STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-024)
Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Assocation, Sandy Bull & His Rhythm Ace, Greg Tate's Women in Love, Tommy Carroll's Wrong Trio, Sly Stone, Shalloboi, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
Over a year ago I made an Instagram post that thanked the 50 Miles of Elbow Room record distro for having promptly fulfilled a bounteous order of mine. One item from that order, not mentioned in the post, was a copy of Issue No. 5 of Tributaries, the Journal of the Alabama Folklife Assocation. I listened to the records immediately, but only glanced at the journal before it got buried somewhere deep within one of the five or six main tsundoku piles we keep watered and fed here at Blastitude HQ. Nonetheless, media junkies like you and I know that every media object, however designed for topicality and immediacy, also has a long maturation period where it takes on new meaning as life and time evolve around it. I am also now more personally ready to read this issue of Tributaries, as I have since driven through the actual state of Alabama, its entire length from north to south, and back again from south to north, not once but twice (in the process of moving my daughter from Chicago to Tallahassee so she can attend Florida State University), through Montgomery (where the Alabama Folklife Association is headquartered) and Birmingham and all of the state’s beautiful hills and forests of fir. I’ve even stopped in Montgomery on one of those drives for some dinner (thanks again, Waffle House) and to visit the street-corner where Rosa Parks got on the bus and wouldn’t move to the back in 1955, and saw, just up the hill, the state capitol building where the Alabama Constitution of 1861 was drawn up, including its ordinances of secession. So again, this particular media object has taken on new meaning and association for me, and sure enough, in the very first sentence of the first article (“The Life and Death of Pioneer Bluesman Butler ‘String Beans’ May” by Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbott) American music history is coming alive all over again: “Small black vaudeville theaters, which proliferated at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, provided the principal platform for the concrete formulation of popular blues, and for the subsequent emergence of blues from its rural Southern birthplace.” The subject of the article Butler “String Beans” May was born and raised in Montgomery in 1894, and by 1910 he “was the greatest attraction in African-American vaudeville, the first recognizable blues star.” The article describes how May started by playing piano in a flatbed truck that would park in various Montgomery neighborhoods, attracting residents to come outside and listen, and then went on to the aforementioned regional black vaudeville stardom as a singer, musician, and comedian. Jelly Roll Morton himself, in a 1938 interview with Alan Lomax, called String Beans “the greatest comedian I ever knew,” remembering songs of his like “I Got Elgin Movements in My Hips, with a Twenty Year Guarantee” (say what), and that “he was the first guy I ever saw with a diamond in his mouth, and I guess I got the idea for my diamond from him.” Sounds a bit like hip hop to me, circa 1910. You can go to the Alabama Folklife Association’s webpage and straight-up download a PDF of the whole issue, and for that matter a PDF of every other issue of Tributaries too, seventeen in all.
Turns out the Live 1976 by Sandy Bull & the Rhythm Ace LP on Drag City/Galactic Zoo Disk, an archival release from back in 2012, is currently going for $199.98 on Discogs (today’s date being 9/28/2024; you can still get it digitally for normal prices). One listen and you can see why, as it’s both casual and powerful, a welcoming portal into Bull’s rarefied sonic universe, which turns out to be a place as friendly as it is heady. First of all, I’m a sucker for any 1970s recorded appearance of the Rhythm Ace drum machine or similar device, whether it’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, J.J. Cale, Shuggie Otis, “Why Can’t We Live Together” by Timmy Thomas, or “Peking O” by Can, and as it says on the cover, Bull uses the Rhythm Ace as his “backing band” on this LP. In fact, one track is called “Rhythm Ace Demo,” which is Bull casually playing his Berkeley Community Center audience different RA presets and chatting about them. This goes on for over 3 minutes and is so charming as to be practically worth the (original) cover price on its own, but you also get a classic deep and haunting Bull solo improvisation like “Oud,” and the sweet and simple vocal ballad “Love is Forever” (“love is forever/and ever and ever . . . . love if you let it be/and love if you set if free/is forever”), not to mention a few other extended swampy cuts, mostly (all?) instrumental and essentially perfect. (Although slight heads up that his “Alligator Wrestler Intro” might be a little T.M.I. It is funny, though!)
Now re-reading Common Tones, Alan Licht’s book of “selected interviews with artists and musicians 1995-2020,” and it’s even better than it was the first time. A real treat to get to read the whole thing again, like when you’ve got Michael Snow talking about smoking dope while listening to water dripping (not to mention buying hash from LaMonte Young), an interview with Tony Conrad specifically about Angus MacLise (who is the initial inspiration for this very internet magazine called Blastitude), what’s gotta be the definitive Sea and Cake interview on how their gentlesweet sadsound comes together, an uncharacteristically not-pissy (and in fact quite stoked) Lou Reed, and the proverbial much much more, such as interviews with Tom Verlaine, Adris Hoyos, one of our great living filmmakers Kelly Reichardt, and the interview I’m currently learning or relearning the most from, Greg Tate talking about his 1990s band Women in Love (for which he played guitar and wrote all the songs) and their sole (?) album The Sound of Falling Bodies at Rest, apparently released (CD only?) by the Madrina label in 1994. In the interview Tate says “I’m as proud of that Women in Love album, The Sound of Falling Bodies at Rest, as I am of [his landmark 1992 essay collection] Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” That original paperback is now going for over $100 on Amazon’s secondhand market; as for The Sound of Falling Bodies at Rest, it might be the first alleged release I’ve seen that truly and fully stumps the internet. Not only is it not on Spotify, it’s not even on Discogs, and there’s no copies on Amazon or Ebay either. To be honest, it’s not even really on Google. In fact, when I type “women in love sound of falling bodies at rest madrina 1994” into Google, which should do it, I only get one accurate result . . . and would you believe it’s a PDF of this same Licht/Tate interview from Common Tones? Nonetheless, if one is intrepid in their searching and researching, they may just find themselves on YouTube, coming across this vaguely-labeled 10-minute upload of two tracks that I believe are from The Sound of Falling Bodies at Rest. To make it even more vague, I don’t believe the YouTube is illustrated with the album cover, but with a static photo of Women in Love vocalist Helga Davis, who sings Tate’s lyrics on these two rather wild songs, the first an expansive progressive piece of late-night jazz balladry, the second a screaming hard rock throwdown that makes Betty Davis sound like Betty Wright. POSTSCRIPT: Check out another Alan Licht interview with Greg Tate, this one not in Common Tones, the “Invisible Jukebox” column that appeared in the January 2004 issue (#240) of The Wire magazine, where the Arthur Jafa photo portrait of Greg Tate reproduced above was originally published.
THE WRONG TRIO, LIVE AT MY FAVORITE PLACE IN THE WORLD: There I was, wandering around my neighborhood during a beautiful June afternoon, and ended up visiting the 2024 Artists on the Wall festival at my favorite place in the world, outdoors at Loyola Park, Chicago, Illinois. (Okay okay, it’s my second favorite place in the world, after my record crib/office a couple blocks away, where I sit right now typing away languorously.) Artists on the Wall is an annual festival, and every year a few bands play live on a makeshift stage at Tobey Prinz Beach Park while artists paint individual mini-murals along a 600-foot sea wall that the stage is perpendicular to. As I approached down my beloved Loyola Park walking trail, right past the tennis courts, there was a band playing some tight and punchy experimental jazz, a particularly interesting-looking-and-sounding trio consisting of a professorial gentleman saxophonist with a goatee, glasses, and sharp suit on, a double bassist in robe and burka, and an excellent tight and muscular drummer, his head mostly down in concentration. The music was very good, but I couldn’t quite catch the saxophonist’s introduction of the group, and had to dig a little bit on one awkwardly designed Chicago Park District website or another to find the band credited only as “Tommy Carroll.” Finally I was only one more google search away from learning that Tommy Carroll is the drummer and leader of the band, blind since the age of 2 when both of his eyes had to be removed due to cancer of the retinas. This didn’t stop him from becoming a highly skilled drummer and composer of experimental rock and jazz fusion music in the greater Chicagoland area. It didn’t even stop him from becoming a goddamn actual skateboarder, which got the attention of Tony Hawk himself back in 2012 when Carroll was 15 years old, and frankly gave Carroll too much attention, as he expresses in the essay “Towards Radical Empathy” as published in Urban Pamphleteer #8: Skateboardings. But this here Blastitude newsmagazine you’re reading isn’t really about skateboarding, it’s about . . . (drum roll please) . . . the music, and you can check Carroll’s music out at tcdrums.com; right now I’m listening to him shred with a fusion jazz keyboard/synth trio called Prosthetic, just dipping in and damn, the two closing tracks on their self-titled debut digital album, “Prosthetic II” and “Earth-Space Balance,” are pretty goddamn good, Carroll on drums with Julius Tucker on Fender Rhodes/miniMoog and Aidan Epstein on bass. That said, the Tommy Carroll trio I saw perform live this summer at my (second) favorite place in the world was not Prosthetic, and has yet to be mentioned on the tcdrums.com website, but after looking kinda harder than usual I’ve finally figured out they’re billing themselves as The Wrong Trio, which is Beau Barry on saxophone, Lyn Rye on bass, and of course Carroll on drums. They don’t seem to have anything recorded just yet, and I’ve already missed the gig referenced in the digital flyer above, but there’ll be a next time.
Longtime reader D writes in with some Sly Stone thoughts and tips in reaction to my recent review of the Stone Flower comp LP: “I think Stanga is just a funky way to say stinger. I interpret as a cold shot - a bracing dose of reality, which IMO is in keeping with the lyrics.” “To be honest I’ve avoided [Sly’s memoir]. I don’t trust the narrator. Joel Selvin’s oral history of Sly/Family Stone to me is definitive.” “There’s also a pretty amazing, very long series of short interviews with Sly’s inner circle called Small Talk About Sly. These young European guys were trying to do a documentary and they talk to lots of key people. On YouTube.” “There is another compilation of Sly demos that Rhino put out called Listen to the Voices. There’s some overlap with Sly’s Stone Flower but there’s also amazing shit that is not on Stone Flower.” “There is some total genius on those 70s PCP albums. ‘Crossword Puzzle’ from the High on You album is so fucking incredible.” “His lead guitar and bass playing is distinctive. I think that’s him doing all the cool guitar shit on ‘Family Affair.’ He never used a pick, and used a Tele with wah-wah all the time. And he was a better funk bass player than Larry Graham, I swear.” “One last thing from me on this subject today - ‘Sylvester’ is an incredibly poignant song, buried deep on one of his last records, that nobody bought - it’s like a beautiful epigraph to an epic tragedy. Hell, THAT is his autobiography!” Right on D, thanks for the “small talk” about Sly.
Ten or maybe even fifteen years ago I was listening to WNUR 89.3FM Evanston in my car and heard two dreamy shoegazy Chicago-recorded tracks by a then-local group/project called Shalloboi. At the time the station had a “now playing” widget of some sort on their website that actually worked and was updated in real time. This is how I saw that the band name was spelled strangely, “shalloboi” (I think the no-caps might be required), and when I got home I googled them and found a couple MP3s for free download somewhere on the internet. I put those on my iPod and actually listened to ‘em hard for a week or two. They sounded just as good as they did on the radio, and I wanted to write about them, and thought maybe I did, but can’t find any mention of “shalloboi” on any of my ancient blog posts or even more ancient website updates. But there I was just yesterday, listening to my still-working iPod on full album shuffle, and would you believe those two Shalloboi songs came up? And sounded as great as ever? It helped to have spent much of 2023 immersed in all eight sides of the two Southeast of Saturn double LP comps of 1990s Midwestern shoegaze, as Shalloboi pick up right where that killer movement left off, even if a decade later, with the best Chicago shoegaze I can think of since Grimble Grumble themselves. (As heard on Southeast of Saturn Vol. 2.) Shalloboi now seem to call Kansas City home, which makes sense because Chicago and K.C. have always had a connection, 500 miles via just two interstates. A relatively easy 7 or 8 hour drive. You can leave one town in the morning and get to the other before it’s night. There’s also been something of a Kansas City Art Institute alum thing in Chicago, which you can see with bands like the Coctails and Sea and Cake, and I think the 90 Day Men too. Anyway, Shalloboi seems to still be a going concern, maintaining a Bandcamp page with dozens of albums, EPs, whatever, that I’ve been poking around in, and so far it’s all pretty damn good. My aforementioned initial two-song download back in the 2010s turns out to be 2/3rds of the angels floating on the head of a pin EP from 2008, which is just “outtakes” for the down to sleep LP, also from 2008, which is excellent ethereal wispy noise pop songwriting and singing, and includes what I guess is the official version of the “angels floating on the head of a pin” song. I also checked out the quarantine covers LP from 2020, which starts with a kinda perfect version of “Plainsong” by the Cure, just like the Cure started Disintegration with it. Second is a really nice cover of “Alison” by Slowdive, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Can + Canned Heat = 1980s Magic Band? (P.S. All-time great Van Vliet hat move at 2:20.)