(Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)
Years ago we heard Chuck Manning and Sal Marquez duet into the wee hours at a party in the hills above Pasadena. The home was old and Spanish, the lights of the city spread out in all directions, and Manning blew long, low tones that Marquez softly cavorted in and around…. Just one of those boozy late night jazz memories.
Photo by Tony Gieske.
(Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly—first draft, 2011)
I was at the Autry Museum a few years back and in the middle of the lobby some cat was making a dug out canoe. He had this enormous chunk of tree right there in the middle of the floor and he’d been hacking away at it in the traditional style. You could see the shape emerging at the one end. The other end, though, was still a big old chunk of tree. I looked at the thing and for some reason tried to figure out how to describe the thing in words. And I froze. It defied my descriptive abilities. This big giant half dead tree half boat thing all carved up, shavings everywhere. I stared and stared but damn man, it rendered me mute, language wise. I kept going back to it seeing if anything emerged, a sentence or three, anything. Nothing. On the way out of the place I made a long detour so as not to look at it again. It still haunts me, years later. It haunts me every time we have to write about a piano. Continue reading
(I have no idea when I wrote this, or why.)
Spinal Tap and Puppet show.
Bingo was a great band, the inspiration behind Pat Boone’s heavy metal album. Saw them I don’t know how many times but never with Paul Anka. With Frankie Valli, Bobby Vinton, Barry Manilow (three times!), Engelbert & His Humperdincks, you name it…but never Paul Anka. Blood Pressure Testing were German, Blutdruckprüfung, sort of a Kraftwerk thing but not so rocking. The kids dug it. The grandparents loved it. Mr. Roboto loved it. I guess you had to be there.
Incidentally, this was the show where Paul Anka’s wardrobe malfunction caused a riot. You’re having my baby, he said, then oops. Talk about Jim Morrison. He survived, Paul Anka did, but no one ever saw Blutdruckprüfung again. Last I saw of them was on a milk carton. They looked so sad. I ate my Wheaties and wondered if they were lost for good. Trapped in a portal somewhere with TJ Lubinsky and the guy who sings Little Green Bag, forever.
‘In your status line, list 10 albums that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes and don’t think too hard – they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag 10 friends, including me, so I’ll be able to see your list!’
So i wrote Best of Foreigner, Best of Styx, Best of Foreigner and Styx, Journey: a tribute to Foreigner and Styx, Boston: the Guitar Solos, Best of Toto, Best of Kansas, Best of Toto When Not in Kansas Anymore, A Lot of Shitty Bob Dylan Songs No One Talks About, and Brian Wilson’s Trout Mask Sandbox.
“Right” or “Great”. That is the written equivalent of the kind of guy who says they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works and makes little finger quotes when he says right or great. Personally, I hate quotation marks. I almost never use them. It really bothers me when I have to use them. There is no such thing as quotation marks in spoken language, hence our meme author here and his finger quotes. Or “finger quotes”. Finger “quotes”. I hate quotation marks. Continue reading
I heard “If You Feel” on the radio tonite, in the car, as I sailed down the 101 freeway, windows open, volume jacked up all the way to eleven. It’s not a song you hear much, but I love it, love the way the drums drive the thing, carry it aloft, make it happen. When I got home I listened to the tune again, then remembered this obituary. It was the summer of 2005….
Spencer Dryden died the other day. Cancer and other things. He was 66. Spencer Dryden played drums in Jefferson Airplane. And he was my favorite rock drummer.
Dryden played jazz drums in a rock band…that’s what made it so special. Just listen:
On “If You Feel”, off of Crown of Creation, a stuttering shuffle kicks off the tune into an archetypal Airplane groove, and as the tune picks up he shifts into rapid polyrhythms, sticks never too loud rattling off the snare and back and forth across the toms and sliding around Jack Casady’s massive bass chords. He tried to play it at Altamont…you can see it in Gimme Shelter, but just as he gets going some biker clocks Marty Balin and that ended it. (Alas, that’s wrong. They’re doing “Other Side of This LIfe” when Marty gets walloped and falls back into the drum kit, knocking over the ride cymbal. Spencer, feeding off the violence, rises to his feet and keeps up the tune’s impulsive, swinging rhythm. I love that moment.) Continue reading
I was at an event a couple nights ago when it was announced that Jim Hall has died. People gasped audibly. The lady next to me began to cry. That’s when I knew for sure it wasn’t a hardcore jazz crowd. Jazzers just sigh and move on. There’ll be a nice memorial, a lot of the departed player’s music on the radio for a few days. Then on to the living. Jazz musicians have been dying since the 1930’s. That’s when the first generation began to go in large numbers. (Life spans were shorter then, and they began to go in their fifties.) After a few generations all that death becomes part of the music’s natural cycle. Sad, inevitable. Rock’n’roll fans will be there in a generation themselves. But rock fans now are in for an endless wave of the sixties greats dropping off, and it’ll be hard, and they’ll cry. Maybe because rock is a music of youthful days, and old age seems somehow cruel and ironic. I don’t know. But I do know that the social media is awash in mourning when a rock hero dies, almost to the point of tedium, whereas jazz fans let it go after a day or two. Two different ways of looking at the same thing. It’s just that jazz people are so used to it.
A buddy of mine, a jazz historian of long standing, told me once how he’s watched entire generations of jazz–entire styles–disappear. He used to interview the 1920’s classic jazz people but then they were gone. He’d interview the swing era people of the 1930’s…but they disappeared. The be boppers of the forties are nearly all gone now, he said. Next comes the great Blue Note era, maybe jazz’s greatest period. So many heroes. So many obituaries. Barely a week goes by now without one. Jazz fans sigh. Continue reading
The cute lady in the Santa hat came into the dining room. Brick, Brick…who is this? I listened. Eric Dolphy. Right! A few minutes later, she comes back into the dining room. Brick, Brick, who is this? I listened again. Tuxedomoon. Right! A few minutes later…Brick, Brick…who is this? Listened a minute. Earl Hines? Yes! Wow! A few minutes later, she’s back, very cute, very determined and very drunk. OK, Brick, we’re playing Stump Brick, who is this? The Pretty Things. Damn. How do you know all this music? Well, they’re my records. Damn, she said, and stomped off.
Pretty Things, “Dream/Joey”, Silk Torpedo (1973)
Gavin Harrison, the super-virtuoso prog/fusion drummer (King Crimson, etc.) is a Shaggs freak. He’s played “My Pal Foot Foot” during drum clinics…and confessed that sometimes he would play Shaggs drummer Helen Wiggin’s beats (sic) during King Crimson sets. The idea of playing My Pal Foot Foot to a bunch of proghead drum students really appeals to me. Imagine them coming home, twirling their sticks, and youtubing it. Feel their pain.
The first time I ever heard the Shaggs was their hit “My Pal Foot Foot”. Maybe hit is an exaggeration. Only a hundred copies were pressed in 1969 and though some were sent to radio stations (seriously) rock stardom eluded them. By the time I heard their record (at a party, though I can’t remember where) it would have been late into the second Shaggs revival, circa early 80’s (the first Shaggs revival was in the seventies, when Frank Zappa would play them on the Dr. Demento show and said they were better than the Beatles.) I remember distinctly that hearing “My Pal Foot Foot” was an unsettling experience. I couldn’t figure them out at all. I knew they had been a real band yet they were obviously from another planet or at least a long dead civilization. Maybe this is what they listened to in Atlantis as it slipped into the sea. Even the song’s title was disturbing. Like what the hell was a foot foot? Later I discovered it was a cat, which didn’t help things. Who names their cat Foot Foot? Even linguistically it’s wrong. I mean what part of Indo-European don’t they understand? The whole thing was so wrong and bewildering, all of it. When I first heard Trout Mask Replica (recorded the same year as “My Pal Foot Foot”, actually, in 1969) it was all wrong, but it was smart and intellectual and deliberate. Captain Beefheart made sense once you got it. There was a logic, a method. Musicians could play it. But “My Pal Foot Foot”?
So I never did pick up the album, Philosophy of the World. (Philosophy of the World?) I was fascinated and repelled at the same time, like watching the Crumb documentary. I don’t think I ever heard anything that helped me put it into context until I picked up a mess of CDs of Indonesian music and discovered their own meter free music. And while the Shaggs weren’t actually meter free–they just couldn’t play together, and their songs lurched and stalled like a dying carburetor—they might have been huge in certain parts of Indonesia. Foot Foot would have even made linguistic sense there. (What morphologists call reduplication—repeating a word to make another word, like foot into foot foot—doesn’t sound weird at all to an Indonesian.) Somehow that made me feel better.
Still, though, I’d rather not think about it.
Turned on the television thinking there was a hockey game. Nope. It’s the King Family Christmas Special. Severe flashback time. Blondes everywhere, blondes with big hairdos and perfect children. Harmonies without even a tinge of funk. Alvino Rey smiling like a goofball. White people used to be way white.
Thirty six of the thirty seven members of the King Family. Where’s Grandma? Behind the tree?
I was once forced to watch the Lawrence Welk Show on PBS–a fundraiser, getting old people’s money before they die–and the young singers and musicians made an obvious drug reference that went a mile or two over Lawrence’s head. A one an’ a two he said, smiling blissfully, and the accordion played and then tap dancer tapped but I knew that backstage somewhere reefer was being blown and Eddie Miller told dirty stories. That made me feel better. And we know now that no matter how happy the Andy Williams family appeared every Christmas, his wife Claudine was boinking somebody else and thinking about guns.
But the King Family? Were there secrets therein? This squarest of the squarest of the squarest of all that was good in America? Well, the King Family was actually the King Sisters, who’d sung with the big bands. Lots of big bands. Artie Shaw, Billy May, Frank Devol (aka Happy Kyne), you name it. And big bands were full of jazz musicians. Jazz musicians with issues. Well, who knew how to have a good time, anyway. And their good times were not fit for a King Family Christmas Special. Obviously there were dark secrets under all that blonde hair. Drunken bus rides, nights in hotels, drummers, vipers, ducking from the cops. If you could have gotten the King sisters liquored up oh the tales they could tell.
But no one ever got the King Sisters liquored up.
So here’s some facts about the King Family you never knew. When ABC cancelled Outer Limits they replaced it with the King Family. Harlan Ellison threw an extraordinary tantrum. When ABC cancelled the legendary Turn-On after one terrifying episode, they replaced it with the King Family. Timothy Leary threw an extraordinary tantrum. And when Nixon resigned the presidency he was replaced by the King Family, at least until Gerald Ford could get settled in. Pat Buchanan threw an extraordinary tantrum.
And there was a spell there around 1966 and ’67 when you got thirty minutes of Shindig! followed by thirty minutes of The King Family. It was only for a couple weeks but at one point The Who played My Generation and Keith Moon got all crazy and mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. Moments later it was the King Family. Right then and there the generations were sundered, the culture war declared, LSD dropped and girls got naked in public. Acid, incense and balloons. Not even the Four King Cousins could stem the tide.
The Four King Cousins tripping their brains out.
Funny how thirty seven nice white people can change the course of world history, accompanied by an accordion. OK, they didn’t. Dylan had already gone electric. Coltrane was already blowing free jazz. San Franciscans were already experimenting with LSD. And Viet Nam was already totally fucked up. The King Family had nothing to do with any of that. Nothing to do with anything, really. Though they did scar the childhood of many a kid forced to watch it with the folks. If you wanted to watch Shindig! you had to watch the King Family. And then an hour of Lawrence Welk. Before you know it you’re hanging with Charles Manson. The King Family messed with people’s minds.
And there they are on TV now, the whole King Family, and I can feel my mind going. So I change channels. Barbara Stanwyck is all over Dennis Morgan like a cheap suit, the vamp. It’s Christmas in Connecticut. Only Barbara Stanwyck could turn a sweet Christmas story into pure sex, even if only for a scene or two. She was a bad girl. She vamped and screwed for money and wore anklets. A real bad girl. Something that never comes up in essays about the King Family.
When I was a kid I thought Kraftwerk were the lamest band ever. Like this is what happens when you lose two world wars. That kind of lame. But that was a long time ago. I’m more sophisticated now, more worldly, more open to new ideas. And now I think they are just one of the lamest bands ever. But their hipster fans might be the lamest fans ever. Though nothing personal, really.
Saw some guy on Facebook begging for Kraftwerk tickets, screaming really, in all caps. So desperate. Oh man, I thought, get a life. Better yet do away with the one you have. OK, I didn’t actually think that. I just thought how sad. Demeaning yourself in all caps just to be able to sing Autobahn with a bunch of record collecting hipster losers who get a little too excited over silly assed Krautrock shit played by geezers old enough to be their fathers. In German that would be one word.
Ein wenig Hass ist manchmal gut, nicht war?
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