Month: April 2018

Random Rekkids Day (April 2, 2018, Columbia, Missouri)

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Today was a Random Rekkids Day–these happen when my other foci are unbreakable. I was back to work after a spring break staycation; I had a bit of planning to do for my students’ research unit; I had students and peers wandering in and out of my office for conversation; we had to hustle to get our walk on before rain hit; we were an episode behind in Jessica Jones (a little goofy in Season Two with its amateur–and professional–sleuthing ridiculousness). As Nicole offered, if Jessica farted once it might smack the series upside the head. A wet bourbon fart.

Anyway, I did listen to some stuff. I have Rhino’s nice two-disc Love Story, ’95 vintage, loaded out in The Lab, which documents the rise and fall of that unique Los Angeles band. I’m quite a fan, but I hadn’t broken them out for awhile, and I deeply enjoyed their progress from the faintly menacing Bacharach-David cover (it’s the bass line, and something about Lee’s way of ending the last word of the chorus) “My Little Red Book” to “Stephanie Knows Who,” which peers over the ridge into the valley of Forever Changes. It was like starting a night with cheap beer, taking someone up on some mescaline, grumbling “Nothing’s happening!” then feeling the green fuses that drive the flowers sprout from your pores. In a purely music-metaphorical sense…

I also finally got to a wondrous gospel compilation my garrulous yet curmudgeonly friend Clifford passed along to me, Lord Have Mercy: The Gospel Soul of Checker Records. Consistently spot-on through 27 cuts, my current favorites are “Soon I Will Be Done,” by the East St. Louis Gospelettes, the political gospel blues “I’m Fighting for My Rights,” by Lucy Rodgers,” the true gospel-soul “Lend Me a Hand,” by The Kindly Shepherds,” and the street-stalking “Crying Pity and a Shame,” by the intense Salem Travelers. Please note: the post-Cooke Soul Stirrers and Detroit’s fabulous Violinaires are also on this comp, and they don’t match the obscurities, not quite. Essential.

Finally, I got home from work to find a used copy of Charlie Feathers: Get With It–Essential Recordings 1954-1969. I knew most of the material, and I had some of the songs already either on CD or in digital form. Honestly, I bought it because I have long admired Revenant’s reissue program and packaging: the art’s gonna be neat, the notes are gonna be eye-opening. The Feathers set, in one way, prophesied our current reissue boom, which labors mightily to make giants out of merely admirable (and/or quirky) (and definitely obscure) strivers, baiting shoppers with 180 gram vinyl editions, archival photos, and admirable and indefatigable scholarship, then crosses its fingers, hoping that (as is true in too many cases) they don’t notice the artists may have been obscure for a reason. The 42 cuts on the Feathers set include (to my ear) 10 indubitable classics, a couple worthy curiosities (including a strange vocal group stab), and a borderline historic but very, very loose pair of mess-arounds with North Mississippi hill country legend Junior Kimbrough (this is ’69). That’s about a third of the set; the rest (Feathers enthusiasts–and they are serious people–may shit here) are…meh. Still, the notes are courtesy of folks like Tosches, Guralnick, and (big kicker for me) Jim Dickinson.

Moptops in the Offing (April 1st, 2018, Columbia, MO)

Midwife

“There’s such a lot of slang in [American] songs, and their diction leaves a lot to be desired!”

So Shelagh Turner prissily scolds, as The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” wafts from the family’s car radio; meanwhile, back at Nonnatus House, Trixie, Barbara, and Cynthia are twistin’ and boppin’ along happily as the song beams its aural sunlight there. It’s the winter of ’62 and ’63 on Call the Midwife (Season 7, Episode 1, to be exact), and it’s so cold that great girl group tune is like a space heater.

I love pretty much everything about Call the Midwife: the cast, the unspooling of a particularly interesting time, the eye cast where no show has tread before, the centrality of working class lives, the camaraderie between the nurses, Sister Monica Joan’s savvy lit-quoting–its virtues are abundant. I particularly love the show’s soundtrack, of course, which functions in many ways, one of which is to reveal how the sound of English radio often reflected changes in social mores; up until the last season, we’d heard few people of color, but that’s gradually changing. A new midwife hailing from Jamaica may have an influence on the house tastes, as well.

As far back as Season 5, I’ve been waiting for the inevitable moment when The Beatles will enter the nuns’, nurses’ and other East Enders’ lives and shake it up. As Season 7 opens, the Liverpudlians have hit the charts; however, their first official Record Retailer #1, “From Me to You,” will be springing with Spring on May 2, 1963–four short months away. If The Chiffons are a threat to the very language the characters speak, and tingle-instigators in presently unspeakable places–well, unspeakable in this context, what havoc will The Fab Four wreak?

It’s funny–I just realized I’m behind. We have had to wait for the shows to become free for streaming on PBS, so the reader may know the answer already.

Don’t spoil it for me!

Short-shrift Division:

I am not a religious man, but I’d go so far as to claim my wife and I claim a feeling for the spirit of life. Easter was on Nicole’s mind, Dr. King was on mine (thanks to terrific pieces by in Sunday’s New York Times by Michael Eric Dyson and Wendi C. Thomas), and we chose corresponding music for our meditation.

Various Artists: Jesus Rocked the Jukebox–a grrrrrreat starter for someone interested in ’50s small-group gospel that lit the fuse for the rock and roll explosion and is still extremely exciting.

Aretha’s Gold–You know, she did what she could with her vocal limitations…

Al Green: Call Me–The greatest soul singer of the Seventies greatest album. Straight soul, gospel, country covers, some mild politics, all sung with electrifying delicacy.

The Essential Ann Peebles–Give her some credit: she’s only one of the most exciting singers St. Louis ever produced!

 

 

Two Divergent Listening Tips (March 31st, 2018, Columbia, MO)

My favorite listening experience of March ’18’s final weekend was Zhang Jian’s Golden Horse Award-nominated score for Chinese director Zhang Chang’s “Yak Butter Western” Soul on a String. I loved the film, which is a metaphysical epic stretched across the Tibetan landscape. It’s so good it can be trance-inducing, which is where Jian comes in, fusing area folk music instrumention with Morricone-like stabs that jolt the viewer back to the concrete realities of the story. If there were a physical copy of the score, I’d buy it; however, to partake, you’ll need to watch the movie, an experience you’ll be better for having.

Some readers may be most familiar with Bukka White from his pre-WWII blues recordings for Victor and Columbia, where he established himself as a great hollering singer and stinging bottleneck player. My favorite White record, which I’ve been cranking in the truck for days, is Arhoolie’s Sky Songs (1963). Numbering seven songs that range in duration from 5:43 to 14:41, the session captures White in a very entertaining discursive mood, dipping into subjects like trains, cards, the single life, Jesus, sex, Harlem and Selma. He plays plenty of guitar as well as rough but lovable piano, and is accompanied by washboard on a couple songs. In many ways, it’s a weird blues album–weird and wooly, and I love it.