100 Awesome Things - Part 22 - From The Vault 2012

This was originally posted on 13 December 2012, a date of great meaning for me. Why? Read on...

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I started writing this yesterday. It was going to be about Led Zeppelin. They're all around at the moment what with the Kennedy Center Honors and the release of Celebration Day. I saw a bit of the O2 gig aired on BBC2 on Saturday, impressed with how not-sucky it was. The three of them and Jason Bonham are all good enough musicians that it doesn't matter how snake-hipped or lion-maned one is these days.

100 Awesome Things - Part 21 - From the Vault 2012

I posted this on 8 December 2012. This is a date that has a great deal of meaning to me, given that it's Morrison's birthday and Lennon's anniversary.

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Sixty-nine years ago today, give or take some hours, Jim Morrison entered the world. I assume he did so kicking and screaming.

I started writing this post a few days ago after a comment on one of my favourite feminist blogs related to a Doors song, then I got caught up in a conversation with a work friend slash bandmate I shall call Mark (because it's his name).

Then I ditched it, because it was the same old "boo hoo me I was a freak at school" toss. Let me try again. Once more, with brevity.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 20 - From the Vault 2012

Reaching towards the end of 2012 as 100 Awesome Things continues...

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Thanks to Crossfire Hurricane and certain small-scale, cheaply priced concerts, the Rolling Stones are all over the news again... my feelings towards  Stones are probably best categorised as "ambivalent".  I think "Satisfaction" is one of the greatest songs in the rock and roll genre. The lyrics are sublime, the riff unforgettable... and yet their Isle of Wight 2007 set was so... bad that I can't forgive or forget somehow.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 19 - From The Vault 2012

I'd love to give you reasons for my absence which are exciting - "I've been on the Nostromo!" or "I was recruited by James Bond for sekrit spy work!" or even "been on holiday" but no, nothing like that. No good excuse, in fact. I haven't even really been editing the Novel O' Doom...

I did, however, play a gig last week with a fab bunch of musicians. We call ourselves Clarabella and the Crypt Kicker Five and we play 'pre-decimal blues', that is to say, mostly blues songs which are from before 1971, which was when Britain went decimal.

As an aside, I'm incredibly grateful for this because my maths skills are not super and I have enough issues counting decimal currency.

So we played a show in a little basement club on one of the most musical streets in London. The Rolling Stones recorded their first album in the same building, so on that basis you can expect tickets to my shows in 2060 to cost about a million quid. Start saving.

I'm fortunate enough to work with a bunch of people who are super musicians away from the electronic yoke of our office jobs. They don't seem to mind that my aforementioned issues with numbers mean I sometimes get stuff a bit screwy. Funny that music, which is so crucial to me, is fundamentally about The Math. Counting bars and figuring out key changes and stuff are actually tough for me because it's maths. Ugh. They're patient with me, anyway. We don't play together very often but when we do it's fabulous fun.

Last year we did a Christmas thing where we performed a Sleepy John Estes song called "Drop Down Baby" (ripped off by Led Zeppelin for "Custard Pie") in a later, Lonnie Donegan/Rory Gallagher arrangement (no prizes for guessing who suggested it, and unfortunately no YT link) which has fantastic slide guitar going on, "Please Mr Jailer" by Wynona Carr which some of you might recognise from John Waters' movie Cry-Baby and 'Got My Mojo Workin' by Ann Cole..

"Mojo" is probably one of the most famous songs in the blues canon. It's also a good example of the many issues around 'borrowing' and 'copying' and 'homage' and 'plagiarism' and 'copyright infringement' one finds in blues.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, Ann Cole did the original. Muddy Waters heard it and put his own version together. Lawyers then made some money but both versions of the song retain their own copyrights. You can probably make a decent argument that Muddy's version is pretty different. Certainly they feel different.

As far as that goes, fine. I love both versions and I'd no sooner choose my favourite child than say which is 'best'. Mind you, I have no children...

There's something about performing a song which (if you're doing it right) gives a person a deep feeling and understanding of a song. Or for me, anyway. I'd been shrieking along to Rory's version of the song for ages, and felt I knew it. I did... to an extent. But standing on a stage and putting it across as one's own self is, for me anyway, a different matter.

Who was I singing to? Who was I singing for? Why?

Remembering the words comes with repetition. Hitting the right notes comes with practice. Feeling it requires effort. That's why there are people with good pitch, decent tone, never get a word or note wrong and leave me cold (see Buble, Michael) and yet there are singers who are barely able to get in the same room as the right note that move me to tears.

It's why I'll put my heart and fucking soul into every damn thing I sing even if there's only five people in the audience. It's why I needed some idea of the answers to those questions.

When it comes to Mojo, the answers are actually pretty simple: I'm singing to every lost crush, every unrequited lover as every frustrated, heartbroken crusher. Pretty universal... more specifically, it's me to every single person who fails to recognise how totally brilliant/fantastic/wonderful/awesome/continued superlatives here I am with all the impotent rage of the unsung genius.

My ego-monster loves Mojo. My inbuilt self-bullshit meter recognises the tragedy of it. After all, not all the black cat bones and hoodoo ashes in the world change the outcome. To me, it's far more than just 'girl can't catch guy's eye', and that's before even dipping into other interpretations - the stalker language, the different vibes born simply of the performer's gender, different arrangements and interpretations of the music.

Intrepretation is at the heart of anything creative shared amongst humanity. It takes different forms depending on the medium, of course, but it's what makes the work live. It's what transforms passive consumption into passionate engagement. Incidentally, this is what 'non-fans' so often misunderstand about fandom. They don't see - don't feel - the effort, the emotion, the work fans put into their item of interest. Go to FictionAlley and you'll find Harry Potter fans still going at it years after the publication of the last book... or hang with Ulysses fans (both of them) on Bloomsday... it's not so very different to me diving into 'Only the Lonely' or all those Thin Lizzy songs I've sung over the years.

Interpretation is also what makes singing someone else's song an entirely different beastt to performing something of one's own. Not better or worse, but different. I have to try harder with someone else's choons than my own. With my own, I've already done the hard work. I've already stabbed myself in the heart and let the results run across the page, after all. I already have the key to the song because I built the lock myself.

It keeps the songs alive, too. I'm not talking about dull-as-scuff identikit covers, or that terrible habit of getting a girl to sing with nothing but an exaggerated Generic American accent, acoustic guitar accompaniment and calling it 'stripped down' and 'reimagined' because most of those are only fit for TV adverts for middle-class lifestyle products.

Now, to the song I'm actually featuring in this post. As well as as the three songs mentioned, we did a few others last week. One was Big Mama Thornton's "I Smell A Rat" which we kicked off so fast I practically rapped it; I had the audacity to think I could take on "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" and did OK precisely because I did my way and not Marvin's. We also did Ike Turner's "She Made My Blood Run Cold" which feels different just by switching genders. And we turned Memphis Minnie's "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" into what I would almost describe as electrified country-blues for want of a better description.

We finished with the many-times-covered "Rock Me Baby". I think most every blues band and every wannablues band has probably done it over the years. You know, people with names like "Hendrix". I like the Doors' version, of course. Otis had a go. I've got more than one of Big Mama Thornton's version on my iPod...

I cannot speak highly enough of the brilliance that was Willie Mae Thornton. Singer, songwriter, just fantastic. As she says in this very video "I can't sing like anyone, but I have to do it my own way." Which is why when we did it last week, we used her tremendous interpretation as a start and moved on from there to something entirely our own.

As Madam Yevonde said: BE ORIGINAL OR DIE!

It's actually really easy to be original: be yourself.

C 2012.

100 Awesome Musical Things

Part One - Statesboro Blues - The Allman Brothers Band

Part Two - Octopus Jig - The Dubliners
Part Three - Got To Give It Up - Marvin Gaye

Part Four - Who Cares What The Question Is? - The Bees
Part Five - Doctor Who Cold Open - Craig Ferguson
Part Six - Monster Mash - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
Part Seven -Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy
Part Eight -These Are The Days of Our Lives - Queen
Part Nine - Who Do You Love? - The Doors
Part Ten - The Mooche - The Duke Ellington Orchestra
Part Eleven - I'm Happy Just To Dance With You - The Beatles
Part Twelve - Rabbit - Chas n Dave
Part Thirteen - The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie - Rambling Syd Rumpo
Part Fourteen - I Found a Dream - Marilyn Monroe
Part Fifteen - FBI - The Shadows
Part Sixteen - A Million Miles Away - Rory Gallagher
Part Seventeen - Mr Cole Won't Rock and Roll - Nat King Cole
Part Eighteen - The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 18 - From The Vault 2012

Part Eighteen already!

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I have a new (to me) computer for which I bought some speakers which came with a subwoofer. I did the obvious: hopped over to YouTube for some funk music to appreciate said subwoofer. It's not big but it does what I want it to.

I've always been fond of a stonking bassline. I love how they can move me from stillness in a way that few other things can. A nifty drumline might get my fingers or feet tapping, great guitar riffs stick in mysoul forever, but fab basslines move my entire being like nothing else.

So I suppose it's not much surprise that one of my favourite bands was led by the bass guitarist.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 17 - From the Vault

The beat goes on... this time, it swings...

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Once upon a time, when I was an impressionable teenager, I saw a TV documentary about a man called Dean Martin. This was around 1997 or 1998 when suddenly (or rather, part of a marketing strategy), the Rat Pack dudes were back everywhere. Dino's tune "That's Amore" was used in a Pizza Hut commercial here and suddenly everyone was singing it. It must not have been long after Sinatra died and the coverage that got... and since then, marketing people have been misusing swing/easy listening/lounge to their selling advantages.

100 Awesome Things - Part 16 - From The Vault 2012

Up to Part Sixteen already... handy when someone already wrote your posts for you...

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I was going to post about a Certain Irish Guitarist but decided to dodge the bullet again. I was going to post some Dean Martin or something.

And then Lou Martin died.

Almost every truly great musical legend worked with other great musicians. They might not be as flashy or as charismatic. They might not be songwriters, but behind practically every single Golden God there is a backing group of brilliance.

Jimi Hendrix had Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell in his Experience.
James Brown had the likes of Alfred Pee Wee Ellis
Freddie Mercury had Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon.
Elvis had Scotty Moore and Bill Black
Miles Davis... basically just worked with the best.
Philip Lynott had his revolving door of guitarists, but he also had a fantastic constant in drummer Brian Downey.
It's not a coincidence that Clapton did his best work with Bruce & Baker and then with Duane Allman.

Rory Gallagher was no exception. One of the real great guitarists, he was also a charismatic frontman with a decent voice, but even he needed something behind him. He, like the other legends, knew the importance of working with the best.

Lou Martin was a great pianist. He could do blues, boogie-woogie and rock for sure but he wasn't a slacker when it came to classical. This link pretty much proves my point.

Funny thing is, Lou died on 17th August 2012. On 17th August 2008, I walked into the Cork City branch of HMV and bought my very first Rory Gallagher record: The Essential 2-disc compilation. It was raining on and off of course, it was a Sunday and I'd been wandering the town since 8am waiting for things to open. I'd even gone to Mass at the cathedral for something to do.

I wandered, listening to The Dubliners on my iPod. Ronnie Drew had died the day before and I was dealing with it in the only effective way I knew: immersing myself in his voice. I had french toast at a trendy cafe and continued my wander.

Rory Gallagher was a name I knew, but I didn't really know the music. I could've told you he was a blues rock guitarist, a dead Irish one no less. I had one of his songs - "Born on the Wrong Side of Time" on my iPod. The title appealed for obvious reasons. There in his hometown I decided I really should buy some record of his. In HMV I was confronted by a giant poster of Ronnie Drew, of all things.

I'm so glad I was in Ireland that weekend. Ronnie mattered there. Not so much here. 'They' knew how I felt. I was at home, geographically and musically. I couldn't summon the necessary to walk into a pub on my own so I didn't check out any of Cork's famous live music scene. I stayed in, watched the Ronnie Drew documentary on RTE 1 and read the liner notes of my new CD.

I went to Cobh, a pretty little port with a strong feeling of grief sewn into itself thanks to the Titanic, the Lusitania and the dreadful legacy of the famine and emigration. I read the liner notes again.

I got on a train to Dublin, where I ate at Gallagher's Boxty House as usual, ate at O'Neill's as usual and went to see Philip on his birthday, as usual. I stared at the Music Wall of Fame in Temple Bar, caring for the first time about the guitarist with the long brown hair. I nipped up Grafton Street to visit Philip's statue and there got into a conversation with two Dub rock fans about Rory.

It wasn't until several days later, back at work, that I actually listened to the CD. A secret: at first I wasn't all that impressed. I mean it was good but it didn't grab me totally. I liked the second song, "Moonchild", for sure. Then I listened to "Barley And Grape Rag". But I didn't get sucked in immediately. I'd be silly to, right?

According to this very blog, I listened to "Barley and Grape Rag" one hundred and eighty-seven times between late August and the end of 2008. I sang it at the work Christmas gig while wearing a Rory t-shirt. It was awesome.

But I wasn't sucked in. Oh no. I was up all night watching videos on YouTube, but I wasn't sucked in. I literally bought the t-shirt, but I'd have to be really fucking stupid to get obsessed by another dead rock star, right?

By 2008 I'd already carved plenty of other names on my heart. Lennon, naturally. Harrison. The lizardy fellow. Philip. Dean Martin. Valentino. Flynn. You pretty much know them if you've been here before. I'd be really daft to left someone else come along and gouge another scar, right?

I am that fucking stupid. By the time I even noticed, I was much too far gone. I should've noticed when I was on the tube late one night, returning home from being in the Just A Minute audience and I was dancing in my seat to the delta-like sound of "Who's That Coming" and I should've noticed when every visit to HMV began with a trip to the 'G' section of Rock and Pop. I should've noticed when the panic of leaving my gymbag in Starbucks was more to do with losing the newly-purchased Against The Grain CD than my sneakers.

No, I should've known exactly what was going to happen on 17th August 2008. He is a dead Irish rock musician who was fantastically good at his job. King Cnut had better odds against the tide.

Truly though, I didn't quite get it right away. It took a little while for my ears to get attuned to his work. It took even longer for me to beleive that he meant it about not selling out, about being dedicated to the music and even longer than that to believe he wasn't secretly a bastard.

Turns out he was that dedicated to the music and I've still yet to find anyone who has a bad word to say about the man himself.

Four years later, I love that man's music more than I can tell you. That's why it's taken until now for him to be the subject of the challenge, because I can't speak about it. I can't tell you how I love it, only that I do. I can't tell you how deeply it is now scored into my soul, as if forty years had passed with me stood by the side of his stage every night.

I picked one video above all for this post. It is the song which probably ensured a part of my heart will be forever Rory's, because he wrote down my pain and gave it voice:

Rory Gallagher - "A Million Miles Away" - which incidentally features footage of Cork City and some excellent Martin organ.

"There's a song on the lips of everybody/There's a smile all around the room/There's conversation overflowing/So why must I sit here in the gloom?.... I'm a million miles away, I'm a million miles away, sailing like the driftwood on a windy bay."

I have been that bleak, adrift and disconnected. Sometimes I still get close to it. Knowing that one of my heroes was able to write a song which so exactly described the state of my soul worries me: I wouldn't wish it on anyone. That he might have felt the same breaks my heart, and I hope it was one of those occasions where a writer was able to portray a world without inhabiting it.

I have been that bleak, adrift and disconnected and that song was, ironically if you like, an anchor I used to drag myself back to shore. That's one reason I love his music so.

Most of it is Rory's guitar and his voice, his songwriting, his grasp of the genre he loved so much. But he wasn't alone on that stage. First with Taste, then with his various Rory Gallagher line-ups, the classic of which involves Lou Martin's keys.

I can't tell you what I love and why without writing a dissertation, and I already wrote one of those for Jim Morrison. You have to listen to the music itself and decide for yourself. It's between me and the music and it's between you and the music. The contract is personal and non-transferable.

For me, the most succinct I think I can be is this: It is a deep scar on my heart and I wouldn't have it any other way. Well, there is another way, but nobody's managed to resurrect the dead yet.

C 2012.

100 Awesome Musical Things

Part One - Statesboro Blues - The Allman Brothers Band

Part Two - Octopus Jig - The Dubliners
Part Three - Got To Give It Up - Marvin Gaye

Part Four - Who Cares What The Question Is? - The Bees
Part Five - Doctor Who Cold Open - Craig Ferguson
Part Six - Monster Mash - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
Part Seven -Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy
Part Eight -These Are The Days of Our Lives - Queen
Part Nine - Who Do You Love? - The Doors
Part Ten - The Mooche - The Duke Ellington Orchestra
Part Eleven - I'm Happy Just To Dance With You - The Beatles
Part Twelve - Rabbit - Chas n Dave
Part Thirteen - The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie - Rambling Syd Rumpo
Part Fourteen - I Found a Dream - Marilyn Monroe
Part Fifteen - FBI - The Shadows

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 15 - From The Vault 2012

I was going to post about a Certain Irish Guitarist, but I had another idea pinged at me and I can sense a Matt Damon/Jimmy Kimmel type theme beginning...

Awhile back, a friend at work linked me to an advert for junk food nastiness which features thousands of mini-Hank Marvin clones in the schoolyards of Britain, who are naturally transformed back into their own selves once they are fed the junk food. "Hank Marvin" is, of course, rhyming slang for 'starving'.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 14 - From the Vault 2012

Part 14...

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I was going to write about a certain Irish guitarist, but Sunday was the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death. I've been a big enough fan of hers over the years to be moved to write about this.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 13 - From Vault 2012

More 100 Awesome Musical Things...

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I was going to make this post about a certain Irish Guitarist, but then tonight BBC Four showed a documentary about Kenneth Williams and I changed my mind.

I loved the Carry On movies as a kid. They were just so silly and naughty without being so explicit that it was unsettling. Kenneth Williams was so snooty and repressed, and Sid James was so common and lecherous in contrast.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 12 - From The Vault 2012

100 Awesome Musical Things continues...

Given the opportunity and the right subject, I can talk for hours without let up. Most of you know this: in person I'm not much different to my blogging self. Never one short word when sixteen long ones will do (except the f-word, of course)...

As a child I was no different. Upon reaching their tether, more than once I heard one or other of my parents say "You've got more rabbit than Sainsbury's!". Sainsbury's sold rabbit then - I remember seeing them in the freezer section. The website suggests this is no longer the case, despite occasional newspaper articles suggesting it's making a comeback in the nosh department.

Friday Fiction - In The Dark Moment Before Dawn - From the Vault 2012

A short story wot i wrote in 2012, inspired a little by Patrick Stewart's powerful episode of Who Do You Think You Are and any number of real life people.

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In The Dark Moment Before Dawn

'Come back,' she whispered into the freezing air. 'Come back to me.'

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 11 - From the Vault 2012

Another '100 Awesome Musical Things' post!

I just saw A Hard Day's Night in my favourite cinema. I haven't seen it in a long while.

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 10 - From the Vault 2012

I have always found it difficult to sleep, but when I was in my first year at university it was seriously bad. It was that year that I pulled my only three-nighter and I only went to sleep because I got bored. This was before Lancaster University had internet in the res. halls so I even had to walk up to the 24hr computer lab to read Buffy fanfic to pass the time.

It was very late one night that I found a TV show worth watching at that time. Four channels don't give you much option at 1am... It was Ken Burns' Jazz documentary. Looking at the Great Wiki's page, I must've come in at Episode 2. The ten episode series ran at two hours per episode so it was perfect for me to burn some time with.

It is a documentary rightly criticised for various reasons, but for me it was just what I needed then: an introduction to the music. My only true exposure to jazz beforehand was Coppola's the Cotton Club movie (itself problematic) and the occasional flicker of interest in something I might hear on TV or in a movie (I remember being entranced by a moment in The Addams Family which used Duke Ellington's "The Mooche" and a similar experience with Billie Holiday's "The Very Thought Of You" during Forever Young). Otherwise, I saw jazz as being like in the Fast Show sketch: up its own arse and really very dull. I was very wrong...

Names like Ellington, Basie, Beiderbecke, Carmichael, Armstrong, Fitzgerald, Henderson began to take on special meanings to me. A whole world opened up as I realised that jazz wasn't what I thought it was - or what it had become in mainstream media. As the series progressed, I discovered more... I already loved Dean Martin and Sinatra's swing but there was more! And then Miles Davis. I still remember tearing open the packaging of Kind of Blue as I sat on the bus back to campus so I could listen to it on my discman. And the feelings when I discovered I preferred Birth of the Cool!

And for the first time, I was discovering that I loved something made by black Americans for black Americans. I was an American Studies major and it was all beginning to make sense to me... my eyes were being opened exactly as a university education should ensure they are. I began to get some understanding of what words like "segregation" really meant - more from Jazz than from class, I should add.

Did I mention I found that I loved a lot of the music? Not all of it, but then there's plenty of rock music I don't like. In some ways, blues music means more to me, but if I've learned anything in my discoveries over the years, it's that all music is connected, bound together in ways expected and not.

So, for my tenth Awesome Thing, I give you Duke Ellington and his Orchestra playing "The Mooche":

C. 2012

100 Awesome Musical Things

Part One - Statesboro Blues - The Allman Brothers Band

Part Two - Octopus Jig - The Dubliners
Part Three - Got To Give It Up - Marvin Gaye

Part Four - Who Cares What The Question Is? - The Bees
Part Five - Doctor Who Cold Open - Craig Ferguson
Part Six - Monster Mash - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
Part Seven -Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy
Part Eight -These Are The Days of Our Lives - Queen
Part Nine - Who Do You Love? - The Doors

100 Awesome Musical Things - Part 9 - From the Vault 2012

The 100 Awesome Musical Things series reaches one of the dudes that was always going to show up sooner or later...

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So far I've posted a variety of dead people's music... and a lil' bit of living people.

There is one Dead Musician who is notable by his absence so far. Today that ends.