John Leland once called Dylan a trickster in his book Hip: The History. He saw Dylan as one of those enigmatic people who we are unable to capture, unable to get a real grasp of. A sense of understanding of Dylan, according to Leland, bestows us with a sense of hipness, even though in silence we must shamefully admit to ourselves that the man totally eludes us. Ironically Dylan's trickster image that made him an icon of hip, wasn't something that Zimnmerman seemed to be striving for at the time. Zimmerman has always appeared to be uncomfortable with the iconic status of Dylan, or at least for a large part of his career. I think Robert Zimmerman might have felt he wasn't all that hot, or at least no better than the Woody Guthries or the Blind Willie McTells who inspired him. So Zimmerman spend his career trying to escape Bob Dylan. Not so much a chameleon, who adapts to his surroundings to gain invisibility, Dylan developed to be a lizard, trying to slither out of his status by alienating his fans. He went electric, he went Country, got religion, but to no avail. Ironically every time Dylan tried to slither his way out, it added to his enigmatic status. Dylan radiated an arrogance that only added to his hipness. By the eighties Zimmerman was sick of being Dylan and threatened to become sick of music all together.
Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8, chronicles Zimmerman regaining a sense of himself and shows how Zimmerman grew truly comfortable with being Dylan for maybe the first time in his career. These days Dylan could rest comfortable on his past achievements, but that doesn't seem to be in his character. With the audience that once was hip, now settled and mundane, Dylan could spend the fall of his year blowing in the wind. To an extent he's doing just that. The post eighties Dylan sounds relaxed, at ease with who he his. His voice has grown both harsher and calmer. The wheezing has gone, replaced by a soulfulness that the early Dylan lacked. The current Dylan appears to allow you to get closer, or at least radiates a stronger sense of intimacy. This is a Dylan that allowed Scorsese to make a documentary on him, wrote volume one of his Chronicles and appears on the radio. But who thinks that we are slowly starting to get to know Dylan might be missing the point of what Dylan has been doing in this second phase of his career.
What Theme Time Radio Hour and Tell Tale Signs make clear is that this Dylan isn't as much opening up himself, but is opening his passion. Dylan is spending his career opening up a door to music that is threatened to be forgotten. Dylan is taking us along the houses of the great Blues and Folk legends that gave him his career. As Larry 'Ratso' Sloman writes in the liner notes, Dylan is creating his own archaic music. This Dylan realizes that he has finally lost his hip status, that the status of hip belongs to the rappers and the DJs. Yet it is also a Dylan that uses his iconic status to bear open the soul he thinks music is threatening to lose. As such Tell Tale Signs is a fascinating study of a man, not trying to escape, but pursuing something himself, trying to capture the magic that inspired him, trying to unravel what makes music tick. Though many of the tracks eventually found their way to earlier albums, in one form or another, Tell Tale Signs is still a great compilation to own in itself. Not just because most of the arrangements here are strikingly different from what they wound up to be, but because Tell Tale Signs tells a story in itself.
Some 30 years ago, when Springsteen released his seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, John Lyon, better known as Southside Johnny did the same with his Hearts of Stone. Though the album didn’t sell all that well at the time years later Rolling Stone magazine would vote it as one of the best albums recorded at that period of time and it has since achieved some kind of cult status. Those in the know recognize Hearts of Stone as one of the best Rock and Soul albums of the late seventies. I sought out Southside Johnny to talk to him about that unrecognized master piece and was thrilled to find the man is as much a fan-boy like his audience. Throughout the interview Southside remained charmingly humble about his achievements and his talent, coming across as a man who is simply thrilled that he’s still able to perform in the shadows of his heroes on stage.
Southside Johnny first started to make his mark at the Upstage, a club down the Jersey Shore. Which according to Southside was more or less a musicians bar, “after all the clubs had closed, we used to just come there and jam into the night,” he recalls some 40 years down the road. Because of its loose atmosphere the Upstage was a draw for musicians from all over the garden state. Southside lived not to far from the club so he would walk up there nightly. Pretty soon he was the constant factor on stage, “because I knew how to sing all those songs,” he explains today. Southside Johnny had been spoon fed Jazz and R&B by his parents. “There wasn’t any Monteverdi or anything like that in our house,” he remembers “they would come home from work and open a beer, have a great time listening to Big Joe Turner or Ray Charles.” His love for R&B made him a perfect match first for Garry Tallent, Springsteen’s future base player, and later for Miami Steve, whom he met at the Upstage club. Southside knew Tallent and Vini Lopez, the first drummer from the E-Street Band, through school, but Miami lived in a whole different area. So if it hadn’t been for the draw the Upstage had, Lyon and Van Zandt might never have met. With a similar sensibility to music his friendship with Miami would later prove key to Southside’s early career as van Zandt became his producer and manager.
The Asbury Jukes, as Southside’s band is called, didn’t form over night however. Southside recalls today that most of the time, whenever somebody scored a gig at the Jersey shore club scene, bands were just formed then and there for the occasion. Lyon was the logical choice to do the vocals, again because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the R&B classics. “It was all less formal than having a band just trying to make it, we were all just musicians learning,” Lyon explains “Nobody was really ambitious, we just wanted to make music and do things.” Things changed when Little Steven started to work in construction, “he was working on the New Jersey turnpike, working a jackhammer, he had been working the guitar for years and years, except there was no money and he had to do something.” Steven had no place to stay, so he was staying at Lyon’s, “one day he walked in, he was covered in asphalt,” Southside remembers “I looked at him and said, Stevie you can’t do this.” Realizing that day jobs wasn’t what was going to make them happy Steven and Johnny started to get serious about music again.
Right around that time Springsteen finally got his big break with Born to Run. Southside got offered a record contract in the slipstream of that success. Something he still is baffled by today. Lyon remembers he was convinced that “they are never going to give us a record contract, they must be crazy! But they did!” Adding with a laugh, “up to this day I don’t know why!!” Steven and Southside went into the studio before all the formalities were taken care of, convinced the record company would change their minds. “We kind of sneaked into this recording studio, the Record Plant, and we didn’t have any money,” he confides today. Jimi Iovine, who had engineered Springsteen’s Born to Run, aided and abetted. “There really was a lot of pressure on us to go out there and make this happen right away,” Lyon explains “Once Born to Run hit, Bruce was swimming in a sea of sharks, he really needed somebody close who he could rely on and relate to, and that was Steven.” So it was also a matter of the Jukes signature guitar player being swooped up in the circus that Springsteen’s career would soon become.
By lucky coincidence Ronnie Spector made a cameo on that very first album. “Jimmy Iovine was engineering that first album, sneaking us into the studio” Southside elaborates, “He had just come of from working with John Lennon on that roots album. Phil Spector produced that, and Jimmy met Ronnie Spector.” While in the studio working with Johnny, Jimmy got a call from Ronnie. Jimmy seized the opportunity and asked Ronnie if she would be interested in recording a duet with Southside. Much to the latter’s excitement, she accepted, “for us she was just a Goddess from our youth!” That fan mentality, the sheer love of the music translated well unto the album and, for that time, it sold very respectable, some 250.000 copies, “so the record company looked at us with some favor” Southside laughs. Yet ’75 proved to be a watershed in the music business, just before the mega million sales started to dominate the market. Southside’s debut was released at the same time as Boston’s first album, “they broke right out of the box office!” Lyon recalls. “We did some shows with them,” he elaborates, “and we were the better band. But they sold 12 million copies, so now the record company is looking at us……”
With the company aiming to repeat Boston’s success, Southside Johnny’s relationship with them would soon sour. Always convinced the record company wouldn’t allow him to do another album, by the time Lyon started working with Steven on Hearts of Stone, this fear was rapidly starting to become reality. To top it off the recording sessions for Hearts of Stone didn’t exactly go as smooth as planned, “we already recorded eight songs, but then decided that they just weren’t what we wanted. It didn’t sound right, it didn’t feel right, so we decided we had to start all over again. The record company by this time was fed up.” Complicating matters was the fact that Miami and Southside had already ran over budget even before they started working on the new batch of songs. “The record company was very, very unhappy with us. They didn’t like the music, they didn’t understand the music, they didn’t really like us. A regime change had happened, people we didn’t know, people who had no history with us. So I told Steven, it’s over”
Hearts of Stone was recorded Southside’s and Steven’s back against the wall, literally on their way out. It was possible that this was their last shot at ever making an album together. “We were under such pressure to make this record that it came out as an intense emotional experience” Lyon reflects on it now “it was one of those moments where you realize that making music is more important than anything else in your life, it made me dig deeper inside myself”. The difference between Hearts of Stone and its predecessor is indeed striking. Where This Time it's For Real was still laden with stylistic exercises (complete with a Leiber and Stoller pastiche featuring the Coasters), strings and sugar sweet blue eyed soul, Hearts of Stone became a whole different ball of wax. In little under 35 minutes all the anxiety and frustration from dealing with the record company, combined with the sheer love of the music, just comes poring out. Hearts of Stone is at the same time jubilant as it is uneasy, brimming with mixed emotions. Steven’s stiletto like guitar slashes though the Motown Soul with raging love. Lyon delivers a vocal performance of a man who is trying to cling on to the love of his life as she’s walking out of the door. In what sounds like a clash between the Four Tops and the King’s Men, Miami and Lyon delivered an album that is a text book case of how a Rock album should sound, a feverish exorcism, a raging celebration. But without the support of the record company, the album sank like a rock.
Despite all that was going on, Southside Johnny remembers that working with Steven on the album, the latter being notorious for his headstrong views on how music should sound and be recorded, was easy. “Because we had faced the adversity of the record company, it gave us the inner strength to say; we know what we’re doing, so we’re going to go out and do it and come hell or high water we’re going to go do it the way we know it should be done,” he reflects on it now, “and of course Steven and I had the same view point on how recording should be done, that it should be a visceral experience, that it should be honest music. So that part was pretty easy, except it was late nights and I’d come of the road, the tour bus would drop me off at the studio and I would sleep on the studio couch.” Despite Hearts of Stone turning out to be one of the best Soul albums recorded after ’75, Lyon doesn’t feel he trumped his heroes, “we paid the best tribute we could” he humbly says today.
When Hearts of Stones was released, Lyon was swimming against the current with his music. “It was actually a time when music had become a little bloated,” he explains “and I think we were part of the reaction against that.” Southside explains that “all the records that I love are moments caught in time, they are not as produced and structured.” From that perspective Lyon was able to relate to the punk movement as well, even though his brand of music (and the Asbury Park scene) was quite a bit more sophisticated. Lyon acknowledges they had different roots, “but we certainly understood each other. Steven and I used to go and see the Ramones in CBGB’s and they were great! Holy shit! The punk scene to me was kind of a breath of fresh air too, for some reason we managed to get along with them. I think there’s a real bond between people who are not part of the system and don’t want to be part of that system.”
With Hearts of Stone sinking, the Jukes were threatened with a life in the bar scene again. Southside Johnny admits that he resented it at the time, “I felt we were better than that.” Lyon was determined not to give up and continued to keep touring while his career hang on a thread. “We just kept going and that’s 30 years ago” he laughs at it now. Lyon elaborating on how he “just want to have a chance to be me and be honest about what I feel,” might just be the key to why he continued to struggle with record companies. Lyon is not the type of artist to compromise his music in favor of current trends. He is first and foremost a fan of music like his audience. Lyon is capable of recounting is first James Brown concert in the early sixties in a fashion that makes it sound like he just stepped out of the venue, still brimming with excitement. Record executives concerned with sales figures, big sales figures, have a hard time following that train of thought. “Most of the people in the business have nothing to do with music,” Southside claims, “and that’s an immediate alienation for most of us.”
It is the same fan boy like admiration that seeps through on his latest project, Grapefruit Moon, a big band take on the songs of Tom Waits. On the surface Waits’ music might seem like a big leap from the R&B records by the Drifters Lyon loves to collect, but as Southside explains, “I think there a real connection between that, there’s a little Howlin’ Wolf in Tom, there’s certainly a lot of cool Jazz like Charles Brown. There’s a real R&B background in Tom, you can really feel it,” adding with a laugh, “he sounds like he’s down on the street, where he belongs.” The big band project first came into fruition when Johnny met Tom after an Amsterdam show Waits just gave. Lyon sprang his idea on Tom and Waits immediately warmed up to it, “so I said ok, if he can understand it, than I’m alright.” Lyon admits that covering Waits was a challenge, “it had been done but it had not done very well. Not to be cool or anything, but I knew if we did it the way I wanted to do it, it would be different” Eventually Lyon got up the courage to ask Tom if he wanted to sing on the album, Tom agreed. “It was a great moment, I was standing in this funky little hippie studio in California, and it was one of these little moments in your life where you just say I’m grateful to have this opportunity.” Southside Johnny’s drive to approach music open and honest, maybe surprisingly, makes Grapefruit Moon an artistic success. The album is as much about the love of music as the music of Tom Waits.
Lyon’s career has been rough and bumpy, and as he admits not without regrets. "I’ve regretted it many times. I hate to be blunt about it, but its true. You know, pulling up four o’ clock in the morning at a gass station where they have a little lunch counter and you know you’re gonna eat a chili cheese dog at four in the morning and be sick, and you’ve got a gig to do that night and the next night, with ten hours of driving in between and you just think, What the fuck am I doing.” Still he is quick to add, “once you get on stage, it all clears up, you understand what you do.” With charming humbleness Southside admits that his aspirations were modest, “I just wanted a chance to tour, a chance to see the world, it may not see like much to most people, but that’s what I wanted.” The audiences all over the world still respond with a fervor to the Jukes on stage. Southside explains “mostly what I wanted to do is have fun. I know that seems like a small ambition but I never wanted to be a R&R hero. I wanted people to come to the shows and have a good time, just enjoy themselves.” Southside in that sense is R&R’s foremost anti-hero. Standing on stage in a plain jeans shirt and small sun glasses, he looks like he just stepped out of an auto parts shop or the construction site Little Steven escaped all those years ago. As such Southside Johnny is easier to connect to than most of R&R’s super stars, maybe even easier to connect to than Springsteen, in whose slip steam he got his first break. “I didn’t think my fans had to worship to any throne or anything like that,” Lyon says about it himself, “I wanted it to be like the music I used to see, where you would go and see the Drifters and just enjoy yourself, I never wanted anything more than that.” Going by that standard you might just say that Lyon’s career has been a great success, a success in honesty and love of music.
We're back on line! While being out of the loop I've made myself useful and prepared two articles that might be of interest to you. The review of Tom Morello's new album is one of them, but I've got a big surprise for you tomorrow!
“The Fabled City” is Tom Morello’s second solo outing as the Nightwatchman. Though Morello admittedly performed a lot of these songs “amidst the tear gas attacks at the G8 protest,” there is, again, little common ground between this solo album and his work with Rage Against the Machine. Though in both projects Morello presents himself as a socially and politically engaged artist, the methods are strikingly different. Morello has called the Nightwatchman as his antidote against arena rock. In tone and approach of the complex social issues Morello likes to address it is exactly that, the opposite of Rage Against the Machine vicious guitar riffs and raging vocals. Morello’s album is more reminiscent of a Rubin produced Johnny Cash album, his voice strikes a resemblance to Iggy Pop, sans the irony, the content closer to a Steve Earle record. On the surface there’s little what links the two projects.
Morello’s inspiration for the Nightwatchman came from a rather unexpected corner for most Rage Against the Machine fans, I can imagine. Explaining the project today Tom claims that “the clear model for me was seeing Bruce Springsteen on his Ghost of Tom Joad tour. I was stunned at how powerful and heavy a concert could be without any Marshall amps in the room.” For Morello fans who view Springsteen through Reagan’s patriotic shades this link might be somewhat of a shocker. But fans who paid attention to Rage Against the Machine’s cover of the “Ghost of Tom Joad” and managed to look beyond the synthesizer layered sound of the “Born in the USA” album, might have found quite a bit of common ground between the two artists. From Springsteen Tom went back and explored the extensive catalogs of Dylan and Woody Guthrie, from where the Nightwatchman started to take shape. Though the two artists shared the stage for a fiercely rocking version of the “Ghost of Tom Joad”, their approach to songwriting bares little resemblance to each other’s work.
Where Springsteen constructs his songs as miniature novel or films, Morello’s songs are decidedly more abstract. Using quite a bit of biblical imagery, Tom paints a rather apocalyptic picture of American society. Though the protagonists Springsteen likes to use, you know, the working class and disenfranchised, Morello chooses to take snap shots of them rather than chronicle the events that mark their lives. Morello’s songs are more like the murals from Diego Riviera, images of working class heroes and victims of capitalism’s shadow populate his songs. Though explicit criticism of the current Bush administration drifts in and out of the songs, the songs keep a certain abstract quality. Where the songwriting at Rage Against the Machine was littered with the same catchy, though strikingly more vicious and rebellious, one-liners politicians like to use, Morello’s albums leave more room for your own reflections.
Question is of course which approach is more the more successful. Graduated from Harvard university with honors as a Political Science master, Morello has always been more of a political activist than he was a rock star, even though his current appearance in the Guitar Hero video came might have you suspect otherwise. Like Woody Guthrie, Morello is a songwriter with a mission. Though lacking the depth Morello’s Nightwatchman has, Rage Against the Machines hard rocking one-liners might just be more effective in getting the attention of a large audience. On the other hand, Rage Against the Machine’s albums have never been as thought provoking as “the Fabled City.” One-liners can be rather off putting in their uncompromising insistence. Morello’s acoustic albums may never reach such a large audience as Rage Against the Machine has, but for who is willing to listen, there is quite a bit more room for developing your own opinion on the issues Tom addresses.
In all, while the record breathes a sense of resilience and rebellion, its atmosphere is dark and dreary. Another vital point where Morello differs from Springsteen, who’s records are always balanced with songs that breathe an enormous amount of hope (though less so in his acoustic albums). Morello’s more skeptical outlook on the elections is no surprise after listening to “the Fabled City”. Where Springsteen is an open supporter of Barack Obama, Morello’s opinion of the man is steeped in criticism. While he concedes that an Obama presidency would be a major step forward symbolically, he also adds :”I firmly believe that it’s the system that’s the problem, rather than one party or the other. When a candidate steps forward who will end poverty and end the war and save the environment and be unbending to capital, we’ll see. Racism is as American as apple pie and baseball. A black president would definitely be a step in the right direction for civilizing the nation. But at the same time there’s Obama’s vow to continue a war in Afghanistan and saber-rattling in Iran. Whatever the voice is in his soul that whispers the good things, there are political demands. That’s why I’m a guitar player and a singer. I answer to no one”
"Whatever it Takes"
Morello will tour behind “the Fabled City” this fall.
Last week I was lucky enough to catch Tom Waits in Paris. One of the last truly hard tickets out there. Front row seats for the Grand Rex went for a whopping 140 Euros a pop. But because of a cunning ticket selling scheme, where tickets were printed with your name and entrance in the theater was only possible with valid ID that matched the name printed on the ticket, the black market was close to no factor in the sales this time around. The Grand Rex proved to be the perfect venue to see Waits. The big stage complete with curtains, lusciously decorated balconies and palm trees, the Grand Rex breathes the days of old. Getting comfortable in one of those big leather theater chairs you feel like you just walked into a relic of the twenties. The Grand Rex could have easily have been a scene in one of Tom Waits songs, which often sound like they would be better at ease in the roaring twenties than this globalized new millennium.
Watching a Tom Waits show on this tour is like stepping into a depression era circus or carnival. With Waits as the ring master you half expect guest spots for the bearded lady or the human snake. Dressed in a costume tailors stopped manufacturing about a century ago, sporting a bowler on his head Tom Waits aims to transport you from here to a dustier, more mysterious time. A time where fortune tellers were about as reliable as mad scientists, a time where a quack was just as likely to heal your paralyzed legs as the revivalist preacher. Tom Waits shows and songs are objet trouvés whipped into something deranged through his seemingly constant delirium, a left over from his whiskey years. Waits outlook on the world is delightfully unique, which makes his work somewhat hard to access, but once your able to look at you're surroundings through his eyes, he sticks to you like a rash.
After waiting in a over heated Grand Rex in tropical Paris, the dust sprang up when Waits started stomping his feet to a deranged rhythm. His gravel voice would gurgle and spit out the songs that would soothe and fascinate for the next two and a half hours. Waits doesn't sing his songs, he acts them out. Waits doesn't do shows he does theater. The band is there to support the theater and the songs sound like a crackling 78rpm record. Where his last studio album "Real Gone" leaned heavy into a guitar sound, on stage, this time around, Waits opened up the sound. While that meant that some songs didn't quite carried the punch you'd expect, it did make room for surprising arrangements of old fan favorites and the obscurities that litter his catalog. Show stopper "Make it Rain" was padded out with organ and sax, "Lie to Me" went back into the Western barrooms. Surprisingly the traveling circus that is a Tom Waits show made quite a few stops that his albums rarely make. Most notably on "Black Market Baby" with a brand new Reggae rhythm, but through out the show there were whiffs of Cuban son, pinches of Trinidad Calypso on "Hoist That Rag" and table spoons of Argentina Tango. Making the performance an especially tasty and spicy stew.
Somehow in Tom Waits hands all these weird ingredients, strange melodies and exotic hooks become the most natural singalongs. Throughout the evening Waits had the audience eating out of his hands, had them enchanted in his ringmaster command, being able to even direct his own applause without it seeming arrogant or jaded. For many the high light of the show was the moment Waits sat down behind the piano himself, accompanied by only a string bass. If anything Tom Waits has always been a beat poet born two decades too late. Behind the keys he seems to pull weird tales right out of his sleeve that could've come straight out of an old pulp magazine. In the context of the evening his yarns make perfect sense, it isn't until you walk out that you realize that it probably isn't possible to have bullfrogs living in your stomach.
Tickets sales isn't the only the only thing where the Boss could take a cue from the ringmaster. The recent Atlanta show is now available on NPR for streaming and in pod cast download. Recapturing the Magic this way kind of makes collecting bootlegs seem obsolete. Why dig through stacks of mediocre recordings if you can enjoy a show in all its sonic glory.
July 17th - Waiting for William Bell at an Amsterdam hotel, I was sipping on some coffee while all the classic Soul hits played in the background. The records from Stax and Motown, that once shook the world, struck me as the perfect background to interview the man who was a big part of the Soul genre’s birth. What at one point, as William would put it, was the Devil’s music, now was enough part of our collective musical memory to soothe us over a hotel breakfast. Sitting down for coffee with a man I consider to be a legend, I was truck with how accessible mister Bell was. Pushing 70 years of age, Bell looked like a man in his late forties. A youth he would radiate later that evening on stage in the Hague while delivering his classic hits such as “You Don’t Miss Your Water (till the well runs dry) and “Private Number.”
William Bell was born William Yarbourgh in Memphis Tennesee 1939. William started his singing career in the Baptist church at a very young age. “I was six or seven when I started singing in church,” William remembers. At the age of 14 William entered a talent contest at the Mid-South Fair, “I won first price and that brought me to the attention of Phineas Newborn who had a big 14 piece orchestra, kind of like a Count Basie type orchestra”. Looking back William really feels his stint with the orchestra, including top talent like Fathead Newman and Hank Crawford, was like going to the university that would prepare him for the rest of his career. “Some of the things I learned back then I can still apply today, how to read an audience, how to time your shows”. Phineas also taught him all William needed to know about chord progression and taught him the basics on the piano. The most important lessons William remember however was to “always leave your audience wanting more” with a laugh he adds, “when you see you’ve got them at a fever pitch…..exit!” A lesson William still applies today.
Coming from a working class background Williams parents weren’t very supportive at first. “Mom was in the choir” William explains “this was what they called Devil’s music” he adds with a chuckle, “they had much rather that I had gone the gospel route, but since old man Phineas’ sons were in his band and he had asked my mum about joining the orchestra, she reluctantly agreed as long as I was back in time on Sunday for church.” Added to his parents reluctance was the fact that both his parents worked hard to make ends meet, “so we weren’t super poor” Williams remembers. But that didn’t take away from the fact that his parents had hoped William would go off to college as the first in the family and become a doctor, “but at that time I had the music in my head.” Music and writing was important to William, “I was always a poet, even as a ten to twelve year old. That was like an escapism, I was always writing lyrics.” Over time the support of his parents grew so when he formed the Del-Rios, a doo-wop group, with some class mates, they were allowed to practice in the house.
The Del-Rios saw William shifting from Jazz to modern music. Like so many performers of his generation it was radio that had first introduced him to R&B. In William’s case it was WDIA that played a key role. As the first black radio station in the country it was through them he got acquainted with the sounds of Little Richard, the Clovers, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters and B.B. King. WdIA also organized teen talent contests, which Bell would use to further hone his performing skills. “They had B.B. King with a fifteen minute show where he would play and sing and then they had the teen talent singers where we would play three songs or so” he remembers. With the Del-Rios he would start to play his first matinees in Memphis and get his first recording experience when they cut “Alone on a Rainy Night” for Meteor records with Rufus Thomas’ band the Bear Cats backing them up. Bell fondly remembers Rufus, “I knew him both as a comedian and a DJ, he kind of was a surrogate father to all of us.” With Thomas being a jack of all trades William picked up a lot of how to become an all round performer.
William remembers Memphis as a melting pot where you’d hear all the different music styles coming through the radio and having Sun records right across town where Elvis Presley and Rufus Thomas had cut their first records. As he explains that melting pot was key in the Stax sound, which married Country and R&B. Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn came from a Rockabilly background, William remembers and explained how that sound mixed with Booker T’s church background, creating a sound that was as unique as it was revolutionary at the time. When William was growing up, Memphis was still segregated. William still clearly remembers the white only signs and the blatant racism, although he does admit he was more or less sheltered from the worst part of it. “It was weird, my neighborhood was like the dividing line between black and white” William explains. Right across the street of him lived a white family, Bell remembers that “early in the morning my mother would have coffee at the kitchen table and exchange recipes with the white lady across the street, so I grew up with more of an open mind. When I got with Stax, having the camaraderie with black and white, it was a mixture there, once we closed those doors, we locked the world outside.” The only tension William remembers amongst his fellow musicians was over how to play the chord changes. Inside they only argued about the important stuff, “it didn’t matter if you were black or white, it was all in terms of what you could bring to the table in terms of your musical abilities.” Stax was the first integrated company in the country Bell remembers, “it was like a family, we opened a lot of avenues by being mixed.”
How much of a family Stax actually was becomes tangible when William reminisces on Estelle Axton, the sister of Jim Stewart. Jim was the St of Stax, she was the Ax. “She was like a mother to us, she was nutritious, she kept us on the straight and narrow a lot of times, because we would be teenagers back than, it didn’t matter to her if you were black or white, if you’d do something wrong, she’d be all over us” he remembers with a warm smile. Estelle also ran the record shop, Satellite Records, that was an instrumental part of the Stax operation. As a small independent operation, Stax didn’t have the financial buffer to take too many risks on their records. So before a record was pressed Estelle would play the record in the record store and see of it commanded a response from the kids who were visiting. If they started to dance, Estelle would know they had another hit.
William claims today he was the first male singer to be signed to Stax, encouraged by Chips Moman, an influential Memphis based guitar player and record producer. William was reluctant at first. His memories of recording for Meteor had left him with a bitter taste in his mouth for the recording industry since he never got paid for that. Bell wasn’t sure he wanted a career as a signed singer for himself. He rather went out on the road with Phinaes which provided him a stable income at the time. However, during a long stand in New York, William started to get homesick and penned “You Don’t Miss Your Water (till the well runs dry)” to give expression to those emotions. Back in Memphis Bell first recorded with the Del-Rios again for Stax, soon however the army stepped in and drafted about half of the group, “So I wound up being a solo” Bell laughs remembering. He cut his song and building regionally it would become his first hit for the company. The simply philosophy that made the song stand out would later become Bell’s trade mark. “As a kid I was always surrounded by grown-ups” Bell explains “So I got a lot of that home spun wisdom from my grandparents and my parents and everything”. These wisdoms would later find their way into other signature songs such as “Everybody Loves a Winner” or “I Forgot to be Your Lover,” making them easy to connect to.
Ironically Bell was drafted himself soon after he had his first hit. When he came back out of the army, Stax had signed Otis Redding who became their first bona fide super star. Almost by default William is compared to Otis these days, even though their vocal styles are strikingly different. “His background was Gospel too, his father was a minister” Bell says explaining the similarities between them. “But of course he was more of an up-tempo singer, wham! wham! ” Bell relates, “and I was more of a hopeless romantic” he says laughing. Explaining further Bell relates that their respective regions were key in how their vocal styles formed. Being from Macon Georgia, Otis was more influenced by Little Richard according to Bell. While William himself was more influenced by Bobby Bland and B.B. King, “Coming from Memphis I got a little bit of everything” he adds, again stressing the melting pot Memphis was.
Despite their differences William and Otis hit it off and started touring together for about a year and a half in 1966. Touring in cramped cars, becoming road buddies was almost a necessity, “we used to flip coins to see who had to sit in the middle portion” Bell laughs. The touring schedule was frantic, “I think in one year we did almost 300 one-nighters.” Bell remembers a specific incident where they came from a show in Washington and had little time to catch the plane after that. Unfortunately the car stalled about a mile away from the airport. Otis and William had to jump the fence and run across the runway to be able to catch the plane, which as about to embark. Luckily the purser, while they were already taking away the ladder from the plane, was a fan who recognized the duo and stalled the plane so they could catch it. “We were lucky we weren’t ran over by a plane” Bell laughs, “these days you probably couldn’t do that without being shot,” he adds.
William cut a couple of albums for Stax. The first one, “The Soul of a Bell,” he produced with his youth buddy Book T, whom he knew from church and high school, at the Stax studios. “Bound to Happen” was produced by All Bell, the company’s president at the time, at Muscle Shoals. Explaining the differences between the two William relates that “Booker was more musical inclined, All was more of a feel person, he approached it almost from a religious point of view, Booker wanted it all to be structured musical correctly. He was such a great musician, really a multi-instrumentalist long before it was fashionable.” He admits that writing with Booker T came easy to him, they could almost read each other’s minds. William explains how he would often come into the studio with just the skeleton of a song, “but then he came in and would take it to another level.” Though sometimes, Bell added, “it was the music that almost dictated the subject matter”.
Though producing records with Booker T at Stax, William wasn’t signed to them as such. That gave Bell the liberty to form his own record label in Atlanta, Peachtree, in 1969. Where talent just kind of floated into Stax through the record shop, in Atlanta however William had to hunt down his own talent. Bell worked together with his then manager Henry Wynn on this, who as a promoter did all the big black acts those days according to William. Wynn also had a few acts signed without any material out. So what Bell would cut those artists to wax, backed by his own road band, Johnny Jones and the King Casuals. As an independent it proved difficult to get their material plugged at radio stations, so Wynn would make sure to make courtesy stops at the local stations whenever the Peachtree acts, like Mitty Collier, would come to town, building a name for them regionally when this was still possible. But the times were changing. By the time Stax went bankrupt in 1975 the market left less room for little labels that could. The big companies had tightened their grip on the market, big FM radio stations with their formats were slowly pushing out the smaller regional stations and Disco started dominating popular tastes.
Ironically William Bell closed the era of what is now considered the golden age of Soul with a bang. After Stax went down William was signed to Mercury. Again his affiliation with this new label came with reluctance from Bell’s part. “After Stax filed bankruptcy I was so disillusioned, because as kids growing up we never thought that Stax would end” he muses today. This time after being motivated and chased down by Peachtree’s distributor Charles Fach, also vice-president of Mercury, Bell reluctantly gave in and agreed to cut four songs for Mercury to be used as 45rpm releases. “At that point I didn’t actually have any songs” Bell admitted with a laugh. By the time he had the songs written, amongst which “Trying to Love Two” which would become Bell’s first number one hit in 1976, the Rhythm section he had wanted to use was no longer available. Bell called upon New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint who set him up with a backing band, possibly Chocolate Milk, but William isn’t exactly sure. After “Trying to Love Two” hit Bell expanded the sessions into an album, aptly titled “Coming Back For More.”
"(C)2008 Jelmer de Haas" Even though the first Mercury album hit big, Bell, like so many of his peers, got lost in the flood of the changing times. Because of a change in executives at Mercury interest in Bell waned within the company and Bell himself had difficulty to adapt to Disco. William can laugh about it today, “Disco was a 120 beats a minute and it was killing us.” Bell explains, “of course the producers became the stars then.” It wasn’t long before Saturday Night Fever hit after that and the DJ became King William reflects on it now, “even though a lot of artists are still around they never came back.” Reflecting on what the music business became Bell relates “it’s too much a melting pot these days, I like some of the modern stuff, but to me individuality is what makes and artist. All of the great artists, whether its B.B King, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix or Clapton, they all had a distinct sound you’d easily recognize.” Bell feels music is missing just that individuality these days. “A lot of it is lost in the generic music of today because they use the same instrumentation, the same chord structure, it just comes across as fast-food music.” Bell suspects a lot of the appreciation for the craft got lost when the small clubs started to close down, “artist don’t have a place to go and hone their craft” he clarifies, “you have to be able to look your audience in the eye-balls.”
Despite the musical and cultural musical changes, William Bell keeps producing music for his own production company Wilbe. It’s the love of it that keeps him going, “it keeps me young.” Something he would prove in spades on stage later that night. Showing to all the Amy Winehouses and Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reeds out there how the game is really played.
Some artists embody America’s rich music history in the strangest and most surprising ways. As a big Springsteen fan I first learned about Mark Wright when he announced a cover project of Springsteen songs. When I decided to investigate a little further I stumbled in one surprise after another. Aside from covering Springsteen, Mark Wright turned out to be an Elvis impersonator extraordinary, a former opening act for Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and a solo artists signed to Universal UK, as which he brings his own interpretation of Americana with original material. Intrigued I sought Mark out for an interview to find out how a lad from Brighton UK manages to tie all these seemingly disjointed personas together.
From seeing Springsteen at Villa Park in 1988, it was the Boss that became Mark’s first and foremost influence. The first song learned was ‘Glory Days’. The Elvis thing just kind of happened after that as a joke that got out of hand. At 17 Mark did an impersonation at a party. It went over better than he though, “before I knew it I was performing up and down the country at various corporate functions as well as casinos, weddings etc. it’s a crazy way to make a living!,” Mark says today. It was the Springsteen connection however that got Mark his first big brake as a solo artist. When the Light of Day foundation put together a charity CD filled with Springsteen covers, to raise money for the research of Parkinson’s disease, Mark’s cover of “Two Hearts” got to be on it. Mark suddenly found himself on the same release as Elvis Costello, Nils Lofgren and Billy Bragg “One of the greatest moments of my life was walking into the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, New York and seeing a whole rack of the Light of Day: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen CDs facing me as I walked into the store,” Mark remembers now.
Revolver, backed Universal's distribution, who released “Light of Day”, approached Mark to sign them to their label. “It was a dream come true really,” Mark says with modest pride, “What was apt was that it was seeing Bruce Springsteen in concert that inspired me to pick up the guitar in the first place. Years later it was my version of a Bruce Springsteen song that led to me being signed. So, really, I owe Mr Springsteen a lot. If he ever wants an Elvis impersonator for a party I’ll certainly offer him a cheap rate! Ha ha!” Revolver released Mark’s first genuine solo album, One Way Ticket in 2007, even though he had already recorded in the Sun studios years before. Looking back Mark says today, “Perhaps the highlight of the [sessions] for me was recording ‘Johnny Bye Bye’. To be recording a song written by Bruce about Elvis’ death in the room where Elvis made his first faltering steps that would eventually lead to his passing was incredibly moving. It was a moment I’ll never, ever forget. It may sound clichéd but I felt that in a sense I’d brought the two of them together somehow.”
In preparation of the album release Revolver send Mark on tour with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot as an opening act, eventually joining Jack on stage regularly on for the encores, sharing the mic on Dylan’s “Ill be Your Baby Tonight” or Lead Belly’s “Stewball”. Mark remembers it as one of the most thrilling experiences in his short career. “I’m not sure that Jack himself releases quite how significant he is in the scheme of modern music history.”Mark told me, “Here was a man who not only played Woody Guthrie songs, he was friends with Woody and travelled with him. He was the bridge between Woody and Greenwich Village. You take Jack Elliott out of the equation and our CD collections would be sounding very different today. I know people always say that Dylan was the heir to Woody but the truth is that Dylan only met Woody when Woody was very ill and could no longer play the guitar. Dylan learnt all the Woody stuff from Jack!”
Mark became quite good friends with Ramblin’ Jack and approaches him with respect. He’s cautious to tell me stories from the road. “I felt privileged that he felt me enough of a friend that we could talk about a lot of things but I don’t feel it’s my place to tell any part of his story” Mark explains. One story on Bruce Springsteen he felt comfortable enough to pass along though. “Bruce apparently went backstage during one the ‘Rolling Thunder revue’ shows in the mid-70’s where he asked Jack his autograph” Mark relates to us now, passing the tale in the best of Folk traditions,.” Years later when they performed together at the Guthrie tribute in ’96 Bruce asked Jack is he remembered him asking all the years before. Jack did and Bruce gave him a bottle of Jack Daniels as a gift. The truth is that Jack isn’t too fond of JD as his whiskey of choice is Maker’s Mark but he didn’t have the heart to tell Bruce and accepted it graciously. So next time Bruce gives him a bottle (which is always gratefully received!) he just needs to make sure it’s ‘Maker’s Mark’!”
Following up a solo album with original material with a Springsteen album, may sound like an odd move. Yet Mark manages to put his own personal stamp on Springsteen’s music by crawling into the songs. Quite the opposite from his Elvis impersonations where he crawls into the persona. "I couldn’t really sing the songs as Elvis!" Mark says with a laugh, "Although maybe it’s something I should consider for the future!" Mark is very conscious of the influence Elvis had on Springsteen fantasizing, “I think in his heart Bruce is a bit of an Elvis impersonator himself. There’s no way he hasn’t practiced all the Elvis moves in front of a mirror! No way.” Although he stresses an important difference as well, “Bruce is about the journey. I get the feeling that he’s always been very conscious of that journey in everything that he writes. He seems to know where it’s going and where it may end up. I don’t believe Elvis had that sort of perspective on his music. I truly think there was a real artist struggling to be heard but he didn’t necessarily have the tools, or the advice, on hand to make those decisions.” Of course Mark offers us an interesting journey through American music in his own right these days, where his seemingly unrelated projects all come together much like the strange and thrilling melting pot that America is today.
Back from Dublin, straight to Boss Tracks after an absence of a few days. Now, I'll have to step into the confession box for a bit. I wasn't in Dublin just to see what subtle differences in taste there is between a pint of Guinness in the various Dublin pubs. I was out cheating on the Boss. While the Magic tour is still going ahead full steam, I was in Dublin ticking off another box in my list of living legends I've got to see in my life time. His grand old grumpiness Neil Young was playing the picturesque Malahide Castle near Dublin, a good excuse to visit the green isle I figured. A decision I will not regret anytime soon. If only because I got to experience how relaxing pit lines can actually be. We arrived at three o'clock and found ourselves, front row, center stage in the pit, arms on the rail. Mind you, this is 3 pm I'm talking about, none of that camping out business.
Another big difference was the fact that we got opening acts until the grand old man was ready to come on stage. While the first band, Everlast, was charming but nothing spectacular, the second act, the Frames, most definitely were. I had heard of the Frames, even listened to one of their albums before, but that didn't prepare me for the show they gave. Front man Glen Hansard is no stranger to drama, or even melodrama, but on stage he balanced that out quite nicely with a down to earth sense of humor. Hansard is quite the communicator and story teller, and the band more than a little impressive. The Frames have a sense of dynamics in their music that is rare and Hansard's emotional range seems to know no bounds. At one point his voice strikes you as dark and brooding, like Leonard Cohen, the next moment he'll be wailing Solomon Burke with a ragged edge. By playing a few verses of "Here Comes the Night" the band gave a nod to Van Morrison, quite probably thanking him for inspiration. I must say though, the Frames will give you a show that will make Van the Man bow his head in shame. It has been a long time since that grumpy Irishman did anything that was nearly as inspirational as what I saw at Malahide.
With the Frames opening Neil actually had something to prove. Neil's current touring band is aptly called the Electric Band with old road buddies Ben Keith and Rick Rosas delivering the cement. The set opened full electric, Neil hacking away at his guitar "Blackie". Neil's electric work is not everybody's cup of tea. Its a great big howling and growling monster threatening to stomp all over you. Young never quite got over his taste for noise, he loves letting the beats claw at you. His erratic way of attacking his guitar during solos leave a lot of room for failure, but I must admit that it all came together quite nicely. For a grumpy old man Neil was in quite the chipper mood, even talking to the audience some between songs. The song selections were pretty representative for his career. High lights like "Mr. Soul" and "Hey Hey, My My" featured prominently in the opening set, along with harder to stomach pieces as "Spirit Road". Quality control never has been Neil's strongest point when it comes to song writing, which seeped into the show a bit. The high point of the show for me was when Young abandoned "Blackie" for the acoustic guitar. My appreciation for young lies more in the subdued song writer than the aggressive rocker, so a selection as "Oh, Lonesome Me" came as a welcome break from all the guitar violence. Young showcased his more fragile side perfectly with a heart breaking rendition of "Old Man" with Larry Cragg stepping out momentarily on banjo.
Maybe it is because of that fragile side, where Young communicates his emotions so eloquently that his stage presence almost comes as a shock. Like his music Young seems to growl on stage, barely able to force a smile. If there's a glitch in the night Young seems to explode, smashing his cup to the ground, cursing. Though by the time Young tears the strings from "Blackie" during the encore, I was half convinced that all this grumpy old man business is simply his take on show bizz. I mean, he still has to at least give us the impression that he's burning out, not simply fading away, right?
Download the full show in mp3 here A small request, use mp3s for personal use only. Keep them in your iPod or on your computer but never use a mp3 based CD in a trade. The quality of mp3s deteriorate rapidly every time a CD is ripped. Using high quality music files such as FLACs is essential in keeping the trading pool healthy.
Recording: 3- out of 5 Show: 3,5 out of 5 Artwork: none
“Kids flash guitars just like switchblades, hustling for the record machine” With these two cinematic lines Springsteen once described the New Jersey R&R scene in his classic song “Jungleland” from the “Born to Run” album. With scenes as the boardwalk and Madam Marie, or artists like Little Steven van Zandt and Southside Johnny, Asbury Park has gained its place in mythical R&R lore, a place where greatness was born. I’ve always felt that in the development of great music scenes play a pivotal role. Music is never born in a vacuum, all the great artists came from a breeding ground of friendly competition. During the early days of MTV and FM radio the importance of local scenes started to wane, musicians started to lose ground to discos and clubs. With American Idols this trend has reached its peak, music is now a commodity with a very short conservation date, hardly rooted in any locality.
But for those willing to look there are still those soldiers of R&R struggling to keep the scene alive, trying to truly connect to their audience and their immediate surroundings. Walk into the Stone Pony at the Jersey Shore on a given Friday night, one of those dives Springsteen still likes to frequent, you might stumble into Cool Days End, a refreshingly straight forward band taking up their switchblades against the sign of the times, trying to prove to the world there still is a place for R&R. To people who sloughing on their couch in their fresh expensive new condos at the Jersey shore a band like Cool Days End or a club like the Pony may seem like a weed that refuses to die. To Cool Days End base player Rick Marsh the Pony is a great place to be. “It is becoming more and more difficult to find venues that cater real music”, he reflects “In this horrific American Idol mind set, people want to be spoon fed the same puke over and over, with little regard for something new. Keyboard player Bill Kace bemoans that the Jersey scene is virtually non existent. “Original band have to practically beg to play” he reflects sombrely.
Cool Days End is proof that there still are quite a few people who enjoy digging for those diamonds. The band started out as a Springsteen cover band called Glory Days, but to singer songwriter Tom Kistler’s surprise people soon started telling him they liked his original stuff better. It didn’t take the boys long ditch the Boss and started focussing on creating their own material. After base player Rick Masch gave the band their name, Cool Days End was on its way. Though the band is now still closely associated with Springsteen they’re working hard to break that stigma. Keeping them in that corner would be selling them short truth be told. Rob Mike, the band’s lead guitar player, finds his roots firmly in Jazz and Blues with hints of Classical music. Keyboard player Bill Kace already has a long career as a professional musician behind him, playing with New Wave band the Good and Disco ducks Third World, he even enjoyed his stint at the Letterman Show. Kace admits today that he technically didn’t join Cool Days End, “The band kind of adopted me after recording the album”.
Somehow the band manages to mix all those influences to a tight unit. Drummer Rob Kulessa remembers with a smile; “It’s all Rick’s fault, he was replacing our old base player and the first thing he did was sit us down and tear the music down to it’s basic elements” Rob explains that getting the band into a tight unit was relatively easy, “We’re all friends outside of the band and we’re all pulling in the same direction” Though Tom Kistler writes the songs, the band sees the arrangements as a band effort. Cool Days End is not backing up a singer songwriter but a cohesive unit. Most noticeably about Tom’s writing however is how he manages to capture everyday scenes. Cool Days End is by no means a Rock act that wallows in cynicism like a lot of young bands to day, going through their songs is more like looking at snap shots of everyday people. Tom has a song writing style that reminds me more of Merle Haggard than of Springsteen. When I confront him with that notion he laughs a little, “I grew up listening to the country greats, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb and such. An influence coming from his father who was a huge country fan taking him to a place named “the Colar Bar” where he got to see them live in action and sneak into the tour busses. “It’s inspiring music to me he admits, real down to earth”
Some of that Country influence seeped through their classic Rock sound when Cool Days End recorded their current album “Streets, Dreams and everything in Between”, available through CD Baby. The track “Believe in Me” was just screaming for an honest to God fiddle. Rob Kulessa approached Springsteen’s violin player Soozie Tyrell to add the part the band was hearing. “Her time in the studio was amazing to watch” he says looking back, “every thing she did was in one take, pure perfection in the space of an hour and a half”. “She blasted it out!” Tom adds. Cool Days End is currently working real hard to try and get that perfection across to a broad audience, securing deals with radio stations for airplay and striking up an alliance with Live Nation to get the band out on the road, possibly even to Europe, right across the ocean from Asbury Park. “The Jersey Shore is an unique environment for artists” Masch relates “Over the years the bar-band scene has been squeezed into a funnel with only a hand full of survivors, we are proud to be survivors”.
The reverend is back at the secular front with his third album since his 2003 comeback "I Can't Stop". After shying away from the secular market, focusing on Gospel, Al Green seems to have fully embraced the salt of the earth again. Green started scaling down his Pop career in '74 when a girlfriend doused him with boiling grits. Any other man would figure he really did something to piss her off this time. Green on the other hand saw it as a sign from God to correct his ways. It did take a fall off stage in '79 however before the good Lord gained his full attention. Green turned his back on a career that made him rich and started focusing on preaching. Ever the showman Green started using his gifts as an entertainer to woo his congregation in service of the Lord. He traded the screams of lust for the hollers of devotion. Though Green himself has always claimed that his spiritual believes were always a part of his music, it took him a quarter of a century to record some of that seductive silky Soul that made him legendary in the first place.
Al Green wrote the book on suave Soul. Though his albums never gained the stature of of Marvin Gaye's seminal works I wouldn't be surprised if Marvin picked up a trick or two from the reverend. Though three decades old his classic records still sound fresh today. A quick glance at the current Soul market is enough to see the younger generations are still attentive to his teachings. So an album where Green would find himself working with the new breed was just a matter of time. His former two records were with his original producer Willie Michel and what was left of the legendary house band of the Hi studios. Fine as they were, that classic set up could never quite match his work from the seventies. I dare say Hip Hop producer ?uestlove comes quite a bit closer to making us, momentarily, forget them. ?uestlove wisely doesn't deviate too much from Green's classic sound. It is in the surroundings of humming organs, syrupy strings and punchy horn lines, that the Reverend's voice comes out best, floating over it, Soul supreme. Instead of the lounge like Hip Hop beats that mar most of Nu-Soul, ?uestlove enlisted the help of the Booker T & the MGs from Brooklyn, the Dap-Kings. The same band that made Wino Winehouse recent outing so irresistible.
Backed by his new team Green whispers, hollers, screams, moans and pleads his way through this new album as if he never stopped doing secular music. It seems his voice only gained depth over the years, it certainly never lost any of its seductive qualities. Though none of the compositions here can match his best songs, I dare say that "Lay It Down" is a supreme album. Green never relied too much on his strength as a song writer, his voice has the ability to make the most mediocre lyrics come to life. When Green sings you get that flush in your cheeks, those butterflies in your stomach, even at an age of 62 he is contagious with that irresistible playful sexuality that defined his classic albums, he still has that deep blue undertones that will make your heart ache with yearning. Green is still the teacher of love as much as he's the preacher.
Some Legends are in your face, like the E-Street Band, some Legends lay waiting in the shadows waiting for us to stumble upon them. The Fleshtones are Living Legends, lurking in those shadow, secretly giving the worlds greatest R&R show, waiting to pull you in to never let you go. Once you stumble upon the Fleshtones, once they enchant you with the magic of R&R, you’ll never be free of their spell. Twelve years after their last show in Amsterdam, the Fleshtones were suddenly back in a funky little place called Akhnaton. A club that carries about 200 patrons, where you’ll still see the stage through a thick soup of cigarette smoke and that gets hot and sweaty as the evening rolls on. Not unlike CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City where the Fleshtones started out 33 years ago I imagine. Through a rough and raggedy show, filled with squealing Farfisa organs, high strung guitar riffing and a thunderous rhythm section, the Fleshtones proved their legend once over. Their hex breaking R&R casting yet another spell on a largely unsuspecting audience and some die hard fans.
The Akhnaton barely had something that you could call a backstage area, so I grabbed my chance, determined to have an audience with the Legends. Going through their road manager and drummer, I weaseled my way to the dressing room, standing eye to eye with that Roman Gods, Peter Zaremba. He would love to do an interview, but first there were fans to meet, brain cells that had to be washed away, feet that needed shuffling on the R&B beats downstairs. Zaremba took some chasing before I finally had him sitting down on the couch. During our chase we stumbled into ax grinder extraordinary, Keith Streng! He was too caught up in the evening to really sit down and talk to us, but did disclose that he was working on his Master Plan, ever chasing the magic of R&R . If we are to take his word for it, the Fleshtones are about to go reach that final frontier, recording a Christmas album that is bound to cement their status of true American icons.
A few to many Heinekens later, we’re sitting down with Peter Zaremba. The Fleshtones just finished 11 shows in a row, a new record in the history of the band. The Giant of R&R slopes down into the couch, tired but strung out on R&R ecstasy. “We’re very lucky” he admits, “a certain amount of people, though not many, say we’re the best band of the world”, allowing the Fleshtones to roll on. There was a time though that the Fleshtones seemed to be destined for greater thing than the Akhnaton, coming up in the New York Punk scene, they got rave reviews from the obscure fanzines to the NY Times. The consensus was that these guys were the hottest act in town. Yet they never achieved the same status as the Ramones. “They were just so quintessential” Peter reflects today “We tried to form a band for years. The Ramones showed us to stop doubting ourselves. It hit us, they were incredible. Within months [after seeing the Ramones] we had a band”. The mid seventies found R&R in a rut. The Fleshtones were determined to save R&R from itself, turning out to be one of the few bands to incorporate disco into their sound. Smiling, with a slight sense of pride Peter remembers “All those people saying Disco sucks, just weren’t listening, there were all those hippies, playing ‘Rock music’ with solos 20 minutes long, where you’d smoke pot and fall asleep”. The Fleshtones weren’t going to be about that, still firmly believing in the concept Peter explains that he wanted music “that made me just want to get in my car, drive fast, meet girls, get drunk and go crazy “ He makes no excuses for incorporating Disco, why should he? The energy of the evening proves him right when he claims “Whatever turns you on, makes you want to dance, whatever’s got Soul, is kind of ridiculous, you take that”.
Of course the Fleshtones were much more than Disco, few bands managed to capture the spirit of R&R like they do, few bands manage to keep going as long as they do. Today they are the only band from that CBGB’s scene still around, still rocking with a fervor that would make a lot of the young guns go green with envy. The band still enjoys being on the road, it seems to be their fountain of youth. People scuffle in and out of the dressing room, Keith Streng has found a few tasty looking girls, playing around like a young man in his twenties. Maybe the Fleshtones captured the spirit of R&R so well because they never gave up on the life style, never compromised on the music. Even today, the Fleshtones sound like they escaped from the legendary Nuggets LP, dodging the bullets of trends and hip new styles, staying true to their school. Finding their sound wasn’t easy though. After years of “Fucking around” in the studio, “The Fleshtones vs Reality” was the first record that captured some of the spirit they’ve got going on stage. Peter realizes now, “You’ll have to be more direct”. For that album, and the records since, “we stripped away many of the insane things we were trying to do”. It took years to find out that records are a lucky shot, referring to the classic Rhythm and Blues sounds coming from downstairs Peter exclaims, “That’s how these great records happened!”
It wasn’t until quite a few years in their careers that the Fleshtones managed to capture that sound. Maybe that’s why their career stalled even though they were getting all this praise in the mid seventies. Though it could be that the Fleshtones have always simply been to singular to fit into any trend or radio format. Looking back on it now, Peter seems to feel no regret about where the Fleshtones ended up in this stage of their career. He’s very proud of the band and flattered by the legendary status the fans ascribe to them. “We always admired the delusional people [in R&R] history. Peter is proud to claim his place amongst them. And lets be honest, how many R&R bands are out there that had kingdoms established in their name. Unlikely as it may seem, when traveling Spain, don’t be surprised if you stumble upon the nation of Fleshtonia, complete with its own flag and rule of the land. All though it has never been recognized by most of the international community, the Fleshtones made their mark on history.
I'm revamping the Boot Tracker by combining them with your stories. One of the things I enjoy about the message boards are the touching, crazy and exiting stories that pop up from time to time. Great yarns on what impact the very first show had, wicked exploits, grand adventures, heart breaking tales, they've all passed by. I would like to give some of those stories a home here on Boss Tracks by combining them with the recording of your personal show of legends!
So if you were at one of those legendary shows, if you had a lucky encounter with the man himself, if you recall the very moment you were converted to the E-Street nation, let me know. Pictures to go with them are appreciated, but not necessary and it always helps if you own a recording of the show, but the story is what matters!
You can send your contributions to soulboogiealex@gmail.com. I look forward to them. And who knows, with Boss Tracks currently linked up to the official site, some one else might take a sneak at them as well. After all, the tour's over, what else is he going to do with his time!
Welcome saints and sinners, A while back as a big Soul music fan I started a blog called the Soul Shack. Almost immediately other things leaked into the blog besides Soul. Music and movies that weren't necessarily Soul music but did get to the soul. One of those interests was the music of Bruce Springsteen. I'm a big fan of the man and every month there were one or two items that just kind of sneaked in there. One of the main attractions to me about Springsteen is how you can trace the history of R&R through his music. Not only are his own songs littered with references to the past of R&R but the man also covered hundreds of songs from R&R's rich past. In all there are over a thousand.
A while back I decided to start chasing these sides, begin a collection of original 45 rpm records that Springsteen covered or overtly referred to in his music.Reason enough to start a new blog dedicated to the works of Springsteen and those who inspired them. There are a multitude of websites and blogs already dedicated to the man, but I feel this approach does have something to add to those corners on the world wide web.
So what to expect? In the coming years I will review songs that were either covered by Springsteen or referred to in his songs as soon as I find the original version on a 7" record. Real vinyl, no CD and certainly no mp3 or other digital format. Expect only the real deal here. I'll try to post about all those treasure troves I hope to find here. Besides that I will be reviewing Springsteen related material found on vinyl, records written or produced by him or members of his band.Every find will be available in mp3 format for a short period of time if possible backed with a live version of Springsteen if available. MP3 files are posted here strictly for the purpose of music criticism and comparison and therefore fall under the "fair use" guidelines of U.S. copyright law. If you find any material here on Boss Tracks that you feel violates your intellectual property be free to contact me at soulboogiealex@gmail.com.This will be a labor of love and it is not my intention of stepping on any body's toes here.
To flesh the site out a little, Boss Tracks will also feature a monthly Bosscast. A pod cast dedicated to the music of Bruce Springsteen, the roots of his music and related artists. There will be occasional concert reviews, articles found on the net and in depth reviews of his own work. If there is anything you'd wish to contribute, Boss Tracks will be open to other users. Just drop me an e-mail if you've got a nice find yourself you wish to review!Hope to find you here chasing with me!
John Leland once called Dylan a trickster in his book Hip: The History.
He saw Dylan as one of those enigmatic people who we are unable to capture, unable to get a real grasp of. A sense of understanding of Dylan, according to Leland, bestows us with a sense of hipness, even though in silence we must shamefully admit to ourselves that the man totally eludes us. Ironically Dylan's trickster image that made him an icon of hip, wasn't something that Zimnmerman seemed to be striving for at the time. Zimmerman has always appeared to be uncomfortable with the iconic status of Dylan, or at least for a large part of his career. I think Robert Zimmerman might have felt he wasn't all that hot, or at least no better than the Woody Guthries or the Blind Willie McTells who inspired him. So Zimmerman spend his career trying to escape Bob Dylan. Not so much a chameleon, who adapts to his surroundings to gain invisibility, Dylan developed to be a lizard, trying to slither out of his status by alienating his fans. He went electric, he went Country, got religion, but to no avail. Ironically every time Dylan tried to slither his way out, it added to his enigmatic status. Dylan radiated an arrogance that only added to his hipness. By the eighties Zimmerman was sick of being Dylan and threatened to become sick of music all together.
, chronicles Zimmerman regaining a sense of himself and shows how Zimmerman grew truly comfortable with being Dylan for maybe the first time in his career. These days Dylan could rest comfortable on his past achievements, but that doesn't seem to be in his character. With the audience that once was hip, now settled and mundane, Dylan could spend the fall of his year blowing in the wind. To an extent he's doing just that. The post eighties Dylan sounds relaxed, at ease with who he his. His voice has grown both harsher and calmer. The wheezing has gone, replaced by a soulfulness that the early Dylan lacked. The current Dylan appears to allow you to get closer, or at least radiates a stronger sense of intimacy. This is a Dylan that allowed Scorsese to make a documentary on him, wrote volume one of his Chronicles and appears on the radio. But who thinks that we are slowly starting to get to know Dylan might be missing the point of what Dylan has been doing in this second phase of his career.
What Theme Time Radio Hour and Tell Tale Signs make clear is that this Dylan isn't as much opening up himself, but is opening his passion. Dylan is spending his career opening up a door to music that is threatened to be forgotten. Dylan is taking us along the houses of the great Blues and Folk legends that gave him his career. As Larry 'Ratso' Sloman writes in the liner notes, Dylan is creating his own archaic music. This Dylan realizes that he has finally lost his hip status, that the status of hip belongs to the rappers and the DJs. Yet it is also a Dylan that uses his iconic status to bear open the soul he thinks music is threatening to lose. As such Tell Tale Signs is a fascinating study of a man, not trying to escape, but pursuing something himself, trying to capture the magic that inspired him, trying to unravel what makes music tick. Though many of the tracks eventually found their way to earlier albums, in one form or another, Tell Tale Signs is still a great compilation to own in itself. Not just because most of the arrangements here are strikingly different from what they wound up to be, but because Tell Tale Signs tells a story in itself.
will also be available in an deluxe three disc edition.
CDs facing me as I walked into the store,” Mark remembers now.
in 2007, even though he had already recorded in the Sun studios years before. Looking back Mark says today, “Perhaps the highlight of the [sessions] for me was recording ‘Johnny Bye Bye’. To be recording a song written by Bruce about Elvis’ death in the room where Elvis made his first faltering steps that would eventually lead to his passing was incredibly moving. It was a moment I’ll never, ever forget. It may sound clichéd but I felt that in a sense I’d brought the two of them together somehow.”
is a supreme album. Green never relied too much on his strength as a song writer, his voice has the ability to make the most mediocre lyrics come to life. When Green sings you get that flush in your cheeks, those butterflies in your stomach, even at an age of 62 he is contagious with that irresistible playful sexuality that defined his classic albums, he still has that deep blue undertones that will make your heart ache with yearning. Green is still the teacher of love as much as he's the preacher.
, Peter Zaremba. He would love to do an interview, but first there were fans to meet, brain cells that had to be washed away, feet that needed shuffling on the R&B beats downstairs. Zaremba took some chasing before I finally had him sitting down on the couch. During our chase we stumbled into ax grinder extraordinary, Keith Streng! He was too caught up in the evening to really sit down and talk to us, but did disclose that he was working on his Master Plan, ever chasing the magic of R&R . If we are to take his word for it, the Fleshtones are about to go reach that final frontier, recording a Christmas album that is bound to cement their status of true American icons.
LP, dodging the bullets of trends and hip new styles, staying true to their school. Finding their sound wasn’t easy though. After years of “Fucking around” in the studio, “The Fleshtones vs Reality” was the first record that captured some of the spirit they’ve got going on stage. Peter realizes now, “You’ll have to be more direct”. For that album, and the records since, “we stripped away many of the insane things we were trying to do”. It took years to find out that records are a lucky shot, referring to the classic Rhythm and Blues sounds coming from downstairs Peter exclaims, “That’s how these great records happened!”
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