More great tunes partly inspired by anniversaries of what my dear old mum used to refer to as “hatches, matches and dispatches”. Enjoy!
Grow As We Go – Ben Platt (2019)
We were at our second wedding of the month last weekend – this time it was my niece getting married to her school sweetheart on a hot sunny day in a great venue on a farm deep in the beautiful Ayrshire countryside. It was a fantastic day and Lisa and Martin had organised a ceremony and a celebration which was totally unique to them.
As young teenagers, their first date was to see Jack Black and Kyle Glass perform as Tenacious D in Glasgow and their love of music featured heavily throughout the day’s events. The table plan for the meal was done using a rack of their favourite CD covers with the top table being Tenacious D, of course. Lisa’s brother Steven had replaced the track listing on the sleeves with the names of the guests, brilliantly mimicking the original font which really appealed to my trainspotter tendencies. It was the first wedding meal I’d ever eaten where a Pixies track was playing on the bride and groom’s selected incidental background music – Where Is My Mind from Surfer Rosa, the LP featured on last week’s blog. And, each place setting had a festival type wrist-band as a souvenir where there was a QR code to scan which loaded up their carefully curated evening playlist on your phone.
Although there was some quirky stuff on there (Limp Bizkit and the aforementioned Tenacious D), a wide range of well-known tunes got the dance floor packed. While there was some Rick Astley, Elton John and Abba aimed at the older attendees, those of a younger heart (including your correspondent) had fun throwing some shapes to the late 90s/early 00s power pop classics that my kids loved – Sk8er Boi, Stacy’s Mom, Teenage Dirtbag and, of course, Crashed The Wedding. Next day, as one of the walking wounded, I discovered that while my heart was young, my knees certainly were not. Ouch!
But before all that madness, the evening began with a first dance to a favourite song of the bride and groom that I didn’t know – Grow As We Go from the 2019 debut album by Dear Evan Hansen actor and singer/songwriter Ben Platt. Except that it wasn’t. Although the happy couple had agreed on the tune, what Martin didn’t know was that Lisa’s father Stuart had recorded a version of her singing the song with the guitar part being played by Lisa’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law Ross – a real family production! Lisa has a beautiful voice and there was barely a dry-eye in the place. I can’t replicate that version here but I have playlisted the original as a musical memory from a great day.
King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown – Augustus Pablo (1976)
Having led with a reasonably rare choice from the ‘matches’ section of this august publication, we move swiftly on with a fantastic tune related to the more usual ‘dispatches’ anniversary choice. I see that 18 May marked the day that Jamaican record producer Augustus Pablo died from a collapsed lung at the age of just 45 in 1999.
Born Horace Michael Swaby in St Andrew Jamaica in 1953, he learned organ and melodica at school and would go on to popularise this simple children’s instrument in reggae. Changing his name to Augustus Pablo, he recorded a number of instrumental tracks for Aquarius Records and his career took off when his melodica led tune Java was a big hit in Jamaica 1972. He formed a number of labels and by the mid 70s he was producing and playing on a steady stream of records such that in his short life, he was incredibly prolific – Discogs lists 38 studio albums, 42 compilation albums and 254 singles with his name on them!
Along with the likes of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby, he was crucial to the development of dub in reggae, where songs were remixed to emphasise the drum and bass track (the ‘riddim’), adding extra echo and reverb and only using snippets of the original vocal. Sometimes vocals and sounds from other records were looped into the remix in an early form of sampling. Pablo frequently used his melodica in this process.
In 1974, Pablo co-wrote and produced a song called Baby I love You So with Jacob Miller and then worked up a brilliant dub version of the tune. He chose to give it the incredibly cool name of King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown, referencing both his fellow dub producer and the name of his brother Garth Swaby’s sound system, Rockers. I first heard this tune when reggae was blasted out over PA systems before punk gigs and it sent me scarpering off to a record shop to buy it. Widely regarded as one of the finest examples of dub ever recorded, it sounds amazing when pushed loudly through large gig speakers and, to my ears at least, is hugely evocative of the late 70s.
Find My Baby – Moby (1999)
On to a release anniversary now. On 19 May 1999, Moby released what he expected to be his final LP Play. Ten years earlier, in 1989, the bald-headed, vegan, electro-dance DJ had moved back to his birthplace New York after trying to develop his music career in Connecticut where he grew up playing in bands and DJ-ing. He got a record deal but his first single did nothing apart from provide him with the opportunity to remix its b-side and get himself a huge hit out of it. Go made the top 10 in the UK in 1991 and the trick in the remix was to build it around string samples from Angelo Badalamenti’s Laura Palmer’s Theme from the wildly successful David Lynch TV series Twin Peaks.
For the next five years, he had some reasonably modest dance hits, produced and remixed songs for others and performed worldwide. In 1996, he decided to shift his musical focus towards his activism, releasing a guitar-based collection of rock tunes on the LP Animal Rights. It bombed critically and commercially and Play was therefore going to be his swansong before heading back to Connecticut. Conceived as a return to electronic music, he sampled ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax’s famous archive of field recordings of old blues and gospel singers in the US Library of Congress and paired these with low-key ambient beats.
As he expected, nobody was really that interested on the record’s release – it sold only 1,000 copies worldwide in the week it came out. Before chucking the towel in, he decided to licence every track on the record for independent movies and TV shows as well as commercials (Bodyrock sold Rolling Rock Beer and Find My Baby was used by American Express). He began to release the tracks as singles and as a result of their licencing, they slowly started to sell in ever increasing numbers in the UK. This peaked with Porcelain which reached No 5 in April 2000 following Danny Boyle using it in his De Caprio movie The Beach. Apart from Southside, which featured Gwen Stefani, none of the singles charted in the US.
I’ve chosen to playlist Find My Baby which was the ninth and final single from the album which everyone already had bought so no-one needed to buy the single. It’s built around a vocal sample from Boy Blue’s Joe Lee’s Rock which Lomax recorded in 1959 at the Old Whisky Store, a bar in Hughes, Arkansas where B.B. King was also known to play.
A year after its release, Play was selling 150,000 copies a week globally and went on to become the biggest selling electronica album of all time. Moby never did go back to Connecticut…
Substitute – The Who (1966)
We’re moving on to a ‘hatch’ anniversary now with the birth of Pete Townsend in Chiswick in West London on 19 May 1945, just as the Second World War was reaching an end. That would make him 20 years old when he wrote My Generation. So, now he is 79, I guess his hope about dying before he gets old was a forlorn one. Although still treading the boards to this day (doing two Teenage Cancer Trust gigs in March), it also made me smile to see he won a Brit Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1983 – when he was 43! To be fair, other than three unremarkable solo albums in late 80s/early 90s and a couple of so-called “Who” albums with Roger Daltrey in 2006 and 2019, he has not done a huge amount since then. So maybe the Brits got it about right.
There is no argument that The Who were one of the most influential rock bands of the 60s and early 70s and that Townsend’s aggressive playing style and his songwriting craft contributed hugely to this. I only saw live them once on their 1976 ‘Put The Boot In’ tour of three UK football stadiums which included Parkhead in Glasgow. Past their recording peak – midway between the band average Who By Numbers and the poor Who Are You albums – at least I got to see the original line-up perform, with a set that had a big chunk of Tommy in it, as well as Baba O’Riley, Summertime Blues and the glorious Won’t Get Fooled Again. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t their idea to have to follow The Sensational Alex Harvey Band on to the stage. In Glasgow. Even though they too were peaking by that point in their career, Alex had the home crowd eating out of his hairy hand.
In terms of their much-loved 60s output, The Who opened that evening in Glasgow with their timeless debut single I Can’t Explain and followed it with fourth single Substitute, both top ten UK hits. Swithering between the two to mark Townsend’s birthday, I’m going to playlist the latter in all it’s muscular glory. With the title inspired by a line in Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks of My Tears, it was released as a stand-alone single on their new Reaction label in March 1966. It opens with an acoustic riff which is soon squeezed inbetween the booming rumble of John Entwhistle’s bass and the clattering of Keith Moon’s drums – listen closely for him roaring over his fill at 2:40. Townsend’s intelligent lyric asks complex questions of mid 60s identity with his harmony vocal to Daltrey’s melody sets off the verse imagery perfectly. And “I look all white, but my dad was black/My fine-looking suit is really made out of sack” is a killer pay-off line.
Not Ready To Make Nice – The Chicks (2006)
Eighteen years ago this week, the band then known as Dixie Chicks released their seventh studio album Taking The Long Way. As well as being their most successful record both in commercial and critical terms, it was also the last record to use their original name. After a long hiatus they marked their return recording in 2020 by removing the reference to Dixie in their name due to its connotations of slavery in the US. The band said they had picked “that stupid name” as teenagers in the 1980s, and had wanted to change it for years. They finally decided to act when they saw the Confederate flag described as ‘the Dixie Swastika’ on social media in June 2020.
They were no strangers to taking a political stance, though. On the back of their successful cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, the band were touring their 2002 LP Home in Europe as the Iraq war was looming. As they introduced their song Travellin’ Soldier at their first show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in March 2003, singer Natalie Maines told the audience that the band did not endorse the war and were ashamed of President George W. Bush being from Texas. This was reported in the UK press and was a cue for an almighty furore back in the country establishment of the US with media boycotts and a backlash from fans. Their record sales dropped as they got blacklisted from radio stations and, in the absence of social media, fans sent old-fashioned hate-mail to the band, some including death threats. There were public spats with right wing country artists like Toby Keith who performed with a mocked-up picture of Maines alongside Saddam Hussein. But there was also support for them on a ‘freedom of speech’ platform from the likes of Al Gore and Bruce Springsteen.
It was a traumatic time and it’s probably no surprise that their next recording reflected this period. And right at the heart of the Taking The Long Way album was the amazing Not Ready To Make Nice. A blistering but beautifully melodic riposte with a powerful lyric that leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that they were unapologetic for their stance. Musically it starts with understated instrumentation at odds with the lyric in the verses before the intensity builds through that wonderfully forthright chorus about still being “as mad as hell“. Another verse and then the song lurches into glorious overdrive on the melody as the bridge section builds and builds to Maines’ declamatory “And how in the world can the words that I said/Send somebody so over the edge/That they’d write me a letter/Saying that I’d better/Shut up and sing or my life will be over”. As she holds that last note, the strings explode around her and we’re into an extended chorus section as Maines vocal soars to new heights in the background. The beauty of this aural attack is the way the song calms again towards the end and finally closes with the gently sung but cutting: “Forgive, sounds good/Forget, I’m not sure I could/They say time heals everything/But I’m still waiting”.
Quite simply, it’s a songwriting masterclass that thrills me every time I hear it.
Things Have Changed – Bob Dylan (2000)
One final ‘hatch’ anniversary before we finish this week and it’s another old bloke. Not just any old bloke, though. Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on 24 May 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota making him 83 years old today. Slightly surprisingly, this will be the first appearance on the blog of his idiosyncratic voice, although last year I did a Dylan theme week, playlisting six of his tunes covered by female artists. WIS 12May23 discussed both Dylan’s originals and the covers and Zimmy fans who have subscribed to the blog since then might want to click the link and catch up with it.
In that blog, I noted a certain apprehension about writing about Dylan given how much as been written about him and his music over his 67-year career and the same feeling persists now. However, unlike Pete Townsend above, I’ve decided to avoid venturing into his early career ‘classic’ period and also to turn a blind eye to his rollercoaster middle age releases with their critical highs and lows. To this end, I’ve chosen to playlist the first recording that one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians released in the 21st century.
Having ended the previous decade on a critical high with the atmospheric Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out Of Mind, Dylan implemented a stylistic volte-face for Things Have Changed. It was recorded in New York the previous summer as Dylan was touring the US with Paul Simon. He had the song roughly shaped out and, during a day off, he took the touring band into Sony Studios where they learned, recorded and mixed the track in five hours. They put down two takes, one in a New Orleans shuffle style and the one that was released. Dylan and engineer Chris Shaw did what the latter thought was a rough mix on the day. But Dylan made it the final mix as he was determined to move to a more ‘live’ sound than the effect-laden one created by Lanois a couple of years earlier. And it’s this sound that has persisted in all of his self-produced recordings since then.
Dylan had written Things Have Changed specifically for the soundtrack of the Curtis Hanson movie Wonder Boys starring Michael Douglas. Hanson was a fan and the movie featured three more of Dylan’s songs including the brilliant Not Dark Yet from the aforementioned Time Out Of Mind album. Things Have Changed manages to combine a musical lightness of touch (despite its percussive bluesy stomp) with a darker minor-key melody and some doom-laden lyrics: “Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose/Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose”. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year and Hanson shot the promotional video for it’s release as a single using film locations and editing in clips from the film, making it appear that Dylan was actually in the movie.
Last Word
Last week I confirmed a couple of guest blogs for June which is also the month that Lynn and I (along with our festival buddies John and Alison) will be returning in our van to Black Deer in Elridge Park in Kent. So, sandwiched between the two guest blogs, Friday 21 June will provide a review of all the bands we have seen the weekend before with six of the best tracks in the playlist. I’m hoping the bloody rain which returned this week is gone again by then…
Before I am accused of being an old git again, I can confirm that the Master Playlist has been updated with this week’s tunes and is waiting for you in the usual place.
AR
Week In Sound 
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