40 Year Itch: David Bowie Writes "Time"

[Purchase]

David Bowie performed two concerts in New Orleans in mid November. The first was uptown, November 14 at the Jesuit university, Loyola, which always had a better meal plan than Tulane University across the street. The second was November 22 at The Warehouse downtown, where Jim Morrison performed his last show with The Doors and where a friend of mine made out with a shockingly beautiful girl at a 1982 Talking Heads concert and discovered she was a he. It was sometime during this week that he wrote "Time" which would greatly benefit from the piano theatrics of Mike Garson when it was recorded a month later at Trident Studios.

The song is best known for its line : "Time; He flexes like a whore/ Falls wanking to the floor". RCA was fine with the masturbation imagery but removed the line "in quaaludes and red wine" from the US single. Not a big fan of the cabaret theatrics of Bowie, I like other things on 1973's Aladdin Sane a great deal more ( "Panic In Detroit", "The Jean Genie", "Cracked Actor").

40 Year Itch: You Hit Me With A Flower

[Purchase]

With his long overdue success finally attained, David Bowie also seemed to have picked up 3 "Get Your Idol Out Of Purgatory" cards. 

He used the first one on Mott The Hoople by providing them with a Top 5 UK hit in "All The Young Dudes". 

Another would be used on (Z)Iggy Pop by producing his final Stooges album, 1973's Raw Power. 

But his most memorable intervention was in the career of Bowie's idol and inspiration, former Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed. Just months after Reed released his mostly flat, poorly selling eponymous debut, Bowie and his guitarist Mick Ronson flew Lou out to London to record Transformer.

The album offers mostly two styles: a glammed-up update of the Velvet Underground sound ("Vicious", "Hangin' Round", "Wagon Wheel") with a few nods to gay life ("Make Up", "I'm So Free") and a New York-centric form of cabaret ("New York Telephone Conversation", "Goodnight Ladies"). 

         Then there are the three songs that anchor Transfomer. With syrupy string arrangements from Ronson, "Perfect Day" is a sweet ode to a day of bliss that may or may not be about heroin. "Satellite of Love", a Velvets leftover, is a song about jealousy, with David Bowie "bom'bom'bom-ing through much of it.. Eventually Bowie sings "Sata-Oooh" which must have seemed strange at the time. ( Apparently there were all kinds of yelling tirades and crying jags between Bowie and Lou.)

And then, buried at the end of Side A, there's one of the oddest songs to ever hit the Top Ten. 

With its double bass lines from Herbie Flowers,"Walk On The Wild Side" has this almost journalistic way of describing the characters Reed met at the Warhol Factory. The song was part of a musical based on Nelson Algren's 1965 novel A Walk On The Wild Side that Warhol has commissioned Lou to write

There's the famous drag queen Candy Darling who "never lost her head even when she was giving head."

There's Holly Woodlawn who came from Miami FLA, shaved her legs and then he was a she.

There's actor "Little" Joe Dallesandro who never once gave it away.

There's Sugar Plum Fairy Joe Campbell who went to the Apollo and you should have seen him go go go.

And finally there's Jackie Curtis who thought he was James Dean for a day.

 "I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn't met before, or hadn't wanted to meet" explained Lou. How that strategy produced a hit single is almost as big a mystery as how that song ever got played on the radio in the first place. And the colored girls who sang were called the Thunderthighs.

I don't know if Bowie and Lou Reed worked together a lot after Transformer. Lou yelled at Bowie so much, the latter could be found embracing the toilet in a foetal position. But it was a hit. So Ziggy's work was done. Now all Lou had to was carry around this "transformed" persona for the rest of his life.

40 Year Itch : The Jackson 5 Live in Paris

[Purchase]

The Jackson 5 spent the first half of November 1972 touring Europe to promote Lookin' Through the Window, the very first album I asked somebody to buy for me. By this point, Michael Jackson's voice had changed from boy soprano to tenor and his solo career was beginning to eclipse the band's. "I Wanna Be Where You Are" is one of the great singles of 1972.



Where are the sounds of screaming girls? Apparently in France, audiences come to concerts to hear the music.

40 Year Itch: The World Is A Ghetto

[Purchase]


"The World is a Ghetto" may have sounded like one of the most political statements of the years, especially coming from a band whose members had still vivid memories of the Watts riots. But War's 1972 album, which would go on to be one of the best selling albums of 1973, is a celebration of ghetto life. To mark the 40th anniversary of The World Is a Ghetto, here's an interview with one of the band's founders, the harmonica wizard Lee Oskar

.


Lee Oskar, a founding member of the 70's pop-funk-jam band War, grew up in Denmark where he was given his first harmonica on his sixth birthday.

Lee:
I remember the first time I breathed on it it would literally play me.
It would sound just like a symphony
I got hooked and that's where it all started

At 17, virtually pennyless, Lee moved to the US where his virtuosity on the harmonica and his easy-going nature eventually led to his friendship with Eric Burdon. Burdon had recently left The Animals and wanted to find a new band.

They drove around LA until they found a funk band in a dive bar. Together they would all form War. A strange name in the age of peace signs and flower power.






Lee:
Everybody walks around saying "Peace!" and I always said "Peace? Nobody is at peace within themselves. The war within ourselves is what makes us be creative" and somebody pulled that out of my conversation and said "Hey let's call it WAR!" and that's how I remember it coming about.

From the very beginning War discovered the songs that worked best were the ones that came out of long improvisational jams. That suited Burdon just fine.

Lee:
We would get on stage and we would basically improvise.
Eric might even set up a scenario "Ok guys, we're gonna go on a rocket ship and we're gonna fly to the moon and you're gonna be the captain"

In 1970, One of those jams landed at #3 on the U-S pop charts. It was called "Spill the Wine" and its chorus is one of those classics nobody knows the real words to.



Lee:
You spill the wine and you take the pearl.
Not girl.
Pearl. --which was acid back in those days so he was talking about spill the wine.Take the pearl.


After Burdon left, the band played on. War scored more Top Ten hits. Among them, "Why Can't We Be Friends?", "Low Rider",The Cisco Kid, and "Slippin' Into Darkness". All of them emerging from jam sessions.






Lee:
We were never successful when we tried to tell anybody what to play.
There would be an argument or fight or something.

The music stayed fresh even as the question the press asked Lee grew stale.He couldn't avoid being asked what was it like being the only white guy in a band of brothers.

Lee:
I didn't have a hang up about stuff that I noticed a lot of people had
I remember one time somebody yelled "Hey Brother!" like that and then comes up close to look at me and asks "Are you a brother?"
So there were all these clichés between white and black and all that and I hated that frankly.I thought it was pretty arrogant or whatever.



That wasn't his only frustration.
Lee had trouble finding good harmonicas.

Lee:
I would literally take every dime I had and buy every harmonica.
Hopefully I would find one out of ten that was good or something.
That was my passion: to be surrounded by my tools.

So Lee teamed up with a Japanese company to make Lee Oskar harmonicas.
How good are they?
Bluesman Junior Wells was buried with a tray of Oskar harmonicas.
Magic Dick of J Geils Band says "I just think, as a musical tool, they're a great musical tool so I can't think of a better endorsement to give them than that."

To listen to Lee play today is quite astonishing if you've never heard a harmonica played as a jazz instrument. He has, in his lifetime, expanded the possibilities of what conventional harmonicas can do.




But Lee isn't all business. He's always looking for a chance to play. Especially with other War veterans, who for legal reasons have to call themselves The Low Rider Band.

Lee:
The integrity of the music and the jam band that we've always been
That's still there
That's the real deal
That's what The Low Rider Band is.
Nothing homogenized.

Lee can even be found jamming around Seattle these days.
That six year old who got a magical harmonica for his birthday still needs to find a way...to play.

Lee:
I get grouchy if I don't eat.
I get grouchy if I don't play music.

40 Year Itch : Whole Oats

[Purchase]

Daryl Hall and John Oates, the #1 charting duo in rock and roll history, released their debut album Whole Oats on November 12, 1972. It didn't attract a whole lot of attention then but, in retrospect, maybe it should have. Produced by Arif Mardin ( who helmed great albums by The Rascals and Dusty Springfield), Whole Oats fills out the folksy sound these favorite sons of Philadelphia had created by plugging in funky guitars, horns and other instruments.

 "Fall In Philadelphia" sounds exactly like what Elton John was recording in his honky chateau on the other side of the Atlantic. The album opener, "I'm Sorry", is a bouncy pop tune that would have sounded right at home on AM radio. Overall, the album is a bit of a light weight. It would be followed up with Abandoned Luncheonette ( featuring the then flop single "She's Gone"). The third album, the Todd Rundgren produced War Babies, nearly killed their career. Then Atlantic Records re-released the single "She's Gone" in 1976...it hit the Top Ten...and the rest, as they say,  is history.

40 Year Itch: A Song for Syd Barrett

40 years ago this month ex-Soft Machine guitarist Kevin Ayers released as a single "Oh! Wot A Dream", a song about his eccentric friend Syd Barrett:
 You are the most extraordinary person /
 You write the most peculiar kind of tunes /
 I met you floating as I was boating /
 One Afternoon”.

 

 The song appeared on Ayers's 1973 album Bananamour, his follow up to 1971's acclaimed Whatevershebringswesing which featured the memorable single "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes.

 

More Krautrock From 1972

Popol Vuh

  1972 was an exceptional year for Krautrock and for German rock and roll. And there is a difference. Krautrock is that experimental form of rock n roll based on the work of minimalists and mad scientist composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen. Bands like Can ( see yesterday's post) , NEU!, Popl Vuh, Faust, Kraftwerk, and Cluster are clearly Krautrock. The great Twenty Sixty Six And Then is probably just German  rock and roll ( as is Grobschnitt). Bands like Amon Duul, Embryo  and Guru Guru straddle the two. So if we can in the time we have left, we'll deal with the others later. This is just an overview of Krautrock circa 1972.

[Purchase]

For their debut album, former Kraftwerk members Klaus Dinger ( drums) and Michael Rother ( guitar) knocked out this influential album of experimental sounds and lyrics in just four days with the help of Can producer Conrad Plank. You can hear the future sounds of Bowie, Eno and Thom Yorke over the 4/4 Motorik beat that became one of Krautrock's trademarks. Fair warning: not everything is as enjoyable as "Negativland". Some of the stuff on this album will clear the room.



This is far more interesting than the drummerless sophmore effort Kraftwerk 2 despite the latter's astonishing 17 minute epic dronefest "Klingklang" which anticipates the sidelong title cut on 1974's Autobahn.

[Purchase]

After experimenting with ambient sounds, Florian Fricke shelved his synthesizers and created an album inspired by sacred music using organic instruments. There's an East meets West vibe here but for the most part Hosianna Mantra is as lovely and ethereal an album as you'll ever find.

[Purchase]

Faust has a notorious aversion to anything even slightly conventional. That holds true on the second album, So Far. After all, the most memorable English lyrics on the album are "Daddy, take the banana! Tomorrow is Sunday!" ( If you have a twitter account I dare you to tweet this line). I played the opening cut "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" to my 10 and 7 year old kids and they loved it.

Years before collaborating with Brian Eno, Cluster was a trio of German experimenters using electronic sounds to create ambient atmospheres. With their second album, you can drone out in your noise reduction headphones and try lip reading your children telling you how hungry they are. Or you can just close your eyes and float up into a psonic stratosphere in your own mind.