The Who, Half-Assing, and the Perils of Full-Assing It: Yet Another Pivot

For my money, that's the one you're after...

It’s fitting to talk about the demise of one maniacally-ambitious project in a post that will end by talking about the demise of several other projects, if the latter were only too ambitious for one man attempting to maximize the internet in order to make the voices in his head calm down. I’ll close with that.

Reviving the Bins Project with a chapter on the band who bundled their greatest hits onto the first cassette I ever bought felt fitting, centering, even a little poetic. When my mom took me to…Kmart(?) and offered to buy a cassette for me (which I don’t even remember asking for), I don’t recall seeing anything else but The Who’s Greatest Hits, the one with a Union Jack jacket on the cover. I have zero recollection of how 11-year-old me came to decide that a cassette by The Who was the one I just had to have. I do, however, remember my oldest sister asking me to record a live radio broadcast of a concert of theirs that she went to see in Indianapolis – one after The Who’s infamous concert in Cincinnati where 11 people got trampled to death. (So called, “festival seating” caused that, by the way, and not the band, but they still got banned from Cincinnati, because that’s how America’s municipalities roll, I guess.)

I started the predecessor site to this one, A Project of Self Indulgence, as a review/farewell to my record collection, which I figured I’d stop listening to once I got lost in the infinite wilds of streaming services like Spotify. It became clearer and clearer, as I worked through my catalog, that I knew very little about the music. Worse, I knew far, far less (far, far, far less) about the artists who made it all. And I think that’s why I cracked up and deleted it.

I bring up all the above because that pattern started with how I consumed The Who. Greatest hits albums were all I ever listened to – whether the greatest hits album named above, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, or The Kids Are Alright, which, as it happens is a soundtrack to a documentary – so I’d never actually sat through an actual album by The Who, i.e., an original product put out for first-time consumption, and not something re-hashed. Well, Tommy excepted. I knew that album very well, even remember the look of the cover from lifting out of the stack of my sister’s records to play it just one more time.

New to Me, No. 2: Orange Goblin, Regular Blokes with Bills, Just Like You

In the best possible world, and more....

“So, we're in a really fortunate position where we basically get to go on holiday with our mates, get free booze, get paid for it, and see the world; and every night you're expected to get up on stage and play the music that you enjoy for an hour and 20 minutes or so."

"Ha, it's a hard life, hey?!"

BW: Yeah! I just wish that we were making a living by doing it...”

That last thoughtm the one about making a living as a heavy metal band came up in every interview (video or otherwise*) I read in a frantic attempt to catch up on Orange Goblin. The two words that consistently show up in the next sentence or two are “mortgages” and “families.” The same words came to mind each time I closed a browser page, or logged off for the night: “they’re regular blokes,” I’d say. (* Not totally regular: both lead singer, Ben Ward, and (I think) bassist, Martyn Millard, were apprentices for Queens Park Rangers at age 16.)

To drive home the point about Orange Goblin’s fixation with keeping ahead of finances, that quote up top came out of a 2010 interview on The Quietus (worth reading for the lede alone…but stay for the quick note on touring through Bozeman, Montana). The band swung at an honest stab of living off music too, when Ward, Millard, Chris Turner (drummer), and Joe Hoare (guitar) set off on a world tour to support the album Ward still rates as their best, 2012’s A Eulogy for the Damned. They traveled the world, “[went] on holiday with [their] mates,” (probably) got their fill of free booze…but after a year or two of touring and struggling to pull together the next album, the financials never came together. In spite of international fame – defined here as being able to fill a large-ish room with highly-interested people (this part is necessary) – the logistics and costs of touring simply don’t pencil out for a band like Orange Goblin. For what it’s worth, I do think they all miss their families too. These are very nice, responsible men, I can't stress that enough.

Noisey put out a solid retrospective about that spirited attempt around the time of the release of 2018’s The Wolf Bites Back; if you want a pretty solid one-stop snapshot of what they’re about, that feels like a good source. While circumstances forced them to downgrade Orange Goblin to a really kick-ass (hopefully lucrative) hobby, every member holds down a day job to keep home, family, and hobby together. All the same, they don’t sound anything like giving up. When TotalRock interviewed Ward at the 2017 Download Festival (link above under “video”), the way he describes the beginnings of The Wolf Bites Back – e.g., band members swapping of riffs and ideas, getting the ideas bubbling – and the fact that they got together as recently as 2017-18 to write and compose together, organically, and that everyone still keeps bringing ideas to the table, that reads like a fair sign this won't be their last album. Their last tour...well, that's another story.

New to Me, No. 1: The Mellow Gold of Weyes Blood's Titanic Rising

From "Everyday." Solid call-back.

“Yeah, I am a special kind of clown. I make people cry.”

That came at the end of a video interview with Weyes Blood (aka, Natalie Mering) on AMBY (A Music Blog, Yea?), who’s as intelligent and thoughtful there as she is everywhere else. For those who don’t want to take the time to watch that, a reviewer on Pitchfork gets you even closer in one vivid sentence:

“She speaks coolly, even when you sense a surge of passion is running through every word, and her music plays a similar trick.”

I got to Weyes Blood when Spotify fed me Drugdealer’s “Sea of Nothing” (one of your weirder accessible tunes).Mering doesn’t even appear on that track, but her singular contribution on “End of Comedy” and “Suddenly” made both songs work better than the rest of End of Comedy (which I still recommend to the right people). It was the recent release of Titanic Rising (in 2019) and hearing “Everyday” (link below) that finally inspired me to dig in to, what turned out to be a longer than expected story.

Mering was born in Santa Monica, California (and I think she’s California-based now), but she landed in Philadelphia’s “noise rock” scene by way of growing up in a musical household in Pennsylvania – specifically in a band called Jackie O Motherfucker (sample of their more normal: ”Hey! Mr. Sky”) and Nautical Almanac (samples are rarer). While I didn’t hear much of Jackie O Motherfucker (only enough to walk away thinking “noise” is a terrible misnomer), I heard enough to make sense of why Mering’s first solo album as Weyes Blood – 2010’s Outdoor Room – sounds like it comes from a totally different artist than Titanic Rising.

The choices on Outdoor Room become actually puzzling to anyone who started on the wrong end of Weyes Blood’s catalog or the Drugdealer collaborations. Then again, a 2015 interview with Noisey describes what Mering was doing even five years later like so:

One Hit No More, No. 10: The Chantays Shoot the "Pipeline" (to Nowhere)

These were men either in, or just after, high school. #OldeTyme

I flirted with the idea of combining The Surfaris and The Chantays into one post, but opted against because dropping them into a bucket called “surf rock” felt like short-changing both bands. As it turns out, though, neither band did much beyond putting out two famous hits, both in the same year, and in a musical movement that everyone agrees got crushed under the British Invasion, and that few seemed to miss when it left. To contextualize that argument, I lifted this from the LA Times’ obituary from founding Chantay, Brian Carman:

“On his debut album in 1967, Jimi Hendrix promised his listeners that ‘you'll never hear surf music again.’”

Surf came and went, mostly within 1963, and Hendrix still felt like he had to crap on it four years later…

The Surfaris had “Wipe Out” (a brief history of the band and the song) and The Chantays had “Pipeline.” The differences don’t quite end there, but they don’t go much further either. Both bands formed in high school (The Chantays were a bit older, collectively), and wrapped up as going, creative concerns shortly after. Both came from southern California, both looked up to and borrowed from the same bands/artists – e.g., The Ventures, Dick Dale, and The Rhythm Rangers, whose line-up included Carman’s older brother, Steve (just for the record, the Orange County Register’s obit on Carman calls them The Rhythm Rockers). Carman and his friends formed The Chantays for the oldest reason people go into entertainment. As Bob Spickard, the other half of the band’s brain said, “Hey, these guys were making money and getting all the girls, so maybe we ought to think about that.”

One Hit No More, No. 9: The Surfaris Barely Had the Time to "Wipe Out"

I don't know who plays what instrument. Not from that photo.

This post marks another rare occasion where the band in question – The Surfaris – really had just the one hit. They came, they recorded “Wipe Out,” and pretty much folded after that. It is, obviously, a monster fucking hit, a song that just about anyone in the Western world (and god knows how far beyond) can hum after hearing only a few bars. They left a genre-perfect standard – even as they had some questions about their genre.

In one of those perfect pop culture twists, The Surfaris recorded “Wipe Out” as an afterthought. They’d recorded “Surfer Joe,” aka, a powerful case that they should stick to instrumentals, when their small-shop producer, Dale Smallin, explained to a very green band that, because a 45 has two sides to it, they needed something for a B-side. The last active member of The Surfaris, Bob Berryhill, relived the moment in an oral history for the National Association of Music Merchants: the band’s drummer, Ron Wilson, laid down the famous (and rightly revered) drumming (“cadence,” he calls it), and the rest of the band started to play over it; you can see Berryhill, who makes frequent, mildly uncanny nods to heavy metal, age backwards as he relives the recording of “Wipe Out.” Someone’s dad (think it was Berryhill’s dad) broke a board to open the track – this was to replicate the sound of a surfboard cracking – and Smallin suggested the maniacal laughter as a smart follow-up.

Catching up on the The Surfaris’ afterlife means listening to Berryhill repeat the same stories with remarkable consistency. In all of the three pieces I read (start with this history), he jokes about Wilson as the “old man” of The Surfaris at age 17. Everyone else in the band – Berryhill (rhythm guitar), Jim Fuller (lead guitar), and Pat Connolly (bass guitar) – was just 15 years old when they recorded “Wipe Out.” They recorded it fast too; in a separate interview from classicbands.com, Berryhill guessed that the studio recording was either the second or third take of the three they recorded. One passage in that interview gives an impression of having gotten away with something:

One Hit No More, No. 8: The Exciters, "Tell Him," and Brenda & Herb

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If you ask most people who have heard The Exciters’ “Tell Him” what they liked about it, I’d put money down on that twinkling intro, which is brightened by someone merrily tapping on a xylophone. I’m guessing the vocals would come up too, belted out by lead singer Brenda Reid with a clarity that borders on digital/ABBA quality (so fresh, so clean). “Tell Him” wasn’t The Exciters only big hit, but it’s the only one they got all to themselves.

When you go deeper into their catalog, though, and listen to more songs, you’ll catch a theme: these ladies really want love. A surface read of the song’s message could translate as Reid and her back-up singers, Carolyn Johnson and Lillian Walker, throwing themselves at the men they want, almost desperately. If you put some thought into when this song came out - 1963 - that flips the dynamic on its head. Reid doesn’t just “know something about love,” she’s doing something about it. Dammit. Girl is gonna go get it.

That cultural reversal didn’t go unnoticed: it’s The Exciters’ gift to pop culture. As one biography put it:

“’Tell Him’ boasted an intensity that signified a sea change in the presentation and perception of femininity in popular music, paving the way for such tough, sexy acts as the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes.”

The Exciters’ planted a bigger footprint in pop culture than “Tell Him,” and another, sweet-hearted review highlights the injustice of making light of their impact: “in the USA they are lumped together with acts both sublime and ridiculous as ‘One Hit Wonders.’” They don’t deserve the cultural downgrade, because once you look, you see The Exciters slip into some curious places. “Tell Him” did more than pop up all over pop culture, and inspire multiple covers (not always good ones (and just plain bad ones*), it also inspired Dusty Springfield to go solo and switch up her sound (Wikipedia’s history includes a fantastic quote from her). Moreover, they had one more massive hit - just one later overtaken by a version put out by another act. If you know Manfred Mann (with or without his Earth Band), now you know he didn’t record the original of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”; The Exciters did, a year earlier, and with one less “Diddy.”

In fairness, The Exciters didn’t record the first version of “Tell Him.” It first came into the world as “Tell Her,” as song by Johnny Thunder (not Johnny Thunders), aka, Gil Hamilton. (The Exciters did it better, and on all levels.)

The 1st Quarter 2019 Playlust Playlist: My (Weird) Top 75 from the First Three Months of 2019

My joke about a second take back-fired.

[Ed. – I actually held onto a few posts from A Project of Self-Indulgence, the first several artist profiles of 2019 among them. Because the 1st Quarter Playlist that I’m putting up includes a fair number of artists on this list, I thought I’d repost these summaries to give people an intro to the artists they hear on the playlist. Just the good ones, mind you. And, now, without preamble…]

Masego
“Anytime I’ve tried to make this recipe for dopeness, it just doesn’t work.”

That doesn’t so much sum up Masego, the stage-name for the fairly-recently launched Micah Davis, as embody him. He describes his influences – jazz-era legend Cab Calloway and Jamie Foxx, of all people, not to mention Pharrell, and OutKast’s Andre 3000 – while also talking about how much he relies on improvisation when making music. He trips when he tries to too-consciously follow his idols.

Masego is a fairly recent act, someone I found when the Portland Mercury named his Lady Lady as one of their top albums of 2018. Personally, the connection came slowly and through inaction: every time I came close to skipping a song, I’d inevitably counsel myself to give it “just a couple more seconds.” I only noticed I’d stopped saying that when Spotify started playing another artist. Lady Lady is the kind of magnetic, low-upon-first-listen kind of albums, but it’s something I sank into, and without noticing it much. I pulled “Lavish Lullaby,” “Old Age” and “Just A Little” to the playlist and, the more I listen to them, and read up on him, the more all that feels like a toe-hold onto something bigger. Judging by the fact he was scheduled to headline a European/North American tour shortly after this interview, says that The Mercury and me aren’t the only people who can’t quite find the skip button.

Born in Jamaica, raised in Newport News, Virginia, by an entrepreneur and a guy in the U.S Air Force, both of them pastors, Masego comes from Soundcloud, and the internet in general. He calls what he does “TrapHouseJazz” (and…I’ll accept it), and, from one interview to the next – whether in a WAMU 85 Bandwidth.fm interview (source for the quote up top), or one with Billboard (link above) – understanding what that means requires some long-form reading. To give an example, he neither reads nor writes music, but, in a testament to his drive and/or compulsion, he created his own musical notation that he understands well enough to translate for others. Most often, though, he just sits down and lets it happen – and, after that, he invites in more people (something about 100 people being “in TrapHouseJazz”). Call it hyper-, open-source collaboration with all kinds of anyone he can find. The man (age 25) even created an app called Network, in order to enable the kind of collaboration that works for him – and probably people of his generation.

One Hit No More, No. 7: The Cascades Played to the "Rhythm of the Rain"

Hard to find concert art for this lot...

I’m going to squeeze out this post, and I mean no disrespect to the artist(s), Claude John Gummoe, and the band he fronted, The Cascades, or to the song, “Rhythm of the Rain.” I love that song, in fact, and have since the first time I heard it (god knows when). The delicacy to the music feels poking out the raw edges of where your heartbreak (if in that mid-20th-century, middle-America way of suppressing emotions that recalls the same state of shock I experienced when I broke my leg; long story). At any rate, it’s a poignant, touching piece of pop, a brittle smile at a personal tragedy. It’s got the chops to survive the test of time…

…which begs the question of why Gummoe did this with it. (Or even something like it.) That’s a 1990 “dance remix” of the song, something that, per Wikipedia, Gummoe did record. Why? To do something between hazard a guess and create a narrative, some people make music - or art of any kind, really - to express themselves, or find some form of companionship with something they think or feel, while other people make music because they like being famous. I don’t know Gummoe at all, never mind well enough to drop him into the “fame-first” column - and I’m not. I will, on the other hand, make him a stand-in for a hypothetical. Some people can perform the same set of songs for years, even decades, and still get a charge out of that. That probably lands between loving to make people happy and loving being the center of attention. I don’t judge, either way. You can see the same thing with Frankie Ford (who I wrote up earlier in this series); the man just loved performing, so he kept going.

All the same, neither Gummoe, nor The Cascades did anything remotely as high-profile after “Rhythm of the Rain.” After a week listening to a 20-song collection of their hits, I heard the echo of ringing bell in “Dreamin’,” but that could just be me remixing in my own head. (Turns out that’s a borrowed song, something I learned  from this site, which also doubles as another history on The Cascades.) I didn’t get much out of that 20-song collection, honestly. While it’s not ear-stabbing torture or anything, The Cascades play inside a pretty narrow band-width. Musically, it steps away from the other “one-hit bands” I reviewed earlier, doo-wop and Motown acts like Don & Juan and The Contours. They borrow doo-wop vocals - see, “Dreamin’,” but also “Is There a Chance?” and “Let Me Be” - and, even if those songs sound like 50s rock ‘n’ roll, you can hear some 60s sound slipping in - e.g., in “Punch and Judy” and “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home.”

One Hit No More, No. 6: The Contours, To Answer the Question, "Do You Love Me?" Not Enough.

You like "Whole Lotta Woman" best. I never realized.....

More than a little hyperactivity surrounds Detroit’s “other” Motown group, the Contours, and it goes beyond their live-wire stage shows. They changed personnel like most people change clothes - e.g., often and without much thought. One website I found organizes that detail in a way that draws the high-volume, “anyone can go” turnover in high relief, but nothing clarifies the mysterious mechanics quite like the lawsuit that wound up blessing the existence of two groups that toured at the same time - one as “The Contours with Joe Billingslea” the other as “The Contours featuring Sylvester Potts.”

To second guess that second lawsuit a little, Potts wasn’t even an original Contour.

Whatever the current line-up at the precise moment/location, The Contours chief claim to fame was 1962’s “Do You Love Me,” a song so nice, it made ‘em famous twice. The second time happened when that song showed up on the soundtrack for one of the 1980s most iconic movies, Dirty Dancing (not a fan; oh yeah, just put Baby in a corner). The soundtrack(s) for that song re-charted as high as No. 11 and kicked off a brand new, 10-month “Dirty Dancing Concert Tour,” and for a group that never really stopped touring (or rearranging the line-up).

To return to the stray reference above to the “other Motown group,” The Contours worked and lived in the shadow of the label’s bigger names - e.g., The Temptations, The Four Tops, and The Miracles. (If it makes The Contours feel better, I didn’t recognize The Miracles until I put “Smokey Robinson and the” in front of it.) Then again, The Contours owe a couple of their other hits (yes, they had them; more later) to Smokey Robinson, including “First I Look at the Purse” and, a personal favorite for the way it gives them something else to do, the ballad “That Day She Needed Me.”

Overall, the story of The Contours is a collection of near-misses – and those started at the beginning. They had to take two runs at Motown Records founder, Berry Gordy Jr., before he decided to sign them, and even that took the familial connection of a recently-acquired bass singer, Hubert Johnson. When they failed to impress Gordy face-to-face, his cousin, “R&B star and Gordy associate Jackie Wilson” prevailed on Gordy to give them another shot through a second audition – but as The Blenders. That they also came close to losing “Do You Love Me” says everything about how close The Contours came to missing their shot.

One Hit No More, No. 5: Don & Juan, & "What Your Name" & Other People with Better Stories

It's the people around them...

This one’s pretty simple: one guy performed as “Don” (Roland Trone), another as “Juan” (Claude “Sonny” Johnson), and they recorded a gently pining doo wop hit titled, “What’s Your Name.” Apart from Trone’s early death (1982, age 45) and acknowledgement of a later “lesser” hit, “Magic Wand,” there’s not much available about Don & Juan, even on the internet, and there’s even less on the song itself. Johnson would go on to write a few dozen more songs, but the specific story begins and ends with: two guys recorded a good song and it became a big enough “monster hit” for them to achieve icon status in the doo-wop genre.

I poked first around people who worked with Johnson, and then did a little digging into the doo wop genre. I can already turn the page on Trone, sadly, with his untimely death and his partnership with Johnson.

Johnson, on the other hand, started in another doo wop act from New York’s Long Island called The Genies. That group formed in 1956, with Alexander Faison, Fred Jones, Bill Gains, and Roy Hammond (you’ll hear more about that last name) as founding members. They got discovered on a beach instead a street corner - the more typical doo wop origin story - but not much else separated them from the competition. The Genies did record an album, one that included their minor hit, “Who’s That Knockin,’” (cute tune about juggling lovers), but that didn’t happen until Johnson came over from Brooklyn and helped with the songs. Their ride to stardom crested at that, and the best story they left to history happened that one time, when Gains “ran off to Canada with a woman and has never been seen or heard from since.” He made that infamous break the night of The Genies one and only (I believe) show at the famous Apollo Theater.

Roughly three years passed between the end of The Genies run in 1959 and the release of “What’s Your Name?” in 1962. With doo wop big as it was - this coincided with that genre’s last, loud gasp - Don & Juan had to break through a lot of noise in order to be heard. The song, a masterful pairing of sound and content, a sort of musical onomatopoeia for love’s dumbstruck awe, gets credit for that. It doesn’t necessarily stand out beyond that, and that’s true of most of Don & Juan’s work. Like “Magic Wand” - and, for me, most of doo wop. As with The Monotones’ “Book of Love,” Don & Juan’s particular spin on doo wop got them in the spotlight, but it couldn’t keep them there. Pop culture couldn’t eat doo wop forever for one; not even the inventive guitar hooks and atmospheric production on songs like “Pot Luck” and “All That’s Missing Is You” couldn’t buy them more time (those are the best songs Don & Juan put out for me). On the other hand, songs like that prefigured Johnson’s future as a songwriter. The man could adapt.

One Hit No More, No. 4: When Bruce Channel (and Delbert McClinton) Shouted "Hey! Baby"

Such a sweaty photo...

Yeah, you’ve got it. It is pronounced “sha-NEL.” Of course that’s how you’d say it.

On the other hand, Bruce Channel, individual, sounds like he plays very much against that type over the course of one long, undated, and just fun interview. It covers a lot of ground - e.g., from the rock ‘n’ roll scene in late 1950s east Texas (he hails from a town called Grapevine) to his original manager, Major Bill Smith, and his fixation on Elvis Presley still being alive - and Channel comes off equal parts humble and charming through it all. It also offers a remarkable history of how music got made and promoted at the time. That includes how Channel and Delbert McClinton (a session player Major Bill introduced him to) played with The Beatles when they were small enough to “open” for Bruce Channel. That was back in 1962, when they still had Pete Best on drums. (For what it’s worth, Channel floats a couple theories on why they let go of Best, one probably true, the other with a wink.)

If there’s one anecdote/myth that seems to keep coming up across what I’m reading about Channel and McClinton, it’s the story about McClinton teaching John Lennon “everything he knew” about getting the most out of the harmonica. Channel laughed that off as a joke McClinton tells, but the statement McClinton puts on it a separate (also fascinating) interview puts it plainly enough to feel accurate:

“John did mention to me that he was inspired by ‘Hey! Baby.’ Of course, it's hard to show anybody anything on a harmonica. But later, he told someone I showed him everything he knew. Just like anything, it gets romanticized.”

Dang. If I could share a beer and a conversation with only one of Channel and McClinton, it wouldn’t be an easy choice, but leaning McClinton.

Two Beatles songs (arguably) feature inspiration from McClinton’s “harp” lessons: “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me.” (You don’t get the harmonica in the live performance of “Please Please Me” that I dug up, but you do get to see The Beatles play live, if with muddled audio.) Both men clearly admire and marvel at the enormity of Beatles-mania, and the way they talk about it shows how well they understand the distance between them and the Liverpool legends. (McClinton’s quick revelries about being a small-town Texas kid in London are worth the glance). All the same, they had their taste of life as an overnight sensation.