"The Only Band that Matters."
mdash; Marketing slogan assigned to the Clash by CBS, the band's record company "Punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS."
mdash; Mark Perry of Sniffin' Glue fanzine When I was younger and stupider, I couldn't stand the Clash.
Like many folks under 35 raised on hardcore and independent rock, I thought the Clash betrayed everything punk should have represented. Except for the triumphant title track, "London Calling" sounded like the worst kind of roots-rock sellout. "Combat Rock" had a silly name, a clich e d album cover, poor costuming and the dishwater-dull "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
" I tried a couple times the introductory anthology "The Story of the Clash," but it's one of the most ahistorical, least helpful career summaries ever. It wasn't until much later in my life that the Clash's mess of political confusion, musical catholicity and open-hearted compassion began to resonate. It was singer Joe Strummer's searching humanism that eventually got me.
His songwriting partnership with guitarist Mick Jones began to feel like one of rock's all-time greats. Bassist Paul Simonon was steeped in reggae and Topper Headon sounds these days like one of the all-time great punk drummers. Yes, they made grand, sometimes silly gestures, but it dawned on me they never made them with all that much self-confidence, which makes all the difference.
This box set reproduces the singles the Clash released in the UK mdash; all 19 of 'em, complete with B-sides, 12-inch single mixes and promo-only cuts mdash; in 5-inch versions of the original 7-inch sleeves. As nifty as these little discs look, this format reduces what were once musical events mdash; the release of a new single by the only band that mattered mdash; to the status of fetish objects. The booklet that accompanies the CDs isn't much better, containing testimonials from celebrities such as U2's guitarist the Edge, the Pogues' Shane McGowan and the Who's Pete Townshend.
Not exactly thrilling. But the music sure is. The Clash's rarely released a duff single and their B-sides are often as good as anything that ended up on an album.
"City of the Dead," "1977," "Jail Guitar Doors" and "Groovy Times" are all crucial sides. "Complete Control" and "London's Burning" are pure punk anthems. There's a lot going on in their cover of "I Fought the Law.
" In the original, Bobby Fuller sounds cool with his decisions. On the cover, Strummer sounds fraught and furious. Fuller is resigned to his life of crime, Strummer sounds committed to resistance.
The intro to "London Calling" will still make your hair stand up and even the rootsier stuff has grown on me. "The Card Cheat" is the finest song Springsteen never wrote, a slice of Phil Spector-ish rock that drives and soars. Sometimes the politics don't work; the "Amerasian blues" on "Straight to Hell" feel like the rantings of a dude who watched "Apocalypse Now" too many times.
But it's still hypnotic, full of sublimated tension never to be released. (Check out the live, definitive version on the album "From Here to Eternity" to hear just how riveting this song can be.) But from their very first single, "White Riot," one of the Clash's most powerful themes was the relationship between white folks and black culture.
Because we live in a pop world dominated by hip-hop, these songs haven't dated a day. "White Man at Hammersmith Palais" is a still-stunningly nuanced look at reggae concert where the white kids want "roots rock rebellion" and the black kids want to see decent pop acts. Rarely has, as scholar Eric Lott put it, the "love and theft" between whites and black culture been so brilliantly addressed.
The reggae classic "Pressure Drop" appears as an well-meaning, ham-fisted B-side to "English Civil War," while "Armagideon Time" and "Bankrobber" are far sharper. They worked with reggae producer Mikey Dread and stuffed wonderful-then-mediocre triple-LP "Sandinista!" with dub versions.
One single from "Sandinista!," the rap song "The Magnificent Seven" (and its attendant remixes) represents everything both exhausting and fascinating about this band. It's not a good song, but it sure is an earnest one.
The album's stock has risen dramatically over the years, thanks to its throw-it-against-the-wall musical eclecticism. Say what you will about the Clash, they feared no music. The Clash flamed out as spectacularly as they lived.
1985's "Cut the Crap," made without Jones and Headon, is a Clash album in name only and was thusly reviled. That's kind of too bad. It's not a great album, but its single "This is England" remains one of Strummer's finest hours.
I remain convinced that had the album been released as the first Joe Strummer solo album, history would have looked kindly on it. After all, history has largely looked kindly on everything else they stood for. Hipster separatists would do well to do the same.
--Joe Gross The compulsive manner in which rockabilly has been compiled, anthologized and re-compiled by specialty labels such as Norton, Bear Family and Flame is matched only by the fervor of the rockabilly faithful. No track too obscure, no artist too forgotten, no pomade too thick. For the slightly more-than-casual fan, 'Rockin' Bones' does a decent job introducing neophytes and plain old rock fans to Rockabilly 101 sides both vaunted and obscure (one-third of which make their American CD debut mdash; the Germans and the British have been obsessing over this sort of twang for years).
The household names are present and accounted for: Elvis, Link Wray, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee and the almighty Gene Vincent, the latter sounds his most insane on 'Cat Man.' Buck 'Corky Jones' Owens and George 'Thumper' Jones contribute tracks; Fat Daddy Holmes turns the chicken scratching up to 11 on 'Chicken Rock,' and John Jackie hit an orgasmic peak on 'Little Girl.' (No, really.
It's this close to porn.) Track after track celebrates the sound of country boys hitting the big city, driving a Caddy, dressed in leather, rewriting jump blues and R B into their own lusty thump. The pulp-fiction packaging is decent if not spectacular, an attempt to access the switchblade-'n'-jailhouse-tats vibe.
Annotations by root music scholar Colin Escott are excellent, though there are a few key names missing from the celebrity endorsements (Comments from two Stray Cats, yet nobody from human archivists the Cramps? For shame!) But the between-song movie-dialogue clips are a corny mistake and there's one huge problem with the subtitle: If there's one thing the cats on this encyclopedia of hip-swivel would not want to be called, it's punk.
Get hip. mdash; Joe Gross Half of the original Pretenders died almost a quarter of a century ago. The fact that the first lineup didn't live to record even early hits such as "Middle of the Road" might be lost on casual listeners, lulled into fandom by the seductive voice of Chrissie Hynde.
But the loss of James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon from overdoses is one reason the Pretenders still exist. As Hynde says in the liner notes to this comprehensive and immensely satisfying box set, she sees the Pretenders as a tribute band to the two late musicians. And what a tribute mdash; the band in its various forms (from ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr to Funkadelic's Bernie Worrell) has produced an impressive body of work, the best of which is all here.
This box set does exactly what a box set should do: remind you of all the great songs ("Talk of the Town," "Don't Get Me Wrong," "Night in my Veins"), introduce you to gems that passed you by the first time ("Tequila") and throw in some unexpected covers (Radiohead's "Creep," "The Needle and the Damage Done"). The set offers the single version of "The Wait," one of my favorite Pretenders tunes, even though I made up my own lyrics for years. I finally had to break down and look them up online, at which point I didn't feel so stupid ("The wait child neon light late night lights hurt").
"The Wait" is also one the songs captured in performance on the accompanying DVD, which features clips from the band on shows such as "Top of the Pops" and "Alright Now." The latter seemed to be a British version of "American Bandstand," but with much more enthusiasm and a 1960s sensibility, even in 1980. The booklet is packed with historical nuggets and photos.
Former Creem editor Ben Edmonds, who met Hynde when she was a writer for the New Musical Express in London in 1974, wrote the journalistic liner notes tracing the history of the band. But most revealing are the song snapshots sprinkled throughout. Hynde reveals tennis bad boy John McEnroe to be the inspiration for "Don't Get Me Wrong," and she explains some of the strange references in "Brass in Pocket," such as "Detroit leaning" and the Cockney "got bottle" (which I still don't understand).
Whether the band was punking out, going for pure pop or getting its reggae groove on, Hynde's voice has been the constant thread. She might see the band as a tribute to its British founding fathers, but this box set is a tribute to one of rock's leading ladies, an Ohio girl raised on American radio. mdash; Kathy Blackwell Oftentimes, the problem with box sets is that you trudge through a pile of familiar material before encountering anything fresh.
Once you do, the music is left out of context, presented without a supporting back story. Tori Amos' albums are soul-baring tales, and her new box set, 'A Piano: The Collection,' is no exception. Hardcore fans might not find much they haven't heard before.
But they will hit upon 86 songs on five discs that cover a singular career with rare personal detail in songs chosen by Amos. From signature pound-out-an-issue piano to dance club retreads, she mixes new with old and reorders the parts into an effective new story. The first disc is an extended version of 'Little Earthquakes,' showing the artist's original vision for her debut.
The other discs take some of the best bits from six other studio albums and one compilation ('Strange Little Girls' is not included) and blend them with enough remixes, alternate and live versions, demos, B-sides and previously unreleased songs to lend the collection its own identity. It is more than a retrospective or chronology. Amos is letting you know what she thinks of her career with all its mistakes and triumphs.
In an enclosed booklet, Amos shares her reasoning for including some songs as well as some history. Anyone who has attended an Amos concert knows she is not shy about opening windows into a song's soul, but it is nice to have it on paper. Sadly, not included are tracks from 2001's concept/cover album 'Strange Little Girls.
' Perhaps there were some licensing glitches, but it would have helped complete the collection to include Amos' version of 'Raining Blood.' Only she could make such a violent song into something beautiful. It is all mdash; well, most mdash; laid bare here: the vibrant storytelling, the sensual and sexual undertones, the lightly veiled rage.
It is what Amos fans have come to expect. mdash; Adrian Zamarron High in the taxonomy of box sets are the cats and dogs, those cuddly selections of popular and critical favorites from beloved mdash; if, perhaps, erratic mdash; mainstream artists such as Otis Redding or Johnny Cash. "RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson" is more of an ocelot mdash; sleek, chic, but sharp-clawed.
Thompson has eked a living out as a cult artist, a British guitarist from the class of '68 who turned not to blues from America but to British folk music for inspiration, and who subsequently became the consummate critic's darling who sold no records. Well, at least that was true at first. Nearly 40 years later, he's the consummate critics' darling who sells an album or two to casual fans.
Yet his bread and butter are the rabid fans, people who will buy not just studio releases but also his ever-increasing catalog of official bootlegs and rarities. This box set is pitched directly at those particular ocelot lovers. You know who you are.
Disc 1 attempts to capture Thompson as his most personal. The tracks are taken from live performances or live-in-studio acoustic sessions and date from as far back as 1972 and as recent as 2005. Several suffer from horrible sound quality, and one wonders whether a record company with deeper coffers could have cleaned the sound better.
Disc 2 offers live versions of fan favorites not included elsewhere, including "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Dimming of the Day" and "Crazy Man Michael." These performances are OK, but their power is a bit diminished in the live context. If, for example, a Richard Thompson fan were to create a best-of mix for a friend, he or she might choose many of these songs, but I doubt too many of these performances, if you follow me.
Disc 3 is for fans of Thompson the guitarist, a role better served live than in the studio, and this is easily the standout disc of the set. Actually, that description isn't remotely strong enough. This disc could make one weep and renounce all worldly goods for another listen.
Evangelical fans might just show up at your door asking for 10 minutes of your time, their iPods cued to the soundboard-melting version of "Calvary Cross." You should let them in. Thompson is one of a very few rock-oriented guitarists with an improvisational grasp of melody and phrasing that could rival one of jazz's heavies.
Disc 4 contains covers, traditional songs, and a couple of examples of Thompson's session work. Most of the best tracks also appear on his 2003 album "1,000 Years of Popular Music," which was expanded and re-released this year. Disc 5 consists of unreleased tracks and Thompson songs recorded by other artists.
It's obvious that the label did not break the bank on its graphic design budget. The artwork is atrocious, with each disc and the booklet strangely emphasizing a washed-out, grainy, awkwardly-posed photor. Perhaps the aesthetic was to capture the style of a passed-around-the-record-show-a-few-too-many-times bootleg, but, seriously, no one buys those for their snappy look.
The interior of the booklet is generally well composed, with plenty of decent-looking photos and illustrations, although a couple of the jokey ones, like Thompson as a metal guitarist, are so broad as to be painful. The booklet, by Nigel Schofield, is full of fascinating stories and wonderful song analysis. Disc 3, if released by itself, would be a perfect gift for any guitar aficionado, but the other four do not present Thompson's considerable songwriting skills in more favorable light than his studio albums.
The previous box set, 1993's "Watching the Dark," delivers three discs from every stage of Thompson's career to that point. Although he's produced plenty of worthwhile music in the 13 years since that set came out, that's the place to go for your more casual puppy-lover Richard Thompson fan. Leave the ocelots to those with a proven taste for the exotic.
mdash; Hayden Childs In 1993, RCA released a two-disc box of Waylon Jennings material from 1965-1984 that was a revelation to a country music skimmer familiar with Jennings' stuff from the "outlaw country" heyday mdash; "Good Hearted Woman," "Luckenbach, Texas" and the like, but didn't know there was much more to him than a loping bass line, the TV theme song better than the show, and Willie in the wings. After listening to "Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line: The RCA Years" over and over and over again on my own private desert island, I heard the Waylon I never knew, the tender balladeer, the country rocker, the honky-tonk troubadour who, like Elvis Presley, could really sing it all. There was a gentle ramble in Jennings' voice that told the story of a talented troubadour who didn't make the big time until his late 30s.
But once he got there, Hoss, he nailed it like the groove of "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?", a song that stomps a hole in the Nashville establishment even as the singer questions his own habits. Next to Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and Hank Williams, its most sensational singer and songwriter, Waylon Jennings is the greatest country artist of all time.
I had no idea until 1993. If two discs of Waylon could be so life-changing, four would be twice as good, right? Not really.
One of Jennings' greatest gifts was his ability to cut right to the bone. There were no wasted movements in his music, no fluffing up for a grander presentation. You have to wonder if Jennings, who died of complications of diabetes in 2002, would've allowed a full disc of earlier material that he struggled to make his own against producers who knew what was best for this brooding matinee idol in waiting.
They tried to make him too pop in the beginning, then too country, when all along Jennings had a completely original sound inside of him that was both and neither. As with almost all chronological four-disc sets, numbers two and three are the best. This is where Jennings finally broke through to make the music of his soul, where he broke Nashville code by using his touring band in the studio.
During the period when the producer-led "Nashville Sound" was the way records were made, Jennings demanded and received creative control, so when he busted out the string section for "We Had It All" (a fine track overlooked by the '93 compilation), it was because that was the sound he heard in his head, not some ornamentation thrown on by the producer because, well, he could. The true measure of Jennings' ability as a singer can be found on a fourth disc, which follows Jennings from the early '80s, when "Storms Never Last" provided the perfect background music to "The Executioner's Song" and duets with Willie Nelson and the formation of the Highwaymen (with Nelson, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson) kept Jennings on the charts. This is not Jennings' strongest material, but his rough-hewn vocals took on a more caressing quality (a la Frank Sinatra) later in life.
"The Waylon Beat" may have put him on the map, but his rich, honeyed growl kept him vital. So, yeah, I guess in that way, more Waylon is better than less. Owning four hours of that voice, those songs, is a good thing.
The new set has it all over its predecessor when it comes to packaging. The 142-page booklet, opening with a passionate summation by Jennings biographer Lenny Kaye (yeah, the Patti Smith guitarist) and flatter, more detailed notes by country music historian Rich Kienzle, goes on to tell the story through more than a hundred pictures. A great improvement is the complete listings of who played what on each track.
For years I had thought Richie Albright, Jennings' closest friend and collaborator, had played drums on "Black Rose," a cut which swung so much better than the Billy Joe Shaver original. Now I find out that it was Willie Ackerman. But Albright did nail a fierce beat onto Shaver's "Honky Tonk Heroes," which I once cited (in one of my many lists) as the greatest Texas recording of all time.
Everything that is great about Waylon Jennings, whose voice goes from gutteral to soaring in seconds, can be heard in that defiant toe-tapper. If you added up all the minutes I've spent listening to Jennings sing "Honky Tonk Heroes" it would be more time than a David Blaine stunt (and just as impressive an achievement.) That's why I know that the version on "Nashville Rebel" is not the same as the version on "Only Daddy.
" Both compilations claim their take as the one that appeared on the "Honky Tonk Heroes" album, but the 3:29 version from "Only Daddy" is a better vocal take than the 3:35 rendition on "Nashville Rebel." I keep almost all my boxed sets locked up in the shed, but "Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line" has never been more than 6 feet from my stereo for 13 years. It's my favorite record not recorded by Elvis Costello or Sam Cooke.
Although the new "Nashville Rebel" set (named after a 1966 movie a slicked-back-and-brooding Jennings was featured in) contains a few cool rarities, especially the rockin' novelty number "People In Dallas Got Hair," I've gotta stick with the old model in the tattered box with the skimpy, 20-page booklet. There's much to be said for simple pleasures, a well-worn shirt that just makes the new ones feel stiff and too showy. I guess I really just don't like what they've done to "Honky Tonk Heroes" and I wonder where else they went wrong.
Ol' Waylon would understand. mdash; Michael Corcoran Tom Waits is the weirdo uncle who'll pull out his glass eye on an unsuspecting nephew just to illustrate the horrors of the real world, and then, when the kid can't sleep, he'll rock him to bed with a lullaby. Eeriness and endearment are as synonymous with Waits as his soul patch and porkpie hat.
And on his new three-CD set, 'Orphans,' he sure-handedly excavates both ends of that spectrum and every divot in between, before welding, sawing and hammering the fragments into an intriguingly oddball collection of 30 new songs and 16 others consisting of redos, covers by the likes of the Ramones and Daniel Johnston, and interpretations of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski prose. 'Heavy' seems a wasted word when Waits writes (in the CD booklet): 'What's "Orphans"? I don't know.
"Orphans" is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.' That pretty much sums up the lyrics. Verbose.
Fantastical. Extreme. But occasionally, Waits mdash; in tandem with his songwriting partner, wife Kathleen Brennan mdash; takes a break from the lyrical and musical mayhem of horns, farm-animal samples and pipes clanging against trash-can lid, for vignettes of unadulterated eloquence.
Try 'Road to Peace,' a treatise on President Bush and Iraq that resonates despite Congress's fade from red to blue. Or 'Little Man,' in which Waits's old-school advice translates as hip when filtered through a rainy-day jazz arrangement. For your convenience, 'Orphans' is divided into the ABCs of Waits: the drunken looney tunes of Brawlers, sepia-toned sad-sacking of Bawlers, and from-the-hip voice-overs of Bastards, a good many of which would have been better off neglected.
No word yet on whether bombshell actress Scarlett Johansson will adopt any of these for her forthcoming Tom Waits cover album. mdash; Michael Hoinski They say there are four elements to hip-hop: MC-ing, DJ-ing, visual art (graffiti, mainly) and dance (breaking, mostly). Is there a fifth element?
Debate is ongoing. Should human beatboxing be an element? Should fashion, what with the role urban clothing plays in setting and maintaining trends?
Should political awareness and activism? Though it could be considered a subset of the DJ experience, I submit that crate-digging mdash; the process of going through old records looking for breakbeats, samples and all-around inspiration mdash; is such a crucial part of the hip-hop experience as to constitute an element in and of itself. Of course, crate-digging isn't what it used to be, because sampling isn't what it used to be.
There was a time when all of music history was up for grabs mdash; the Beastie Boys sampled the Beatles on their landmark 1989 album "Paul's Boutique," something that's just unfeasible today. These days mdash; between the copyright cops cracking down on uncleared samples and the exorbitant licensing fees that producers pay to use samples legitimately mdash; many hip-hop producers have chosen to forgo samples altogether, opting for live instrumentation, synths and raw drum machine beats. Texas and New Orleans hip-hop built their devout fanbases and singular sounds on such spare, cost-effective music.
But crate-digging never really died. If anything, the stakes got higher. Since the mid-'90s, funk and soul have become prime targets for devout record collectors.
(Just check out the pricey soul sides at the Austin store Friends of Sound for proof.) In fact, it seems these days as if there simply are no more old funk records out there. The curators of "What It Is!
" know this mdash; heck, they celebrate it, even the inflated market driven by online auction sites such as eBay. "Suddenly," critic Oliver Wang writes in the box set's excellent booklet, "paying $1,000 for a slightly scuffed funk 45 wasn't so ludicrous anymore." (On some level, of course it is, but I'm sure glad somebody's doing it.
) Mixing in a handful of funky chestnuts with prime examples of super-rare tracks, this wonderful 91-song, mostly chronological set feels like a loving ode to crate-digging. It's assembled and paced with both the neophyte and the hardcore fan in mind. The 80-page book is informative, funny and filled with rare photos and album cover scans.
Even the box's muted colors are classy, understated and impossibly cool. For every instance of a well-known classic such as Curtis Mayfield's immortal "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go," there are three ultra-hard-to-find rarities. Baby Huey and the Baby Sitters were Mayfield's prot e g e s, so it's not surprising that their grim "Hard Times" features such Mayfield staples as wah-wah guitar, congas and horn stabs.
Underknown funk also-rans Rasputin's Stash turn in "Mr. Cool" which is simply the most stoned funk song of all time mdash; check out that exhale in the opening! The great Sly Stone appears on Little Sister's "Stanga" and 6ix's "I'm Just Like You.
" Eugene McDaniels rails at political parties on the cult fave "Headless Heroes," Young-Holt Unlimited's "Wah Wah Man" celebrated the funkiest effects pedal ever made and Darrow Fletcher's "Improve" features a bass sound that should have gear heads storming Internet message boards to discuss how he did it. There's a track from Aretha Franklin, an admittedly hen's-teeth-rare alternate take of "Rock Steady," featuring drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie at his illest mdash; and something from Little Richard, whose "Nuki Suki" proves that the hippie revolution didn't tone him down a bit. (As the liner notes put it, when he sings "Gimme some, gimme some, gimme some" and "nooky sooky, nooky sooky" "Is he or is he not talking about drugs, sex or rock 'n' roll?
") "What It Is" is filled with moments like this, and the set closes, wisely, with Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel's take on "California Dreaming." In the original, the Mamas and the Papas sold Cali as the hippie Nirvana, the antidote to brown leaves and gray skies. Hazel's post-Jimi guitar workouts give Los Angeles a completely different feel.
The compilers know just how good a job they've done. "Among record collectors, the craze around rare funk has been on the wane," Wang writes. "If anything, this box set shows .
.. the more you look, the more excellent, underappreciated funk there is to find.
" In other words, this is simply the year's most listenable box set, as likely to start a party as a debate, as likely to inspire dancing as more record buying. Get down. mdash; Joe Gross My kind of town, Las Vegas is.
No, not my kind of town mdash; my town, period. Frankieville. Sinatra Land.
Five hotels and a lot of sand before I got here, now it's Shangri-la on the Mojave mdash; if Shangri-la had hot-and-cold-running booze and broads. The audience? A bunch of jokers who didn't give a damn about me when I was on the skids.
But now they love everything I do: The way I sing "Imagination" and pronounce it "Ih-mag-ih-nay-kin," the my-hangover-was-so-bad-my-hair-hurt-when-I-woke-up-this-morning jokes, that mincing voice in the middle of "Lady is a Tramp." And when I knock one out of the park mdash; I'll tell ya, something happened during "Moonlight in Vermont" mdash; maybe, just maybe, they know the difference. Like I said, my kind of town.
Hey mdash; what if I stayed and never left? What if the cops set up checkpoints at the city limits and kept Dorothy Kilgallen and Elvis Presley out? Turned this whole town into one big Rat Pack?
Wouldn't that be a blast? The band mdash; a little ensemble called Count Basie His Orchestra, thank you mdash; is hot. And, let's not mince words, so is Francis Albert Sinatra.
Maybe I had one scotch too many backstage, but even half-sloshed I can sing circles around Jack Jones. (Don't get me started on those maledetto Beatles.) Thought Basie was gonna blow a gasket when I started yucking it up in the middle of "I've Got a Crush on You," but then he figured out I stick to the beat even when I'm cracking jokes.
"It's not that I'm attracted/But oh my heart grew active/When you . . .
became a Jew. I mean, came into view!" Where do I come up with this stuff?
Good audience tonight. Good house, lotta money out there. Not as much going in my pocket as when I owned 9 percent of this joint, but that's what happens when your name ends in a vowel mdash; you get photographed with a respected Italian businessman and the Nevada Gaming Control Board sends you packing faster than one of Dino's one-night stands.
Elvis is dead, but I'm still here. "All of Me" mdash; bam! "Maybe This Time" mdash; boom!
"The Lady is a Tramp" mdash; pow! That's how we do it in Vegas, baby. You flash 'em that same 100-karat smile you give yourself in the mirror right before you hit the stage and then knock 'em out with a 1-2-3 mdash; Simons and Marks!
Ebb and Kander! Rodgers and Hart! mdash; that has 'em thinking, "Who needs rock 'n' roll?
" Speaking of which, they ate up my version of mdash; feh mdash; George Harrison's "Something." Will I ever figure out how to sing a Beatles song? I don't know, jack, I don't know.
Nice to see Orson in the audience tonight. Man, he looked happy when I introduced him as "a genius all languages." He hasn't put out a decent movie in years, but genius is genius, even when it's stuck making wine commercials.
"Citizen Kane," "War of the Worlds," "The Chick From Shanghai" mdash; with a track record like that, there's nothing anybody can say that'll bring you down. I've done a few duets in my time, but nowadays everything I do sounds like a trio: Me, Philip Morris and Jack Daniels. Spend 50 years singing, smoking and drinking your heart out and that's what you get mdash; no upper range, lots of middle and a low end that wanders around like Dino after cocktail hour.
It's all about moxie now mdash; stay on top of the rhythm, sell the lyrics hard, bob and weave around the high notes and get out alive. Sometimes, though, this beat-up relic of a throat leads me to places I've never been. I've sung "Night and Day" what mdash; a thousand times?
Ten thousand times? mdash; but "the silence of my lonely room" sounds a lot more silent and lonely without The Voice to warm it up. Then there are those other times, when the next line scares me so bad that I cling to a note as long as I can, until it wobbles and falls.
That Piscopo kid thinks it's a big joke. But there's nothing funny about it at all. The voice is 90 percent shot mdash; when did I lose that high note on "It Never Entered My Mind"?
But "Witchcraft," "Pennies From Heaven" and "Angel Eyes" mdash; some things never let you down. Like Vegas. Vegas: Some jerk in the Peanut Gallery begging for "New York, New York," a bunch of drunks laughing when I call Don Rickles "Hitler's kid," a roomful of tourists who think covering "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" makes me look hip rather than desperate.
Like I said: My kind of town. Some nights, I don't even think about Ava. mdash; Jeff Salamon There's a John Coltrane mdash; well, a few John Coltranes mdash; that anybody familiar with modern jazz knows: the saxophonist who brought a frantic, scalar intensity to 'My Favorite Things'; the spiritually intense composer of 'A Love Supreme'; the fearless avant-gardist of 'Ascension.
' 'Fearless Leader' documents none of these men. Instead, it offers us a picture of a younger Coltrane leading his first groups. Recorded in 1957 and 1958, the 48 tracks included here were originally released on nine different albums, including the well-known 'Soultrane' and 'Lush Life.
' Remastered and presented in the order they were recorded, these songs show Coltrane working, at first, in the hard-bop mode of Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon mdash; his tone is warm on the ballads and full-throated on the faster numbers. The backing musicians mdash; pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Arthur Taylor, most of the time mdash; are deeply embedded in the idiom. But as the months pass, you hear Coltrane grasping at something else.
The famous, note-packed 'sheets of sound' begin to appear in early '58; a few months later, on 'Sweet Sapphire Blues,' Coltrane worries a quick, four-note figure over and over, twisting it into strange, alien shapes, a brief glimpse of the profound transformations he would wring upon jazz soon after. If you've heard Coltrane's later work mdash; even a second-tier album such as 'Sun Ship' mdash; it's impossible not to hear the music on 'Fearless Leader' as a little tentative. But, really, you'd have to know what was coming to feel anything other than elated by this collection.
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