Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Steeleye Span - ATV's Music Room 1970/Live Ainsdale Beach 30 June 1971/Electric Folk BBC 1974

 
Steeleye Span - ATV's Music Room 1970
 

 Steeleye Span - Live Ainsdale Beach 30 June 1971
 

 Steeleye Span - Electric Folk BBC 1974
 
The initial idea by soon-to-be ex-Fairport leader Ashley Hutchings, was a band that would explore the electrification of traditional music from the British Isles. It started after discussions at the '69 Keele folk festival in June between Ashley, Maddy Prior & Tim Hart and Dave & Toni Arthur. They discussed their dissatisfaction of the isolationist nature of the British Folk scene, and the unwillingness to consider an 'electric' approach to traditional music from within the folk scene, rather than it coming from the Rock side, which it had so far. In the car on the way home after the festival Tim, Maddy and Ashley also got the seal of approval of Bert Lloyd for what they were planning. Ashley had already explored the use of traditional music in Rock setting with Fairport Convention, culminating in 'Liege and Lief' in Dec 1969. Ashley left Fairport to continue this 'Folk Rock' after the remaining members of Fairport had seen it as a one-off experiment.
Ashley initially tried to form a band with Sweeney's Men (Irvine, Moynihan and Woods) and had good initial discussions with Terry, with whom he had become very good friends with. Johnny Moynihan however was not interested after a falling out with Terry, whilst Andy Irvine wasn't keen without Johnny. This left Ashley with only Terry Woods (now with his wife Gay, who had come over from Ireland). They then considered the Pegg's, but they wanted to explore a more experimental direction. Finally, after an unsuccessful approach to the Dransfield brothers, Ashley then called upon Maddy and Tim, recalling their discussions at Keele. Tim and Maddy were at a point where they were to keen to expand their own sound having been successful as a duo on the folk club scene.
The name of the band, Steeleye Span, comes from a song about 100 – 150 years old. There’s this place called Horkstow Grange (the name of the folk song) up in Lincolnshire; the foreman there was a man called John Bolin, and there was a waggoner called John ‘Steeleye’ Span who worked there too… and both men obviously hated each other’s guts. They eventually had an enormous punch-up and the whole thing is commemorated in the ballad. Well the song has got changed somewhere along the line so that Steeleye Span is now a miser, and John Bolin is his foreman. In the song, Span takes every opportunity to shit on Bolin, who eventually loses his cool and hangs one on him. Then Span, instead of belting him back, takes revenge through the courts.
Alternative names were 'Lyubidan Waits' (Terry and Gay, named after an Irish God) and 'Middlemarch Wait' (Hutchings) Maddy and Tim wanted Carthy's suggestion but apparently Tim voted twice!
With Ashley's success from Fairport Convention they managed to get the successful producer Sandy Roberton as their manager, who had recently joined B&C records after working for RCA, and who were keen on getting into 'underground music'. This gave them the funds and the equipment they needed to go and live together in Winterbourne Stoke, a small village in Wiltshire, where they practised for 3 months 'getting it together’. Later described by Ashley as 'Two couples and a referee'. Although they all found the music inspiring, living so close created strains amongst the two chalk and cheese couples and 3 months of living this way proved too much.
The recording of the first album was fractious with the living arrangements spilling over into the recording sessions, and with one song still to finish Gay and Terry left after a bust up in the studio. The reasons highlighted since have mainly centered around Tim and Terry's relationship. They were both strong personalities with their own ideas about the direction of the music and didn't particularly get on, in part apparently because Tim & Maddy continued to gig together during the initial rehearsals, which straight away got the relationship off to a rocky start.
As far as Terry and Gay were concerned there was an agreement that if anyone left, the band split up and the remaining members would not use the name Steeleye Span. This 'betrayal' almost certainly accounted for Terry Woods never appearing with the band again, including the 1995 big Reunion concert where he was the only member to not appear. Terry said: "We ended up signing stuff that we should never have signed. It was such a nasty way for such a great thing to end". Terry and Gay went onto record albums together as a duo and as 'The Woods Band'.  
Released after the band split up and after Martin had joined, Hark! The Village Wait, the debut album was mostly traditional material apart from the opener - 'A Calling-On Song' which was written by Ashley based on an old tune (Earsdon Sword Dance'). 'Fisherman's Wife' Lyrics were written by Ewan MacColl. As became the accepted way for a Steeleye album, all the members brought different songs to the recording sessions. 
Guest drummers were Gerry Conway and Dave Mattacks, both of whom performed later with the band in the 90's.  A 'Wait' is a Tudor village/town band or musician. No outtakes have appeared from the sessions but it's believed one song was recorded but not included.  
The band had effectively split up when the Wood's initially left. Ashley went off to pursue a project with Bob and Carole Pegg. However, Tim Hart was keen to continue the project and called up his friend Martin Carthy to see if he would be interested. Martin had seen his playing partner of 3 years - Dave Swarbrick - join Fairport (Carthy had turned down Fairport) and was in his words 'living out of a suitcase', having just split up from his first wife. All these factors made Martin think why not, he "just fancied it...it was this huge thing - why not?" This then encouraged Ashley to leave the Pegg's, with whom he was working with again to come back and try again with Steeleye. As Maddy said, Martin joining gave Steeleye 'A stamp of approval' amongst the Folk audience.  The significance of Martin joining cannot be underestimated. As well as providing a folk 'legitimacy' Martin also drove the group to being a fully electric band. Martin described the first album as 'mainly acoustic'. Martin's reputation also gave the band a boost in being able to start touring and get gigs straight away as there was considerable interest in seeing how he would play in an electric band - having only played acoustic guitar so far.
After practicing for 2 months at the Vicarage, St. Albans, the four members soon realised they needed another multi-instrumentalist to join them as they felt they were too guitar heavy. Peter Knight had been seen playing in the folk clubs, particularly the Irish Folk scene in London, so was known to Ashley, Tim and Maddy, having performed with Maddy on TV recently (now lost). He had also done some gigs with Bob Johnson. Peter was classically trained which appealed to Martin and Tim as they had a good musical knowledge themselves but wanted to explore more complex arrangements. This then completed the first Steeleye line up that went out and played live and produced two classic Electric Folk Albums.  From: https://steeleyespanfan.co.uk/the-history/1969-1971
 

Electric Looking Glass - Purple, Red, Green, Blue & Yellow

 
 
Electric Looking Glass are a Los Angeles based baroque pop band with an aesthetic and sound that is so authentically 60s, you feel like you’re reliving it. Recently, they released the music video for their new single, “Someday Soon”. The video is absolutely beautiful and reminds me so much of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. Very summery.
Electric Looking Glass are: Arash Mafi (organ, mellotron, vocals), Brent Randall (bass, vocals), Danny Winebarger (guitar, vocals), and

Angie Moon: How did you get started in music?

Arash: music has been surrounding me from a young age, my entire family has harvested generations of musicians, mostly flamenco and classical guitarist.

Brent: I watched too may Elvis movies growing up and it was pretty much a lost cause after that. That and plonking around on the family piano.

Johnny: Remember when you were a kid and you watched those cartoons and they drove around in a cool ass van and had a band? Yeah.

Danny: My uncle used to play acoustic guitar and he was always smoking as well. I used to remember thinking he looked really cool when I was a wee lad. When I turned 12 he gave me his guitar then I’ve been playing ever since.

AM: How did Electric Looking Glass get together?

Arash: Johnny and I met two years ago at a pop up I was having at Nico & Bullitt for Mercury Magicians and talked about music and our visions and starting a band together and the possibility of the current line up, fast forward to now and you have ELG!

Brent: I met Johnny in a pie shop and we discovered we both loved The Rutles. He introduced me to these other cats and now we’re stuck with each other.

Johnny: Lemon Meringue

Danny: Me and Johnny had another band prior to this called the turns.

AM: How did you get started in tailoring and fashion design?

Arash: I bought a sewing machine and pushed myself to make clothing that I wanted and couldn’t find, mostly because of long arms haha!

AM: Who would you say are your biggest music and fashion inspirations?

Arash: Granny Takes A Trip, Apple Boutique, Hung On You, Fashion from the 1960s, and the baroque period, which essentially to me 1960s did with a modern touch of the time.

Brent: Fashion: Willy Wonka. Music: Mary Poppins.

Johnny: Music: The Banana Splits. Fashion: The Banana Splits.

Danny: Same as Arash; the 60s is also my main music and style inspiration. I also listen to other stuff as well from other periods and genres as well.

AM: Who are your favourite organ players?

Arash: Richard Wright, Mick Fowler, Matthew Fisher, Glenn Quackenbush, John Lord, Jimmy Smith. Too many geniuses to name!

Brent: I don’t know any of these guys but Arash is my favourite organ player.

Johnny: Arash is king organ. But Quackenbush sure is a cool last name.

Danny: Arash for sure

AM: What is the psych scene like in LA?

Arash: There are some great bands out here, I don’t really like to label it as psychedelic scene. Everyone is doing their own thing here and something weird and interesting, but there is a “good music scene” here for everyone and everything in between to thrive in!

Brent: Groovy people are abound all doing splendid things and we are thankful for it.

AM: What have you been listening to recently?

Arash: I’ve been grooving to Tea & Symphony: The English Baroque Sound 1967-1974 comp. literally love every song on this comp.

Brent: Ian Whitcomb’s Mod, Mod Music Hall. Jaunty lil’ piano numbers for you and yours.

Johnny: Myself humming along with a made up mash up of Happy Holidays by Andy Williams and Henry the 8th by Herman’s Hermits.

Danny: I’m actually listening to Piccadilly Sunshine right now which is an amazing sixties pop compilation. Also the usual, and plenty of northern soul as well.

AM: What was recording “Death of a Season/Someday Soon” like?

Arash: The process was very straightforward and simple. We tracked everything straight off of the preamp into our 16 track 1” tape machine. One track at a time. Using about 12-13 tracks max with all the layers together, and mixing down to ¼” tape at the bounce down.

Brent: Yes!  Arash has an abundance of wonderful analog recording equipment so we stuffed it Johnny’s basement and had fun making our dreams reality. 5/5 Would recommend.

Johnny: Yes as stated above… the Yelp review was solid.

AM: What inspired those songs and the music video?

Brent: “Someday Soon” is the grumpy old men in us complaining about modernity. About wanting nothing more than to stroll along a cobblestone street and throw pennies in a fountain. The video however was just a fun jaunt in the park slightly inspired by those classic low budget romps all the beat groups did back “in the day.” We shot it on Super8 so that was fun!

AM: If you could go to any concert in the 60s, who would you see?

Arash: It’s really hard to say, I’d buy a time machine and go catch all the happenings!

Brent: Herman & The Hermits at a state fair.

Johnny: Okay well Brent claimed it. I’ll have to go with Andy Williams. Dang it.

Danny: Hmmm - Monterey Pop Festival? Would’ve been great to see Otis and Hendrix in one place. So many artists that my generation never got a chance to see so it’s hard to answer that question.

AM: What future plans do Electric Looking Glass have?

Arash: More promo films, Another 45 single coming out this Fall, followed by our long player that’s already in the works and tour dates. We’d love to play for you!

Brent: ELG Breakfast Cereal!

Johnny: ELG night lights. Will show that we are always there for you.

Danny: Ha! More music and more gigs. Hopefully a breakfast cereal too.

From: https://crazyonclassicrock.com/2019/07/03/interview-electric-looking-glass/
 
 

Fern Maddie - Hares on the Mountain

 
 
Vermont-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Fern Maddie fell for British and Irish traditional music in her teens, then inhaled folk songs and began songwriting, encouraged by her composer father. After his early death, she decided to live her life making music in tribute to him in her own curious way. She now makes a podcast about traditional music, Of Song and Bone, writes music in her woodland cabin, tends goats, and documents her life, without embellishment, on Instagram.
Ghost Story is Maddie’s powerful, immediate 10-track debut (you can imagine her singing its songs on festival stages, as if early-career Sharon Van Etten had been diverted on to an ancient, rougher road). The mood throughout evokes the dimly lit intimacy of early 2000s albums by Diane Cluck, Emilíana Torrini and Nina Nastasia, with added warmth. Tunes are often carried by banjo or guitar, supported by low strings, the percussive shudder of bones, or on Scottish ballad Ca’ the Yowes, a synthesiser providing a strangely fitting, scratchy counterpoint.
Maddie’s young, welcoming voice also makes her an accessible storyteller. This often gives a surprisingly unnerving quality to songs that already hang heavy with horror, something she plays with. As she twists the gender roles in the well-known ballad Hares on the Mountain, turning the maids into hares, and men into the hunters, contemporary US politics barrels into view.
Her fantastic, original lyrics unsettle you, too. “Don’t worry, don’t wait around / Just leave me in the ground,” begins the protagonist of Unmarked, before we’re told delicately, terrifyingly, to “take off that winded skin”. Even better is Dorothy May, the tale of a woman who sleeps “on a pillow of salt brine”, then asks if we can hear the trumpets ring out. This album is constantly arresting, emotional and thrilling.  From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jul/01/fern-maddie-ghost-story-review-folk-album


 

Euzen - Phobia

After a long back and forth, the third album “Metamorph” by the Danish-Norwegian quintet Euzen has finally found its way into my system. And how happy I am about that, because “Metamorph” turned out to be a really nice thing. First of all, something about nomenclature: According to the booklet, the album title does not refer to the epic of the same name by the Roman poet Ovid, but rather to the band's music. The band wants to express that they want to lose themselves between creative and actual realities. Modern possibilities make it possible to capture the moment and create a bridge between the band's intentions and the listener's interpretation. The band name Euzen probably comes from an ancient Greek philosophical concept that deals with a happy life. It also fits that the band's debut is called "Eudaimonia", which means bliss. Someone should say again that you don't learn anything with us anymore! But now to the music. The foundation of this is electronic sounds and synthesizers, which are complemented by organic instrumentation, with the latter always operating in the background. In addition to the drums, you can also hear guitar and bass. Maria Franz sings with a lovely voice and a folky touch. Well, does that sound familiar? Right, that screams – at least on paper – for a comparison with the avant-garde icon Bjork. However, this turns out to be difficult because Euzen play less introverted and reserved, instead the music is more “In Your Face”. This also applies to the lyrics, which are written much more directly and less personally than you would expect from the Icelandic art pop elf. But singer Maria Franz sounds a lot like BJÖRK, so at least in this respect there is a certain comparability. And the Norwegian can withstand that, even if Franz sings much more open-heartedly. The metamorphosis takes place on a musical level when the powerful synthesizers come together with fragile piano and an idiosyncratic rhythm like in “The Order”. Maria Franz sings with her fascinating and hypnotic voice and immediately captivates the listener. You could almost say that “Metamorph” sounds like the love child of Trent Reznor and Bjork. This creates a uniform interplay between nature and technology, folk and electro. Maria Franz effortlessly switches between moods, be it powerful hymns like “Mind” or sensitive passages like “Words”. The music ranges from dreamy ballads like “Me And My” to danceable numbers like “Wasted”. Despite all this, the music of the Scandinavians is surprisingly minimalistic, which gives the individual pieces an original touch and contributes to their independence. Actually, the only thing missing from the songs is the overall contextual framework. Overall, Euzen develop a wide spectrum of different influences that you have to discover for yourself little by little. These individual parts transform into a larger whole that has enormous recognition value. In addition, the production is rich and the music is very audible without appearing flat. Anyone who enjoys experimental music with female folk singing simply cannot ignore “Metamorph”. Not fans of Bjork at all.  Translated from: https://www.metal.de/reviews/euzen-metamorph-60504/


Devo - R U Experienced

 
 
American rock band Devo recorded "Are You Experienced?" for their sixth studio album, Shout. It was released as the album's lead single (stylized as "Are U X-perienced?" on the picture sleeve) and includes the non-album track, "Growing Pains", as its B-side (which was also released as a bonus track on CD release of the album). Their adaptation carried on the Devo tradition of radically transforming notable songs, which began with their 1978 cover of the Rolling Stones song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."
A lavish video for "Are You Experienced?" was produced by the band in conjunction with Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius. The video includes Devo as floating blobs of wax in a lava lamp and Jimi Hendrix (played by Hendrix impersonator Randy Hansen) stepping out of his coffin to play a guitar solo, and the cover children Zachary Chase and Alex Mothersbaugh. Despite being one of Devo's most visually complex and expensive music videos, costing about $90,000 to produce, it was not included on the 2003 DVD music video collection The Complete Truth About De-Evolution (although it had been included on the LaserDisc of the same name issued in 1993). In an interview, group co-founder and bass guitarist Gerald Casale explained:
E.C. (earcandy.com): Speaking of de-evolution, why didn't the Hendrix estate give you permission to put the "Are You Experienced?" video on the DVD?
Gerald Casale: Further de-evolution. You understand that the consortium of people that now represent the Hendrix estate are basically run by lawyers; the lawyer mentality. Lawyers always posit the worst-case scenarios. Though that video was loved for years by anybody who saw it including the man who commissioned it—Chuck Arroff, a luminary in the music business, who still claims to this day that it was one of his five most favorite videos ever—they [the lawyers] didn't get it and assumed we were making fun of Jimi. That's like saying "Whip It" makes fun of cowboys. This is so stupid it's unbelievable.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Experienced%3F_(song)
 

Belly - Slow Dog

 
 
It was hard to resist keeping Tanya Donelly on the phone for 12 hours straight. A founding member of Throwing Muses and the Breeders, as well as frontwoman for her own band, Belly, and a subsequent catalog of solo work, hers is a storied biography, full of flowers and not a few thorns. Now practicing as a post-partum doula, Donelly is still writing songs, in the past months releasing a series of collaborative EPs called Swan Song Series, marking an unofficially-official retirement from the industry. The last volume will be issued in December, though Donelly qualifies, “There will be songs trickling out after that.” Before the end comes, we look back to the beginning as part of our “Holy Hell!” series. It’s been 20 years since “this little squirrel I used to be slammed her bike down the stairs.” Join us as we contemplate the life cycle of Star.

Thinking back to 1993, what are some of the first flashes that come to your mind about that year?

Oh my goodness, I don’t know! It was such a crazy year. I mean, it just really felt surreal to me. Because there really weren’t – from either label and from myself and the band – any expectations of [Star] doing that well. We wanted it to do as well as I had previously done in my other bands, but we had no idea that not just that record, but alternative music in general would explode that year. A lot of the success of that album had to do with a lot of other things that were going on, just timing in general. For some reason that was a gate-opening year.

When we’re looking at what led up to the formation of Belly, obviously your work with Throwing Muses and the Breeders – two huge, revolutionary alt-rock bands – comes up. The narrative often is that you were in a deferring role to Kristin Hersh in the Muses and Kim Deal with the Breeders. Kind of like a John Oates phenomenon. And Belly was your liberation from that. How accurate is that? Or is that a misconception altogether?

It is a misconception because it had more to do with the logistics of everyone releasing their songs. We had our outlets for that. There was never a point where I ever expected to start releasing those kinds of songs with Throwing Muses specifically. The Breeders was a different story. The genesis of that band was going to be that Kim would have an album and then the next one would be my songs. And in fact all of the demos for Star say “The Breeders” on them. Like, on the reels and on the boxes. Because that was supposed to be the second Breeders album originally.

So Star was going to be the follow-up to Pod?

Yeah, it was unnamed at that point, it wasn’t called “Star,” but those songs were all demoed under the Breeders name and Kim actually played on a few of the songs.

How did that not come together then? Was there a crystallizing moment where you were like, “You know, I’m just doing this”

Yeah, it was in Dayton, Ohio with Kim, and we were trying to figure out how we were going to make it work, timing-wise. I had left the Muses and she was not at that point going to play with the Pixies, and they had a ginormous tour coming up [supporting U2’s Zoo TV Tour, in 1992]. At that point I said, I think it probably makes more sense if I just do this solo. And originally I was just going to start off on a solo gig but then I just really wanted another band. So I went home to Rhode Island and started Belly.

Getting back to the “secondary songwriter” idea, I had read that some of that had to do with your introversion?

Definitely. I think Belly somewhat cured me of a lot of shyness. But I was still terrified, too. There was something about having it be my name that felt wrong. And being very shy was part of that. And also just being very afraid of how things were gonna go, and what was gonna happen, and if I was making the right choice, and I wasn’t quite ready to take ownership of that by putting my name on it. And I really wanted to start that band with those people.

How did you manage your shyness? What were some of the coping strategies you used?

A lot of vomiting (laughs). And unfortunately, probably some drinking. There was definitely too much of that going on. Although I have to say, when [bassist] Gail [Greenwood] joined, she’s straight-edge and has been her whole life, and I didn’t stop completely but I was inspired by her honesty and bravery. She was a huge part of reeling me back from that.

At some point do you just become brave, or is it something – then and throughout your career – you continue to struggle with?

It was not so much gaining confidence as immunity.

In terms of publicity, in going back and reading reviews and interviews from that time, how in control of your image were you? With the ethereal quality of your voice, there was this sort of elfin, wood nymph thing you were getting. In the interviews it always seemed like you were having to push back against that, especially too because the riot grrrl scene was in full force. How did you deal with that?

That was very upsetting for me. I felt like no matter what I did, I couldn’t break that image. It’s certainly not the image I have of myself, I’m about as far from elfin as you can possibly be. I tried really hard not to engage in the attack posture [the riot grrrl scene] was taking against me, against Kristin, against at one point PJ Harvey. I mean, why???

Those “gender traitor” accusations were getting leveled at us. I really tried hard not to engage in that but it was difficult. And Melody Maker was constantly quoting these women who were SO angry at other women. It bummed me out. Because I came from a community and a mindset that everyone makes their own art and that that’s a journey everyone was doing individually and you held that as sacred. It was a sad time, it just really made me… bummed out.

It’s funny, because I’ve always thought Star had a lot in common with [Hole’s] Live Through This, at least in respect to its totems: dresses, dolls, witches, stolen children, mother/sister/daughter themes. Did you ever feel a sense of sisterhood with that album?

I do, and I did, and I doubt that she feels the same way. I think she’s a wonderful songwriter and singer and performer. I think that album is amazing. I love it. I don’t really come up on her radar much I’m sure these days, but there were a couple of times where she stuck up for me. She said, “Well, whatever you think of her, at least she’s writing her own songs and playing her own instrument.” That could be seen as damning by faint praise! (laughs) We actually had a funny moment the first time we met. She said, “You’re not so little and cute…” And I said, “Well… you’re not so big and scary!”

“Witch” is emblematic of these themes, the first line of what sounds like a lullaby is this cooing whisper of “You’re not safe/ In this house.” It’s like this angelic warning of dark, dark possibilities. Star almost feels like a concept record in this regard, with this nightmare secret fairy tale mythology and magic at the core of it. What inspired you to tap into the occult aspects of childhood?

That comes from my childhood, I felt all of those dark undercurrents very acutely. I think children can go there very quickly. Halloween has become really child-owned because of that. They’re so right there. It’s frightening, but I think as a child people see the beauty in it too, and the power and the mystery. Sometimes we’re afraid of things that are actually quite necessary to pull into your personal ecosystem.

You can hear that in the music of Star, the coexistence of opposites. The balance between safety and danger is always very emotionally close on that record. Is this something that you were intentionally going for?

Not intentionally. But that album was really me killing my childhood. I think that’s where I was able to process a lot that I hadn’t really up to that point – a little late at [age] 24 when I wrote those songs! But it was still an important thing for me to do. I don’t want to sound all Psych 101, but it was very much me as an adult taking care of that person.

Can we talk about “Slow Dog”? For years I was dying to find out the meaning behind that song – until I did.

That one’s almost an embarrassing story because it was one of my most manipulated lyrics ever. Usually they just come and I work with it a little bit to make it more listenable, but that one was a story I read about ancient Chinese culture. It was a piece of fiction about a woman who was an adulteress, and as punishment had a dead dog stuck to her back until it decomposed. That image – I couldn’t shake it. So I started to write it as a poem, and it took on this Southern Gothic character to it, so I framed it there, in the American South.

But it’s a jubilant song! How…?

Oddly, it ends up being about her liberation. Once the dog is gone – and I put it so that the dog was some sort of metaphor – she’s free.

“Maria, carry a rifle/ Maria, carry a dog on her back” – certainly “Maria” is not a name from a Chinese folktale…

I used to actually say “Mariah.” And it was the Pavement guy who pointed it out to me: “Did you write a song about Mariah Carey?!?!”

Stephen Malkmus?

No, it was Bob [Nastanovich]. It was when I had just done the demos and I gave him a copy. And I said, “Who’s Mariah Carey?” (laughs)

In the past week, I came across a few Belly references coincidentally – both from the AV Club. One was in a “Hatesong” interview in which Dean Ween rails against 4 Non Blondes, but agrees with the interviewer that “Feed the Tree” was an alt-rock single that worked. Another was a bit they did about songs about ghosts where they revisited Kristin Hersh’s duet with Michael Stipe, “Your Ghost.” Tangentially, Belly gets a lot of love in the comments, and those folks are tough customers. It seems to me that Belly has done well against the test of time, especially a band with a two LP discography, which is more than you can say for a lot of ‘90s alt bands. How do you view Star after everything else you’ve done in your career, these 20 years on?

I love that record and I loved making it and I loved touring it. The whole year was a halcyon year for us. We loved each other so much at that point! It was so fun and exciting and scary and nerve-wracking. But I am proud of that one. There was a chunk of time there when, if I was making a guest appearance somewhere or doing an interview, they would say “formerly of Throwing Muses” or “the Breeders” and stopped having Belly in there. There was some erasure that was happening. But recently I noticed it’s back in there! Apparently, we’re okay again. It’s okay to like us now! (laughs)

From: https://spectrumculture.com/2013/11/13/holy-hell-tanya-donelly-talks-about-belly-20-years-later/
 

Blvck Ceiling - Young

 
 
Music video for Blvck Ceiling created by Redrum Image: facebook.com/redrumimage. Written, directed, cinematography, edit, postproduction, vfx, graphic, set design, styling: Katarzyna Widmanska & Amadeusz Wróbel
 
 



Scarling - Band Aid Covers The Bullet Hole


Once upon a time, in a dirty, dingy, nefariously owned Los Angeles club that no one hardly ever goes to anymore, singer Jessicka (ex-Jack Off Jill) met guitar player and future writing partner Christian Hejnal. Their relationship was combustible from the beginning, and although they had no interest in playing music together, they exchanged numbers anyway on the off chance that one day they might see eye-to-eye. That day finally came to pass during an impulsive get together at a rehearsal space in the dismal San Fernando Valley during one of the hottest summers L.A. can remember. Says Jessicka, "It was amazing - so amazing that we almost forgot how disgustingly hot it was in the valley that day - almost. I think that's where the seed was planted to start a band together, though neither of us let the other one know."
Two months later, after Jessicka sang on a track Christian had written, they were ready to acknowledge the musical chemistry that had blossomed between them and began writing. After collecting enough songs, the time was ripe to recruit a band. But like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, Scarling still needed time to evolve. After several line-up changes, the band's current - and best and most beautiful - incarnation was solidified. The boys, Garey Snider (drums) and Kyle Lime (bass), are pretty enough to pass for girls; and guitar player Rickey Lime (formerly of all-girl Olympia-based Shotgun Won) brings a tougher meaning to the term "'40s pin-up queen".
But lest you think this is the story of a band that is all about style over substance, beauty over musical brawn - think again. Influenced by everyone from My Bloody Valentine, Loop, Lush, Daisy Chainsaw,The Pixies and Sonic Youth to the Cure, The Velvet Underground, to The Melvins, Scarling is an amalgam of sound and texture, perversely experimental and sonically assuming. But unlike a few of those aforementioned bands, Scarling's talent lies in their ability to create actual song structures from noise and chaos. Try to listen to Scarling's first single "Band Aid Covers The Bullet Hole" (produced by Chris Vrenna and released on Sympathy For the Record Industry on March 19th, coincidentally the same day as cover artist Mark Ryden's "Blood" show and Bush's declaration of war - how's that for combustible?) without the inability to eradicate the chorus from your head.
The Scarling story is nowhere near close to being completed. This is only the first chapter, so put on your reading glasses, pour yourself a glass of something strong , and settle in for a long, hard ride. And don't get too comfortable - dark and menacing, Scarling will always be ready to creep up on you from behind and invite you to a one-on-one game of spin the bottle so they can French-kiss you with a mouth full of razorblades. Days later you'll wake up to find that you've been infected with something that, while it makes you anxious and uncomfortable, is also warm and seductive.  From: https://morbidangle.tripod.com/id51.html

 

Mandrill - Fat City Strut

 
 
Mandrill was formed in Brooklyn in 1968 by three multi-instrumentalist brothers, Louis, Richard and Carlos Wilson, all of whom originally hailed from Panama. After running an ad in the Village Voice they were soon joined by Omar Mesa, Claude Cave, Charlie Padro and Bundie Cenac. Between them this seven man group could play over 20 instruments. Although often labeled a funk or R&B band, Mandrill is much more than just that. Their music combines those two genres with jazz, rock, classic Latin music, and styles of their own creation, often mixing all this together in the same song. Their albums are often composed of multi-movement songs that blend together to make a long running urban tone poem. In concert, their songs are often taken to great lengths with creative improvisations. Although different band members have come and gone over the years, the three original brothers still remain, and they are often joined onstage by their musically talented children. Mandrill continues to tour and record to this day, inspiring many with their complex rhythms, arrangements and lyrics about spirituality, peace, love and brotherhood.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=4142

According to the liner notes of this CD, Mandrill were considered far too complex for the standard funk listening audience. And their compositional style was not at all conducive to trimming for radio airplay. While I doubt anyone will confuse the band with Semiramis or Museo Rosenbach, there are plenty of tricky grooves here to engage even the most finicky progressive rock head. Especially when one considers that Mandrill were a seven-piece unit that played close to 20 different instruments!
The album itself, Mandrill's fourth, is a mixture of hard funk, soul, hard rock, jazz, and (gasp) progressive rock. Mango Meat and Fat City Strut are classic funk tunes with great horn charts, complex groovy meters and, on the latter, some good time Caribbean party music. Never Die is a cross between The Temptations catchy chorus lines and soft psychedelia meets soul music. Love Song would fit comfortably on classic soul romancer albums such as those by Isaac Hayes or Barry White. But the best is saved for Side 2. Two Sisters of Mystery features a monster fuzz bass riff that would make Hugh Hopper blush. This is one hard rocking track with a gritty horn section and rollicking guitar licks. Best of all is Afrikus Retrospectus, an eight minute instrumental beauty carried by a gorgeous running organ melody and some nice Burt Bacharachian sax (i.e. The Look of Love). The mid section has some fantastic piano, flute and trumpet jams. The closing track Aspiration Flame is another slow instrumental track with some great flute and an inspiring, energetic ending. Overall, Mandrill are just the sort of band to introduce funk to those who enjoy listening to music rather than dancing to it.  From: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/mandrill/just-outside-of-town/
 

Rickie Lee Jones - We Belong Together

 
 
In late 1979, Rickie Lee Jones’ life was going in all sorts of directions. After her European tour and a triumphant homecoming show at Los Angeles’ Perkins Palace, Jones and boyfriend Tom Waits settled into a bungalow in Echo Park. Over the previous year, Jones had also settled into a heroin habit. After an argument with Waits one night, which involved a plate of spaghetti becoming acquainted with their kitchen wall, Jones confessed her addiction. She had resolved to get clean a few days prior, but that night, as Jones was withdrawing from heroin, Waits withdrew from her. On hearing the news, he became distant and inconsolable; the next morning, he drove away.
After trying to reconcile with Waits later that afternoon, Jones returned home and wrote “Skeletons”, which became the third track on the album Pirates. The song is based on a real-life incident where a Black man was pulled over while driving his pregnant wife to the hospital. As he reached for his driver’s license, the cops, believing he was going for a gun, shot him dead. Though the song was not borne from Jones’ and Waits’ breakup, the tragic incident resonated with her in its wake. As she writes in her 2021 memoir, Last Chance Texaco, “The desolate afterlife of tragedy is what I grew up with.” The song, which recounts real-life events, also imagines the future that never was for the new father and his family. In six simple verses, Jones renders the senseless tragedy with a sensitivity that is as devastating as it’s beautiful.
After her split from Waits, Jones retreated to her mother’s house in Olympia, Washington. An old high school friend procured the keys to the music room at a nearby college for her to use after hours. There, in nights alone with a piano and a healing heart, she composed “We Belong Together”, “Pirates”, and “Living It Up”.  Given the circumstances of its creation, it’s safe to assume “We Belong Together” is about the breakup. Jones name-checks Natalie Wood in a nod to Waits, who recorded “Somewhere” (from West Side Story) for his 1978 album Blue Valentine. (Jones was photographed with Waits on the back cover of his LP, completing the circle.) The song transcends the usual breakup lament by referring to the protagonist (Jones herself) in the third person. With references to Marlon Brando and James Dean, Jones inserts her story into a universal narrative written on the big screen. After two minutes of hypnotic piano, Steve Gadd’s drums kick in and take the song from a maudlin plea to a jubilant assertion. It’s as if Jones has found strength by embracing her feelings and making them known: “Are the signs you hid deep in your heart /All left on neon for them?”
As Pirates is a product of the album era, it gives careful consideration to track listing and pacing. The result is a self-contained record whose eight songs fit together like the numbers in a Broadway musical. Indeed each track, through mercurial changes in tempo and mood, feels like a complete story unto itself. “Living It Up” starts straightforwardly enough but its carefree shuffle conceals darker themes of domestic violence. The lyrics are populated by Jones’ usual cast of colorful characters, sung with her trademark elision. Midway through, however, the title refrain appears as a desperate interlude, suggesting “living it up” isn’t always a good time.
Hardly anyone on the pop charts at the time was recording such complex, multi-dimensional songs. Joni Mitchell’s mid-1970s albums favored sleek SoCal jazz fusion, with lyrics that retained the confessional tone of her earlier work. By 1981, however, Mitchell had veered away from jazz (after the Mingus album) toward a more 1980s pop sensibility. Steely Dan shared an affinity for studio mastery, but their technical proficiency could sound cold. Moreover, Donald Fagen’s voice had a narrow range compared to Jones’ idiosyncratic dynamics. Jones fused jazz, soul, and be-bop overlaid with impressionistic imagery, creating a sound that was impossible to pigeonhole.
Fagen plays on the album, as do a roster of studio all-stars such as Steve Gadd, trumpeter Randy Brecker, and percussionist Victor Feldman. Legendary Broadway and film arranger Ralph Burns rounds out the ensemble. Lenny Waronker & Russ Titelman’s sterling production is lauded by audiophiles for its three-dimensional quality. The listening experience is that of being on the soundstage, surrounded by all of the instruments distinct in their timbre and weight.
To think of Pirates as a breakup album does it a great disservice. While several songs were written in the relationship’s immediate aftermath, many predate it. Another was written with Jones’ new lover Sal Bernardi in their apartment in Manhattan (the haunting “Traces of the Western Slopes”). Bernardi, by the way, is the “Sal” referred to in “Weasel and the White Boys Cool” on Jones’ first LP. As she writes about her time with him, “We stayed up all night and slept until 4:00 pm and rose half-dead to get high and feel half-alive again. We lived in the strange twilight, the slow motion of fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.”
Looking back, Jones refuses hackneyed assessments of her addiction. As she tells the Guardian, “… with heroin, people just want you to say, ‘Oh, it’s so terrible’ and condemn it outright, but I think it’s wrong somehow to do that. There’s a reason why people get addicted to heroin. There is something there that they like, some kind of solace, some kind of numbing.” In her book, Jones speaks to the double standard afforded to men in rock, particularly when it comes to drug use. She cites Keith Richards and Ginger Baker, whose self-destruction was a “badge of manliness”.
Similarly, Jones’ reputation for being difficult in the studio is patently sexist. Any man with the same dedication Jones had to her vision would be called “exacting” and demanding of excellence. That Jones was referred to as “the female Tom Waits” is also laughable, considering the opposite was true. The two will always be entwined in musical history, but in reality, Waits’ persona was a character named Tom Waits. Jones lived the lives he only wrote about.
Pirates’ creation was fueled by drug use as much as by heartbreak. Both Waits and heroin are spectral presences on the album. Even without the twin love affairs—with a man and a drug—Jones would have crafted a masterpiece. Reducing the album to a narrative shorthand misses its richness. The songs on Pirates are worlds unto themselves, drawing upon myriad experiences and impulses, all resisting a single, simple interpretation.
Jones could have cut two minutes from “We Belong Together”, kept the tempo steady, and thrown in a few lines of “baby please come back”. It would have been a mainstream radio smash. She could have just as easily filled her second album with ten more variations on “Chuck E.’s in Love”. Instead, she went one better and made “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking”, expanding on the sound and the characters from her first hit. “Woody and Dutch” was so widely copied that, as Jones writes, “when people heard it, they thought I was imitating the imitators”.
Like its forebear, Pirates stands out among its contemporaries for being a formidable creation of a singular talent. Without an obvious single, the album takes longer to walk into than her first release, but the more you wander, the greater the reward. Jones resisted the easy musical path in favor of one as meandering and complicated as her own life. The only direction she followed was her own while making it look effortlessly cool.  From: https://www.popmatters.com/rickie-lee-jones-pirates-atr
 

Dirty Honey - When I'm Gone

 
 
Dirty Honey is an American rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 2017. It consists of singer Marc Labelle, guitarist John Notto, bassist Justin Smolian, and drummer Corey Coverstone. Their self-titled extended play was self-released in March 2019.
History: When vocalist Marc Labelle moved to Los Angeles he met guitarist John Notto. After performing a gig of cover songs together at a bar, they then played on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard in front of about 100 people. It was after this second performance that they decided to officially form a band in 2017. Notto recruited bassist Justin Smolian, and the trio had trouble finding a drummer until Smolian brought in Corey Coverstone, who enthusiastically asked to join. Labelle came up with the name Dirty Honey after hearing Robert Plant mention his band The Honeydrippers in a Howard Stern interview and thought it sounded like such a "dirty" rock and roll name.
After hearing their song "When I'm Gone", the band's longtime friend Mark DiDia, a music industry veteran from Columbia Records, became their manager and quickly got them gigs opening for Slash in fall 2018. The band traveled to Australia to record their self-titled extended play with producer Nick DiDia. It was self-released on March 22, 2019. Eight hours later, friends contacted the members and family telling them their music was being played on the radio.
Dirty Honey toured in 2019 as the opening act for Red Sun Rising on their Peel Tour. On May 7, the band opened for The Who at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan as part of The Who's Moving On! Tour. Dirty Honey opened for Skillet and Alter Bridge on their Victorious Sky Tour from September 22 to October 25. They also supported Guns N' Roses on their Not in This Lifetime Tour on November 1 and 2 in Las Vegas.
Dirty Honey, now consisting of frontman Marc LaBelle, guitarist John Notto and bassist Justin Smolian and new drummer Jaydon Bean have unveiled the title track from their upcoming studio album Can’t Find The Brakes, which will be released via Dirt Records on November 3, 2023.  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Dirty+Honey/+wiki
 

Jill Sobule - When My Ship Comes In

 
 
Jill Sobule doesn’t plan, onstage or off. As a musician on the road, she loves to riff between songs, most of which she calls “story songs.” “They’re narrative. I talk about people. I was influenced by storyteller-songwriters… Dylan. John Prine. Leonard Cohen.” So, it wasn’t that difficult for the singer to turn her catalog into a theatrical piece that rocked New York City in October and November of 2022. Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade at Manhattan performance space the wild project was extended, and beloved by critics for its warmth and honesty. I sat down with her recently to ask about her process, her influences, and her background.
Sobule might be best known for the song “I Kissed A Girl.” No, not the 2008 Katy Perry song. Sobule created her version in the nineties: “I was about to record for Atlantic, and I was goofing around… there were no queer songs in 1995 on the charts. It was kinda based on queer pulp fiction from the 1950s.” Unlike the straightforward flirting of Perry’s record, Sobule’s is wry. She describes it as “two unhappy housewives who get it on after their Tupperware party.” And the irony was intentional and double-edged. “We knew that the only way to get that song on the radio was to make it light and funny, so we could get away with the ‘insidious gay agenda’,” Sobule jokes.
By the time Sobule was recording in the early ’90s, she’d learned to forge her own path. She didn’t want to just be the singer in the band: “I wanted to be a little rocker, but there were no female role models for me…” When she was coming of age in the ‘80s, female musicians in a Guitar Center were “asked if that’s their boyfriend’s guitar,” and one label even felt comfortable explaining to Sobule that they’d love to sign her, but “we already have a female artist.” 
Sobule managed to acquire not only a guitar but also a strong identity and sense of self growing up as a “Denver Jew, third generation from the Old Country.” She describes her family’s secular Judaism with humor and self-awareness: “We were to Judaism what Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.” In fact, as the sole and self-described “token Jew” at St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, she was excused from theology class but elected to attend, and even played guitar at mass. “I’ve always been, and still am, interested in everything from world religions to weirdo cults.”
Growing up, she mined music, religion, and words wherever she could find them. She recalls asking her mother for Ms. Magazine, devouring her mother’s copy of The Women’s Room, and frequenting a bookstore in Denver called Women To Women. “I remember going in there like going into a speakeasy for books. I remember having this huge crush on Gloria Steinem,” she laughs. “I was a little political girl, a little radical left-winger. I don’t know where I got that. Maybe knowing that inside there was a little queer identity waiting to burst out.” In Denver, she had no one to share that with. “It was my own thing.” So when Sobule decided to put together F*ck7thGrade, she knew the story had to take place in that particular moment. “I realized I had a lot of songs about that period in my life. Freud said, the first week or month or year in your development is the most important. He was full of shit. It was seventh grade that made you who you are today.”
This isn’t her first theatrical piece—this summer she played “a rabbi’s wife who gets murdered” in A Wicked Soul In Cherry Hill at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. That role marked her first time back on stage in a scripted piece since playing “Miss Hanukkah and Queen Esther” in first grade. “It’s a whole different world than what I do in concerts—having to memorize! I have a whole new respect for actors.” Now that the run is over, Sobule is in familiar territory, the unscripted. “I’m a rolling stone. My stuff is still in a storage locker. I have to figure out where I want to be.” And whatever the next story song brings.  From: https://lilith.org/2023/02/jill-sobule-is-still-laughing-at-the-world/
 

Blood, Sweat & Tears - I Love You More Than You Ever Know

 

This song was written by Blood, Sweat & Tears founder Al Kooper and is the second track from the group's debut - and only album recorded with that lineup - Child Is Father to the Man. While the song itself didn't see single release, it did see some substantial play on progressive rock stations.
From Al Kooper's biography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards: "'I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know' was a split tribute to Otis Redding and James Brown. (The lyrics were a nod to Otis' song 'I Love You More Than Words Can Say,' and the melody was 'reminiscent' of James Brown's 'It's a Man's World.') On December 6 1967, Otis died in a plane crash and it really fucked me up. The next night we began recording the album. I insisted we record 'I Love You' first. Nobody objected. We put down a blistering track, and it looked like this was gonna be an easy album to make. We overdubbed Freddie [Lipsius]'s solo and Steve [Katz]'s fills, and then it was time to put a vocal on it." Kooper goes on to say that the band was so nervous about his vocal skills, that he prepared a practical joke to ease the tension. On the first recording take, he started singing the lyrics in French, having memorized them that way beforehand. Everybody stopped in shock and he innocently smirked "Oh, you wanted me to sing it in English?" Then there was take two... Going on from BB&BB: "Now my eyes were screwed shut, and I was thinkin' about Otis and this sounds clichéd as hell, but it's true. I was saying to myself, "This is for you." And I was singing. One take. They called me into the booth for playback, and everyone was smiling."
In spite of this song's success, the band eventually did kick Al Kooper out. It was a cross between wanting a different lead vocalist, and creative differences with the rest of the band objecting to Kooper's tight control. For one thing, Kooper insisted on including one song, "The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes, and Freud," which he wrote, and the rest of the band hated. He got his way by the grace of producer John Simon's mediation, and Kooper points to that moment as the beginning of the breakup of the band. The chief rivals here are Kooper and Colomby; these two continue bitter feuds to this very day over whose idea was what and who gets the money from Child Is Father to the Man.
The album cover art is famous for being a funny/creepy photo trick, showing each of the band members sitting and standing with child-sized versions of themselves. We all know that. But did you know about the popular blog meme using Photoshop (although Gimp can do it, too) to swap heads between a baby and an adult? It's called a "manbaby" and there's a page about it at Know Your Meme which seems at a loss to explain exactly whence this meme originated... but we know, don't we?  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/blood-sweat-tears/i-love-you-more-than-youll-ever-know

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Nina Simone - Live Holland 1965

 Part 1

 
Part 2

#Nina Simone #folk #gospel #blues #jazz #R&B #soul #1950s #1960s #live music video

“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two worlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.
A lot of black women have been openly angry these days over a new movie about Simone’s life, and it hasn’t even been released. The issue is color, and what it meant to Simone to be not only categorically African-American but specifically African in her features and her very dark skin. Is it possible to separate Simone’s physical characteristics, and what they cost her in this country, from the woman she became? Can she be played by an actress with less distinctively African features, or a lighter skin tone? Should she be played by such an actress? The casting of Zoe Saldana, a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along European lines, has caused these questions—rarely phrased as questions—to dog the production of “Nina,” from the moment Saldana’s casting was announced to the completed film’s début, at Cannes, in May, at a screening confined to possible distributors. No reviewers have seen it. The film’s director, Cynthia Mort, has been stalwart in her defense of Saldana’s rightness for the role, citing not only the obvious relevance of acting skills but Simone’s inclusion of a range of colors among her own “Four Women”—which is a fair point. None of the women in Simone’s most personal and searing song escape the damage and degradation accorded to their race.
Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation. At Motown, in the early sixties, the wildly popular performers of a stream of crossover hits became models of black achievement but had virtually no contact with the movement at all.
Simone herself had been hesitant at first. Known for her sophisticated pianism, her imperious attitude, and her velvety rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” (which, like Billie Holiday before her, she sang without the demeaningly ungrammatical “s” on “loves”), she had arrived in New York in late 1958, establishing her reputation not in Harlem but in the clubs of hip and relatively interracial Greenwich Village. Her repertoire of jazz and folk and show tunes, often played with a classical touch, made her impossible to classify. In these early years, she performed African songs but also Hebrew songs, and wove a Bach fugue through a rapid-fire version of “Love Me or Leave Me.” She tossed off the thirties bauble “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with airy insouciance, and wrung the heart out of the lullaby “Brown Baby”—newly written by Oscar Brown, Jr., about a family’s hopes for a child born into a better racial order—erupting in a hair-raising wail on the word “freedom,” as though registering all the pain over all the years during which it was denied. For a while, “Brown Baby” was as close to a protest song as Simone got. She believed it was enough.
And then her friend Lorraine Hansberry set her straight. It speaks to Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” A milestone in Simone’s career was a solo concert at Carnegie Hall—a happy chance to show off her pianism—on April 12, 1963, which happened also to be the day that Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, and locked up in the local jail. The discrepancy between the events was pointed out by Hansberry, who telephoned Simone after the concert, although not to offer praise.
Two months later, Simone played a benefit for the N.A.A.C.P. In early August, she sang “Brown Baby” before a crowd gathered in the football stadium of a black college outside Birmingham—the first integrated concert ever given in the area—while guards with guns and dogs prowled the field. But Hansberry only started a process that events in America quickly accelerated. Simone watched the March on Washington, later that August, on television, while she was preparing for a club date. She was still rehearsing when, on September 15th, news came of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young African-American girls who had just got out of Bible class. Simone’s first impulsive act, she recalled, was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people.”
This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists. At the Washington march, John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was forced to cut the word “revolution” from his speech and to omit the threat that, absent immediate progress, the marchers would go through the South “the way Sherman did” and “burn Jim Crow to the ground.” James Baldwin, in a televised discussion after the bombing, noted that, throughout American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” But the center held. Simone’s husband, a smart businessman, told her to forget the gun and put her rage into her music.
It took her an hour to write “Mississippi Goddam.” A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words—“Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest”—that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: “And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (“Too damn lazy!”), government promises (“Desegregation / Mass participation”), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to “Go slow,” a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, “Too slow!” It wasn’t “We Shall Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: “Oh but this whole country is full of lies,” she sang. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”
She introduced the song in a set at the Village Gate a few days later. And she sang it at a very different concert at Carnegie Hall, in March, 1964—brazenly flinging “You’re all gonna die” at a mostly white audience—along with other protest songs she had taken a hand in writing, including the defiantly jazzy ditty “Old Jim Crow.” She also performed a quietly haunting song titled “Images,” about a black woman’s inability to see her own beauty (“She thinks her brown body has no glory”)—a wistful predecessor to “Four Women” that she had composed to words by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. At the time, Simone herself was still wearing her hair in a harshly straightened fifties-style bob—sometimes the small personal freedoms are harder to speak up for than the larger political ones—and, clearly, it wasn’t time yet for such specifically female injuries to take their place in the racial picture. “Mississippi Goddam” was the song of the moment: bold and urgent and easy to sing, it was adopted by embattled protesters in the cursed state itself just months after Simone’s concert, during what they called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, and what President Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.”
There was no looking back by the time she performed the song outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965, when some three thousand marchers were making their way along the fifty-four-mile route from Selma; two weeks earlier, protesters making the same attempt had been driven back by state troopers with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The triumphant concert, on the fourth night of the march, was organized by the indefatigable Belafonte, at the request of King, and took place on a makeshift stage built atop stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes, and in front of an audience that had swelled with twenty-five thousand additional people, drawn either by the cause or by a lineup of stars that ranged from Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to Joan Baez. Simone, accompanied only by her longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, drew cheers on the interpolated line “Selma made me lose my rest.” In the course of events that night, she was introduced to King, and Schackman remembered that she stuck her hand out and warned him, “I’m not nonviolent!” It was only when King replied, gently, “Not to worry, sister,” that she calmed down.
Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.  From: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/raised-voice


Igorrr - Very Noise


 #Igorr #Gautier Serre #extreme metal #breakcore #experimental #industrial #baroque metal #trip-hop #death metal #electronic #Meat Dept #animated music video

We have a challenge for you: Watch Meat Dept’s latest video and try and keep a straight face. Chances are you probably can’t. A weird and wacky music video created to accompany French musician Igorrr's track,Very Noise, it may surprise you to hear that there is a quite a serious meaning behind it – amidst all the madness. “Very Noise is an attempt to transcribe on video the synthesis of numerous testimonies of stroke victims that we have collected over the past few years,” explains David Nicolas of Meat Dept. “About 3/4 of the stroke victims are heterosexual white males over 50 years old, and the visions that arise from these experiences are in common with the neuroses of this category of the population. Identity disorder, existential anxieties linked to erection problems, transfer phenomenon to a more sporty image of the father, a burning desire for extreme but playful activities such as motocross or solo rock climbing…”
What on the face of it seems to be impossible to link together, was actually created with a lot of consideration and much thought. “The notion of figurative abstraction is also very significant in the stories, it is a form of link between two ideas that challenge each other, one could speak of a remedy for cognitive dissonance generated by overlapping fantasies,” explains David.
Bearing in mind the serious subject matter underpinning the project, Meat Dept have approached it in a typically humorous and open manner. “We just opened our psychic channel and went fishing for ideas,” recalls Laurent Nicolas. “We basically took the ideas as they came and translated them instantly into images, without any filter or thinking, like the “cadavre exquis.” Then we connected the dots to create some kind of story and everything made sense.” The team behind Meat Dept are David Nicolas, Laurent Nicolas and Kevin Van Der Meiren, who's varied backgrounds across animation, design, art and film have proved quite a prolific combination. As a collective they have previously had a short film premiere at Sundance and produced idents for Adult Swim, alongside their own personal film and music video projects. They are currently working on their first series, entitled Black Holes, which has been signed by a US television network.
Looking through their portfolio, it is clear that the team has a unique way of looking at things, that manifests itself in such intriguing work. Their process that facilitates this seems to be one which snowballs from one idea: “The deal with Igorrr was total freedom. We started from a motion capture bug in a loop David was working on: the chewing gum character on the boxing ring. Then we improvised and built around it, with a lot of experiments,” explains Kevin. “Then what’s important in our approach is the attitude we have towards the variety of tools and techniques we’re using. Technology plays a very important part in our process. We are as excited about the technology as the art itself. We love to play around with new tools and push them to their limits. As we said, the starting point of the video was some weird bugs and distortions in motion capture movements. From this technical problems can sometimes arise interesting forms. You have to be open to that kind of discovery.”
When they were approached by Igorrr, the team were experimenting for an exhibition that focussed on loops. David explains that this was where the collaboration began: “At the time we were preparing an exhibition of living paintings, made of loops, basically an animation sequence that loops perfectly and can be watched endlessly,” he says. “Gautier loved the concept, but listening to the track, we were really disconcerted. It’s very violent and unpredictable.” The fast and varied nature of the track itself is obviously something that drives the visuals, and many of the scenes are directly synced to the beat - something that Meat Dept considered important. “Of course, especially for a track like Very Noise, it’s all about rhythm. Towards the end of the process, we adjusted the cuts together with Gautier and he tweaked the music a little bit and added some sound design to make it perfectly fit with the images,” says Laurent. “Some say he’s a genius but he’s just a maniac really! Jokes aside, it was great working with him. Great guy!”
The video has had an amazing reception so far, with millions of views on Youtube and the inevitable reaction videos alongside them. Famous fans of the piece also include Mike Judge, someone that Meat Dept hugely admires. Based on the success of Very Noise, attention turns to where they go next. We ask them if any of the characters may make an appearance again in the future, to which Kevin responds: “Haha! The Grandpa biker is definitely coming back…”  From: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/meat-dept-digital-film-310120