Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Diana Krall's peckerwood husband.



Just kidding! (Peckerwood-wise.) Elvis Costello has been a favorite of mine for over 30 years, and this cut stands out to me among his long list of masterpieces.

The zippy pop arrangement, as exuberant as bubble gum, provides the happy "vector" for delivering an apocalyptic prophecy for Empire. I assume that Costello's lyrics were understood much more directly by his British audience, being children of an imperial twilight, than by Americans. But his imagery is so vivid that the thrust of the words were readily discerned even by a complacent twenty-something college slacker in 1979 who had little detailed knowledge of colonialism.

This song has not become any less relevant with the decline of the great Western colonial powers, because those empires have been supplanted by extractive transnational corporate enterprises that rival the power of  any in world history. And ultimately, I think the new ones are every bit as doomed as the ill-fated empires of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. This is still a prophetic, snappy little pop ditty that should haunt the brain stem of any plutocrat within hearing distance.

Oliver's Army, Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979, from "Armed Forces," Columbia JC35709), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Bonus fun stuff: while scavenging my vinyl LP collection for the catalog information I rediscovered the bonus 33 rpm demo EP packaged with the original US release of Armed Forces. It contains "Watching The Detectives," "Accidents Will Happen," and "Allison." Also stashed away in the sleeve: my ticket stub for the 10 March 1979 Elvis & Attractions performance at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Bruce Pavitt's girlfriend smuggled my camera into that show under her greatcoat after a security goon tried to confiscate it from me. Don't try that today unless you're prepared to get beaten in the skull with a five-cell Maglite or else give some fat turd a blowjob.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (after hours)

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My favorite version of the two 1970 vinyl releases by Joe Cocker:



Strangely, whenever I hear Cocker's performance of The Letter on my local FM feed of a generic corporate oldies "station," they do not play the one that actually charted on Top 40 AM radio. Instead they play the album cut, taped live on Cocker's 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which wasn't part of our collective high-school rock and roll experience. Speaking for myself, one of the relatively few who coughed up the ruinous price of, what? $4.75 ? for the double LP, it was a little depressing to hear the live performance. The horn solos were poorly crafted and sounded distant, and the whole shape of the mix felt wrong in comparison with the single, probably because of the difficulties mic'ing practically 3 dozen musicians out in the field. The performance here, though, was a studio rehearsal recording that was rushed out by A&M records to promote the tour while it was still in progress. The horns have real presence in the studio mix, especially the straightforward, rocking trumpet and tenor solos.

So why does the "mothership" corporate oldies network, which seems to occupy 97.9 on the FM dial no matter what city you drive through, play the album version instead of the hit single? My guess is that it has something to do with bundles of "intellectual property" that they license from the corporate copyright holders and force-feed to listeners until they sicken of it. And so, in the bargain, they colonize our pop music memories just like the East India Company colonized south Asia 400 years ago. Countless original performances and mixes become unknown to younger generations of listeners. Yet there's a backhanded benefit to this trend: lots of goodies that have been stashed in the closets of collectors eventually emerge on places like YouTube, unruined by corporate stress rotation.

The Letter, Joe Cocker with Leon Russell and The Shelter People (1970, 45 rpm single A&M 1174), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Fun fact: Cocker is 40 years older, to the day, than Beer-D. Please make a note of it.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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After last night's post I suppose it's incumbent upon me to prove that I'm not just a random, bitterly nostalgic geezer who believes that no one has recorded anything worth listening to since some arbitrary holy moment in my youth. So put this in your pipe and smoke it.



I think it's safe to say that most people my age (high Baby Boom era) would probably consider this selection to be "noise" just as our parents condemned the Stones or the Rascals as "jungle music." Myself, I view of Seattle grunge in general as an antidote to the sterile, vacuous sound of Reagan-era rock and pop that I was lamenting here last evening. These grunge bands used instrumentation and even production values that could be replicated in any working-class garage or basement assuming a few thousand dollars of investment in recording gear and a mixing board. Pure, primitive rock and roll. I remember that there was a certain amount of hype about the Seattle sound in the early 1990s as if grunge were revolutionary and unprecedented. It wasn't; it was a throwback to the '60s and early '70s with which there was nothing wrong other than pretending that one invented it when one actually had not. Grunge lyrics were, of course, uncensored existential despair for jaded kids, but I don't think that was so much a Seattle innovation rather than a generational change in community standards for rock lyrics trafficking in despair.

This track reminds me of early '70s Alice Cooper in some respects. The chord progression, if you can call it that, seems to be variation of the classic I - IV rock chord change, but using a mutated and dissonant variant of the tonic chord. The band pretty much vamps on these chords throughout, using the mutant tonic chord almost like pedal tones. But the harmonic environment creates plenty of elbow room for the musicians to play pretty much any notes they wish at any time. They do it with discipline, though, using scales, modes, and passing tones for harmonic coherence. As far as my ears are concerned, the vocalist can hold his own with any idol of the "classic rock" era. Lyrics? My mind is too literal to understand much poetry, but I reckon they have something to do with addiction and one-upsmanship originating in some sort of personal rivalry or hostility. I don't care---my earbones have historically processed vocals as one instrument among the ensemble. Never could understand the damn things, either in terms of diction or meaning.

Retarded, Afghan Whigs (1990, from "Up In It," reissued 1991 on "The Grunge Years," Sub Pop SP112b), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Nothin' new, sound of breaking glass



A peppy little number about real anarchy, not the Disney version that Libertarians pretend can save the world. Our British cousins had an ugly taste of it last week. The conscious agenda of the rioters was "smash and grab"; nothing overtly political motivating it, and nothing sympathetic to say about it. But both of those remarks are beside the point, I think: riotous anarchy is an emergent phenomenon that explodes forth when a certain set of social, political, and economic conditions is satisfied. It has root causes that can either be mitigated or aggravated. In Western democracies we have sparks that are being fanned into flames by an international nest of motherfuckers. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if I have more to say on the subject sometime. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass, Nick Lowe (1978, from "Pure Pop For Now People," Columbia 35329), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note:  The UK release of this album was called "Jesus of Cool," but Lowe's US label wouldn't stand for such heretical cheekery in the title, so my original purchase of this music was called Pure Pop. But Lowe reissued "Jesus" on CD a few years ago, which I also own and highly recommend for the bonus tracks.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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During the so-called Summer of Love, this peculiar composition was "in the tube," chartwise, for The Beach Boys. I never understood the song at the time, but it's grown on me after 40-odd years. I still don't understand it, though. And just to make matters a little more inscrutable, here's an alternate version that didn't make it out of the studio until a few decades later. But it's the one Brian Wilson originally intended for you and me to hear.



This track was supposed to be part of Wilson's "psychedelic" masterpiece album, Smile. But his well documented crackup overtook him before he could get the whole thing right to his ears and ego. The completed pieces---the releasable ones, at least---were issued on a disc called Smiley Smile. Yes, "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" were basically salvage material from the Smile project. The version of Smiley Smile that I own, a 1990 reissue that also includes the Wild Honey album, includes the present track.

Wilson, morbidly depressed over the whole matter, claimed to have destroyed all the 1966 - 67 Smile masters. He "reconstructed" the project in 2004, unwisely in my opinion. I've unintentionally heard snips from it, and prefer not to hear any more.

So here's a summer song for you, simmered in vinegar by Brian Wilson 44 years ago, presented to commemorate both our current brain-denaturing heat wave and the slide of much of our populace into a state of desperate mental illness. Brian was far ahead of his time on that score, as well.

Heroes and Villains (Alternate Take), The Beach Boys (issued 1990, Capitol C2 93696), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Jackie Wilson, singing lead for Billy Ward and His Dominoes.



I really like this performance and arrangement, but it certainly is a noodle-scratcher.

First, consider the most prominent facet of this track: Wilson belting out the lyrics with depression and mania, bundled under tension tighter than a gnat's ass. But he sounds like nothing so much as a freshly minted graduate of the Dudley Do-Right School of Voice.

Then there is the chart, which definitely has the upbeat "fish-fry" feel as a frame for some pretty "prayer-meeting" lyrics. I'd started to post this several times in past months but couldn't figure out which rubric it belonged under. But since it's in a tempo suitable for shagging at a Carolina beach music club with sand on the floor (it's a dance, perv!), here it is on a dog-day Saturday night.

And, as a production artifact---but not one engineered into the original---there's this cheesy post-production reverb hovering conspicuously over the recording like a cloud of corn aphids wanting to get into your ear canals.

Frankie Sinatra recorded this tune the same year as the Dominoes---1955. The lyrics sound like a natural for Sinatra, and with a Nelson Riddle arrangement one might expect his version to be the definitive one. I'm sure most people familiar with it agree with that sentiment, but not me. The way I hear it, Riddle's chart doesn't surpass "OK" and neither does the orchestra performance. And Frank's fiddling with the melody at the margins, which is a key to his interpretive genius, falls flat on this one and actually weakens the line considerably. If you want to compare it with Wilson's interpretation, go look for it on YouTube---Sinatra's version doesn't rise to the level of interest that I need in order to be bothered to embed it and track down the catalog data for you.

But Wilson's peculiar version of this composition totally kicks ass. Not sure why it didn't hit in 1955, but they didn't even try because it was the B side of another Dominoes tune few people have heard of---"May I Never Love Again." I'd guess the studio chumped it as a throwaway track because the lyrics were too mature of a take on getting the bum's rush from a lady to have broken through on the emerging rock charts of the day. That is, it did not reflect the standard teenager-style sentiments about such matters.

Learnin' The Blues, Jackie Wilson with Billy Ward and His Dominoes (1955, King Records 1492), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Has this ever happened to you?



It didn't happen to me, exactly. However, my 7th grade teacher, Miss Kilmartin, left the employ of Woodland School, Illinois School District 152 and a half (no joke!) around Thanksgiving 1966. Coincidentally, it was about that same time I'd laid my hands on a copy of Playboy (stole it from Timmy Rogers big brother, if I remember correctly) and what to my wondering eyes appeared but a Playmate falling out of her sweater who was a dead ringer for Miss K. I was preoccupied with this mystery for a few weeks late in 1966. My dad, who was a member of the school board during that era, might have shed some light on the subject for me, but I couldn't think of any way to approach the subject with him.

Ahem. Anyway, "Chicago's own" Cryan Shames never hit the charts very hard in other parts of the country, but "the Shames" were one of the Windy City's big three rock bands in terms of local pride during the mid-1960s. In my personal mythology, the golden age of Chicago pop bands (including the Buckinghams and the New Colony Six) was 1965 through about mid-1967, with the Shames coming on fast in 1966 and then pretty much finished along with The Summer Of Love.

That's too bad; I wonder why. It's easy to hear that this band had a lot going for it in this 2-minute gem. Listening to it tonight I was surprised how "California" it sounds, with impressive four-part harmonies like the Beach Boys, jangly Byrdslike guitars, and the peppy good-clean-fun pop sound of The Turtles. Very catchy; very slick. A flawless piece of pop that totally flashes me on getting too much sun during the summer of '66---heard it coming out of transistor radios everywhere.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the story of which band member was infatuated with which model from which magazine, or if he ever got his gal. Probably not. But feel free to chime in if you know the tale.

I Wanna Meet You, Cryan Shames (1966, 45 rpm single Columbia 43836), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I do not dedicate this song to the royal newlyweds. But it is not because of any malice in my heart. I do dedicate this song to you, though, who choose their blog-reading material with care, intelligence, and taste. More specifically, I dedicate it to those of you who have a sweety pie, a libido, appropriate precautionary technology, and a pure heart.



Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes stuck with the style of music, which was what originally made me a Springsteen fan for a short time. Dig Springsteen's sustained "altissimo" vocal note near the end. "The Fever" is a Springsteen composition, but I always knew it as a Southside song. I wish the sound were better in this clip so we could hear the full power of the horns and their slinky accompaniment. As heard from a good audio source, this tune is a tour de force. But at least on this video we can enjoy Clarence Clemons lumbering around the stage, without his tenor but clad in a very tasteful yellow jumpsuit and giant Panama hat, grabbing the mike on cue to belt out his profundo embellishment on the refrain. It's fun!

The Fever, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, with Bruce Springsteen (1978, live performance at the Agora Club, Cleveland, Ohio), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Who ever said we couldn't have a multimedia fish fry on Saturday Night? Not me!



This 1933 Betty Boop cartoon from Fleischer Studios has so much going for it that I'm not sure what to start with. Almost always, Fleischer cartoons are about world-class Depression-era animation and backgrounds. But for a short time right after sound was wed to film action, the Fleischer Brothers collaborated with some of the greatest seminal northern jazz big bands to create extraordinary modern art. So I'll start with the music.

Don Redman was one of the giants of early jazz, probably much more important as an arranger than as an orchestra leader. But here he is, with his orchestra, getting top billing before Betty Boop herself in this short. I Heard presents a medley of three Redman compositions (with collaborators) that are all included in an out-of-print 1990 Redman collection called Don Redman And His Orchestra, 1931 - 1933 (1990, Classics 543). My favorite is the opener, called "Chant Of The Weed" (1931), which is based on a very unusual set of changes that quickly alternates between a major key and its relative minor (I think), the minor being remarkably avant garde and the major being a classic, upbeat jazz-age sound. The version in this cartoon is much more intriguing to me than the Classics reissue, which is faster and somewhat mechanical sounding. But in addition to the musical intro, look at all the work the Fleischers put into Redman's backdrop: a theatrical flat of Betty Boop's Saloon (it's called a Tavern in the actual cartoon) replete with live animated cutout cartoon animal heads!

Chant melds into "How'm I Doin' ? (Hey-Hey)," with the voice of Boop, Mae Questel, sharing the vocals with Redman (who also blows alto sax in addition to directing the band). As coal miners go, these fellas are really lucky: their lunch spot is, by night, a Hot Jazz club. The waiter (Redman's voice) advertises La Boop's after-hours shows to the guys, then gives 'em a taste of Betty whilst they feast on species-specific entrees.

Finally, the "story" transitions to the surreal sequence accompanied by the title piece, again with vocals by Redman and Questel. As purposely gimmicky as her voice is for these cartoons, Questel has an impressive mastery of rhythm; listen how she works ahead of the beat like a wired tommy gun during the telephone sequence.

But what you really should do, in my opinion, is just feast your eyes on everything. This world is bursting with action, visual puns, audiovisual synchronicity, violence, and the macabre. And there are plenty of the famous visual hi-jinx that characterized this series before stringent Hollywood censorship began cramping Betty's style in 1934. These include the usual mix of phallic symbols, lechery, and Betty's tendency to lose her clothing at least once per episode. To pointlessly state the obvious, these cartoons were always aimed at teenagers and adults, not the kiddies---like [adult swim] for Depression-era moviegoers.

I Heard, Betty Boop cartoon series, featuring Koko The Clown and Bimbo (1933, Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures, directed by Dave Flesicher, animated by Willard Bowsky and Myron Waldman), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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John Mayall twin spin twin spin twin spin DOINNNGGG!!!



Marginalia wrote from across the deep blue sea to give us a few more details about Mayall's 1960s British R&B laboratory, the Bluesbreakers, which served as a training ground for British pop music royalty, including Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Mick Fleetwood, and many others. With hindsight it seems sorta weird to me that Mayall wasn't much bigger in the United States, at least in the late 1960s. Don't think I ever heard a peep about him from the Beatles, either---also strange considering their own reverence for American "roots" music and Mayall's role as a champion of it.

This cut is the opening track on The Turning Point; the YouTuber clipped off a portion of the band introductions, but the song is intact. It's a standard 12-bar blues construction, but that easily cliched form doesn't jump right out at me because the arrangement is so interesting. It's a good example of how the band uses their instruments so effectively to make percussion unnecessary. The harp is sharp as razors, the bass bubbles and pops along, and the tenor works as a rhythm instrument while infusing the sound with the jazzy warmth that is so important to this quartet's sound. There's also a bit of mouth percussion on the track, which is the central feature on "Room To Move," another track you can find on YouTube.

To my ears, Mayall on this album sounds like a graduate of the Dudley Do-Right School of Voice. I don't mean that in a mean spirit at all, but that association baked itself into my skull upon first listening. And I call this a "school of voice" because I've heard it in a number of other places; the one that comes immediately to mind is J.W. Hodgkinson, who was lead vocalist for a unique-sounding UK band called If. I have to wonder if they're emulating the style of an American blues hero I'm not aware of.

One other distinguishing aspect of this cut is the lyrics. It's an unusual protest song that invokes the memory of American free-speech hero Lenny Bruce, who fought obscenity charges in the courts for the better part of two decades. He was also a pot smoker and a junkie. Mayall makes the case that weed should be legal, but since it's not then you shouldn't blame cops if you get busted for possession---you should respond with political activism, instead. I remember thinking the lyrics were somewhat "square," but not really objectionable. Looking back, I think Mayall's presentation was remarkable during an era when the terms "police" and "pigs" were synonymous with many, many youth in the United States.

Acknowledgment: I thank my old friend Gurlitzer, known to some people in southwest Cook County as Janet, for scraping up the catalog information.

The Laws Must Change, John Mayall (1969, "The Turning Point," Polydor Stereo 24-4004), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway...



This version of "Penny Lane" was first sold to fans on a US-issued 1980 Beatles anthology called Rarities. This recording dates to 1967, like the original single and album releases of the same track, but differs (very significantly, to my ears) in that it includes a piccolo trumpet flourish in the final measures. This is the version that many, but not all, radio stations played in spring 1967---the version that all of us who couldn't afford to buy records grew up with. Years later, when I finally bought Magical Mystery Tour, I thought the album version of this song had somehow been stunted in production because of how the tune ends in an anticlimactic instrumental drone with a weak drizzle of cymbals.

I first learned that the "trumpet ending" was an actual rarity when Rarities was issued. If I remember the story correctly, the trumpet ending didn't make it to the pressing of the commercial 45 rpm single, but Paul for some reason intervened and had it included on the promotional version of the record that was distributed to US radio stations, both aired by them and given away at radio-hosted "sock hops" and the like.

Today is a sunny but frustratingly chilly early April day, like weekends I remember in April 1967 when Chicagoland was slowly ascending from a brutal winter. "Penny Lane" was in solid rotation then at both WLS-890 and WCFL-1000, with its merry, surreal narrative beaming through the "blue suburban skies" on a 50 kilowatt AM signal.

Penny Lane, The Beatles (1967, Capitol promotional 45 rpm single P-5810), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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A lyric emblematic of the nation I've lived in for the past 10 years. [End of pseudo-topical but not insincere political lead-in hook.]



Oddly, and apropos of nothing, in the back of my mind this song always reminded me vaguely of Jesus of Nazareth. No, really. It may have something to do with the upbeat treatment of the narrator's comeuppance, and my derivative interpretation that Bobby Fuller was somehow really telling us that the law really didn't win.

And in the case of Fuller's 1966 death, the law really didn't win. Accounts of his demise indicate that the investigation was seriously inconclusive, and the purported cause of death (self-asphyxiation by gasoline in a closed but unlocked automobile) seems a bit farfetched as a suicide mode for a successful, rising rock star. Some theorize that Fuller was done in by the notorious LAPD due to his relationship with a mob-connected girlfriend, but if we want to theorize it would seem to make more sense that the mob might finish him off, perhaps for "dishonoring" his young lady or maybe because he accidentally ended up with some dangerous information. Not exactly JFK at Dallas, of course... but then there is that Lone Star connection with Texas native Fuller. Hurm.

Anyway, this is a neat performance from Hullabaloo. I like the rocky jailhouse set, but I think that a few more imprisoned go-go girls are called for here. As always, I wait with anticipation for the crowd-pleasing, percussive six-gun sextuplet (over a whole measure). As a kid I imagined performing this passage with a quintuplet over the measure, instead of six, to indicate a bad round in one of the revolver chambers... perhaps in order to help explain how the law beat down the irrepressible Bobby Fuller.

Personal indulgence detour: As I watched the close-up of Fuller strumming the rhythm solo at the bridge (about 1:20 into the clip), I was reminded of an occurrence at Blackburn College during fall 1977, shortly after I returned there to complete my bachelor's degree. I had dragged my thrift store 45 record collection with me to Carlinville, Illinois, stuffed in a thrift store physician's bag, and came to share many of these '60s sides with an interesting kid named Bruce Pavitt, then from Park Forest, Illinois (near my hometown). I will take credit for first exposing Pavitt, who later went on to found Sub-Pop Records in Seattle, to a number of proto-punk sounds from my 45 collection, in particular "Talk Talk" by the Music Machine. I can't remember if I actually introduced him to "I Fought The Law" or if he previously knew it, but I clearly remember that he was absolutely awestruck by the bridge; as an interested but not highly motivated guitar noodler, he confessed that he had no idea how Fuller played that solo. We listened to it over and over on the third floor of Butler Hall during my "salad days."

I Fought The Law, The Bobby Fuller Four (1965, date unknown, live performance broadcast on the pop music variety show Hullabaloo, NBC-TV), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Addendum: double-dig the groovy band intro provided courtesy of The Serendipity Singers!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'll wrap up my current mini soul fugue, as prompted by a flash from Big Hussein Otis in last night's Fish Fry comments Thread. It's my favorite cut by the pride of Harvey, Illinois: The Dells!



Most Chicagoland kids who listened only to the city's two Top 40 stations never heard of The Dells until 1968, with the release of their first crossover single, "There Is." Several more big hits crossed over to Top 40 playlists over the next year, including "Stay In My Corner," "Oh What A Night," and this one, "Wear It On Our Face."

What we didn't know was that The Dells had been around since 1952, and were masters of doo-wop, jazz, and R&B in addition to the soul mode they hit big with in the late 1960s. And what I didn't know until tonight is that they provided backing vocals for the likes of Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Barbara Lewis. Neither did I know that the omnipresent Quincy Jones worked with them to help refine their sound.

As inferred by Big Otis in the comments, the Dells were at least indirectly part of the same galaxy that spawned the Twinight label in Chicago, all of them working in the orbit of a large independent soul and R&B promotional firm that handled groups signed to Chess Records, including subsidiaries Checker and Cadet (not to mention national labels like Atlantic, Motown, and Stax). But these guys were the old timers of the scene, all members having been born during the Great Depression---some of them were practically 35 when they released this side, fer crying out loud!

Wear It On Our Face, The Dells (1968, original 45 rpm release Cadet 5599, reissued on CD compilation "There Is," Chess [MCA] CHD-9288), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You'd be blue
Without a neighbor next to you



This is a Chicago band, The Notations, from 1971. I may have heard a snippet of this track while surfing the AM dial when Chicago's two Top 40 stations were either playing the same song at the same time... or crap at the same time. Edging up the dial into "police band" territory I'd sneak a listen to Chicago's mighty soul giant WVON-1450---"The Voice of the Negro." Sadly for me I never stuck around long in that radio neighborhood for it to become a habit. Having been acculturated as a South Side/south suburbs kid starting in the mid-1950s, I absorbed by osmosis the idea that there was something "wrong" with, and even "dangerous" about, listening to the negro stations at the frontiers of the dial, including Chicagoland's thousand-watt jazz beacon in Harvey, Illinois, WBEE-1570. (Fortunately for me, I rediscovered WBEE after dropping out of college in 1973, and this listening experience accounts for a considerable amount of my jazz "ear" knowledge.)

The Numero Records Eccentric Soul reissue series is a compilation of "lost" recordings from America's regional and farflung soul music markets, including (believe it or not) Columbus, Ohio; Tallahassee, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona! This side is reissued on "Twinight's Lunar Rotation," an outstanding two-disc set of singles issued by the top Chicago local soul label. This Numero compilation is the best of the crop that I own, but there is lotsa strong stuff on the other half-dozen Numero compilations of different soul labels that I own. There are numerous tracks on this and the other compilations that were certainly worthy of charting nationally, and many others that might have charted but for a vocalist who was out of his or her league with top-drawer material.

There is no legitimate reason why "A New Day" should not have charted nationally, in my opinion. There were probably two problems, one being failure to tap into the crossover market using progressive promotion techniques (i.e., payola) and the other being that this sound is very reminiscent of hits by The Esquires (e.g., "Get On Up"). In the case of the latter problem, the issue would probably have been the "dated" sound because the top-charting Esquires hits came and went in 1967. You see, 1971 was probably thought to be light years beyond the 1967 soul style in the ears of the national labels. Nevertheless, here it is: a gem of upbeat, feelgood soul---a flawless performance, in my opinion. These Numero compilations feel like a glimpse into the soul music scene from a closely parallel universe. There's lots more where this came from.

A New Day, The Notations (1971, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records A4KM 2409; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Following a bit on last night's subtext, here's another band and song for "purists" to hate---this time, "rock purists."



Yes, I know the costumes and slap-happy comedy was lame, and certainly performed for edification of the emergent teeny-bopper cult. Also, while I don't know anything about their production methods, it would not surprise me if most of Paul Revere's big hits were laid down by studio musicians even though the lads could play their instruments. But the hard rock sensibilities of the Raiders jab holes through the facade and production value. It would have been very uncool to admit to anyone that I liked Paul Revere upon my arrival as a buzzcut nobody at Hillcrest High School in 1967. But as I began collecting 45 rpm singles in the 1970s I could hear, through more well informed ears, that lots of pop acts---including this band and the Monkees, for example---had much more going on for themselves than the era's longhairs would ever acknowledge.

I don't think a person has to listen too hard to hear some Stones-like guitar and energy in "Good Thing" and other Raiders tracks from the mid-60s. Of special interest to me in this tune is the movement of parallel fourths and/or fifths both in the vocals and guitars---they're the odd-sounding harmonies that sound vaguely oriental and a little incomplete, which Aerosmith and many others made heavy use of decades later and to this day.

The most capable dancer, which some of the YouTube commentators seem to think is Goldie Hawn, is featured near the front of the set and distracts attention from the weird gunplay subplot that ends up getting under another dancer's feet. "Good Thing" was issued in Chicago about this time of the year in the winter of 1966-67, when there was a shortlived pop music style fascination with the Victorian and Roaring 20s eras, which accounts for the dancers' flapper-style dresses in the midst of American Revolution drag. Anyway, it's a bit of flavor from an eclectic time in American pop music; three minutes of upbeat full-color rock, dancing, and tomfoolery.

Good Thing, Paul Revere and the Raiders (1966, from "The Spirit of '67," Columbia Records CL 2595 [mono], via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Went to buy some cheap detergent
Some emergent nation 
Got my load



"Can't Afford No Shoes" (lyrics here, because it's hard to catch most of them without reading along) was not an evergreen crowd-pleaser in Frank Zappa's live performance repertoire, but I don't understand why. The Recession/Depression economics theme was surely of concern to Zappa's audience from the time this song was released in the mid-70s well past beyond the sunrise in of St. Reagan's Morning in America. (It certainly was to me, as late as 1983!) And the composition was about as straight-ahead of a hard rocker as Zappa ever recorded.

The instrumental arrangement is explosive, as you will hear if you jam in your waxy little earbuds and crank up the volume. The rhythm section is really punchy, and the guitar tones are aggressive. Based on the liner notes in both copies of this album that I possess, it looks like Zappa is playing the slightly unhinged slide/Dobro-sounding solo about halfway through. He usually delegated this sound to Denny Whalley, who was actually playing with him in 1975 (maybe an album-credit oversight?). If there's a harmonica down in the mix on this track, and I can't tell on this low-fi YouTube clip, it is being respirated by one Bloodshot Rollin' Red, known in the personal mythology of all Zappaphiles as Captain Beefheart, the charming avant-garde multimedia artist what I composed a humble eulogy for yesterday.

The vocals are, in my opinion, somewhat marred by the inexplicable self-mocking delivery that seemed to self-sabotage any number of Zappa cuts that had all other necessary elements for a big radio hit. Johnny "Guitar" Watson, one of FZ's musical idols, is credited with vocals on two other cuts of this album, but I'm pretty sure I hear him in a supporting role on this track as well.

I think this song is "low-hanging fruit" for some band to revisit today and hit big with.

Can't Afford No Shoes, Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention (1975, from "One Size Fits All," reissued as RykoDisc RCD10095), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: clarifying edits made to the first narrative paragraph in response to commenters. Thanks, commenters!!!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I start out clean each day/
Shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down



Music like this confirms to me that I'm not the typical older-generation crank to think that pop music became pretty uniformly bad starting in the 1980s. Why? Because along the way I've found a nontrivial amount of bands that have dug deep to innovate on the root forms, whether extending them in terms of form or rethinking how rock and pop should sound. I think that what this relative handful of groups has in common is that you can't point to much that obviously identifies them as eighties, nineties, or tenties music. Another thing is that they do not sound like the product of teen focus groups and coke-sniffing producers. In my view, they say something... whether there are lyrics or not.

Here is one of my favorites: Morphine. No historical or critical essays tonight, except to say I think it's funny that the recurring phrase they use in the framing passages sounds like a mild perversion of the famous Joe Walsh riff from "Rocky Mountain Way" (find it on YouTube if you don't recognize it by name; you should recognize it right away).

Now, you know the routine here at the fish fry: mash those earbuds into your head and turn up the volume to 11.

Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'm Down, Morphine (1993, from "Good," RykoDisc), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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If the Beach Boys had been able to continue in this direction, with Brian Wilson channeling his musical explorations back into a commercial rock vein rather than what Mike Love called "Brian's ego music," this group might have gained a whole new relevance in the late '60s and early '70s. Unfortunately, other things happened.



It doesn't take my ear much imagination to hear something very much like Chicago at their peak form during the "CTA" era. Swap out the low-rent piano and bass lines with something jazzy, use a larger drumkit played around the beats instead of straight up and down, throw some reverb on the horns, put Pete Cetera on lead vocal. I owe this observation in part to old pal Larry K., who reported to me some years ago that he saw a Chicago/Beach Boys mashup during the mid-70s in The Windy City, and Chicago did in fact perform Darlin' with Petey on lead vocal and other beach men participating. I can hear why that would have worked then by listening to this track.

Darlin', The Beach Boys (1967, from "Wild Honey," originally released on Capitol Records T-2859), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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In keeping with our dual-use scary music thrust this week---Halloween and election day---we (by which I mean "I") present the debut cut on the debut album of King Crimson:

TWENTY   FIRST   CENTURY   SCHIZOID   MAN!!!!!



DARE DEHDEHDET DET DEHHH! 
DEHHH! DEHHH! DEHHH!

Odd thing about this album is that all of the other tracks on it are laid back, and even "pretty." The album cover nails vibe of this song, if not the whole album.

21st Century Schizoid Man, King Crimson (1969, "In The Court Of The Crimson King: An Observation By King Crimson," reissue Discipline Mobile Group DMG0501), cover art embedded with music, the latter via YouTube, for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

 Editor's note: oh, wait, there's more!



...as presented by "Seasons," possibly the most adorable string quintet you've ever seen. Works perfectly chartwise, performance-wise, and production-wise (especially that big cavernous sound that stays percussive and punchy all the way through). Unfortunately I can't find out jack about the group on the web. But it's embedded here via YouTube, for the same purposes noted above.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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As Hedley Lamarr once said, "My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."



Just cuz! An all-too-rare specimen of Lummox Rock from Frank Zappa leading (in my opinion) his best band ever, period. (Thank you for your attention to this matter.) As much as I love Zappa, I feel he spent way too much time expressing obscenity, disrespect for women, and pointless vulgarity. This performance, however, is not any of those: it's a straightforward and witty expression of an ultra-lewd sentiment that probably has overtaken every gentleman reading these words at a certain point. I'd be very interested to hear any version of this viewpoint as expressed musically from the female point of view, preferably in a Lummox Rock format. In fact, I may know of one from the '90s, but that will have to wait. Meanwhile, if you know of any, do tell.

And as with all Lummox Rock, plug in your headphones and turn it up louder than you can stand. Just fuckin' do it!

Dirty Love, The Mothers (1973, from "Over-Nite Sensation," DiscReet MS 2149), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.