Woke up this afternoon - PART TWO

I became a fan of the cartoonist's art fairly early on, principally through being introduced to the writings of James Thurber and finding that I enjoyed his captioned drawings almost as much as I did the text. In our local library his books were kept in the 'Literature', section for some reason, as were collections of Ronald Searle drawings, which I really admired and the works of one Gerard Hoffnung, whose line wasn't quite in the Searle class but whose subject matter was music. I soon became the owner of a number of his books and my particular favourite cartoon was of an organist observing in his mirror that he was about to be overtaken by a car. Imagine my delight then when I discovered that the man made music as well as drawing it. His 'Interplanetary Music Festivals' were wonderfully funny and eccentric, as well as being extremely musical. He was able to persuade a great many serious musicians and composers to contribute to these affairs. Alas, I can find no footage of the original concerts on the web, but here is a more modern performance of 'Grand Grand Overture' by Malcolm Arnold, which may give you some idea. This was originally written for a Hoffnung concert. I heard some of these on the radio and others on that reel to reel recorder that had also introduced me to Tom Lehrer and Victor Borge (see yesterday's posting). Alas, Hoffnung lived a very short life and no sooner had I discovered his work than he was gone. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1959, aged just 34.

A few years later, when I was working in record shop in Southall (see Indian Summer), I first came across P.D.Q.Bach. He has been described as "...the last of Johan Sebastien Bach's twenty-odd children, and certainly the oddest.") In fact this fictitious member of the Bach family is the creation of one Peter Schickele, whose name I first came across on a Joan Baez LP, for which he had provided some string arrangements. I've long since forgotten the Baez album but P.D.Q. Bach remains a firm favourite to this day. There is, I'm happy to say, a great deal of material out there on the net, and many of the albums are a available in CD form. Here is a sample - 'The Hindenburg Concerto'. I also recommend a visit to the Peter Schikele/P.D.Q. Bach website.

Around 1965 I became aware of an outfit called The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I read of their doings and was much intrigued, but it wasn't until 1967 that their first album - 'Gorilla' - was released and I got a flavour of the inspired lunacy of this wonderful unit. I subsequently bought all their albums as they were released and was lucky enough to see them live on their farewell tour in, I think, 1970. Those last few gigs are generally considered to be amongst the best that they ever did. I can remember being almost helpless with laughter by the end of the evening, Profoundly happy that I had seen such a thing and profoundly sad that I would not see such a thing again, Needless to say, a small part of my mind stayed vigilant and made notes...some of their style was due to show up in the Jugular Vein stage act in the very near future. Here is a taste of their surreal splendor, a TV performance of 'Canyons of your Mind'.

Along the way their have been people who wrote and performed songs that made one laugh - such as Jeremy Taylor and Leon Rosselson, but they were not exclusively humourists, and the musical content in both cases was not in the same class as the lyrics. Never the less they produced some good stuff, frequently with a strong political edge and their respective web sites are well worth a visit.

Randy Newman is in a league of his own. He writes great tunes and superb lyrics. His arrangements are brilliant. He makes you laugh and he makes you cry, frequently at the same time. I have followed his career with enthusiasm since hearing his second album in 1970. I was so bowled over by his song writing that I felt that their was no point in me trying to write any more because he was doing everything that I had ever tried to do and unlike me, succeeding at it. I can't recommend him highly enough. Here's a clip of a live performance of 'Christmas in Capetown'. If you are familiar with the recorded original then you will realise that all the elements of the instrumental arrangements are there in his solo piano part. It's a very good example of him climbing into another mind and writing a song from that mind's perspective. He's not a prolific songwriter just eleven new albums of songs since 1968 but the quality rarely falters and the good news is that their is a new album, entitled 'Harps and Angels' is due for release in August. It includes a song called 'A Few Words in Defence of Our Country' which demonstrates that, if possible, he's sharper than ever. Roll on August!

Woke up this afternoon...

No - this is not the second part of my 'blues' strand, but a quote from one of my favourite musical humorists, Martin Mull. His 'Middle Class Blues', from the 1973 album 'Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture Live in Your Living Room' contains the following verse:

Woke up this afternoon and both my cars were gone

Said I woke up this afternoon and both my cars were gone

Felt so low down deep inside, I threw my drink across the lawn.

This is accompanied on a ukulele played bottleneck style, using a baby's feed bottle as a slide. It contains all the elements of 'funny' music that I love. The playing is good in its own right, the genre is satirised from the inside, that is, by someone who obviously completely understands the music and -where applicable -the lyrics are extremely sharp. As far as I know Mr Mull hasn't recorded any new material since the early eighties, having concentrated mainly on painting and on his acting career. Only two of his albums are still available - the above mentioned 'Fabulous Furniture' and 'I'm Everyone I've Ever Loved', which spoofs every popular music genre from folk to the Philadelphia Sound, with contributions from Rob Reiner and Tom Waits and some of the best musicians around. Unfortunately all I could find in the way of clips is his folk spoof, 'Men' which is good, but doesn't really do him justice musically. The two albums available are well worth tracking down and can be found on a number of US web-based retail outlets.

I was first introduced to musical humour through the recordings of Michael Flanders and Donald Swan (see 'Wonderful round, black, shiny things'). I loved the cleverness of the lyrics and the way they fitted so naturally and seamlessly with the music. Most people probably associate Flanders and Swan with 'The Hippopotamus Song (Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud)', if they know of them at all, but their work could also embrace more adult topics, witness 'Have Some Madeira M'dear'. I used to love this song and could sing all the words, but I have to admit that, at the age of ten or thereabouts, I wasn't entirely aware of the significance of all they were singing about. Well, these were more innocent times...

It was a few years after this that I first heard Tom Lehrer on my friend Paul's father's reel to reel tape recorder. I must have been about fourteen when 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park' first made me wet myself with laughter. I'm happy to report that there is a whole host of Lehrer performances available on the web which clearly illustrates that his facility to combine music and words with satirical intent (which easily stands comparison to Gilbert and Sullivan) still resonates today. I'm not quite so sure about 'The Merry Minuet', performed by the Kingston Trio, which I heard from the same source and was pretty taken with at the time. That same tape recorder also introduced me to Victor Borge, whose wonderful routines I happily plagiarised a few years later for The Jugular Vein (see Mutt and Jeff). His superb explanation of a Mozart Opera confirmed all the prejudices I was already developing about that particular branch of music (and I'll undoubtedly return to this subject), although in his case I think there was probably slightly more affection for that art form than I have.

Next up was probably an EP of The Firehouse Five plus Two, which was one of Muff's purchases. The band was the spare time project for a bunch of Disney animators who played humour-laden dixieland Jazz. This clip of 'Tiger Rag' from 1951 or thereabouts doesn't demonstrate this terribly well but this was definitely another link in the chain of influences that would lead to founding of the J.V. A little later, The Temperance Seven (see 'Pop and me') arrived upon the scene, with their elegant recreations of Twenties dance music, which were played 'straight' but presented in a highly amusing fashion. Despite the fact that you couldn't actually see them whilst listening to their records, they somehow managed to communicate the drollery of the live performances. Certainly the sleeve notes of their LP's contributed to this, as did all of their publicity material. I went to see them play many times. It was their habit to arrive at the venue by hearse and to ceremoniously carry a trombone case onto the stage in the 'coffin' position. As they all tended to dress like Victorian undertakers and never smiled, the juxtaposition of personal solemnity with the jauntiness of the music was their stock-in-trade and I loved it. They were, inevitably, another source of influence on the soon-to-be Jug Band. This clip of 'Everybody Loves My Baby' gives a good flavour of their stage presence.

The 'Temps' achieved the height of their fame during that brief, weird chapter in British Pop History, The Trad Boom which , as I have observed before, is worth a posting in its own right. It only lasted a couple of years but led straight into the start the 'Beat Boom' which in turn ultimately led to the birth of Rock. There's a strange intermingling of strands in the early sixties. Us teenagers were into a variety of different types of music, thrashing around in the worlds of Pop, Rock and Roll, Folk music, 'Trad', and Modern Jazz and looking for something new...and that too, is a theme to be developed. But tomorrow I'll conclude this segment about humour in music.

A bit of flag waving

I heard an item on the radio yesterday evening about a disastrous collapse in the British flag making industry. Now those of you with a passion for football - and at this point I must stand up and be counted as a football hater - will be aware that the England team has not made it into the final stages of some sort of tournament that's happening at the moment. As a consequence the flag makers have not sold a plethora of pennants bearing the Cross of St George. (Incidentally, the first time that the world around me suddenly erupted with St George's Cross flags was a couple of years ago, when Alcohol, Ganja the Dwarf and I were off on a quest together. Being all of us unversed in the ways of Football, we spent several days travelling discretely and by water, under the impression that the British National Party had somehow taken control of the country - I'll no doubt tell more about this in the fullness of time.)



Now - if I can just go of at an apparent tangent for a moment - I come from a fairly socialistic background and to say that we have no love in my family for Margaret Thatcher is about as much of an understatement as describing the surface of the sun as being 'a bit warm'. My father's dying words were actually 'Bastard...Thatcher', and the rest of us have never had to come near death to attest to that sentiment. My younger brother, Ganja the Dwarf (hereinafter known as 'G the D') has recently acquired a flagpole (can you see where this is going yet?) and expressed to me one day his intention of buying a red flag to fly when the news of Lady T's demise is announced. As one who can't wait for that happy day, I wanted to be ready and so soon located a flag manufacturer on the net that will happily provide you with any kind of flag - including a red one - for around about Eight quid, including postage. So I'm now the proud owner of a red flag - ready to fly it the moment the glad tidings are announced.



I'm pretty certain that there are a whole bunch of you out there that share these feelings (and if you have been following these pages but don't share them I guess this is probably the parting of the ways for us, in which case - Goodbye) so what I propose is this: start the Red Flag campaign now. I won't advertise the web site here but a quick search on 'Flag Sales UK' should do the trick. Be prepared for the day and tell all your friends and fellow sympathisers about the wheeze. Lets face it, when it happens we are going to be up to our arses in non-stop TV, Radio and Newspaper coverage for days on end, most of which will be telling us what a great leader she was and how much she did for this country. Ha! My red flag will be flying within seconds of the news. I shall also be breaking the habit of a lifetime and phoning the local radio station for a request. You might like to do the same. My choice is 'Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead'. All right - yes - I know I expressed a great dislike of 'The Wizard of Oz in an earlier posting (Wonderful round, black, shiny things), but in this case I'm willing to make an exception. Go on - do it! You know it makes sense.

Woke up this morning...

Although I ran into a brick wall with Rock and Roll (see Pop and me), Blues was a very different kettle of fish altogether. My friend Barry (see Wonderful round, black, shiny things) is a year older than me, which meant that he got a job before I did and had some spending money of his own. Muff - as he was known - had equally catholic tastes to my own and figured that if we were to investigate the second-hand shops for 'sennyeights', we were bound to find some interesting stuff. Every weekend we would head into Uxbridge (our nearest town) and visit all the record shops, including Tommy Barnard's second hand books and records emporium in Uxbridge High Street (the others being Barnard and Warren, which sold new books and records and was located behind Uxbridge Underground Station, and Woolworth's, which sold the top twenty in four formats - original 45's and 78's of the hits of the day and Embassy label copies of same - also as 78's and 45's and a bit cheaper. I should point out that we didn't go to Woolworth's record department to look at the records because we were not really interested in anything they had for sale, but they did sell coffee in there and it was cheaper than the Aero Milk Bar).



Muff was particularly interested in anything old, and we came home from some of these jaunts with an extraordinary selection of stuff - some of which was to form the basis of our subsequent musical careers (Muff was later to metamorphose into The Reverend B. Sprules Murfet of the Jugular Vein - see Mutt and Jeff). 'Christmas in Kitchener's Camp' was not one of these, but 'Me and Jane in a Plane' by Harry Bidgood and the Broadcasters certainly was (Ironically this was itself a Woolworth's cover version of the original which, I think, was by one Debroy Summers. But the great find was a Bessie Smith recording of 'St Louis Blues'. We were familiar with the tune through a recording of the U.S. 7th Army band (or some such unit) performing a drill routine to it, but had never registered the true nature of blues at this point. The Bessie Smith version was a revelation. Unfortunately I have been unable to trace a version of the original version on the web, but this clip of Bessie in the 1929 film 'St Louis Blues' will give you some idea.

We still weren't quite sure what 'blues' was - apart from it being the music of black Americans - but our interest was aroused and Muff soon found an LP of black Southern convicts recorded on a prison farm. This was a real eye-opener (or should that be 'ear-opener'?). There was an authenticity to this stuff that was a million miles away from the pop that we were being bombarded with. Both of us being readers as well as listeners, the next move was to find a book about blues. A visit to the library unearthed 'Blues Fell This Morning: The meaning of the blues" by Paul Oliver. This had a companion LP on the Philips label and I somehow scrambled the money together to buy it. Suddenly the world of blues opened up for us: artists like Barbecue Bob, Peg Leg Howell and especially Memphis Minnie (whose 'When the Levee Breaks' we were later to record with The Jugular Vein) really caught our imagination. Soon we had tapped into the ragtime side of blues, with artists like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, and realised that the performances of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were closely related to jazz. We also heard the music of Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Lonnie Johnson ( a find that was to lead us back to jazz again). But the greatest of our discoveries was the music of Robert Johnson, which was to have probably more influence on the world of Rock than that of almost any other artist except Muddy Waters - but the story of how we followed blues into the electric music world is one for another day.

Local hero(ine)s

The other night I went to see a gig by a duo called Knight and Gayle, who were performing in a rather nice little restaurant in Hayle called The Foundry Bar. Kris Gayle is a singer who has been one of the south west's best kept secrets for many years and John Knight is a guitarist of considerable ability who ran his own recording studio for some time and is now involved in production and design. They first worked together in the early seventies in a band called 'Matrix', and have recently got together again to form this interesting unit.

Kris has a superb, pitch-perfect voice, a great sense of timing and phrasing and an ability to really inhabit a song. The pair performed an eclectic mix of material ranging from Van Morrison and Randy Crawford to Sting and Steely Dan but Kris managed to make each song her own without ever indulging in flamboyance or histrionics. John's accompaniments are most interesting. He uses a Roland guitar synthesiser, which allows him to generate bass lines, organ and string parts - all in real time: there are no backing tapes here! Despite the problems with latency that a guitar synth has (the synth voices respond a fraction of a second after the notes have been played), John manages to sustain a great groove. His chord voicings involve some pretty challenging stretches so as to accommodate the bass lines and he really has mastered the art of accompaniment. Oh, and his harmony backing vocals are spot on too! I really do recommend that you go and hear them if you get the chance.

Kris also works regularly with pianist Viv Rodd. Kris and Viv have landed a deal for their new CD '8.00 am' with Discovery Records and which was released nationally on June 2nd. Jazzwise gave it a great review in the May issue and Jack Massarik of the London Evening Standard made it his CD of the week, in the June 6th issue. Kris's web site is http://www.krisgayle.com/ and you can hear tracks from the new CD, which also happens to feature another ex band mate of mine, Marc Hadley. Go on.Check it out! It's well worth a listen.

The twang's not the thang

Having been only briefly enchanted by Duane Eddy (see Pop and Me), I remained vaguely interested in guitars. Unlike most of my contemporaries I didn't necessarily want to play one at this stage. I just quite liked the noise they made, provided that it was allied to some sort of actual content.

My next guitar-orientated record purchase was an EP (if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that term by now) by a musician called Laurindo Almeida, entitled 'Guitar Music of Spain'. I was, I admit, primarily attracted by the word 'guitar'. I had no idea who Laurindo Almeida was and not the remotest idea what Spanish guitar music might be, or how it differed from any other kind of guitar music. So when I pulled that sleeve out of the rack and asked the shopkeeper to play me a track I had no idea what to expect.

What a revelation that was. As the sound of Fernado Sor's Study No.12 washed over me for the first time I moved swiftly from 'vaguely interested' to 'totally hooked' in the space of a few minutes. It wasn't so much the Spanish guitar as the guitar itself that embedded itself in my consciousness. I could suddenly see that it was an instrument which allowed you to play more than one note at a time, that it was possible to play melody and accompaniment simultaneously, in the same way that you could on a piano. I played that record endlessly. It was my introduction to an entirely new world - that of Sor, Tarrega, Turina and Albeniz. It was also, unbeknownst to me at the time, my first record by a Brazilian artist.

The next guitarist to seriously grab my attention was Tal Farlow. (Here's a clip from, I think, the early eighties). This was another accidental discovery. My friend Mole (see Wonderful, round, black, shiny things) had an older brother with an interest in Modern jazz. Mole turned up at our mutual friend Dave's house one day, with a selection of his brother's LPs under his arm. One of these was a Tal Farlow album (there were also records by Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck, but that's a different strand of this tale). Once again I was transfixed. The music was totally different and yet it 'spoke' to me in the same way that the Laurindo Almeida record had. Needless to say I was soon hunting in the record shop for Tal Farlow recordings, but because my dad (a) kept me very short of pocket money and (b) would not allow me to get a paper round so as to earn money for myself, I could not afford to buy LPs, and there were no EPs of Mr Farlow available. But I had discovered modern jazz guitar and soon found an EP called 'The Train and the River' by the Jimmy Giuffre 3, which featured a guitarist called Jim Hall.

This was yet another revelation of a find. Not only did it introduce me to a guitarist who has remained one of my favourite musicians of all time, but it let me see that a musical group was could be more than the sum of its parts - that at the highest levels some sort of gestalt seemed to operate. Here's another, much later clip of Jim Hall (this time with the late, great Michel Petrucciani) which I think illustrates that gestalt at work, as well as demonstrating just what a great musician he is.

Followers of this blog will realise that I was dipping into all sorts of music at the same time and that I'm just trying to pursue some individual strands here. My burgeoning parallel interest in folk music had led me to trust the Topic record label, so when I came across a guitar instrumental EP on Topic called 3/4 AD, I thought it was worth checking out. It was by someone called Davy Graham. The tracks were 'Angi', 'Davy's Train Blues' and a duet with Alexis Korner called '3/4 AD' Once again, this was a revelation. It was a whole new musical arena: it wasn't folk or jazz or blues or pop but it had elements of all of those things. Whatever it was, I found it deeply satisfying. Davy inspired a whole raft of players to follow in his wake and I subsequently bought albums by disciples Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, both of whom reached fame in their own right. But with hindsight I realise that Graham was the man and that what he played was not folk or jazz or blues or world music or guitar music. It was just MUSIC. (Alexis Korner will feature in yet another strand of this blog, as will Bill Leader, who recorded Graham, Jansch and Renbourn (see also Keeping it in the family)

After that there were many players that whose work I fell in love with, in all spheres of music - Segovia, Narciso Yepes, Django Rheinhardt, Eddie Lang, Tony Rice, Mike Marshall, John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny, Larry Carlton, Jim Mullen, Julian Bream, Baden Powell (no, not that Baden Powell)...the list is endless and I will come back to them, but if you've checked out any of the clips in this piece then you'll know why Duane Eddy never made the final cut!

Pop and me

I've always had a very uneasy relationship with Pop (and I'm not talking about my late father here - that relationship was a bloody sight more than just uneasy!). The schmalzy confections that infested the late forties and early fifties were not really aimed at my age group anyway, although I was vaguely aware of them - 'Shrimp Boats is a Comin'', 'There's a Pawn Shop on the Corner in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania', 'Hey Up, Pat him on the BoBo', 'Where Will the Baby's Dimple Be?' and similar stuff. The official version of the invention of the 'Teenager' and the evolution of the youth-orientated music industry says that it was all pretty dire until Rock and Roll came along, and I would agree with that up to a point. It was all pretty dire. Unfortunately I felt the same way about Rock and Roll (I still do. I can now see its importance and relevance in the scheme of things but I still don't actually like it).

I had heard stuff on the radio - 'Rock Around the Clock' and so forth, but had remained unimpressed, then one day we went to visit relatives and I found myself in the company of my cousin Michael and his record player. "Right" he said, "you've got to listen to this!". 'This' was "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard. I have read so many Rock biographies in which the writers describe that seminal moment when they heard Rock and Roll for the first time and it totally changed their lives. Often it is the words (if you can call them that) - "A Wop Bop a Lubop, A Wop Bamboo" - that are cited as the great eye-opener. They certainly were in my case. I knew then for certain that if I never heard this drivel again it would be too soon for me.

The first record I ever bought was 'Rebel Rouser' by Duane Eddy. I was fascinated by the guitar and thought that maybe I had found a route into pop through instrumentals (I still had that instinct to be like my peers and they were nearly all into 'teenage' music by now). The next record I bought was an EP (see Wonderful round, black, shiny things.) of Mendelssohn Overtures, with 'Fingal's Cave' on one Side and 'Ruy Blas' on the other. 50 years later I still have a recording of those works (in fact I still have my original EP but it's pretty unplayable now), but I had wrung all the juice out of Duane Eddy within six weeks. I did have another flirtation with the charts when I bought 'Hoots Mon (there's a moose loose aboot this hoose)' by Lord Rockingham's Eleven, but this was another six-week wonder. (Incidentally, the recently reformed Bonzo Dog Band have recorded a version of this on their new CD, under the title 'Hawkeye the Gnu')

The next pop act to grab my attention wasn't really a pop act at all. It was The Temperance Seven, whose unlikely appearance in the charts with 'You're Driving Me Crazy' was a part of a singularly anachronistic hiccup in the English pop world that saw 'Trad' jazz become the great teenage thing for a brief period. (I'll undoubtedly return to this theme later.) I was much taken with this band and went several times to see them play. Curiously, I was to end up in a band with some one who, to this day, still plays with them. When 'Fingers' Bartram left the Jugular Vein, he was replaced by Mike Deighan, whose connection with 'The Temps' opened several doors for the J.V. (but that, again, is another story). Many years later I also recorded a more contemporary instrumental version of 'You're Driving Me Crazy' with my own band.

The Beatles, initially at any rate, received a somewhat lukewarm reception from me and it wasn't until 'A Hard Day's Night' that they began to get my full attention, although by this time they were already becoming much more than just pop. I was initially more excited by 'The Who', and purchased 'Substitute', whose opening riff was an object of interest for the then aspiring guitarist in me. There was then a gap of about four years and I bought 'America' by The Nice, then another gap of nearly ten years and I bought 'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll' by Ian Dury and the Blockheads - and that was it for me and pop singles. I bought many albums by people who had chart success - The Beatles, The Band, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire, Steely Dan, Manhattan Transfer and Kirsty MacColl - but they , like most of my supposedly pop choices all transcended the genre and their music was far and away removed from the ephemeral nature of purely commercial 'product'.

I think that for most people, the pop of their time is not just about the music. it's about relating to a time and a place, style, clothes and rituals, their peer group - their tribe. I've never felt that sort of sense of identity. Yes - I can wax nostalgic about the music of my youth, but there's an awful lot of it and there's a great deal of variety to it. My tribe was a very small one that consisted mostly of people with similarly catholic tastes to my own. I'm still in regular contact with most of them -and still arguing about music