Music notes: Incomparable Elvis, Chuck Berry and verbs, Hollywood Beatles, influential Dolphy, towering Grateful Dead sequence, shredding Valentine, Yardbirds legend, Townshend/Moon, rockin' Pops

Sunday 8/18/24

It's kind of staggering how inventive Elvis's Sun sides are. Today, in the age of imbecility, people want to be all, "He stole from Black musicians!" He did not. There is nothing that sounds like Elvis's Sun material. A person is simply ignorant if they're saying otherwise, and they likely have listened to very little and I would bet have not heard the Sun material at all or anything that came before it. I mean, really: Listen to "Milk Cow Blues Boogie."

There may be no finer lyric than Chuck Berry's "Promised Land." Masterful. A great piece of American writing. It's a story and a poem and a part of a song. Chuck Berry understood verbs. E.G.: "Smokin' into New Orleans."

I've always found the Beatles' Live at the Hollywood Bowl to be a tremendously exciting album. It was the first live Beatles anything that I had heard because I got it before I listened to any bootlegs. This was prior to being able to find and hear things online, because there was no online, and before I could drive and get to used record stores to hunt the racks for bootleg LPs.

I wrote in a piece the other day that Eric Dolpy was the most influential jazz musician of his era. What he did, wrote, played, and thought had more direct impact on important jazz artists at the time than anyone else had. He kept turning up in key spots, at key dates. This is not a coincidence. Look at Dolphy in December 1960. He's doing Third Stream music, he's playing on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, he's cutting his own Far Cry with Booker Little. You cannot convince me that Coltrane did not know that Dolphy was a realer deal than he.

I stayed up almost all night last Saturday/Sunday listening to the concluding "Dark Star"/"St. Stephen"/"The Eleven"/"Turn on Your Love Light" sequence of the Grateful Dead's 1/2/70 Fillmore East gig repeatedly. They make the best music I have ever heard. They are more about what it's all about than any other musical act. "We'll give you some easy listening music," says Bob Weir before "Dark Star" begins, and what then follows is seventy minutes of sound that could have come from no one and nothing else in the galaxy unless, perhaps, the dying star of a human soul sliding into heaven as it fills with light.

Hilton Valentine: Underrated guitarist. He shreds on the Animals' early recorded live performance from Newcastle at the end of December 1963. A very Chuck Berry-heavy set, actually.

There are times when I think there's no finer guitar solo than the one Jeff Beck plays on the Yardbirds' "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago." It is one of the few Yardbirds songs to feature both Beck and Jimmy Page on guitar. That technique where Beck creates a sustained line of feedback is similar to what he does on "The Nazz Are Blue," except in this case he solos while coming out from under the line. The song has two riffs, really: That double-downstroke percussive refrain and the descending figure--played by Page--that follows it. So it goes like this: downstroke, downstroke, descending figure, downstroke, downstroke, descending figure, etc. Think of it like Morse code being sent into a different dimension.

Hanging out at Gerosa Records in Brookfield, CT as a teen, I encountered a guy who said he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy--you know how it goes--who had session tapes of Beck and Page in the studio with the Yardbirds. I've always clung to the idea of "Ooooh, maybe someone like that is out there and one day the tapes will come out," silly as that may be.

The Who's "The Kids Are Alright" is kind of a ballad but not really a ballad--it was sort of a ballad by their standards and mod standards. A ballad for the type of kids we see in Quadrophenia, vulnerable to a degree but while still tough. The opening vocal harmony is very Four Freshmen. The Who circa 1965 could do that kind of thing and then head straight for the power chords. There is no guitar solo, but the playing is quintessential Pete Townshend--the hard, rhythmic chording--not dissimilar to what we hear when "Young Man Blues" revs up on Live at Leeds--but with a lot of range in the tone. As driving and forceful as his guitar is, it also has a bell-like quality. It wouldn't enter any other drummer's mind other than Keith Moon's to play as he does on the track. The song is a percussive wonder. I've always found it fresh, surprising, and as apt as can be in that thinking and the actual drumming execution. A thrilling drum performance and also one perfectly suited to the song with its nervous energy. You think about someone wanting to approach someone else, trying to build up their nerve, sitting there with their leg sort of going up and down, foot tapping the ground. That's how Moon drums on the song, but also with confidence and command.

Nothing is made of the relationship between Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens sides and rock and roll. Armstrong and his groups get bustling on some of that material.