Sunday, August 23, 2009

blame drew's cancer

Rilo Kiley "Silver Lining"




And I'm not going back
Into rags or in the hole
And our bruises are coming
But we will never fold

And i was your silver lining
As the story goes
I was your silver lining
But now I'm gold

Hooray hooray
I'm your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I'm gold

And I was your silver lining
High up on my toes
You were running through fields of hitch-hikers
As the story goes

Hooray hooray
I'm your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I'm gold

Hooray hooray
I'm your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I'm gold

And the grass it was a ticking
And the sun was on the rise
I never felt so wicked
As when I willed our love to die

And I was your silver lining
As the story goes
I was your silver lining
But now I'm gold

Hooray hooray
I'm your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I'm gold

Hooray hooray
I'm your silver lining
Hooray hooray
But now I'm gold

But now I'm gold
But now I'm gold

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Leiber and Stoller

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are one of the greatest songwriting teams in history. I would have put them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if they had written nothing but "Stand By Me." But their list of hits also includes, "On Broadway," "Young Blood," "Yakety Yak," "Love Potion #9," "Poison Ivy," "Kansas City," and so many more.

They joined me on KTRS/St. Louis to talk about their remarkable half-century careers and their autobiography, "Hound Dog," named for the song they wrote for blues artist Big Mama Thornton, which was turned into a huge hit by Elvis Presley -- without their knowledge. When you listen to the interview, you'll shake your head in amazement about how they found out about it.

We also discussed how they wrote a lot of early crossover hits for black artists at a time when they were not played on white radio in the US, how they made money in an era infamous for royalties and other rights not going to performers and writers, how they were forced to write "Jailhouse Rock" and other songs on a strict deadline, and how they were the first to introduce strings into an R&B arrangement with "There Goes My Baby."








Thursday, August 13, 2009

Till the Clouds Roll By

Till the Clouds Roll By
Starring - Robert Walker as Jerome Kern, Van Heflin as James Hessler, Judy Garland as Marilyn Miller, Lena Horne as Julie from Showboat, Paul Langton as Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Patrick as Eva Kern, Joan Well as the young girl Sally Kessler Lucille Bremer as adult Sally Hessler, Frank Sinatra as the star in the big finale,
Directed by - Richard Whorf, Vincente Minnelli

(1946) - Color - 132 min
tells the story of one of America's greatest songwriters - Jerome Kern. His list of classics is nearly endless - including Smoke Gets in your eyes, Old Man River, The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance and Look for the Silver Lining. Plus 1000 others. Jerome Kern was nothing short of amazing. This film tries to straddle the line between a biography and a Broadway Show - with mixed results. Still, Jerome Kern led a fascinating life and his songs are as remarkable today as they were when he wrote them.


LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows




And what a star-studded cast - including Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Van Johnson, Lena Horne, Angela Landsbury, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Shore, June Allyson, Van Heflin and Robert Walker, as Jerome Kern. With a cast like that - you can expect some amazing song and dance scenes and this movie offers many scenes with the great ones giving a tribute performance to a legendary songwriter, Jerome Kern.


Frank Sinatra has got it going on in the big finale


Part one
Intro, Color, credits, etc. This film meanders between a Broadway stage production and a compelling biography - and such was the life of Jerome Kern. Watch some great scenes from Showboat including Lena Horne just nailing it - and a huge production of Old Man River. Jerome Kern died on November 11, 1945 and this tribute was made in 1946.


Part two
A young Kern tries to take his music to a famous producer and arranger named James Hessler. Hessler (Van Heflin) tells him he's out of the business. Sally Hessler, his young daughter takes a shining to Jerome and soon they are all like family, and Sally calls him Uncle Jerome. After that, they are off to London, because British songwriters are the current rage on Broadway.


Part three
In London, Jerome meets his one true love, Eva - played by Dorothy Patrick. He does his best to woo her - but oh my, not sure about that striped sports coat on the gondola. Just when things are going swell with his girl, Jerome has to rush off to NYC for a big production. Dinah Shore shines in They Wouldn't Believe Me.


Lena Horne performs a song from Showboat

R.I.P. Les Paul



Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains. He was 94.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, Gibson Guitar announced.

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.

Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
By JON PARELES

Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains. He was 94.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation announced.

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.

Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.

Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polfus, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.

His interest in gadgets came early. At 10 years old he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine from a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist’s drill.

From country music Mr. Paul moved into jazz, influenced by players like Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who were using amplified hollow-body guitars to play hornlike single-note solo lines. He formed the Les Paul Trio in 1936 and moved to New York, where he was heard regularly on Fred Waring’s radio show from 1938 to 1941.

In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. “The log,” as he called it, was probably the first solid-body electric guitar and became the most influential one. “You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding,” Mr. Paul once said.

The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in public, so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log was a conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it was designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and processed — the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world’s music.

Mr. Paul was drafted in 1942 and worked for the Armed Forces Radio Service, accompanying Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith and others. When he was discharged in 1943, he was hired as a staff musician for NBC radio in Los Angeles. His trio toured with the Andrews Sisters and backed Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, with whom he recorded the hit “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” in 1945. Crosby encouraged Mr. Paul to build his own recording studio, and so he did, in his garage in Los Angeles.

There he experimented with recording techniques, using them to create not realistic replicas of a performance but electronically enhanced fabrications. Toying with his mother’s old Victrola had shown him that changing the speed of a recording could alter both pitch and timbre. He could record at half-speed and replay the results at normal speed, creating the illusion of superhuman agility. He altered instrumental textures through microphone positioning and reverberation. Technology and studio effects, he realized, were instruments themselves.

He also noticed that by recording along with previous recordings, he could become a one-man ensemble. As early as his 1948 hit “Lover,” he made elaborate, multilayered recordings, using two acetate disc machines, which demanded that each layer of music be recorded in a single take. From discs he moved to magnetic tape, and in the late 1950s he built the first eight-track multitrack recorder. Each track could be recorded and altered separately, without affecting the others. The machine ushered in the modern recording era.

In 1947 Mr. Paul teamed up with Colleen Summers, who had been singing with Gene Autry’s band. He changed her name to Mary Ford, a name found in a telephone book.

They were touring in 1948 when Mr. Paul’s car skidded off an icy bridge. Among his many injuries, his right elbow was shattered; once set, it would be immovable. Mr. Paul had it set at an angle, slightly less than 90 degrees, so that he could continue to play guitar.

Mr. Paul, whose first marriage, to Virginia, had ended in divorce, married Ms. Ford in 1949. Together they had a television show, “Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home,” which was broadcast from their living room until 1958. They began recording together, mixing multiple layers of her vocals with Mr. Paul’s guitars and effects, and the dizzying results became hits in the early 1950s. Among their more than three dozen hits, “Mockingbird Hill,” “How High the Moon” and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” in 1951 and “Vaya Con Dios” in 1953 were million-sellers.

Some of their music was recorded with microphones hanging in various rooms of the house, including one over the kitchen sink, where Ms. Ford could record vocals while washing dishes. Mr. Paul also recorded instrumentals on his own, including the hits “Whispering,” “Tiger Rag” and “Meet Mister Callaghan” in 1951-52.

The Gibson company hired Mr. Paul to design a Les Paul model guitar in 1952, and Les Paul models have sold steadily ever since, accounting at one point for half of the company’s total sales. Built of a thick layer of maple over a mahogany body, with Mr. Paul’s patented pickups, his design is prized for its clarity and sustained tone. It has been used by musicians like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. Paul and Ms. Ford moved to a house in Mahwah, N.J., where Mr. Paul eventually installed film and recording studios and amassed a collection of hundreds of guitars.

The couple’s string of hits ended in 1961, and they were divorced in 1964. Ms. Ford died in 1977. Mr. Paul is survived by three sons, Gene, Russell and Robert, and a daughter, Colleen. In 1964, Mr. Paul underwent surgery for a broken eardrum, and he began suffering from arthritis in 1965. Through the 1960s he concentrated on designing guitars for Gibson. He invented and patented various pickups and transducers, as well as devices like the Les Paulverizer, an echo-repeat device, which he introduced in 1974. In the late 1970s he made two albums with the dean of country guitarists, Chet Atkins.

In 1981 Mr. Paul underwent one of the first quintuple-bypass heart operations. After recuperating, he returned to performing, though the progress of his arthritis forced him to relearn the guitar. In 1983 he started to play weekly performances at Fat Tuesday’s, an intimate Manhattan jazz club. “I was always happiest playing in a club,” he said in a 1987 interview. “So I decided to find a nice little club in New York that I would be happy to play in.” After Fat Tuesday’s closed in 1995, he moved his Monday-night residency to Iridium.

At his shows he used one of his own customized guitars, which included a microphone on a gooseneck pointing toward his mouth so that he could talk through the guitar. In his sets he would mix reminiscences, wisecracks and comments with versions of jazz standards. Guests — famous and unknown — showed up to pay homage or test themselves against him. Despite paralysis in fingers on both hands, he retained some of his remarkable speed and fluency. Mr. Paul also performed regularly at jazz festivals through the 1980s.

He recorded a final album, “American Made, World Played” (Capitol), to celebrate his 90th birthday in 2005. It featured guest appearances by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Sting, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. The album brought him two Grammy Awards: for best pop instrumental performance and best rock instrumental performance. He had already won Grammy recognition for technical achievements.

In recent years, he said he was working on another major invention but would not reveal what it was. “Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Marc Cohn - Walking In Memphis


"Walking in Memphis" is the signature song of American singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, from his self-titled 1991 album. The song became Cohn's biggest hit, peaking at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and, after being re-released in fall 1991, reached #22 on the UK chart. The popularity of this song helped Cohn win the Grammy for Best New Artist in 1991.
Story
Cohn was a young aspiring singer-songwriter from Cleveland, Ohio. He'd never been to Memphis before; in fact he'd never traveled at all. Upon reaching the South he was very moved emotionally after seeing an Al Green sermon, and underwent both spiritual transformation and professional growth. Al Green is referenced in the lyrics as 'Reverend Green.' It was there in Memphis he met his first wife Cindy, about whom he wrote the acoustic cult classic "Cindy Sue, I Love You". The evocative song contains references to Elvis Presley and W. C. Handy.

Meaning
The song opens with what might sound like an allusion to Elvis—referencing the protagonist putting on his "blue suede shoes." The "Blue Suede Shoes" reference is actually to Carl Perkins, who recorded the song in Memphis for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Perkins' ill-luck in a car wreck stopped him from touring to promote the record, allowing Elvis' cover version to become a massive hit. Presley's copy was recorded at RCA studios in Nashville. The narrator tells of seeing "The ghost of Elvis up on Union Avenue and followed him up to gates of Graceland." Sam Phillips' studios were called "Memphis Recording Service" and were at 706 Union Avenue. Elvis' start on the journey to fame and fortune (i.e. Graceland) is usually attributed to the success of "Blues Suede Shoes" - and that of "Heartbreak Hotel." "Now, security did not see him" is probably a comment on the story that Bruce Springsteen once successfully scaled the wall at Graceland, trying to deliver a song he wrote. Apparently, Elvis wasn't there.
"There's catfish on table and gospel in the air" marks the dichotomy between secular and sacred. Catfish is the standard Blues metaphor for sexual intercourse. (The word is also interchangeable with the slang expression for female genitalia). "Catfish" thus would appeal to the bodily instincts, whereas "gospel" would be to the intellect.
This interpretation is dubious at best, as catfish is common Mississippi fare, and the tone of the entire piece is nostalgic and spiritual.
The metaphor gains more credence since Al Green supposedly renounced secular music after being scalded with grits by a jealous girlfriend. The lyrics refer to the girl waiting in the Jungle Room. This was the name of the play area at Elvis' Graceland mansion where he and the crew would take care of business (TCB).
After touching down in the "land of the Delta Blues," he asks W. C. Handy to "please look down over me." Although he has a first class ticket, he's as "blue as a boy can be."
From this opening verse, the narrator seems to be following in the footsteps of Elvis Presley, and his plea to W. C. Handy would appear to reflect his desire to work in music. After the second chorus, the narrator talks about Memphis, ending with the line "but, boy, you've got a prayer in Memphis," reflecting his hopes, and the probable reason he made the journey. In the chorus, he describes himself as "walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale," a reference to the famous street in Memphis and to the fact that in times of happiness, one can be described as walking ten feet off the ground.
The second verse describes a visit to Elvis' home, Graceland, where the narrator sees the ghost of Elvis and follows him up to the gates. He also describes a "pretty little thing, waiting for the King, down in the jungle room," which could be a reference to Lisa Marie in the famous Graceland jungle room (It is believed that Lisa Marie would sit waiting for Elvis to return in the Jungle room - her teddy bear can still be seen located on her chair in the room).
The final verse describes the narrator being asked to "do a little number" for Muriel who plays the piano at the Hollywood, a cafe in what is now Tunica Resorts, Mississippi. The line, "Muriel plays piano every Friday at The Hollywood" is a reference to a local artist who played at the Hollywood Cafe, which is a small diner/music joint in Tunica County, Mississippi. Muriel has passed away, but The Hollywood is still there - you drive right past it to go to several of the casinos now located in Tunica. In arguably the song's most memorable line, when she asks Cohn, who was born Jewish, whether he's a Christian, he replies, "Ma'am, I am tonight."