Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars

The back cover of the glorious compilation Best of Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, which I am unable to locate online, portrays four strangely attired people running around a tree. They don’t seem to know why they are doing this, but they are enjoying themselves immensely, and seem committed to continuing the action until they fall down. This is an ideal image for understanding the band.

Sam the Sham, whose real name is Domingo Samudio, is a Dallas-born crazy (last we heard he was a street preacher and motivational speaker working out of Memphis) who loved raunchy, laconic rock and roll of the most giddily mindless variety, and his sidemen—Ray Stinnet, David Martin, Jerry Patterson, and Butch Gibson—were consistently able to carry him to a demented part of frat-rock heaven. They recorded briefly for something called Dingo Records and then moved to MGM.

Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs are best known for their pair of Number Two smashes, “Wooly Bully,” a masterwork of indecipherability that made “Louie Louie” sound like an enunciation class, and “Li’l Red Riding Hood,” a hormone-laced fairy tale with a happy ending. If you’re guessing an enormous Kingsmen influence on these organ-heavy folks, you’re right. Hits aside, the modest gifts of the band were surprisingly malleable, as showcased on charming, wacked-out cuts like “The Hair on My Chinny Chin Chin,” “El Toro de Goro (The Peace Loving Bull),” and “(I’m in With) The Out Crowd.” All these songs were defiantly insubstantial, and all held out deep meanings to those with the right bent.

Historical note: Every cut on The Best of Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs was produced by legendary Sun Records sideman and sometime Elvis Presley composer Stan Kesler. You go figure the connection.

How much fun is this nonsense? Even a lipsynched version of “Wooly Bully” will improve your day:

Alas, this is one of the most-covered numbers ever:

And I do mean alas:

Lily Allen, “Guess Who Batman” (aka “Fuck You Very Much”)

The genius behind “LDN” and “Smile” delivers the sharpest flipoff to a racist friend since, well, the Specials’ “Racist Friend.” It’s also a lot goofier, thanks in part to the piano line stolen from the Carpenters. (No video, but I used the YouTube link so my readers don’t have to suffer through MySpace, where Allen posted the song.)

Clarence Ashley, “The Coo Coo Bird”

There’s no video of his 1929 original take, preserved on the awesome Anthology of American Folk Music, I’m guessing. This version of the song, performed during Ashley’s ’60s rediscovery, raises profound questions, particularly the line about seeing Willy “fly by.” Who is Willy? Why will he fly by? Why will that have an impact on the singer?

Bouncy pop or rail-thin folk? I vote for both today.

A few years ago I saw a documentary about the late, great Minutemen. In it, Flea, the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, said that whenever he made a career decision he’d ask, “What would D. Boon do?”

We may all ask that, but none of us actually do what Boon would. We don’t know what he would do now, more than 20 years after his death. Some background: When they were a going concern, I loved the Minutemen more than was healthy. When Boon died in a car crash in 1985, shortly after the release of the band’s best album, 3 Way Tie (For Last), he left with his career frozen. He didn’t get old or boring or repeat himself. We could always remember him as one of the guys screaming righeously on the cover of the 1983 EP Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat:

I’m not the first person to ask this question in a blog post, but whenever I read about some performer I like threatening to do something stupid, I wish D. Boon, or at least my idealized version of him, was around to give advice.

Why am I thinking about the Minutemen this morning? Because this morning at the coffee shop I heard a John Fogerty song, which made me think of Creedence Clearwater Revival, which made me think of the Minutemen covering Creedence, which they did not only on record but in someone’s backyard:

And while we’re on the subject of transformative covers of ’60s classics by SST rabble-rousers:

He’s about to start promoting his catalog with the beginning of the Archives onslaught, so what is Neil Young doing? Debuting new songs, of course:

1. “Sea Change” (on YouTube, but it’s audio only):

2. “Just Singing a Song Won’t Change the World”
in MP3 format

(I found both of these via the useful Neil Young News fan blog.)

(2007) Starts around 7:02:

(197 Fellow old-timers may prefer this one (solo starts around 8:18):

(1975) Even older people may be taken by this one (no guitar solo, but no guitar either, barely a picture to be honest):

Neil Young week is behind us at Jewels and Binoculars, but I must share this unexpected Beatles cover he’s been playing. Stay until the end; it’s all about the feedback:

UPDATE: Someone else has linked to the video — and, unlike me, has bothered to describe it.

Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band’s Jobless Rate Hits 20% (The Onion)

The numbers don’t lie:

I’d like to add, belatedly, my voice to the chorus of praise for R.E.M.’s Accelerate. I tend to distrust comeback storylines, so for a while I distrusted my own affection for this record, but Accelerate isn’t merely a comeback; it’s one of the band’s best and the only one they’ve made since Bill Berry left that’s worthy of the band.

R.E.M. is a singles band: a great singles band, but a singles band. Even full-length records of theirs that I have enjoyed — from Lifes Rich Pageant to Monster — have had long stretches of dull. Hey, the only R.E.M. album I like beginning to end is Chronic Town, which has a mere five cuts. But, for four minutes at a time, they can feel like perfection.

Accelerate is not perfect. The slow and midtempo numbers are a step above the snorers on the band’s last three records, but the rockers are outstanding: snarling, angry, bursting with life, the closest they’ve gotten to punk since their debut EP. Most people have pointed to Peter Buck’s rattlesnake riffs as the difference here, and they are sharp and surprising, but the greatest triumph here is Michael Stipe’s. He’s way outside his comfort zone here, both as a lyricist and a singer. On recent records, he’s been most comfortable overenunciating and overemoting. On Accelerate’s fast cuts, he manages being both pissed-off and openhearted simultaneously. Maybe it takes someone who’s been at this for 30 years or so to sound so raw, so surprised by what he’s come up with?

“Living Well’s the Best Revenge”

I was hoping to end our Neil Young week last month with some of my favorite versions of Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand,” as suggested by dedicated J&B reader Brian Johnson. I found some good ones, among them…

a live acoustic version from Massey Hall, 1971

and a more recent live version from earlier this year.

And I’ll add one: Live in London, solo, during his 1973 tour with the Santa Monica Flyers (MP3 format, 15.3M), a distant audience-recorded bootleg, but a performance that manages to be both wavering and strong simultaneously

But wait. Those performances show only one side of Neil: the quiet, precise, intense solo side. The wild, messy electric attack on “Cowgirl” isn’t well-documented on YouTube or any video side I could find (let me know in the comments if you found anything) so Jewels and Binoculars wants to deliver a pair of messages from that side:

Live with Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East, 1970 (M4A format, 15M): Young and Danny Whitten trade scorching solos, Jack Nitzsche adds muscle to the rhythm section; at 16:09, this is way too short (Like it? Buy it.)

Live at Red Rocks in 2000 (M4A format, 16.9M): gets off to a rough start (roughly half the band, including Young, starts leaning into “Like a Hurricane” — with headphones on, you can hear a woman in the crowd yell “Like a Hurricane!” — until everyone agrees which song to perform), then they work up to the expected level. (Like it? Buy it.)

I have two tickets to see Dengue Fever at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on July 9. Turns out I can’t go. If you’re interested AND YOU AND I KNOW EACH OTHER ALREADY, please let me know and we’ll set up, as they say in crime shows, a drop.

Prince Sues to Destroy All Copies of Tribute Album (Wired)

One of my regular correspondents has requested “Cowgirl in the Sand” to end Neil Young week. I’ve been scouring the Interweb for good versions to share. I’ve had no problem tracking down acoustic takes (including a pair from Massey Hall, 37 years apart), but I’ve had no luck locating many electric versions, either with Crazy Horse or the strong one from the Road Rock video. If anyone can direct me to sturdy cowgirls, please do!

(Brian, I’m trying…)

Maybe you like the rock video (a little cheesy):

Maybe you like this Crazy Horse version from 2003 (a little messy):

Maybe you like it with the E Street Band (!):

Maybe you like it with Pearl Jam (not bad, despite being Pearl Jam):

Maybe, like me, you think the performance on Saturday Night Live with the all-too-short-lived Lost Dogs, however contrived, stands as one of the wildest things Neil will ever do:

Neil Young week continues.

Here’s a good example of how the same song — in this case a more-than-quarter-century-old warhorse — can feel fresh when the band playing it every night is Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

I’m pretty sure the two versions of “Like a Hurricane” I’m pointing to here are from the band’s two nights at the Rock in Rio megaconcert in 2001. Please write me if I’m wrong.

The first version is the standard live version, exciting even in the little YouTube box on your computer screen, with an outstanding final solo:

The second version, though, which may be only one night away from the first, is dramatically different. It starts off on a less elevated plane, but Neil feels his way around the first solo to carve out some new wrinkles. Then, during a breakdown around five-and-one-half minutes in, one of Neil’s guitar strings breaks and chaos ensues. Rather than call for a new guitar, he lets the dead string sway against the five live ones, he moves briefly to the piano, he pulls out the other strings, he shakes the guitar, he supervises pandemonium. You must see this. The last two feedback-drenched minutes of this version are what the end of the world may sound like:

P.S. As a bonus, for the historians among you, let’s revisit the song as performed in 1976:

P.P.S. And let’s not forget its most unlikely cover:

Neil Young’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” backed by the then-current version of Booker T. and the MGs, was widely hailed as the highlight of the Bob Dylan “birthday” concert in 1993. Less heralded, but also tremendous, is his “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”: funny, loose-limbed, you can feel Young pull the band deeper into the song during his guitar breaks. Indeed, you can hear Neil and the MG’s coalesce as a band as this song progresses: he went on to tour and record with them.

If you must see Neil Young sing “All Along the Watchtower,” why not with the E Street Band?

And, for balance, here’s a clip of Bob Dylan singing Neil Young’s “Old Man”:

Plenty of people hate this performance of Neil with 3/4 of Led Zeppelin performing “When the Levee Breaks” the night both of them were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Plenty of people voted for Barry Goldwater, too, so don’t let that stop you from enjoying this.

The naysayers have a point: It’s a long, messy performance. When you have Neil Young and Jimmy Page onstage, it’s perverse to have Robert Plant take a guitar solo. (Don’t worry; Neil solos, too.) Indeed, Page betrays something close to a genuinely human smile as Plant spits out his surprising solo.

That solo isn’t as perverse, though, as the jam, which develops/deteriorates into Plant helming a pre-Danger Mouse mashup, singing the words to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” over the music of “When the Levee Breaks” and trading brief, efficient solos with Young. It’s a glorious mess, a wonderfully sloppy example of what pros can do when they’re playing for their own entertainment, regardless of the presence of TV cameras and audience.

It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday; time to start wasting time. I’ve been on a Neil Young kick lately, so every day this week I’ll point you to some of my favorite rare Young material available on the Interwebs.

Let’s start with a double shot of “The Sultan,” an ultrararity that will be part of the Archives box coming (yeah, we’ll see) in the fall. It’s an instrumental recorded in 1963 by Young’s first band, the Squires, and it sounds a little something like this:

On his recent tour, which Eric and I had the pleasure to witness during its Boston stop, Young ended a few shows with “The Sultan.” It is, I believe, the first time he played the song live in more than 40 years. Here’s the Paris performance back in February:

Endlessly malleable…

with The Band (1966)

with The Band (1969)

with Johnny Cash (also 1969)

with Rolling Thunder Revue (1975)

on the Never Ending Tour (1998 )

Just the tip of that particular iceberg…

Old means your comeback album is 30 years down the road…

One of the people at O’Reilly I hope I stay in close touch with is Roger Magoulas, who runs the company’s research group. Maybe we will, now that our conversations will no longer revolve around where that damn updated chart is. Roger sent me a great email about Bo Diddley and I asked if I could pass it along. So…

Roger writes:

I was surprised at how strongly I was affected by the news that Bo Diddley (ne Elias Otha Batea, ne Elias McDaniel) had died on Monday. It got me thinking about why and then it hit me, Bo Diddley hacked rock’n'roll. From building his own guitars and electronic effects, to using nursery rhyme self-referential boasting, to the driving beat (yes, the beat was copped from elsewhere; yes, it still resonates) and distorted guitar sound, Bo seems to have single-handedly invented much of the rock vernacular. He influenced nearly everyone of merit over the last 50 years, really anyone trying express high-energy with a dirty ambience. I love that the list includes Buddy Holly, the Dead, Bruce Springsteen, ZZ Top ,and the Clash. And how can George Thorogood ever repay him?

It wasn’t just the music, check out this video - in just 94 seconds on The Big TNT Show you can see just how rock’n'roll the big guy was:

Check out the staging, the knowing smirk on Bo’s face when the song starts, the wall of amps, the strut and moves, the skintight dresses, how much fun everyone seems to be having. Bo played a major role defining what a rock show should be. And he had women playing a pivotal role in his band from the early 60s. The woman playing guitar in the video, Norma-Jeane Wofford, aka The Duchess, could really play, providing the lead fills so Bo could concentrate on the rhythm and singing.

Like many disruptive hackers, Bo never got his full due. But I’ll never forget as I sit strumming out that crazy beat with the distortion turned way up on my amp. Rest in peace Bo, seminal rock’n'roll hacker.

Thanks, Roger!

Amy Rigby fans, take heart.

Just got sent this: ZME Music anniversary contest

I don’t know anything about these people, but it’s sort-of funny in a “they can’t even give away my book unless they throw in a t-shirt” way.

For obvious reasons, I’m listening to Bo Doddley’s Beach Party today.

I know that Ellis McDaniel has been the subject of some fine compilations (stop reading this and buy The Chess Box immediately), but I want to celebrate this album’s awesome grunge. Forget The Kingsmen on Campus, forget Nuggets. This live album is the most delightfully primitive rock’n'roll album ever. Recorded during two hot nights in July 1963 at the Beach Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Bo Diddley’s Beach Party is Bo at his most brazen and caustic, despite the safe-for-a-white-audience album cover. The sound quality lies somewhere below horrible, with vocals and instruments sliding in and out of earshot; even Diddley’s legendary rectangular guitar settles in the murk from time to time.

But what never sinks from center stage is Bo Diddley’s barbed-wire presence. He never ventures from his unshakable boasts — “Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger,” “Hey Bo Diddley,” “Bo Diddley’s Dog,” and “Bo’s Waltz” suggest the relative breadth of his interests. (No doubt that Universal, which owns the Chess catalog, is sitting on a tape of “Bo Diddley Is God.”) Bo is in love with himself, all right, but he is more in love with music. Specifically, he’s enamored of the electrified shave-and-a-haircut/two-bits stomp that he gave rock’n'roll and which subsequently has been picked up by everyone from Buddy Holly to Chrissie Hynde. Ben Vaughn cut a tune to Bo’s beat called “I’m Not Bo Diddley.” No one argued.

So all here reduces to beat. “What’s buggin’ you?” he asks as a throwaway deep into Side Two. “Well, knock it off.”

Amusing consumer note: Long out of print, the version of Bo Diddley’s Beach Party I have is a Japanses vinyl reissue, including a riotous lyric sheet that translates the line “Bo Diddley at the O.K. Corral” as “My poor Lily and ol’ Greg Morell.” Words don’t matter, though. Bo’s beat speaks in all languages.

Have a wonderful weekend. Back on Monday…

From the inventor … and two more giants …

#1
Jimmie Rodgers

#9
Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash

The brain works in weird ways. I was just listening to Little Richard singing the New Orleans ballad “Send Me Some Loving,” and midway through I started thinking about his great rocker “Bama Lama Bama Loo” and that made me think of the time I saw Elvis Costello sing “Bama Lama Bama Loo” on TV.

I hardly ever watched Letterman after I graduated college in the early ’80s, so it was just a fluke that I happened to be awake and Costello happened to be on the show one night in 1995. Was I working late? Was I up with a child? I don’t remember. I do remember that Costello was touring behind his precious covers record Kojak Variety and I didn’t expect much. But this was terrific. The core Attractions quartet was augmented by two top-notch guitarists — James Burton and Marc Ribot — and the six-piece unit grabbed the song and brought it to some new places. Enjoy!

Little Richard:

Elvis Costello and the Souped-Up Attractions:

…getting married. Hooray for Amy and Eric!

Which Sandinista Project contributors will be next?

As digital sampling becomes more and more pervasive as a recording technique in pop, the belief that anything is possible in a studio nowadays is also on the rise. But “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” took the cut-and-paste-sound approach used covertly on many records today and the scavenging of other songs as its very subject. The number asks: How smart can you steal? How slick can you mix? This technical apex of one of rap’s leading disc-spinners is tremendously influential—many of today’s dance-music and rock productions are unimaginable without it.

Grandmaster Flash started as a South Bronx dance-hall disc jockey whose trademark was taking his favorite rock and rap songs and repeating their hottest elements for heightened effect. “Wheels of Steel,” despite being credited to the full Furious Five, was a solo shot by Flash designed to show off the wizardry that knocked ‘em out live. After a stuttering intro, Flash lets Blondie’s “Rapture,” Chic’s “Good Times,” the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” as well as snippets from earlier Flash/Five singles glide in and slam out of the unwavering beat. These songs of different tempos all fit without being forced. Spoken sections, boasts, and song apexes are finely woven into an amazingly seamless whole. Before the serrated-edged righteousness of “The Message” and “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” turned attention to rapper and writer Melle Mel, the group was a showcase for Flash. This is why.

Visually pointless, but the only way I can point you to this song:

Wal-Mart Secures Bryan Adams Album Exclusive (Billboard)

Survey finds rockers Coldplay help you sleep (Reuters)

Stone Temple Pilots Rock Houdini Mansion

Over the past two months I think I’ve listened to more Asian rock’n'roll than in the previous 45 years combined. I highly, highly, highly recommend the following:

Look Directly into the Sun is a collection of Beijing punk bands, recorded last year by Martin Atkins, who fellow oldtimers will remember as the drummer in the original PiL lineup. This magnificent compilation of punk, pop, and rock’n'roll bands is the sound of a revolution about to happen. It feels like a London 1977 roundup. No matter the culture, the political system, or the economic framework, young people everywhere wanna scream and some of ‘em do it brilliantly. Like the ones here.

Friend, colleague, and esteemed Sandinista Project contributor Jim Duffy alerted me a while back to Dengue Fever, a California band that started out specializing in covers of Cambodian rock’n'roll of the early ’70s and has subsequently delivered a number of tough garage rockers that extend the tradition. I wanted to hear what inspired this inspired band so I’ve picked up a number of CD compilations of the original performers, stirring and alive, before the Khmer Rouge got their hands on them. Some of the selections on these sets may not be quite legit — I doubt that synthesizers and syndrums were available in pre-Pol Pot Phnom Penh — but some of the performers here, like Sinn Sisamouth, are secret giants most American rock’n'roll fans have never heard of, let alone heard. Jewels & Binoculars readers, can you direct me to your favorite Cambodian rockers? If you’re new to the band Dengue Fever, any of their three full-length sets — Dengue Fever, Escape from Dragon House, and Venus on Earth — offer exhilarating ways in.

The user-generated video below ain’t much (listen to it with your eyes closed if you wish, though it has charm), but this song offers endless pleasure. It’s like Chic and Abba had a baby! (That’s a compliment, by the way.)

Mikey Dread (nee Michael Campbell), producer, songwriter, and performer, is dead. We were honored that the man who so influenced The Clash’s Sandinista! was a contributor to our Sandinista Project (he accompanied The Blizzard of ‘78 on “Silicone on Sapphire”).

Carl Perkins’s gracious, quavering tenor carried some magnificent country ballads; among the most noteworthy are “Turn Around,” his first professional recording, and “Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing,” the most understated expression of honky-tonk regret and paralysis in post-Hank Williams country music. But Perkins’s meat is his rockabilly, “Blue Suede Shoes” and all that, in which he repeatedly drives full speed to the edge of his world, leans over the cliff to enjoy the view for a brief second, and then, as he knows he must, pulls back and carefully heads home.

“Rockabilly sure takes me over the edge,” top Stray Cat Brian Setzer countered when I threw that idea at him a few decades ago. “It’s the most menacing music. Heavy metal is kid’s stuff compared to it.” Yes, but Setzer and the many legions who adopted pompadours in the late seventies discovered the music and the accoutrements, not the culture. It’s no accident that most of the rockabilly revivalists came from northern urban areas. To them, rockabilly was Gene Vincent’s leer and Eddie Cochran’s shake without regard for the honky-tonk imperatives behind them. Setzer’s Stray Cats, eventually reduced to beer commercials, could afford to shoot over the edge; Perkins and his contemporaries, who didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a society that had already been liberated by rock’n'roll, had no such romantic alternative.

Yet on “Dixie Fried,” his greatest uptempo composition, Perkins comes as close as any rockabilly performer to going over the edge and living to tell about it. His guitar flashes like the barroom-fight switchblades his tale chronicles; his voice dances with the wobbly exuberance of his brazen, drunken protagonist. “Let’s all get Dixie fried!” he screams, shattering any pretensions to caution, or civilized behavior. The violence escalates and the song smashes to its head-on conclusion, not with the law, but with the inevitable. Perkins may have the gleam of the honky-tonk in his eye, but his eye is fixed on home, where he prays his honky-tonk gal has returned.

And they said we took liberties on The Sandinista Project.

Thanks to R.C. for the pointer. Sorry for taking so long to acknowledge it.

Sometimes you learn more from songs you’ve heard 10,000 times already after you haven’t heard them in years. That old warhorse “Baba O’Riley,” for example, is pretty terrific after you’ve kept away from it for a good long time.

And that’s the way I felt when R.E.M.’s radio breakthrough, “The One I Love,” came over the radio the other day. There’s so much there: the nasty repetition of the lyrics, the combination of yearning and disgust, deep desire and no affect, in Michael Stipe’s voice, the bruising jangle of Peter Buck’s guitar, the otherworldly counterpoints of Mike Mills’s bass and harmonies, and the emphatic closure of Bill Berry’s drums. This is thrilling, impolite, dangerous stuff.