Well this was a thoroughly enjoyable 50 minutes, there is some major talent on the stage by the end of the show...
I watched a fascinating documentary about Elvis Presley last night on BBC4. I have to admit that I know practically nothing about his music although I was aware that his early material was heavily indebted to blues and Black popular music. What little I had heard and seen always gave me the impression that he was incredibly kitsch and effectively ended up becoming a parody of himself. The documentary was framed along the context of his attempt to revive his career in the late sixties in the wake of bands such as The Beatles and the emerging counter-culture of the time. Effectively, it concerned attempts to make Presley sound relevant. What was interesting was that anything that he seemed to do which was "good", appeared to have been contrary to the advice of his manager, Col. Tom Parker. I was not aware how influenced Elvis had been by another popular singer of the day called Roy Hamilton nor the level of respect with which he had held him. The whole programme was a revelation to me as most of this was new as far as I was concerned. An attempt to cut and paste Presley with the more "modern" Memphis sound appeared to have been an artistic success yet Parker prevented any attempt at a follow up due to a dispute over royalty rights. Ultimately, Presley ended up performing endless gigs in Las Vegas , initially with critical acclaim before becoming totally bored by the process. It was a fascinating programme, in my opinion, because this was all new to me. What was interesting was that although his career was successfully revived, it struck me that he never managed to come up with a permanent solution to sounding "modern." He was a talented singer and ended up fronting what was effectively a really tight big band including backing singers. By this point the musical production behind him was very professional and well played although often undone by some incredibly corny material such as a mish-mash of popular American theme including "Dixie." With the hindsight of fifty years, these latter performances are probably played by better musicians than he had had backing him previously but seem almost like a pastiche and irrelevant if you consider what else was happening in popular music at the time of the late sixties / mid seventies. (Thinking about bands / musicians like E,W&F, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, NY Loft scene, etc.) Instead of making Presley relevant, he was recast as decidedly middle-of-the-road. Not knowing this story before, I was left wondering whether any other manager has ever been so detrimental to a musician's artistic output. Some of the clips from Presley's films were used as examples as to how Parker's crass and overbearing demands for royalties ensured that no decent songwriters would associate themselves with Presley. Given Presley's inability to write his own material, this meant employing some decidedly second rate songwriters which subsequently had a detrimental effect on his popularity after the early 1960's. No one believed in the material he was given to perform. This was a really good documentary and a fascinating insight into how an attempt to make a musician's work more commercial can backfire. As a fan of jazz and blues, the earlier material which kick-started his career definitely shares an affinity with some blues artists I enjoy. After that and excluding the brief flirtation with Memphis, the documentary was a salutary lesson in letting a non-musician making artistic decisions. In every case cited in the documentary, whenever Presley rejected the advice, the consequence was to the betterment of his work. Having been totally unaware of a lot of his work, I felt this documentary was very interesting even if the music did make me wince more than once.
He's Belgian. The song used a lot of very obscure slang from the 70s that nobody really remembers, and as a result it's virtually impossible to get an accurate translation as everybody interprets the slang meaning differently. The face of "Plastique Bertrand" was a drummer called Roger Jouret who didn't even sing it, and apparently the vocal is by a producer. Here's the story below. Great track though. https://dangerousminds.net/comments...lastic_bertrands_immortal_1977_euro-punk_anth
The music made Elvis wince sometimes too. I love this version of one of his greatest hits, ruined by an over-enthusiastic and completely oblivious backing singer. The King battles on to the end though:
I love a lot of the music Elvis created. This is one of my all time favourite Elvis songs and it would seem to be appropriate for the days we are all living through .....
With the country covered with rainbows in appreciation of all the fabulous people involved in our caring professions it seems like a good idea to join in with a musical rainbow from the evergreen Robert Plant. Not bad Robert, not bad at all .....
I can’t believe this song is 50 years old! Guaranteed to brighten your day anytime, but this version rocks like a rocky thing from the land of Rock.
I had no idea that this tune was a cover but I like the version of this song by Cassandra Wilson. I love the fact that she often covers a lot of pop material , especially by white artists and manages to add something to the tunes. I have heard her do this will songs by such unrelated artists as U2, The Monkees and Bob Dylan.
Written by Robbie Robertson, first appeared on The Band’s first album “Music from Big Pink” in 1968. An absolute classic.
One of the first numbers Andy Sheppard learnt on tenor sax and performed with his first band Sphere was a Steely Dan song, Do It Again.
Hear is the original from 1927.... I find this to be a strangely haunting tune. The minor saxophone motif behind the soloists is really effective. This tune continued in the Duke's repertoire right up until the late 1960s although made more modern,
I used to work with a bloke who was a neighbour of Andy Sheppard in Salisbury before used swapped trying to sound like Hendrix on a guitar for a tenor. At one stage he was a regular visitor to Southampton with Sphere and the bassist Pete Maxfield still lives in the area. (He played up the road in The Kings Head, Hursley, a few years back.) I cannot recall the last time I heard Andy Sheppard although I am guessing it must have been with Carla Bley's group at Vienne sometime in the 2000s'.
I knew Andy from the days he used to get up on stage at 14 years old and do the whole of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. One day he sold his Gibson J200 acoustic guitar and bought a tenor sax, having never played one before. 3 weeks later he fronted Sphere’s first gig! I knew all the guys in Sphere quite well in those days, especially Pete, and Geoff Williams the piano player. I even went to Andy’s wedding in Paris, where he lived for a while. One day I was driving from Winchester back to Salisbury and picked up a guy hitchhiking. He turned out to be a jazz trumpeter called Dave Defries, and so I took him round to the Sphere house in Milton Road and introduced him to the guys. I believe they have worked together a bit over the years. Andy still lives in Bristol I believe, but I haven’t seen him for years.
