Juliette Lewis channels Mick Jagger, City Winery. photo: Linda Covello

By Larry Jaffee

The Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks 1964-1971 was the first record – a double gatefold album – I ever bought, back in 1972 when I was 14, unleashing an obsession with recorded music that remains more than 40 years later.

I thought of me forking over my saved-up allowance money to the suburban mall store Sam Goody’s cashier when it was announced that New York live music impresario Michael Dorf was assembling an all-star lineup to play Hot Rocks, as part of his continuing benefit concert series for young people paying tribute to the music of great artists.

Last night (March 12) at Dorf’s intimate City Winery venue in Manhattan’s Tribeca, an eclectic group of artists took the stage for about a ramshackle two hours in what essentially was a rehearsal gig for the Carnegie Hall (www.carnegiestones.com) concert tonight (March 13).

Patti Smith Group leader Lenny Kaye led the house band, supported by PSG cohorts Tony Shanahan on bass and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and a few other musicians.

Highlights included bluesman Taj Mahal on “Honky Tony Women”, and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes on “Winter,” which didn’t make Hot Rocks but was an unearthed chestnut from Goat’s Head Soup (1973), which like most albums for the next decade, had its moments; and John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats in a dirge-like “Paint It Black” with funereal backing drums.

Actress Juliette Lewis, who moonlights as a rocker clad in leather, most likely studied old Stones performances on YouTube as she strutted (and warbled) her way like Mick Jagger through “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” but in the style of Ike & Tina Turner, a one-time Stones opening act.

David Johansen was seen leaving the City Winery soundcheck, but ended up not performing.

Headliners promised for the Carnegie Hall gig including the likes of Art Garfunkel, Jackson Browne, Ian Hunter, Ronnie Spector, Rickie Lee Jones, Roseanne Cash, Steve Earle, and Marianne Faithful, among others.

I clearly remember hearing as a kid listening to WABC-AM on my transistor radio to then-Stones hits like “Time Is On My Side” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and wishing I was older, even though I wasn’t quite sure what the lyrics “let’s spend the night together” meant.

By the time I finally saw the Rolling Stones in concert in 1975 at Madison Square Garden, I had to admit they were sadly past their heyday and merely going through the motions. Billy Preston on keyboards was inexplicitly a highlight; Eric Clapton playing on the encore of “Sympathy for the Devil” saved the night from being an overall disappointment. I admitted to myself they were no longer “The World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band,” as billed on the opening sounds of the 1969 live, indispensable Get Yer Yah Yahs Out.

Despite my ambivalence about the band’s relevancy as I came of age, I didn’t hesitate to name in my 1976 high school yearbook Mick Jagger as the one person I’d like to be reincarnated as.

Hot Rocks, shrewdly released by Allen Klein’s ABKCO for the 1971 holiday shopping season, predated by nearly six months Exile on Main Street, the last truly great Stones album and one that succeeded three other, as good if not better masterpieces. Let’s face it, what came after Exile more often than not were retread riffs we’ve heard millions of times before. Or they clumsily attempted to join whatever musical fad was happening at the time (e.g., disco and “Miss You”).

Even the band was in on the joke by naming a compilation Sucking in the Seventies. They’ve mostly sucked in the decades since then, too. Sorry, but Mick and Keef’s solo excursions haven’t fared much better.

On stage, they’ve rested on the laurels of a hit-rich catalogue (i.e., a glorified oldies band that hit the road every few years). Since the Beatles took another route (i.e., cash out while on top as only a studio band after 1966), we’ll never know what would have happened if they stayed in the game.

Meanwhile, as long as there are babyboomers with disposable cash, the Rolling Stones and other classic rock favourites will be around to collect the spoils from tours, or royalties. Pushing septuagenarian status, Jagger and Richards were rumored a few months ago to be planning to regroup for another farewell tour, but all’s been quiet of late in that camp.

Klein, who died at 77 on July 4, 2009 (interesting irony in that date), might have lost the mechanical and publishing rights to the Stones’ post-Let it Bleed catalogue, but he had the last laugh regarding sales: Hot Rocks is by far the most successful Rolling Stones release at 12x platinum. In contrast, its second best-selling album is Some Girls at 6x platinum. Several hundred people a few years ago packed the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to listen to stories about what a great man was Allen Klein.

Perhaps the most apt eulogy came from impresario Lou Adler, who wasn’t present and knew Klein well, but asked Andrew Loog Oldham to deliver it for him: “There are no words to express these feelings of loss, but if there were, I’m sure Allen already secured the copyright.”

Oldham said he enlisted Klein’s help to manage the Rolling Stones when he realised what a massive task that had become (“I wasn’t equipped to handle the force of the Rolling Stones”), and how the first time he met Klein in 1965 he asked Oldham what did he want. Oldham responded “a car,” and he soon had one.

Oldham reminisced about introducing “Mick and Keith” to Klein at the Dorchester Hotel in London. “Allen was incredibly passionate about the record business. British people were really quiet about it.” Oldham also told a story about how he once accompanied Klein to see the Broadway musical Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, starring Al Green and Patti Labelle. Oldham ducked around the corner to light up a spliff. Klein asked Oldham, “Am I boring you?” Oldham told the audience, posthumously, that Klein never bored anyone. He name-checked some of the people who made the scene with them in the Swinging 1960s, such as Mickie Most, Donovan, John & Yoko, Pete Townshend and Phil Spector, “who can’t be with us here today,” sparking some laughter in the chapel.

There were a few mentions of Klein’s ruthlessness as a businessman, but he was more often portrayed as a benevolent pioneer who fought for the rights of musicians. His son Jody Klein, who’s now running the ABKCO business, spoke the longest – about a half hour – retelling the familiar biographical details, such as how his father grew up an orphan, trained to be an accountant after the war, and convinced Bobby Darin that he will give him $100,000. While in high school, Klein, perhaps unsurprisingly, was undefeated on the school’s boxing team.

Jody said his father expressed uncertainty about managing Sam Cooke because he had never done it before, to which Cooke responded: “I wasn’t a songwriter until I wrote my first song.” A string quartet backed by a guitarist and bassist opened the service with an instrumental version of Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” while the attendees filed out to the band playing John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Several references were made to Klein’s long-time dream to manage not only the Rolling Stones but also The Beatles. A lawyer working on Klein’s behalf about the dissolution of the Beatles as a corporate entity, described an all-day and all-night negotiating session. Among Klein’s demands was that John & Yoko have dinner with a relentless Allen. Although I didn’t see her, Klein’s former assistant told me that Yoko attended the 80-minute service. Richard Roth, a music packaging executive of some renown, claimed to me about 10 years ago when Abkco re-released the Stones catalog on SACD that he named Hot Rocks. “I thought of it while lying on the beach. [Allan] Steckler always takes credit, but I actually named it.”

The new Welsh film Hunky Dory, which premiered last night in London, doesn’t exactly tackle unchartered cinematic territory. Didn’t Sidney Poitier back in 1967 in To Sir, With Love cover the idealistic high school teacher seeking to set working-class youths in the right direction upon their graduation? American contributions to the sub-genre include The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Teachers (1983), to name a few.

Hunky Dory is set in 1976 at a Swansea school, whose students are entranced by David Bowie (hence, the title). Minnie Driver plays Vivienne, the bohemian performing arts teacher preparing a production of The Tempest that “would make William Shakespeare and David Bowie proud,” as she explains to her hormones-raged pupils and skeptical teaching colleagues.

Otherwise, the film is a bit weak on plot, as we get various slice-of-life glimpses of working-class kids from broken families as they somehow manage to get themselves to school during the week (Skins, Glee, anyone?). Pyromania is suspected when the musical’s set and half the school are burned down, but the film ends without the crime getting solved. And what teen drama would be without a coming-out story?

Notwithstanding that cliché, Viv’s sexuality is briefly questioned by a loutish rugby coach. Driver’s character apparently shares her house with fellow, like-minded liberal teachers, a male and a female, from the same school. No ménage a tois is ever suggested, and the film could have easily turned into an updated version of The Children’s Hour, as the result of her continuing feud with the faculty’s resident fascist, Mrs. Valentine (Haydn Gwynne). Viv goes about being the students’ advocate with righteous dignity, quietly backed by the headmaster (Robert Pugh). It’s nice to see the arts supported in an academic setting in these austerity-minded times.

At a private screening Thursday night in New York sponsored by the Welsh government here, it was the music that held my attention throughout. Using soft drink bottles containing various amounts of liquids for different levels of percussion, cue flutes, this talented bunch of kids give a new lease on life to not only Bowie tunes, but also other overplayed 1970s hits by the likes of Electric Light Orchestra. Who would have ever thought that “Strange Magic” could sound so hip in 2012?

Aneurin Barnard dominates the screen as dreamy-eyed Davey, who beautifully sings “Life On Mars” early in the film and develops a crush on teach after getting dumped by class dish Stella (Daniella Branch). Like the 20-somethings cast from Glee, Barnard manages to pull off teenhood.

I happily found out afterwards that the student actors – not studio musicians – really played what was heard and seen on screen. It’s clearly a case of art imitating life, or vice versa, given the Welsh eisteddfod tradition of children showing off their talents in music, literature and performance for an annual festival.

New arrangements of classic rock songs, powered by wall-of-sound choirs accompanied by sparse instrumentation, also have been done before effectively by both young (Langley Schools Music Project, Canadian-recorded in 1976 and released on CD in 2001) and old (Young At Heart, 2007 film), not to mention Ray Davies and the Crouch End Festival Chorus’s resulting The Kinks Choral Collection (2009).

Kudos to Hunky Dory’s musical director and arranger Jeremy Holland-Smith, whose gypsy arrangement to Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World” is one of the most imaginative cover versions of any song I’ve ever heard. It’s the epitome of what a cover should be – breaking down and transforming it into something entirely different but just as memorable as the original, unlike lame note-for-note tribute bands. Introduced mid-way through Hunky Dory’s long-awaited performance of The Tempest, the choreography matches the spirited rendition.

Also deserving praise is music supervisor Liz Gallacher for dusting off The Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned,” arguably David Crosby at his pensive finest.

Like many successful musicians, Frank Zappa wanted to curate, and help expose other talented artists who might not otherwise get a chance to be heard.

The Beatles obviously attempted a similar thing around the same time with Apple’s roster of Mary Hopkins, Badfinger, Billy Preston, and James Taylor, among others. A later example would be Prince and his mid-1980s Paisley Park, Minnesota fiefdom (e.g., Sheila E, The Time, et al).

From Straight to Bizarre, a captivating new documentary produced by the UK creative house Chrome Dreams and distributed by MVD Entertainment Group, sheds light on this little known aspect to Zappa’s career, picking up at 1968.

A year after fighting with Verve over content censorship and lack of promotion for The Mothers of Invention 1967 double album, Freak Out, Zappa figured he could leverage some of his reach with disenfranchised youth by creating his own imprint. Whereas Zappa’s own uncompromising music included fusion jazz, doo-wop and progressive rock, coupled with anti-establishment humour, the artists he sought were even more eclectic.

They include a 17-year-old female folkie, the better-known all-female GTOs who had a reputation for being groupies, and the Sunset Strip’s favourite schizophrenic songwriter, Wild Man Fischer. While Captain Beefheart, Tim Buckley, and Alice Cooper eventually emerged as artists in their own right after garnering initial intrigue, the label never seemed to make serious money or gain much retail distribution.

A revelatory DVD highlight is the section dealing with Zappa’s signing of the New York gospel group The Persuasions and their resulting Acappella album, perhaps the label’s crowning achievement, albeit artistically.

What you get in From Straight to Bizarre are familiar tales of starving musicians, who seem to be ripped off by their label, obviously not Zappa’s intention. Beefheart’s drummer tells tales of how Don Van Viet instructed the band to shoplift from the supermarket. They do, get arrested and Zappa at least arranged for their bail. Interviews with various experts detail the recording of Trout Mask Replica, which neither Zappa nor Van Viet ever fully embraced despite its status by many critics to be an overlooked classic, perhaps even a masterpiece.

Despite his hippie appearance, Zappa abhorred drug use, especially around the recording studio, as one musician recounted him not being amused after the band came back stoned to lay down more tracks.

Zappa’s Straight and Bizarre imprints, ironically distributed by Reprise/Warner Bros., with whom he would have his own legal battles, also issued recordings by Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley (great footage here with Groucho Marx).

That Zappa fancied himself a record business impresario is somewhat ironic, given his non-commercial leanings, and it’s not surprising the venture petered out after a few years considering the headaches and overhead of running a successful enterprise, as he somewhat selfishly concentrated on his own recording and performing. Alice Cooper eclipsed Zappa and became a superstar. Too bad we don’t have any direct footage of Zappa explaining his aims of the labels.

By 1979 Zappa went truly independent with his own Zappa Records. A decade later, Zappa launched “Beat The Boots,” an initiative to take on bootleggers at their own game, for which he partnered with Rhino Records (not yet owned by Warner) to reproduce with the same artwork on vinyl, cassette and CD several dozen of the Zappa titles on the back market.

One wonders what Zappa, who died in December 1993, would have made of the Record Industry Association’s legal war on file-sharing. Zappa was no fan of the RIAA, but at the same time he vigorously defended artists’ rights, including ownership of their masters.

Since he’s not around to ask, I’m not about to surmise what side he would have taken on file-sharing. One of the best tales I ever heard about Zappa was how he was invited to speak at a music industry event – it was unusual for him to make such a public appearance. He goes to the podium to a standing ovation. When it quiets down, he says: “I have only one thing to say to you: Fuck you!” He walks off, and got another standing ovation.

Zappa’s 1989 autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, sheds some light on what a visionary he really was. In a chapter about his various attempts to start businesses with venture capital, he tells of his plan in the early 1980s – even before CDs hit the market – launch essentially a digital subscription music service not unlike Spotify – three decades ago.

Writes Zappa under the heading “A Proposal For A System To Replace Phonograph Record Merchandising”:

“We propose the rights to digitally duplicate THE BEST of every record company’s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items, store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable in the the user’s home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (Sony consumer-level digital tap encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rental D-A converter in the phone itself … the main chip is about twelve dollars).

“All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the consumers, etc., would be automatic, built into the software for the system. The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more ‘special-interest category’, charged at a monthly rate, WITHOUT REGARD FOR THE QUANTITTY OF MUSIC THE CUSTOMER WISHES TO TAPE.

“Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night…”

There’s no doubt in my mind that if the RIAA for that matter had such a forward-thinking mind as Zappa’s at the helm, it most likely would not have been asleep at the wheel as the Napster revolution passed it by.

Since Run-DMC’s cover of/recording with Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” topped the charts in 1986, there has been a kinship between rap/hip hop and rock. (Personally, I preferred session player Eddie Martinez’s howling metal guitars on the rap trio’s “Rock Box” two years earlier; still got my 45 single.)

The sound arguably has been perfected by Dr. Dre’s production work for Eminem (e.g., Aerosmith’s “Dream On” overdubbed to “Sing for the Moment”) to more recently Kanye West’s sampling of classic prog-rock King Crimson (“21st Century Schizoid Man”) for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

A link to a YouTube music video, “Midnight Ride” by WEST END WOLF ft. MWS, INSANE & PETER GODWIN, that recently landed in my in-box represents a continuum of hip-hop/rock melding, although this time there’s a less primal splicing going on here with its shimmering Euro-club tracks.

Not surprisingly, “Midnight Ride” is the brainchild of Bryan Ferry co-producer Johnson Somerset (Olympia, Mamouna, Taxi, and Dylanesque) a/k/a the “West End Wolf,” the primary writer and producer of the track. His production credits also include Duran Duran and Simple Minds, artists also prone to the mix, and I mean that in a good way.

Somerset is cultivating a new talent pool, among which are 20-something vocalists Godwin, the former lead singer of Metro, as well as rappers Insane and MWS, whose skills are evident over the infectious synth-driven melody that not surprisingly is reminiscent of Roxy Music, and Godwin’s singing chorus repeated several times. Story-wise, Insane and MWS provide a slice of life, alternating on the lead rap, then coming together for the finale. There’s pining for some bird, but work is getting in the way, at least that’s what I’m picking up.

Stylish London night-scene visuals filmed by Daniel Wild at Skarlet Films and edited by Ras perfectly match the music. Bowie got it right, “Sound and Vision,” indeed.

Marianne Faithfull with backup vocalist Jenni Muldaur photo: Steve Bedney

By Larry Jaffee

Marianne Faithful’s welcome return to the New York concert stage reminded one of that funky old aunt in everyone’s family. You know, the one who has lived a rich life, albeit one with a colourful past. In her younger days, she was a looker, the traveler who visited other continents, who might have had a brush with fame and glamour, and who made some mistakes she might not be too proud of.

Faithfull’s three-night stand last week at the City Winery reinforced her musical legacy of someone far more than Mick Jagger’s girlfriend during the Swingin’ London era. It was a great contrast to her powerful 1990 comeback show at St. Ann’s Church is Brooklyn, captured on CD and video for posterity as Blazing Away, which I was lucky to witness as an audience member.

Since then, Faithful has made a string of always interesting albums, collaborating with various hipsters, such as Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker and The Decemberists, the latest being the recently released Horses and High Heels, the title track of which opened the second night set. For me, the set highlight was “The Crane Wife 3” and I loved how she made Decemberists staple her own.

There’s no denying of Faithfull’s ability to survive or tell a story. All right, maybe a few of them went on for too long. And the decades of cigarette smoking, hard drinking and drug use have perhaps taken a toll on her voice. But it’s always about the phrasing, and for this chanteuse, she’s most at home in a cabaret setting. Midway through, she apologized for needing a fag, as she defiantly lit up, ignoring that it’s against New York City law to smoke in a public place. Her four-piece band lovingly supported her every vocal, and the sound didn’t get harder rock than “Broken English.”

Set-wise for the nearly two-hour show, she stayed mostly in her ballad-heavy comfort zone, such as Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Strange Weather.” She tapped the new album for a few songs, but also some of the songs that have been cornerstones of her live act for the past decade, such as “Incarceration of a Flower Child,” which she explained was written in 1968 by Roger Waters “but not recorded by the Floyd.” Tucked away in a drawer, Waters and Faithful liberated it. She mentioned that one of her biggest mistakes in the 1960s was admitting to her mother that she did drugs, which resulted her being locked up in a mental hospital. “I had to call Mick to get me out.”

She graciously sang “As Tears Go By,” realizing that the classic song will be forever tied to her, and that she owed it to the audience.

                                    R. Crumb with his 78 collection. Photo: Alex Gold

By Larry Jaffee

For that last-minute holiday gift, there are three books that should interest most any music lover. One’s an autobiography, another a biography and the third a graphics bonanza for aficionados of yesteryear.

I first learned of Nile Rodgers’ autobiography Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny (Spiegel & Grau) after reading an excerpt in The New York Times Magazine about what it was like growing up in New York with a junkie mother, father and stepfather. A particularly poignant section deals with how he stumbled upon a Greenwich police scene in which the raving lunatic threatening to jump out of a window turns out to be his seldom-seen biological father, whose musical genes were obviously passed on to the future leader/guitarist of Chic.

Beautifully written and vividly described from the perspective of an innocent yet street-wise kid, the piece wanted me to read more. The squalor he experienced in New York, and then later in Los Angeles as an adolescent no doubt made him determined to be a successful musician. It’s, by far, the best part of the book, seconded by the fruitful partnership he forged with Bernard Edwards by his early 20s.

Rodgers lived the high life, literally and figuratively, and the excesses of their success in the late 1970s as the world’s leading dance band, whose riffs are still sampled many times over, led to the not-so-good years in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, along the way, he produced hit records for the likes of Madonna and David Bowie, but his addictions could have easily killed him several times. Rodgers leaves out the failed independent label he launched (a friend of mine handled PR) and jingle firm that most likely was paying his bills (another friend was his partner in the business). But he’s a survivor, and the music speaks for itself.

The first time I interviewed underground comic god Robert Crumb, on whom I made a 15-minute documentary about in 2004, he bellowed over the phone from his house in southern France, “I’m not interested in vinyl; 78s were made of shellac. I collect 78s.” I innocently broke the ice by telling him that there was chapter on him in a book called Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting. Don’t shoot the messenger. He calmed down, and we became acquaintances over the next few years.

Although he’s best known for illustrating the cover of Janis Joplin & the Big Holding Company’s classic Cheap Thrills, I learned from friends of his that he never really stopped designing album jackets. But it came with a caveat: it had to be the old-time music he liked. Crumb figured such musicians all would also be 78-rpm geeks too, and he would barter to supply the cover in exchange for some 78 missing from his own massive collection.

In any case, The Complete Record Collection (W.W. Norton & Company) compiles all the great and colorful drawings he’s done for various album covers, as well as other comics about record collecting and music in general. It’s of course, handsomely packaged, and a keeper.

Atlantic Records’ co-founder Ahmet Ertegun was a businessman, but he lived like a rock star. Robert Greenfield’s new biography, The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun (Simon & Schuster) shows where art intersects with commerce – and hedonistic excess, as he globe-trotted with the likes of Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin at their peak of popularity. But Ertegun always had impeccable musical taste, as he nurtured talents like Ray Charles and wooed away with his money already established acts like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones.

He was a privileged Turkish immigrant who felt a duty to showcase his adopted country’s culture for the masses. Above all, Ertegun was an urbane music man with golden ears; there aren’t many of them left (e.g., house producer Jerry Wexler). And the record industry that made him his fortune has all but disappeared. Greenfield has done a great job researching capturing a personality who embodied a bygone era.

The Story of Lovers Rock is a feature-length documentary chronicling the peak of popularity of a subgenre of reggae, which was widely popular in the 1980s black British community.

The film on Nov. 25 opened New York’s African Diaspora International Film Festival, and its director Menelik Shabazz was on hand to present it, as well as his 1981 feature, Burning An Illusion, from the perspective of a young independent black woman, whose boyfriend is turning into something of an unwelcome leech. Shabazz is also publisher of bfm (Black Filmmaker) Media, which ceased publishing its excellent print magazine some years ago but remains online at http://www.bfmmedia.com.

Back to the music, Lovers Rock never really reached the U.S. market, which is not surprising because if it weren’t for white middle college kids, reggae and Bob Marley would have never become a success in the States. African-American radio stations never played reggae. In 1973 The Wailers were on the same bill as Bruce Springsteen at the New York club Max’s Kansas City.

I heard those Jamaican sounds for the first time on the sound system of an outdoor Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert in August 1974 was blaring The Wailers’ second Island album, from which I recognized “I Shot The Sheriff.” Eric Clapton had a popular cover version at the time. What followed was an obsession that even culminated in a pilgrimage to Bob Marley’s Miami house, where I met his mother in 1995.

It was during this search for reggae’s origins that I first came across Alton Ellis, whose romantic crooning (think early 1960s Marvin Gaye) to a gentle rock-steady beat in the mid-to late 1960s no doubt was an influence to the male Lovers Rock vocalists who emerged in the late 1970s. But Ellis oddly isn’t mentioned at all in the film, although one of the Kingston, Trenchtown native’s discoveries after immigrating to Britain in 1972 was Janet Kay, a leading force of Lovers Rock. Whereas roots reggae in the Marley mode was a male domain, females became Lovers Rock stars in their own right. Feminist statements were made in the form of 45-rpm records. The battle of the sexes became an intellectual art exercise. The music’s goal was romance.

Lovers Rock was as much as a slow bump-and-grind dance as it was a musical style.
Shabazz does an excellent job in getting fans of Lovers Rock to explain how important the music became to their social lives. A male and female separately recount basically the same story about how dark the dance floors were and how horrified they were once they could see after the number was over who their partners were. In particular, two male mates humorously reminisce about their various moves and experiences with the ladies; one scored often, the other didn’t. Some of the so-called experts come off better than others. Two white tastemakers who ran an influential reggae shop are fairly inarticulate, or just stiff on camera, and one wonders why Shabazz didn’t leave them on the cutting room floor. Thankfully, Dennis Bovell, a producer/DJ/bass player, is a captivating screen presence and excellent storyteller, about how Lovers Rock as a local British phenomenon caught on. Despite being all but ignored in the U.S., Lovers Rock found an appreciative cult of fans in Japan years later, the film explains.

Shabazz relies on a combination of archival and recent concert footage of a London show in which the subgenre’s purveyors came out of semi-retirement for a reunion show, which was the impetus for The Story of Lovers Rock. “I didn’t set out to make a documentary about Lovers Rock,” he explained in an interview. He happened upon an ad for the reunion show in the London newspaper the Voice, and decided the concert should be captured for posterity.

Musically, Lovers Rock absorbed the 1960s American R&B and Motown that the transplanted West Indians heard in their youth. But the same way that dance hall – echoing much of American gangster rap’s lewdness – made roots reggae irrelevant by the late 1980s, Lovers Rock also bid farewell to its heyday.

One would think the film’s release would be a good excuse to reissue a Lovers Rock greatest hits soundtrack either on CD or digital form, but Shabazz wasn’t too encouraging about those prospects, no doubt tangled in copyright clearance issues. However, fans of music documentaries and cultural nostalgia won’t be bored when The Story of Lovers Rock becomes available on DVD.

http://nyadiff.org/events_OpeningNight.html?feature=player_embedded&v=JNNNWZvq1as

By Larry Jaffee

Nico never struck me as funny. Some of her more morose material, such as her even more gothic take  on The Doors’ “The End,” or the acquired-taste and decidedly non-commercialism of her solo albums The Marble Index and The Desert Shore, were downright scary.

But the two-month-long weekly residency called Chelsea Mädchen that comedienne/singer Tammy Faye Starlite just wrapped up last Saturday night impersonating Nico at Greenwich Village’s The Duplex was clearly created for laughs. It was a return of sorts of the show she did this past summer at New York’s Joe’s Pub.

The exotic German model-turned-chanteuse will go down forever in the rock ’n’ roll annals as a member of the initial version of the Velvet Underground. But the only reason she became part of the band was that Andy Warhol wanted it back in 1966. Even though Warhol wasn’t a music person, despite the cover title of “producer,” the artist clearly knew something about packaging and creating a media sensation. Besides, he paid for the recording session.

It was Andy’s idea that the Velvets needed a beautiful blonde lead singer. However, the VU were always Lou Reed’s band, despite valuable contributions from John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, and he begrudgingly allocated/wrote only three songs for Nico, but what songs they were!

Reed’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Femme Fatale” are among Nico’s “greatest hits” performed roughly in chronological order during Chelsea Mädchen, backed by a crack six-piece band (guitar, piano, bass, drums, viola, and flute/sax). The musicians added just the right instrumentation to deviate from note-from-note renditions, arrangements informed by knowing the difference between parody and homage.

Tammy Faye Starlite (and the show’s poster) bears an uncanny resemblance to the striking woman, circa 1967, who adorned her Chelsea Girl album cover. Only Velvets aficionados like me would quibble that by 1968, Nico traded in her long, straight blonde mane for raven colour. The show’s star clearly did her YouTube homework to capture Nico’s deadpan essence. The on-stage radio interviewer asks her to comment while he pretentiously reviews her body of work, leading up to her last solo record in 1985. (The show does a nice send-up of us rock critics who populate Rock’s Back Pages.)

As the DJ/critic notes, she started her music career – prior to joining the Velvets – with a UK single, a very folkish-sounding cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’,” and oddly not with the Germanic-accented singing voice that would soon emerge. The critic attempts to get her dish dirt on accompanist Jimmy Page, but to no avail.

The show’s funny stuff emerges from her asides about various other collaborations, saving the most vicious for Reed, who she says ruined it for her to have sex with Jewish people. She complains about the length (“two more verses!”) of his song “Chelsea Girls,” and somehow suffers her way through the wordy slice-of-life reportage going on at the Chelsea Hotel – the seedy side of the summer of love. She claims Lou copped the title “I’ll Be My Mirror” from something she said to him. (The feeling was mutual that she not stick around for another VU album, and by then, Andy was also out of the picture.)

Despite Nico’s apparent problem with the production of Chelsea Girl and in particular flute on several tracks, the album holds up as a timeless artifact – filmmaker Wes Andersen seamlessly used her version of “These Days” – in The Royal Tenenbaums on the soundtrack a decade ago.

Tammy Faye unleashes physical comedy worthy of Lucille Ball-meets Tonya Harding, as she attempts and eventually succeeds to wrestle the flute away from the flautist, taking it apart and handing pieces to audience members. Later in the show, she does it again after he plays his part from the back of the club (learned his lesson), and it was just as funny the second time.

Several times during the show, the lead singer drops racist and anti-semitic remarks, living somewhat up to her reputation of not being politically correct.

(The viola player Pinky Weitzman, who Tammy Faye noted as “Jew” when introducing the band at the end of the show, writes in an email the day after: “I was lucky to have been part of the brilliant musical spectacle. Did you catch the part where Rich (guitar player directly to my right) fixed himself a turkey and swiss on white with extra mayo during ‘Chelsea Girls’? Performance art in sandwich form. Glad my viola didn’t suffer the same throes as the flute – not sure my insurance would cover ‘unspecified Nico onslaught.’”)

Tammy Faye/Nico claims Dylan was in love with her, which is why he wrote “I’ll Keep It With Mine” just for her to sing. Along the way, we learn she deflowered a 16-year-old Jackson Browne; he apparently repaid her with “These Days,” which Tammy Faye lovingly sung during the show. According to “Nico,” she taught Iggy Pop how to perform oral sex on her. She’s kindest to David Bowie, whose “Heroes” song she proudly sings, and Jim Morrison, who she calls her soul mate before launching into “The End.” Tammy Faye/Nico also sings a nice version of the standard “My Funny Valentine,” true to the version popularized by fellow tragic musical figure Chet Baker.

The real Nico somewhat tragically died a few months before her 50th birthday in 1988 from a bicycle fall and a brain hemorrhage, somehow surviving 15 years of heroin addiction before that. Her keyboardist James Young wrote a memoir dubbed The End about touring in her band in the early 1980s, right around the time I was lucky to catch them at the New York club Danceteria. In the book there’s a memorable tale about how they were once touring Eastern Europe amid Nico suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. Thinking she finally scored smack, it turns out to be petrol. Nico was not amused by the language miscommunication.

At the gig I witnessed, she sat like Rasputin behind her harmonium. I remember the band cooking on “I’m Waiting For My Man” (sort of a fuck-you to Lou) thinking to myself that was the closest I’d get to a live experience of Velvet Underground & Nico, despite seeing Reed at least a dozen times, him with Cale (the live Songs for Drella show), a Tucker solo show at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn with both Reed and Cale in the audience and several Cale solo shows. Nico live was bewitching, and I’ll never forget it – much like Chelsea Mädchen.

http://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/jennifer-lopez-got-a-lap-dance-from-beau-casper-smart-at-club-20111711

Wyld Olde Souls

By Larry Jaffee

The Summer of Love (that would be 1967 for non-babyboomers) was resurrected early this month on two consecutive weekends at The Drom, an acoustically great sounding club in Manhattan’s Alphabet City.

Local band The Wyld Olde Souls, making a rare club appearance, brought good vibes and multiple-voice female harmonies with them, as they’re Celtic psychedelic folk sound echoes the best of the Jefferson Airplane and the Incredible String Band.

The band first caught my attention last February when they performed at a George Harrison tribute concert headlined by Roberta Flack at the Ethical Culture Society.
Ivy Vale is the lead vocalist, the ringleader in the wicca hat, providing a maternal presence to the flock amid acoustic strumming by her husband Rick Reil (who also leads the British-influenced power pop rock band The Grip Weeds) and co-vocalist Kristin Pinell Reil, Melissa Davis provides further sweet supporting vocals. Meanwhile, Naren Budhakar keeps the beat on his tables, traditionally dressed in Indian garb, injecting some Eastern mysticism to the pleasant – and at times – haunting tunes.

The band played most of their recent self-released album, Ensoulment, the follow-up to a six-song mini album, Poems From the Astral Plane, from 2000. “There have been births, deaths, break-ups, marriages, degrees, reunions . . . . we always thought we’d get this album out sooner, but real life dramas have a way of taking over,” explained Vale in the new CD’s press release.

At the WFMU Record Fair at the Sundazed Records table, I ran into Rick Reil, who I learned was moonlighting as a drummer in yet another band, the legendary The Left Banke, whose original member George Cameron was signing LP covers for Sundazed, which  recently reissued on vinyl and CD The Left Banke’s first two albums. Best known as a one-hit wonder,  The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” goes down in my book as one of the greatest singles of all time.

I learned that George, in fact, was planning to sing with The Wyld Olde Souls that coming Friday night at The Drom. And it was at that gig, after they encored with “Walk Away Renee,” George told me that The Left Banke were going to being playing two shows there at the club eight days later.

The reconfigured Left Banke also had in tow original member Tom Finn, who recruited Mike Fornatele to share on lead vocals.

Like many other rock bands, The Left Banke never reached their full potential, as a result of a series of misfortunes of bad management, in-fighting and label politics. But they were left with a #6 hit in 1966, and three albums.

Reconstituted, The Left Banke at the Drom had 10 people on stage, to deliver a Phil Spector-like Wall of Sound to replicate the “baroque rock” aural sheen that permeated its vintage records. “We’re not getting rich off this,” promised Finn. They’re working on a new album.
Reconstituted Left Banke, June 201, Joe\’s Pub1

Frank Zappa once said in an interview that his experience working in classical music was far more perverse and corrupt than anything he encountered toiling in the rock industry.

Zappa was a perfectionist and an eccentric no matter what genre he was working in at the time. His uncompromising quest for perfect sound and output of what was going on in his brain is at the heart of the award-winning documentary Pianomania, which opens a 93-minute window (in English and German with subtitles) into the livelihood of Stefan Knufer, a piano tuner for Steinway & Sons in Austria.

His unflappable personality aims to satisfy the most demanding of world-class concert and recording pianists the likes of Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, among those who come to check out the instruments at the Steinway showroom/concert halls. Along the way we’re treated to snippets of Bach, Liszt, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.

Knufer goes through a series of Rube Goldberg measures to jerry rig the interior with various materials in what should be already a perfect-sounding piano. But apparently no two pianos are alike, despite their precision construction, and pianists will always seek that indescribable je ne sais quoi, placing as much emphasis (or blame) on what they playing on as to what composition they playing, the room, the conductor, the orchestra, etc.

Artists’ temperaments are typically mercurial, sullen and ebullient, often in equal doses. The pianists depicted in the film nebulously describe the sounds they’re seeking from the instrument in terms of colors and shapes; Knufer claims to understand what they mean; deep down he probably doesn’t, and is a frustrated artist like all the rest of us.

A record producer asks him if he plays piano himself, and he explains that he did a long time ago but gave up the aspiration when he saw all the suffering a brilliant pianist must endure for the sake of art. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the jest.

At one moment in the film, he carefully uses his wrench to tighten a string, and looks like he’s on verge of a breakdown. He explains to the confused pianist that the reason for the moment of anguish had to do with a nightmare he had of that particular string breaking.

Comic relief is provided by Alesky Igudesman and Richard Hyung-Ki Joo, two musicians who seem more interested in rock-star like showmanship than upholding the traditions of Beethoven, Tchiakovsky, et. al. No doubt there are some in serious music circles who view their antics as blasphemy. Knufer plays along, insisting that a fragile violin could replace a piano leg, hold up all that weight, and still be played along with the pianist. Igudesman and Joo look at him like he’s crazy; the tuner knows better, and the filmmakers, Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis, have a memorable cap to a slice-of-life-story.

It’s scenes like these that make Pianomania immensely watchable, even for a classical music neophyte.

http://firstrunfeatures.com/pianomania/