STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-028)

Danny Adler, Dieuf-Dieul de Thies, Max Roach, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Mainliner, Bitchin Bajas, Hole, Ramsey Lewis Trio

WHAT’S UP WITH DANNY ADLER ANYWAY DEPT.: I first heard of the guy in an unlikely place, not on the internet, not on the radio, but as part of side B of this weird punk record from 2022, Queen Mary Mill by Meercaz, where side A is a few normal songs but on the B he’s just doing some sort of needle-drop pause-tape DJ set under the name Meercaz Worldwide. After a few B movie samples the first groove kicks in and it’s this gnarly grinder with “oohs” and “aahs” and an occasional refrain “ride your pony ‘til you make it sore” and it puts me in a trance every time with its super funky layered groove, low-end barrelhouse piano, muted guitarpeggiation, and monstrously heavy rhythm section (the drummer, whoever they may be, is heavy in the pocket). Even in this looped/cut-up/tape-edited form the Shazam app was able to tell me it was a song called “Everybody Dance” by someone named Danny Adler, and sure as shit, there the song was on that shifty Shitify platform, as part of a whole album called The Danny Adler Legacy Series Vol. 13 — Session Man which is decidedly not on Discogs (“Everybody Dance” isn’t either). Volume 13, huh? And not on Discogs? What’s up with Danny Adler anyway? Well, it seems that he was a session guitarist/vocalist/writer/jammer in the mid-late 1960s, originally from Cincinnati, who ended up in the NYC band Elephant’s Memory for about a year in 1969, before said band met John & Yoko and became ‘famous’, but possibly during their first brush with ‘fame’, when their haunting song “Old Man Willow” was used in Midnight Cowboy (1969, d. John Schlesinger) to represent the de rigueur psych band in the de rigueur groovy party scene (and I should say that as de rigueur groovy party scenes go, this was l'un des meilleurs, comprendre?) After that Adler relocated to England and had an almost-career with a band called Roogalator when John Peel played his song “Roogalator Blues” for a while. Haven’t dug too much deeper but what I’ve heard is intriguing and “Everybody Dance” rules.

SCORCHING AFRICAN HIGH LIFE LEAD GUITARIST ALERT DEPT.: The Senegalese band Dieuf-Dieul de Thies, who recorded in the early 1980s and had a name which is very hard to remember, had a “chef d’orchestre & guitar player” named Pepe Seck, and not only is he apparently the band’s chief orchestrator, his lead guitar playing is super good. The liner notes on a 2013 archival release parenthetically note that he’s “(an ex-member of Guelewar),” how about that. Right now I’m rechecking the 10-minute track “Demba Saly Madior” and digging its scorching but subtle creamified guitar solo that sneaks in at the 3:10 mark and winds in and out of the groove for a minute or so, stepping hard on the distortion at 3:44 but still refracting it through gentle fx-pedal filters. And wow, here’s Dieuf-Dieul de Thies playing the same song live in 2017. I’d bet that’s Pepe Seck in the white robe, still killing it.

REASON TO HATE ON SPOTIFY #4,080 DEPT.: They refer to Max Roach’s 1968 album Members, Don’t Git Weary as Members Don’t Get Weary. No comma and blatantly mispelling the colloquial word “git.” Reminds me of Trump just saying complete bullshit on purpose because his doing so is actually effective at asserting power, technofascist billionaires verbally and syntactically grinding their boots onto the heads of the oppressed and subjugated by saying stupid bullshit on purpose that discounts, demeans, and degrades entire populations, leaving us scrambling to correct his phrasing while the plunder and attacking continue. You’d be surprised what effect something as apparently small as changing “git” to “get” can actually have. It’s called a microaggression for a reason, because it’s fucking aggressive. Fucking fuck Trump, and good thing Spotify isn’t a film streaming service, or they’d probably ‘fix’ Existenz (1999, d. David Cronenberg) by calling it Existence.

JIMI HENDRIX STUDIES DEPT.: Don’t forget that the complete recordings of Jimi’s historic four-set two-night stand at the Fillmore East with the short-lived trio with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles known as the Band of Gypsys, from which their legendary self-titled 1970 LP was drawn from, were released in full on a 5CD (or 8LP if you’re totally nuts) box set in 2019, for some reason given the obfuscatory title Songs for Groovy Children. (I would’ve been more perfunctory. Like, Band of Gypsys at the Fillmore East: The Complete New Year’s Concerts, December 31st, 1969-January 1st, 1970 perfunctory.) Dug deep into this one after reading John McDermott’s glowing description of the first night’s sets in his book Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight. This is a very detailed biography, and recommended for that reason, but McDermott’s prose has the typically British emphasis on business matters as well as a tendency for very closely withheld praise, which made his rapture over that first Band of Gypsys set on December 31st, 1969 all the more notable. It does seems like a magical night, already one of the more festive nights of the year, the band on fire, the first set ending in 1969 and the second beginning in 1970 with a boldly/casually/groovily Hendrixian arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne,” not to mention Jimi changing the opening lyrics of the next song “Who Knows” from “they don’t know/like I know” to “happy new year/goodbye ‘69.” The next day was New Year’s Day, and as that holiday is quite reserved and sleepy compared to the electricity of the night before, it’s not surprising that the band was also more reserved. Still, all of the material chosen for the original 1970 LP was from those reserved New Year’s Day sets, and McDermott seems quite (Britishly) flabbergasted that they would have made such a poor decision. Of course “Machine Gun” from January 1st, the one on the LP, was the right choice as it has become a Hendrix classic that some call the greatest single electric guitar performance of all time. I think all of the New Year’s Day performances are great. I like the more laid back funky side, Miles and Cox being two all-time great pocket players allowing Hendrix to dig deep at his own steady pace.

DISCOGRAPHICAL MYSTERY DEPT.: You might know Erick Sermon’s 2001 hit song “Music” and its sublime Marvin Gaye sample, that all-time sweet voice singing the phrase “just like music,” bobbing and weaving throughout and serving as the chorus . . . but exactly what original Marvin Gaye song did this sample come from? Well, there is a great funky/electro song by Marvin Gaye called “Just Like Music (Music Feel the Soul),” embedded above, and it’s clearly the source of the Sermon sample . . . but was it ever officially released? Is it a Midnight Love outtake? Or something he did in the seventeen months between the release of Midnight Love and his untimely death in April of 1984? To be honest, I can’t really find it on Discogs. Can you? Or is this YouTube all we’ve got?

MAINLINER: This is the picture on Discogs. L-R: Asahito Nanjo on bass, I assume Koji Shimura on drums, and Makoto Kawabata on guitar.

NOISE ROCK DEPT.: Speaking of noise rock (I wasn’t, but Blastitude was essentially founded as an actual noise rock fanzine in the year 2000, so in a way I always am), I re-revisited Mainliner for the first time since the oughts, and yes, the actual playing itself by this band is incredible, a full-on heavy-rock destructo-throwback move firing on all cylinders; unfortunately, the records all sound like shit. Every single one of them. High Rise records too; literally any record that has Asahito Nanjo on it. Just had to say it. I don’t enjoy listening to a single one. Maybe some rock sounds are just too big to capture. It’s the reason Blue Cheer recorded some of their second album outdoors, and also seemed to be the case with one of my favorite 1990s live bands, the Cows.

CALENDAR COINCIDENCE DEPT.: I kid you not, here I am listening through the Bitchin Bajas’ massive 2018 7CD box set Rebajas, and right now this crazy spinning reeds/synth jam is pealing steadily outwards, and I look it up in the handy booklet, and it’s called “Consciousness 1” (released in 2011 as a split 12” with Faceplant on Bathetic Records), and the liner notes say it was recorded while “trapped inside during a blizzard in Chicago, February 1-3, 2011,” and I’m reading this in Chicago on February 1st, 2025, exactly fourteen years later to the day. Neat! Also glad that the weather is decent today. I’m not trapped, and there is no blizzard outside.

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CALENDAR COINCIDENCE PT. 2 DEPT.: Whoah, here’s another crazy calendrical coinkydink, just thirteen days after the Great Bajas Incident. It’s Valentine’s Day 2025 and I’m alone. Kids are off at college, Angelina’s in Omaha for the weekend to be with her mom, and in my solitude I find myself yet again aimlessly scrolling through Instagram reels, and suddenly I’m watching Hole in the studio in the year 1993. It’s the Live Through This sessions and they’re listening to a playback of the superlative “Asking For It,” Courtney Love in deep listening mode working on the mix with producer Sean Slade. Sitting and also listening just behind them are the bassist Kristen Pfaff, alive and luminous, and the drummer Patty Schemel, humble before their own immaculate rhythm section work and the way it frames Eric Erlandson’s epic guitar arrangement, and the way Pfaff’s spare background harmonies so perfectly chime in with Courtney’s always-raw vocals and withering chorus: “Was she asking for it?/Was she asking nice?” And I’m like DAMN, what a great song, and I end up digging around for more Hole greatness online and listen to a “live acoustic” version of “Asking For It” that is very good too . . . and at the end Courtney starts introducing their next song, and she says “this is a song Kurt wrote . . . we can’t do it very well, but we’ll try it because it’s Valentine’s Day and maybe he can hear it,” wait what? Turns out this is from Hole’s appearance on MTV Unplugged, air date April 17th, 1995, taped live on February 14th, 1995, exactly 30 years ago tonight.

RAMSEY LEWIS TRIO PLAYING “SUMMER BREEZE” LIVE ON MUSIKLADEN DEPT.: Damn, who is that bass player beasting? Well, his name is Cleveland Eaton, and he’s another Chicago guy I didn’t even know about already, although he’s really a Birmingham, Alabama guy who didn’t actually move to Chicago until he was 21 years old, in 1960. By 1964, he was the bassist in the Ramsey Lewis Trio as you can in the 1973 Musikladen performance embedded above. That lasted until 1974, and in 1975 he recorded a funky LP of some underground renown called Plenty Good Eaton. In 1979 he got a call from the Count Basie Orchestra and ended up playing with them for 17 years, well past Basie’s death in 1984, and didn’t pass away himself until 2020 at the ripe old age of 80, back home in Alabama. And man, he was tearing up some Seals & Croft on that day 52 years ago in Germany.

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Thank you for reading this latest edition of Stuffs & Things & Things & Stuff here at the Biweekly Blastitude BlastiStack Blastletter. Tune in every month or so for more stuffs, and more things.