THE SCENE:
There once was a small man who had a big dream.
His stage name was Spookie, and Lord could he scream
with a gospel falsetto both shrill and elastic;
he sang his wee heart out, and it was fantastic.
He stood on street corners with tip cup in hand,
performing his songs in a one-person band.
His lone instrument was a CasioTone,
a magical keyboard that played on its own.
It had tiny buttons named “March” and “Beguine”
that spit out drum patterns synthetically keen.
Over these sounds he would sing about life.
He’d sing about love and about his new wife.
He’d sing homemade show tunes, he’d sing rockabilly.
He’d sing torchy ballads so grand they were silly.
He sang to man from a large record label,
who gave him a contract that seemed somewhat stable.
He recorded songs with his CasioTone,
and the big-name producer of rock band Fishbone.
The tracks all still sounded like tunes from his toy,
but glossy and huge like a old Bob’s Big Boy.
Candy-like melodies sparkled with joy,
earnestness bouncing alongside the coy.
Who cares about where all the studio days went
if all the songs tango with childlike amazement?
But there was a fallout, as there always is
In the “look for a sure fire hit-driven” biz.
Spookie was set-up to be the next Prince,
and when that fell through we’ve not heard from him since.
Spookie’s long deleted so you’re out of luck.
Sometimes it’s on eBay for twenty-odd bucks.
I’ve added some tracks for your listening pleasure,
decide for yourself what’s better to measure:
the cost of a dream to a label’s stockholders
or the whether the lack of a dream leaves you colder.
See you next Wednesday.
NEXT WEEK: Uppity Music’s first podcast, featuring an interview with Greg Tate of Burnt Sugar.
THE SCENE: In 1996 surfing the Web was a silent activity until multimedia company Macromedia announced Shockwave®, the first browser plug-in that could play sound over the Internet. I excitedly downloaded and installed Shockwave then clicked on one the few song samples Macromedia had posted, expecting to hear something simple, basic. What I heard instead was a molasses-slow alien ooze, undulating under tender displaced violins, punctuated by a single note bass line and a calmly disturbed emcee:
Dr. Octagon, paramedic fetus of the east With priests, I’m from the church of the operating room With the strike support, scalpels since the holocaust I do indeed in greed, explore meet the patients Back to brooms with the nurse with the voodoo curse Holding up office lights, standing at huge heights Back and forth, left wing swing to north East and south with blood pouring down your mouth I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep beep Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap Look at the land… blue flowers!
By this point I’d completely forgotten about the technological feat of audio streaming because my synapses were in overload. What was he on about? Who was responsible for this unhinged brilliance?
Turns out Dr. Octagonecologyst was the brainchild of ex-Ultramagnetic MCs rapper Kool Keith and up-and-coming producer Dan The Automator, with supremely wicked scratching by DJ Q-Bert. Kool Keith had long been twisting surreal verses about animals and orifices under assumed names but this was the first time his alter-ego had consumed an entire project.
The good doctor was on a mission to misdiagnose, over-medicate and violate all patients while traveling through time and space. Over a soundscape of boom-baps, blip-blips and skits that mimicked a 1950s hospital drama, Kool Keith uncoiled intricate rhymes of unbridled lunacy.
They drop science of the nonsensical kind in “No Awareness” (Reinforce mixing copper nickel-beryllium oxide/Concentric layers, proportional carbon density of the radius/Indisturbed existence if it does produce contradictory statements) and meet mutations in the creepy “Halfsharkalligatorhalfman” (With my white eyes, gray hair, face is sky-blue yellow/ Sideburns react, my skin is colored lilac/ My skin turn orange and green in the limousine/People think I’m mixed with shark, drinking gasoline).
Radio transmissions of the alien kind infiltrate the beat-poetry of “Technical Difficulties”, while the doctor reinterprets the Hippocratic oath in the clinically gangsta “Waiting List”:
You enter, step in the room, 4, 5 My overcompressed thoughts and ways make you get live You are the patient, and I your black doctor, Medical bills, insurance, cash in the ceiling. Dioxalyn fingerprints here ever since I got my white suit pressed, out the cleaners, X-ray shades, with hard shoes and some razor blades Who’s the brother that’s sick, and needs the operation? Bullets removed from your head, grand central station I gotta cut off your ear, first behind your neck Rip out the stomach, and open rectum’s to dissect Shine the light, inside, roaches crawling in your throat I have no tools, my hammer’s done, my drill is broke
An underground indie record sensation, Dr. Octagonecologyst was picked up and re-released by major label Dreamworks Records…
THE FALLOUT: … a label best known for country superstar Toby Keith and alternative rockers AFI and Papa Roach. Communication breakdown between the band members and the label came swift and hard, resulting in Kool Keith refusing to perform on a tour booked without his consent. Dr. Octagon soon disbanded, and Kool Keith had the doctor whacked on his next album, Dr. Dooom’s First Come, First Served.
Dr. Octagonecologyst is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
Doing for doctors what Little Shop Of Horrors did for dentists, Dr. Octagonecologyst transforms repulsion into altered consciousness.
See you next Wednesday.
NEXT WEEK: Behold the Casio-Tone shrine of Spookie.
THE SCENE: The English music sub-genre “shoegazer pop” never took off large in America. Its layers of watery, echoey guitars nearly smothered most vocalists’ delivery and we here just couldn’t hang with that, man. But the Chapel Hill, N.C. natives The Veldt evolved this sound with the addition of hip-hop beats, resulting in their major-label debut, 1994’s breathtaking Afrodisiac.
Heavy blankets of oceanic guitars still ring through cuts like “Soul in a Jar” and “It’s Over” but the drums are surprisingly groovy and propulsive. Lead singer Daniel Chavis’ tenor cuts through the brittle fog like a mountain climber, his introspection soulfully directs the hard-driving bell tones of “You Take the World”.
“Until You’re Forever” dreamily glides like metallic butter melting over a very large piece of toast, rooted by unfeasibly funky, cannon-like drums, The sculptural feedback of “Heather” carves space with its leonine roar, and the band almost flirts with new jack swing in the shiny’n’ fuzzy “Wanna Be Where You Are”.
Almost.
THE FALLOUT: “Black guys with guitars who aren’t bluesmen” were a difficult issue for their label, and in spite of positive reviews Afrodisiac never caught a wave of acceptance. Their next album was released independently, and after its followup The Veldt packed it in.
Afrodisiac is out of print worldwide but you can pick up used copies from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
If you stood on the planet equidistant from the musical centers of New York and London then lunged into the Atlantic Ocean, that feeling would be the sound of this album. Unique, unmatched and overlooked, Afrodisiac is still waiting to catch a wave.
THE SCENE: In 1968, in a pop world dominated by Motown soul, British rock and American folk, blues legend Muddy Waters had all been forgotten by mainstream music fans. His record label then crassly masterminded a comeback plan — fuse his Chicago blues stylings to the hot new sound of the day, psychedelic rock, which resulted in the lysergically enhanced Electric Mud.
Although Waters himself sounded exactly the same, he replaced his usual band with a collection of young avant-garde jazz musicians who re-rendered his blues into smeary hyperactive acid funk.
“She’s Alright” is a death march prelude to a bar-knuckle bar fight, with power-drill guitars, goofy audio panning, and a completely unexpected segue in The Temptations “My Girl”.
Perfect for a blaxploitation soundtrack, the ultra-macho come-ons of “Tom Cat” strut around a radioactive fallout of moist sax riffs and parched guitar feedback.
“Mannish Boy” was a song he’d performed for years, but now it was dressed up with backward rooster sounds and trashy jungle drums, ready for its modern spotlight:
Now when I was a young boy, at the age of five My mother said I was, gonna be the greatest man alive But now I’m a man, way past 21 Want you to believe me baby, I had lot’s of fun I’m a man I spell M, A child, N That represents man No B, O child, Y That mean mannish boy I’m a man I’m a full grown man I’m a man I’m a natural born lovers man I’m a man I’m a rollin’ stone I’m a man I’m a hoochie coochie man
“Herbert Harper’s Free Press News” swings like a lost James Brown vamp, with Waters’ locomotive-strong baritone nearly dueting with the ear-piercing guitar shriek that runs through the entire track.
This was not your fathers’ blues.
THE FALLOUT: Blues purists abhored it. They, in fact, still abhor it. Muddy Waters totally disowned it, refusing to play any of it live and dissing the session musicians. He never publicly disowned the money he made though, as it sold an unexpected quarter million copies. The album also neatly set up Led Zeppelin’s debut the following year, a band whose fame was built upon electrifying (and stealing) Muddy Waters songs. Nevertheless Electric Mud fell out of print until 1996.
Electric Mud is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
Sure it’s a sellout to the white audience but Electric Mud is still, inadvertently, a hard grooving and rewarding album.
See you next Wednesday.
NEXT WEEK: Gaze at your Timberlands with The Veldt.
THE SCENE: In 2001 the London-based electronica group Spacek released their first album of restrained and futurist R&B called Curvatia. Championed by a small but feverish lot they returned in 2003 with an even more subtle and skeletal recording, the click’n’blissed Vintage Hi-Tech.
Ever see shapes in the clouds and wonder how long before the wind dismantles them? That’s the fragile sound of Spacek. Using clicks for snares and clacks for kick drums, Spacek’s production technique is to record as few instruments as possible while using almost no sounds that one would associate with music.
Hums from escalators, taps from a cell phone, the modern sounds of a highly wired urban society invade the tones, much as a wooden flute reinterpreted the sounds of a singing bird way back in the day of the hunter-gatherers.
Offsetting this foundation of quiet inorganicness is the burgundy smooth voice of leader Steve Spacek. Barely singing above the volume of a golf commentator, his delicate soul crooning is the anchor that gives the songs their barest wisp of shape.
The tunes don’t ebb and flow as much as they fade in and out. The syncopated swing beats of “Motion Control” bob and weave like a street baller, with barely audible woodpecker percussion. It’s clinical and sexy, like a forensics lab with a singles bar.
“Time” flows smoothly like the weightless movement of a glass elevator, every floor revealing new gorgeous vocal layers and funky deep ends. On the jagged side, “Amazing” sounds like monkeys firing zap guns during a tango in a Chinatown dry goods shop.
The shuffling “Light Up My Life” orbits around mirrored sound puddles of electric piano. Bass shows its face now and again like a hot air balloon that occasionally hits the ground, bouncing off doo-wop vocals and synthetic chicken clucks.
Over an accompaniment of toy piano and thump, “123 Magic” distills the childhood glow of awareness into a wafer-thin mint of perception:
I’m gonna disappear right before your eyes Then I’m gonna reappear make you feel surprised 123 I’m gone you know I won’t be long Gone to another place spend a little time in space All in a zone you wanna come with me I can take you there you can fake it there I’ll find ways for you Cause I can see right through
A song about being barely there, performed as if it was barely there. Clever.
THE FALLOUT: Turns out the sales were barely there as well. Vintage Hi-Tech was well-received in dance circles but pretty much ignored everywhere else. They have yet to record a follow-up, but Steve Spacek released a solo album in 2005.
Vintage Hi-Tech is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
Romantic dance tunes for pumping out of your hovercraft, Vintage Hi-Tech gently dropkicks soul music into the next century.
See you next Wednesday.
NEXT WEEK: Muddy Waters’ sells out to the young’uns.
THE SCENE: Oh Europe! You lover of American culture you! How thankful we are that you support jazz and techno and comic books and interpretive dance cause we here in America need a helping hand to validate our own greatness! We love us some Hendrix but damn if he didn’t have to go to England to get a leg up.
This outright dismissal of homemade brilliance happens less in New York, and its downtown music scene of the early ’80s is where the zoot-suited Kid Creole and The Coconuts made their mark. Their revelatory blend of swinging salsa, frenetic funk and big band Broadway show tunes populated their 1981 album Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, which found only a tiny audience. For their next album they turned up the gloss without losing the crunch, resulting in the dazzling Wise Guy.
An audio vacation cruise to exotic unknown locales, each cut shimmers and shakes with lusty abandon. Much like the Kid himself all the songs are danceable, humorous, nuanced and oh-so-sharp. The calypso and soca-fueled “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” cleverly shows off the lighter side of pre-DNA paternity testing (“cause if I was in your blood, then you wouldn’t be so ugly”).
The romantic and dangerous “The Love We Have” mixes cold strings and warm horns into a frothy jungle drink of icy confusion. “I’m A Wonderful Thing, Baby” features a subdued swagger, its rippling muted guitars supporting a laundry list of the Kids’ liaisons.
Straight outta the speakeasy slides “Stool Pigeon”, a gangster-hard cautionary tale of ratting out to the Feds:
If you wanna squeal, said the FBI We can make a deal, make it worth your while So he told it all and in return He got a credit card and a Thunderbird He got a spanking new identity And a condo down in Miami He bought a plane, a boat and jewelry But he couldn’t buy any company
Deep grooves with dark themes cloaked in confectionary glaze, how could anyone resist?
THE FALLOUT: Like Jimi Hendrix and James Baldwin, Kid Creole and the Coconuts blew up in England big time. Retitled Tropical Gangsters, it was a top five album, produced three hit singles and stayed on the charts for nine months. But back in the States it fell off the chart faster than a baby bird out of a malformed nest. Except for the rare dance hit, Kid Creole and the Coconuts never broke through to most of America.
Wise Guy is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
Groundbreaking in its world music synthesis, Wise Guy dances alone.
THE SCENE: In 2000 Cody ChesnuTT’s band The Crosswalk were dropped from their label without ever releasing an album. Where many folks would respond by shutting themselves off in their room for a good long sulk, ChesnuTT went to his room with a four-track recorder and cut the thirty-six tracks that make up the exuberant The Headphone Masterpiece.
Back in the day (and by this I mean before computers came with free audio software) inexpensive four-track recorders were the must-have item for all working musicians. No matter where inspiration struck, within seconds you could capture your musical ramblings for posterity. Eventually many a musician would get the urge to recreate their intimate demos by shelling out thousands of dollars for a proper studio recording, where the unfamiliar surroundings would ensure a soulless, sterile facsimile of a once great performance.
ChesnuTT’s brilliant move was to completely ignore this urge and release his recordings as is, complete with tape hiss, background noise and the occasional bum note. Headphone has ninety minutes of songs as catchy as a food-borne virus, its length providing an extra-large visit with ChesnuTT’s extra-large love and sex-fueled persona.
Like a friendly waiter at a down-home diner he provides comfort-food helpings of ’60s style rockers (the surf garage-y “Upstarts in a Blowout” and “Look Good in Leather), soul-man electronica ( the ominous “The World is Coming To My Party”) and folk-gospel ballads (the sad organ pleading of “She’s Still Here”). With his unfeasibly large ego, flexible tenor and dark humor he begs for forgiveness in the nicotine withdrawal anthem “Somebody’s Parent”, and gets jealous of his infant son in his own damn lullaby (No worries/No stress/You lucky motherfucker) in “Daddy’s Baby”.
In the original, shambling version of “The Seed”, ChestnuTT compares musical genre-breaking to primal infidelity:
I don’t beg FROM no rich man And I don’t scream, and kick, when his shit don’t fall in my hands, man Cuz I know how to STEAL Fertilize another against my lover’s will I lick the opposition cuz she don’t take no pill Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-no dear You’ll be keeping my legend alive I push my seed in her push for life Its gonna work because I’m pushin’ it right If Mary drops my baby girl tonight I would name her Rock-N-Roll
Even his indulgences are interesting, such as the way-too-short “Batman vs. Blackman”, the never-really started “Setting the System” and the warped-in-progress “ So Much Beauty in the Subculture”.
Ambitious? Oh heck yeah.
THE FALLOUT: Cody ChesnuTT was a media sensation in 2003, appearing in an unprecedented amount of high-profile media outlets normally out of reach for such an unknown and unclassifiable musician. He also had a minor radio hit with “The Seed 2.0”, an muscular re-recording with The Roots. Oddly, The Headphone Masterpiece never sold as well as his notoriety would lead one to believe, and in 2006 I had a difficult time finding a store that stocked it. And I live in a college town.
Cody ChesnuTT has yet to record a followup.
The Headphone Masterpiece is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
In a modern world where nearly every musical note we hear has been placed and altered with diamond-cutting precision, an album that ignores thirty years of recording advancements is downright heretical. But top-notch songwriting and performances trump sonic clarity any day of the year, and The Headphone Masterpiece proves that point admirably.
THE SCENE: To my sixteen-year old nephew Star Wars has always existed, whereas I distinctly remember life before Darth Vader. By the same token I don’t remember a time when dub music didn’t exist, as its melted beat-eat-eat-EAT-EAT-EAT has always been a part of my listening experience.
Dub was created in the late ‘60s by Jamaican producer King Tubby, who daringly dropped lead singers in and out of their own recordings while bathing instruments in milky delays and boxy distortion. It was an instant, massive hit and much pillaged sound.
Meanwhile, Jamaican producer and musician Augustus Pablo was gaining major international respect due to his mastery of the melodica, a child’s instrument that looks like the love child of a plastic flute and a toy piano. In 1975 he paired with King Tubby to record and remix tracks that became the landmark King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown.
Like a jungle predator, Rockers Uptown gives the listener heightened sensory powers. The bass is ALL bass, no high-end, no mid-range, just strong, sweet deep bass. Cymbals are ALL treble, sneaky and clicky. Every other sound is time shifted, dissolving at the moment of recognition, like the faded memory of a dead loved one.
“Keep On Dubbing” has a watery drunken piano and a smoky horn section gait that’s akin to traveling along the island, onward and inward, hot like the Jamaican sun. The slow rubbery vibe continues in the scratch percussion of “555 Dub St”. and the slo-mo dishwasher drums of “Satta Dub”.
Pablo’s melodica notes float like bubbles through the air in “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”, its childlike innocence wafting along the ominous rhythms. Hollow drums ping-pong double time into infinity, guitars are delayyyyyed and pop up like muscle tremors.
The ghost vocals of reggae singer Jacob Miller haunt “Each One Dub”. His refrain “Tomorrow will not be the same same same same…” dissipates into a wall of wet organ notes.
Since all of these songs started with such strong compositions, the dub versions manage to create their seductive druggy magic with a minimum of gimmickry, and a maximum of head-bopness.
THE FALLOUT:Rockers Uptown was a watershed album upon its release, catapulting Augustus Pablo into one of the leading lights of reggae music. Alas he was overshadowed by Bob Marley internationally, and this album had little presence outside of reggae circles.
King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown is available worldwide from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
An art form that only could exist with the advent of multitracking, dub is the first post-modern music genre and is the godfather of hip-hop, electronica and ambient music. King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown is perhaps its finest hour.
THE SCENE:
In 2000 Chicago-based conscious rapper Common released his third album, the instant classic Like Water For Chocolate. His first Top Twenty and first gold record, Chocolate’s lyrical depth and tight songs catapulted his ascendance into hip-hop’s big leagues. But his next album was in a league of its own, the retro-rockin’ Electric Circus.
Utilizing musicians and singers from rock, rap and R&B, he filled the album with gurgling organs, backwards noises and distorted guitar solos, the cumulative effect akin to hearing a rap album from 1967.
Adding to the surprises Common doesn’t even show up until the second song. The Zap Mama singers help tilt the carnival feel of “Ferris Wheel” into an ad hoc intro theme, then Common drops the boom-bap in “Soul Power” over a gumbo of spooky voices and violins.
Lyrically he chooses to be more impressionistic than specific, which suits the creepy French spy chase of “New Wave” and the psychedelic gospel of “Electric Wire Hustler Flower”:
Mercury and retrograde, I’m trying to get niggas in the ghetto paid While they watch pornos and Escalades, away from floats and the dope in sex parades Somebody screamin in my mind, I’m tryin to find if it’s me Or voices on the master, they design to be free Same revolt, can’t be found on TV, or radio, its livin in me Hey lady, that smoke is bothering me If I put it in your eye, ashes you would cry All this rap talk is blowing my high I just came to chill and build with my guy I try to walk but I stumble off the humble path This story of a pimp stick that became a staff You got it, you gotta know where to aim the Mag Art and opinions are made to clash
When he does focus his thoughts he brings forth the meditative and liquid “Between Me, You & Liberation”. A nearly spoken word poem on death and release, it floats in a midnight pool of jazzy drums and squirmy tones.
Common updates ragtime in “I Am Music” fusing fantastic bleary horns with UFO landing sounds. He also remakes rock’n’roll in the Hendrix homage “Jimi Was A Rock Star” an eight-minute exorcism of piledriving drums and head-bashing fret shredding.
With the right amount of record-label promotion, precisely setting and resetting expectations, this was the album to make his career.
THE FALLOUT: Three weeks after Electric Circus’ release, Common’s record label dissolved. Without adequate promotion it never gained a footing into other music circles, which left it squarely in the hip-hop camp. Journalists and fans dismissed it as un-listenable trash and publicly blamed his then-girlfriend, Erykah Badu, as the catalyst for his hideous transformation. His next album, Be, was a return to acceptance and sales, and free of all Circus’ progressiveness.
Electric Circus is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:
See you next year.
NEXT YEAR: More albums, more obscurities, more cultures, and more uppityness.
Yeah, I know “uppityness” isn’t a word, but you know what I mean.
THE SCENE: In 1966 Christmas albums were strictly the domain of pop acts (think Nat “King” Cole) or smoothed-out rock acts (think The Beach Boys). James Brown was the first Black rock’n’roll or R&B artist to release an entire Christmas album, the aptly named Sings Christmas Songs.
One of five albums he released that year, Brown recorded a surprisingly lush assortment of standards with subtle dustings of breakbeats. Even though this coincided with his ascent into his heavy funk many of these tracks are waltzes. Go figure.
Brown tackles Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song” with skittering drums, warm horns and a vocal raspyness that humanizes some of the more trite lyrics. He also serves up a cover of Charles Brown’s “Merry Christmas Baby”, in which he oddly tries to emulate Charles Brown’ buttery flow.
He reclaims his own voice in “Let’s Make Christmas Mean Something This Year” where he stops singing and talks to you, the listener, about what he’s thankful for this holiday season. It should be corny as hell but he pulls it off brilliantly.
Rich romantic violins feature prominently in “Please Come Home For Christmas” and “Christmas In Heaven” where Brown gets his croon on and gently pleads (OK, begs) for his baby.
His ode to Jesus, “Sweet Little Baby Boy”, is a surprisingly orchestrated country & western affair, perfect for drinking hot toddies or slow line dancing.
All in all, the perfect holiday package for, well, no one in 1966.
THE FALLOUT: Stylistically out of character and indifferently packaged, Sings Christmas Songs went over as well as coal in a Christmas stocking. He fared exceeding better with his next Christmas album, 1968’s unabashedly funky Soulful Christmas.
All of Sings Christmas Songs can be found on The Complete James Brown Christmas, available from Amazon, and you can sample tracks here:
A groundbreaker in holiday albums, Sings Christmas Songs opened the door for all musical acts to record Christmas-themed concept records. (So in some strange way, William Hung’s Hung for the Holidays is James Brown’s fault. Thanks, James.)
