Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Friday Tracks: Susie (Dramas)
Elton John - oh man, where do you start? The man more legend than person at this point. From his elaborate stage costumes to his adidas tracksuits, I’m sure he occupies a larger space in this dimension than just his physical form would suggest. Obviously everyone knows his hits, the Rocket Man’s, the Your Song’s, THAT moment in Almost Famous. All strong choices no doubt. But there’s one track on his ’72 album Honky Chateau that at some points I like more than all of his big crowd pleasers.
Susie (Dramas) precedes Rocket Man and that’s probably one of the reasons that it’s fallen by the wayside. The other being that, Elton’s recorded over a million and a half songs by this point and no one can be expected to keep track of them all, let alone him.
Honky Chateau was the first album on which EJ had managed to circumvent the irritating record company and feature his full live band across all the tracks. The way they blend, you can tell stage performance has honed these guys into a finely tuned machine.
Susie, lyrically, isn’t much to shout about. It tells the story of a country woman leading her man along and by about a minute and a half in you’ve heard all the original lyrics your’e going to hear. That said, it has some great turns of phrase from Bernie Taupin including ‘I’m an old hayseed harp player, I’m the hit of the county fair’, aided in fairness by Elton's delivery.
But it’s not the lyric you’re here for, it’s the sweet grove laid down by Nigel Olsson backed up by Dee Murray who locks this down on bass hooking nicely into Elton’s own bass part in his left hand. Davey Johnstone adds a nifty backwards guitar solo. This is one to make you dance - if it doesn’t you definitely aren’t listening to it loud enough.
Monday Moods: Feeling Heavier
I've opened it up with ZZ Top, who are truly in the upper echelons of cool. If you look past the beards and the furry guitars there's a lot there, and one thing that goes without argument is Billy Gibbons' guitar playing is no laughing matter. According to him, it was BB King who told him to use light guitar strings as anything heavier was getting in the way of his playing. My Dad used to love this band, and I finally see it was with good reason. Also included is yet another great 70s cut from Aerosmith, No More No More. Opening with the absolutely excellent lyric "Blood stains the ivories on my Daddy's baby grand, ain't seen the daylight since we started this band", Steven Tyler sure knew how to pen 'em. Moving on, as usual a few fun facts about some of these songs:
- - On The Ocean, there's a bunch of background noises that can be noticed through careful ringing, including a telephone ringing. This all happened by chance as the band recorded House of the Holy in a house, rather than a regular recording studio
- - On Melbourne based Australian radio station 3RRR in the mid to late 1980s, a legal show aired named after Warren Zevon's song 'Laywers, Guns and Money'
- - Though it sounds deceivingly simple, hidden on September Gurls by Big Star is a Fender mando guitar, an early electronic guitar/mandolin hybrid.
- - Bonus fact - I once caught a live Justin Timberlake concert playing on VH1 in the mid 00's. They sampled The Ocean for a verse of one of his songs. It was pretty, pretty awful.
Monday Moods: I'm Melting
So, with that in mind this playlist is a celebration of hot melty summer heat. You've got Bruce Springsteen singing about the hot sun beating on the tarmac, Elton talking about how much he loves Jamaica and the classic Rivieras celebrating the gorgeous California Sun. As with last week here are some fast and fun facts about some of these tracks.
- - The excellent Sherry Darling features on the Bruce Springsteen Promise documentary, about the making of Darkness On The Edge of Town. Bruce & Steven Van Zandt play it on a piano, finishing with saying it was the one and only performance of that song. Little did they know..
- - Elton and his band had originally planned on recording the whole of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in Jamaica, however studio facilities were not quite up to par and they eventually decamped to the South of France. This song sums up their feelings pretty much perfectly
- - California Sun is not orginally by The Rivieras, but by singer Joe Jones. It's since been covered by a metric fuckton of people, but if you're a fan I would recommend checking out this version by legendary NYC punk band The Dictators
Monday Moods: Moving to the woods
Right now in London it’s pretty warm, and if like me you work in a giant air conditioned building you’re probably craving a trip to the woods to sit in the shade of a big tree and watch nature go by. So this is what this playlist is for. If you can’t be there, you can at least close your eyes and imagine it.
Cool facts about some of these tracks:
- Lookin’ Out My Back Door was written for John Fogerty’s three year old son and inspired by the Dr Seuss book ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street'
- Key To the Highway was first recorded in 1940 and has since been recorded by seemingly a million and one different people. This version with B.B. King is Eric Clapton’s 4th out of his 5 released versions of the song
- Led Zeppelin’s Going To California is reportedly written about Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s shared infatuation with her. To be fair, who wouldn’t fall for Joni in 1970?
Friday Tracks: Running On Empty
If you’re not familiar with Jackson Browne’s work but his name rings a bell, you might remember him for producing Warren Zevon’s first album which I talked about in the first Friday Tracks. He also worked with The Eagles, co-writing their hit Take It Easy (which I’ve only just discovered so get ready for me to start going on about that as a Friday track in a few weeks time..)
Running on Empty starts with a little bit of audience noise and guitar ambience and then a bang and you’re in, out on the road. The piano carrying the melody with the warm hum of the lap steel humming underneath everything before punctuating the song with high notes (and two killer solos no less). There’s something about road songs that highlight the unseen world of the touring musician and glamourise it into something mystical and amazing. This song captures that perfectly with the perfect hint of sadness and loneliness needed to make everything great.
Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels,
I don’t know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels,
I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through,
Looking into their eyes I see them running too
It would be foolish to write about this song and not mention the soaring harmony work undertaken by the backing group The Section and backing singer Rosemary Butler. Creating a rich warm harmony they give this song such a depth that without it the tone of the song would drastically alter. Summer’s here and there’s no better time to get on the road, let this song take you there.
Friday Tracks: Answering Machine
This week I got to see my favourite band play twice. Their first UK shows in 24 years at The Roundhouse in Camden. Usually things like this seem cheesy and like a cash grab for nostalgia, but they gave it their all. Even if it is a cash grab. Four men on stage playing perfect rock music. No coloured lights, no pyrotechnics, just music. I was going to take a load of cool pictures and write a review but in all honesty both shows passed by in a blur of happiness and I couldn’t even begin to put into words how good they were, so instead for this week’s Friday Tracks I’ve decided to dedicate a post to The Replacements.
I can, and given the opportunity will, say a lot about The Replacements. The band that rejected stardom and praise in favour of self deprecation and a probably disdained (until recently) cult status. They’re cooler than the other side of the pillow. Formed in Minneapolis in 1979 in a basement, they have more songs that feel real, funny and sad, than probably anyone else. From their seminal ‘Let It Be’ album, the last before they signed a major label and the penultimate album to feature founding Stinson brother Bob on lead guitar, Answering Machine is widely recognised as some of singer and main songwriter Paul Westerberg’s best work.
This is one of those perfect songs that encapsulates feeling stranded and lonely it in it’s rawest form. Admittedly it’s from that beautiful time before mobile phones and the web of connection they’ve cast over the world, when you could only hope to catch someone’s fleeting attention on a tape recording left on their answering machine when they were out/ignoring you. Hearing this song paints a picture in my mind of small towns, piled high with snow drifts where the only hope you have of a hot meal is a cheese burger with a lurid yellow cheese slice melted on top of it and a side of cardboard fries with an ombre of ‘cajun’ seasoning.
Originally recorded as solo voice and guitar the official LP version is very good, however I think this version recorded at the University of Wisconsin is just a little better. Released as part of a promotional EP for college radio called “Inconcerated Live” to help promote their second major label album ‘Don’t Tell a Soul” it opens with a drunkenly uttered “Okay, forgive me if I fuck this one up a little bit..” and you just know you’re in for something special. The band deliver, the end of the song culminating with the energy of a jet fighter taking off. Utter, real emotion comes through in this performance and if you can’t appreciate it I guess you should go back to listening to Ed Sheeran singing about love in mysterious ways or whatever.
Friday Tracks: Up On Cripple Creek
Lately I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with a new (read: old) band. This happens quite regularly and friends/family are frequently subjected to my sermons on famous music which I’ve only just discovered. This has included Creedence, Jackson Browne and The Hold Steady amongst others. But this month it’s The Band. The mighty troubadours known for backing Bob Dylan on The Basement Tapes and for their Scorsese directed concert film The Last Waltz.
Over a decade ago some 'reputable' music magazine ran a ‘best live albums EVER’ feature and being young and impressionable I naturally went out and snapped up everything I could get my hands on. One of the albums that really stuck for me was Before The Flood by Bob Dylan & The Band, recorded in ’74 on their co-headlining tour. I’d already fallen in love with Bob’s oeuvre and I believe there’s nothing better than a live record to hear the songs you love really breathe. As is the case with many a great album, before you even hit play on this album you know it’s going to be good - the cover is a see of people holding their lighters in the air before it was a cliché and the crowd seem to stretch on forever in the hot summer heat. It's just one of those shots you wish you could live inside.
Back in the mid-00’s when I first picked it up, the country tinged stylings of The Band didn’t really capture my adolescent furore and nine times out of ten I would skip through them to get to Bob killing it solo acoustic on Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright. As with all albums, slowly it fell out of my regular rotation and became something I’d go back to occasionally, though didn’t think about much. Recently however, something changed. Surfing Netflix for something new and inspiring to watch I stumbled across ‘Ain’t In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm’. I had no idea who Levon Helm was, but I figured I’d throw it on having had a good time randomly selecting the Harry Nilsson documentary last summer. I wasn’t disappointed. The film itself is a great piece about The Band’s drummer in his twilight years battling cancer and working on some of his last music, a watch which I would highly recommend. On the topic of today’s post, though, it specifically made me revisit my old friend Before The Flood, and finally give The Band’s tracks on the album a chance. Through hazy remembrance I realised I HAD listened to these songs before, and was more than a little baffled as to how I hadn’t realised their true greatness before this moment.
For this week’s Friday track I’ve selected the absolutely stomping Up On Cripple Creek. On this live cut Levon sings and growls his heart out a little more than on the studio LP, and lays down a funky backbeat whilst doing it. The whole group lock into a real dirty 70s groove with Garth Hudson playing the clavinet through a wah-wah pedal in one of the coolest fills ever, and all before Stevie Wonder had even thought about laying down Superstition. I think the real beauty of this song is in the space the group leave for each other to shine.
Friday Tracks: Chip Away The Stone
Ask your average person on the street about Aerosmith nowadays and the tunes they’ll name are the same as those of most reading this - Walk This Way, Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing, Cryin’, Crazy… all known from their late 80s and early 90s MTV music video heyday. But back in the 70s Aerosmith weren’t quite the coiffed TV ready rock stars you believe them to be, they were a down and dirty rock n’ roll band from Boston fuelled by alcohol, sex and death-defying amounts of cocaine.
In 1978 Aerosmith were on the verge of imploding under the weight of various band members' shared addictions. These habits coupled with tensions within the group meant the band were turning in increasingly sloppy performances and playing smaller and smaller venues.
Chip Away The Stone was originally released as a live recording on their Live! Bootleg in 1978 around the time everything was collapsing and very shortly before Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, the band's guitarists, left the group for a couple of years. The studio version of this track didn’t see the light of day until 10 years later on the compilation album Gems, but it’s the slightly cleaner alternate version below the Pandora’s Box boxset which is the best in my opinion.
Chip Away The Stone was originally released as a live recording on their Live! Bootleg in 1978 around the time everything was collapsing and very shortly before Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, the band's guitarists, left the group for a couple of years. The studio version of this track didn’t see the light of day until 10 years later on the compilation album Gems, but it’s the slightly cleaner alternate version below the Pandora’s Box boxset which is the best in my opinion.
Steven Tyler’s lyrics, as usual, conjure a short film inside your head around the slightly questionable story of wearing down a girl until she's so fed up she'll go out with you. Put like that it doesn’t have much class, but this song absolutely rocks with the help of a halftime verse groove laid down by the band and some great guitar interplay between Joe Perry and Brad Whitford building to a chaotic climax call and response vocal. I’d recommend throwing this on when you’re getting ready to go out tonight and having yourself a pre-game Appletons and coke.
Well you stand like a marble statue
Trying to look so hard
All decked out in your antique dress
While the boys all promenade
Even a rock will crumble
If you strike it night and day
If hammer I must, I'm gonna get through your crust
Friday Tracks: Desperados Under The Eaves
I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lyin'
All the salty Margaritas in Los Angeles
I'm gonna drink 'em up...
I’ve never been a fan of 3 minute biographies of artists as way of introduction to their work, so I’m going to avoid that when talking about my love of ‘70s singer songwriting genius Warren Zevon.
Cutting and hilarious lyrics are sung with a voice that has the deep reverberations of the echo in an aircraft hangar and in the dive bar of my dreams he’s the person playing piano when I walk in at 3 o’ clock on a sunny Thursday afternoon.
His second album, the first real one, recorded in 1975 was produced by Jackson Browne and feature an impressive line up of an Everly brother, a Beach Boy, a couple of Eagles, Bobby Keys of The Rolling Stones Fame, Bonnie Raitt, three members of Fleetwood Mac AND the legendary guitarist Waddy Wachtel (X-Pensive Winos, Iggy Pop, Linda Ronsdadt). With that much talent working together, you may think that the end result may sound convoluted and not aurally pleasing, and there you couldn’t be more wrong.
For proof look no further than the beautiful harmonies, strings and guitar licks on his ode to LA, Desperados Under The Eaves:
WZ went onto release a further eleven albums, his last ‘The Wind’ being completed during his battle with terminal lung cancer. If you ever feel like spending an extremely sad Sunday, the VH1 documentary chronicling his last months and the making of the album is embedded below. It isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a touching tribute to someone who stared death in face and sang his heart out at him.
