Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Stone The Crows, Ontinuous Performance

File Between: Janis Joplin and Taste

Comments: Maggie Bell is probably best known to most rock listeners for being the female voice on the title track of Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story. Like Rod, she was a Scottish singer with a prematurely raspy voice and a deep feeling for the blues, soul, and British and American folk, whose period of greatest creativity coincided with her stint as the frontwoman of a great hardworking rock & roll band who never really got the recognition they deserved. Unlike Rod, she never sold out, and she’s relatively unknown as a result. This was Stone The Crows’ last record; their talented, compositionally brilliant guitarist Les Harvey was electrocuted onstage during a concert, and Thunderclap Newman/Wings guitarist Jimmy McCulloch substituted for him on the handful of tracks needed to fill out the record. One of them, “Good Time Girl,” is the best song on the album, and was apparently a minor British hit, but the rest of the record is a similarly pleasant mix of rock and soul, with Harvey showcases like “King Tut” and the extended suite “Niagra” [sic] making the record a good tribute to one of the more tragic rock & roll losses of the decade.

A Keeper? It’s a great record in that loose, jammy 70s-band way, and Bell’s voice is one of the secret weapons of British rock. You really do have to already like this sort of thing, though.

Vinyl Rip: Niagra

41. Cow Cow Davenport, “Cow Cow Blues”
(Charles Davenport)
Vocalion 1198, 1928 · mp3
And rock & roll is born. Or born again — or seen in a vision before it was born — for like any hero of myth it has had numerous and contradictory births. But that stomping bass line is familiar to any listener of Fats Domino, and the way it rings changes on blues chords is a stripped-down, elemental version of party jazz, one with a stronger backbeat and less showy than stride or ragtime. It’s hairy, unreconstructed boogie-woogie, which is one of the many fathers of rock & roll (just ask Pete Johnson), fifteen years before lyricists like Johnny Mercer started using “boogie-woogie” to mean ultramodern, hip-to-the-minute music (cf. Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Old Music Master,” which this song incidentally resembles by underscoring the contrast between the high solemnity of longhair classical and the hep jump of the now, just in its first few seconds). Cow Cow Davenport was an obscure pianist who was best known for accompanying guitarists like Tampa Red, but whose comparatively few solo recordings burn with a fire undreamt of in most understandings of the music of the 1920s. And no — perhaps there’s not much that grabs a modern listener by the lapels without they understand the significance of the date attached, but that’s true, in its way, of all pop music. There’s been some uninformed speculation that the western swing/jump blues standard “Cow Cow Boogie” (the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Ella Mae Morse, and Elvis Presley all recorded versions) may be related in some way to Cow Cow Davenport, but it had purely Hollywood western origins, part of the same tradition that gave us Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” — still, the Steve Miller Band’s 1969 “Kow Kow Calqulator” (featuring psychedelic boogie-woogie virtuoso Nicky Hopkins) conflates Cow Cow Davenport and “Cow Cow Boogie,” with the usual rock & roll utopianism.

40. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground”
(Traditional)
Okeh 40155, 1928 · mp3
Maybe the best thing about Bascom Lamar Lunsford is his name — the kind of name that immediately evokes a world far different from ours, a unique combination of English lexical morphemes that have never otherwise been related. No joke, when I first read the name I thought Bascom might be an obscure title, not unlike Deacon or Reverend, which existed only in a little-known Appalachian dialect. It might as well have been — Lunsford is one of the high priests of American folk music, one of the immutable facts one must accept in order to enter into the spirit of the thing. Nearly everything he recorded reverberates spookily throughout American music, from country to blues to rock & roll and even unto hip-hop. “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground” has pride of place largely because it was included in the Torah of American folk, Harry Smith’s Anthology. Here we find the railroad men who will drink up your blood like wine (they make a cameo on Blonde on Blonde), an unstable image that has no precedent in folklore or any explanation that reason can find: it’s simply burned into the background of the national psyche, a ghost of a meaningless warning from an age long gone. Here, too, is a man who wishes to be a mole in the ground so he can root a mountain down, and a lizard in the spring so he could hear his darling sing — a darling (equally mysteriously) named Tempe. Or maybe not; one of the reasons that recordings like this one can so easily captivate people is the eerie level of uncertainty about nearly everything; every hearing differs, as surface noise, nonstandard pronunciations, and unfamiliar combinations of words work their unique magic on the individual listening ear, a magic which never works the same way twice. Lifetimes can be lost tracking the grooves of of old, rare 78s.

Mike Quattro Jam Band, Paintings

File Between: The Bob Seger System and Genesis

Comments: Mike Quatro (the spelling varies even on this record) was the brother of Patti Quatro (leader of legendary Detroit girl-garage band the Pleasure Seekers, and the replacement guitarist in Fanny) and of glitter goddess Suzi Quatro. Patti’s on this singing backup, but Mike is definitely the star here: his keyboard playing is both virtuosic and rocking, filled with complex finger runs and unusual time signatures even at its most stripped-down and garagey. In a lot of ways the record seems like the secret origins of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, especially with the lengthy, synthesizer-heavy instrumental opening track, though there’s nothing as explicitly pop as Elton John’s reflexive compositions. The general atmosphere is post-psychedelic, though Detroit influences from Seger to Motown make their presence felt. He covers Rachmaninoff and King Crimson, but his original compositions are even more interesting, if varying in quality — the lyrics especially can be as generic as early 70s rock songwriting gets.

A Keeper? Weird, little-known discs like this are why I starting building this collection in the first place. It’s not necessarily essential to anyone else, though.

Vinyl Rip:Detroit City Blues

B. B. King, Guess Who

File Between: Muddy Waters and Rufus Thomas

Comments: Since B. B. King became synonymous with an upscale, NPR-friendly version of the blues sometime back in the 1980s, it’s become increasingly difficult to hear him as anything but sonic wallpaper, at least for me. But he sounds at the peak of his powers here, riding high after 1969’s “The Thrill Is Gone” had asserted him as a major figure in the post-rock & roll blues scene (even though he had been gigging and recording since the 50s). This record, on the not-exactly-hip major label ABC, is as much Memphis soul as pristine blues, and the soulful horn charts keep B. B.’s understated guitar style from drifting off into cliché in my ears. Guess Who opens with a nice and funky version of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City,” and damn if it doesn’t sound better, or at least sultrier, than the original; the rest of the tracks are lesser-known blues and soul standards that King declaims with his customary authority and puncuates with his customary tasteful licks. Nothing particularly relevatory, maybe, and he doesn’t have the gutbucket fire of Freddie King from two records ago, but it goes down smooth.

A Keeper? I’m not really an experienced enough B. B. King listener to know how this record stacks up against the rest of his career: it sounds great to me, though.

Vinyl Rip: Better Lovin’ Man

How is it that I have never encountered this before now?

Sure, I’d heard the title. It’s one of those unforgettable phrases that stays with you, even if you never think of it again. I have a dim sense that I’ve read C. S. Lewis say something about it, probably complimentary. I don’t think I ever knew it was by T. H. White — though if I did know, that in itself is probably why I never bothered.

For I loathed The Sword And The Stone when I read it (for, I think, the second time) in high school, ca. 1994. (I’d seen the Disney movie, of course; I was a child in the VCR-happy 80s. Even then, I never cared for the anachronistic humanism of Merlin’s lessons, but only for the climactic sword-drawing scene.) You see, I was something of an Arthurian nerd in high school; a childhood fascination with Prince Valiant had turned into a haphazard search through such history as was available (not much) to see what was going on in Europe and the Near East in the fifth and sixth centuries (I still remember how heartstopping those National Geographic articles on Petra were). Then I’d discovered Charles Williams’ Taliessin cycle between sophomore and junior year, and read Tennyson’s Idyls, and filtered all my Arthurian ideas through Lewis’s rather whimsical Romano-Celtic theorizing in That Hideous Strength; though, pretty ridiculously, I read no Malory aside from the excerpt in A Connecticut Yankee. So T. H. White’s sardonic twentieth-century take on the mythos, with hyperliterate prose that I found to my profound irritation going over my head (I’ve never dealt well with not being the smartest guy in the room) and its unapologetic anachronisms, cemented my disgust with post-Williams depictions of the Arthurian legend. In my junior year, I wrote my own Arthurian cycle in several dozen poems of wild stylistic variance and, presumably, flesh-crawling terribleness (I still have them, having dutifully transferred them from computer to diskette to computer to CD to laptop to flash drive to laptop, but have been too embarrassed to even open the files in over ten years), and I still nourish a fond hope of returning to the mythos at some point in the future and adding my own voice to the variety of interpretations, perhaps in comic-strip form.

But this is neither here nor there — merely a lame explanation of why I had for so long avoided anything to do with T. H. White. Well, I was in a used bookstore the other day, as is my wont . . . .

It was a cheap paperback, and I have no money whatever, which is more than anything else the reason I bought it. (With William McFee’s Casuals Of The Sea, because I thought I remembered P. G. Wodehouse saying nice things about it, though I can’t find the reference now.) And the illustration on the cover made me think of Garth Williams’ illustrations of E. B. White, and I had recently revisited Gulliver’s Travels, and anyway I have long had an irrational love for small-people fantasy: The Borrowers, The Indian In The Cupboard, Honey I Shrunk The Kids . . . and, too, there was the unexpected coincidence of that evocative title coupled with the name of my old enemy.

So I started reading it the other day (aloud, as is my wont), and I wasn’t half a dozen pages in before the overwhelming sensation of having missed out big time started to take hold and never left until I had finished the whole thing (not aloud, because that takes too much time and I can read faster in silence). White’s smart-ass hyperliteracy worked superbly, now that I have the experience and context to place it in (the fading Empire; other midcentury, prose-happy British satirists like Waugh and Powell and Amis and even Wodehouse in a pinch), and his stringent humanism, undercut with more than a dollop of self-mockery, is far more appealing to me now than when my favorite passage in all of literature was Éowyn vs. the Lord of the Nazgûl.

The two writers who kept circling in my mind as I read were Roald Dahl and Mervyn Peake. I have enormous respect, if something shy of love, for Peake — the first volume of Gormenghast is the most scorching evocation of Edwardian childhood I know — and I’ve never been able to overcome my childhood horror of Dahl, due mostly to the grotesque punishments he metes out to his villains. But while the villains in Mistress Masham’s Repose are fully equal in grotesquerie and wickedness to anything dreamt up by Peake or Dahl (the way he manages to suggest the horror of murder as an idea is exemplary), White’s humanism extends even to them, and I am content.

Goddamn great book. If anything I’ve said piques even a little bit of interest, look it up. I won’t be happy with it out of my life from now on.