My favourite track-or one of them-from Totally Shuffled. I was so pleased when this came up at random as it was one track I really wanted to write about. It's like nothing else...
May 23rd
The Silver-Do You Wanna Dance-white label
7” single
The maddest
record ever. I’m sure of it. The funniest one for certain. It always makes me
smile, if not actually laugh out loud.There
are some records that words can’t do justiceto, that words can’t fully describe and I know that this is one of
them. You’d really have to hear it to get any comprehension of what I’m about
to say, but I’ll give it a go.
(I played this
for Amy and Thomas, after trying to get a copy for many years, with a high
level of excitement and anticipation. I really built it up, “You just have to
listen to this...”etc. After a few brief bars of the track, they both looked at
me with utter disbelief and incredulity. There were a few seconds of stunned
silence followed by shaking of heads and a genuine, heartfelt question, “You
actually like this? You think this is good? Really?”)
I first heard
this, like many other records, on John Peel’s radio show. He played it each
night for a week in 1980, so I knew it was something special. An old tape of the
programme that I’d copied and spliced over and over again, just for this one
track, had Peel chuckling to himself as the song ended, “It’s a good job no-one
is listening to this right now”-which just about sums it all up.
Anyway, here
goes, with a brief factual description. The single is a cover of the famous
1958 Bobby Freeman single, covered by The Ramones and The Beach Boys, as well
as many others. The Silver were a Finnish band (I did mention previously that I
didn’t have much Finnish music on the iPod-how on earth did I forget this gem?).
I don’t know anything about them at all; they never released anything else.
Purely from the sound of this record, it seems to be the work of a couple of
teenage girls let loose in a studio with only a rudimentary grasp of the song
or their instruments. Their grasp on reality was a bit slack as well. Whether
it was down to natural exuberance, over consumption of alcohol, drugs or the
effects of a long and dark Nordic winter it’s hard to tell, but barely a third
of the way into the song they lose it big time. Their version only lasts 2
minutes 11 seconds and the only words that they seem to know, apart from the
title, are “under the moonlight” ,“baby” and “1,2,3,4” which, as time
progresses, they scream and shout louder and louder. The microphones buckle
under the overload, and at 1 minute into the song, Silver collapse into a fit
of giggles and screaming. The phrase “under the moonlight” particularly seems
to amuse them. Normally, there would be some sort of resolution within a track
like this, and it would be brought back to earth by the producer before the
song ended, but I have a feeling that there was no-one around to keep an eye on
things. It all grows increasingly manic until it concludes with a random
banging of cymbals and drums and yet more shouting. What a classic.
extract from "Totally Shuffled- A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
May 17th
Hambone Willie Newbern-Roll and Tumble
Blues-Okeh 78
Of course I’d
love to have the original Okeh 78, but this was ripped somewhere from the web
and was tagged as “Rolling Tumbling Blues” by Blind Will Newburn, so it took me
a while to find out what exactly it was. There are quite a few blues tracks on
the iPod that are misnamed and have the artist names spelled completely wrong,
as well as not stating what album they came from. I think that I must have
downloaded a whole bunch in one swoop; a bit of a lucky bag of blues if you
want to consider it that way. They are mostly really obscure tracks by pretty
much unknown artists-for example, it took me a bit of digging around to find
out anything about this song and the artists who made it.
“Hambone” Willie
Newbern was born in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1899, and recorded only six
tracks for Okeh over two days in March 1929 in Atlanta. All of them were
released as 78’s in 1929. I’ve only, to this moment, heard this one song by
him, but from the titles of the others alone, I’m going on a mission to try to
get hold of the others as they sound so good. “Nobody Knows (What The Good
Deacon Does)” -the A -side of this 78. “Roll and Tumble Blues” was one of the
earliest recorded versions of the Delta blues classic.
The other two 78s were “Way
Down In Arkansas” b/w ”Hambone Willie's Dreamy-Eyed Woman'sBlues”, and “She
Could Toodle-Oo” b/w“Shelby County
Workhouse Blues”. Doesn’t a track called “Dreamy-Eyed Woman’s Blues” sound so
evocative merely because of the title?
There are images
of two of the labels of the 78’s on the net. Maybe the third one-which is the
aforementioned “Dreamy Woman’s” - is one of those apocryphal old blues records
that is known to exist but has not yet been found. Maybe there is only one copy
left, lying forgotten in a loft somewhere and gathering dust. Maybe it will
never be found, or maybe it’s been lost forever-the last copy being thrown out
as junk many years ago.
The labels however, are beautiful by themselves. Plain black with the Okeh logo and all the
other text in a plain white font, they helpfully include the description of
“Singing With Guitar” in a prominent position as well as advising that, “For
best results use Okeh Needles”. I love the idea of describing what the record
is on the label - Singing With Guitar- what more could be possibly needed?
As for Hambone
Willie Newbern, there’s little if nothing known about him. The blues musician
Sleepy John Estes recalled playing with him and Yank Rachell in the 1920’s and
1930’s, and that he was a pretty disagreeable character. That’s it. There’s no
known photograph of him and he died in a prison brawl around 1947 in Marvel,
Arkansas. All he left to the world were these three 78s. It’s quite odd to
think that 80 years after he recorded them, I’m sitting here on a drizzly Thursday
morning in Liverpool, a whole world away, listening and wondering.
another extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod" and the connection between Bruce Springsteen and The Fall...
October 16th
Bruce
Springsteen-Thunder Road-Live 1975-85
In many ways Bruce Springsteen is the
antithesis of one of my other favourite artists, The Fall. I cannot imagine
that there is much commonality between the two of them-on the surface at least.
I certainly wouldn’t imagine that Mark E Smith has many Bruce Springsteen
albums in his record collection and I’d guess that Bruce has never heard of The
Fall. Even if he had, even the Fall’s most commercial output wouldn’t figure in
his in-car entertainment. Springsteen is famous for covering other artists
songs in concert, but I’m not expecting a version of “Who Pays the Nazis?”
complete with the full E-Street band to crop up soon. I can live in hope
though-it would be interesting. But liking both The Fall and Springsteen not to
the point of obsession, but close enough is, at times, I think an odd choice,
and a little bit schizophrenic.I do
find it difficult to switch from a Fall track to one by Springsteen; there has
to be a bit of a buffer between them, some sort of transition. It’s similar to
that feeling I get when having driven a hire car on holiday that’s properly
serviced and virtually brand new, with pedals and controls that require the
lightest of touches to returning to my 10 year old, 140,000 miles-on-the -clock
Citroen and having to drive it with the equivalent of lead boots and arms of
steel just to change gears. Both cars do what I need them to do i.e. get me
from A to B; it’s just that they do it in different ways. Well, that the same
thing with Springsteen and The Fall. Both make music unlike anything else and
both are utterly unique-but for that reason they are more similar than you
might expect. (More of this later).
My interest in and love for
Springsteen’s music goes back a long way however and, unlike The Fall, there
have been peaks and troughs, and for many years that I’ve either not been
bothered or unfairly dismissed it.
Thinking about it there are actually three
distinct phases.
It really started when, back in early
1980, when my best friend at the time introduced me to “The Wild, The Innocent
and the E Street Shuffle” album as being something I should marvel at. Now, I
usually took their judgement as impeccable, but being at the time of post-punk
and the height I suppose of my blinkered approach to music, I was dead set
against it from the start. To convince me that I was wrong somehow-Ican’t remember how as this was the before the
time that videos were generally available- they managed to show me the famous
clip of Springsteen playing “Rosalita” live-the one where there is a stage invasion
at the end. I think that this was recorded sometime in the late 1970’s and
broadcast on the BBC at some point. This is where we must have caught it. I was
reluctant to admit it, but there was something about it, about the sheer
exhilaration and passion that did make a lot of the music I was listening to at
the time seem a bit grey and lifeless. I compartmentalised it to a corner
marked “American Guitar Rock” for a good few years, although I always kept a
soft spot for that song. (Maybe it was pure sentimentalism based upon memories
of good times-I’m just not sure).
It all went quiet however for me
Bruce-wise until 1986, and the release of the 5 LP Live 75-85 box set. I hadn’t been convinced of any of his supposed
greatness, and was still writing him off as a mere chest-thumping anthemic stadium
filling U.S. star, devoid of any true soul or real insight. (I was possibly
also influenced by Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls”, where Paddy McAloon
dismissed Springsteen as writing only about those two topics. That’s how easily
influenced I was at that time. I hadn’t actually really listened to any
Springsteen, but merely based my dislike of his music on irrational and
ill-founded assumptions). But the box seat was issued and received a 5 star
full page review, in of all places, NME. It did therefore cross my mind that
I’d been missing something. Always ready to fall for a good review, and with
£30 that I’d got from work as a birthday present, I toddled off to HMV,
pondered long and hard as to whether it would be a stupid extravagance to blow
it all on one live box set, worried if I was somehow betraying my “punk roots”
(how naïve, but that’s how it was), and ending up going home with the whole 3,
nearly 4 hour collection. I really didn’t expect that much, and thought that I
would end up forcing myself to like it as it had cost me so much.(£30 was not a
small amount at the time). I needn’t have been concerned. It was a revelation
from the start. A 1975 recording of “Thunder Road” is the first track, side one,
and I was blown away by the sheer poetry of it all. It wasn’t what I was
expecting at all. As I listened to disc after disc, it dawned on me that this
was so much more than I could have hoped for. Even the tracks recorded in the
stadiums were something special. As the massed audience sing the first two
lines of “Hungry Heart” and as a huge cheer rises when Springsteen sang about
New York in “Jersey Girl”, I felt a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.
Even today, after hearing a lot of Springsteen’s live music, there’s something
about those two tracks that takes me back to that moment and still provokes the
same emotions. I’d always thought until then that The Velvet Underground’s
“Live 1969” was one of the best live albums ever, but I revised my stance after
hearing Springsteen’s box set. (I do have a bit of a dilemma now because of
Dylan’s “Live 1966 Albert Hall” album. Maybe I could qualify things by saying
that the Dylan album in the greatest live show recorded and the Springsteen is
the best live compilation. A bit of a cop-out but it works. Sort of).
However much I was, and still am, enamoured
by the Live 75-85 box set, there was a long hiatus before I bought another
Springsteen record or truly got it. There was always a lot of other music to
hear and a lot of other records to buy, and for at least 15 years the
Springsteen box set was Bruce’s only representation in my record collection. I rationalised
it by thinking that it was a good representation of his output, and that
nothing could really live up to it anyway. But for some strange reason I can’t
recall about ten years ago, my interest in Bruce Springsteen suddenly was re-
awakened. This has led until now (and shows no signs of diminishing),to me
getting all the studio albums and at least 150 live recordings from the
internet. I can’t believe that for so long I closed my mind to this great,
passionate music.And that’s the
connection between The Fall and Bruce Springsteen for me. Irrespective of
whether you like either of them, what they make is produced seemingly out of a
deep need to communicate and with no eye upon prevailing fashions. It’s just
something that they have to do- and it’s made with honesty and truth and love.
