TWO FROM THE VAULT

Here are a couple good tunes from the vaults. First up is a nice jam with some old pals, Yo La Tengo, and "Stockholm Syndrome." This is a great song. I know it's wrong but I swear it won't take long.


"Born in the Seventies" by the Fruit Bats is an hilarious backwards glance at a decade you might remember. Vaguely. Great seventies pedal steel and appropriately opaque lyrics. The sands of time stuck in your shoe...that make you cross, they make you blue. Whatever happened to you? You were born in the seventies.

LES PAUL DIES AT 94

Sorry to hear that Les Paul just passed away at the age of 94. He was an amazing musician and innovator. I saw him live with Chet Atkins at the Bottom Line in New York City back in 1975, and it was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen.

A guitar player extraordinaire, and a major influence on the development of the electric guitar, Paul was responsible for the Gibson Les Paul and countless amplification devices. Les Paul succumbed to severe pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, New York, surrounded by family and loved ones.

The classic Gibson "Les Paul"


Les Paul-Chasing Sound! is a feature-length documentary on an American legend. For more info check out www.lespaulfilm.com.

WATERMELON IN EASTER HAY

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Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) combined the sacred and the profane as a musician, songwriter, composer, bandleader, guitar-player, weirdo, and outspoken critic of mindless censorship in a free society.


Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore on December 21, 1940 to Francis Zappa (born in Partinico, Sicily) who was of Greek-Arab descent, and Rose Marie Colimore who was three-quarters Italian and one-quarter French. His father was a chemist and mathematician in the defense industry, and the Zappas moved around the country as the old man worked in various arsenals and chemical warfare facilities, finally skipping around California--Monterey, Claremont, El Cajon, and San Diego--where Frank joined his first band, The Ramblers, at Mission Bay High School.

The Zappa Family

By 1956, the family had moved to Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base. Zappa continued devouring music. He soaked up avant-garde composers Stravinsky and Varese, old fashioned R and B, early rock and roll, and pachuco Do Wop bands. He met Don Vliet at Antelope Valley High School and they became friends--Vliet of course later recorded under the name Captain Beefheart, though he wasn't actually a captain and his heart was almost certainly human. Around then, Zappa played drums for The Blackouts, a racially mixed band that played blues and R and B. Zappa graduated from AVHS, and would later thank two of his high school music teachers on "Freak Out!" (1966) the first album recorded with the group that made him famous, The Mothers of Invention.

thanks for letting me sign your yearbook, Frank


Zappa at 22 on the Steve Allen Show: experimental music on a bicycle

To quote the Wicky, "His own heterogeneous ethnic background, and the diverse social and cultural mix in and around greater Los Angeles, were crucial in the formation of Zappa as a practitioner of underground music and of his later distrustful and openly critical attitude towards "mainstream" social, political and musical movements."

Today, we celebrate Frank Zappa--and Easter--with this 1988 performance of his beautiful composition, "Watermelon in Easter Hay."

SONG TO BOBBY

Cat Power--Chan Marshall. Cette chanson est extraite de son dernier album Jukebox. Seul morceau original de l'album, "Song to Bobby", raconte l'histoire vraie de sa rencontre avec son idole de toujours, oserais-je dire l'homme de sa vie, Bob Dylan : "Giving you my heart was my plan".


And after Chan Marshall's "Song to Bobby," here's a rare clip of the man himself playing with some old friends. Back in 1966, an unwitting Playboy reporter asked Dylan what made him choose the rock and roll life.

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

TWO FOR THE POLITICIANS

Sometimes, you have to return to the titans, the behemoths, the Godzillas of Classic Rock to find a fighting rebel spirit when fey indie pop won't get the job done. Here are two numbers for the politicians.



The first--appropriately enough--is "Politician" performed by supergroup Cream at Royal Albert Hall, London, 1968. Yup, that's Eric Clapton, along with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

The second clip, equally classic and appropriate, is "Won't Get Fooled Again" performed by the Who. Roger Daltrey swings the Divine Hammer, and guitar player Pete Townshend dances a little jig between windmilling power chords.

DESERT BLUES FROM TIMBUKTU

This is beautiful--just listen to this snakey bluesline from Mali and you can hear the sounds of Africa and the Mississippi Delta crawling across the land like a giant Kingsnake. This is Desert Blues, a music project with Habib Koité, Afel Bocoum and the Tuareg Women Ensemble Tartit from Timbuktu. These African musicians are poets and play the traditional instruments like the Tinde, Tehardant, Balafon, Imzad -- and some electric guitars, too. Timeless and mysterious, like nothing you've ever heard before but somehow strangely familiar.

JIMI HENDRIX PAYS HIS DUES

This is a video from 1965, featuring Buddy and Stacey performing "Shotgun" on Nashville's WLAC-TV. The rendition is pretty generic, but the guitar player is a young Jimi Hendrix.

This is the oldest known film of Hendrix performing -- paying his dues in a back-up band. Check out the young avatar a full two years before his fiery debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967!

Jimi in 1965

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE DAY!

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973) was a pioneering gospel singer who played wild electric guitar way ahead of her time. Recently, Governor Edward G. Rendell proclaimed January 11, 2008 as “Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day” in the State of Pennsylvania. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss have a song on their new album called "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us." She certainly did!

To hear a great show about Sister Rosetta Tharpe produced for "All Things Considered" by Ross Reynolds, please click this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1603597

Ross Reynolds is the host of "The Conversation," a daily news-talk program on public radio station KUOW. http://www.kuow.org/about/staff.asp?staff=1268