Three years ago this month, Rock Turtleneck took a bold leap into the blogosphere, with an appreciation of Urge Overkill's overlooked 1993 classic Saturation.
The third anniversary is significant because, as anyone who grew up watching Schoolhouse Rock will tell you, 3 is a Magic Number.
"3 is a Magic Number" was the first song written for the Schoolhouse Rock project, which began to fulfill a government requirement to add educational content to children's Saturday morning programming.
Ad exec David McCall complained that his son had a hard time memorizing multiplication tables, he could memorize rock lyrics with stunning ease. And thus, with a song and lyrics by Bob Donough, "somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity" the decades-long legend Schoolhouse Rock was born:
In the Daisy Age days before freewheelin' samplin' became illegal, De La Soul sampled "3 is a Magic Number" on their 1989 landmark Hip-Hop masterpiece 3 Feet High and Rising. It's probably the only hip-hop album I ever loved from start to finish. And it should be noted that De La Soul was a trio and their album title contained 3 - that's a magic number.
Whilst wishing friend and occasional Rock Turtleneck contributor Dan Cassidy a happy birthday the other night, Mr. Cassidy pointed out that he shared a birthday with none other than Elvis Costello.
Costello, born Declan McManus on August 25, 1954, is a brilliant wordsmith with an insatiable musical curiosity. To paraphrase Dan Aykroyd insulting Jane Curtin on SNL's "Weekend Update" back in the 70s, Elvis hops from musical genre to genre "with the frequency of a cheap ham radio." A few of those genres, off the top of my head: punk, new wave, chamber pop, power pop, country, bluegrass, classical, torch ballads, show tunes, instrumentals, soundtracks, jazz, soul, standards, blues, zydeco and rockabilly.
Elvis was ostensibly a punk rocker when he debuted on the music scene in 1977 - he even had the nerve to steal his first name from the King of Rock & Roll, who wasn't even dead yet. But it became quite clear quite quickly that beneath his angry visage, Costello was really a singer-songwriter who just happened to use punk as his entry point, not unlike the way Bob Dylan used the folk scene. Elvis Costello would have thrived in the Brill Building or Tin Pan Alley, Athens GA, Seattle, Memphis, Manchester or Liverpool. And for that reason, he is truly a Man Out of Time.
To wit, here's Mr. Costello playing "Man Out of Time," from my second favorite EC album Imperial Bedroom, on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982.
This past weekend, my family and I headed up yonder to Woodstock, NY to visit friends. We had a great time, enjoying the air, trees, animals and cuisine and mingling with the local citizens.
While one might think the place would be overrun with hippies and Deadheads, the vibe is actually much more of the aging-folkie/creative-professional variety. Not surprisingly, the spirit of our hero Bob Dylan looms large.
Dylan, as you may or may not know, lived in Woodstock for many years; it's been a haven for artists and writers for well over 100 years. In 1964, Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, set Bob up in an apartment above the Cafe Espresso so he could concentrate on his monumental songwriting gifts (and play a little chess) away from the distractions of New York City life. This clip from a film called Woodstock Revisited gives a nice sense of what Dylan's life was like way back when:
After going electric in 1965, releasing his genius trilogy (Bringing it All Back Home/Highway 61/Blonde on Blonde) and red-lining himself on his epic tour with the Band, Dylan bought a house in the Byrdcliffe section of town and spent a few years out of the spotlight to raise a family.
In 1967, Bob may or may not have had a motocycle accident on Route 212. Was it real, or was it an excuse to get out of his lethal touring schedule? Only Bob knows for sure. But having seen the road firsthand, it's certainly plausible.
Great artists like the Zim-master have a way of absorbing their surroundings into their art. While in Woodstock, Dylan cast his urban-electric-beatnik-blues aside and whipped up the Americana genre with his buddies in The Band on The Basement Tapes. His subsequent albums John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and New Morning are equally evocative of the Woodstock region.
Woodstock-era Bob is my favorite Dylan music, and all of these albums are filled with a calmness, serenity, wisdom, warmth and brilliance that make them truly timeless.
On Saturday night, we went to a fundraiser for the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild communtity. One of the attendees was Happy Traum, who played with Bob on the wonderful series of covers featured on side 4 of his 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II record.
While I didn't get a chance to shake the man's hand, it was a pleasure just to be under the same tent. Here's Happy doing the Nashville Skyline coda "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You."
The Rock Turtleneck staff bows its collective head in shame for forgetting to mark August 16th, the 32nd anniversary of Elvis Presley's alleged passing.
One cat who didn't let Elvis Day slide was Bob Dylan, who played a first-ever cover of "Heartbreak Hotel" in Tahoe that night. There's not much to look in on this YouTube clip, but plenty to listen to; Dylan, as is often the case live, puts more brio into his cover than he does his own songs:
Though it was long rumoured that Dylan's song "Went to See the Gypsy" (from New Morning) was about a meeting between Bob and Elvis, Dylan remarked in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he and the King never actually met.
I guess the closest Dylan ever got to Elvis was this silk-screen portrait by Andy Warhol. Warhol gave it to Dylan in 1965 in exchange for filming Dylan as one of his series of "screen tests" seen below. Since the screen test is a minute and the picture is worth millions, I'd say it was time well spent. TCB.
Forty years ago today, Jimi Hendrix closed the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival at sunrise with a set that included his epic version of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s probably the most inspired choice cover tune in rock history.
It would be easy to dismiss Hendrix’s version as an overdriven freakshow flight of fancy, but the passion that comes through in his playing is unmistakable. Equally hard to miss are the sonic references to the Vietnam War – once he hits that amazing note a minute in, it sounds more like a full-blown air raid than a guitar solo. (And before you dismiss Jimi as a Commi, note that he spent a year as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, though he did get booted.) Bob Dylan, who Jimi idolized, hears deeply personal things in “Star-Spangled Banner” as spoken by Jeff Bridges’ character in Dylan’s unusual but fascinating 2003 film Masked and Anonymous:
“Playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through two lousy speakers to a half a million people in the mud? Oooh, what a cry that was. Cry forlorn. Man, it was a desperate cry of freedom up there with that screaming guitar… Now what was that all about, huh? Revolution? I don’t think so. You could hear tears, in every note he played, sayin’, love me. Love me. I’m not a traitor – I’m a native son! He took the glorious anthem, he dropped drug bombs on it. You could hear that cry around the world, saying, Hey! I’m an American citizen. He was calling out to his forefathers, the Pilgrims, the Pilgrims!”
If you think watching Jimi do his thing is surreal, here he is talking about it with Dick Cavett.
It seems appropriate that It Might Get Loud, Davis Guggenheim's documentary on the power of the electric guitar, should come out only a day after the death of its inventor Les Paul.
Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for directing the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, and even more impressively is married to whitebread hottie Elisabeth Shue, demonstrates the majesty of Paul's baby through the portals of three of its greatest wizards: Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White.
The three legends, each from a different generation, explain their wildly different approaches to the guitar and how they got there. The film concludes with a guitar summit wherein they swap stories and riffs.
Understandably, rock geeks and guitar nerds are twisting their knobs in anticipation of this film, which looks amazing and utterly fascinating. Here are a couple more clips to whet your guitar-geek appetite.
Jack White recalls his early days upholstering couches and learning guitar.
Edge and Page discuss their first electrics:
Page recalls coming up with the riff for "Whole Lotta Love":
Edge shows what's really behind the riff for "Elevation":
Les Paul, who passed away today at age 94, invented the electric guitar and multi-track recording. So it's fair to say that pretty much every recording artist of the past 50 years, except for perhaps Dan Fogelberg, owes him a huge debt of gratitude. To say nothing of music listeners.
Les pioneered multi-track recording, and had a big string of hits, back in the 1950s with his partner in music and love, Mary Ford. Here they are doing their big hit "How High the Moon":
Of course, Les is best known for his eponymous solid body guitar, known for its never-ending sustain.
The greatest practitioner of the Les Paul is almost certainly Jimmy Page, who, with Led Zeppelin, cast magic spells of light and shade with his 1959 sunburst edition, which he bought from Joe Walsh.
Another legendary Les Paul is Old Black, Neil Young's black beauty, which is actually a goldtop model with a paint job. For 40 years, it's been Neil's go-to axe when he wants to rock out and open up the sky.
Right up till the end, Les played Monday nights at the Iridium night club in New York City. Friend and fellow music fan Richard Fronapfel attended one of these intimate shows and shared his memories of the night in an exclusive interview with Rock Turtleneck:
"I saw him at Iridium in 1996 where he spent as much time making lewd suggestions to the female patrons (my then girlfriend included) as he did playing, and it was spectacular. So happy to have had that experience."
With the possible exception of the also-recently-deceased Michael Jackson, no one had a greater cultural influence on the 1980s than the great John Hughes, who passed away last week at age 58.
And because my frame of reference was very similarly suburban to the physical and psycho-sexual landscapes Hughes explored in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Hughes's work had much more impact than the homoerotic gang fights of "Beat It," a white glitter glove or endless rounds of rhinoplasty.
In addition to being one of the most-quoted writers of all time, Hughes was also probably the most music-friendly mainstream film director since Martin Scorcese, and his love of new wave and rock & roll cast a shadow over the decade as well. And like so few in show business - Johnny Carson and Greta Garbo are the only other examples that come to mind - he knew when it was time to get out of the spotlight, and stayed there.
Herewith, a few of Hughes's greatest music related moments. RIP, JH. Simple Minds: "(Don't You) Forget About Me" EXTENDED 12" MIX; The Breakfast Club
Lindsay Buckingham: "Holiday Road;" Vacation
The Beatles: "Twist and Shout"; Ferris Bueller's Day Off I believe Ferris put the Beatles back in the Billboard Top Ten in 1986 - that dude could do anything.
By the way, John, thanks for loanin' me the Donger - he's really bitchin.'
On July 20, as the world marked the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, I marked a more private, but equally epic anniversary: the 25th anniversary of the best concert I ever saw: R.E.M. at the smallish club The Agora in West Hartford, CT. R.E.M. was touring in promotion of their new LP Reckoning, an album that in contrast to Murmur captured their loose, exciting live sound. Far from the world-famous supergroup they are today, R.E.M. circa 1984 was maybe as big as, say, MGMT is today: a serious buzz band with a couple albums. People who were into music were into them, but they hadn’t broken through to Joe Six-Pack yet.
Michael Stipe was not the politically correct Patti-Smith-arm-candy fashionista he is today, but a painfully shy Southern bookworm with a thrift-store wardrobe and a thick mop of hair covering his shyness. But combined with his unique, powerful voice, his overbearing reticence made for a magnetic stage presence. The band crisscrossed the country not in individual Airstream buses but in a single van. They bathed occasionally. After a strong opening set by the Velvet Underground-ish Dream Syndicate, Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe tore into their best-known song at the time, “Radio Free Europe.” I had been to a few rock shows, but the immediacy and energy coming from the stage was like nothing before I'd ever seen, certainly more riveting than ZZ Top, who I'd seen a few months earlier. More than anything else, the four guys on stage seemed like guys you would want to hang out with.
Next was “Harborcoat” the lead track off Reckoning. During the song's instrumental break, Peter Buck’s amp gave out. Frustrated, he threw his jetglo Rickenbacker on the ground and started dancing like a Russian in the Nutcracker Suite. Stipe, not missing a beat, pulled a harmonica out of his coat pocket and started playing whatever came to mind. The audience ate it up.
The spontaneity and see-what-happens attitude was an epiphany to this teenaged budding rock fan. I stood mesemerized as the band tore through one instant classic after another: “Sitting Still,” “7 Chinese Bros.” “So. Central Rain” “Pretty Persuasion,” “Second Guessing.”
This show, recorded in Hartford-esque Passaic, NJ, a few months prior, captures perfectly the vibe of that night.
A show like the one I was watching raised the question What does one do for an encore? - and R.E.M.’s answer was twofold: 1) Pull a bouncer out of the crowd and ask him what song he wants to sing: “How bout ‘Wild Thing?’” Sounds good. The band launched right into it. 2) Have the bassist sing “Smokin’ in the Boys Room,” the 70s classic by Brownsville Station. This version has become well-known in R.E.M. circles, even becoming the title of a famous bootleg of their live covers. Bassist extraordinaire Mike Mills took the vocals, ending the song by jumping off his bass amp. For R.E.M. it was another night on the road, headin' for another joint, but for me it was an epiphany. That night, a mere 15 years after man landed on the moon (if you believe), and eight years before "Man on the Moon," I became a fan for life (or at least until Reveal). That fall I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Connecticut, and the first day I was there, I went to the campus record store and picked up this R.E.M. poster (my roommate hated it): For all the peaks R.E.M. hit in the ensuing years, from Document to Automatic for the People, Reckoning-era R.E.M. has always been my favorite. They were truly a band with something to prove, and they were proving it again and again.
I don’t have a copy of the Hartford Agora show (if you do, please let me know), but the next best thing is now available: The 2-CD ReckoningDeluxe Edition, released last month. It features a freshly remastered edition of their 1984 classic plus a wonderful concert from the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, recorded about 2 weeks before the epochal Hartford gig.
How dedicated were R.E.M.'s fans in 1984? Michael Stipe dedicates "7 Chinese Bros." to "the guy that broke his leg coming in tonight and went to the hospital and came back." A must.
There's a splinter in your eye and it reads react (R-E-A-C-T)
In the Daisy Age days before freewheelin' samplin' became illegal, De La Soul sampled "3 is a Magic Number" on their 1989 landmark Hip-Hop masterpiece 3 Feet High and Rising. It's probably the only hip-hop album I ever loved from start to finish. And it should be noted that De La Soul was a trio and their album title contained 3 - that's a magic number.
