Come along and share the good times while we can

Your eyes won't believe what your mind can't conceive

I like B-music. What's B-music? You know what B-movies are. B-music's the also-ran, the didn't-quite-make-it, the one-hit-wonder or, in its most piquant form, never-was-gonna-make-it-but-they-followed-the-dream-anyway (aka Anvil).

I fell down a Spotify k-hole and found some sweet late-disco/early Quiet Storm B-music.

The Jones Girls had been plying their trade for most of the 70s. They were Detroit-born sisters, forged in gospel singing, discovered first by Curtis Mayfield and later, after backing Diana Ross on tour, re-discovered by Gamble and Huff. Stars aligned then, and though they didn't become stars, dancefloors pulsed in '81 with this track.



I'm aching to find a good 12- or 7-inch copy of it, and in this week's obsession with it I've figured out its A-list sonic cousin.



Chaka's track is clearly more sophisticated, and there's a good reason why there's a gulf way wider than the Mediterranean Sea that separates "Tunisia" from "Egypt." Chaka's single "Night" in Tunisia is a cover that came from the mind of an actual genius who's genetically incapable of creating something as rustic as the unnecessary Middle Eastern-sounding keyboard riff in "Nights Over Egypt."

The Jones Girls can sing. But what they didn't have is access. The saying in the creative world is that you have to work with artists who are at least a little better than you so that your craft is raised. Access is based on timing, and the Girls' timing was not good, seeing as it was situated on the back-end of the (post-payola) Gamble and Huff juggernaut and given writers from the Philadelphia International stable that were maybe on the downslope of creating hit soul music.

After 1984, while Chaka found the third act of her career, The Jones Girls never got back on track.

Unequal songs, unequal careers, unequal access. But I (and probably only I) respond both songs with equal enjoyment, despite the unfair outcomes for the singers. But maybe they didn't want any more than that -- someone's ears being pleased at the sound of their song.

I best return my ears to simply listening before I embark on a master's-thesis rumination about the post-80s diminishing returns of Patrice Rushen.

Steamy like a winter storm

Sade's band melts the snow. But where are they now? Or, rather, when will we hear from them again?

You'll be okay, follow your heart

So he had a soul that couldn't tolerate the braggadocio and the bleakness of the biz. That's what happened. 

"It's the deal with the devil: if you want your work to be seen, it's unfortunately not just about the work. And when it becomes less about the art, then the art suffers."

I savored this interview with musician/songwriter Gregg Alexander yesterday, reading it twice, listening to the songs*. And THE song:



I loved this song. I found it because I listened to the radio--the actual FM radio--15 years ago, daily. So many blocks between 1 W and 2200 W and 10 S and 1600 N spent tromping around to this, wondering what the hell I was doing in this city after only five months. I only feel like I heard it all the time, because I mustn'tve. Some time was spent hearing this or this and straining to reach the dial when this came on.

But this was constant, at least in my head, and when, a few years later, I could obtain (not legally) and play (legally) digital music files, I found this first, or something close to it (not like I remember my first CD purchase, which was, of course, this).

The song--and its creator--were widely admired and naturally dismissed until he slipped into obscurity. Some of the admirers who stepped up were surprising; Joni Mitchell, herself once an idealistic newcomer, gave the highest praise, including the track among others by Debussy, Duke Ellington and Dylan on an album of "music that matters to her."

Gregg resurfaced later, but no on really knew it. Of course, of course he also wrote this other guilty-pleasure treasure of mine, aerial and poppy and classic rock-y, all at once.

My own well-loved digital file of "You Get What You Give" faded, disappearing sometime in the last few years between device changes and computer upgrades and virus-laden downloaded file flushes from my music storage. That's okay; it's a relic of a time past, sonically, socially, personally. But there are some things about this song that are ageless. I mean, replace some of these names, and then trawl Twitter, the New York Times, or some episodes of The Daily Show (which, incidentally, premiered in its current incarnation at the exact time that "You Get What You Give" and Gregg were pushed out over radio waves in January 1999):

Health insurance rip off lying FDA big bankers buying
Fake computer crashes dining
Cloning while they're multiplying
Fashion mag shoots
with the aid of 8 dust brothers Beck, Hanson
Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson
You're all fakes
Run to your mansions
Come around
We'll kick your ass in! 

But, for me, the bloom is still on this rose because the song's sound matches the point. The sound and the thought soar together. This song was not at shy about aspirational, and that's how I needed to be in early 1999. It says, "Remember how you did that/this with them/those? And who you are? You still are."

You still are.

My answer is always the same

I was treated to the subtle and powerful songs of Bill Callahan Monday night. Flanked by winged bulls and the other decadent props of an overpriced Middle Eastern restaurant, he laid out this mesmerizing number.



Today I found out it's a cover of a soulful and decidedly and uncharacteristically (for the time) blues ballad from 1950 by Percy Mayfield, who is no relation to Curtis but was known for this exquisite song and for "Hit The Road Jack," which he provided to Ray Charles. After that, he sank into obscurity.



It's been covered by scads of other ballad crooners, from Sade to the Dead. I think these two, what is perhaps the most recent version bookended with the original, suit me fine.

Looking good's a state of mind

This is a perennial favorite, and one that I hadn't thought of for some time until today, the roots of which spread deeply and unexpectedly.

See, a Swedish singer-songwriter-rapper turned Londoner (with a visual cameo in a Big Audio Dynamite video) scores a worldwide hit, gets robbed (literally) of a Grammy, records, performs and collaborates around the globe, and lands in indie-darling heaven (hell), file under Reinvention (but not).

I just think this is a great song. I scored a used copy of the CD and hung onto it for quite some time but eventually ditched it in some move or other. Nonetheless, I'm going to check out the recent outing, The Cherry Thing, toute suite.



And the performance in the clip is rad if only because she's strutting and fronting seven months pregnant on TOTP.

It's almost like living a dream

Today, randomly, is about English bluesmen-at-heart who ended up being fleeting pop sensations in the States.

Chris Rea was playing on a jukebox last night, but he wasn't. It was just the Chris Rea of my imagination, or, rather, a late-career Gino Vannelli.

Chris Rea was not a smooth crooner at all, really. He wanted his blues influences and craggy voice to emerge from the crisp yacht-rock coating applied by Elton John's producer. He returned to his early goals only after surviving pancreatic cancer, including the same harrowing-sounding surgery that Steve Jobs had had.

Still, I like Rea's intimate little admonishment to a heartbroken girl."I'll buy your first good wine," he offers.

Creepy? Maybe--but this was 1978, after all.



Climax Blues Band is that workhorse that's been around since bellbottoms and now, somewhere, they play with a little gut (and a lot of guts) and some gray hair. (This is when I always think of walking down a street in downtown Asheville, NC one summer night in '01 or something during a festival and there, at the bottom of the road, was Foghat.) They got it right (ha) in '76 with a clomping, funky favorite (I thought "that lot" came from America, too, dude), and came back again in '80 with this couples-skate-only ballad that's so much more than that, including a band-buster that was only performed live once, karaoke-style, in an English pub in Clearwater, Florida. But what emerges from its crisp, yacht-rock coating, applied by an American producer (who gave us not just Styx, but Styx II and went on to crisp up Animotion with a Fairlight), is an unalloyed love song.



 

Friday Night: No Way To Fake It

You bet I'm posting the seven-minute version of this song.

I'll march this road

Oh, the drama. Still, I love this Simple Minds song that's not by the Simple Minds.



Dang. The Call leader Michael Been:

• died of a heart attack at a music festival at age 60
• his son is in the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and is named Robert Levon Been. I think know where that middle name comes from
• Been played the apostle John in the film The Last Temptation of Christ
• in the late 60s/early 70s, he was in the band that Peter Cetera was in before he was in Chicago Transit Authority. That band was called Aorta

Facts. They can paint a better picture of a man than his one-to-two hit wonders can.

She comes as no surprise

"See if you can get his two meanings..."

You have to watch my second-favorite Rick James song to hear the first. For to kick off yer weekend and stuff.

Thoughts of You Get In My Eyes

When the band Semisonic was still Pleasure, I saw them play a cover of "Erotic City" at Shank Hall with drummer Jacob Schlichter playing drums with one hand and doing the dee-do-dodo on a tiny keyboard with the other.

This would have been...1995. Yes, 95. Way before they got hooked up with the likes of Paul Fox, who produced the big smash break-out and eventual one-hit-wonder single "Closing Time" on The Great Divide (which, okay, has a couple of worthwhile tracks), or Nick Launay, who recorded PiL and Killing Joke (and INXS' The Swing!) as well as the album from which the maxi-single that this cover appears on (whew).





The live performance has pretty much nothing in common with this slick recording by Mr. "I mixed The Suburbs." 

It was raw, but, mostly, it worked because it was a surprise and out of character. And, live, John Munson sang the "if we cannot make babies/we can **** until the dawn" in that sweet falsetto that he usually wrapped around a metaphor about a tree in the dark woods of northern Minnesota.

Plus, after the show Jacob (checked me out and) said he liked my coat, which of course he did, it was the (first) vintage black Persian lambswool coat I had acquired in those years, the one I found in New York. Bought it in April, lugged it back, wore it five months later.

I say all of this with love because I feel like Pleasure (Semisonic) was never recorded and presented the way that they actually were. The industry makeover really smothered their actual, excruciatingly good musical abilities and smarts. They were made to sound like Marcy Playground and Smash Mouth had a baby that went to Harvard, not like the charming, spare trio that killed it and made me stand there with my mouth gaping and probably spill beer on my Persian lambswool coat balled up at my feet one winter night at Shank Hall. I'll take the version of "F.N.T." on the the demo cassette I bought at the Shank Hall Pleasure show over the not-as-fascinating new thing that Paul Fox glossed up for Semisonic a couple of years later. Paul Fox did also produce some of my favoritest music ever--but then I never heard the Oranges and Lemons demos first, did I?

Althought the name change was precipitated by the existence of another group--a 70s-80s funk band--named Pleasure, I suppose Dan Wilson also steered the output in a more soapy direction. My heart is hung up on rock band Pleasure over "all-in-studio 'make-out music for the millennium' project."

(Though I gotta say that the cover of "Midnight at the Oasis" by the first Pleasure is giving me the chair dances right now. Do they make music like this in Portland nowadays? How would we even know?)

Of course, you can read all about it in Jacob's book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life. I'll loan it to you, if you want. You know I have a copy.

Must Play Loud: Wisdom Is Better Than Silver and Gold