Month: August 2010

Cover Versions, demo, Gone but not forgotten

Black Sheep Boy Triple Whammy

Craig McAllister

Or Meet The Folkers (Slight Return). Coming hot on the slippery flippers of the folkie Dolphins post a week or so ago, I’m about to wax lyrical about Tim Hardin‘s Black Sheep Boy. Released in ’67 on Tim Hardin’s 2nd LP (Tim Hardin 2), Black Sheep Boy is a gentle finger-picked acoustic track, melancholic, downbeat and, thanks to the Atlantic Gulf Stream, perfect for this Indian summer we’re currently experiencing on the West Coast of Scotland.

Joe Strummer called Tim Hardin a ‘lost genius of music‘ and he was right. A songwriter’s songwriter, he penned one stone cold classic that would be oft covered by others (Reason To Believe), provided Nico with Eulogy For Lenny Bruce for her Chelsea Girls album and more recently has given Mark Lanegan the perfect track for his gargling sand ‘n gravel growl (Shiloh Town).  Black Sheep Boy is a melancholic rumination of a life gone awry. Basically it says, “I can’t do right for doing wrong, my family don’t love me and no-one understands me ‘cept for the girls who dig my golden curls of hair.”

Much like Reason To Believe, Black Sheep Boy has been covered by numerous hipsters, all eager to worship at the altar of Hardin. Front of the queue was Scott Walker who took Hardin’s introspective strumalong and turned it into a lush Spectorish wall of sound production, all sweeping strings, plucked nylon acoustics and bathed in pathos. Sitting quite happily amongst a mixture of originals, contemporary covers and the odd Jacques Brel song of decadance and decay, it is quite splendid and appears on ’68s Scott 2 (sleeve notes by ‘his friend‘ Jonathan King, fact fans).

Not as rich but no less fantastic to these ears is Paul Weller‘s frantic knee-trembler of a version, released on the now-obscure Volume series of CDs (the hip and happening of the day compiled on a CD with an accompanying fanzine-style glossy book.) At less than 2 minutes long it cuts to the chase, managing to pack in tasteful pedal steel, some subtle organ, occasional double-tracked vocals and Weller’s signature white man trying to sing like Otis on the last couple of lines. PW’s version was recorded in 1994, around the time of Wild Wood. You could suggest that Tim Hardin was something of an influence on the Wild Wood LP, given that album’s rootsy acoustic feel. You might even suggest that Weller has been a fan of Tim Hardin for a number of years. On Side 2 of Tim Hardin 2 you’ll find a song called Speak Like A Child. Now. Where have I heard that before?

Bonus Tracks!

Tim Hardin Speak Like a Child

The Style Council Speak Like A Child

(2 totally different songs, in case you were wondering)

demo, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!!!!

Craig McAllister

Think of a classic album. Go on! Just one! In fact, name two! Two universally accepted classic albums! Don’t tell me yet! You could probably name three, eh? Go on then! In fact, make it ten! Still easy isn’t it? I bet you were thinking about Rubber Soul? Revolver? Blonde On Blonde? The Dark side of the Moon? Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars? London Calling? Pet Sounds? Born to Run? Nevermind The Bollocks? The Velvet Underground & Nico? Yeah, yeah, yeah and yeah! I knew it. Take the standard Mojo/Word/Uncut/Guardian/Times list of da greats with you down to your local record shop (remember them?) splash the cash and hey presto! Instant cred in your record collection. But outta that list, you’ve got them all anyway, eh? Or at least the ones you like. Maybe even also the ones you know you should like but never actually play. I know, I know, I’m guilty of that too.

Bet you didn’t think of Sunflower though. Sunflower. Nope, not Paul Weller’s rockin’ and rollin’ clarion call from ’93 (I’m back! I’m back! Check out me Patrick Cox’s while you listen!) I’m talking about The Beach Boys Sunflower, released one week short of 40 years ago today on August 31st 1970. You’re all people of good taste. I expect you’ll have heard of it. No doubt some of you will have actually heard it. If so, sorry for the condescending tone. If not, sorry for the condescending tone, but what exactly have you been using those ears of yours for all this time? Sunflower is the best Beach Boys album In The World….Ever. Forget any one of those cars ‘n girls ‘n surf compilations that turn up every time the sun pokes it’s stupid head from out behind a big fat rain cloud. Forget (gulp!) Pet Sounds. Honestly! Forget it! It’s good. OK, it’s great. But it’s not even up there with Surfs Up. As a proper bona fide studio album, Sunflower knocks spots off of all of them.

Demoed mainly in the summer of ’69 (howdy Bryan Adams) the songs that make up the final, released version (like gazillions of albums before and since, it went through a series of tracklist changes) really benefit from the shared songwriting talents of Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson and Bruce Johnston. Brian’s songs make up the lion’s share of the album, but for me, it’s the Dennis songs that sparkle just that bit more.

Listen to Forever. Here’s a guy who’s a major player, a bit of a shagger as they say round here, and he’s writing love songs as tender and romantic as anything Paul McCartney’s ever came up with, with the added bonus of none of the sickly sweet gloop that McCartney can sometimes be guilty of plopping all over his best tunes. We all know guys like Dennis and if any of them wrote a line as brilliant as

If every word I said could make you laugh I’d talk forever…

if the song I sing to you could fill your heart with joy I’d sing forever

they’d get a kicking. Dennis, surf dude and man’s man must’ve had some nerve to bring those words out his brain, onto paper and ultimately onto vinyl. What a guy. What an absolute guy. (That’s a quote from the best film ever made). The words, the music, the arrangement, the na na na na na coda make Forever my favourite Beach Boys song bar none. Easy. Even Mike Love gets in on the act. Granted, not the Beach Boy most BB fans warm to the most, his vocals on All I Wanna Do are superb. On top of one of thee classic Brian Wilson chord progressions, they’re slightly far away sounding and as sunkissed as I can only imagine Malibu Beach to be. They help make this track one of the standouts on Sunflower. By proxy, this makes it one of the best Beach Boys tracks you’ve quite possibly never heard. Do yourself a favour, eh?

Elsewhere on the album you’ll hear snatches of melodies from the abandoned Smile album (Cool, Cool Water), top notch production and the best Californian session musicianship that Reprise Records’ money could buy. Belle and Sebastian would wet their beds if they could come up with an album approaching this amount of class. Misguided twonks like Richard Ashcroft think they’re making albums as good as this today (he really does hahahaha!). Most people consider the Beach Boys to be a singles band (see also Madness and Blur) but truly, Sunflower stands head and shoulders above everything the Beach Boys ever put their name too.  Buy it at your usual vendor of choice. Now!

*Bonus tracks

Everyone knows that Charles Manson became bezzy mates with Dennis Wilson for a wee while at the tail end of the 60s. He thought Dennis could get him a record deal. Instead, Dennis pissed him off by knicking one of his songs, changing some of the lyrics and sticking it on the Beach Boys 20/20 album. Silly move! Contrast and compare…

Charles Manson Cease To Exist

Beach Boys Never Learn Not To Love

Cover Versions, Dylanish, Hard-to-find

Meet The Folkers

Craig McAllister

A quick history lesson. Sit still at the back!

The Marymass Festival in Irvine is an annual event that dates back to the Middle Ages, although the Marymass festival that Irvinites are familiar with has been going in its current guise since only 1920. The Festival celebrates the time when Mary Queen of Scots stopped off briefly with her entourage of maids-in-waiting at Seagate Castle in (what is now) the town centre. In the lead up to Marymass, a group of voted-in dignitaries go around the local schools and select a 15 year old Queen and four Marys who’s job it is to sit in a couple of wee carriages and get drawn around the corners of the town as the centre piece of a parade. It’s all very serious stuff to those involved.

The parade appears to get smaller every year but always features a dazzling array of dancers, drunks and dandies. Horse-drawn floats dressed up in the themes du jour (this year will no doubt feature a Toy Story float) follow pipe bands who follow twirling majorettes who follow somersaulting seven year olds in leotards trying hopelessly to avoid the horse shit on the road.

The crowds love it. Sunburnt, tattooed and dressed in their Old Firm finery (and that’s just the women), they follow the parade as it progresses out towards The Moor on what was once the outskirts of the town. Ever since a drunk councillor pissed on the sacred, crumbling walls of Seagate Castle a few years ago, public drinking has been banned at Marymass. The pubs open ridiculously long hours on Marymass Saturday, but if you’re caught drinking outwith the walls of The Turf or The Porthead or any local hostelry, you can expect a clip roon the ear from the polis.

Glugging Buckfast from craftily disguised Cola bottles, the throng make their way to the greasy pole to watch as teams of young men (usually from the same family) make a human ladder up the pole to get to the top and remove a giant ham that awaits them. There can be only winner – it’s generally accepted that the ham is always won by the baddest boys from school’s big brothers and that all other teams are there merely to add to the spectacle. And it really is a spectacle. Horse racing, the shows (that’s a funfair, if you’re reading daan sarf) and any number of attractions, the whole of Irvine will be out on the streets this Saturday. Dontcha dare miss it now.

The music bit.

As part of Marymass, there’s an annual folk festival. Held over 5 days around Marymass, I think I’m right in saying it’s the oldest surviving folk festival in the world. This year is its 43rd year. It’s healthy, self-sustaining and plays to a small but fanatical crowd. When Billy Connolly plonked his big banana feet onto the bottom rung of showbusiness, he played the festival. Nowadays, there’s a hardy mix of locals, Irish, American, Scandinavian and Antipodeans who get together to swap stories and song.

Last night saw the annual ‘Open stage’ event and I was there. Judges from Living Tradition magazine put on their  Simon Cowell masks and select an appropriate winner, judging performers on choice of song, musicianship, vocal ability, you know the sort of stuff. The act that won it were head and shoulders above all others, and I say that not because 2 of  the trio were my parents, but because they really were the best. Pause. Pause again. Aye. You read that correctly. My parents. Way back before I was born, they were regulars on the folk scene, playing on the same bill as Billy Connolly, railing against the government with a handful of protest songs and a couple of cheap guitars. All this fell by the wayside when 3 children arrived, but they’ve picked it all up again and with a fanatacism that’s hard to beat.

Lou Reed? Joe Strummer? Him from Glasvegas?

One of the acts last night did a song that sounded like Greenwich Village folkie Fred Neil‘s The Dolphins. But it wasn’t. However, it gives me a good excuse to stick up some versions of The Dolphins, a spot-on brilliant song that’s been covered countless times by countless artists.

Tim Buckley‘s version

Beth Orton‘s version. Features Terry Callier on backing vocals.

A youthful sounding Trashcan Sinatras version.

Taken from a hissy radio session in February 1991.

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

King Curtis (part 2)

Craig McAllister

Everybody listen up! Everybody! All you laydees an’ Gen’lmen! All you foxes an’ fellas! All you fellas wishin’ they was foxes an’ all you foxes wishin’ they was fellas! Tonight’s contest sees some of the greatest soul records ever made* slug it out in this here ring for the crown of Best Version Of a Curtis Mayfield Song….Ever! In the black corner we have our tag-team challengers, the mysterious and little-heard of 16 year old wonder, Miss Patti Jo and, fresh from touring the World and beyond with The Jackson 5, the delicious Sisters Love. And in the black corner we have the Undisputed! Genius! Of Soul! Funk! R&B! Gospel! And stack-heeled boots! Thee Heavyweight Champion of the World, Mr Cuurrttiiss Maayyffiieelldd!

Seconds out, Round1!

By 1973, Curtis Mayfield had penned an astounding 44 Top 50 US R&B chart hits for other artists. His version of the sublime Make Me Believe In You appeared on 74s Sweet Exorcist album, but by then it had been recorded by Patti Jo. Little is known of Patti Jo. I do know she was only 16 when she recorded her version. No amount of GoogleWiki sheds any light on her at all. I don’t know what else she recorded, what she looked like, where she lived. I don’t know anything about her at all. But I do know that her version of Make Me Believe In You is a reliable standard in Pete Wiggs’ (St Etienne) DJ box whenever he gets the chance to spin the wheels of steel. Vinyl pops ‘n crackles ‘n all, this is the harder-to-find full length version, not the edited one that usually crops up on yer more trainspottery soul compilations. Flute solo included, it knocks Curtis’ original into submission by the first minute, if you ask me.

Seconds out, Round 2!

Curtis put his version of Give Me Your Love on the soundtrack to Superfly. Scroll down a wee bit from here and you’ll find a live YouTube video of it. It is Blaxploitation personified. Lush, sweeping strings, hypnotic 4 note bass riff, stabbing brass, the ubiquitous wah-wah, by the time the vocals come in I find myself struttin’ the room like a velvet-adorned Harlem pimp. A look that doesn’t go down particularly well in this exclusive part of Ayrshire, even at Halloween. Snoop Dogg liked it so much he knicked it for the opening track of Doggystyle. But you knew that already. Or maybe you didn’t? Hear here.

In contrast, 73’s version by Sisters Love turns the original’s man-coming-on-to-woman on it’s sweet soul head, giving it an empowering pro-feminist love ’em and leave em twist. Or something like that. Either way, it‘s a bona fide, stone-cold underground funk/disco classic. Does that genre even exist? It does now, brothers and sisters. Punch for punch and pound for pound, Curtis takes this one for me.

That’s one round each. Patti Jo takes the first. Curtis batters Sisters Love in the second. Who wins? It’ll go to points. Listen, score them and post your winners in the comments section below. Ciao, soul brothers and sisters!

*mid 70s only

Cover Versions, Hard-to-find, Live!

I Love Led Zeppelin But…

Craig McAllister

..they didn’t half present themselves as the Artful Dodgers of rock music throughout their tenure as global-shagging rock gods. With a cheeky grin, a sly wink and mutterings of “public domain“, Jimmy Page was something of a sticky-fingered riff lifter. I’ve written about this before and I’m sure you know anyway, but any old blues tune that happened to catch his ear would be lifted in whole before being coated in volume, augmented by a slick bit of frettery and re-packaged as the big new thing. “I got those West Bromwich blues“, as Robert Plant moaned on one of those fantastic BBC sessions. Not that Robert Plant is entirely innocent in the whole thing either…

Jake Holmes. Not exactly a household name, but in the late 60s he was a regular of the Greenwich Village folk scene. In fact, in 1967  The Yardbirds caught him at the Village Theater where they watched him play the tracks that made up his debut album, ‘The Above Ground Sound Of Jake Holmes’. As Holmes put it in 2001,

“and that was the infamous moment of my life when ‘Dazed & Confused’ fell into the loving arms and hands of Jimmy Page.”

If you were being kind you could say that a keen-eared Page took the paranoid scratchy folk of the original and transformed it into a much bigger, more frightening rock song. If you were being honest though, you’d have to say that Page lifted it all, from those wee pinged harmonics at the start, to the descending riff and the whole sense of impending doom. Even Robert Plant got in on the act. His quietly sung vocals at the start are a carbon copy of the original’s. Did Holmes get credited when the track surfaced on Led Zeppelin I? Nope! Just like Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Albert King et al before him, he was conveniently un-acknowledged and forced to watch from the sides as his tune made someone else lots and lots of money.

The one thing Page did add to the original was the bowed guitar section, where he scraped a violin bow across the top of his heavily-echoed strings. But even this trick wasn’t original! Mod pop outfit The Creation had been doing this in their stage show since the mid 60s. Watch 1966’s Painter Man for proof….

This is a hot topic right now. 5 weeks ago, Jake Holmes began legal proceedings against Jimmy Page, claiming original copyright on the song. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. Poor Jake certainly neeeds to see things set to right. Sadly for him though, legalities mean that, if successful, he’ll be allowed to claim back just 3 years of royalties. That should be a decent sum, but peanuts compared to what his rightful share should be.  

Go Compare dot com:

Dazed & Confused (Jake Holmes)

Dazed & Confused (Led Zeppelin)

Dazed & Confused (Led Zeppelin, live Paris Theatre, London, April Fool’s day 1971. 18+ minutes. Can you handle it?)

*Footnote

When writing this piece, I was checking my facts and figures online when I stumbled across this fantastic site. All of the above, bar the quote from Jake Holmes is my work, out of my own head and arranged accordingly by me me me, but credit where it’s due and all that. I don’t want Perfect Sound Forever chasing me for royalties in 40 years time.

Rubber Plant

Cover Versions, demo, Hard-to-find, Sampled

Stone Soul Picnic

Craig McAllister

There was a brilliant piece in Mojo a few months back where a Dutch writer tracked down Sly Stone and managed to get him to ruminate on his life and music. Currently living between low-rent hotels and a minibus, Sly is crippled financially by the double whammy of huge medical bills and the ongoing saga of not receiving royalties from any of his Family Stone material. It seems that the Michael Jackson Estate holds all his copyright and since Jackson’s unexpected death Sly has been trying somewhat unsuccessfully to have his songs (and royalties) returned to him. All this won’t matter though, if the new album he has ready to go puts him back in the big time. Hmmmm.

Sly Stone 2009. Do not adjust your set.

Sly took a lot of drugs in the 70s. But you knew that already. He famously invited girls back to his studio, offering them the chance to sing on his records if they in return took care of his more immediate needs. Deed duly done, he would simply wipe their vocals from the session, ready to be replaced by the next naive hopeful the following day. Listen to There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Fantastically dark, druggy album, yeah? But a bit muddy sounding? That’s due to all the tape wiping that went on. By the time the record was finished the mastertape was almost unusable. I don’t know if he could get away with that today in the era of ProTools, but I’m sure if there’s a will there’s a way. He ain’t called Sly for nuthin’.

Classic Sly. Waiting for a backing singer.

You will all be familiar with Sly’s greatest hits ‘n bits of music. The focus for now is on those little-heard gems from his extraordinary back catalogue. One of his least-praised albums is 1974’s Small Talk. The last Sly album to feature the original Family Stone, it was released just after Sly married Kathleen Silva on the stage at Madison Square Garden. A mellower and downbeat affair (surprisingly given he’d just been wed), Small Talk relied heavily on pitter-pattering drum machines for the back beat. You won’t find anything approaching Dance To The Music-style hysterics on here, but you will find Time For Livin’. Have a listen to Time For Livin’ early version. Now go and compare it with The Charlatans‘ excellent wah wah and beat-heavy cover, taken from 1995’s charity ‘Help‘ compilation. I like the way Tim Burgess sings ‘fook‘. I had been unaware Sly swore on his version until hearing the cover and backtracking, ears ablaze and eyes a-popppin’. You probably know that the Beastie Boys do a thrash skate punk version on Check Your Head, but you’ll also know how far removed it is from Sly’s original that it’s almost impossible to count it as a cover version.

“I do!”

Although one or two band members appeared on it, Sly dropped the Family Stone moniker for his next outing, ’75’s High On You. None of its singles managed to crack the US Top 40, something Sly wasn’t used to at all. One of the better tracks is Crossword Puzzle. You might recognise the trumpet break from it. De La Soul sampled it to good effect on Say No Go. Here’s the harder-to-find Say No Go (Dope Mix). I’ve posted some stuff about De La Soul before, the records they sampled to make The Magic Number and suchlike. I don’t think the mp3 links will still work, but you can read about it if you’d like. Listen too to this, a trumpet-free take of Crossword Puzzle (early version). Demoed, sampled, looped and covered. That should be enough to keep you going for a few days.

Sly at Woodstock. That frantic, scratching sound you can hear in the background is the sound of Prince and Lenny Kravitz and (insert your own) scribbling down notes as they try to keep up with the master.