Off Topic Saints Not606 Music Thread

I totally agree. I know a lot of excellent young musicians, most of whom weren’t born when people like Peter Green were in their pomp, but who still quote Green, Gallagher, Clapton, Hendrix, and also the Robert Johnsons and T Bone Walkers, as major influences, not just on their style of play, but in getting them playing in the first place.

Sorry Ian, I appreciate the point you are making, but you are mistaken here. The blues lives on, and will do forever.

 

R.I.P. Denise...

 

RIP Denise

 

Blimey - that’s no age. So many going so young

 

The times we are living through would be familiar to Arlo’s father, but with songs like this Stephen Foster classic and musicians like Arlo, Jim Wilson, Vanessa Bryan, Stanley Clarke et al, there is still hope.

 

Bournemouth's finest

 

Siouxsie and the Banshees in German for a German audience. Tight as a drum performance from the original line-up and she's looking great too!

 

Did you know that in the famous motorcycle chase the German chasing Hilts was also played by Steve McQueen?

 

https://images.app.goo.gl/EAjTTL6oJsw49HDx6

 

About a year ago I read a fascinating book called "Swingin' the dream" by Lewis A. Erenberg which was effectively about the social impact of big bands in America from the early thirties through to the advent of Be-bop in the mid -forties. The chapters which really interested me concerned the politics in America during the 1930s and, particularly, just how much traction the American Communist Party had within popular culture at the time. It is really fascinating discovering how interlinked the popular music of yesteryear was with radical politics and although the likes of the Lomax's , Peter Seeger , Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly had a massive following amongst the intellectual Left of the time in America,. I was really surprised to find some of the more "mainstream" big band leaders and their musicians were strong advocates of the Left. In some instances such as the clarinetist / bandleader, there were simultaneously supporting Left wing causes financially too. Some musicians such as Teddy Wilson were, if not communists, had a strong sympathy for the communist movement. The most famous politicized jazz musician of this time was trumpeter Frankie Newton whose name was appropriated by the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm when writing about jazz in the 1950s/ 60s. Many bandleaders , both black and white, were also involved in proto-civil rights movements as well as supporting Republican causes in the Spanish Civil War. A lot of this support was quite explicit. Goodman's involvement was much closer than I had imagined despite his well known association with his brother-in-law, the radical music promoter John Hammond. (Hammond regularly worked with the Communist Party and was also keen to support radical left wing causes including strikes whilst at the same time promoting the careers of the likes of Count Basie and Billie Holiday. )So whilst the connection between the emerging folk music scene of the late 1930s and the Left has always seemed to be clear cut in my perception, there were elements within the big band scene at the same time where the links were even more explicit, especially as many of the bandleaders would have enjoyed a far greater profile and earned more money than obscurantist folk acts whose popularity only increased post-War. Until I had read Erenberg's book, I was totally unaware of this fact. By the late 1950s and throughout the 60s and 70s, jazz became noticeably more radical , especially with regard to racial equality with some very famous albums like Sonny Rollin's "Freedom Suite" or Max Roach's "We insist, Freedom now!" standing as testament to this struggle The fact that there were similar stirrings in jazz in the mid-late thirties is largely neglected even if the Traditionalist revival movement of the following decade and onwards was often re-cast as recreating a past untainted by commerciality and rather falsely perceived to be another form of folk music.

The books can be picked up second hand and I would recommend it as a piece of social history which explains the impact of the Swing Era on American culture which only started to take a more obvious turn towards the "Right" when America entered the war and the government managed to manipulate big bands to portray a more wholesome image than they had five years beforehand. This is best typified by the very commercial bands such as Glenn Miller's.

It struck me how little appreciated it is that the folk and blues boom which started in the late thirties and became fully flowered in the 50s and 60s was not the first attempt at moulding music and politics together in the 20th century. Whilst you can see the likes of Seeger and Guthrie as the white equivalent of country blues artists, I feel that they were more political than their black counterparts whose music reflected everyday life in a matter -of-fact style , making musical protest or recorded suggestive songs whose meanings would have been lost on a contemporary white audience. When there are examples such as the likes of Skip James' "Hard time, killing floor blues", it is not so much a protest song as recording the chilling facts of life for the Black community at that time. For me, these country blues artists were poets and social historians combined. I don't feel that blues became "politicized " as being "Left Wing" until picked up by white audiences some 30 years after the records were originally made. You can also argue that the blues themselves may have been performed by country musicians but that this was not a "folk" music, rather the reiteration of the Blues craze from the early 1920s and therefore an example of pop music emerging outside the main urban areas. I would recommend Elijah Wald's excellent book on the blues if you want to follow this up. There isn't much evidence for blues being widespread in the country states prior to the early 20's or at least at the level when the blues came into vogue.

It is a fascinating topic and I suppose goes to show that "country musicians" need not necessarily be voices for the politics of the communities they represent and, conversely, seemingly "commercial / urban" jazz musicians might be far more radical and political than anyone could have anticipated.

 

Alice Cooper Eleanor Rigby

 

Hello Goodbye The Cure with James McCartney. God does James look like his dad

 

Phil Collins with George Martin. I loved this

 

In a total 80s mood tonight (when is it any different!)

An apt song for today/tonight

 

And still stuck in the 80s...my daughter just called and my phone did this:

 

I am halfway through a terrific book which I think will interest a lot of people on this board. The books is by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow and is called "Up jumped the Devil: The real life of Robert Johnson."

The book is the culmination of 50 year's research and commences by looking at the factors which led Robert Johnson to be so revered. Apparently the mystique regarding him stemmed from the issue of an LP in 1959 which was effectively the first time the work of a classic, acoustic blues artist had been re-issued since originally released on 78 rpms. Once this introduction is over, the biography begins and quite a significant amount of information is released. I think this book is as interesting as a similar effort I read about 10 years ago about Blind Willie McTell, probably my favourite of all these blues musicians. This book is impossible to put down and makes Robert Johnson as real person. What I like most about it is that the research is thorough enough to debunk a lot of the stories about Johnson told by contemporaries such as Son House which is found to be totally unreliable. If you like, the book strips away the myth to reveal his true if no less tragic life. The end of the book explains how Johnson met his end.

I think there will be a few such as Dave and Chilco who will find themselves unable to resist the need to snap up a copy/ I am halfway through and thoroughly recommend it.