Dance Dance Revolution, pt. 2

Anyone else out there feel like I've been falling down on the job lately? I'm averaging about two posts a month right now, which is probably what I'd have said my goal was when I started out. But two weeks go by, and I start feeling like a slug. It ain't that I'm a sloth (not when it comes to all things music, anyway). It's that I keep starting these epic-sized treatises that spiral out of control faster than a Van Halen guitar lick. I promise: someday, you'll all read my 13,000-word disquisition, Paul Robeson, Hirsh Glick, Lucy Kaplansky, Gerry Tenny and M.I.A. vs. Nazi Frogmen in the Sonic Temple of Our Souls. While you're waiting, though, we might as well talk about Draggin' the Line.

Or "Snoopy," as we're fond of calling it 'round Colebrook River Road. And only us, apparently. Marathon research jags into the annals of recorded ethnomusicological history have produced nary a reference connecting the ubiquitous beagle to Tommy James. (Other potential correlations also didn't pan out.) (Although if one of my readers can make a plausible link between Love and Draggin' the Line, I'll dance the damn thing in my skivvies at share this summer, that's how blown away I'll be.) Suffice to say, I got bubkis on the secret origins of this rechristening. What I can tell you about the tune itself is that it was released twice on the Roulette label (as a b-side in 1970, then as it's own single the following year), so there's a decent chance that the Hopewell Junction crowd has no idea what I'm talking about. (Any old-time kinderlachen care to weigh in?) It was James' first solo hit after breaking with longtime backing combo The Shondells, climbing to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August of '71.

And like most camp-related things going down in August, this one is a little peculiar. For example:

• First of all, any time a top-40 anything enters the Tolland canon, it's a little surprising.

• It's a weird song for the camp scene, given that it may be an overt paean to illicit drug use, or it may be an "I ❤ Jesus" anthem. (It was released on James' second solo LP, a religious-themed album called Christian of the World.) Possibly it's both.

• I totally get the significance of the Snoopy connection. Whatever the song's meaning, it's all about laid-back gratification with life's simple pleasures – a fitting epigram if ever there was one. But it leads to a glaring conundrum when you take into account the opening line of the second verse: "My dog Sam eats purple flowers." As Draggin' the Line, there's no problem. As Snoopy, it calls into question the heated deliberations over the anthropomorphization of fictional animals, with a case at least as contentious as the whole Goofy/Pluto debate.

As a tune, it's almost impossible not to like. It's exactly the right blend of low-key psychedelia with a lazy-but-unswerving rhythmic beat. Dig that killer bass-riff opening, and the inspired trombone/trumpet call-and-response in the chorus. As a dance, it's also hard not to like: easy to learn, easy to remember, and maybe the only folkdance that improves the less energy you expend on it – perfect for those 90-degree afternoon dance sessions right before an hour of swim. And for the record, whoever came up with the opening count-off is a genius.

Tommy James: Draggin' the Line

Oh yeah. . . R.E.M. did a passable cover of Draggin' the Line for one of the Austin Powers soundtracks. Am I the only one who remembers that R.E.M. once promised if they were still together in the year 2000 they'd break up on principle? C'mon guys, show a little integrity. Bill Berry, thou art truly our hero. (This came out in 1999, so once again the KassaNostra narrowly avoids glaring hypocrisy! Michael Stipe can bite me.)

R.E.M.: Draggin' the Line

Just a quick heads-up before I go. It seems a little weird to keep posting about camp songs while camp's actually in session, so I'm planning to put the blog on hiatus for July and August. I'll post at least once, maybe more, before the end of this month. But those of you who rely on this site for your Kinderland music fix, you're gonna have to go without, or get yourself to Tolland this summer. Should my legions of fans choose to stage a Beatlemania-esque rally outside the camp office in an attempt to get me to change my mind, I may reconsider.

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra

Just the Tsvey of Us

I had a whole different post ready for you guys, but then I read something neat, and wanted to share.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video clip of Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing Down By the Riverside. That wasn't exactly spontaneous – I've been reading an excellent (and long overdue) biography about Tharpe, Gayle Wald's Shout, Sister, Shout! I didn't know a whole lot about Tharpe's life before, but enough that I didn't expect anything in the book to completely knock me on my ass. Then I read that Tharpe recorded a duet with Red Foley in 1952, and BANG! (KassaNostra's ass, the floor. The floor, KassaNostra's ass.)

Longtime fans of the Tolland scene will recognize Foley as the mellow baritone behind the folkdance craze Salty Dog Rag. In addition to his c&w bona fides, he was apparently a longtime admirer of gospel music, and the rare white performer who didn't shy away from the prospect of crossing over to black audiences. (Their duet – Have a Little Talk with Jesus – was released on the Decca label in 1955 as a b-side to Foley's cover of Tharpe's biggest hit, Strange Things Happening Every Day.) But the camp connection – the "Kinderland tie," if you will – is only part of this package. . . there's pertinent social significance to boot! Wald speculates that the Foley/Tharpe pairing is the first ever release of an interracial male/female duo:

"In the course of commercial popular recording, had two well-known stars of different races – people who, in Tennessee, were legally prohibited from marrying – ever appeared as a duo? When Foley and Kitty Wells, country music's two biggest stars the time, paired up in 1953 for the duet 'One By One,' listeners could imagine the two as a couple. Unlike Foley and Wells, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (married in real life), or later, the African American rhythm-and-blues duo Mickey and Sylvia, Red and Rosetta could not claim the intimacy of lovers, although their voices would intertwine in song."

Now, granted, the song itself is as chaste as an Inter sleep-out. And Decca wasn't exactly looking to make music-recording history (Wald suggests they buried the release in their catalog, albeit in deference to financial motives above all else). But still, it's nice when the people you associate with for purely aesthetic reasons surprise you by doing the right thing. Besides which, it lends credence to the KassaNostra's longstanding campaign for an Olympic team commemorating the Plato's Stepchildren episode of Star Trek.

By the way, Wald thinks this is a sub-par effort, but I like it just fine (and I hope no one's turned off by the song's less-than-Yiddishkeit nature). Foley and Tharpe balance each other in lively fashion, and it's an excellent example of the homogeneity in American roots music that the music industry has historically taken great pains to suppress. At one point in her book, Wald quotes black c&w singer/songwriter O.B. McClinton:

"You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls and two watermelons in his back pockets, and they will call him r&b. You can take a white guy in a pinstripe suit who has never seen a cotton field, take him to Nashville right out of a subway in Manhattan, and they will call him country."

Red Foley & Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

Have a Little Talk with Jesus

Anyway, I dig both the song and the backstory – hope y'all do as well. And since we've started down the male/female duet path, I thought another couple of tunes in that genre would round out this post in appropriate fashion. So next up, I give you Bob Dylan and Joan Baez performing Deportee, as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. For you Dylan completists out there (or the even rarer Joan Baez freak), this is from the second leg of touring in 1976, and was recorded live on May 23rd at Hughes Stadium at Colorado State University. Just for the record, this track does not appear on the official Rolling Thunder bootleg release that came out a few years ago. Also just for the record, re: the completists, I am not one of you – the KassaNostra firmly believes that the human brain can only absorb so much Dylan music in one lifetime, and with respect to his own sanity, has made the conscious decision to draw the line at the first sixteen studio albums, unless, of course, the new stuff totally kills, including the Basement Tapes, a few dozen random bootlegs, the complete Johnny Cash sessions, about two-thirds of the Wilburys stuff, his 2003 gospel album, and his absolute brilliant effort on the Band of the Hand soundtrack.

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez: Deportee [live]

Finally, to close, here's the married duo of Kim and Reggie Harris, with a very soulful version of If You Miss Me (ably assisted by Peter Yarrow, Bethany Yarrow and Rufus Cappadocia). I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of the Harrises until friend-of-the-blog Howard Glass clued me in last month. It always feels a little weird to learn about underground folk artists. There's a bunch of internet outlets that I use to track the next big thing in a few different genres, but traditional folk music in the 1950s/60s model that we generally adhere to in camp is not one of them, even though it's such a natural vehicle for independent music. I'm sure that's an extension of the word-of-mouth traditions I grew up on, wherein you learned about a new act because you saw them play the latest anti-intervention rally, or open for Pete Seeger, before Pete ascended to national treasure status. All of which only serves to prove that either me or traditional folk music needs to be dragged kicking/screaming into the new millennia, and since it's almost assuredly me, I hereby vow to voluntarily walk that plank. While you're waiting for the inevitable splashing noises, be sure to check out the Harris website for additional tunes and CD ordering info.

Kim & Reggie Harris: If You Miss Me [live]

Speaking of Seeger, I'm a complete ass for missing out on his 90th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden. If anyone scored an unauthorized bootleg, definitely send me a copy c/o the camp office (mark it "educational supplies"). Everyone else should make sure to check out Katie Halper's very Tolland-centric review.

Peace & Vinyl,
The KassaNostra

Mishmash

Since today is May Day, I should probably think about spinning a few rounds of The Internationale. But the KassaNostra's in spring cleaning mode, and so instead you're gonna get a few random things that I can't readily pigeonhole into themed posts. No need to thank me. By the way, anyone know if mishmash is a Yiddish word? I got two sources that say yes, another that says it's Middle English. Don't mind if one's a cover version. . . just wondering about the original pressing.

First up: a strange and mournful take on Dark as a Dungeon, by Gnonnas Pedro. Pedro was a giant of the West African music scene for forty years, and especially renowned -- as this track demonstrates -- for cross-breeding different styles, including salsa, highlife, and the traditional agbadja music of his native Benin. This is copied from an old 45 on the French Discafric label, probably recorded in the late 1970s. Sorry about the crappy sound quality. But if you can endure the static, it's worth a listen.

Gnonnas Pedro: Dark as a Dungeon

Just so we're clear, I have absolutely no idea what's going on in this song. I don't know why he drops the second/third verses but repeats the first verse (in a different version he cut in 1980, he sings it three times). I don't know if he's singing about an actual place: DED-doo-wee Mine -- ring a bell for anyone? And while it's certainly possible that he's using some kind of pidgin dialect, I really think he actually substitutes "rabbit" for "habit" in the third line, which kind of makes sense if you think about it. To be sure, the whole thing's a little odd. But Sacre Bleu! Is there any doubt that Gnonnas and his Panchos fully comprehend the despondency that Merle Travis' lyrics were shooting for? You could play this at any UMWA meeting, and you just know everyone there would be nodding their heads and going, "yup." [Obligatory May Day comment: Further proof that the exploitation of the working masses is an injustice on a global scale.]

Next, we got us a cover of Woody Guthrie's Hard Traveling, by Philly-based antifolksinger Adam Brodsky. That's right -- I said antifolk. It's a real thing, and you can all look it up for yourselves, because I'm not wasting precious blog space delving into the minutiae of subgenre classifications. Look, it's not that I disapprove of narrow subgenres. On the contrary -- I love them. I mean, I L❤VE them. You walk up to me and say, "Hey KassaNostra. . . Nerdcore vs. Cowpunk?" And I will literally swoon. But my aural fetishes are fodder for a much different blog than this, whereas I'd much rather use this space for talking about our (yours and mine) collective Kinderland music experience. So come together, you Mods and Teds and Greebos! Solidarity for Lilliputians and Zooks, Anathematicians and Star-Bellied Sneetches and Judean Peoples Fronters! (And if anyone's got a problem with that, take it up with the guy who does the KinderRing music blog.)

Anyway. . . Brodsky. Dude's righteous. Given that he's of the same lefty Jewish intellectual self-deprecating performer stock that usually gets rave reviews at campwide share, and given that his performance medium of choice happens to be folk music, it seems a little incomprehensible that we've never had him up to Tolland (let alone named the rec hall after him already). His take on Woody manages to do justice by the original whilst simultaneously dragging it headfirst into Mike Judge's Office Space reality. Off his 2002 CD Hookers, Hicks & Heebs, which is the album you always wished you'd cut, if you had the guts to write folk/bluegrass tunes about rejected love, suicide, and the Patriot Act. Not to mention a talkin' blues Holocaust number. Go here and buy the damn thing already. [Obligatory May Day comment: Every dollar spent by a worker in support of proletarian artists is a revolutionary act.]

Adam Brodsky: Hard Traveling

Finally, I've been thinking about this clip since my last post -- the one that included the Million Dollar Quartet's rendition of Down By the Riverside.

That's Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and she was a huge influence not just on all the Quartet boys, but also on your Little Richards, your Etta Jamses, your Ruth Browns. . . basically, anyone and everyone involved in early rockabilly, r&b and/or rock 'n' roll. In the clip? That abbreviated duck walk she's doing around the 2:00 mark? Yeah, she was prototyping that move for Chuck Berry a solid decade before Maybellene hit.

Tharpe began her career as a child prodigy in the gospel music scene of the 1920s. Over time, she pushed the boundaries of "acceptable" spiritual music, infusing her performances with the unbridled energy typical of the Pentecostal services she was reared in. She never actually crossed-over to secular music per se, but she played with jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Lucky Millinder, and routinely mixed her stage performances to deliver gospel and secular music to both religious and non-religious audiences. To her, there was little distinction between singing about angels or devils, as long as she regularly got to blow people away with her god-given talent. It cost her -- the gospel crowd eventually abandoned her flamboyant stylings for more dignified alternatives, and it's only in recent years that she's been recognized as the pioneering force she was. This clip is from an early 1960s broadcast, so keep in mind that that's a fifty-year-old woman wailing away on that guitar. For this post, about artists and music that defy easy categorization, take it from the KassaNostra: there ain't nothin' better / then going out with Sister Rosetta. [Obligatory May Day comment: If I can't dance, then screw your revolution.]

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra