One Hit No More, No. 58: Hurricane Smith, a Legendary Producer and...Well...

He's coming straight for us!

The Hit
The source material continues to deliver songs I do not know…

The packaging is enticing - I mean, the possibilities of a name like “Hurricane Smith” - and the title, “Oh, Babe What Would You Say” sounds era-specific, e.g., easy-listening, care-free (self-absorbed?). A little shimmer announces the song, then the horns come in with a swinging, happy melody - so far, so good - and the beat plays at a simple, upbeat finger-snapping clip…and then Hurricane Smith starts singing.

I can handle a wide variety of singing styles: starting from actual barking, passing through atonal yelling, up to voices so nasally that you’d swear it’d take the power of helium to pull them off (and yet the artiste needed none), and onward up to voices of pure velvet that make you want to weep at their beauty. I’ve loved vocals that fell many, many miles short of pitch-perfect, in other words, but they should possess a certain quality that compliments either the music or the project - and I’ve certainly heard worse voices than Hurricane Smith’s. He carries the tune nicely through some of the verses, but he definitely strains to hit notes outside that range and often fails to reach them; something like growling comes and goes. It doesn’t really add anything to what he does, at least not beyond a sort of homely sincerity. The whole thing comes off as a game attempt at karaoke, basically.

It feels like a novelty act, a put-on, maybe some famous person’s musical alter-ego. But it wasn’t.

The Rest of the Story
Norman “Hurricane” Smith had a remarkable career, no question. He was the sound engineer for The Beatles early career, everything up to Rubber Soul. He moved over to producing after that where he had a hand in making Pink Floyd famous, working on their albums The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma. It is very hard, in other words, to be more at the center of mid-to-late-60s English rock than Smith - and that’s before throwing producing credits for the Pretty Things’ S. F. Sorrow, aka, “one of rock’s first concept albums,” onto the pile.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 5: Blind Lemon Jefferson Lays the Foundation

A strong riff on the original photo.

There’s an entire book written about 1920s blues legend, Blind Lemon Jefferson, but there isn’t a whole lot about him online. Don’t expect this post to improve much on Wikipedia's entry, basically; a couple decent quotes notwithstanding, it provides the bulk of this post. That said, and because I have them, let's start with one of those quotes (from Oldies.com):

“He had a good vocal range, honed by use in widely different venues, and a complicated, dense, free-form guitar style that became a nightmare for future analysts and copyists due to its disregard for time and bar structure.”

One more, this one’s from Wikipedia:

“It is likely that he moved to Deep Ellum on a more permanent basis by 1917, where he met Aaron Thibeaux Walker, also known as T-Bone Walker. Jefferson taught Walker the basics of playing blues guitar in exchange for Walker's occasional services as a guide.”

To answer the first question, yes, Jefferson was really blind. Born in 1893 (or 1894), the seventh (or eighth) child of sharecroppers Alex and Clarissa Jefferson in Coutchman, Texas, his lack of sight precluded working as a farm-hand, which, if nothing else, freed up his hands for the guitar. He started playing at an early age, first at parties and picnics near home; his late teens saw him busking on street corners in the cities of East Texas, all the way up to Dallas. Most accounts agree that Jefferson traveled widely - presumably, with someone standing in for T-Bone Walker at each stop - without his blindness getting in any part of his way (as noted most succinctly on Blackpast.org):

“It was widely thought that he played in every Southern state at one time or another and several artists recount stories of playing with him multiple times. Lemon was a firm businessman, playing only for money, with a reputation for stopping as soon as it did.”

Among those “several artists”: the famous Huddie William Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly. Beyond a collection of names and places, tracing Jefferson’s footsteps involves jumping over some gaps. It’s unclear, for instance, who discovered him or how, but the fact he lived and worked in Deep Ellum feels like the likeliest answer to how - i.e., the gathering of blues artists drew music industry interest looking for people to record. Some things never change...

One Hit No More, No. 57: Climax...and Things That Got in the Way

I can think of many worse states of mind, honestly.

The Hit
Yessir, the One Hit No More project has definitely entered into a personal blind-spot, the space between what one hears on “oldies stations” - say, The Outsiders’ “Time Won’t Let Me” - and a tune like 1971’s chart-topper, “Precious and Few,” by a band called Climax. A sensual ballad that threatens to tumble into sappy for the length of its playing time, built around tones warm as wrapping yourself in a blanket in front of a smoldering fire (those strings, those horns!), the song has a powerfully intimate feel to it. The languor in the vocals suggest either seduction or its aftermath…but even that flirts with parody. Still, it communicates a mood you can’t miss.

I mentioned “Time Won’t Let Me” in the same thought as “Precious and Few” because they came from the same band - or at least members of both. The singer was the same - Sonny Geraci, a Cleveland, Ohio native, who had the (semi-)rare honor of posting chart-toppers with two different bands - and (for lack of a better word) dated as his vocals sound in both projects, that’s a question of phrasing, not quality. Geraci had range to spare…and he looked like a solid showman.

The Rest of the Story
It started in Cleveland and ends in Los Angeles, for one, and with yet another band, The Starfires. Geraci recalls most of that band as “old, older than I – 22, 23 – and tired of the game,” but he heard the promise of a number by Tom King and Chet Kelley (“Time Won’t Let Me,” as it happens). Based on what he told Classic Bands (when? don’t know; those are always undated), he sort of took over the band, replacing the drummer and a guitarist with people who shared his enthusiasm. They released the single as The Outsiders (there’s a fun, minor dispute as to why) and the #5 hit sent them on their way to weeks-long tours, first with Paul Revere and the Raiders, then on one of a Gene Pitney package tours that included bands like ? and the Mysterians, The Shadows of Knight and a west coast act called The Seeds (that was the second of two Pitney tours, both in 1966?).

The Outsiders released four albums, three of which sold well, and they posted a couple more hits (e.g., “Girl in Love” and “Respectable”), but, like a lot of bands from that era, management pinched a little more than its share. Per a quote attributed to Geraci on One Hit Wonders the Book:

“That was our big year, 1966, but it was all over for us. By the end of the year, our manager had a Porsche; we didn’t. We could see that we weren’t getting our money, and it just tore us apart.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 4: Jelly Roll Morton...Which Was as Dirty as It Sounds

That's really him. "Jelly roll" is a tough search.

Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, which, according to one record would have made him 12 years old at the time and, according to another, 17. Most people (or Wikipedia, at least) has 1890 for his year of birth, but Morton claimed 1885. He didn’t have a birth certificate, so the world may never know…

…he does, however, popularly get credit for producing the first published jazz composition: the semi-autobiographical “Jelly Roll Blues” way back in 1915. (That version will sound pretty damn ragtime, by the way.) His specific contribution aside, Morton became one of the first great names in jazz. Though he was multi-instrumentalist, he mostly played and composed on the piano. He operated all over the country and wrote and arranged scores of jazz numbers and at a time when many of his contemporaries either refused to or couldn’t, as well as ragtime, “stomps,” and several at least titled as “blues.” By leading one of the first “big bands,” he popularized the idea before the big band/swing era of the 1930s. For all that, Morton didn’t leave much for the historical record - and what he did leave, historians take with a grain of salt (bit of a fabulist) - a detail music critic named Scott Yanow summed up like so:

“Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth.”

Whenever it happened, Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe. Reading between the sources, his family seemed reasonably well-to-do, or at least well-established in New Orleans’ Creole community. Squaring that thought with some details of his upbringing takes some doing. His father, a bricklayer named Edward Joseph Lamothe, left when he was three. Louise Hermance Monette, “a domestic worker,” raised him as a single mother until she married a man named William Mouton shortly after Monette's lover left. According to Wikipedia’s account, “Morton” came from an anglicization of “Mouton.” Other sources say differently…

Blackpast.org offers the most romanticized take on his early life, not least by accepting 1885 as his date of birth. It also names a working, lightly-itinerant trombonist named E.P. LaMenthe as his father, and the figure who “encouraged” Morton’s musical abilities. Another source, 64 Parishes, shrugs off the mechanics of his childhood, but brings in a detail that supports both Morton coming from a family of some standing and a particular influence of music within it:

One Hit No More, No. 56: The Buoys, Cannibals & Pina Coladas

The Hit
The Buoys' 1971 hit, “Timothy,” was a new song for me, so I came into the whole thing fresh. Musically, it has that post-60s rock sound, polished and busy (see the instrumental flourishes), “lushly orchestrated” they used to call it. It plays at a high tempo, like the beat’s driving toward something, a resolution perhaps…

…or cannibalism. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, right? The subject matter to “Timothy” was subtle, maybe the lush orchestration swallows a telling phrase here or there if you don’t listen carefully (“and Joe said he’d sell his soul/for just a piece of meat”); as Wikipedia’s entry notes, executives at Specter Records only caught on after the song got a ways up the charts. On the other hand, the songwriter, Rupert Holmes, refused to change either the lyrics of the song or its premise; he’d made a conscious choice to offend when he wrote it…

…but with assurances that he’d never even heard of the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963 when he wrote it. (For the record, this doesn’t seem horribly far-fetched; Holmes hails from England, which surely had its share of collapsed mines.)

The Rest of the Story
The story of the band called The Buoys doesn’t go much further than that. Based in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Pennsylvania, the original band included Fran Brozena, Carl Siracuse, Chris Hanlon, Bob Gryziec on bass, if only at the time they recorded “Timothy,” and Jerry Hludzek on guitar and Billy Kelly on vocals. Holmes does not appear to have been part of the actual band - though he did record the single with them (and maybe others?) - but he did write the song. Another fun fact: The Buoys were Holmes' second choice to record “Timothy,” behind another act named The Glass Prism, an act both time and Wikipedia forgot.

According to a Classic Bands interview with Hludek, they lived the life for a while - including a festival in Oregon where they played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers after they ran through their thin material; Rolling Stone called it “a near flawless imitation” so there’s that - but only Kelly and Hludzek cared for it. The rest declared the life “bullshit” and (presumably) settled into day jobs. Anyone who takes the time to read that Hludek interview will learn a lot more about Kelly and Hludek’s second band, Dakota (who sound like this, or this; not for me, fwiw, in fact, the sound of my most hated era) than they’ll learn about The Buoys.

Crash-Course, No. 33: Noise & Azealia Banks

Phuket, so someone else uses "Fantasea."

[Ed. - Because I can’t make up my fucking mind about where to go next, I decided to return to the inspiration for my original music project - i.e., learning about the bands/artists in my personal collection. Alphabetically, as it happens.]

Where I Found Her
There was this old site, Too Good for Radio (which doesn’t look terribly active anymore), that used to put out massive monthly playlists. I found it during the dub-step era, which says something about its hit/miss ratio (e.g., much, much more of the latter), but still credit the site for introducing me to artists like Lana Del Rey and, of course, Azealia Banks. That said, the one and only thing I ever downloaded was her debut mixtape, Fantasea. Je regrette rien…

Who She’s For
I would call her club/dance music, but also accept that sells her short. The best description I’ve read so far came from The Guardian’s John Robinson (quoted by Wikipedia), which framed her as “an appealing blend of Missy Elliott and dance-pop.” The same source calls out other genres - e.g., “hardcore hip-hop” and “indie pop” and “dance music” - and maybe that middle genre sounds closest. Banks straddles a lot of genres - and I think that’s her appeal for me.

A Little More
“Yet her willingness to push those buttons is refreshing.”

The day I decided to do a dive into Azealia Banks I pulled up Google news and typed “Azealia Banks” into the search bar. This was the first headline:

Azealia Banks denies rumours she ‘ate her dead cat’ and reveals she has a child’s SKULL

Or at least the text in the url (here's the actual, equally unflattering article). Again, that was the first news item on Banks from a web search on a random goddamn Thursday. The young woman meets her reputation. Related, the following appears in the sub-section of her Wikipedia page under “Controversies”:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 3: Bessie Smith, A "Rough," Brilliant, Damned Tragic Woman

The Empress of the Blues.

Tragedy bookended the life of 1920s blues legend, Bessie Smith. She lost her father, “a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher," before her memory kicked in and lost her mother (and an older brother) by the time she was 9 (or 10; I’ve read both). That threw her family onto the resources and guidance of her oldest sister, Viola, to raise what was left of a too-young family. The Smith family did some of the usual things to find income - e.g., doing other people’s laundry - but Bessie Smith and one of her remaining brothers (Clarence, I’m guessing) raised money by busking; they even had a street corner nailed down, Thirteenth and Elm Street, in front of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s White Elephant Saloon.

Clarence Smith later joined a touring troupe, one owned and operated by Moses Stokes, leaving Bessie behind and breaking up the busking team. He snuck out at night, knowing that Bessie would try to go with him. I haven’t read anything that says how she reacted to that whole thing, but, if hard feelings were present, Clarence made it up to her by finagling an audition to the same troupe for Bessie when she was 18 (old enough, basically, which was why Clarence snuck out the first time); that would have been 1912. She landed the job and joined her brother and the troupe on tour. The name of the company: The Rabbit Foot Minstrels - e.g., the same outfit that employed Ma Rainey. Rainey took Smith under her wing (there are rumors she kidnapped her, but…) and taught her how to sing the blues. Smith learned well. Very well:

“None of the others could sing with her combination of field holler and Jazz Age sophistication. None could throw her voice from the stage — without a microphone — and make a balcony seat feel like the front row. None made such an artistic impression on her contemporaries in jazz, or her disciples in rock 'n' roll.”

“Smith's version of ‘Downhearted Blues’ sold a reported 780,000 copies in 1923, a minor miracle for a song that had already hit nationwide for a variety of different artists.”

“In Smith's case, they amount to a woman whose life makes a liar out of every subsequent performer claiming to have had an original experience in the music business. She was the first bisexual, alcoholic, horsewhipped-by-segregationists, beat-out-of-songwriting-royalties, lemonade-making, dark-skinned singing-sensation whose husband cheated on her with a light-skinned ‘Becky with the good hair.’”

One Hit No More, No. 55: Coven, One Tin Soldier...and a Large Side of Satan

The Hit
I first heard “One Tin Soldier” on the 1987 Freedom Rock compilation…which, if I’m being honest introduced me a slew of acts from the late-60s/early-70s acts that didn’t stay in the headlines after the decade ended. Like any kid who found something that excited him, I played Freedom Rock into the goddamn ground (or parts of it; stretched that tape to the breaking point), but “One Tin Soldier” always came across as hokey, hippie-dippie, etc. - e.g., if you listen and hear what the greedy, murderous Valley People find under the stone, the naivete passes like a kidney stone. That carried into the music - the delicate flute it opens with, the soaring, uplifting horns - it sounded like folk after the marketing department got its hands on it. Researching this has only made this funnier…

At any rate, the original song came from the songwriting team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter (also responsible for Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds, “Don’t Pull Your Love,” the Four Tops, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got),” and the Grass Roots’ “Two Divided by Love”) as an anti-war ballad during the Vietnam War. The original was recorded in 1969 and performed by a Canadian act named Original Caste, with Dixie Lee Stone on vocals. The song played well in Canada an all right in the U.S. (#34). You don’t have to look hard to find Original Caste’s original, which…does not sound like the version I heard on Freedom Rock (above comes close, but I don't think it's entirely right). The tune is there, along with the strident critique of greed and organized religion (cousins!), but the production lacks the polish and richness of the other version.

The makers of a movie called The Legend of Billy Jackrevived the song for its soundtrack in 1971, only with the credit going to a band called Coven. That movie tells the story of a half-Native American Green Beret (presumably returned from Vietnam) who fought (semi-) reluctantly fought injustice in an Arizona town relying on martial arts. The rest of this post tells the story of Coven.

The Rest of the Story
“Also included inside the album was Coven's infamous Black Mass poster, showing members of the group displaying the sign of the horns as they prepared for a Satanic ritual over a nude Dawson lying on an altar.”

Crash Course Playlist, No. 12: Laura Jane Grace, the Devouring Mothers, and Pearl Charles Meet Amigo the Devil in a Bar

Dropping the sub-title into a Google image search....hey-oh!

And…we’re back to the playlist posts. And, between the hiatus and all the deletions, yes, this is just No. 12. Happily, I think I’ve got a workable formula this time. No, really.

First up, I’ve already written posts/little histories about a several of the bands/artists on the playlist during the past month - and, because those posts have links to songs and sources galore, I’ll just direct anyone who wants to learn more about or hear more from any of those bands/artists to those posts. In alphabetical order:

At the Drive-In: Rock Band Made Flesh

Derek (Clapton), the Dominos and "Layla" (Derek & the Dominos)

Jean Knight, "Mr. Big Stuff" and the Bakery

The Stranglers: Long, Slow and So, So Good

For what it's worth, those four posts come from two different projects...which is hard to explain here, so see the sidebar, I suppose. The rest of the playlist comes from all the other I’ve squeezed in over the past month…but I’ve only selected three for short introductions/little link-fests down below. I mention the dumber reason(s) for the limited selection down below, but the short reason is, they’re the bands/artists that interested me most. With that, let’s get to it…very likely in alphabetical order (shit…yes.).

Amigo the Devil, Love Songs by Serial Killers
An Austin, Texas-based purveyor in the rare “murderfolk” genre, Amigo the Devil is the brainchild of Danny Kiranos. I don’t recall how I backed into him, or which song I heard first, but it probably featured a banjo accompanying Kiranos’ (for lack of a better word) cold vocals (if I had to guess, though, it was “Hell and You”). He traffics in some dark shit - his earliest material imagines love notes from serial killers, which I didn’t pick up on, say, “The Dreamer” and “The Recluse” (through the eyes/heart of Ed Gein), but something I couldn’t miss in “Dahmer Does Hollywood.” Those songs show up as Volume 1 on Spotify, but (I think) they came into the world as EPs titled Manimals, Diggers and Decompositions. The themes only grow darker from there - e.g., the (alleged) suicide note he worked into a song (“First Day of the End of My Life,” which I also missed) - but Kiranos cuts the heartache with humor. And he’s less a “fan” of serial killers (or suicide), but sees both as extremes of lived experience people would do well to understand. As he explained “First Day of the End of My Life” to Kerrang (best read on him, btw):