Jimmy Fallon and Pharrell Williams look back at some old clips of the ’80s R&B duo “Afro & Deziak.”
That Time Sun Ra Played On The Batman & Robin Novelty Record
In 1966, a novelty record of the best kind (well, in my life it was the greatest album I had as a kid for a few weeks) was a children’s album called Batman and Robin, essentially to ride the popularity wave of the Adam West Batman TV series. The album was mostly instrumental, which excited me to no end for some reason, but I just realized who played on it: While it was credited to “The Sensational Guitars of DAN & DALE,” the actual studio band was made up of members of Al Kooper’s Blues Project and Sun Ra’s Arkestra
Bruce Eder’s deeply-researched Allmusic overview:
No, Batman and Robin doesn’t match the importance of the Blues Project’s own official recordings, or anything that Sun Ra was doing officially, but what a chance to hear these guys kicking back for a half-hour’s anonymous blues jamming. Everything here, apart from the Neal Hefti “Batman Theme” is public domain blues built on some familiar material (including Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Bach), one cut, appropriately entitled “The Riddler’s Retreat,” quotes riffs and phrases from a half-dozen Beatles songs, and another, “The Bat Cave,” that’s this group’s answer to “Green Onions” (and a good answer, too). Along with Sun Ra, who dominates every passage he plays on, Steve Katz and Danny Kalb are the stars here, romping and stomping over everything as they weave around each other, while Gilmore, Allen, and Owens occasionally stepping to the fore, Blumenfeld makes his percussion sound downright tuneful in a few spots, and some anonymous female singers throw out a lyric or two on a pair of cuts, just as a distraction.
This year marks the 101st anniversary of Sun Ra’s birth. I’m going to play this album in his honour all day.
H/T to Dangerous Minds
Take away the music from The Beastie Boys’ Fight For Your Right (To Party) video and you’ll have this
Mario Wienerroither is back with another Musicless Musicvideos, where he removes all the music from the popular videos, and adds his own sound affects.
Here’s The Thing New Episode: Alec Baldwin and David Blaine Do Magic
David Blaine begins his visit to Here’s The Thing by pushing an ice pick through his hand. He tells host Alec Baldwin that he began training his brain to overcome pain at a young age. Blaine grew up in Brooklyn, an only child with a single mother. He spent many afternoons at the local library and he channeled his isolation and loneliness into an early fascination with magic. Today, Blaine is an acclaimed street magician and sleight of hand artist, and also performs staggering feats of endurance: He has balanced on a 100-foot pillar for 35 hours; hung in a transparent box for 44 days; held his breath for more than 17 minutes at a time. He calls it magic, but says his work is mostly about mental toughness. “Anything I do, anybody could do… It’s playing with that line of how far can you push yourself before you crack, live in front of an audience, that I’m intrigued by.”
Remember ‘The Toothbrush Family’ Short Films?
This little gem of a series should be well known – it was run on Captain Kangaroo & Commander Tom’s World, and on Toronto’s Global TV and Hamilton’s CHCH 11 almost every morning.
TED-Ed Video: Those songs that get stuck in your head
Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently perusing the magazine rack, when a song pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading the vegetables in time to the beat? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis explores earworms — a cognitive phenomenon that plagues over 90% of people at least once a week.
Doc Walker: “Writing Songs Have Kept Us Alive”
With over 20 Top 10 singles, Doc Walker is one of the most recognized Canadian country acts of the past two decades. The group has received multiple Canadian Country Music Awards, including Fan Choice, Group or Duo of the Year, CMT Video of the Year, Single of the Year, and Country Music Program or Special of the Year. In addition, Doc Walker has been nominated for several JUNO Awards for Country Album of the Year, including a win in 2009 for the album Beautiful Life.
Even with several mantelpieces worth of hardware to their credit, and a growing international profile that has resulted in three Australian tours, the band refuses to rest on past laurels. “After a while the tried and true becomes been there, done that, guitarist Dave Wasyliw says. “With every new album we evolve to some degree. I think it‟s exciting to go to work and not know what‟s going to happen next.” The band‟s seventh album, 16 & 1, released in 2011, was a bit of a sea change for the group musically, but still reflected the values that have made the band endearingly popular over time. Now, with Doc Walker’s eighth full length album, that includes the Top 10 hit “Put It Into Drive,” and the singles Shake It Like It‟s Saturday Night, and That’s How I Like It. “Our music speaks to the pride we have in our roots, and the gratitude we have to the fans,” says lead singer Chris Thorsteinson, “and that is the most important thing. At the end of the day, all we want to do is write a record that we love, and that we know our fans are going to love and want to sing along to.”
The 8th is their eighth studio album, released on October 21, 2014 by Open Road Recordings. The album includes the singles Put It into Drive, Shake It Like It’s Saturday Night and That’s How I Like It.
Eric: So, look, every country music fan knows about Doc Walker now. Here’s what surprised me going back into the history of the band. You guys released 11 singles in the beginning of your career, but it didn’t get a lot of play. Then, all of a sudden your next eight hit, then your last three, two of them broke into the top 20. When that happens, do you guys look at each other and say, we’ve figured it out?
Chris Thorsteinson: Never, you never know what’s going on in the industry or what’s going to hit or what’s not going to hit. I think, what we’ve tried to do throughout our career, and I know this sounds cliche but be true to what you are. The thing is, if you’re true to what you like to play and what you like to write, it’s easier to repeat that. Say you stumble upon a single that someone else wrote and it’s a huge hit, ok, I’ve got to go find more singles like that. We were lucky enough that the singles we were writing and even the singles that we were picking that we liked were connecting. It was an easy process for us to either pick another song or write another song that was sort of in the same ballpark as that. That is what, over the years, has kept us alive.
Eric: One thing I’ve loved about Doc Walker, you’ve never been shy of doing covers. When you figure out what kind of cover that you want to do, how deep into it do you get in terms of learning from what made that song really great to begin with?
Dave Wasyliw: The great thing about it is the songs that we do decide to cover, they’ve hit each band member in a certain way. So, it’s almost easy in that sense where I already feel something for that song. Each guy agrees that it’s going to be on the record so they feel something for it too.
Eric: Of all the songs Genesis did in their career, and I dearly, deeply love them, That’s All was the one I couldn’t get into, but I was amazed no group had covered it before.
Chris: [laughs] Our producer, Justin Niebank and his wife, they were driving through the TN hills, listening to music, they were listening to Doc Walker and they were listening to radio and that song came on and his wife said, this would be a great song for that Canadian band to record? Even Justin is a producer who has produced Taylor Swift, everybody, worked on all the Keith Urban records, just shocked by this observation going, well that’s a really good idea! Then Murray came up in the studio with that sort of guitar lick, that swampy guitar lick and it all made sense. The thing is, the hard part for me anyway is trying to be as respectful as you can to the original artists and the reasons why it was a hit yet still try to put your stamp on it without offending any huge Genesis fans, which we did, and it’s fine.
Eric: You did Bob Seger’s Get Out Of Denver.
Chris: Then Drivin’ With The Brakes On was a Del Amitri song.
Dave: We did Comes a Time, Neil Young.
Chris: Waylon Jennings. So we’ve done a lot, but like Dave said, all of them have a special place in each of our hearts.
Eric: You’re paying homage to those great artists, but you also pay tribute to you families on the single That’s How I Like It.
Chris: The reason we actually picked that song, we didn’t write the single but for me and being married now and having three kids.
Eric: How old?
Chris: Seven, four and three.
Eric: So you haven’t slept since 2008.
Chris: Ha! No, and Dave has three kids also.
Eric: Same ages?
Dave: No. I have a thirteen year old, four year old and a six month old.
Eric: You didn’t plan this out between band members correctly.
Chris: Tell me about it! The single “That’s How I Like It” is about love and relationships that really reflects the life that Dave and I lead right now with having kids. It’s a nice little love song to our families. My goal when I got married and had kids was to not write a song about my kids and my wife because so many artists do it. When you’re single and you look at and say, I’ll never do that! We’ve written songs like that but when you think oh my god we’re having another kid and you have two and it wasn’t something you expected and then you see this beautiful little girl. All of a sudden we find ourselves writing these songs but we wanted to do it in a very honest way.
Eric: What did you want to do on the new album that you might have not had the chance to do before?
Chris: We made vinyl, which is cool.
Eric: When you’re a band, there’s something about holding your own vinyl.
Chris: We set out to make a record when we were young, and we finally did!
Eric: The audiences keep getting bigger for you. Do you miss anything of the old days?
Chris: Oh yeah, and no.
Dave: I miss a lot less than you do, I think.
Chris: I don’t miss traveling in a suburban.
Dave: I don’t miss Mr. Noodles.
Chris: You know what I do miss? And we got to experience this, with the first time we went to Australia. We’ve had 4-5 records out in Canada, it was doing really well, we go to Australia and it was like going back to the start of our career again with these brand new fans. No one knew us. The one single we had out, If I Fall, it was the first time that this sort of Country has ever heard of this band and it was a real nice exciting moment for us, which was what I miss about the old days. We’re always fighting for it but it was nice to have that freshness again.
Catch Doc Walker on Tour
Apr 24 Southey Rink Southey, Canada
Apr 25 Rockglen Community Hall Rockglen, Canada
May 30 Grande Prairie Stompede 2015 Grande Prairie, Canada
Jun 19 Red River Ex Winnipeg, Canada
Jun 20 Beaumont Blues and Roots Festival Beaumont, Canada
Jun 25 Dauphin Country Festival Dauphin, Canada
Queen’s Brian May Teaches You How To Play Guitar
As an artist, Queen’s Brian May has done whatever he wanted to do – building a a home-built electric guitar, called the Red Special, becoming an astrophysicist, going out on tour with Adam Lambert and performing with Lady Gaga. As a teacher, he can teach you how to play guitar just like him. His independent spirit and genius, though, will have to come from within.
https://youtu.be/BuU0Xz-P_Jw
The Official Trailer For Amy Winehouse Doc Is Here
From Asif Kapadia, the director of Senna, comes the documentary film to see if you’re a music fan – Amy, The Story Of Amy Winehouse.
How Four Women Ruled the ’90′s and Changed Canadian Music
Eternal Cavalier Press is proud to release details from our third title, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90′s and Changed Canadian Music by celebrated Vancouver-based music journalist Andrea Warner, due April 2015.
We Oughta Know is equal parts music criticism, cultural analysis, and feminist coming-of-age memoir. In a series of thought-provoking, subversive, vulnerable and intelligent essays, Warner writes about the four best-selling Canadian artists in Canada: Alanis Morissette, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, and Shania Twain. Narrowing in on the five-year period between 1993 and 1997, Warner focuses on the music and legacies of the four artists, and their influences on her as a teenage girl.
The book will be presented as a series of essays with titles that include: Adventures in Sexism: Media, Music Critics, and Mucking up the Boys Club; Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill, and 1995: What it Feels Like for a Girl; and Of Feminist Heroes, Vapid Wonders, Madonnas, and “Whores.” Capturing the intriguing wit and detailed research skills Warner has displayed as a writer/associate producer at CBC Music, We Oughta Know is a powerful debut from one of the strongest young voices in music journalism that will appeal to fans of music, pop culture, feminist art, and engaging, razor-sharp criticism.
“To me, women have always been at the forefront of Canadian music. But I know that’s not the case for a lot of people,” Warner says. “I started to find all these weird statistics that proved it wasn’t just in my head, and I wanted to explore that. What has it meant to me, to music, and Canada? How have our perceptions of them been shaped — sometimes unfairly — by the media and our own biases? Dion, Twain, Morissette, and McLachlan are these hugely important artists, they really did change everything, but they don’t always get the respect they deserve. Sometimes even from me.”
Some aspects of We Oughta Know have already been examined in Warner’s pieces for CBC Music, but it’s the personal perspective that she adds to both her critical writing and her examination of feminism in Canadian music that will make We Oughta Know one of the most talked about music books of 2015.
We Oughta Know will be available at independent bookstores and online retailers across Canada.
Eternal Cavalier Press is proud to continue its look at Canadian music stories that often go untold with a commitment to furthering the conversation about Canadian music and developing independent music culture in Canada.
Andrea Warner has contributed to the CBC, Exclaim!, the Georgia Straight and the Globe and Mail. She is a Polaris Prize Jury member who served on the Grand Jury in 2013.
