Nu Rave Brain Wave

Been wavering over making this post, but I’ve also been revisiting this album kind of a lot recently. When I was a younger person than I am now, I was a Civil War dork. I was obsessed with it. It was my favorite part of History every year, and in high school I would always leave school about noon-ish and go to Barnes and Noble and read Civil War books, and sometimes I’d read really weird ones. People always gave me weird looks. So, when I was 14 or whenever Cold Mountain came out, it was my favorite movie. Of course, I bought the soundtrack on CD and have listened to it in cycles up until this day.

Now let me make this seem at least a little bit cool. It was a great soundtrack that featured a lot of Jack White interpretations of the songs of that day, some really great original score, some of Tim Eriksen interpreting Appalachian songs, and also some more modern songs that fit in really beautifully. Besides having the great Jack White on it, the whole thing was produced by T Bone Burnett. Therefore it’s automatically cool.

White’s contributions are super cool: the banjo driven ‘Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over’ which I swear will get stuck in your head for at least twelve months; the trembling, beaten down ‘Wayfaring Stranger’; the somewhat upbeat, twangy jangling ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’. But he has two songs that are just ridiculously good. The first, ‘Never Far Away’ is a beautiful composition that sort of wanders along driven by something really tender in White’s voice. ‘Great High Mountain’ starts with a sort of melancholy fiddle that turns into something a bit more joyful and hopeful – there’s a real twang to White on this one, and it rules. Also, I’m throwing in for good measure Alison Krauss’s (before she did that album with Robert Plant) ‘The Scarlet Tide’ is quiet, it allows her incredible voice to weave a really depressing story, but it still is excellent.

mp3 | Jack White - Never Far Away
mp3 | Jack White - Great High Mountain
mp3 | Alison Krauss - The Scarlet Tide

I’ve pretty much acknowledged that our Classics series is basically an excuse for me to wax poetic about my deep love for Chuck Berry and today’s post is no excuse. The London Chuck Berry Sessions was an album released in ’72 by Chess Records that featured some studio recordings, but side two featured three cuts from a live performance at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry. I’ve been listening to these recordings a lot recently, and I’m fairly obsessed with the extended live version of ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ from the festival. It’s such a good version, with typical Chuck Berry unabashed energy and flame, a lot of really good lyric changes and improvisation and although it’s an amazing soundboard recording, you can hear how much the audience is eating out of Chuck’s hand. I’m sure I say this constantly, but Chuck Berry rules and more to the point, is there a more simple or better way of putting anything than: “Sometimes I will then again I think I won’t”?

mp3 | Chuck Berry – Reelin’ and Rockin’ (London Chuck Berry Session)

I was kind of debating posting this or not, mainly because it’s so out of left field, I feel like most people would be shocked to hear that I have this really great Debussy introduction album played by Scott Price. I’ve been reiterating (unnecessarily, might I add) how much I love relaxing recently, but there’s sometimes where my head is way too caught up in obsessing over myself and I need to clear it with something that doesn’t have some dude shouting bullshit over guitars. Or sometimes, I remember that I’m actually, like, totally supposed to be studying and writing essays so I can get the fuck out of university ASAP, and this is the perfect thing to focus with. I don’t know what more to say than that this is a classic, timeless beautiful piece of music and everyone should hear it at least once a month. It’s calming. If I could write about the technicalities of the music, or really even describe it to you, well I’d probably be getting paid for this shit, now wouldn’t I? So I won’t but, download this. Chill the fuck out and come back to me.

mp3 | Debussy (Played by Scott Price) - Clair de Lune (Suite Bergamasque)

Okay, so my new obsession is relaxation. Not really new, since I’ve been obsessed with it for many years and outside of my jetsetting, gig-going, and craziness — it’s my number one hobby. Now, this weekend has been very relaxing which is great because I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks, and this is mildly thanks in part, to Chuck Berry, and big thanks to this song. ‘Blues For Hawaiians’ is one of the instrumental jams off of The Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings and I fell in love with it over the summer. This song is about as relaxing as being in actual Hawaii is, like, I put it on and all I want is to have someone fanning me with a giant leaf and dropping grapes down my gullet as I sip a margarita in the shade on a daybed. Like, if you can imagine how perfect that image is, and then turn it into a song, it’s this song. I don’t know how else to write about an instrumental song, but this one is so god damned amazing, it will cheer up some of the winter bummer blues.

mp3 | Chuck Berry - Blues For Hawaiians

I don’t think I listen to enough stuff that is old enough to be considered classic, but then I remembered this song and how I adored it earlier this year. The Dover’s are considered to be one of the great lost classic 60s garage bands. The Santa Barbara band have hazy, mysterious origins and broke up after what was reported to be some mild success in the Santa Barbara/Ventura area and were forgotten until like the 80s or something. Keen people will probably recognize this song as the sample Bradforx Cox/Noah Lennox used on ‘Walkabout’, but take my word for it — forget that song. The real song is where it’s at. Let’s just admit it, it was a great song to sample mainly because the keyboard and the guitar line and the way they work together is just flat out brilliant. It’s just so god damned groovy and perfect and I love it to bits. Nuggets can be extremely intimidating, but if I may say so, this is one of the best songs on the compilation. Get at it.

mp3 | The Dovers - What Am I Going To Do

Photo Courtesy of | Ryan Muir

Welcome back to another edition of Classics. Now I’m aware that it’s only the second one, but it’s Chuck Berry again! Maybe I just need to turn this into a Chuck Berry weekly post — who knows, it’s been on my mind.

This song has been repeated all summer since I discovered it off the great Johnny B. Goode: Chuck Berry Complete ’50s Chess Recordings album that I started slogging through earlier in the summer. Unlike most of the songs on his most purchased compilations, this song is a nostalgic and heartfelt account of his brief love affair with a Spanish-speaking girl in Baja California. This song, however, does follow in the tradition of ones like ‘Memphis’ and ‘Havana Moon’ in their very straightfoward, yet sublimely revealing and intricate song-writing styles. Although I love the Berry that gets me dancing like I belong in 1958, I’m very much into the more tender side of his early years and ‘La Jauanda (Espanol) is a pretty perfect example of this.

mp3 | Chuck Berry - La Jaunda (Espanol)

As I have witnessed since early 2007, Entourage has some of the best music on television. I knew it as soon as I heard Jamie T’s Salvador on the ending credits one day a long time ago, in a country far, far away known to us all as Texas. Broke Mogul is the one who does it, and thankfully for all of us, puts some of the music into mixes and downloads. This week’s episode featured the awesome Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson’s classic “Funnel of Love”.

mp3 | Wanda Jackson - Funnel of Love

Classics probably will not end up being any kind of weekly coloumn or anything, perhaps I will make this into a Chuck Berry Songs Are Better Than Your Songs coloumn, but I just felt very compelled to write about this song.

I won’t pretend like I can write coherently about Chuck Berry (unlike Bob Dylan, who I venture I could probably write about), the breadth of his career is too wide for me to even attempt and relies too heavily on compilation albums, so I hope you’ll accept this extremely uncoherent plea for you to listen to this song. Lately, I’ve been listening to his compilation album “Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings” a lot recently – it’s chock full of Berry goodness (for a didgital hoarder like myself) like studio outtakes of the classics, beautiful instrumentals, and a little unknown song called “Time Was”. It’s no secret that I love to blog about songs that I feel have a certain sense of nostalgia, and that’s something I love about Berry’s songwriting – his kind of nostalgia is not the same that I usually post about. There’s nothing feigned here, the emotions are real and they are clear, there’s no need for a layer of fuzz, there’s nothing to hide. The fact that he writes so simply, almost childlike, and that he’s so dedicated to that 50s era of it’s-all-fine-and-dandy songwriting makes the songs he writes so easy to consume but clearly very difficult to write.

Time Was is both of those things, nostalgic and deceptively simple. It’s beautiful, it has a fantastic hook, a groovy solo, beautiful lyrics and just is probably one of the best songs I have heard in quite some time. I would never say this, mostly for the fact that I doubt I’ll get married (at the very least, not in some ceremony or whatever) but I would love for this song to be my first dance song. That’s just how good it is.

mp3 | Chuck Berry - Time Was (Fast Version)
mp3 | Chuck Berry - Time Was (Slow Version, Take 4)
mp3 | Chuck Berry - Time Was (Slow Version)