct and thorough current, to a familiar emotional tinge from my childhood. As far as I can tell, the tinge is unattached to any one point in the past. More, it’s that it is precisely the same primal response–in the present tense–that I had when I was 6. There’s a particular acoustic guitar strum on “We Can Work It Out” (1:09) that does the same thing. In the case of “I’m A Believer,” it is actually a product of the songwriting–something present both in The Monkees’ hit that I first heard and Diamond version from The Bang Years–and not merely a production flourish, as it frequently turns out to be with other songs in this category. And, in a peripheral way, the whole collection carries that same personal time-track residue in its songwriting. Whatever it is, Diamond’s thumbprints in the melody and changes, it seems entirely intended. Which makes sense. He was a professional songwriter.
We have a friend’s pretty great LP collection on semi-permanent loan, since she’s moved into a smaller apartment, and I recently dug out Velvet Gloves and Spit, the first after those represented on The Bang Years, and holy sweet merciful motherfuck is it square. That’s pretty much obvious from the Bang material, too, but it’s aspirations towards teen-pop carry the day. Velvet Gloves, though, is from 1968, and it’s easy to tell which side of the castle gates Diamond is positioning himself on, musically and otherwise. The music is all dense chintziness, the aural equivalent of candelabras. No idea if Mr. D. ever used stuff like that in his stage sets, but that’s what I see. The folksinger/Elvis get-up he sports on the cover the live album Hot August Night probably informs this. Also, Velvet Gloves’ “The Pot Song,” which would be a pretty good slab of stoner folk if not for the interspersed monologues of recovering drug addicts talking about the gateway aspects of herbal jazz cigarettes.
And on top of that, an inscription in the liner notes: The American Popular goes on and on…. Just like that. In italics. In curling fancypants heavily seriffed script, centered, about two-thirds down on an ever-so-stately Dodge Dart brown sleeve. It’s an odd divide in time, historically and in popular music, and it’s a little discombobulating to actually hear the divide as clearly and cleanly as Neil lays it out. The textures aren’t even that far off from The Bang Years stuff, bouncing organs and hand-claps, but the forward motion of the Brill Building is gone. It’s powered by something else, moves off in a different direction into a sophistication without rebellion. So that’s going back on the shelf for a while, unless somebody presents some compelling evidence otherwise. There’s some typical nostalgia at play, of course, in listening to these recordings from the mid-60s. But mostly it’s just listening to transparently great songs. Um, thumbs up.
Here’s The Monkees, Neil Diamond, and (of course) Robert Wyatt’s versions of “I’m A Believer,” in which his man-child yip-croon seems to blow up each one of those memory-rubbing melodic details.
The Los Angeles Times of April 12, 1912, quoted a pitcher for the Portland Beavers as calling his special curve “the Jazz ball” because “it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” The next sighting was similarly in a baseball context, in a column about the San Francisco Seals, who returned from their Boyes Springs training camp in 1983 “full of the old ‘jazz’.” This time the reporter appended a definition: “What is the ‘jazz’? Why, it’s a little of that ‘old life,’ the ‘gin-i-ker,’ the ‘pep,’ otherwise known as the enthusiasalum. A grain of ‘jazz’ and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks.”
1. Nu Sounds – “Black Sky and Blue Moon” – Spaceship Lullaby (Atavistic)
2. Bill Evans Trio – “Solar” – Sunday at the Village Vanguard (Riverside) [Paul Motian, 1931-2011.]
3. Sal Valentino – “Friends and Lovers” – Arrangements, v. 1 (Bananastan)
4. Jurgen Muller – “Meeresbett Meditation (Sea Bed Meditation)” – Science of the Sea (Digitalis)
5. Jonti – “Twirligig” – Twirligig (Stones Throw)
6. Sagittarius – “My World Fell Down” – Present Tense (Sundazed)
7. The Bats – “Getting Over You” – Free All The Monsters (Flying Nun)
8. Sonny and the Sandwitches – “Cathedral in the Desert” – Sonny and the Sandwitches EP (Empty Cellar)
9. Richard and Mimi Farina – “Reflections In A Crystal Wind” – Reflections In A Crystal Wind (Vanguard)
10. Ted Hawkins – “Sorry You’re Sick” – Watch Your Step (Rounder)
11. The Styrenes – “Where The Girls Are” – It’s Artastic! (Homestead)
12. The Druids of Stonehenge – “Earthless” – Creation (Sundazed)
13. Alec Bathgate – “Faked” – The Indifferent Velvet Void (Lil’ Chief)
14. James Blackshaw – “Boo, Forever” – Holly EP (Important)
15. Danny Paul Grody – “Ohr” – In Search of Light (Students of Decay)
16. Jon Gibson – “Cycles” – Two Solo Pieces (Chatham Square)
17. Steve Hauschildt – “Music For A Moire Pattern” – Tragedy & Geometry (Kranky)
18. Debo Band – “Gedawo” – Gedawo 7-inch (Electric Cowbell)
19. Ty Segall – “Booksmarts” – Singles 2007-2010 (Goner)
20. Gregory Rogove – “Young Mountain” – Piana (Knitting Factory)
21. Illitch – “Chambre 3” – Rainy House (Sparkling Spare Wheel)
22. Nick Storring – “Artifacts 2007-9” – Rife (Entr’acte)
23. Alain Savouret – “Ballade Rustique (excerpt)” – Ballade Rustique (Le Kiosque d’Orphée)
24. Less Motion – “Fields of Bells” – Less Motion (no label) [feat. “Debriefing” by Susan Sontag (TANAM)]
25. various – “Side A” – Indian Shortwave and the Sounds of Kumbh Mela (TBTD)
26. Master Musicians of Jajouka – “Prayer” – The Primal Energy That Is the Music and Ritual of Jajouka, Morocco (Sol Re Sol)
27. Anthony Braxton – “Composition N. 228” – Two Compositions (Leo)
28. Zusaan Kali Fasteau – “Benevolence” – Prophecy (Flying Note)
29. James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg – “Believer Field” – Avos (Tompkins Square)
30. Robert Hunter – “13 Roses” – Amagamalin St. (Relix)
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1. Ursula Bogner – “Sonne = Blackbox 1972” – Sonne = Blackbox (Faitiche)
2. patrice moullet – “Alchimie Rythmique” – Chronoradial (Omni Recording Corp.)
3. Tom Waits – “Back In The Crowd” – Bad As Me (Anti)
4. Lambchop – “If Not, I’ll Just Die” – Mr. M (Merge)
5. The Tower Recordings – “Delmak-O” – Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles (Stiltbreeze)
6. Susan Pillsbury – “It’s Hard To Be Easy” – Susan Pillsbury (Sunbeam)
7. The Mandrake Memorial – “This Can’t Be Real” – The Mandrake Memorial (Collectables)
8. John Villemonte – “I Am The Moonlight” – People Like You (Sebastian Speaks)
9. These Trails – “Hello Lou” – These Trails (Drag City)
10. Peter Laughner and Lester Bangs – “Goodbye, Lou” – Creem magazine office, 1976
11. Steve Reich – “Drumming” – Drumming (Nonesuch) [feat. Seijiro Murayama, Milford Graves, Man Forever, Foot Village, Steve Reid, Bill Kreutzmann, Susie Ibarra]
12. White Out – “Möbius Strip” – Asphalt and Delay (audioMER)
13. Husere Grav – “#2” – Myths (Prison Tatt)
14. – “MIDI Dark Star seashore loop”
15. Grateful Dead – “Dark Star” – 15 November 1971 Austin Music Hall [(El Paso excised)]
16. Eve – “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” – Take It and Smile (LHI)
17. Les Kitschenettes – “La Fermeture Eclair” – Qui C’est qu’a Di quon Peut pas imitter les Anglais? 10-inch (Pinkitsch)
18. Television Personalities – “i was a mod before you was a mod” – I Was a Mod Before You Was a Mod (Overground)
19. Radar Eyes – “Miracle” – Miracle 7-inch (HoZac)
20. Mark Sultan – “In Future Worlds” – Whatever/Whenever (In The Red)
21. J.C. Samba – “Misunderstood” – Hell Death Samba (Slovenly)
22. Nâ Hawa Doumbia – “Danaya (à Sidi Konaté Pour Toujours)” – La Grande Cantatrice Malienne (Awesome Tapes From Africa)
23. Heresy of the Free Spirit – “A Prayer For Light” – A Prayer For Light (Incuna Bulum)
24. Cian Nugent – “Sixes & Sevens” – Doubles (VHF)
25. Gene Clark – “In A Misty Morning” – Roadmaster (Sundazed)
The Frow Show with Jesse playlists: http://wfmu.org/playlists/JJ
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