First stop at YouTube this morning finds us revisiting the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness that took place at London’s Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992. Joining Queen for a superb version of “All the Young Dudes” were Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople; David Bowie, who wrote the song; guitarist Mick Ronson; and Joe Elliott and Phil Collen of Def Leppard.
The Bette Midler/Bob Dylan version of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain” was one of the more popular mp3s ever posted here. I couldn’t find a video of it – I’d hoped for some television performances – but I did find a decent live performance of the song by Neko Case in Seattle, Washington, on August 30, 2008.
Here’s Talking Heads with a kickass version of “Take Me to the River.” The original poster at YouTube noted this was a “clip from the movie.” I’d assume that “the movie” was Stop Making Sense, except that the soundtrack for the film lists a running time for “Take Me to the River” at about six minutes and this clip last for more than eight minutes. All-Music Guide lists only one Talking Heads version of “Take Me to the River” that runs eight or more minutes, and that’s on an album entitled The Complete Gig, about which I can find little information. Answers, anyone?
[Note from 2022: The Complete Gig was a live album released unofficially on CD in Italy in 1991. This clip is likely from the concert that was recorded for that album. Note added May 17, 2022.]
Tomorrow, I may dig into some music by one of my favorite bands from the 1990s, or I might go back to the box of unsorted 45s. We’ll see.
Here’s a video of the Staple Singers performing “Respect Yourself” at the 1972 Wattstax music festival, which took place in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The festival, notes Wikipedia, was “organized by Memphis’ Stax Records to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots. Wattstax was seen by some as ‘the Afro-American answer to Woodstock.’ To enable as many members of the black community in L.A. to attend as possible, tickets were sold for only $1.00 each. The Reverend Jesse Jackson gave the invocation, which included his ‘I Am – Somebody’ poem, which was recited in a call and response with the assembled stadium crowd.”
I think – but don’t know for sure – that the video is pulled from the film Wattstax, a documentary by Mel Stuart that focused on the festival and, as Wikipedia notes, “the African American community of Watts in Los Angeles.” Wikipedia adds, “In the film, interspersed between songs are interviews with Richard Pryor, Ted Lange and others who discuss the black experience in America.” (Richard Pryor’s fame still shines; for those who don’t remember, Ted Lange’s fame came from playing Isaac Washington, the bartender, on the television series The Love Boat.)
Video unavailable.
Yesterday, I posted “Bags and Things,” the title track to Dennis Lambert’s 1972 album. This morning, I found a video of Lambert performing “It Only Takes A Minute” in March 2008 at Hollywood’s Viper Room. It turns out – and I might have been one of the few out of the loop on this one – that Lambert co-wrote (with Brian Potter) “It Only Takes A Minute,” which was a No. 10 hit for Tavares (No. 1 on the R&B chart) in 1975.
Here’s a look at Honey Cone dancing and lip-synching their hit (No. 15) “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part I” on a 1972 episode of the The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
Video unavailable.
One of the songs I posted yesterday, “All These Things We Dream” by the Living Daylights, has been downloaded less than any of the other five. Noticing that last evening, I pulled the group’s self-titled CD from the stack and dropped it in the player. I still like almost all of it, and as the CD seems to be out and print and I am persistent, I’ll be offering the entire CD tomorrow, hoping to persuade at least a few of you to give a listen to an unknown group who put out a very, very good album in 1996. See you then!
When the Rolling Stones recorded “You Got To Move” and released it on Sticky Fingers in 1971 (with the title offered as “You Gotta Move”), they credited the song to Fred McDowell, a Tennessee-based farmer and blues singer who’d somehow been given the name of Mississippi Fred McDowell. It was not an unreasonable decision, as McDowell had recorded the tune in 1965 for his second album on the Arhoolie label, which was released a year later and listed him as the song’s writer.
Here’s that version by McDowell:
(It’s worth noting that McDowell was an anomaly in the blues revival of the late 1950s and the 1960s: He’d never recorded before, while many of the blues artists celebrated during that revival had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether that made McDowell’s previously unrecorded music more “authentic” – as I’ve seen written in at least a couple of places – is for others to judge. It was certainly new to listeners, and, despite McDowell’s frequent use of an electric guitar, clearly linked to the Delta tradition.)
But McDowell did not write the song. Second Hand Songs lists the song as “traditional,” noting four recordings that predate McDowell’s 1965 recording. (McDowell’s 1965 recording is not listed at all; his 1969 live version with the Hunter’s Chapel Singers is listed, another reminder that as useful as the website is, it’s not complete.)
Those four earlier listed recordings came from the Willing Four in 1944, the Two Gospel Keys (Emma Daniels and Mother Sally Jones) in 1947, Elder Charles Beck & His Religion In Rhythm in 1949, and Blind Gary Davis with Sonny Terry in 1953. One can assume two things, I think: There were other recordings as well before McDowell recorded his 1965 version, and the song no doubt predates the Willing Four’s version. By how much, who knows?
And I’m going to make a third assumption: That crediting the song’s creation to McDowell on his 1966 album was an error by someone at Arhoolie. McDowell would certainly have known that he’d learned the song elsewhere, and everything I’ve read about McDowell tells me that he was an unassuming, almost humble man. I have my doubts that he’d have claimed the song as his.
(At Second Hand Songs, “You Got To Move” is called “traditional,” and on the CD version I have of Sticky Fingers, it’s credited to McDowell and Davis. I don’t know what credits there are on more recent versions of the CD or the LP.)
McDowell recorded the song at least a couple more times: The previously mentioned 1969 recording with the Hunter’s Chapel Singers for an album titled Amazing Grace, and in a 1971 performance in New York City that was released as a live album two years later.
There are, of course, other covers out there, some by artists I know and others by artists unfamiliar to me: The Party Boys, Mike Cooper & Ian A. Anderson, Mick Taylor, Herman Alexander, the Radiators, Corey Harris, Jorma Kaukonen, Townes Van Zandt, Cassandra Wilson, Aerosmith, and Koerner, Ray & Glover are just some of them.
Most of those are faithful to the Delta sound of McDowell’s version; some of them reach back to what I assume are the song’s Gospel origins; and some are hybrids. Here’s one of the latter, the version offered by Sista Monica Parker on her 2008 album Sweet Inspirations.
We resume our tour this morning through the five W’s and one H of basic journalism, a trek we’re calling Journalism 101, during which we’ll highlight tunes with titles that include the words “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” and “how.” We started with a post titled “Who” last month. Today, we move on to “what.”
Our initial search through the 96,000 or so tracks in the RealPlayer brings us 1,476 candidates. There’s winnowing required, and we lose entire albums (except, in some cases, the title track) from William Vaughn, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Jimmy Smith, Bobby Womack, Koko Taylor, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Janiva Magness, Catherine Howe, the Decemberists, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jackie Lomax, Gloria Scott, Pat Green, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, and a fair number more. We also lose a few tracks from Michael McDonald, a couple tracks from the Staples, one track from the Dynamics, two tracks from Dinah Washington, a track from Rodney Crowell and a few others.
But there are plenty of tracks remaining for our needs this morning, and instead of trying to sort through the remainder with any sort of criteria, I’m going to let the RealPlayer do the work randomly. I’ll intervene for spoken word tracks, tracks shorter than two minutes, and anything before, oh, let’s say 1945. So here we go:
First up in our trek today is “What Do You Want” by the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds. The track showed up in the U.K. on the 1966 album Yardbirds. In the U.S., it was on Over Under Sideways Down. It’s your basic garage rocker with a slight Brit twist, at least until the last third or so, when Beck takes things over. It’s not near the top of the Yardbirds’ oeuvre, but mediocre Yardbirds is a lot better than a lot of other things we might hear as we wander among the digital shelves here.
We move on to a record about which I know next to nothing, “What More Can I Say” by Jeffrey Clay & The Diggers. It was released by MGM in 1965 but went nowhere; it came to our attention in the massive Lost Jukebox collection that was available online a while back. It’s not in any of the chart books or files I have, the Airheads Radio Survey Archive finds no mention of the single in its vast collection of surveys, and it’s the only single for Mr. Clay and his pals listed at Discogs. It’s not a bad record, just a little boring, with one odd thing: Producer Gene Nash tacked the sound of an audience of screaming girls to the beginning and the end of the record, in what I’d guess was an attempt to make the listeners think the group was overwhelmingly popular. I just wonder who it was those young ladies were actually screaming for.
And we hit some traditional country with “What’ll You Do About Me” by Randy Travis. I suppose that back in 1987, when the tune was an album track on Travis’ Always & Forever, the tale of a spurned lover who won’t give up seemed like a good topic. But listening thirty years later, in a world that’s become much more attuned to the traits of domestic abuse, I hear the story of a stalker who’s likely dangerous (especially in the verse where he’s got his hands on a two-by-two):
All you wanted was a one-night stand
The fire and the wine and the touch of a man
But I fell in love and ruined all your plans
Now what’ll you do about me?
Imagine the faces on your high-class friends When I beat on the door and I beg to come in Screamin’ “Come on, love me again!” Now what’ll you do about me?
Well, you can change your number, you can change your name You can ride like hell on the midnight train That’s alright, Momma, that’s okay But what’ll you do about me?
Picture your neighbors when you try to explain That good ol’ boy standin’ out in the rain With his nose on the window pane Now what’ll you do about me?
What in the world are you planning to do When a man comes over just to visit with you And I’m on the porch with a two-by-two? Lady, what’ll you do about me?
Well, you can call your lawyer, you can call the fuzz You can sound the alarm, wake the neighbors up Ain’t no way to stop a man in love Now what’ll you do about me?
All you wanted was a one night stand The fire and the wine and the touch of a man But I fell in love and baby, here I am Now what’ll you do about me?
Well, you can change your number, you can change your name You can ride like hell on the midnight train That’s alright, Momma, that’s okay Now what’ll you do about me?
And we close our four-tune sample with the combination from 2008 of a long-familiar name with a long-familiar tune: Bonnie Bramlett taking on “For What It’s Worth.” Bramlett, of course, was the Bonnie of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, the powerhouse group of the late 1960s and early 1970s that offered a wicked stew of rock, blues, R&B and gospel; and the song, of course, is the one that Stephen Stills wrote when he was member of Buffalo Springfield that became an anthem for the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A cynic could say, “Hey! It’s Double-Nostalgia Day!” But the song, slightly cryptic as it is, still sounds right today, and Bramlett’s supple and bluesy voice still sounds good on what is – so far – her most recent album, Beautiful.
In the past few days, I’ve set up the temporary table in the kitchen. It’s now home to boxes of canning jars with their rings and lids, envelopes of pickling mix, extra kettles, various canning implements, and a stack of fresh kitchen towels. I’ve brought the big canner up from the fruit cellar and wiped it clean of cobwebs and anything else that might have gathered during its off-duty months.
In the past few months, we’ve been giving away the 2016 batches of pickles, clearing the shelf in the fruit cellar as well as we can. There are maybe two pints left of last year’s pickles, as well as the big – two gallons, I think – jar of whole kosher pickles the Texas Gal made for herself last year. She’s still leery of opening it: As big as the cucumbers she chose were, she’s not entirely sure that nearly a year in the jar has pickled them to her taste.
And this morning, the Texas Gal is off to the farmer’s market downtown to bring home a bushel of early cucumbers from a woman who grows them on a farm near Browerville, about seventy miles northwest of here. It looks like our garden will supply plenty of cukes this year, but for the past few years – ever since we had one very poor cucumber season – the Texas Gal has ordered early cucumbers just in case.
So as of today, the Thirteenth Avenue Pickle Factory is open. Varieties this year will be kosher and Polish dill, bread & butter (both regular and zesty), sweet pickle relish, and a new variety of mix the Texas Gal grabbed during one of her preparatory shopping trips, spicy pickles. (I also noted that she’s picked up a mix for pickling okra and other vegetables; we neither grow nor regularly eat okra, so she has something else in mind for that mix, and she also found a package mix for salsa with the spices premeasured, so when we get enough tomatoes, she’ll be doing a couple batches of that.)
As I’ve noted other years, she does most of the work when picking and canning season rolls around, loving it during the early part of the season and maintaining good grace during the later portions of the season when the time spent in the kitchen gets a bit wearisome. I help with chores that require lifting or climbing the stepstool, and I pitch in and slice onions or whatever else needs to be done when required.
And we both get a good measure of satisfaction from all of it, first from the “plink” that each jar of pickles or other canned food makes as its seal sets in and later from the pleasure of giving away (and eating, too) pickles and other delights over the following winter.
To go along with this piece, I looked for a tune with the word “pickles” in its title. I found one, a jaunty little number by Allen Toussaint from 1970 titled simply “Pickles.” It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, so I searched for the word “kitchen” instead, and got back forty-seven results. Most of them, of course, are versions of Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen,” a song I love but that isn’t quite what I was looking for today.
So here’s “Mama’s In The Kitchen” by Toni Childs. It’s from Childs’ 2008 album Keep The Faith, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
The week is getting away, what with the holiday Tuesday and a meeting yesterday with Mom’s bank, working through some of the details for settling Mom’s estate. That should all be sorted through in a couple of months, but it’s going to be time-consuming (more for my sister than for me, although she’s asked me to pick up a couple of tasks).
Among my tasks for today is to call the storage place and change the billing for the two units where we have a lot of Mom’s furniture and some other stuff. We’re thinking about an estate sale in October to take care of most of things in the units.
And, since the word “estate” is on my mind, I searched for it among the 95,000-plus mp3s in the RealPlayer this morning, and I came up with eighteen tracks. Ten of them comprise the 1974 album Estate Of Mind by American singer/songwriter Evie Sands. It’s an album that I don’t know well. Perhaps I should give it more attention, since John Bush of AllMusic writes in his review that Estate Of Mind “was one of the better pop/rock albums of the mid-’70s,” adding in a parenthetical note, “It certainly deserved better than its poor sales performance.”
Another seven of the “estate” tracks come from the late Sixties group the Fifth Estate, known solely in most quarters for getting a No. 11 hit in 1967 out of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard Of Oz. Those seven tracks also include a couple of similar follow-ups to the hit, covers of “Heigh-Ho” from the 1937 Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and of “The Mickey Mouse Club Mouse March.” Neither of the follow-ups charted. (As to why I have the other four tracks from The Fifth Estate, I’m not at all sure. Things happen.)
The final track with “estate” in its title is “Estate (Summer)” by the Brazilian pianist and singer Eliane Elias, from her 2008 album Bossa Nova Stories. Her take on the Bruno Martino song is lush and languid and perfect for today. Here’s an English translation of the words that I found at the website of jazz pianist Michael Sattler:
Summer
You are as hot as the kisses that I have lost
You are filled with a love that is over
That my heart would like to erase
Summer The sun that warmed us every day, That painted beautiful sunsets, Now only burns with fury
There will come another winter Thousands of rose petals will fall The snow will cover all And perhaps a little peace will return
Summer That gave its perfume to every flower The summer that created our love To let me now die of pain
I’m battling another bit of cold/sinus crap, the Texas Gal and I are dealing with some impending changes in our health insurance, and I’m keeping up perhaps a bit too obsessively with the news coming from Washington, D.C.
So I’ve not been in the best frame of mind this week. And that’s why it was pleasant on Wednesday evening to get together with a few of the other musicians from our Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship to plan our musical offerings for the next few weeks.
We try to do that on a regular basis, but things got a bit stretched in December, what with holiday activities, so we were pretty much scrambling week-to-week as we put together the music since January began. So it was good to put a little bit of order in place, and it was good – as it always is – to work on some music for the next few weeks.
One of the tunes we’re planning to do in a couple weeks comes from a folkish trio of women who call themselves Red Molly. The trio – Laurie MacAllister, Abbie Gardner and Molly Venter – released five studio albums, a live album and an EP between 2005 and 2014. Since then, they’ve been on what they call a hiatus, working on solo projects.
The tune – “May I Suggest” – might seem out of touch with the way these times seem to be flowing, but I think that along with being concerned about that flow, we also need, more than ever, to be aware of the good things that still fill our lives from day to day. And Red Molly’s “May I Suggest” might help folks do that. I know it does for me.
It’s from the trio’s 2008 album Love and Other Tragedies.
The Texas Gal is in the kitchen, sorting a bushel of pickling cucumbers she picked up at the local farmer’s market this morning. Yes, she has cucumbers in her garden in the side yard, but just to make sure she has enough for an early batch of pickles each summer, she orders a bushel from a woman from Browerville, a burg of about 800 folks about sixty-five miles northwest of here.
The vendor called yesterday and said those cucumbers would be available at the farmer’s market today, and the Texas Gal brought them home a little bit ago. By that time, I’d gotten the canner and its accessories and about eighteen quart-sized canning jars up from the fruit cellar. And in a couple of hours or so, the smell of pickling brine will fill the house, and by sometime this afternoon, the first batches of pickles – combining the Browerville cucumbers with the first ones this season from our garden – will come out of the canner to cool.
It’s remarkable to realize that until we moved into the house not quite eight years ago, the Texas Gal had never gardened and never done any canning. She learned quickly, even with some missteps along the way, both in the garden and in the kitchen, and one side of our fruit cellar is almost always pretty well stocked. Well, the shelf space devoted to pickles is pretty empty right now – one lone jar of Hot Texas Mustard Pickles remains from last year – but that’s intentional: Over the winter and into the spring, we gave away everything else we had left on the shelves from the past few years to clear the space for this year’s batches.
It’s not just pickles, of course. Over the past few years, she’s canned green beans, wax beans, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, chili starter and various relishes that are staples here. She’s also tried some things that weren’t as successful, like the sweet and sour curried vegetables from last year. It was an interesting idea, but the reality was a little less tasty than we hoped.
This year’s canning efforts, however, will be mostly devoted to pickles. There will be green beans and wax beans galore from her portion of the community garden, but most of those will go to the Dream Center, a residence for ex-felons on the North Side that we help support through our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The same holds true for a lot of the tomatoes we’ll get, although I imagine she’ll make and freeze some pasta sauce, as the large batch she made and froze two years ago is now gone.
But that will come later in the summer, probably in mid-August at the earliest. Today and tomorrow, it’s pickling time. I’ll contribute where I can, but my role is mostly limited – as I’ve noted here in other summers – to the literal heavy lifting, moving the filled canner from burner to burner and lugging jars of cooled, sealed and labeled pickles to the fruit cellar as the last part of the process.
So with all that, it seemed like a good time to look for a tune with “kitchen” in its title. I dismissed twenty-seven versions of “Come On In My Kitchen” and looked further. And I came upon “Mama’s In The Kitchen” by Toni Childs. It’s from her 2008 album Keep The Faith, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
Echoes In The Wind Archives 