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Thursday, July 9th, 2009

CD Review: “The Stone Roses” (20th-Anniversary Reissues)

“Anniversary editions” of an album rarely stand up to the hype. It’s as if the record companies, having run out of new recording formats to remarket to the public, latch on to these in place of having the next 8-track, cassette, CD, or SACD, or what not. Like, the jig’s up. We don’t feel inferior for only having MP3s.

Once in a while, however, they’re totally worth it. For example, Beck’s tenth-anniversary Odelay — it wasn’t even obvious there needed to be a celebration — but the bonus material was so good it turned it into an even better double CD than it was as an original single disc. (Just to be clear, I’m referring to the two-CD set, not the insane four-LP, $100 aberration still making the rounds. If you’re a vinyl junkie, God bless ya. Stick to music that came out on vinyl in the first place, not faux vinyl-fied CD releases.)

The Stone Roses is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its release this summer, and Legacy is pulling out all the stops with three separate editions due August 11: The Special Edition includes the remastered album with an expanded booklet; Legacy Edition adds the Lost Demos, featuring 15 tracks including the previously unreleased “Pearl Bastard” and a 1989 concert DVD. The Collectors Edition ($129.98) adds a third CD of B-sides and non-album singles, a 12-inch album folder with three vinyl LPs in a gold foil-embossed hardback slipcase. And this takes the cake: A lemon-shaped USB flash drive with promo videos, ringtones, wallpapers and previously released John Leckie home video footage of the recording of “Fools Gold.” (more…)

Tags: DVD, Entertainment, Gramophone record, Ian Brown, Music, Shopping, Stone Roses, Turns Into Stone
Posted in CD Reviews, Music | Comments

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Michael Jackson and Me

by Mojo Flucke

The glove. The dancing. The videos. The Paul McCartney duets that — I’ll say it here — resurrected Macca’s career and made him relevant as Wings was grounded for good. Michael Jackson had trademarks, and despite his personal flaws, he had style and an open mind to collaborate with artists so different from himself. His forward thinking earned him the massive crossover success he reaped.

The best music-biz reminiscence I’ve heard is how tastemaking national album-rock stations, when “Beat It” and its Eddie Van Halen guitar solo came out, slipped the record into their rotations amid the Zeppelin hits and “Dance the Night Away” and Steppenwolf and whatever…without naming the artist. After a week or so, they copped to playing Michael Jackson. Eddie was hot, Jacko was hot, they couldn’t not play it. It’s like next year, Shaq and LeBron will be on the same team — even if you hate basketball or think Shaq’s too old to win the big one, how can you not watch?

Michael Jackson was so good, whatever he touched turned to gold in the 1980s. He was generous about it, too, he spread himself around. Even his brother Jermaine — not always on the best of terms with his younger sib — got a big career boost when Michael sang on his minor hit “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming (Too Good to be True).”

His 1970s vocal performances were sublime. “I’ll Be There.” “ABC.” “I Want You Back.” Pillars of the soul canon. All-time great tracks, crackling with energy and talent. Lightning on vinyl.

Yet I find it hard to listen to Michael Jackson. Even before he allegedly drove over the cliff with Demerol (according to published media reports) this week, the magic from listening to classics like “I’ll Be There” had left the building, for me. It was hard to marvel anymore. In its place, sadness. Sadness for the mess Jacko made of himself, his life, and the kids who hung out with him.

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Tags: Michael Jackson, Mojo Flucke
Posted in Current Events, Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Music | Comments

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Mighty Sam McClain, “Betcha Didn’t Know”

by Mojo Flucke

My fellow New Hampshire resident Mighty Sam McClain will be releasing his latest record, Betcha Didn’t Know, on City Hall Records July 21. It’s been a while in the releasing, but blues and soul fans will quickly figure out it’s worth the wait.

Betcha Didn’t Know finds McClain, a singer who had some downs earlier in life (luckily, the last couple decades have been mostly up), in fine fettle, belting his deep “red clay” Louisiana soul in front of a full horn section.

Definitely worthy of being featured as the album’s centerpiece, the title track is a midtempo jazz piece that showcases McClain’s vocal chops. At 66 the guy still has total control over his vast dynamic range. There’s blues all over the record, but Mighty Sam infuses it with more contemporary southern soul this time around.

Old fans will wilt over “Just Want to Be,” a gospel-soul love song of the kind that dominated the charts in the early ’70s; McClain still does it better than most people on the planet. Speaking of ’70s material, the guy’s got a love for the funk and takes every opportunity he can to throw it down, e.g. “Funky Love” and “Can’t Stop the Funk,” a live performance with which we’ll leave you.

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Posted in Mojo's Cold Shot, Music | Comments

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Popdose Flashback: Terence Trent D’Arby, “Neither Fish Nor Flesh”

by Mojo Flucke

flashback_wide

Let’s get a couple things straight: Terence Trent Howard, a.k.a Terence Trent D’Arby, a.k.a. his latest name–which came to him in a dream–Sananda Francesco Maitreya, is a certifiable nut. He also doesn’t seem to have someone in his entourage who can reel in his nutty musical impulses, which leads to peculiar interludes, asides, giggling, and soliloquies in his recordings. He likes making weird concept albums, rock-opera things that sound like what might happen if Wilson Pickett were fronting Styx.

Yet his voice is beautiful, powerful, and rough. His grasp of soul singing is extraordinary; he can effortlessly flit from gospel to jazz to hard funk to pop to Memphis-style soul shouting, and even pull off late-’60s psychedelic soul, which was pretty weird to begin with but yet he makes it sound cool. He’s kind of like Prince, except more flawed in a Sun Ra kind of loony way (both D’Arby and Ra had issues with U.S. Army service, so they have that in common). (more…)

Tags: Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Mojo Flucke, Neither Fish Nor Flesh review, Neither Hit Nor Successful, Popdose Flashback, Popdose Flashback '89, Terence Trent D'Arby, textbook definition of "sophomore jinx", Wilson Pickett
Posted in Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Music, Popdose Flashback '89 | Comments

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Koko Taylor, 1928-2009

by Mojo Flucke

You never forget your first love. As such, I will never forget Koko Taylor. I forget lots of other stuff. Spelunking to the craggy areas of my memory where it’s dark, dank, and the stalactites and stalagmites grow, I cannot for the life of me remember what drove me to buy my first blues CDs upon entering college in the late 1980s.

(I don’t know for sure, but I am thinking it was because I liked the music of the dumb Ralph Macchio movie, Crossroads. Ironically, if that was it, it was the harmonica solo by the old blues dude in the big “cuttin’ contest” scene that pushed me toward blues–ironic because the old sage was harmonica-syncing to the J. Geils Band and Magic Dick doing “Whammer Jammer,” and not some good old Jimmy Reed or Sonny Boy Williamson stuff.)

No matter what drove me, a Koko Taylor greatest-hits compilation was one of the CDs I plucked out of the used bin upon cashing in more than 1,000 cassettes for store credit. With no idea whether or not Koko Taylor was a man or woman, I dropped it in my bag–the name sounded bluesy to me. Her signature “Wang Dang Doodle” was one of the cuts on the CD, here live with Little Walter in 1967: (more…)

Posted in Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Mojo's Cold Shot, Music | Comments

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Popdose Flashback: The Stone Roses, “The Stone Roses”

by Mojo Flucke

Manchester boasts arguably the most fertile British rock soil, having birthed a million bands from John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers to 10cc to the Buzzcocks and the Smiths. In my lifetime, the scene was never hotter than in the mid-to-late 1980s, when it was dubbed “Madchester” and gave rise to a bunch of bands that all quickly came and went. One of the first, and the hottest, was the Stone Roses, whose self-titled debut hit American shores in 1989.

Not a lot of Americans hipped themselves to The Stone Roses, which is a shame, because it contained some rockin’, melodic tuneage that provided an antidote to the synth-y tripe, hair-metal power ballads, and teenybopper nymphs like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson polluting the charts at the time. These guys shut up and played their funky guitar lines that took their cues straight from James Brown and Parliament as much as they did their 1960s English pop forebears. (more…)

Tags: Ian Brown, Jackson Pollock, James Brown, John Mayall, John Squire, Madchester, Mani, Mojo Flucke, Popdose Flashback, Popdose Flashback '89, Stone Roses
Posted in Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Music, Popdose Flashback '89 | Comments

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Lo-Fi Mojo: The Godfathers

by Mojo Flucke

Sorry mates, don’t mean to confuse y’all. For the record, Ed Murray’s currently writing Lo-Fi Mojos, and this is the normal location for a refreshing, boozy Cold Shot of blues to pour down your neck.

Being the whimsical old cuss that I am–spirit blown in all directions by a muse that knows neither organization nor regularity–this week finds me writing a Lo-Fi salute to a band recently rediscovered here in a case of never-ripped CDs rotting in the bottom of my musty closet: The Godfathers.

Most of us came by this one-hit wonder through the band’s one hit, “Birth School Work Death,” off the album of the same name. However, the band actually recorded six studio albums, before and after that solitary commercial success. The Londoners still play here and there, stateside, with a small but loyal following that come to their reunion shows. (more…)

Tags: Agent Orange, Birth School Work Death, Fleshtones, Lo-Fi Mojo, Mojo Flucke, Shadows of Night, Sonics, The Godfathers, Walking Talking Johnny Cash Blues
Posted in Lo-Fi Mojo, Music | Comments

Monday, May 25th, 2009

The Popdose Guide to Jimmy Smith

by Mojo Flucke

Hi all!

Click full screen to get the full effect. Also, just so you know, I’ve never done radio, a podcast, or pencast in my life, so please consider this the rookie effort it is.

Tags: Hammond B-3, Jimmy Smith, Mojo Flucke, Popdose Guides
Posted in Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Music, Popdose Guides | Comments

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Do We Call What White Rockers Play “Blues?”

by Mojo Flucke

Since I started listening to blues, that’s been a hard question for me to answer. It’s important, because it speaks to what blues is, really. Can Clapton play the blues, really? Sure he knows the chords better than most any player, ever, and his technical facility was never in doubt, even before some spray-painting urchin deified him in the famous English graffito.

But is it Blues with a capital B? What about Zeppelin playing covers of 1930s tunes, or Mick Jagger barking out sweet papa Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain?” I mean, come on, really.

If you’d asked me that question 15 years ago, I’d spit on your shoes and ask how dare you desecrate the hallowed names of Magic Sam and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and Muddy and Broonzy and Jimmy Reed by putting people like Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger in the same sentence. I’d invoke the spirit of Big Mama Thornton and have her chase you in your dreamsÂ at night, wielding her crowbar.

That was then, and this is now. It’s not that I’ve done a 180-degree turn, but an acknowledgment that:

So many legends have passed away since that time, and it seems that more and more white blues lovers are keeping the art form alive;
I’ve gone through deep explorations of obscure 1960s garage rock, much of it including loving, and, well, good covers of Muddy and Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed; and
The latest blues revival—Deep Blues, as performed by the likes of the Black Keys and Black Diamond Heavies—sounds more primitive and raw, more like the original blues than polished stuff from the Yardbirds, etc. of the classic rock era ever did.

(more…)

Tags: Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Mojo Flucke, Mojo's Cold Shot, Robert Johnson
Posted in Mojo's Cold Shot, Music | Comments

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Live Music: Booker T., Tupelo Music Hall, Londonderry NH, 4/29/09

by Mojo Flucke

Full disclosure: I’m a Hammond B-3 soul and soul-jazz freak, so I’m a homer here. My universe aligns around the likes of great players like Billy Preston, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Al Kooper, and Groove Holmes. Topping my list is Booker T. Jones, one of the prime architects of the Memphis Soul sound. I recently gushed over Booker’s new CD, Potato Hole, at Bullz-Eye. Also, the pictures were taken by my father-in-law, Richard Binder, who accompanied me to the show and used his celly to great effect.

booker_t_1_blog

This club gig was a stunner, for a number of reasons. First, that this guy would actually make it out to the sticks of New Hampshire. Maybe, like, an auditorium at Dartmouth or Manchester or Plymouth State…but Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry? A brutally small crowd of 80 people showed up, but like me, most of them were diehards who collectively “ooooohed” when Booker nonchalantly recited his part in music history between numbers, saying things like “My songwriting partner William Bell and I wanted to write a blues song, and we wrote this next one, ‘Born Under A Bad Sign.’ Albert King first recorded it,” and kicked into it–singing!

Another stunning part was the Hammond sound. I’ve heard many players bash it out, some of them like Tony Monaco and Bruce Katz, whose ornamental, two-handed, two-footed, flashy styles push the technical limits of the B-3’s features as they squeeze every drop of distortion and click out of the instrument. Fun stuff to watch, kind of like the musical equivalent of a Fourth of July fireworks show. (more…)

Tags: Booker T. Jones, Live Music, Londonderry, Mojo Flucke, Tupelo Music Hall
Posted in Live Music, Music | Comments