STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-018)
Rattleback Records (Chicago), Rapper Robert & Jim Brown, Cornell Campbell b/w Windel Haye, Incite fanzine, Velvet Underground, Keiji Haino/Jim O'Rourke/Oren Ambarchi, Andre 3000, Ray Davis/Parliament
Shoutout to the 45RPM dollar bin at Rattleback Records in Andersonville, Chicago (5405 N. Clark Avenue) and their “Rattleback Mystery Bags” of six hidden 45s for $1. I recommend going in, walking right past all the $34.99 reissues and $79.98 4LP sets, grabbing one of the mystery bags and a few quick-choice $1 bangers, and then for $10 or less you can go home and have a fun afternoon playing a buncha tunes, maybe even write about ‘em. Today I grabbed Parliament’s “Aqua Boogie (A Psychodiscoalphabetabioaquadoloop)” b/w “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign,” not just to hear some monster Bootsy thump from those wider 45rpm grooves (even if admittedly diluted by a wall of loud worn-vinyl static), but mainly because B side “Water Sign” is one of Parliament’s most haunting, strange, subaqeuous, and orchestrally stoned slowjams from their entire career. Sing it, Ray Davis: “Caaan wee go DOO-OOWN?” Also grabbed a couple KC & the Sunshine Band hits I remember fondly from my youth, “Keep It Comin’ Love,” admittedly a bit of a pop trifle, and then the real non-trifling jam, the darkly urgent and I would say somewhat dark-magickal “That’s the Way (I Like It).” (Lol, so many parentheses in 1970s disco/R&B song titling.) B side of “That’s the Way” is “What Makes You Happy” which is pretty great too, slow and nasty South Florida funk. Percussion production is kinda dull-tweaked in a cool way (check out the intro drum break, which was sampled a couple times by Dilla himself). Also grabbed all-time slammer “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers because why not? (Need to find a dollar 45 of their all-time magical/mystical “For the Love of You (Part 1 & 2)” though.) T-Neck 45s, like Curtom 45s, are always a safe one-dollar bet. B side is a kinda wild and upbeat funky tune called "Don’t Give It Away.” I can hear this 45 as a 1969 bridge between the early “Shout”/“Twist and Shout” Isleys and the psychedelic 1970s Ernie-era Isleys. Turns out the “It’s Your Thing” single was Ernie’s first appearance on record with his older brothers; he was 16 years old and playing bass instead of lead guitar. Next up is an A-side by Lefty Frizzell called “Saginaw, Michigan,” and I just assume I’m gonna like a vintage country song called “Saginaw, Michigan,” and indeed I do, just wishing yet again that the 45 sounded a little bit better instead of the entire vocal having a shroud of worn-vinyl distortion blaring around it. You do get what you pay for, but your ears do always adjust to low fidelity, like when you listen to VU bootlegs over and over. Either way, I dedicate this song to all the great Saginawans . . . Stevie Wonder, Chris Sienko, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and of course Alan and Richard Bishop aka the Brothers Unconnected and 2/3rds of Sun City Girls, before they moved to Phoenix and then Seattle. Turns out “Saginaw, Michigan” is the B-side of this 45, and “When it Rains the Blues” is the A-side, a pretty good tune itself, but gotta say: B side wins again. Also picked up “Atlantis” by Donovan, a song that has haunted me ever since I woke up to it one morning as a youngster when my alarm clock radio was set to its broadcast on some Sunday-morning oldies show. In fact, I have this nagging feeling that I already bought a 45 of it for a dollar or less within the last ten years, chasing this same childhood clock-radio memory, and listened to that one a couple times before it got buried, unalphabetized. Not sure, but what does it matter? These 45s only cost a dollar apiece which is almost certainly cheaper than a digital jukebox selection at a bar these days, and it’s always at least fairly wondrous to hear a soft-spoken psychedelic Englishman saying science-fictive lines like “The antediluvian kings colonized the world . . . all the gods who play in the mythological dramas/in all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis . . .” but then the over-triumphant chorus/outro riding out over and over and over is honestly a bridge too far. B side “I Love My Shirt” is also winning again with more soft-spoken sung vocals and an actual thumping rock’n’roll backbeat, giving the pop-folky Donovan a sexy T-Rexy twist. And those were just the $1 hits I grabbed; here’s the mystery bag with six more surprises, starting off pretty hot with thee doo-wop classic “Blue Moon” by the Marcels, which is the version you know, the song that went to #1 in both the U.S. and the U.K. in 1961 and has probably been licensed for use in at least 100 post-American Graffiti period piece films or TV shows or commercials, bomp-baba-bomp-ba-bomp-ba-bomp-bomp vedanga-dang-dang-vadinga-dong-ding blue moon. (P.S. Blue blue blue blue moon/Dip-de-dip-de-dip.) The Marcels formed in 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, if you were wondering where they were from, like I suddenly just was. The Marcels = Pittsburgh’s greatest single contribution to rock’n’roll? 2nd greatest being Don Caballero? (I’m only slightly kidding — Art Blakey was from Pittsburgh, as well as a few other jazz greats like Billy Strayhorn and George Benson, but that’s jazz. Don Cab is a legit rock contender.) B-side “Goodbye to Love” is a very slow bombastic ballad, this copy completely wrecked by more of that stormy bad-vinyl static. The mystery bag also contained a second 45 by the Marcels, a song called “Heartaches” which is an attempt to cash in on “Blue Moon” if I ever heard one, basically another bip-de-bip-de-bip bass intro, only slightly different, and then right into “heart-aches” to the tune of “blue moon.” Now I’m wondering: what is the name of the Marcels’s bass singer who does those immortal bomp-ba-bomps? Shouldn’t we give him some recognition? Well that would be Fred Johnson, who died at age 80 just last year (2022), and is the second great R&B/rock&roll bass singer I’ve mentioned by name in this overlong paragraph. Do you remember the first? (The answer is as above, so below.) The “Heartaches” B-side “My Love For You” is pretty good. Solid B. Then there’s a 45 with an A-side called “Beep Beep” by the Playmates, an extremely corny white doo-wop car-song story-song novelty/gimmick-song that (spoiler alert) speeds up as it goes, just like the car it’s about. B-side ballad “Your Love” is pretty much the white doowop dregs. Turns out “Beep Beep” reached the Top 5 in 1958. Never underestimate a gimmick. Ok just a couple more in the mystery bag and they’re by Perry Como and Paul Anka, just like my last mystery bag had a Neil Sedaka 45 at the bottom that was such an annoying doo-wop pastiche I couldn’t even get through it, and threw in the trash because I wasn’t sure what else to do with it. (Postscript: I decided to ritualistically throw the Como and Anka 45s in the trash as well, without listening to them at all. 16.6666667 cents down the drain, twice…)
And on to a 45 and a 12-inch I don’t actually have, and would not throw in the trash, and that would cost me or you quite a bit more than 16.6666667 cents: my latest Studio One top want, after the “Minister for Ganja” by Rapper Robert & Jim Brown b/w “Minister for Version” by Rapper Brown & Soundemension 45, is this 1979 12” that has Cornell Campbell singing “Conversation” in his achingly sweet falsetto over a classic subaqueous Studio One-goes-disco groove on the A-side, with a B-side that might be even better, a really fun dancehall tune called “Haunted House” by Windel Haye which might be a riff on Lone Ranger’s “Barnabas Collins,” though who knows because both seemed to have been released in 1979 (these guys acted fast).
I’d love to hemorrhage out some words about fanzines from over the years like Jay H. is doing such a fine job of over at fanzinehemorrhage.com, but I’m having a hard enough time keeping up with just records. That said, I do still read stuff every day, or at least skim stuff every day, and it’s usually about music, and I did just come across this complete archive of the Incite fanzine maintained by its creator/editor/publisher Tim Alborn, and now I’m geeking out about the Fall while reading a fun interview from 1988 with Brix Smith. (Though the interviewer, who is not Alborn, and generally seems like a nice and thoughtful person who apparently ended up as the executive editor for Discover magazine, finds himself interviewing a cute and charismatic young woman and therefore can’t help but sexualize the situation somewhat with his editorial comments. The 1980s were wild that way, so much sexualization, and even the issue’s cover as pictured above reflects it. Is the cover critiquing the sexualization of women running rampant in the 1980s as a direct outgrowth of 1950s space-age Playboy culture and post-Disney princess/fairy narratives? Or just participating in and perpetuating it? Who knows, I didn’t go to Harvard like these guys did.)
After all this time that I’ve owned the “closet mix” of The Velvet Underground’s self-titled 3rd album on an original vinyl pressing and played it over and over and over, hearing the apparently more common (though not in my house!) replacement mix is actually shocking. I mean, “Some Kinda Love” is a COMPLETELY different take, the closet version being more laid-back, the playing itself more subdued and quiet, Lou’s vocal more playful with more melodic ad-libbing, more of that always-charming shaky affectation he does in his more intimate ‘talking blues’ moments. There’s also the obvious difference that his vocal on the closet mix version comes in after just 4 bars of guitar intro, where on the replacement version the vocal doesn’t come in for like 16 bars. I’m so used to the closet mix version that I honestly didn’t even know this other version existed, and as of now I don’t like hearing it at all. It might be my second least favorite Velvets or Velvets-related track other than the Reed/Cale/Morrison “Prominent Men” demo! (And no, much as I love Doug Yule’s contribution as a member of VU, I’m not considering Squeeze as even Velvets-related.)
It might be hard to realize just how serious of a power trio Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi is. Maybe if they had a cool power trio name like Snowblood or Pillar or something, or maybe if these three musicians weren’t so associated with highly prolific experimental and/or improv music culture where groups and personnel are often/usually ad hoc and one-off and shifting and not given cool names. For example, there is no Discogs page for this group as a trio, like there would be if they had a cool standalone name like Snowblood or Pillar, so you can’t peep their discography all at once, but yet this group has been playing together regularly since 2010 and has now released (by my count) 11 full-length LPs, most of them double vinyl. Why wouldn’t they have as much group identity as any other trio that has released 11 albums over 13 years? Maybe they should’ve been called the Keiji Haino Experience, with O’Rourke & Ambarchi being so good in the Redding & Mitchell roles. Ambarchi is such a great heavy jazz/rock drummer, always keeping things moving and rolling in a way that could never be static formulaic free improvisation, which creates tons of space and context for O’Rourke to do whatever he wants, and he can do a lot, from raging electric bass guitar to atmospheric electric guitar to synth noise attacks and other electronic intangibles. (I’d also like to pause here and shout out what a crazy and powerful bass guitarist O’Rourke is, an instrument he’s not even particularly associated with.) And of course, Haino is filled with surprises too, and might rage on anything from lead vocal to wood flute to his own raging electric guitar. In fact, as you may well know, Haino can even rage on the instrument that is total silence, and like Mtume said that Miles said, “Silence is sound.”
And to get back to New Blue Sun by Andre 3000, as all things must in late November of 2023: another hallmark of a strong work of art is that it can bend perception itself into its prism for up to several hours after contact. Like when you finish a Herzog or Tarkovsky film and on the way home the landscape you move through every day is suddenly charged with a cinematic vanishing-point gravity. Similarly, I listened to New Blue Sun this morning and now everything I’m listening to immediately after seems to sound a lot like it. First there was the aforementioned Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi trio playing “Only Wanting to Melt” and hitting an extended quieter section in which Haino is straight-up jamming on wood flute, so of course it sounds connected, and then the real corker was listening to Alvin Curran’s Canti Illuminati after that. Granted, it is markedly different than New Blue Sun in many ways; it’s clearly more 1970s than 2020s, less overtly electronic and more acoustic, less washed-out in approach, with more prominent vocals, and it couldn’t be called “new age” music because it was recorded before “new age” music was invented. But, do try this at home: play Andre’s “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy,” followed by Mako Sica’s “Sensed” (from the Formless CD), and then side B of Canti Illuminati. All three tracks have an open exploratory form and are bolstered by a similar rippling modal/chordal piano style, though I would venture that Carlos Niño in Los Angeles in 2023 and Thymme Jones in Chicago in 2022 and Alvin Curran in Rome in 1982 are each coming to the piano from their own unique place, not a case of direct one-way influence but true parallel development occurring at tiny points in an acknowledged vast cosmos.
One more thing about New Blue Sun, and then perhaps my own flurry of thinkpieces on the matter will end. This bit from Andre 3000’s GQ interview gets into a lot of things: “One thing I noticed listening back at the album is it’s kind of a reset, or a reintroduction, of a new volume. I’m not tryin’ to compete with people on the radio. Like most records that come out, when you master them, you master them to the loudest that they can go, you know. And I was having a conversation with the engineer, and a lot of his engineer buddies, they were saying, ‘We’ve realized as engineers that as humans we’ve gotten as loud as we can get in human history.’ When you think about that, we can’t get any louder. As an engineer, people send you files. A lot of times they look like these thick bars, solid bars, when music used to look like that [indicates varied waveform with hand].” “Sure. Dymanics.” “Dynamic. And so on the record there’s certain kind of suggested listening tactics. Like you know, we would say, listen at a low-to-mid volume, because these are not bangers.”
And finally, back to Ray Davis for a sec, I just noticed for the first time ever his unstaged laugh at the 7:13 mark of “Sir Nose D Voidoffunk,” right after he chimes in on the line “Baa-baa black sheep/Have you any wool?/Yes sir yes sir/A nickel bag full.” Drug references can be funny! Frank Zappa asked the question, “Does humor belong in music?” and I would give the (admittedly partial) answer that humor definitely belongs in Parliament music.