Soul Serenade: Barbara George, “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)”

It’s one-hit wonder time again and once again that one hit was a monster that inexplicably never found a follow-up. This time the record came out of New Orleans and set the national charts on fire, topping the R&B chart and finding Top 5 crossover success on the Pop chart.

Barbara Ann Smith came from New Orleans fabled Ninth Ward and got her singing start in the choir at her Baptist church. What set her apart from other young singers was that Smith was already writing her own songs at a young age. Another thing she did at a young age was to get married when she was 16 years-old and become Barbara George.

Somewhere along the way, George made the acquaintance of Jessie Hill, another Ninth Ward resident who had a smash hit with “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” in 1960. Hill was impressed enough to get an audition for George with the legendary record producer Harold Battiste who in turn was sufficiently impressed to sign George to his AFO (All For One) record label.

Barbara George

Some accounts claim that “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)” was written by George’s mother, Eula May Jackson. But the credit on the record belongs to George so I’m going to stick with that. Battiste produced a session that was split between George and another Battiste signing, Prince La La. They recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio and the backing band included Roy Montrell on guitar, drummer John Boudreaux, and cornet player Melvin Lastie. With all of those iconic New Orleans figures on board, George’s record couldn’t miss … and it didn’t.

“I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)” was inspired by the traditional hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Battiste had a distribution deal with Juggy Murray at Sue Records and that allowed the single to achieve national distribution in 1961. When the record became a hit, Murray began to court George, finally convincing her to leave AFO and sign directly with his label. She released one last single for Battiste, “You Talk About Love,” but it failed to crack the Top 40. Soon after that, Battiste left New Orleans for Los Angeles and George’s career floundered.

There were several singles for Sue including “If You Think,” “Send for Me (If You Need Some Lovin’),” and “Recipe (For Perfect Fools),” but they all lacked the passion and charm of George’s AFO efforts. When “Something’s Definitely Wrong” failed to make a mark in 1963 Murray cut George loose. Her failing career led to drug and alcohol abuse that left George in the wilderness until she mounted a comeback in 1967.

She gave it her best shot, signing with Seven B Records and getting Eddie Bo to produce her single “Something You Got,” but when the record failed to chart George call it a day, retiring from the music business to concentrate on raising her three boys. There were a couple of singles for the Hep label in the late ’70s, “Take Me Somewhere Tonight,” and “This is the Weekend,” but they would prove to be the last recordings that George would make.

Barbara George, a born-again Christian, returned to where she got her start, her church choir. But somewhere along the way she had contracted Hepatitis C. She fought the disease for more than ten years before succumbing in 2006, a few days before her 64th birthday. George’s song, “I Know,” has been covered many times over the years including versions by the Newbeats, Cher, Bonnie Raitt, Ike & Tina Turner, Anne Murray, and Steve Marriott.

 
 
 
 

Radio City With Jon Grayson & Rob Ross: Episode Forty-One

Radio City With Jon Grayson & Rob Ross:  Episode Forty One

Having had so much fun and a great deal of success (even with a technology calamity) in doing a “freeform” show, completely improvised, Jon and Rob have decided to do it again – and not too far on the heels of that initial attempt.  Having a sense of flow and tempo, the organic nature of their conversation is a pure delight as they tackle everything and seamlessly.  Some of it is angering (like politics); some of it is thought provoking (like their takes on music or movies) and some of it is downright hilarious (like “visits” from dead presidents).

All in all, you’re going to want to sit down and get into this latest “no script” installment of Radio City; it’s the only way to arrive without traveling!

Radio City With Jon Grayson & Rob Ross: Episode Forty One


The podcast will be on the site as well as for subscription via iTunes and other podcast aggregators. Subscribe and let people know about Radio City, as well as Popdose’s other great podcasts David Medsker’s Dizzy Heights and In:Sound with Michael Parr and Zack Stiegler.

Boxset Review: Hüsker Dü, “Savage Young Du” (3 C.D./4 L.P.)

Here are the facts about Numero Group’s 3 C.D./4 L.P. set (with hardcover book), Savage Young Dü:

Most of the tapes came from the collection of Terry Katzman, the former owner of Minneapolis record shop Garage D’or and an early Hüsker Dü soundman, who co-founded Reflex Records with Bob Mould to put out some of band’s early titles (including “Statues” and Everything Falls Apart). “Terry Katzman documented almost everything the band did, going back to the very end of 1979,” says Numero’s Ken Shipley, who took Katzman’s stash of “maybe 130” tapes back to Chicago in June of 2016.

Once home, Shipley transferred the hoard — including a good sixty more tapes from the Hüskers’ own collections — to digital, working primarily at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio owned by famed engineer and musician Steve Albini. Once there, old titles were “completely remixed to the exacting standards of what the record was — but improved,” says Shipley. “It was, boom! Perfect.”

While the joy of having previously unheard music from Hüsker Dü is certainly marred by the passing of drummer/singer/songwriter Grant Hart, these discs will easily bring a rush of excitement to anyone who was ever a fan – and a perfect primer for illustrating as to how it should be done (and how it was done, with no compromises) to young people/burgeoning musicians.

Of the previously unheard material, “Sore Eyes” is a speedy but melodic and tight track – not exactly hardcore; definitely punk-ish and Mould’s young voice has a terrific feel; “Can’t See You Anymore” is a tongue-in-cheek horny teenager’s lament and, frankly, is hilarious and catchy; “Picture Of You” is fast, taut and basically The Buzzcocks going at 150 m.p.h. instead of 100.  “The Truth Hurts” is a slower, heavy rock piece that would have fit in on any of the Huskers’ later albums – and it has to be noted, the mixed/restoration of these early recordings is stellar.  “Do The Bee” (on the later Land Speed Record live debut album) is far more coherent and (again) catchy, although of a slightly less quality, sound-wise; “All I’ve Got To Lose Is You” is another uptempo punk-pop number and would, again, fit perfectly on Flip Your Wig or Candy Apple Grey.  Of course, the band’s debut single, “Statues” and “Amusement” is here as well – sounding bigger and better than previously heard.

For me, the third disc (I’m in possession of the C.D. version) is the prize – the remixed, full-on clear firepower of the “In A Free Land” single and the band’s debut studio album, Everything Falls Apart.  From the title track to “Bricklayer”, “Punch Drunk”, “Target” and “From The Gut”, it immediately catapulted me back into my late teens, albeit without the burning anger I may have once had, but giving me an emotional adrenaline rush.  On a good day, for me to consciously sit and listen to hardcore punk would be unthinkable, but hearing these songs with fresh ears, fresh mixes and a very long space in time from the last time I actively listened, brought me a great deal of joy.

It’s easy to rhapsodize poetic about Hüsker Dü, but it would be prudent for me to say this:  get this boxset and listen to it, end to end.  It’s fascinating; it’s eye-opening, energetic and its beauty and strength lies in the fact that this incredible trio was as progressive as they were ground-breaking as they were shit-hot and tight and fucking talented.  There has never been nor could there ever be a question about it:  Hüsker Dü were simply the best and we will never see the likes of them again.  So revel in this; it’s a vital document.

ESSENTIAL LISTENING – HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Savage Young Dü is currently available

http://www.numerogroup.com/products/hsker-d-savage-young-d

Album Reviews: Tom Waits – “Alice”/”Blood Money” (Remastered)

Tom Waits never has sounded better, at least in terms of fidelity, than he does on the new, re-mastered versions of Alice and Blood Money – which were released, to much anticipation, on ANTI- Records.

There are good reasons for these revelations, of course, and some of them are so obvious they don’t even need to be stated. For one, yes, yes, musicians have never had the kind of access they do now to add finesse and fluidity to once-rough-edged (relatively speaking) recordings. These “new” recordings, which I’m sure will be gobbled up by vinyl enthusiasts before you’re done reading this review, go a long way to making Waits’ music sound even more bizarrely contemporary.

But Alice and Blood Money, a strange pair of theatrical accompaniments originally released sort-of-together 15 years ago, always have been ripe for this kind of treatment, this careful repeat meditation. They are theatrical in both the literal and figurative senses, and invite that kind of returning attention. And God bless Waits/Brennan for working these over and including them among their new spate of ANTI- re-masters.

On the new LPs, the details are in the forefront – from the rough gravel of Waits’ voice on the epically wicked “God’s Away On Business” and the weeping chamber orchestration on “Poor Edward” to the vibes on “Everything Goes To Hell” (a Partchian dance-anthem for Dante’s seven rings) and the fragile acoustics of “The Part You Throw Away.” Songs like “Everything You Can Think” and “The Part You Throw Away,” in fact, sound completely reinvented, as the little touches of harmonics, horns, vibes or a shipwrecked bass come to the fore. (I found this more the case on Alice, but that could be my Waits playing habits; Blood Money always has been a guilty favorite, despite the legendary bootleg status of Alice.)

If you’re looking for reasons to claim this music has been reinvented, you don’t have to look very far. The new mixes and masters are beautifully done. “Lost In The Harbour,” once militantly melancholy, now also comes off as slightly deranged. “Fawn,” once slight, now stands on its own, devastatingly sad. On “Table Top Joe,” Waits’ Louis Armstrong bellowing feels ever more the role of showman. “Another Man’s Vine” sounds both boozier and more sinister. Waits’ voice, with this kind of attention to detail, has never hit the mark so precisely. Fidelity clearly goes a long way on these two LPs.

Tracks that were previously giants – I’m thinking largely of Alice’s title track, one of Waits’ best pieces of the last 20 years – hold their own among the new flourishes and even unleash some surprises. Those listening closely will be rewarded.

So, if you’re on the fence about forking over your hard-earned cash for re-mastered outings without outtakes or secret tracks, jump off. This set is worth the investment paid. And the time expended. And, of course, the magic captured.

-30-

Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll #11: Reap What You Sow

(Archive.)

Wednesday, October 3, 2016

The band may be called Roscoe’s Basement, but in fact Roscoe — Tom and Deanna Finn’s ridiculously lovable spaniel — never comes down in the basement when we play. At best, he’ll listen from the top of the stairs. But tonight we do have a guest listening to our practice — a young guy named Joe Nauert.

Joe is a college kid, a student in the audio production program at Finger Lakes Community College. As part of the curriculum, each student has to record and mix an EP of at least six original songs by local performers. Our drummer, Tom Finn, has volunteered our services to any student needing a subject, and we have found ourselves matched up with Joe.

Ostensibly, Joe is listening to us play our originals so he can assess his production strategies; but in practice, it kind of feels like an audition. He’s a good guy, though, wry and laid-back, with a solid appreciation for classic rock — exactly the sort of no-frills, slightly old-fashioned brand of music we deliver. We agree to work together; Joe will get in touch once he’s scheduled the first round of sessions.

We try to keep our expectations in check. At the very least, Joe gets four credits and we get a couple of studio demos. And if the recording quality turns out better than that, well … who knows?


Tuesday, October 11, 2016

It’s a long drive in my ailing old Honda to the FLCC campus for the first night of recording. It’s dark and raining, and there’s no direct access to the studio from the parking lot; we’ve all got to hump our gear down corridors and up concrete stairs to the big studio on the second floor. Joe has an assistant tonight, and they start setting up the drums while the rest of us try to settle in.

I logged plenty of studio hours when I was in college myself, but the last time I did any proper recording was a marathon session with We Saw the Wolf — nearly twenty years ago now. However much the technology has changed, though, the atmosphere of constant, low-grade anxiety has not. You’re in a gray, windowless room, dimly lit and none too clean. You wait and wait and wait while problems you cannot see are resolved by people hidden in another room entirely; then you must perform with intense and absolute concentration for brief, controlled periods.

Time becomes elastic. The minutes of waiting drag, and the performance of a three-minute song feels endless as you hyper-focus on every wobbly pitch, every missed pick stroke; but somehow the hours roll heedlessly on, and suddenly it’s midnight, and there’s an acute sense of waste. Even if you’re not paying by the hour (and thank God we are not), there will be a cost attached to everything taking so long — a cost you will pay with your own body, with red eyes and cold hands and a stiff neck, with a weariness you will carry through the days like Marley’s chain.

But we are tight and well-rehearsed, and our songs are already fully arranged. We figure we can work (relatively) fast, with a minimum of punch-ins or retakes. We agree to try for eight songs, bargaining on this single session to record the drums, another for bass, one or two for guitars, and a couple for vocals.

These plans derail almost immediately. The studio is a profoundly unnatural environment, and what you’re doing hardly feels like music-making at all. It’s certainly not playing in any meaningful sense. There’s none of the feedback of energy you get from an audience, or even from the other band members. We all play along while Tom tracks the drums, and though we’re arranged in our familiar broken circle, we’re still isolated. Our guitarists, Mike Mann and Chuck Romano, play from behind baffles; Chuck’s amp is literally in a closet, and he stands half-in and half-out. Craig Hanson’s bass is run direct to the board. We’re all tethered with headphones, and the playback mix alternates between painfully loud and uselessly quiet.

And everybody hates working with the click track. Craig did some sessions years ago with his old band the Mooska Movers, and Chuck recently recorded a five-song EP with local musician and producer Dave Drago, but none of us are exactly studio veterans. We are a live band, and our sense of rhythm still hews to analog time. Before we lay down a single complete take, we sweat through what seems like dozens of false starts; the time drifts, and even though we all drift together, it’s no good because the click falls out of sync. There’s a reorientation that needs to happen when you play to a click, and Roscoe’s Basement in not managing it.

It’s long past midnight by the time we wrap up. By the end, it’s only me and Tom and Deanna (and Joe, of course). We have managed to track only five songs — meaning we’ll need at least one more studio date just for the drums. We’re behind schedule before the first session is even over.


Saturday, October 22, 2016

We’re closing the second night of Harvest Fest, a three-day live music event to benefit Rochester’s Veterans Outreach Center. It’s a good cause, and we’re happy to play. We’re just a little punchy because we’ve spent the last couple of nights in the studio.

After more than a week off, we reconvened on Thursday to finish laying down the drums. Craig was unavailable, so I played bass for the guide tracks; then he came back Friday to knock out his parts. At some point we gave up on using a click track — which will cause us problems down the road, when we have to sync up introductions — but even without that struggle, the sessions ran late into the night.

It feels good to be back together, though, playing live with no metronome and no ticking clock. It’s Craig’s birthday, and his beloved Chicago Cubs are in the World Series. We’re in good spirits.

The show goes down in the front room of Bernunzio Uptown Music, a local spot that sells and repairs instruments of all vintages, a hub of Rochester’s acoustic and traditional music scenes. Roscoe’s Basement is odd man out on a bill mostly made up of solo folkies and bluegrass cats.

We go on after a jazz quartet of kids from the Eastman School, and if we had any illusions about “closing slot” translating into “headliner,” they don’t last long. The music has been going since noon, and Bernunzio’s has been emptying steadily since we arrived. It takes us a long time to set up, and by the time we launch into “Honky Tonk Women” there are only a dozen brave souls left, standing at the back behind a sea of empty folding chairs. Well, fuck it; if no one else is using that space, I will. I bound off the stage with my wireless mic, prowling up the aisle. We don’t tone down out act one white in deference to the setting; we may be playing our (abbreviated) set under a wall of mandolins, but we are a full-on dirtyass rock ‘n’ roll band from first note to last — which is all we can ask.Punks in the pun'kin patch. L–R: Tom, Deannam Chuck, Jack, Mike, Craig (with Cubbies hat). Photo by Janice Hanson.

FOREGROUND: Punkins. BACKGROUND: Punks. L–R: Tom, Deanna, Chuck, Jack, Mike, Craig (with Cubbies hat). Photo by Janice Hanson.


The thing of it is this: I’ve learned that sometimes you can go in with the best will in the world and your intended audience just isn’t gonna dig it — even if it seems they’d have every reason to. Earlier in the year, Craig shared with us, in the same batch of demos that yielded “Got That Girl,” an unfinished song that he called “Balada Da” — an instrumental with a scatted vocal melody, lacking only lyrics. I listened for months, wondering if I might make something of it.


Original home demo of “Balada Da,” recording date unknown. Music, production, all vocals and instruments by Craig Hanson.

Moved by the headlong rush of the music, I hit upon a scrap of lyric that took the form of a manic street preachment delivered by a homeless man in the grips of a religious psychosis — a little Tom Waits-y, maybe a little Nick Cave-y, folding in a highfalutin literary allusion to the visionary verse of the eighteenth century mystic and proto-beatnik Christopher Smart amid the babbling frenzy.

(This is why I’m the frontman — my foolproof instinct for what makes a great pop song.)

There was no clean recording of “Balada Da” without vocals, so demo the song I had to learn all of Craig’s guitar and bass parts and recreate the whole thing from scratch. This afforded me the opportunity to tweak and reorganize the tune slightly, and to add a new bridge. I laid down a scuzzy, lo-fi demo at the start of October, with a choir’s worth of vocal tracks recorded on the laptop’s crappy built-in mic — and man, I thought it was a sure thing. As when I co-wrote with Mike, I ran the demo past Craig as courtesy before thinking to share it with the group.

Home demo for “Rejoice in the Lamb.” Music by Craig Hanson; words by Jack Feerick. Drum sample, two electric guitars, two electroacoustic guitars, bass, all voices by Jack Feerick; recorded October 2016. 

And Craig did not care for it. At all.

He just wasn’t big on God-talk in rock ‘n’ roll, he told me in an email. When I read this, my mouth opened — and then I closed it again. A man likes only what he likes, and I’m not the one to tell him he’s wrong — because he’s not wrong.

And so that was that. The song sat on my hard drive, and I never shared it with another living soul until just now.


After teardown, we lock up Bernunzio’s and head next door to Victoire for a celebratory beer. A ballgame is on the giant TVs — game seven of the World Series. We catch the final minutes, bering witness to the mother of all comebacks as the Cubs win it all. The room erupts in cheers; but the excitement is touched with a quiet astonishment. In the dark, in the warm, these seem the days of miracle and wonder.


November grinds on, and we continue recording when we can. Apart from the first night, we are never all in the studio at the same time; we gather in clusters of three and four, making fragments that will form a mosaic. Some nights are better than others. We gather to track backing vocals on the night after the election, and it is a welcome distraction from the feeling that our insides are falling down around our feet. Craig, Deanna, and I are joined by Debbie Stiker-Mann, Mike’s wife, who sang with me at Starry Nites during our surprise acoustic show. Deb is a studio novice, but she’s got a great ear and she’s game to try. (It doesn’t hurt that she’s simply a delightful person, either.)

The best part of it, for me, is getting to try a couple of variant approaches. For the simpler songs, we use a technique that Roy Thomas Baker used on Queen’s records; the four of us stand around one bidirectional mic, singing each part in unison (or octaves), one after the other, so we get a blend of timbres in each vocal line that results in a thick, creamy sound in the final mix. (This is amusing for me because I feel like I’m directing a choir again.) For Craig’s more harmonically complex songs, we take the Brian Wilson approach: Craig, Deanna, and I sing our three-part harmonies live in real time to three isolated microphones. The choral effect comes from multiple iterations of the same voice singing the same line, and there’s a New Wave-y, almost synthetic quality to it — a different sound to suit the feel of each song.

That night is probably the most fun I have during the whole process. Mostly, things just drag out; five recording dates turn to eight, and then I lose track. Late at night, everything gets unreal, listening to playbacks of take after take that all sound pretty much the same. Our arrangements are not so well-rehearsed as to be airtight; I sneak in some extra percussion bits, as well as a few acoustic guitar parts — a lively strum that gives Chuck’s “Offensive” an extra bounce, a touch of drop-D fingerpicking lilting through “Purple Jesus” — but sometimes I feel the songs are losing shape, homing in so tightly on the details that the outlines are growing blurry.

The guitars do a weekend session without me, but otherwise I am the first in and the last out for every date, driving home through deserted small-town back streets — Bloomfield, Lima, Avon, Mumford, Caledonia — at two or three o’clock in the morning. The dim glow of storefronts abandoned ‘til daylight; strange musics on overnight radio; sudden green flare of deer’s eyes at the edge of my headlamps. Joe is doing his best, but I’m well aware that I’m keeping him up late, too. This is no environment for a healthy, growing boy.

The lead vocals are the last thing scheduled, and because the studio availability is catch-as-catch-can, Deanna and I end up in the booth over a pair of frosty mornings. It’s a sorry state of affairs, trying to conjure the rock ‘n’ roll spirit at an hour when any real rock star would just be getting to bed.

But at last, on November 18 — a Friday morning, six days before Thanksgiving — I nail my final overdub. It’s just Joe and me. One last bang on the cowbell, and it’s over. Joe will do the mixes and get them to us before Christmas. We shake hands, and I’m gone.

The final drive is all barren trees and fields of yellow stubble. Even at noon, the little towns all seem deserted; but the way home seems unfamiliar in the daylight. I make a wrong turn in Caledonia and get pulled over by the cops. My inspection sticker is out of date, and all this time, I barely noticed.

The cop asks me if I’m lost. And in that moment, for the life of me, I’m not sure how to answer.

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