Robert Plant and Allison Krauss came together to make a great album of roots blues rock music this year. It was heaped with praise and amply awarded. You remember Plant as the lead singer in the Golden Hindenburg (see clip) and Krauss as a simple washer woman in Dogpatch, USA, but together, well...just listen. Good stuff.
(The video of Plant & Krauss was pulled due to questions of copyright infringement, so here is a replacement clip of Plant's old band from the gloriously excessive '70s)
Hear Plant and Krauss sing "Please Read the Letter" from their album Raising Sand--just click the button:
"Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his 'profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.'
"It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive."
--From the AP story by Hillel Italie.
For this post, I picked "Forever Young" from 1977 and "Love Sick" from 1998. You could pick plenty of other songs that would showcase his talents -- he wrote so many. I could probably come up with a dozen from each different Dylan period. Let see, there's folk Dylan, finger-pointing Dylan, electric Dylan, Nashville Dylan, Rolling Thunder Dylan...not to mention Kate Blanchett. Nobody else comes close. Thanks for writing 'em, Bob. And congratulations!
A Rutles reunion? Amazing but true! It's hard to convey the thrill of the first Rutles performance on the Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964. They tore the roof off the place. If you were a kid in that era, you know what I mean. Now, it's very possible these four lovable moptops are getting back together again. You heard it here first.
Scientists at Leeds University are asking people to recall their Beatles memories as part of a study to better understand how musical memories help shape a person's identity. If you're like me, you've got plenty of Beatles memories, and memories linked to Beatles music. They're part of the soundtrack of growing up in the 1960s and 70s for all of us, but if you were a fan, they were even more important. I can remember getting the albums as they were released, one by one, and learning them by heart, while my uncles said they looked like girls with those crazy haircuts, and they just made noise. "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" This was well before Sinatra covered "Something," and won over the so-called Greatest Generation with a Beatles tune.
For those of you who missed it, either being born too early or too late, it's hard to convey the doors these Liverpudlians opened for us kids to jump through. There were other groups, of course, some really great, but these guys set the standard. Hell, they created the standard as far as pop combos are concerned. The rock and roll of the fifties had died out, and there were hordes of phony teen idols, Fabians and the like, filling the void after Elvis went into the Army and emerged reconditioned like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. No hope there. Television was full of squares and blandos like Pat Boone in his white bucks, snoozers like Andy Williams, old crooners from Vegas, and the champagne music of Lawrence Welk, which was piped into living rooms and filling retirement home dancefloors with processed cheese. In that cultural gridlock, the Beatles sprang from nowhere (England?) loud and exciting and obviously having a good time doing it! They were clever lads who wrote and played great music, and the kids got it immediately.
Watching this clip from August of 1965, of the Beatles playing Shea Stadium, will undoubtedly bring back memories for some of you. For more about the Leeds University study of the music memory, click here.
Here's a good clip of Declan Patrick MacManus, otherwise known as Elvis Costello. There are great clips of him everyone has seen, such as the SNL performance where a skinny Elvis stops a song, switches gears, and launches into a blistering "Radio, Radio," but I wanted to find something from a few years later, and came across this great live clip from 1982, off the album Imperial Bedroom.
This is a more sophisticated Elvis than his 1977 punky debut, with a fuller, almost lush back-up, and nearly Beatle-esque production values. The lyrics are Costello at his best, a soul crushed under the wheel, broken but still full of venom, nasty literate and schoolboy clever.
Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around
To murder my love is a crime But will you still love A man out of time
My friend Tommy turned me on to this clip of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames performing on Ready, Steady, Go! It's a cool performance from the mod British pop singer, another great one from an amazing year, 1965.
As music goes, 1965 is hard to beat. The Byrds had a huge hit with Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," and Dylan came out with "Like a Rolling Stone," perhaps the greatest single of all time. In a year of classics, The Rolling Stones couldn't get no "Satisfaction," the Who sang about "My Generation", and The Animals screamed "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." The Beatles, still riding a wave of hits since they'd shown up in America the year before, gave us "Help!", "Ticket to Ride," "Day Tripper," and the brilliant Rubber Soul album that marked a new level of sophistication and introspection in pop music, and showcased such classics as "Norwegian Wood," "In My Life," and "Nowhere Man."
There were so many good songs that year, it's hard to keep track. The Temptations sang "My Girl," the Supremes urged us to "Stop! In the Name of Love," and the Four Tops sang "I Can't Help Myself." James Brown came out with "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." Sam Cooke released "A Change is Gonna Come." Nina Simone played "I Put a Spell on You," and Otis Redding released "Otis Blue." The Kinks released The Kink Kontroversy, Sam the Sham danced with the "Wooly Bully," The Righteous Brothers lamented "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," and the Beach Boys rhapsodized about all those wonderful "California Girls."
I could go on. There were plenty more. There was so much great music that many tracks that would normally have been huge in a regular year got plowed under by the wave. Here's a clip you might have forgotten, with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. A great clip from a great year, 1965.
These heavy, fuzztone riffs launched a thousand garage bands. The Kinks were a highly influential British Invasion band, and the true ancestors of punk -- and they did it with style. The Beatles may have been more creative, the Stones more bluesy, but the Kinks were a crack little outfit that blasted riffs like nobody else. They changed over the years, and created little baroque masterpieces of English life, but I prefer the early angry years. Ray Davies was something of a genius. I always expected him to grow up to be Vincent Price, but maybe it was just the Edwardian outfit. At any rate, dig this clip from Shindig, in 1965!
Robert Plant and Allison Krauss came together to make a great album of roots blues rock music this year. It was heaped with praise and amply awarded. You remember Plant as the lead singer in the Golden Hindenburg (see clip) and Krauss as a simple washer woman in Dogpatch, USA, but together, well...just listen. Good stuff.
