Crash-Course, No. 30: Bill Withers, The Storyteller from Slab Fork, WV

A home of Bill Withers

Bill Withers struggled to get inside the recording industry and kept struggling once he got inside. He came from literally nowhere, growing up in a small town called Beckley, Western Virginia, that lived and too often died according to what happened in the mines. He had a storyteller’s sense to claim Slab Fork, West Virginia as his hometown; he was born there, but the more poetic name suggested itself for his bio. He would find his way to Los Angeles by way of the U.S. Navy and a succession of manufacturing jobs in the defense industry, but Withers spent his time off writing songs and plotting his escape.

He never trusted the industry, not even before he got into it, but reports that he held on to his day job to see what happened with 1971’s Just As I Am matches what he calls his hometown. As he admits in a 2014 interview with WNYC’s Anna Sale, he had been laid off while all that was going on and got a call to return to work and a call from Johnny Carson’s people the same day. No matter what he said at the time, he went straight to The Tonight Show and never looked back. That album featured “Grandma’s Hands” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a song inspired by the Jack Lemmon/Lee Remick movie, Days of Wine and Roses. The latter won a Grammy and gave Withers a chance to record a follow up the next year with Still Bill, which brought more fame and another Grammy for “Lean on Me.” With two massively successful (and ultimately iconic) singles in his pocket, Withers looked like a man with a formula - enough, even, to punch his ticket to perform at the famous Rumble in the Jungle, where Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. And yet his record companies kept meddling.

He put out several more albums as a solo artist through the rest of the 1970s, but basically checked out after 1978’s ‘Bout Love. Withers had reached his limit with the A&R people - “antagonistic and redundant” he called them during his acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award he received in 2015 (great speech, btw). They’d tell him no one releases a song without a few bars of intro (he’d comeback with “’Ain’t No Sunshine’ didn’t have one) or that he should add some instrument or another to punch it up (to someone who got famous sitting on a stool playing a guitar), so Withers busied himself with a handful of collaborations and not much else. That lasted until 1985’s Watching You Watching Me, which I have yet to listen to…then again, I have a pathological distrust production from the 80s, and I’ve got a thousand other stops to make on this tour...

Crash-Course No. 29: Jungle Brothers Blazed a Trail

The new album. 2020, y'all!

[Ed. - Another “rewrite,” which is in quotes this time because, the About the Sampler section aside, it’s going up here the same way it did in the original (messy) mega-post. Still leaning toward keeping the “Who They’re For, A Little More,” and “About the Sampler” format…separating the sources too.]

Who They’re For: Hip hop fans with a fondness for originators - e.g., one of the earlier attempts to expand the genre’s musical influences by fusing jazz, hip-hop and house music (hip-house!) - and lovers of both consciousness and fun. They came out about a decade into hip hop’s existence and still opened up one of its most fruitful sub-genres.

A Little More
“So where you had Jungle Brothers brought into the nation by Red Alert, you had Jungle Brothers bringing in Tribe and De La and we rolled out like that. Before that, it was BDP, Ultramagnetic MCs, Nice & Smooth and Mark the 45 King with Markey Fresh and the Violators. Red was mentoring all of us.”

This one starts with the thought experiment: what would it be like to grow up in New York with Kool DJ Red Alert, one of the biggest names in the beating heart of hip hop, as your uncle? The leg up didn’t hurt the Jungle Brothers, but Red Alert only gave them a platform (by playing “Braggin’ & Boastin’” on his Kiss 98.7 radio show), which left Mike G (aka, Michael Small; also the nephew), Afrika Baby Bam (aka, Nathaniel Hall), and DJ Sammy B (Sammy Burwell) with the work of changing what hip hop artists could talk about ahead of them. With musical and performance influences like Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire as their North Star, Jungle Brothers built the Native Tongue crew one band and one artist at a time, playing together and touring together, and generally keeping an exhausting pace. They also added musical elements to hip hop beyond the funk, disco and dance breaks and pushed forward Afro-centric themes; the latter wasn’t so unusual - see, Boogie Down Productions - but Jungle Brothers, and Native Tongue as a whole, made it all sound more fun - and funny. Their 1988 release, Straight Out of the Jungle, put them on the map and they expanded it a year later with Done by the Forces of Nature. Their peers passed them - Tribe Called Quest, in particular - and they arguably arrived in the wrong moment, i.e., a couple years before hip hop’s center of gravity shifted to the West Coast, then got swallowed up by the East Coast/West Coast mess. They’re easy to research in that you don’t have to turn over too many stones to find interviews, but they have neither the history nor the drama that gives the “holy shit” moments that make these things easy to write. If I had to name the one thing that kept coming up in most of the sources I read, it’s the recording of “I’ll House You,” and why not? By most accounts, everyone involved but the Jungle Brothers gave that track the side-eye and the producer suggested recording it as a lark, something to fill some time at the end of the album. That song still seems to get a lot of play and I’ll always cherish it for the way Afrika Baby Bam describes the recording process:

Crash-Course, No. 28: Billy Paul, Keep Sight of the Forest and the Trees

Visualizing "towering."

Despite recording one of the most popular soul numbers you’ve heard (from wherever you’ve heard it) - “Me and Mrs. Jones” - Billy Paul was surprisingly hard to research. He's pretty much pre-internet, which kinda sucks, because he’s got a rich story.

Paul started recording long before his success - as far back as 1952 (with two songs I can’t find) - and he crossed paths with some straight-up legends, becoming very close to one of them. He was inducted into the U.S. Army and served in Germany with Elvis Presley starting in 1957, but Paul couldn’t sell The King on a touring band he put together; Elvis focused on driving jeeps and keeping his nose clean and away from show business (all of it carefully managed and encouraged by Colonel Tom Parker). Much later in his career, Paul and his future wife/manager, Blanche Williams, grew close to Marvin Gaye, but, to the regret of The Roots’ Questlove, he never matched his friend’s reputation or influence. It was never for lack of trying or originality.

Even before they found Harold Melvin, even before they launched PIR, Gamble and Huff found Paul singing in a Philadelphia venue called The Sahara Club. Liking what they heard, they signed him to their then-label Gamble Records and put out his full debut album, 1968’s Feelin’ Good at the Cadillac Club. That album sounded nothing like his later material (and it didn’t work for me), and Paul explained the shift in an unexpected way:

“I was singing totally Jazz then, but when I heard the Beatles and heard the gospel influence and everything I just said: 'I can make jazz with R&B.' That transition came when The Beatles came out to America.”

While he called Billy Holliday his biggest influence - because he (generally) sang higher up the scale - Paul pulled inspiration from all over:

Crash-Course, No. 27: Viva Viva Voce

Also the name of a German a capella group.

Viva Voce was a two-member outfit built around husband and wife, Kevin and Anita Robinson (nee Anita Elliott), so it’s not too surprising the band ended when they divorced. They started out in their native Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1998, before relocating (first) to Nashville, Tennessee, then Portland, Oregon - apparently, with some prodding by Menomena’s Danny Seim - where they spent most of their careers. They played most of that time as a two-piece, even live and, if you spend any time listening to them, they put out an impressive amount of volume, variety and texture with just two people. A Guitar World interview with Anita that came out around the same time as their final album (lots of great gear/guitar talk in that one, btw), The Future Will Destroy You, neatly summed up how that worked in practice:

“With Kevin manning the drums while also playing acoustic guitar (no kidding!) and singing, and Anita playing lead guitar while singing ethereal lead vocals, their live sound is surprisingly fat and ballsy for just two players.”

Viva Voce lasted over a decade as a going concern - not bad for an indie outfit - and, per Wikipedia, toured with some of their bigger peers, like Jimmy Eats World and The Shins. That gave them enough time to drop a pretty healthy discography, spanning from 1998’s Hooray for Now to The Future; their breakthrough album, to the extent they had one, was 2004’s The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, which got them big enough to tour in Europe (if I combine sources here - Wikipedia and a 2014 Willamette Week piece on Kevin’s (ungentle) life after the split (seriously, oof), that could be when they got on board with a UK indie label called Full Time Hobby). Another thing worth noting: they expanded to a four-piece, at least for touring purposes, during/after 2009’s release of Rose City (5th album; cute song, btw), by adding Evan Railton (instrument unknown) and Corinna Repp (guitar, I’m guessing).

That Willamette Week piece flags the tour for The Future as the beginning of a very sharp end: Kevin colorfully described the experience as “going from one beheading to the next.” It’s funny, if only in that highly-specific context, to read a 2005 appreciation of The Heat (etc.)/evil prophecy from the UK's Independent regarding how many bands built on two people implode in white-hot recriminations - and woe betide the people dumb enough to attempt it while married (though it’s nice when the same article credits Sonny and Cher for being “troupers” for reaching “an amicable rapprochement after their split). Good on calling the future…I guess?

One Hit No More, No. 50: No One Home at the Edison Lighthouse

Totally wizard, man.

The Hit
I’m pretty confident I’d heard “Love Grows (“Where My Rosemary Goes)” one-to-several times or another on the various local oldies radio channels I listened to down the years, but I couldn’t have connected them to an act called Edison Lighthouse, not even if that was the only way to rescue my kids from a hostage situation. As it happens there’s a pretty good reason for that, something I’ll get into below.

“Love Grows” is a pretty, catchy song from straight outta the late-stage bubblegum pop era and it takes liberal advantage of the ear-worm arsenal: e.g., the white-funky guitar riff, the soft, bright horns that swell into simple verses of nonsense (“she ain’t got no money/her clothes are kinda funny/her hair is kinda wild and free”) that opens up into a sticky chorus, and a basic toe-tapping rhythm that just about anybody can’t lose. It’s like somebody was tasked with writing a hit, so they listened to what was working at the time and got to work.

That’s not too far off, really, even if it jumps ahead of the main story by about an album and a tour.

The Rest of the Story
As much as I regret it happening on the 50th post in this series (who shits on a milestone?), I will not regret phoning in this one. On the plus side, I get to kill two birds with one stone courtesy of that editorial decision, thus saving me from having to listen to The First Class’ “Beach Baby” ever again. I mean, what sane man wouldn’t take that trade?

Unlike most of the bands discussed below, Edison Lighthouse was an actual band - even if the last one for the main person of interest to the larger story.

Tony Burrows started his career in pop music with The Kestrels, a band he formed between the English version of high school and a stint in the Army. Two of his bandmates - Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - went on to become London’s answer to New York’s Brill Building songwriting machine, writing a string of hits for a generation of English artists, plus a couple for Eurovision contests and, with your friends at the Coca-Cola corporation, one of the most famous ad pitches in history. They’d also write several more hits with/for Burrows…but I’m getting ahead on him again.

Crash-Course, No. 26: King Princess, the Stuff of Legends

Fuck it, I'll call her an icon.

Mikaela Mullaney Straus, aka, King Princess, has an interesting enough bio for someone so young - her great-great grandfather, Isidor Straus, was a member of Congress (and perhaps the only one) who slipped into the icy waters with The R.M.S. Titanic, and she descends from the co-owners of (fucking) Macy’s (though she’s clear on one thing: “I didn’t inherit any of this money”). Even her recent family history ties her to someone interesting - e.g., Oliver Straus, Jr., a recording engineer who ran Williamsburg’s Mission Sound recording studio, where she learned a true gear-head’s worth of knowledge, wisdom and technical prowess.

And yet she’s made more life on her own in her short time on Earth than most of us ever will. The challenge comes with wrapping your head around the avalanche of personal details and complexities that surround the one studio album she’s put out…with a deluxe version.

King Princess arrived with a rush of success: her debut single, “1950,” an ode “to The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952 novel), to the LGBT community and queer love,” went platinum both on its own strengths and with a push from Harry Styles…who, by the way, she was scheduled to tour Europe with before COVID took a giant shit on everyone’s life and plans (fucking COVID…). She’s got a number of connections to the stars - e.g., Mark Ronson as the flagship artist to his Zelig Recordings (that was in 2017) and Fiona Apple, who calls Straus “my son” and who featured when Straus covered her song “I Know” - all of which sounds like going stratospheric out of the gates…but King Princess has a strong sense of playing on the outside looking in. Which is a shame, because, holy shit…she is good. But she also sounds like…for lack of a better phrase, a full-time fucking handful.

“You know what’s not a fun person to be around at age 7, 8, 9?” she asks. “Someone who knows they’re going to be famous. That kid is challenging. I was a lot. I was brutal.”

That comes out of a New York Times profile from early 2020, before the world closed shop (and which I’m afraid of opening again for fear of burning my free reads), and I feel like the best way for a middle-aged straight man explain King Princess is to let Straus explain herself by way of some telling quotes - if with some filler by other writers. Before that, though, I wanted to round out her profile and career highlights so far.

Crash-Course, No. 25: The Happy Fits, It Came From Spotify...

Who could say no to those faces?

[Ed. - This was a good format, so I’m keeping it for this post…and holding it as a thought.]

Who They’re For
Picking through the influences they name - e.g., The Killers, The Strokes, Young the Giant and Two Door Cinema (who…got me) - gives a fair impression. So, lots of angular sounds, generally up-tempo stuff, with a 2000s throw-back vibe. Maybe the easiest way to explain is to let their lead vocalist*/mainsongwriter/cellist, Calvin Langman talk about inspirations:

“One thing all these bands do in common is that they write awesome melodies that make you want to scream and dance your butt off.”

That’s right, he’s a cellist…classically-trained too.

A Little More
“It’s rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what we want to be called. That’s what I feel when I play bar chords on a cello. Nod your head, tap your feet.”

Langman met his original co-collaborator, Ross Monteith in high school and through a combination of Latin class and facebook. After talking about the guitar covers Monteith posted and finding they liked the same sounds - in someone else’s words “A shared affinity for crisp melodies and crunching guitar” - Langman passed on the bones of a couple songs he wrote to Monteith (think it was “Dirty Imbecile”) and they decided to start playing together. A four-song EP they titled Awfully Apeelin’ came out of that and they posted it to Spotify for family and friends and went off to college - separate ones, from the sound of it. It was a lark, basically…

…until Spotify got their hands on it and dropped it onto one suitable Discover Weekly playlist after another (mine included), pushing and pushing and pushing until “While You Fade Away” became a brand-new baby/the No. 5 of the 50th most-viral songs posted to the service (for 2018). Monteith dropped out of college one semester later, Langman after two - and The Happy Fits were born. The band’s drummer, Luke Davis, has perhaps the best origin story. The other two brought him in as a session drummer to complete their debut album, Concentrate (2018): “I didn’t even think anything of it. I was like, ‘70 bucks man, that sounds awesome!’ As a college kid, that’s like the gold mine.”

Crash-Course, No. 24: The Lemon Twigs, Cool, Connected Theater Kids

In their natural state....

“Brian: Creatively, it's been pretty healthy since we've started enjoying each other's music --

Michael: We just get out of each other's faces.

Brian: But there's like a looming question of the fact that we split the duties and we fill up an album with half my songs and half of Michael's songs, basically.

Michael: What's the looming question? I'm still waiting on the looming question. Nothing's looming.

Brian: It's looming so much that I'll never get to it.”

That exchange is about four years old, but it sums up the functioning relationship between brothers behind The Lemon Twigs, Michael and Brian D’Addario. People with patience for sibling squabbling can enjoy through an extended version of it in a two-part interview with an outlet called Face Culture from a year earlier (pt. 1 and pt. 2). They’re both very young in that one - Brian around 18, and Michael just 16 - and it takes a little while to warm up…but once it does, holy shit, is it entertaining (it’s comedy gold for me). They did interviews separately after that, at least for a while. As Michael explained in a 2018 interview with The Independent, “Better to contradict than to be cut off.”

Spotify hepped me to The Lemon Twigs about [two and a half years] go with “Tailor Made,” which dropped me in the early-middle portion of their output. Without knowing anything about them, I thought they’d read my likes and fed me either an old 70s song, or some throwback act pushing their mid-20s or so. Turns out the actual story is much odder.

The D’Addarios grew up in a musical family from Hicksville, Long Island - one wired enough into that world where they could ask Todd Rundgren to sing a part on their second album. Both brothers have been performing since childhood, doing everything from Youtube videos to multiple shows on Broadway - e.g., from 2018 article in an outlet called Another Man Mag (this is Michael), “Assassins, The King and I, South Pacific and Oklahoma as childhood favourites, in addition to early roles in Oliver and “fucking Les Mis and stuff like that” - to movies involving Ethan Hawke and Michelle Pfeiffer. They started writing their own material by age 7 (per Brian, “basically a Monkees song” called “Girl”). They put out Do Hollywood in 2016, an either conscious or unconscious homage to The Beatles or The Beach Boys, or even Procol Harum (that Face Culture interview is messy), but a mid-60s Beatles influence comes through very cleanly on a track like “Those Days Is Comin’ Soon” (or “Haroomata”), among others. Their debut EP, Brothers of Destruction, makes a case for my, frankly, shaky understanding of The Beach Boys - e.g., “Why Didn’t You Say That?”

One Hit No More, No. 49: The Jaggerz...and That's the "R-A-P-P-E-R"

A jagger bush.

The Hit
I don’t recall ever hearing “The Rapper” before this week, which doesn’t give me a lot to work with on the “memories” side. On the one hand, it’s before my time (1970), but, on the other, I came out near enough to where I grew up to where that surprises me a little.

Having heard it, I can confirm it’s a catchy little bugger. No matter how many times I went through the two albums by The Jaggerz Spotify gives me access to, I always found myself humming that one (and only that one) after moving on. As noted by its main songwriter, Donny Iris, it opens on a simple strumming guitar riff vaguely reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Tight, bright harmonized vocals break over that singing about a guy chatting up a girl - they called that “rapping” back then, or at least in Pittsburgh, PA, hence, “The Rapper” - before the song shifts to a booming funk chorus with fuzz bass buzzing under it and a cowbell clanging through it. Amending the above, it’s a really fucking catchy tune. As for the inspiration, it’s as straightforward as it sounds, as Jimmie Ross recalled in an interview the always awesome Classic Bands:

“Actually, that was a Black saying years ago. What it meant was a guy rapping on a girl in a nightclub. We would see that all the time, so Donny wrote a song about it.”

Iris (born Dominic Ierace) worked up the lyrics, put together the guitar part and brought it to another member of The Jaggerz, Benny “Euge” Faiella. After they fleshed out the song together (the band worked collaboratively in generally), they couldn’t exactly explain the why or what of it. As Faiella explained to the Times Online (from western Pennsylvania?):

“At the time, we were a very soulful band and we were influenced by R&B and like the Temptations and the Impressions and all the black music we played a lot. That song was nowhere like where we were. It sounded entirely different, you know?”

Crash-Course, No. 23: Lucky Daye's Old, Striving Soul

Yeah, sometimes I show the artist...

“I consider myself an old soul, a forever soul, an infinite soul, a soul that ain’t ever gonna die. I feed my soul to love, man. It can’t die.”

If you weigh what Lucky Daye has accomplished against what he's gone through, chalking it up to something bigger makes as much sense as anything.

Born in New Orleans 35 years ago as David Debrandon Brown, he was raised in a religious setting that flirted with sociopathy. Described as a “cult” across multiple outlets - I’d call Fader’s 2019 article the most eloquent on details, Vice’s interview the most thorough - his parents and some of his extended family joined before he was born and followed its strict rules of discipline (e.g., beatings for not eating everything off your plate; “"I just know there was a room that I hated that they put us in.”) and as complete a separation from “secular” society as one can manage in 21st century America. That Daye asked Vice not to identify the now-defunct church adds another layer, as did credible, "no-contest" reports of sexual abuse.

Both his parents had left the "church" by the time Daye was eight, but the experience still separated him from the "normal" around him. He navigated all that as well as he could, and the quality of voice helped; he was charming girls with it for pocket money by 9th grade. His father left when he was young, leaving his mother to raise his siblings and him - something that became harder still after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. Something to note: he tried out for American Idol that same year, singing as David Brown. He wowed all four judges (even that prick Gene Simmons) and went to Hollywood.

Daye’s family moved after Katrina but the search for that religious/spiritual something kept his mother on the same path, if a healthier version of it(?). Feeling increasingly at odds with that upbringing, Daye checked out that life - and with finality and feeling:

Crash-Course, No. 22: Black Pumas, a Busker Meets a Producer

Guessing Burton met a brighter fate than this guy...

[Ed - I looked into the Austin-based, 2020-darlings Black Pumas at the beginning of the year - e.g., before the shit hit the fan. Something in Spotify’s algorithm decided I loved them - strong word, but not far wrong; good band, great sound - which made them one of my accidental heavy repeats of 2020. But, because I buried them in one of those mash-up posts, I worked-up a stand-alone post for the Crash Course series.]

When a new band makes it “Grammy-nom-bid” out of the blue, a lot of outlets come a-callin’ to help the world play catch-up. When there’s not a lot of story to tell - Black Pumas came together only in 2017 - you wind up telling the same story over and over, whether to Rolling Stone, or to Q on CBC. It’s a good story, and that’s below, but the looser, name-dropping fiesta posted earlier this year by Interview Magazine reveals them as people and according to their inspirations better than anything else I read or watched. Now, the origin story.

Adrian Quesada was already established in Austin, Texas, and with a strong track record as a guitarist and producer behind him - e.g., 15 years of touring, several Grammy nominations, including a win with Grupo Fantasma (a taste), an invite to play Prince’s Glam Slam club, etc. After burning out on touring, he’d settled down into Austin, but still had the itch bad enough to work up the beginnings of some songs. That had him casting around for a new collaboration.

Eric Burton, meanwhile, grew up in the San Fernando Valley as a theater kid, but in a religious setting (when people use the phrase “secular music”…). Growing up in choir competitions (this part of the Interview…interview is charming) developed his voice and he knocked around acting a little (e.g., a bit role in the Keira Knightly/Mark Ruffalo vehicle, Begin Again) and flirted with college in his youth. He eventually gravitated to busking, starting on the Santa Monica Pier (where he did quite well; a couple hundred a night) before a road-trip with friends to Austin landed him at his final destination. Once he nailed down a popular Austin street corner, he started gathering notice. Burton, as it turns out was working up some material of his own (a strong cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” among them).