The Basement Rug

I am currently working on a future compilation post based on memories of my school days. Black Sabbath was huge amongst my high school friends and I recall more than a few sets of speakers being blown at a friend’s house as we cranked up songs like War Pigs.

One of my favourite albums was Volume 4, which was a bit of a departure point for the band - as far as studio production values go. Already known for his extensive guitar overdubs, guitarist Tony Iommi began adding orchestral sounds via mellotron and piano as well.

I had nearly forgotten about this album (I listen to so much jazz now) until last night, when I heard an awesome cover of Snowblind by System of a Down:

Like most of System’s recordings, this one suffers from the Loudness War, but not so badly as to make it unlistenable. Apart from the intense volume and guitar stylings, what struck me (as I listened on my car radio) was how the lyrics had changed. The line I feel the snowflakes freezing me was changed to I feel there’s no place freezing me. Changing lyrics in cover versions is not that uncommon, but this particular change made absolutely no sense to me, so I decided to troll around on the search engines to see if I could figure out why.

Based on a cursory examination of lyrics sites it would appear the problem has to do with information integrity and the echo chamber effect of the internet - ie - the problems of cut and paste from bad sources of information (one of the main reasons I believe we need to continue to support print publications). It made me wonder if System of a Down sung the wrong lyrics simply because they went to the internet to look them up, instead of asking Black Sabbath for the proper lyrics or checking the original LP inner sleeve (I can’t remember if there were lyrics in there or not).

Here’s the original Black Sabbath recording (from their 1972 album: Volume 4) and lyrics for Snowblind:

What you get and what you see
Things that don’t come easily
Feeling happy in my vein
Icicles within my brain
(cocaine)

Something blowing in my head
Winter’s ice, it soon will spread
Death would freeze my very soul
Makes me happy, makes me cold

My eyes are blind but I can see
The snowflakes glisten on the tree
The sun no longer sets me free
I feel the snowflakes freezing me

Let the winter sun shine on
Let me feel the frost of dawn
Fill my dreams with flakes of snow
Soon I’ll feel the chilling go

Don’t you think I know what I’m doing
Don’t tell me that it’s doing me wrong
You’re the one who’s really a loser
This is where I feel I belong

Crystal world with winter flowers
Turns my day to frozen hours
Lying snowblind in the sun
Will my ice age ever come?

“Back in the day” when LP’s were still the norm, there were two truly great record stores that I would frequent in Toronto: Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum and Incredible Records.

Dunn’s (which closed more than 15 years ago) sold so many records at his three locations that his plastic LP protectors and inner sleeves still turn up on used albums sold in the Toronto area.

Ironically, it was Incredible Records that was a true museum. The walls were plastered with rare concert posters from the 1960s and 1970s and the main counter contained various memorabilia that was unmatched anywhere in Toronto at the time.

One of the items that always caught my eye was a copy of Charles Manson’s LP that was released on the ESP label. Every time I walked into the store, Manson’s contorted face (on the faux-LIFE mag cover) would taunt me.

I always wanted to hear what that album sounded like, so I did a bit of blog-o-trolling and came across a decent FLAC download [part-1|part-2] at the Stadium Studios blog that I converted to mp3 format. This CD re-issue is made from an LP and not the master tapes, but the quality is still worthy for download.

Incredible Records moved to Sebastopol, California (west of Santa Rosa, which is north of San Francisco) in the 1990s.

You can listen to “Look At Your Game Girl” in the player below while you are reading the original Stadium Studios blog post below:

Lie: The Love and Terror Cult (actual title Charles Manson Sings) is the debut album by Charles Manson, originally released by ESP-Disk. Recorded on September 11, 1967 and August 9, 1968 (overdubs), its distribution began during the Manson murder trial.

The cover is a copy of the 19 December 1969 Time Life front cover, only with “LIFE” substituted with “LIE”.

“Cease to Exist” had been previously recorded by the Beach Boys under the name “Never Learn Not to Love”, and appears on their 1969 album, 20/20, and as the B-side of the single of “Bluebirds over the Mountain”. The single gives songwriting credit to Manson and Dennis Wilson. Manson is not given co-writing credit on the album. It is worth pointing out that the Beach Boys’ version does include significant changes (including a bridge that wasn’t part of Manson’s version, and changing the line “Cease to exist” to “Cease to resist”, which does alter the meaning of the song).

Portions of the album have been sampled by many other artists, such as Front Line Assembly. Many of the songs have also been re-recorded; a version of “Look at Your Game, Girl” appears as a hidden track on Guns N’ Roses’ cover album “The Spaghetti Incident?”, while GG Allin covered “Garbage Dump” for his 1987 album You Give Love a Bad Name and Redd Kross and The Lemonheads have both covered “Cease To Exist”. Dilute released a cover of Home is Where You’re Happy in 2002 on the CD compilation If The Twenty-First Century Didn’t Exist It Would Be Necessary To Invent It (5 Rue Christine). The Brian Jonestown Massacre does a slightly reworked cover of “Arkansas” (called “Arkansas Revisited”) on their 1999 album Bringing it All Back Home - Again. The band’s leader, Anton Newcombe, has expressed interest in Manson’s songwriting.

Devo are alleged to have plagiarized their song “Mechanical Man” from Manson’s composition of the same name.

An acoustic version of the song “Sick City” was recorded by Marilyn Manson but has never been officially released. The Marilyn Manson song “My Monkey”, from the album Portrait of an American Family, contains samples of Charles Manson speaking, as well as lyrics from the track “Mechanical Man”.

All proceeds from one reissue of the album, released by Awareness Records, are donated to a California fund for victims of violent crime (California law prohibits Manson from collecting any money or royalties for his work).

Artist: Charles Manson
Title: LIE
Label: Awareness Records
Catalogue No: 08903-0156
Year: 1974 (CD Release 1987)

Lineage: Original Silver CD > Nero > Wav > BonkEnc > Flac

Track Listing:

1) Look At Your Game Girl
2) Ego
3) Mechanical Man
4) People Say Im No Good
5) Home Is Where Youre Happy
6) Arkansas
7) Ill Never Say Never To Always
8) Garbage Dump
9) Dont Do Anything Illegal
10) Sick City
11) Cease To Exist
12) Big Iron Door
13) I Once Knew A Man

I have been trying to find some Roy Buchanan CD’s for the last little while, but have come up empty handed at even the best stocked record stores. Worse still, the best stores I know of don’t even have a place-holder for Buchanan and when I ask about him, nobody seems to know who he is. All this has me asking: What happened to Roy? and: Why is he forgotten?

A friend of mine just gave me a great 2-CD Buchanan Anthology which I listened to with joy while whipping up a collosal dinner this evening. Roy has a kind of mojo that only comes from a truly troubled soul. He plays with incredible emotion and truly has his own style. You can listen to a taste of his mojo in the funky “I’m a Ram” from “In the Beginning” (1974) in the player below:

The following review for the “Live Stock” LP (which I have somewhere) was posted by “stranger2himself (Down Here)” on amazon.com on 11 September 2002:

“I will never forget the first time I saw Roy Buchanan live. In 1976, at Alex Cooley’s Electric Ballroom in Atlanta GA, Roy played 4 nights in a row, Wed. thru Sat. There were 2 sets each night. Roy played his first set from about 10 until midnight, and then a second set from 2 to 4 a.m. Bugs Henderson was the opening act. I was there for every string-bending, chicken-picking, volume-swelling, steel-imitating, tube-frying minute. I was dumbfounded. I have been a serious guitar player for 30 years. Let me tell you, there are very few electric players in his league. His technique and unbelieveable depth of emotion were astonishing. More comparable players who were influenced by Roy are people like Arlen Roth, Danny Gatton, Eric Johnson and David Grissom.”

I decided to troll around the blogosphere for some biographical info and downloads and came up with the following that I decided to share with y’all.

Bio from RoyBuchanan.org:

Buchanan’s reputation as a hot-shot guitarist extends back to the beginnings of rock & roll itself. On the road and recording with Dale Hawkins by his teens, Buchanan became the law of the land around the Washington, D.C., area by the mid-to-late ’60s. His use of the Fender Telecaster, using high harmonic squeals in place of feedback and distortion, was part and parcel of rock guitar’s vocabulary by the early ’70s. A reluctant superstar, Buchanan later became more unfocused as his career waned, but his unique stylings remain etched into his best records. Sadly, when Buchanan seemed on the verge of a comeback in, he was said to have hung himself in a police cell in 1988, after he was arrested on a drunk-driving charge.

I found this more extensive bio here:

1957

Roys career starts around 1957, where he played in Dale Hawkins band and provided guitar work for Hawkins rockabilly and blues records on Checker (a subsidiary of Chess). He replaced James Burton who had previously worked for Hawkins but had left for a more promising career working for Ricky Nelson and others.

1969

“Buch & the Snakestretchers”: Buch was a Roy’s nickname used often by Chuck Tilley (current band vocalist). “One of Three” was the first release of what was planned to be a trilogy. Roy Buchanan and the Snakestretchers were the house band at the Crossroads Night Club in Bladensburg, Maryland in 1971 when the album was recorded. The sessions, over a week or two, were engineered by Hal Davis ( also RB manager ) along with Bob Ahrens.

Roy had established an affiliation with Polydor by doing a recording with Charlie Daniels in 1969. He wanted Polydor to release “One of Three” as his first release for them. They refused ( it was this refusal that caused Roy to name the label BIOYA) and he eventually did a studio album wich contained some of the same material on it.

1970

A guitarist of incredible ability who sadly lacked the public acclaim he rightly deserved. The nearest he ever got to fame was when Eric Clapton reputedly asked him to join Derek And The Dominoes in 1970. Buchanan politely refused saying he had his own band, The Snakestretchers.

1971

Premiere blues guitar player and WAMA Hall of Famer Roy Buchanan discovered by Washington Post and secures first solo recording contract after playing in local groups such as the British Walkers and developing career as sideman for Dale Hawkins, Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks, Freddy Cannon and many others.

1972

Roy Buchanan’s debut LP, Buch & The Snake Stretchers, recorded at Crossroads Restaurant in Bladensburg, Md.

1988

Roy dies in a police cell (FAIRFAX, VA).

Roy apparently came home from the local bar with some male person, who then along with Roy acted up, so Judy threw them out, then called the cops. The cops picked up Roy and, the county sheriff tells Jim Buchanan, he was jovial when locked up. Sheriff says they didn’t even arrest and book him and told him to sleep it off. A routine check supposedly found Roy hanging from his shirt in the cell, from a low window grate that would make that difficult if not impossible. Marc Fisher, a friend, claims to have seen Roy’s body afterwards and reported bruises about the head. It is possible Roy did himself in. It is also possible that he grew belligerent at being picked up, gave the cops a hard time, and they used a choke hold or something that resulted in his death and the need to stage a suicide. Roy may indeed have been fatally remorseful that he couldn’t stay on the wagon (reports differ on why he shaved his head that summer) or he might have been the victim of murder.

My name is Jerry Hentman, I was in the cell directly across from Roy’s on that fateful night. I can say with confidence that I was the last person to speak to him. I was locked up in the DT block at Fairfax jail for a B.S. charge (argument w/ girlfriend). I fell asleep only to be awakened several times by Roy throwing some toilet paper at me and cussing at me. I got fed up with it so I told him to shut the “F” up. We went back and forth several times and it just ceased. I was awakened early the next morning to some commotion, I looked from out of my cell and saw the Deputy Sheriffs open Roy’s door and cut his shirt from around his neck from the door. I was the only person contacted by I.A.D. several times after this and what I saw was that Roy had taken his own life. They tried in vane for about 15 minutes to revive him but it was too late. Look, I know that it is easy to put the blame on someone else but sometimes the truth is hard to handle. I did not know who Roy Buchanan was, in 1988 I was 24 years old and was into heavy metal rock and roll.

Discography:

• Buch & The Snakestretchers, 1971, BOYA
• Roy Buchanan and the Snakestretchers, 1972, BOYA
• Roy Buchanan, 1972, Polydor
• Second Album, 1973, Polydor
• That’s What I Am Here For, 1974, Polydor
• In the Beginning, 1974, Polydor
• Live Stock, 1975, Polydor
• Rescue Me, 1975, Polydor
• Street Called Straight, 1976, Atlantic
• Loading Zone, 1977, Atlantic
• Live in U.S.A. & Holland 77-85 - Silver Shadow CD 9104
• You’re Not Alone, 1978, Atlantic
• Live in San Francisco, 1978
• Live in Japan - 1977 (Rel 1978) Polydor MPF 1105
• My Babe, 1981, AJK
• When a Guitar Plays the Blues, 1985, Alligator
• Live - Charly Blues Legend vol. 9 85-87 - Charly Schallplatten GMBH - CBL 758
• Dancing on the Edge, 1986, Alligator
• Hot Wires, 1987, Alligator
• Early Years, 1989, Krazy Kat
• Sweet Dreams: The Anthology, disc 1 | disc 2, 1992, Polydor
• Guitar on Fire: Atlantic Sessions - part 1 | part 2, 1993, Rhino
• Malaguena - part 1 | part 2 (The Collector Edition), 1997
• Charly Blues Masterworks: Roy Buchanan Live, 1999, RedX entertainment
• Deluxe Edition: Roy Buchanan - part 1 | part 2, 2001, Alligator
• Blues in E - part 1 | part 2, 2001
• 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: Best Of Roy Buchanan - part 1 | part 2, 2002, Polydor
• Before and After - part 1 | part 2, 2003
• American Axe: Live In 1974 [Live] - part 1 | part 2, 2003, Powerhouse Records
• The Prophet - Unreleased First Album - part 1 | part 2, 2004, Hip-O Select/Polydor
• Live, 2006, Charly Records
• The Definitive Collection, 2006, Polydor
• Rhino Hi-Five : Roy Buchanan, 2007, Rhino Atlantic

This is a story of 1960s spaghetti-western meets rock and roll meets disco meets hip-hop.

I first heard the Babe Ruth recording of The Mexican from their 1972 debut album First Base. It was part of a mixed tape that my brother-in-law had put together, and the song was an immediate standout. The lyrics, the grand arrangements, and the incredible guitar playing were just so compelling.

By the time I was introduced to Babe Ruth I thought I had heard all of the best guitarists of the 20th century - at least in blues, jazz and rock and roll, but I had never heard playing so precise - yet soulful - as the playing by Alan Shacklock on The Mexican (Shacklock’s version of Frank Zappa’s King Kong is also great).

Shacklock’s nearly flawless playing made him my new “favourite guitarist” for quite some time, and that tape is still in regular rotation in my car. I am still surprised to meet guitarists who have never heard of Shacklock and am always eager to drop his name whenever I can.

While I thought that Shacklock, Babe Ruth and The Mexican were hidden gems in the most obscure parts of rock and roll history, it turns out I was quite mistaken. While Babe Ruth may be mostly forgotten, The Mexican continues to have almost a life of its own.

The Mexican is actually an interpolation of the theme song from the 1965 film, A Few Dollars More, which was originally created by Ennio Morricone, the award-winning Italian composer who arranged scores for more than 500 film and television productions. Morricone wrote the characteristic soundtracks of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964); For a Few Dollars More (1965); The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966); and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Although these themes are recognized the world over, it wasn’t until recently that I connected the dots between A Few Dollars More and The Mexican, when I was listening to the soundtrack recording by Hugo Montenegro and his orchestra, and started to hear Alan Shacklock’s guitar riffs in my head.

About a year ago a friend of mine was playing an “old school” mix at a party and The Mexican came on. I recognized it immediately as a version of the Babe Ruth song, and began telling him about the incredible guitar work of Alan Shacklock, but my friend had never heard of Babe Ruth or Shacklock.

My friend has a wide ecclectic taste like mine and he told me that the mix we were listening to was an educational project compiled by a friend who was trying to bring him up to speed on the roots of hip-hop.

As it turns out, the Babe Ruth original of the song was first honoured “back in the day” by DJs Kool Herc and Grand Master Flash in the Bronx street partys in NYC. The Mexican and it’s rebirth from the old school to the present day Hip-Hop culture has become “the Anthem” to DJ’s, Remixers, B-Boys and breaking crews throughout the planet. Imitated by such legends as Afrika Bambata on the Platinum seller “Planet Rock”, Todd Terry’s “Orange Lemon” entitled “Dreams of Santa Anna” (a lyrical quote), The Mexican has popped up in recordings by Sugar Ray, R. Kelly, The Chemical Bros, Doug E Fresh, Funky 4+1, Jungle Brothers, Maestro Fresh Wes, and many more.

I am not sure what version my friend was playing on his mix, but I have a feeling it was this version by The Bombers:

The musicians on The Bombers recording included Walter Rossi on guitar, Marty Simon on drums, Buster “Cherry” Jones on bass, and a host of keyboardists: George Lagios, Dwayne Ford, Gino Soccio, Denis Lepage, Pierre Gauthier. Percussion was performed by Billy Workman, B.C. Jones, Tony Grant, and Joey Armando. Background vocals were performed by Sharon Ryan, and Yves Lapiere.

Downloads:

• For a Few Dollar’s More - Hugo Montenegro (1965)
• The Mexican - Babe Ruth (1972)
• The Mexican - The Bombers (1978)
• Main Man - The Bombers (1978)

Lyrics extracted from BabeRuthBand.com:

Chico Fernandez sleepin’ on his gun
dreams of Santa Anna fightin’ in the Sun
Drums so loud from all sides
makes it hard to dream
a’blue is fallin’ hard and fast
makes it all seem real

mornin’ come mornin’
Chico gotta have his share
mornin’ sad morning’
said he must be there
mornin’ come mornin’
well I laughed and I cried
and I cry cry cry cry cried

mornin’ sad mornin’
Mexican

Signorita’s pinin’
Chico come on home
Santa Ana’s losin’
n’ you’ll be first to go
Sam Houstan’s laughin’
and Davey Crockett too
When Ana takes the Alamo
The first to go is you

Mornin’ come Mornin’
a chico gotta have his share
Mornin’ sad mornin’
Heaven will be there.

mornin’ sad mornin’
well I laughed and I laughed

© Carlin Music Corporation

This is a 10-LP boxset called The History & Collected Improvisations of Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, which comes with a 36-page booklet called Ten Years on the Road with Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, which consists of reproductions of various newspaper, magazine and other articles. The bulk of the recordings come from live concerts that took place from 1973-1976. You can view the list of songs on the back cover of the box-set. The package has been re-issued several times on coloured vinyl. All records were also sold separately, each in a 100-copy edition. The total download is about 2.5 GB.

1) Ultra-Modern Stringbean (dark blue label) part1 | part2
2) Nifty (sky blue label)
3) Ein Monster in der Musikhalle (orange label) part1 | part2
4) If You Get a Headache (pink label) part1 | part2
5) Frank Zappa vs. the Tooth Fairy (red label)
6) A Token of My Extreme (silver label) part1 | part2
7) I Was a Teenage Maltshop (pale yellow label)
8) Petrouska (bright yellow label)
9) Zurkon Music (cream label) part1 | part2
10) Back on the Straight and Narrow (green label) part1 | part2

So the 1980s are back, and apparently with a vengence. Despite a 20% approval rating, Bush and his neocon nutcases are still managing to tug those weak-kneed, cozy-centre (and what IS centre these days?) liberal Obamamaniacs farther and farther into right-wing territory.

What was once called the left is now thoroughly invisible. But what about Lou Dobbs you say? As Steve Earle said in the liner notes of his latest Washington Square album: Fuck Lou Dobbs!

The once government sponsored enterprises (GSE) of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will soon be taken over by the U.S. Treasury (although the details of said “take over” have not yet been widely published in the MSM). As usual, the taxpayers - ie: working class - get stuck with the bill of the irresponsible and greedy.

World markets have already rallied around this announcement and the central (and commerical) banks are already whooping and hollering over the effective increases in capital requirements that will let them create new money out of thin air at leverage rates ranging from 10:1 to 32:1, depending on the debt “instruments” being used.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

“And so it goes” –Kurt Vonnegut.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before we start hearing again about the magic of “trickle-down” economics. Rising tides lift all boats, my ass. The poor who are shackled in debt at the bottom of the peer drown and die. As a co-worker once quipped, “It’s not a trickle-down, it’s a gushing up!”

Every day I tell myself (and my friends) that the world cannot possibly get any more surreal, and every day I am proven wrong - thoroughly wrong, in fact.

Last night I was kicking back in front of the evil blue glow after work when I caught an interview of some young musician showing off tatoos (on either hand) of Hall and Oates.

“They are my heroes.”

Heroes? Are you fucking with me? And indelibly stamped on your paws no less. I stared down at my Woody Guthrie t-shirt. Heroes? Fuck me, I am not that old, but I gotz to say, “What’s wrong with these kids!”

I grew up in the 1970s and went to high school in the 1980s. Now I look back on that time with a certain amount of nostalgia, sure, but at the time, I couldn’t wait for it to end - culturally speaking. Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, the rise of the neoliberal, globalist, new world order, and a shitload of terrible music blasting on the radio everyday.

I always figured that the music of the 1980s was so bad that it would never come back to haunt us in any serious way. A lostos plasticos, dig? But around 10 years ago I began imagining that at some point the music of the 1980s would make a come back of some kind. In the 1980s I was mostly listening to music of the 1960s and 1970s, so it seemed logical that some of the kids today would be following a similar trend and listening to the music of the 1980sdoing the same, I just never imagined they would run so far with it.

Hall and Oates are HEROES?

I think these new bands that are trying to reshape the electronic/dance wonders of the 1980s into a new-fangled sound are making a genuine attempt (and some are pulling it off quite well) to enter new territory, but where’s the substance? Where’s the spirit and the soul-stained and soul-strained creations? I just don’t hear it.

If you are gonna explore the music of the 1980s, you can skip most of the radio-worthy crap and head for the world of college radio, underground tape trees, and indy labels. Here you will find an edgy mosh of rock, punk, surf, folk/traditional, country - even some jazz and blues stylings. The genre-busting bands of the 1990s were heavily influenced by this anarchistic scene.

The “new-fangled” young’ns have learned at least one lesson from the 1980s - it’s better to keep things simple and primal, even in electronic music. Unlike the production black hole of the 1980s, these new bands have taken a minimalist approach while going high-tech (portable digital), low-cost (thank you child labour and economies of scale), and independent.

In the 1980s, very few bands were as stripped-down and hard-hitting as the Violent Femmes. The Femmes were formed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, around 1980 by singer/songwriter and guitarist Gordon Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie, and drummer Victor DeLorenzo. Their 1982 eponymous debut is still a cult-classic, but despite its critical acclaim, their second album: Hallowed Ground (1984) has been largely ignored.

Perhaps it was the darker subject matter of Hallowed Ground that scared off the fans? As the title hints, the album is an exploration of Gano’s Christian background and beliefs. The album opens with “Country Death Song”, which builds gradually around some simple, but clever layers of banjo by Tony Trischka. Gano’s storyteller tells us how his impoverished world drives him into a madness that leads to murder and suicide:

I had me a wife
I had me some daughters
I tried so hard
I never knew still waters
Nothing to eat
and nothing to drink
Nothing for a man to do
but sit around and think

Well I’m a thinking and a thinking
’till there’s nothing I ain’t thunk
Breathin’ in the stink
’till finally I stunk
It was at that time
I swear I lost my mind
I started making plans
to kill my own kind

The album is pretty much a trip into Dante’s Hell after that. Of course, in the world of the Violent Femmes, Hell is a place of comic madness, and this is best illustrated by the avant stylings of John Zorn’s sax in Black Girl, avec the comic jaw harp punctuations of Brian Rithcie.

It’s ironic that one of the most redeming records of the 1980s comes from a trip into Hell, but that’s the surreality of it all.

And so it goes.

Track Listing:

1) Country Death Song
2) I Hear the Rain
3) Never Tell
4) Jesus Walking on the Water
5) I Know It’s True but I’m Sorry to Say
6) Hallowed Ground
7) Sweet Misery Blues
8) Black Girls
9) It’s Gonna Rain

Personnel:

Gordon Gano – vocals, acoustic guitar, fiddle
Brian Ritchie – acoustic and electric bass guitar, celesta, marimba, jew’s harp, vocals
Victor DeLorenzo – drums, percussion vocals
Mark Van Hecke - piano, organ
Tony Trischka - banjo
Christina Houghton - autoharp
Peter Balistrieri - vocals
Cynthia Gano Lewis - vocals
Drake Scott - cornett, sackbut
John Zorn - alto saxophone, game calls
John Tanner - clarinet
Producer - Mark Van Hecke
Engineers - John Tanner, Warren Bruleigh

Let’s take a trip back to 1977.

Music is in a state of upheaval again. Jazz has moved to Europe. Disco pollution is everywhere. Progressive/art rock has overstayed its welcome. The most talented musicians have been lured from lonesome bars and wayward places to go hibernate in recording studios as session whores, with copious amounts of drugs, electronics, and the worst of music industry swine: producers.

The fever of the 1960s is finally breaking, but it has left the masses in a weakened state. Many are sucked further into the abyss,  but a few remain hopeful and begin the task of rediscovering their roots. The rock and roll diaspora are packing their bags and heading for home.

Like a phoenix rising from the ash and cinders, rock and roll makes yet another attempt to complete the revolution it started just over 20 years before. From the remnants of swing, rhythm & blues, rockabilly, skiffle, boogie-woogie, and jump jive comes a new force to be reckoned with.

In England a hopeful mix of revival, punk, and pop emerges, but many bands are so focused on the politics of smashing the state and sticking it to the man, they forget that their first job is to make music.

The U.S. has its own scene going on, but it is fighting a losing battle against the pop machine, which ironically, is killing the American dream it claims to uphold.

Pop will eat itself we are told, but I am still waiting.

Then along comes David Wilcox in Canada and George Thoroughgood in America.

While the rest of the music scene is moving into arenas and stadiums, putting on ever more grand spectacles, these two bar-flies take mojo back down to ground zero - at the local pub.

Imagine that? Bar bands that actually play in bars.

Thoroughgood’s band plays the pub scene with such intensity that a fan takes on a promotional campaign that ends in a deal with Rounder records.

After cutting his teeth with The Great Speckled Bird (Ian and Sylvia Tyson), Wilcox signs with the independent Freedom label in Toronto and releases his solo debut: Out of the Woods in 1980. After grinding his axe for a few years in the local clubs, he signs with Capitol/EMI, and Out of the Woods is re-issued in 1983. A handful of popular albums follow, but just as he is gaining momentum, Wilcox is run over by the grunge scene.

I got to see Wilcox a few times at his peak in the mid-1980s and those memories are indelibly stamped upon my brain.

The biker crowd loved him, and one night his mojo drove them into a drunken frenzy, and they rushed the stage of the Ontario Place Forum during a smoking performance of Hot, Hot Papa.

The forum (which was replaced by the Molson Amphitheatre) had this unique rotating stage that played into the round, so everyone had a chance to view the band up close.

Wilcox liked to dip into the sauce himself, and so the scene was a mutual fanfare. The bikers were literally hanging off of him while he was playing, but he took it all in stride, adding new lines to the song about the unfolding scene while scanning around for security.

In those days, the forum had only a small security staff and a few hired police officers working overtime, so removing the two-dozen bikers proved to be a bit difficult. Worse still, Wilcox had asked the stage hands to set the stage rotation to its maximum speed, and so the apprehension of the staggering, lumberjacket-laden-biker-lumpen became a full circus act.

As soon as the police had removed one biker from the stage, another one would magically appear. The slapstick just made the crowd go even wilder, and Wilcox and his band were feeding off the melee:

“Ah ooh, ah ooh….. yeaaaaah…..c’mon!”

The tracks below from Out of the Woods are available on CD, but I decided to rip them from the original Freedom label LP so that you can hear the mojo they way I heard it so many years ago. It’s really impressive the way this recording has stood the test of time. It’s the closest thing to a live Wilcox performance of those days.

Hot, Hot Papa remains one of my favourite rock songs of all time. When I hear that opening run on the guitar something just gets switched on inside me. It’s stripped down and utterly furious, with an attack that’s razor sharp, lightning quick, and ready to rumble - mojo on fire!

But despite David’s Fender firestorm, it is the drums that are really cooking on this tune. He’s giving us the full monty and then some. Countering off each other, these two elements create a rhythmic crossfire that just screams:

“I can sip hot lead and spit out rivets!”

I can listen to this song 20 times in a row and it is still as fresh as the first time I heard it 25 years ago.

That’s what real mojo is all about.

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