"I Got Everything I Need (Almost)" by Downchild Blues Band*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx5HCCIvQD4
I had forgotten how good these guys were. I also forget what led me to stream this song on to my playlist. (I have a "playlist" that I can listen to however and wherever I want to -- without wires! Some technology is too wonderful for my poor words.) I was in my twenties when I often saw this brilliant band in bars in cities where I was living, and falling in love, and learning about the blues -- of goddamned course, they're on my playlist.
This singer (he was big and hairy and completely unpretentious, as I remember) -- oh man, back so many years ago, he told us all about how he had it all: a car, a wish on a star, lots of friends (who liked him!), lots of dough, fame, no trouble getting high. But he had wisely discovered what he'd been missing, and now he was just telling us about how he'd come to his senses. Perfect horns, drums, guitars, and a dazzling harmonica that forced us to move our bodies backed up his epiphany. (There's usually music for those, right?)
* I believe they eventually shortened their name to "Downchild", but I prefer the extended nomenclature.
Saturday, 26 March 2016
Thursday, 24 March 2016
Sir Jagger Meister
"Hang On To Tonight" by Mick Jagger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q063y5d_YE
Mick Jagger has so much glamour and money and fame on his hands it's easy to forget he's always been a really soulful country singer as easily injured as the rest of us. He was good even when he was a kid, and has just improved with age. I think he was in his fifties when he sang this song, and like all great singers he makes you believe that he's lost in the person who's feeling the feelings and singing the words that are making you stop what you're doing. It's all great studio sweetness (it's got Sir Mick's longing harmonica, too), and it's exactly how you'd plead your case to an unsure lover if you had a case to be pled.
Too bad Sir Mick Jagger too often chooses to holler at thousands in stadiums instead of doing what he does in this song. If you offered me a free ticket to a Rolling Stones concert in such a place, I'd run for the nearest small night club and pay whatever outrageous cover charge demanded by management if someone like the Mick Jagger in this gem were inside, getting ready to sing, getting ready to show us his scars. If you're in the upper deck of a place where baseball or football or soccer or hockey or basketball is played, looking at a giant video screen and listening to aural mud, you can't hope to witness anything as musically or emotionally interesting as that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q063y5d_YE
Mick Jagger has so much glamour and money and fame on his hands it's easy to forget he's always been a really soulful country singer as easily injured as the rest of us. He was good even when he was a kid, and has just improved with age. I think he was in his fifties when he sang this song, and like all great singers he makes you believe that he's lost in the person who's feeling the feelings and singing the words that are making you stop what you're doing. It's all great studio sweetness (it's got Sir Mick's longing harmonica, too), and it's exactly how you'd plead your case to an unsure lover if you had a case to be pled.
Too bad Sir Mick Jagger too often chooses to holler at thousands in stadiums instead of doing what he does in this song. If you offered me a free ticket to a Rolling Stones concert in such a place, I'd run for the nearest small night club and pay whatever outrageous cover charge demanded by management if someone like the Mick Jagger in this gem were inside, getting ready to sing, getting ready to show us his scars. If you're in the upper deck of a place where baseball or football or soccer or hockey or basketball is played, looking at a giant video screen and listening to aural mud, you can't hope to witness anything as musically or emotionally interesting as that.
Their Majesties
"Baby I Love You" as performed by Bonnie Raitt and B.B. King
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lB9gC_Bnfo
Because I love when men and women really talk to each other, I love male-female duets, especially this one, where lucky you and I actually get a male-female quartet: her guitar (all its buttery desire) and his guitar (all precise urgency, equally desirous), plus her voice and his, each of them as euphonious as you could want. Because all four of them know what's what, that's a lot of talking going on, but overkill it ain't: four interactions of atoms are telling each other that they love each other, and there aren't sounds enough in the universe to nail that one down. It takes a lot of playing and singing, a lot of consultation. Ironically enough, here it's a queen and a king showing us how to talk to each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lB9gC_Bnfo
Because I love when men and women really talk to each other, I love male-female duets, especially this one, where lucky you and I actually get a male-female quartet: her guitar (all its buttery desire) and his guitar (all precise urgency, equally desirous), plus her voice and his, each of them as euphonious as you could want. Because all four of them know what's what, that's a lot of talking going on, but overkill it ain't: four interactions of atoms are telling each other that they love each other, and there aren't sounds enough in the universe to nail that one down. It takes a lot of playing and singing, a lot of consultation. Ironically enough, here it's a queen and a king showing us how to talk to each other.
Saturday, 19 March 2016
Super And Natural
"Witchcraft" as sung by Frank Sinatra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmNgiEgPoQ
I've said it before: Frank Sinatra was an asshole with women*, but man, did he know how to tell them he loved them! In this song, he does it really nakedly, admitting his helplessness right out of the gate: Those fingers in my hair/That sly come-hither stare/That strips my conscience bare/It's witchcraft/And I've got no defense for it/The heat is too intense for it/What good would common sense for it do?
Although it would be perfectly fine if this song were just about sex, I don't think it is; hell, sex isn't about sex -- it's about surrendering. If even a smooth operator like Mr. Sinatra has "no defense" for whatever "it" is, what chance do the rest of us schmucks have?
The band is cool but ecstatic as it backs up all the tightly clever lyrics and the exquisitely phrased singing ("such an ancient pitch," indeed). The drummer swings, the horns do, too . . . Why, it's witchcraft! And all in less than three minutes!
(* With men, too. He was rich, white, powerful, glamourous as hell, very deeply talented, and he really alpha-dogged his way all over the place. If I'd known him, I would've hated him, but if he'd broken into song every time we were in the same room, I'd have stayed in that room at least until he was finished.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmNgiEgPoQ
I've said it before: Frank Sinatra was an asshole with women*, but man, did he know how to tell them he loved them! In this song, he does it really nakedly, admitting his helplessness right out of the gate: Those fingers in my hair/That sly come-hither stare/That strips my conscience bare/It's witchcraft/And I've got no defense for it/The heat is too intense for it/What good would common sense for it do?
Although it would be perfectly fine if this song were just about sex, I don't think it is; hell, sex isn't about sex -- it's about surrendering. If even a smooth operator like Mr. Sinatra has "no defense" for whatever "it" is, what chance do the rest of us schmucks have?
The band is cool but ecstatic as it backs up all the tightly clever lyrics and the exquisitely phrased singing ("such an ancient pitch," indeed). The drummer swings, the horns do, too . . . Why, it's witchcraft! And all in less than three minutes!
(* With men, too. He was rich, white, powerful, glamourous as hell, very deeply talented, and he really alpha-dogged his way all over the place. If I'd known him, I would've hated him, but if he'd broken into song every time we were in the same room, I'd have stayed in that room at least until he was finished.)
Monday, 1 February 2016
Loudon Clear
"Haven't Got the Blues Yet" by Loudon Wainwright III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OkyVdgA814
You don't have to be male, or middle-aged, or clinically depressed to love this song. If you're just privileged and lucky (that's me!) and if you value self-mockery and are prone to introspection (that's me, too!), I don't see how you can't love it.
Mr. Wainwright has been making funny, tuneful, honest, and moving music since the 1970s (has also sired a few very musically adept children, the best known of whom is probably Rufus Wainwright; see http://deejayjay-waitaminute.blogspot.ca/2015/03/something-instead-of-nothing.html). He can do country, folk, jazz, and, as he does here, the blues. He's most often with other musicians on his albums, but when he performs live, it's usually just his guitar and his reedily engaging tenor voice. Back in those long-ago '70s, I saw him at the old El Mocambo in Toronto (is that place still around?), and pretty well immediately after he took the stage, he owned the whole audience. It was a great, hammy, hilarious performance (just like the one he gives in the linked video); I remember that my face actually hurt for a while after he finished because I'd severely strained every last one of its smile- and laugh-muscles.
He's a gem, and so is this song, with all its gemmy, funny lyrics. My favourite lines: My life isn’t tragic/But it’s still a doggone shame/That I’m not the man I used to be/Though we’re genetically the same. (Okay, I'll admit that an appreciation of this song might, after all, get a bit of boost if you're male and middle-aged.)
You don't have to be male, or middle-aged, or clinically depressed to love this song. If you're just privileged and lucky (that's me!) and if you value self-mockery and are prone to introspection (that's me, too!), I don't see how you can't love it.
Mr. Wainwright has been making funny, tuneful, honest, and moving music since the 1970s (has also sired a few very musically adept children, the best known of whom is probably Rufus Wainwright; see http://deejayjay-waitaminute.blogspot.ca/2015/03/something-instead-of-nothing.html). He can do country, folk, jazz, and, as he does here, the blues. He's most often with other musicians on his albums, but when he performs live, it's usually just his guitar and his reedily engaging tenor voice. Back in those long-ago '70s, I saw him at the old El Mocambo in Toronto (is that place still around?), and pretty well immediately after he took the stage, he owned the whole audience. It was a great, hammy, hilarious performance (just like the one he gives in the linked video); I remember that my face actually hurt for a while after he finished because I'd severely strained every last one of its smile- and laugh-muscles.
He's a gem, and so is this song, with all its gemmy, funny lyrics. My favourite lines: My life isn’t tragic/But it’s still a doggone shame/That I’m not the man I used to be/Though we’re genetically the same. (Okay, I'll admit that an appreciation of this song might, after all, get a bit of boost if you're male and middle-aged.)
Saturday, 30 January 2016
Companion(s) Pieces
"Late to the Party" by Kacey Musgraves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM07F5bYRhc
"Let's Get Lost" as performed by Chet Baker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIoquPMcG_E
This first of these two dreamy songs (you can't listen to them and not lose your bearings in the wakeful world) is all female finesse and charm -- good lord, how some girls can sing! When this one hits it a touch higher on you and groove in a sweet country quatrain -- I'm sorry I'm not sorry that I'm/late to the party with you/Oh, who needs confetti/we're already falling into the groove -- you're gonna swoon, I guarantee it, despite the imperfect rhyme. The players are all expert, the lyrics mischievously vivid and true, the voice filled with desirous love for its world of two. If you live to be a hundred, you won't hear a sweeter love song.
Chet Baker, I think, is celebrating an anniversary of ecstasy ("this night we found each other"). How else to explain his taking to his horn even before he starts singing? If you can sing without your voice, and if the occasion demands, you've gotta do it. If your voice also knows what it's doing, you get to make a smooth little pearl of a song in which you very politely tell the world to stop bothering you because you've got better things to do, one of which is to attend to the person you're in love with. You get to sing for her (twice!) and play for her (also twice!). You also get to pull off a perfect double rhyme: Let's get lost in a romantic mist/Let's get crossed off everybody's list. You're being brilliant like this, of course, because you're living in a rare dream cast in a romantic mist, Population Two.
In the future, when dictionaries catch up, they'll contain unorthodox entries like "anti-nightmare" and will simply provide hyperlinks to these two songs.
"Let's Get Lost" as performed by Chet Baker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIoquPMcG_E
This first of these two dreamy songs (you can't listen to them and not lose your bearings in the wakeful world) is all female finesse and charm -- good lord, how some girls can sing! When this one hits it a touch higher on you and groove in a sweet country quatrain -- I'm sorry I'm not sorry that I'm/late to the party with you/Oh, who needs confetti/we're already falling into the groove -- you're gonna swoon, I guarantee it, despite the imperfect rhyme. The players are all expert, the lyrics mischievously vivid and true, the voice filled with desirous love for its world of two. If you live to be a hundred, you won't hear a sweeter love song.
Chet Baker, I think, is celebrating an anniversary of ecstasy ("this night we found each other"). How else to explain his taking to his horn even before he starts singing? If you can sing without your voice, and if the occasion demands, you've gotta do it. If your voice also knows what it's doing, you get to make a smooth little pearl of a song in which you very politely tell the world to stop bothering you because you've got better things to do, one of which is to attend to the person you're in love with. You get to sing for her (twice!) and play for her (also twice!). You also get to pull off a perfect double rhyme: Let's get lost in a romantic mist/Let's get crossed off everybody's list. You're being brilliant like this, of course, because you're living in a rare dream cast in a romantic mist, Population Two.
In the future, when dictionaries catch up, they'll contain unorthodox entries like "anti-nightmare" and will simply provide hyperlinks to these two songs.
Friday, 18 December 2015
Nouns Sense
"Ain't Got No, I Got Life," as performed by Nina Simone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUcXI2BIUOQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUcXI2BIUOQ
Then, so many other things to have: hair, brains, eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, a smile, a neck, boobies (she said it, not me), a soul, a back, one's self, fingers, toes, a liver, life (a life, really), headaches, toothaches, bad times, one's sex (her piano hits it there). Talk about wealth! Talk about having so many just-as-real things, too!
Nina Simone is all nouns in this live number, all substance: a singer, a woman (in this video, an extremely beautiful one), a piano player, an explainer, a sad soul and a happy one, a steady occupant of time and space -- just listen to how she leads her band for these four entrancing minutes. You wish she were still alive so that you could go somewhere to listen to her, and maybe, after the show, to seek her out and ask her for advice about something that might be bothering you.
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