"Never Never Gonna Give You Up" Barry White-Stone Gon'

I remember listening to Barry driving up to hockey practice when I was ten years old, my father had it blasting, the standard tunes, "My Everything", "Can't Get Enough of Your Love", etc. In today's world he would probably be in jail for some type of sexual offense, there would probably be some shrink that would convince me that he touched me in a certain way and my father would spend the rest of his life in jail on a bullshit charge. Even though at the time I had no idea what the man was truly speaking of his music resonated within me. How could a voice like that not? Impossible.

Barry White taught a lot of men (well at least the ones who were listening) that it doesn't matter how fat you were (as BW was a big boy) nor did it matter how sub par you looks were (he wasn't the best looking fellow) you could still get laid with one thing: Swagger. As a man who never had any homosexual tendencies, having that soul, bass, ridden voice echo in my ear....well I would be hard pressed to not give the man some action. Years later after those rides to hockey practice I would remember my first experiences in the realm of love (in a terrible cliche) formed on this man's music.

You can have your Marvin Gaye and Al Greene and whomever else could be construed as love making music but nothing comes close to Barry. Somehow it even transcends the physical act itself. Tonight as I write this after many drinks in multiple places I found myself home alone. Somewhere in the course of the night this song was played and it came to me as an old friend.

So I am here in a robe, alone and in the most non-sexual atmosphere imaginable, writing this on my laptop trying to hit the correct keys in my drunkenness. I put this song on as it had been stuck in my mind for the entire night. The thing about it is the groove is still there, the bass line, the tempo and most importantly the lyrics blasted out by a three hundred plus pound man with enough attitude to serenade and seduce the world, as well as myself through my shitty speakers, echoing off of my old plaster walls.

It is a beautiful experience. No one encapsulates what it is like to be in love, to have a ten hour, sweaty, change the sheets after while drinking champagne session more than this man. It should only be reserved for those that deserve such a night. As a single man in New York there have been a plethora of opportunities that have breached the threshold of my door but only a few who have been worthy of a Barry playlist. He is the forty year old scotch, the '51 Bollinger champagne of the music realm and only broken out when it is truly warranted and deserved.

Clarence Clemons

I had heard he had a stroke a week ago, I had also heard that he has been in bad shape for some time before that. But yesterday on the phone talking to my brother I couldn't believe he was dead. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard at first, and then couldn't stand the fact it was true.

As a disciple of Springsteen, Clarence is part of his Holy Trinity, even non-believers associate The Big Man with almost nothing but The E Street Band. So it may be a surprise that when I think of Clarence the first thing I think of is a magical Grateful Dead show on December 31, 1988. In my mind it was the height of the band with Bret Mydland on keyboards and Jerry's licks were in full bloom. I found the video in my possession somehow and remember sitting on my college couch excited that I had another video to check out. About midway through I noticed a large black mass standing on the side of the stage with a sax in his hand and couldn't believe it was Clarence. I mean what the hell was he doing playing at a Dead show?

To me it showed the connection of music in a way that many people don't see or even think about. Hey man if you are a musician you dig music, then good music regardless of the Genre is what you dig. The show culminated with two epic, long running Dead tunes: "Morning Dew" in which one is privy to probably the greatest Garcia solo ever performed, there is one section where Jerry brings it together with so much skill it boggles the mind, at that point I will never forget Clarence taking his mouth off of the reed and mouthing "Wow" as he was bending at the back backwards and looking up to the sky. Then it was "Standing on the Moon" which admittedly gets me all choked up every time it comes on, Clarence noticeably was affected in the same way.

At the time I couldn't stand how people didn't get the Dead and wrote me off as that typical college fake hippie (meanwhile I was the farthest thing from it) but they got Springsteen and screamed "Thunder Road" at crowded parties dancing on tables. Now right there in front of me and my roommate's faces was the validity that I craved. From that point on they opened their minds and forgot about the stereotypes, they just started digging the music.

Not a lot of people know that Clarence had a tryout for the Cleveland Browns but the day before was involved in a terribly serious car accident or that after moving to Newark, New Jersey he worked for eight years as a counselor for disturbed and troubled boys at Jamesburg (which was the Juvie hall my parents would threaten me with whenever I got out of line). Nor that he was a devout Baptist from his youth in Virginia.

But they know the sound, if Bruce was the nervous system for the band then there is no doubt Clarence was the backbone. At times his playing was melodic and haunting ("Jungleland") then other times it was a Harley Davidson with straight pipes grinding up eardrums and elevating heartbeats (solo from "Promised Land"). Without Clarence there as no band.

I often wonder if the music created the brotherhood between Bruce and Clarence or the brotherhood created the music. But look at some old pictures of the two from the 70's and you can see it, feel it right there in front of you. Black, White...skinny, fat. It didn't matter they were brothers. In today's world where every commercial has some bullshit group of friends all of different ethnic races, constructed to appease the political massses here was a real life representation of color blindness. But hell, music has been breaking down barriers for decades. Frank and Sammy (where Frank wouldn't play anyplace that made him walk in the back door), Elvis, and Keith Richards' colorless life.

And with his passing another musician whom the next generation will never have the privilege of knowing. I hope to God the industry will change sometime so my son will have the heros I had growing up in music. I hope the Boss will continue to play in some capacity but pray they don't supplant the sax with a lesser human much like the remaining members of the Dead did after Jerry's death. If you want to play Bruce then do so with the E Street Band sans sax if you could make it work. I can't imagine it will and as much as I would love to head out to Giants Stadium for four hours of preaching you can't have a mass without the cornerstone the chuch was founded upon.

"Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson" Robert Plant and Alison Krauss-Raising Sand

I sat down to play this song on guitar, it had a strange chord progression, the key was in a Beach Boys "Pet Sounds" sound, A, E and D flats which can be strange to play on guitar. The type that you really can't hammer out to mindlessly. Taken back at first until the groove filled my soul intravenously and on a Sunday night I was sitting around half in the bag trying to channel old Led Zep with a dash of George Jones, Chuck Berry and Emmylou Harris.

The song is straight forward, little subtext, face value; but it couldn't be better. I was blasting it this morning driving like a maniac north of Manhattan on 287 with little traffic and the windows down. After a round of golf and a stimulating phone conversation with a new female friend I headed two blocks away for a late afternoon martini and oddly enough this song came on. I asked the waitress to turn it up, she complied, and sat there in the glorious June sun, empty bistro looking out on east 65th street while the sun collapsed over the concrete canyons.

A marvelous way to end a weekend and while the scenery didn't quite fit the music on the surface, someplace inside it did. Whether it be the juxtaposition or simply the mood I was in, the sultry phrasing of Alison combined with that honky tonk guitar...it just worked. Pure American music after days of listening to Serge Gainsburg and Leonard Cohen preaching about love and revolution. Road music you can dig sans road while being stationary on a bar stool in a French bistro a thousand miles away from the closest honky tonk.

"Sign Language" Eric Clapton-No Reason To Cry

There are some songs that are so good that the lyrics don't even matter, or rather a few lines that just don't jive. In this song we have the third line of the song: "...as I'm eating a sandwich in a small cafe, at a quarter to three" and you just want to smack yourself in the face and wonder what the hell they were thinking. If I was to write a line such as that and sing it to someone they would never stop laughing. But when you attached the names Clapton, Dylan and Robertson to the liner notes it suddenly becomes genius.

Poor start notwithstanding this song just works. It works on so many levels, the chill slide guitar, smooth melodic tempo and southern-flavored licks played low on the bottom pickup that snap coarsely contrasting with the vibe, the mandolin like start to the first solo; it all comes together giving one the sense that it was put together ad hoc with a dozen joints burning at four in the morning.

The first time I heard this song was in a forty dollar hotel room in Van Horn, Texas about three hours east of El Paso in the middle of nowhere while a non English speaking Mexican welded the tongue of a trailer for thirty dollars in the parking lot of the diner next door at midnight. It had broken during a drive from Florida to San Diego when I first became transfixed with the American Southwest. Walking out of my door on the first and only floor that stepped right out to the parking lot I saw the shadows of the mountains lingering in the background behind the few neon lights of the main strip on a Saturday night. The scene was Hopper-esque in the style of "Nighthawks" with hints of "American Graffiti" mixed in as the Mexican boys rolled up and down the thin strip looking for something that was never there and never would be.

That slide echoing through my head and out off of the mountains, the surrender of the August heat that would soon begin again in a few hours. The desolation and openness under a pitch black sky perforated by specks of white brilliance and the knowledge that there was not one person on the planet who knew where I was or where to find me, the juxtaposition of seeing my Range Rover with three surfboards on the roof in the middle of the desert; all of it coming together to be one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. To know what freedom truly was and just how sacred it could be when experienced fully.

Later on in that new day I would cross the Continental Divide in New Mexico and roll downhill into the Pacific where the mountains were green and flower ridden, sweet smells of eucalyptus and jasmine permeated the air flowing through my sunroof and all four open windows while Clapton and Bob whined through the speakers once more.

All of which has nothing to do with the meaning of this song. Save it for a time and place where you can make a memory to savor years later while sitting in traffic surrounded by canyons of concrete and steel.

Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens-What Have You Done My Brother

Goddamn man just check out the fine ladies in this picture and the soul leaking out of their pores. The truth and honesty in their smiles, the pain and heart contained within those ample bodies, toothy smiles and heart-fucking-breaking voices that harmonize with reckless abandon. If you were to channel Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Melvin Seals, Bobby Womack, Bootsy Collins, James Brown, Jackie LaBranch, Gloria Jones and Gladys Knight, squeeze them all together in a French Press, add pure soul concentrate and have a child with Van Morrison the offspring would be this band.

It is impossible to just pick out one song from this album. I would say that "He Knows My Heart" belongs in some dark scene of a Scorsese movie just as it does being sung in a Baptist Church in Memphis along the muddy rivers by a congregation soaked with sweat. "By Your Side"...if there's a woman who can sing that to me or even give me that feeling then there's a five carat ring in the picture and a life of selfless devotion waiting for her while I cry on my knees. I never knew there could be a song that would make me bust out in dance outside of a few Smokey Robinson and Sam Cooke numbers until "I Need You to Hold My Hand" came through the speakers in an orgasm of ecstasy. They are all testifying, they all bring me down genuflecting in humble piety while my consciousness climbs to the stratos.

You can sing it in the car when no one is looking, you can sing it to someone in the moonlight with the sand between your toes, salt caked on dark skin after a midnight swim and a warm six pack stashed on the dunes. You can sing it in a low roofed club up in the 120's in Harlem with a zoot suit and feather in your cap. In truth you can sing it every and anywhere because good vibe tunes such as these contained in this album should be sung as much as possible. But you have to have the heart, the groove and the spirit to do it right. If you don't and you don't get this album then there's no hope; go back to your life and loveless cubicle. Go back to shades of grey and leave the rest of the spectrum for the enlightened, I want every band of it, I want to house it and have it explode out of my door every morning when I arise and take on the new day touched by my sisters, stick my chest out greet it all with a smile.

"Shave 'Em Dry II" Lucille Bogan-The Best of Lucille Bogan

In the late years of the 20th century there were a bunch of people who decided that we all weren't responsible enough to police ourselves and our children. I won't digress into a political rant but just to let you know I am a pure Libertarian. I should be able to listen to what I want, drink what I want no matter of the age, smoke what I want no matter what it is and say what I want no matter how derogatory.

But that is another matter. What I am speaking of is the Parental Advisory label affixed to records deemed offensive by those in power. I still don't know how Tipper Gore and her friends at the Parents Music Resource Center are qualified to state what is obscene. When the label became popular some of the first albums with the honor of having said label were from: Guns and Roses, 2 Live Crew, Danzing and Soundgarden, all of which pale in comparison to this song. I'm not saying that they are great bands and albums but what I find funny is the fact that the world thought that this was a new thing; as if this was a recent movement in music.

It has been around for a long time. Blues music used carefully coded slang to hide the sexual content of lyrics. "Jellyroll" is slang for Vagina, hell it occurs in too many songs to list. When B.B. King sings "I have a sweet little angel, man you ought to see the way she spreads her wings..." just what do you think he is speaking about? Or in the classic "Come into my Kitchen", hmmmm. I am pretty sure they ain't speaking of cooking. There were artist more blunt and rough around the edges in the past, without a doubt. Songs that were sung in juke joints in the south where prostitutes danced for a dime and then took you upstairs in the muggy heat to squeeze a few extra cents out of the deal.

One of them was Lucille Bogan who was born in 1897 and started recording in 1923 in New York City, a far cry from her Alabama roots. What this woman spoke of was impossible of being mistaken. Here's the lyrics:

I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb,
I got somethin' between my legs'll make a dead man come,
Oh daddy, baby won't you shave 'em dry?

Want you to grind me baby, grind me until I cry.
Say I fucked all night, and all the night before baby,
And I feel just like I wanna, fuck some more,
Oh great God daddy,
Grind me honey and shave me dry,
And when you hear me holler baby, want you to shave it dry.

I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb,
Daddy you say that's the kind of 'em you want, and you can make 'em come,
Oh, daddy shave me dry,

And I'll give you somethin' baby, swear it'll make you cry.
I'm gon' turn back my mattress, and let you oil my springs,
I want you to grind me daddy, 'til the bell do ring,
Oh daddy, want you to shave 'em dry,
Oh great God daddy, if you can't shave 'em baby won't you try?

Now if fuckin' was the thing, that would take me to heaven,
I'd be fuckin' in the studio, till the clock strike eleven,
Oh daddy, daddy shave 'em dry,

I would fuck you baby, honey I'd make you cry.
Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell sapper,
And your dick stands up like a steeple,
Your goddam ass-hole stands open like a church door,
And the crabs walks in like people.

A big sow gets fat from eatin' corn,
And a pig gets fat from suckin',
Reason you see this whore, fat like I am,
Great God, I got fat from fuckin'.

My back is made of whalebone,
And my cock is made of brass,
And my fuckin' is made for workin' men's two dollars,
Great God, round to kiss my ass.


I'm not trying to shock people or be rude. I just figured that in keeping with the title of this blog I would be remiss to not include this song that I first learned from Keith Richards. The man is a wealth of knowledge. Also, whenever we think of ourselves as a collective species living in a specific time; that we came up with kink and whatever perverted and however perverted we think our society has become, well someone else has been there before and they were probably much worse than ourselves. From what I've seen we still came out all right.

"Vanlose Stairway/Trans-Euro Train/A Fool For You" Van Morrison-A Night in San Francisco

The only part of this medley that matters is "Vanlose Stairway", the remainder is just fill for the set. I put this song on once on a drive through eastern California with a dear friend I haven't seen in a long time en route to the east coast. We were terribly hung over and feeling like bloody hell, we'd been in the car for a few hours with just some background music while we caught up and bullshitted. During a lull in our conversation I put this song on and my companion started laughing the second he started singing.

The reason why is you can't understand a word he says throughout the entire song. I challenge you to listen to this song without looking at the lyrics and tell me what he is actually saying.

With Van what he is saying isn't even the point. What is you can derive from the emotions bleeding out through the speakers, rattling off of your eardrums and settling down in you gut, your heart; filling you with a warmth and soul that cracks a smile and sets your blood running through your veins in an autobahn of traffic engorging you and everyone around.

But if you want to go beyond that and dig into the words you'll find that it is about a Danish girl in Copenhagen who lived on the fourth floor of an old building. It is about Van's spiritual awakening and his eastern beliefs, about Gita and Krishna, about love and the pursuit of Brahman.

So throw it on and revel in the mysticism that is Van when he is live and cranking, when the words are flowing and the meaning is understood without comprehension. He is a force of nature whipping across the planes taking out trailers and trees, across oceans sending ships to the deep and taking my existence onto another plane beyond the comprehension of so many who simply do not get it in the end.

"No Expectations" The Rolling Stones-Beggars Banquet

It is always funny the inspiration I get to do a post here, at times I have something in my head so inspiring and visceral I almost don't have a choice but to write. Then again at times I simply feel as though I should write but don't have a clue. Sitting here tonight after two very hardcore days of drinking until the sun came up I am tired and spent. I walked over to First Avenue and had dinner alone on the sidewalk with a bottle of Sicilian wine which I am always impartial to for some reason. Delaying laying in bed for a while until sleep approached I was texting a friend about a few things and reviewing each other's night I was still searching for a song until in reference to her night and one particular facet of it she stated: "I have to change my state of mind, that's really it. No expectations." With that she gave me an answer unknowingly and this sublime piece of old Stones shot through my head. A song that is the last example of Brian Jones' creative work with the group until he spiraled out of control and died at his own hands. A song that displays a narrator being at piece with his hopelessness and lot in life.

In construction this song is a monumental work. The open tuning used by Richards, at the time new for his playing, would become the hallmark of his style. Jones' earthy, metallic slide channeling the old Mississippi blues masters, Charlie Watts' simple claves is all that is necessary to keep the beat and Mick's lack of Rock and Roll, Hollywood pretense is refreshing; sadly it is something we would see less and less of as the years transpired.

And it is somewhat funny that the person who inspired this song would be someone who put me in the narrator's situation one day at a train station years ago. The station being out in eastern Long Island. I remember hanging up the phone with my mechanic after he just told me that I had a dead cylinder in my old Porsche. I had just moved back up to the northeast and living with my parents while I was looking for a place in Manhattan (at 31 years old) and, well let's just say it wasn't the homecoming I was expecting. While waiting for the train to arrive to take me back to Manhattan so I could take another train another hour back to my childhood home, broke and staring an engine replacement and at least another ten grand in moving expenses the final truss broke and we broke up on that platform. I could tell it was moving in that direction but the last thing I needed was to contemplate it with three hours of solitude staring me in the face.

As bad as it was in retrospect it was quite romantic to deal with it on a desolate platform in the cool spring air, alone surrounded by hundreds of people after boarding and watching the landscape sweep past in a small blur. If I was the artist that Richards and Jagger were I would have had a song for it, instead I went home and listened to this one in the bedroom I grew up in, a bedroom that still housed plane models, an old Nintendo and animal wallpaper that matched a shag green rug. People always love to tell others not to forget where they came from and the act of saying is strikes me as the biggest verbal dirarreah imaginable. That night surrounded by the child I had been as the adult that I was humbled me in a frightening way. There's a reason why you can never go home again, then again there's a better reason for events playing out in this life and whatever reason I bore that crucible of abject humility for two months, hopefully I'll find the answer one day.