music Archives - Page 156 of 265 - Ramblin' with Roger

Music Throwback Saturday: The Horse

In the heyday of AM radio as music powerhouses in the 1960s, the DJ would talk through the instrumental.

My search for Soulful Strut and Grazing in the Grass led me to another horn-driven instrumental, The Horse by Cliff Nobles & Co. I remember this title and recognize the song, but I would not have been able to put them together.

Like Soulful Strut, it is derived from another song, Love Is All Right, with the vocals of Cliff Nobles stripped. In fact, the instrumental was originally the B-side, but, improbably, went to #2 on both the pop and soul charts in 1968. The “& Co.” became MFSB.

The Horse reportedly still is played in today’s school marching bands.

It occurred to me that I had trouble remembering instrumentals’ titles because, in the heyday of AM radio as music powerhouses in the 1960s, the DJ would talk through the instrumental. He’d say, “Coming up at the top of the hour, the new hit by the Beatles! Plus the Stones, Aretha, the Rascals, and much more.” But he’d not announce the wordless tracks.

Whereas the instrumental Classical Gas, written and performed by Mason Williams, I remember extremely well, because I saw this exactly three-minute song accompany a video on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which he was a comedy writer. It went to #2 on the pop charts for two weeks, #3 on the Adult Contemporary Charts, in 1968, and won a Grammy for best pop instrumental.

Listen to

Love Is All Right – Cliff Nobles HERE or HERE

The Horse – Cliff Nobles & Co. HERE or HERE

Classical Gas – Mason Williams HERE or HERE

September rambling #2: R.I.P. Herschell Gordon Lewis

Why Marvel movie music is so forgettable

Climate change illo is so perfect, it’s undeniable

Dying to be me! Anita Moorjani at TEDx BayArea

It’s Time To Call Out ‘Nice Racists’ And Their White Fragility

Self Care For People of Color After Psychological Trauma

No touching. No human contact. The hidden toll on jail inmates who spend months or years alone in a 7×9 foot cell

The Smithsonian’s African American museum – a monument to respectability politics; hmm, I am a charter member

Forehead Tittaes / Marion Cotillard and Pinksourcing With Kristen Bell

Homeless, Looking for Work

Childhood lost: Schooling a workforce and Naviance not so transparent- and cooking up data starting in kindergarten?

Now I Know: Charles Bernard’s Unexpected Vacation and Avast, Ye Groceries! and The Secret, Broken Language of Fire Hydrants and The Dangerous-Sounding Threat of DHMO and A Fishy Story

Is Inbreeding Really That Bad?

It occurs to me that I ALWAYS knew who Arnold Palmer was. From watching him and his army of fans on TV in my grandfather’s apartment, just upstairs from mine, to the epic golf battles between him and Jack Nicklaus, to an iced tea with lemonade drink named for him, to ads for prescription drugs. Arnold Palmer was 87. Here’s Olin and Palmer Team Remembered in Silver; Spencer Olin is a distant cousin of my wife’s

R.I.P. Herschell Gordon Lewis, the “Godfather of Gore”, Has Passed Away at 87; Our business library had a business book of his, called Big Profits from Small Budget Advertising, from 1992, and when we deaccessioned the tome, I scooped it up. So it’s now in the same office at home as my copy of FantaCo Enterprises’ The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis and His World of Exploitation Films, autographed by HGL “to my friend Roger,” also signed by coauthors Daniel Krogh and John McCarty at FantaCon 1983

The Miami Marlins’ Jose Fernandez, one of Major League Baseball’s top pitchers, was killed in a boating accident; he was 24 and had a great backstory

Bill Nunn, Who Played Radio Raheem in ‘Do the Right Thing,’ Dies at 63, which is my age; Love – Hate: Do the Right Thing

Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer-winning playwright and ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ author, dies at 88

The three “tireds”

‘Rock star’ Baltimore librarian makes history at Library of Congress

See Amazing Images of American Sikhs

5 Rules for Hosting a Crappy Dinner Party (and Seeing Your Friends More Often)

There’s a movement afoot to name an intersection in Los Angeles for the late Forrest J Ackerman

Tom Hanks Has Made a Fortune Bringing Your Travel Nightmares to Life

Vin Scully is a voice for the ages and The national pastime continues to endure and Ken Levine’s tribute; we’re talkin’ baseball.

History of the Volkswagen and especially its groundbreaking advertising

48 Hour Film Project 2016 – SUPr, featuring Rebecca Jade (niece #1)

THE TRUST BOOK ONE: SILENT SCREAM Kickstarter. Goal met, stretch goal sought. Dennis Webster, Bill Anderson, Gabriel Rearte and Laurie E. Smith bring you the Roaring Twenties like you’ve never seen them before

Essay on lettering in comic books

Dominoes, and I don’t mean the bad pizza

Music!

Jolene by Dolly Parton and PTX

Gilbert, Sullivan, Spinners

The surprising reason music for Marvel movies is so forgettable; the tyranny of the temp track

Memorable tracks that never got above #58 on the Billboard charts

Fred Armisen & Bill Hader’s Test Pattern Parody Talking Heads On Seth Meyers

Stanley Dural a/k/a Buckwheat Zydeco died at the age of 68. Here’s Beast of Burden.

Alan Vega, artist and punk musician – obituary (HT to Shooting Parrots)

K is for Kris Kristofferson

“He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction”

I happened to get an issue of Rolling Stone magazine this year, and there’s a story called Kris Kristofferson: An Outlaw at 80, about how “one of the greatest songwriters of all time (covered by Johnny Cash… Elvis Presley and some 500 others)” was experiencing an “increasingly debilitating memory loss.” It turns out it wasn’t Alzheimer’s or dementia, but Lyme disease.

His first album, released as Kristofferson in 1970, was rereleased, with a nicer cover, a year later, as Me and Bobby McGee, named for the posthumous #1 song by Janis Joplin that he wrote. Some of the songs on that album include Help Me Make It Through the Night, For the Good Times, and Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, all hits for other people.

His second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, featured Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again), a minor hit for Roger Miller, and got to #26 on the pop charts for Kristofferson. It also contains my favorite Kris Kristofferson lyrics, from The Pilgrim, Chapter 33:

He’s a poet, an’ he’s a picker, he’s a prophet, an’ he’s a pusher
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction
Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home

His biggest single recording was Why Me, which got to #16 in 1973, from his fourth album, Jesus Was a Capricorn. He also recorded with his second wife Rita Coolidge.

Kris Kristofferson is also an actor, appearing in several films, before becoming a Movie Star in A Star is Born, with Barbra Streisand.

Now that he has most of his memory back, he’s listening to the old songs again, “to get reacquainted with his life’s work. ‘It just takes you back like a picture of something would,’ he says. ‘I was also interested in seeing if they still sounded good to me,’ he continues. ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised, particularly with this one.’ He points to his third album, Border Lord. ‘I can remember at the time being so disappointed at the reception it got.’

“His wife [since 1983, Lisa] sits to his left and looks at him, beaming at his recall. ‘To me, the song is what matters, not necessarily the performances,’ he says as he moves a napkin to examine a picture of him in his twenties, looking disheveled in his meager Nashville bedroom. ‘Just the words and melody – that’s what moves your emotions.'”

“‘I may have some more creative work in me,’ he finally admits, then concludes on a characteristically impassive note. “But if I don’t, it’s not going to hurt me.'”

LISTEN TO:

“Blame It on the Stones”
“To Beat the Devil”
“Me and Bobby McGee”
“Best of All Possible Worlds”
“Help Me Make It Through the Night” which gets ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ right and wrong in the same song
“The Law Is for Protection of the People”
“For the Good Times”
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”
“The Silver Tongued Devil and I”
“Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”
“The Pilgrim, Chapter 33”
“Nobody Wins”
“Why Me”

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

Music Throwback Saturday: Soulful Strut

Dusty Springfield recorded a cover version of Am I The Same Girl.

A variation on this happens a LOT to me.

One librarian starts humming this tune to me; he thinks it was performed by a singer, such as Lisa Stansfield. I recognize it instantly as a long-ago instrumental, but cannot place it.

Another librarian sends me a clip of the music, as background to a vulgar Howard Stern rant. Yup, it’s THAT song.

I am notoriously bad at remembering the titles of pop-music instrumentals. Obviously, there are no lyrics to hook onto – but if there is a single word, such as Tequila by the Champs – THAT I can remember.

Finally, I send the Stern clip to Times Union blogger, and trivia buff Chuck Miller, and he identifies it as Soulful Strut by Young-Holt Unlimited. That track got to #3 on both the pop chart and the soul chart in early 1969.

It was also the frame for a song called Am I The Same Girl, originally done by Barbara Acklin, whose original version got to #79 in 1969. In fact, Soulful Strut was the instrumental backing track to the Acklin song. Dusty Springfield recorded a cover version of Am I The Same Girl that same year.

The song gained new life in 1992 when Swing Out Sister covered Am I The Same Girl. It only reached #45 on the pop charts, and it got some airplay in my neck of the woods. But I don’t think I had heard it, probably listening to Nirvana or something.

This story should further explain the brain of the librarian, and the ~~desire~~NEED to know.

Listen to

Am I the Same Girl – Barbara Acklin HERE or HERE

Soulful Strut – Young-Holt Unlimited HERE or HERE

Am I The Same Girl- Dusty Springfield HERE or HERE

Am I The Same Girl- Swing Out Sister HERE or HERE

Freddie Mercury would have been 70

Various artists have sung with Queen since his death, but Freddie Mercury has never been replaced.

It’s almost certainly true that the band Queen, and its lead singer/ keyboardist/songwriter Freddie Mercury, are bigger now than they were at the time of Mercury’s death on the evening of 24 November 1991.

“In the UK, Queen has now spent more collective weeks on the UK Album Charts than any other musical act (including The Beatles), and Queen’s Greatest Hits is the highest-selling album of all time in the UK. Two of Mercury’s songs, We Are the Champions and Bohemian Rhapsody, have also each been voted as the greatest song of all time in major polls by Sony Ericsson and Guinness World Records, respectively.

There have been several stories about Donald Trump’s repeated unauthorized use of We Are The Champions. The outrage, not just from Queen’s guitarist Brian May, but from Queen’s fans, points out that Mercury was a bisexual man who died from AIDS, and that the Trump/Pence platform isn’t exactly gay-friendly.

Others note that Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, was also an immigrant, “a brown-skinned man born in Zanzibar who went to school in India, and whose family immigrated to England because of unrest in their country in 1964. He was brought up in the Zoroastrian faith. Freddie Mercury, in short, embodies just about everything Trump’s fakakta wall wants to keep out of our country.”

My own sense of Mercury’s impact has grown since his passing as well. He died the same year that a friend of mine also died of an AIDS-related illness. Reading Freddie and Me further enhanced my appreciation for the artist.

Freddie’s death triggered the remaining members of Queen to create The Mercury Phoenix Trust, funded in the beginning by the massively successful Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness.

Various artists have sung with Queen since Mercury’s death, including Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert, but Freddie Mercury has never been replaced.

Some Queen songs

– links to all

12. We Will Rock You (segued with We Are the Champions, 1978) – Anthemic. Hearing this too often at minor league baseball parks SHOULD have ruined this song for me forever, but it did not

11. Play the Game (#42 in 1980) – Spacey beginning, great guitar solo by Brian May

10. Keep Yourself Alive (1973) – Written by guitarist Brian May, it was one of the songs on their original demo for its record label. More fine guitar work.

9. You’re My Best Friend (#16 in 1976) – The Daughter was recently watching some show which was using his song in an ad. I realized its timeless quality.

8. We Are the Champions -oft-covered, usually off-key, by winning sports teams. “In 2011, a team of scientific researchers concluded that the song was the catchiest in the history of popular music.” Who am I to argue with science?

7. Somebody to Love (#13 in 1977) – I did not know that they “multi-tracked their voices to create a 100-voice gospel choir”, but surely love the effect

6. Bicycle Race (#24 in 1979) – it starts with a cappella chorus (unaccompanied by instruments). And it’s about bicycles, with a video of naked women riding that got banned in several countries.

5. Killer Queen (#12 in 1975) – their first American hit, I loved the tight harmony vocals and its theatrical style

4. Crazy Little Thing Called Love (#1 for four weeks in 1980) – a rockabilly hit that sounds like Elvis. “Mercury played rhythm guitar while performing the song live, which was the first time he played guitar in concert with Queen.”

3. Another One Bites the Dust (#1 for three weeks in 1980) – this lives on the bass line. It also was #2 in the rhythm & blues charts for three weeks. Also, check out Another One Drives a Duster.

2. Bohemian Rhapsody (#9 in 1976, #2 in #1992) – In the UK, it was #1 for NINE weeks in its original release, and five more weeks a decade and a half later. Its inclusion in the movie Wayne’s World in 1992 brought it new life. It is often covered. Here’s the Muppets and a whole bunch Mark Evanier linked to. Plus Kids react to Bohemian Rhapsody.

1. Under Pressure, with David Bowie (#29 in 1982) – this was #1 in the UK, and I thought it would have fared better in the US. In any case, my affection for Bowie, even before his sudden death, propelled this to be my favorite Queen song. And they were right to sue Vanilla Ice for copyright infringement.