Album of the Day 12/17/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #774:

The Viper Mad Blues anthology

This compilation features old songs from the late 20s through the 40s about smoking pot, and occasionally, snorting coke. This old jazz and country shizzit is more punk than the Ramones and more gangsta than L’il Wayne ever dreamed of, and although it was banned from the radio it was wildly popular in its day. The coolest thing about the 25 tracks here is that only two of them, Cab Calloway’s 1935 hit Kicking the Gong Around (which is actually about smoking opium), and a gleefully adrenalized version of Leadbelly’s coke anthem Take a Whiff on Me, are really obvious. The others have proliferated thanks to youtube and file sharing, but when the compilation came out in 1989, it was a tremendous achievement…for those who like funny songs about drugs, at least. If ragtime guitar star Luke Jordan’s Cocaine Blues (not the version you’re thinking of) is to be believed, that stuff was a staple of hillbilly life back in 1927. Some other highlights: Larry Adler’s hilarious 1938 hit Smoking Reefers; Cleo Brown’s deadpan The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow; Champion Jack Dupree’s Junker’s Blues, a kick-ass piano boogie from 1944; Baron Lee & the Blue Rhythm Band’s 1935 tribute to their dealer, Reefer Man; and Fats Waller’s Reefer Song: “Hey, cat, it’s 4 o’clock in the morning, here we are in Harlem, everybody’s here but the police and they’ll be here in a minute. It’s high time, so here it is…” Here’s a random torrent.

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Album of the Day 11/22/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #799:

Millie Jackson – Live and Uncensored

The funniest woman in soul music, Millie Jackson got her start singing gospel, but by the mid-70s she’d gone from the sacred to the profane and stayed there, taking Bessie Smith innuendo to its logical, smutty extreme. L’il Kim and Foxy Brown have nothing on this woman. Her studio albums were popular for obvious reasons, but her live shows were beyond hilarious. This double live lp from 1979 doesn’t have the classic Lick It Before You Stick It, but it’s got most of her funniest songs, recorded in front of a well-oiled, extremely responsive crowd – as much as she plays the role of a woman who’s been dissed too many times and isn’t going to let a guy do that to her again, the guys love her. She does the innuendo thing with Logs and Thangs, Put Something Down on It and the deviously juvenile Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night. The big over-the-top hit – a Beethoven spoof – is the Fuck You Symphony. Much of the time, the band launches into a funk vamp for her to rap over: the best one of these is a particularly venomous, obscene diatribe directed at soap operas and those who watch them (she’s not a fan – she thinks they’re racist and they rot your mind). When she’s on top of her game, her covers, like Sweet Music Man and If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want To Be Right) are viciously satirical – this may be soul music, but the vibe is pure punk rock. This one was reissued sometime in the 90s as a twofer with the equally raunchy 1982 album Live and Outrageous. Now in her sixties, Jackson has toned it down a bit, most recently as the afternoon drive dj on an Atlanta radio station. Here’s a random torrent.

Album of the Day 10/24/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. We’re putting Sunday’s album up a little early since we’re going up to Graceland North for a little pumpkin picking. Back on Monday with more news and reviews. Have a fun weekend! Here’s #828:

Jimmy Castor – The Everything Man: Best of the Jimmy Castor Bunch

Jimmy Castor was cursed with a great sense of humor. Cursed, because he’s a serious musician – a classically trained pianist and saxophonist – pegged as a writer of novelty songs. He may be known as the funniest man in funk, but in a career that spans part of seven decades, from doo-wop (he replaced Frankie Lymon in the Teenagers) to go-go to latin soul (he was one of its pioneers) to his most famous period leading the Jimmy Castor Bunch in the 70s, he’s also one of the most successfully eclectic songwriters ever. A lot of his catalog is out of print. This early 90s compilation, for better or worse, focuses on the hits, most of which are as hilarious as they are boundary-smashing, incorporating elements of psychedelia, heavy metal and latin sounds into funk: Sly Stone and George Clinton had nothing on this guy. This covers the decade of the 70s into the early 80s, starting with Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You – the dozens, updated for the pre-disco era; the slinky, Joe Cuba-inspired Southern Fried Frijoles, and It’s Just Begun, sampled by thousands of hip-hop acts in the following decades. That’s just the beginning. There’s also the follow-up Say Leroy (The Creature from the Black Lagoon Is Your Father); Castor’s best-known funk hit, Troglodyte, and its even funnier sequel the Bertha Butt Boogie (a massive top 40 hit in 1975); along with the self-explanatory King Kong, The Return of Leroy (where finally the joke starts to wear thin), the popular and well-sampled dancefloor vamps Potential and Maximum Stimulation and a couple of throwaways among the album’s 17 tracks. Here’s a random torrent.

Album of the Day 8/11/10

Every day, we count down the 1000 best albums of all time all the way to #1. Wednesday’s album is #902:

Dickie Goodman – Greatest Fables

Dickie Goodman invented sampling. Along with his partner Bill Buchanan, Goodman enjoyed a string of comedy hits in the mid-1950s that worked a bizarrely funny call-and-response between an announcer (usually the fictitious, bewildered “John Cameron Cameron”) and snippets of the pop hits of the day, the first and most famous of these being The Flying Saucer, a War of the Worlds parody. In shades of what the RIAA would do to unsuspecting downloaders fifty years later, the recording industry sued them for copyright infringement. Buchanan and Goodman responded that their creations were parodies and therefore exempt from prosection – and won the case. And responded with the even funnier Buchanan and Goodman On Trial. Goodman resurfaced, solo, in the 70s with the topical Energy Crisis, the blaxploitation soundtrack parody Superfly Meets Shaft and then his only platinum single, Mr. Jaws, in 1975. Goodman: “And what did you say when the shark touched you?

Olivia Newton-John: “Please, mister, please.”

And so on. This 1998 compilation has all the Buchanan and Goodman hits, including The Touchables (a spoof of late 50s tv detective shows) along with all of his solo singles including the very funny King Kong, from 1978, and an updated version of Flying Saucer by Goodman’s son Jon, utilizing more contemporary song samples. Dickie Goodman committed suicide in 1989. There are several download links for this out there: here’s a random one.