Tag: Music

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RIP Jerry Leiber

Stoller presley lieber

It’s hard to believe that music that was considered dangerous, subversive and a corrupting influence on the youth of America were written a straight-laced looking guy named Jerry Leiber. In the photo above, he’s the square on the right, and the only one wearing a tie. The slightly hipper guy to the left of Elvis is Mike Stoller, Leiber’s friend since their late teens. Leiber and Stoller are rock songwriting legends, having penned some of the defining songs of 1950s and ’60s rock and roll.

Lieber died last week at the age of 78, and the music world is poorer for his loss. Requiescat in pace, Jerry. (And no, I don’t really think you’re a square.)

And now, some of my favourite tunes by Leiber and Stoller:

Hound Dog

Performed by a number of people: “Big Mama” Thornton, a lot of country acts in the early ’50’s, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, Elvis and even El Vez, the Mexican Elvis (as You Ain’t Nuthin’ but a Chihuahua), this is a twelve-bar blues classic.

Jailhouse Rock

Best unintentional song about prison sex ever! But seriously — this was another Elvis hit, but for this tune, I’ve chosen to show its best use in film: the closing scene in The Blues Brothers, featuring Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and some of the finest blues/R&B musicians and singers ever.

King Creole

If you watch only one Elvis film, it should be King Creole. It’s Elvis at his best — this is pre-army Elvis, a little wilder, and before they started sticking him in the campy, formulaic movies most of us know him for — doing his best acting and bringin’ the pimp hand on a whole lotta chumps.

Kansas City

Yeah, I know that Wilbert Harrison was the guy who made this song famous, but I’m a fan of the Fats Domino version. As of 2005, it’s the official song of Kansas City, Missouri. They play the Beatles version of this song after games where the Royals win, and the Wilbert Harrison version when they lose.

Stand By Me

Covered by a gazillion artists (and even sampled — this is where the sample that makes the backbone of Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls comes from — this song was named in 1999 as the fourth most-performed song of the 20th century.

Is That All There Is?

Okay, so this one isn’t rock and roll. But it’s still a great song, whether it’s the background for the first bourbon or final dance of the night.

Love Potion #9

Where would cover bands be without this number? I’ve even done a parody: Web Browser #9, which I did at an Internet Explorer 9 event when I was still with The Empire. The version above is a pretty lively one — a live version by The Searchers, the band with whom the song is associated with. However, The Clovers were the band who put out the original single.

Stuck in the Middle With You

This is one that Lieber co-produced. Most of you think of the ear-cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs when you hear this tune, but it’s really Gerry Rafferty’s (Dang! I didn’t know he passed way until I looked him up) way of telling the story about being on the road, touring with his band Stealer’s Wheel and driking with comedian Billy Connolly.

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Disney, Star Wars and Guns ‘n’ Roses, Together at Last!

Back in 1987, Disney and Star Wars first came together with Disneyland’s Star Tours ride, the first such attraction based on a non-Disney film. That same year, Guns ‘n’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction, an album with a slew of rock hits, including Welcome to the Jungle, the second single off that album (a song that got a big boost from the “Dirty Harry” film The Dead Pool).

We would have to wait until 2011 for Disney, Star Wars and G’n’R to join together and form a triumvirate of awesomeness. In case your brain refuses to accept what’s happening in the video above, it’s Welcome to the Jungle featuring the Mos Eisley Cantina Band as backup dancers, Chewbacca as Axl Rose and the Ewoks as guitarists and percussionists (they’re playing on the helmets — or is it decapitated heads? — of fallen stormtroopers and TIE fighter pilots).

I normally don’t go for the live entertainment at Disney parks, but this one I’d love to see.

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Mike Essoudry’s Mash Potato Mashers at Le Petit Chicago

On Saturday night, I caught a great performance by Mike Essoudry’s Mash Potato Mashers, an all brass-and-drums marching band who take klezmer, Brazilian, jazz and funk, mix it all up, and create some deliciously messy, beautiful, cacophonous musical biscuits. As an added bonus, it was a chance to catch up with some old friends from my Crazy Go Nuts University days, Brad and Peach, who along with me, were engineering students and contributors to Golden Words.

The Mash Potato Mashers played in that part of Gatineau which we used to know as Hull. It’s a good deal quieter than in my late high school/early university days: back then, with Quebec’s drinking age of 18, last call a good two hours later and the fact that their culture invented the concept of laissez-faire, it functioned as a sort of Tijuana for us Ontario kids. The venue was Le Petit Chicago, and as the cab sped me there, the cabbie felt obliged to inform me of the crowd.

“Are you sure that’s where you want to go?” he asked with only the slightest hint of a French accent. “It’s an older crowd there.”

“I am part of that older crowd,” I assured him. “I remember when we used to call the place just ‘Hull’.”

“Okay, then,” he said, “then you’ll remember some of the old places. See that club called Addiction? That used to be Ozone.”

“Oh my god!” I said “Ozone! I remember that place from high school and university. Ellen even took me there once.”

Of course, the cab driver had no idea who Ellen was. That was just me failing to keep my inner dialogue inner. For someone with whom I completely struck out, she ended up paying me an odd-but-appreciated compliment a while later, when complaining about boys: “There are three kinds of men in the world: scum, art fags, and Joey.”

“And that place over there,” said the cabbie, pointing to what looked like a bistro, “was Shalimar.”

“It cleaned up nicely,” I said.

He pointed out a couple of places that would’ve been packed solid on a Saturday night during the Wedding Singer era, but now looked about as placid as my own Sparks Street once the sun goes down, after which we arrived at Le Petit Chicago.

The Mash Potato Mashers put on a killer show, keeping the audience entertained as they bounced from melodies based on Jewish folk songs to samba to New Orleans jazz, often in the same song, and all without missing a beat. They got the crowd jumping and clapping along, and they all looked they were having a grand old time doing it. I’d gladly catch another one of their shows.

Here’s how they closed the evening:

After that performance, it was our turn to close the evening with our final number: a run to the Elgin Street Diner for club sandwiches and smoked meat poutine.

All in all, a nice night out.

I took a lot of photos at the show, and if you want to see them, they’re in the slideshow at the top of this article, as well as in this Flickr photoset.

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“Douchebag” par Etienne Dano

Tu vas au salon de bronzage trois fois par semaine et au gym six fois par semaine? T’as pas fini ton secondaire? Tu t’habilles en T-shirts “Tap Out” et “Ed Hardy”? T’as une “douchebeard”? T’habites à Laval? T’aimeras ce chanson!

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Cee-Lo’s Funky New Tune: “F**k You”

Cee-Lo Green’s upcoming anthem for the dumped, Fuck You, may not be radio-friendly, but it sure is catchy:

I get the feeling that this is going to be a big R&B / alt-rock crossover hit, in the same way that Outkast’s Hey Ya was.

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R.I.P. Bobby Hebb

bobby hebb

Although the organ lessons I took at the Yamaha School turned out to be valuable – I could never have taken up the accordion and reaped its benefits without them – they were a dreadful experience at the time. I liked the instrument and didn’t have any issues with the teachers; I just hated the music. The tunes Yamaha licensed for lessons back in the eighties were a mix of some of the blandest “adult contemporary” pop to come out of the sixties and seventies, copyright-free traditional songs that any beginning guitar player who’s suffered through a Mel Bay lesson book will recognize and the “Largo” movement from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which every organ lesson book seems obliged to ruin with a cheeseball arrangement. Adding to this misery was the book for the upcoming year’s lessons: the Barry Manilow songbook, featuring 16 of his “hits”.

In my three years at the Yamaha School, I studied only a few good songs, one of which was Bobby Hebb’s soul classic, Sunny. A song that Hebb described as being about having “a sunny disposition over a lousy disposition”, many music critics believe that it was written in response to a couple of events in late 1963 that affected him deeply: the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of his brother. Sunny’s success led to his becoming an opening act for the Beatles when they toured in 1966.

Sunny is a timeless song that’s equal parts pop, R&B and jazz, and just begs to be covered on the organ. I played it during my last organ recital before quitting the Yamaha School, adding an extended break where I dropped the bass pedals and lower manual, set the drum machine to play jazz rock fills and improvised on the upper manual with the Leslie effect kicked into high gear, riffing with licks I stole from Jimmy Smith. That deviation from the sheet music, along with the stunt I pulled with the next number (Barry Manilow’s Weekend in New England, a story for another day) annoyed my teacher to no end and got me kicked out of the program.

Everyone has covered Sunny:

Jamiroquai almost always include it in their live shows. Here’s a particularly nice rendition with Jay Kay from Jamiroquai on vocals and Squeeze’s Jools Holland on piano:

Here are Pat Martino and John Scofield, tearin’ it up jazz style, with Joey DeFrancesco on the mighty B3:

I’m glad to see that even the young folks like Sunny:

And not even Boney M. can ruin the song, try as they might:

Bobby, for Sunny, and its valuable lessons of optimism and knowing when to throw away the rulebook, I thank you. Requiescat in pace.

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When Muhammad Ali Met The Beatles

beatles and ali

It made for a nice picture, but a less-than-nice story.

Here’s an excerpt from Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World describing the meeting:

Cassius Clay and The Beatles climbed into the ring and, as if they just hadn’t met each other, they went through what seemed like a total choreographed routine. There are wonderful photographs of this, in which he pretends to hit the first Beatle and they all fall down like dominoes and scamper about the ring. Then they go off to their history and he goes off to his. Then, a few minutes later, he called me over and said, “So who were those little [anti-gay slur beginning with “f”]?”