Crash Course, No. 36: Blondie, Definitely Important, but Also Better than I Thought

Not the inspiration, btw.

The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.

“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"

"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)

A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:

“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”

I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

Think of the date as beyond time...

This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.

William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.

Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.

For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…

Crash Course No. 35: Blitzen Trapper, Origin Story to End(?)

Yep, just like he said.

While I came a couple years late to the Blitzen Trapper party, I geeked out hard first and most to the same album that everyone else did: 2008’s Furr. In fact, that album deserves as much credit as any other for guiding me toward more rustic sounds. Which I have always resisted more than most genres…though it helped it was leavened with lots and lots of rock...

And now, a crash course on their story.

The Very Basics
“I always thought that Blitzen Trapper, the sort of classic lineup, was like a benevolent psychedelic street gang. Not a scary street gang.”
- Eric Johnson (of Fruit Bats), Talk House interview, 2020

Blitzen Trapper semi-officially formed circa 2000 under the name Garmonbozia and self-released three albums. Nearly all of the original (and surprisingly stable) line-up hailed from the “outskirts of Salem, Oregon,” and included: Eric Earley (guitar/harmonica/vocals/keys), Eric Menteer (guitar/keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums/vocals/harmonica…a lot of harmonica), Michael Van Pelt (bass), Drew Laughery (keys), and Marty Marquis (guitar/keys/vocals/melodica); Marquis counts as the geographic outlier, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and the band became a five-piece when Laughery left around 2010 - e.g., after the tour supporting Destroyer of the Void. A couple songs carried over from the Garmonbozia period (~ 2000-2003; e.g., a proto-version of “Sadie,” “The All Girl Team,” and “Reno”), but the sound that made them famous hadn’t taken shape point. A quote in Wikipedia’s write-up describes Garmonbozia’s sound like so:

“Many of the Garmonbozia recordings are experimental prog-rock and psychedelic songs, more concerned with creating interesting soundscapes than the tighter rock/soul/country/pop crispness of their later albums.”

The band switched it’s name to Blitzen Trapper in 2003. When reflecting on those earliest days with Eric Johnson (see the Talk House interview), Earley agreed they were fortunate to come up in “a good time to wander your way into things,” aka, posting songs on a MySpace page and getting signed to a label. And now feels like a good time to confess that my greatest disappointment in reading about Blitzen Trapper came with learning that Earley did nearly all the songwriting and that he conceived albums as far back as American Goldwing as solo projects. Going the other way (and I lifted this from a recent Street Roots feature on (again) Earley): “Holy Smokes could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism.” (Or, from the Talk House interview: “A lot of Blitzen Trapper was trying to navigate those two realities, the recordings and the band.”)

Crash Course Timeline, No. 28: The Hal Kemp Orchestra & The Trumpetist He Launched

Think both are in there....

I’ll be running into the biggest, bandiest names of the 1930s soon enough, but what started as a quick study into a bandleader whose name I kept seeing wound up detouring into the more interesting story of a member of not just his band, but just about every big band of the day. To start with the bandleader.

James “Hal” Kemp was born in 1904 in Marion, Alabama, but he made his name in Charlotte, North Carolina. A precocious kid, he formed his first band, the Merrymakers, while still in high school; by age 19 he led the Carolina Club Orchestra, a band associated with the University of North Carolina. The university showed a surprising willingness to let its band tour, even internationally, and Kemp’s Carolina Club Orchestra drew attention on its tour to England. The press passed on word of the tour and the orchestra had the honor of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII (the one who later abdicated) sitting in for a session (he loved both jazz and American women).

A fair number of the guys Kemp played with in the Carolina Club Orchestra stuck with him for much his career. They included Ben Williams and Horace “Saxie” Dowell (one guess what the latter played, and they both played it), but also John Scott Trotter, a pianist who served as Kemp’s long-time musical arranger, and Edgar “Skinnay” Ellis, a drummer who became the voice of the Hal Kemp Orchestra when it took its successful, final shape. Per the Big Band Library, that line-up first came together in 1925 with Kemp doing the composing, co-arranging, playing clarinet and, his favorite, alto saxophone (sometimes “through an oversized megaphone with holes cut in the sides so his hands could work the keys”). That first line-up started playing standard 1920s jazz, but they switched over to the “sweet dance” jazz by 1930.

Sources describe Kemp’s sound with adjectives like “distinctive” (Wikipedia) and “intricate,” but Big Band Library wrote the more efficient paragraph on it:

“For decades afterwards, his fans and his former musicians continued to cherish the unique sound of Kemp’s band, with its muted, staccato trumpets (playing phrases, accented by four-note clusters of dotted 16ths - like a typewriter) and intricate clarinet and saxophone ensemble passages.”

When they broke in as professional performers, they started in New York. Rather than bang out the path of his career in my own words, I’m going to quote a long paragraph from a site called Oldies.com, because it gives a helpful impression of how careers in music looked in the early 1930s:

One Hit No More, No. 91: The Sugarhill Gang's Gently-Borrowed, Ground-Breaking Hit

Acknowledging it was a touch commercial...

The Hit
Swear to God, I’ve already written a full post on The Sugarhill Gang - I certainly know the story, and not just from Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 2 - but, these are the hazards of deleting half the things you write.

At any rate…

1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” took the world by storm when it came out and recycles through pop culture with enough regularity, even if it ain’t clockwork. Which is to say, who doesn’t know this song? As for liking it…

A stand-alone Wikipedia page gives a closer history of The Sugarhill Gang’s (borrowed) breakthrough hit - e.g.., the famous bass line came from Chic’s “Good Times” with writing credits going to co-founder Bernard Edwards, how the members of Sugarhill came on stage at a Bronx “hip hop event” and started freestyling with Fab Five Freddy when Chic started playing the that single, the fact the melody was interpolated, instead of sampled, etc. If you listen to the non-single version - something I’d done before but spaced - that opens with another interpolation from “Here Comes That Sound Again,” a single by a UK disco act called Love De-Luxe.

The lyrics are famous, the song’s origins infamous…I mean, what can I tell people in this post that they wouldn’t already know from watching Hip Hop Evolution?

Long story short, it was the first hip hop hit to crack the Billboard Top 40 (it only reached No. 36 in the U.S., but it climbed into the top 3 in several international markets), Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson lifted the lyrics from Grandmaster Caz (aka, Casanova Fly, aka, Curtis Fisher), and, yes, it was the Sugarhill Gang’s only major hit in the U.S. market, though, both “Apache” (pretty sure that one came from elsewhere; also, o ye gods, that fucking video, ) and “8th Wonder” (still, both better songs, for me) became solid UK hits. To sum up its origin and legacy in two quotes, respectively:

“There's this idea that hip-hop has to have street credibility, yet the first big hip-hop song was an inauthentic fabrication. It's not like the guys involved were the 'real' hip-hop icons of the era, like Grandmaster Flash or Lovebug Starski. So it's a pretty impressive fabrication, lightning in a bottle.”
- Oliver Wang, author of Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide

Crash Course Timeline, No. 27: Bennie Moten, the 20th-Century Kansas City Pioneer

Press!

In just about every way I can think of, Benjamin “Bennie” Moten rightly belongs in the 1920s. He formed his first band as early as 1918, his first recordings (for the ubiquitous Okeh Records) moved the New Orleans jazz sound to the Midwest, though another, even earlier influence from his native Missouri came in as well: ragtime. He enjoys a niche reputation to this day: according to Wikipedia’s entry on Moten, his 1923-25 recordings for Okeh count among “the more valuable acoustic jazz 78s of the era.”

Full disclosure, I dropped Bennie Moten in the 1930s for no better reason than overlooking him while digging into the 1920s. Still, he and his Bennie Moten Orchestra hit its peak the same year the decade started. More significantly, Moten carried forward the “riffing” approach to popular music and gave jazz a Midwest-inspired spin with the “stomping beat” then popular in Kansas City. A site called The Pendergast Years (one of the few sources for this post, sadly) sums up his beginnings and influence with this intro:

“On September 23, 1923, the Bennie Moten Orchestra made its first recording consisting of eight songs. By strict musical standards, the songs themselves were unrefined and not much removed from existing blues music. But the Bennie Moten Orchestra would soon build upon its earliest recordings to develop a distinct Kansas City style of jazz that later dominated the jazz scene in the late 1930s and 1940s.”

Those two innovations became foundations for a lot of the big band sound - including that of his protégé, and future member of jazz royalty, Count Basie. While I don’t think the phrase “stomping beat” confuses anyone, I want to pause here to confirm that, yes, “riffing” means about what a casual reader thinks it does. Wikipedia’s explainer on the subject gives people from the rock era some examples (e.g., Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or AC/DC’s “Back in Black”), as an aural hook for the basic definition:

“…it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition.”

[Ed. - While that’s broad, digestible and accurate, I'm compelled to include this: “A riff is a short, repeated, memorable musical phrase, often pitched low on the guitar, which focuses much of the energy and excitement of a rock song,” because “excitement of a rock song.”]

Crash Course No. 34: For My First Time, More than One Black Sabbath

I can stare at this album cover for ages...

The Very Basics
Formed in Birmingham, England in 1968, with OG members Tony Iommi (guitar), Bill Ward (drums), Geezer Butler (bass) and Ozzy Osbourne. The inspiration for the name-change/sound came from watching people line up at a movie theater to see Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath and a vision Geezer Butler had of a silhouetted figure standing at the edge of his bed; Ozzy and Butler wrote the lyrics for “Black Sabbath” and the band used “the Devil’s Interval” to lend the music an ominous sound. Just to note it, the cinema crowd anecdote come up in only one source: Wikipedia. Either way, thus was born heavy metal (at least in one telling).

Black Sabbath started as a six-piece group called the Polka Tulk Blues Band - so named “after the cheap brand of talcum powder Ozzy’s mother used.” They clipped that to Polka Tulk, then switched to Earth, and, after finding out another band used that name, and after writing the song (I think), eventually to Black Sabbath (they also cut a couple members, a saxophone player, I think, on the grounds they should have a full horn section or none at all). Even after discovering an audience existed for heavy, occult-themed music, their first manager, a Birmingham club owner named Jim Simpson, pushed them to play…something else. From a Rolling Stone remembrance of the band’s early days:

“One of those tunes a poppy, piano-driven number called ‘The Rebel’ that Simpson’s Locomotive bandmate Norman Haines had written. They also tried their hand at writing an original, titled ‘A Song for Jim,’ a jazzy, syncopated song, which featured Iommi on flute.”

Apparently, one can hear that…period on recording of a live show in Dumfries, Scotland, but the first, widespread exposure of the Black Sabbath sound came with a performance on John Peel’s Top Gear in 1970, where they played , “Black Sabbath,” “NIB,” “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” and “Sleeping Village.” Their general momentum bought them enough space to book a couple days (which, here, means literally two) to record their first full album of originals, which they released as an eponymous album on Friday, February 13, 1970. They recorded most of that material on the first takes (per Butler, “We never had a second run of most of the stuff”), but it still sold really well, hitting No. 8 in the UK and No. 23 in the U.S.

From that point until the end of the Ronnie James Dio era - and nothing after that will be included here, for the record - two themes run through Black Sabbath’s history: 1) steady, robust sales of their albums despite steady critical opprobrium and very little radio air-play; and 2) drugs. So many drugs. For as long as everything held together - until 1981, loosely, though Ozzy was out by 1979 (reunions excepted) - they did quite well as a band. As much as Ozzy gets credit for who/what they were, the (maybe?) official band bio credits Butler for the balance of the lyrics and Iommi as “the musical architect.”