Sunday, March 10th, 2024

March 9, 2024 by 2 Comments

{ONE} A RAINY NIGHT IN SOHO
Crossing from a Mayfair private view into Soho, I put the airpods in and hit play, and DJ Shadow is thrown up by the randomiser that is Shuffle. It’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” and it is indeed perfect, for this moment, in this imperfect world. I find myself slouching along in time to its wonderful backbeat as I walk through St Anne’s Court to the Elizabeth Line Tottenham Court Road entrance — TfL missed a trick in not calling it TCR [Soho]. Walking in the rain in London at night never loses its appeal.

{TWO} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 1
I keep waiting for Pop to Eat Itself, as the most brilliantly named group of the Eighties would have it, but Pop doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it’s a driver or important component, in many of the new series and movies on Netflix or Apple or Terrestrial TV. For me, All of Us Strangers has the most evocative use of a single song. Nothing we’ve watched recently was as poignant, melancholy, and controlled as Andrew Haigh’s film. There’s no weakness, and the extraordinary performances of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are so quiet and nuanced that you catch your breath as their story with their [now] adult son plays out. The film has its theme song, and it’s perfect — the Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls”* with its talk of “too many shadows, whispering voices”, and although it tracks club dancing, its melancholy is worn on its sleeve. And the original video had Tennant’s partner in PSB, Chris Lowe, as a ghostly figure in the street scenes…

* I’d forgotten the verse, “We’ve got no future / we’ve got no past / here today, built to last / In every city, in every nation / from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.” (The Finland Station in Leningrad is the place where Lenin got off the train on the night of April 3, 1917, to take charge of the Russian revolution), but if anyone’s going to put that in a pure Pop hit it’d be Neil Tennant, no?

{THREE} FILM 2024
I had watched Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh talking about All of Us Strangers (if you’ve seen it, you’ll understand the difficulty) at Mark Kermode’s MK3D show at the BFI on the South Bank. As I had designed the slides for Mark’s show, I’d popped backstage to say hi. It was an interesting Green Room — Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh; Mahalia Belo (director) and Alice Birch (writer, from a novel by Megan Hunter) of The End We Start From, which features an excellent, panicky score by Anna Meredith and a standout performance from Jodie Comer; Jane Giles and Ali Catterall with their film, Scala!!!, about the King’s Cross Cinema and the extraordinarily diverse programming that inspired future generations of filmmakers and musicians; and Jerskin Fendrix, composer of the exceptional Poor Things soundtrack.

{FOUR} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 2
Mark Kermode: “Yorgos Lanthimos said he just knew from listening to your album (Winterreise — it came out in 2020, tagged as Indie Pop by Apple Music) that you could do the soundtrack. He said he played the album to Emma Stone and she said that when she heard it, it was like everything exploded, your head exploded into music, which I thought was a fabulous description. But it’s a really big thing to be asked to score a major motion picture straight out the gate. Did you know that you could do it?”
Jerskin: “I spend a lot of time not going to the cinema — I’m sure you might be more familiar with it, but it was an odd mental thing, just being in the studio by myself, already being isolated by lockdown, and thinking everything I’m doing right now is going to end up in a colossal environment in a lot of places in the world. The mental gymnastics of that was sort of impossible…”
Mark: “The score is right at the heart of the film — I think it would be quite easy for the film to be emotionally alienating and I talked to Yorgos and we agreed on this point — what you need is an emotional, visceral reaction. I’m just astonished that it’s your first film. It’s like you were always ready to do this.”
Jerskin: “I think it was very lucky that it was this exact film, this exact project, with this exact director, because my background up until that point had been pop music. I think there’s a level of emotion, and a level of hyper-exaggerated emotion that you can play with in pop song writing, which in most other art forms verges on the cloying.”
Mark: “What was the first pop record you ever bought?”
Jerskin: “The first pop record I remember listening to was The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen”.
Mark: “Wow! My first one was Alvin Stardust, “Jealous Mind!”

Jerskin then went on to detail his recent love for Carly Rae Jepson’s album Emotion — “Every song has this incredible core”. I checked — it does have all the elements that are present in Jerskin’s own album, and the Poor Things soundtrack — sparkling synth hooks, woozy atmospherics and all sorts of sounds used as beats and percussion without being drums, as well as on-the-nose pop melodies. I ended up talking to Jerskin after the show about Bruce, The Wild etc… and the song that he feels combined everything he loves about Pop Music in all its unabashed brilliance, “Jungleland” (from Born to Run). We also talked pitch-bending (you’ll know if you’ve seen Poor Things), and I ended by wishing him luck for the Oscars, for which his soundtrack has been nominated. How incredible is that? First Soundtrack, first Oscar Nom…

{FIVE} AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…
For Best Original Soundtrack, I think that the Academy will probably give it to Robbie Robertson for his work over four decades with Martin Scorsese. Killers of the Flower Moon is a really powerful soundtrack, full of bluesy foreboding, deep, rough sonics, heartbeats, and overdriven slide guitar. It also has one final send-off of a song, ”Still Standing”, poignant and moving as sung by an eighty-year-old Robertson, sounding as full of piss and vinegar as he did as a sixteen-year-old sending shards of guitar around Ronnie Hawkins as he sang “Who Do You Love.” [Update: I was wrong, Oppenheimer won, soundtrack by the brilliant Ludwig Göransson.]

{EXTRA} SHOALS’ SOUL
I was reminded of James & Bobby Purify’s wonderful track by a nice interview with Dan Penn in The Guardian this week by my friend Garth Cartwright. “I’m Your Puppet” was the only song cut at Muscle Shoals by James and Bobby (their record label sent them to Moman’s American Studio in Memphis for their follow-up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the song, mainly for its rolling melody line, sitting atop a lovely chord progression. The Guardian piece was timed to the release of a great album that Dan cut on Bobby Purify in 2005 that is only now seeing the light of day: The Inside Track on Bobby Purify (The Last Music Company). It consists of Dan’s heartfelt demos, followed by the album itself. Find it, buy it, support real soul music. 

When we recorded half our first album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Mark and I were in thrall to Southern Soul (our more Northern and Western influences being Prince, Ray Charles and Bobby Womack). The classic songs of Penn, Spooner Oldham, Chips Moman, Eddie Hinton, Donnie Fritts and others were really important to us, from “Dark End of the Street” to “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”. The weeks we spent there were among our best musical memories, warmed by the fantastic hospitality and talent of all at Muscle Shoals Sound. 

A few years later, our career in the dumpster, I asked Mark to add piano and bass to a version I had started recording as a gift for a friend’s wedding [long story]. I can’t sing like the great Purify cousins, so I opted for a cooler, slightly swampier version with a dobro lick replacing the lovely xylophone on the original. I love Mark’s playing here — he has the South in his veins! — with his elegant take on Floyd Cramer’s country piano stylings. Enjoy…

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Thursday, August 22rd | Six Robbie Robertson Songs & Performances for the ages

August 23, 2023 by 4 Comments

{ONE} RONNIE HAWKINS, THE LAST WALTZ | “COME ON ROBBIE, LET’S TAKE A LITTLE WALK…”
Robbie still has to count Ronnie in … but the sound of his newly-bronzed Stratocaster summons up the rowdy rockabilly that Ronnie Hawkins traded in. “I didn’t know whether it would be a bad idea, but I decided to have the Stratocaster bronzed. It was a bit tricky, you know, finding somebody to do that. One of the road manager guys said, There’s a place where they bronze baby shoes. He did some research, took it, brought it back, and it was bronze. I thought, Wow — it does look beautiful. They put it all back together again. I played it, and it sounded unlike any guitar I had ever played. Then, when I stood up and put on the strap, I realised it weighed more.

I tried it out in the rehearsals for the Last Waltz and it started to feel right to me, and I was quite drawn to the tonality of it. There was a little bit more… it was just a sharper tone, with more metal involved. It grabbed right onto the notes, making them sting, in a way, and have a nice sustain to it as well…” Well, there’s a whole life on the rockabilly road in Ronnie’s performance, topped with his glorious scream, and Robbie becomes eighteen again, the six-days-on-the road, “blowing down the backroads headin’ south” boy, taking lessons from Fred Carter Jr. and Roy Buchanan and trying to be the loudest, flashiest guitar player on the circuit.

{TWO} BOB DYLAN’S HOTEL ROOM, GLASGOW | “I CAN’T LEAVE HER BEHIND…”
Robbie Robertson jamming with Bob Dylan at the Station Hotel, Glasgow, on a day off between concerts, 18th May 1966. One of Dylan’s song sketches from a time when he’d try out melodies, often having an almost medieval feel, with dummy or half-formed words (most famously on “I’m Not There” on the Basement recordings the next year). How good would this have sounded on Blonde On Blonde? 

“I’m not getting the bridge,” says Robbie, as he tries to read Bob’s mind… “That’s it, that’s it”, says Bob. Towards the end, as the song coalesces, hear how Robertson became one of the great structural guitarists of the pop age, learning how to play behind singers, how to structure the textures, the hills and valleys of songs, and when to drop in sweet grace notes, or play a fill that knits two parts together.

{THREE} OLD, OLD WOODSTOCK | “KING HARVEST (HAS SURELY COME)”
Everyone’s seen this performance, shot in what is now John and Jan Cuneo’s house, but was Robbie’s studio back then. Maybe no songwriter outside of Fleetwood Mac has written so many songs directed at their bandmates as Robbie Robertson has — “Stage Fright”, “Where Do We Go From Here?” Forbidden Fruit,” but here, as the second album is finished and all is well in the Band world, this film shows their characters and connection beautifully.

Barney Hoskyns, in his excellent book on The Band, Across The Great Divide, wrote: “Corn in the fields / Listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water / King Harvest has surely come…” It was the first of three marvellous images that Levon intoned as prefaces to Richard’s verses — just part of the song’s intricate structure, which involved several time changes and suspensions. “The chord progression was a little bit complex”, says Robbie. ‘There’s a sifty feeling we were trying to get, which was subtle and bold at the same time.’ Just as ‘sifty’ were the sounds the band attained for each instrument. With John Simon playing an electric piano through the same black box Robbie had used on “Tears Of Rage,” Garth’s Lowrey shimmered away in the background, and Robbie made tiny Telecaster incisions off to one side. “This was the new way of dealing with the guitar,” Robbie says. “Leaving out a lot of stuff and just waiting till the last second and then playing the thing in just the nick of time. It was an approach to playing where it’s so delicate, the opposite of the “in your face” playing that I used to do.” After the final verse, Robbie played a solo so intense it was frightening. “It’s like you have to hold your breath while playing these kinds of solos,” he says. “You can’t breathe, or you’ll throw yourself off.”

“Tempo sounds slow, John”, Levon drawls to their producer, John Simon, at the end. Sounds perfect to me.

{FOUR} I SAW IT AT THE MOVIES | “WONDERFUL REMARK”
A Van Morrison song and performance from the soundtrack of Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, produced by Robertson.

Robbie’s tremolo’d guitar comes in halfway through the song, playing along with Richard Tee’s glorious piano and then re-appears shuddering, swooping and stinging, taking out the song as Van moans, “I sighed a million sighs / I told a million lies / to myself / To myself / Baby, to myself…” It’s some of the most “Robbie” playing on record.

{FIVE} DOWN SOUTH IN NEW ORLEANS | “SECRETS OF STORYVILLE”

“Tipitina’s at 1:00 a.m. A sound so loud it seemed to suck the air out of your lungs. George Porter Jr., formerly of the Meters, also a sideman on Robbie Robertson’s album Storyville, was playing up there beneath a giant picture of Professor Longhair, playing funky stuff with four horns under smoke that swirled in cones of colored light. Nervous people, wall to wall, danced to the nervous licks from a bottleneck guitar. A man in a donkey mask danced for a moment in an orange light and then was swallowed by the primordial, protoplasmic crowd. A miasma of smoke and sweat rose to the faint lights. A soprano saxophone wailed old Coltrane, set to rhythm & blues. 

We were trying to hide in the shadows beside the stage “to avoid any foolish thing that might happen,” as Robbie had put it. But the band began what Robbie called “this ferocious funk thing,” and then Porter went up to the microphone and looked over in our direction, saying with a sly smile: “Robbie? You wanna get some of this?” It was such a cool way of putting it. It was practically irresistible on its own. But then it was Nick Wechsler, Robbie’s manager, who did it. He had gotten up behind Robbie, and he was pushing him like a tugboat, pushing, pushing through the crowd, and there was nowhere else to go. Robbie later told me: “The appeal of it was that it was just this unknown ferocious funk that evolved. When I went up there, I didn’t know what they were playing.”

When Robbie pushed past Paula and me to get to the stage, we didn’t know what he was doing. Robbie rarely sat in, but there he was, climbing the stage, and the guitar player handed him the instrument as the crowd erupted with sustained Indian cries. It was as if a dam had burst, and sound flowed out, transforming itself into “Iko Iko,” the national anthem of New Orleans funk. Paula and I were absorbed into the crowd, and then we were dancing, Dominique was dancing, and the notes from Robbie’s guitar were unfurling like bolts of coloured fabric tossed into the wind.” — From a great Laurence Gonzales article, “Secrets of Storyville”, Men’s Journal, 1993

Here’s “Go Back To Your Woods”, a song from the album co-written with Bruce Hornsby — hear Robbie backed by the Meters, with George Porter on bass and some incantations from a couple of Parade Chiefs. There are some brilliant things on Storyville — “Soap Box Preacher”, ”Night Parade”, and ”Breakin’ the Rules” (with its great opening line, “I tried to reach you, on Valentines Day” and Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan on vocals).

{SIX} RECITING LOU REED | “SOMEWHERE (DIRTY BLVD.)”
Lang Lang’s extraordinary merging of Bernstein and Sondheim’s “Somewhere” and Lou Reed’s “Dirty Blvd.” If you remember “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” then it makes perfect sense. It’s amazing, ten and a half minutes of pianistics, bombastic percussion, “Somewhere” sung by Lisa Fischer, and “Dirty Blvd” spoken by Robertson. One of America’s iconic songs of hope balanced by one of Lou’s greatest songs about lives lived in poverty and trauma.

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Thursday, February 2nd

February 2, 2017 by 4 Comments

Woody Guthrie went through World War Two with a sign on his guitar, ‘this machine kills fascists’. After the war was over, he kept the sign on and we said, “Woody, Hitler’s dead, why don’t you take the sign off? He says, “Well this Fascism comes along whenever the rich people get the generals to do what they want…”
Pete Seeger, interviewed in Greenwich Village, Music That Defined a Generation (2012)

ONE NEXT OF KIN
I spent a part of this week being intrigued by Loyle Carner, a gentler form of MC, whose songs often ride on summery jazz or feel-good gospel while they talk of cooking pancakes for an imaginary sister, missing his student loan or grieving for his late stepfather. Still very South London (Croydon, to be precise) but there’s something interesting going on. Oh, and the cover of Yesterday’s Gone harks back to Music From Big Pink…

bandcarner

TWO BOOKS CORNER: NEXT OF KIN PT. 2
Which neatly leads on… I’m gonna recommend the Robbie Robertson book, Testimony, to y’all. It puts proper flesh on the bones of many of the stories that have been told again and again – such as how they sourced a new drummer once Levon Helm bailed on the 65-66 Dylan tour, and why Robertson ended up photographed alongside Alan Ginsberg in front of City Lights bookstore in 1965 – as well as providing a sense of the dizzying nature of their work with Dylan. It’s light on the specifics of his songwriting, the recording process and the evolution of his guitar playing, but strong on portraits of the many characters that cross his path. If you read this alongside Levon’s “Wheels on Fire” and Barney’s “Across The Great Divide” and “Small Town Talk”, you can patch together a story with at least seven different sides, Rashoman-style. Doing this reveals a rounded narrative about the extraordinary series of events that gave birth to The Band, and the clash of Robbie’s voraciously aspirational search for knowledge and status with Levon’s “Hell, let’s just play” mentality that signposted the death of this joyous group even at the moment of its greatest triumph, The Band. I mean, Bunuel and F.S. Walcott’s Medicine Show had much in common but – in the end – not enough.

THREE SAD NEWS, SAD NEWS COME TO ME WHERE I SIT…
… that Terry Cryer has passed away [Val Wilmer’s Guardian obit here]. I’ve always loved the pictures that he took of Jazz musicians in the 50s. They (and more) were collected in a fascinating book, One in the Eye, edited by Ian Clayton and with a great introduction by Val Wilmer in 1992, which is set to be reprinted soon, apparently. It’s full of deadpan writing, by a man who said, “I broke the rules because it was a lot more fun than following them”. “By the time I got to London, dope was becoming fashionable. People stopped chewing benzedrine inhalers when the company that made them took the Benzedrine out. Pity about that, they were quite nice with lemon gin…”; “Ann and I got married – we were quite happy just living together, but under pressure from Sister Rosetta [Tharpe], I bought a special licence. She gave us the best wedding present, a night in the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool!” I always have a print of one or more of Terry’s photographs wherever we’re living – currently these two grace the wall behind the record deck.

cryer

FOUR IF YOU REMEMBER IT…
My favourite items in the V&A’s You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 were in a small case (see picture by Lucy Hawes/V&A). They were the messages written on paper plates and scraps of paper and pinned to shelter doors or trees at the Woodstock Festival. You know the kind of thing – Beware of the Brown Acid/I’ll meet you by the right-hand Tower – but touching that someone saved them. Frustratingly hit and miss as a round up of those five years, but hugely enjoyable none the less, it’s on ’til Feb 26. Now let me hear you shout… “Gimme an F!

revolution

FIVE I’M LOOKIN’ FUNNY IN MY EYES
In the week that Bob Dylan’s take on The Great American Songbook is announced, with 2017’s ‘worst font on a record cover’ already sewn up, I watched Greenwich Village, Music That Defined a Generation, on Sky Arts. In the midst of a host of fascinating clips was this unlikely pairing, singing an unlikely song, Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die”…

greenwich.jpg

EXTRA! MORE
After mentioning Lou Reed’s “Dirty Blvd.” in the synaesthetic wine thing (here) a couple of weeks ago, I spent some time looking for songs that could possibly be covered by an unnamed legendary rock singer as he contemplates a new album. In my trawling I was looking at a couple of songs on Robbie Robertson’s “How to be Clairvoyant”, an album I’d never given the time of day to. It’s really good – my slight antipathy to solo Robbie is breaking down. And that led on to Lang Lang’s take on “Somewhere/Dirty Blvd.” It’s kind of amazing, almost 12 minutes of pianistics, bombastic percussion, “Somewhere” sung by Lisa Fischer, and “Dirty Blvd” spoken by Robertson. It’s on Spotify, although not on YouTube, if that has whetted your appetite.

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Wednesday, December 14th

December 14, 2016 by 4 Comments

ONE JAZZIE B: FROM DOLE TO SOUL, BBC 4
This documentary started lazily, but gradually sharpened up to be a fascinating portrait of black experience in 80s London. “The media painted us all with the same brush, but we were all different strands of that brush… not everybody in south London and Brixton enjoyed West Indian food – no we didn’t. We were sick of chicken and rice and dumpling and all that stuff, ’cos that’s what we were raised on. We aspired to the Wimpy Bar – we wanted to eat chips. I was born and raised in England. I wanted to be like my mate at school. I wanted to go fishing down on the River Lea. I wanted to play Subbuteo, I wanted to roller skate. I wanted to have those kind of experiences. I played Ice Hockey, for Christ’s sake!”

TWO RICHARD HARRIS IN A COMMENT ON thebluemoment
On a post about the Stones’ new album: “May 12, 1963 (Sunday) they played an afternoon “R&B” session at The 51 Club (Ken Colyer’s place). We were in London, up from Wales for the opening concert that night of Ray Charles’ hugely anticipated first British visitation, so wandering through Soho just to kill time, we drifted in. Yes, they cranked through the Chess Best Of anthology rather well, loud and tight, and with embryo attitude! I do remember they also did “I’m Moving On” with a two chorus break, the second with the bass lifting up an octave. We stole that! The Stones at a pivotal, enthusiastic point and Ray & that Band on one London Sunday… to be alive etc…”

THREE LORRA LORRA ROBBIE ROBERTSON THIS WEEK…
from an animated (!) interview by Andy Kershaw on Radio 4, to a very interesting Michael Simmonds piece in Mojo. The Kershaw interview felt to me to be treading old ground (the Starlight Lounge story is told in the Last Waltz and in every book about the Band ever written), but reading the interview in Mojo reminds me that there’s more than one side to any story. I was idly looking at robbierobertson.com when I came upon this gallery of his guitars. I singled out one Telecaster, partly because of its extraordinary appearance, partly because of its extraordinary history.

robertsonguitars

Then I went off on a detour around Chuck Berry. First, a wonderful piece by Peter Guralnick, where he discusses a series of meetings with Chuck Berry, where the subject of poetry’s influence on the words of Berry’s songs comes up.

It’s here, too, in this interview shot for “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll”, with Robertson and Berry looking through Chuck’s scrapbook. It’s fascinating how subtle and tender Berry’s thoughts are.

FOUR A LOVELY IDEA…
Tyler Coates in US Esquire on the news that no, Bob won’t go to the Nobel Ceremony, but yes, he has written a speech for it: “Usually when one RSVPs “no” to an invitation, it isn’t necessary to submit a long explanation or – perhaps even more ballsy – a script to be read to the people who did show up to the party. Then again, we’re talking about a guy who ghosted on the people who simply wish to bestow upon him one of the world’s most coveted awards. Would it be too much to ask for a member of the Swedish Academy to stand up in front of the crowd, silently hold up Dylan’s speech on cue cards and drop them to the floor?”

The reality was a moving rendition of “Hard Rain” by Patti Smith, beautifully chronicled here by Amanda Petrusich on newyorker.com (she’s the author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records, a fantastic book.)

FIVE REST IN PEACE, HERB HARDESTY
Not only a kick-ass saxophonist on those great Fats Domino records out of New Orleans, but for those of us who saw Tom Waits touring in ’79, a fabulous trumpet player, too. Follow this link to hear him on the glorious medley of “Summertime/Burma Shave” essayed on that tour. Apparently, his trumpet was custom-made by Henri Selmer Paris, one of two made in France by a master craftsman; the other was owned by Louis Armstrong.

AND FINALLY… PHOTO OF THE WEEK
Halfway up the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, we come across this…

gaga

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Five Things: Wednesday 23rd October

October 24, 2013 by 12 Comments

Gainsbourg Auction: + 6 citrons, du parmesan, et un pot de crème fraîche, merci…
A bizarre collection of Serge Gainsbourg’s belongings are at auction on October 31. The list of items include four cigarette butts in a cassette case (estimate £425-£600), a pair of his nail clippers (estimate £40-£70), and a telegram to his wife, Jane Birkin, of controversial Number One single “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus” fame. Last year his handwritten shopping lists were sold for £6,540. Said David Richard, a spokesperson for the auction house: “When we sold those we realised there was a great interest in items from his everyday life. Quite a lot of the bidders were women and they were prepared to go quite far but it’s always difficult to know how much people are prepared to pay for these things”. Well, here’s a few of my favourite things (but I think I’ll pass on actually bidding):

Serge

From Michael Gray’s Outtakes blog, Mike Bloomfield and Big Joe Williams:
In 1980 Mike Bloomfield published a short memoir, Me and Big Joe, which not only portrayed the difficulties of their relationship very honestly but also, in Peter Narváez’ phrase, illustrated “the cross-cultural triumph of the blues tradition”. Bloomfield wrote: “Joe’s world wasn’t my world, but his music was. It was my life; it would be my life. So playing on was all I could do, and I did it the best that I was able. And the music I played, I knew where it came from; and there was not any way I’d forget.” I really love that sentence, and reading more excerpts discover that the book is compelling, well-written and illustrated by Robert Crumb.

Joe

Favourite Story Of The Week
Tony Bennett questionnaire, The Guardian: Q: You must have mixed with them all… I lived for 15 years in Los Angeles and I still can’t believe that the handsomest man in the world, Cary Grant, and the greatest performer in the world, Fred Astaire… were in my home. I celebrated my 50th birthday with them. Unforgettable.

Did any of them do anything in your home that you’ve had to keep secret? No. But once Dean Martin was in his home, having this mad party, and he was trying to study his lines for a television show so he called up the police and said: “I’m Dean Martin’s neighbour and there’s too much noise coming from his house. Have the police come and slow down the party.” And the police came and broke the party up and he got rid of everybody in the house.

A Note On Packaging The Past
I give into temptation. I’ve bought this music on vinyl, in 1972. In its first digital form on CD in the late eighties. On remastered CD in 2000. And here we are, buying it again in 2013, remixed, re-programmed, repackaged. Rock of Ages by The Band, originally in a three-gatefold sleeve of purple with Bob Cato’s enigmatic oriental statue on the front and mysterious pictures by Magnum’s Ernst Haas (the impressionistic colour ones) and John Scheele (the beautiful B&W’s) on the inside. One of the great live albums of the rock era. As Allen Toussaint says: “They dance by a different drummer, all the time. There was nothing stock about them”. But I baulk at the stupidly-priced Venal-Record-Company-Death-Throes Box Set, with its 5.1 Surround Sound DVD version of the tracks and the Sebastian Robertson soundboard mix of the uncut New Year’s Eve night. Come on. How many times can the people who love this music be ripped off? Yes, I know that everything in Heritage Rock World™ has to be a ‘production’. And, yes, it sounds fantastic, remixed by Robertson and the brilliant Bob Clearmountain with a staggering degree of detail. But then, it always did sound fantastic, I just didn’t know it could sound better, and may never have felt I was missing out…

And Also…
Robbie Robertson’s liner notes are less annoying than usual. I love his comments about Rick Danko: “Rick showed something during this period that I still don’t understand. While singing like a bird, he played a fretless bass… in an unorthodox style that worked against reason and normality.” Toussaint again: “Rick Danko – his approach, there’s nothing like it. Some people, you can tell what school of thought they come from on the bass… I don’t know where Rick Danko comes from. I don’t know his source of reference… it was just his very own thing and I think it was perfect”.

 

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Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 28th March

March 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From Madison Avenue to Gillian Hills
That hysterical Zou Bisou Bisou birthday party scene! The band (all Fender instruments present and correct) groove quietly on Dobie Gray’s—or Ramsey Lewis’ if you prefer—1965 smash The ‘In’ Crowd (of course). Megan, Don’s wife, gives it her best yé-yé on 16-year-old Gillian Hill’s 1960 poptastic smash—Zou Bisou Bisou. I always think of Robbie Robertson when I watch Jon Hamm as Don Draper. Why? He’s watchful, taking in the surroundings, rarely speaking. He’s also the creative one they all circle around, who somehow brings out all the others’ talents. And—mostly—keeps his council, because as both Abe Lincoln and Ronnie Hawkins said, in different ways, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

Dale Rogers & Trigger
Clint Black introduction on Songwriter’s Circle at the BBC: “This is a song really inspired by Roy Rogers, who I had the pleasure of gettin’ to know a little bit—great experience, recorded a song with him and got to spend a couple o’ years with him, off and on—going to a few award shows and bein’ nominated with Roy Rogers. And he said lots of great stuff—and his wife, too, Dale. A great lady. And the one thing that stuck out above everything else… she was kinda secretly hoping that Roy would pass first, because she really, truly, was afraid… that he might have her stuffed.”

Vox Pop
The Voice, Saturday Nights. Favourite Judge: Will.i.am. Who knew he was so much fun? There’s almost a Dr Seuss-like quality to his looks, eyes scanning the other judges like a fawn in the forest. Quirky, impish, arrogance undercut by a winning vulnerabilty. Best Song Choice: Come Together rammed into Lose Yourself. One of the great songs of the Sixties b/w one of the great songs of the Noughties. Impressive that Judge Danny knew all the words and rapped along perfectly. Most Agonised Judge: The excellent Jessie J, taking the whole thing waaaay seriously.

$ade
Sade outearned any other touring British act in the world last year. Even Adele. Extraordinary. Under the radar, not courting press, just selling out a rare tour. I confess that the only time I’ve actually fallen asleep at a live gig was when I saw Sade at, I think, the Hammersmith Odeon in the Eighties. My wife had modelled dresses designed by her friend Sarah and Sade when they were at St Martin’s (the short-lived label was Lubel And Adu and the dresses were beautiful) so I guess that’s why we went. But, as mid-tempo ballad followed mid-tempo ballad, my eyes grew heavy. Nice & Lovely Songs, but not my speed.

Geek Patch Board
In this glamorous world of iPad and Pods and their gleaming curved surfaces and edges it’s always great to come across a piece of kit designed in the sixties that is still in use. Al Jazeera studios, South Bank, Gary Lineker photoshoot with Pal Hanson, always a pleasure to work with.

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