Funky Worm, Ohio Players (1973)

Certain historical events are gifts that just keep on giving. Coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Watergate holds that distinction for me; call me a Watergate junkie if you want to. It happened at a time when music seemed headed for places I didn't feel like going. Example: Funky Worm by the Ohio Players, which was topping the charts in May of 1973.

That same month, my budding interest in public affairs and journalism was galvanized by the live theatre that was the televised Senate investigation of the Watergate break-in. I lived briefly after college graduation in Washington, and will never forget opening my apartment door the morning of August 9, 1974, greeted by the beefy Washington Post emblazoned with the momentous 2-inch headline, NIXON RESIGNS.

Sens. Howard Baker, Sam Ervin getting it done

Watergate's dramatis personae have always been a source of fascination to me. So Thomas Mallon's historical novel, Watergate: A Novel, fictionalizing some aspects of the scandal as it unfolds from the perspective of selected characters, was high on my reading list. Like other Mallon works I've read, it did not disappoint.

They're all there, from Nixon on down, including two with whom I've had actual interactions - Jeb Stuart Magruder and John Dean. Magruder, who found redemption in becoming an ordained minister after doing time for his role heading up the aptly-named CREEP (the Committee to Re-Elect the President), became the pastor of a church in Columbus, Ohio, where I was once a member of the flock. I'd been thinking of leaving, but no way was that going to happen with a Watergate conspirator giving the Sunday sermons!  I also commiserated about investigative journalism then and now with John Dean, the hapless White House counsel, when he spoke to the City Club of Cleveland about his book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush a few years ago. Like me, he couldn't understand how the media had fallen asleep at the switch during that entire administration.

Mallon's flair for both dialogue and narrative meticulously weaves together the stories of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's ultra-loyal secretary and eraser of tapes; Pat Nixon, his long-suffering wife; Fred LaRue, one of the least well-known but most embedded cover-up conspirators; E. Howard Hunt, one of the "plumbers," and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the ancient daughter of Teddy Roosevelt who was a major Washington wag. The overwhelming sense I get is that, as with so many things, actions that could just as easily not have been taken led to calamity that ruined lives. Tragedy in the best Shakespearean tradition ensues.

Blues So Bad, Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars (1977)

I try to drown 'em in drink
But what do you think
The blues can swim
They don't sink


I've been away from the blog for too long, working on "other projects," as we say, and I'm itching to get back to it. While I was AWOL, any number of music greats passed on, and two of them - Levon Helm and Duck Dunn - just happen to be featured in Blues So Bad, from an album, Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars, that escaped my notice at the time.

Tomorrow would have been Helm's 72nd birthday, so this is highly appropriate, but the way I found the album had nothing to do with him (I wrote about him in a previous post). I was looking for information on Henry Glover, a pioneering music executive whose name I ran across when I wrote about Steve Cropper's Dedicated some months back. On that tribute album to the 5 Royales was a touching cover sung by the glorious Dan Penn, Someone Made You For Me, which had been written by Glover, just one of 20 pages of songs that his entry on AllMusic shows he wrote or co-wrote over his long career. Glover, also the first black record executive in America dating back to the 1940s, was, with Syd Nathan, the brain trust behind Cincinnati's King Records, and helped make that company a trailblazer in not profiling white and black music, merging its "race music" label, Queen, into King in 1947. 

If You Don't Think (That I Love You), Frankie Pighee & the Soulettes (1967)

Numero Group has done it again - excavated soul music that would otherwise have remained dust in the wind, and it blows in from my own backyard. The Boddie Recording Company box set brings together scores of songs by mostly unsung performers that a husband-and-wife team, Thomas and Louise Boddie, lovingly recorded and pressed into vinyl for more than 20 years in an old dairy on property they owned on Cleveland's East Side. The building at 12202 Union Avenue remains, its imposing metal sign with eighth notes for the two Ds still intact.

Thomas was a wizard with electronics, and graduated second in the class of '42 at Cleveland's East Technical High School, where he was the lone black student. After WWII army service, he became an organ repairman and bought a music recording machine. Thus was born the first black-owned recording studio in Cleveland.

As described in the accompanying booklets, Boddie seems to have been set up and operated on a wing and a prayer, but it was a nexus of activity at a time when cities made things - and pressing records was one of them. The box set is an astounding representation of that output, dubbed a "who's who of who's that?"

The Boddie clientele at first was gospel and jazz performers, with soul singers following in droves as that style became pervasive in the early 60s. The Boddies had no money to meaningfully promote this music, and never pressed more than a thousand copies of anything, but hoped that the recordings could at least serve as demos for their clients. In all, there were seven labels, the most enduring of which was Soul Kitchen, and on this compilation is a stirring cut by Frankie Pighee & the Soulettes, If You Don't Think (That I Love You). Pighee's catchphrase, "Boy, that's cookin'!" was the inspiration for the label moniker.

Although you could mistake Pighee's raw dynamic voice for a male's, as I did, the singer was a 400-pound woman early in her career (she later had weight reduction surgery that altered her voice considerably). She cut her teeth at church. Then she made friends with Leo Frank, whose Leo's Casino was the venue to which the big-name soul acts of the day flocked. That friendship led to Pighee opening for the O'Jays, the Temptations, Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson. Her recording career seemed to be held back by her imposing frame, but the surgery negatively impacted her voice and strength. She died in a car accident in 2002.

Like all Numero box sets, it is a work of art and craft. The Boddie set, comprised of 58 soul and gospel tracks on three CDs, also presents delightful artifacts like old photos and advertising flyers. The Boddies freely promoted their sidelight business, on-location recording services. One flyer says: "If you are tired of terrible sound, call us, for block partys, picnics, parades, conventions, bazaars, carnivals, political rallies, re-unions, mobile sound advertising, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc." Yes, there are five etceteras.

The Boddies became recyclers in 1973 when an OPEC oil embargo imposed restrictions on the petroleum that's a primary feedstock for vinyl. Thomas' supplier informed him, according to one of the Numero booklets, that as a minority he would be serviced last, if at all. Flagrant discrimination couldn't have come at a worse time, as the need for their pressing services was at a peak. Ever resourceful, Thomas bought a grinder, which meant he could reuse inventory from dead labels as well as from jobs where the customer simply disappeared. Even after the embargo ended, he continued the practice.

When Thomas Boddie's industrious life ended in 2006 following a brain aneurism, Louise shuttered the facility with its contents left to molder intact. Years later, Ohio-based archivist Dante Carfagna convinced her to help him sort through the priceless flotsam and jetsam of Cleveland music history. Thanks to him and Numero Group, a stunning box set now documents the hard work of so many young hopefuls and the couple determined to give them their place in the sun, if only for a moment. A must-have for music history devotees.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron (1971)

"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied." - Langston Hughes

When I discover, as I often do, all of the glaring omissions in my awareness of the long roster of baby boomer-era musicians, I always wonder how I missed these things. There were only just so many ways to hear music back in the day, so the question is usually one with no answer except I wasn't in the right place at the right time. 

So in the case of Gil Scott-Heron, I can't really say why I was oblivious to him in his heyday; I would have been a fan had I known. He was technically a spoken word artist so that made him something of a rarity, I never heard him on the radio stations I was listening to, no one else I knew was listening to him either, and given the subject matter and presentation of his often scathing social commentary there were probably efforts to marginalize him in the music industry itself.

The New Yorker did a profile on him a year ago that I hung onto and only just read today, even though I intended to back in May when he died. At that time it was obvious how much he meant to many people, both as an influence for other performers - his work's often seen as the forerunner of hip hop, a distinction he had no use for and disagreed with - and just generally to a certain segment of the music-consuming public.

Scott-Heron, who loved to write, was intellectually and creatively precocious, and bored out of his gourd at the public school he attended in New York City. His English teacher, once she got her hands on some of his writings, approached a private school in a tony section of the Bronx about possible enrollment. They were very interested in him, but since he would be one of just five blacks in the student population and hailing from a vastly different socioeconomic status, he was asked by a school official how he would feel if he saw a classmate go by in a limo while he trudged up the hill from the subway. An irrepressible wit and no-bullshitter all his life, he replied, "Same way as you. Y'all can't afford no limousine. How do you feel?"

After graduating from high school he got a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, an institution founded in 1854 to educate blacks who would never be admitted to other colleges in segregated America. Among Lincoln's alumni was the poet Langston Hughes, who Scott-Heron always claimed had influenced him mightily. There he also met his long-time collaborator Brian Jackson, who composed and arranged the music for Scott-Heron's spoken words through 1980. What's so striking about those words is the staggering number of cultural and political references in so many of them - he had a granular awareness of what was going on in the world around him. And he was having none of it.

He raised his deep, rich voice in so many memorable songs, but he is probably best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. There were two versions of it, a live one with just percussion and another with a full band. The first came out on his album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and was rerecorded with the band for the B-side of his single Home Is Where The Hatred Is. There's so much going on in this and so many ways it can be interpreted (here's Scott-Heron himself explaining) and the cadence of the words reminds me a lot of another poet that I often read aloud in those days, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

As time went on, Scott-Heron's life became mostly a horrible mess, ravaged by a powerful drug addiction, health problems and prison sentences. "No matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around," Scott-Heron sang in his 2010 release, I'm New Here. Not as true when you've got a crack cocaine habit as he did. We're all the poorer for his demise.

UPDATE, January 1, 2012: Two news items from today, or news to me, anyway, both from today's New York Times. First, a posthumous memoir entitled "The Last Holiday" is coming out on Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. There's a wonderful excerpt in today's Times magazine. Second, Mos Def is changing his name as of today, to Yasiin Bey, and on Jan. 6 will be at the Indelible Festival in New York performing a tribute to Scott-Heron. Wish I could be there. 
 

I'm Into Something Good, Herman's Hermits (1964)

PBS is airing one of its perennial oldies programs to raise money, and I happened to tune into it this past week right at the point where the sunniest vestige of the British Invasion, Peter Noone, launched into I'm Into Something Good, the debut single of the band known as Herman's Hermits (often pronounced with dropped H's for maximum effect). I'm telling you that opening riff is loaded with some sort of happiness elixir, because my mood went from one thing to the other in seconds flat. It was positively medicinal.

The song was penned by none other than Carole King and her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, and like so many songs of the British Invasion groups at the outset, theirs was not the first recorded version. A member of the Cookies, Earl-Jean McCrae, released her version as a solo artist earlier the same year, although I have no memory of it whatsoever. Some of the Cookies later became Ray Charles' Raelettes. And I didn't realize this, but they were the original singers of Chains, also written by King and Goffin, and later covered by the Beatles on the Please Please Me LP.

Mickie Most, who was producing the Animals and the Nashville Teens, took a shine to a demo he was given of the boys from Manchester. He thought Noone looked like the late President John F. Kennedy (maybe so, but not with that snaggletooth he had at the time), which was a selling point any day of the week during that time period. Though just a teenager, Noone had been acting since childhood, playing a bloke named Stanley Fairclough in the long-running British TV series Coronation Street, among other roles, and had a definite stage presence, as front men go.

Most's strategy for success with the group involved concocting a repertoire of sweet, usually bouncy, non-threatening songs that made them seem squeaky clean despite the fact that they had the same threatening haircuts as the Beatles did. Herman's Hermits were actually more popular in the U.S. than they were in their native land, where in some instances no one bothered to release some of their American hits, which always had a decidedly English feel to them (Herman's Hermits went out of their way to affect English accents, including ones not their own, while other groups were more keen on sounding like they could be from anywhere). The group spent almost all of 1965 on this side of the pond, touring and fending off screaming teenyboppers at every turn in exactly the same manner as the Beatles did, and selling about as many records.

Despite being musicians in their own right, Most favored the use of session musicians for Hermits' records - musicians which included, at various points, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones (the latter arranging many of their songs, according to Noone). While a dizzying string of hits was to follow into 1968 - some of which were quite nice, others of which were too cloying for my tastes - ultimately being a singles band doomed them as album-oriented radio evolved and flourished. (Their cover of Sam Cooke's Wonderful World was delightful, I thought.)

Noone, who also continues to act, has for years made the scene with a version of the Hermits wherever the 60s is being revived and reminisced over. He has come here to Akron, Ohio, on numerous occasions and I have not gone to see him. His appearance on this PBS show was so therapeutic, however, that I may have to check him out if he comes again. Reliving the past seems to agree with him - he's the healthiest looking rocker from that era out there, and still has a head of shining hair. And I think he may have had that snaggletooth snapped out as well!

I will play us out with Dandy, but not the version Herman's Hermits did - Ray Davies wrote it, which somehow I managed to not know, and the Kinks originally recorded it.

Many Rivers To Cross, Jimmy Cliff (1969)

Look at all of the things I've done that are really not reggae: "Sitting in Limbo," "Many Rivers to Cross," "Trapped." So really first and foremost, I'm an artist. - Jimmy Cliff, November 2011 GQ)

A Jimmy Cliff resurgence is afoot, and it's giving me the opportunity to make up for a sizeable lapse in my musical education. He just performed with the Roots on Jimmy Fallon, and released a new EP, Sacred Fire (becoming a full release next year). Even before that, though, I was pondering him because he showed up in a big music feature in GQ called "The Survivors," about a group of artists who've "never stopped rocking" despite various challenges.

Everything I've read today makes clear that Cliff is a consummate collaborator, influencer of many other musicians and passionate social commentator, and has always marched to the beat of his own drummer as far as the music industry is concerned. Which may be why the entirety of his career has not followed a trajectory that led to enduring commercial success. But I don't know if that really matters.  

In the 60s and 70s I wasn't into reggae, wasn't really even exposed to it in any significant way I can recall, so I was only dimly aware of Cliff then. What's interesting to me is his comment above about not seeing himself as a reggae artist exclusively, particularly in view of GQ's contention that he would belong in the pantheon of great musicians for Many Rivers To Cross alone. A recent Cliff performance of this song at an intimate venue in New York City had the club owner in tears, according to one report I saw, and I would imagine I'd have been right there with him. This is gospel and gospel music never fails to unhinge me. It takes only seconds, usually; I have absolutely no defenses against it.

Though world music might be a better category for him overall, Cliff is generally considered the poster child for reggae; outside his native Jamaica, he has long been viewed as an ambassador for the rhythmic musical style with the upbeat tempo. In fact, he was one of Jamaica's cultural representatives to the 1964 World's Fair in New York (I was there!). When he was 14, he left the impoverished rural community he lived in, having quit school, moved to Kingston, overlaid ska beats on American music, and then had his first hit, Hurricane Hattie. (This was an actual hurricane that ravaged the Caribbean in 1961.) He's said in interviews that reggae developed organically, emerging from him and other Jamaican performers who were frustrated having to sing music that in no way represented their specific social consciousness or life experience.

Personal note: Setting aside Eric Clapton's cover of Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff, my first really meaningful introduction to reggae, which is still flimsy at best, came in the form of a band that an old boyfriend and I followed devoutly in Columbus, Ohio, in the 80s, Arnett Howard's Creole Funk Band. Howard's repertoire was comprised of many influences, particularly Jamaican, and we became regulars at many of the Columbus venues where the band performed. I will always remember how the music propelled our relationship forward - it made us get out on the dance floor on a regular basis and put us in touch with a sort of joy that had a strengthening effect on us for a very long time.

As is the way with music, genres are revered and altered in other genres. Among the well known Cliff appreciators were The Clash's Joe Strummer, and today, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, who produced Sacred Fire; Cliff covers their song Ruby Soho on the EP. The trend of younger artists (Jeff Tweedy of Wilco with Mavis Staples or Jack White with Wanda Jackson come to mind) nurturing older artists in the studio and giving them new life is one that is bearing very interesting fruit right now. Bob Dylan allegedly pronounced Vietnam the best protest song ever written (Cliff has updated this now to Afghanistan); Paul Simon's Mother and Child Reunion grew out of his admiration of Cliff (it was recorded in Jamaica with Cliff-associated backing musicians), who has made at least one wildly successful cameo appearance on Simon's current concert tour. These are only some of the artists who count Jimmy Cliff as important to them personally or in general.

And then there's The Harder They Fall, which starred Cliff and to whose soundtrack he contributed several original songs, including Many Rivers To Cross. It turns 40 next year. I've never seen it, but it's now in my Netflix queue and I'm looking forward to checking it out. In the GQ interview, Cliff hints a remake may be in the works. New life, indeed. I'll play Cliff out with him singing Many Rivers To Cross at this year's Glastonbury festival in England. We can dispense with the dry eyes right now.

I Live For You, George Harrison (1970)

This past month I was stricken with bacterial pneumonia and landed in the hospital for 10 days so my plan to comment on the long-awaited documentary on George Harrison by Martin Scorsese, Living in the Material World, went by the wayside. I am now recuperating at home and thinking about George is back on the agenda.

Note: I Live For You is not a cut on Let It Roll shown above. I just love the beauty of his likeness here.  The song isn't in the documentary either, but to me it exquisitely sums up what George's life came to be about.

Every Scorsese music doc I've ever seen suffers from content that zigs and zags and leaves me hanging. This one is no exception. Fortunately, it does settle down in enough places to further my education about George and for that I am supremely thankful.  

My primary interest was understanding his spiritual journey and getting some sort of bead on the entirety of the life that the Beatles' only true outsider had led.  I remain sorry that he left us too soon and so painfully but have no doubt that George made the most of the life he had, in spades.

The man had so many friends, and they are liberally featured in the film. One of the most intriguing aspects of his personality was how many he had despite having such a devotion to solitude and cultivation of his inner life.  And of all of them, there was an uber-friend - Ravi Shankar.  I am clear that we have Shankar to thank for George's liberation as a solo artist committed to putting the material world in its proper perspective after a life where all of his worldly needs had been met very early on but brought little happiness. He states unequivocally that Shankar ("my blessing") was the first person in his life to ever impress him who wasn't trying to impress him. He showed him how his beloved music had the power to take him directly to God, George's paramount objective.

Nothing about his Catholic upbringing, which exhorted him to simply believe, resonated. His ongoing exposure after a certain point to holy men, swamis and mystics helped him to arrive at one major epiphany: you must see God, you must perceive the soul, otherwise it's better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. His life became a quest for direct spiritual experience and meaning, while doing the things he loved with the people he loved. As much time as is spent on this topic in the film, I would have been open to seeing more.   

As we all do, George had a dark side. Eric Idle and others point out the bitterness and anger that he always struggled with. Sources of those emotions varied, and aren't fully explored here, but certain things can be deduced and at the very least revolve around the Beatles - and taxes. 

On the Beatles years, not much is new, but the doc distills it well - how marginalized he was despite his obvious and prodigious talent as a musician and deep knowledge of so many genres, and how ready he was to fly the coop of the oppressive group politic. A lowlight: too many of the comments excerpted from McCartney interviews here were maddening in their condescending tone. Put a sock in it, Macca. What a massive ego that man has.

Yet I would argue that George's quiet personal influence and competence as a band member probably kept John and Paul from destroying each other sooner - as George Martin points out, they were far more competitive than they were collaborative. George does acknowledge, though, that the four of them depended on each other every overwhelming step of the success ladder they ascended. ("How many Beatles does it take to change a lightbulb? Four!") 

The composer of Taxman truly loathed the punitive British tax system, although that's not given any major emphasis either beyond one early interview where he and John were asked if they were millionaires yet. No, they said. Where does your money go, then?  "A lot of it goes to Her Majesty," John says. "She's a millionaire," George says.  While he was dying he bought a house in Switzerland so that he wouldn't have to pay exorbitant taxes. 

In one of the final moments of the film Ringo relates going to that house to visit George in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life.  Ringo's daughter Lee was battling a brain tumor in Boston and he had to immediately depart for the U.S. following the visit. With tears in his eyes, Ringo, who in every interview excerpt clearly communicates his love for his bandmate, says the last words George spoke to him were, "Do you want me to go with you?" 

George believed that leading a spiritual life was a choice and was available to anyone who was willing to work to find what was already present but hidden.  It does seem he was more evolved than the rest of us for having put forth the effort with such dedication. And when he finally died, "he just lit the room," according to his wife Olivia.