rockfunkboogie

So doggone funky this Elvin Bishop tune - love the way it twirls and sashays in the gtr-solo-y sections

I expect if I trawled through the Struttin My Stuff album and his other records of that period I might find one other gem at least 2/3rds as groovy and charming

But "can I be bothered?" is the question (so far, the answer is "no")

The references in "Struttin'" to the girl in Atlanta who "ain't nuthin but a Georgia peach"  got me thinking of this other rock / funk / boogie beauty. which starts with the lines  about a Georgia woman suffering from a mysterious ailment and in dire need of remedial rhythm



That drummer with the pointy little beard looks coked out of his mind - unless it's just the itchy-itchy funk that's making him twitch

"Two degrees in be-bop, a phd in swing"

Now what this got me thinking of again is how the date of these recordings / performances - 1975 for both Little Feat on Old Grey Whistle Test and "Struttin My Stuff"  - is just a few years distance in time from punk-funk moves like Go4's "Damaged Goods" or various songs on Talking Heads's first two albums

Begging the question so why was that move such a big deal?  Wasn't it a bit after-the-fact?



I mean, sure, the postpunk rending of funk is "tense and nervous and unrelaxed" -   a different, uptight feel

It's less "black" - more suburban stilted stiff-jointed neurotic white-geek

So more striking - potentially leading to a new sound, new direction - rather than simply replicating (and reinforcing ye olde muso values of slick lickmanship that Old Wave white bands shared with their soul and R&B counterparts)

New Wavers doing it themselves and slight wrong versus  Robert Palmer actually recording with The Meters (and Lowell George)



Still, with Old Wavers routinely adopting funky modes all through the mid-70s , it remains odd that "we like funk and disco and what do you think of that, eh?" was such a powerhouse postpunk rhetorical stance to make

As I observed on an earlier occasion, talking about "nifty groovers"

"You almost wonder what the point of postpunk's vaunted embrace of funk and disco etc was as a gesture -  given that the funk was already so deeply imbricated with mainstream rock music. It didn't need to be added or restored, it's there. "

Take this Al Green cover - for which Talking Heads got a lot of praise and even achieved a modest chart hit in the US -  this is just a standard sort of Old Waver who loves black music move isn't it?

 (A wonderful and clever version of course, with the Jerry Harrison aqueous keyboards)





Robert Palmer learned to do the whiteboy-funky thing in the New Wave mode of doing it eventually






It's not even a question of amnesia of recent musical history - pre-punk seeming on the other side of Year Zero -  because you had Old Wavers doing their funky-disco move at more or less the same time as the New Wavers like Blondie











This one below by Paul McC actually sounds a bit like Talking Heads - or ACR's cover of "Shack Up" (at least until the goofy chorus)




Old Wavers disguised as New Wavers (but still Old Wavers at bottom) doing the funky-disco move



The Blockheads used to be called Loving Awareness!.

Of course the intersection point between rock and disco is the word "boogie" which in music history is polysemous - as I explored in this Guardian blog

Another version of the sublime "Rock and Roll Doctor"  (wish they'd done a whole album in exactly this vein)




Live "Struttin"



Bishop on the box

work aesthetic #2

Like "Workin' In A Coalmine", another working man blues

selling your time / life, in  by-the-hour chunks, dirt-cheap

"and i'm highly embarrassed / ev-er-y time i get my pay"

it's a wage-packet racket

"somebody doin' something slick / yeah they are"

wage-slave en route to an early grave, the graft getting to feel so futile

"might as well go uptown / and dig a ditch"


And how about this for "this shit is systemic" analysis - from the preamble to "Ain't That A Bitch":

“Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract!”


One thing I quite like in an artist - admire the shamelessness, maybe, or the canniness, not sure which-  is that thing where they have a hit, and they immediately try to have another hit that is essentially the same song: thematically, sound, feel, stance, emotion.

Sometimes they will even repeat the same key word in the song title (see Pete Frampton with his successive smash singles with the word "Way" in them)

Johnny 'Guitar' Watson doesn't go quite that far with "Real Mother For Ya", but it is essentially "Ain't That A Bitch Pt 2"



Actually, "Ain't" was never a single as such, but it was the killer tune on his first really successful album, so in that sense fits the syndrome

"Mother" was actually a big R&B chart hit and grazed the outer edge of the Billboard Top 40

I bought these tunes some time in the early Eighties, I think they were rereleased as flipsides of the same 12-inch or something like that. (Or maybe not - can find no trace of this on Discogs. Perhaps they were separate rereleases).

Never got around to the albums though.

This is the one where some claim he's inventing rap




Another real-talk, cost-of-living, themed tune, in a way.

Also quite like that thing where  musicians (this is particularly common in black music, but really in most music if you think about it) just fairly brazenly jump on the latest sound - - and keep on jumping on the latest sound, successively if not always successfully.

I mean, why not? They wanna sell some records. Probably they gotta sell some records.

(It's a different angle on the "work aesthetic" theme - this music thing isn't some higher calling or anything airy-fairy like that; it's a job, a livelihood, my means of production, and I gotta stay competitive in the changing market).

I suppose he's trying to do a George Clinton / Zapp with this next  tune, sonically,  while also striking a "microchips gonna put all of us outta work" stance, lyrically. A/k.a having your cake and eating it.




stop press: an entire essay on the "proletarian funk of Johnny 'Guitar' Watson" by Dominick Knowles at Viewpoint

work aesthetic #1

"Course I make a little money
Haulin' coal by the ton
But when Saturday rolls around
I'm too tired for havin' fun"

Man, I used to love this song

My memory of it sounds better than the actuality of it now (which is still pretty fabulous)

The radio memory - the 'pick axe' snap of the drum cutting right through the sound  - the whole track sounded so odd, so minimal -  clanking mechanistic blues, the grind of regimented labor rendered as joyous celebration.

The flipside of "work" as dance music / club culture buzzword - in this case, for once, literally referring to labour... the travails of being a fleshly "appendage attached to the machine".

You can see why Devo wanted to do it

Although they did a pretty dreary job with it really - or perhaps simply redundant, they couldn't make it anymore rigid or machinic



Bought that Charley collection of Lee Dorsey tunes with the Joe Strummer liner note (literally a note - hand scrawled!) perhaps a year or two after it first came out

Great stuff, but nothing quite as odd and emaciated as "Working in the Coal Mine"

I  think this was my next favorite (what with Funk being my new religion in that 1980-81-82 period)



Actually probably the next fave was really "Ride Your Pony" -  pumping, so tight.




(Backing band = The Meters - a word with a technological undertone as well as its musical connotation)

Back to "Coal Mine"...

"Lord I'm so tired
How long can this go on?"

Apparently neither Dorsey nor producer-writer Allen Toussaint had ever been in a coal mine

But Dorsey knew about hard 'n' dirty work and the man-machine interface, what with running his own auto repair shop. A job he went back to during the dry spells between hits.

"He was a body and fender man when he wasn’t singing and even at his peak, when he would come off the road at the end of a successful tour, he would go and get into his grease clothes, his dirty work gear and go and work on cars. Straightening out fenders and painting bodywork" - Toussaint. 

love A Certain Ratio -- well, love certain things by them - but really, at the end of the day, they were just a washed-out, slightly stilted, sub-arthouse/existentialist version of Heatwave, weren't they?

a song-less, and hitless, version of Heatwave, at the end of the proverbial day...

although one of the things I like about Heatwave's sound is actually a certain proto-ACR-ish ghostliness, those blank colorless vocals....

bizarrely grim and grisly story, Heatwave's, with two members of the group involved in stabbings, one fatal and the other calamitous:

"Rhythm guitarist Roy Carter replaced [Jesse] Whitten after Whitten was killed in a stabbing incident. They began creating their first album Too Hot to Handle in the fall of 1976."

....

"Heatwave were about to return to the studio, when [Mario] Mantese attended a party at Elton John's house in London. He was with his girlfriend, who decided to go home early from the party, reason unknown. When Mantese arrived home, she was furious with him, perhaps from an incident that happened at the party and stabbed him. The knife hit him in the heart and for several minutes, he was clinically dead. When, after several months, he awoke from coma, he was blind, mute and paralysed in his entire body. To date, he has no memory of this tragic event. He decided not to press charges against his girlfriend, and moved in with her after leaving the hospital. Mantese was replaced by bassist Derek Bramble"

"Decided not to press charges... and moved in her with after leaving the hospital" - making him the Rihanna of his day!


Now tell me people, what the fuck happened to Rod Temperton, one of the greatest songwriters and groove-makers of the 20th Century???

 The funkiest white Englishman ever, this side of Chas Jankel?

(Chas J, who also had an involvement with Quincy J)

Temperton's Wikipedia entry more or less ends after the Quincy J/Michael J moment, although there's a mention of a Grammy nomination for his co-write of a song on the soundtrack of The Color Purple.... 

He did go on to write a whole bunch more songs for a whole bunch more people, including this one, theme song to a cops 'n' robbers movies, sung by Michael McDonald, and for which I have a soft spot (actually reviewed this wack movie, would you believe, for Melody Maker)

Presumably with a net worth estimated to be 150 million  Rod T  probably doesn't need to work..

the trouble with internet as archiving system is that it tends to offer the diachronic view (history, biography, chronology) but be not much use if you are trying to re-establish a synchronic view -- all the things happening at one moment -- a week, a month... even a year, it's not that easy to get the total-spectrum view, the simultaneity of parallel events and narrative strands intersecting and clashing

 i was reminded of this when hearing "Favorite Shirts" by Haircut 100 and remembering that there was a moment  - a season, a year or so -- when you had a lot of almost-funky records by British groups  - records often with patches of weak rapping in them - and where funk was understood as a sort of flustered take on Chic  + hand percussion + a certain kind of  rubbery, disco-walking bassline + maybe some horns

Funk was the big buzzword of that year (1981, i think) although there'd been murmurings obviously  before with Delta 5 and Gang of Four and Pop Group and "Death Disco"--  but i distinctly remember in late 81 as a freshman having a brief earnest conversation with a trendy-looking fellow student in which he said "bass is so important" and I replied "yeah, and percussion". Both parrotting talking points we'd absorbed from NME probably. Or The Face, in his case.

But, as executed by the bands above,it was already a lagging-behind-the-times idea of funk - black music had moved on - it was the time of the crunch-thwack snare and the beginnings of postdisco and boogie and electrofunk - horns were disappearing, and hand percussion, and Bernie  bass and Niles guitar were already fading out of black music (the Niles sound would drag on for years of course in non-black music: Let's Dance, The Power Station) in favor of synth bass and drum machines

the sharper Brits would keep up (the leap from "Sex" on Songs To Remember to the "Wood Beez" / "Absolute" / Cupid & ; or from "Poor Old Soul" to "Rip It Up")

but that led to some diabolical records too, also including crap-rap

Ah here's some thoughts i jotted down for the Rip it Up Esoteric Discography some years ago:

Sub-trend #1 within New Pop was “Funk”. Basslines, percussion, and horn sections suddenly began very crucial indeed. Dropping their synths for all three, Spandau Ballet produced the almost-great “Chant #1” (several minus points though for the “rap” mid-song about clubbing at New Romantic nightspots like Le Beat Route). Their ghastly second LP Diamond (Chrysalis, 1982) came packaged as four 45 rpm 12 inch singles (one better than Metal Box!), with five of the eight tracks remixed for dancefloor action.  Despite making a better go of dance music than Spandau, posh boys Funkapolitan got flak for not fitting the W/C soulboy template. Black Britfunkers Linx and Junior Giscombe  were ultrahip, but other mainstays of the real working class dance underground, such as Beggar & Co and Light of the World, never quite shook off the taint of jazz-funk. Fashion-world operator Perry Haines (style adviser to Duran Duran and Visage, co-editor of iD, etc) caught the moment with his single “What’s Funk?” (Fetish, 1982), featuring his own weedy attempt to chant James Brown style. You can find a version of it, “What’s What,” on Sex Sweat & Blood (Beggar’s Banquet, 1982), a very Zeitgeist-attuned comp (subtitle: “The New Danceability”) featuring everyone from punk-funkers Maximum Joy, Medium Medium, and 23 Skidoo to future Scritti member David Gamson to Zeitgeist-attuned New York band The Dance (of “In Lust” semi-fame) to Chicago’s very own New Romantics Ministry. Nothing by Stimulin, the band Haines managed, though. They were one of those classic UK music press phantom groups, virtually a figment of discourse. Trigger/pretext for yet another classic New Pop manifesto from Morley, Stimulin released nary a disc.

Sub-trend #2 within New Pop: “Salsa”, shorthand for Latin rhythms in general, in vogue off the back of Kid Creole & The Coconuts. Zoot suit troupe Blue Rondo A La Turk were the big hype, but it was Modern Romance (formerly punk jesters The Leighton Buzzards) who scored with heinous hits like “Everybody Salsa” and “Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey.”

Stimulin! You can actually find MP3s of their terrible Peel session online.

The singer was Alix Sharkey.