Friday, January 5th

A quick round up today. Too much time spent watching tv (how poor was McMafia? From its terrible title to its watery atmosphere, its lousy script to its underdeveloped characters… Everything that The Night Manager was, this isn’t. End of rant) and catching up with work to concentrate on 5 Things. I hope normal service will resume from next week. Happy New Year!

ONE MY FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Latest in the repurposed Ladybird People at Work series:

“This is a rock star. His name is Bob Dylan.
Bob is rehearsing with his band. It takes a long time.
First the band have to learn all of Bob’s famous songs.
Then Bob has to think of worse tunes he can sing over all of them.”

TWO R.I.P. RICK HALL, GIANT OF ALABAMA MUSIC
Although we recorded in Muscle Shoals, we were working at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, set up by Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, Roger Hawkins and Barry Beckett, who broke away from Hall’s FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) studio. I took the photo below in Florence, just across the river. And, below, I’m standing by the famous sign at the city limits. Among some fine obits, rocksbackpages reminded me of Mick Brown’s wonderful piece on Rick Hall and Muscle Shoals for the Daily Telegraph in 2013. You can find it here.

From Mick’s piece: For a brief and exhilarating period Muscle Shoals rivalled New York, Los Angeles and London as one of the most important recording centres in popular music. You need only visit Muscle Shoals to realise quite how remarkable this was. The town is one of four – the others are Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia – that cluster along the Tennessee river in the north-western corner of Alabama, and are collectively known as the Shoals. The combined population is 69,000. It is a place of wood-framed houses, their porches entwined with bougainvillea; of handsome antebellum mansions – and of restaurants serving fried catfish and turnip greens. Thick forests flank the river, which rolls sluggishly in the summer heat. For an anonymous backwater, the Shoals has an improbably rich musical history. Florence was the birthplace of WC Handy, the father of the blues, and of Sam Phillips, who in 1953, convinced, as he put it, that “if I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars”, had the presence of mind to record an 18-year-old Elvis Presley singing the blues song “That’s Alright, Mama” – effectively creating rock’n’roll.

THREE THE “AMERICAN PIE” CLASSIC ALBUMS PROGRAMME…
reminded me of Don McLean’s song, “Orphans of Wealth”, at this moment as apposite as it’ll ever be…
“And they’re African, Mexican, Caucasian, Indian / Hungry and hopeless Americans / The orphans of wealth and of adequate health / Disowned by this nation they live in.
And with weather-worn hands, on bread lines they stand / Yet but one more degradation… / And they’re treated like tramps while we sell them food stamps /
This thriving and prosperous nation…”

FOUR I TRIED TO WRITE ABOUT DYLAN’S GOSPEL YEARS…
but the issue that I’ve had since 1980 keeps rearing its head – I listen to the first bars of any song thinking, “This sounds great” and ninety seconds later I’ve zoned out. I don’t understand – the band is great, the arrangements are good, it’s performed with drive and commitment… But it’s the same problem I have with the whole of Tom Petty’s oeuvre. I can never stick around ’til the end.

FIVE FROM MAJOR TO MINOR
A fascinating piece about the current state of pop music at Popbitch. They’ve looked at one element in particular…
“Being popular gets you a good place on a Spotify playlist; getting a good place on a Spotify playlist gets you more plays. The more plays you get on Spotify, the better your chart position. The better your chart position, the better your placement on Spotify playlists. The more you get heard, the more popular you become. The more popular you become, the more you get heard. This is not a particularly groundbreaking observation. People have been talking about this quirk of the new chart calculations for years now. What is interesting about this run of long-standing number ones though is that something else significant seems to have changed since the days of “Everything I Do” and “Love Is All Around”. Specifically: the key that the songs are in.”

If you’re receiving the email out, please click on the Date Headline of the page for the full 5 Things experience. It will bring you to the site (which allows you to see the Music Player) and all the links will open in another tab or window in your browser.