Friday Jukebox: ¡Oscile los timbales!

Alexander Abreu - currently of Habana d'Primera - rocks the timbales:

What can I say? The sun is trying to break through, and I'm feeling muy Cubano; ohe', 'mana, dame una cerveza mas y' baje y siéntese al lado de mí, mi guapa, y mire la puesta del sol conmigo...

Friday Jukebox: Guitar Gods Edition

Caught Rodrigo and Gabriela - and their new sidemen, the Cuban group C.U.B.A. this past Wednesdayand they rocked the house just like this:Makes my fingers hurt just listening. But wonderful, wonderful music.

Friday Jukebox Saturday Edition: Like Nashville With A Tan

I wanted to post this yesterday because it came across the radio late one afternoon and reminded me of the way it made me fell back in the late Nineties when it was in heavy rotation on the FM Radio.
In case you don't know the backstory, the guy who did this is someone named "Shawn Mullins", who may very well be the poster boy for one-hit wonders. This is pretty much it.

I was going through a divorce at the time, and I was feeling sorry for myself. Even though reasons 1 through 99 my ex was leaving had to do with that I had been a lazy git, and a self-absorbed dick, and she had finally had enough of my nonsense and left.

But aside from the sob factor something in this little song always got me; maybe it was the horrifying grimness of the story he tells in it, the relentless misery of this wretched woman in this shitty little bar who is out of ideas and hope, and the guy on stage who doesn't have an answer, either...until the chorus.

And then, well, everything's gonna be all right. Right? Because...because...well, everything's gonna be all right.

And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that this goofy little song isn't a bad theme song for our lives, most of us. We know that all around us is the stuff of tragedy, or at least bad melodrama. Poverty, cruelty, misery, unhappiness of every sort and color, pain, death, loneliness, the end of all our hopes and dreams. Non-alcoholic beer. Vengeful tax auditors. Divorce. Cancer.

But those are just the cold and dark outside our window, always there, always waiting.

Inside it's warm, and light, and there's love and hope, and those we care for around us. And if we look away from the black panes long enough, and pretend hard enough we can almost believe that those evils will not touch us; that the Angel of Death will see the blood of our sacrifices on the lintel and pass us by.

And, like the song says - the happy part, the catchy part, the part you want to believe - everything's gonna be all right.

And you know what? Maybe that's not such a bad way to live.

So let's take that chorus to the bridge, and peer over the railing there, and throw our dreams into the water.

And let the stream take them far away.

Friday Jukebox: Surprise!

Loves me some Norah Jones; sorry about the ad, but she's totally worth it.

Country when Country Wasn't Cool

Just a brief note that at the same time I was bloviating about country music Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money was doing about the same thing

His money graf: "Rather, today’s country radio provides messages that fit in very well with the modern Republican voter: reinforcing what they see as traditional values based in an idealized rural setting that they see as threatened by B. Hussein Obama and his Weatherman-loving, Derrick Bell-hugging ways with his health care and such." And he also has some interesting things to say about the marginalization of the "old" country style after the Seventies.

Worth a look.

Friday Jukebox: Dead Man Walkin' Edition

I've developed a mild obsession with the music of The Civil Wars:And the thing is, I'm not a particular fan of "country" music, at least the kind of thing that comes out of the Nashville yick-a-hoo music factories today.

The Civil Wars create something very different; a frighteningly naked, stripped-down, achingly-harmonious plainsong of the sort that my Celtic ancestors brought with them to the impoverished hills of places like West Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas that eventually became the blues, and Western swing, and finally the country-and-western that we know today.

The "country" music you hear cranking out of pickup trucks and from the speakers in the faux-cowboy bars always seems to me to be fundamentally about pride and arrogance. The singers - and the listeners - may adhere to the old formulas about whiskey and broken hearts and faithless women. But down inside is a sort of inverted smugness. Yeah, the music seems to say, I'm an ignerent shitkicker...but because of my bone-deep Country Strength (and patriotism and the love of Jesus in my heart) I'm a better man (or woman) than you latte'-sipping sophisticates and I - and down deep in your heart, you - know that.

If the music of The Civil Wars is "country" it sounds to me like the older country; the "country" of the Scots-Irish refugees who came here seeking not a better life but any life at all, having been whipped out of their old lives like starving dogs. It's a grievous music, full of the knowledge that while the meek may inherit the Earth while they live in it they'll probably get jack, and shit; that the rich man and the strong man are going to grow richer and stronger and the poor man will not. That a lifetime of toil and heartbreak are your lot and mine, and we cannot change that, and we cannot escape it.

Friday Jukebox: Poison and Wine

Remember where I talked about simple voice putting across a beautiful song?

Simply lovely.(Sorry for the ad, but it's worth waiting through, and h/t to Krugman, wherein I first heard this)

And this is for Lisa, with the gentle thoughts of another hopeful romantic.

Friday Jukebox: Gramma's Naughty Youth Edition

From 1931.I love the comment on the Youtube site: "1931? Did they execute this guy for releasing such a song? I thought sex didn't exist before 1965, when hippies discovered it."

Friday Jukebox: Tears

My bride told me this story.

She and The Girl were coming home from a simple errand; a shopping trip, a visit to the library, and she was playing this on the radio as the station wagon pulled to a stop at the curb outside the house.
She sat for a moment, watching the windshield wipers push the spitting rain, until she heard a to-a-parent-familiar sound and turned to see our little girl weeping.

Like any mother would do, she turned and unfastened the Girl's seatbelt and hauled her over the partition into her lap. She hugged the small, shaking body to her, and kissed the bowed head on the sleek, shining black hair, and asked Missy if she could tell her Mom what was wrong.

Mojo says that when she had swallowed down her sniffles the Girl said;

"This song makes me think of all the bad things I did and the times I wasn't nice, and the times you didn't like me. And that makes me feel sad."

So Mojo squeezed little Missy tight and promised her that part of being mommies and daughters was that you were always loved, no matter what sort of bad thing you had done.

Because, really...what else can you say?

And the two of then sat listening to the pattering of the rain until it was time to go into the house.

Friday Jukebox: Double St. James Infirmary Edition

Today two videos for the price of one, both covers of the jazz standard "St. James Infirmary Blues". The first is probably the "classic", the 1959 Louis Armstrong version:
There's a nice discussion of the man's work on this number, and this recording in particular, here.

And then there's this, a recent performance by, of all people, the actor Hugh Laurie:
I'm not actually sure which one I like better, other than to repeat something I read once that Billie Holiday said when asked about the blues. She said that the difference between white people singing the blues and black people singing the blues is that for the white folks - no matter how sorrowful the tune - the music was essentially "happy"; syncopated, swinging, fun. For the black, no matter how zippy the tune or jump the rhythym, the music was fundamentally sad.

So...on this rainy Friday put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain.

So the gals can all know I died standing pat.

Friday Jukebox: Wild Wild Edition

Just felt like some serious boogie today.
Ella was truly brilliant and isn't this a great cover?

Dunno why this occurred to me; remember that awful "Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey" song I posted a year ago last December?

So, OK...if you watch, or hear, or read anything from the U.S. from about the turn of the 19th Century to sometime in the 1960's you can't get away from the "white ethnic" stuff.

By that I mean that it mattered - sometimes it REALLY mattered - whether you were a Yankee-type Yankee or whether your mom or grandpa got off the boat from Sweden or Italy or Greece. Ballplayers were "wops" or "squareheads" or "hebes", guys in the news had knicknamess like "Dago" or "Heinie", women were characterized as "fiery" if they had a name ending in "i" or "a" and "placid" if they looked like Heidi. And those goofy ethnic songs, they were all part of that.

And suddenly - within a decade - it all vanished. By the Seventies the whole "white ethnic" thing had dropped out of popular culture. It still pops up once in a while - the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or "Moonstruck" sort of thing - but nothing like you'd have run across in the Thirties or Forties.

Bill James, writing about baseball (of course) said that it had much to do with the arrival of the African-Americans (and, probably to some extent, the Hispanics). When the civil rights era began and the blacks had semi-open entry into American society everyone else was just "white". At least, that was James' theory.

The other thing that occurs to me is that the early Forties was the end of the mass European migrations. The immigration window closed to Europeans as a group. By the Sixties the last first-generation Swedish-Americans and German-Americans and Italian-Americans had been here twenty years. They were, by the primary indicators that mattered; language, dress, tastes indistinguishable from the Yankees that had been here since 1790.

Not sure which was the most critical. But it's interesting that Ella and the Ink Spots and the bluesmen and rock-n-rollers and soul singers that followed them helped make all those wops and squareheads and hebes into "white people"...

One last bit of marginalia.

I enjoyed seeing a handful of magpies on my trips East this week (the one detailed in the post below as well as an even longer expedition just yesterday...).

Pica hudsoni has always been a favorite of mine, both for its gorgeous plumage as for its rude and intrusive intelligence.

But that wasn't what wandered across my mind. It's that the European cousin of our "Black-billed Magpie" (Pica pica) is just called a "magpie" and has a little doggerel associated with it. Are you familiar with it?

It's supposedly Scots and goes something like this:

"One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a wedding,
Four for a birth.
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Eight for heaven,
Nine for hell,
And ten for the Devil's one self..."

That's really all. Hope you had a great week, and are looking forward to a great week-end...

Friday Jukebox: Wednesday Edition - Trouble Man

Because it was a long, cold day and I'm feeling like looking for trouble.
What the fuck is with contractors who seem to have a problem understanding this simple rule; if you bid the contract to build my engineer's design, you don't get to choose not to build that design because it's haaaaard.

If you can't do the work, don't bid the job.

There's only three things for sure: taxes, death and the trouble I will give your incompetent ass if you send your people out to do a sad, sorry job and then expect me to fucking sign off on it.

I come up hard but never cool.

I'm your construction inspector, and right now I'm your goddamn Trouble Man.

Friday Jukebox II: Northern California Kick Ass Edition

OK, nepotism confession time; the bass player for this group - The Mermen out of San Francisco is my ex-brother-in-law Allen Whitman.But ex-family-connections aside (and losing my friendship with Allen was and is perhaps the thing I still regret the most about my detonation of my first marriage) it is more than just nepotism that makes me post this video here. These guys genuinely rock, and they are a sort of kind of odd fixture in the northern CA surfer scene.

Which is pretty amazing, because as I understand it neither Whitman nor the lead guitarist (Jim Thomas) can surf across a flat pond on a calm day.

Be patient (or forward to about 2:20 when the rocking really begins) because this song, "Casbah", is one of their more kick-ass, except for the very vivid memory I have of one show of their I went to see at some little shithole bar somewhere in the dumpy part of Santa Rosa, CA, back in the Nineties.

A typical Merman song is not quite as tight as this one - there's a lot of noodling about and long soloing. And there's not a lot of FM radio 3:40-style discipline. A Mermen tune goes...well, as long as it needs to. And there's a lot of very astral spaciness there. So there we were, just surfin' along with the Mermen (all of us with our earplugs in - these guys are LOUD) on our ride to...where-ever.

Until suddenly the boys kicked over into a beautiful, incredible, perfectly terrifying instrumental cover of the Rolling Stone's "Paint It Black".
I wish I could find you a YouTube video of that cover. It fucking blistered what was left of the dingy paint off the walls and knocked us out of our chairs. It hammered the freaky dancers who had been ambling around the tiny dance floor to their knees. It made the sun come out into the northern California night; it made the mountains tremble and the seas run red with blood.

It was everything fucking great about rock n' roll.


Damn. I miss those guys.

Friday Jukebox: Northwest Kick Ass Edition

Did I mention I loves me some Sleater-Kinney?
Proof that the Northwest can produce some great four-chord rock bands outside Seattle. Miss 'em.

Friday Jukebox: Shameless Vidiot Edition

Heard this last night while the Boy was watching the "Cars 2" movie:Odd thing: I love the Weezer cover of this old Cars tune, and I loved that the Pixar people used it for a movie about cars.

But the actual movie?

Sucked pipe.

I've been wondering if it was even possible for the little desk-lamp to MAKE a bad picture. Apparently so; not awful, just long, slow, and a very pedestrian mashup of race-car and spy movies without any particular flair for either one.But the song kicks tailpipe.

Friday Jukebox: Latter-Day Lehrer Edition

Caught this on our local jazz station KMHD on the way back from Port Angeles tonight;She's got a CD release party tomorrow here in Stumptown and unless I'm held captive by social obligations I intend to see her, by Joe.

Friday Jukebox: Mercenary Memories Edition

Warren seems to be confused between the "Simba Rebellion" of 1964 and the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.Mind you...is there anyone now who really remembers either one?Or Patty Hearst and the SLA?

No matter. Great song, and it serves to remind us that our nation, our government, and our world in general is stuffed with people who would make Roland post-decapitation a candidate for fucking MENSA.

Friday Jukebox: Tuesday Rah, rah, Rasputin Edition!

Remember back when I told you about trying to teach the Russian Revolution to high school freshmen and how the only part they "got" was the song about Rasputin?

Well, here it is.Now is that one funkaliciously infectious, ridiculously silly, freakadelic-disco-pop hook, or what?

And the part I like is the "dancing" Russian girls on stage in their goofy lingerie. Between that and all the pretty Muscovites in the audience, I think ol' Raspy would approve of his theme song, no?

Sunny Day Blues

Because it's eight o'clock and I'm still at work.Because nothing says "the Delta blues" like a bunch of Brits jamming down at "The Wheatsheaf" on a September evening. Because it's Friday, and let's go have a weekend, eh?

Friday Jukebox: End of the World Edition

Well, I know for damn sure I've got no travel plans for tomorrow - God and I still aren't speaking after the whole "You killed my little girl, you omnipotent, omniscient deity fuckpole bastard!" thing - so here's my contribution to the discussion of the coming Rapture:I dunno much about rapture other than what the Mojo does for me when she does her "Dance of the Seductive Herdbeast", but I know this: damn, but these women rocked.