andrew_jorgensen

Ben Ratliff:

SEVERAL weeks back, someone directed me to a Web site to see a clip of George Clinton and the Parliaments, in you-will-freak-out tones. I looked on the Internet at youtube.com and found my way to it. I was freaked out, though not just by the music.

There is Mr. Clinton, in 1969, on "Say Brother," a television show produced by WGBH in Boston. (This is early Clinton, even before Funkadelic's first album; the Parliaments would soon become Funkadelic.) He is wearing a purple jumpsuit with crossed suspenders over bare shoulders and a kind of rounded Mohawk, a shaved band of scalp below a bulbous crown of hair.

The band plays a series of vamps. The first builds on Sly and the Family Stone's "Into My Own Thing." "What is soul?" Mr. Clinton yells, in the middle of the song. "What, brother?" responds the band's other lead singer, Fuzzy Haskins. "Soul is the hamhock in your cornflakes!" Mr. Clinton intones.

After a break, the Parliaments stretch out at length, playing their acid-Motown for almost 10 minutes, going from vamp to vamp; at a climax, Mr. Clinton rolls on the floor. The band becomes a mob of rising fists and shaking hips. The sequence ends with the guitarist Eddie Hazell detuning his strings and distributing a cloud of feedback, with various band members whacking cymbals.

I am not a collector of music, or of video. I have had friends play me the best clips from their music video collections, in full, collectorish, this-will-freak-you-out mode, and enjoyed it. Still, I don't really love music on video, per se. It reduces a performance so brutally.

But a missing link of performance history as potent as that George Clinton thing? Even if on bad video? It's hard not to keep looking.

That's right, I scooped The New York Times.

In related news, I went to see The Constant Gardner at the fifty-cent movie theater the other day. The movie itself was made more interesting by the tourettic fellow a couple of rows behind me. But what stuck with me was the preview for The Family Stone. I've long complained about the producers' attempt to piggyback on the success of a well-known brand, though perhaps I should not overestimate the confusion created. After all, one of these things is not like the other:


The Family Stone


Wall-to-wall white people

(Pace Tavon, that is.)

What I hadn't known until I saw the trailer, though, is that at some point in the movie lily-white Luke Wilson counsels ceramic-complected Sarah Jessica Parker, "You have the freak flag . . . you just don't fly it," co-opting the other founding father of the black bohemian bourgeoisie, Jimi Hendrix.

But Rachel McAdams is cute.

Justice League Unlimited just totally ripped off "Soul Purpose".

***
Rick James has died at age 56 of natural causes. Though one would assume with Rick James that it wasn't so much natural causes as a long, polyrhythmic concatenation of extraordinary causes.

I was thinking about Rick James a few days ago, even before I heard of his passing, as I was reflecting on "lost albums," those records which were made but never released. Certainly the lost album I most wish to hear is the album James made with his mid-sixties Toronto band The Mynah Birds. The Mynah Birds were, with Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, one of Berry Gordy's first salt-and-pepper signings in his attempt to find an interracial group that could, like Booker T. & the M.G.'s, bridge the gap between soul and rock markets. The group came down to Detroit and recorded an album, but the album was stored away after it was revealed that James, the group's lead singer, was at that point AWOL from the US Navy. Gordy always demanded that his artists maintain a certain image of wholesomeness, and he suggested to James that he go and serve his debt to society; there might be a place for him at Motown when he had fulfilled his other responisibilities. It took James twelve years to return to Motown; in the meantime, his bassist and guitarist, Bruce Palmer and Neil Young respectively, decamped for California where they hooked up with Stephen Stills and formed Buffalo Springfield. At least one person who has heard the album has called it "Holland-Dozier-Holland with twelve-string guitars." Others have said that you can't hear much of Young's guitar on it at all -- of course, I'd rather listen to the Funk Brothers anyday.

A different album has recently reappeared from the mists of memory: the album John Kerry made with his high school garage band The Electras (certainly one of the three or four greatest surf bands ever to come out of New Hampshire) will be hitting stores soon. From what I've heard of his bass playing, Kerry is competent if unremarkable; of course, he recorded the album in 1962, well before John Entwhistle and Larry Graham emerged with the idea that a rock bass player could be more than competent if unremarkable. Tom Feran (who ends his column with a pun unbefitting a former editor of The Harvard Lampoon) asked a local Cleveland DJ and a local garage band to review the album; their reaction could be summed up as "Kerry was a root note bassist - pretty simple, but that's what you're supposed to do with that style." Entertainment Weekly got The Hives to offer another review:

The bassist is a solid foundation, a good person. Maybe bass players don't have the strongest leadership qualities, but they are good at negotiating, they have a basic fairness, which is very important if you're gonna run a country.

All of which I'd be fine with at this point. But though I don't want to seem overly enthusiastic about Kerry, I do have to point out that occasionally the bass player turns out to be Bootsy Collins.

Bootsy's Rubber Band: "Psychoticbumpschool (Live)" (YouSendIt.com)

Comfort food is making me uncomfortable. I rationalized the economy of my P. F. Chang's trip with the idea that I could stretch out my order of Kung Pao Chicken and Spicy Eggplant over several meals, and then proceeded to eat the entire thing.

It is my understanding that there exist, along with comfort food, comfort magazines, so I bought a couple. I got the new WIRED, for reasons that may later become apparent, and, inspired by the example of hermionesviolin, the current Rolling Stone. This is the Rolling Stone which contains its list of the 500 "Greatest Albums Ever Made." Hmmm. It seems like just six years ago that they were prying my money from my fingers for their list of the 200 "Greatest Albums Ever Made." I'm not buying another issue until they come out with the 10,000 greatest. Take that, exponential progression!

Perhaps because I've had the earlier list as a subconscious influence since 1997, I own a higher percentage (54 out of 200, compared to 87 of 500) of what was then the "definitive library of the best albums ever made). My suspicion is that the earlier list was actually superior (and thus, my tastes are actually superior). It was chosen by a smaller panel with more of an eye towards history, and thus contains selections by Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker. On the other hand, the later list has a lot more jazz on it (a surprising amount of which I own -- not that I listen to it -- not that the panelists listen to it either). The earlier list also has the advantage of being arranged chronologically instead of in some supposed order of quality, which prevents us from being consumed with inanities such as "Hotel California is only number thirty-seven? Damn it, that's a top thirty-five album in my book!" It also provides the benefit of disguising the Beatles fetishization by slotting the copious amounts of their records into their proper slot -- the 1960s -- rather than into nearly half of the top ten.

Anyway, what follows is the list of the albums from the new list which I own. Most of these I have on CD, some I bought back when I was primarily a casette consumer and have not updated since I got my first CD player in 1990 (make of that what you will), and a couple I only have because I ripped my girlfriend's CDs onto my MP3 player. I have not included tapes I made of CDs my high school friends had, mostly as a discriminatory measure designed to keep Pink Floyd off the list. I was a bit confused with how to count some of the anthologies: for example, I do not actually own Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest Hits, but I own Anthology, which contains all of Greatest Hits plus tracks off of there's a riot goin' on and Fresh. However, I have not checked whether or not the anthologies of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf and others correspond to what I have in any way.

( 87/500 )

I suppose one could compare the above to the full list, then cross-reference with my preferences stated both in my user info and my response to shadowkat67's meme and come up with a reasonable approximation of an Amazon Wish List. And with the holidays just around the corner. Of course, on any list of the 500 things I need most, 413 albums have to come pretty low.