Category: Music

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ambulo Ergo Sum

Dionne Warwick, Walk On By
Leroy Van Dyke, Walk On By.  Same title, different song.
Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight
Rooftop Singers, Walk Right In
Everly Brothers, Walk Right Back
Four Seasons, Walk Like a Man
Ventures, Walk Don't Run
Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line
Ronnettes, Walkin' in the Rain
Left Banke, Walk Away Renee
Nancy Sinatra, These Boots are Made for Walkin'
Robert Johnson, Walkin' Blues.  Clapton's version.  Rory Gallagher's version.
Jimmy Rogers, Walkin' By Myself

Bob Dylan Albums Ranked From Worst to Best

A plausible ranking!  Blonde on Blonde is numero uno as it should be.  Bob's debut album, Bob Dylan (1962), comes in at only 26th place.  Admittedly, this album was Dylan before he was Dylan, but I would have ranked it higher. 

In the '60s I argued that there was and could be no such thing as a bad Dylan album.  Then I was a fanatic, now I am but a fan. 

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marie/Maria/Mary

Beautiful names celebrated in song.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame
Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie  By the way, this certified Dylanologist can attest that in the first line it is 'railroad GAUGE,' not 'railroad gate.'  'Gauge' is a measure of the width of the track; that's what our boy can't jump.
Bachelors, Marie

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Jimi Hendrix, The Wind Cries 'Mary'
The Association, Along Comes Mary  I only just now fully appreciated these amazing lyrics.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mary Had a Little Lamb

And finally Mary takes Marty Robbins back after his tryst with the Devil Woman.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac’s Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

Another 'river' song in the same plaintive vein is Pat Boone's Moody River from 1961. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Pattie Boyd as Muse

A musician needs a muse.  George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd.  Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired.  If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment.

Something
Isn't it a Pity?
Wonderful Tonight
Layla  (The best part starts at 3:13 the poignancy of which still rends my soul the way it did over 40 years ago)
Bell Bottom Blues  ("If I could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms . . . .")

Pattie boyd

 

‘Surely’

A device of literary bluster.  When one is unsure about something, or sure about what one has no right to be sure about, one writes 'surely.'  Example:  "Vallicella links to Dinah Washington here. But surely Peggy Lee's version is better. A voice like no other, and the little piano break at 1:13 is exquisite."

I confess to using 'surely and 'of course' promiscuously.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Midnight and Other Hours of the Day

Benny Goodman, One O'Clock Jump
Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock 
Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis
Eric Clapton, After Midnight
Thelonious Monk, Round Midnight
Jack Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight
Headswim, Old Angel Midnight
Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight
Rolling Stones, Midnight Gambler
Allman Bros., Midnight Rambler
B. B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Etta James,  Midnight Hour
The Vogues, Five O'Clock World
Blind Boy Fuller, Ten O'Clock Peeper
Eric Clapton and B. B. King, Three O'Clock Blues
Skip James, Four O'Clock Blues
The Gods, Eight O'Clock in the Morning

Why Typos Don’t Matter and the Musical Watershed That Was the ‘Fifties

An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together

Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical hang-ups here.  My friend is an old Keroauc aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives.   Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen?  My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.

A curious watershed era it was in which  the sweet & tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse.  Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music.  "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."  That was actually played on the radio in the '50s.  To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing.  And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."

I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic.  The prime example?  Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.  One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!'  Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Four Black Barbara’s

Barbara George, I Know.  A cute ditty from late 1961, 'I Know' made the Billboard Hot 100  #3 spot in the U.S. George counts as a one-hit wonder at least on one definition of the term.  She left the music business by the end of the '60s and died in 2006.

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing. This great R & B number made it into the Billboard top ten in 1962.

Barbara Lewis, Baby I'm Yours.  From June 1965.  I like Hello Stranger from 1963 even better. 

Barbara Mason, Yes I'm Ready.  From 1965.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outer Space

1960's psychedelia explored inner space, but there were a few songs from the '60s about outer space themes.  Telstar, an instrumental by the British band, The Tornados, 1962, was presumably in celebration of Telstar, the first communications satellite which also got high up in '62. (Telstar the song made it to the #1 slot on both the U. S. and British charts.)

Speaking of high, the Byrd's Eight Miles High, 1966,  tells of a trip into the outer or perhaps into the 'inner' or both.  I never paid much attention to the obscure lyrics.  The Coltranish riffs executed on a 12-string Rickenbacker were what got my attention.

Also by the Byrds, 1966, is the playful Mr. Spaceman.  And we can't omit Elton John, Rocket Man from 1972.

Off topic, but appropriate given current East Coast weather conditions: Good Night, Irene, 1950, the Weavers. 

Finally,  a tip of the hat this Saturday night to Victor Reppert who pointed me to this incredible oldies site.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Color

Here is a sampling, starting with the determinable and proceeding to some determinates:

Donovan and Joan Baez, Colors
Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses.  A beautiful song. Give it a chance.
Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses.  Never could understand why this tune is almost never played on the oldies stations.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze.  For all you benighted qualia deniers out there.
Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk
Jimi Hendrix, Red House
Cream, White Room.  You say this is not a song of color?  What, is white not a color?
Los Bravos, Black is Black
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
Joan Baez, The Green, Green Grass of Home