I feel so humble with you tonight.

Viva L'Amore

Sometimes, this beach house music expresses the perfectest joy to me.

And the intertubes is a time-I-don't-have treasure trove of it. To wit, these guys have more.

Won't do no good thinking, you got to do it

You can have the machine-gunned "Simply Irresistible." I'll take this 1975 funky exhortation to not be afraid, to just do things, today and forever, off of an album I'm sticking in the repeat zone (and one that features what's probably my favorite reggae track ever).



I've always thought Robert Palmer was an underrated chameleon; about once a year I wonder what more he would have given us if he'd lived on.

I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away

I saw the fantastic 20 Feet From Stardom last night. I have no time nor space to enthuse at length about the film, which is about so many things, the foremost being that graceful, humble place of creating--in this case, singing a wondrous gift--for only the love of it, and the immaterial joy of being part of a harmonious whole.

But I will mention its most affecting--gutting, really--passage, which illustrates the impact of the egoless, identity-less voice--just a voice, not a personality--in music (which, of course, is the point of backup singing): the recounting of Merry Clayton's recording of the backing vocals on the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," you know, that passionate howling in what's more or less the bridge of the song. First of all, I didn't know that the lyric was actually "Rape...murder...it's just a shot away." Second, well--Merry, summoned from bed, shows up in curlers in the dead of night to yowl this lyric for some English boys she's never met (nor claims to have heard of, really, which is kind of hard to believe), and delivers more than anyone expected. We know what the song is about, or, at least, the ravaged ground in which it's rooted. In a the briefest time and with less than ten words, Merry's voice, ablaze, conveys what 1969 must have felt like to many. She's an oracle. 

And I couldn't like her more as she seems to be as a human being and artist, a champion combination of guts and humility. "I was kicking ass and taking names every time I opened my mouth."

It's a stunning scene in the film, watching her listen to that moment some forty-plus years before. Mick does, too. Listen to the isolated track embedded in this story of that night.

I'm digging into Merry's solo albums (she recorded a few in the early 70s, prior to raising a family and falling on harder times) today, and wishing I could find the video clip of her gut-ripping performance of  Neil Young's "Southern Man" as shown in the film.

Instead, listen to this, and imagine the woman who arrived after midnight, pregnant and in curlers, to shred the Sixties with her voice.



All she set out to do is simply sing, and by doing so, did so much more. As she says in the film, "Stay cool, stay humble, stay beautiful, and just do the work."

Lay back and groove with mine

 

I didn't know it then when I first ripped the shrink-wrap off of Thriller and put a needle down on it, but this--this--was where it was at. 

A true find--so said the Reckless Records clerk. 

FRIDAY NIGHT.

Hope for a Badman

But at least the seeds of love will be sown...

Your Guilty Pleasure: Full stock of thoughts and dreams that scatter

You CANnot deny this groove.

It's from this album, the predecessor to the monster Private Eyes. I dig this track and the album's other hit, because they're really in the same family as the early croony, funky blockbusters, and they precede the movement (descent?) into total synth and mechanized drumland, aka the mid-80s.

When the sun settles down and it takes a lovely form

I discovered this song back when I would bike to the lakefront with my now practically prehistoric mp3 player/radio combo on Sunday afternoons and would sit there and out at that sky/sea line and listen to Herb Kent The Cool Gent all afternoon, until the sun wasn't burning overhead anymore and the water turned into that unreal mercury color.

But it made me think of the end of the day someplace else, on my beloved Anna Maria Island, where we'd carry our gear (chairs, umbrella) and munitions (beer) to the beach after the burning peak of the day, at about 3, and live there--I mean live--until after sunset.

Each of those sunsets is still etched in my heart somewhere, after almost exactly a decade ago and two additional midsummer visits. The day trip a couple of years ago as March dawned was especially special because we brought new visitors with us.

There was a time that this song salved some wounds for me, on those long and solitary Sunday afternoons, and offered the inkling of the constancy of peace in one's heart. It places me there, in the heart, and at AMI with the people and place that I love, and reminds that the part of the day spent in that kind of peace, company and place, is what matters most.

Today's Shuffle: Everybody wants to look the other way

Periodically, this blog is about how I (still) like Sting when I shouldn't.

My return to Shuffle coughed up my favorite track from The Soul Cages, the tour of which I actually saw almost exactly twenty-two years ago. I managed to miss most of Don Henley, who opened (hah, post-punk rules!) that night at Alpine Valley. My roommates bought me a ticket for my birthday earlier in the summer and then set me up to travel to East Troy with some of their friends.

I haven't forgotten that show, mostly because someone had a reserved ticket stub and each person in the group (who the hell they were, I have no idea now) used it to travel into the rarefied air of the Reserved Covered Area. I made to row 8 and was able to get an up-close with a forty year-old and still incredibly hot Sting and his big ol' Doc Martens.

Now, of course, I look at the footage of it from my desk (and imagine not being able to comprehend that 22 years ago--I mean, did I know an Internet existed in 1991?) and see that Sting, as usual, positioned some incredible musicians from across genres to deploy his cross-genre music, his music that, in the immortal words of Branford Marsalis, "is a motherf*cker."


Love, Erykah Badu New Amerykah Part Two
Lithium, Nirvana Nevermind
Pass the Plugs, De La Soul De La Soul Is Dead
Pursuit of Happiness, Weekend Players Pursuit of Happiness
Ships Passing Through, Jimi Hendrix Valleys of Neptune
Everybody Wants The Same Thing, Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah
My Time, Kaskade It's You, It's Me
Summertime, Sarah Vaughn The Very Best of Sarah Vaughn
Uncountable (Feat. Tomomi Ukomori), Hideo Kobayashi A Drama
Fin, Supergrass Road To Rouen
Don't Lose Your Temper, XTC Black Sea
You Can Get It If You Really Want, Jimmy Cliff The Harder They Come
As, Stevie Wonder Songs In The Key Of Life
Baby Britain, Elliott Smith XO
Seen Your Video, The Replacements Let It Be
Bombers, Gary Numan The Pleasure Principle (30th Anniversary Edition)
Can I Get A Witness, Marvin Gaye Greatest Hits
Fire Island, Fire Island Hed Kandi: Back To Love - True Club Classics 2
West of Hollywood, Steely Dan Two Against Nature
Hoover Dam, Sugar Copper Blue
Jeremiah Blues, Sting The Soul Cages



Addendum:

I just found this, and, despite afternoon dyspepsia, I've become happy as a pig lolling in jazz-rock poo:



By the way, is Branford wearing the first iteration of a WHO DAT t-shirt, or what?

Absolute elsewhere

Summer nighttime first listen surrender yes love flower.