Office Naps

A note to kind Office Naps readers

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:53:00 +0000

Some of you have noticed that your author, who has made it a habit to drop things for months at a time, then to only suddenly reappear like that errant stepfather, has done it again.

A bit of explanation. When one's waking hours are spent pitch-adjusting blue audograph discs or wondering whether more time shouldn't be spent with something called digiprov, other things - important things - perspective, for one, updating music blogs, another - tend to get pushed aside. Healthier souls, even in their busiest stretches, commit themselves to at least some daily moment of relaxation or favorite activity. The word, I think, is balance. That's something I've never much messed around with.

But Office Naps is something that we record collectors strive for. An unmediated, unregulated forum for our collections, simply, and an audience there to pay the tiniest bit of attention. Believe me, having someone, anyone, to listen to your music and your various exhortations about music is a true pleasure. And you, readers, you're more than just anyone, you're the best.

Which is to say I'll be back. Just give me another month or two.

much love,
Little Danny

No car, no woman, no money

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Whither the hard-luck lounge singer?

The dark-lit cocktail lounge at city limits, its few patrons and the décor both well past their prime. The nightclub singer, somewhere between down-on-his-luck and end-of-his-rope, staring pathos in the eye.

This week: everything that gets idealized, if that’s the word, about old Vegas. (It's also sort of a follow-up to this earlier post.)

Our historical revisionism aside, none of these three singers was from Las Vegas. Nor, probably, were they nightclub performers. But the overwrought vocals and haplessness are there. It was a shtick that would become even more of a caricature, reaching a nutty crescendo in the ‘70s, when every huge-lapels-and-sideburns duo from here to Elko self-released an album: Steve and Cozy Sing!

Photo courtesy of Tom Spaulding's excellent NorCal Explorer blog

But these three souls are downright compelling, if not good. Unlike a lot of previous Office Naps posts, they’re gathered together without a shared lineage to unambiguously connect them, or any obvious commercial antecedents. The Rat Pack - Dean Martin especially - may have played the part to a certain extent, but they were the boozy, free-spirited playboys, debauched rather than dejected. These, on the other hand, were the guys who always hung out down near the end of bar with an inevitable refrain: no car, no woman, no money.

1. Henry Thome, Wolf Bait (Viv)
I’ll begin with a bit about Phoenix’s Viv Records.

Viv was a label founded by Lee Hazlewood in 1955, when he was still a local country music DJ, and fledgling producer and songwriter, his “Some Velvet Morning” still a decade away, his hip drifter persona only beginning to develop. (Hazlewood’s ‘50s credits are nonetheless impressive, including “The Fool,” recorded by Sanford Clark, and a series of twangy instrumentals by guitarist Duane Eddy.) Viv was typical of the better independent regional labels that flourished in post-war America, the sort that chronicled hinterland music otherwise neglected by the labels in Chicago, New York City, Nashville, or Los Angeles, the sort run by individuals with certain ambitions, if not an idiosyncratic ear for music.

And that individual was Loy Clingman, a folk/country musician and songwriter who himself had recorded for Viv Records and who, by the late ‘50s, had bought the label from Lee Hazlewood. In addition to operating Viv (and several tiny affiliates), Clingman - a junior high teacher by trade - also ran the Baboquavari coffeehouse in Scottsdale with his wife. Given what must have been considerable strains upon his time, he managed it all with an enviable persistence. From the late ‘50s onwards, Clingman released a schedule of Phoenix-area 45s through Viv: country and rockabilly, folk, and, later, garage bands - as well as a smattering of local R&B and soul along the way.

Which brings us to Henry Thome. The almost comical sung-spoken asides, the lonesome piano, the 3 am trumpet solo: “Wolf Bait” could have had its own talk show. Thome plays the lovelorn sap brilliantly here, but, strangely, he was by all accounts a folk-singer who performed around Scottsdale and Phoenix in the early ‘60s. Thome was a regular at Clingman’s Baboquavari coffeehouse, apparently, a relationship that resulted in Thome’s three Viv 45s released between 1962 and 1963. This was the first of the three records, though none, of those I’ve heard, are particularly folk-y.

Nor were any of the Viv releases particularly successful. This record, from 1962, would be one of the label’s better performers - not for “Wolf Bait” but for its flipside “Scotch and Soda,” an oddly jazzy reading of an unattributed song from the Kingston Trio’s debut album a few years prior.

In addition to Thome, both “Wolf Bait” and “Scotch and Soda” feature Mike Condello (bass) and Bob Morgan (playing “drums” on a cardboard box). Notable Arizona musicians both, Condello in particular released some excellent late ‘60s psychedelic records, and was musical director for The Wallace and Ladmo Show, a local children’s television show.

2. Bobby Blue and the Love Orchestra, Black & Blue (Love)
Though presumably based in the New York City area, many questions will likely never be answered about Bobby Blue and this excellent version of “Black & Blue.” Including the thorny one of race. I only bother to mention this because “Black & Blue” is a well-known song, actually, one written by African-American lyricist Andy Razaf during the Depression, and famously performed by Fats Waller, Razaf’s great interpreter. Razaf penned, among hundreds of others, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose,” but “Black & Blue” is especially poignant, with understated commentary on racial injustice.

But Bobby Blue, in this version, crucially changes one of the original’s lines, and one of its most poignant: “I'm white inside, but that don't help my case / Cause I can't hide / What is on my face.”

Anyway, Blue’s version barely sold, which is a different type of poignant.

Love Records was a small Brooklyn-based label owned and operated by Alan Hartwell, a jazz bandleader. Hartwell produced the label’s sole hit: drummer Cozy Cole’s hip instrumental “Topsy.” (Cole, incidentally, would revisit “Topsy” several times in coming months for Love Records, including “Turvy,” parts I and II, and “Topsy-Turvy,” parts I and II - never too much of a good thing, that.) A full-length Cozy Cole album (Cozy Cole Hits), a few 45s from jazz singer Savina Cattiva - plus this week’s mystery selection, recorded in 1960 - would round out the label’s short, happy run of releases.

Surprisingly, Love Records has been reactivated by Hartwell himself in recent years.

3. Trey Barker, Valley of Tears, Part II (Fifo)
The songwriters here are Bob Markley and Baker Knight.

Bob Markley - self-styled bohemian, scion of Oklahoma oil wealth - first appeared in Los Angeles in the early ‘60s with a law degree and a burning desire for fame. Markley wrote a song or two (including this selection), and released one dire teen-pop 45, but his dreams only reached any sort of bloom as part of one of the stranger phenoms of ‘60s L.A. psychedelia: the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Most of this group preceded Markley, actually - core members Michael Lloyd (later a big-time producer and industry executive) and Shaun and Danny Harris had already been making home recordings together - and fell in with Markley after an introduction through notorious Hollywood rock impresario Kim Fowley in 1965. Markley desperately wanted to play frontman, and the group was impressed enough with Markley’s well-heeled circles and financial leverage to take him aboard. Thus was one of the stranger bonds in ‘60s pop music forged.

Baker Knight is an entirely different entity. A guitarist, singer and prodigious songwriter, the Alabama-born Knight journeyed to Los Angeles in 1958, where Ricky Nelson would make his fabulous “Lonesome Town” a big hit. From some ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll 45s to, later, some strange psychedelic pop, Knight would continue to release records under his own name, but his bread and butter would always remain songwriting. Ricky Nelson in particular would record Baker Knight songs, though several of the pop stars of the Frank Sinatra-owned Reprise label - Dean Martin, Nancy Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sinatra himself - would also record Knight’s material in the ‘60s.

“Valley of Tears”: something is clearly working here. Like “St. James Infirmary,” “House of the Rising Sun,” or, for that matter, “Lonesome Town,” this is just as much a state of mind. A great, weird blend of high atmosphere and bluesy hard luck, “Valley of Tears” could have shown that ham Presley and his “Heartbreak Hotel” a thing or two about creating a mood. Likely recorded around 1960 or ’61, Knight’s involvement here is not entirely confirmed, actually. Given the lyric’s similarity to “Lonesome Town,” though, this is almost certainly his handiwork. (Baker and Markley were acquaintances, moreover - Baker later contributed the song “Shifting Sands” to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.)

The story behind “Valley of Tears” will, I suspect, always remain obscure. This was only one of hundreds of songs that Baker wrote or co-wrote, and no, and I do mean no, information is available about singer Trey Barker. (I have the sneaking suspicion that Trey Barker is Baker Knight.) Also murky is the extent of Markley’s involvement with the mysterious Fifo label, which had a short, spotty run of obscure 45s in the early ‘60s, finally bringing everything full-circle with a lone album release in 1966, the ultra-rare debut by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Classic puzzle-wrapped-in-an-enigma stuff here.

Either way, Baker would continue writing songs. Elvis had a hit with his “The Wonder of You” in 1970, and Knight wrote country and pop songs with success in ‘70s, including Mickey Gilley’s 1976 version of “Don’t the Girls Get Prettier at Closing Time.” Baker retired from the music business in the ‘80s and moved back to Alabama, passing away in 2005.

As for Markley, despite artifice and his all-around dubious talents, his connections paid off to the extent that the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band released five interesting, if wildly uneven, albums for Reprise Records. However, Markley, according to legend, also later tangled with the police and, later still, drifted into dementia. The saga of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band is thoroughly chronicled here.

The War of the Roses

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:41:00 +0000

Boys and girls singing duets: not a new thing. You can probably trace an unbroken line from show tunes like "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” (1937’s On the Avenue) and “Do I Hear You Saying” (1928’s Present Arms!) backwards to 17th or 18th Century opera; Pamina and Papageno in The Magic Flute or Nero and Poppea in Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea.

A “Hey Paula” benefits from the same thing that made a “No Two People” special a few decades earlier. Chemistry, namely - the warmth and harmonics of the male and female voice added together, the sweet frisson of flirtation.

The ‘50s and ‘60s were golden decades for male-female duets in all different quarters - pop, folk, R&B, country, even jazz (think “Girl from Ipanema”). There are plenty of enduring examples: Louis Prima & Keely Smith’s “That Old Black Magic,” Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love is Strange,” Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell’s “All I Have to Do Is Dream” - “I Got You Babe,” of course. They captured the male-female thing in its carefree or deeply inspiring moments. Even the ribbing of Otis Redding & Carla Thomas’s “Tramp” or Johnny Cash & June Carter’s “Jackson” is affection in the guise of mere sauciness.

And there’s your problem: love is not all sunshine and strawberries. For every ten “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”'s, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recorded only one “Give In You Just Can’t Win,” a wildly implausible ratio in the scope of romantic dalliance.

To that there would always be country music, where the brokenhearted were part of the genre's biological fabric. Kitty Wells & Roy Drusky’s “I Can’t Tell My Heart That,” Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton’s “Holding on to Nothing,” Dottie West & Kenny Rogers’s “Two Fools Collide,” George Jones & Tammy Wynette’s “Cryin’ Time.” Believe me, the list is endless. You cry in your beer, the jukebox keeps on playing, things get worked out.

But if those wistful, grown-up discussions seem a bit old-fashioned in their restraint, then this week’s selections offer something more in the way of epithet-screaming catharsis. These spread the bitterness all around, verse by combative verse, with the raw sound to match. This phenomenon - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style combat - would be pretty limited, unfortunately. But how could it not be? It was sort of like sitting at a table with a bickering couple, one just tries to stay out of the crossfire.

Time to reopen some old wounds.

1. Bud & Kathy, Hang It Out to Dry (Downey)
A mystery duo, Bud & Kathy recorded “Hang It Out to Dry” for the Los Angeles-based Downey Records.

Downey Records embodied all that is great about local, independent labels. Begun in the early ‘60s by Bill Wenzel and son Jack in Downey, California, the label took root in Wenzel’s Music Town record store. Downey would release a number of great instrumental 45s, including the Rumblers’ “Boss” and the Chantays’ “Pipeline,” two definitive early ‘60s Southern California surf hits. By 1965, the Wenzels transitioned to briefly take advantage of the suburban garage band phenomenon, issuing 45s by the Sunday Group, the Last Word and the Barracudas before shutting down the operation in 1967.

Among those releases would be this great raver from 1966, written by Pat McGowan, the man behind Pat and the Californians’ “Be Billy,” an earlier Downey release. Kathy is thrilling here, her voice an icy-cool dagger of reason. Bud is… being Bud. You have to love the basic conceit of “Hang It Out to Dry,” though. It’s not like there aren’t easier ways to tell off your lover, but sometimes only duet form will do.

2. Jon & Robin, You Don’t Care (Abnak)
Texas duo Jon & Robin were John Howard Abdnor Jr. and Javonne (Robin) Braga.

In the early 1960s, Abdnor’s father, Dallas businessman-turned-record-baron John Abdnor, Sr., started Abnak Records, a label that would earn its greatest national notice with some sterling rock 45s by the Five Americans, including “Western Union.”

Abnak’s initial 45 releases mostly indulged Jon Abdnor Jr.’s own songwriting and performing ambitions. The label would expand to accommodate favorite sons the Five Americans, and would add the R&B-oriented Jetstar Records subsidiary, too. And Abdnor would continue recording: from the teen pop of his first 45 to the country-rock and strange psychedelia of 1969’s Intro to Change LP, Abdnor’s series of records encompassed the entire Abnak timeline, if not the general arc of ‘60s pop.

But Abdnor’s best, and best remembered, records were with local teenager Javonne Braga, henceforth known as “Robin” (to fulfill the lingering obligations of the duo’s original female half, a vocalist named Robin). As a duo, Jon & Robin would have a run of interesting pop records for Abnak between 1965 and 1969. In a strictly ‘60s pop sort of way, their dozen 45s and two LPs were nothing if not eclectic, incorporating folk-rock, soul and AM radio stylings with a pleasant, vaguely Southern aesthetic. This would include their crowning achievement from 1967. “Do It Again A Little Bit Slower” was Jon & Robin capitalizing on the gimmick of Sonny & Cher. Neither were particularly telegenic, but the song’s charm was enough to make it a sizeable pop hit.

Jon & Robin’s second album, Elastic Event. Thanks to Strider’s Journal for the image.

Jon & Robin also tried out other styles, dabbling in the more aggressive tones of the garage band sound. There would be the jangly, “Gloria”-influenced “Love Me Baby.” And there was this selection, also from 1967, a laundry list of grievances set to a pounding beat. Minus the white lip-gloss all over the microphone, every relationship will have its “You Don’t Care” moments.

Jon & Robin’s productions were polished, their performances - backed often by the Five Americans - excellent, and their songs occasionally great, especially material written by Wayne Carson Thompson (author of the Boxtops' "The Letter"). But, even if their voices were better, without the momentous melodic hooks or Los Angeles industry connections, they never quite escaped the “regional act” taint. Plus they just looked so tragic in their psychedelic duds. Jon & Robin would release more good records together - and some apart, too, singing solo - but only with middling success.

The Abnak label itself folded in 1971. Robin reportedly married Five Americans drummer Jimmy Wright, and seems to have retired from music. Jon, sadly bedeviled by bouts of mental illness, was convicted in the murder of his girlfriend in the early ‘70s.

3. The Gas Company, Get Out of My Life (Reprise)
The Gas Company was the vehicle of Los Angeles songwriter Greg Dempsey and his longtime collaborator, Kathy Yesse.

Greg Dempsey’s first credits turn up in 1965. There were a few independent songwriting credits: Los Angeles garage band the Purple Gang recorded his “I Know What I Am,” for instance. Dempsey also produced an obscure 45 by Junior Markham & the Tulsa Review, an R&B-oriented group of studio musicians that included the young Leon Russell and Levon Helm.

In 1965 Dempsey would also join forces with the brilliant Jack Nitzsche, a Los Angeles studio wizard with a gift for dramatic arrangements and productions. This partnership would spawn a few co-authorship credits over the next year or two, including P.J. Proby’s “Sweet Summer Wine” and Don & the Goodtimes’ “I Could Be So Good For You.”

More to the point, Nitzsche would also produce several 45s by Dempsey’s group the Gas Company. The group’s roster featured more session musicians - guitarist Ken Bloom, bassist (and future Crazy Horse guitarist) Greg Leroy, drummer Gary Greene - suggesting a studio project rather than a working band. Either way, the Gas Company’s four singles records between 1965 and 1967 were commercial California pop and folk-rock, and were neither successful nor, this selection aside, especially noteworthy. Nor is Nitzsche’s involvement here necessarily a measure of success: he had a hand in a prodigious number of ‘60s pop sides, many of them quite obscure. Still, these activities give one a sense of Dempsey’s milieu.

Even less, or no, information about the early career of Kathy Yesse exists. Yesse sang with Dempsey on all of the Gas Company’s output, including 1966’s “Get Out of My Life,” the third and best of four singles. The accompaniment here is mid-‘60s Los Angeles folk-rock to the bone, if deceptively cheery, considering the song does not mince its words, except to rhyme them.

Dempsey and Yesse would continue to record into the mid-‘70s, sporadically but nearly always together. One of these efforts was quite memorable: a 1968 album of baroque psychedelia as the Daughters of Albion (again, basically a studio project), now a minor cult collector’s item. Others, like Kathy Yesse’s 1973 album Amazing (credited to her as Kathy Dalton), have not held up as well. Except for a few appearances by Yesse as a background singer on a some obscure Van Dykes Parks dates in the '80s, the duo since seems to have largely settled for obscurity.

Cool, man, cool

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:49:00 +0000

These selections are noteworthy not only for their curio factor, but also for their contributions to the same aesthetic that made Cozy Cole’s “Topsy” (hear excerpt here) and the Viscounts’ “Harlem Nocturne” popular. They seem to speak the same Lonelyville argot, conjuring clichés and swirling them about in a cocktail of inflamed passions, bongos and street smarts.

West Side Story and Mike Hammer and The Nervous Set was post-War America besotted with the image of the city as alternately dangerous, bohemian and craaaazy. Certain subcultures suited this image more colorfully than others, and pop culture would be right there, ready to fire the suburban imagination with a confusion of stereotypes and garbled slang. Nowhere did pop culture's various creations - its jazz musicians, its detectives and underworld types, its juvenile delinquents, its beatniks, especially its beatniks - turn up more mangled and mixed than in popular music. From the jazz-punctuated chases of Johnny Staccato and Perry Como ridiculously crooning “Like, Young” to the gangland theater of Link Wray’s “Rumble,” it was a good time to be a cliché.

If they didn't satisfy some deeper level of middle class fantasy, then the macho action and sexual license were all still pretty exciting at least. Which is not to say hard-boiled detectives were mere invention or that there wasn’t anything by way of “authentic” poetry readings or recreational drug use in certain quarters - there was. But realism was plainly not why viewers turned to Peter Gunn every week. Allen Ginsberg wrote in editorials and spoke on radio, defending his cohort against the insult of the term “beatnik.” To which the Life magazine readers of America distinctly answered: less “Howl,” more “Kookie’s Mad Pad,” please.

This week: little authenticity, plenty of fantasy. These three achieve a sort of hat-trick by offering no fantasies specifically, yet many fantasies all at once, and vaguely. Sometimes you can be all things to all people.

1. Fleet & Freddy, Pad (Protone)
Fleet & Freddy were Fleet Tomlinson and Freddy Countryman.

Fleet Tomlinson had a forgotten 45, “Bumping Knees,” on Los Angeles indie label Arlen. He also produced, wrote and played on Bobby Hicks’s rocker “Hassle It Jack,” a 1958 single on the hip Skyway label. Freddy Countryman - a guitarist, I believe - had a handful of early ‘60s rockin’ country numbers and twangy guitar instrumentals on yet another tiny Los Angeles label, Western Electronic Divisions.

So what happens when two aspiring spirits on the fringes of the record industry knock heads?

1959’s “Pad” clearly never set out to be any sort of pop masterpiece. Nor, sadly, did it have much of the bounce of popular contemporaries like “Tequila” or “Topsy,” instrumental hits with commercial appeal and, of all things, drums. “Pad” was just too weird. But there is something beautiful about the way juvenile delinquency, slang, drugs, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll - all the sideshow clichés of the beatnik craze - are woven together so deftly.

As if trying to prove the limitations of the concept, there are actually three different recordings of “Pad.” Fleet & Freddy’s is less manic than the Bobby Summer’s original version (hear excerpt here), by far the most popular - to misuse the word - version, which came out earlier that year on Capitol Records. Fleet & Freddy’s version was also more atmospheric than the song’s third and final incarnation (hear excerpt here) by Fritz & Jerry on Los Angeles’s RIP Records.

Fleet & Freddy had one more record together, 1961’s “Drag Race Boogie,” again on Arlen.

2. The Madmen of Note, Peppermint Fink (Ra-O)
Appleton, Wisconsin. Plattsburgh, New York. Albuquerque. Wherever. Wherever there were towns and hinterland cities and teenage abandon - that is where the sound of regional rock ‘n’ roll of the late ‘50s and pre-British Invasion '60s will take shape. There will be armory halls to be rented cheaply, bands in matching suits every Saturday night, teenagers to dance.

The Pacific Northwest had its network in these transitional years - the record shops, recording studios and teen dances from Portland to Pullman. It had the sympathetic DJs, small-time record label owners, producers and entrepreneurs - all the teen scene prerequisites. If only the Kingsmen, the Raiders and, to a lesser extent, Tacoma’s Wailers (with 1959’s “Tall Cool One”) ever enjoyed much in the way of national chart success, the region in its time was a paradise garden of rock ‘n’ roll combos, teeming with cheap guitars and overdriven amplifiers. Bands like the Wailers, Dynamics, Viceroys and Galaxies defined the sensibility: raucous instrumentals, ballads and shouting R&B-edged party numbers.

Except for sometimes being racially integrated, it must be pointed out here that there was nothing unique about the Northwestern combo itself. Rather, it’s just that the Pacific Northwest was the most cohesive and crazily fertile of all the regional scenes of the transitional era. This would eventually change with psychedelia and the new infrastructure of Rock.

Before that, though - before the British Invasion, even - there were the Madmen of Note, one of hundreds of groups breaking strings across the region’s dancehalls and ballrooms. On paper, other Seattle-area 45s like the Exotics’ “Oasis” or the Night Peoples’ “Zazerac” promised hip exotica but had a way of winding up closer to “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” or “Night Train.” A peppermint fink sounds like some Doctor Seuss phantasm, but this 1963 selection is the real thing, a booming drama somewhere between striptease grind and Middle Eastern raqs.

The Madmen of Note, live. George Lind, Elliot Wakefield, Bob Delgato, Charlie Johnson, Larry Evans. (Photo from Pacific Northwest Bands.)

Consisting at various times of Robert Delgado (drums), Larry Evans (keyboards), Charlie Johnson (bass), George Lind (guitar), David Raby (guitar and organ), Ken Raby (bass), and Elliott Wakefield (saxophone and vibraphone), the Madmen of Note hailed from Lake Stevens, just north of Seattle. All in their late teens, they played local clubs in the early ‘60s, and recorded this one exceptional 45. As was typical of the age, many of the Madmen’s members played with other area groups. Additionally, both “Peppermint Fink” and its flipside “Club 21” were co-written by saxophonist Ray Guyll, who played in Lake Stevens compatriots the Cherchers.

Nowhere is early ‘60s Pacific Northwest rock ‘n’ roll documented better than Norton’s Northwest Killers series. Thanks also to Pacific Northwest Bands for the Madmen of Note information.

3. The Rockbusters, Tough Chick (Cadence)
Soundtrack composer and “Barry” of the Tamerlanes, Barry De Vorzon was born in New York City in 1934. Like his parents, De Vorzon was musically inclined; his family moved to California, and there, De Vorzon, clearly taken with the allure of pop music success, set about finding it.

De Vorzon was first, though not necessarily foremost, a pop singer. He released a few teen-oriented 45s in the late ‘50s, a fairly short-lived arc that hit paydirt in 1963 with "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight,” by Barry and the Tamerlanes, the group he’d assembled with songwriting partners Bodie Chandler and Terry Smith.

It would be songwriting and music publishing that proved the more durable line for De Vorzon. Initially his royalties owed more to songwriting - Marty Robbins and Johnny Burnette squeezed minor hits out of his “Just Married” (’58) and “Dreamin’” (’60) - than to musical compositions, which were not unqualified successes. In late 1958, De Vorzon, operating under the nom de plume John Buck and the Blazers, released the “Forbidden City” instrumental 45 on New York City’s Cadence Records. “Forbidden City” (hear excerpt here) was especially hip, but its release on Cadence - as well as its inexplicable re-release a few months later on Warner Brothers - failed to arouse any interest. (Except in Germany, where flipside “Chi Chi” was a fluke hit - another story altogether.)

Which brings us to 1959’s “Tough Chick.” The Rockbusters’ sole release, it was released six months after “Forbidden City” and another twelve hours before it went out of print. Certain clues suggest that the Rockbusters and John Buck and the Blazers are the same. “Tough Chick” appeared on Cadence Records, and, moreover, it was another De Vorzon composition. Not to mention the atmospherics of both.

But De Vorzon had bigger fish to fry. Since 1960, he and partner Billy Sherman had run Valiant Records, a Los Angeles label with a string of hits running from the pre-Beatles era - Shelby Flint (“Angel on My Shoulder”), the Cascades (“Rhythm of the Rain”), and, of course, Barry and the Tamerlanes - to the Association’s sunshine pop to some nifty garage band and psychedelic records.

Ever the prolific songwriter, De Vorzon’s career solidified in the late ‘60s with his film and television music credits. Among them would be the films Xanadu and Private Benjamin and the themes for television’s S.W.A.T., Rolling Thunder and Simon & Simon. One tune, "Cotton's Theme" (originally heard in Bless the Beasts and Children), was re-recorded as "Nadia's Theme,” the eternal opener of The Young and the Restless.

De Vorzon also scored cult soundtracks like 1970’s R.P.M. and 1979’s The Warriors. So often with career music-types, their most interesting work is clustered near the beginning. This was the case with De Vorzon: deadly and deliberate, “Tough Chick” came before all the nutty impulses were quashed by record industry protocol and life’s little details, like earning a living.

De Vorzon has won a total of six daytime Emmys for his music for soap operas Another World and Guiding Light, and one Grammy (Best Instrumental Arrangement) for “Nadia’s Theme.”

Office Naps Winter 2008 Psychedelic Pop mix

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 06:28:00 +0000

The latest version of the psychedelic pop mix, streamlined and scratchier than ever.

If anything, people tend to remember the decade for the sitars and sunshine harmonies and fuzzed-out guitars. The reputation is not entirely undeserved. But I am here to say that it was echo, great heaping slabs of it, that really makes things go ‘round.

Anyway, there were a million deserving songs that didn’t make the mix, and we wish them good luck in their future pursuits.

Office Naps Winter 2008 Psychedelic Pop mix

Blair Smith, Vision of Molly (7”, Pompeii)
The Sunshine Trolley, Cover Me Babe (7”, Trump)
The Gallants, Robin's Blues (7”, Capitol)
Opus I, Backseat '38 Dodge (7”, Mustang)
Things to Come, Come Alive (7”, Warner Brothers)
The Gates of Eden, Elegy (7”, Warner Brothers)
Sagittarius, The Truth Is Not Real (Present Tense, Columbia)
The West Coast Workshop, Ode to Jackie, Dorothy and Alyce (The Wizard of Oz and Other Trans Love Trips, Capitol)
The Models, Bend Me, Shape Me (7”, MGM)
Unknown Korean Composer, Side 2 Track 4 (Heavenly Home Coming to Stars, part II soundtrack, SRB Korea)
The Parade, This Old Melody (7”, A&M)
Ian Freebairn-Smith, Other Hawaii (TV Track) (The Other Side of Clouds EP, Proud Bird)
6 7/8, Ski-Daddle (7”, Dot)
Ustad Vilayat Khan, Title Music: Tom's Arrival (The Guru soundtrack, RCA)
Click, Fat Lady in the Wicker Chair (7”, Laurie)
The Advancement, Child At Play (The Advancement, Philips)
Hearts and Flowers, Tin Angel (Will You Ever Come Down) (7”, Capitol)
Bill & Howdy, Misty Morning Confrontation (7”, Verve-Forecast)
The Pretty Things, My Time (7”, Fontana UK)
Somebody's Children, Shadows (7”, Uptown)
London Phogg, The Times to Come (7”, A&M)
The Relations, The Image (7”, Reena)
The Brain Train, Me (7”, Titan)
The Robbs, Castles in the Air (7”, Atlantic)
Evie Sands, It's This I Am, I Find (7”, A&M)
Ananda Shankar, Snow Flower (Ananda Shankar, Reprise)
The Fallen Angels, Most Children Do (The Fallen Angels, Laurie)
The Elite, I'll Come to You (7”, Charay)
The Vejtables, Shadows (7”, Uptown)
The Electric Tomorrow, The Electric Tomorrow (7”, World-Pacific)

Oh, Calcutta!

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:57:00 +0000

Oh! Calcutta! wanted to be provocative in the worst possible way.

Released Off Broadway in 1969, the musical revue featured sketches of various sexual neuroses and peccadilloes, and included frontal nudity - only the second major musical after Hair to do so. Oh! Calcutta! also had some avant-garde cred - respected British theater critic Kenneth Tynan conceived and assembled the program, with bankable names like Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, Margo Sappington, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Jacques Levy and Sam Shepard contributing sketches.

Sometimes mere pedigree and nudity aren’t enough. Sometimes weak writing and silly, rigidly heterosexual humor will earn you a reputation as an inconsequential diversion. New York Times critic Clive Barnes concluded after the opening: “To be honest, I think I can recommend the show with any vigor only to people who are extraordinarily underprivileged either sexually, socially or emotionally.” Musical theater was only beginning to embrace the counter-culture’s possibilities, but others, like Stag Movie, The Faggot, or Let My People Come - or Hair, for that matter - would explore sexual politics more gracefully and more incisively. None of this deterred curious patrons, however, who made Oh! Calcutta! both an instant sensation and, over the course of its original run as well as a record-setting revival begun in 1976, a long-lasting tourist staple.

But the original cast recording for Oh! Calcutta! (originally released in 1969 on Aidart Records, a tiny affiliate of United Artists Records) is another story. Composed and performed by Robert Dennis, Stanley Walden, and the young Peter Schickele (of P.D.Q. Bach and Schickele Mix fame), operating here as the Open Window, the score consists of songs and instrumental interludes that accompanied and divided the revue’s sketches, rather than being full-blown musical numbers. It was similarly derided in contemporary reviews, and it did not sell well, but the original score stands up today as superior even to the great Hair score. There is excellent psychedelic pop to be found in among the heavily arranged chamber-rock.

Thankfully, America’s easy listening bandleaders were not oblivious to the resilient groove of the title track. Alongside “Aquarius,” “Last Tango in Paris” or “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Oh, Calcutta” was popular, albeit briefly, among those meisters still optimistic about bridging that cursed generational divide. Ferrante and Teicher did a swell job of it and so did, all things considered, Al De Lory: I suspect any version of “Oh, Calcutta” merits at least a casual listen.

1. The Dave Pell Singers, Oh, Calcutta (Liberty)
Born in New York City in 1925, saxophonist Dave Pell’s formative professional gigs were with Tony Pastor’s big band. Upon relocating to California in mid-‘40s, he’d join a succession of bandleaders: Bob Crosby, Bobby Sherwood, Bob Astor, and, finally - between 1947 and 1955 - Les Brown and His Band of Renown.

These were competent bands, popular but hardly the cutting edge of jazz. Indeed, Pell’s entire trajectory would be characterized by this sort of commercial orientation. In addition to a series of budget-oriented big band tribute albums, Pell released many decent-selling jazz records throughout the ‘50s with a smaller group - his popular octet (many of its members borrowed in turn from the young modernists of Brown’s orchestra). Even these dates, while sophisticated, were on the more conservative, tightly arranged side of West Coast jazz.

There has always been that pragmatic streak among certain jazz talents, the pull to the more reliable life of studio arranging, directing and producing. Post-War musicians like Shorty Rogers and Quincy Jones made big names for themselves thusly, while many others - the Bob Florences, Manny Albams, and Johnny Mandels of this world - toiled further from the spotlight. This pragmatism diminishes none of their art, necessarily - especially some of their wilder soundtrack moments - but it does open a certain distance from their “authentic” jazz roots. Dave Pell? Just part of the trend.

Pell’s years as studio musician (he would back Mel Torme and June Christy, among many others), octet leader, and budget record label producer (for the infamous Tops Records) led, by the early ‘60s, to a turn as a producer and A&R man at Liberty Records, then one of the more successful post-War California labels. Experience in the industry clearly had served Pell well. At Liberty he had produced pop records in a big way for artists like Gary Lewis, Bobby Vee, the Ventures, Martin Denny, Gene McDaniels and the young Vicki Carr. Pell’s time there also included a few of his own albums - two commercial pop/jazz records in 1963, and finally, in 1969, the Dave Pell Singers’ Mah-Na-Mah-Na LP. Everything about that album, including this glorious selection, was a quick study in studio-tempered grooviness, raining down sunshine down all over Orange County. What generation gap?

After the Liberty marque was bought by United Artists Records in the late ‘60s, Pell worked behind-the-scenes in the Los Angeles industry, scoring and coordinating music for the television shows Stand Up and Cheer and The Real Tom Kennedy Show as well as a rash of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood vehicles: Sharkey’s Machine, Sudden Impact, Cannonball Run II, Honkytonk Man and Paternity. Pell would release two albums with his Lester Young tribute group Prez Conference in the late ‘70s. In more recent decades, Pell revived his octet and founded specialty labels Headfirst Records and Group 7 Records. Dave Pell is still active today.

2. The Milt Okun Arrangement, Oh, Calcutta (Decca)
Milton Okun, born in New York City in 1923, was a junior high music teacher and folk music fan when he joined Harry Belafonte as a pianist and singer (and later as arranger and conductor) in the mid-‘50s.

Okun parted ways with Belafonte in 1960, thereafter taking on various production and arrangement work around Greenwich Village’s burgeoning folk scene. Alongside several long-forgotten albums of his own folk song interpretations, Okun’s dozens of ‘60s production credits would include obscure singers like Lynn Gold and Ernie Sheldon as well as - thanks to good fortune and a good ear for commercial talent - many of the folk revival’s most popular artists: the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Miriam Makeba. The folk revival began foundering in the mid-‘60s; Okun forged ahead with his artists and with newer talents like Laura Nyro. His biggest protégé, however, would be John Denver, a Chad Mitchell Trio alum whom Okun mentored after the Trio’s dissolution, and whom Okun would continue to produce for another decade.

Denver was perhaps his single greatest success, but Okun’s production duties extended to assorted improbables, including ‘70s soft rockers the Starland Vocal Band (of “Afternoon Delight” fame) and future tenor celebrity Placido Domingo in the early '80s. This is not to mention Okun’s written articles about folk music, his string of song books of the late ‘60s and ‘70s - among them Something to Sing About, Great Songs of the Sixties, Country Music’s Greatest Songs and Great Songs of Lennon and McCartney, or his music education magazine, Music Alive!, begun in 1981.

Okun’s was a broad, impossible-to-pigeonhole career, but fitting this languid 1969 version of “Oh, Calcutta” in somewhere is still a bit of a challenge. It’d been years since Okun had recorded under his own name. This sounded like a studio lark, and it probably was. Lucky record buyers didn’t care about any of that, though. They knew it’d still be life of their next party.

To a great extent, Okun’s business interests have now largely superceded his musical associations. The Cherry Lane Music Group, which Okun founded in 1960, is, as of 2008, a major player in the music publishing business, with publishing, print, digital and licensing divisions and a lucrative, if schizoid, roster that includes Will.I.am and Quincy Jones alongside Ralph Macdonald and Tom Paxton.

Okun is also still active as a director at the Los Angeles Opera.

3. Henry Jerome, Oh, Calcutta (United Artists)
Like Dave Pell and Milt Okun, trumpeter Henry Jerome was a working musician who found his eventual calling in the studio. Born in New York City in 1917, Jerome formed his first dance bands in his late teens. His band, Henry Jerome and His Stepping Tones, was familiar to late ‘30s audiences for its regular appearances along the northeastern ballroom circuit, and for its residencies at (and radio broadcasts from) New York City’s Edison Hotel.

Jerome, hitherto stylistically indebted to Hal Kemp’s dance orchestra, began to update his orchestra with hipper musicians in the early ‘40s. The band - including pianist Al Haig, saxophonist Al Cohn, drummer Tiny Kahn, trombonist/composer Johnny Mandel and guitarist Billy Bauer - would be something of a bop jazz cauldron, though the modernization was mostly for naught. The swing era drew to a close and Jerome finally dissolved his group in the late ‘40s.

After some forgettable mid-‘50s pop albums on MGM and Roulette Records (as well as themes for children’s show Winky-Dink and You in the mid-‘50s and for the Soupy Sales show a few years later), Jerome joined the Decca record label. There, in addition to his work as an A&R director and producer, he’d release a series of his Brazen Brass stereophonic project albums. By 1967, Jerome was at United Artists Records, where he recorded one more Brazen Brass-style album, and continued his pop productions. Along with pop and country crossover singer Bobbi Martin, these included, not insignificantly, his production of the original Oh! Calcutta! score.

From 1969, I believe this selection is the original theme’s very first cover version. More upbeat than the original, and set at least slightly in the future, this is “Oh, Calcutta” reimagined with a payload of tiny lights and chirping electronics, Destination 1999.

Jerome’s involvement with the record industry tapered off sometime in the very early ‘70s. Sadly, current information about subsequent activities or whereabouts is scarce.

Henry Jerome’s legacy still is known among two peculiar groups, however. Fans of early rock ‘n’ roll recall him for his somewhat unexpected involvement (under the pseudonym Al Mortimer) with Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, who waxed some intense rockabilly sides under Jerome’s watch in 1956 and '57. Fans of unrepentant deregulation, of course, remember Henry Jerome for his ‘40s orchestra, an organization that included not only future Nixon-era White House Counsel Leonard Garment on saxophone, but also future Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan on, against all logic, bass clarinet.

Booker T. and beyond

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:01:00 +0000

Booker T. and the MG’s contributed so much to the popularity of Memphis’s Stax Records in the ‘60s, and were so fundamental to the label’s sound - sharp, soulful, and classy, never flashy - it’s impossible to separate the histories of the two.

The group coalesced from young session players at the Stax Records studios - Booker T. Jones (organ, piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg (bass, replaced by Donald “Duck” Dunn in ‘64), and Al Jackson Jr. (drums) - really only becoming an official unit after the success of their iconic instrumental “Green Onions.” In turn, the group helped make Stax a ‘60s powerhouse soul label - just behind Motown - and stars of many the label’s roster - Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Johnny Taylor, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas.

Booker T. and the MG's, mid-'60s publicity photo. Donald "Duck" Dunn, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

It wasn’t just that Booker T. and the MG’s were racially integrated at an inauspicious moment in Southern history. It wasn’t just that they were sensitive accompanists, either, or that their sound or their guitar-bass-drums-organ line-up was unprecedented. Simply, it was that they consistently hipper and funkier than anyone that had come before them, playing with an impeccable economy that skirted minimalism. Even on their records like “Time Is Tight,” “Hip Hug-Her,” or, of course “Green Onions” - terrific sides as successful as the Stax headline artists they backed - they were brilliant strategists, never playing two notes where one would do.

Just as every hit inspires a dozen hopeful homegrown soundalikes and variations, all of this did not go noticed by American musicians, this week’s included. America itself seemed to prefer its Memphis instrumentals straight from the source, however (Willie Mitchell perhaps being the notable exception), and Booker T. and the MG’s would continue to oblige, producing hits from one end of the ‘60s (“Green Onions,” 1962) to the other (“Melting Pot,” 1971). Our guys didn’t have the same luck, but they had nothing to worry about in retrospect. There’d always be more room for their kind around here on Office Naps.

1. Del-Rays, Night Prowl (R and H)
The Del-Rays were one of several white R&B-based groups who percolated out of northwestern Alabama in the late ‘50s.

It was a surreal scene. They came from surrounding Alabama towns, young white kids nursed on country music and crazy for R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Crazy, period. Early on, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the Del-Rays were working an improbable circuit of Southern fraternity parties alongside like-minded groups like Dan Penn & the Pallbearers, the Mystics and Hollis Dixon. When they weren’t confounding the brothers from Phi Kappa Theta with manic versions of “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” or “Kansas City,” these musicians gravitated to the FAME recording facilities.

Started in the late ‘50s, FAME (short for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) was the quixotic vision of local Florence character Tom Stafford and young musicians Billy Sherrill and Rick Hall. Commandeered by the ambitious Hall in the early ‘60s, and moved to nearby Muscle Shoals, the FAME studios would become the region’s galvanizing force of soul music. Arthur Alexander recorded “You Better Move On” there in 1961, and Jimmy Hughes “Steal Away” in 1963. By the mid-‘60s, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin had recorded there. By 1971, so had the Osmonds: FAME had come a long way.

As part of the studio’s house band, the Del-Rays - or at least several members - would play a significant role in FAME’s success along the way. In 1964, however, when “Night Prowl” was recorded, the Del-Rays were another working-touring group, hanging around the FAME Studios but still a few months away from becoming full-time session musicians there.

The influence of Stax Records - a mere hundred miles to the west, but sort of in a different league at this point - is clear on this selection. Lean and mean, like “Green Onions,” perhaps even more so, a title like “Night Prowl” promises much, and the song delivers - the greatest thing to hit street brawling since Thunderbird Wine. “Night Prowl” would be the second of four 45s by the group, who at this point included guitarist Jimmy Johnson, saxophonist Billy Cofield, organist Billy Scott and drummer Roger Hawkins. (The Del-Rays’ debut was 1959’s “Hot Toddy”; the two later 45s - one on R and H, and one on Atco Records - were more rock ‘n’ roll-oriented, with vocals by Jimmy Ray Hunter.)

Not long after “Night Prowl,” Johnson, Cofield and Hawkins would join FAME as the studio’s second, and most storied, house band. Along with organist Spooner Oldham, bassist Albert “Junior” Lowe, guitarist Marlin Greene, trumpeter Jack Peck and saxophonist Don "Rim" Pollard, this band would back Pickett, for instance, on “Mustang Sally” and Aretha Franklin on the original version of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).”

In 1969, Johnson and Hawkins - along with fellow Muscle Shoals musicians David Hood and Barry Beckett - left FAME. They formed the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and would became partners in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, an immensely successful recording studio in ensuing years.

2. The Pac-Keys, Dig In (Hollywood)
Like “Night Prowl,” this selection encapsulates a certain aspect of Southern R&B history. The Pac-Keys in this case were the vehicle of Charles “Packy” Axton, a saxophonist known as both a founding member of the Mar-Keys, and the son of Estelle Axton, the early co-owner of Stax Records, a label which her brother Jim Stewart - Packy’s uncle - founded.

The early chapters of Stax Records are inextricable from Packy Axton. The label, founded as Satellite Records in 1957 (the name changed to Stax in 1961) had some early success with 1960 records by legendary R&B father-daughter team Rufus and Carla Thomas. It would be one of Axton’s early records with the Mar-Keys, however, that brought his family’s record business to national attention. 1961’s “Last Night” (hear excerpt here) was just as significant for its popularity - charting at number three - as it was for its lean, soulful motif, which set an early precedent for the Stax sound, and the sound of Memphis soul in general.

Other members of the Mar-Keys (Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn) would disembark for even greater fortune as Booker T. and the MG’s. Axton’s own would not follow down the same path, however. A wild man, his tendency towards dissolution increasingly marginalized him from the shifting rosters of the Mar-Keys (who, either way, were largely overshadowed by Booker T. and co. by the mid-‘60s) as well as the Stax staff in general, despite his mother’s fierce loyalty.

It wouldn’t be the last of Axton, though, who relocated to Los Angeles in 1965. There he recorded the moddish instrumental “Hole in the Wall” with, oddly enough, members of Booker T. and the MG’s, who were then touring the West Coast as part of the Stax Revue. Released on infamous Los Angeles DJ and promoter Magnificent Montague’s Pure Soul label, and credited as the Packers, “Hole in the Wall” would be a surprise number five R&B and a top fifty pop hit in the fall of 1965.

More records hastily followed for the Packers, whose shifting members revolved around the erratic stewardship of Axton and percussion player Bongo Johnny Keyes, one of Montague’s old friends. There was a flurry of releases on various indie labels - HBR, Imperial, Tangerine, Soul Baby and Pure Soul - as the Packers; there were also several releases under different names - the Martinis, L.H. and the Memphis Sounds, and, finally, the Pac-Keys.

These records are hip, if a bit unmemorable, R&B instrumentals. The thumpingly great “Dig In” was recorded back in Memphis at Hi Records with James Alexander (bass), Jimmie King (guitar) and Carl Cunningham (drums) - all members of the Bar-Kays, another famed Stax instrumental group. “Dig In” is by far the most impressive of these records, clocking in at a scant 1:51, which only meant you could hear it again that much sooner.

Released on Hollywood Records - a former Los Angeles R&B label then operating as a scaled-back subsidiary of the country Starday label - neither “Stone Fox,” nor its follow-up “Greasy Pumpkin,” nor any of the various Packers releases, recaptured the success of “Hole in the Wall.”

Axton would drift further into obscurity, and deeper into his cups, alas, as the ‘60s wore on. He died of a heart attack in 1974 at age thirty-two.

3. Lorenzo the Hat and the Mad Hatters, Fun-Key (Space)
This week’s mystery selection, Lorenzo the Hat was either one Lorenzo Mandley, according to the label credits, or one Lorenzo Monley, according to BMI. Either way, this may be Lorenzo Manley, a Los Angeles singer who released a good soul 45 in early 1967, “(I’m Gonna) Swoop Down on You” on Original Sound Records. Again, just speculation.

Recorded around 1967, “Fun-Key” is a funky jam that rotates around the guitar fill from Booker T.’s “Hip-Hug Her” (hear excerpt here). Many great ‘60s instrumentals - think “Wipe Out,” or for that matter, “Green Onions” - followed this pattern: barely rehearsed sketches that started out interesting melody and wound up chart-topping hit. “Fun-Key” sounds awesome with its electric piano and wicked drumming, but it is not, in retrospect, a case of should-have-been-a-hit. “Fun-Key” is so loose it is clearly stoned, not the sort of thing to capture the public’s imagination. To be fair, its flipside “The Hat’s Back,” another stylish instrumental, has much more in the way of convention - a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, for one.

Space Records was a subsidiary of Kris, an independent Los Angeles record label founded by singer-turned-DJ-turned-entrepreneur Mel Alexander. Kris issued a lot of excellent Los Angeles R&B and soul throughout the 1960s on its subsidiaries (Space as well as Car-A-Mel and New Breed), though Space’s would be the coolest label design.

Office Naps...

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:00:00 +0000

...takes the week off.

Vibraphones, flutes and California Latin jazz

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:56:00 +0000

I’ve posted extensively about Afro-Latin music in California (here, here, here and here). The subject fascinates me, so I’ll try not to belabor the point too much.

Latin jazz in the post-War Bay Area and Los Angeles was a diffuse, small-scale phenomenon. It’s not entirely accurate to summarize the cities as “scenes” the way one refers to Latin music in New York City as a “scene.” Even so, the West Coast version of Latin jazz had its own sound. If one were pushed to generalize, one might say that it was more atmospheric, less fiery than the East Coast version. Jazzier, if you will. Why the difference? To some degree, it’s a matter of demographics.

At least initially, the West Coast didn’t have the substantial Puerto Rican or Cuban communities to nurture Afro-Latin music, and, consequently, early California Latin jazz experiments were comprised to a greater degree of jazz musicians. East Coast bandleaders like Tito Puente or Eddie Palmieri, on the other hand, had groups with higher ratios of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, musicians who’d grown up playing Afro-Latin music as actual participants in the culture. These New York City groups played Afro-Cuban jazz, or mambo jazz, usually as part of a broader repertoire of guaguanco, cha cha, guajira, son montuno, plena and bomba.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, California society orchestras and Mexican-American bands like Chuy Reyes’ had updated their repertories with fashionable boleros, rumbas and danzones, of course, but their music remained polite - supper club stuff. There was mambo and montuno in the pioneering Mexican-American swing and R&B of the Pachuco Boogie Boys and Lalo Guerrero, too, but only in the most elemental form. Latin jazz in post-War California would largely begin as an import, that is, not an in situ development of the community as
New York City’s Latin jazz was.

The Panamanian-born percussionist Benny Velarde summed up the differences another way in an interview:

“On the East Coast they were playing music that was called “Afro Cuban Jazz”. It was heavily influenced by Chano Pozo who played with Dizzy Gillespie and Mario Bauza. On the West Coast we were playing what was called “Latin Jazz” - which meant jazz standards with Latin percussion …Another difference was that on the East Coast the music was played by Big Bands like those lead by Dizzy Gillespie and Machito. But on the West Coast we did not have Big Bands but the music was played by smaller combos.”

Post-War appearances of Latin jazz pioneers Machito and His Afro-Cubans and the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra (with Chano Pozo) - and later Tito Puente and mambo king Perez Prado - dazzled West Coast audiences. Few in the audience, it seems, would be more greatly affected than jazz musicians. They were a diverse bunch, the early California converts to Afro-Latin music and Latin jazz. Pianist Eddie Cano and vibraphonist Bobby Montez, for example, were Mexican-American, and major draws in Hollywood clubs. White vibraphonist Cal Tjader came from a bop background, and so did black bassist Al McKibbon, though Tjader was basically a native son, and McKibbon arrived from New York City. Percussionist Ricardo Lewis played in some early (and sadly underdocumented) Bay Area Latin jazz combos, and hailed from New Orleans, where he began as a jazz drummer. Like so many others, Los Angeles bandleader Stan Kenton began adding Latin rhythms to his arrangements after a firsthand introduction to the Machito Orchestra. Pianist George Shearing was British, and blind. The list goes on.

The remaining, and most critical, component of early Latin jazz sessions was the seasoned Afro-Latin congueros, bongoceros and timbaleros. Percussionists like Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Luis Miranda, Benny Velarde, Carlos Vidal, Armando Peraza and Francisco Aguabella had grown up in playing in the tradition. They were masters, and they were indispensable.

Together, at least in Los Angeles, these groups might play huge music ballroom events like the Mambo Jumbo, Joe Garcia’s nights at the Zenda ballroom or Lionel Sesma’s ongoing Latin Holidays at the Hollywood Palladium - events that presented visiting Afro-Latin orchestras.

More often, however, Latin jazz groups traveled along the same circuit of jazz venues, supper clubs and upper-crusty nightspots that jazz combos did, playing places like the Crescendo, the Latin Quarter, Ciro’s, the Garden of Allah and Slapsi Maxi's in Los Angeles and the California Hotel, the Copacabana Club, the Black Hawk, Bop City and the Frisco Club in the Bay Area.

These places fostered a certain dynamic, which brings us finally around to this week’s artists. Jazz players found that an exotic tone poem in the setlist was a clever way to transform a club’s atmosphere, and, additionally, it afforded a certain latitude to explore new sounds, modes, and time signatures. Latin jazz combos, too, found the same experimental freedom in exotica. Certainly it was a great way to put those vibraphones to dramatic effect.

Their audiences didn’t quite get all this, but found it all very diverting nonetheless - long enough to idly consider flute lessons before the last gin and tonic kicked in, at least.

1. Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharaoh’s Curse (GNP)
Singer, bandleader, bassist, percussionist and vibraphonist Tony Martinez was an incorrigible showman. He wound up - where else - in television in the late ‘50s, and, for better or worse, those years as Pepino on The Real McCoys will probably be the ones that he’s remembered for.

Martinez’s spotlight flair bore its greatest fruit in music, however. There is drama in his handful of brilliant mambo-jazz 45s from the early- to mid-‘50s - this selection, for instance, as well as previously posted “Ican.” The virtuosic performance with his combo (with Eddie Cano on piano) in 1956’s Rock Around the Clock is pure showmanship.

Tony Martinez was born in 1920 in Puerto Rico. A gifted musician, he studied in San Juan, moving to New York City in the ‘40s to attend Juilliard. He’d form a few groups of his own there, and play bass for pianist Noro Morales, a pioneer of jazzy rumbas. Destined for balmier shores, though, Martinez relocated to Hollywood in the late ‘40s. His combos would be among the first to play the mambo and heavier Afro-Latin material. He was a local phenomenon; by the ‘50s he was a featured act both at upscale Sunset Strip clubs and at huge ballroom events like the Palladium’s Latin Holiday dance nights.

The Pharaoh's Curse (1957). Thanks to the fabulous Bleeding Skull for the screen shots.

Though unusual, especially the organ, this selection - written for the 1957 mummy must-see Pharaoh’s Curse - was not that uncharacteristic of Martinez, who of anyone knew his way around a spooky melody (see “Ican,” again). The movie itself was spearheaded by Bel-Air, an early independent production house known for low-budget ‘50s genre movies, which meant that most of its production values wound up in this selection. Exotica hero Les Baxter wrote this selection, by the way, and provided the rest of the soundtrack. (Note: if anyone’s seen Pharaoh’s Curse, I would love a description.)

This would not be the last of Martinez’s involvement with film industry. He’d been landing small parts in the movies since the late 1940s, and, when offered the role of Pepino Garcia on The Real McCoys in 1957, he accepted. It was a breakthrough role for a Latino on network television, though a highly problematic one - a Puerto Rican playing a Mexican farm hand, and a role scripted with every cliché in the book.

For a time, Martinez’s work was divided between television and music. There would be a good 1960 live album with Eddie Cano and bongo player Jack Constanzo. There would also be The Many Sides of Pepino LP - a sort of novelty-personality album that exploited his stereotyped image - best forgotten except for the storming instrumental “Mandarin Mambo.”

Tony Martinez’s music days wound down, and so did The Real McCoys, finally ending in 1963. Stage and screen occupied the remaining decades of Martinez’s life. He played Sancho Panza in 2,245 performances of Man of La Mancha, according to his obituary, and devoted much of his subsequent energies to creative and executive roles in the Mexican and Puerto Rican film industries.

Tony Martinez passed on in 2002.

2. Pepe Fernandez and His Afro-Cubans, G.I. Rhapsody (Key)
One distinguishing feature of “G.I. Rhapsody” is that it absolutely represents California Latin jazz: flutes, vibraphones, a combination of jazz musicians and Latin percussionists, an exotic port-of-call sensibility.

The other distinguishing feature is a total lack of forthcoming information - great, if you like unresolvable mystery. I identified Pepe Fernandez as a New York bandleader in an early post. This record changes that, of course, but adds little else, despite the musician’s roster on the label. Flautist Bob Messenger was a studio musician who later played winds on Carpenters albums. Wally Snow is a percussionist and vibraphonist who still turns up on Los Angeles sessions. Pianist Amos Trice played on some West and East Coast jazz recordings, mostly in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. These are the best known players here, which says something, and, either way, nowhere else are they credited for their work in the Afro-Cubans.

Key Records was a tiny Hollywood record label, with probably no more than a dozen or two 45 releases from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, mostly country and rock 'n' roll. There were also several long players on Key, notable only in that they were almost entirely anti-Communist screeds, albums with titles like Our Nation’s Pact With the Devil and The Two Fists of Communism. Not to mention 1960’s Rendezvous With Destiny, an album of speeches by then-political-upstart Ronald Reagan. The album’s back cover praises Reagan for his logic, which reminds us just how nutty the Cold War mentality got, though there’d be far worse to come.

“G.I. Rhapsody” was recorded in the early part of 1958. One wonders if its goofy patriotic introduction was a stipulation of the same brainiac who commissioned all of those albums.

3. Manny Duran and Orchestra, Tabu (Fantasy)
Mexican-American jazz pianist Manny Duran grew up in San Francisco playing music with his two brothers - also excellent jazz musicians - guitarist Eddie and bassist Carlos. The three, inspired by the urbane jazz of the wildly popular Nat King Cole Trio, first performed professionally as the Duran Brothers in the late ‘40s, and would continue to play on each others’ records over the coming decades.

Fixtures in San Francisco, the Durans would also play, individually and collectively, with the major names of post-War Bay Area jazz. Foremost among these was vibraphonist Cal Tjader, whose string of ‘50s and ‘60s Latin jazz recordings convened many of the West Coast’s finest Latin jazz and bop musicians, and set the mold for the sound of California Latin jazz. All three Duran brothers would enjoy residencies early on in Tjader’s working combos, with Eddie playing on a Tjader bop session in late ’54, and Manny and Carlos appearing on Tjader Plays Mambo - one of two watershed Latin jazz releases by Tjader, also that same year.

That incarnation of Tjader’s Latin combo dissolved after only a year or two together. But Manny and Carlos, along with Benny Velarde - also from Tjader’s group - would continue as a working unit through 1960, including a long residency at the Copacabana Club. Only two records - this 1960 reading of the exotica warhorse “Taboo” (on the premier Bay Area jazz label Fantasy) and the equally stunning “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Mambo” - came of it. Both were incredibly hip records with everything going for them except sales, which is not the last time you’ll see that around here.

A gifted professional, Manny Duran was like all but only the most fortunate of musicians. He continued to divide his time between Latin jazz and bop, enjoying an active recording and gigging career without becoming any sort of recognizable star, insofar as such is possible in the world of jazz and Latin jazz.

Manny Duran passed away in December 2005.

Incidentally, according to Benny Velarde, Duran assembled the Mambo Devils, one of San Francisco’s first Latin music groups, in the early 1950s.

The sea

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:44:00 +0000

The sea. Its mystery and expanse has inspired innumerable poets, writers, artists and musicians throughout the millennia, its endless capacity for beauty and violence has silenced individuals not usually given to speechless wonder.

Cursed, mythologized, prayed to, every seafaring culture has its own tradition of music of the sea, from Vietnamese fishermen’s poem-songs to Irish shanties.

The tradition would renew itself in the strangest ways after World War II, as Americans drew further into the suburbs. Smooth easy-listening themes like Frank Chacksfield’s “Ebb Tide“ and Nat “King” Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” sold in the millions, and they sounded lovely on the new hi-fi, all sumptuous strings and soothing sunset moods. Such productions were but Technicolor fantasia, though - the sea as great make-out spot. If they signaled the extent to which the ocean played a role in Americans’ romantic imagination, they also reminded us the vicissitudes of the sea had become utterly inconsequential to our daily lives. Which of course is how Americans have long preferred our relationship with Nature to stand.

Still, there were some livelier alternatives to the Ray Conniffs and Billy Vaughns. Cocktail jazz exotica, for instance, a beloved sub-genre here at Office Naps. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny could hardly be described as authentic, and any personal connection to the sea was mostly through the tourist industry, but they made well-known Asian and Polynesian folk songs of the sea a staple of their repertoire, and infused “Beyond the Sea” and “Harbor Lights” with a proper, if kitschy, mystery. There was surf music, too, impressionist music’s final and only stand in American rock ‘n’ roll - “Pipeline” as a sort of Pacific arabesque. Sometimes surf music was made by surfers themselves. It was the spiritual peak of the guitar instrumental form.

There are also this week’s artistes, the instrumental combos who straddled surf music and exotica. They summoned atmosphere every Thursday night, Debussys for the Officers’ Club dance, though one struggles to imagine a greater gulf between Debussy and the Melody Mates. Debussy never had those cool foghorn sound effects, for one.

1. The Melody Mates, Enchantment (Nix)
“Enchantment” would be the second of two Melody Mates 45s. The first, the rockin’ instrumental “Just Plain Guit,” was released on Decca Records in 1959. This gem followed on the tiny Pittsburgh label Nix in 1961. But besides the group’s probable Pittsburgh origins and their members James Testa, Gene Toney and Vladimir Maleckar, little is known about the Melody Mates.

The most fruitful lead here is our narrator, one Nick Cenci, who introduces “Enchantment” with a certain earnestness. From the late ‘50s onwards, Cenci, a Pittsburgh producer and promoter, was involved with much of the city’s teen pop, and many of its indie labels, Nix included.

For thousands of years, the distant blue horizon has called to the restless seaman, and both he and the Melody Mates have shared something of a fundamental understanding. A voyage into the unknown is nothing without its beckoning Shangri-La, and a beckoning Shangri-La is nothing without its wordless falsetto wail. “Enchantment” is a wonderful high camp: it’s got prom magic written all over it.

Alas, “Enchantment” is also an obvious cash-in record. It was identical in concept and atmosphere (including the bell buoys and the lapping waves) to the Islanders’ “Enchanted Sea” (hear excerpt here) a dreamy, seaward instrumental that hit the top-twenty, and had the benefit of doing so in 1959, two years before the Melody Mates plied the same waters.

“Enchantment” was doomed to sink without a trace, and did so, taking the Melody Mates with it. It wouldn’t be last of Nick Cenci. With his business partner - infamous Los Angeles promoter Herb Cohen (who was in town for a few years while credit problems on the West Coast blew over) - Cenci would put together the Co & Ce label in the early ‘60s. It was one of the city’s most successful labels, with a motley assortment of mid-decade Pittsburgh acts - ‘50s-leaning vocal pop from Lou Christie and the Vogues (who had two of Co & Ce’s top ten hits, “You’re the One” and “Five O’Clock World”), pop-rock from the Fenways, and a 45 by wild garage band the Swamp Rats.

Oddly enough, “Enchantment” would be covered note-for-note (including the prologue) by a Los Angeles group called the Castiles a year or two later.

2. Eden Ahbez, Tobago (Del-Fi)
So many terrific stories persist about “Nature Boy” Eden Ahbez - that he was raised in an orphanage, for instance, that he walked across the continent eight times - and so little exists in the way of hard fact, that summoning even the barest sketch of the man is only to repeat those same mythologies. Which perhaps does say something about Ahbez, who America recalls as composer of the standard “Nature Boy.” Ahbez was, if nothing else, a skilled manager of his own mythology.

Consensus is that he was born Alexander Aberle in either 1908 or 1913 to a Jewish Brooklyn family. Adopted in his youth by a small-town family in southeastern Kansas, he grew up as George McGrew, and later, as a young man, he lived for spells in Kansas City and New York City. Certainly he was inclined to the musical arts; there is speculation, especially concerning Ahbez’s New York City years, that he was involved in Yiddish musical theater.

The details begin to coalesce in 1941, when Ahbez arrived in Los Angeles, apparently with hopes of earning a living as a songwriter. He began playing piano at the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw foods restaurant, one of the earliest of its kind in the states. The Eutropheon was run by John and Vera Richter, German followers of Lebensreform, a fascinating nature-worship and “natural health” movement based in ideals of a temperance and vigorous, natural living, along with stray bits of Eastern spirituality. The movement developed in the industrializing Germany of the late 19th Century, and its ideas spread with German emigration. The Eutropheon - founded in 1917 by the Richters - would become a hub for adherents and image-conscious celebrities alike. Gloria Swanson was an habitué, apparently.

The image and philosophy of this health-obsessed asceticism must have resonated with Ahbez on some level. Thus in Lotusland was Eden Ahbez, Nature Boy, truly born. The Nature Boys - there was actually a whole group of them, including Hollywood health guru Gypsy Boots - were mostly American males taken with the Lebensreform lifestyle, and they were as good at having their pictures as they were at sustaining themselves on raw food and growing their beards long.

The "Nature Boys" in full regalia, Topanga Canyon, 1948. Eden Ahbez is in front. Future California fitness guru Gypsy Boots is back row, left. (Photo from hippy.com, courtesy of Gypsy Boots.)

References to Ahbez as a beatnik and proto-hippie abound. That’s not quite the case, however. Certainly there was their wooly appearance, but the Nature Boys preached temperance, not the radical politics or the sexual and chemical libertarianism of the hippie counterculture. They’re more directly connected to 19th Century Protestant Germany - as well as to the bohemian fringes of California surf culture that followed them. Regardless, the “Nature Boys” were a local phenomenon in the late ‘40s and 1950s. Ahbez, who’d never abandoned his ambition for selling songs, leveraged his unique celebrity, striking up a partnership with Cowboy Jack Patton, a Hollywood radio personality and health nut. Together, they landed the words and melody to Ahbez’s autobiographical “Nature Boy” (part of a larger Nature Boy Suite, apparently) in Nat “King” Cole’s hands. Just as improbably, it became a number one hit, one of the biggest of Cole’s early mainstream singing career. Somehow this all made sense in post-War Southern California.

Though “Nature Boy” was not without its controversies (songwriter Herman Yablakoff sued, alleging that the Eastern melody to "Nature Boy" came from his song "Sveig Mein Härtz"), Ahbez’s celebrity increased to a national level - there were articles in Time, Life and Newsweek magazines. It was a role that did not seem to disagree with him. Ahbez continued publishing and selling his unique songs in Hollywood (including “Lonely Island,” a minor 1959 hit for Sam Cooke), just as the legends proliferated: he and his young wife had once lived for a time beneath the Hollywood sign, his young family foraged for food in the Hollywood hills.

His sole album - 1960 Eden’s Island - is the culmination of both his philosophy and musical career. Released on Bob Keene’s hip Del-Fi label, Eden’s Island capitalizes on Ahbez’s image as the sun-worshipping, beachcombing vegetarian-philosopher. West Coast pianist Paul Moer’s instrumentation was California jazz at its most exotic, with Ahbez - on flute and hand drum - accompanying the soft vibes and Martin Denny-style birdcalls. Even better, Ahbez gently intoned his own poetry over the score. Composed as a “spiritual song cycle,” the poems are idylls of the Nature Boy lifestyle - terribly redolent of Rod McKuen and a certain type of lightweight mysticism. Nonetheless the album is highly original, an absolute high point of American post-War exotica and armchair escapism. (Hear an excerpt of the album's "Full Moon" here.)

Eden’s Island did not sell well in its time, though. And thereafter do the details of Ahbez’s existence grow hazy again. He penned and recorded (usually pseudonymously) a few more obscure 45 recordings in the early ‘60s, he was spotted in a 1967 photograph with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and he met with folk boy-wonder Donovan the same year.

There was always something of the showman to Ahbez, part mystic, part beneficent charlatan. To his credit, however, he lived out the life he advocated. Shortly before his death, he was interviewed standing next to the van where he lived, still the long-haired vegetarian, still quoting his own philosophy.

Sadly, Ahbez was struck and killed by an automobile in 1995.

“Tobago,” an instrumental taken from the same session that produced Eden’s Island, only appeared on 45.

3. Bruce Norman Quintet, Keeper of the Sea (Rust)
Should sound familiar. The dirge rhythm, the tremolo guitar, the sound effects, the mysterious communion with the sea. Hardly a triumph of the imagination, but no good concept should be without its repeat visits. Think seafood buffet.

New York City’s Rust Records was the smallish subsidiary of Laurie Records, a pop-oriented indie label, one of the more prolific of its kind during the ‘60s. Rust itself was around for a just few years in the mid-‘60s, its output leaning heavily towards commercial pop. With some discographical triangulation, we can safely identify a 1963 release date for “Keeper of the Sea,” and we can probably assume the group was from the New York or New Jersey area. But further details about Bruce Norman or producer John Brindle must remain, for the moment, speculative.

12-Strung

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:45:00 +0000

When we think about the 12-string guitar - if we think about it at all - we associate it with the ‘60s. More precisely, we associate it with the Byrds, whose dense California jangle was such a tonic amidst the waves of British Invasion pop in the mid-‘60s.

The association is not undeserved. On 1965’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the spellbinding “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Eight Miles High” that followed, the instrument was so fundamental to the Byrds’ aesthetic that all of the 12-string's ensuing adherents - ‘60s cult-rockers Love, for instance, or REM and Tom Petty in later decades - have been doomed to inevitable Byrds comparisons.

The Rickenbacker 360/12

But the 12-string guitar, despite its exoticism and profusion of strings and metal hardware, was not just some newfangled hunk of space-age electronics in 1965. Its strings doubled in identically tuned pairs, the 12-string guitar had been around in acoustic form since before the turn of century. 19th century Mexican Mariachi musicians played them, as did pre-War Southern blues troubadours like Blind Boy Fuller, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Willie McTell. Later, Pete Seeger, emulating his folk hero Leadbelly, would pick up the 12-string, Seeger’s followers in American coffeehouses (including the young Roger McGuinn, then an aspiring folkie) doing the same in turn.

Such was the state of pop music in 1964, though, that it would be a visiting Brit - the Beatles’ George Harrison - who would be presented with a prototype of the American-made Rickenbacker 360/12 guitar, one of the first electric 12-string models.

An acoustic 12-string guitar is louder and fuller sounding than its 6-string counterpart; electrical amplification adds something more - something akin to cavernous space. It took just a few magically ringing notes at the end of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” (hear here) to inspire Roger McGuinn to switch over to the electric 12-string in 1964 - a switch fated not only to become the signature sound of the Byrds, but also to precipitate something of a passing vogue for the instrument. Sonny & Cher and Barbara Lewis featured the instrument on some of their mid-‘60s releases, for instance. So did the Mamas & the Papas. And, not insignificantly, so did this week’s three selections.

Alas, it was a phenomenon that remained mostly such - a passing vogue. Perhaps because the 12-string doesn’t lend itself to showboating solos or fat rock ‘n’ roll riffs. Perhaps because one doesn’t just go about knocking out plainspoken melodies on the instrument. Perhaps it’s the extra labor of its tuning. Chiming waves of sound might spiral magically forth from them, but, for whatever reason, the instrument has always remained something of a specialized whirligig, the Concorde of guitars.

1. The Mods, Days Mind the Time (Cee Three)
We might be forgiven for momentarily thinking the Mods English. Listen closer and you hear it, though - that unmistakable lack of polish that persisted around even the most vigilant stateside Anglophile musician. Something like the reek of Baron Cologne and Budweiser. Americans!

The Mods, in fact, hailed from Ft. Worth, Texas, a scene that produced some amazing ‘60s garage bands. It was scene, too, that, for want of fuller description, lacked musical subtlety (well documented on Norton Records’ brilliant three-volume Ft. Worth Teen Scene series). Which makes 1966’s “Days Mind the Time” that much more compelling. City elders fretted over wild-eyed Fort Worthians like Larry & the Blue Notes and the Barons, giving the Mods just enough time to record this class-act anomaly. For all of its clipped accents, “Days Mind the Time” is stunning, a blend of impeccable arrangements and soaring harmonies, all steeped in 12-string jangle.

Consisting of multi-instrumentalist Scott Frasier (drums), Chris Hawkins (guitar), Eddie Lively (vocals, guitar), and Don McGilvery (bass), “Days Mind the Time” would be the only 45 that the Mods produced, sadly. Frasier, along with Lively, would go on to record in the Texas band Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit, and Greenhill, who released an excellent, though wholly unrecognizable, album of psychedelic folk-rock in 1968 on the Los Angeles-based Uni label.

Thanks to my well-worn copy of Fuzz, Acid and Flowers for much of the information about the group. A special thanks, too, to Westex over at the must-read Lonestarstomp, the unrivalled king of its kind. Tex must have been in some sort of crazy mixed-up psychosis when he sent me home with this same 45 last summer.

2. Dale & the Devonaires, Never Be Free (IGL)
Dale & the Devonaires, were formed in the early '60s in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and forged in the state’s homegrown scene of the 1960s.

Truly they were a product of the heartland. The Upper Midwest's circuit of performing venues - especially its ballrooms - created a vibrant regional infrastructure where there might have otherwise been towns isolated by windswept prairie. The region’s stable demographics, too, meant that rock 'n' roll combos might expect a larger local following - if not a longer life-span - than their counterparts in the faster-paced suburbs of Dallas, say, or Phoenix or Los Angeles.

Indeed, Dale & the Devonaires - comprised at their core of Dale Black (vocals), Dave Bringle (keyboards), Dick Malloy (guitar), Frank Segar (guitar), Larry Lind (bass), and (Jack Yates) - would remain a fixture of the region well into the early '70s. If the quantity of their output - just two 45s - never fully represented the extent of their popularity, they compensated through quality. 1966’s “Never Be Free,” followed a year later by “Come Back to Me,” are haunting, minor key nuggets of the highest order.

“Never Be Free,” produced at another cornerstone of the Iowa scene - Milford’s prolific, teen-oriented IGL Records & Recording Studios - features the 12-string prominently, of course. And the instrument does here what it does best, imbuing teen love with melancholic mystery. Landlocked, lovelorn males suspect it, and “Never Be Free” seems to confirm it: there is a thrilling jezebel lurking somewhere in the heart of every female upperclassmen.

The group was a 1997 inductee into the Iowa Rock'n Roll Music Association Hall of Fame (thanks to the same site for much of the information). For more on Dale & the Devonaires and Iowa’s IGL Records, see Arf Arf’s two-disc archival compilation of the label. Highly recommended.

3. The Other Four, Once and For All Girl (P.L.A.Y.)
They began at one end of the 1960s as teen rock ‘n’ rollers the Man-Dells and came out at the other end, in reconfigured form, as psychedelic rockers the Brain Police. And, in between, they put out three 45s as the Other Four. They would continuously adapt themselves to the times without necessarily being innovators in their field, achieving local popularity in their various permutations without realizing chart success.

A well-worn trajectory for the ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll band to be sure, though the Other Four released some truly memorable 45s. “Searching for My Love,” their first 45 as the Other Four, is ringing, minor key pop straight from the Zombies and Searchers songbook. Their second - this selection - has all the right moves for 1966: commercial harmonies, mystical reserves of teenage energy, the briefly de rigueur 12-string.

The group, which consisted of Norman Lombardo (vocals, bass), Kenny Pernicano (drums, vocals), Craig Palmer (vocals, keyboards, bass) and Don Sparks (vocals, guitar) for “Once and For All Girl,” recorded the song at Hollywood’s Gold Star Studios, and, for obvious reasons, it was strong enough to attract the attention of Decca Records. To which Decca quickly set about transforming the Other Four’s manic verve into bland, fatal irrelevancy for their third and final 45, “How Do You Tell a Girl.”

Vocalist Norman Lombardo and one-time Other Four guitarist and keyboardist Rick Randle would reconvene a year or two later with a few other local San Diego musicians, self-releasing an obscure acid rock LP as the Brain Police in 1968. Incidentally, Don Sparks, who played on “Once and For All Girl,” enjoys an active career in television.

Farewell, for a little while

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:51:00 +0000

It’s come time to say goodbye, if for a little bit.

My first semester as a full-time graduate student at the University of Texas’s School of Information just lurched to a start. It’s a turn of events that came only with a characteristically protracted process of procrastination, and I do miss the security of the old computer programming job that sustained me for seven years. But this, this decision - it seems inevitable now that I’m actually here. On Office Naps, discussing 45 rpm records always superseded news of my personal life, but it will likely come as little surprise to many readers that I am pursuing coursework in archives and preservation - audio, specifically. It’s exciting.

Photo courtesy Ron Slattery's bighappyfunhouse

Office Naps was something I that began as spare time activity, a trifle for my own amusement. I just knew I wanted to discuss music. Thinking about music’s place in the context of American post-War history is a big thing for me. I wanted to freely elaborate on music and, moreover, I wanted to do so online, where much discussion about records is either acutely anti-intellectual or mired in hopelessly cutesy collector talk. I half-heartedly thought that I might reach artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, pop culture freaks, amateur historians, bloggers, etc. Anyone, really, who loves interesting music and enjoys reading about it. The generous encouragement and word-of-mouth support from readers and other bloggers was not expected, though, and it absolutely sustained me. Better care was taken with the writing, research leads were followed more assiduously. The site evolved, organically, into something bigger as well as something that assumed a bigger part of every weekend. But my efforts paid off. Readership increased with every month, and now surpasses over one thousand visitors on a daily basis. I’m proud of that.

With my initiate’s anxiety and enthusiasm, I'll be concentrating my efforts on the new direction, much to the exclusion of recreational writing, recreational anything. One thing, though: more than radio, more than club DJing, an audio blog is a supremely satisfying activity. I ’m hooked. Office Naps isn’t going to go away, and I do hope everyone will drop by occasionally. Expect mixes, podcasts, various digitized flotsam as well as the familiar thematic 45 reviews to be floated your way, just on a less frequent basis. Got an idea for a guest post or three related 45s you’re dying to write about? I’d love to hear from you, too. And - it may be a year or two, it may be a mere semester - but weekly Office Naps will be back, as surely as the junkie’s quest for vinyl curios continues unabated.

much love,
DJ Little Danny

Naked City Latino

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:48:00 +0000

Few of Tinseltown’s directors, writers, cinematographers or creative minds - and certainly none of its soundtrack and television composers - turned a blind eye to opportunism in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Each location or genre came with its familiar set of musical formulas, moods, metaphors and cues. North African epics with their sweeping “Bolero”-style scores, caper movies with their saucy continental themes. And detective movies and crime dramas with their jazz.

The point, and the money, was in indulging audiences’ fantasies, not social realism. In the 1950s, the studios’ hipper soundtrack composers knew a good moment when they saw one. They seized upon the jazz phenomenon, bebop especially. Rippling piano chords registered looming danger. Heart-stopping moments of suspense were followed with lonesome saxophone reveries. Villains' exploits went hand-in-hand with screaming brass as inevitably as dangerous men would just as soon shoot you. Bop was sophisticated and gritty. Bop could be a bit menacing to those only comfortable with Swing-era big bands.

Consider Latin jazz part of the same commercial equation. Sometimes there were mambos done fairly accurately. Henry Mancini’s Touch of Evil was a masterpiece of the crime genre; the Machito Orchestra could have practically played its main theme. More often there were standard crime charts embossed with a spray of rhumba rhythms and Latin percussion. Leith Stevens’ Private Hell 36 had its “Havana Interlude,” Billy May’s Johnny Cool had its “Juan Coolisto,” Warren Barker’s 77 Sunset Strip had its “77 Sunset Strip Cha Cha,” Stanley Wilson’s Music From M Squad had its “Cha-Cha Club” and so forth.

Like bop, Latin jazz was urbane, if not a bit exotic, and Hollywood arrangers and composers plundered the genre and its popular appeal indiscriminately. Tito Puente’s thundering percussion, the cool vibes of Cal Tjader, the after-hours themes of George Shearing: all were colors to paint an impression of the urban jungle. Any time the hero wandered into El Barrio or across the border? Better cue those bongos. It was utter fantasia, of course, the Latin Quarter one more neighborhood in an artfully typecast Gotham.

1. Neil Lewis with his Quintet, Harlem Nocturn (Gee)
The immortal ”Harlem Nocturne” was conceived by Earle Hagen, who, before his prolific Hollywood career, worked as an arranger and trombonist in the big bands of the ‘30s. Hagen was behind loads of memorable soundtracks and television themes - The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, Gomer Pyle, The Mod Squad, among others - but his ”Harlem Nocturne,” recorded in 1939 during a stint with the Ray Noble Orchestra, is the source of his enduring fame.

“Harlem Nocturne,” big band success and later R&B instrumental staple, was performed most famously in 1959 by New Jersey’s Viscounts (excerpt here), though hundreds of versions would be committed to record whenever high drama was needed. “Harlem Nocturne” is a crime soundtrack gold standard.

Little seems to be known about Neil Lewis, however, or his fine Latin version of the theme. If names are any indication, Lewis, along with Alfred “Alfredito” Levy and the Harlow brothers, was one of a few non-Latino New York City bandleaders to record in more authentic modes. Lewis recorded a total of four 45s, all released in the mid-‘50s for local labels, all excellent jazzy small-group mambos and cha chas. This would be his second of two 45s on the Gee label, both recorded in 1954.

Lewis’s version is where mood music meets the dissipated side of midnight, its most prominent feature the way it alternates the understated theme with a mambo-driven chorus. Kind of like you alternating whiskey with beer last night. Too bad you drank away all of next month’s rent.

2. Curtis Amy, Bongo Blue (Palomar)
“Bongo Blue” is a sexy blues done by West Coast jazzmen. It’s got style, smoke and atmosphere. It’s got desperate characters nourished on liquor and cinematic cliché. “Bongo Blue” conjures the nightclub tableau that every private eye movie aspires to.

Curtis Amy is one of a select coterie of Texas-born musicians - saxophonists, especially - to distinguish themselves in California’s post-War jazz scene. Born in Houston in 1929, Amy was a clarinetist first and later a saxophonist; after earning a music degree, his early career days would be divided amongst the Army, occasional club gigs and a Tennessee teaching job. Relocating to Los Angeles in 1955, Amy would, after the perfunctory years of R&B and jazz supporting roles, record a half-dozen excellent LPs as a bandleader for the Pacific Jazz record label in the early ‘60s.

Amy and other transplanted Texans - among them James Clay, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and the Jazz Crusaders - defied the cliché of post-War California jazz as a refuge of homogeneous cool jazz. He also happened to be very, very good, a musician with an attractively hard tone and a deft way of infusing the blues into sophisticated post-bebop improvisations. In addition to accompanying his wife - singer Merry Clayton - Amy would remain in Los Angeles, teaching music and appearing on pop and rock sessions. His career as a recording bandleader would essentially be finished by the mid-‘60s, however, his six Pacific Jazz LPs forming the bulk of his recorded legacy. And to that end one cliché was upheld: Curtis Amy epitomizes the forgotten jazzman.

“Bongo Blue” is an obscure 45 recorded with some of the then-vanguard of Los Angeles jazz and Latin jazz: Roy Ayers (vibes), Horace Tapscott (piano), John Gray (guitar), Arthur Wright (Fender bass), Henry Franklin (acoustic bass), Moises Obligacion (conga) and Tony Bazley (drums). Curtis Amy also recorded an uninspired album of current pop hits (The Sounds of Broadway, The Sounds of Hollywood) on the obscure Palomar label, but that effort did not include this mid-‘60s gem, which seems only to have seen release on 45 rpm format.

Curtis Amy passed on, sadly, in 2002.

3. The Embers, Peter Gunn Cha Cha (Wynne)
The component parts of crime music - its bombast, jazzy allure and torrid moods - had largely coalesced when Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” (excerpt here), one of the genre’s signature pieces, blared forth from a nation of tiny television speakers in 1958.

With its instantly identifiable metallic guitar riff and macho swagger, the “Peter Gunn Theme” told us, basically, that justice was something on the move. The Embers’ “Peter Gunn Cha Cha,” from 1959, might have lacked the original’s thrilling audacity, but it told us that justice was not always tireless. Justice liked to take it easy sometimes, too. You know, drop in La Cubana for a plate of ham and cheese croquetas. Emphasis on cheese.

The Embers were a jazzy R&B instrumental group from, I believe, Philadelphia, and released at least one other fine 45 - the exotic “Alexandria” - on Newtime Records. This selection features the redoubtable Candido Camero, a Cuban-born musician whose Latin percussion graced many bop sessions in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In 1965, Henry Mancini released a Latin-inspired album, The Latin Sound of Henry Mancini, an LP that included his own exoticized take on the theme, "Señor Peter Gunn.”

Office Naps takes the week off...

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:29:00 +0000

...as I move back to Austin and gird myself for the beginning of my graduate school career. Like Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School, just not as hilarious. More soon.

Psychedelic folk

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:22:00 +0000

Much is made of Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival. Less tends to said of either the ensuing folk-rock - young, post-Beatles groups like the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield who merged folk’s lyrical aesthetic and harmonies with rock production - or the ensuing electrified folk of an earlier generation like Judy Collins or Richard & Mimi Fariña who experimented, maybe more uneasily, with electrified instrumentation.

Perhaps because folk-gone-psychedelic was, after Newport, less of a statement than folk-gone-electric - just more water under the bridge to the purist factions of ‘60s folk music. Perhaps because the commercial viability of psychedelia-tinged folk was only transitory. Either way, very little is said of the phenomenon of singer-songwriters, duos, trios, groups not only gone electric but gone psychedelic, folk musicians who imbued chiming 12-string guitars and pretty harmonies with mysticism, back-to-the-country beneficence and Eastern-tinged instrumentation.

The Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead - all groups with folk pedigrees - famously did so, and even “authentic” folkies like Fred Neil and Hearts & Flowers plugged in and turned on, albeit more at their producers’ behest. It was a diffuse, ephemeral phenomenon, though, and with the arrival of the ‘70s and the fragmentation of the previous decade’s counterculture, psychedelicized folk would be subsumed - along with psychedelia in general - by a wave of boogie-rock, confessional singer-songwriters and cocaine country.

But some proclivities - the deeply felt impulse for creative self-expression and the spiritual liberation of running around naked, stoned out of your mind - never quite lie dormant. Psychedelic-folk would fall from favor, certainly, but it never completely disappeared. It'd just retreated underground. From the late ‘60s onwards into the ‘80s, introspective, psychedelic records pressed in impossibly tiny quantities would continue to be produced by musicians like Michael Angelo, Linda Perhacs, Maitreya Kali and Bobb Trimble, latter-day folkies with cult followings in inverse proportion to their obscurity.

This week’s selections fall somewhere along that continuum, a chronology of psychedelic-folk from its flower power commercial peak to its subsequent home in the hinterlands of “outsider” vanity pressings, shrinking market be damned.

1. The Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt, Hey There Sunshine (NWI)
Though not quite the powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll region that it’d been five years previously, the Pacific Northwest’s scene was still fairly vibrant in the late ‘60s. Many of its original bands had dissolved, recasting themselves, true to the time, with longer songs, longer hair, bigger amplifiers and psychedelicized hippie-rock garb. Portland-based Douglas A. Snider, the drummer, vocalist and songwriter of “Hey There Sunshine,” would go on from the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt to form Douglas Fir, a loosely psychedelic blues group; their sole 1970 full-length offering, Hard Heartsingin’, would embody the Pacific Northwest sound.

Much less is known of the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt, however. They were not simply some one-off studio concoction with a baroque psychedelic name invented for the occasion: a 1967 poster reveal that the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt were a real band, with real live shows. They played Portland’s storied Crystal Ballroom, and there’s nothing to indicate they weren’t a popular live draw. Then again, there’s nothing about the wonderfully strange “Hey There Sunshine” to indicate how exactly they could’ve been a popular live draw, either.

Either way, “Hey There Sunshine” and its flipside - a cover of Bonnie Dobson’s hoary “Morning Dew” - are hardly the stuff of ear-bleeding Northwest psychedelic rock. Snider is a bit reminiscent of folk eccentric Fred Neil, and the group sounds like unreconstituted folkies having the old college try at psychedelia and succeeding, at least, with an echo-bathed anomaly.

This was recorded in 1968, I’d guess.

2. Creme Soda, Roses All Around (Trinity)
A foursome hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Creme Soda consisted of Art Hicks (drums, vocals), Ron Juntunen (lead guitar), Bill Tanon (guitar, vocals) and Jim Wilson (bass, vocals).

Their "Roses All Around" 45 was taken from Creme Soda’s sole album Tricky Zingers, released on the tiny Trinity record label. The sensibilities of Tricky Zingers are a dead ringer for the gentler side of ‘60s pop and psychedelic-folk, though tracks like "(I'm) Chewin' Gum" conjure trashy ‘70s-era punk as well. It’s truly an excellent album, stylistically everywhere. Everywhere but the year 1975, the year when, against all probability, it was actually recorded. A quick glance at the Tricky Zingers album cover gives them away: if you can’t judge a book by its cover, then facial hair.

Creme Soda did get some notice amongst underground rock cognoscenti - power-pop and ‘60s garage-rock champion and Bomp! magazine (and record label) founder Greg Shaw wrote the album’s liner notes - but their low fidelity and general obsolescence only increase their charm. “Roses All Around” - all of Tricky Zingers, for that matter - was a defiantly unfashionable statement in years of bar band rock ‘n’ roll and outlaw country. Too unfashionable, perhaps - Creme Soda were no more not long thereafter, though guitarist Bill Tanon would release a 1982 LP, Free Man’s Rainbow, also on Trinity Records.

3. The Friends of Mind, Not Much Lovin' (Insounds)
The Friends of Mind? The group - including its songwriter Ken Tumlin - seem to have come and gone with nary a trace.

The only salvageable connection here is arranger Bill Cheatwood, presumably the same Bill Cheatwood who was a founding member of the Wayfarers Trio, an Oklahoma City folk trio that released a Civil War-themed album - Songs of the Blue and the Grey - for Mercury Records in 1961. The trio also included guitarist Mason Williams (whose 1968 instrumental “Classical Gas” later topped the charts), and Cheatwood would wind up hanging out again with Williams, by then a hot commodity, in late ‘60s Los Angeles. Where, if I may bring all of this supposition full circle, Cheatwood had a hand in releasing this fascinating duet. “Not Much Lovin’” is the Friends of Mind’s plaint of this dog-eat-dog society of ours; a bum trip atmosphere and some very odd analog guitar effects are put to good use conjuring that same dog-eat-dog society. The Friends of Mind would never be heard from again.

Insounds Records was the tinier subsidiary of the tiny Los Angeles-based Accent Records label, home to some other excellent and obscure psychedelic and garage-band 45s by the Rob Roys, the Human Expression, the Peace Pipe and the Silk Winged Alliance.

Chicago soul, part two

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:38:00 +0000

(Ed. note: more of my favorite late ‘60s Chicago soul this week and a continuation of a very early Office Naps post - back when I wouldn’t let minutiae like research or facts stand in the way of posting.)

Like its Great Lakes counterpart Detroit, Chicago in the 1960s was a vast industrial landscape, a city with a substantial and concentrated African-American population, much of whom had migrated in earlier decades from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the American South.

Though it had its Brunswick Records in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Chicago, unlike Detroit, never truly had its own Motown Records, that national tastemaker, that entity which so thoroughly dominated the local record industry. Chicago had its own homegrown economy of labels, though, a network that serviced and sustained itself through the African-American community. Successful independent record labels - United, Mercury, Vee-Jay and, perhaps most critically, Chess Records - registered both the vibrancy of Chicago’s post-War African-American demographic and north-by-south pedigree of its music scene. Its appeal would extend well beyond Lake Michigan, too, with millions of Chicago blues, R&B, gospel and jazz records sold nationally in the post-War decades. And the ensuing infrastructure of A&R men, distributors, studios, record stores, clubs, promoters, session musicians and entrepreneurs - the bedrock of a strong record industry - carried Chicago soul music well into the ‘70s, its record industry more formidable, diverse and ultimately more resilient than Detroit’s.

Chicago's well-developed concentration of R&B-oriented labels would be the foundation from which the soul-oriented labels could emerge after a gospel-infused number like Jerry Butler and the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love” proved an early hit in 1958. Artists like Jerry Butler, the Impressions, Curtis Mayfield, Gene Chandler, the Sheppards and the Dells paved the way for soul’s organic evolution from R&B; established labels like Chess, Okeh and Vee-Jay - as well as new indies like Constellation and One-Derful - would be there to capture it. Soul music was ascendant, the hits rolled in, and many of Chicago’s own would be national stars by the mid-‘60s: Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, Betty Everett, the Dells, Gene Chandler, the Artistics, the Vibrations, Fontella Bass, McKinley Mitchell.

Most soul groups and soloists truly were vocalists only, however, and their backing, as had long been tradition, was still primarily assembled from session musicians, their productions in turn orchestrated by studio arrangers and engineers. If the Chicago soul idiom had begun to coalesce in the mid-'60s, then behind-the-scenes names like Burgess Gardner, Calvin Carter, Carl Davis, Billy Davis, Johnny Pate, Bill Sheppard, Johnny Cameron, Willie Henderson would define that style every bit as much as the performers themselves. (Some, like Curtis Mayfield, Syl Johnson and Monk Higgins were immersed in both worlds.)

This week’s selections, all made in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, reflect a pattern common amongst all commercial recordings, the tendency, that is, to appropriate the sound and spirit of their popular contemporaries. Specifically, these selections reflect the sound of industry veteran Carl Davis’s Brunswick Records (and its sister label Dakar), a Chicago label then rising with hits like Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher” (1967), the Artistics’ “I’m Gonna Miss You” (1967), Barbara Acklin’s “Love Makes A Woman” (1968), Tyrone Davis’s “Turn Back the Hands of Time” (1970) and Gene Chandler’s “The Girl Don’t Care” (1967). Carl Davis was an A&R man, vice-president and, importantly, a producer at Brunswick Records. His aesthetic was dramatic - strings, vibraphones and an abundance of the soaring, sophisticated, gospel-infused harmonies that have been so identified with Chicago soul since the early soul hits of the Dells and the Impressions. Davis’s productions also managed a rhythmic wallop, too – loud bottom end and clear drums – that resonated with the dancefloor.

Brunswick Records embodied both the sound and hit-making success of late ‘60s and early ’70s Chicago soul – according to that logic, these selections should’ve been hits. But then you wouldn’t be reading about them on Office Naps, of course.

1. The Roe-O-Tation, Old Love (Gerim)
Precious little is known of the Roe-O-Tation themselves, but the credits of their sole 45 reveal much: this record was the handiwork of Gerald Sims, a name ubiquitous in ‘60s Chicago soul.

Gerald Sims, born in 1940 and a participant on the city’s music scene since his arrival from Kalamazoo, Michigan at age nineteen, was absorbed early on into the Daylighters, a vocal group then recently transplanted from Alabama. His considerable musical gifts – singing, writing, guitar playing – found Sims assuming lead vocal and songwriting duties for the Daylighters, and he would oversee the group’s transition from R&B to soul with solid regional hits like 1962’s “Cool Breeze” and “I Can’t Stop Crying.” Sims himself would release two obscure soul singles under his own name on Okeh Records. His performing career, however, would be exchanged for expanded behind-the-scenes duties as a session guitarist, songwriter and producer with Okeh, Constellation and Chess Records, easily three of the city’s most vital soul labels in the mid-‘60s. Later that decade, Sims procured work as a songwriter and orchestra leader at Brunswick Records, but - before finally landing a producer role at Jerry Butler’s Fountain Productions in the early ‘70s - Sims worked in some time to release one record, this selection, on his own independent label, Gerim. Likely produced in 1969 or ’70, “Old Love” (and its flipside, “Special Category”) would be a one-off trial run for Sims’ label aspirations.

The sublime “Old Love” is a production in every sense of the word, a stunning bit of theater with wild tempo changes and an almost psychedelic vibes-and-guitar breakdown – great for making the whole dancefloor list to one side. “Old Love” makes you wonder what was happening in 1970. These soul guys were always running into old girlfriends on the street.

Gerim Records operations would be revived in the early ‘80s - the Chicago scene a pale shadow of the powerhouse it had been a decade earlier - for a brief flurry of contemporary soul releases from local groups like MC², Encore and 7 Miles High.

2. The Esquires, Reach Out (Capitol)
The Esquires, a group best known for 1967’s harmony-soul hit “Get On Up,” were originally formed at Milwaukee’s North Division High School in the late ‘50s by siblings Gilbert, Alvis and Betty Moorer and a series of neighborhood acquaintances.

Though popular in their native city, the Esquires did not record until relocating to Chicago in 1966, where the young group caught the attention of Bill “Bunky” Sheppard. Former A&R man at the recently bankrupt Vee-Jay Records, independent promoter and manager, owner and vice-president of Constellation Records: Sheppard was an entrepreneur completely immersed in the city’s music industry.

Following the collapse of Constellation Records, Sheppard was shopping for talent for his new label, Bunky Records, and the Esquires impressed Sheppard enough to record a Gilbert Moorer original, “Get On Up.” Released in the summer of 1967, “Get On Up,” characteristic of their sleek, falsetto-led sound, was a huge pop and R&B hit, and it unequivocally put both Bunky Records and the Esquires on the map. It would be their biggest hit, too, though the Esquires, suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, would continue to work closely with Sheppard, charting with late ‘60s singles like “And Get Away,” “You’ve Got the Power” and “Girls in the City.”

1969’s “Reach Out” was released on Capitol Records, based in Los Angeles, but don’t let that fool you. This embodies Windy City soul in all of its brassy, thumping glory; one doesn’t mistake Chicago soul like one doesn’t mistake an oncoming freight train. Produced and written by Bill Sheppard and Tom “Tom Tom” Washington (a Chicago-based arranger closely aligned with Sheppared), “Reach Out” was recorded by an incarnation of the group comprised of Gilbert and Alvis Moorer, Millard Evans and Sam Pace (part of the group from their Milwaukee days). It is silly-energetic, a 45 single flinging itself at the pop charts through exuberance alone, and a lesson in why that rarely works. Too bad. The Esquires’ star had begun to plateau a bit, but it wasn’t reflected on this gem.

Their last chart hit was their 1976 disco remake “Get On Up ’76.” As of ten years ago at least, the Esquires were still singing together in some capacity.

3. Judson Moore, Everybody Push and Pull (Capri)
“Everybody Push and Pull”: obscure soul dance, you-got-your-thing-I-got-mine party anthem. Push. Pull. Or not. Just be yourself, baby.

Research returns nothing on Judson Moore, and little more about either Capri Records – a label with a few other obscure 1970-era releases by Fred Johnson (“I Need Love”) the Scott Brothers (“Gotta Get Away From You”) and Reggie Soul and the Soul Swingers (“My World of Ecstasy”) - or this selection’s principal producer Al Altog, who had a hand in releasing a few singles by the Soul Majestics on his own Al-Tog label in the early ‘70s.

This was speculatively recorded in 1970, the year that Rufus Thomas recorded his “(Do The) Push and Pull” on Stax Records.

Office Naps returns after Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Have a wonderful holiday - see you in a few days.

-Little Danny

Outré refugees

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:35:00 +0000

Dig a little below the surface and you’ll find in our cumulative 45 rpm output a discography of the strangest musical impulses. Rare were the financial returns great for the independently pressed 45 record but rare was its overhead, either. Its inexpensiveness has made it, since the early ‘50s, the first (and last, often) commercial frontier of America’s idiosyncratic visionaries and of its overlooked, exotic, homespun and most anti-social musical niches. I tend to rhapsodize endlessly about this relationship on Office Naps. Visionaries and musical niches, though: these are forces that redeem American culture.

Such dynamics, the subtle balance of economic and creative energies, were still going strong in the mid and late ‘60s. The 45 was still the predominant format in much of popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll - though not for much longer - and examples of unconventional 45 records were just as ample, if not more ample, in 1968 as they were in 1958. It’s simply that, of the unusual or nominally experimental records that were issued commercially, they were then more likely to be the work of rock musicians, psychedelic individualists like Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson and the Holy Modal Rounders. In the guise of psychedelia, their freakishness would even perversely capture a fleeting commercial potential.

That’s what’s different about the selections this week, all recorded and released in the mid- and late ‘60s, the psychedelic era. They are likely strange by most listeners’ standards. Nonetheless they are neither rock nor psychedelic. They seem to be from some different moment, like beatnik artifacts washed up in a later decade. Their anomaly only seems to increase the profundity of their strangeness.

1. Kali Bahlu, Lonely Teardrops (Terra)
The enigmatic Kali Bahlu was a young woman in 1967 when she released her Cosmic Remembrance LP on the then-foundering World-Pacific record label. A swirling tableau of gongs, sitars, tablas and Bahlu’s Buddhist chanting and fairy-tale ruminations, Cosmic Remembrance is an album known for its general incongruity and for testing listeners’ patience. For all of its faux-Eastern artifice and Bahlu’s voice - sometimes a feral soprano, sometimes a jarring, child-like babble - Cosmic Remembrance is nonetheless quite unique, a relic that stands apart from its era. (Hear an excerpt of the album’s “A Cosmic Telephone Call” here).

“Lonely Teardrops” - Bahlu’s first recording, I believe - is not wholly dissimilar from the otherworldly atmosphere of her Cosmic Remembrance LP. It’s just much better. It’s also Kali Bahlu singing from some grimmer place. The ominous rumblings, Bahlu’s naked, if indecipherable, emotion, the wonderfully stark gloom: those of us drawn to sunless, wintry tundras find much to love in the remarkable “Lonely Teardrops.” This is the reason bears hibernate. Brighter days lay ahead for Kali Bahlu, however - they could hardly get any bleaker.

Whether it was the Bahlu of “Lonely Teardrops” banging on a detuned guitar - or the beatific Bahlu rambling in sing-song tones about Lord Buddha and “clocks of never” on Cosmic Remembrance - this is clearly someone on a separate psychic plane. Often referred to as acid-influenced, that is perhaps a disservice to the peculiar experience of Kali Bahlu, whose Californian, pseudo-Buddhist cosmic consciousness just happened to synchronize with hippie sensibilities.

Kali Bahlu would later be involved in some capacity with a few hens-teeth-obscure ‘70s albums of Eastern-inspired singing and commune vibes by the Los Angeles hippie-rock group Lite Storm. Bizarrely, Bahlu was more recently spotted in Taiwanese filmmaker Mei-Juin Chen’s film Hollywood Hotel.

I’ve found no conclusive information on Terra Records or this selection’s producer, Michael O’Shanessey. I believe “Lonely Teardrops” was recorded in 1966 or 1967.

2. George Loa and Maui Loa (Little Brother), Polynesian Chant of Green Creation: Cosmic Climax (Green Power)
The brothers Loa, this week’s mystery artists.

This is Hawaiian cosmology reinvented for a headier moment in history. The flute and conga drum channel grooviness. Same for the sexual overtones of the selection’s spoken-word introduction and title. The haunting call-and-response chanting seems authentic enough, but whether or not it was a pre-coital dance of the Polynesian gods is anyone’s guess.

There’s nothing one can definitively point out as either a precedent or an obvious target audience for 1969’s “Cosmic Climax. “ One might have found it being sold from ads in the back of a Stag magazine or peddled to shell-bar tourists. It might have been handed to you at last summer’s gathering of the tribe. Whoa, thanks man. But let’s not mistake the 45 rpm record for a medium that demands market analysis or committed commercial vision. It can be many visions all at once. It can be a great mass of anthropologically incorrect, conflicting intentions.

“Cosmic Climax” was recorded in Hawaii or possibly Los Angeles.

3. Miriam, Catwalk (Tanqueray)
“Catwalk” is the handiwork of the Hollywood actress Miriam Byrd-Nethery and her husband Clu Gulager, an actor, too, and later an aspiring filmmaker.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery (born 1929 in Arkansas) and Clu Gulager (born a year earlier in Oklahoma) met in the theater department at Baylor University, married and found their first professional theater and television work in New York City. Relocating to Hollywood in the late ‘50s, Gulager would go on to distinguish himself as a prolific genre actor in both movies and television, including deputy sheriff Emmett Ryker in TV’s The Virginian, rig-hand-and-ladies-man Abilene in The Last Picture Show and contract killer Lee in The Killers. Starting with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, Gulager’s work as horror movie stock character revived an acting career that continues today, albeit at a subdued pace.

Miriam, too, managed her own small-time acting career in Hollywood, but if it was Gulager who enjoyed the spotlight, theirs would first be a marriage, then family, energized above all by a spirit of collaboration and the noblest of artistic endeavors: filmmaking. Their obsession with producing films - including the family’s eight years in Tulsa trying unsuccessfully to realize their grisly serial killer horror noir Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (its saga detailed in an engrossing 1997 LA Weekly article) - put them on the brink of starvation.

None of this does anything but increase the charm of this maverick and quintessentially American couple, whose lust for creative, budget-minded expression reached early fruition on “Catwalk,” a slice of pure Sunset Strip eccentricity from 1967. Ever wonder what really goes inside the actors studio? This is it.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery passed away in 2003.

Message from the ghetto

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:14:00 +0000

What ties this week’s selections together is not merely their spoken word component (though it’s significant, certainly). Nor is it just their cause of change and greater societal welfare. Awareness-raising ballads, agitprop invective, activist commentary, summons-to-action and subversive parody are everywhere in recorded music - African-American or otherwise.

Their defining aspect, rather, is their specificity. “Invitation to Black Power,” “It’s Free” and “I Care About Detroit” aren’t broad laments of urban blight or gospel-liberated anthems. Theirs are messages associated with specific causes, specific religious organizations, specific cities, specific venereal diseases, even, and they’re calibrated to their communities accordingly.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s would be the apogee of this sort of thing, specialized message records reflecting the general tumult of the era - the counterculture, the assassinations, the radical strategizing and the sexual and cultural politics. Music suffused the era’s upheavals, and the years’ idealism and anger inspired more than a few to disseminate the word in turn on the very model of audio expediency, the 45 rpm record. It’s music meets message meets shiny black wax this week on Office Naps.

1. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Despite its reference to the "long, hot summer” - Detroit’s deadly spell of rioting and discord in 1967 - I believe that “Invitation to Black Power” was actually produced in Chicago. The selection was likely recorded in 1968 or 1969 - after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, certainly. But no substantive light can be shed on the Shahid Quintet or Richard or Earl Shabazz, who, either way, were probably not related. (Shabazz is a frequent surname assumed by Nation of Islam adherents.)

Its mysteries aside, “Invitation to Black Power” is a fascinating, a one-of-a-kind snapshot of a particular dimension of the black inner-city experience of the late ‘60s. It’s a bit amateur, sure, and its format is more a throwback to earlier beat-poetry-with-cool-jazz collaborations than the screeching saxophones and intellectual aspirations of contemporaries like Archie Shepp or Amiri Baraka. But it succeeds in one account: running down, humorously and unpretentiously, the Nation of Islam promise of rebirth, equality and separation of the races.

2. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Which is not to say that “Invitation to Black Power” was ever a proselytizing tool espoused, officially or otherwise, by the Nation of Islam in the local communities. It has more the flavor of a vanity project, the handiwork of a ragged jazz combo and two men with poetic and theatrical proclivities and the zealous energies of the converted.

Earl Shabazz and Richard Shabazz might have envisioned their record finding its way to their local Black Nationalist bookstore, they might have seen it being sold at local poetry readings. Some forty-odd years later, though, they likely wouldn’t have foreseen that their recording had landed mostly in hands of white record collectors, the inevitable home to such cultural ephemera.

3. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, I Care About Detroit (Motown and Stein & Van Stock, Inc.)
A name that looms large in America’s pop music annals, William “Smokey” Robinson was born in 1940 in Detroit and grew up singing and writing songs for the local vocal group the Five Chimes. The Five Chimes became the Matadors who, in turn, metamorphosed into the Miracles, the group with whom Robinson, the very icon of the romantic, urbane tenor, would go on to become one of the definitive voices of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Besides his considerable vocal gifts, there was Robinson’s acumen behind-the-scenes at Motown Records and his longstanding partnership with the man at the head of the Hitsville U.S.A. empire, Berry Gordy, Jr. It was Berry Gordy, then an aspiring producer, who recorded the Miracles for their first single “Got a Job,” a minor hit for the New York City-based End Records in 1958. It was Gordy who signed the Miracles as one the first groups to his fledgling Tamla Records (later absorbed under the Motown Record Corporation aegis) and it was Gordy, too, who made Smokey Robinson the company’s vice-president in 1961.

If early Miracles records failed to catch fire, 1960’s million-seller “Shop Around” changed all that. It would be the first in a decade-long series of hits like “Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion” and “The Tears of a Clown.” Robinson’s successes as in-house songwriter and, later, producer mirrored both the ascendancy of the Miracles as one of the decade’s great soul groups and the broader fortunes of Motown.

The little-known “I Care About Detroit” was Motown in full 1968 flower, the synthesis of social consciousness and soulful groove, the embodiment of young, interracial, turned-on America. Penned by Michigan labor attorney Jack Combs and Detroit R&B vocalist Jimmy “Soul” Clark, this was the second of two Motown 45s produced for “Detroit Is Happening,” a summer-long education and recreation program implemented after the Detroit riots of 1967.

The record industry was not quite the cynical monolith in 1968 that it is today. Still, Motown Records was a mainstream tastemaker and hardly one to hurl itself at a cause without a certain reflexive measure of caution. If Motown is to be commended for their gesture to public service, then Detroit’s disillusionment was that much more acute when Motown Records abandoned the imperiled city for its sleek new Los Angeles headquarters in 1972. Coming together for unity and progress seemed like a good idea until everybody had tried out their new, leather-upholstered swivel chairs.

Officially parting with the Miracles in 1972 to pursue a solo career, Robinson’s success as an adult-contemporary R&B singer - and unwitting pioneer of the dreaded quiet storm format - tapered off sometime after his biggest solo hit, 1981’s “Being With You.” A vice-president at Motown until the company’s sale to MCA in 1988, Robinson has remained semi-retired since, with a few albums of smooth ballads and gospel in the last decade-and-a-half.

4. Bishops of the Holy Rollers Fallout Shelter with Curtis Colbert, It’s Free (CAVDA)
This spoken-word gem was written and performed in part by Gylan Kain, a poet and a founding member of the Last Poets, easily the best-known spoken-word group in the pre-rap era. To the relentless beat of conga drums, the Last Poets spieled unsparingly about revolution, racist society, poverty and the plight of African-Americans. Kain, though he never actually recorded with the Last Poets, took their aesthetic one step further on his sole LP, 1971’s Blue Guerrilla, a potent stew of psychedelic, funky jazz and Kain’s incendiary poetry and surreal incantations.

Produced by Gylan and Denise Kain (his wife, presumably) for the Chicago-based Citizens Alliance for VD Awareness, “It’s Free” has moments that bear resemblance to Blue Guerilla’s colorful, stream-of-consciousness imagery. If the references to “johnsons” and pre-AIDS unprotected sex seem a bit quaint in 21st Century America, then the level-headed humanism and candor of “It’s Free” seem positively radical in cultural terrain presently mediated by sinister, regressive forces like the Christian Coalition. Still, “It’s Free”’s quandary is not unlike that of any organization attempting to connect with a younger demographic. It’s hip, it’s direct, “It’s Free” rises to the challenge of outreach with aplomb and intelligence. The problem was neither its message nor how it was conveyed, though. The problem, rather, was the stomach-turning imagery of "It's Free." No one ever, ever played this record, which explains why this 45 is always in perfect condition when you find it.

In recent years, Gylan Kain has collaborated with the Dutch jazz and turntablist group Electric Barbarian.

Continental European ‘90s Garage Punk

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:14:00 +0000

This week a special guest post from a friend and true radio hero of mine. Scholar and dancefloor dynamo Scott Gardner has hosted Stronger Than Dirt at Austin’s KOOP radio (my old radio alma mater) since the station’s inception in early 1995. German synths and ‘60s British freakbeat, floor-busting glam and modern-day fuzz-pop: Scott’s playlists read like a survey of the world’s rock ‘n’ roll backwaters. Hear him every Saturday night from 8-10 pm (on KOOP radio, 91.7 fm), and check him out this week on Office Naps.

And now for something different. This week’s Office Naps delves into a sometimes maligned and not-too-distant era of music known as ‘90s garage. An umbrella term for sure, it encompasses various styles, from the lo-fi toga punk of the Mummies to the cleaner Mersey-tinged beat of the Kaisers to the swaggering punk of the New Bomb Turks to the alien surf tones of the Bombooras. I pretty much ate it all up at the time (except for the heavier bands like the Hellacopters), and am now in possession of way too many garage records that may not stand the test of time. Local record stores (we still have a couple here in Austin) have consignment bins stuffed with those of other former garageniks. (Word has it, that KBD guru Johan Kugelberg scoffs at the idea that 90s garage records will ever bring much in the world of record collectors. He’s probably right. Sigh.) Still, there are plenty of obscure blog-worthy nuggets out there that deserve a second listen. (Be sure to check out the Static Party blogsite for a sampling of the punkier/DIY side of the garage scene of the ‘90s.)

To that end, I bring you three of my favorites, all of them from the lower and grittier end of the production spectrum, and all of them from Europe. Following the Office Naps format of thematically related records, I hereby create a sub-genre: Continental European ‘90s Garage Punk. I’ll be honest, the designation is pretty much defined by geography, and not so much by a particular “Continental” sound, though when I listen to each of these, they sound to my ears vaguely European. One thing is clear, like their American (and Japanese) counterparts, the numerous European garage punk bands were looking to familiar groups from the past (and present) for inspiration, Sonics, Stooges, DMZ, Mummies, Headcoats. You know the formula, ‘60s garage plus ‘70s punk equals ‘90s garage punk. Maybe an oversimplification, but for the following three bands, it’s right on.

1. Daxls, Chickenshit (Pornogram 1)
Despite the German title of the EP (which translates as “I’m Drinking Myself to Death”) and the German “news” article on the cover, the Daxls were indeed Dutch, hailing from the city of Utrecht. Like many garage bands of the ‘90s they embraced lo-fi production values, but they were certainly no Mummies clones. (Though on the sleeve of their first EP, “The Daxls Go Way Out,” a scantily clad lass is using a “Radio X” toy rocket for purposes of sinful self-gratification, suggesting among other things, a connection with lo-fi royalty Supercharger.) Their sound was boozier, queasier, with more emphasis on the organ and a greater variety of tempo. Their output was limited to a cut on an obscure compilation (“Highs in the Mid-Nineties”) and two EPs.

“Ich saufe mich tot,” the second of the EPs appeared in 1996 in two editions of 200 copies each. The packaging is decidedly DIY, with different colored photocopied wraparound sleeves. Of the four songs on the EP, “Chickenshit” is certainly the most uptempo, and one that suggests that the Daxls might have been an amazing live band. You can find out more about them at their rather amusing Myspace site.

2. Blue Devils, Fooled by You (Makeface RiKordz 001)
The Blue Devils, from Limoges, France, played a decidedly more straight ahead brand of garage rock and roll. Their music was a little bit of Cramps, a little bit of Sonics, and a whole lot of ‘90s punk energy. From what I’ve been able to find out, they released two singles and had tracks on two compilations. “Fooled by You” comes from a 1995 split EP (with another French band, the Mini Cooper Gang) on the Makeface Rikordz label.

On this one, forget about the Cramps, this is a sweaty, pissed-off, propulsive Sonics romp, replete with screams and a squawking guitar break. It’s easy to see how they scored a gig at the Dirty Water Club in London, a 90s garage punk Mecca of sorts.

3. Doktor X, The Sickening Sound of Doktor X (self-released?)
Doktor X were/are (I think they’re still playing) from the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, and apparently had a reputation for pretty over the top wild live shows. I can believe it. As for their output, well, they have a four-song EP, a single and an LP on Fanboy Records. The Sickening Sound…” comes from the 1997 EP and falls under one of my favorite sub-genres, band theme songs.

This is another beer-soaked, sweaty 3-chord Neanderthal stomper with an organ that pounds away relentlessly. Maniacal vocals deliver a mostly indecipherable, but obvious message, get out on the “dance” floor and move your drunken ass. The tortured screams give the whole thing a creepy feel, but in a fun way, of course.

Surf exotica

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:36:00 +0000

If it was the instrumental that kept rock ‘n’ roll simmering in the murky years between its ‘50s inception and arrival of the British Invasion in 1963, then surf music would be the instrumental’s final, most colorful efflorescence.

Excited by classy, guitar-based instrumental hits like the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run”, Duane Eddy’s “Movin’ and Groovin’” and the Fireballs’ “Bulldog,” American teenagers everywhere - Southern California included - began forming their own hard-driving instrumental combos in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Some regions would develop their own subtle variations of instrumental rock ‘n’ roll - none, however, as distinct as the Pacific Coast’s. The booming reverberation, the propulsive thrust, the “moody” minor keys and the vibrato guitar accents of early regional hits like the Gamblers’ "Moon Dawg!" (1960), the Revels’ "Church Key" (1960), and the Belairs’ "Mr. Moto" (1961) were the stylistic elements which captured Southern Californian youth’s vision, if not experience, of their own sun-and-surf predilections. Just a year later, numbers like Dick Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’” and the Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards” embodied surf music in all of its formalized glory, a new aesthetic forged from ringing Fender guitars, sunshine and arcane surfer references. Surf music was like some tanned, grinning evolution of the whole instrumental genre. Peculiarly adapted to beaches and teen clubs, it came crawling from the primordial Pacific waters to capture America’s Kennedy-era consciousness.

Surf music, though clearly something new, nonetheless shared certain characteristics with an unlikely older cousin: exotica. The overlap is especially apparent with a cocktail jazz combo like Martin Denny’s or Arthur Lyman’s. Before vocal harmonies began dominating surf music, both styles were obviously instrumental, and both styles' adherents occasionally dipped into the same bag of exotic standards like “The Breeze and I,” “Miserlou,” “Quiet Village” and “Istanbul.”

The most significant shared characteristic, though, is that both surf and exotica music sought to summon sensation through sheer atmospherics. The surf groups, with their staccato guitar runs and crashing drums, preoccupied themselves with the dizzying rush of the wild surf. Exotica’s proponents knew that the real action was back on shore, casually dressed and safely settled around the kalua pig at Luau Village, but there would be plenty of moments when surf music crossed, even if inadvertently, into exotica’s tropical waters. Read on.

1. The Blazers, Bangalore (Acree)
The Blazers were a brief-lived Fullerton, California surf group. Their “Bangalore” was the second of two excellent instrumental surf 45s, their first, 1963’s “Beaver Patrol,” was banned, according to legend, from local radio airplay due to its title’s innuendo. Both of the Blazers’ 45s would be released in 1963 on Acree Records, a tiny label formed by Vern Acree, Sr., a professional country and western guitarist and the father of the Blazers’ lead guitarist.

The Blazers’ two singles were recorded at the legendary Downey Records, a small studio located in the back of a record store in Downey, California. Part recording studio, part record store, part record label, Downey Records was the sort of sympathetic, independent operation at the foundation of any thriving regional rock ‘n’ roll scene.

On “Bangalore,” the Blazers themselves - lead guitarist Vern Acree, Jr., rhythm guitarists Steve Morris and Wayne Bouchard, saxophonist Larry Robins, drummer Chris Holguin and bassist John Morris - voyage to the east, completely on their own fabricated terms, and pay homage to Dick Dale’s influential “Miserlou,” surf music’s best-known exotica anthem.

In 1962, surf music was thriving, but it was still largely a phenomenon particular to Southern California. The young Beach Boys would have their first local hit, “Surfin’,” that year. Same for the Marketts’ “Surfer’s Stomp” and Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards,” early recordings that directly referenced the lifestyle in their titles. Fender’s all-important standalone reverb unit for its electric guitars had just been introduced. By 1963, however, even the record industry’s major labels, for all of their erratic beneficence, sensed something was afoot, and so did a national consciousness taken with the fantasy of sun, fun and the opposite sex that surf music offered. Providence would smile and a national spotlight would shine, however briefly, upon groups like the Surfaris (“Wipe Out”) and the Chantays (“Pipeline”).

Such would not be the fortune of the Blazers, alas, nor the vast majority of their surf-inclined brethren. They’d play the same high school dances and armory hall teen shows for the next year or two until high school graduation or the British Invasion rendered the whole genre obsolete.

2. The Surfmen, Paradise Cove (Titan)
Composed of Ray Hunt (lead guitar), Nick Drury (rhythm guitar), Armon Frank (sax), Randall Anglin (bass) and Tim Fitzpatrick (drums), the Surfmen were integral to the Southern California instrumental surf music phenomenon from its very inception. The Surfmen grew out of the Expressos, a young group from the Orange County suburbs who issued one 45, “Teenage Express” - with its flipside “Wondering,” an early version of “Paradise Cove” - on the local Trans-American label in 1960. Changing their name, the Surfmen would record and release a handful of 45s on Titan Records before finally metamorphosing, late in 1962, into the Lively Ones, one of surf music’s finest combos.

“Paradise Cove” and its flipside “Ghost Hop” would be the first of the Surfmen’s three 45s, all recorded in 1962. While not quite the deadly thoroughbreds that the Lively Ones were, the Surfmen’s atmospherics and echoing guitar sound captured the spirit, if not the sound, of the nascent surf instrumental.

Paradise Cove is a real place, actually, a formerly popular surfing spot near Malibu. Like Tahiti, Tehran, Thailand or any subject matter popular in exotica music’s geography, the song’s locale is invested with fanciful measures of mystery and intrigue. The real Paradise Cove was a place you went to surf. The song “Paradise Cove” - one of a number of solitary meditations like the Beach Boys’ “The Lonely Sea,” the Essex’s “Pray for Surf” or the Sandals’ “Theme From the Endless Summer” - was nothing you’d want to paddle across. Mostly it was a place for sunset communion and prayers to Poseidon for perfectly cylindrical waves. Dense, savory musical atmosphere was the mission here. Not reality.

3. The Pharos, Pintor (Del-Fi)
Aspiring jazz-musician-turned-entrepreneur Bob Keane formed, after some initial tribulations in Los Angeles’s independent record industry, his Del-Fi Records label in 1957. Ritchie Valen’s Latin-tinged rock ‘n’ roll put Keane’s fledgling label decisively on the map with hits like “Donna” and “La Bamba.” While Del-Fi’s succeeding years served post-War California with a fascinating body of teen rock and pop, exotica, Latin jazz and instrumental novelties, by 1963 - the genre’s apotheosis year - surf music would be the label’s bread and butter, sleek, reverb-heavy productions its specialty. To scan the Del-Fi Records album discography is to scan some of surf’s archetypal instrumental groups: the Lively Ones, the Sentinals, the Impacts, Dave Myers and the Surftones. Perusing the label’s 45 discography, on the other hand, is chasing rainbows. The Gonzos? The Moongooners? The Centavos, anyone?

Add the Pharos to that list. Except that it was almost certainly from 1963, no one anywhere seems to have anything to say about either the group or their songwriter Jack Irvin, but I won’t belabor the folly of further speculation. Just say that “Pintor” makes up one of surf music’s more endearing legacies, an ephemeral streak tinged loosely by the Spanish fandango. The Sentinals did it with “Latin’ia,” the Trashmen with their “Malaguena.” What is the sound of wishful thinking? “Pintor,” of course, the music of the Iberian Peninsula transformed into blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sun-crazy fantasia.

West Coast boogaloo, part two

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:23:00 +0000

(Ed. Note: More this week on West Coast versions of the quintessential ‘60s Spanish Harlem musical phenomenon, the boogaloo, that fusion of black R&B aesthetic with Latin rhythms and orchestration. Broadly speaking, the boogaloo's West Coast cousins tended to be a lot jazzier and more relaxed, a Pacific balm to El Barrio's Nuyorian grit.

The first post on California boogaloo can be found here. Other Office Naps posts about West Coast Latin music can be found here and here, with, finally, an introductory post about the boogaloo here.)

1. Ricardo Luna and The Latin Jazz Quintet, Strolling the Cha Cha (Blue-Rubi)
The chugging Afro-Latin rhythms, the R&B sensibilities, the dancefloor mojo: don’t let the title’s “cha cha” reference throw you, this is pure boogaloo. This is pure boogaloo with, of course, that infusion of jazziness so prevalent among the West Coast Latin groups. More time is given over to instrumental solos, more time to general breeziness. Even that rarest of exotic Pacific birds, the jazz flute, gets some precious seconds here.

This, I believe, is Ricardo Luna of los Hermanos Luna, an obscure and jazzy Los Angeles-based Latin combo that pianist Ricardo led with his brother. Along with a few 45s on Revolvo Records, the brothers Luna issued one LP (Bailando a lo Latino) on Discos Corona Records in the ‘60s.

The vocal chorus of “Strolling the Cha Cha” refers obliquely to the Diamonds’ “The Stroll.” No one knew that a cha cha could be strolled until this 45. As “Strolling the Cha Cha” probably sold in exclusive - that is to say, negligible - quantity, no one would really think much of that possibility after this 45, either.

“Strolling the Cha Cha” was likely recorded around 1967.

2. Harold Johnson Sextet, Sorry ‘Bout That - Part I (HME)
Probably the best known of this week’s artists - which really isn’t saying that much - the Harold Johnson Sextet was a young Los Angeles combo that existed for three albums of hip, late ‘60s instrumental soul jazz and Latin modes. Harold Johnson, a pianist who grew up playing in his father’s church, first formed his sextet in the mid-‘60s; the Sextet's first record, this selection, would be released while Johnson was still a senior at Los Angeles’s Washington High School in 1967. Succeeding full-length releases would feature an ever-shifting roster, always revolving, however, around Harold Johnson.

By the early ‘70s the popular vogue for modish combo jazz had basically dissolved, and so had the Harold Johnson Sextet. A series of unsubstantiated connections suggests that this is the same Harold Johnson who later played keyboards on, among other mainstream R&B sessions, numerous Motown recordings during the label’s ‘70s Los Angeles years. These connections suggest, too, that this is the same Harold Johnson who has recently played organ behind expatriate black gospel diva Liz McComb.

Lo, from a primordial soup of emails, inference and unsubstantiated speculation an Office Naps post is born.

3. Harold Johnson Sextet, Sorry ‘Bout That - Part II (HME)
Addressing the boogaloo fad, the Harold Johnson Sextet’s “Sorry ‘Bout That” is a revealing demonstration, West Coast-style, of the whole phenomenon. “Sorry ‘Bout That” is an understated instrumental, more Latin jazz than torrid El Barrio fare, more polyglot stew of jazz musicians and Latin percussionists than Puerto Rican anthem. It doesn’t so much invite one to dance as it invites one to have a seat, relax.

Run by local record impresario Harry Mitchell, HME Records was a tiny label that was home to a few interesting Latin-ish releases, including Reggie Andrews and the Fellowship’s Mystic Beauty and Harold Johnson’s first full-length, House on Elm Street.

The musicians of “Sorry ‘Bout That” (a song which only appeared on 45) probably reflect, in some form, the personnel of House on Elm Street: David Crawford (flute), Billy Jackson (conga), Jimmy Nash (bass), Mike Shaw (tenor sax), Alfred Patterson (alto sax), Eddie Synigal (alto sax), Ronald Rutledge (drums) and Harold Johnson (piano).

4. Tony Done’s Hollywood Quintet, Micaela (Vance)
Recorded around 1967, Tony Done’s “Micaela” is a spare reading of a minor Latin hit for New York City bandleader Pete Rodriguez.

The mysterious Tony Done's Hollywood Quintet’s repertoire, if this EP is any indication, was based in guaguanco, bolero, mambo, son montuno and boogaloo - styles familiar to any late ‘60s working New York Latin combo, styles which would have made his combo both curious anomaly and perfect fit in Hollywood's after-hours club playgrounds.

“Micaela” is not only the most obscure of three obscure selections this week, it’s also the most representative of Spanish Harlem-born boogaloo. What else can one say, though? The legacy of Tony Done’s Hollywood Quintet leaves us with precious little save a four-song EP and that familiar, gnawing sense of Office Naps mystery.

Ed Bland

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:17:00 +0000

Ed Bland is an American composer, musical arranger and producer with a considerable catalog of contemporary classical compositions - “Art Music,” as Bland would note - to his name. Bland is, at least among a coterie of vintage soul fans, also identified with his recordings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, singular R&B and jazz arrangements so distinct that they unwittingly dominate the music at times. You’ll know what I’m talking about by the end of this post.

Ed Bland was born in 1926 and grew up in Chicago’s South Side, studying as a young saxophonist and clarinetist at the University of Chicago and the American Conservatory of Music after World War Two. Composition studies behind him, infatuated by philosophy and West African drumming, he immersed himself in avant-garde musical theory as well as the intellectual life of post-War Chicago trying, all the while, to get his songs and compositions published. In 1959, he co-produced the experimental film Cry of Jazz, an exposition of race and jazz (with rare early footage of Sun Ra), before moving with his family to New York City in the early ‘60s.

In New York City, Bland found work as a freelance producer, composer and arranger on the strength of his jazz and conservatory pedigree. Ed Bland’s musical objective was to “create a raw, colorful, funky, soulful sound combined with complex linear patterns,” according to his own abstract musical philosophy. Therewith he would spend much of the next two decades in the record industry, eventually becoming a producer and A&R head at Vanguard Records from 1974 to 1978.

Settling in Los Angeles in 1984, where he continues to live and work, Bland wrote music for motion pictures, TV and occasional record productions, composing the scores for A Raisin In the Sun and The House of Dies Drear and orchestrating A Soldier’s Story. Bland still actively composes, his recent score for 34th St. NYC and albums of compositions like Urban Classical: The Music of Ed Bland (Cambria) and Dancing Through the Walls (Delos), though with no obvious connection to his days as an R&B innovator, evincing an idiosyncratic vision at work.

Looking over his discography, one gets the feeling that Ed Bland is one of these gifted American musical minds who successfully navigated the straits of the record industry but who was rarely granted the latitude to fulfill their vision - especially on the industry’s commercial terms. There’s something of a maverick quality to Bland, a musical individualist if not eccentric, which perhaps explains why his handiwork never found a more consistent niche in an industry that rarely rewards such qualities. Helloooo, Office Naps.

1. The Pazant Brothers, Skunk Juice (RCA Victor)
Brothers Eddie (saxophone) and Alvin Pazant (trumpet) were raised in a musical family in Beaufort, South Carolina, though it was in New York City with Lionel Hampton where Eddie’s professional career first took root in the late ‘50s and also where, a few years later, both Eddie and Alvin met Ed Bland, then a freelance arranger with Hampton. Forming their own group in 1964, their sporadic records as the Pazant Brothers would alternate throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s with supporting gigs in Hampton’s band and Pucho & the Latin Soul Brothers (among other notables).

Theirs, mostly, is a long discography of jazz, R&B, soul and rock session work, but with the Pazant Brothers’ handful of late ‘60s 45s - as well as their 1975 LP Loose and Juicy - something different is clearly happening. One senses that in the Pazant Brothers Bland had found his ideal protégés, musicians who were both sympathetic to his unorthodox vision and had the chops to realize it. Tellingly, the ‘70s recordings the Pazant Brothers issued without Bland’s involvement - and there are a handful of such 45s - suffer as merely decent instrumental funk.

There are identifiable solos, riffs and verses in Bland’s charts, it’s just they’re never conventional. By his standards, 1969’s “Skunk Juice,” with its wildly kinetic expressions of melody, is still quite exceptional, though. Whole honking flocks of geese, whole brass bands, are swallowed and spat back out, all in march tempo. Hope is renewed for tuba players everywhere.

The Pazant Brothers play today as leaders of the Cotton Club All-Stars.

2. James Moody, If You Grin (You’re In) (Sceptor)
An important and accomplished post-War bop composer, saxophonist and flautist, James Moody was born in 1925 in Georgia, grew up in New Jersey, and, like many other second-generation beboppers, found himself in army bands overseas during World War Two. His return to the states included - again, like many of his generation - a formative apprenticeship in the pioneering bop orchestra of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Though much of his post-War time was spent abroad in Europe’s more jazz-sympathetic cities, Moody established a higher profile with some leader dates in the late ‘40s, recording “Moody’s Mood for Love,” (based on Jimmy McHugh’s “I’m In the Mood for Love”) in Sweden, a significant hit in 1949 and an even bigger hit in 1952 with singer King Pleasure’s vocalese reading.

Moody also spent an increasing part of his days in his cups, a struggle later recounted on 1958’s Last Train From Overbrook. The five decades since have seen Moody leading small groups of his own, and, with the exception of a few funkier sessions and some years spent as a backing musician in Las Vegas in the ‘70s, he’s rarely veered from sterling, straightahead bop. Though well regarded amongst other musicians and devotees, Moody’s consistent, prolific output has perhaps been overlooked by casual jazz fans only interested the latest Blue Note reissues.

“If You Grin (You’re In)” was taken from Moody’s 1964 LP Running the Gamut and was recorded with a group including Patti Bown (piano), Albert Heath (drums), Reggie Workman (bass) and Thad Jones (trumpet). Though it is an early recorded date for him, the arrangements and wild horn play are unmistakably Ed Bland. There’s no logic anywhere that says a single, unwavering organ chord should sound so funky, but it does, and gloriously so, and I suppose that is why, finally, Ed Bland was the arranger here and not you or I.

Ed Bland also produced Moody’s ’76 album Timeless Aura. James Moody himself is still very much active.

3. Lionel Hampton and his Inner Circle of Jazz, Greasy Greens (Glad-Hamp)
Jazz’s best-known vibraphonist. Born in Kentucky in 1909 and attracted to music - drums, originally - from an early age, Hampton played a few early ‘30s Chicago vibraphone dates, some of jazz’s earliest, before being discovered in Los Angeles by clarinetist Benny Goodman. Famous swing dates with both Goodman and with his own all-star groups ensued, and though he played piano and drums capably, it was Hampton’s spellbinding, consummately swinging work on vibraphone which made him a star during the swing era. After World War Two, Hampton continued leading his own big bands and absorbing popular tastes. Sometimes his groups reflected bebop, just as often they sounded like R&B, but Hampton remained popular with audiences as one of jazz’s elder statesmen until his death in 2002.

Hampton’s own Glad-Hamp Records was a label that was home to many of his ‘60s albums. It was label that, in between endless iterations of warhorses like “Flying Home,” one can find some interesting selections. Take this, for instance, a number commissioned for Ed Bland by Hampton in 1967. “Greasy Greens,” thumpingly funky, sounds unlike anything Hampton, or anybody else, had ever done - not counting other Ed Bland productions, of course. Hampton would later make other funk-tinged records in the early ‘70s for Brunswick Records, but nothing so bracing.

Credit Hampton for making this record, and for making “Greasy Greens” something of a concert staple. The musicians on this first version include Wallace Davenport (trumpet), Ed Pazant (alto sax), Dave Young (tenor sax), John Spruill (piano), Billy Mackel (guitar), Skinny Burgan (bass), Ronnie Kole (drums) and Hampton on vibraphone.

4. Phil Upchurch, Muscle Soul (Milestone)
Chicago’s Phil Upchurch has long enjoyed a fairly high profile, which has as much to do with his infectious, funky R&B instrumental hit, 1961’s “You Can’t Sit Down,” as it does with his professional musical career.

Upchurch never quite recaptured the spotlight of “You Can’t Sit Down.” Nor did he have to: beginning with late ‘50s blues and R&B sessions for Vee-Jay Records and, later, soul and jazz for Chess Records in the ‘60s, Upchurch has been a wildly successful studio guitarist (and bassist), his name showing up everywhere over the decades - on Donny Hathaway albums, on Staple Singers albums, on Cat Stevens albums, on Chaka Khan albums for that matter. Upchurch also has his own extensive recorded history as a leader, and while his late ‘60s soul jazz releases like The Way I Feel have some psychedelic rock moments, mostly his solo releases mirrored the straight ahead pop, blues, soul, jazz and R&B of his studio work.

“Muscle Soul” is more straightforward than this week’s other arrangements. If, that is, straightforward can be said to consist of five things going on where in Bland’s case there’d normally be ten: it’s still a jolt of crashing freneticism. This selection originally appeared on what is Upchurch’s first and probably strongest jazz-oriented LP, 1967’s Feeling Blue, with Ed Bland providing arrangements. The album also includes Al Williams (piano), Chuck Rainey (bass), Bernard Purdie (drums), Warren Smith (congas), Wallace Davenport (trumpet) and John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Eddie Pazant (saxophones).

Now based in Los Angeles, Phil Upchurch is as active as ever.

Vocal group exotica

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:57:00 +0000

A post-War vocal harmony group like the Flamingos could summon angels with a haunting ballad like “I Only Have Eyes For You.” So why not, with a bit of tweaking, conjure the reverie of the faraway jungle isles as well? And so it would be, the Billy Wards reaching for the vaporous high notes of “Pagan Love Song” or the Platters crooning “Harbor Lights.” Vocal group exotica essentially was easy-listening and instrumental exotica transposed to a more human scale, its yearning for mysterious, faraway continents transposed to yearning for that unattainable love - the next block over, across the sea, it didn’t matter.

The effect was similar, but the music was somewhat different. Groups who’d first harmonized together in the theaters, nightclubs, school hallways, churches and street corners of post-War America necessarily availed themselves of simpler mechanisms than the dark swells of Les Baxter’s orchestra or Martin Denny’s shimmering vibraphone tones. Here the otherworldly atmospherics were accomplished with soaring, ethereal harmonies and layers of crude studio echo.

Here there were lyrics, too - vocal groups were after all entertainers, not just purveyors of mood music and jungle tone poems. From the Cleftones (“Red Sails in the Sunset”) and the Avalons (“Ebb Tide”) to the Four Jokers (“Beyond the Reef”) and the Cardinals (“Misirlou”), always the theme was love, and always the love was lost, departed or unrequited. If instrumental exotica records obviated travel for the armchair fantasist, then vocal groups obviated exotica’s very instrumentation, their spectral falsettos jungle passion enough for any lovelorn soul by his turntable.

1. The Charades, Flamingo (Skylark)
The Charades’ brief history was intertwined with that of Billy Storm, a longtime Los Angeles vocalist noted for a solo hit, 1959’s teen ballad “I’ve Come of Age,” as well as for his earlier involvement with the Valiants, an R&B group who’d scored with 1957's “This Is the Night.” It was Storm who co-produced and sang lead on this 1964 version of Edmund Anderson and Theodore Grouya’s enduring “Flamingo.” This would be the most memorable of several obscure Charades singles recorded between Storm’s ongoing commitments as a solo singer and as a member of local groups the Nuggets and the Electras.

This is music for Valium eaters, a hypnotic, slower-than-sunset reading of “Flamingo.” That’s not the distant surf you hear, that’s the gurgling sound of you, fallen asleep to Love Boat reruns.

Billy Storm continued recording into the early ‘70s, always with somewhat marginal success. His later endeavors would include the gospel-pop supergroup the Brothers and Sisters of Los Angeles (with their 1969 album Dylan’s Gospel), as well as the psychedelized soul group Africa (with 1968’s Music From ‘Lil Brown’).

2. The Passions, Jungle Drums (Audicon)
The Passions were like Dion and the Belmonts, Vito & the Salutations, the Mystics or any number of other New York City-area harmonizers, the very model of the white street-corner vocal group. From Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, one of vocal groupdom’s fertile crescents, the guys first formed as the Sinceres, coalescing shortly thereafter with the revamped line-up of Jimmy Gallagher (lead), Tony Armato (first tenor), Albee Gallone (second tenor) and Vinnie Acierno (baritone) and a new name, the Passions.

The group scored a minor hit with their first record “Just to Be With You” on A&R veteran Sol Winkler’s Audicon label in 1959, but the returns would mostly be diminishing from that point onwards. This 1960 version of Ernesto Lecuona’s exotica warhorse “Jungle Drums” was the b-side of their third Audicon single. Its a-side, an iteration of the oft-covered Leon Rene vocal number “Gloria,” seems especially well-regarded among doo-wop fans. Personally speaking, however, I find “Jungle Drums” the Passions' most compelling recording. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: most white doo-wop is pretty corny, but the Four Seasons never had these booming blasts of slide guitar.

After five 45 releases on Audicon, the Passions went on to record for a number of labels, including Diamond, Jubilee, Octavia and ABC, all in a similar style, all without much luck. The Passions finally called it quits in 1963.

3. The 4 Most, The Breeze and I (Relic)
An obscure New Jersey group, the 4 Most’s members Bobby Moore (lead), Ronald Mikes (tenor), Charlie Chambers (baritone) and Bobby Frazier (bass) first formed in Newark in the late ‘50s. They rehearsed, they hustled, they found a sympathetic manager, they played a few high-profile gigs at the Apollo Theatre and elsewhere, they built a local following. And they released single 45 record on a tiny local record label, too: the group’s version of yet another Lecuona chestnut, “Andalucia” (later known as “The Breeze and I,” with 1941 English lyrics by songwriter Al Stillman). Issued on local record impresario Joe Flis’s Milo label, “The Breeze and I” would be a resounding flop when released in 1960. It would also be the 4 Most’s only release - at least initially. Their story no more remarkable than any of the era’s other vocal groups, the 4 Most dissolved the next year.

Oddly, though, “The Breeze and I” (and its flipside “I Love You”) would be released again, on a separate occasion, just three years later. Its second issue in 1963 on Relic Records - an early collector label devoted to vocal group reissues - netted significant local recognition. Enough recognition, in fact, that Bobby Moore, who had recorded in intervening years with the Fiestas as well as under the name Little Bobby Moore, reconvened the 4 Most in 1964. A few more 45s by the group would be recorded and scattered though the mid-‘60s. Again, it was all to be without much success. Bobby Moore sang with Duke Anderson’s big band in the ‘60s, remaining more or less inactive since.

But back to this selection. In a theme common to exotica lyrics, some third party - a flamingo, the jungle drums, the breeze - assumes the role of messenger among separated lovers. And, in a theme common to doo-wop, the lyrics of “The Breeze and I” are subsumed by its vocal pyrotechnics, the lead tenor personally taking the role of “the Breeze.” This is the baritone’s eternal lament. Why does the romantic lead always go to the tenor? Why do the tenors always get to play the part of the breeze? Fuck you tenors!

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop mix

noreply@blogger.com (DJ Little Danny) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:46:00 +0000

This is the rose-colored soundtrack I strive to cocoon my life in, a CD-length metaphor for the first time you watched Solaris. Part of the ongoing Office Naps psychedelic pop mix series.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop Mix

The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (7", Prince)
The Deep Six, Rising Sun (7", Liberty)
The Buff Organization, Upside Down World (7", Original Sound)
Chip Taylor, You Should Be From Monterey (7", Rainy Day)
The Gordian Knot, Year of the Sun (7", Verve)
Celebrated Renaissance Band, Heavy Is the Sundown (7", Lion)
Hard Times, Blew Mind (Blew Mind, World Pacific)
Phil Cordell, Red Lady (7", Janus)
The Glass Family, Agorn (Elements of Complex Variables) (7", Warner Brothers)
Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (7", Capitol)
Mercy, Our Winter Love (The Mercy and Love (Can Make You Happy), Sundi)
The Group Therapy, Thoughts (7", Mercury)
English Setters, Wake Up (7", Jubilee)
Dave Miller Set, Mr. Guy Fawkes (7", Spin)
Art Guy, Where You Gonna Go (7", Valiant)
Smokey and His Sister, Creators of Rain (7", Columbia)
The Raik's Progress, Why Did You Rob Us, Tank? (7", Liberty)
The Federal Duck, Peace In My Mind (The Federal Duck, Musicor)
Sonny Bono, Motel II (Chastity, soundtrack, Atco)
Peter Pan & the Good Fairies, Kaleidoscope (7", Challenge)
The Collection, Both Sides Now (7", The Hot Biscuit Company)
Pipes of Pan, Monday Morning Rain (7", Page One)
Emil Richards and the Factory, No Place I'd Rather Be (7", Uni)
The Sandals, Coming Down Slow (The Last of the Ski Bums, soundtrack, World Pacific)
Thomas Edisun's Electric Light Bulb Band, Common Attitude (7", Tamm)
The Yardbirds, Glimpses (Little Games, Epic)
Eden's Children, Echoes (Sure Looks Real, ABC)
The Soundz, Freak Out, pt. 1 (7", Crown-Psychedel*lite)