International Mix of Action
The following is a love letter to mixing of all sorts.
1. Gikki/Gong – Lowney’s Chocolates
This irresistibly upbeat 45 rpm promo record for the now-defunct Lowney’s Chocolate brand features a kind of meditation on writer’s block and inspiration: “I paced the floor and worried a lot / I even started to cry / Then I said to myself / which was easy to do / ’cause I was standing nearby . . .” Oh brother. The real inspiration here is the pop-bottle percussion (which reminds me of the Dixie Cups, which was just an impromptu version of this). It’s better than Prozac. And anyway, who knew that the Lowney’s Chocolate Exhibit Building at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo was three stories high full of chocolate?
UPDATE: A commenter suggests that the “Gikki/Gong” vocal line was actually lifted from Tom Jobim’s “Samba de Uma Nota Só.” I think he’s right, but judge for yourself. (The recording features Elis Regina on vocals.)
2. Der Junge von nebenan – Katja Ebstein
Three-time Eurovision contestant Katja Ebstein peaked with a second-place finish in 1980. This is her horn-filled cover of “Son of a Preacher Man,” a song originally offered to Aretha but immortalized by Dusty. For Aretha, it hit a little too close to home, apparently. But for Katja it was perfect. In the ’70s, she founded Künstler für Christus (Artists for Christ) with another German singer, Inge Brück. Which definitely makes this cover a candidate for revival.
3. L’agent secret – Petula Clark
This is either high camp or Britain’s most popular female recording artist making a desperate bid for a Bond theme. (Cha-ching, etc.) Well, I’m sure it’s both. There are silly machine guns (which remind me of this bit of DPRK madness) and silly pukey-dying noises and silly French lyrics. Oh, and a silly apocalyptic ending. It’s all very Bollywood . . .
4. Title Music – Kalyanji-Anandji
From the 1963 Urdu-language film Bluff Master about a Bombay con man named Ashok who falls in love with Seema who is loved by Kumar who abducts Ashok’s mom. Bollywood ensues . . . (Found on Bombay Connection, Vol. 2: Bombshell Baby of Bombay.)
5. Disco Shit – Millie Jackson
6. Honolulu, America Loves You (We’ve Got to Hand It to You) – Arthur Fields
This minor classic from 1917 is preserved by the Department of Special Collections at the Donald C. Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara. And thank God. Kate & I traveled to Honolulu over Christmas to visit my older sister—it was our first time in Hawaii—and I can second Arthur Fields’s generous if condescending sentiment. At one point the old minstrel singer croons, “Our millionaires are playing ukulele’s, too!” As it turns out, we had a roadside taco with Pierce Brosnan, and he’s probably a millionaire, right? Search UC-Santa Barbara’s site for more great Hawaii crap, including “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo: That’s Love in Honolulu.” And then go to Hula Pages to find the original sheet music covers!
I kissed America when she was fleecing me
She knows I understand that she needs to be free
I miss America and sometimes she does, too
And sometimes I think of her when she is fucking you.
Moroccan-born Rhany visits the Buena Vista Social Club. (Found on Rough Guide to Latin Arabia.)
9. Sorry – Marty Grosz & His Honoris Causa Jazz Band
According to his profile at San Antonio’s Riverwalk Jazz Hall of Fame, “Marty and his wife like to spend afternoons on their patio in Piermont, New York, vodka in hand, watching the lazy Hudson drifting by.” Which is nice. But this is not kick-back music. It’s more like tap your foot till your ankle burns. True, it went out of style something like sixty years ago, but Bix Beiderbecke, who blew the best version of “Sorry,” never grows old and never gets stale.
Let’s review: So far we’ve had a German singing about a Southern preacher, a Brit singing in French, another Brit professing his love for America, a minstrel singer declaring his love for the South Pacific, and a Moroccan going to Cuba. With “Wimoweh,” we have a Scot—born Angus Murdo McKenzie in Springburn, Glasgow—offering up a falsetto yodel in honor of a Zulu lion. Once upon a time this was a top-ten hit in the UK, where radio listeners have stiff upper lips and strong stomachs. (Look for Karl Denver in Michael Winterbottom’s fabulous 24 Hour Party People, a film about Joy Division and the Manchester scene that nevertheless finds room for, well, Karl Denver.)
11. Hair Dressin’ Women – Big Maybelle Smith
Mabel Louise was dead at 47, but she put everything she had into it while she was here. And had she ever told me to be “mighty, mighty careful,” I believe I would have been . . .
12. PSA 4: Bachelor Cooker – U.S. Department of Agriculture
Solid!
13. Sénégal Fast-Food – Amadou et Mariam
Apparently West Africa also has that most American of all inventions, drive-through. And so subject meets form, because Amadou et Mariam mix bits of Southern blues harp with pretty much everything else. I feel like Miss Peggy on Romper Room: I hear reggae . . . I hear Indian . . . I hear French . . . I hear West African. Amadou, by the way, is Amadou Bagayoko, a Mali-born guitarist who met Mariam Doumbia at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako. They married, had three children, and traveled across West Africa until they were known everywhere as Amadou et Mariam, Le Couple Aveugle du Mali. At which point they stopped and had a well-cooked burger. Solid!
14. Big City Blues – Fadhili William Mdawida
“We had traditional acoustic Kenyan music, and it lasted until people like Fadhili William came along with all this jazzy Jambo Boys stuff,” explains one of the late singer’s colleagues. “That’s when the whole thing started . . .” The “whole thing” meaning the devil rock ’n’ roll. In fact, Mdawida was among the first in East Africa to use an electric guitar, which he uses here to gently support this ballad of a love-sick boy. The song is by turns funny and poignant. “He should have known I wasn’t serious,” the boy’s love declares. “He makes me sick!”
To Ghana now, where the secret to everything can be found on a king-sized bed.
16. Abass – Abass
If they have drive-through in Sénégal, then certainly they have rap. And if you have rap, then you’d better have some foul-mouthed fronting or else what’s the point? The action starts at about 3:54, when the backup singers unexpectedly switch to English. For a moment it’s not clear who’s talking to whom, just that somebody’s gonna be spending the night on the street.
You thought they sounded pissed off over at No. 16? Try Alif, which stands for Attaque Liberatoire de l’Infanteries Feministe, or the Women’s Infantry Liberation Army. Sources conflict on who’s holding the infantry and why, but this Dakar group—the only all-woman hip-hop group in Sénégal—will set it free on attitude alone. “Addu Kalpin” is about a gang of young & dirty men robbing a minibus.
I first heard this track on a French import blues compilation given to me by a Parisian-turned-Mainer, a Frenchman who actually wore berets and had a handlebar mustache. Lee was a ’60s soul singer with an Alif-edge.
19. Evil Hearted Man – Josh White
Josh White first came to my attention through David Margolick’s Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, in which he details the competition between Josh White, who got to “Strange Fruit” first, and the song’s most famous interpreter, Billie Holiday. Here White explains it all from the man’s point of view.
20. Souvenirs – Bettye Lavette
With “Strange Fruit,” Lady Day took a folk protest song written by a New York City Jew and turned it into something profoundly soulful. Bettye Lavette attempts something similar here. “Souvenirs” was actually written by two Chicago folkies: Steve “The City of New Orleans” Goodman and John Prine [see correction below]. They recorded the song together and continued to be best friends until Goodman died of cancer in 1984. (Kate & I just saw Prine perform in Davenport, Iowa. He told about how his guitar “tumbled, fell down, and broke its neck” a few weeks earlier in Michigan. “I haven’t been without that guitar in thirty-five years,” he said. “So I went and found Steve Goodman’s guitar. I didn’t have to teach it anything; it knew all the songs by heart.” He then played “Souvenirs.”) In LaVette’s hands, Goodman & Prine’s crisp poignancy stretches out into something more dramatic if not more profound. Whatever the case, Bettye’s got some pipes.
21. Living on a Prayer – Pastel Vespa
“You know it’s quite sad,” writes the half-Italian, half-Brazilian Ms. Vespa, “I’ve never seen my father—he left my mother when he found out that she was pregnant with me. It is my wish that one day my father will take me back into his arms, into his life and into his will because I hear he’s got quite a lot of money so that would be great. But one thing that reassures me is that whenever things are really bad, we always seem to have one or two empty platitudes that seem to make us feel a whole lot better.” God bless Pastel Vespa!
22. Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian – Petty Booka
Southern minstrels aren’t the only ones who love Hawaii. Having just spent a night on Waikiki, I can say with conviction that so do the Japanese. In particular, so do two Japanese girls in cowboy hats who call themselves Petty Booka. They play ukulele (which is Hawaiian for “jumping flea” after the motion of fingers on the fret board) and come armed with a Brit punk sensibility. They also dig kazoos.
23. Kaze ni Naru – Ayano Tsuji
Tsuji is also Japanese, and she also loves her ukulele, but she draws the line at singing in English. (Here’s a recent NPR profile.)
24. Moon River (Hi-Posi Goes to the Moon) – Hi-Posi
And then there was Hi-Posi, featuring the sex kitten Miho Moribayashi whispering Henry Mancini with a NASA overdub. It’s so nice that the Japanese have finally reclaimed “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and that awful Mickey Rooney character. On the other hand, Audrey Hepburn’s rendition was just perfect.
ONE MORE THING: Mixing is made possible through sharing, and all of these songs were shared with me—by friends or by Internet strangers. “Densu,” for instance, came to me from a friend who was taking photos in Ghana for the Christian Science Monitor, David Byrne came courtesy of my wife, and Fadhili William Mdawida was discovered via the wonderful blog Benn loxo du taccu. So thank you!
AND A CORRECTION: Clay Eals reports that Prine alone deserves writing credit for “Souvenirs.”
Good to see the warm anecdote you recount about John Prine, Steve Goodman and "Souvenirs." Goodman often doesn't get his due. Thought you might be interested in an eight-year project of mine that is coming to fruition -- a biography of Goodman that will be published this spring. The book covers the complete background of "Souvenirs" and of Goodman's rich catalogue. Please e-mail me at ceals@comcast.net if you would like me to e-mail you a background sheet on the book. Or check my Internet site below.
Clay Eals
1728 California Ave. S.W. #301
Seattle, WA 98116-1958
(206) 935-7515
ceals@comcast.net
http://www.clayeals.com
Posted by: Clay Eals | March 16, 2007 at 07:23 PM
Welcome back to the web. Thanks for posting what will become the soundtrack of next week for me.
Posted by: James | March 20, 2007 at 12:30 AM
Isn't the vocal line from Gikki Gong lifted from "Samba de uma nota so" (aka "One Note Samba")?
Posted by: Another James | March 21, 2007 at 03:17 PM
Does this mean you're back? Pretty please??
Posted by: reader_iam | March 23, 2007 at 07:05 PM