Song for Leap Day: "Jumpin’ Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones

I can think of no better way to celebrate February 29th, aka Leap Day, than with the greatest leap-related song of all time, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones. It has to be one of the most inexhaustible songs ever written - I’ve literally heard it thousands of times and it still makes me leap about on every listen.


It's appropriate that Mick Jagger wears warpaint in the video below, as the tune has a tribal quality that makes it connect with the listener on the most primal of levels.





Recorded in 1967, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was the tune that took the Stones out of their bummer LSD phase (which nonetheless produced trippy gems including "Ruby Tuesday" and "She's a Rainbow") and took them back into balls to the wall rock & roll. The tune also kicked off the band's partnership with producer Jimmy Miller, which would spawn four consecutive masterpieces: Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St.



As Keith recalled in his book Life, the "Jumpin'" Jack in question was a cat named not Flash but Dyer:


Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, "What's that?" I said, "Oh that's Jack. That's jumping Jack." I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase "Jumping Jack." Mick said "Flash," and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it. 

Not only was "JJF" one of their best singles ever, it also had one of their best B-sides: "Child of the Moon," a Beatlesque farewell to their psychedelic phase. 


The video was pretty Beatlesque as well — a typically shameless ripoff of the Fab's innovative promo film for "Strawberry Fields Forever." It's all there, the trees, the dilated pupils, the capes, the whole magilla.
But the Stones were always smart enough and talented enough to steal from the best and make it their own, whether it was The Beatles, The Kinks, Chuck Berry or Son House.


Happy Leap Day from Rock Turtleneck to you - hope it's a gas, gas, gas.




For more amazing Stones singles like "Jumpin' Jack Flash"/ "Child of the Moon, "get The Singles Collection: The London Years on iTunes here.

Happy 80th Birthday to Mr. Johnny Cash

Rock Turtleneck sends 80th birthday wishes to Johnny Cash: singer, songwriter, symbol, Bible-thumper, bad ass, husband, father, savior, saint, sinner, maverick, martyr.

Cash passed away in 2003, not long after the love of his life June Carter Cash. The long decline of their final years was captured poignantly in Mark Romanek's video for Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt."

Cash and producer Rick Rubin turned "Hurt" from a song about the downward spiral of drug use into a meditation on the "stains of time" when "everyone I know goes away in the end." It might be the best music video ever made, at least of the conceptual variety.



As powerful as the "Hurt" song and video are, I prefer to remember The Man in Black in happier, more robust times. One of my favorite clips is his performance of "Orange Blossom Special" from San Quentin in 1969, where he plays two harmonicas at once. I've never seen anyone do that before or since.

No tribute to Cash would be complete without "Ring of Fire," the 1963 masterpiece written by June and Merle Kilgore. June wrote it when she was falling in love with Johnny: "Bound by wild desire/I fell into a Ring of Fire."  Johnny said that the idea to put mariachi horns on the track came to him in a dream. That's an out-of-the-box genius move right up there with playing two harmonicas at once.



Happy Birthday Johnny Cash - you may be gone but your music lives on.

Get a whole lotta Johnny Cash on iTunes here.

Happy Fat Tuesday from Professor Longhair

So I just learned from my lovely and better-educated wife that "Mardi Gras" is French for "Fat Tuesday." I knew Mardi Gras was on Fat Tuesday, but I didn't know it meant Fat Tuesday. And I still don't know what "Fat Tuesday"really  means.

Actually, I do — it means I need to get to New Orleans pronto. I have spent quality time in just about every other music capital in the U.S. — Memphis, Chicago, New York, Austin, Storrs — but New Orleans has thus far eluded me. That will change soon.



So in honor of the beginning of the Mardi Gras season, Rock Turtleneck pays tribute to Professor Longhair, one of the musical patriarchs of the Big Easy. Here he is doing one of his signature tunes, "Tipitina."

I'm guessing the famous New Orleans nightclub Tipitina's is named after the song and not vice versa.

The Professor, who was born Henry Roeland Byrd in 1918 and died in 1980, was one of the originators or the New Orleans sound later popularized by Fats Domino and Dr. John, among others.

He gets some pretty magical sounds out of his run-of-the-mill Baldwin piano, so that alone should tell you there is some voodoo goin' on. Here's the Professor getting down with Dr. John, The Meters and some other New Orleans luminaries on his classic tune "Big Chief."



Buy The Very Best of Professor Longhair - 35 tracks for just $9.99 - on iTunes here.

Happy Valentine's Day from Rock Turtleneck

 Pixies, "La La Love You"
 (Doolittle, 1989)



Get Doolittle on iTunes here.

R.I.P. Whitney Houston: The Definitive Tribute

Everyone knew Whitney Houston's demons were as massive and inescapable as her gifts. Like many people, I admired her but thought her talent and charisma were wasted a little bit on overproduced pop ballads, though as far as overproduced pop ballads go, they were top-shelf.

A personal favorite from the Houston hit parade was 1986's "How Will I Know," a delightfully chewy piece of bubblegum that showed her at her most likable. Looking at it now, a fall from grace seems both unimaginable and inevitable.

Back in the day people like me with hipper than thou music taste would profess to only listening to The Smiths, R.E.M., New Order and the like.

But if we were in a bar with a few beers in us and "How Will I Know" came on the jukebox, we would admit we loved it. And really, from the song to the video to the beautiful 23 year-old singing it, what's not to love?



Though she was married to Bobby Brown, Whitney was also looked after by many of the best in the business, including the legendary A&R man Clive Davis. I always thought that eventually the forces of good in her life would lead her out of the darkness and back into the light and she would record something that bluesy and real, something that was infused with the struggles and hard lessons she learned, something like Billie Holiday recorded in her later years. (Though who knows, maybe there's some stuff in the vaults.)




R.I.P. Ms. Houston, the only person to turn Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner" into a hit single. We salute you.



Get Whitney Houston's Greatest Hits on iTunes here.

All the Way from Liverpool: The Beatles on Ed Sullivan 48 Years Ago

Friday was the 48th anniversary of a truly seismic cultural event: The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I remember reading in a Beatles book somewhere that the screaming was so loud in the theatre that some people lost their teeth. Here's their full set from that appearance: "All My Loving," "Till There Was You," "She Loves You," "I Saw Her Standing There," and "I Want to Hold Your Hand."


Watching the above clips, it’s worth noting how tight they were as a band - these songs weren’t easy to play. In its way, their mop-top era music was as radically different compared to the mainstream pop of the day as their later work would be. They were innovators right from the beginning, impressing fans, critics and fellow musicians alike. 

I've always loved this quote by Bob Dylan, wherein he describes hearing the Fab Four for the first time right around the time of Sullivan:

"We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid...I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go."

There’s a fab doctumentary called the Beatles 1st US Visit which covers all the unbelievable mayhem swirling around the boys as they live calmly in the eye of the Beatlemania hurricane. 

Despite the significance of the event and the fact that it was directed by the famous filmmaking brothers Albert & David Maysles, who would go on to direct the best rock-doc of all time, Gimme Shelter, the film remains curiously underseen. Fortunately, someone has loaded the whole Beatles film up to YouTube, starting with part one here:

R.I.P. Don Cornelius: All Aboard that Soul Train Line in the Sky

Soul Train svengali Don Cornelius tragically hopped off the life train yesterday, dying at age 75 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Soul Train, of course, was the hipper, blacker counterpart to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Both shows showcased the newest sounds and freshest dance moves of the day. 

But the Genius o' Cornelius was to populate a dance show with people who could actually dance, as opposed to the white folks on  Bandstand who so often looked like guests at a wedding reception doing the white man's overbite.

Case in point: the moneymaker-shaking Soul Train Line, a funky testament to what white people think they look like when they dance, but never, ever in a million years  actually do.

YouTube has dozens of priceless clips of Soul Train funkitude such as this one to Kool & the Gang's "Jungle Boogie," made famous many years later by its use in Pulp Fiction.

It’s acually kind of amazing that Soul Train debuted a good decade after Bandstand. Usually the white man takes the music from the black man, like when Pat Boone used to score hits of vanilla versions of Little Richard songs. But in the case of Soul Train, the black man got the Payback. and the results, as demonstrated in this James Brown clip, were often Superbad.

In addition to being a brilliant music impressario and businessman, Don Cornelius also possessed one of the coolest names ever. There's simply no way to grow up with the name Don Cornelius and not becaome a badass mutha.

Don only joined the Soul Train Line once in his career, appropriately enough to James Brown's "Doing it to Death." (He was joined by Mary Wilson of the Supremes.) And when he did, he showed the  kids that funky is as funky does.

R.I.P. and TCB, DC. Thanks for bringing the funk.

Get 100 Soul Train Hits for just $24.99 on iTunes here.