“Experimental” is the operative word for this album, although it’s more satisfying than the word might suggest. It’s a good 50% hear-us-on-acid clatter, and a good 10% “When I’m Sixty-Four” envy, but it’s the other stuff, the moderately weird 40% that sounds best. Here’s one of those: an ode to whips and chains that closes with a Salvation Army band playing a Protestant hymn (“There is Sunshine in My Soul”).
United States of America – “I Wouldn’t Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar” (1968)
This track, from Kendell Kardt’s unreleased Columbia sessions, features a gorgeous arrangement by prolific Nashville-based composer Bill Pursell. If you’re well-versed in your instrumental hits of the sixties, you may know of an atmospheric track called “Our Winter Love,” that features a nicely plump, buzzed guitar/proto-synth duet near the middle. Well, this beauty was Pursell’s piece, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it aroused a tinge of professional jealousy in Percy Faith at the time. Pursell’s only big hit, the song reached #9 in ‘63. (Give it a listen here).
Kendell’s friendship with Pursell came about through his work on the Columbia LP. He had been given some arranger demos to listen to and chose Pursell due to what he’d heard as a more classical than commercial orientation. “Whatever you might think of the song itself,” as Kendell puts it, “I can’t say enough in praise of the beautiful symphonic and choral treatment he created for this piece. I think the word ‘masterpiece’ may actually apply here.” Amen, Kendell.
Buried for decades as a memory at least powerful enough for the two to drunkenly wonder together about what might have been, now’s everyone else’s chance to hear it.
My friend Paul Borelli is a self-taught painter and the biggest Fred MacMurray fan I know of. This latest work of his is based on a photo from a Van Heusen shirt ad that appeared in mid-60s magazines.
The big news about this is that it will soon be added to the collection of the Museum of Bad Art, located in the basement of a community theatre in the Boston area. As Paul puts it, “I only recently became aware of their existence when I saw and purchased a book of their ‘masterworks’ at Book People here in Austin. Their web site also contains a gallery of some of their more dazzling pieces. I hope that they will see fit to add my work to their online gallery, where it could be seen and enjoyed by MOBA’s over 10,000 members.” Paul will be the first Austin artist to be curated by the MOBA, a true mark of distinction.
The portrait is also of personal significance to Paul, because as a “MacMurray-meets-Magritte treatment,” it marks the “transitional point from my Paint-by-Numbers Period to my Pseudo-Realistic Period.” It also prompted him to “read a few books about how to paint portraits more accurately.” Paul is currently in the middle of a self-portrait (his second), which he hopes to show at the Self-Portrait Show at the Austin Figurative Gallery.
(By the way, did the Three Suns ever do a version of the My Three Sons theme?)
Goin’ Down the Road was an influential Canadian film about two Nova Scotia young bucks who drive a cool 1960 Chevy Impala to Toronto in hopes of snazzing up their floundering lives. It’s pretty much a bummer, like most movies at that time were. But it was a worthwhile bummer. Particularly worthwhile was the soundtrack by a young Bruce Cockburn, the venerable Canadian singer-songwriter who was only one album into his career back then. No soundtrack LP ever appeared because Bruce, apparently, insisted on not releasing something commercially that didn’t reflect his direct experience. Too bad. Anyway, I loved the theme song so much when I first saw this (still do) that I propped up a tape recorder by the TV, merging the opening first few verses with the closing verse that plays at the end.
Here’s another cut from the same unreleased Columbia sessions that brought us Kendell’s “Funky Song.” It’s called “Marylou” and you can hear a touch of the fifties nostalgia that had been wafting through (and generally cheering up) the hungover pop culture of the post-sixties. More Columbia tracks to come later this week, so stay tuned.
Here are a couple more Indianapolis tributes I’ve gotten my hands on thanks to Lovemeknot Kyle, a native who first told me about the city’s “Naptown” nickname. The first one’s by Bill Gaither, also known as “Little Bill” or Leroy’s Buddy (as in Leroy Carr). (This is not the same Gaither as the contemporary gospel singer.) His own Naptown tribute came out some six years after Carr’s.
The other one is by Sid “Hardrock” Gunter, a national treasure who’s still at it. A proto-rocker if there ever was one, he was rockabilly before it existed, crossed over into R&B territory with his cover of Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ steamy “Sixty Minute Man,” and got signed to the forward-thinking, country/R&B mishmash label Sun Records two years before Elvis did.
Bill Gaither (Leroy’s Buddy) – “Naptown Stomp” (1935)
While Kendell was staying with a Hawaiian family that included 10 children during his time in L.A., he was able to meet the family’s grandmother, who was known affectionately – as many Hawaiian grandmothers are – as “Tutu.” This particular Tutu was the widow of a Catholic missionary who’d served on a South Sea island inhabited by cannibals. The revered matriarch’s visits from Hawaii were “anticipated with great delight,” and when she came, the children would traditionally gather at her feet and ask her to repeat once more the story of how she lived in the jungle with the cannibals. Kendell found this little ritual “both charming and amusing,” given the fact that he felt like he too was “living in the ‘jungle’ – right there in LA,” where the “‘natives’ were as exotic and perplexing” as any that Tutu had encountered. His tongue-in-cheek “Tutu and the Cannibals” would become a popular staple of Kendell’s live performances.
In With Six You Get Egg Roll, Doris Day’s final film, the Grass Roots show up and, taking their cues from the Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” sound more weirdly alluring than they ever would again. Curiously, Arthur Lee’s Love, who used to be called the Grass Roots but had to change it thanks to these LA rivals, toyed with the melody line from the verses of “Feelings” for their verses in “A House Is Not a Motel.”
This is Red Buttons’s last high profile performance before he passed away in July 2006. Some modern day St. Francis (who I’m certain is no sissy) has gone and posted it.
Some time ago I posted a track by the Lovemeknots, a proudly Indianapolis-centric “indie” rock band (never truer) who worked the downtown club scene during the 90’s before calling it good at the end of the decade. The band’s been back on its feet of late, thanks to the relocation of one of the band’s key members – Kyle Barnett – to Louisville, KY, right down the street. They’ve recently posted four songs from their ‘06 Live at Zanie’s Too EP on their MySpace page, including a spirited, Velvet Underground treatment of fellow hoosier Leroy Carr’s “Naptown Blues.”
Carr was a smooth crooner who was wildly popular during the late 20’s and early 30’s. By the time he was thirty, the bluesman/boozeman’s life had careened to an unceremonious halt, but his records had a far-reaching influence long after he was gone, informing a range of legendary performers from Count Basie to Nat King Cole. Carr’s “Naptown Blues”, which showcases the local pet name for that Indiana capital, has the Lovemeknots written all over it (“nobody knows old Naptown like I do,” goes the opening refrain), and while the two versions come from pretty disparate musical approaches, I can’t think of a band more worthy of taking it on.
