SATURDAY SHUFFLE

There is a light at the end of the tunnel -- spring vacation is here, and possibly, just possibly, I can get back to regular blogging very soon.  Until then . . .

1. Seeds and Stems (Again) / Commander Cody and The Lost Planet Airmen
From Lost in the Ozone (1971)
Now here's a little time machine for you: This track effortlessly induces a contact high, every time.  It isn't just nostalgia -- I never had the pleasure of listening to this great stoner rockabilly stuff back in the day -- but thank god I found them since.   

2. More and More and More and Then Some / Nina Simone
From Pastel Blues (1965)
Here's a two for one -- Nina Simone working a Billie Holliday song, and adding her own extra throb of bluesy desire.  I certainly wasn't listening to this in 1965; I wouldn't have known what to make of it, anyway. But oh, what fine stuff this is, a shot of moaning late-night melancholy that's just about perfect.  

3. Bingo / Madness
From The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009)
Ska-flavored music hall soft shoe, full of Cockney smart-arse patter -- all in the service of a downright Dickensian panorama of London low-life.  A seriously brilliant album, criminally unheralded this side of the Atlantic. I think I can safely say that anybody who loves the Kinks would totally dig this stuff.  

4. She Said / Collective Soul
From Dosage (2008)
Funked-up loungy rock, craftily laden with hooky riffs, and cue the strings and synths. I love how Collective Soul pitches to their female audience with sensitive-guy "I understand your pain" lyrics, meanwhile baring their chests and tossing their long hair... 

5. Live Alone / Franz Ferdinand
From Tonight (2009)
Talk about hooks -- these Scots rockers pump 'em out recklessly, along with charged-up tempos that sweeten the minor-key desperation of their songs. "I want to live alone / Because the greatest love is always ruined by the bickering / The argument of living..."  

6. Nobody Told Me / John Lennon
From Milk and Honey (1984)
What a amazing groove John hits here, loose and comical and reconciled.  "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed!" He's just sitting back shaking his head, amused by the absurdity of it all.  When I think that this was where he'd gotten, finally, and then to be shot down -- tragic. 

7. Rain Coloured Roses / The Beatstalkers
From The Beatstalkers (1968)
Serendipity!  Put together Franz Ferdinand and John Lennon and what do you get?  "Glasgow's Beatles" -- or so this band was touted at the time. Sorry I can't post a link, as I only got these tracks from my Glasgow connection (thanks, Davy!). But they were clearly the peers of most British Beat bands of the period (even recorded some early Bowie compositions) and really should be better known.    


8. Profoundly in Love With Pandora / Ian Dury and the Blockheads
From Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Best of Ian Dury (compilation)
Last week I finally watched Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, the brilliant recent biopic of Ian Dury, so I'm very happy to have this 1985 gem shuffle up. "My mother's heart and soul have gone halfway up the pole / My father's on the dole / It's taking its toll..."   As if Dury's clever subversive lyrics weren't enough, this band was an incredibly tight jazz-ska ensemble.  Man, do I love them. 

9. Further On (Up the Road) / Johnny Cash
From American V: A Hundred Highways (2006)
Late Johnny Cash, gravel voice and all.  The fierce distilled intelligence of Johnny Cash at the end of his career is not to be rivaled -- talk about raging against the dying of the light!

10. Retrieval of You / Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
Scott McCaughey and Peter Buck's other other job, when they're not playing with Robyn Hitchcock.  I love the copacetic groove of this "pop collective," which this time round enlisted Wilco to jam with them. It's all good.

BONUS TRACK!!!  (Because I can't resist these guys...)


11. All Kinds of Time / Fountains of Wayne
From Welcome Interstate Managers (2003) 
Clever AND tender -- that's the special thing about Fountains of Wayne. They gently satirize the football hero in slo-mo exultation at the height of his achievement, and yet make us feel wistful about how fleeting this moment is.  It really is "all kinds" of time...

SECOND BONUS TRACK!!!  (Because...well, it's Johnny.)

12. Learning How To Love You / John Hiatt
From Bring the Family (1987)
My very first Hiatt post  -- loved it then, love it now.


And now I promise I'll stop -- even though Graham Parker's next...

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

Funny thing about my iPod -- almost all the songs on it have some subtle Nick Lowe connection. Just for fun, let's see if I can do Six Degrees of Nick Lowe for everything that shuffles up today.

1. "This Boy" / The Beatles
From Past Masters, Vol. 1 (compilation)
Okay, I'll admit, I was a Beatle fan LONG before I ever heard of Nick Lowe. (Flash to the instrumental version of this song, in A Hard Day's Night, when Ringo is wandering around down the docklands, communing with the street urchins.) But Nick's first band Kippington Lodge recorded several Beatles covers, and then Brinsley Schwarz toured with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's band Wings. I think it's safe to say Nick was a Beatle fan as a teenager. With lush harmonies and a fox-trot tempo, this song sounds to me like a bid to charm our parents, so they'd let us listen to the frantic rock & rollers. But you know what? Even when they were trying to do schlock the Beatles could do no wrong.

2. "String Pull Job" / John Hiatt
From Two Bit Monsters (1980)
Obvious Nick link, since Nick produced and played bass on Hiatt's breakthrough album Bring the Family, then joined him in the band Little Village. (Even though I knew Hiatt as a kid, growing up in the same neighborhood, it was the Nick link that finally led me to Hiatt's grown-up music [smacks self on forehead].) But here's a bonus connection -- listen to this song's jerky tempo, the brittle grating guitar, the hostile lyrics ("She's doing that jerk, she's pulling it tight-err..."). During this period, Hiatt styled his music to fit being marketed as "the American Elvis Costello" -- and we all know that Nick was Elvis's first producer.

3. "Trouble in Mind" / Merle Haggard
From Down Every Road (compilation)
Here's a 180-degree turn from Hiatt's edgy early days, closer in spirit to Hiatt's current alt.country sound. A shuffling two-step full of twang, with a fiddle solo in the first break, honkytonk piano in the second, and Merle's dreamy vocals. Far from his outlaw image, here Merle sounds positively laidback -- even though his life's going wrong, he seems to know it'll all straighten out some day. Nick Lowe connection? Well, Nick just recorded this Merle Haggard song on Bill Kirchen's latest album.

4. "Baby My Heart" / Bobby Fuller Four
From Never To Be Forgotten: The Mustang Years (compilation)
Clean, uncomplicated rock & roll, circa 1966, with crunchy guitars, strict time cymbals, and loads of reverb on Fuller's boyish vocals. "You gotta baby my heart / Treat it gentle and kind . . . " IMHO, Bobby Fuller was the missing link between Ricky Nelson and fellow Texan Doug Sahm -- if only he hadn't died young in a tragic car crash! In the liner notes to Nick Lowe's Wilderness Years CD, he sets up his song "I Don't Want the Night to End" thusly: "With the ghost of Bobby Fuller riding shotgun, this one composed in the back of a Queensgate-bound mini-cab sometime in 1977."

5. "Run" / Vampire Weekend
From Contra (2009)
The diametric opposite to Bobby Fuller -- jump forward 40 years, to East Coast privileged smart kids with a knack for complex rhythms and world-beat sounds. Dig those layered keyboards, alternately stabbing and shimmering, laid over a slapping drum track. Textures like crazy, from the anxious tension of the verse to the waterfall of sound in the chorus, to the poppy syncopation of the bridge "(honey it's you /oo / oo / And a battery radio)"... I am coming up empty on any Nick Lowe connection for this one, I have to admit.

6. "That's Not the Way That It's Done" / Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
Several members of this band are also in the Venus 3, musical collaborators of Nick's label-mate and sometime opening act Robyn Hitchcock. I love the slightly boozy, woozy good-times vibe of this band. Picture graying beards and flannel shirts, with a sweetly snarky sense of humor. All he's trying to do is put her in the mood for love...

7. "Black Lincoln Continental" / Nick Lowe
From Pinker and Prouder Than Previous
Yippee!! Graham Parker's rockabilly romp, as faithfully rendered by Nick Lowe on one of his most obscure and underrated LPs. Grrrr-EAT organ counterpoint by Paul Carrack. This track is so adorable I could eat it up. (Sorry, Graham, but I actually think I prefer Nick's version...)

8. "Sing A Song For Them" / Jenny Lewis
From Acid Tongue (2008)
I loved Jenny's autobiographical, country-inflected debut album; I never warmed to this self-consciously poetical second one, despite all the guest artists -- INCLUDING the aforementioned Nick Lowe colleague Elvis Costello. (Though getting Elvis Costello to sing on one track of your album is apparently not that difficult these days.)

9. "Pistol on the Shelf" / Eggs Over Easy
From Good 'N' Cheap
Ah, the band that gave birth to pub rock and inspired Nick's band Brinsley Schwarz -- a bunch of American visitors to London, led by the much beloved Austin DeLone (that's him on the piano), who later played in the Moonlighters with the aforementioned Bill Kirchen. Mellow, mellow, MELLOW country-rock, with not a jot of angst.

10. "Ordinary Millionaire" / Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3
From Propellor Time (2010)
Speak of the devil! Keep this on the Q.T., but some days I'm nearly as besotted with Robyn Hitchcock as I am with Nick Lowe, though it was the Nick connection that first led to Robyn. I never 100% know what's going on in an RH song -- it seems like there's always a little novel hidden in it, which only Robyn has read -- but this one sounds like a love affair running aground on mistrust and thwarted ego. "I don't know where you've gone from me / I know you don't belong to me / I only know you're there." But man oh man, the sinuous melody, the fluid rhythms, the shifting key changes -- I'm hyp-mo-tized!

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

Plug in your earbuds and take a ride with me!

1. "Passing Through" / Marshall Crenshaw
From Jaggedland (2009)
One of the great neglected albums of the past year. I love how the twangy guitar line weaves around, while Marshall's reverbed vocals gently meditate on the passage of time. When I saw him last fall, he mentioned that he wrote it while stuck at an airport in Alaska, but its sense of life's transience is bigger than that.

2. "Dream Baby" / Waylon Jennings
From Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964
Waylon's outlaw country persona dominates his image, but he's been around a lot longer than that. Here's a blast from Waylon's rockbilly past -- and what a great vehicle for his voice!

3. "Where Will You Go" / The Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
At least part of the Minus 5 (Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey) are in the Venus 3, Robyn Hitchcock's frequent collaborators. There's a genial goofiness to some of their stuff that I find appealing, though the songs (usually written by McCaughey) don't make a hundred percent sense. I dig the unspooling guitar riff that stitches this song together.

4. "Tears in Heaven" / Eric Clapton
From Unplugged (1992)
Oh, I know it's the big sappy hit, written about his son's early accidental death, and I've considered deleting it a dozen times. But here it still is, tugging on the heartstrings. Absolutely nothing that makes Eric Clapton a major musical figure makes an appearance in this song (okay, there is that one deft little guitar twiddle). The soporific pace is putting me to zzzzzzzzz....

5. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" / The Testotertones
From Singing in Hormony
A CD by the a capella group at my kids' high school, which was our constant road trip accompaniment for a couple summers when the kids were younger. I've never heard the original, but it sounds like something they'd sing on Glee. Nice harmonies, though, which was kinda the point.

6. "Seein' Her" / Paul Westerberg
From Besterberg
Now this is more like it. Replacements-style crunchy garage rock, with a frantic beat, tapping right into the uncritical exuberance of new love. "Everything about her, I like everything about her / I like everything about her" -- sometimes it really is that simple.

7. "Love Me Dead" / Ludo
From You're Awful, I Love You (2009)
This funny, snarky indie track is a perfect follow-up to "Seein' Her" -- this is what happens when the teen love goes sour.

8. "Birthday" / The Beatles
From the White Album
I want this song sung to me every birthday. Those doubled guitars just spank the hell out of that riff, and Ringo's drumming is insane. "I would like you to dance / Birthday! / Take a ch-ch-chance" -- wild and crazy.

9. "I Got the Love" / Nick Lowe
From Pinker and Prouder Than Previous (1988)
What a boppy little gem! Such a light touch, just a perky loping bass line and few exhalations of organ, a tinkle of piano keys here and there. It's like the rockabilly lovechild of reggae and bluegrass, with fantastically simple lyrics ("I've got the love / And I want to shout it / I've got the love / The rain has gone...And if it don't stop / I'm-a gonna pop!") It's entirely possible that this is Nick Lowe's worst album ever, but I have to admit, I kinda love it.

10. "I'm A Fool for Loving Her" / George Jones
From I Am What I Am (1980)
You want extravagant emotions? George Jones is the master of love triangles, infidelity, and every other brand of misplaced affections, and he knows just how to wring it out, with deft yelps and yodels. There's a lot of country music I don't like, but George Jones? Brilliant.