A diminutive Pākehā (a Māori of European descent), now in her twenties, Hollie Smith is one of New Zealand’s most prominent female singer/songwriter/musicians. Her voice has been described (locally, and perhaps with no concern for political correctness) as that of “a big mama from a Southern Baptist choir.”
Born in 1982, Smith won the award for Best Female Vocalist at the National Jazz Festival of New Zealand at the age of 16, and in the same year released her debut album, “Light From a Distant Shore” featuring traditional Celtic Scottish songs. Today’s selection, unsurprisingly entitled “Dream” (three days running with that title), is a lullaby written by Smith herself.
Born in 1984 as Priscilla Natalie Hartranft in Fort Stewart, Georgia, Priscilla Ahn (her mother’s maiden name) split her childhood between the States and her mother’s native Korea. A singer songwriter, who plays guitar, piano, harmonica, ukulele and banjo, she is now based in Los Angeles and, as is often the case with up and coming artists these days, many of her songs are most recognizable as featured music for Hollywood movies, television programs and commercials.
Today’s selection was released on her 2008 debut album, “A Good Day”. Once again we have a song entitled, “Dream” but this one comes accompanied by two YouTube videos.
The first, entitled “A Dream” is accompanied by the song’s studio version – it has a thumb’s up button that says “Thumbs up if you cried”:
The second – and there are those of us who think the song bears repeating – is Ahn’s compelling live version:
Holy Moly, by the time he was my age he’d been dead for two years. Born in Vernon, Texas in 1936 (he succumbed to a heart attack in 1988, at his mom’s house in Tennessee), Roy Kelton Orbison was six when his father gave him a guitar and as he later recalled, by age seven, “I was finished, you know, for anything else.”
With a sallow complexion (after a bout of childhood jaundice), thick glasses and protruding ears, Orbison’s looks were’t nearly of teen-idol caliber, especially after his hair turned prematurely white, inducing him to dye it at a very young age. Yet with no PR to speak of and despite (or perhaps with the help) of early record sleeves that didn’t include his picture, he began to reach a listening audience.
Orbison was wearing prescription sunglasses while traveling to to one of his earlier performances, when he realized he’d forgotten his regular glasses, so by necessity, he wore the sunglasses onstage. A shy man, who suffered from severe stage fright, he found the dark glasses helped him to “hide” a little, and so he continued to perform in them.
“I wasn’t trying to be weird you know,” he once said. “I didn’t have a manager who told me to dress or how to present myself or anything. But the image developed of a man of mystery and a quiet man in black somewhat of a recluse, although I never was, really.”
As a matter of fact, although quiet and self-effacing, the remarkably polite Orbison was known to have a fine sense of humor. All of which mattered little when he began to sing. A natural baritone, musical scholars have noted that he had a “three-of-four octave range” that, when combined with complex musical arrangements led some to refer to him as “the Caruso of Rock”…as even the Beatles would discover.
With his star rising in 1963, Orbison was given top billing on a tour of the UK with the Fab Four (whom he’d never heard of) just as they were beginning to build their own enormous fan base. After his arrival in England, it became clear that he was no longer the main draw and he commented out loud, “What’s a Beatle anyway?”
He then felt a tap on his shoulder and John Lennon replied, “I am.”
On the first night of the tour Orbison took the stage first with his usual, sedate manner. This was completely alien to the raucous Beatles who were dumbfounded when he was called back for fourteen encores. Apparently lifelong friendships were formed during that tour, with Orbison feeling a particular kinship with Lennon and years later, with George Harrison, but first a little adjustment was required, as Ringo Starr recalled, “We were all backstage listening to the tremendous applause he was getting. He was just standing there, not moving or anything.”
No doubt some of that applause came as a result of today’s selection, from Orbison’s 1963 album, “In Dreams”. Written by Johnny Mercer in 1944 and first recorded by June Hutton and the Pied Pipers, other notable versions of “Dream” include the Skylarks, Betty Johnson, Frank Sinatra (who had two hit versions, one in 1945 and one in 1960), Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Buble… and in 1970 on his album, “Sentimental Journey” none other than Ringo Starr himself.
But I ask you, if you had but one version of “Dream” to play, which would yours be? I thought so….
Formed in Argyll, western Scotland with the notion of adapting traditional Gaelic songs with modern production techniques, and named after the Western Capercaillie, a bird native to the Argyll region, Capercaillie, the band, recorded its first album in 1984.
Today’s selection was included on “Get Out” the group’s sixth album, released in 1992, with many of its tracks focusing on the notorious Highland Clearances.
Ranging from the 18th Century to well into the next one, the clearances came about as a result of an agricultural transformation by hereditary aristocratic landowners, who forced crofters (farmers) and their families off their lands in droves (at a rate that reached 2,000 families a day), sometimes brutally.
Tacitly abetted by the government, financial aid for new infrastructure was provided to strengthen trade and support the new sheep-fueled economy. The great expulsion also hastened the end of Scotland’s age-old clan system. Displaced to the seacoast and the Lowlands, many were forced into emigrating to Australia and Canada where today there are now significantly more highland descendants than in Scotland itself.
That said, today’s selection, an instrumental, is one of the album’s few tracks that has nothing to do with the clearances. Rather, Dr. MacPhail’s Trance comes to you as a precursor to another “Dream Week” with each selection focusing on Dreams.
Time again for this song, stolen off one of the kid’s I-Pods a few years back. Laugh if you must, especially if you live anywhere near a Six Flags, but it happens to be a track from the best selling music album of all time in the UK, where enough copies have been sold for each household in the land to have six of them.
First released in the Netherlands as “Up & Down – The Party Album!” in 1997, “The Party Album” was the Vengaboys’ debut release. A Eurodance group, based in Amsterdam, “Vengaboys” was originally the nickname of a couple of young “party animal” Dutch producers (“Venga” is Spanish for “come on”) who had an old school bus. The “boys” enjoyed a great deal of success in the mid-90s, cruising around to various Spanish beaches with their DJ gear and holding illegal beach parties, which usually ended when the Civil Guard showed up.
In the summer of ’96 they’d just been discussing ways to expand their parties, world-wide if possible, when they met soon to be front-woman, Kim Sasabone (from Salvador, Brazil) at one of their beach parties and she introduced them to some of her friends. Within months Kim and her friends were touring in the “Vengabus” as “The Vengaboys” and by the following spring “The Party Album” was beginning its worldwide spin.
Known in the UK for their Number One singles, “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!” and “We’re Going to Ibiza” the “Eurohouse” group (with an estimated 15 million records sold worldwide) is best known in the U.S. for “We Like to Party” which peaked at Number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart. …Damn right I can still dance to it!
So there really was a Vengabus and today is my birthday, and here I’ll freely admit that when I blow out those candles my wish will be (along with health and happiness for my friends and family) that, if ever those “wheels of steel” churn this way…they allow me to sit in for that driver.
Since it keeps on showing up on Facebook I may as well address it. I’m on the eve of my 54th birthday. Now there are some who consider 54 to be positively antediluvian, while many others I know, view it as an age when the bloom has yet to even meet the rose. Me, I’d say that 54 is just about right…be foolish not to…and at least I can have a little fun with that fact.
So let me ask those who have lived through at least four or five decades, if you could be 20 again, would you do it?
This picture was taken on the John Weeks Footbridge, (connecting Cambridge with the Allston section of Boston) around about this time of year in 1978 and it’s diverting to consider, as any actuary will agree, that the odds are downright bankable that there will be a far greater age difference between this 54 year old and that 20 year old, than there will be between this 54 year old and the fellow who hears the sound of that final horn.
Time is fleet and for the most part life has been grand, but there is no…way…in…Hell that I’d want to go back, even to that remarkably delightful moment on the bridge and the halcyon times that surrounded it. Would you?
Admittedly, from a physical standpoint it would be nice not having to contend with some of the grievances Father Time and Mother Nature have thrown my way, and I’m not about to include a current picture as a means of comparison (ouch!) but when you consider all that life has brought to most of us since the age of 20, or 30, or even 40, I’ll take today…any day.
Right, and where do we go from here? Just recently we saw one of our favorites in concert, Loudon Wainwright III, and he didn’t disappoint, especially when he sang today’s selection. High, Wide and Handsome: in a literal sense, well, at least I can claim to be wide, but when taken figuratively (as in jovial, carefree and…jaunty) it’s truly something to aspire to.
A genuine All-American phrase that conjures images of openness and freedom (and maybe a cowboy or two), High, Wide and Handsome has been in use since at least the 1880s; eventually even making the leap across the pond in the 1930s, when it was used in a British newspaper advert for an ocean liner, described as: “A trim ship built high, wide and handsome, a ship with ‘decks appeal’.”
By decade’s end P.G. Wodehouse had placed his own spin on the phrase in “Uncle Fred in Springtime”. Although… “He has a nasty way of lugging Pongo out into the open and proceeding to step high, wide and plentiful.” …certainly lacks the punch of today’s song, which was included on Wainwright’s 20th studio (and first Grammy winning) album, “High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project”
Released in 2009 as a tribute to singer and musician Charlie Poole (1892–1931), the album features original songs (such as this one) as well as numerous versions of songs made popular by Poole, a “rambling, hard-drinking, crazy Southern showman,” much like Wainwright himself (raised in New York but born in Chapel Hill).
Admittedly, the notion of promiscuity and abject carousing belongs back on a bridge somewhere, at least for this particular 54 year old, but there’s still something rather wonderful in the realization that it “isn’t that long a stay” …and we may as well tackle what’s left in a high, wide and handsome way.
And now it’s summer. And here I feel like a regular blackguard and a heretic too, having “ripped” out the first half of an artist’s song to get to what, in my opinion, is the far better second half. Ah yes, right at the point where, with a pffffttttt, he opens a beer and takes a satisfying gulp…
Born in Orillia, Ontario in 1938, with hundreds of recordings released over a career that has spanned five decades, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot, Jr. has been called a Canadian National Treasure by no less a Canadian treasure himself than Robbie Robertson. Then there’s Bob Dylan, who refers to him as one of his favorite songwriters, further noting that when he hears a Lightfoot song he often wishes that it would last forever.
So who am I to question the artistic vision of such a man when it comes to the final track of his seventh album, 1971’s “Summer Side of Life”? Entitled “Cabaret” it starts out with a lilting (some may say tedious) dewy-eyed reminiscence about the sea and the sky and “sounds of laughter on ladies gay….” Sorry but riiiiiiip…because at 2:53, when you’re about to drift away that initial song, which really must have started life as a different track, evolves into the highly resonating account of a drifter (so maybe that’s it) on the road.
And here we are, huddled in some west coast roadside diner while the big rigs roll by. Anyone who has spent a few days “cold on the shoulder” will immediately identify. Then comes the chorus, which always makes me think of my wife, Linda (now decades ago), back in Toronto when she was roundly pregnant with our first-born.
My job would regularly have me venturing to Ottawa or Hamilton or maybe to Winnipeg, all within 150 kilometers of the great southern border (which is where four-fifths of the Canadian population resides). But in the icy vortex of January, Linda’s company would send her to the wilds (and I mean that) of Timmins on the frozen Mattagami, or to Kapuskasing, where GM operates its “Cold Weather Development Center.”
Well into her third trimester, well before mobile GPS devices or practical cell phones for that matter, she’d fly through the frigid northern darkness, rent a Jeep Cherokee at the air field and drive for an hour and a half down a plowed but barren highway, and then…according to the desultory directions she’d received…”take a left.”
It’s summer time now, but this song transports me back to a tiny Beaches (neighbourhood) apartment, when on more than one cold, dark winter’s evening I’d sit close to the telephone on the kitchen wall and await my wife’s call, thinking all along how much…”I’d like to tell her that I miss her so, in North Ontario.”
Ever have one of those days that starts out on an even keel, but continuously picks up tumult so that, for reasons out of your control, you’re feeling downright harried by day’s end? Well that explains the brevity of this write-up along with the mellow nature of today’s selection performed by “Mr. Acker Bilk” …yes, that’s exactly what was on the record label.
A bowler-wearing clarinetist, also known for his goatee and striped-waistcoat, he was born Bernard Stanley Bilk in Somerset, England in 1929. “Acker” is local slang for “mate” (as in friend), ‘though it must have been a hard earned appellation as he lost his two front teeth in a school fight that forever-after affected his jazz clarinet style.
Although he had a number of light jazz recording hits in the UK, Bilk was far from an international star when he wrote today’s selection for his newborn daughter, Jennifer (and initially named it for her) in 1961. When a BBC television producer happened to hear the song he asked Bilk for permission to use it as the theme song for a new television series, called, “Stranger on the Shore”
Wise choice, “Stranger on the Shore” as the song itself was soon called, was the biggest selling UK single of 1962, becoming the first British recording to reach Number One on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
In May of 1969 it accompanied the crew of Apollo 10 in lunar orbit, as lunar module pilot, Gene Cernan selected it as one of his choices on a cassette tape used in the spacecraft’s command module. “To the moon, Acker…to the moon.”
The phenomenon began in London’s East End somewhere around 1840, either through the criminal element, as a means of excluding the “coppers” from pertinent communication, or (more likely) in the marketplace where traders could talk amongst themselves without their customers knowing what they were saying. After a while it simply became a way of speaking.
Cockney rhyming slang (CRS) involves the replacement of a common word with a word that rhymes with it, as found at the end of a short phrase. One then utilizes the beginning of the phrase and omits the rhyming word. For example:
Wife, (famously) rhymes with “Trouble and Strife,” and so: “Bloody ‘ell, the trouble’s been shopping again.”
Money, rhymes with “Bees and Honey,” as in: “Hand over the bees, mate.”
Head, rhymes with “Crust of Bread,” as in: “Use your crust, lad.”
Legs, rhymes with “Bacon and Eggs,” and so: “Cor, look at the long bacons on that one!”
Feet, rhymes with “Plates of Meat,” so you get: “It nearly knocked me off me plates.”
Coat, rhymes with “Weasel and Stoat,” as in: “Oy, where’s me weasel?”
Eyes, rhymes with “Mince Pies,” and Telephone rhymes with “Dog and Bone,” and so you get: “So I got straight on the dog to me trouble and told ‘er I couldn’t believe me minces.”
One of the wonderful things about CRS, and indeed language in general, is that it is ever-evolving and had you been wandering around the East End a decade or two ago you might have heard someone say, “So we was in the middle of a Leo and…” which was to say they were in the middle of an “all-dayer” (an all day drinking session), as derived from the once highly-popular “Leo Sayer.”
Born in Shoreham-by-Sea, on England’s south coast in 1948, and far from a Cockney himself (as a matter of fact he’s now a naturalized Australian citizen), Leo Sayer had seven Top 10 UK Singles in a row back in the 1970s. The streak began with “Giving it All Away,” a song that he gave to Roger Daltrey, who had his first hit, without The Who, with it in 1973 on his solo album, “Daltrey”.
Actually, the then-unknown Sayer wrote or co-wrote ten of the album’s eleven tracks, not releasing his own debut album, “Silverbird” until later that year. Today’s selection was his first hit as a recording artist, peaking at Number 2 on the UK Charts. In the U.S. “The Show Must Go On” was covered by (that “cover machine”) Three Dog Night, peaking at Number 4 on the Billboard Charts.
Three Dog Night had changed the last line of the chorus from “I won’t let the show go on” to “I must let the show go on,” which apparently upset Sayer who had invested a great deal of artistic energy in the (metaphorical) circus-themed song, even performing it dressed as Pierrot the clown.
Although Three Dog Night altered the song’s meaning, they did at least wear (American) clown makeup and, like the original, began their version with a brief rendition of Fucik’s “Entrance of the Gladiators”. Still,it’s hard to imagine anyone performing it with quite the nuance…and urgency…of the scat singing Leo Sayer.
Those who have cited her as a major influence include: Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Steely Dan and Melissa Manchester. Todd Rundgren affirms that after listening to her, he stopped “writing songs like The Who and started writing songs like Laura,” while Elton John (whose song “Burn Down the Mission” was written with her style in mind) confessed that he “idolized her…the soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes came was like nothing I’d heard before.”
Born Laura Nigro in 1947 in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Gilda, a bookkeeper, and Louis, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. As a child, she taught herself piano and composed her first songs at age eight. As a teenager she sang with friends in subway stations and on street corners and attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art. She also began to experiment with a stage name, finally settling on Laura Nyro.
At the age of 17 Laura Nyro sold her first song (which happens to be today’s selection), for $5,000, to Peter, Paul and Mary. A record deal followed and her debut album, “More Than a New Discovery” was recorded in 1966. Although not a huge success for Nyro, many of the album’s songs became hits for other artists, including “Wedding Bell Blues” topping the charts for The 5th Dimension, “Stoney End” (reaching Number 6 on the charts) for Barbra Streisand and (once again), today’s selection, this time for Blood Sweat & Tears, who peaked at Number 2 on the Billboard Charts with the song.
It’s fascinating to note that Nyro had actually considered becoming lead singer for Blood, Sweat & Tears after Al Kooper left the group, but was dissuaded by her manager. Instead she went on to produce her “break-through” second album in 1968, “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession,” which like its predecessor, also furnished hit covers by other artists, including “Eli’s Coming” for Three Dog Night; and “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Sweet Blindness” both for The 5th Dimension, who must have thanked their lucky stars for her very existence.
But the streak began with the song Nyro first sold to Peter, Paul and Mary. You’ve heard it performed by others and I ask you…now, just a few years shy of a half-century since it was written, whose version would you want played at your funeral?
thisrightbrain 