TUNING

Take A Message To Mary- But Don't Tell Her Our A&R Man's In Jail

Quick, name a song the Everly Brothers shouldn't sing ... Actually, only one of them sings it, but it doesn't stop the thing from going Pete Tong by bar 11 or so. It makes you wonder what business Ibsen had writing 60's pop songs*

*He didn't but this sounds like he might have done. [ed]

Weird Scenes Inside The Girl Mine

I like girl groups and I like 'em weird- to wit:
I Just Dont Understand Ann Margaret discovers tsuris,with help from the Jordanairs.

Dead Dana Gillespie, you're bumming me out in a supreme fashion. Thanks though.

The Powder Puffs tell me You Cant Take My Boyfriends Woodie . Taken at face value, I don't forsee any problems along these lines. It's a shame that Surf/Girl Group crossovers have to sublimate to the patriarchy.

Tonight You Belong To Me Everything Liberty records finest non live performers Patience and Prudence ever recorded could serve as perfect ironic counterpoint to the creepiest scenes in a slasher movie. This shit gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

We Can't Sing Rhythm and Blues. No one really asked you to Patience and Prudence, and this song is more than enough rhetoric to prove your point.

It Means Whatever You Want It To Mean

I've always liked the expression I Ain't Fattening Frogs For Snakes even though I'm not altogether sure what it means. The Larks try their best to explicate this for me but wind up with a kind of cyclical redundancy that is none the less bluesy, gospely , and all together great.

Be Bop Wino has kindly posted "Up With the Larks: The Uptempo Apollo Recordings 1951-1955 featuring such provocatively titled cuts as: "Eyesight to the Blind" "Little Side Car" "Honey From the Bee" , "Coffee, Cigarettes and Tears", and the classic "My Reverie".

To these ears it sounds like the place where jump blues meets close harmony gospel singing and nobody cares about any sort of boundries, secular or not. Highly reccomended. I'm off to fatten a frog for a snake, just one could'nt hurt, right?

THE LARKS ON YOUTUBE
The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise
Danny Boy
Shadrack- This is the kind of music God likes, I bet.

Roll On, Viagra, Roll On

" To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent. She can't wait to disprove it.”- Cary Grant

The folk idiom is rife with tales of sexual bravado and errant potency.
The hokum blues is choc-a bloc with with entendres about grindin' daddy's et al, such that given the frailty of the recorded medium and the overdose of euphamisms, it's often confusing as to what's exactly going on.
You know it's really dirty, but only because of the liner notes

The Ballad Tradition of Great Britain has it's own take on priapism, cloaked in modesty- but smutty if you know where to listen. There is an emphasis on making cuckoldry somehow heroic, knights and highwaymen promise to return to thee after uh, "kneeling before ye...."

The chicks in these ballads being comely ( a euphamisim for having a great personality) and , above all,
way fucking naive, wait for the return of these clanking studs on horseback and wind up dying of a broken heart, or preemptively throwing themselves into the sea or over a cliff.
Not that there isn't some form of revenge in a few of them.
Lord Randall gets fed some spotted eels by his "True Love" for dipping his wick elsewhere.
Spotted eels don't sound good, because they are not good-as it turns out they are poisonous.
but then again who says "Mmmm... a dish of eels, sure hope they aren't spotted, the spotted ones are poisonous you know, munch munch oh , fuck me they are spotted and I fain' would lie doon........."
Don't even get me started on "Little Musgrave" a tiny dude who cuckolds the hell out the gentry and when they catch him says " Yeah, I'm tiny and whatnot, but dudes, I totally cuckholded you.... " The response to this is to quarter him post haste.

It is refreshing then, to find blues and folk songs about impotence. I know of only two, which I present to you below.

Bo Carter My Pencil Wont Write No More mp3
Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon performed with and managed "The Mississippi Sheiks" and had a solo career in "hokum" Blues that is ecellently represented on The Yazoo Collection Banana In Your Fruit Basket[buy] . The other songs are typically filthy, but this one is almost a lament. What other old blues mack daddy would pre-emtively tell the ladies he couldn't get it up? That would be no one.
How crazy is Bo Carter? Did you not hear what I just said?
He wrote a song about how impotent he has become and then sang it to some ladies.
It's jaunty and he just doesn't care , obviously. That's how nucking futz Bo Carter is.


Maddy Prior & June Tabor My Husbands Got No Courage In Him .mp3
Maddy Prior and June Tabor came together in 1976 to form " Silly Sisters" during a lull in Steeleye Span's touring schedual , and gameness on June's part .
This song, from the eponymous 1977 album, is a standout amongst several academic sounding olde ballads.
Asking the musical question "Who's a girl gotta do to get out of the Scottish Highlands?" then being more than willing to have a go with hubby, in fact insisting on it, the heroine of the song is thwarted by Lord Noodle Crotch.
Well, if that's the way it's going to be, might as well let the whole town know about it.
Hark the village, wait! Indeed.
I'm not sure if this is a rare example of women's empowerment in traditional balladry, or just randy kvetching.
Either way, it's fantastic.

A PSA ON LSD

The Dukes The Dentist
I thought that this 1968 recording by Germany's scuzz beat psyche merchants The Dukes was going to be a horror freakout all the way through , but then it turns into a public service announcement about the importance of visiting your freindly neighborhood dentist. Who knew? I'm thinking this combo are the same Dukes of "I'm An Unskilled Worker" non-fame.
Come to think of it,that song is ostensibly about the importance of trade schools. Could it be that the Dukes were part of some government program that tried to keep the kids in line with fuzz guitars and Teutonic screaming? I haven't been able to come up with any more Dukes cuts about washing your hands or community gardening , but you never know. Any readers have other songs by The Dukes that fit this civic mould?

She Loves To Yodel

Thanks to the more than excellent Magnets And Lasers I have discovered another yodeling sweetheart in Carolina Cotton .
Billed As The Yodeling Blonde Bombshell, the perfectly named Cotton did it all, radio, tv and B movies, and sang with a who's who of western swing bands.
Let's start with statement of intent-"I Love To Yodel".
"Cattle Call "approaches Desurik Sisters territory which is always a good thing, and then we have the embarassment of riches that is the cyclicly redundant "Yodel Yodel Yodel".

No one ever told Carolina that hoary old chesnut (even for the time) "Nola" was an instrumental showcase.
If they did, she wisely thought "Fuck that noise" and turned in an amazing, pyrotechnic performance.

I Love To Yodel
Mockingbird Yodel
Cattle Call
Yodel Yodel Yodel
Nola

The Lord Don't Mind

The Rance Allen Group Talk That Talk pt 1
Having vauge notions of who the Rance Allen Group was/are , I clicked play on this mp3. At first, I couldn't figure out why it sounded kinda stagey- but really good none the less. Then it got to the scat singing part , and at that point I thought "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and ran them through various search engines. A little research revealed why I was immediatly taken with this song-It's secular gospel stuff. And I like that. Mystery solved.


A Soulful Experience [Buy From Amazon}
Rance Allen Group On Myspace (??!!)

The Teutonic Safety Net Of America's Past

It seems that we have to rely on other countries to preserve our precious musical heritage.

Much like the British Blues scene preserved the obscure and authentic bluesmen who had been forgotten by the mid sixties, It seems that the Germans have taken on the task of preserving the sound of country music before it was even called country music, and rockabilly by the shelfload.

By 1986, Sam Phillips was telling adherents who had made the pilgramage to Sun Studios and wanted to buy singles that "Sorry Hoss, the Germans done got 'em all".

That said, I need to alert those of you who may not know about the German Lable Trikont, and specificly their latest release, Flowers in the Wildwood;Woman in early country music .

Started in 1967 with proceeds from selling Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, the company has become the best archival label the globe has ever seen.

Sound quality is excellent considering the source, (78s mostly) and the annotation is near perfect.
I think It sounds so good because collectors (with the notable exception of Joe Bussard) didn't cotton to early country until the mid 1990s. Country 78's were what you passed over when you were looking for Black Patti Records.

Early country records were also less likely to be stored in crumbling cardboard boxes out in the barn for 45 years.
In short, they were taken better care of , were often recorded for radio play, recorded by major labels, and nobody wanted them. (much).
Thus they remained relatively unplayed and pristine.

If you got into my Dezurik sisters post, you need this CD pronto. Featuring two cuts by the sisters D and Many more sisters and mothers and aunts you have never heard of and will want to hear again.

The CD's liner notes and catalog description make the excellent point that A) There as country music before WWII
and B) Women were most likely the source of a lot of it in the rural south due to the relative inexpensiveness of guitars and autoharps , and the limited access to radio .

Outside of Alan Lomax, real authentic hillbilly music wasn't recorded that much. Come to think of it, authentic shitkickery by males was few and far between.

Doc Boggs and Bascome Lamar Lunceford are the only two artists I can think of who didn't have ties to radio shows sponsored by flour or tea, who are fairly well known in the genre. Boggs got sponsorship later in life on the strength of his recordings and the fact that he would play gigs at the opening of a faucet if you'd let him. Lunceford plucked a banjo in obscurity until 1954, when his first recordings were made.
So it's doubly delightful that these recordings by women were lovingly archived and annotated. Some of it can be a bit irritating at times, especially the dour religious numbers, but all of it is heartfelt and raw and beautiful. I picked my new favorite sister act, the Aaron Sisters to lay on you because they make the hair on my arms stand up.

Aaron Sisters She Came Rollin' Down The Mountain

Aaron Sisters w/ the Songopators How'm I Doin'

Here's where it gets jazzy and wonderful. It sounds like a backwoods version of the Boswell Sisters who you just know
don't really need your approval despite the song's title. Also, you simply must fall in love with contractions like "How'm".
They're what make American idiomatic speech so great. You also must smooch up on a band with a name like "Songopators" . How fucking great is that? Anybody know if they have any more recordings?

Here's where you can get it:
Venerable Music
Amazon Has only one left in stock as of this writing.
Aquarius Records Doesn't have it , but they do have large portions of the back catalog of Trikont, and many more fantastic and hard to find American Primitives, and besides they are the nicest people in the mail order record buisiness.
Down Home Music has it deep in the bowels of its Country Collection list , just keep clicking the "next" button and try to avoid buying all the collections you click past.
Dusty Groove has completely done away with their country section but have many Trikont sides pertaining to what they do best, which is quite frankly, groovin'.
Other Music has a smattering of Trikont titles available via mail order, but if you're in NYC you can bop on down to their retail store and see if they have it. politely bug them to order it for you if the don't.

The Entire Late 60s in Eight Minutes

Are there songs that distill the sixties down to a sonic nub? a nugget of pure, unadulterated zeitgiest that not even Hegel could unravel (assuming that Hegel owned a headshop and was freinds with Roky Erikson) ?

When posed this question, popular avantguardist Alex Keller had the answer at the ready.
Apparently In the heady days of the late 1980s' Alex and his wife , in the aftermath of a drug fueled bacchanale, had composed the ultimate in head music with the toe -tapping yet harrowing "Dirty, Naked, And High".

This mythic opus went on to win the Institute Of Sarcastic Sociologys' "That's Fucking Perfect" award.

If we were less conceptual and more ambitious, Neil Martinson and I would have certainly followed through with the 6 disc concept album "Drugs are Cool-And I Love You" .

We were not, to say the least.

As I recall, the titular song had driving horn charts and an anthemic chorus.
Ok, so it was a less than radical blend of "Cant Judge A Book By It's Cover" and "I Can't get Next To You", but dammnit, it would have meant something to a generation of unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed.

Unbeknownst to either group of hot rockin' Social Historians, the 60s' had already been summed up by authentic practitioners of same.

Sexual Fantasy #8 by willfully obscure 60's mokes "Fate" had firmly closed the coffin lid on all that needed to be said.

What little info I could find says that this record barely made it to a test pressing in 1968 , only to moulder until Shadoks Music out of Germany picked up what they were layin'down. It's also available on the fabulous Shadoks Music Comp [7.99 from Amazon] along with loads of other patchouli scented obscurities from the planet Buzz Click Whirr Twang.

The First Mashup? You Are The Jury....

If I were the sort of person who had any respect for the hirarchy of the history of popular music, I would gladly start the argument about what was the first mashup by using dynamic logic principles set forth by those who get in physical rows about Rocket 88 VS The collected works of Milt Brown and his Musical Brownies.

Unfortunately, there aren't any hillbillies or itenerate bluesmen in Hackney, so it's hard to make these kinds of comparisons.

None the less, Australian 60's aggregate The Groop [64-69] released (In every sense of the word) a cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" with the backing marimba/horn track from " It's The Same Old Song" by the Four Tops.

The Skinny is that this band packed it in in 69 because half of them were enamored of Music from Big Pink and the other half were content to be a glorified showband.
I'm not saying one can hear the titanic struggle of earthy authenticity VS frilly- shirted professionalism on this track, but at least it's fuckin weird.
Keep in mind the backing track is live- in other words; "They meant to do that."
I think it works in a "people -have- stopped -listening- ages- ago, -so -who -gives -a -shit" kind of way. Here's hoping you feel the same.
PREPARE TO BE MILDLY NON PLUSSED:
The Groop Baby Blue
AND FOR COMPARISON'S SAKE:
The Four Tops It's The Same Old Song