Flannel Shirt

Sorrow Tears and Blood by Fela Kuti

 

Shades of Blue: Oh How Happy

Before Edwin Starr was explaining to the world what war was good for (absolutely nothing) he wrote this great song, performed by the group Shades of Blue.

 

Music Monday: It's Your Thing by Dyke and the Blazers

 

This song has always troubled me

From back in the days of disco a British band named Hot Chocolate came out with a song called "You Sexy Thing". The song opens up with the singer announcing, "I believe in miracles. Where ya from, you sexy thing?" The singer has the weirdest delivery. You expect the woman he's hitting on to say something like, "Well, you'll need a miracle for me to go out with you." Really, the singer sounds totally goofy. I always wondered what happened to this guy, although I think he and the sexy thing actually hook up in the last verse.

I came across this You Tube cartoon which shows the goofiness of the song.

 

Here's the whole song, live:

 

Music Saturday: Fresh Garbage

Ed Cassidy, the drummer for the psychedelic-jazz-rock sixties band Spirit just died recently, and it reminded me of this great song. The guy who died in 1997 was the guitarist, Randy California. Jay Ferguson, vocalist-keyboardist-songwriter, is still around, making incidental music for the TV show "NCIS: Los Angeles". 
 

 

Obscure and early in their careers

Diana Ross symbolizes to me all that is wrong with celebrity. But early on in her career, as part of the Supremes, she did some great Motown. Like this one:

 

Beatles write a hit on demand

As part of the 50-year anniversary of Beatle history, here's the story of "From Me To You". 

Though Lennon and McCartney wrote a substantial number of songs between 1957 and 1962,* their confidence in all but a few of them was low. The majority of the group’s pre-1963 act consisted of other people’s material with only an apologetic leavening of Lennon-McCartney originals. Realizing the weakness of his protégés’ existing catalogue, George Martin advised them to come up with more hits without delay, a plea repeated with added urgency when “Please Please Me” began to move in large quantities. They wasted little time. Based on the letters page of New Musical Express (“From You To Us”), “From Me to You” was written on the Helen Shapiro tour bus on Feb. 28, 1963—the group’s first custom-built Beatles song as Parlophone artists.

Dismissed in most accounts of their career as a transitional time-marker between “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You,” “From Me to You” was actually a brilliant consolidation of the emerging Beatles sound,** holding the No. 1 position for seven weeks (the longest occupation of this place by any of their eighteen British No. 1 singles apart from “Hello, Goodbye” and “Get Back”). That it was specifically designed to accomplish this testifies to the canny practicality of the group’s songwriting duo. Like most of Lennon and McCartney’s few recorded full 50-50 collaborations, “From Me to You” proceeds in the two-bar phrases a pair of writers typically adopt when tentatively ad-libbing at each other. The usual result of such a synthetic process, in which neither contributor is free to develop the melody-line in his normal way, is a competition to produce surprising developments of the initial idea. As in “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the variation surprise in “From Me to You” consists of a sudden falsetto octave leap, a motif first tried on the chorus of “Please Please Me” (itself rewritten in this to-and-fro fashion)

Read it all.

The Beatles record "Twist and Shout"

Here.

Take On Me

 

And the "Family Guy" takeoff.

 

At the Oscars

During the Oscars last night every time someone talked about it, and when Adele "Skyfall" I kept thinking about this. Maybe there'll be a commercial in the future.