Back to life, back to reality, as the song goes. Picking up the pen again after some time away and hoping I’ve not forgotten how to do this. Enjoy!
First Word
I want to start by thanking all the guest blog contributors over the last few weeks for filling the airwaves with their terrific tunes – I thoroughly enjoyed them all. Who couldn’t love Marion’s clinical dissection of her LA cuts and Dave Heatley’s Dickensian stroll around the backstreets of a soulful capital city? And what about Stuart’s pithy walk through the eclectic highlights from his record collection or Mick Lynch’s witty and insightful Australian cultural history lesson? And then there was Fraser’s fantastic finale last week – I still can’t get the hooks from the Barry Can’t Swim and Beth Orton/Terry Callier songs out of my head. If you missed out on any of these blogs then they are only a click away on the link at each name. All well worth exploring.
Volver Volver – Los Lobos (1984)
I’m starting back with a track that I should have included on the Mexico edition of the blog (WIS24Jan25) issued before we went on our travels. What is clear from our time out there is that Mexicans love their music – you hear recorded music blasting out from nearly every bar or shop and live music of all types being played on many street corners and around the tables of restaurants, as buskers of all styles ply their trade. As we ate one night out west in Loreto on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, the tables in our restaurant were being serenaded by a duo singing traditional music. About thirty seconds into one song, I realised that I knew it as a Los Lobos song which I first heard and loved as the final track on the 1985 NME tape called Tape Worm (NME17).
T’internet tells me Volver Volver is a ranchera song written in 1972 by Fernando Maldonado and made popular by Vicente Fernández in 1973. In addition to East LA band Los Lobos, many other artists have covered it including Ry Cooder and Nana Mouskouri! You can hear Los Lobos lead singer David Hildago introducing the track as a “Mexican blues” on the playlisted live version. The recording comes from the same period as the live recording on the NME tape, just as the band’s first major label album How Will the Wolf Survive? was gathering critical praise in 1984.
A very well known song in Mexico, Volver Volver is seen as the anthem of lost love with volver meaning return in Spanish. Sung passionately, the emotional lyric resonates with broken-hearted longing for a return to the arms of an old lover: “Este amor apasionado/anda todo alborotado, por volver”. The best translation I can find online is “This impassioned love/goes on, compelling me to return” but it sounds so much better in Spanish with the swelling accordions, burbling bass and the occasional wailing in the background. One from the heart, indeed.
Trombone – Nick Lowe (2019)
Gig tickets go on sale earlier and earlier these days and it is not that uncommon to be asked to pay handsomely for your night’s entertainment a year in advance. I don’t know when I arranged with my pal Ken to get tickets for Nick Lowe’s gig at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow but it was certainly before plans for our trip to Mexico evolved. Sadly, due to timing and flight availability, the gig was a casualty of the holiday. There was a slight irony in this as Lowe was performing with his now regular collaborators, Los Straitjackets, a Nashville-based instrumental band who appear on stage wearing dark suits and personalised Mexican wrestling masks. Wrestling is huge over there and, although we never saw a bout, there were stalls selling masks in every market
Lowe featured on the blog not that long ago as I was reading his highly entertaining biography. This time, to mark missing the gig, I’m playlisting a track from the latter part of his career, where he has adapted his sound to a more mellow, acoustic “countrified crooning” style. His brilliant songwriting remains as sharp as ever and, to prove this point, I present the wonderful Trombone from an EP he released with Los Straitjackets in 2019. Another tale of lost love, it’s a beautifully constructed sixties-style brass-inflected pop tune which one review noted might be the saddest song ever written about a valve instrument. Musically, it shuffles along nicely and the guitars tastefully twang throughout, while the muted blasts of the titular instrument are played splendidly by Duane Benjamin.
The wryly observational lyric is simple and, wrapped delicately around the melody, it floats gently into your head and stays there. By the time he gets to the last verse, he’s even describing his song-writing process: “Spilling from an upper story/Comes a half-remembered melody/And I’m whistling the missing harmony/In B, or C, oh please!”. Talking of which, try stopping yourself joining in on the terrific harmony in the second and third chorus: “Trombone, come play your song/Make it the one about good love gone wrong”. But maybe that’s just me…
Walk A Mile In My Shoes – Bryan Ferry (1974)
Like many people, I spent last Friday evening in a state of shock having watched the live coverage from the White House of Volodymyr Zelensky being ambushed by Trump and Vance. It was macarbe theatre set up for the cameras with the clear intent to gang up on the Ukrainian president to arrogantly shout him down and humiliate him. It was the politics of the playground where Trump the bully had picked a fight with his gang gathered all around him. Vance’s intervention (incredibly on Zelensky’s lack of respect – huh?) was like one of the bully’s cowardly mates running in to get a kick in while the bully was pummelling his victim. It was a depressing spectacle and left me feeling slightly sick for the rest of the evening.
Later on, I used BBC Sounds to tune into Radio Foyle for what used to be called The Mickey Bradley Record Show but now labours under what someone must have thought was a better title, The Late Show with Mickey Bradley. He still plays great records though, and his witty chat that evening cheered me up immensely. Like this humble blog, he often uses anniversaries to choose his tunes and on Friday he was marking the birthday of the lesser-known American singer-songwriter Joe South. South was a prominent sideman, playing bass on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, guitar on Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and the great tremelo guitar intro to Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools (see WIS 31Mar23). Under his own name, he is best known for his much-covered hit song Games People Play from 1969.
Mickey played that tune on the show but he also played two of the many Joe South songs that have been covered by others. Firstly, Kula Shaker’s hit single version of Hush from 1997, which was also covered by Deep Purple in 1968 and features on WIS 26Apr24. He then played Bryan Ferry’s version of South’s Walk A Mile In My Shoes which appeared on Ferry’s 1974 covers album Another Time, Another Place. Back then, I was only aware of the singles from that record, so I was hearing the Joe South tune for the first time. I was immediately struck by how perfectly the lyrics fitted the events in the Oval Office that evening from Zelensky’s point of view – give them a listen and you’ll see what I mean.
I went to bed that night with the chorus ringing in my ears: “Walk a mile in my shoes/Walk a mile in my shoes/And before you abuse, criticize and accuse/Walk a mile in my shoes”.
Strange Town – The Jam (1979)
I had arrived back in London to hear that drummer Rick Buckler had died as we were traveling across the Atlantic. It seemed an appropriate place to be as, although The Jam were famously from Woking in Surrey, to a seventeen-year-old boy from Paisley that might as well have been London. Formed at school in 1972, they had evolved into a dynamic three piece of Buckler, Bruce Foxton and Paul Weller by the middle of the decade and exploded into my life in 1977 when In The City (WIS 3 May24) became the first of 18 consecutive top forty singles released before Weller split the group.
Buckler was not a dazzling drummer – he has referenced Ringo Starr in discussing his playing style – but, to my ears, his work was what gave the band’s songs their “Snap”, the title of their post-break-up singles compilation album. Singles were important to the band and their fans, with nine of their eighteen releases not appearing on their LPs. And it is a ‘non-album single’ that I am turning to for my playlist choice as it shot straight into my head as I crossed London from the airport. “Found myself in a strange town/Though I’ve only been here for three weeks now/I’ve got blisters on my feet/Trying to find a friend in Oxford Street”.
Strange Town was one of two singles released in 1979 between their third and fourth albums, All Mod Cons and Setting Sons. Both it and When You’re Young sold enough to reach the top twenty (Nos 15 and 17 respectively) but this was the band on the cusp of becoming hugely popular and having 4 No1 singles in the next two years. A pounding tale of suburban anxiety but to my ears the backing vocals lend it an oddly wistful feel. Weller varies the time signatures throughout and this is particularly notable on the extended coda where Butler’s drumming really stands out. In 2015, Weller suggested Strange Town was one of the best songs he had written but I’ll leave the last word on the tune to Buckler himself who listed the tune among his favourites saying:
“This is a really driving song, married with the lyrical content of finding yourself as a stranger in a strange town – I just loved playing this one live. It always went down really well, and I’ve got some great memories of it.” RIP Rick.
170 – Anna Erhard (2023)
During the course of this week, it kinda dawned on me why I enjoyed the guest blogs over the last month or so. Most of the songs that I playlist and write about are chosen because they are known to me in some way or another – essentially so there is something that I can hang a story on. A good number of the guest blog tracks were new to me so I had the fun of hearing them for the first time with the added bonus of some incisive and witty commentary on the tunes from people whose taste in music generally matches mine. I’m hoping that this enjoyment is what others get when they find something in my blogs they like and they haven’t heard before – it’s certainly what I’m aiming for.
And now I’m thinking what if I didn’t know the song or the artist and had a story ready? What if I just playlist it because I liked it on first hearing? You’ll not be surprised to hear I keep a series of playlists where I add songs I discover through other playlists or hear on the radio or on TV soundtracks – Shazam is a handy app! I rarely give these tunes a deep dive, but I thought I’d start throwing a few of these “new to me” tracks randomly into the blog, starting with this oddity of a single from Anna Erhard. It seems to be all about an argument over her friend’s height and its enjoyable quirkiness really caught my ear.
Her Spotify ‘About the Artist’ section explains: “Berlin-based Swiss artist Anna Erhard writes songs somewhere between the spirit of Kurt Vile and early Beck, with an eclectic mix of distorted guitars and lo-fi keyboards. With characteristic nonchalance, she performs mischievous lyrics, setting her everyday life and her wanderings to music”. That sounds about right to me. And I think there will be more of these ‘New To Me’ songs dropped into the blog in the weeks ahead.
Funky But Chic – David Johansen (1978)
The passing of legendary New York Dolls singer David Johansen was announced this week and I wanted to mark the event. At 75, Johansen was the last surviving member of the band, his relative longevity flying in the face of their live fast, die young attitude in the early 1970s. With their first drummer Billy Murcia drowning in a bath while out his head on methaqualone and alcohol in 1972 before the band had even released a record, it is a wonder that Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain lived until the 2020s. That fellow guitarist Johnny Thunders made it to 1991 was nothing short of miraculous. The original line-up (with Jerry Nolan on drums) was only together until 1975 releasing two acclaimed albums, the second of which was presciently titled Too Much Too Soon. However, Johansen and Slyvain got back together and fronted a version of the band which toured and recorded three albums between 2004 and 2011.
The Dolls have appeared on the blog a couple of times in the past where I have wittered on about the proto-punk credentials and the glorious shambolic androgyny of the original line-up. On each occasion, I playlisted tracks from their seminal self-titled 1973 debut LP; firstly the Shangris-Las referencing Looking For A Kiss on WIS 6Oct23 and the iconic blast that is Personality Crisis on WIS 12Jan24. I was going to reach for another track, possibly the atypical low-key Lonely Planet Boy penned by Johansen, but I’ve opted for a song from his 1978 debut solo album, Funky But Chic. I only discovered this about five years ago and love the way the rhythm swings but the tune retains an underlying NYD rock feel, with co-writer Sylvain’s guitar all over it. The reformed Dolls re-recorded the song in 2011 but I prefer the 1978 solo version with the youthful exuberance still in Johansen’s unmistakable voice.
Fascinating Fact: The untimely demise of Billy Murcia is referenced in the lyric of David Bowie’s Time from Aladdin Sane – “Time – in quaaludes and red wine/Demanding Billy Dolls/And other friends of mine/Take your time”. I’ve been singing along not understanding that line for 50 years.
Last Word
Well, it turns out that working on WIS is just like riding a bike – you sit back down in front of the laptop and it just happens. Having slipped quietly past the second anniversary of spewing out all this stuff a couple of weeks back, maybe it’s not that surprising.
And we are now well into the 600s on the Master Playlist with 48 hours of music now on the horizon for some time at the end of the Spring, which (whisper it) seems to be underway now. Huzzah!
AR
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