music Archives - Page 149 of 265 - Ramblin' with Roger

A time of great distress

Are we in a time of great distress? I was, right after the election for about a month. Then I hit a plateau. But now I see the previous guy doing his farewell tour, and I’m feeling the tension all over again.

Let the record show that I did not consent to this. Yet we are about to have a President:

*whose Cabinet picks are “a lethal combination of corporate bigwigs and military men with plenty of know-nothing about political affairs and diplomacy,” a group the National Council of Churches condemned as “morally inconsistent with Christian principles.”

*whose plan to avoid conflicts of interest is toothless

*who orders ambassadors to yank their kids out of school and come home ASAP in disregard of precedent even as taxpayers are subsiding two households for the Trumps so that their child doesn’t have to move from NYC to DC mid-school year

*who threatens the press for doing its job

*who petulantly taunts Schwarzenegger over Celebrity Apprentice ratings, a program for which he is an executive producer

*who is for sale

*whose DC Hotel has been tagged With $5 Million in Unpaid Worker Liens

*who now asks Congress, not Mexico, to pay for a border wall, but tweets that MX will pay for it eventually – good luck with that

*who has necessitated Internet Archive’s special archive

*who is Like King Henry VIII Revived — Without The Charm

*who is turning America into a Stan

*who prompted California to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for legal counsel

and yet
* who complains that he is being mocked

I guess As We Enter 2017, Keep The Big Picture In Mind, and Here’s how we prepare to be ungovernable in 2017.

FLATUS is the regular target of Lawrence White, especially on the Russia thing.

I choose to think we’ll get through this, we’ll get through this, we’ll get through this…

But I won’t use the Make Your Face Great Again makeup tutorial. Instead of going to the inauguration, I could look at editorial cartoons.

Hey, TCM is airing A Face in the Crowd today at 5:45 p.m. ET- great film! – in honor of Patricia Neal’s birthday. It’s one of the films to get us through his Presidency, according to Chaz Ebert.

But what I REALLY need…

Music!

Seriously. Sara Bareilles imagines what President Obama must have been thinking about this past election and Donald Trump before November 8, but couldn’t say publicly. Leslie Odom, Jr. performs the song.

Rebecca Ferguson said she would have played the inauguration if she could have sung Strange Fruit; other suggestions for inauguration day, made by a coterie of folks:

Who Will Survive America? – Amiri Baraka
Mississippi Goddam – Nina Simone
Go Up Moses – Roberta Flack
You can’t bring me down – Suicidal Tendencies;
Alright -Kendrick Lamar
People Have the Power – Patti Smith
Fortunate Son – CCR
Cult of Personality – Living Color
(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang – Heaven 17
There Goes the Neighborhood – the Busboys

I won’t be boycotting L.L. Bean, but maybe I’ll drink some New Zealand wine for Arthur’s birthday.

Music Throwback Saturday: Carry On, Wayward Son

“My charade is the event of the season”

When I was broke and directionless at the end of 1976, I ended up staying with my parents and my baby sister in Charlotte, NC for the first four months of 1977. It wasn’t a good fit for me.

I spent a bunch of time working in this massive defunct store, broken up into sections. I’d help my parents set up up and restock products, selling some costume jewelry or knickknacks from time to time.

Some of the other vendors believed that I thought I was better than they were. They would criticize me for using two- and three-syllable words. Yet my parents got along with these people just fine.

I was miserable. I even took up smoking, though “took up” would be overstating it a bit. I probably had a half a pack over the four months I was down there, trying desperately to fit in and failing badly.

One day, sister Marcia plugged in a jukebox I had not seen before. I don’t know if she had to put in coins, but I do know what it played, Carry On, Wayward Son by Kansas. And even in this cavernous building, the music was LOUD, almost deafeningly so.

Naturally, all the vendors in my area looked askance. I, on the other hand, did what I had seldom done in my time in Charlotte to that point: I laughed hysterically. That machine REALLY gave a good feeling to the bottom of that song, and it brought me joy for the 45 seconds it was on before either it was turned down or unplugged, I forget.

At the same time, it made a lot of sense lyrically, which I hadn’t thought about until the next day:

Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don’t know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I’m like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune, but I hear the voices say

Carry on my wayward son,
For there’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more

Interestingly, I never owned the song until I bought a greatest hits CD considerably later.

Listen to Carry On, Wayward Son by Kansas HERE or HERE.

A for Are You Experienced -Jimi Hendrix Experience

American compilers often choose the singles to be included on the album, whereas the British saw the single and the album as separate entities.

I have the American version of the Jimi Hendrix Experience debut album, Are You Experienced, on vinyl, but it’s difficult to get to in the house. So I went to the public library and borrowed the CD, which has 17 songs, rather than the 11 on my LP. Not that all the other songs were unfamiliar.

What I’ve long known about the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Donovan and many other artists was also true of Hendrix. The US and UK versions were very different, even when the titles were the same. The picture at the top of the page was only vaguely familiar, but it is the original UK cover, which Hendrix didn’t particularly like. Note that the band’s name does not even appear.

Links are to music, but not every song is represented.

The UK/international version, released May 12, 1967, included:

Side one
1. “Foxy Lady” 3:22
2. “Manic Depression” 3:46
3. “Red House” 3:44
4. “Can You See Me” 2:35
5. “Love or Confusion” 3:17
6. “I Don’t Live Today” 3:58
Side two
7. “May This Be Love” 3:14
8. “Fire” 2:47
9. “Third Stone from the Sun” 6:50
10. “Remember” 2:53
11. “Are You Experienced?” 4:17

The original North American edition, released August 23, 1967, dumped Red House, Can You See Me, and Remember in favor of the singles Hey Joe, Purple Haze, and The Wind Cries Mary, even though they weren’t hits in the US, initially. American compilers often choose the singles to be included on the album, whereas the British saw the single and the album as separate entities.

Notice that even the same songs are slightly shorter on the American iteration. Hendrix liked this psychedelic cover far more.

Side one
1. “Purple Haze” 2:46
2. “Manic Depression” 3:46
3. “Hey Joe” (Billy Roberts) 3:23
4. “Love or Confusion” 3:15
5. “May This Be Love” 3:14
6. “I Don’t Live Today” 3:55
Side two
7. “The Wind Cries Mary” 3:21
8. “Fire” 2:34
9. “Third Stone from the Sun” 6:40
10. “Foxy Lady” 3:15
11. “Are You Experienced?” 3:55

Also on the CD are the B-sides of the UK singles Stone Free (Hey Joe), 51st Anniversary (Purple Haze), and Highway Chile (The Wind Cries Mary).

In any configuration, Are You Experienced is considered one of the best debut albums of all time.

ABC Wednesday – Round 20

David Bowie would have been 70

David Bowie did not “go with the flow of the times.”

Right after David Bowie died, almost a year ago, I went to buy his then-new album Blackstar on Amazon. But it was SOLD OUT. Bowie’s first #1 album in the United States, which I purchased a couple of weeks later, is a fitting ending to an eclectic career.

About a month following his death, I was doing some research on how to market oneself as an artist. I came across this article about David Bowie. Well, more his response to comments about his previous article about David Bowie.

A commenter wrote that Bowie is “one of the most brilliant marketers in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” adding, “He is all about the money and he goes with ‘flow of the times.'” And the writer largely agreed: “Bowie tailored his music to fit each era, embracing styles from folk to glam rock to soul to electronic music and ‘drum and bass.'”

That didn’t sit well with me at all. He did not “go with the flow of the times,” he helped INVENT the flow of the times, which is why he was revered and is missed.

Here are 16 Bowie songs. The fact that many are in a different order than the last time I put together such a list shows how fluid my affection is for different songs, depending on what I heard most recently. Links to all, #s indicate US Billboard highest position. .

16. Let’s Spend the Night Together (From Aladdin Sane, 1973) – I like how reads the title lyric, compared with the Rolling Stones original
15. Starman, #65 (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972) – my favorite album, still
14. Life on Mars? (Hunky Dory, 1971) – from the first Bowie album I ever got, won from WNPC radio station in a phone contest
13. TVC15 (Station to Station, 1976)- because I like the vocal

12. Rebel Rebel, #64 (Diamond Dogs, 1974) – love the guitar on this
11. Suffragette City (Ziggy Stardust) – the dialogue is the first hook
10. DJ (Lodger, 1979)- “I am the DJ, I am what I play” used to mean something
9. Lazarus (Blackstar, 2016) – such an honest final statement

8. Fashion (Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980)- beep, beep
7. Young Americans, #28 (Young Americans, 1975)- I believe he performed this on Soul Train. “Do you remember your President Nixon,” whose birthday, BTW, is tomorrow.
6. Fame, #1, and #21 soul (Young Americans) -the original, not the lesser Fame ’90 remix that I have on the Pretty Woman soundtrack. Co-written by John Lennon. LOVE the scales of “fame, fame, fame, fame…”
5. Panic in Detroit (Aladdin Sane)- “looks a lot like Che Guevera”, plus great background singing

4. Star (Ziggy Stardust)- rock and roll!
3. Golden Years, #10 (Station to Station)- the kids on Soul Train didn’t know what to make of the Thin White Duke, but they liked the song
2. Changes, #41 (Hunky Dory)- even my college roomie Ron liked THIS song
1. Space Oddity, #124, then #15 in 1973 (David Bowie – in the UK; Man of Words/Man of Music, 1969) – this song became more acutely painful after Bowie’s death

Oh, and in its own category: Under Pressure, with Queen, #7 in 1981 – a bass line so good, even Vanilla Ice sounded (relatively) good…

Music Throwback Saturday: The Creation

The salesperson wondered if I meant the Haydn piece; no, that’s not

Many, many years ago, I was a member of the choir at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, and we sang something called the Creation. The text is based on the first three verses of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

When we performed this, the presentation was very dramatic in that the lights would dim as the lyrics “and darkness fell upon the face of the deep.” At the point where we sang, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” all the lights came on. We used to memorize the music we sang.

I have never sung The Creation again, and I had never heard anyone else perform it. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure I could still sing most of the bass line, nearly fifty years later.

I couldn’t look at the piece, though, because I didn’t remember who the composer was. When I went to a local sheet music store, now defunct (alas!), and tried to replicate the sound, the salesperson wondered if I meant the Haydn piece; no, that’s not it.

Fortunately, my sister Leslie, who I’m sure could still sing the alto line, recently found a copy of the music. It was written by Willy Richter (1914-1984). She directs a choir part-time and wants her group to perform it. I’d crash her choir except for the fact that she’s 3000 miles away.

Though I sang it with males and females, there are arrangements for men only as well.

Listen to The Creation by Willy Richter

USD Chamber Singers

The NJHSA Chorale at Pascack Bible Church

Luther College Collegiate Chorale

Gary D. Gardner/Michiana Male Chorus

Listen to

THE CREATION (Franz Joseph Haydn), which is a very long piece. From 7:45 to 10:30 – it matches the scripture covered by Richter. Do you hear any musical similarities?

Next week, back to pop tunes.