Only in the US would a genius like Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex be known as a one hit wonder. The single released after the massive “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” was “Jeepster” – which failed to chart. And, those who didn’t get the LP not only missed out on “Jeepster”, but its flip side, the album closing “Rip Off”. It’s Marc rocking out but keeping it groovy like only the boa wearing, guitar hero he was could. It’s almost punk-rock before it existed and the perfect finale to the ride that is Electric Warrior. Some folks who “got it” were the members of alternative super group Dim Stars, which featured Richard Hell, Don Fleming and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore & Steve Shelley. They covered “Rip Off” on their classic 1st EP.
Kevin Gilbert (R.I.P.) and Patrick Leonard combined to create Toy Matinee, one unforgettable album of what I like to call progressive power pop.Each song has a unique arrangement and influence that make up their own sound.With the help of Juliann Lennon’s background vocals, ”Things She Said” highlights many influences and yet feels brand new.Kevin Gilbert’s musical voice is sorely missed…
On the closing track to his 1969 LP, My Way, the Chairman Of The Board openly shows his disdain for rock & roll by taking this Simon & Garfunkel classic and literally chewing it up and spitting it out. Don Costa provides an impeccably swinging arrangement, and Sinatra certainly delivers the song his way, virtually ignoring the lyric sheet after the first verse. Lines such as “you’ll get yours Mrs. Robinson, fooling with that young stuff like you do” and “how’s your bird, Mrs. Robinson” reportedly left Paul Simon none too pleased with Sinatra’s artistic license, but they shine as delivered with his classic snap. For reason’s possibly unknown to anyone other than the singer himself, he vamps on the outro, instructing to the listener to “keep those cards and letters coming.” Classic Sinatra!
Along with The Offspring and Rancid, Green Day pioneered the punk revival of the early ’90s and have gone on to define themselves as a dominant presence in the modern day rock scene. Today’s selection, “Panic Song,” comes from Insomniac, the follow up album to their landmark release Dookie. “Panic Song” showcases the elaborate guitar work of front man Billie Joe Armstrong, interlaced with Mike Dirnt’s driving bass and Tre Cool’s manic drum fills. Over their more than 20-year career, the Berkley trio have amassed a worldwide following and will go down in history as one of California’s most iconic bands.
Tracy Nelson’s sweet, pure, utterly incandescent voice has proven to be one of the great hidden treasures of the rock era. Sexual and spiritual all in one breath, the unhurried elegance of Nelson’s music, both with the band Mother Earth and solo, created an island of calm transcendence amidst the often frantic and silly San Francisco hippie era. “Tennessee Blues” (written by Abbeville, Louisiana’s Bobby Charles, who also penned “See You Later, Alligator” for Bill Haley and the Comets) takes up where 1969’s magnificent Tracy Nelson Country LP left off, presenting an unapologetically earthy and passionate paean to the deep satisfactions of leading a simple life, living with the animals, making a joyful noise, and feeling the fertile soil beneath your bare feet. Nelson deserves to be mentioned in the same class as Janis Joplin, Linda Thompson and Sandy Denny. She’s an absolute gem, and overdue for rediscovery.
It’s near impossible to imagine any holiday season without Frank’s sentimental tone. From his slow renditions of holiday standards to his upbeat seasonal jingles, Sinatra’s voice is perfectly suited for this time of year. Today’s track “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” closes out the album Ring-A-Ding Ding on a snappy, seasonal note. While a number of greats have covered this song, it’s hard to compete when Ol’ Blue Eyes lays it down.
There are very few artists who can actually be identified by simply using their first name. Frank is one of those artists. No one is going to mistake who you’re talking about when you say: “Frank sang this one back in 1961,” which is exactly when this DFD gem was originally recorded and released as the lead off track on his Reprise debut album of the same name. “Ring-A-Ding Ding,” a Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen composition is classic Sinatra and a perfect choice today as we celebrate Old Blue Eyes’ birthday (which is technically tomorrow December 12).
If you expect nothing more than classic disco or smooth ballads from the Bee Gees, this 1967 single will certainly throw you for a loop. The brothers ditch their old school folk balladeering for a detour to Pepplerland on this dark psych ballad, awash with swirling mellotron, acid guitar and echo drenched drums. (Thankfully, the trademark Gibb sibling harmonies still remain intact.) Having recently moved to London, the Gibbs were clearly taking in all that the swinging city had to offer as evidenced on the trippy track, which owes much to the work that Pink Floyd and the Beatles were doing at that time.
I’m old enough to (vaguely) remember the TV commercial of the early 1970s wherein the hit “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” morphs into a Coca-Cola pitch. For some reason that’s all I can think of when I hear Liam Gallagher sing the opening line in “Shakermaker” from Oasis’ first — and still best — album, Definitely Maybe. Beyond the melody, though, there’s not a lot of common ground between the feel-good sounds of The New Seekers and Brit-Pop’s biggest stars. The lyrics feature a touch of surrealism a la late-’60s John Lennon (one of songwriter Noel Gallagher’s favorites), while the ominous arrangement has a slow motion feel to it enhanced by a bit of slide guitar as it builds in intensity. Sunshine pop it ain’t.
I’ve Got You Under My Skin (Live at Carnegie Hall) Frank Sinatra
Label: Reprise
Released: 2009
Today’s track is a world premiere on Damn Fine Day!
Some twilight: Three years after announcing his retirement from the business of show, 58-year-old Frank Sinatra was in New York—deep in the heart of it—packing them in at Carnegie Hall. Such a talent was not made to rest; as he himself would sing, “I know I said that I was leaving/But I just couldn’t say goodbye.” Act 2 was underway. This rare performance of Chairman staple “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” that trusted Cole Porter woo-pitcher, wowed ’em in April 1974 and is sure to deliver a few chills now. Sinatra’s effortless caress of a phrase, the way he made each syllable intimate yet universal, remains impervious to time, his and ours. To say that Ol’ Blue Eyes was back was an understatement. The good ones don’t just come back, brother: they return.
Going toe-to-toe with the “fella in the Brite Nightgown” was based on a W.C. Fields line about the Grim Reaper. Donald Fagen took the idea, tossed in a few of his own—backed with a thick, relentless groove—and the result was one of the highlights of 2006’s Morph The Cat. Had his mother’s recent death and his turning 55 inspired his take on the big sleep? How could they not? But it sounds like Fagen subscribes to the other notion that if you can’t laugh at death, they’ll bury you wearing a frown.
This unsung highlight of Are You Experienced? didn’t even make the U.S. version of the album back in 1967, one of three tracks cut to make room for the early singles “Hey Joe,” “Purple Haze,” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” But it would have been a better album if they’d added those and kept “Remember.” Picture Hendrix doing Memphis soul without the horns. Guitar licks stab and swagger like the great Steve Cropper while the lyrics channel Otis Redding in his brokenhearted prime and Hendrix sings about the impact of his baby leaving him on nearby birds and honeybees. “They used to sing so sweet,” he sighs. “But since my baby left me, they ain’t sang in two long days.” And just in case she won’t be swayed by melancholy honeybees? He lets her know that if she doesn’t come back soon, he’ll starve to death. Apparently, he doesn’t cook much.
There’s plenty of clatter and chaos and tension going down in the first 40 seconds of this track, including the torture of a violin in what sounds likes the devil returning to Georgia for a rematch. It’s the first song off Being There, Wilco’s second LP and their first with then-new member Jay Bennett, who left the world far too soon last Sunday. “When you’re back in your old neighborhood, the cigarettes taste so good, but you’re so misunderstood,” Tweedy sings on the understated first verse. The piano is gorgeous, playing off the ache in Tweedy’s vocal as the tension slowly creeps back in with squalls of feedback and assorted racket. And, after winding their way through a lead that could pass for an outtake from Magical Mystery Tour, the drummer and the strings throw exclamation points at Tweedy’s vocal as he tells a needy fan, “I’d like to thank you all for nothing!”
There is nothing quite like the first time you listen to a new album by one of your favorite artists. You anxiously listen for those mind-blowing new songs that will soon be rock ’n’ roll classics. Upon my first listen of Green Day’s underrated 2000 release, Warning, I just knew “Church On Sunday” was going to be a massive hit. It has that killer opening riff, with its jangly rockabilly sound, and a hook with the perfect mix of Green Day’s pop and punk sensibilities. I must’ve listened to that song 20 times that day. It was inevitable that in six months the world would share my love for this song. Turns out, I was wrong. “Church On Sunday” wasn’t a massive hit. Hell, it wasn’t even a single. Things turned out OK for Green Day, though; their next album was American Idiot.
For somebody who gets around as much as Jack Elliott it comes as a surprise to learn that he has only ever made it to New Orleans once. This trip, however, inspired one of his finest recordings. An air of wistful, stoned nostalgia graces this talking blues (“greens”) as Jack regales us with a typically rambling account of his memorable trip. It took place in 1953 and involved an encounter with a three-legged cat and an “ex-ballet dancer” with whom Jack danced naked around a banana tree in the rain. As this exquisitely evoked paean to the city that care forgot appears to taper away in a slow fade of hypnotic fingerpicking, Jack unexpectedly checks back in, singing the immortal lines, “Did you ever stand and shiver . . . just because you were looking at a river?” This is one of his very few credited compositions. It’s a shame he hasn’t written more.
If the wails from Neil Young’s guitar on this track—arguably among the most heartbreaking he’s ever recorded—move you to tears, well, welcome to the club. What Neil sings in “No More” is honest enough, but what he gleans from Ol’ Black, his Les Paul, is beyond devastating. The song opens with a deceptively happy melody, then quickly makes way for notes so battered and lonely they must’ve escaped from the depths of another lost soul. Played in tandem with “The Needle And The Damage Done” on Saturday Night Live in 1989, “No More” capped off a decade that began with “Just say no.”
From start to finish, is there a better soundtrack for driving through the desert than Chris Isaak’s 1987 self-titled album? Certainly no song from it channels his heroes—Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley—better than “Blue Hotel.” Chris played the song around San Francisco in the early ’80s with his band Silvertone—named after that cheap line of guitars from Sears. Speaking of Isaak and guitars, Chris is the sole owner of a Gretsch 6120 copy that he says Gibson made just as a one-off. For those of us who’ve found solace in these bluer-than-blue notes while driving through the Lucerne and Coachella Valleys, we’re much obliged to that guitar.
Is this a song about a go-go dancer or just some girl dancing at a bar? It’s hard to say, but I’d like to think that “Ambitious Anna” is a beautiful and simple little ditty about a man who wants to go home with a stripper. Or maybe it’s about Anna Karina, swaying in front of a jukebox in Band Of Outsiders or some other Godard film. It isn’t easy to find much information about David Blue, and his music has only recently become available again. Back when his early albums first came out, he was dismissed by critics as a Dylan sound-alike, even though Blue was already a folk singer in Greenwich Village when he met and befriended Dylan in the early ’60s. Later he toured as a member of Bob’s Rolling Thunder Revue and made a couple of respectable turns as an actor.
Jimmy Webb, only 24 years old at the time, had already penned “MacArthur Park,” “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “Wichita Lineman” when he recorded this ode to one of his songwriting heroes. Sloan was still very much alive when the song came out and still is today, but by 1970 he wasn’t nearly as well-known as he’d been in the mid-’60s, when he wrote songs like “Eve Of Destruction,” “Where Were You When I Needed You,” and even “Secret Agent Man.” Webb has since expressed regret for writing about Sloan as if he were already a dusty old relic. But this nostalgic ballad, with a terrific harmonica part and incredible vocal harmonies, is a fitting tribute to a pop music icon.
As a pre-Internet child of the Midwest, the earliest sparks of a now-lifelong obsession with music history were largely created and satisfied by a handful of invaluable sources—battered copies of Grand Royal magazine, lifted from a friend’s older brother, answers given by our local record shop (if the courage was ever mustered to ask the significantly older/cooler employees anything beyond restroom location), and the cover tunes found on Yo La Tengo’s 1990 album Fakebook and in the encores of their live shows. I was a big Velvets fan as a kid, but was just too young to even realize that if I took a chance and explored beyond their albums and the first few Lou Reed LPs, I might find more songs I liked. This changed when I heard Yo La Tengo’s version of John Cale’s “Andalucia.” I immediately bought Paris 1919 and more or less set sail on an infinite journey backwards that I’ll probably stay on ’til the Vampire Weekend is over.
Maria Muldaur’s love affair with American roots music went public with 1974’s Waitress In A Donut Shop, which danced between delicate folk, swing jazz, and tough-girl barroom blues. Clarence Ashley’s “Honey Babe Blues” is straight-ahead “old-timey” acoustic blues, brought to vivid life with David Lindley’s slide guitar and with flat-picking as pure as Blue Ridge mountain spring water by the masters of the plectrum, Doc Watson and his son Merle (that’s Doc imploring Muldaur to “sing it, gal, sing it”). In fact, Muldaur tells us, she first absorbed the song when Doc and Clarence picked it in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse in the early ’60s. “It was one of the first tunes I learned to sing and play on the fiddle,” she says, “back when I was a young beatnik babe falling in love with all kinds of old-timey and Appalachian music.”
What would you expect to find inside the pocket of a clown—noisemakers, paper flowers, a hand-buzzer, a clandestine, to-go squirt bottle of seltzer? Dwight Yoakam reached in there, and, true to form, discovered nothing but heartache. “Pocket Of A Clown” finds our hero betrayed and hurting, as the woman he loves cheats, lies, and makes a face-painted fool out of him. Built around the loping Bakersfield shuffle that Yoakam virtually owns, the song is augmented by a 1950s girl-group chorus, sweetly crooning “oo-wah” while Dwight squirms, the knife having found its mark. Add to the mix a taunting, Western swing-style fiddle solo and Pete Anderson’s growling honky-tonk electric guitar, and it’s all too evident that this clown’s story is no laughing matter.
