Music – Page 25

And Counter-Intuition Replied…

April 27, 2012 by John 9 Comments

[Video: studio version of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” by Yes]

Not a few, but everyone, makes art. There is no art beyond the sensibility of the people confronting it: art is an interaction between object and beholder. The idea of a human being forced to concede the superiority of a work of art without in fact being able to participate in judging that quality is a surrealistic idea. In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.

(William Stafford)

…and:

learn to say “I don’t know”
learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”
learn to say nothing

train your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay mute

insist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history’s winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life

(Urszula Koziol, To a Young Man)

…and:

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

(Wendell Berry)

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: The Band, “Rockin’ Chair”

April 25, 2012 by John 6 Comments

[The Band (circa 1969), left to right: Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson]

I‘ve posted about The Band exactly once, and barely then — tacking “All La Glory” onto the end of a whiskey river Friday post in December, 2008. I’ve not been ignoring them offline; in fact, as with (to take one example from a whole ‘nother musical universe) Madeleine Peyroux, I sometimes go for weeks listening to no one else. Artists like these (whatever “like these” means!) just sort of tingle in resonant sympathy with something inside me. But personal taste isn’t always something you can expect others to share, and I try hard not to overplay them here.

The death last week of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and probably its signature vocalist, gave a lot of casual (and otherwise) listeners an excuse to dust off the group’s albums for a listen. And this does seem like a good occasion to mention The Band again.

Whether the work of the moment is writing, editing, Web work, or software, I’ve always found their music difficult to work to; its drive and its characteristic electrified-hillbilly sound make it push to the forefront of my conscious mind — especially in rollicking favorites like “Rag Mama Rag” and “Time to Kill.” (Helm’s voice in particular punches through, very hard not to attend to.) So when I’m working, you won’t usually find those numbers in rotation. What you’ll find instead is the quieter ballads, for which the lead singer was often Richard Manuel or Rick Danko. “All La Glory,” from that long-ago post here, was one such. Right up there with it is today’s choice, “Rockin’ Chair.”

The title apparently name-checks both a Hoagy Carmichael tune from 1929 and — more of a stretch if you ask me — the (common but unofficial) title of a 1962 blues album by Howlin’ Wolf. The Band’s song (written, like most of their music, by Robbie Robertson) is deceptively simple: an old-timer looks back, wistfully, on his life. Apparently a sailor, he drifts back and forth between being at sea and wishing he were home, and being at home and wishing he were aboard again.

But the confusion between where the narrator is and where he wants to be masks a deep subtlety — a shifting chiaroscuro of metaphor overlaid on statements of apparent fact. The old sailor (with his companion “Ragtime” Willie Boy) is gripped by confusion himself, fading in and out between past and present; he seems almost to trail off into frightened, hallucinatory dementia, as though babbling I’m dying! I’m not ready to die! I’m so ready to die! Willie! Willie!, the Flying Dutchman, Willie!…

Levon Helm didn’t sing lead on this song, simply providing harmony (with the others) for Richard Manuel’s voice at its most wistful. Even in photos in which he’s smiling (like the one on this page), Manuel seemed to me to bear a mantle of sadness on his shoulders. In the photo which tops this post, that’s him on the left — the only one not dressed in dark clothing, but that doesn’t make him “lighter”; his demeanor appears almost fearful. This is just 20-20 hindsight conjecture, though: he spent much of his offstage life plagued by depression and substance-abuse problems, especially with alcohol. (His drink of choice: Grand Marnier. Wikipedia says that he maxed out at an average of about eight bottles a day. And reportedly, when he left one residence in 1976 the people who cleaned up afterwards had two thousand empty Grand Marnier bottles to dispose of. One doubts that these were the 50-ml “minis.”) By the time The Band filmed their farewell concert for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, in 1978, Manuel could barely sustain his sweet but heartbreaking voice through more than a few songs. He committed suicide in 1986. He was then on tour with The Band, reunited (without Robertson), and had just left Levon Helm’s motel room; indeed, Helm and Danko had to lift him down from the bathtub shower rod where he’d hanged himself (I can’t even imagine the horror).

Band members and others always insisted it had to have been an accident, or maybe a bad joke gone wrong. (According to People Magazine, Helm told police, “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his own bathroom.”) But it’s hard for an outsider, at least, not to picture him asea and drifting, pushin’ age forty-three, suddenly dashed on some reef rearing up out of the fog.

Here’s “Rockin’ Chair”:

[Lyrics]

Addendum: A 1997 BBC documentary, an hour-plus in length, explored the making of The Band, the album on which “Rockin’ Chair” first appeared. The entire documentary (first released in the UK, in partnership with the VH1 music channel) was for a time available at YouTube in a single clip. Speakers included Levon Helm, John Simon (one of the album’s producers), Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko. It’s not on YouTube anymore, alas, but here in the US — at least as of August, 2023 — you can find it on DVD, or streaming via various services (Amazon Prime, Pluto, Tubi, et.).

____________________________________

Minor gripe: the only thing marring this song, I believe, is the way it ends. Others (including many other fans) have commented that The Band’s songs often don’t conclude, so much as plain-old stop; and this is particularly egregious in “Rockin’ Chair.” Compounding the weird abruptness of the close is the mandolin (wielded by Helm, I think), which plucks out something very much like a playful Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits! rhythm completely at odds with the elegiac melody and loose, ropy lyrics which preceded it. (In the BBC/VH1 documentary I described above, Helm asks producer John Simon, How’d we come up with that Chinese ending?!? Simon replies, I don’t know. Makes at least three of us then!

Midweek Music Break: Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, with Warren Haynes, “I’d Rather Go Blind”

April 18, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Video from In Performance at the White House: Red, Hot, and Blues]

[Video above not working for you? In its place, I offer you the audio only:]

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_tedeschitruckshaynes.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Tedeschi Trucks Band w/ Warren Haynes”]

[Original lyrics, by Etta James]

I first encountered the name Derek Trucks within a few years after I’d moved down here. Some kid was doing a show at a club in town — an amazing blues guitarist, said the newspaper preview, and only a teenager: 14 years old or so. How amazing? He’d toured with Buddy Guy. He’d performed with the Allman Brothers. The kid was hot.

[Aside: I’ve got something like a third- or fourth-order connection to him, too. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the drummer for the Allmans. When Butch was in elementary school, he attended a dance with my Missus-to-Be on his arm — his very first date.]

Susan Tedeschi has had some kind of career of her own, dating back to her childhood. She grew up listening to blues and gospel music, and eventually played Austin City Limits and Lilith Fair. (Her voice, says Wikipedia, has been described as a blend of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. I don’t believe even that does it justice.) She also toured with the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and, well, the Allman Brothers.

Trucks and Tedeschi married in 2001, and continued their separate careers. Recently, wanting to minimize their kids’ exposure a typical touring-musician family’s lifestyle, they set up a studio in Jacksonville, FL, and formed their own band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Their first album, Revelator, came out last June; it’s a killer, and I’d intended with this post to cover a couple of tracks from it for you.

But in doing a little research about it I stumbled on the above recent performance on the PBS special In Performance at the White House: Red, White, and Blues. Tedeschi and Warren Haynes share the vocals while Trucks’s slide guitar tears up the instrumental lead, on “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

The song itself, co-written and first recorded by Etta James in 1968, holds legendary status as one of the best, most successful B-side recordings in pop-music history. The A side was an even bigger hit, “Tell Mama.” In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James says that she never liked “Tell Mama.” (“I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the one you come to for comfort and easy sex.”) But about “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she relates this story of label executive Leonard Chess:

When Leonard heard the song the first time, he got up and left the room ’cause he started crying. That touched my heart. Other cats I know would have wanted me to see them cry, just to show me how soulful they were. I liked that Leonard did his weeping in private. […] When he came back in the room, he said, “Etta, it’s a mother… it’s a mother.”

It does no disservice to James’s memory — she died shortly before the above video was recorded — nor to the talents of Tedeschi, Trucks, and Haynes, to say that this performance lives up to the song.

Just for completeness, here’s the reference version — Etta James’s mother of a performance:

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_ettajames.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Etta James”]

____________________________

Note: Hat tip (and a deep bow) to my little brother for introducing me to Revelator.

Midweek Music Break: The Ramsey Lewis Trio, “The ‘In’ Crowd” and “Wade in the Water”

April 11, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod’s blog of “music-themed ink drawings” called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this “straight to ink,” without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to Lewis himself.]

When we hear people refer to the 1960s, we think of upheaval: the remaking of music and politics, the overturning of what we thought we knew about family and art. But the ’60s had another side, and it’s one of the reasons why (I think) the TV show Mad Men has been such a hit: under the surface of frothing water swam small schools of fast, sleek, and, well, non-splashy fish, making their way through the culture without apparent effort…

Reportedly, it was a coffee-shop waitress who suggested that the Ramsey Lewis Trio add to their repertoire a tune called “The ‘In’ Crowd.” (It had been a recent hit for singer Dobie Gray.) The song’s chorus pretty much summed up its theme:

I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes
(Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows

Lewis and his group did an instrumental take on the song while recording an album at Washington DC’s Bohemian Caverns nightclub in 1965. (None of the trio sang, really. But I understand that you can hear bassist Eldee Young vocalizing here and there as he’s transported by the music and rhythm. Can’t hear it myself, but you may be able to pick it up.) That recording, nearly six minutes long, became Lewis’s first gold record:

With the same personnel, he followed up with another pair of gold records a year later. The first covered The McCoys’ 1965 hit, “Hang On Sloopy.” The second took the spiritual classic “Wade in the Water” and turned it inside out — from an assertion of the blessings of baptism, to one of the blessings of moving through water in general: the blessings of cool:

Note: You can find another cool-jazz take on “Wade in the Water” in a whiskey river Friday post a few years ago, in a video by “Barefoot Contessa” singer-organist Rhoda Scott.

Midweek Music Break Playlist: Windows to the Soul

April 4, 2012 by John 5 Comments

[Image: girl, dancing, in giant eye costume. Note the hands: one giving “thumbs-up!” sign,
one holding a cocktail. I have no idea if this is an advertising image or what; found it at a couple
of places, never with any explanation.]

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the Play button. Total playlist length: around 31 minutes.

Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes… It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes’ elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn’t, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.

(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)

Windows to the soul, right. That’s what they say about eyes, anyhow. Which, if true, is good news for everybody but (poor) liars.

I poked around to see if anyone knew, definitively (or even convincingly) who first came up with the “windows to [or of] the soul” metaphor. Best guess, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it came from Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations. I’ve found a translation of that work (by Andrew Peabody, in an 1886 edition) at the Internet Archive. The passage there (in a chapter called “On the Contempt of Death”) reads as follows:

Therefore it is that often, when hindered by being absorbed in thought or by some morbid affection, we neither see nor hear, though both the eyes and the ears are open and in a healthy state, so that it may be readily inferred that it is the soul that sees and hears, and not those parts which are like windows of the soul, but through which the mind can perceive nothing unless it be actively present.

When you pick this apart, it’s actually pretty plain that he’s lumping the eyes in with the ears as windows of the soul. But let it pass, let it pass, and give the guy the benefit of the doubt: after all, windows are predominantly an architectural feature which serves the eyes.

Whether they’re good or bad for people facing interrogation, eyes are without question a godsend to songwriters. If, as Diane Ackerman says, 70% of our sensory wiring is given over to support of vision, it’s easy to imagine that at least 70% of our music deals with it in some form or another. It (haha) focuses on the orbs themselves, or on the things the orbs perceive; the songs are full of color, light, shadow, and of course blindness. (Let’s not forget Talking Heads’ “Cross-Eyed and Painless.”) And given the other pop-music preoccupation — love, et all the cetera that goes with it — songs often deal with the color the lover sees when he sees the beloved’s eyes. Indeed, try to substitute in a song title any other sensory organ or its sense in place of the eyes and vision and you wind up with ridiculously Daliesque imagery: “Doctor My Ears”; “I Only Have Sniffs for You”; “Taste Bud of the Tiger”…

(As a thought experiment, I turned it around: pick some other art form, and some other sense, and try to think of examples of that art’s preoccupation with that sense. It’s not easy — although I suspect you, clever readers that you are, could run off a dozen examples.)

This was a difficult mix to put together — way too many choices. We take vision very, very seriously, and the eyes are everywhere in our songs.

Better Fictions, Lesser Truths

March 30, 2012 by John 12 Comments

[Image: one of various digital collages in the “Fictions” series by Flemish photographer/artist Filip Dujardin. (Click to enlarge.) These buildings and landscapes do not actually exist (although he starts with images of buildings in and around Ghent, Belgium).]

From whiskey river:

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors.

“He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”

(Loren Eiseley [source])

…and:

Here and There

Here and there nightfall
without fanfare
presses down, utterly
expected, not an omen in sight.
Here and there a husband
at the usual time
goes to bed with his wife
and doesn’t dream of other women.
Occasionally a terrible sigh
is heard, the kind that is
theatrical, to be ignored.
Or a car backfires
and reminds us of a car
backfiring, not of a gunshot.
Here and there a man says
what he means and people hear him
and are not confused.
Here and there a missing teenage girl
comes home unscarred.
Sometimes dawn just brings another
day, full of minor
pleasures and small complaints.
And when the newspaper arrives
with the world,
people make kindling of it
and sit together while it burns.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: The Animals, “The House of the Rising Sun”

March 28, 2012 by John 10 Comments

[Image: The Animals (original image doctored up by Jude Kane and found on Freakoutville Xpress). And they looked like such nice boys…]

To get it out of the way right up front: no house in New Orleans called the “Rising Sun” ever existed.* Or rather, more precisely: never definitively, and no one establishment. Furthermore, it may or may not have been a brothel, which is fitting… because to find one in the song’s house of the rising sun we have to read between the lines, nudging that meaning into place with the words draped over it. (Not that we have to nudge too hard.)

I was surprised to learn that it began life as a folk song, first recorded (as far as we know) in 1934 by a Clarence “Tom” Ashley, in a version alternatively titled “Risin’ Sun Blues.” (Wikipedia does its usual brisk, reliably good job in documenting the song’s performance history, and outlines the several theories about the real (or otherwise) house in question.) My surprise is 100% Boomer-centric: You mean history happened at some time other than my own?!? Inconceivable! But yes, Eric Burdon and the Animals were pretty far down in the chronological list of performers. Nevertheless, they did succeed in putting their stamp on it; I doubt that I’m the only one who knew it first, and presumably always, as the vehicle for Eric Burdon’s howling vocals and that maddeningly relentless guitar. (The latter can likely induce motion sickness in sensitive individuals.)

To get back to the real (or otherwise) house of the title: it’s been claimed, variously, to have been a brothel, maybe a proto-casino or prison, dating back as early as 1821. That site was excavated by archaeologists within the last few years, which turned up evidence that it in fact may have been a bordello, or at least a house where “gentlemen” could “relax.”

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, back in 2003, ran this letter on the issue:

Fact: It’s Been the Ruin of Many a Poor Myth

As a reference librarian for many years specializing in local history and lore, as well as a long-time fan of The Animals and that group’s rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” I was very interested in Chris Rose’s Jan. 12 article, “The rising son.” I have made a study of the history of prostitution in New Orleans and have often confronted the perennial question, “Where is the House of the Rising Sun?” without finding a satisfactory answer. Although it is generally assumed that the singer is referring to a brothel, there is actually nothing in the lyrics that indicate that the “house” is a brothel. Many knowledgeable persons have conjectured that a better case can be made for either a gambling hall or a prison; however, to paraphrase Freud: sometimes lyrics are just lyrics.

After having discussed the “rising sun,” a popular decorative device, with a colleague who has just completed her doctoral work on the history of prostitution in New Orleans and a historian who has written about Shreveport’s red-light district, as well as being personally familiar with a number of general works on the “oldest profession,” there is no evidence or even a mention of the use of a rising sun as a universally recognized symbol of prostitution.

In examining property records for 826-832 St. Louis Street and numerous other resources on prominent pre-Storyville madams and prostitution in the Crescent City, I find it interesting, too, that any reference at all to the “notorious” House of the Rising Sun is conspicuously missing. Public records simply don’t confirm it.

Pamela D. Arceneaux

(“Sometimes lyrics are just lyrics”: love it. That whooshing you hear is a collective sigh of relief of from a thousand songwriters.)

If you’re interested in the definitive answers to the song’s mysteries, you might find them in Ted Anthony’s 2007 book, Chasing the Rising Sun [Amazon / Google Books]. Disclaimer: I haven’t read it myself! However, he does include this little item towards the end of the book (from “January 27, 1821, on page two of a New Orleans newspaper called the Louisiana Gazette“):

Rising Sun
Hotel,
Conti Street,
Nearly Opposite the State Bank.

The undersigned inform their friends and the public that they have bought out the interest of JOHN HULL & CO. in the above establishment. No pains or expence will be spared by the new proprietors to give general satisfaction, and maintain the character of giving the best entertainment, which this house has enjoyed for twenty years past.

Gentlemen may here rely upon finding attentive Servants. The bar will be supplied with genuine good Liquors; and at the Table, the fare will be of the best the market or the season will afford.

The business will be carried on under the firm of L.S. Hotchkiss & Co.
Jan.27

“Attentive Servants”; “general satisfaction” and “best entertainment”… Mmm-hmm.

[Below, click Play button to begin The House of the Rising Sun. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.]

[audio:houseofrisingsun_theanimals.mp3|titles=’The House of the Rising Sun’|artists=The Animals]

[Lyrics]

One interesting thing about the song’s lyrics over time: they’ve switched genders. Early versions were often sung by women, about the ruination not of “poor boys” but “poor girls.” I don’t want to guess what it says about our culture — even in the “enlightened” world of 1960s rock — that in the song’s most successful version the real victims of such places can be found among the patrons.

_______________________________

* Well, as it happens, there is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun: it’s a bed-and-breakfast (apparently quite nice) which opened its doors in 1999. (WARNING: Before following that link, you should know that the song will start playing, unbidden and fairly loudly; it took me a while to find the little audio-control widget which controls it, but it’s over in the left-hand sidebar, close to the top.) Their site includes a good page of information on the various legends about the “real” (or otherwise) Rising Sun, and the song which commemorates it. And I had to laugh when I read this:

We named our former bed & breakfast the “House of the Rising Sun” for the obvious reason… the way the song starts. What else could we call it… “Dunroamin”?

I’m not sure what they mean by “former” — as far as I can tell, it’s getting along just fine — but you’ve gotta give credit to business owners who poke fun at their own naked commercial moxie. :)

The Calm at the Core of Disorder

March 23, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Lyrics]

[Video: “Saints & Liars,” by Pony Boy. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.

(Jusan Ed Brown)

…and:

A Settlement

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

It’s all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won’t do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up — restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain — just watch it come up and don’t get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.

(Henepola Gunaratana [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer

March 21, 2012 by John 13 Comments

[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia]

When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. The mass media hadn’t quite figured out what “mass media” might mean. Television still felt like an extravagance. Pop-culture artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century could still be found lying around in basements and attics, waiting for (re)discovery by kids with maybe a little too much time on their hands.

One such sort of artifact in our household was 78rpm record albums. I have no idea from which side of the family most of these things might have come to us — or, rather, to the cardboard boxes in the second-floor “storage room” and in dark back corners of the basement. If they were Big Band-related, odds were good that they’d arrived trailing in Dad’s wake. But the others…?

We had a couple of records by Arthur Godfrey, for instance, including one on which he and a would-be comic country-singin’ group sang an embarrassing number called “Slap Her Down Again, Paw.” (That was the refrain, in a narrative about an adolescent girl who’d stayed out later than her parents allowed — but finally came in at sunrise.)

And we also had a collection of recordings on a musical instrument called the Novachord.

Like the Mellotron (covered here in a Midweek Music Break some time ago), the Novachord was an experimental keyboard instrument straddling the analog/digital divide. Wikipedia says only about a thousand were manufactured by Hammond (the organ company) between 1939 and 1942; production lapsed during World War II because of the shortage of parts, and never resumed afterwards because, apparently, the thing just hadn’t caught on anyway.

I don’t ever remember Mom or Dad playing the Novachord records on the family hi-fi (or later, stereo). But I listened to them myself, for some reason, and often enough that one song really lodged in my head. The label identified it as “Estudiantina,” a waltz by a composer named Émile Waldteufel. Although (as Wikipedia says) Waldteufel is considered a French composer, he was born in Strasbourg — as German a city as a French city may be, right down to the geography. (And his surname is German, meaning — I love this — forest devil.)

Given all that, maybe it should not surprise that “Estudiantina” — certainly as rendered by the Novachord, in the hands of someone named Collins H. Driggs — has so much a lilting, oomp-pa-pah beer-hall quality:

Maybe the main reason why this performance struck me with such force was that I recognized the tune well before I heard it from the Novachord recording — and even then, when I must’ve been only ten or twelve years old or so, I recognized it for an unlikely reason: it provided the melody to the advertising jingle for (yes!) a Germanic-sounding brand of beer, Rheingold. That’s Miss Rheingold* of 1949 in the ad over there on the right. I can almost hear “Estudiantina” tootling from her concertina, which perhaps sounded much like the Novachord: thin, reedy, and rather, well, burbly. I can even almost hear her singing the jingle — whose words, indeed, included the announcement: My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer…!

Background: When I set out a couple days ago on this general topic, for no reason that I can put my finger on, I had exactly two facts at my disposal:

The word “Novachord.”
The remembered connection between that old 78rpm record, and the Rheingold jingle.

I certainly couldn’t remember the song title, “Estudiantina.” And I don’t think I’d ever even registered the name of Émile Waldteufel.

But as I continued to think about the recording, I vaguely remembered that the overall album title coupled Novachord somehow with the word magic. It wasn’t Novachord Magic… nor The Magical Novachord… it was… was… was it The Magic of the Novachord?

And folks, I wanna tell you: I just about fell out of my chair when a quick check of Google led me to that very album on iTunes.

I love the Internet.

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* The very first Miss Rheingold, in 1940, was Jinx Falkenburg. (I might have been able to invent that name, but I’d never have had the nerve to use it in a story. Too implausible.) Her autobiography, Jinx, came out in 1951, but apparently went out of print long ago. (Hers, I’d wager, is a potential best-selling story in search of the right biographer or filmmaker, especially in our beautiful-celebrity culture.) There are many pictures of her online (and yes, Jinx appears to have been something of a minx), but one of my favorites is the one at the right. She is here not signing the accordion, as it appears. She’s signing a short snorter. You can be forgiven for not knowing what a short snorter is; according to the site of The Short Snorter Project (where I found the photo), it is:

…a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met. The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920’s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink (a “short snort”, aviation and alcohol do not mix!).

Did I say, I love the Internet?

Midweek Music Break: The Essex, “Easier Said Than Done”

March 14, 2012 by John 3 Comments

In 1961, a couple of US Marines stationed in Okinawa — Rodney Taylor and Walter Vickers — formed a vocal duo with the slightly odd name “The Essex.” Shortly thereafter, they were reassigned to Camp LeJeune in North Carolina; there, they added a couple of their fellow leathernecks, Billy Hill and Rudolph Johnson. They even encountered a woman Marine performing in the base club for non-commissioned officers; they liked the way her voice sounded, and convinced her to join their act.

Still on active duty, the quartet (Johnson left after a few months) set out to polish their routines, eventually recording a demo tape of ballads to send around to the big-name labels. Roulette Records expressed interest in recording them — they’d have to audition, of course, but if that went well… Except for one thing: what song to audition with? The problem, see, was that Roulette specifically asked for something a little snappier than the ballads on the demo.

Vickers had a friend, William Linton, who worked in the base communications office. Linton claimed to be a songwriter, so they asked: Could he come up with something suitable for their audition? Together with another friend, Larry Huff, Linton cobbled together a short little thing called “Easier Said Than Done.”

At the audition, as it happened, they didn’t perform “Easier Said Than Done.” (The group themselves didn’t much care for it, in fact.) The Roulette producers liked their sound nonetheless, and agreed to release their first single, called “Are You Going My Way?” For the flip side of the single, they requested — yes — “Easier Said Than Done.” But now The Essex had another problem: although they’d recorded fragments of the song, they’d never recorded a full-length version — even just a couple minutes long, the bare minimum for a 45rpm recording.

Out of the editing room emerged the “B” side, spliced together from multiple takes and pieces into a single, barely-two-minutes-plus chunk… And that pastiche, maybe needless to say, quickly swept the record’s “A” side into oblivion.

“Easier Said Than Done” is one of my favorite oldies, for its sheer crackling energy. No wonder it’s got that energy: the rhythm, Linton maintained, came from that of a teletype machine in the office. I also love the way the lyrics — mostly monosyllables — fit so well into every little niche of the music, and Humes’s delivery taps them into place there. Yet I think it’s also got one of the most disappointing finishes of any oldie. Before I knew the above story about the splicing-and-cutting, I’d always thought it sounded like the songwriters, exhausted by what came before, had simply run out of gas on the last line.

Anyway, here’s 1963’s “Easier Said Than Done,” by The Essex. The teletype rhythm — close to the actual sound — is in the insistent background duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh (bass? rhythm guitar?) playing behind the other instruments and vocals.

[Lyrics]

The Essex didn’t hang around together for more than a couple of years before their military schedules forced them to head in different directions. And after “Easier Said Than Done,” their sales pretty much spiraled downhill; that hit had sat comfortably at Billboard’s #1 slot for two weeks, but their next best-seller, “A Walkin’ Miracle,” made it –briefly, a couple months later — only to #12. (A 1995 “Best of” compilation somehow pulled together a couple dozen songs, but I don’t recognize any of the others; of the 24, five are identified on the back of the album as “previously unissued tracks.”) Anita Humes attempted a solo career, but that never really came together, either.

Only one other song I know of includes a background like this one: a so-called “Light Classical” piece, 1950’s “The Typewriter Song,” which literally uses that “instrument” with an orchestra of more conventional ones. (Its composer, Leroy Anderson, also composed “The Syncopated Clock,” the Christmas hit “Sleigh Ride,” and other just-short-of-novelty pieces.) Here’s the Boston Pops and a brief version of “The Typewriter Song,” YouTubed over images of… well, you can probably guess: