The Blog Kept A-Rollin’ — Day 1: “Train Kept A-Rollin’” — Tiny Bradshaw & His Orchestra
In most of the posts on this blog, I mention cover versions (if any) of the song I’m writing about. For a change of pace, I’m going to do a series of seven posts, tracking the evolution of a single song through a number of covers.
The song I’ve chosen is “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” which has gone through some intriguing transformations as various artists have recorded it over the years.
So, let’s start at the beginning: Tiny Bradshaw and His Orchestra recorded “Train Kept A-Rollin’” in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 25, 1951 (exactly 60 years ago today). Myron “Tiny” Bradshaw had been a bandleader since 1934, first playing swing and then, after World War II, Jump Blues—a precursor of both Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll.
He had several hit records on the King label but never achieved the massive level of cross-over success that fellow Jump Blues bandleader Louis Jordan did.1 “Train Kept A-Rollin’”, which Bradshaw co-wrote with Howard Kay and Lois Mann, was released by King Records in 1952. The single was a relatively modest seller at the time.
Now, let’s go back to the days when people actually traveled across America by train. All aboard!
Wow! You can hear all the lyrics (unlike most of the cover versions I’ll be posting). And dig those crazy lyrics:
“She was a hipster and a gone dame.
She was pretty, from New York City,
And she trucked on down the ol’ fair lane.”2
This usage of the word “trucked” put me in mind of cartoonist R. Crumb.
Just for laughs, I looked up “truck” in the dictionary. Sure enough, one of the definitions listed is:
“Slang. To walk or stroll, esp. in a jaunty manner: trucking down the avenue on a Sunday afternoon.”3
The arrangement is great. I love the call and response between Tiny and the back-up singers. Red Prysock takes a wailin’ tenor sax solo. Willie Gaddy’s electric guitar is definitely the mellowest one that you’ll hear all week; the familiar riff isn’t there—it came a few years later (more about that tomorrow).
One cool element of the original Bradshaw arrangement has been kept in most of the cover versions; it occurs at the end of the second verse:
“We made a stop at Albuquerque.
She must have thought I was a real gone jerk.
We got off the train in El Paso.
Her lovin’ was so fine Jack, I couldn’t let ‘er go.”4
After “El Paso,” the snare drum snaps, the band stops and Tiny speaks the last line a cappella.
It sure sounds like they were having a “real gone” time!
Next: Five years later, the song is resurrected in a Nashville Quonset hut.
- I wrote about Louis Jordan in an earlier post: http://djmjd.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/%e2%80%9cain%e2%80%99t-that-just-like-a-woman%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%94-louis-jordan-and-his-tympany-five-2/
- © 1951 by Bienstock Publishing Company, Jerry Lieber Music, Mike Stoller Music, and Fort Knox Music Inc./Trio Music Co. Inc.
- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/truck
- Bienstock Publishing Company etc., op. cit.
“Alice D. Millionaire” — Grateful Dead
Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s long, strange trip came to an abrupt end on March 13th when he died in a car crash in Queensland, Australia.
Although he wasn’t a musician, “Bear” loomed large in the West Coast music scene of the late 1960’s.
Owsley, with artist Bob Thomas, designed the Dead's distinctive logo
If you aren’t familiar with him, the LA Times obituary provides an adequate bio of this unique character: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-owsley-stanley-20110315,0,3733346.story.
Despite his multi-faceted career, Owsley will always be notorious as a psychedelic brand name. The obit neglects to point out that LSD was legal in California when he started manufacturing it—it didn’t become illegal until October 6, 1966.1
This, however, is a music blog, so let’s move ahead to February 2, 1967, when the Grateful Dead recorded “Alice D. Millionaire.”2 The song’s title is a pun inspired by several newspaper headlines that referred to Owsley as an “LSD Millionaire.”3
Turn on your lava lamp and groove to “Alice D. Millionaire.”
If you’d heard this song on the radio, you probably would have thought that the title was “No Time to Cry.” But you wouldn’t have heard it during the Summer of Love—although the song was recorded during the sessions for their first album (The Grateful Dead), it was not included on the initial release of that record. In fact, “Alice D. Millionaire” was not commercially released until 2001—on a 12-CD box set of early Grateful Dead recordings called The Golden Road.
This song reminds me of a different box set—Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. The Nuggets compilation is a favorite of mine—a treasure-trove of “garage rock” singles recorded between 1965 and 1968. I think “Alice D. Millionaire” would fit nicely on Disc 2—perhaps just after “Time Won’t Let Me” by The Outsiders.
Lyrically, the song begins with a typical adolescent gossip drama:
“You say you’re living in a world of trouble.
All your schemes have popped like a bubble.
Your mother told your sister and your brother told your friend.
Now your secret’s out and you don’t have to pretend.
You can see for yourself, it’s really not the end.
You’re standing there with tears in your eyes,
There’s too much going on now, there’s no time to cry.”4
By the end, however, the “too much going on now” is happening in a distinctly altered state:
“Your yesterdays are all left behind.
There’s a brand new light in your mind.
You don’t need a key to define
What’s written on the magic sign.
There’s no time to cry.
When the season of the magic lantern
Is transformed into a funny pattern,
And the wheel of fortune has a flat tire.
You can’t seem to get any higher.”5
Even so, why call this song “Alice D. Millionaire”? Maybe it was a sort of “shout out” to their benefactor—at the time, Owsley was playing Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Dead’s Michelangelo—or maybe it was just acid-inspired whimsy.
I also don’t know why the song was left off The Grateful Dead— maybe someone at Warner Brothers figured out the title—but a remastered version of the album, released in 2003, included it as a “bonus track.”
In that same spirit, I’ll include a few Owsley-related “bonus tracks” for your listening pleasure:
Owsley clearly inspired Steely Dan’s song “Kid Charlemagne” on the album The Royal Scam.
It’s a great song—Larry Carlton’s guitar solo is particularly cool—but unlike Kid Charlemagne, who winds up a paranoid anachronism, Owsley (while certainly eccentric) reinvented himself several times after his days as a “chemical engineer.”
On the Mothers of Invention’s brilliant (and often hilarious) album We’re Only In It For The Money, Frank Zappa “simultaneously skewered the hippies and the straights as prisoners of the same narrow-minded, superficial phoniness.”6
In the song “Who Needs the Peace Corp?” the clueless protagonist describes his plan for dropping out, which includes a direct reference to Owsley.
Last but certainly not least, Jimi Hendrix gave Owsley a literal “shout out” (“Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?”—an acidhead precursor of a Verizon commercial?) at the start of his guitar solo on a cover of “Day Tripper”—a song title that, in this context, also can be seen as an LSD-related pun.
To learn more about Owsley from someone who knew him, listen to and read recollections by Charles Perry (a.k.a. Smokestack El Ropo).
http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2011/03/19/rip-owsley-stanley/
http://www.laobserved.com/visiting/2011/03/the_owsley_stanley_i_remember.php
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grateful_Dead_(album)
- Troy, Sandy, Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1994), p. 99.
- http://www.dead.net/song/alice-d-millionaire
- Ibid.
- Steve Huey http://www.allmusic.com/album/were-only-in-it-for-the-money-r22631/review
“Persecution Smith”
My previous post featured “Positively Wall Street,” a Dylan parody by Christopher Guest [http://djmjd.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/%e2%80%9cpositively-wall-street%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%94-national-lampoon-lemmings-soundtrack/].
The song I’ve chosen for this post—“Persecution Smith”—is also “Dylanesque,” and it raises the issue: how do you differentiate between a parody, an hommage, and an imitation?
Based on their definitions, the distinctions seem fairly clear:
- Parody is “a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing… a burlesque imitation of a musical composition.”1
- Hommage (French for “homage”) is “tribute paid to an artist, writer, composer, etc., as by incorporating some characteristic idiom or style of the person in one’s own work.”2
- Imitation is “an instance or product of imitating, such as a copy of the manner of a person; impression.”3
Intention is what distinguishes the terms—are you trying to make fun of someone, are you demonstrating your admiration for the person, or are you just ripping them off?
But how do you know what a performer’s intention is? Anyone hearing Guest sing the line “I’m up to my knees in cow shit” could obviously tell it’s a parody (if being part of a National Lampoon production hadn’t already tipped them off). However, the artist’s intent isn’t always that clear—which brings me back to “Persecution Smith.” Where on the parody-hommage-imitation continuum does this song fall? Normally, I identify the performer upfront, but in this instance, I want you to guess who he is. Please resist the temptation to Google it before you listen; I think you’ll be surprised.
From 1966, it’s Persecution, Persecution, “Persecution Smith.”
Parody, hommage, or imitation? I’m inclined to say “All of the above.”
Musically, it’s a knock off of Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues.” The high-pitched “Morse Code” guitar part at the beginning and ending of the song is reminiscent of Dylan’s harmonica; the other guitar fills sound similar to Mike Bloomfield’s playing on that song .
Lyrically, it’s all over the map. The name Persecution Smith is a play on Dylan’s Mr. Jones (from “Ballad of a Thin Man”) and, as in that song, the singer is pointedly putting him down and mocking him—though who exactly this object of scorn is gets pretty muddled: he’s ambushing the mailman, watching protest marches, and at the Watts riots. And what’s up with the “My Friend Flicka” reference?
The point of the song only comes together in last verse:
“When you’re finished with your ideals,
And you’re finished with your dreams.
When you’re finished your crusading and no longer hear the screams.
When you’re finished trying to picture a world with people free.
When you’re finished looking up and the down is all you see.
Then make your goal the first foxhole,
And hide your head beneath your bed.
’Cause you won’t be alone my friend, you know who you’ll be with —
With Persecution, Persecution, Persecution Smith.”
Not remotely equal to Dylan, but okay for a struggling 21-year old musician in Detroit. And that musician was…
Bob Seger. “Persecution Smith” was one of 5 singles released in 1966-67 by the group Bob Seger and the Last Heard. They all sold moderately well in Michigan, but it would take 10 more years before he achieved massive commercial success with his album Night Moves.
I first heard “Persecution Smith” on public radio station KCRW. From 1984 to 1988, they broadcast a fantastic comedy and music program called The Cool and the Crazy. It was the brainchild of Gene Sculatti (a.k.a Vic Tripp) and Ronn Spencer (a.k.a Art Fraud). For several weeks, they had a contest called “Battle of the Bob Dylans,” where they would play 2 songs by artists emulating Dylan and have listeners phone in to vote for which they liked better. One night they pitted “Public Execution” by Mouse and the Traps (which I knew from the Nuggets compilation) and “Persecution Smith.” “Public Execution” won and the hosts theorized that Seger lost in part because he had become mainstream (and thus was viewed as uncool by KCRW’s audience). You can hear one of their “Battle of the Bob Dylan” contests (though not the one with “Persecution Smith”) online:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1174786498311&ref=share
In 2000, Gene Sculatti wrote an article called The All-Time Top 10 ‘Next Dylans’: Monkee, Punkers, Bubblegum King: They Wished That For Just One Time They Could Stand Inside His Shoes.4 Bob Seger didn’t make his list that time—probably because, whatever you think of his music, “Persecution Smith” was his only Dylanesque song.
Anyone who has read my other blog (http://thedornblog.wordpress.com/) knows that I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan and also a satire enthusiast. This week my musical selection merges both interests. I think—as a Dylan fan—you’ve got to appreciate a well-done Dylan parody, and this is one is hilarious!
Based on its pedigree, it should be. Back in the early 70’s, National Lampoon was a monthly magazine that “regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics with recklessness and gleeful bad taste.”1 Needless-to-say, I read it religiously (sacrilegiously?).
In 1972, National Lampoon put out a comedy album called Radio Dinner.
One of the tracks was a spoof of a commercial for a K-Tel-style compilation album. On it, a 24-year-old actor named Christopher Guest impersonated Dylan pitching a record called “Those Fabulous Sixties.” Guest would later play Nigel Tufnel (the guitarist whose amp goes to 11) in This is Spinal Tap and write/direct/perform in a series of comic faux-documentaries including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind (in which he played a member of an early 60’s era trio called The Folksmen).
In 1973, a comedy revue called National Lampoon Lemmings opened at a nightclub in Greenwich Village; the second half of the show was a mordantly funny send-up of the Woodstock Festival.
The cast featured John Belushi (including an early incarnation of his Joe Cocker imitation), Chevy Chase (savaging John Denver), and Guest. He did a take-off on James Taylor called “Highway Toes” as well as co-writing and singing the Dylan parody spotlighted here. Besides being hysterical, it gives you 2 very different Dylan voices—one circa Highway 61 Revisited and one circa Nashville Skyline—in the same song.
So… stand inside my shoes and give a listen to “Positively Wall Street.”
Okay… commenting about a song containing the line “I’m up to my knees in cow shit” may well put me in that same situation, but here goes. The lyrics (by Sean Kelly), while humorously contrasting the so-called “voice of a generation” with the mellow “Country Pie Bob,” also parallel comments Dylan would make 11 years later in a Rolling Stone interview:
“I’d also seen that I was representing all these things that I didn’t know anything about… It was all storm-the-embassy kind of stuff—Abbie Hoffman in the streets—and they sorta figured me as the kingpin of all that. I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m just a musician. So my songs are about this and that. So what?’ But people need a leader. People need a leader more than a leader needs people, really. I mean, anybody can step up and be a leader, if he’s got the people there that want one. I didn’t want that, though.”2
To which some people would respond “Boo-f___ing-hoo.” Anyway, taking what Dylan says in an interview at face value is risky business.
Another irony in this parody is the prescient reference to Jesus—but enough with the literary criticism BS. Check out this clip from a grainy video of Lemmings, featuring “Positively Wall Street.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS83HGHU934
The opening segment, with Belushi as the stage announcer, brings up that Frequently Asked Question: Why did Bob Dylan, who lived in Woodstock at the time, not perform at the Woodstock Festival?
A. He had an exclusive contract with the promoters of the Isle of Wight Festival that forbade him from appearing at any other festivals that summer.3
B. He and his family were scheduled to sail to England (for the Isle of Wight Festival) on the ocean liner QE2, on the day Woodstock started. While boarding, his son Jessie hit his head and lost consciousness; the ship’s doctor wouldn’t take responsibility for him, so they disembarked, took him to a doctor in New York City for treatment, and then flew to London.4
C. He didn’t want to be home when 300,000 baby boomers “dropped in.”5
Answer: D. All of the above.
Fun Fact: Christopher Guest is a British peer (The Fifth Baron Graden-Guest of Saling, England) and actually served briefly in the House of Lords.6
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_(magazine)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_Portrait_(Bob_Dylan_album)
- Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (Grove Press, 2002) p. 250
- Ibid., p. 251
- Ibid., p. 249
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Guest
The song in my previous post was a prototype of “garage rock.” I don’t think that “garage blues” is an actual musical genre — but if it were, then Hound Dog Taylor would definitely be its epitome.
In the early 70’s — after college and before grad school — I lived in an apartment in Berkeley, California. I had quite an interesting assortment of roommates; in the summer of 1973, one of them — his name escapes me, unfortunately — was a psychology major who also happened to be an excellent guitarist (that summer he was the opening act at a show by Old And In The Way, Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass side project). One day he heard me playing slide guitar and turned me on to the album Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers.
I’d never heard anything like it… so raw and exuberant!
Born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1915, Theodore Roosevelt “Hound Dog” Taylor moved to Chicago in 1942 after “a harrowing encounter with the Ku Klux Klan in 1942 (he had a cross burned in his yard).” 1 During the late 50′s and 60′s, he and his band — the aptly named HouseRockers, consisting of Brewer Phillips on second guitar and Ted Harvey on drums — became local favorites at Windy City juke joints.
Taylor played various cheap-o Japanese guitars — a collection that Jack White (White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather) would be envious of — through a Sears Silvertone amp with cracked speakers, using a “brass-lined steel slide (made from the leg of a kitchen chair).”2
In 1971, a 23-year-old blues fan named Bruce Iglauer used his small inheritance to record that first Hound Dog Taylor album (above), which was also the first release on Alligator Records (the leading contemporary blues label).
Now, without further ado — from the South Side of Chicago to your computer, here’s “Give Me Back My Wig.”
Hey, what guy hasn’t been in this situation? You break up with a girl and she refuses to return the wig you got her. Jeez… don’t you just hate when that happens?
[On the other hand... let her keep the merkin.]
Of course, I couldn’t write about Hound Dog Taylor without mentioning his left hand. Trust me — the picture below has not been PhotoShopped.
Actually, he was born with six fingers on both hands, but “one night, a drunken Hound would, with a straight razor, cut off the small extra finger on his right hand.”3
Given Hound Dog Taylor’s relative obscurity, it’s surprising how many blues performers have covered “Give Me Back My Wig,” most notably George Thorogood (who once opened for Taylor at a Cambridge, Massachusetts club)4 and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Their versions are fine — technically better played and better recorded than Hound Dog’s — but, frankly, I prefer the raucousness of the original.
Since those days in Berkeley, I’ve taken guitar lessons and realize that my roommate was dissing my slide technique. You’re supposed to use a finger to deaden the strings behind the slide, reducing overtones and thus giving you a cleaner sound — neither Hound Dog nor I were doing that. Before he died in 1975, Hound Dog Taylor said, “When I die, they’ll say ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’”5 Amen!
“I Can Only Give You Everything” — Them
[This week’s song goes out to Kathleen Roberts — a good friend of mine from Santa Cruz, California — who hasn’t been feeling well lately. Ms. Roberts is quite a fan of Van Morrison and I really hope she enjoys this post.]
It’s hard for some people to believe that the soulful romantic who wrote and crooned “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” was the same guy who had salaciously screamed out the letters “G-L-O-R-I-A.” Nevertheless, Van Morrison was indeed the singer and harmonica player in Them. The band — which took its name from a science fiction movie about gigantic irradiated ants — was from Belfast in Northern Ireland, but here in the U.S. they got lumped in as part of the “British Invasion.” And, like The Animals and The Rolling Stones, they did cover a lot of American blues and R&B standards. However, they also recorded several songs — including the aforementioned classic, “Gloria” — that were templates for what would come to be known as “garage rock.” Wikipedia’s article on garage rock states that:
“The lyrics and delivery were notably more aggressive than was common at the time, often with growled or shouted vocals that dissolved into incoherent screaming. Instrumentation was often characterized by the use of guitars distorted through a fuzz box.”1
Based on that description, “I Can Only Give You Everything” — from the 1966 album Them Again — was Them at their “garage-iest.”
Let there be fuzz tone!
Okay, let’s start with the title: “I Can Only Give You Everything” succinctly combines youthful exuberance and sarcastic arrogance. It also sounds like a twist on the old jazz/pop standard “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” The song — written by Phillip Coulter and Thomas Scott — was clearly influenced by “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense — they’re essentially just a vehicle for what writer Richie Unterberger describes as “one of his [Morrison’s] toughest, most snarling vocals ever, and indeed one of the snottiest vocals of the entire British Invasion… an utterly convincing mixture of aggressive and desperate pursuit of affection.”2
In a word, what this song had going for it was ATTITUDE!
Back in July of 1966, I saw Them perform at the Waikiki Shell (a smaller, flatter version of the Hollywood Bowl) in Honolulu. It was a weird show — the sound was lousy and the band seemed pissed off. Frankly, I can’t even recall whether they played “I Can Only Give You Everything” that night. It was released as a single around that time, but flopped. Soon after, the band broke up and Van began his solo career.
The record may have tanked, but some people heard it — and covered it. In the 60’s, it was recorded by numerous bands, most notably The MC5 (it was the group’s first single) and The Troggs (who, of course, had given the world their own garage rock classic, “Wild Thing”). Moving from garage rock to punk rock, Richard Hell and the Voidoids recorded a version on their 1982 album, Destiny Street.
That fuzz tone guitar riff took on a life of its own in 1996, when Beck used it in the song “Devils Haircut.”
Throughout the album Odelay, Beck used samples (including samples from other tracks on Them Again — an album that was released 4 years before Beck was born!), but on “Devils Haircut” he only used (per the liner notes) “elements” from the song — he re-recorded the riff .3
[Get well soon, Kathleen!]
“I’m An Adult Now” — The Pursuit of Happiness
I started writing the dorn blog just over a year ago. My first post was titled “The Purfuit of Happineff”1 — the phrase is a punchline from a skit about the Declaration of Independence on the classic 1961 comedy album Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America: Volume One — The Early Years.2
I recently re-read that first post and recalled that there was a rock band called The Pursuit of Happiness. It seemed appropriate on this 4th of July weekend to select a song by them for this week’s DJ MJD’s Back Tracks post.
During much of the 1980’s I put together mix tapes — cassettes to listen to in my car and send to friends. Sometime in 1988 I began working on one that I didn’t finish; for whatever reason, I never made another mix tape. The opening song on that final, unfinished cassette was “I’m An Adult Now” by The Pursuit of Happiness. Significant? Perhaps… but more likely just an ironic coincidence.
Let’s give it a listen:
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Moe Berg was the creative force behind The Pursuit of Happiness. The original version of “I’m An Adult Now,” a self-produced single released in 1986, was a cult hit in their native Canada. They re-recorded it in 1988 with Todd Rundgren producing; it was the first single from their debut album Love Junk.
This was the version that I first heard and put on that incomplete tape (and it’s the one posted here). Since it was the 80’s, there was a video for it3 — incredibly, MTV originally banned it because of the lyrical references to alcohol, sex and drugs. What genius decided that the basic cable audience needed to be protected from statements such as “I can’t even look at young girls anymore/People will think I’m some kind of pervert”? Eventually MTV showed it and it became a modest hit in the U.S.
Moe Berg, like his fellow Jewish-Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, writes wryly humorous lyrics about the complications of sex and romance. He’s also published a collection of short stories, The Green Room.4
I do have one quibble: The Pursuit of Happiness is a Canadian band. What gives them the right to use “our” famous patriotic phrase for their name? I wonder how Canadians would feel about a U.S. band called “The True North Strong and Free”? Yeah, I know… it’s not likely to happen.
Bizarrely, it turns out that there’s even a cover version — a Rhino Records anthology called Tales From The Rhino includes a version by Mogan David & His Winos.5 Oy vey!
- http://thedornblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/the-purfuit-of-happineff/
- http://www.amazon.com/Freberg-Presents-United-States-America/dp/B0000033TV
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSDF8VvU13M
- http://www.amazon.com/Green-Room-Moe-Berg/dp/189635632X
- http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Rhino-Various-Artists/dp/B0000033CL
