Album of the Day 1/12/11

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues, all the way to #1. Wednesday’s is #748:

The Bobby Fuller Four – Never To Be Forgotten: The Best of the Mustang Years

The two most popular “best albums” lists on the web both include something by Buddy Holly, and that’s cool – if you play rock guitar, he’s worth knowing. For us, it’s hard to shake the association with boomer nostalgia, not to mention that interminable Don McLean monstrosity that pops up during your trip to the grocery store and is still going when you leave. So in lieu of Buddy Holly we give you a vastly underrated early rocker from Texas, heavily influenced by Holly, who also died before his time. In the case of Bobby Fuller, it was a murder that was never solved, one that was particularly suspicious since the investigating cops in Los Angeles, 1966, appear to have withheld evidence. Which is tragic, because in his 24 years Fuller not only took rockabilly to the next level, he was also adept at surf music. And was a particularly good singer: he didn’t do the cliched hiccupping vocal thing like so many of his contemporaries. This massive 44-track box set approaches overkill – the last of the three cds include innumerable outtakes and even a shoe commercial – but it’s nothing if not exhaustive. The song everybody knows is I Fought the Law, immortalized (and taken to the next level) by the Clash, along with the similarly catchy Let Her Dance, Julie, A New Shade of Blue, Another Sad and Lonely Night and Love’s Made a Fool of You. The surf stuff – an irresistible version of Our Favorite Martian, and Thunder Reef, for example – hint that he could have had a whole other career in instrumental rock, or maybe even in psychedelia, if he’d lived. Here’s a random torrent.

Die Hipster Scum: Simon and the Bar Sinisters Live at Lakeside, NYC 4/12/08

Simon Chardiet surveyed the packed house at Lakeside last night. “I’m always amazed that you come out,” he told the crowd.

“Because you’re good, Simon,” somebody in the back murmured. Understatement of the year. Chardiet and his rhythm section are a New York institution: they’re been playing as Simon and the Bar Sinisters since 1991. Chardiet isn’t just one of the best rock guitarists in town: he’s one of the best rock guitarists in the world. When you hear Simon, you know it could be nobody but Simon. Playing with his signature growly, distorted tone, he alternated between the big, expansive chords he loves so much, fast, precise chicken-scratch staccato solos and some awe-inspiring surf, rockabilly and jazz work. He’s a musician’s musician, the kind of player who, just for kicks, would take the time to score the entirety of The Planets by Holst for bass (true story).

He’s also extremely funny. “Never mind real estate, the oil companies, defense contractors: when it comes to craven greed, nothing matches mine,” Chardiet told the audience. “Somebody told me that I could make money being a guitar player,” he mused sarcastically as a young woman made the first of three trips through the crowd with the tip bucket. Someone had recently asked to be taken off his email list, offended by one of Chardiet’s famous anti-yuppie screeds, and in removing the guy, Chardiet accidentally deleted his entire email fan base. “Don’t sign the mailing list if you can’t handle sarcastic humor. I don’t mean to offend anyone, I just want to tell the truth,” he explained, and there was no sarcasm in that. Although along with his cds, he was also selling “Die Hipster Scum” bumper stickers, a welcome concept, especially in this day and age.

Chardiet may have assimilated every worthwhile retro guitar style ever invented, but ultimately he remains true to his punk roots. As wickedly smart and witty as his music is, his songwriting has all the good fun, fearlessness and in-your-face antagonism that made classic punk rock so great. Tonight it took him awhile to warm up, but once he got rolling he and the band were unstoppable. The surf interlude in the middle of the set was the best part of the show, all original songs, beginning with a surprisingly wistful, nostalgic one possibly titled Mr. Pickle, then a scorching, chromatically fired tune that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Dead Kennedys album. He took a few requests, including the amusing Bad Boy, an expansively jazzy, torchy tune about a lunatic. Later, he dedicated a rockabilly number to Eliot Spitzer: “I can’t believe this guy…I never paid more than $5 to get laid in my life” Then he changed the lyrics at the end of the verse into “I’m leaving town, gonna get me a $5 whore.”

Toward the end of his long set (over an hour and a half), he and the band played one of his best songs, the ruefully sarcastic rockabilly number Wooden Nickel, about meeting someone who doesn’t exactly turn out to be as advertised, using it to address first the women, then the men in the audience, leaving everyone in stitches (Chardiet’s comedic timing is just as spot-on as his playing). The rhythm section was excellent: the drummer is a hard hitter, but he swings like crazy; although he was playing bass guitar, the bassist frequently slapped at it, as if playing an upright bass, to create a boomy, low tone on the rockabilly songs. They’re back at Lakeside on May 10: be aware that since this band is very popular, you need to get here early if you want a seat. Lakeside shows usually start around 11 on weekend nights, but Chardiet would probably play four sets if they let him. Expect the festivities to start around quarter after ten.

Concert Review: Rockabilly Night at Lincoln Center 8/18/07

The Dixie Hummingbirds opened, playing to a shockingly small crowd in the park out behind the concert hall complex. They were fantastic. Established in 1920, this gospel group gives new meaning to the term long-running. Their oldest member joined as a 13-year-old in 1938 and proved that he still has his pipes, even if he’s due for a knee operation. “You get old, it happens,” he waxed. Backed by a rock-solid rhythm section and a superb guitarist, the gospel harmonizers left no doubt where the soul stars of the 60s got their inspiration, their melodies and even their arrangements and choreography. They may have been playing religious music, but for them it is clearly a religion of passion. Their young bass singer stole the show with some low notes to rival Huun Huur Tu, and their guitarist wound up their set with a long, spectacularly good solo to rival any coda Tony Iommi ever lit into. One would have thought that the Harlem church contingent would have come out in full force, especially as this was a free show, but they didn’t.

Now who wants to hear about a bunch of old geezers playing stuff that every bar band in the country knows by heart. Yawn, right?

Was a time that this stuff was revolutionary. Hard to fathom in the gangsta rap age, until you realize that the songs they played tonight were just as much IF NOT MORE reviled than the raunchiest Fitty number you can imagine. And the guys onstage got it right, making sure they included plenty of R&B – real R&B, not the stuff that Macy Gray does – and gospel and blues and a Chuck Berry number to go along with the barrelhouse boogie and the country and the embryonic rock they played tonight. Half a century ago, racists across the country would stage bonfires of rock records because they were terrified that their precious, virginal children would listen to black music and actually prefer it to Pat Boone. Allen Freed ended up going to jail for playing rock music. Hard to imagine that happening today to, say, Funkmaster Flex. The songs the band played tonight may sound pretty tame to jaded late-zeros ears, but the band onstage wasn’t. Major props to these guys for taking stuff they must have played literally thousands of times, over and over again and giving it a defiance and passion worthy of players a third their age. It was as if they were just glad to be alive.

One of the reasons that a lot of 50s rock recordings sound pretty harmless compared to what came later is that the people who were making them were using such primitive instruments, amps and studio gear. As guest singer Dale Hawkins told it, in his native Arkansas there weren’t any recording studios. To make a record, you had to go to a radio station between midnight and 1 AM when they were switching between transmission towers. Tonight, with some big Fender tube amps roaring and screaming, it seemed that these musicians were finally giving voice to their songs as they’d originally envisioned them, wild and fiery and absolutely unstoppable.

Backed by a drummer who doubled on harmonica, a young bassist and aptly named piano player David Keys, 67-year-old baritone rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef ran through a whole lot of 50s favorites. While there were some excellent performances tonight, this was his cavalcade of stars and he was its leader. He’s a hell of a guitar player, equally adept at blues as rockabilly, and with his big beautiful hollowbody Gibson roaring with overtones and distortion, he wailed all night long. The songs were familiar: My Gal Is Red Hot, Waltz Across Texas, Polk Salad Annie and something of a surprise, These Boots Are Made for Walking. Keys dazzled on a brief Jerry Lee Lewis medley, and LaBeef did a great job with the Johnny Cash numbers. A couple of times, the band wound up the songs with trick endings followed by excerpts from surf songs.

After about half an hour, LaBeef brought up the night’s first special guest, blues guitarist Larry Johnson, whose amp was stuck on standby for awhile before the roadies finally got it to work. “I’ve had moments like this,” he told the crowd. “One time I got to a club and the mic didn’t work, so I got paid and left.” He then did Mystery Train and then the haunting, minor-key gospel tune Can’t You Hear the Angels Crying.

Philadelphia singer Charlie Gracie – “the only Yankee on the bill,” as he put it – sang Butterfly, the relatively innocuous pop single that knocked Elvis Presley off of #1 on the charts for the first time, and then delivered an absolutely sizzling guitar instrumental. If anything, he’s twice as good as he was fifty years ago: something to aspire to. Dale Hawkins reminded the crowd how important gospel was to early rock, leading the crowd in a singalong with a jaunty version of his signature song Susie Q (a gospel ripoff, he explained), strikingly similar to the Creedence cover. In a particularly talkative mood, he demonstrated how Willie Dixon turned a Sister Rosetta Tharp gospel number into My Baby Don’t Stand No Fooling (a hit for both Hawkins and Little Walter). He also led the band through a particularly soulful version of the Ray Charles classic I Got a Woman, complete with an excellent harmonica solo from the drummer and an even more energetic one from Keys.

The night’s only Branson moments came toward the end, when 60s Texas white funk singer Roy Head – who seemed pretty drunk – took the stage and did a forgettable James Brown impersonation. Naturally, it was this clown that the crowd decided to get up and dance to. At the end, the whole crew wrapped it up with a medley, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (a final nod to the bluegrass influence in early rock) and then a singalong on Amazing Grace. A clinic in American music from some of its more inspired practitioners.