Last fall, our readers loved watching Iron Horse, a bluegrass band from Alabama, performing a most unusual version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The band’s take on Metallica’s anthem was originally recorded on the 2003 album, Fade to Bluegrass: Tribute to Metallica, where Iron Horse — with Tony Robertson on mandolin, Vance Henry on guitar, Ricky Rogers on bass, and Anthony Richardson on banjo — played Metallica hits in bluegrass fashion — “or at least as bluegrass as it’s possible for Metallica songs to be.”
This January, the quartet released a new video, this time covering “Rocket Man.” Sung by Elton John in ’72, written by Bernie Taupin, and inspired by a Ray Bradbury story, Rocket Man has been covered/performed by Coldplay, Kate Bush, My Morning Jacket and many others. But, if you have a scorecard, you’ll almost certainly give Iron Horse top marks for creativity and originality. Hope you enjoy.
When we think of film noir, we tend to think of a mood best set by a look: shadow and light (mostly shadow), grim but visually rich weather, near-depopulated urban streets. You’ll see plenty of that pulled off at the height of the craft in the movies that make up “noirchaeologist” Eddie Muller’s list of 25 noir pictures that will endure, which we featured last week. But what will you hear? Though no one compositional style dominated the soundtracks of films noirs, you’ll certainly hear more than a few solid pieces of crime jazz. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, writing about Rhino’s eponymous compilation album, defines this musical genre as “jazzy theme music from 1950s TV shows and movies in which very bad people do very bad things.” She links to PopCult’s collection of classic crime jazz soundtrack album covers, from The Third Man to Charade (the best Hitchcock film, of course, that Hitchcock never made),to The Man With the Golden Arm, all as evocative as the music itself.
“Previously, movie music meant sweeping orchestral themes or traditional Broadway-style musicals,” says PopCult. “But with the growing popularity of bebop and hard bop as the sound of urban cool, studios began latching onto the now beat as a way to make their movies seem gritty or ‘street.’ ”
At Jazz.com, Alan Kurtz writes about the spread of crime jazz from straight-up film noir to all sorts of productions having to do with life outside the law: “In movies and TV, jazz accompanied the entire sordid range of police-blotter behavior, from gambling, prostitution and drug addiction to theft, assault, murder and capital punishment.” Get yourself in the spirit of all those midcentury degeneracies and more with the tracks featured here, all of which will take you straight to an earlier kind of mean street: the theme from The M Squad, “two minutes of mayhem by Count Basie and his mob of heavies”; Miles Davis’ “Au Bar du Petit Bac,” improvised by Davis and his Parisian band against Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows; and Ray Anthony’s “Peter Gunn Theme,” a “quickie cover” that “beat Henry Mancini’s original to the punch.”
And finally we have Duke Ellington’s score for Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger in 1959.
Do they look a bit scruffy, the Doors on live Danish TV in 1968? My image of the Doors is forever colored by Oliver Stone’s The Doors. But the real Jim Morrison had even better hair than his doppelgänger Val Kilmer (“not a case of casting,” quoth Ebert, “but of possession”), even if the above performance is less Lizard King than lounge lizard. John Densmore lays back on the beat, gets out the way of Morrison’s free associative poetry. Guitarist Robbie Krieger riffs intently, looks subdued. Always the one to watch, the recently departed Ray Manzarek plays hypnotic baselines with his left hand while his right dances around melodic blue note phrases. It’s a very cool show, but the lack of an audience is palpable.
Morrison was at his best, and probably also worst, before crowds of admirers. He has no lack of them in another ’68 performance, this time at the Hollywood Bowl. Where the Danish gig is cabaret, this is a shamanistic happening: Morrison wears something like a sleeveless toreador’s jacket and the band plays loud, especially Densmore, who bashes his drums like John Bonham. Jim Morrison seems entranced, and really stoned. Densmore later said he’d just dropped acid: “I could tell once we hit the stage because his movements, his performance, was a little deliberate; a little like he was holding it together. But he was fantastic.”
The Hollywood Bowl is the show to see. It was a magical night. It was a big deal to play the Hollywood Bowl. We were all so excited. We’d had dinner with Mick Jagger just before the show and he was right in the front. For any fan of The Doors — young or old — this is really the way it was; this is the way to see what it was all about.
In neither of these concerts is Morrison quite the unhinged maniac of legend, but things, as they say, had already begun to unravel. Two years later the band would play its last show with Morrison at The Warehouse in December of 1970. Some believe the Doors peaked in 1967 and never topped their debut (a “stoned, immaculate classic” and the dark underbelly of Sgt. Pepper’s sunny psychedelia). I don’t buy that at all. But even if these shows catch them on the start of a decline, it was a long slow burn, and beautiful to watch.
In the clip above, ex-Sex Pistols leader John Lydon (aka “Johnny Rotten”) goes before TV’s Judge Judy in a 1997 episode of the daytime show. How and why this came about I cannot begin to imagine. The case is straightforward enough. Robert Williams, former drummer of Lydon’s post-Pistols band Public Image Limited, brought suit against the punk icon for breach of contract and assault and battery. Judy obviously doesn’t care much for Williams and calls him a “nudnik.” She seems to like Lydon, though, despite having to shush his snide outbursts numerous times. It’s also clear she has absolutely no idea who he is. “I don’t know from this band,” she says, “This last band I heard was Lawrence Welk… Jimmy Dorsey… Tommy Dorsey… I don’t know. Those are bands!”
Judy ultimately calls out Williams for expecting so much order amidst the chaos of the music business, and she dismisses his suit. And as for Johnny Rotten’s odd fifteen minutes on daytime television? “Perhaps this was the moment Lydon’s ambition as a TV presenter was born,” muses Dangerous Minds. Who knows? It’s a long way from the famous Bill Grundy interview, yet perhaps not so far from his televised confrontations of the following few decades. But consider as evidence a much earlier Lydon appearance on a 1979 TV court show, “Juke Box Jury” (above), where Lydon and a panel of celebrities pass verdicts on the current pop hits: “It ain’t the Donna Summers I know. I hate it. It was awful!”
“If you have means please show [the bands] love by naming your price. If you do not have any means, in exchange for each download we kindly request that you post, share, tag and tweet to tell your friends about each album as our bands depend on your word of mouth.”
The indie record label has released LPs by bands such as Lights & Motion, The Appleseed Cast, Brandtson, The White Octave, and Planes Mistaken for Stars, plus a number of compilation albums, including The Emo Diaries. If you’re looking for a place to get started, one reader on Metafilter offers up this list.
Thanks to the efforts of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox and singer Miche Braden, the world now knows how heavy metal rockers, Guns N’ Roses sound with their knees rouged up and their stockings down.
Their New Orleans jazz take on 1987’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” replaces the preening rock god sensitivity of the original with a sort of mature, female swagger harkening all the way back Bessie Smith. (Braden’s stage credits include turns as Billie Holiday, Valaida Snow, and Ma Rainey.)
The backup musicians get in on the fun, too, retooling Slash’s guitar solo as a horn-driven cakewalk. I know which party I’d rather hit!
Over the years, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” has proved a remarkably study workhorse, withstanding attempts to make it over as electronica, a Gregorian Chant and Brazilian prog rock. Or how about this version played on the Guzheng, an ancient Chinese instrument. Postmodern Jukebox’s entry into this stakes is not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one.
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25 years ago, the hip hop trio De La Soul released its debut album 3 Feet High and Rising (above). Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics” and long-time music editor for the Village Voice, declared that it was “unlike any rap album you or anybody else has ever heard.” And it wound up 23rd on The Source Magazine’s list of The 100 Best Rap Albums.
To celebrate the anniversary of this release, De La Soul has gone over and beyond and made all (but one) of their studio albums free to download until noon tomorrow (Saturday). Head over to the band’s web site, select the albums that you want to download, enter your name and email address, click “Submit for Sounds” and then wait until you receive an email containing the download links. It’s as simple as that. Happy listening.
The website of Abbey Road studios has an EarthCam trained on the intersection of Abbey Road and Grove End Road, right outside its stately Georgian Townhouse. You can monitor the site all day and night if you like, and the prospect of doing so seems no crazier to me than indulging a fixation with Paul is dead conspiracies. It’s a magical place, as likely to inspire awe as blind obsession. Although it has recorded artists from Paul Robeson to Lady Gaga, the historic studio acquired its shrine status from one moment only—The Beatles final recorded album, Abbey Road, and its infamous cover shot.
Seeing the sausage of that cover made in the alternate takes posted at the Beatles Bible site (two of which have Paul wearing sandals) doesn’t necessarily dispel the mystique, but it does disabuse one of illusions of total spontaneity. Even more so does the drawing at the top, which Paul McCartney made for photographer Iain Macmillan, who had 10 minutes to get the handful of shots he captured with his Hasselblad. In the top right-hand corner, you can see a small drawing added by Macmillan which adds depth to McCartney’s rudimentary compositions. These sketches show McCartney and Macmillan carefully visualizing the symmetries, strides, and even shadows of the crosswalk photo. (See the landmark above, empty, in a photo taken that same day.)
Sketching out important shots like these is common practice. For example, above you can see Peter Blake’s 1967 outline for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover art. But the Abbey Road sketch is further evidence of McCartney’s guiding hand in The Beatles’ image-making. Of Sgt. Pepper’s, John Lennon went on record as saying of the concept that “Sgt Pepper is Paul.” In this case, McCartney’s idea for the cover was instrumental in Blake’s eventual design: “a presentation featuring a mayor and a corporation, with a floral clock and a selection of photographs of famous faces on the wall behind The Beatles.” McCartney circulated a list among the band members, asking them to list their choice of celebrities. Many of the suggested figures ended up on the cover.
Of their subsequent concept album, The Magical Mystery Tour, Ringo likewise claimed “it’s Paul’s idea really, he came up with this.” Whenever McCartney formulated his ideas—for album structures, cover designs, or movies—he says in this video (which we can’t embed, unfortunately) that he would “draw something out.” Above, see his conceptual map for the Magical Mystery Tour film (click to enlarge). It may only be a coincidence that it looks something like a dreamcatcher. Maybe it’s more of a pie chart. In any case, McCartney describes it in fairly matter-of-fact terms as “virtually a script” that allowed him to “focus his thoughts.”
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