DISCUSS!
pickwick33
8,946 Posts
David Porter's singing career - was he as good as Isaac Hayes?[/b]
Bill Cosby's occasional attempts at music - should he have stuck to telling jokes?[/b]
Chicago vs. Detroit - who did sweet soul better back in the sixties?[/b]
Papa John Creach - period?[/b]
Should waterbeds make a comeback?[/b]
Scuse me, y'all - slow day at the office and I'm just wondering out loud...[/b]
Bill Cosby's occasional attempts at music - should he have stuck to telling jokes?[/b]Chicago vs. Detroit - who did sweet soul better back in the sixties?[/b]Papa John Creach - period?[/b]Should waterbeds make a comeback?[/b]Scuse me, y'all - slow day at the office and I'm just wondering out loud...[/b]
Comments
Hell to the naw! one interesting solo album thats better known for its samples than its music does not come anywhere close to Ike.
Bill made some damn good jazz with them Sussex releases, and I can't front I get a kick out of the Bill cosby is not himself, and At Last Bill cosby really sings LPs
East Los!
NEXT!
only if they are murphy waterbeeds
Now, those "Bunions Bradford" elpees - is Bill playing an instrument on them shits, or is it more like: "Bill Cosby Presents?"
2) i dug his music
3) detroit!
4) sure
5) waveless waterbeds are where it's at.
1. JOHNNY RIVERS
2. YOUR MAN DINO DANELLI'S COVER ART FOR THE ISLAND OF REAL[/b]
Isaac wins if you dont count his debut LP where it sounds like he is drunk...I think he was shithammered when he made it:
seriously, sit down and listen to this thing...dude is drunk!
definetly a tough listen
and lacking musically all over. ill check it out tonight for the drunkeness.
2) Cosby made some good music when he was serious about it.
3) Chicago!
4) I actually have one Creach LP that's not bad.
5) NO!
An underrated roots-rock giant. For some reason, people hate - scuse me, "hatt" on him as if he were some flaky teen idol who had nothing better to do than cover well-known material all the time, but he was too damn authentic for that. He had this incredible bayou drawl and actually cut some credible rockabilly singles in the fifties before he hit it big in the sixties, and when he finally makes it to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, folls will be dancing in the streets like it was Cinco de Mayo.
The Part Of The Song That Just Kills Me, Part 38: that downhome blues guitar lick that concludes each verse of "Poor Side Of Town"...as out of place as a piece of coal in a sack of marshmallows, but I always anticipate that lick when it rolls around...
Now as for...
Not bad, not bad.
But trust me, the album inside is not to be slept on. People figure that it was awful just because it was the last before the breakup, but this sounds real good next to What's Going On and Music Of My Mind.
And when you get a load of the cover of Rascals' first album...
That's not an opinion, that's a fact - Isaac himself said that he recorded that album "under the influence" one night after a Stax office party.
ha! I did not know that fact...The first time I heard it I laughed...dude is slurring his words...
You???re right, though???that is actually a pretty good record. Very few clunkers, and for post-Archie-Bell blue-eyed bounce, ???Hummin??? Song??? is the lick.
But yeah, Johnny???s my man. Were I ten years younger and new to soulstrut, I might even say ???I fucks with some Johnny.??? I can understand the criticism about all the covers1 (indeed, shame on him for monkeying with the impeccable lyric for ???Cupid???), but taken as a whole--his choice of covers coupled with the original (or ???non-cover,??? at any rate) material, and along with the voice with which it???s draped up and dripped out--there???s an earnest, searching feel that I can really, uh, feel. Musically it???s not always there, but in terms of voice and delivery, it???s not a thousand miles away from the vibe I get from Archie Whitewater (that simplicity that so often verges on--or crosses into--pure corn, but with a sincerity that I can never really write off completely), save for the fact that Johnny was acting it out in front of millions, which is compelling to me. I suspect, however, that I???d ride a little harder for the mid-period material than you might; I ???fucks with??? Realization2, City Ways, and a good half of Home Grown (the latter goes downhill precipitously once JR starts kicking some Promise Keeper shit towards the end; even so, the gatefold is unfadeable). It???s mostly some personal resonance, though, and I???m not sure any of those records are anything that I???d necessarily recommend to anyone.
And I???d agree that whenever I hear ???Poor Side of Town,??? it always sounds waaay better to me than it should. I was somewhere getting a burrito (which my grandmother would have pronounced ???buh-REET-uh???), and that shit came over the PA like sunshine after the rain. They're not recording 'em like that anymore.
...
1 WHICH SONG WOULD YOU RATHER HEAR COVERED BY JOHNNY RIVERS: ???SYNTHETIC SUBSTITUTION??? OR ???NINETY DAY CYCLE PEOPLE???? DISCUSS!
2There???s, like, two dudes on here that I think might be able to answer this question, and you???re one of ???em: Out of curiosity, was Johnny???s ???Summer Rain??? the first pop record whose chorus mentioned a specific, widely recognizable, contemporaneous pop record by someone else?
But yeah, Johnny???s my man. Were I ten years younger and new to soulstrut, I might even say ???I fucks with some Johnny.??? I can understand the criticism about all the covers1 (indeed, shame on him for monkeying with the impeccable lyric for ???Cupid???),
How did he alter the lyric to "Cupid?"
I suspect, however, that I???d ride a little harder for the mid-period material than you might
Not necessarily - I've heard stuff he's done in the '80s and '90s that I kinda liked.
To me, the most consistent Rivers album I've ever heard is a mid-period goodie - 1967's Rewind, which is basically a grip of Jimmy Webb songs plus a couple of Motown covers. He handles Webb's complex material as well as anyone this side of Glen Campbell.
; I ???fucks with??? Realization2, City Ways, and a good half of Home Grown (the latter goes downhill precipitously once JR starts kicking some Promise Keeper shit towards the end; even so, the gatefold is unfadeable).
Realization is...okay, but the flower-power ambience hasn't aged well. Never heard of City Ways - what's the label/year on that one? As far as Home Grown, this turns up often in Chicago used-record bins, and the patched-jeans, Woodstock Hog Farmer-cover has turned me away from ever finding out what it sounded like. And then there's that gatefold of Johnny and his friends hanging out at the hippie commune...I got my reservations about that one.
It???s mostly some personal resonance, though, and I???m not sure any of those records are anything that I???d necessarily recommend to anyone.
I feel you, James. 1972's L.A. Reggae affects me the same way. It includes one bonafide hit single ("Rockin' Pneumonia - Boogie Woogie Flu"), a few knocked-off remakes (J.J. Cale's "Crazy Mama" doesn't sound half bad with a horn section filling in the gaps), no reggae at all, and a political consciousness (more than one song urges his audience to get out and vote, and at least one tune, "Come Home America," was the campaign song for George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Richard Nixon that year). It's a good buy if you keep your expectations low (and find it for $5 or less), but it's not as essential as, say, The Very Best Of Johnny Rivers.
One classic Rivers cover you should track down: 1969's "One Woman." Al Green and Isaac Hayes had versions out that same year, but theirs are too melodramatic and corny. Rivers' version is almost anthemic (particularly on the fadeout, where Rivers, the backup singers [the Blossoms], and a gang of L.A. studio pros put their feet to the floor and give it some extra gusto). I have this on a 45, I don't know if this ever made it to an album.
Cats used to give shoutouts to other people's records all the time in the fifties (and pre-Beatle sixties) - Sam Cooke's "Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha" and Dee Dee Sharp's "Mashed Potato Time" mention a whole gang of then-contemporary songs in the lyrics. There's this rockabilly song that wasn't a hit, Leon Smith's "Little Forty Ford," where Leon warns his drag-racing rival, "just like in 'Sixteen Tons' you'd better step aside." Goofiest example: Bobby Rydell's "Kissin' Time," where he sings "don't make me fight 'The Battle Of New Orleans' tonight!" He's referencing a Johnny Horton country crossover hit, and it sounds a little forced. Not only that, but if you've never heard Horton's hit, the reference to New Orleans sounds too strange, surreal and unlikely.
Porter career < Hayes career
Porter voice > Hayes voice
Johnny's twang would sound real good doing Charles Wright's spoken intro to "Ninety Day Cycle People." Never heard that other song, but I'll bet he'd do a mean "Have You Seen Her?".
Truth be told, I'm actually indifferent to that cover - looks like any other random FM rock record from the early '70s. I wouldn't post it in a "best album covers" thread, but it's not so bad that I wouldn't look at it while eating.
I know one doggone thing; if you hung the FIRST Rascals album cover over your circular waterbed - the one that I posted earlier in this thread - you'd be haunted with nightmares for years.
I couldn't get into Peaceful World, the album that came before it, but Island is a fine way to go out.
For all except the last iteration, "Straight to my lover's heart" becomes "Straight to that girl's heart," with "girl" being stretched to two syllables (rhymes with "squirrel") to keep the meter. It's not bad, exactly, it just that 1) it's such a graceful song to begin with, why would you inject a needless change like that? (Was Johnny's orientation in question? Or was it just a puritanical reaction to the admitted skeeviness of calling someone your "lover"? Who knows?), and 2) the three hard consonants in "that girl's" preclude anything approximating the beautiful roll of "mullivers."
Said cover also has some atonal string-bending, but I'm not mad at that.
If "Sweet Smiling Children" was on some private-press loner-folk record, there's a lot of the kind of dudes who are apt to describe records as having "moves" who would pay dumb money for it. And if my grandmother ("buh-REET-uh"!) had wheels she'd be a wagon, but you know what I'm saying.
Some googling has led me to believe this is in fact some kind of compilation rather than an album proper (all I have is a burnt cd that says "Johnny Rivers - City Ways - 1969"), which surprises me because the songs thereupon do trace some kind of loose arc: "City Ways," "Do What You Gotta Do," "You Better Move On," etc. Just the power of suggestion, I guess.
I like about half of it, but again, I cannot in good conscience recommend it. HIPPIE KRISHNA JESUS JESUS JESUS MULTI-DEASY MOVES
Yeah, in re-reading, I realize that I should have framed my question differently; A lot of those dance tunes that rattled off a litany of the competing records did occur to me, but I was thinking more of tunes that do it--for lack of a better term--dramatically. Like, not as a call-out or a punchline, but as a for-real part of the song structure, with capital-m Meaning. Johnny's utilization of it just seems so awkward to me--sweet and sincere, maybe--but still awkward as fuck, and I have to think that whatever cutural currency he may have gained with his allusion to "Sgt. Pepper's" was negated by the vague Funicellism of "groovin' in the sand" that immediately precedes it. Like Johnny, that whole tune is caught between worlds. I love that shit.
Perhaps not your bag, pickwick, but all my David Mancuso heads need to, as they say, get familiar.
I don't believe you.
The one I have is called Filthy! and sounds damn good. Can't say that I'm fond of everything else I've heard.
I just thought it sounded awkward, period, like some guy on the outside looking in desperately trying to be hip. Johnny didn't have to do that. It's like that song "Rings," a forgotten soft-rock hit by Cymarron from 1971, with the lyric: "Baby, come on in, I got James Taylor on the stereo...." Yikes.
(Remake by Reuben Howell from 1974: "...I got JIM CROCE on the stereo.")