Canned Heat: Christmas Blues

There are times when I get really tired of hearing music.  I think most can relate to this.  You get stuck on a CD for a while, but then your ears get tired of hearing the same old thing and you attempt to relieve the monotony by switching it up something different.  But sometimes, there's just nothing that will fit in that niche and you find yourself turning through station after station until you settle for some talk show radio and mindlessly complete your commute, chugging through a 75 hour work week in 5 days.

And then it hits you.  You're so tired you can't think, you're so hungry you can't think, you're mind is jello and you're not even sure what day it is anymore.

And that's when you realize it's Friday and you have no idea what you should be listening to.  
And when you have a blog called "Listening Friday" that's a problem.

Hint: The planet.  It's Friday.

And it's like already 9pm.  You quickly run through your options- Bust it out, bail, bullshit...or blues?

So as I was leaving work tonight and wallowing in self-defeat at the fact I had indeed been unable to complete my quest to accomplish the 3rd Listening Friday of Christmas my radio happened to land on the local college station.  Ordinarily when given airtime during periods when the administration is fairly certain no one of serious consequence is listening, the DJ's of such stations tend to play things that sound like emo kids murdering band saws while hitting 50 gallon drums with pickles.

Tonight, being a Friday night (in a town with what could be considered a passable nightlife) one might expect the airtime to be fertile with opportunities of musical debauchery.

One might be wrong.

#GIFsthatworkbetterwithaudio

Tonight, there was some wonderful gentleman who was laying down some serious blues.  As I turned on the car I was treated to a rendition of a Roy Buchanan tune called "The Messiah Will Come Again" by Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers.  Full disclosure- I had never heard Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers, but I have to admit that it was choice.  Mr. Thackery, for lack of better words, murders his guitar and records it for posterity.  That's one of the elements of Blues I find most endearing actually.  Just listening to a slow, drawn out, barely moving blues shuffle while someone just wails on top of the engine room with a mouth harp, guitar, what-have-you, makes me just...

I can't even describe it.  Words fail.  It strikes a point deep in my soul, a place where all of us try to keep under wraps.  A place where we've been hurt before, a dark place.  A cold place that derides warmth.  Blues exists to magnify that spot, and yet minimize it.  Package it neatly into a product that we can all share and take communion of.  No one is immune to its call, because no one has never not had the blues.

So I began thinking this might be a sign!

Except, we're in the 6 (or 5) Listening Friday's of Christmas and we're talking about the first time Jesus came around, so The Drivers, while apparently awesome, don't fit the bill at the moment.

But it did get me thinking.

So I got home and googled.  And googled.  And screwed around on Facebook.  And then googled some more.  And after I downloaded like 20 new *.gif's, I wrote this entry.

Canned Heat, blues/rock band out of California, was founded in 1965 by Allen Wilson (1943-1970) and Bob Hite (1943-1981) on the premise that being so strung out that drinking sterno sounds like a good idea is pretty much a blues song that wrote itself.  The group rounded out with Bob Hite singing, Alan Wilson covering guitar, harmonica and vocals, Henry Vestine or Harvey Mandel on lead guitar, Larry Taylor on bass, and Adolfo de la Parra on set.  For the recording we will listen to today they are joined by Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, aka Dr. John on the piano.

The song is titled simply, "Christmas Blues" and evokes exactly what you might expect from such a title.  I could go on a bit more about the history of Canned Heat, but I'll be honest- I'm really tired and it will be pretty awful.   Not that what you've just read wasn't, but

OK! OK!  Here's Canned Heat + Dr. John burning down YouTube with "Christmas Blues".

See you next Friday.

-ED

Embedding the video was disabled at the request of someone.  I'm not sure who.  But you'll have to leave this site to watch.  But it's ok.  You're just going to YouTube.  There's a lot of cool stuff there.  

Sources:
www.youtube.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canned_Heat
http://www.cannedheatmusic.com/merch.htm
http://www.jimmythackery.com/

BONUS

Here's the recording of Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers taking us to church.  Enjoy!

Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

I can recall as a child watching the sitcom, Family Matters religiously.  It would air as a part of a series of Friday night shows that were all family-friendly and classic examples of sterile and ideal 90's family life.  We called it TGIF.  Family Matters followed the Winslow family and their patriarch, Carl, through the daily trials and triumphs of being a middle-class family in a Chicago suburb in the mid-90's.

And their video game deal with Activision.

The show was pretty standard as your sitcoms go and since a good percentage of you probably watched it too, I won't spend time going over the finer points and recurring themes in the show.  I will however share that for the entire time the show was on the air, I really had no concept that all of the characters were black, nor that this was anything out of the ordinary.

It wasn't until some time later that I went back and watched the show after being an adult for some time that I realized it.  Now, I take great care to make my point here because:
          #1 I am not a racist 
          #2 I still find this show one of the best sitcoms ever (because whatever the hell you people watch on TV nowadays is pretty much crap).

I still don't understand why it was any better with Charlie Sheen, but I guess you can polish a turd after all.

I couldn't help but realize that some part of me had been irrevocably altered.  I no longer could just look at the Winslow's and say, "Here's that really funny TV family that I used to watch."  Somewhere along the way my brain had absorbed the idea that people could be classified in many different ways, and this is not abnormal.  I have a 3 year old son.  I've watched over the past few years as he comes to terms with this world he was thrust into.  Initially he just began observing patterns in his day and found that "food time" and "play time" and "bath time" and "bed time" were basically the rule.  He began categorizing all new things as based on those initial criteria.

Eventually he'd come across something that didn't fit into any of those four categories (like pizza for example, which is in fact both party and food) and he'd make a new category and keep moving on.  I think this behavior continues on for the rest of our lives.  I think we're always finding new things and putting them into various boxes to label and associate them.  I think it's human nature and by itself is essentially harmless.

It was the reaction I had when I realized the incongruity with how I remembered the Winslow's and how I perceived them in context with my current category system.  I became quite disappointed in myself.  It was like a part of my childhood was wrest from my control.  It wasn't that I felt any differently about the show or that somehow learning that the characters were black was anything bad.
 
I just didn't have a box for skin color before and now I did.

In 1944 the movie musical Meet Me in St. Louis premiered.  It was a pretty standard plot, family with various age children, living in middle-class 1944, and the oldest daughter (played by Judy Garland) has a crush on the neighbor guy (Tom Drake) and they eventually get engaged despite some comedic hurdles along the way.

The other storyline is that the father has recently received a promotion requiring the whole family uproot and move to New York.  This means, among other things that the family will miss out on the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.  Ultimately, dad decides that moving is a bad idea for his family and they all live happily ever after.

You see, movies before Michael Bay and MTV were like big, 90-minute music videos. Devoid of significant plot, they were designed to provide a fertile place for actual musicians to create their produce and the American public in this era always asked for seconds on veggies.  Of this single movie, Hugh Martin (1914-2011) and Ralph Blaine (1914-1995) had created three hits that still occasionally get radio play today.  The piece we're focusing on today for the second Listening Friday of Christmas 2014 is one of my favorite pieces of music of all time.

Judy Garland's character is trying to convince her younger sister, Tootie, that moving to New York will be alright and that Santa will still be able to find their house.  She sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to calm her.  The song itself has undergone quite a few notable revisions in its history, even beginning before this movie was released.  Hugh Martin wrote several lines that were downright depressing, focusing on the somber air in the flick and giving an encouraging sentiment to enjoy the moment now because next Christmas the family could be anywhere.  Several producers, the director and actors all requested he alter the lyrics to add a more hopeful nature to the piece.

Other changes came when Frank Sinatra recorded the track for a Christmas album and was noted as saying to Martin, "The name of my album is 'A Jolly Christmas'. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?"  The line in question was the "we'll have to muddle through somehow" which you'll notice in the Judy Garland original, but in subsequent versions was changed to "hang a shining star upon the highest bough."

The song speaks to an area of our culture that praises the so-called "perfect Christmas" and established standard that frankly is really hard to achieve in most of our lives.  The truth of the matter is that most of us are pretty normal and a big part of being normal means a lot of crazy, goofy crap happens.  Especially, when we try to achieve a "perfect" anything.

I think Hugh Martin got that when he wrote it, and the ensuing evolution of the lyrics to a more positive place contrasted with the original purpose of the song, to tell someone everything will be OK when you yourself have no reason to believe it.  But ultimately, your outlook is yours alone and you are the only person who can control it.  And the other important thing to understand is that you can't control how anyone else thinks either.

I recall an episode of Family Matters where the son, Eddie, was pulled over and harassed by law enforcement.  This was complicated by the fact that his father was also a cop.  Carl confronts the officers who pulled over his son in the following scene:

The fact of the matter is we can't change anyone's viewpoint on anything and Carl knew it as evidenced by the way he spoke to the rookie at the end of the scene.  Race, religion, ethics, whatever. The views we develop are long established by the boxes we've created and how we've filled them. That's why we need to be so careful who we let influence our choices on what goes into which box. If we believe a certain way, we have to continually question and analyze why it's the way it is and if it's the right way or if there's a better way.  I think far too often people allow far too much control over their own categorization of ideas instead of turning off the news and exploring an issue for themselves.  Often times the news (and even Facebook) will show two sides to an issue that is much more multifaceted than that.

When I watched this episode the first time I had to have been like 10 or 11.  I didn't have a box- for any of this.  I didn't really understand why anyone would be mean to Eddie, let alone what his skin color had anything to do with it.  But the fact of the matter is that there are people in this world who think the behavior of a person is linked to their appearance and I'm here to tell you that people who think like that are in fact unequivocal assholes.  

The only thing we can do is to put our own boxes in order and I for one endeavor to put all people into one gigantic box.  Will it stop injustice?  Or anger?  Or racism?  Or violence?  I doubt it. But what can one person do?  You can put all people into the same box, and categorize them only by their actions and their words.  That's what you can do.

That's all any one of us can do, but now imagine if it caught on...

And we'll muddle through.

Somehow.  

See you next Friday.

-ED


Judy Garland's original version-





Béla Fleck and the Flecktones' version-



Sources: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Me_in_St._Louis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Yourself_a_Merry_Little_Christmas
www.youtube.com
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones
FOX
ABC
Sony

Leroy Anderson: A Christmas Festival

In 1950, A Christmas Festival was premiered in the middle of June.  At this time, Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) had been writing frequently for the Boston Pops, having garnered the attention and respect of its conductor, Arthur Feidler, back in 1938.  Anderson had a tremendous capacity for writing relatively short, relatable and digestible orchestra works that could be played by studio orchestras and then broadcast on the radio.  You see, back in the 1950's people would actually listen to orchestral music without having to sit through an action film.

That is, if you call what Hans Zimmer does "music".

A Christmas Festival is like the holiday mother lode.  In Anderson's own words it is not a medley of carols, but a reckoning.  A wholly consummate bible of all that pre-1950's Christmas music could proffer to mankind, hewn together to accommodate the limited technical requirements of his time and place.  In fact, it literally could not be contained by the recording faculties of the era.  To quote Anderson from an interview with Dick Bertel of WTIC Radio, Hartford, Connecticut:

"...when this was done, I think it was in 1950 or 1951, they still had single records as the main part of the market; LP's were just about coming in. so while it was played all the way through, that is, when it was recorded, for the LP, we also had to make a split after four minutes - the Christmas Festival runs about 8 minutes so that meant that when I wrote it I had to make a place in the middle where you could stop...

"... and if I may brag a bit, I defy anybody to find out the exact spot where that occurred..."

Already, this is a piece of music that is bursting at the seams of convention.  I like to imagine the hypothetical conversation between Leroy and his wife Eleanor as they discover that Arthur Feidler has commissioned the work went like this:

~~~

Leroy places the receiver on the cradle of the phone as he reaches for the wing of the large red chair and  slides into it as an untethered pile of bricks slides off a pallet on a moving truck.  His wife enters the room, immediately aware of the change of demeanor as a cold pall fell softly upon the parlor room.

"It was Arthur..." Leroy trails off.
"Yes?" Eleanor replies expectantly. 
"He..." Leroy trails off as he searches the wall to his left for the words that will not come. "He said, 'It's time.'"

Eleanor grows pale as the gravity of realization washes over her like the thousands of Christmas-past before. "It cannot be!  It's much too soon, my dear!  You'll have to call him back and expl-"
"Explain what?  That it's too much to bear?  That it's February?"
"Leroy..."
"That it isn't my destiny?!"
"It's just that..." 

Leroy calms a bit, realizing the brunt of his frustrations laid bare had upset his bride.  "What, my dear, what?" he said calmly, rising to hold her in his arms.
"T-the children..." she stammered.  "I asked Jane and Eric what they wanted Santa to bring for them and...and," she began weeping openly into Leroy's shoulders.  
"What was it?"
"Jane asked for a pair of Hopalong boots and Eric..." she breathed heavily, "He asked for a pistol!  That shoots!" 
She collapsed into his arms like a crushed rag doll, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Damn that Meredith Wilson!  That infernal '76 Trombones' simply wasn't enough for him, now he wants my children!?"  Eleanor was inconsolable, Leroy was galvanized.  "It's time.  I'll be in the study."

~~~

I did take a few liberties there considering that Leroy was probably really stoked to write this work, and it shows.  Also, Meredith Wilson didn't write "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" until 1951 and "The Music Man" premiered in 1957, but hey it's artistic license.

One could make the argument that Leroy Anderson was not a serious composer of serious music and therefore somewhat less important an author of music history than others of his time.  I would counter that many dismiss Hemingway on similar terms for his favoritism of short words opposed to the loquacious vocabularies of his contemporaries.  Quantity does not an artist make.

Anderson was a cult favorite for all things in the light orchestral category and one of the best things about that is that his music maintains a certain relevance today.  Since my wife and son are now listening to that Christmas radio station daily, I've heard "Sleigh Ride" about 47 times already this year!

The other side of Leroy Anderson is that his music is still played frequently by Pops orchestras and school bands and orchestras.  A frequent trick to getting kids to realize that instrumental music isn't all lame is to relate it to something that has credibility in their stupid lives of Beats by Dre and pictures of cats.

Or whatever...

It's recognizable and relevant to them because they've heard it on TV and the radio and the movies. It's part of the easily acceptable culture to them and therefore they can buy in without fear of looking foolish.  The other neat part is that it's just a lot of fun to play and to listen to as well.  It's not easy to write parts for specific instruments and make them fun to play for all.  As a trombonist, I can give you hours of music with horrifically boring trombone parts, but Leroy (being a trombonist himself) knew what he was doing.  He spread the love around.

As a special note, this is the remastered original recording.  

See you next Friday.

-ED



Sources:
YouTube
http://www.pbs.org/sleighride/Video&Music/Compositions_CFestival.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Anderson#Early_life
http://www.leroyanderson.com/biography.php