It's ten years ago. Like, right now the calendar should say 2002, maybe 2001. I don't know how -- I ain't no rocket surgeon -- but certain events have transpired that have me convinced we've stumbled into a way-back DeLorean machine.
THE IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE
- Twothirtyeight are back together and rehearsing in preparation for DeLuna Fest in Pensacola and a "thank you" gig in Atlanta. Instagram has the proof.
Twothirtyeight's last studio album, You Should Be Living, was released in 2002. They broke up shortly after. And now they're back! No word yet on a tour, or any new material, or any new releases. In the meantime check out Chris Staples' fantastic solo material. All kinds of streamy and downloadable goodness on his Bandcamp site.
- David Bazan, who has never really gone away (nor would we ever want him to), is on a Control tour. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of Pedro The Lion's Control, Bazan will be singing the album's songs on the road. Chronologically, alphabetically, I don't know. It doesn't matter. Great album, great musician.
I have my tickets stuck to the fridge, so you will likely hear more about this later.
- Further Seems Forever is back together, and not only are they back together... they're back together with Chris Carrabba! And not only are they back together with Chris Carrabba, they are also touring! And not only are they back together with Chris Carrabba and touring, the band is also releasing a brand new full-length album! Squeal!
Check out the first single, "So Cold," with Chris looking as chick-magnety as ever.
Carrabba, as you will vividly recall, left Further Seems Forever in 2001 to do his Dashboard Confessional thing. FSF's last studio album, Hide Nothing, was released in 2004. But now everybody is back together and being productive!
So maybe the clock hasn't been turned back. Maybe it's still the present day. And maybe all of these reunitings and tributes are for us geezers who can't let go of our glory years. But if my old favorite bands still want to dish out the songs, I'm more than happy to sit here and eat it up.
Man, I loved Steve Sabol. I didn't know him personally, of course, and his career began decades before I was even born. But to a kid like me whose appreciation of sports and film were on an equal plane, Sabol's work was absolutely mesmerizing. Before I even knew who the man was I was absolutely captivated by the slow-motion images of looming football players set to dramatic orchestral music. It all seemed so epic.
As somebody who never really fully matured into true adulthood what I really loved were the bloopers. The "Football Follies." Watching Sabol's follies was like watching a variety show. There would be a series of short segments, and each segment centered around a theme or told a silly story. The narratives really made the videos endearingly entertaining.
We take it for granted, the aesthetics of the football highlight reel. Steve Sabol pioneered a lot of that. Early on he did a lot of the camera work himself. Not content with a high static shot from the fifty yard line, Sabol's images were tight and intimate. And more often than not the best images were just off the playing field, like players gabbing on the bench and psycho fans hollering in the bleachers.
Beyond the imagery, Sabol also pioneered the technique of hooking everybody up with a microphone. Audio was key, and sound-catching dishes could record the grunts and clangs of offensive lines meeting defensive lines, but only lapel mics could catch actual conversation. And in-game football conversation is awesome, especially when coaches are wired up. Players taunt each other, complain about the heat, talk about whatever, but the coaches are viciously ruthless.
And that brings us to the bleeps. Half the fun of an NFL Films production from the 80s is hearing the naughty words bleeped out. Imagine Stevie Wonder getting elbowed in the stomach during a harmonica solo, or the sound an old Macintosh computer made when you sat on the keyboard. That's what Jerry Glanville ended up sounding like in these films every time he tore into a referee. It was great.
Steve Sabol died Tuesday at the age of 69 from a brain tumor. He transformed the way we watch football. He turned a pile of men mud-humping each other into a triumphant spectacle. He leaves behind decades of work, hours of film, and tons of documented football awesomeness. I owe Sabol much of my football fandom, and I miss him already.
While doing fake internet research for my last post I stumbled across two videos that were too good not to share, but I didn't have any place to casually insert them. So here they are.
First we have Otis Redding doing his thaaang on British television when... oh, hi there, Eric Burden! And from that point to the end of the video there is nothing else awesomer. Sweet percussion, horn sections, and a whole truckload of gyratin'. NOTHING.
And then there's this. It requires precisely zero explanation. Just make sure you wait for the printer.
First of all I apologize for the video-heaviness of this post. Just give it a second to load up or crash your browser or do whatever it is it's going to do.
Now, this is about cover songs. But this is about cover songs you may not have known were cover songs. Or maybe you did know they were cover songs and you were just keeping it a secret. Either way, I hope you enjoy this mass of information I'm suddenly heaping upon you.
Cover songs! Popular ones! From the 1960s!
When there weren't yet very many songs to cover!
"Twist And Shout"
The Beatles were so good at songwriting that people forget about their early-year cover songs. And they performed those cover songs so well that people forget that they were cover songs in the first place. Take "Twist And Shout." Listen to John Lennon lose his mind and lose his vocal chords. The story goes he was sick as a dog, but the vocals absolutely needed to be laid down. So Lennon guzzled a carton of milk and tore through the track in one take. Or something like that. Another version I heard describes how he screamed the words while lying on his back. Milk was still involved. Who knows how much of that is true. Regardless, the song is now -- and forever will be -- a Beatles song, despite the fact that it's a hand-me-down.
The Isley Brothers had taken "Twist And Shout" to #17 on the charts in 1962, and while a lot of people actually do recognize that the Isley Brothers recorded the song a year before the Beatles did, not too many people know that a year before that a little-known group called the Top Notes (guided by a young producer named Phil Spector) first recorded the song. The Top Notes' 1961 version, titled "Shake It Up, Baby", is an agitated little rock number and sounds absolutely foreign next to the Isleys and the Beatles. In fact, the song's co-writer, Bert Russell, felt Spector screwed the whole thing up and decided to produce the song himself with the Isley Brothers. Spector would later become a world-famous producer and thus had the last laugh, but now he's in prison, so maybe not.
"Land Of A Thousand Dances"
If you don't recognize the title, you definitely recognize the NA-NA-NA-NA-NAs. And Wilson Pickett absolutely crushes it, shoving so much soul and swag and funk into your ears that if the song was a couple minutes longer your head would very literally explode from awesomeness. Pickett's tune peaked at #6 on the US charts in 1966, but DID YOU KNOW the song was a moderate hit the year before for a peculiar little band called Cannibal & The Headhunters.
The Headhunters came from east LA, which automatically made them tougher than any of the other bands in the mid-1960s. They gave themselves individual nicknames like Scar and Yo-Yo and Rabbit and Cannibal. And they recorded their creepy version of "Land Of A Thousand Dances" a year before Pickett decided to turn it into something less unsettling.
But, like the Isley Brothers and "Twist And Shout," "Land Of A Thousand Dances" is often attributed to the Headhunters and not to its true originator. R&B singer Chris Kenner wrote and recorded the song in 1962. As you listen you'll notice two things: 1) Kenner's got soooul, and 2) no NA-NAs. Cannibal & The Headhunters added the NA-NAs because apparently somebody along the way forgot how the song went. It turned out to be the most endearing part of the song, and that's why Wilson Pickett kept it when he recorded his version, and that's why up until you started reading this blog you thought it was simply called the NA-NA song.
"Respect"
Quick, what song do you think of when I say Aretha Franklin? You think of "Respect" because that is her signature song and also because I used the song title as the header. But yeah, "Respect," not "Freeway Of Love." However, lemme tell you about a fellow named Otis Redding.
Otis Redding's Wikipedia page is full of fascinating material, but basically it comes down to Redding being an intense man of music. Not only was he a prolific songwriter, his live shows were soul-tastic. You know him for "Dock of the Bay" (which became his only #1 song, and only after he died in a plane crash, because the universe hated Otis Redding), but he also penned and recorded a funky little ditty in 1965 called "Respect." That song went to #4 on the R&B Singles chart and up to #35 on the plain old white people music chart. In 1967 the song was presented to Aretha Franklin (with tweaked lyrics) and she recorded the "Respect" you know and love today.
Is is ironic, then, that Otis gets no "respect" for writing a song called "Respect"?
I once listened to a recorded live performance of Otis Redding performing "Respect." With an audible shrug he talked about how Aretha had taken the song from him, and that he, in this very performance, was going to take it back. And then he commenced to sing the holy living soul-funkin' crap out of "Respect." But he could never really take the song back because Aretha had turned it from a juicy soulful romp into a palpable soul-pop nugget. And nothing is more delicious than soul-pop nuggets.
"House of the Rising Sun"
This is one of the most popular songs from the 1960s. You know it. I know it. And we both sound awful when we try to sing along. But you've probably gathered at this point that The Animals were not the first to record it.
You can find "House of the Rising Sun" on Bob Dylan's self-titled 1962 debut album. It's all mournful and warbly and folky, and with good reason because Dylan's version was heavily influenced by New York folk legend Dave Van Ronk. Here is a clip from the excellent documentary No Direction Home regarding the song.
Though Van Ronk's version would not appear on a record until 1964, he had been performing his arrangement of the song for years. And guess what? Though Van Ronk arranged the song into the familiar tune we know today, he wasn't the one who originally wrote it. In fact, nobody knows for sure where "House of the Rising Sun" came from because it is OLD. Van Ronk picked it up from somebody in the 1950s, who had picked it up from a Kentucky girl on a 1930s field recording, who had learned it from God knows where, and so on and so on until one day somebody discovers the lyrics on the other side of the Rosetta Stone.
"Turn! Turn! Turn!"
The Byrds were folk-rock staples in the late 1960s, pumping out hit after hit that were really actually electric-guitar'd Bob Dylan covers. I'm not even joking. In 1965, after recording and releasing two consecutive Dylan-cover singles, the band instead turned to a Pete Seeger song. "Turn! Turn! Turn!" was something Seeger had arranged in 1959 and was recorded by a few other folkies in the following years. A group called the Limelighters recorded the song in 1962 and left quite an impression with the band's back-up guitarist, a fellow named Roger McGuinn. McGuinn would rearrange the song for Judy Collins in 1963, and then again for himself and his own band, The Byrds, in 1965.
But where had Pete Seeger glommed those lyrics? If you were good at Bible Quiz you would know the answer already. Turn with us, in your King James Bible, to Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, starting from verse 1. Read until you get to the words "worketh" and "laboureth" because those aren't in the song. Nobody is one-hundred percent sure who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, but there's a pretty good chance it was King Solomon. I don't know if he gets royalties or not.
For as long as it had been decided that hipness and irony could co-exist artists (and wannabe artists) have retrofitted their work to not only make it appear older, but to make it appear nostalgically older. This has made photo-filtering apps like Instagram insanely popular. Swedish electro-disco musician Johan Agebjorn released a track only available on 3.5" floppy disc. Google Maps turned the earth into a Nintendo playground this past April Fool's Day. All for the aesthetic thrill of reveling in the imperfections of old technology. When done well the results can be startlingly beautiful. When done unwell... then you just fuzzed out a perfectly good photograph of your dog.
To my infinite amusement, Sleeping At Last just posted four "8-bit" tracks up on NoiseTrade. Now solely the project of frontman Ryan O'Neal, the Illinois-based Sleeping At Last is one of the few remaining active remnants from when emo ruled the world a dozen years ago. Normally the music is soft and introspective, but these remixed songs play like the soundtrack to a lost Zelda game.
This is retrofitting done well.
For comparative/contrasting purposes the original versions of the songs are included in the free(!) download.
I don't know how long this whole thing will be up. However long a "limited time" is. Check it while you can.
Despite releasing an album every couple years since 1985(!) and having a dedicated cult following, it is hard to find people who have heard of The Choir. I don't know why they are so invisible and ignored, but they have always been supported by their tight fan base (which explains why Wikipedia, with its open-contributor policy, gives the band several lengthy sections while AllMusic and their selected fleet of music writers give the band's profile only two sentences). It could be they way they've been [mis]marketed over the years. Too artsy and intelligent and coffee-house for the general CCM crowd, but too Jesusy for anybody else.
According to Last.fm's user-generated charts (which will wonderfully waste hours of your time) the average Choir listener tends to be very male and very 40-ish. So I guess if you're an old guy then this band is for you. But, as you can see, there are people like me who like Cat Power (although I'll be the first to admit I'm not a 22-year-old female) and still dig The Choir. So... whatever.
[Er... maybe I AM a 20-something woman]
The Choir is freely offering their 2010 album, Burning Like The Midnight Sun, on NoiseTrade. It's good. Surprisingly good, especially for a bunch of old guys. This isn't a re-formed Eagles halfheartedly
pulling themselves together for another easy-listening go-round. The
music here is fresh and alive and not at all what you would expect from a
group of guys who've been doing the same thing for almost thirty
years. Man, even U2 blanded out, but The Choir sound like they're
cutting these tracks with the exuberance of a first professionally made
album.
In that NoiseTrade download they also snuck in a track from their just-released album, "The Loudest Sound Ever Heard." The song has a 90's shoegazey glam vibe to it, so if you were into the Prayer Chain or Luxury then you might be into it. I don't know if the whole album sounds that way, but I do see Leigh Nash is featured on a track, so there's that.
This wasn't a Cobain shot to the face. Not a Tupac drive-by. Not an Elvis overdose. Not even a Bon Scott misadventure. No car wrecks, no plane crashes. Nothing sudden or instantaneous. And yet we were all caught off guard.
We knew his health had waned over the years, and we knew the cancer never completely left his body. Maybe this is something we should expect when we see somebody slowly physically deteriorating. But it is -- still -- unfeasible to imagine a world without any of the Beastie Boys frolicking around.
For those of my generation they have always been there. The three of them jumping around, dropping sick beats, dropping sicker rhymes, constantly amused by the attention given to them. As we grew up we watched them grow up. We watched them evolve from bratty Brooklyn punkers to bratty hip-hop gurus to bratty music godfathers. Our lives had a varied soundtrack, and the Beastie Boys were a significant part of it.
We still have the songs and the videos and the wacky interviews, but as MCA departed so too did the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys without Adam is like The Beatles without... well, take your pick. When one is removed what remains is noticeably incomplete.
There will be a slew of unreleased material on the way as well as re-mixes and re-imaginings of existing BB material, but we won't have any more all-new studio albums. No more new addicting hooks that bounce around in our heads for days. No more big chunky beats that make us feel like pimps as we thump that stuff from our Honda Civics. And nothing more from MCA and the mesmerizing unique way he slings out his rhymes.
But, like I said, we still have a large library of Beastie Boys music, and when we start missing the guy we can always bust it out. And we will. We'll bust it out LOUDLY.
