I liked it as a film very much. 'Real' source  music would probably have cramped its presentday realism. Jerry Lee and friends are peripheral to the story, they're quickly dabbed in background, impressionistic strokes to establish context without drawing attention away from the center. Approximations of their sound (and appearance)  are all that's needed in my opinion, especially so since J. Phoenix was directed to do his own musical interpretation. He's absolutely got to for the screenplay he's working in: the songs are expressions of himself as we get to know him onscreen, to the extent that we have Sam of Sun coaxing out the real Johnny-Joaquin from the bogus gospel imposter version who first auditions for him, both egos and voices belonging to the same actor essaying the part. To have real Cash slipped in there instead would sound bizarre and peculiar and rob the performance of half its strength. He's not impersonating Cash, he's doing a personal interpretation to fit Cash as a character in a story. The real victory here is that the story reasonably credibly explains Cash's own, and  that Joaquin's soul maps itself to the subject's. I ended up believing in the guy up on the screen, musical versimilitude notwithstanding, and having that guy up there singing out was essential for the trick to work.

Gilberto Gil, The Early Years, a compilation of 22 tracks by this Brazilian national treasure recorded between 1968 and 1976,  the majority from the very earliest years and the first couple albums as he navigated from Bossa Nova into Tropicalia of which he was a cofounder with -among others- Caetano Veloso, Gail Costa and young pup mascot-clowns Os Mutantes.

There's nary a bad track here; at the least-inspiring, it's still super-smooth pop of the Sergio Mendes variety. At its best, revelatory in any number of ways: the easy mastery of traditional forms and his supremacy over nearly all his rivals in this arena; the rock and soul and psychedelia: just as facile being these things, but what's really inspiring is that he's no mere bandwagon jumper and expert mimic, but a real artist integrating  what he digs into what he must do, a charismatic musical spokesman for a generation akin to the Beatles he loves and emulates; and a Tropicalista mutater of the international influences he's absorbing, and in tune with the comrades in arms he's playing with, and as such fascinating for fans of Mutantes: much overlap here with those more straightforwardly rock and roll folks: the George Martinesque arrangements, the daft, surreal, sunny protest lyrics, not to mention Gil's greatest contribution to pure Rock and Roll: Bat Macumba, played great by the Mutants, equally great here in a raga rock arrangement.

The best track is so for partly extra-musical reasons: samba Aquele Abraco (That Hug), recorded live as Gil announced his goodbye to his public heading into political exile in the UK for the next several years. The crowd-singer feedback loop is amazing as they hug one another in a really passionate tearstained performance. Interesting too is exile-recording Can't Find My Way Home, a Blind Faith-Winwood cover that rivals the original (and points out what Gilberto and Stevie share vocally), but trumps it in terms of poignance and soul invested in the lyric. 

Dress Up In You -Belle & Sebastian

 

Joan has a very lovely voice, but she way overdoes the vibrato (that's the irritant for me) ; btw her guitar playing sounds pretty fine to me

Did you get my email from a few days ago, cabinessence?

Woops. There it is among the trashed Viagra ads on my basket. Sorry I missed it, on the case now.

Wild Tiger Woman by The Move. I've already stated it, others have spontaneously echoed the opinion: this is where the classic Queen sound begins..the recipe down to the last pinch of Duane Eddie mixed with castrato choruses and a certain guitar sound, unmistakably beyond a doubt but how'd they get here way first? And why didn't Roy Wood's band exploit it to death first upon discovering it. Maybe because it didn't chart too well, ahead of its time as they say. Check it out.

I'm also listening to some old Belle and Sebastian as my next track (my soundtrack has shifted since I started writing), more great baroque bubblegum.

[Message...]

Ah, sorry about the Rick Price misattribution! I may have been thinking of Bev Bevan's negative response to the direction Move was taking by the time of Message... which he's grouched interspersed good material with 'just plain silly!', "...probably my least favorite Move album (Shazam is definitely my favorite)..." (Message from the Country booklet, artist statement).

The Lynne quote about ELO as managed by Wood not being to his tastes I can trace. It's at the excellent www.brumbeat.net, and the quote goes:

[sounded like] a load of old dustbins falling down the stairs

Thanks for clearing up the phrasing ambiguities (and just plain ignorances!) in my account of Lynne's early days.

As to the end of the Wood and Lynne story, it remains a bit ambiguous however one spins it. Maybe it's best that way, Wood bowing out graciously-surprisingly, leaving a friendship and good collaboration intact and unsoured.  Two bands with two Move players a piece was the interesting result

Interesting that Trevor Burton had quit The Move earlier because he didn't approve of the pop-sellout he sensed the band was becoming post-Blackberry Way, and new recruit Rick Price left (only to rejoin in Wizzard clothes) because Lynne and Wood had become too waywardly selfindulgent and goofy-experimental for his tastes. There's an underlying never resolved tension between the two extremes that marks the history of the band it seems to me. It also marks Wood's subsequent work and the divide is often pretty clearly defined by what he released on 45 and what he reserved for LP. The Wizzard who did hit singles like Ball Park Incident and Angel Fingers isn't quite the same unit that made albums like Wizzard's Brew, schizophrenic in itself: plastic pop motifs -an Elvis impersonation, a musichall number- turned into molten plastic fifteen minute dirges and oratorios, like a bad trip taken while lost in the horn section of some Rock and Roll-R&B band of fifties yore! (As I recall. Not saying this record is bad, far from it: just even stranger 'heavy pop' than he'd been making with the last couple incarnations of Move. I sense this was the grandiose direction he wanted ELO to go, but Lynne wouldn't let him...)

Funky Worm by Ohio Players (though the one doing virtually all the ohio playing is future P-funkateer Junie Morrison)

My 'biggest' or most intensely pursued  collections (forget CDs; any format will do) are of long-ago artists who are rarely heard on these American shores, and whose limited release recordings are unlikely to be rereleased anywhere any time soon, strictly my private stash of personal pleasures.

For example, 'Palm Wine Guitar' master of Sierra Leone, S.E. Rogie. He's the one I collect first and foremost.

I can't remember which two originals it was off the top of my head, but I'm thinking "Fire Brigade" and "Flowers In The Rain".

Yes, those were the two originals according to the Movements booklet.

I likewise recall reading that Eight Miles High was a song the band covered in concert (just not that particular evening)

Trivia: Both Move and Idle Race covered Moby Grape's Hey Grandma. Wood's band released a studio recorded version. Don't know if a Lynne band recording exists.

Further note on Wood and Lynne after doing a little homework (the Wikipedia entry on Idle Race is the best first source to check and covers nearly all reported below). Lynne replaced Wood in Mike Sheridan's band as lead guitarist. Idle Race's first single was planned to be Wood/Move's Here We Go 'Round the Lemon Tree (till the Move's  version on a current B-side overfamiliarized the public with the tune); Wood supported the group and gave them recording space; Lynne was Wood's first choice to replace departing Move member Trevor Burton in 1969; but he demurred, preferring to try and give his critically praised but unpopular band one more try, throwing in his lot only after a second Idle Race LP crashed and burned.

It's clear that Lynne's intro into the limelight was 'in the shadow of Roy Wood' every step of the way. Interesting that it was Lynne who wrestled away the Move 2.0 band ELO from its cocreator (not quite sure how he gained the rights to the name, a two members vs. third vote?), claiming their LP collaboration under that  rubric was commercially wrecked by Wood's willfully ugly-weird sounds; there's a quote  from Jeff I can't place right now to the effect that Roy made it all sound like dustbins tossed down the stairs! Which is not a bad description of the truculent-heavy side of Wood musicmaking at all, and it does mark the differences in long term big picture sensibility between the two players. As long as Lynne was in the Wood orbit, he crunched and clattered in similar ways, but after serving his aprenticeship, he set forth for a kind of unproblematic mass appeal Wood had already rejected. The tension worked both ways. Hear Wood's explanation of his cover art for Message from the Country, an illustration of a Lynne song...

all about trees dying and all that crap...[my art]...shows a huge bird flying out of the sun with bomb doors where its stomach walls should be, about to deposit a load on the country

(this priceless quote culled from the booklet accompanying the CD of that same name)



 

He's a precocious child in the body of an older man.

Nicely put!

I'd like to hear Eight Miles High too.

Jazz Fascist's comments filled in a piece I didn't manage to capture: the laddishness and pub-football stadium-sing along anthemness of the singles.

Wood sure knew how to pander to the crowd! Wizzard worked Wizard for him too in the same way: this incarnation consistently ran neck and neck with Slade in the same yobbo-yet-Beatlesque top of the charts race for a very long spell

'J.F' has also got it right as to the simple driving bass-drums combination, which I'd add originated as a cartoonish and boozy-sloppy reduction-amplification of the already rather outlandish  Entwhistle-Moon combination. (Bev Bevan is an interestingly stylized minimalist drummer throughout his career: his specialty is 'signifying' rock drumming in broad strokes, playing the rock movie fantasy of a drummer: he was one of the first to hit the cowbell really hard!)

BUT, for all the easy locally orientated appeal on the early singles, there's also Roy Wood the ambitious provincial modern artist, a rough hewn genius of sorts. He's got to be addressed above and beyond his knack for keeping his units solvent and viable. Has anyone had such a midas touch in combination with such a perverse disregard of what the public will think? Any thoughts?

I'd go with Message from the Country, their last record (available on a CD from Harvest which tosses in the singles from the same era, all of them essential and arguably better than the album tracks. ) It's representative enough that you'll know after listening whether you want to pursue them further back, plus it has Jeff Lynne being recognizably his best musical self (if you are an ELO fan; if you're not, you may be surprised how bright and original a talent this individual once was)

Then again, if you're strictly a British-psychedelic- pop-40 fan, you'd likely prefer the band-titled debut. If you're into early prog-rock and San Francisco Fillmore with heavy metal undertones, Shazam may be your thing. Third LP Looking On is probably not the  best place to start, but it's certainly a nice place to end up.

In short, Message is a great recap of the band's achievements and forecast of things to come. Pick it first, then listen to their ongoing story from the beginning in chronological sequence. It makes sense best that way, I think

Thanks! I've emailed you (and will try and figure out what's blocking the instant message function)

EDIT: other Birmingham crosscurrents that flow through this band periodically: Ozzy and Black Sabbath; Roy Wood often does a Jeckyll-Hyde flip back and forth transformation  between genteel vicar with a taste for sherry and Noel Coward and old 78s...and an utterly lost (and somewhat menacing) poor beggar suffering from deepest heavy metal PARANOIA, harsh discordant pinched strife of industrial-man daily life as root of rock and roll, Brumbeat style. Secondly,  Denny Laine-era Moody Blues: the subsequent Wingsman, along with Birmingham style generally,  is much more fundamental in the genesis of that band's continuing sound than generally understood. The Move faithfully reflected his original impact as first local hero made good worldwide, and supply a direct tribute that explains quite a bit about what they were up to themselves with their cover of his fine neo-Buddy Holly number 'Too Much in Love' .

[Ugly Things]

Sure. I just reacquired the near-totality of the stuff released under the Move moniker (The Message from the Country CD has got all their Harvest  recordings; a triple CD set has all of the earlier ones), so that's at my fingertips.

A lot of the rest before and after and alongside The Move has slipped out of reach for the moment; even more I've never heard in the first place (biggest lacuna being The Idle Race, Lynne's band)

BTW there's an excellent article/joint-interview in the latest issue of the zine Ugly Things devoted to Mike Sheridan and Rick Price, both closely affiliated with The Move (Mike was leader of Roy Wood's first band; Rick Price was in the Move and Wizzard) as well as being songwriting partners for a spell. Their collaborative story is interesting in itself, but it's the  hugely detailed account of the Birmingham music scene in the early days that makes this essential

[Night of Fear]

Any fans of this "Brumbeat" superduper group which launched Roy Wood and spawned ejectopod band-concept ELO?

Speaking personally, they're my absolute favorite sixties hit-machine Brit-band that's not the Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks.  I can rave all day about individual tracks, but I find it much harder to give a simple characterization of their "sound" and spirit. That's partly because they were so good at shapeshifting and cherrypicking the styles of others for their own super catchy -but very peculiar- mash up,  switching, for example, from Eddie Cochran thunder to Paperback Writer Beatles harmonies to Hollies-derived ones with a little Beachboys and Hi-los tossed in within a single composition while arranger/producer Tony Visconti and Roy W interpolate medievally woodwinds and proto-ELO classical boogie: oboes, cellos and saxophones  sawing away,squonking and grinding, getting it on...

And there are so many Move reenvisionings: the original hydra headed beast with five lead singers who took the Who routine one step beyond, smashing TV sets and automobiles while dressed in Gangster pinstripes...between sunshine lysergo-pop songs about flowers in the rain and hearing the grass grow, the twee-ness always laced with deadly bad-trip nightshade (listen to their very first single Night of Fear  or the B-side which ends with extended horror movie sound effects, or the schizo classic Cherryblossom Clinic, an ecstatic ode to being insane and suicidal!

This unit losing a member or two along the way consolidates into one of the tightest singles bands of all time crafting a signature style that is Glam before it was invented (Wild Tiger Woman is a blueprint for the Killer Queen sound of Freddie and Brian, as well as a forecast of shapes of things and bands produced by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn to come (like the entire catalogue of the Sweet). Tunes like Blackberry Way (Penny Lane by way of Strawberry Fields) and Fire Brigade (canonical power pop) are as nonbiodegradable deathless radio-music as anything of the decade, just a lot less well known

Then, losing a whole lot of members and gaining a new one, they tried their lot briefly as a Cabaret-Vegas type act favoring singer Carl Wayne's Tom Jonesian-Engelbertian bent, but then suddenly changed course yet again and emerged on Shazam as the heaviest UK prog band of the moment, Wayne still the frontman (the only LP where he has the stage pretty much to himself in this regard) but now the compleat rockstar. His performances here are amazing, comparable to the best of Terry Reid, Daltrey, Steve Marriott, Tim Buckley,  and that "All Right Now" and "Bad Company" guy Paul whatshisname (actually rather better than him): the other exemplars of  crooning troubador  and R&B mod-shouting styles morphing over time into Acid Blooz Rock.

The album's best seen perhaps as a belated sequel to their EP from a couple years before, Something Else, a stunning set of cover versions of old rocker faves and the hippest current West Coast sounds played live in concert, great renditions of songs by bands like the Byrds and Love, even a cover of the Berns-Ragavoy Piece of My Heart (first done be Erma Franklin) before Big Brother and Janis did theirs...to virtually identical effect.

Shazam! too is cover-heavy, strange great choices like Tom Paxton's Last Thing on My Mind, Ars Nova's Fields of People, the Mann-Weill Don't Make My Baby Blue (popularized in the UK by Cliff Richard). Wayne works the room like a rock-god/uber lounge singer while Wood, bassist Rick Price and drummer Bevan supply power trio backing of the first order, Roy orchestrating and timing the whole deal flawlessly.

For this one record, the Move proved they could be Super Heroes, and then, once again, they promptly moved on, chucking Carl Wayne (and an arena rock future) and subbing this alter ego of Wood's with a guy much more like a musical twin, Jeff Lynne. The super-eccentric first result of the partnership was Looking On. Whereas Shazam was super smooth and cockrock cool, this was squonky, and honking, bordering on barking mad at times; it's occasionally mistakable in its slide guitar dust storms and strangulated weirdo vocals for Beefheart, but it also has that high Romantic piano arpeggiating thing going on beloved of both Wood and Lynne, one part of the core sound among many on display here of their dreamchild Electric Light Orchestra...which they promptly embarked on as soon as this was done...while continuing to record contract-obligation-wise as Move as well. They may have been tossing the Move stuff out as fast as they could to be done with it, but the material gathered on their last LP Message from the Country is far from negligible, and the singles released separately include some of the all time best of Move in any incarnation, like the blistering bubble pop of Tonight! and the wonderful Jerry Lee Lewis fantasia California Man with Roy and Jeff as duelling Jerries. Cheap Trick revived this one, and if you like them as a band, just check out this whole Move era: the thoroughgoing resemblances are there for all to see.

Phew! I didn't mean to write so much, and I haven't even touched on the E.L.O. debut with the same trio who were also The Move. What can you add?

Earlyish Move:



Last Move-ment:

'Chuckberry Fields Forever' by Gilberto Gil

[Tecnicolor]

The thread started with the rereleased (originally unreleased, then exhumed a few years ago, then back in oblivion again) band offering Tecnicolor

I just caught up with it.

Here's one description from Jason:

Upon recruiting bassist and future hit producer Liminha (allowing Arnaldo to move from bass to keyboards) and drummer Dinho, the band embarked to France to record their crossover LP, Tecnicolor. Recorded in English as an attempt to break into the Western market, this album toned down the experimentation to more "acceptable" levels and offered remade versions of several Mutantes classics

The only real modification I might make  to that  is possibly to edit  'several' to  'nearly all' covers of past Mutantes material. More than not is present on the Everything is Possible 'best of' in its non-English lyrics original form .  Same compilation also has both versions of 'Baby'.

That song was the right cut among the auto-covers to pick, the best original reinterpretation, and a great performance in its own right.

I'm not sure Tecnicolor was intended to be more 'accessible' except at the level of English (or in one case French) language comprehensibility, probably the greatest overall thing in this disc's favor (it's really nice to know what they're singing about!) They're as Mutant as ever, just stripped of those excellently odd studio arrangements.

This is more like 'live-in-studio Mutantes' playing their greatest hits

I would definitely go for the originals first. Nonetheless, a song or two arguably improves without the fancy psychedelia weighing it down; others supply excellent alternative takes: among them Gilberto Gil's Bat Macumba, the Louie Louie of Brazilian music, one of the most coverable and re-coverable idiot-riffs ever coined, the rallying cry of Tropicalia, a fundamental root-music source of eternally refreshed inspiration, always a gas when vamped and revamped by the whole gang it belonged to (and listen to Gil's own versions some time: he owns this movement as much as the Mutantes, along with fellow travellers like Caetano and Gail: don't discount them, buy them all!); yet others  justify themselves through the English lyrics alone: the Veloso-Gil Panes et Circenses being the most noteworthy example with its scenario og The same old people always dining inside busy with their food till they die, and the singer trying to speed that death along by commissioning a stainless steel sword to kill/wake up his yuppie  girlfriend from her shallow, jet set same old samba trance.  And the Gilbert Becaud cover Le Premier Bonheur du Jour is a nice tribute to the local troubador tradition in their adopted land (though also available on Everything is Possible, as is band original El Justiciero...I'm mentioning that to keep a tally on cd-overlap for those interested)

Speaking of Mutantes in France, were they visiting to make international inroads as prime reason...or were they also temporarily in political exile from the ruling party at home? Both Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were making records in English at the same time mainly because they had no other viable choice, settling in England rather than a prison cell. Any knowledge on this stage of the band history?

(And Sean Ono Lennon's back cover illustration is also 'not bad at all', my characterization of this generally groovy Mutantes offering, generally)

Mike Watt and D.Boon = Minutemen (the musical group, not the 1776 people, or the border guarding vigilantes):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000000LZW/102-5438550-0555335?n=5174

I like this one's scenario/experiment: a very talented person who came to the classic totally blind, commisioned by Mike Watt to remake it  to satisfy a sentimental need (D. Boone's old fave) with a mystic twist ("she" was somehow  the one who 'must' do this), Petra hearing it fresh and reproducing it without a clue except what her ears told her to do. Shades of "Cobwebs and strange", and a very uncynical deal I assure you. 

The Petra Haden Sells Out record (for about the seventeenth time, the only cd I remembered to pack for a long trip)

"Touch Me, Feel Me..." is the connection I draw between the Who's masterwork and your friend's butt

Tommy was my introduction to The Who. I'd heard I Can See For Miles once or twice when it was briefly a would be hit single, but the rest was silence and popular obliviousness. The band had no AM radio profile whatsoever when Tommy rapidly built from word of mouth rumor to cult to monster-phenomenon and introduced them to  tons of kids like me born after their generation.

It blew my mind that there was another band as good as Beatles and Stones who'd been around just as long that we'd never even heard of. I had nothing to compare it to from their own past work, nowhere to pigeonhole it in a band-career still in mid-evolution. I just heard the  undeniable greatness of Townshend and mates, and was especially prejudiced in its favor because our music teacher a little later tried to put it down as naive pop in contrast to the 'truly musical' and great  Rock Opera that was Jesus Christ Superstar in his opinion!

Hearing what was predominantly a Townshend solo project fleshed out by the rest of the band skewed my sense of their identity just like first knowing 'classic Who' and then hearing Tommy does (see many comments above)

I liked the warm acoustic Pete-demo dimension and Daltrey's seraphic voice. Who's Next came as something of a shock  by comparison and forced a lot of adjustment and reorientation, prompting a lot of back catalogue Who-history reconstruction till I got the full quadrophenic measure of this unit. I prefer NEXT today, but it wastes practically all the competition, whoever's, so its not a particularly useful unit of measurement.

Tommy's it's own pulsing vibration, a headtrip, the lead character and Pete's. If you want to group it with other things, it's a an extension of prog-folk-voyage Rael on Sell Out, very much so, and also songs like Sunrise and I Can't Reach You and Tattoo from the same disc, in terms of acoustic textures, rich harmonies and strange melancholy, tender, sinister ditties