College Collage Setlist – 9/9/07

A sequel of sorts to my crate THE GREATEST DECADE, this includes music from the 1970-1976 period (just before, during and just after my college years), from artists I loved (the Allmans, Van the Man) and some (Nick Drake) I only discovered later.

Current Bluebeat Ranking: 115th

Created: 19 months ago

Last Changed: 19 months ago

Running time of contents: approx. 204 hours

The music of College Collage is what one might have heard in a college dorm or fraternity during the early-to-mid 1970s when I was studying at the university. The 1960s had brought about a permanent transformation in the nature and even the function of popular music. In addition, at the beginning of the following decade, the tyranny of the pop single was finally losing its grip on the marketplace and the LP was in ascendance. The upshot was that songs in general began to get much longer and looser and funkier. You can find the contents of College Collage here.

I find it amazing how many of the artists listed below still have viable careers over thirty years later. I guess a lot of people, like me, are still fiercely loyal to the music of our youth.

Remember that, for the following "setlist," the computer is "selecting" the songs, not me. If you're a Bluebeat subscriber, you can listen to your own "setlist" from this radio station by clicking here.

• Hot Pants Finale – James Brown (Make It Funky: The Big Payback 1971-1975) – The Big Payback, indeed! The innovations that the late, great Godfather of Soul introduced into pop music in the ‘Sixties paid off handsomely in the early 1970s, when funk (which he’d helped invent) became a hugely profitable and influential genre. It’s still a great pleasure to listen to Brown and the other musicians egging each other on to more and more intense playing and singing. However, I could have lived without the M.C. on this track announcing “Let’s hear it for James Brown: Soul Brother Number One!” about fifteen times (literally).
• If It’s Magic – Stevie Wonder (Songs in the Key of Life) – Wonder’s dead-on mastery of the romantic ballad, particularly on this album, is truly magical. (He developed a taste for such material during his early days at Motown, under the tutelage of his mentor, Clarence Paul, who trained him to sing traditional pop styles.) Here, accompanied only by a single musician, Dorothy Ashby (on harp!), Wonder reveals his Achilles heel – his banal and often awkward lyrics – but the lovely melody and his beautiful phrasing truly evoke the wonder of life that the song seems to be about.
• Redwood Tree – Van Morrison (St. Dominic’s Preview) – More magic. The lyrics tell a tale so banal (about a boy, his father and their dog) that, if written as a short story, it wouldn’t have been accepted by the most humble boy’s magazine at the time. Yet, Van’s all-enveloping warmth (helped greatly by the wonderful horn and vocal arrangements) carries the day, and makes this brief, modest story song quite beautiful and moving. From one of the best albums of Van’s “classic” period, which can stand proudly alongside Astral Weeks and Moondance.
• Judy – Al Green (Let’s Stay Together) – Al Green. ‘Nuff said.
• Give Love on Christmas Day – The Jackson 5 (A Motown Christmas) – A fairly saccharine Christmas ballad. But the J5 give it their professional best, and Michael sings as if he means every single word. Sad to hear such innocence after all that’s happened to the adult Jackson.
• Friend of the Devil – The Grateful Dead (Dick’s Pick, Vol.8) – The Dead live at Harpur College, Binghamton, NY, May, 1970. It must have been great fun to perform these songs when they were brand new. In fact, The Dead had not even recorded the studio version of this tune (for their classic album American Beauty) when they took it on the road, and the ecstatic audience reception explains why they chose to put it on the album. The all-acoustic performance is brief, and after they’re done, the band can be heard deliberately teasing the audience, taking so long to tune up and launch into the next song that Jerry Garcia is moved to exclaim, “Everybody just relax, man, we have you all night long!” They then went on to play for three more hours.
• Was a Sunny Day – Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin’ Simon) – A typically sly and witty and rather risqué Caribbean-flavored song from Simon’s early solo period. “He was a Navy Man / Stationed in Newport News / She was a high school queen / With nothing really left to lose.”
  
• Whaling Stories - Procol Harum (Home… Plus) – With its “sea” theme sounding like an outtake from their previous album (and greatest masterpiece), A Salty Dog, this song is perhaps the most typical track ever produced by this great band. It starts out ominously (the tense calm before the storm), and then musical apocalypse breaks out (could this song really be about World War II?). The track ends with a miraculous evocation of peace and survival, echoing the “redemption” theme of so many of their earlier songs (Repent Walpurgis, A Salty Dog). The song is thus a kind of summing up of all their past styles and themes. “God’s alive / Inside a movie / Watch the silver screen.” It’s melodramatic, bombastic, way over the top, and I love it!
• Kitty’s Back – Bruce Springsteen (The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle) – I’m no longer the huge fan of the early Springsteen I used to be. However, this song, which sounds as jazzy as Bruce would ever get, is easy to take, lacking the bluster and self-pity that often mar Bruce’s work from this period.
• The Hitchhiker’s Song – Joan Baez (Blessed Are…) A strong song written by the lady herself. I’ve never heard the album that this track comes from. I’ll have to give it a listen sometime.
• Love the One You’re With – Aretha Franklin (Live at the Fillmore West) – The Queen loved to cover songs by white male rock stars (e.g., Bridge Over Troubled Water), either out of a desire to branch out into styles other than straightforward Soul, or as revenge on all those white artists who made millions ripping off Soul music (as well as every other black music style). Perhaps both motivations applied. In any case, this is a lively live recording of the Stephen Stills tune, though hardly a definitive cover.

• Shake Your Hips – The Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street) – We end with a highlight from The Stones greatest-ever album… but just about every track from that album is really a highlight. It’s a cover of a Slim Harpo tune that captures the mysterious, ominous, smoky-club-at-three-in-the-morning ambience that pervades the whole album and makes it unique in the band’s vast catalog. Very nice work by Jagger on harmonica. (Actually, I prefer to hear him play that instrument, on which he is at least as good as Brian Jones was, than listen to him sing). This track, appearing third in the album’s running order, after brilliant, hard rocking parodies of Chuck Berry (Rocks Off) and Little Richard (Rip This Joint), respectively, signaled that the boys had something a bit more serious and dangerous in mind this time than a rock-and-roll revival show.

Next time, my third station: Positively B-Side Myself. Stay tuned!

Bluebeat Setlist for 9/1/07

Here is my most recent setlist for The Greatest Decade radio station (see post below), which played on my computer yesterday. The duration of the program was about 90 minutes.

1. Love Street – The Doors (Waiting for the Sun) – Every time I hear The Doors music from this period, I think of the Weimar Republic! Had forgotten all about this song: nice tune, interesting lyric.
2. Reach Out I’ll Be There – The Four Tops (Greatest Hits (Motown)) – One of the most enduring of all Motown classics. This time, I paid close attention to the background vocals: love those sudden shouts they use to ratchet up the excitement. The clip-clop rhythm of the opening had always sounded to me like somebody slapping their knee with spoons, which, knowing Motown and the improvisational genius of its musicians, might very well be the case.
3. Stanley’s Song – The Byrds (Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde) - Country-era Byrds: just okay, not one of their best.
4. No Reply (Demo) – The Beatles (Anthology Vol. 1) – The saddest song John Lennon had ever written up to that time, but on this run-through, the whole band can’t stop cracking up! Lennon, ever the class clown, keeps repeating the rhyme phrase from the first verse – “your face” – at the end of every verse, with hilarious results. The John-Paul harmony on the middle eight is subtly different from the released version, and just as exciting. The song finally breaks down, but they know it’s too good to abandon, so they’ll do it again until they get it right. (It first appeared as the opening song on Beatles for Sale.) There’s a very interesting story to this song. John based the idea on an old tune by The Crests (Johnny Maestro’s first group), in which the very stupid hero, who is something of a Peeping Tom, spies on what he thinks is his girlfriend kissing another guy, only to discover that he’s got the wrong house and it’s a different girl entirely! In Lennon’s version, though, he’s not at the wrong house, it is his girl, she is with another guy, and he’s toast! But, being the gentleman he is, he gives her a chance at forgiveness. (The scary vibe of Run for Your Life was a full year, and a creative eternity, away.) In this first period of their recording career, the sheer fun of playing, and being Beatles, always trumps the unhappiness and anxiety that underlie so many of those early songs.
5. Sunflower River Blues – John Fahey (Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes) – From the super-famous to the super-obscure… but just as magnificent. A typically perfect early instrumental, by the master who created the solo acoustic “art” guitar genre (his disciples include Leo Kottke).
6. Don’t You Think It’s About Time That We All Be Free – Mabel Hillary (Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966) – This album is one of the unknown gems of my Bluebeat “collection.” No soundtrack of the 60’s is complete without civil rights songs and chants, and this album provides an excellent sample of them. Very raw and churchy sound: a great sample of the Black Gospel style that Aretha would take to the bank in 1967 (see, also, 9 below).
7. Talkin’ About the Good Times – The Pretty Things (S.F. Sorrow (bonus track)) – In the lead-up to their masterpiece album, S.F. Sorrow, the Pretties, during this transitional period, recorded several singles as stunning as they were unsuccessful. One of the best was this one, which features superb (and heavily compressed) electric guitar work by ex-Rolling Stone Dick Taylor, some cool Beach Boys-influenced vocals, and special effects that sound so much like psychedelic-period Beatles (specifically, Strawberry Fields Forever, including the false ending) as to border on parody. Yet it all hangs together. It’s amazing how completely this great band, which started out solidly in the R&B camp, like The Stones, adapted to the psychedelic revolution, and then expanded its meanings.
8. Big Boss Man – Elvis Presley (Tomorrow Is a Long Time) – It’s quite amusing to hear Elvis tackle this tune, which I associate with Pigpen of The Grateful Dead. This belongs to a period in which The King, prodded by the counterculture he’d unwittingly helped create, was experimenting a little, and he does a pretty good version of it, but is altogether too polite to deliver the rage the song implies.
9. Anyone Who Had a Heart – Dusty Springfield (Stay Awhile – I Only Want to Be With You) – Dusty does a fine job (as usual) on this Burt Bacharach-Hal David weeper, which had been a number one hit for her countrywoman, Cilla Black, in early 1964.
10. Walk With Me Lord – Fannie Lou Hamer (Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966) – (See 6 above) This is a gospel tune sung by one of the great heroines of the Civil Rights movement in America, Fannie Lou Hamer, who could neither read nor write… but expressed herself very well in song.
11. Secret Love – Marvin Gaye (Together – Take Two) – Although credited to Gaye alone, this album actually consists of duets with Mary Wells and (in this case) Kim Weston. In this performance, there’s the usual, lovely blending of Gaye’s and Weston’s voices, and the tune allows Gaye to show off his sophisticated supper-club-style phrasing. But the greatest duets were awaiting the arrival, shortly thereafter, of Tammy Terrell (see 20 below).
12. Homeward Bound – Simon and Garfunkel (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme) – Good to hear Si and Gar again on one of their best early songs.
13. Is That a Ship I Hear – The Tornados (Archive Series) – The great, demented British producer Joe Meek was up to his usual tricks with this instrumental, the sound of which has been compressed to such a degree that it sounds as if it were recorded on Mars.
14. The Gallery – Joni Mitchell (Clouds) – From her second album, which was even more impressive than her debut, comes this lovely ballad, on which Joni, double-tracking her own harmony, sounds very pretty indeed.
15. I’m Leaving – The Creation (We Are Paintermen) – I enjoy the satirical tune “Painter Man” which was a Top Forty hit in the U.K. for this interesting British band, but this song did not make much of an impression on me.
16. Rock and Roll Woman – Buffalo Springfield (Buffalo Springfield Again) – Stephen Stills showing off his musical chops once again… and why not?
17. Had to Cry Today – Blind Faith (Blind Faith) – From Blind Faith’s one and only album. Clapton always disparaged this “supergroup” he put together with Stevie Winwood (once and future leader of Traffic), but they made some incredible music together and this is a very poignant tune.
18. Summertime – Martha High [with James Brown] (James Brown’s Original Funky Divas) – Actually, this was recorded by Ms. High and Brother James in the 1970’s (the album contains material from both decades, featuring many of the women who sang with Brown, including Tammy Montgomery, who later changed her name to Tammy Terrell - see 20 below). It’s a moving performance, with the Godfather and Martha beginning the track with a spoken intro that laments the problems of the world – poverty, pollution – then proceeding to the Gershwin tune itself, on which both Brown and the high-voiced Ms. High do an admirable job.
19. One Long Glance – The Pretty Things (Emotions) – (See 7 above) The Pretties are still feeling their way into psychedelia at this point, but they’re making progress.
20. Come and See Me – Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell (The Complete Duets) – Has there ever been a more exciting male-female duet partnership in the history of popular music? (This song, BTW, was co-written by Harvey Fuqua, Marvin’s mentor.)
21. Love Me Two Times -- The Doors (Strange Days) – We end as we began, with The Doors and this terrific hit from their appropriately-titled second album. I don't think I'd ever heard this through headphones before, and the sound of it is definitely enhanced when you can hear the two harpsichords, one in each channel, driving the tune forward.

So, in less than two hours, we’ve covered an incredible amount of ‘Sixties ground. But this is typical of this channel of mine – every listen is an adventure. Stay tuned!

Station #1: The Greatest Decade

Here I go with a guided tour of each of my eight Bluebeat stations, or “crates”. (I begin each one with the description that appears on the website.) I’ll talk about why I created it, why I chose to include or omit certain music and the general vibe I was shooting for, as well as my own experience in listening to it.

Let’s start with the first and biggest of the stations…

The Greatest Decade

“The Most Powerful Drug Is the Human Soul! The 'Sixties were a surreal (and glorious) juxtaposition of contrasting styles. This crate recreates the pleasure I felt then, but using a much wider range of music than what was on the radio at the time.”

Current Bluebeat Ranking: 224 (as of 9/1/07)

Highest Ranking: Top 20

Created: 19 months ago

Last Changed: 2 months ago

Running Time of Contents: 383 hours

Of all my radio stations, this is the inevitable one, the one I had to build. It contains by far the largest and most varied repertoire of all of them, with albums by dozens of ‘Sixties artists comprising over 380 hours of music. Theoretically, you could play the station twenty-four hours a day for fifteen days and nights and never repeat a single song!

Why the ‘Sixties? I grew up listening to a lot of radio back then, and the music exposed me to a world of incredibly intense feeling I never knew existed within the confines of my staid, religious, middle-class home. The wild blast of joy that was the music of the very early Beatles was just the beginning. Through the force of his personality, Bob Dylan kicked open a hundred doors and demonstrated that language could work its magic in a song as powerfully as in a novel or a poem. The Rolling Stones both taunted and excited me; The Doors disturbed me; Motown liberated me. Otis Redding’s performance of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” -- though not a blues song -- gave me my very first taste of the blues’ majesty. Aretha’s steamroller of a voice revealed the primal power of black gospel.

Dusty Springfield cooed and whispered her repressed longing into my brain. Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes projected an utterly carnal innocence. Joni Mitchell radiated adult sensuality -- even when her voice broke like a little girl’s. The Animals introduced me to working-class rage; The Who charmed me; The Kinks made me laugh and think. Jefferson Airplane fed my head; Cream blasted my ears and mind; Buffalo Springfield evoked the paranoia I was just beginning to feel myself. Sly Stone confronted the psychedelic world with a chuckle and a grin and a seemingly endless supply of hummable, danceable tunes. Creedence Clearwater Revival rocked the American proletariat, but added a whole new political power to the beat. And over and above it all, the older and wiser Beatles hovered like guiding spirits, turning their hand at dozens of different styles while remaining quintessentially, inimitably themselves.

As the years wore on, I couldn’t seem to stop making new and exciting discoveries. A remarkably belated revelation was the music of The Velvet Underground, which hit me with sledgehammer force (as it must have done for countless younger listeners in the late ‘Sixties) when I purchased my first single-disk retrospective of the mighty New York band in the 1990’s. It was as if a whole new aspect of the era opened up for me, and though the urban reality that Lou Reed and Company depicted was quite dark, the music was wonderful (and, sometimes, surprisingly joyous).

More recently, I’ve had the good fortune to meet up with a bunch of fine lads known as The Small Faces, who were a very big deal in their native England but, thanks mostly to inept management, never broke through in a big way in the American market. (They enjoyed only one major hit Stateside: the classic “Itchykoo Park.”) The Small Faces started out as one of the finest pop-soul bands in Britain, only to evolve, in the psychedelic era, into one of the island nation’s most experimental groups, all without losing their sense of humor or becoming the least bit pretentious.

Finally, there are the bands that almost nobody has ever heard of. One of the best of these, in my view, is the San Antonio-based psychedelic band The Children. Their album Rebirth (which begins with the remarkable “Daybreak”) was “reborn” – that is, re-released on CD – several years ago.

All this is my way of saying that the study of the music of the 1960’s is literally inexhaustible. For many major artists of that era, there exists more and more music to hear (often in the form of bonus tracks, or of entirely new CDs, as in the case of The Beatles). And there are artists who were, or have become, cult figures (The Pretty Things, The Monks), whose work from decades ago now exists on CD to explore and appreciate. A trip to the ‘Sixties is thus not just a stroll down Memory Lane; it’s a journey to a musical world that remains to a great degree uncharted to this day. And I like to think that The Greatest Decade captures that world. But you won’t know if I’m right until you sign up with bluebeat.com, or, if you’re already signed up, clicking here to listen in to my radio station.

Introducing Jack the DJ

The purpose of this new blog is to draw attention to the eight music crates I have created on the website of Internet music provider, Bluebeat.com. My goal is to make these crates the most popular (or at least among the most popular) of the 2000+ crates that have already been created by users of Bluebeat.com.

Full Disclosure - Before I continue, I wish to state the following: I am not an employee of, nor do I have any commercial relation with, Bluebeat.com. This site has not been created at their request, nor have I requested permission to do so. My relation to Bluebeat is strictly that of a fan, trying to get other net surfers who might enjoy it to go to the site and try out the service for themselves.

What is Bluebeat? Bluebeat is an Internet music provider, a subsidiary of MRT, which offers an enormous catalog of commercial music to users, either in the form of prefabricated channels -- designated either as The Time Machine, which divides the catalog into decades, and Killer Playlists, which divides the music (roughly) by theme -- and individual channels created by the listeners themselves, called "DJ crates." The Time Machine channels include popular music going all the way back to the early 1900's (and it's a trip to hear some of those old wax cylinder recordings), as well as classical music going back to Medieval times. (A single Time Machine channel -- for example, "Brit-Pop" -- may belong to more than one decade.) The Killer Playlists can be about anything and everything. But the coolest thing about the site is being able to listen to the channels (crates) built from scratch, not by the company, but by everyday people like you and me... or to create such a crate yourself.

And the best thing about Bluebeat is... it's FREE!

Basically, you sign up, download their proprietary software, install it, and enjoy the music. (I know this sounds like a commercial, but I need to get this basic info out of the way before talking about what I really want to talk about: me.)

After I had created my first crate, The Greatest Decade -- my own "time machine" channel, focusing on the music of the 1960's -- I wrote this to the Bluebeat Forum (and I'm the kind of guy who never writes such testimonials):

"BlueBeat has changed my life! After listening for weeks to several great stations of 60's music on BlueBeat -- British Invasion, 60's Pop, Soul 60's, Psychedelic Era, Folk Rock, Strictly Motown, etc. -- and marveling at the sound quality and the sheer variety of the material, I thought things just couldn't get any better. Then, one day, in addition to the usual icons, I noticed these weird 'plus signs' all over the site. They were placed next to station homepages, next to artists' biographies, next to albums, even next to individual songs. What could this mean?

"Suddenly, I realized that BB had taken interactive radio to a whole new level. I could be what I always wanted to be: the DJ. And even as a DJ, I would be a DJ with a difference. For a real DJ (or his or her program director) has to take the time and trouble to create a playlist. But I have a computer to do that for me. So while I create the basic parameters for my crate, I am constantly amazed by what comes up. So I created my own crate: THE GREATEST DECADE, pouring my heart and my musical knowledge into it. (Need I add that "greatest decade" means The 1960s?) Rock, folk, jazz, rock, soul, funk, rock, pop, blues, rock and more rock. 360 hours (15 days and nights) of music in all. A mellow Coltrane ballad followed by Mississippi John Hurt at Newport, followed by an early Yardbirds classic, followed by Sly Stone gleefully inventing funk, followed by Marvin and Tammi harmonizing as if they were already in heaven, followed by a Pink Floyd journey into outer (musical) space, followed by an obscure single by the one-hit wonder girl group, The Angels, followed by... anything in the world from that best of all possible decades. And now I listen to my personal radio station all the time, and like the Lord I declare my creation good. Because of THE GREATEST DECADE, I feel empowered as never before.

"Keep on keeping on, BlueBeat! Our world would never be the same without you."

After creating that first crate, I created seven more. (Though I consider them not as "crates," but as my own personal radio stations.) However, The Greatest Decade was the most popular, residing for a long time among the Top 30 crates in terms of listenership and peaking at (I think) number 6. I was ridiculously proud of this distinction.

However, my crates, after a strong start, dropped in popularity, as users began to listen to newer crates. I cast about for a way in which I could revive their popularity, or bring their listenship to new heights. Then suddenly, the perfect answer: start a blog! So this is for Bluebeat users (and those who intend to be Bluebeat users) who may be interested in the remarkable music "my" online collections have to offer.

In the next post, I will describe the eight crates, the contents of each one and my rationale for creating them. And in future posts, I will share with readers the experience of listening to my crates and my thoughts on music generally.

Jack