Guys and Dolls: King Short Shirt - Tyranny (28 May 1993)

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When it came to calypso music in Antigua, one man reigned supreme through the 60s, 70s and 80s. McLean Emanuel aka King Short Shirt, was the only performer - at least at the time that this article was written - to have won Antigua’s national calypso competition three times in a row, on three separate occasions.  Doing well in the competition opened up opportunities to record music, and Tyranny is taken from his fourth album, Illusion, released in 1977 by A & B Records.

In this frantic calypso - I hope that whoever was playing the cowbell was able to have a nice lie down after the session - King Short Shirt ponders the ongoing chain of unfairness that sees Africans move from slavery to living in countries run as dictatorships and totalitarian states. He namechecks apartheid

South Africa, Uganda (at that time still ruled by the despotic, Idi Amin), Rhodesia (like South Africa operating under white minority rule) and Chile (which was ruled by Augusto Pinochet). He notes too that the Caribbean has also known similar tyranny, such as that practised by the Duvaliers in Haiti, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Rafael Calderón in Costa Rica.*. 

King Short Shirt believed that change could come in each of those countries if the people rose up, which is always easier said than done of course, though he was proven right in the end. Amin fled Uganda in 1979 after his attempt to invade Tanzania backfired. The same year, white minority rule ended in Rhodesia and the country was renamed Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, this also meant the world was lumbered with Robert Mugabe for 37 years. Chile and South Africa took a little longer, but in 1988 Pinochet held a referendum to see whether the country wanted him to continue as president, and stepped down after losing it so as to pave the way for democratic elections. Meanwhile, in South Africa, F.W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, dismantled the apartheid system and was succeeded as president by Mandela in 1994. 

The beauty of the sentiments expressed in Tyranny is that they are applicable to any country labouring under a dictatorship. And as White Afrikaners arrive in the United States under a refugee programme enthusiastically set up by the current president of the United States, we can only wonder how long it will take for Americans to follow King Short Shirt’s advice and cast their tyrant into the sea - preferably just off Mar-a-Lago.

*Not strictly speaking a dictator in the same mould as the others, but his refusal to accept the results of the 1948 General Election led to a civil war.

Video courtesy of Akla Tha First.

Guys and Dolls: Luscious Jackson - Daughters of the Kaos (28 May 1993)

 

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In the year of riot grrrl, New York four-piece Luscious Jackson carved out a fascinating niche for themselves which owed less to Bikini Kill and more to gangsta rap. Daughters of the Kaos is a work of subversive brilliance which manages to both demonstrate female power within a male dominated song subject (violence/crime) and show that you can get away with morally questionable sentiments in a song if you drape them in softly sung/spoken trimmings. Throw in the mariachi cum flamenco style guitar riffs, Lalo Schifrin style drum beats and the street flavour vibe that bubbles away underneath the track, and you get a song that has me offering up everything I own without any of the band needing to pull out the six-guns mentioned by Jill Cunniff.

Daughters of the Kaos hits a sweet spot in that it doesn’t glamorise the lifestyle it’s singing about, but it also makes clear that if you’re born into crime, it needs the guiding hand of a woman to both keep you alive and allow you to thrive in that environment: 

Never leave a child alone in a world like this.

He’ll play with bombs and always miss.

He’ll make a girl pick up a gun.

So she can show him how it’s done.

While not completely misandrist, the song makes clear that men are tolerated until a point that they’re no longer required:

Always give shelter to a man in need.

In the face of chaos I give up my greed.

Insane and unknown is my only creed.

Enjoy, destroy then set you free.

It’s wonderful, thrilling stuff - a product of its time and politics, yet set slightly apart from it. It shares riot grrrl’s female empowerment ethos, but acknowledges that they may need to fight dirty and with something stronger than an Andrea Dworkin paperback in their back pocket if they’re going to enjoy the spoils that men took as their right.

All lyrics are copyright of Jill Cunniff

Video courtesy of GR2 Records.

Guys and Dolls: Lonnie Johnson - Sam, You’re Just a Rat (28 May 1993)

 

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Recorded on 9 February, 1932, Sam, You’re Just a Rat subverts cliche by taking as its subject the rejection of an untrustworthy friend, rather than an untrustworthy lover. Whoever Sam is, they’ve been sniffing around not only Lonnie Johnson’s wife, but other men’s wives too, so the ostracisation is pretty damning: 

Sam, you’re not my friend and my home you’d better stop hanging round.

‘Cause I’ve paid for your coffin and I mean that you graveyard bound.

Mistrust and betrayal seemed to be on Johnson’s mind given that this song was recorded in the same session as Men, Get Wise To Yourself, a song in which Johnson considered infidelity to be so widespread among both sexes that humankind was beyond redemption. The two songs were coupled together in a release on Okeh, though Peel was playing Sam, You’re Just a Rat due to its inclusion on a reissue of the 1972 Yazoo compilation, Barrelhouse Blues 1927-1936.

Hilariously, this track about a friendship hitting the buffers was played immediately after Peel read out a fax from a listener called Mark Taylor, who asked him to dedicate a record to a friend of his who was celebrating their birthday, but had been taken ill on Friday 27 May and advised by doctors that they needed to cut out chocolate and beer. We can only hope that having had two avenues of pleasure closed off to them that Mark’s friend didn’t look to fill the gap with adultery instead.

Video courtesy of Lonnie Johnson - Topic.

Lyrics by Lonnie Johnson.

Guys and Dolls: Nigel Whitely Show - Saturday 22 May 1993 (BBC Radio 1)

 Although it didn’t make that week’s edition of the Radio Times, Peel had decided to rename this edition of his programme after Nigel Whitely, a listener who was celebrating their 40th birthday. Had I been a) listening to this programme when it was going out and b) had access to a fax machine, I would have faxed Peel to ask him to rebrand the programme as the Louise Gibson show in honour of my cousin, who had got married on Friday 21 May. 

That was a long day for me and my parents, as we had left Falmouth at 4am in order to drive up to Hertfordshire to attend the wedding.  I had been asked to give one of the readings at the service, because I “did acting”. Although I was happy to do this, I remember feeling a little worried that if I kept attending family weddings, I’d be expected to do readings at all of them like some kind of performing dog. As I was the youngest child of my generation on my mum’s side of the family, I always felt a little defensive about this. I was worried that even though I was now 17 years old, my relatives would still regard me as the baby, and seeing me do readings would provoke an onslaught of well meant but patronising compliments. This was my paranoia at work rather than a result of any evidence of condescension from my relatives, but I sat out several family weddings over the next couple of years, though a few of them were easy to miss as they were held in the United States. 

My parents and I spent the best part of 22 hours awake that day, so spent the rest of the weekend recuperating, before returning home on Bank Holiday Monday. 

12 years later, we would go through the same kind of rigmarole again when I accompanied them to a family weekend at Center Parcs in Thetford. Another early start, a longer journey than May 1993, but with no pressure to read anything. It was a cracking weekend, which climaxed in a family singalong on the Sunday night with nearly everyone performing a song.  It was though a different age from May 1993: John Peel dead for nearly a year and Louise, whose husband didn’t accompany her, laid up in bed in her cabin all weekend with flu, with concerned whispers doing the rounds that it wasn’t just the flu that was depriving Louise of her natural vigour and spirit. They separated in 2012.  Had I been aware how things would play out for her, the request would have been to name the programme by her maiden name, the Louise Kinsella Show.  With her new partner, she now spends most of her weekends participating in historical re-enactments, dressed as a cross between Guinevere and Anne Bolelyn. It suits her wonderfully.

Catching my interest - though not strongly enough to merit inclusion on the metaphorical mixtape - from this edition of Kat’s Karavan was Peel’s inclusion of Paydirt by Shampoo. Just over a year later, they would become Top 20 chart stars, but here Peel was playing a track from their Blisters and Bruises EP, of which more, potentially, in a few weeks time.

Apart from the occasional, murmur of Fades in quietly, Peel was not known for talking over the beginning of tracks. He made a rare exception though when playing Bad Man by Shaggy Wonder. The track featured a short spoken word opening, which Peel disliked so he spoke over it before letting the record play on. He was not being censorious though, his objection was to the ‘intergalactic’ voice effect that had been applied to it. I had sympathy with him over this. After all, it had proven to be something of a deal breaker for me when he played Saucer Surfing by Steve Hillage, a few months previously.

The selections I made from this programme were from a virtually complete show. Everything I wanted to include was available. Only one track in my original list of selections fell from favour:

Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet - Spy School Graduation Theme - A track title which makes perfect sense when you consider how much of the sound on Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet records owe a debt to the guitar playing of Vic Flick, who played the guitar riff on The James Bond Theme. But I found it too slow to want to listen to again. At their best, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet are vibrant, exciting and thrilling. When the tempo drops though, they can cross the line into musical wallpaper.

When looking back over the list of selections I made from this show, I found I’d listed two tracks from previous programmes that I’d already blogged about. If Peel was repeating a play for a track, he clearly really liked it. You can enjoy the following again if you wish:

Rollerskate Skinny - Bow Hitch-Hiker

LMNO Pelican - Spine

Happy birthday, Nigel!

Guys and Dolls: Magic Sam - Look Whatcha Done (22 May 1993)

 

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Blues guitarist, Magic Sam Maghett got a lot of exposure on Peel’s playlists across 1993, mainly due to the release of a compilation called West Side Soul on Charly R & B, which gathered together most of Maghett’s A & B sides from the singles he released through the late 1950s/early 1960s, together with a few other tracks. Curiously, Maghett never had an original album issued under his own name in his lifetime, though he put out two albums as Magic Sam’s Blues Band in the year before he died of a heart attack on 1 December 1969. Indeed, the Charly compilation shares its name with the first Magic Sam’s Blues Band album.

Look Whatcha Done was issued as the b-side on Maghett’s 1958 single, Everything Gonna Be Alright. In keeping with many of Maghett’s b-sides, it offers a genre mashup in comparison to the pure blues sounds of his A-sides. In his home region of Grenada County, Mississippi, he grew up listening to as much bluegrass and country music as he did blues and this eclecticism distinguishes a number of his tracks such as the rockabilly blues of Love Me With a Feeling (b-side to All Your Love) or the rhythm & blues of 21 Days in Jail,** which demands a sacking if it was never dangled in front of Elvis Presley as a potential song for him to record.

Look Whatcha Done brings together blues and swing, though its centrepiece has to be the guitar solo from 1:01 to 1:26 in which Maghett picks out the notes with the precision of a sculptor cutting a piece of marble into the statue he wants to make.  Willie Dixon, who worked with Maghett as a musician, producer and writer* described Magic Sam’s use of harmonies in his playing as what marked him out as different from those who came before him. It certainly sounds as though multiple guitars are chocking that solo out, even though it is the work of one man.

*Going by the record labels on the original 45s, Dixon wrote a lot of Magic Sam’s songs; however, the credits on the West Side Soul compilation list only Maghett as the author of many of the same songs. Happily, both the original record and West Side Soul credit Maghett alone as the author of Look Whatcha Done.

** b-side to Easy Baby

Video courtesy of TheBluesfan12.

Guys and Dolls: Krispy 3 - We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum (22 May 1993)

 

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I’m so pleased that this blog’s 1000th post coincides with the return of the wonderful Krispy 3, who released We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum as a precursor to their second album, Can’t Melt the Wax.

Krispy 3 were always at their most entertaining when they were singing about the music industry and their own quest for artistic purity inside a business which either failed to recognise their genius or tried to persuade them to peddle pap for profit. Inevitably, they would stick to their principles and then bemoan the fact that lesser acts - both in terms of talent and integrity - were cleaning up financially or being promoted as cultural game changers, when they were doing nothing more than maintaining the status quo. The Can’t Melt the Wax album features a brilliant track called Who Ya Know, which rages against the fact that, in the music industry, contacts trump talent 9 times out of 10. I’m surprised that Peel never played it, especially given that his name comes up in the track.

What makes We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum so interesting is the conflict that runs throughout it. Krispy 3 always seemed keen to emphasise that, as far as they were concerned, rap music lived over here and pop music lived over there, and never the twain shall meet. Take the dripping disgust with which they read the headline Pop king is king of rap at the start of Don’t Be Misled as an example. Even though their own material was quite clean and positive by the standards of what rap music was considered to be i.e materialistic, violent, defiant etc, they were adamant that just because they used humour in their lyrics, they were first and foremost, a rap group - not a pop-rap confection. And yet, listening to the names and scenes dropped into the track by the Finlayson brothers and George Gueye, it ends up coming across as a bit of a love letter to pop music. Although the cover photo to the Can’t Melt the Wax LP featured a generic photo of the three of them, they could have used the cast list they assemble in We Don’t Go Pop Like Bubble Gum to make their own version of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead.

Based on what I can hear, and I may well have missed some other references, the cover would have included:

Sounds of Blackness

Dionne Warwick -  Walk on by like Dionne. And they may very well have thrown in Dion, for good measure, too.

Meat Loaf - A dead ringer.

The Champs - Tequila

Rupert Holmes - Pina Colada

Tone Loc - Funky Cold Medina

Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon - I make peace like Dempsey* is one of the best lines in any track I’ve heard since I started doing this blog.

Pat Morita - I love you Sensei.

Lou Rawls - Your love is hard to find, like my man, Lou Rawls, so I keep my head high and my head on my balls.

Fred Williamson - Black Caesar

Lucille Ball - I Love Lucy

Judy Garland - Skip to my Lou

Vernon Buckley and Gladstone Anderson  - Little Boy Blue**

Wings - Mary Had a Little Lamb***

That would be a row or two or sorted out, I think. 

Here’s to the next 1000!

Video courtesy of zitterfinger.

*Given Dempsey often solved problems by pulling out a gun, this might be less peaceful than initially thought.

**Buckley and Anderson recorded as a duo, Verne and Son, releasing their version of the nursery rhyme in 1971.

***So, Paul & Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell.

Guys and Dolls: Ween - Peel Session (22 May 1993)

Exactly a year after their first Peel Session was repeated, the Ween boys were back for their second and final Peel Session. Like the evening’s other Session guest, they used it as an opportunity to play songs which had not yet been issued on record. All instruments on the session were played by Dean Ween (Michael Melchiondo Jr.) and Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman), so the tracks have a slight element of works in progress about them; the entire session clocks in at less than 9 minutes. But, not a moment is wasted, and with one exception, they were fully in control of the material that they were playing.

After playing the first track, What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, Peel thought it sounded like a country song, and this inspired him to play a country music track by Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (Das Hab Ich Falsch Gemacht). I’d be more inclined to describe it as the session’s indie-folk tune. Sung by Gene, it describes his experience with anxiety attacks, which was something that Dean had apparently suffered from all his life. The line, If I was king, I’d wear a ring/And never hurt my people, suggests that the anxiety is caused by somebody rather than something. This could be a link to the third song in the session, the jazzy Take Me Away, where Gene sings about his struggle not to go crazy after being cheated on by a woman; a devastating experience for anyone, but something which should at least offer clarity. The woman took his love for granted and took him for a fool. The heartache has to be gone through, but there will be someone else out there who will help him to repair his broken heart and make him smile again. That’s the optimistic take, but the closing lines on What Deaner Was Talkin’ About, I don’t think I will ever return again, my friend, suggest that Gene currently finds the damage to be irreparable.

Both What Deaner Was Talkin’ About and Take Me Away were recorded for Ween’s 1994 album, Chocolate and Cheese. 

The fourth track on the session, Buckingham Green, apparently takes its name from a shopping centre based in New Hope, Pennsylvania, close to where Ween were formed.  Even in a stripped down form it promises a psychedelic epic in its brief running time with its lines about eyeless children, meetings with God and beings descending from the stratosphere, which was duly realised when the song was finally recorded for their 1997 album, The Mollusk.

Apologies for jumping about the running order in this session, but I was originally going to pass on the second track, Vallejo, because it didn’t have much to recommend it beyond the catchiness of its Latin rock stylings. I changed my mind because given how short the whole session is I didn’t think would be too much of an encumbrance to have it included if I was listening to it on the metaphorical mixtape. In the event, it’s the song in the session which has most intrigue about it, especially this version of it.

The Ween wiki states that Vallejo was written and first performed during 1992.  Its role in live performance was to provide the music to a lengthy piece of performance art whereby the Ween boys would stack up instruments, amplifiers, drinks and many other things on top of their touring drummer, Claude Coleman Jr.’s drum kit, so as to form some kind of impromptu sculpture which could then be played to produce noise and feedback. This could take up to half-an-hour of time in the concert. One YouTube commenter I saw mentioned that they saw Ween do this in a live show once, and they decided to go and play a game of pool in another part of the venue. When they went back after their game, the song was still going and the sculpture was still being built.  

All that would be lost on record though, so, by the time Ween put Vallejo out as a b-side on their 1994 single, Voodoo Lady, it stood as a song about the life and wild times of the painter, Boris Vallejo. None of this features in the Peel Session version. I wondered whether the BBC quailed at lines that feature in the studio version version such as, I lick your pussy and then cum inside. Considering that this would have been going out long after the 9pm watershed, I can’t see why it would have been a problem. But nevertheless, Vallejo was presented as a short instrumental which tonally sounded closer to another version of the track called Vallejo Pt. 2.

If there were censorship issues  - and I’m only conjecturing about that - it might explain why Ween never recorded another Peel Session. However, this was not the last time that Ween’s music featured on a Peel Session, given that Tim Wheeler and Charlotte Hatherley of Ash included a cover of What Deaner Was Talkin’ About on their acoustic Peel Session at Peel Acres on 15 April 1999.

Video courtesy of VibraCobra23 Ennui.

All lyrics are copyright of Dean and Gene Ween.