Various video embeds, of any stripe
GIVE TIL IT HURTS!
As if any were needed.
Turning a water tub into a splash-tastic playground 🐘♥️ pic.twitter.com/WN1LwTcwET
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE)
Cue up the musical accompaniment, please.
Ahhh, here’s to the incredible Henry Mancini. Who’s like him? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid. Got no idea whether the vids are capable of simultaneous playback, but if not they sure oughta be, if only just this once.
1
1Looking around earlier for something else entirely, I stumbled across a great old tune I’d very nearly forgotten about.
That’s the late Robert Gordon performing T-Bone Burnette’s original composition, with Chris Spedding on guitar; the bassist and drummer are unknown to me, I’m afraid. On the Gordon LP this selection is from, the guitarist is the incomparable Danny Gatton, and of course the above vid is interspersed with scenes capably culled from Robert Mitchum’s classic tale of bootlegger derring-do, Thunder Road. Whoever put this video together did one heck of a fine job, if you ask me.
1Appropros my response to Ase’s comment here, please allow me to present Macy “Skip” Skipper’s RaB classic, “Bop Pills.”
Excellent tune, fun lyrics, solid arrangement, the song would go on to become grist for the classic-cover mill for the Cramps, my old friend Tim Polecat*, and a smattering of other artists of discriminating tastes.
* My relationship with Tim got off to a somewhat rocky start when, after the BP’s set on a RaB-weekender bill on which Tim’s band the Polecats were that night’s headliners, me and my bud Too Tall Paul (both of us obnoxious rowdies just drunk as boiled owls, as per usual) stood off to the side of the stage and heckled Tim mercilessly in exaggerated, poofter English accents. This fusillade of aggressive catcalling had poor old Tim glaring angry daggers at us all thru his entire set, and understandably so. The offense which got us started in on him in the first place was the Polecats’ recent recording of a particularly wimpy David Bowie semi-hit, “John, I’m Only Dancing”—a limp dishrag of a song that bore no relationship to the kind of punchy, hard-edged Neo-rockabilly my band and Paul’s Frantic Flattops were known for. Reintroduced to Tim many years later by a mutual female friend; I spoke at length to him over the phone one night at her place, and as it turned out we got along famously. Imagine my surprise to learn during that unexpected conversation that Tim was in truth an entirely likeable, warm, unpretentious cat after all. Tim avowed repeatedly that he remembered the Playboys fondly and admired us as a thoroughly kick-ass outfit; the heckling incident in New Jersey never came up, to my profound relief. Iconic Polecats guitarist Boz Boorer eventually became a good friend as well, but that’s a whole ‘nother story
1Had a phone convo with the ex-wife earlier, wherein I inquired whether she might have any thoughts or feelings on this fantastic song.
Like her former hubby and our amazing daughter (15 in August—FIFTEEN!—Heaven help me, has it really been that long?), Suzie is also a hugely talented multi-instrumentalist, hence my curiosity regarding her opinion of the tune, if any. Never having been much of a CSN fan herself (she’s a lot younger than me, I mean a LOT, so it was well before her time), she couldn’t really remember it, so I sung a few lines over the phone for her, thereby unveiling the powerful emotional effect it’s had on me since the very first time I heard it, back when it was originally released in the late 70s/early 80s.
Y’know, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. In days of old, when knights were bold, and condoms not invented.
See, whenever I hear “Southern Cross” on the car-raygia, I crank the volume way the hell up and sing along with the low-tenor part of the arrangement, as sung by…who, Steven Stills, maybe? Or Graham Nash? DEFINITELY not scraggly old David Crosby, I know that much. Which works out just fine and is a lot of fun, right up until they/we get to the “I have my ship/And all the flags are a-flying/She is all that I have left/And Music is her name” stanzas.
And that’s when I always just lose it completely: my throat closes, my eyes sting and burn, I feel my heart shatter inside my chest, and I have to struggle mightily not to burst into tears and sob like a itty-bitty baby—sometimes successfully, usually not—every single last time, even after all these years. Don’t ask me why, I’ve never understood it myself. Admittedly, there are a few others that hit me deep inside hard, make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and raise goose-bumps on my forearms, and can even choke me up like that sometimes, particularly certain Classical and Romantic-era pieces. But for whatever reason, “Southern Cross” is by far the worst of the lot, and has done it to me Every. Single. Time.
Such was the case day before yesterday, when I heard it played again for the first time in I don’t know when. I halfway thought that, being older, presumably wiser, and out of the music-biz game altogether for nigh on a decade now (which beggars belief for me, I must say), I might have developed an at least partial immunity to falling completely apart at those lines by now. WRONG-O, boy-o! I tootled along with nary a hitch when, all of a sudden-like, at “She is all that I have left,” the same old feeling of overwhelming sadness and inexpressible grief flew all over me again.
It being a glorious day out—warm but not hot, cloudless sky, low humidity, gentle breeze—I had my windows cranked all the way down, as did the girl sitting next to me at the stoplight. So naturally, the poor dear gawped in affrighted wonderment and concern at the bizarre spectacle of this broken-down, crippled old relic at the wheel of the bashed, smashed, ’n’ trashed Burick Grampamobile© flivver alongside her in the right lane, going all kerblooey for no apparent reason as he attempted a sing-along with some stupid Oldie-but-Mouldy she’d never heard the likes of before in a cracking, wavering, old-man warble—what, something-something about a ship, and flags, and an ocean, and some islands or some other such ancient tripe-o-la. Mighta been a long-gone lover in there with the rest of it too, who knows. Or cares.
I mean, this girl clearly didn’t know whether to shit, go blind, throw rocks and head for the hills, or call for a fucking hearse to come sweep up the remains and cart ‘em off to the morgue where they belong. I laid off singing, smiled and waved cheerily at the startled young ‘un, then took off like a scared rabbit when the light finally went green again. When I was safely back home, I pulled up the vid on YewToob and started putting this post together.
Some things never change, I guess.
4lachrymose adjective
lach·ry·mose ˈla-krə-ˌmōs
1: given to tears or weeping: TEARFUL
tended to become lachrymose when he was drunk
2: tending to cause tears: MOURNFUL
a lachrymose drama
Another sleepless night, owing to the agony of relentless phantom pains lancing through a foot and ankle that burned (along with one of my very favorite tattoos, on the side of my lower-left calf) in a hospital medical-waste incinerator well over two years ago, has produced its silver lining: I was awake at three AM to hear the local classical station play this brilliant, spare arrangement for clarinet and piano of the Lacrimosa section of Mozart’s (and his pupil and friend Sussmayr’s) exquisite Requiem mass.
Simple, elegant, tuneful—just altogether lovely, no?
11Since JC gave him a mention in comments the other day/week/whatevs, have y’selves a little sumpin’-sumpin’ from the man they call the greatest guitarist you never heard of: Irish white-boy-blues legend Rory Gallagher.
Never have been a huge fan myself, but I would nonetheless never dream of denying that the boy could really, truly shred.
My own new git-fiddle acquistion is supposed to arrive tomorrow by 7PM, so if I decide to just blow off posting altogether you’ll know the reason why. The new axe is sure to need a set-up done (every new guitar does, especially after traveling across the country), a procedure I learned the basics of years ago but have never been any damned good at; like playing itself, set-ups are as much art as they are science, requiring an innate talent I just do not seem to possess, alas.
Spoke last week to my old friend Stacy Leazer of NC Guitar Works and arranged to bring the pseudo-Mosright in next week to get the job done right, but I can tweak and fiddle about with it enough to do until I can get it into the hands of the bona fide professionals.
(Via Joe Jackson)
31A fascinating list of the most expensive guitars EVAR, including this one.
5. Reach Out to Asia Fender Stratocaster
Sold: Qatar, 2005
Price: $2,700,000Unique here in that it was never owned by a superstar, the Reach Out to Asia Strat was auctioned for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
It was a humble Mexican Standard Stratocaster bearing the signatures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend, Mark Knopfler, Ray Davies, Liam Gallagher, Ronnie Wood, Tony Iommi, Angus and Malcolm Young, Paul McCartney, Sting, Ritchie Blackmore, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams.
New made-in-Mexico Strats sold for around $350 in 2005, making this objectively the most overpriced axe of all time.
If 2 million seven sounds a tad extravagant to ya, believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
One of the very best Strats I ever did own was a Mexi-Strat, a Wayne’s World model, incredible as it may seem. Hard as I tried to be one, as desperately as I wanted to be one my whole life, I just never could master the Stratocaster. Me, I’m way more of a Gibson guy, myself. That said, enjoy this vidya of little ol’ moi bashing away on the best guitar I ever did own: a heavily-customized and -tweaked Sam Ash house-brand copy of the grand old Gibson ES5 box, playing a song I’d completely forgotten I wrote until I ran across this h’yar vid just recently.
Good times, good times.
Update! One of the aforementioned tweaks was the replacement of the “master tone” knob, which is pure-tee uselessness defined, with a master volume, which is anything but. The guitar came stock with a volume control for each pickup, which was also extremely useful, but no pickup selector switch, which elevated the master-volume from being merely useful, to damned critical: you needed a way to cut the danged thing off between songs onstage, lest you get either that annoying 40-cycle hum single coil pickups are infamous for, or outright squalling feedback should you be bold enough to remove your damping-hand from the strings for a micro-millisecond, and a quick swipe of that master-volume accomplished that nicely.
31To the incomparable Franz Schubert, born on this day in 1797, of whom Beethoven said on his deathbed, “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!” For his own part, Schubert practically worshipped Beethoven, leading to this lovely story.
Five days before Schubert’s death, his friend the violinist Karl Holz and his string quartet visited to play for him. The last musical work he had wished to hear was Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131; Holz commented: “The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing”.
Nice, no? Schubert served as a torch-bearer at Beethoven’s funeral, and was buried near Beethoven’s grave at his own request. The latter-day charge that Schubert was a homosexual and actually died of syphilis is arrant bullshit.
Schubert died in Vienna, aged 31, on 19 November 1828, at the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. The cause of his death was officially diagnosed as typhoid fever, though other theories have been proposed, including the tertiary stage of syphilis. Although there are accounts by his friends that indirectly imply that he had contracted syphilis earlier, the symptoms of his final illness do not correspond with tertiary syphilis. Six weeks before his death, he walked 42 miles in three days, ruling out musculoskeletal syphilis. In the month of his death, he composed his last work, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”, making neurosyphilis unlikely. And meningo-vascular syphilis is unlikely because it presents a progressive stroke-like picture, and Schubert had no neurological manifestation until his final delirium, which started only two days before his death. Lastly, his final illness was characterized by gastrointestinal symptoms (namely vomiting). These issues all led Robert L. Rold to argue that (although he believed Schubert had syphilis), the fatal final illness was a gastrointestinal one such as salmonella or indeed typhoid fever. Rold also pointed out that when Schubert was in his final illness, his close friend Schober avoided visiting him “out of fear of contagion”. Yet Schober had known of his earlier possible syphilis and had never avoided Schubert in the past. Eva M. Cybulska goes further and says that Schubert’s syphilis is a conjecture. His multi-system signs and symptoms, she says, could point at a number of different illness such as leukaemia, anaemia, or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and that many tell-tale signs of syphilis — chancre, mucous plaques, rash on the thorax, pupil abnormality, dysgraphia — were absent. She argues that the syphilis diagnosis originated with Schubert’s biographer Otto Deutsch in 1907, based on the aforementioned indirect references by his friends, and uncritically repeated ever since.
In any event, as I said the other day of Mozart, it’s a real pity Schubert left this world so soon, thereby robbing us of even more wonderful music. If I had to pick the Schubert composition I like best of all, it would have to be his overture for the play Rosamunde.
Happy birthday to Franz Schubert, with heartfelt thanks for all the wonderful music.
Update! Okay, okay, it just doesn’t sit well with me to leave this excellent piece out.
I went looking on YewToob for this one a few months back, misremembering that it was by Mozart for some unknown reason, and couldn’t find it anywhere until the “it’s SCHUBERT, you dope!” lightbulb finally switched on in my head.
Dear old Franz wrote so many good ‘uns—The Trout; his Symphony No 8 (a/k/a the Unfinished); the 4 Impromptus for piano (check out the third in particular, which starts at 20:05; SO achingly beautiful!)—that it’s damned difficult to choose a single favorite from among ‘em. But the above two would definitely top my personal Best Of list.
11On this date in 1756 was born, in Salzburg Austria, the greatest composer of all time: Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (“Amadeus” was an in-joke used by Mozart to make sport of any perception of him as pompous, inspiring him to sign letters to friends as “Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus,” at least according to one of the biographies I have). Follows, one of his most well-known and admired compositions for piano, the Rondo in D major K.485.
Another wonderful rondo written concurrently with the above-embedded one, from his Horn Concerto #4, K.495.
Happy birthday, Herr Mozart. Would that you had lived longer, so that the world could have been blessed with more of your beautiful music. Not that the contribution you did make was anything to be sneezed at, of course. When a composer as gifted as the great Ludwig Van Beethoven cribbed directly from your work…well, there’s just not a whole lot more to be said, I shouldn’t think.
31The Delaware Destroyer rocks out on one of my personal faves, a cover of rock ‘n’ roll icon Bo Diddley’s original tune.
Back in the day, Diddley was always jokingly known in the BPs band-van as Squiggly Diggley. Hey, when you’re tired, smelly, hungover as hell, and still have another six to eight hours of driving before you make it to that night’s venue, pretty much everything begins to seem funny, aiight?
The George Thorogood backstory is an interesting one.
Thorogood began his career as a solo acoustic performer in the style of Robert Johnson and Elmore James after being inspired in 1970 by a John P. Hammond concert. In 1973, he formed a band, the Delaware Destroyers, with high school friend and drummer Jeff Simon. With additional players, the Delaware Destroyers developed its sound, a mixture of Chicago blues and rock and roll. The band’s first shows were in the Rathskeller bar at the University of Delaware and at Deer Park Tavern, both in Newark, Delaware. Eventually, the band’s name was shortened to the Destroyers. During this time, Thorogood supplemented his income by working as a roadie for Hound Dog Taylor.
Thorogood’s demo Better Than the Rest was recorded in 1974, but was not released until 1979. His major recording debut came with the album George Thorogood and the Destroyers, which was released in 1977. In 1978, Thorogood released his next album with the Destroyers titled Move It on Over, which included a remake of Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over”. He followed those recordings in 1979 with “Please Set a Date” and a reworking of the Bo Diddley song “Who Do You Love”, both released in 1979. The band’s early success contributed to the rise of folk label Rounder Records.
During the late 1970s, Thorogood and his band were based in Boston. He was friends with Jimmy Thackery of the Washington, D.C.-based blues band, The Nighthawks. While touring in the 1970s, the Destroyers and the Nighthawks were playing shows in Georgetown at venues across the street from each other. The Destroyers were engaged at the Cellar Door and the Nighthawks at Desperados. At midnight, while both bands played Elmore James’s “Madison Blues” in the same key, Thorogood and Thackery left their clubs, met in the middle of M Street, exchanged guitar cords and went on to play with the opposite band in the other club. The connection with the Nighthawks was extended further when Nighthawks bass player Jan Zukowski supported Thorogood’s set with Bo Diddley and Albert Collins at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 1985.
Thorogood gained his first mainstream exposure as a support act for the Rolling Stones during their 1981 U.S. tour. He was also the featured musical guest on Saturday Night Live (Season 8, Episode 2) on the October 2, 1982, broadcast. During this time, Thorogood and the Destroyers became known for their rigorous touring schedule, including the “50/50” tour in 1981, on which the band toured all 50 US states in 50 days. After two shows in Boulder, Colorado, Thorogood and his band flew to Hawaii for one show and then performed a show in Alaska the following night. The next day, Thorogood and his band met his roadies in Washington and continued the one-show-per-state tour. In addition, he played Washington, D.C., on the same day that he performed a show in Maryland, thereby playing 51 shows in 50 days.
With his contract with Rounder Records expiring, Thorogood signed with EMI America Records and, in 1982, released the single “Bad to the Bone” and an album of the same name that went gold. The song became the band’s most well-known song through appearances on MTV and use in films, television and commercials. Thorogood and his band went on to have two more gold studio albums in the 1980s, Maverick and Born to Be Bad. The former features Thorogood’s only Billboard Hot 100 hit, a remake of Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive”, and his concert staple “I Drink Alone”.
Breakthrough hit or no, I’d be a-okay if I never heard “Bad to The Bone” again for the rest of my life. That said, I still like most of the rest of George’s recorded output just fine, thanks. Legend has it that the Stones, Mick or Keef one, ran across Thorogood gigging in some small gin-joint or other and were impressed enough to offer him the support-act slot on the above-mentioned 1981 tour on the spot, after which it was off and running for the toothy slide-player from the Small-Wonder State. Good for him, I say; the man has damned sure paid his dues, as the old bluesmen used to say, and gained his fame, fortune, and success the old-fashioned way: he earned it.
Update! Not Thorogood, but have yourselves a bonus tune anyway. Heard it on the car radio earlier; I’d just about forgotten how much I always liked it.
Burton Cummings, the guy who wrote this one, absolutely rips some boogie-woogie pi-anny on the original recorded version, although it seems just a mite understated here. What the hey, though, this one’s live, and it’s still damned good if you ask me.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll during the making of the Blues Brothers movie. Even more great behind-the-scenes tales than is usual in the movie biz, which is justly famous for them, with this long 2013 article, to wit:
One night at three, while filming on a deserted lot in Harvey, Illinois, Belushi disappears. He does this sometimes. On a hunch, Aykroyd follows a grassy path until he spies a house with a light on.
“Uh, we’re shooting a film over here,” Aykroyd tells the homeowner. “We’re looking for one of our actors.”
“Oh, you mean Belushi?” the man replies. “He came in here an hour ago and raided my fridge. He’s asleep on my couch.”
Only Belushi could pull this off. “America’s Guest,” Aykroyd calls him.
“John,” Aykroyd says, awakening Belushi, “we have to go back to work.”
Belushi nods and rises. They walk back to the set as if nothing happened.
Well, in Belushi World, nothing much had. Another:
Filming finishes in Los Angeles, in and around the Universal lot, where Aykroyd again takes up residence. John and Judy rent a house in Coldwater Canyon. “By the time we got to Los Angeles,” Aykroyd says, “[the shoot] was a well-oiled machine.”
By comparison, anyway. Production goes more or less on schedule, and Los Angeles injects its energy: parties at the Playboy Mansion, nights with De Niro and Nicholson.
Belushi summons periods of sobriety. By now he has met Smokey Wendell, a kind of bodyguard/anti-drug enforcer for Joe Walsh, a guitarist for the Eagles. “If I don’t do something now,” Belushi tells Wendell, “I’m going to be dead in a year or two.”
Belushi is on his best behavior while in the presence of the movie’s other musical stars: Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Cab Calloway. They, too, are in fine form. Even Charles, the crankiest of the bunch, laughs and laughs, usually while retelling the same dirty joke. The Blues Brothers presents a real opportunity for all of them, since all but Charles are in commercial ruts.
Not that this changes any of them. Marini, one of the horn players, spots Franklin taking a cigarette break. He approaches sheepishly, saying, “I just want to tell you how much I enjoy your work.” Franklin turns, glancing at the number on Marini’s football jersey. “Sixty-nine, huh?” she says, and turns away.
One day Aykroyd and Belushi raid the wardrobe department. Tanen happens to be in Wasserman’s office when Wasserman takes a call notifying him that two of Universal’s biggest stars, dressed as Nazi SS officers, have driven off the lot and onto the freeway. Tanen finds this hilarious. Wasserman does not.
Behind the scenes, it’s a different story. Daniel and Weiss are spent. And now they’re confronting the movie’s climactic concert scene. The finale requires Belushi and Aykroyd to do cartwheels, dance steps—the whole deal. It requires hundreds of extras. It requires the Hollywood Palladium.
Daniel gets a call from Weiss. “You better get down here,” Weiss says. When Daniel arrives, Weiss explains. A kid had ridden past Belushi on a skateboard. Belushi asked to ride the board. Belushi fell off the board.
Daniel finds the star clutching his knee and in serious pain. “This was bad,” Daniel recalls. “We had to deal with it in the most effective and emergency-like way. And there was one person who was wired into the Los Angeles medical community better than anyone else.” Wasserman. “I was one of the last people he wanted to hear from,” Daniel says. “The only thing he wanted to hear from me was ‘We’re done.’ ”
Wasserman calls the top orthopedist in town. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend,” the doctor points out. “I’m on my way to Palm Springs.”
“Not yet,” Wasserman replies.
Thirty minutes later, the orthopedist wraps and injects Belushi, who then grits his way through the finale.
End of story.
Or not.
It’s not; still tons more fascinating, entertaining inside dope left here, of which you should read the all.
1Indulge me for a mo’, folks. I know this ain’t exactly the usual profane and objectionable fare you’ve come to expect here, and there’s really not much reason you should care, if any. But dang it, I’m busting here and just can’t help myself. Ladies and germs, kindly allow me to present to you the Bessemer City (NC) High School marching band!
Never so much as heard of Enka, NC before, but it appears to be located just outside the scenic, neohippie doofus-infested burg of Asheville. To avoid nettling those of you who might not be interested in reading further, I’ll tuck the rest of the story below the fold.
Continue reading “Proud papa gloats a bit”
31In a comment to this post, AWM helpfully reminded me of something I already knew:
That’s Billy Preston, not Buddy Miles. I know, they all look alike…..
To which I responded with this:
Heh. Yeah, I was just kidding around with that one, hence the big buildup before the vid. I’d just been listening to some Buddy Miles earlier, and the strong physical resemblance between the two–especially the classic 60s/70s Nee-grow coifs and cool threads, duuuuude–kinda struck me as funny. No racial slurs or anything intended (this time–AHEM), they’re both fine musicians and I love their stuff, which in the end is all that matters to me.
My thanks to AWM, whose good intentions provided me with an unassailable excuse to repost this:
Man, ain’t never the wrong time to rock out on that fat, butt-rocking-good groove, if you ask me. One of the very best rock ‘n’ soul/jazz/R&B crossover hits the era ever gave us, in my opinion.
Them Changes is an album by American artist Buddy Miles, released in June 1970. It reached number 8 on the 1970 Jazz Albums chart, number 35 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on the 1971 R&B albums charts.
Reception
Writing for Allmusic, music critic Steve Kurutz called the album “quite simply, one of the great lost treasures of soul inspired rock music…definitely worth the extra effort to try to locate.” Conversely, Robert Christgau wrote “His singing is too thin to carry two consecutive cuts, his drumming has to be exploited by subtler musicians, and the title cut is the only decent song he ever wrote.”
Yeah, well, y’know, Robert fucking Christgau. He always was a consummate bitch-ass little prick, according to all I’ve heard from people in a position to know firsthand. Now the NYT’s longtime lead music crit, Jon Pareles, on the other hand…
A-HENH! That blurb was just one of the first of quite a few favorable reviews Parales went on to bestow on us, from which you can easily discern that here was a man who knew what the fuck he was talking about.
Anyway, to press ”ESC” on the self-congratulory digression and get back on-topic: It just kills me how, given the way classic-rock stations keep spinning the same well-worn old tunes over and over and over—many of which I do love, mind, but I mean really now, COME ON!—somehow you never, ever hear this one. It’s as if programmers, DJs, and/or station managers are completely unaware that these great artists actually recorded and released a helluva lot more material than just the five or six all-too-familiar songs they’ve boiled entire careers’ worth of output down to and are even now running into the fucking ground. I just don’t get it, I really don’t.
Update! What the hey, one golden musical memory from my childhood deserves another, right?
Buddy Miles, as I’m sure y’all know, filled the pounding-skins slot for Jimi Hendrix (among other notables) for a goodish while there. Preston, for his part, worked the 88s for pretty much everybody who was anybody in the classic-rock days. Wrote or co-wrote a fair few hit songs recorded by other artists, too; pretty much anyplace you looked on the Billboard Hot 100 in the late 60s/early 70s, there ol’ Billy Preston would be. God bless ‘em both, sayeth I.
4Okay, since the Tik-Tok video worked out nicely, let’s find out how YewToob fares.
Cooool, dude.
That’s the mighty Fu Manchu, king of the stoner-rock bands. I tremendously dig how hard they work a groove consisting entirely of one (1) chord, going from a seemingly mild, almost bland intro, building up the tension until by the fadeout my neck hurts from violently thrashing my head as if I had any hair to be tossing. A bio bit on the boys:
Fu Manchu is an American stoner rock band, formed in Orange County in 1985. The band underwent multiple lineup changes throughout the 80s and 90s, but has remained consistent since 2001. The band currently consists of founding guitarist turned lead vocalist Scott Hill, bassist Brad Davis, lead guitarist Bob Balch and drummer Scott Reeder.
Fu Manchu have been long associated with the Palm Desert Scene, alongside bands such as Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss and Mondo Generator. Monster Riff has described the band as “one of the most loved and revered…bands in the stoner rock world.”
Indeed, and deservedly so too. But what is this “stoner rock” of which I speak, you ask? Oh, just this:
Stoner rock is typically slow-to-mid tempo and features a heavily distorted, groove-laden bass-heavy sound, melodic vocals, and “retro” production. Due to the similarities between stoner and sludge metal, there is often a crossover between the two genres. This hybrid has traits of both styles, but generally lacks stoner metal’s laid back atmosphere and its usage of psychedelia.
For my money, Monster Magnet and Fu Manchu represent the tippy-top of the stoner-rock heap. An amalgamation of late-60s/early-70s hard rock a la DPurp, Sabbath, Zep, and Hawkwind, cranked up to 11 by the breakneck intensity of late-70s/early-80s punk—really, what’s there for a guy like me not to like here? Next up, my all-time fav-o-rite Fu Manchu tune.
One could be forgiven for not expecting subtlety from the above description of the genre they’re working in, and maybe one would be right at that. But take careful note of how, after using a choppy staccato throughout the first verses, the bassist transitions during the guitar solo to a pounding, single-note legato throb. Meanwhile, the vocalist begins the breakdown section in a conversational near-whisper, working up an octave until he’s reached a frantic bellow. The drummer swaps out his high-hat for the ride, then starts in wailing on the crash cymbal like it just stole his girlfriend. The lead guitar wraps the party up with a series of vicious, bent-string squalls.
All that doesn’t come together by accident, y’know; while it may not be what Frank Sinatra would think of as subtle, it’s subtle enough for rock and roll.
Of the incomparable SRV, I mean.
That, of course, is Kenny Wayne Shepherd, courtesy of the likewise incomparable Diogenes Sarcastica, who I gratefully thank for the steer to this one. A bit of bio on Shepherd and his interesting road to blues fame—a long, strange trip fueled, of all things, by the delight of grandmas across America: S&H Green Stamps.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd (born Kenny Wayne Brobst; June 12, 1977) is an American guitarist. He has released several studio albums and experienced significant commercial success as a blues rock artist.
Shepherd was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from Caddo Magnet High School in Shreveport. He is “completely self-taught”, and does not read music. Growing up, Shepherd’s father (Ken Shepherd) was a local radio personality and some-time concert promoter, and had a vast collection of music. Shepherd received his first “guitar” at the age of three or four, when his grandmother purchased a series of several plastic guitars for him with S&H Green Stamps, which Shepherd has said he would “go through like candy”.
Shepherd stated in a 2011 interview that he began playing guitar in earnest at age seven, about six months after meeting and being “pretty mesmerized” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Labor Day weekend in 1984, at one of his father’s promoted concerts. His self-taught method employed a process of learning one note at a time, playing and rewinding cassette tapes, using “a cheap Yamaha wanna-be Stratocaster…made out of plywood, basically”, and learning to play by following along with material from his father’s record collection.
Blues musician Bryan Lee invited the then-13-year-old Shepherd to play guitar onstage. He subsequently made demo tapes, and a video was shot at Shepherd’s first performance at the Red River Revel Arts Festival in Shreveport. It was this video performance that impressed Giant Records chief Irving Azoff enough to sign Shepherd to a multiple album record deal.
From 1995 on, Shepherd took seven singles into the Top 10, and holds the record for the longest-running album on the Billboard Blues Charts with Trouble Is…. In 1996, Shepherd began a longtime collaboration with vocalist Noah Hunt, who provided the vocals for Shepherd’s signature song, “Blue on Black”. Shepherd has been nominated for five Grammy Awards, and has received two Billboard Music Awards, two Blues Music Awards, and two Orville H. Gibson Awards.
I thought I recognized drummer Chris Layton in the above vid, an alumnus of Stevie Ray’s Double Trouble band, and turns out I was right about that; he’s been back there pounding the skins for Shepherd since 2006, as it happens. No surprise that, really; although it could be argued that Shepherd doesn’t quite have the same casual, flawless fluidity as Vaughan, there’s no denying the lad has some damned fine chops of his own, and definitely knows a thing or two about that elusive will o’ the wisp: TONE. It’s the bluesman’s meat and potatoes, a make-or-break quality that the very best players spend entire careers obssessively chasing down, never entirely convinced that they’ve quite caught it. YET.
And Kenny Wayne has it, in spades. His breakout classic-rock-radio hit “Blue On Black” I’m sure you’re all familiar with already, so let’s try another one on for size and see how it fits.
Fits pretty nicely on a hot summer Saturday night, I’d say. One last vid to pull it all together.
Somewhere out there, Stevie Ray Vaughan—and Jimi Hendrix too, probably—are smiling down in approval at their rightful heir.
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