This is my personal taste and not a criticism of anybodies music, or taste. I set this up so that all the new bands I have found I can easily know what I think of them
William James "Willie" Dixon (July 1, 1915 January 29, 1992) was a well-known American blues bassist, singer, songwriter, arranger and record producer.
Divendres al vespre. La gent comença el cap de setmana i sembla embogir.
A la Jazz Cava fan blues aquesta nit, però em fa mandra baixar-hi i m'ajaço al sofà de casa. M'ajaço al sofà, prenc l'àlbum dels Estats Units i em torno a perdre per Chicago. Nits de Chicago, nits del blues ...
És allà, a la capçalera de llit, esperant-me. M'agrada acariciar-la a Coll Pregon, en una fageda del Montseny... El millor so el treu dins Sant Miquel dels Barretons. Ai! Si sabés de notes! Ai! Si sabés de notes... Si sabés de notes, potser tiraria menys de sentiments quan modulo la respiració per fer vibrar la meva nena!!
L'harmònica és una bèstia impressionant....
I en Charlie Musselwhite l'acaricia amb gust exquisit i em fa dansar... em fa ballar amb el lament harmònic de la seva ànima... animal... sentimental... primitiva... Un home i una filosofia... Una filosofia i una mirada... una mirada franca, la mirada d'en Charlie... el gran Charlie:
So, as many of you know by now I'm taking a History of Rock course for one of my electives. Its hard to believe a class covering the history of rock is worth 3 credits.
Anyway, I would like to think I know something about the history and progression of rock. Building upon the blues and R&B basis, throwing in the poor-white-boy-country to form rockabilly and then really taking off from there. Just by listening to things, even in chronological order, its hard to really imagine how influential an artist is on another or how important an artist is to a single genre without some extra, third-party knowledge being thrown in. Whether its a book (this is the book for our course), a course, or a combination of the two. Sure, its easy to hear just how good an artist was back in the day and with some exceptions (ie: Bo Diddley Beat) it takes more than simply listening to an artist to develop a sense of influence surrounding them.
In contrast whites droned out Protestant hymns like the braying of asses in one steady beat. - President John Adams
The book is good for some great quotes, such as the one above comparing African-American gospels to the whites' services.
Anyway, with the blues starting out in the poor South, there was a very minimal arrangement in the songs. Robert Johnson accompanined his vocals with only a guitar - using it at his will to develop his songs rather than using it for a firm structure or to keep time. With the migration of African-Americans from the South to the North during the world wars to escape the crippling economy and racism, the blues moved to Chicago. Muddy Waters went, as well.
Like a lot of the early blues and rock artists, Muddy refined his vocals in gospel services stating he was "a good Baptist, singing in church. So I got all of my good moaning and trembling going on for me right out of church." Big Bill Broonzy elaborates just a bit explaining "Blues - a steal from spirituals. And rock is a steal from blues… Blues singers started out singing spirituals." Before moving to Chicago, Muddy was recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax (he himself is mentioned quite a bit in the book in connection with his recording of early blues greats for the Library of Congress) in 1941 during Alan's search for Robert Johnson. In 1943 Muddy moves up to Chicago where he starts developing a new kind of blues, or as Willie Dixon said, "There was quite a few people around singin’ the blues, but most of ‘em was singin’ all sad blues. Muddy was giving his blues a little pep."
In the book, it describes Tampa Red's house in Chicago, which was basically the headquarters for a bunch of blues artists to hang out and play music together. Which contributes to another thing which I find really interesting in how everybody pretty much knew everybody else playing.
Howlin' Wolf played with Robert Johnson before he moved up to Chicago. While in Chicago he stayed with Muddy Waters before making a name for himself. When that started happening their friendship developed into more of a competition with Muddy becoming a little jealous with Howlin's rise to fame and taking some of Muddy's thunder from him.
Chess Records is one of those recording companies who practically defined an era or genre, much like Motown did. They signed Muddy and Howlin, along with master harp players Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, plus Bo Diddley. Chess' biggest competitor was California based label Modern Records, who signed Riley "Blues Boy" King. He too developed his vocals in church.
In the early 1950s with millions of white teenagers latching onto R&B, new icons starting to emerge as the blues greats got older. Little Richard and Chuck Berry being the first real rock n roll acts. Unfortunately, during this period there was a massive backlash against the new rock-n-roll genre primarily due to money and racism.
ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Publishers) were pissed because this new, popular rock-n-roll genre didn't need composers because the artists would sing their own songs. Of course this hit ASCAP in the wallet, where it hurt so they started mudslinging the genre. Frank Sinatra testified before Congress in 1958 that rock was "the most brutal, ugly desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear," and that rock-n-rollers were "cretinous goons” with “almost imbecilic repetitions and sly - lewd - in plain fact dirty - lyrics."
Racism ran rampant, as well, relating rock-n-roll to tribal celebrations of sexual grandeur, animal and equating those things with the African-Americans who made the music. This resulted in white fears of possible white and African-American sexual relationships. Nat King Cole was attacked on-stage during one of his concerts in 1956 while Bo Diddley had to deal with bomb threats via KKK at his shows in South Carolina.
Since the independent labels controlled the now popular genres of R&B and rock, the major labels signed white artists to "cover" songs of African-Americans in which they would clean up the lyrics. Pat Boone was the biggest offender ranking up 60 hits and providing us with the following two quotes: I had to change some of the words, because they seemed too raw for me. I wrote ‘Pretty little Susie is the girl for me’ instead of ‘Boys you don’t know what she do to me.’ I had to be selective and change some lyrics, but nobody seemed to care… I made it more vanilla. Explaining his impact on rock-roll: R&B is a distinctive kind of music; it doesn’t appeal to everybody… So if it hadn’t been for the vanilla versions of the R&B songs in the 1950s, you could certainly imagine that rock and roll as we think of it, would never have happened..
Thankfully rockabilly emerged in a manner similar to the emergence of the blues. Poor white southern teenagers mixed blues with country-western to create rockabilly. This sound was cataloged heavily by Sam Phillips of Sun Records, who recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and for a short-period Roy Orbison.
Elvis was the biggest success, proving early-on that image is just as important (perhaps moreso) as the actual music as he overshadowed his fellow rockabilly rockers. In 1955, Phillips sold Elvis to RCA Victor for $35,000 because he couldn't afford to keep Elvis - Phillips, as an indie owner, simply could not afford to keep up with the demand and rise of Elvis; as he puts it "I mean, I wasn’t broke but man, it was hand-to-mouth." TV played a major part in Elvis' rise as Steve Allen explains that "It was television that made Elvis’ success possible. What his millions of young fans responded to was obviously not his voice, but Elvis himself. His face, his body, his hair, his gyrations, his cute, country boy persona." Also fueling the rise of Elvis was the top 40 format which was developed in 1954 and in 1956 launched Elvis even higher. In the same year Colonel Parker (Elvis's famous manager) teamed up with advertising and marketing executive Hank Saperstein who "wanted to manufacture a phenomenon” and “began to plaster Elvis’ name and picture on all types of products.” By 1957 Elvis' name had saturated the market with 78 different Elvis products which grossed nearly $55 million by December 1957. An employee of Parker's had this to say about the way Parker marketed/sold Elvis: The Colonel doesn’t sell Elvis to the public, dig? He sells Elvis to the people who sell to the public, and those are the media people - the television and motion picture personalities, the executives and businessmen who control the networks, the important radio people…Elvis, as a product, always in the state of being sold.
Elvis himself received a great deal of backlash for his rockabilly antics and gyrating hips during his performances as the media and religious leaders attacked him for his sexual innuendos. Parker answered these attacks by scaling back Elvis' antics, which increased his sales and audience.
By the end of the 50s and early 60s rockabilly had come to an end with several major events occurring during this time:
Elvis went into the Army
Chuck Berry is jailed thanks to the Mann Act
1959 - Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens are killed in a plane crash
1960 - Eddie Cochran killed and Gene Vincent severely injured in a car crash in England
Little Richard went to God: That night Russia sent off the very first Sputnik earth satellite. It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It shook my mind. It really shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said “this is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God… If you want to live for the Lord, you can’t rock-and-roll too. God doesn’t like it.
There was a big void in the market and in stepped Dick Clark. Dick Clark studied radio and advertising in school and upon replacing the host of Bandstand quickly realized the show's potential, stating "The more I heard the music, the more I enjoyed it; the more I enjoyed it, the more I understood the kids. I knew that if I could tune into them and keep myself on the show, I could make a great deal of money." Dick turned the show into a national phenomenon in 1957, enforcing rules of conduct of the show to make it more acceptable to parents as he was clean-cut, poised, well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-groomed - a clear contrast to the rebel teens in films. He used the show as a platform to launch the creations of teen pop idols he groomed such as Fabian and Frankie Avalone.
The payola scandal (pay-per-play) revealed Dick Clark's empire and control over the music business and process, having ownership in distributors, labels, and recording studios, not to mention being able to promote his own creations on his own show. While others lives were ruined (ie: Alan Freed) due to the scandal, Clark's image pushed him through unscathed as Chairmen Oren Harris told him "You’re not the inventor of the system…you’re a product of it. Obviously, you’re a fine young man."
After the payola scandal which was also fueled by ASCAP, Don Kirshner masterminded the takeover of rock by the songwriters and opened an office right across the street from the Brill Building (Tin Pan Alley). He hired songwriters such as Carole Klein and Neil Sedaka to write songs in the tradition of Doo-Wop groups (which originated in New York where poor Black singers would harmonize with their vocals to provide accompaniment since they were too poor to buy instruments) for African-American female vocal groups. Carole Klein wrote their first hit titled Will You Love Me Tomorrow which was performed by The Shirelles. The Ronnettes and The Crystals were female girl groups on Phil Spector's Philles Records. Phil Spector basically created that patented girl group sound single handedly with his Wall of Sound production technique where he would pile up instrument upon instrument to create an upbeat, epic and ethereal girl-group sound. As a result of the girl-group success, Tin Pan Alley was transformed into Teen Pan Alley as the Saturday Evening Post noticed "Broadway’s Brill Building, once the home of jelly-jowled, gray headed music publishers, is now being refurbished with youthful executives who have grown up to no other kind of music than the beat of today… One of the typical and prime- figures in youth’s takeover of the pop-record business is a onetime unsuccessful songwriter named Don Kirshner."
Like the mass migration of African-Americans from the South to Chicago, California was the home of another migration in the early 60s with the promise of bikini clad blond bombshells, higher salaries, plentiful jobs, beaches, swimming pools, and Disneyland. Along the beaches a surf culture started to emerge and among the partakers was Dick Dale who worked closely with Leo Fender to capture the " tremendous amount of power I felt while surfing and that feeling of power was simply transferred into my guitar when I was playing surf music… I was trying to project the power of the ocean to the people. I couldn’t get the feeling by singing, so the music took an instrumental form. and in 1962 released Misirlou. Helping to establish surf music as a national craze were three brothers, a cousin and a friend who recorded Surfin' as The Pendletones, but changed their names to The Beach Boys. In 1963 they released Surfer Girls which went to #3 on the National charts which was followed by many more hits.
Also released in 1963 was Jan & Dean's Surf City which Brian Wilson had started but gave the song to Jan & Dean to finish (Wilson provides backup vocals on the song). The bands also captured another culture of California which was the car culture, featuring lyrics about dragsters which The Beach Boys received helped on from Roger Christian, who also worked with Jan & Dean. Jan & Dean released Dead Man's Curve which proved to prophetic when Jan Barry was almost killed and brain damaged when crashed his Stingray in LA.
Of course this isn't the whole story, but its the general idea of the first couple chapters of the book. The class has, if nothing else, helped me appreciate some artists a lot more (most notably Brian Wilson). There are some random tidbits which I feel I have to include, as well:
That's All Right by Elvis featured two guitars and an upright bass - no drums. The tick sound which sounds like drums being hit is actually the bass-strings snapping back and hitting the neck of the bass.
Brian Wilson's competition with Capitol label-mates The Beatles has been a part of rock lure since their back and forth tug-of-war in the 60s. Good Vibrations was Wilson's answer to Yesterday by the Beatles. The song itself is composed of three separate parts, edited together to create a type of musical collage. Pete Townsend feared the song would lead over-produced records as a result of its success. Brian Wilson and the song would in turn, according to Paul McCartney, influence them to create similar musical collaged songs such as Day in the Life and Strawberry Fields Forever.
1987 - The Jesus and Mary Chain were banned from appearing on a US music TV show after complaints of blasphemy when the groups name was flashed across the screen. The CBS show asked the band to be called JANC but the group didn't agree.
My heroes owe everything to black people. By that connection, I owe a lot of credit and thanks to the black community. It's as simple as that. Without black people, The Rolling Stones and The Who wouldn't exist. Without them, bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC wouldn't exist. And if there's no Zeppelin, there's no heavy metal. Do you see my point here? If you don't, let me explain it a little more in-depth. Here's a history lesson for you:
Everything has a starting place. The origin of rock and roll, believe it or not, starts with the slave trade of the 1800s. When the Africans were brought to the Americas(albeit against their will), they brought with them their tribal music. This music was sustained all through the period of slavery, helping to keep the African community alive and connected. They started to sing gospel music in the church, producing a feeling of togetherness in the presence of music.
In the 1930s, a Southern black man named Robert Johnson became the first man to "sell his soul to the devil" and starting picking on his guitar. He then crafted what eventually became the blues. His new style of music became known as the Delta blues and began spreading over Southern America, spawning artists like Sonny Boy Williamson and others like him. Eventually, the blues found its way up the Mississippi to Chicago. It was here in the 50s that guys like Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters began playing the earliest incarnations of rock and roll music.
Once gospel singers like Ruth Brown started singing with blues bands, rock and roll became an even stronger force in the music scene. B.B. King brought "blues-based rock and roll" to the people with his brothers from Chicago. As the 50s progressed, the black community was stirring up something wicked.
Little Richard and Chuck Berry then hit the scene, bringing a new element of showmanship to rock and roll. They were the first real performers, putting on the first rock and roll shows. Little Richard had his loud voice and flamboyant facial expressions, while Chuck Berry had "The Duckwalk" (which would later be imitated into infamy by Angus Young). They were full of sensationalism and, because of that, garnered the interest of white people.
It's here that "the King" comes along. A young white man named Elvis Presley takes his black musical influences and launches rock and roll to the highest stage. I hate to say it, but I believe Elvis Presley is hailed as "the King" of rock and roll because he was the first white man to take it to such a large level. But Elvis, in my mind, owes more than a simple "thank you" to people like Fats Domino; he owes a large majority of his success. I'm not ragging on Elvis, I'm merely stating that Elvis did not invent rock and roll. I like Elvis (he's pretty high up in my charts) and I give him credit for bringing rock and roll to the masses, but he did not create it, and he is not "the King". He is merely the white poster boy for the black man's music. There is no real King of rock and roll. There just isn't.
But anyway... after Elvis, artists like Bill Haley and the Comets came along and projected rock and roll even further. Rock and roll was now in full swing, and what had started as simple gospel music in the black church had now become a full sensation in the white man's world. With so much focus on American R&B music, our neighbors overseas began to take notice.
This is where bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who come in. All the guys in those bands got their start playing in blues clubs in England. Their passion eventually developed into British rock and roll. The Beatles took a more poppier route, while the Stones and the Who stayed more blues-based. This trinity of British bands is what started the British Invasion of the late-50s/early-60s.
The late 60s saw the black community's music taken even further with the introduction of psychadelia and the hippie age. Cream and Jimi Hendrix were at the front of this movement, and they'll tell you themselves that their influences were primarily black musicians from the 50s and earlier.
From there, you get the story all of the classic rockers know: Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath came along and made the two basic templates for rock bands. Hard rock and heavy metal took over throughout the 70s and 80s and manifested many of the bands I listen to today. AC/DC, Van Halen, Motley Crue, Guns N' Roses, Queen... they're all in there. And they all owe it to black people.
So you see, I (along with many others) owe a lot to those early black musicians who were brave enough to make their own kind of music in a white man's world. Without them, even bands like Pantera wouldn't exist. There is a lot more in common between the old blues and the new metal than you might notice.
You know that euphoric feeling you get when you listen to your favorite rock band? That emotional high you get from hearing a wailing guitar or an earthquake drumbeat? That's the same emotional high black people got (and still get) from singing the gospel in church. Swaying lighters at a rock concert aren't so different from swaying arms in a black chruch. The band on stage at a rock concert mimics that of the black preachers on stage in those gospel churches.
We're all brothers and we're all together, whether we know it or not.
The reason for the many Tom Waits tracks and the more 'quiet' set was a religious 'holiday' ("Buß- und Bettag" / "Penance Day" which actually isn't a real holiday, but anyway...) and german (especially bavarian) law concerning these kind of 'holidays'. And that meant: Pray, purge and drink until midnight.
next date: December 12th 2007
BANANE, Goldene-Bären-Strasse 10, 93047 Regensburg, Germany - official website
DJ-Sets on one wednesday per month between 9:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. Styles: 80s, Wave, Punk, Oldies - NO Industrial.
Sonny Boy Williamson
