The name is Bootsy. And this is my job.
DIG THE FUNK PARTAY PLAYLIST. NOW.
Continuing with my motif of great summer good times playlists with questionable spelling, I just assembled a list of some of my phunk phavorites for your enjoyment.
Bear with my artistic license. As with punk, the definition of funk is in the eye of the beholder.
O.C. Smith singing “Wichita Lineman” is funk, IMO.
We’re all familiar with the “Desert Island Discs” phenomenon: What 3 or 5 or 8 or 10 records couldn’t you live without?
I was thinking tonight about doing my desert island discs but it just seemed too obvious.
What about songs you can live without…maybe even are slightly embarrassed to like…but that nevertheless satisfy you like a sickly sweet piece of chocolate cream pie? Like dessert.
I present the first in my series of Dessert Bar Discs, Garth Brooks’ “Rodeo.” Don’t ask. Something about when he rhymes “latigo” and “rodeo” in the chorus.
I like the studio version better, but this live take showcases Mr. Garth in all of his fist-pumping greatness. It looks easy to pull that crap off — the winking and finger pointing and such — but it’s a lot harder than it looks and I tip my hat to the man.
I’ve never spelled “cruising” “croozin” before and I hope I never do again.
But today was one of our 5.3 perfect days a year here in Seattle and tonight I was feeling the sun and searching (serchin?) for some summer love on nuTsie.com.
And I found a great playlist titled “Summer Croozin.”
Dinah Washington, Bill Withers, Weather Report, J.J. Cale, Howlin’ Wolf, The Buddy Rich Big Band and Fleetwood Mac…all together…beautiful.
The one obvious classic missing from an otherwise great list is Smokey’s 1979 jam, “Cruisin’.” Smokey don’t ‘low no “Croozin.”
While building a playlist of my punk favorites for my last blog post I had to sift through two, three or more versions of certain songs, thanks to the useless reissues record companies put out to try to take your money.
None of us ever need to hear a crappy demo of The Ramones’ “Suzy is a Headbanger.” Period.
Enough already! The first version of London Calling was perfect! Smart, creative people made smart, creative decisions to create a great work of art. We don’t need all the demos, alternate takes and other crud, which only compromise and dilute the original.
IMO, the most egregious reissue of all time is the 1997 remix of Iggy and The Stooges’ 1973 Raw Power album. They didn’t reissue it with a bunch of junk you don’t need, they remixed it so that it sounds completely different from the original. One of the weirdest, most intense records of all time, with guitars, drums and vocals totally out of balance (relative to “normal” practices) was mediocritized into a much less interesting and more pedestrian rock record. Bummer. From greatness to so-what.
Would Raw Power have been such an influential record if the original were as milquetoast as the reissue? We’ll never know, but we do know that the original spawned a generation of admirers and imitators, including many of my Seattle compatriots.
Punkest of the punk
Dig my ever-changing PUNK PLAYLIST.
A few years ago the Presidents were recording at Egg Studios with Conrad Uno. Some kids in their early teens had been recording there with their “punk” band and were hanging around.
One of them asked Presidents drummer Jason Finn, “What kind of music do you play?”
“Oh, rock and roll, punk rock.”
“What kind of punk rock?”
Jason, ever-ready with a quip, was struck speechless.
Spirit of ‘77 punk? Pop punk? Straight-edge punk? Garage punk? SoCal hardcore punk?
Punk is a loaded word if you’re a musician or music fan aged 50 or younger. Punk means credibility and authenticity.
Problem is, everyone has their own definition of punk.
My punk? It’s a mishmash, unified by elements of energy, irreverence and passion.
The punkest thing I know is The Sonics, from Tacoma, WA. They made their mark in the early 60s and have influenced everyone from Iggy and The Stooges to The White Stripes.
My punk includes obvious stuff, like The Sex Pistols and The Clash and The Buzzcocks.
My punk also includes some not-so-obvious stuff. For example, The Who qualify, as do The Monochrome Set, sort of an anti-punk punk group during the first wave of late 70s punk. Many punk bands were rich kids trying to act working class, while they were working class kids trying to act rich.
I consider The Jam punk, though saying that in the U.K. in 1977 might have got me killed by The Jam’s crazed Mod fan base.
What’s yer punk?
Hendrix & Co. PLAYLIST — his contemporaries, collaborators and disciples
I’m a guitar player. This is a blog about music. A Hendrix post is inevitable, so let’s just get to it.
80-odd years into the history of the electric guitar and nearly 30 years since his death, there’s still no one who can touch Hendrix.
Hendrix had a secret weapon. He was a black American. He had actually been steeped in, educated in, BASTED in real American blues and R&B on the Chitlin’ Circuit. He backed up Little Richard, King Curtis and many others. The pretenders, your Claptons, Pages and so on, they could only…well…pretend to know about that stuff. Jimi lived it.
When he plugged into the cultural revolution of the 60s, loads of drugs and alcohol, many Marshall stacks and a wah-wah pedal (now worth $15,500), he brought America’s most deeply rooted folk music into the Space Age. No one else could credibly be said to have come from and combined both of those worlds in the same way. Which is what made him the greatest.
One of the fellas who comes in a close second to Jimi (purely as a guitar player) is Roy Buchanan. Dig his version of “Hey Joe” for comparison’s sake. BTW, the two of them played together on more than one occasion.
So many songs you should know but don’t. So many songs I should know but don’t.
The Celibate Rifles formed in 1979 and are/were one of a great generation of Aussie bands virtually unknown in America, also including Radio Birdman (dig their song about Hawaii Five-O).
I love this song, “Cycle.” Really tops. Go buy the studio version now.
My only connection to The Celibate Rifles is that sometime in the early 90s they slept on the floor of a house on Franklin Avenue in Seattle that was shared by my sister’s then-boyfriend Ed Fotheringham, Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner, PUSA drummer Jason Finn and Flop guitarist Bill Campbell.
We also had some wonderful Tuesday night poker games at that house, but that’s a different blog post.
From Elvis’s hips to Plant’s golden curls to Cobain’s flannel, the singer grabs 99.99% of us.
Beyond that, guitar players get all the glory.
Which makes no sense at all, because the guitar player mostly just makes annoying buzzy noises, unless maybe that guitar player’s name is Jimi Hendrix. And that’s coming from me, a guitar player.
Even a super guitar player sounds like a schmuck if the drummer sucks.
The GREATEST bands have only two things in common with each other:
1. At least one great singer
2. A truly great drummer — not only swinging and powerful but with an IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE style
The Beatles: Two great singers and two pretty good singers; Ringo on the traps
The Stones: Rock’s greatest showman on vox; Charlie Watts (rare interview link) brings his jazz and swing
The Who: One great singer, one good singer; Keith Moon was a force of nature and utterly inimitable
The Band: Three great singers; Levon Helm was one of those singers and also possibly the funkiest white person ever to play the drums
Led Zeppelin: Mr. Golden God on the mic; John Bonham IMO greatest drummer ever in any style…so much of Zeppelin would be 2nd-rate without him
AC/DC: A great dead singer and a great singer still living; Phil Rudd brings his bitchin’ Camaro four-on-the-floor 16 oz. tallboy of whup-ass
Fleetwood Mac: In their prime, three great singers; Mick Fleetwood pounds out a tom-heavy low-beat groove all his own
The Police: Love him or hate him, Sting is mega alpha; Stewart Copeland bangs an on-the-beat stomp groove with unexpected cymbal and rim shot accents borrowed from reggae and, possibly, outer space
Nirvana: The voice of a young genius falling apart; Dave Grohl IMO the greatest living rock drummer — power incarnate plus limitless musicality
Try it yourself. Here are some borderline test cases:
Guns N’ Roses: WOW, what a singer; first album will live on in greatness because of greasy Steven Adler drum groove, later recordings suffer from stiffer feel of super-rock-stud drummer Matt Sorum (to his credit, Sorum is a monster player and more likely to show up at the gig sober enough to play)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: One of the best rock singers ever; IMO one of the GREATEST bands until the departure of first drummer Stan Lynch, who’s in my list of top 10 fave musicians…hard to imagine “Refugee” without his super-swinging groove…he’s sort of like a Ringo on steroids…
Prove me wrong…
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I started thinking about this the other day when I dusted off my original vinyl from Monty Python alum Eric Idle’s Beatles parody/tribute, The Rutles. As adolescents, we got the joke, but we also came to love the songs on the record. “Hold My Hand” is as good as anything to come out of the British Invasion, short of the Beatles themselves.
How about The Archies? I LOVE The Archies! Fake, right? Sort of, I guess. “Sugar, Sugar” is one of the better pop songs of all time. Two of the guys in the studio band went on to long careers, one as a producer, the other, Andy Kim, scoring a #1 hit in 1974 with “Rock Me Gently.”
Where do you draw the line?
Paul McCartney’s solo output is mostly just him. The Band on the Run album is almost entirely him. Is that any more or less a fabrication than The Archies or the The Monkees, another great “fake” band?
Boston’s massive debut album was entirely played and recorded by MIT nerd Tom Scholz. He tried to sing it, too, but eventually had to bring in Brad Delp to fill that role.
Aside from a few tiny bits here and there, Prince played every instrument and sang everything on 1999 and his other early records. Same goes for Lenny Kravitz. Same goes for Stevie Wonder during his apex in the early 70s. We’re talking about some of the greatest records of all time, completely fabricated by one dude locked in a studio with himself.
And that doesn’t even get into the world of post-apocalyptic sampler- and computer-generated music. Fatboy Slim…real or fake? One guy plus record collection plus computer.
Does it matter? NO! If you’re tapping your foot, it’s real.
GREAT FAKE MUSIC playlist. Enjoy.