BoogMusic

This kid is pretty awesome.  He is also, at ten years old, already a larger human than Randy Rhodes was when he wrote the song.

But alas, nothing beats the real deal.

We’ve all been there.  We’re all sure to get there again at some point on this rocky road.  Think of these ten songs as sympathetic souls you meet along the way.  Don’t open a vein- open a beer and shed a tear with some good friends.

In early 1970 James Brown’s entire band got sick of his crazy bullshit and walked out.  In their place he hired the Pacemakers, a teenage funk band from Ohio featuring brothers William “Bootsy” Collins on bass and Phelps “Catfish” Collins on guitar.  Within a year most of that band, which had been rechristened the JBs, would also leave Brown (Bootsy was apparently canned for dropping acid before a show and wandering off in the middle of a song). Lucky for us in just 11 months they created some of the best soul and funk ever made.

Catfish Collins died this past Friday of cancer.  While never the star his younger brother was, Catfish’s sense of rhythm and attack helped define what funk guitar playing should sound like.  Case in point, “Super Bad”:

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Here is the man in action on tour in Paris, 1971:

Rest in Peace Catfish.

Hi Folks,

Still on vacation (mentally, at least).  In the meantime, here’s some Sha Na Na- why? why f***ing not!

BoogMusic

On vacation this week- will be back next week with a new post.

This awful ad from late 2008 featuring John Lydon had many scratching their heads and even more in the blogoshere calling him a sellout and a pathetic shill. While never one to back away from a camera, at the time the former Johnny Rotten claimed this one was all for art- specifically that all the money he was paid for the ad would go into putting some form of Public Image Limited back together.  Fortunately, Lydon has kept his word.  PiL is currently touring in the UK and Lydon claims the band (which really has always been a revolving cast with Lydon as the driving force) is working on new material.  It’s nice to see Lydon back working on PiL, a band that has, consistently, cut its own brazen musical path; that, somehow, was able to release an album with a naked vagina on the cover without the label realizing it until it was too late,; and that Henry Rollins rightly called “[an] infinitely more interesting a band than the Sex Pistols”.  Hopefully this time around the band won’t be riven by legal disputes…

If you’re going to be in the UK in the next few weeks click here to find out about tickets.

Boogmusic would like to wish Happy Birthday the only Beatle left that no one can argue is a douche (a statement that isn’t as anti-Paul as it may seem;  really, somebody somewhere has had a beef with one of the other three- that’s why Ringo’s never been shot, stabbed, or targeted by a gold-digger [Ringo's been married twice, both for a very long time]).

As we look back on a life so intertwined with the zeitgeist of our era, we must recognize the moments in this life that helped him shape our times…

From birth, Ringo was always the poorest Beatle, the last Beatle, and the dismissed Beatle, but he’ll never be an unloved Beatle.  Happy Birthday Ringo.  We will never pass you by.

In September 2007 Brooklyn native Rashid Lamarre moved from his Yorkville man cave to a lovely semi-detached with his future wife and her little ones.  Thankfully he took his guitars with him- after some months of getting a sense of the local scene he was well on his way to putting a new band together. With Jamie McGaw, Kyle Hartman, and Ryan Staples, Lamarre soon released a four song EP under the name The Black Tape.

Steeped in equal parts sixties pop and nineties indie, The Black Tape EP shows a band as comfortable with each other as it shows the maturing of Lamarre as a songwriter.  In Tiny Robot, his last effort in New York, the songs were morose and overly long, like a series of consoling conversations with a lovelorn teenager.  Here, Lamarre gives us four songs that show that rather than wallow in misery or self-pity, melancholy need not be expressed solely through copious tears and four minute guitar solos.  “Everytime I Stop To Breath” and “Summertime” are not exactly happy songs, but that’s not really the point.  No part of life exists in a bubble; a good artist knows to hedge the bright and twee with a minor seventh hanging off the end-just enough to pull us back from the event horizon of obnoxious rapture.  They must also know when to wink and nod as we approach the emotional rock bottom that is a singularity of shit.

It’s a fine line to walk: for god sakes, the man sings “I love you, I love you” over and over again; rather than reach to throw the speaker against the nearest wall you can find, this is the refrain that stays with you the longest of any phrase on the EP.  Gentle, sincere, and even somewhat strained, it is a phrase offered as much as an apology as a promise; he’s singing it not to an object of obsession, but to someone so totally human and infuriatingly loveable that they indeed stop the breath.  And all that to the “Be My Baby” beat.

If you have not heard The Black Tape please click here to listen.  By all means, there are loose spots- this is a self-produced EP by a relatively new band that has played out a lot since recording this, so I can only assume the live show delivers on the promise (an East Coast tour would be nice).  Regardless, The Black Tape deserves a listen.

Sweden 1, Long Island 0.  Weird-on, Fever Ray.

In 2004 The Croup, a studio project conceived by Jason Gambrell and Casey Brandt, released its self-titled debut album.  Described on CDBABY as “Bluegrass with… post-punk sensibilities”, The Croup is an album as sweet as it is hornery, as concise and coherent as it’s bleary-eyed and rambling: it’s as if the band went into the studio with a lot of enthusiasm only to find it sweaty with only room temperature Grolsch to take the edge off.  That might not actually be very far from the truth- most if not all of this album was recorded in the bedroom that was converted into a studio in Casey Brandt’s Brooklyn apartment in the middle of summer with the AC off for noise purposes.  Not that the album suffers for it; rather, instead of crashing into the alcohol-fueled chaos of early Replacements albums, The Croup growls quietly (“Coney Island”), snarls a curse (“Debilitate”), then apologizes with a sweetness so subtle it’s both surprising and sublime (“Rock and Roll”, “In This Hole”).

That was in 2004.  Since then, both Jason Gambrell and Casey Brandt have moved onto other musical projects, and indeed, Brandt has since moved to Maryland.  Before moving, however, Brandt and Gambrell were able to write and record at least ten tracks for a second album, more akin to Brian Eno than early Wilco.  Ambitious as this follow up effort may be, in this age of ftp sites, Skype, and MySpace pages I see no reason why we can’t expect to see a second Croup album sometime in the near future.

At this point I should mention that I am friends with both Jason and Casey and have made music with both Jason and Casey: I hate to use this blog to shame, but as both your friend and your former colleague, for god sakes finish the second Croup album!  It’s been six years now, don’t let this turn into your Chinese Democracy. I shame because I love.

Here is the video for Coney Island off the first album, released about three weeks ago.