FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #298

BB King RIP

BB King was that rare thing – a game-changer who was also beloved
The blues legend, who has died aged 89, pioneered a style – and did so with a grace that made him a hero to fans and musicians alike

Charles Shaar Murray
Friday 15 May 2015

Very few 20th-century musicians were able to combine the roles of game-changing, creative, innovative virtuoso and beloved popular entertainer. Within this tiny elite group, BB King ranks second only to the late Louis Armstrong, who not only charmed the world with his jovial, winning personality but virtually invented the concept of the jazz soloist, and on whose broad shoulders all successors stood. Who else is there? Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra and, of course, the Beatles in general and Paul McCartney in particular.

Genius and popularity alone are not enough: despite their brilliance, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis were too taciturn, too mysterious and too sharp-clawed for an audience to feel entirely comfortable and relaxed in their presence. BB King’s impact on the way blues guitar – and, by extension, rock guitar – is played to this very day is immeasurable. It is impossible to imagine how Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Albert King, Freddie King (both of whom dropped their birth surnames in favour of BB’s), Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Moore or Joe Bonamassa, to name but a few, might have played had BB King never existed.

Yet his instrumental virtuosity and the seamless interaction between the liquid, vocal tone he conjured from the numerous Gibson semi-acoustic guitars that have borne the nickname “Lucille” over the past six-and-a-half decades and his warm, chesty singing (“First I sing and then Lucille sings”) was only one part of the reason for his pre-eminence not only in his chosen field of the blues but in the broader expanse of the past musical century’s popular mainstream. BB King was also one of the planet’s consummate entertainers; his expansive stage presence, enveloping generosity of spirit, patent willingness to drive himself into the ground for his audiences and ability to put virtually any crowd at their ease took him from the backbreaking labour and harsh racism of the rural Southern states to the biggest stages of the world’s capital cities. As an old man he would duet on Sweet Home Chicago with Barack Obama at a gala blues concert in the White House. Along the way, he collected enough awards, trophies and honorary degrees to fill a small warehouse and was the subject of a biographical documentary feature, The Life of Riley, narrated by Morgan Freeman.

And, for what it’s worth, that “nice guy” bit was no mere act: 65 years in the business and absolutely no-one ever had a bad word to say about him. His generosity to peers and protégés alike was as much the stuff of legend as his manifest talents. For much of his performing life he averaged 300 shows a year and devoted any energy left over after each performance to meet and greet his fans until utter exhaustion set in. No wonder he was taken to the world’s collective heart in a manner unlike any blues artist before or since; no wonder he was called “The Chairman of the Board of Blues Singers.”

And yet, and yet, and yet … it was perhaps unsurprising that a man in his 80s who was drastically overweight and struggling with type 2 diabetes should have to slow down and acknowledge a decline in his once-formidable powers. For some time, he had been seated on stage rather than standing up; his concert schedule, which would have been intimidating for a performer half his age and weight, had been reduced to a mere 100 or so gigs a year, and he had not released a new album of fresh recordings since 2008’s One Kind Favor.

When he played the Royal Albert Hall in June 2011, I wrote: “As his 86th birthday looms, BB King remains King of the Blues, with Buddy Guy, at a mere 75, as his heir. No surprise, then, that a long line of distinguished guests showed up at the Al to pay affectionate tribute and help the ancient titan shoulder the weight of a two-hour show: please meet and greet Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, Ron Wood, Slash and (to sing some of the lyrics BB can no longer remember) Mick Hucknall.

“Also no surprise: the set is no longer a stately procession through 60-odd years of greatest hits, but more a combination of party, informal jam session and family visit to a mischievous, cantankerous but benevolent granddad. Forgetting lyrics (and even the names of some of his long-serving band-members) and occasionally starting a lick on the wrong fret of his guitar, BB’s immaculate comic timing turned each potential embarrassment into an endearing gag … The voice is still miraculous, once it’s cranked up, and that guitar tone is still authoritatively unmistakable. He roared through The Thrill Is Gone, Sweet Sixteen and Rock Me Baby, caught all the rock guitarists out with the tricky chord changes of the glutinous Vegas ballad Guess Who and made his triumphant exit to – shades of Louis Armstrong – When the Saints Go Marching In.

“Losing the plot? Maybe. But he’s still BB King ... and nobody else is.”

Despite all attempts to put the most positive possible spin on the evening, the occasion was still somewhat dispiriting. The Big B had become a magnificent ruin, like the Coliseum or the Sphinx: a monument to be visited not in the hope of seeing it as it was in its halcyon days, but to marvel at the fact that it was still here and, indeed, that such something so marvellous existed in the first place. Last year, a concert at St Louis’s Peabody Opera House disintegrated into an outright debacle, with BB actually getting heckled as he rambled and stumbled through a formless attempt at recapturing former glories.

BB had always claimed that he would continue to perform as long people still wanted to see him, but by the end it had come to seem as if neither mind nor body were any longer equal to the task. He had the admiration of his peers, the affection of much of the world and an eight-figure bank account, none of which were anything less than fully deserved and thoroughly earned. Maybe he should have made the decision to take it easy at last: to rest on his considerable laurels and spend his last years taking pleasure in a lifetime’s achievement: a job well done.

In 2010, he and Buddy Guy recorded an affecting duet entitled Stay Around a Little Longer. If only he could have been able to take his own advice: then he might have celebrated his 90th birthday this September by putting his feet up, secure in his extraordinary legacy and enjoying the knowledge that what he has left us is, for all practical purposes, immortal.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/15/bb-king-game-changer-beloved-died-89

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Ron Elderly: -
Dead Flowers
Streets Of London
Need Your Love So Bad
Autumn Leaves

Da Elderly: -
Love Song
In The Morning Light
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Out Of The Blue

The Elderly Brothers: -
The Price Of Love
Walk Right Back
I Saw Her Standing There
He'll Have To Go
Medley: Sweet Caroline/Hi Ho Silver Lining
Bye Bye Love

Another packed house for the open mic night, perhaps bolstered by some spill-over from the first York Races meet of 2015. Plenty of players too, including a young lass making her debut; brought the house down with original songs, a distinctive voice and assured guitar playing. Another excellent turn was a trio (electric bass plus two guitar/vocalists) - they managed to get a soulful groove to each one of their songs. The Elderlys closed the show to a well refreshed and responsive audience! 

Steely Dan - The Outtakes Album...

A new Steely Dan album? Here’s one that would be dandy...
12 October 2014

Something Else

It’s now been twelve years since Steely Dan released their last album, with isn’t quite as long as the nearly twenty-year layover between Gaucho and Two Against Nature but — to quote a song from that most recent record — it’s getting pretty damned close. We know that they’ve hardly let any rust settle since making Everything Must go; since then, we’ve seen Walter Becker make a nice album (Circus Money), Donald Fagen make two (Morph The Cat, Sunken Condos), and both have kept Steely Dan a going concern as a live act, conducting eight tours from 2003 to the present.

Last year during the run-up to their Mood Swings tour, Becker and Fagen seemed to crack open the door for making a new Steely Dan album, however. During an interview with Billboard, Fagen allowed that it could happen, noting that they have “some songs, these really good ones that we only half-finished back in, like, 1984 that we keep threatening to work on,” while his songwriting partner clarified that “actually we did finish a couple of those. We have a bunch of things.” He explained why these songs hadn’t been completed and released up to now, saying, “Put it this way; any other band in the world would have finished or mixed these old things that were lying around and issued them with a great ta-da fanfare. But we just don’t. We don’t play it like that, necessarily. It’s not the way we roll.”

Nevertheless, Becker struck a positive tone overall: “It’s in the air, it really is. It’s just a smell now. The next thing is then you taste it, then you start to feel it. You know how this goes.”

Since then, the duo went on tour, rested, and went on tour again. Oh and Fagen published a book, too. Were they just teasing us?

Making a new Steely Dan album wouldn’t be that hard for them to do. Yeah, yeah, they do fuss over the recording process a lot in the studio, but we get the notion that they love to do that, anyway. And it’s not as if they even need to finish up those old songs from the mid-eighties, there are enough completed or near-completed tunes that are up to par to make up a complete album. Steely Dan devotees S. Victor Aaron, Preston Frazier and John Lawler humbly offer up a suggested song line-up that they could bring into the studio for a new Steely Dan album, culled from outtakes, live-only songs and one famous erasure. 

1. The Second Arrangement
A shoo-in for making the cut on the hard-to-crack Gaucho and even a probable single from that top ten, platinum-selling album. And then disaster struck when a junior engineer accidently wiped out the finished track. The band tried to recreate the magical take but just couldn’t make lightning strike twice. “Third World Man” to the rescue, but we’d still like to see them give “Arrangement” a second shot.
S. VICTOR AARON: A polished, groove-oriented dancefloor number that would have fit in perfectly with Gaucho‘s vibe. It comes off as an improved “The Glamour Profession.”
JOHN LAWLER: The full demo version that survived used WENDEL and Steve Gadd for the drum samples. The original sounds like Jeff Porcaro on the kit. There’s literally 14 seconds that survived, and it had a lot more organic potential. An erased magnum opus.


2. The Bear
S. VICTOR AARON: Even in rough form, it’s a damned fine song. It’s a soulful blues-based mid-tempo shuffle complemented by a funky combination of rhythm guitar, Rhodes and clavinet. The intro figure recycled for the piano instrumental break is a descending minor chord progression straight out of the Billy Strayhorn playbook, as elegant as anything Steely Dan has done.


3. Kulee Baba
JOHN LAWLER: “Kulee Baba” captures an awakening of live reality TV and news reporting, prescient of decades of voyeurism of the great big world out there. The chord progressions immediately stand out. From Katy Lied through The Nightfly, the chords underneath the melody and harmony were consistently sublime, but Fagen really seems to be peaking here.


4. Gullywater/Funky Driver
JOHN LAWLER: “Gullywater” could have easily have been a catchy theme song to one of those TV buddy programs of the era (1975); a tune simply begging for visuals. Very snappy and upbeat, while featuring chord progressions in the segue between verses and during the “chorus” that have the elegance and sophistication of “Dr. Wu.”


5. The Steely Dan Show
PRESTON FRAZIER: “The Steely Dan Show” is a tongue-in-cheek look at the Steely Dan concert experience. Adding to the humor was the fact that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen didn’t sing or play the tune, leaving the lead vocals to the horn section and the backup vocalists. It has a tight R&B rhythm similar to some of the tracks on Everything Must Go and included tasty tenor sax and guitar solos. With lyrics like “…well don’t you fret/It’s not your fault/Just lay it all on Don and Walt. Just trip out on these hits/the groove that never quits/at The Steely Dan Show…”, you’re put in the mood to groove again.


6. Mr. Sam
JOHN LAWLER: “Mr. Sam” embodies everything one would expect from a song of the mid-Jurassic period of Steely Dan. A very peppy sounding number: upbeat ear candy covering up another story of something gone very, very wrong. It sounds classic, and just may be. After Katy Lied was resuscitated following the DBX disaster, the choice of an initial single may have suffered as well.


7. Talkin’ ‘Bout My Home
JOHN LAWLER: We find an ebullient Donald Fagen on up front vocals in this demo, accompanied by bass (Walter Becker) and piano (Fagen) with a Wurlitzer or synthesizer infused for accents. Though a Gaucho-era outtake, the lyrics and snappy chords underneath the verses could go back to the early 70s, and have a feel like “Mr. Sam.”


8. I Can’t Write Home About You
JOHN LAWLER: While we will probably never hear the full monty, the song melds together some of the best sides of both Donald and Walter, and their dichotomy. Jazz and blues. Acerbic and winsome. Sweet and sour. Yet, part of an emerging vector in adult jazz pop sound that’s classic yet post-modern.


9. Kind Spirit
JOHN LAWLER: It’s an earthy and meaty tune whose corpus suggests that “Kind Spirit,” in some form, might have made for a very lively and full recording. Quite upbeat, even with the minor key inflections. No apparition…”Kind Spirit” had the bones to become the real thing.


10. Stand By The Seawall
JOHN LAWLER: There’s so much here and so much space, “Seawall” is a crystalline peak behind the scenes of SD studio gigs, merging the best of the Katy Lied and Aja sessions. A real treat, but at the same time it’s a bit sad that such a full jam session or something like it never made the final grade.

http://somethingelsereviews.com/2014/10/12/a-new-steely-dan-album-heres-one-that-would-be-dandy-steely-dan-sunday/

Lest we forget...

 Wetside Story

Cash Only Island

The early, equally good version of Jack of Speed

 Runnin' Child or...

J. D. Salinger's Spiritual Quest

When the late American author J D Salinger ceased publishing and withdrew from the public gaze, he left many with a fractured understanding of the man behind the writing.

His books, including Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, supported the belief that Salinger flew from one religious conviction to another. However, recently released letters reveal a deep and enduring relationship with both Hindu philosophy and a New York based monk.

There's always been a certain mystique to the iconic Salinger. While The Catcher in the Rye has sold over 65 million copies, the author lived much of his life as a recluse. But, even while out of the spotlight, Salinger continued to write letters. He was a keen correspondent with friends and family - including the spiritual leader of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, Swami Nikhilananda.

In this programme, Vishva Samani investigates what the letters might tell us about Salinger's relationship with Hindu philosophy and, in turn, his literature.

Today, the hidden and pervasive influence of Vedanta and Indian philosophy is interwoven into all our daily lives. We talk of karma, practice yoga, and every politician has a 'mantra'. However in the 1950's and 1960s, few outside of India Salinger had heard these terms.

As a journalist and Hindu centred in Vedanta, Vishva Samani seeks to clarify whether Salinger just dabbled or if his faith went deeper. She reveals how Vedanta left India to reach not just the Western World, but other brilliant minds including William James, Leo Tolstoy, Nikola Tesla, Aldous Huxley and, of course, Salinger.

Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050rz2r

Poem for VE Day - For Johnny by John Pudney

For Johnny

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.
Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.
Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

by John Pudney

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #297

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Letters In The Sand
Out Of The Blue
I Don't Want It All
Everybody's Talkin'

In the absence of Ron Elderly (on holiday) there was no Elderly Brothers music this week. The joint was rockin' from the off with a surfeit of players. Some only got 2 or 3 songs later on. A new trio (unnamed); vocalist, guitar and clarinet, made an impact with their jazz-tinged delivery. There were one or two shouters, but that didn't really detract from a buzzing night, closed out with 3 Bowie numbers: Space Oddity, Ashes To Ashes and The Jean Genie. The after show jam descended into a Beatles/Neil Young/Bonzos music-fest. A most enjoyable evening/morning!

Ten great movies about movies...

The 10 best films about films
With Fellini’s flamboyant 8½ back in cinemas this week, here are the 10 best self-referential movies

Jonathan Romney
Friday 1 May 2015

Behind the Screen

Charlie Chaplin, 1916

It didn’t take cinema long to realise that the art form could be its own juiciest subject. Silent cinema’s most famous musing on itself is Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924), with the star as a projectionist dreaming himself into a movie. But eight years earlier, Charlie Chaplin made this illusion-puncturing short about the humdrum realities of the movie studio. Chaplin’s antics as a stage hand reveal the industrial nature of the silent film business, while a scowling director in dark glasses and cap worn backwards – grimly supervising a pie-throwing scene - is surely the first angst-ridden auteur to be depicted on screen.

The Player
Robert Altman, 1992

Producers are sometimes depicted on screen as monstrous yet magnificent (Kirk Douglas’s character in The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952), sometimes as just monstrous. But movie execs were never as abject as empty-souled, smooth-suited studio apparatchik Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins). Written by Michael Tolkin, this scabrous satire was Robert Altman’s gleeful revenge on the Hollywood system – with hordes of names from both sides of the camera showing solidarity by contributing cameos as themselves (Cher, Bruce Willis, screenwriter Buck Henry pitching a sequel to The Graduate). The opening shot, riffing on Orson Welles’sTouch of Evil, is the most spectacularly mounted movie in-joke ever.

Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, 1960

The film that launched a thousand film studies dissertations on the politics of “the gaze”, Peeping Tom also virtually ended the career of its maker, British pioneer Michael Powell. Written by Leo Marks, this thriller is a rare study of the film-maker as committed (not to say deranged) loner, with Carl Boehm as a duffel-coated voyeur obsessed with capturing the look of terror. Peeping Tom is a rarity because it captures image-making at all levels – from studio fodder, through the science documentaries of the hero’s father (played by Powell himself), to backroom porn. At first reviled, later revered, Peeping Tom is easily as influential as Psycho in opening up the dark mindset of cinema.

8 ½
Federico Fellini, 1963

Re-released this week, Fellini’s hyper-flamboyant autobiographical fantasia is, depending on your tolerance for the mirror gazing of maestros, one of the visionary peaks of cinematic modernism or an exercise in self-aggrandising solipsism that had the disastrous effect of encouraging generations of auteurs to take themselves deadly seriously. Marcello Mastroianni – who made agonised intellectuals look cooler and suaver than they ever do in real life – played Fellini surrogate Guido, a director running short of inspiration and making a movie in his head, out of his own life and loves. Nino Rota’s kaleidoscopic score keeps the whole crazy circus metaphor spinning to rapturous effect.

Le Mépris (Contempt)

Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

Based on an Alberto Moravia novel, Le Mépris finds Jean-Luc Godard ruefully moping over cinema’s lost glories while pushing the art form towards a radical future. The setting is Italy - Rome’s Cinecittà studios, then Capri - where the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself) is trying to film The Odyssey under the aegis of a philistine American producer (a magnificent Jack Palance). With its sublime Georges Delerue score, and a strange prelude featuring Brigitte Bardot’s meta-commentary on her own naked body, Le Mépris is the only Godard film that could make you conceivably cry as much as it makes you furrow your brow.

Singin’ in the Rain
Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952

The most beloved of all screen musicals is also the most scholarly – a mock film-historical piece about the travails of a silent cinema star, Don Lockwood (Kelly), struggling to make the transition into the talkies. Some of the film’s choicest humour is, a little cruelly, at the expense of lofty diva Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, priceless), Lockwood’s co-star in the preposterous The Duelling Cavalier, whose aura is destroyed by her Noo Yawk accent (“I cyan’t stan’im!”). Kelly and Donen’s classic, and the industry crisis it depicted, were paid due homage in Michel Hazanavicius’s brilliantly tricksy silent pastiche The Artist (2011).

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Wes Craven, 1994

Horror buffs’ fascination with genre rules has made terror an unlikely breeding ground for metafiction, notably in The Cabin in the Woods, Wes Craven’s Screamseries and The Human Centipede 2 (featuring a villain morbidly obsessed with The Human Centipede). Before Scream, Craven concluded his A Nightmare on Elm Street series with this paradox-laden contemplation of the perils attendant on trying to kill off his creation Freddy Krueger. Craven, Nightmare stars Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and even studio boss Robert Shaye all play themselves. The ingenuity is compelling, although this fared worse at the box office than any previous Nightmare.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang, 2003

Among cinema’s elegies to the lost wonders of the movie theatre – the most popular being the mawkish Cinema Paradiso – the richest and strangest comes from Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang. The setting is a Taipei cinema about to close; the film showing is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn. But we’re watching the staff and the sparse audience – the lonely cashier wandering the upstairs corridors, the punter idly flicking sunflower husks at the screen, the gay men cruising the toilets. Eerie, stately and glumly comic, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will strike a chord with you even if your own lost beloved fleapit was only a humble ABC.

Hellzapoppin’
HC Potter, 1941

Vaudeville comedians Olsen and Johnson would be forgotten if not for this delirious vehicle, nominally an adaptation of their Broadway stage hit. Ostensibly about an attempt to turn Hellzapoppin’ the show into a backstage musical, this surreal, altogether avant-garde fantasia rings wild changes on the film-within-a-film format, beginning with an exasperated director shouting “Cut!” on an opening sequence set in hell. Later, the stars get stuck between film frames as chaos breaks out in the projection box. Hellzapoppin’ has an animation counterpart in Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953), in which Daffy Duck discovered the existential drawbacks of being a character in a cartoon.

Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, 2014

Written by Bruce Wagner, this lurid black comedy about psychosexual excesses in Tinseltown may not be the freshest of its kind. But it proves that there’s always morbid fascination to be had from the simple observation, boldly stated, that movie folks are just plain crazy. The most exalted example remains Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard (1950), in which silent-era legend Gloria Swanson played Norma Desmond, a screen goddess lapsed into cobwebbed ruin. Cronenberg’s film is brazen fun, though, not least because of Julianne Moore, superb as a neurotic, narcissistic star - proof that the ghost of Norma Desmond hasn’t been exorcised from Beverly Hills yet.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/may/01/the-10-best-films-about-films-fellini-cinema

And surely...

Truffaut's Day for Night

Sturges' Sullivan's travels

Wilder's Sunset Boulevard

Minnelli's The Bad the Beautful

De Sica's After the Fox

Zieff's Hearts of the West

Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio

Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo

Hazanavicius' The Artist

Rush's The Stuntman

And...?