FeinMessJan99
If you’re reading this you’re a musical idiot savant.
OK, maybe you CAN tie your shoes, but you see everything in terms of your only interest, music: you scan articles about sports, dieting, whatever, for music errors and you often find them.
Like I do. My wife does crossword puzzles. When she calls out “Blank Darlin’, 1957 Diamonds song, three letters” I call back “Lil” without pointing out that the word is “Little:”
Crossword writers freely take such liberties, like everyone else. Music history is blurring as each generation thins. Someday mid-20th century music will simply be remembered as the era of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. The slide will start, or has already, when a summer intern at a major encyclopedia changes the singer of “Johnny B. Goode” from Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley because he heard the song on an Elvis album.
The verisimilitude is its own proof, and it will not be fact-checked because, as you know, rock & roll information is trivia.
Diamonds
Some music sightings are good-weird.
In a car article in the October 21, 1998, New York Times, a guy remembered riding in his dad’s Edsel singing “Blackland Farmer,” and I nearly fell out of my chair. I’ve never, ever, seen a “civilian” (non- musical idiot savant) reference to Black-frigging-land Farmer, the sad, weighty country song by Frankie Miller on Starday. I’ve loved it since I heard it in 1961 on a trip to L.A. with my parents, and located a copy in the early 70s at a junk store. In 1973 I played it for Levon Helm, who’d walked past my office at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood.
“Damn” said Helm, darkly. “I’ve been trying to write that song all my life.” Though it charted locally in Los Angeles and nationally just barely (#82), I figured no one remembered it but me and Wink Martindale, who covered it -- need I say unconvincingly? -- on Dot.
Now, for the first time in my life I see a reference to it in an article about a guy in Wisconsin who collects Edsels. Nice weirdness.
Levon
Then there’s just plain weirdness. In a convoluted article in an October, 1998, New Yorker, writer Hilton Als posited that Aretha Franklin was not a true soul singer because white people understood her (Als is black), then said, in so many words, that in the late 1960s people stopped listening to the hard-edged sound of Darlene Love and turned to the slicker sound of Tina Turner.
WHAAAATT? Darlene could outsing just about everyone, but she hardly was “rawer” than Tina Turner. By the late 1960s both women sang in tightly-produced circumstances, and both were cut from the same sinewy cloth. Als assigned their roles arbitrarily to fit his argument.
But there’s more. In the same paragraph he said that people tired of hearing rough-edged songs like “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” and turned instead to Ronnie Spector singing “Tandoori Chicken.”
Ohkaaaaaay....One song was virtually unplayed and unreleased Crystals record (written, halfly, by Carole King) the other an unknown 1971 Spector effort on Apple.
Not strange choices but preposterous ones, and clues that the whole article was a put-on.
Because he’s a Spector fan, I forgive the joke.
Ronnie
Randy
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You don’t always learn things firsthand. On a recent Poker Party I tried to amaze French journalist and Led Zep nut Philippe Manoeuvre by telling him that the guitar intro to “Stairway To Heaven” was perhaps purloined from “Taurus” on the first Spirit album (information I “purloined” from Seattle record collector Neil Skok), but Manoeuvre out- maneuvered me by replying “I asked Randy California about that once and he said he didn’t care, he was happy they became successful with it.”
Freebo
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RIPTIDE -
The five Rips I have known have all been connected to music:
1. Ral Donner, mentioned in last month’s AFM, was managed by Rip Lay.
2. The Persuasions, recent guests on the Poker Party, are aided these days by Rip Rense, the journalist and Zappa enthusiast. (The Persuasions are preparing an album of Zappa songs!)
3. I just took some shots of Rip Masters, the guy who wrote “Rockabilly Man,” for his new album. (His real name is Martin. He took the name from the lieutenant on Rin Tin Tin. His father, John Masters, wrote Bhwani Junction and other books.)
4. I knew a promotion guy named Rip Pelley at Elektra in 1977.
5. Rip Stock, from New York, (I met him when I was a deejay at KLRB-FM in Carmel in 1972) had something to do with early Bonnie Raitt music and was in a band with Freebo.
I guess between 1946 and 1956 parents were on a Rip tear.
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But What Have You Done Lately?
On December 16th, Brian Wilson appeared with the Wondermints at Spaceland in Silver Lake (L.A.). Brian did one song, Nancy Sinatra sang two, and Evie Sands sang a couple. A Pop earthquake!
I don’t quite have this straight (but why should that stop me), but I understand that promoters would not back a scheduled Brian/Wondermints U.S. tour because Brian’s new album stiffed.
Guy
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I got an e-mail from the UK in early 1998: “Are you the Art Fein who took a picture of Guy Clark with Emmylou Harris at the Troubadour in 1976?” I love messages like that. I wrote back to Jeff Horne and supplied a half-dozen photos for the book Song Builder, The Life & Music of Guy Clark (Heartland Publishing, Kingsdown, Warmlake Road, Chart Sutton, Maidstone, Kent, ME17 3RP). Guy, what a guy!
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Researching my new book (I HOPE it’s up somewhere on this website), I set out to find Carl Franzone, the partner of one-time Freak-Out dancer Vito Paulekas who died in 1992. In April 1998 I found Franzone (through Elliot Ingber, whom I’ve since lost, and then Carl’s brother John Franzone, who was in Brotherhood of Man) at his apartment in Petaluma, in northern California, where both he and the Paulekas family moved in 1967 after their goings-on attracted too much “heat” in L.A.
Franzone has a large scrapbook of the days dancing at Zappa, Byrds, and Love shows, and he introduced me to some of Vito’s kids, who still live in Vito’s house.
One kid I didn’t meet (or maybe I did, maybe they’ve “normalized” their names) was Free Kiss. His name reads Freakus Paulekas, and for that you have to tip your hat to Vito.
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PBS is running the 1988 black & white-ized Roy Orbison music tribute, one of the only ones ever held before (but not long before) a subject’s death.
It sure is static, isn’t it? The music seems canned. That’s what happens when everyone gets to re-do their parts in a recording studio, as in all movies. I can remember only one instance of live music in a non-concert movie, a garage-music scene in La Bamba. And if music isn’t “live” then what is it?
Tom
I was at that filming and remember a couple of things.
One was that Tom Waits, the singing negative-image of Orbison, was prowling the stage avoiding microphones, wondering what to do with himself.
The other was that musical director T-Bone Burnett, looking like William Randolph Hearst in a long topcoat, came out to “warm up” the audience but instead alienated them (us) by joshing about how hard it was to teach new songs to Roy, like he was an uncooperative child. The muttering in the crowd amounted to “Who the hell do you think YOU are?”
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The Sprague Bros., Chris and Frank, have just finished an album, with five tracks produced at Mark Neal’s studio in San Diego, and a couple others employing the bass-guitar talent of Randy Fuller .
It turns out there are OTHER Sprague Bros., based in the Northwest, touring America.
It’s a big country, but somebody ought to change their name.
