Pablo Neruda Was Never Called an A**hole

. . .not in New York.

Just a quickie post, for those of you who got hooked on the weekly updates. Today marks the 36th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's death, which itself coincided with the Pinochet coup that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973. The following year, Phil Ochs organized the Friends of Chile benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, which also included Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, the Beach Boys, and a couple of readings by Dennis Hopper, including the following Neruda poem.

Dennis Hopper: Pablo Neruda Poem [live]

Philistine that I am, I can't tell you which Neruda poem this is. And since this occurred during his lost decade, neither can Hopper. If anyone knows, that's what the comments section is for. A recording of the concert - An Evening with Salvador Allende - was later released, and can be downloaded in its entirety here if you're interested.

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra

The FABulous Return of. . . pt. 3

Was thinking about suspending the Beatles finale for a Mary Travers post, but I'm not enough of a PP&M fan to throw something ad hoc together that's also properly respectful. Something we'll get to later, maybe. Right now, let me tell you how it will be. . .

If you were born anytime after 1968, chances are that Bob Dorough was one of your favorite performers before you were ten years old, without your ever knowing his name. That's because Dorough (pronounced like The Explorer) was the artistic director behind ABC's Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon shorts that've been running on Saturday morning TV since the early 70s – think Three Is a Magic Number, among other classics. When not edu-taining millions of children, Dorough is better known as one of the most eclectic jazz singers of the last fifty years, having released close to two dozen albums, and holding the distinction of being the only vocalist to ever record with Miles Davis (on Davis' 1962 Sorcerer LP). Among his many accomplishments is a quickie collaboration with jazz bassist Steve Swallow: The 44th Street Portable Flower Factory was one of two EPs recorded as promotional giveaways for Scholastic Books. It's unbelievable where great music turns up sometimes. There very well may be better versions of Blackbird floating around, but there is only one Bob Dorough, and getting him into this blog gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Also, there aren't any better versions of Blackbird floating around, 'cause Dorough's that amazing.

The Portable Flower Factory: Blackbird

Gabor Szabo is Hungary's all-time greatest jazz guitarist, bar none. (Which lends a little something extra to the "he's world famous in Poland" gag.)

It'd be great if the global universality of Beatle-powered love and good will is what led him to a seemingly unlikely collaboration with Lena Horne, but in actuality, Szabo played on-and-off in her backup band for a few years, and they ended up cutting an album together in 1969; Rocky Raccoon was the b-side of the album's only hit, Watch What Happens. Look, this is just a flat-out brilliant cover – way bluesier and seedier than the original. Which may be for the best, given that the subject material covered here includes infidelity, fisticuffs, hard living, frontier-style vengeance, the cheap moralizing of a remorseless god, and quite possibly a large anthropomorphized nocturnal varmint cavorting undetected amongst humans. (Sorry – after years of completely misunderstanding the song, I can't not think of the protagonist that way. My version is just as poignant, dammit!)

Lena Horne & Gabor Szabo: Rocky Raccoon

How the hell did Come Together ever become a song to rock out to? A few power chords in the chorus notwithstanding, it's one of the Beatles' smoothest numbers. (There's no way that's really the Paul/Ringo rhythm section driving this tune. Don't care what George Martin says. I'm gonna need to see the birth certificate.) I'd really like to blame this on Aerosmith, whose crappy 1978 version turned it into a hard rock anthem. But that doesn't explain swagger-happy pre-'78 versions by Gladys Knight & The Pips, Ike & Tina Turner, and. . . Count Basie?!? (Yeah. . . the less said about that last one, the better.) So I really appreciate The Brothers Johnson for going against the grain on this one with a cover that taps into the original's inherent grooviness. The dual lead vocal effect is an especially nice touch.

The Brothers Johnson: Come Together

There's something about Annie Clark – better known onstage as St. Vincent – that scares the crap out of me. Seriously people, check out her video for Actor Out of Work. Every time she opens her mouth wide I think a murder of crows is gonna fly out and peck everyone bloody.

But. . . she's got a voice like frostbite, and her acute, gossamer vocals balance nicely with the porcelain-and-razor wire creepiness of her visual effect. I know she covered Dig a Pony for her Black Cab Session; here's a better audio take, from a 2007 show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. This song should be pushing all of your eerie-childlike-gibberish buttons anyway, even before you knew she did a take of it. Dig a pony, indeed! Don't the Children of the Corn sing this one in unison? (Not harmony, unison.) Well. . . they should.

St. Vincent: Dig a Pony [live]

If there's a more predictable way to wrap things up than with Let It Be, I can't think of it. Every recording artist in the history of the world may very well have covered this song at one time or another. Thing is, most of 'em play up the gospel angle of the song, which is a mistake. While the Beatles' version obviously draws cues from religious music, it really isn't anything more than an anthemic rock ballad with a little stained glass window dressing. Even John was put off by its generic quality, remarking that it could've just as easily been done by Wings. Artists who try to drag this song closer to its original roots quickly discover there's nowhere to go after those opening chords; they're thinking old-time gospel, but what they end up with is often overwrought, and sometimes even schmaltzy. With that in mind, I'm going with Bill Withers, who manages to pull off a rendition that's spiritual but also vibrant and uplifting. It turns out to be exactly the right way to handle the song, and it makes you wonder if he kept the arrangement in mind a year later when he wrote Lean on Me.

Bill Withers: Let It Be

BONUS NON-TOLLAND ALL-TIME KASSANOSTRA GREATEST BEATLES COVER EVER: Eleanor Rigby is a song we pretty much never sing in camp – we may be the only ones. Much like Let It Be, there are hundreds of recorded versions of this song. (A little Liverpudlian poverty and degradation are the perfect way to class up anyone's album, don'tcha know!) Unlike Let It Be, there are a lot of very good covers out there. Some of them – Aretha Franklin's come to mind – are transcendent. But! If the KassaNostra's learned one unimaginably vital thing in all his years scouring the world for musical sublimity, it's this: never underestimate the raw lounge jazz power of five Filipino-American sisters (plus backing combo) and guiding ex-Zappa collaborator to lay bare the innate depravity in a hit song about the death of a forlorn spinster, and to do it with unquestionable style. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Third Wave (from their 1969 Here and Now LP).

The Third Wave: Eleanor Rigby

And that's it! Next week: The Rolling Stones Kinderland tribute extravaganza!!! Hmmmm. . . may need six posts to cover that one.

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra

The FABulous Return of. . . pt. 2

Before we get back to the Beatles, Gerry Tenney asked me to mention that Khane Yachness is the translator without whom Schvereh Togedike Nakht would not have been. Gerry says, "She was a Kinderland person herself, and her father Zalmen Yachness was the Lakeland social director for many years, and her mother sang in the chorus and was an actress." Gerry and Khane: a dank.

And now. . .

There are at least a few artists you could accuse of injecting death into a cover version, but James Taylor would probably not top your list. And yet here he is, referencing his own demise at the end of With a Little Help from My Friends. Nu? Not sure what he's up to. Maybe it's the ultimate extension of the sensitive folksinger persona? This song - revised last line and all - was his standard opening number for early 70s live gigs (this particular recording is a 1970 concert at Harvard's Sanders Theatre). Whatever his reasons, kudos to Taylor for steering clear of the clichéd suicide/drug OD approach, in favor of a scenario where his friends bear the responsibility for having done him in. Maybe they finally got sick of the sensitive folksinger persona.

Actually, the Beatles/James Taylor connection is surprisingly conspicuous. Taylor's self-titled debut was released in 1969 on Apple Records, having been recorded the previous year at London's Trident Studios, where the Beatles were next door putting The White Album together. The "holy host of others standing around me" in Carolina on My Mind is a reference to the lads, a couple of whom did uncredited work on the song (the initial release, not the more familiar version from 1976). It's a matter of record that when Bob Dylan first met the Beatles, he introduced them to marijuana. You are free to let your mind wander in imagining what momentous development transpired as a result of Taylor hooking up with the Fab Four. The KassaNostra knows enough to steer clear of such debauchery.

James Taylor: With a Little Help from My Friends [live]

I wanted to include this version of Hello Goodbye by the Soulful Strings specifically as a bulwark against the innumerable classical/easy listening Beatles tribute albums in existence, just waiting around to be snatched up by the gullible, the ignorant, and the obsessive Beatles fan. (Not going to take a shot here at the redundancy of all three. . . oh wait, I just did.) Richard Evans was the in-house svengali at Cadet Records in the 1960s and 70s: an accomplished musician (played bass for Sun Ra and Ahmad Jamal), producer and arranger (Marlena Shaw, Dorothy Ashby, Ramsey Lewis, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Brother Jack McDuff, to name a few) - he formed the Strings in 1966, a time when whitebread cover LPs of hit pop tunes were ubiquitous. "Strings" is a bit of a misnomer, since they operated with an electric rhythm section and incorporated a variety of other instruments into their sound. But the group, bolstered by Evans' magnetic arrangements, flies high above the sea of easy listening pap, with a soul/funk dynamic that paints a musical picture that's both easily recognizable and intriguingly different. Listen here in the second verse/chorus, how the rhythm guitar, bass, flute, strings and vibes all dance around each other, seamlessly passing off the lead and then coming back to undergird the melody, and how all that suddenly gives way in the bridge to the groove of the lead guitar solo, which in turn gets reigned in by the strings when they come in with the familiar coda. It's all rather wonderful.

Soulful Strings: Hello Goodbye

We acknowledge the Lennon/McCartney songwriting team as something more than just a pop act - it's a template for the loftiest possibilities of pop music, and that's how it should be. But then we also should acknowledge that a really great Beatles rendition requires a performance that's up to the task of respecting the source material. Nobody ever expects magic from a high school Gilbert and Sullivan production; subsequently, while the ethos of rock dictates that any combo can and should muscle their way through any song, the fact remains that the Beatles are great in part because they transcended the limits of rock music to incorporate a pop sensibility that opened the door on countless sonic innovations. That's not to say that every attempt to cover the Beatles should realize a certain level of sophistication. But many, many such attempts - in every genre - fail because they willfully ignore the complexity of the music. And it's a rare and transcendent thing when someone like Evans comes along and completely gets it right.

Anyway. . .

You say you want a Revolution? You gonna call on a buncha snotty puss-puss basement-dwelling mushy pea and turnip fawningly polite sons of the motherland fugazi Howlin' Wolf parody dirty collar-wearin' tea-sippin' empire-lovin' nancy boys? Or are you gonna call on Nina Simone? There's the Beatles version of the song, and there's Simone's "cover" version, and only one of them is about getting your hands dirty. (And right now, you should all be thinking the same thing: it's about damn time the KassaNostra put some Nina freakin' Simone up on this site! I hear ya.)

Nina Simone: Revolution

Chubby Checker had a career-defining hit with The Twist back in 1960, and then spent the next fifteen years spiraling towards irrelevance. Luckily, when a guy hits it that big, somebody'll always pay him to make records. Also luckily, the further away Checker got from his moment in the sun, the more he seemed keen on pushing the musical envelope. His 1971 Chequered! LP is, if not an outright masterpiece, than one of the finest cultural oddities you'll ever listen to. He wasn't exactly there yet in 1969, but his cover of Back in the U.S.S.R. is still a fine effort. The decision to approach this song in complete over-the-top Vegas lounge act fashion was undeniably the correct choice. There are Superbowl halftime shows less choreographed than this production, but Checker's heart is clearly driving the performance, and the unabashed excess behind him is glorious. If the Beatles were less image-conscious, they would've cut this live, with a 30-piece band and two-hundred showgirls in the buff save for tastefully arranged babushkas; Chubby's version is the next best thing.

Chubby Checker: Back in the U.S.S.R.

To wrap this post up, I give you a 1969 BBC recording of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, by Desmond Dekker (plus a brief segue into his own tune, Wise Man). As far as I know, this wasn't formally released until it appeared on a 2005 compilation CD. I'm guessing he's being backed by his longtime group The Aces - no info to confirm that, but the timing's right. There's nothing particularly special about this recording, but I think we can all agree that the coolness factor goes through the roof when you're able to cover the pop song the Beatles wrote specifically about you. No word on what his actual wife, Margaret, thought about this Molly floozy they set him up with. By the way, I know a lot of people hate this song, but it's the KassaNostra's favorite McCartney-penned tune.

Desmond Dekker: Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da/Wise Man

Okay - part 2 is in the books. Part 3 in a week. Until then, stop yer minds from wandering. . .

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra