Sunday, May 15, 2011
On Caitlin's Rose's Own Side Now
Caitlin Rose: Own Side Now
by Wayne Robins
I've been listening to Caitlin Rose for nearly two months now, and have not been quite ready to let go. The problem is a benevolent one, as far as the music writing racket goes: I am used to restraining my enthusiasms, hedging my endorsements. It's got to do with the trained skepticism that is both innate and highly developed: Can this music really be this good? Especially considering Rose's her age. She is 23; I am a baby boomer, some of whose members of my class of 1949 now have grandchildren Caitlin's age. I have daughters both slightly older and a bit younger than Rose, and when it comes to singer-songwriters and their view of life, I trust almost no one under 30.
And yet Caitlin Rose earns, and deserves that trust on "Own Side Now," her first fill album. It was released last summer in the U.K., and just in March in the United States. It follows the highly promising EP debut "Dead Flowers" two years ago, highlighted by her true and daring reading of the Rolling Stones' greatest contribution to the Gram Parsons strain of defiantly doomed country rock.
But in the first moments, I discern her brilliance as both a singer and interpreter of her own songs. One is the double tracked vocals that give luster to the opening song, "Learnin' to Ride," in the way that the early practitioners of the technique—Patti Page, Mary Ford, and the early Beatles—might have done it. In this spot and others on the album, it makes Rose sound like she's harmonizing with a sibling: she sounds like the Everly Brothers, if the Everly Brothers were a single person, and that person was a 23-year-old woman.
There is also something in the phrasing (vocal styling) and the phrasing (word choices) that reminds me of Guy Clark, my touchstone for twangy singer-songwriter greatness. She's got a similar nonchalant shrug in the voice, and she's already showing the required storytelling skill, the honesty and clarity of the lyrics, and the devotion to craft that Clark has. In fact, I'll go a step farther and say that there are times when Rose's commitment to craft is as natural and fastidious as, say Paul Simon.
Rose grew up in Nashville, music in the air and in her blood: dad is musician Johnny Rose, who has been working in the business side of the music as an executive at DreamWorks, Capitol, and now Orbison Music Productions. He was also a road warrior whose most recent band is Out of State Plates. (Johnny plays some mandolin on the album.) Caitlin's mom, Liz Rose, is one of Nashville's most esteemed songwriters whose most current and madly successful partnership is with another young lady who goes by the name Taylor Swift.
Caitlin Rose is two years older than Swift, but seems half a generation older. Swift appears to be the kind of young person who really enjoys living in the suburbs and going to the mall. Rose is the young woman who flees suburbia for Williamsburg or Greenpoint, where she can drink too much, smoke herself silly, and live the artist's life. (She has a house now in boho East Nashville.) The album was produced by Rose with Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Andrew Bird) and Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle). She's shared stages with a staggering range of artists, including Earle, Deer Tick and Phosphorescent. As far as social groupings go, this seems as right a place as any to place Rose: Phosphorescent is led by Matthew Houck, who keeps his Alabama roots intact in Brooklyn and who is a musical kindred spirit pretty close to Caitlin's.
"New York City" has the Guy Clark mojo working in the phrase, "New York's a good time to let go": not a place, not a town, but a "time." There's a contrast between the too slow South and the too-fast city, underscored by play between a steel guitar riff and gritty electric guitar solo that is mediated by some rolling piano about halfway between country and rock. Rose sings about the temptations available to a worldly but reckless young woman just barely old enough to drink with an inclination to make the best—or the worst—of it. And she's wise enough to know that when she lets the flip of a coin determine whether she sleeps with a guy she just met or not, that sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart.
The song "Own Side" may be the postmodern young woman's affectionate rebuke to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." Yeah, its love's illusions she recalls, too. But with tenderness and a pocketful of payback—Rose declares: "I'm goin' out on the town, said I'm tired of chasin' you down/It's not my right to always push you around." The mingling of defiance and melancholy creates a distinctive tone. She wears that signature emotional mix like a tattoo on the next song, "For the Rabbits," with strings arranged by Jordan Lehning (who also wrote the song "Things Change" with Rose). The tune has an edgy name but the stylistic rigor 1950s jukebox torch song. It's got one of Rose's best vocal performances, building towards a grand, if understated finish. There have been many songs about relationships that don't work, but are too comfortable to leave. But few connect as powerfully as Rose does in the piercing and precise chorus, in which the invitation to "fall back into routine disaster" is inevitable as it is irresistible.
The inability to completely let go is also the subject of Rose's most brilliant rocker, "Shanghai Cigarettes." The riff, the bounce, the energy, the fuzz guitar, the handclap rhythm, the punchy harmony from Rayland Baxter and the nimble lyrics stick in the head and is enough to keep your spirit afloat for a month. She surrenders to her inner rock imp in her in the crowing finale, as she breaks through her controlled restraint and just tears through the message of the song, "This will never be right and I will never let go!"
The final two songs are consistent with Rose's vulnerable but powerful persona. Both have elements of revenge: "Sinful Wishing Well" is a musical poison pen letter that all but places a curse on the object of her disaffection. "Comin' Up" is 1950s honky tonk in which she vows to get and stay inside the head of the one who done her wrong, to be "the echo you can never find": Retribution by the power of memory.
How good are these songs? There is a knockout cover of an excellent Stevie Nicks song, "Things Change," first done by Fleetwood Mac on their "Mirage" album. The first few times through the album, you hardly notice it, and you don't pick it out as a cover: it's not insignificant that even a song by a writer-performer as renowned as Nicks is overshadowed by the Caitlin Rose songs that surround it.
Google News
by Wayne Robins
I've been listening to Caitlin Rose for nearly two months now, and have not been quite ready to let go. The problem is a benevolent one, as far as the music writing racket goes: I am used to restraining my enthusiasms, hedging my endorsements. It's got to do with the trained skepticism that is both innate and highly developed: Can this music really be this good? Especially considering Rose's her age. She is 23; I am a baby boomer, some of whose members of my class of 1949 now have grandchildren Caitlin's age. I have daughters both slightly older and a bit younger than Rose, and when it comes to singer-songwriters and their view of life, I trust almost no one under 30.
And yet Caitlin Rose earns, and deserves that trust on "Own Side Now," her first fill album. It was released last summer in the U.K., and just in March in the United States. It follows the highly promising EP debut "Dead Flowers" two years ago, highlighted by her true and daring reading of the Rolling Stones' greatest contribution to the Gram Parsons strain of defiantly doomed country rock.
But in the first moments, I discern her brilliance as both a singer and interpreter of her own songs. One is the double tracked vocals that give luster to the opening song, "Learnin' to Ride," in the way that the early practitioners of the technique—Patti Page, Mary Ford, and the early Beatles—might have done it. In this spot and others on the album, it makes Rose sound like she's harmonizing with a sibling: she sounds like the Everly Brothers, if the Everly Brothers were a single person, and that person was a 23-year-old woman.
There is also something in the phrasing (vocal styling) and the phrasing (word choices) that reminds me of Guy Clark, my touchstone for twangy singer-songwriter greatness. She's got a similar nonchalant shrug in the voice, and she's already showing the required storytelling skill, the honesty and clarity of the lyrics, and the devotion to craft that Clark has. In fact, I'll go a step farther and say that there are times when Rose's commitment to craft is as natural and fastidious as, say Paul Simon.
Rose grew up in Nashville, music in the air and in her blood: dad is musician Johnny Rose, who has been working in the business side of the music as an executive at DreamWorks, Capitol, and now Orbison Music Productions. He was also a road warrior whose most recent band is Out of State Plates. (Johnny plays some mandolin on the album.) Caitlin's mom, Liz Rose, is one of Nashville's most esteemed songwriters whose most current and madly successful partnership is with another young lady who goes by the name Taylor Swift.
Caitlin Rose is two years older than Swift, but seems half a generation older. Swift appears to be the kind of young person who really enjoys living in the suburbs and going to the mall. Rose is the young woman who flees suburbia for Williamsburg or Greenpoint, where she can drink too much, smoke herself silly, and live the artist's life. (She has a house now in boho East Nashville.) The album was produced by Rose with Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Andrew Bird) and Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle). She's shared stages with a staggering range of artists, including Earle, Deer Tick and Phosphorescent. As far as social groupings go, this seems as right a place as any to place Rose: Phosphorescent is led by Matthew Houck, who keeps his Alabama roots intact in Brooklyn and who is a musical kindred spirit pretty close to Caitlin's.
"New York City" has the Guy Clark mojo working in the phrase, "New York's a good time to let go": not a place, not a town, but a "time." There's a contrast between the too slow South and the too-fast city, underscored by play between a steel guitar riff and gritty electric guitar solo that is mediated by some rolling piano about halfway between country and rock. Rose sings about the temptations available to a worldly but reckless young woman just barely old enough to drink with an inclination to make the best—or the worst—of it. And she's wise enough to know that when she lets the flip of a coin determine whether she sleeps with a guy she just met or not, that sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart.
The song "Own Side" may be the postmodern young woman's affectionate rebuke to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." Yeah, its love's illusions she recalls, too. But with tenderness and a pocketful of payback—Rose declares: "I'm goin' out on the town, said I'm tired of chasin' you down/It's not my right to always push you around." The mingling of defiance and melancholy creates a distinctive tone. She wears that signature emotional mix like a tattoo on the next song, "For the Rabbits," with strings arranged by Jordan Lehning (who also wrote the song "Things Change" with Rose). The tune has an edgy name but the stylistic rigor 1950s jukebox torch song. It's got one of Rose's best vocal performances, building towards a grand, if understated finish. There have been many songs about relationships that don't work, but are too comfortable to leave. But few connect as powerfully as Rose does in the piercing and precise chorus, in which the invitation to "fall back into routine disaster" is inevitable as it is irresistible.
The inability to completely let go is also the subject of Rose's most brilliant rocker, "Shanghai Cigarettes." The riff, the bounce, the energy, the fuzz guitar, the handclap rhythm, the punchy harmony from Rayland Baxter and the nimble lyrics stick in the head and is enough to keep your spirit afloat for a month. She surrenders to her inner rock imp in her in the crowing finale, as she breaks through her controlled restraint and just tears through the message of the song, "This will never be right and I will never let go!"
The final two songs are consistent with Rose's vulnerable but powerful persona. Both have elements of revenge: "Sinful Wishing Well" is a musical poison pen letter that all but places a curse on the object of her disaffection. "Comin' Up" is 1950s honky tonk in which she vows to get and stay inside the head of the one who done her wrong, to be "the echo you can never find": Retribution by the power of memory.
How good are these songs? There is a knockout cover of an excellent Stevie Nicks song, "Things Change," first done by Fleetwood Mac on their "Mirage" album. The first few times through the album, you hardly notice it, and you don't pick it out as a cover: it's not insignificant that even a song by a writer-performer as renowned as Nicks is overshadowed by the Caitlin Rose songs that surround it.
Google News
Labels: Americana, Caitlin Rose, country rock, Gram Parsons, Nashville, Rolling Stones, Stevie Nicks
Saturday, March 20, 2010
“T.A.M.I. SHOW” BATTLE OF THE BANDS: JAMES BROWN VS. THE ROLLING STONES
by Wayne Robins
On “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released on DVD March 23 by
Shout Factory, the Motown acts were exquisite as expected, not yet overchoreographed into entertaining but limiting cliché. Marvin Gaye exuded “Pride and Joy,” the Supremes’ hit all their spots perfectly. Yet it was Smokey Robinson’s uncharacteristically wild performance that led the Detroit contingent.
The whole ensemble was revealed behind a balloon barricade while Lesley Gore sang “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” leading some to conclude that it was the song itself that produced such uproarious applause. It looks to me like Lesley was being upstaged by the ensemble cast of hand-clappers behind her—the Beach Boys in their matching stripes, the suave Gaye, an irrepressibly grinning duckwalking Chuck Berry, and even a slightly befuddled looking Smokey Robinson. Clap? Yeah, OK.
Nevertheless, the primly dressed Lesley Gore signifies like a sleeper cell for a future feminist insurrection. Her songs and stoic character presented independence, disdain (“It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to”), and defiance (“you don’t own me”) that saved tens of millions of suburban teenage girls—in 1964 still on the path to subservience in most sectors of American life—from a Stepford Wives future. The Gore Effect was a delayed one: anywhere from 3 to 5 years after initial viewing, girls engaged or going steady with presumptuous, entitled young guys named Chip, Skip, Larry and Barry woke up one morning, burned their bras, tossed back their going steady baubles and engagement rings and declared that from now on, Chip, Skip, Larry and Barry could go play with themselves.
And to think James Brown had to follow that! But Brown, like everyone else in the house, was unaware that the gods had already thrown a monkey into the future—partly delivered by Smokey and the Miracles’ ridiculously awesome extended, spontaneous cultural ju-jitsu of “Mickey’s Monkey.”
Symptom of “Mickey’s Monkey” syndrome: tens of thousands of young men—white, black, Latino, suburban, urban, even farmboys and farmhands—heard the song on the radio, and the next day walked around goofy singing “lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye! Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!,” not realizing they had invoked an ancient African incantation that would also detonate three to five years later. It was then variously defined as the following: You know dad, I really think I’m gonna pass on the grad school thing, but I really think it’s more important to investigate some Native American peyote rituals out west, Arizona or Big Sur somewhere. “Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye! Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!” Others thought these syllables meant: “Hell no, we won’t go?,” while others subconsciously knew—they just knew— they were meant to sit quietly in dark rooms lit by black light and fluorescent posters burning sandalwood and smoking a once-obscure plant called cannabis sativa and listening to something called The Doors.
Back to 1964: Now comes James Brown on to the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, looking like dancing black granite sculpted by Michaelangelo, his spectacular square jaw and stunning cheekbones studied carefully by at least two dozen future Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons in the audience. Future neurologists and gastroenterologists also paid close attention: A collection of seizures, wails and grunts emanated from Brown, the only singer in the bunch who carried his own band with him, the Famous Flames, sounding like the sacking of Troy conducted with militant efficiency and discipline. Brown wiggled and wriggled through “Out of Sight,” and then moaned that he was a “Pris-oner…pris-oner of love.” To prove it, he falls to his knees and begs: “Please. Please. Please.” Not “Please Please Me,” as those happy young Beatles were singing somewhere, but an excruciating, agonizing, pitiless, please, please, please…please don’t go.
And so he didn’t. The kids didn’t know the routine yet: This was not the Apollo Theater. The band vamps, James Brown falls to his knees, an aide puts a cape over his shoulders, the more sensitive in the audience wonder if an ambulance should be called…then Brown throws down the cape, spins back to the microphone and continues. The scene repeats, and repeats, the tension rising and subsiding and increasing with each cycle. It goes on for…a long time. The minutes don’t matter—there were a lot of them. But no, the conjurers trick here is that while he is on the stage at the crest of “Please Please Please,” time stops. It just stops. Seconds, hours, days later, whenever the spell is over and he’s really left the stage, it is the viewer that is almost too drained to continue anything resembling a normal routine.
You think Mick Jagger was nervous backstage? Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones were terrified. Those at the tapings—or at least processors of the legend, you can’t trust anyone these days—say there was a rather long delay before they took the stage. Let the electrons stop pinballing.
When they finally arrive, they look like boys. But the pieces fit. If you ever wondered what the Rolling Stones were like with Brian Jones on guitar, along with Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, this is the place to see it. Of course, the Stones were never soloists, and especially not with this material: At the time, they were still largely a R&B club band: Their set contained Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” Irma Thomas’ “Time is On My Side” and Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now.” And yet it was a watershed moment for the Stones: they found they had enough skill to address adversity, and enough guts to raise their stagecraft to the level it needed to follow James Brown. The way they did it was to also plead with the audience. But while James Brown put on a show, a performance, Jagger found he had the ability to reach individuals, staring into the eyes of those in the crowd and establishing intimacy in the moment.
A different dampness pervaded: Not James Brown’s sweat, but something emanating from the young ladies startled and thrilled by Jagger’s leer, which wasn’t as confident as it would become. As the triumph is savored to the jam of “I’m Alright” (permutating into the Isley Brothers “Shout”), Brian Jones looks delighted. After all, the Stones were his band as much as Jagger’s. Jones would be dead in five years, drowned in his own swimming pool, kicked out of the band, having taken too many drugs for even the Rolling Stones to tolerate. (Imagine that.) On this day in 1964, the future looked unlimited.
And why wouldn’t it? Because what really sinks in about these performances is that neither the Rolling Stones, nor James Brown (nor the Beach Boys, nor Marvin Gaye, nor the Supremes for that matter) had peaked. The Stones hadn’t even really gotten beyond nursery school as songwriters: “Off the Hook,” the only real original of their “T.A.M.I.” set showed promise. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “The Last Time,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” the 1965 hits that would make them superstars, were not yet in their repertory because Jagger and Richards hadn’t written them yet. Soon they would rival Leiber and Stoller as the second greatest songwriting team of the rock era (after Lennon and McCartney), but at “The T.A.M.I. Show,” they were prodigious students.
Likewise, savvy, studious professional that he was, James Brown probably watched the Rolling Stones come close to matching him after one of the great performances of his career, and said, I’m never letting That happen again.
So the next year he invented funk.
He picked up the tempo, tricked up the rhythm, punched up and pulled in the horns. That next year, 1965, James Brown had “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and “I Got You” and kept rolling on a winning streak that changed the future of music: funk. Rap. Brown until the day he died he was merely unstoppable.
Who knows what secrets were traded backstage at “The T.A.M.I. Show”? But there had to be a reason that the next year, 1965 was the arguably the greatest year in pop music history. That year Bob Dylan was prepared to plug in to the rock’n’roll priesthood, Otis Redding and southern soul would join Motown on America’s radios and dance floors, that the Beach Boys, or at least Brian Wilson, would lock up his surf board and explore more intimate oceans. All of which would make the Beatles say: "We've got to top them all again," which they more or less did with "Rubber Soul." “The T.A.M.I. Show,” so seemingly innocuous at the time, was both the end of the world as we knew it, and the dawning of a new era. It's really something to see: Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!
Google News
On “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released on DVD March 23 by
Shout Factory, the Motown acts were exquisite as expected, not yet overchoreographed into entertaining but limiting cliché. Marvin Gaye exuded “Pride and Joy,” the Supremes’ hit all their spots perfectly. Yet it was Smokey Robinson’s uncharacteristically wild performance that led the Detroit contingent.
The whole ensemble was revealed behind a balloon barricade while Lesley Gore sang “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” leading some to conclude that it was the song itself that produced such uproarious applause. It looks to me like Lesley was being upstaged by the ensemble cast of hand-clappers behind her—the Beach Boys in their matching stripes, the suave Gaye, an irrepressibly grinning duckwalking Chuck Berry, and even a slightly befuddled looking Smokey Robinson. Clap? Yeah, OK.
Nevertheless, the primly dressed Lesley Gore signifies like a sleeper cell for a future feminist insurrection. Her songs and stoic character presented independence, disdain (“It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to”), and defiance (“you don’t own me”) that saved tens of millions of suburban teenage girls—in 1964 still on the path to subservience in most sectors of American life—from a Stepford Wives future. The Gore Effect was a delayed one: anywhere from 3 to 5 years after initial viewing, girls engaged or going steady with presumptuous, entitled young guys named Chip, Skip, Larry and Barry woke up one morning, burned their bras, tossed back their going steady baubles and engagement rings and declared that from now on, Chip, Skip, Larry and Barry could go play with themselves.
And to think James Brown had to follow that! But Brown, like everyone else in the house, was unaware that the gods had already thrown a monkey into the future—partly delivered by Smokey and the Miracles’ ridiculously awesome extended, spontaneous cultural ju-jitsu of “Mickey’s Monkey.”
Symptom of “Mickey’s Monkey” syndrome: tens of thousands of young men—white, black, Latino, suburban, urban, even farmboys and farmhands—heard the song on the radio, and the next day walked around goofy singing “lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye! Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!,” not realizing they had invoked an ancient African incantation that would also detonate three to five years later. It was then variously defined as the following: You know dad, I really think I’m gonna pass on the grad school thing, but I really think it’s more important to investigate some Native American peyote rituals out west, Arizona or Big Sur somewhere. “Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye! Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!” Others thought these syllables meant: “Hell no, we won’t go?,” while others subconsciously knew—they just knew— they were meant to sit quietly in dark rooms lit by black light and fluorescent posters burning sandalwood and smoking a once-obscure plant called cannabis sativa and listening to something called The Doors.
Back to 1964: Now comes James Brown on to the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, looking like dancing black granite sculpted by Michaelangelo, his spectacular square jaw and stunning cheekbones studied carefully by at least two dozen future Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons in the audience. Future neurologists and gastroenterologists also paid close attention: A collection of seizures, wails and grunts emanated from Brown, the only singer in the bunch who carried his own band with him, the Famous Flames, sounding like the sacking of Troy conducted with militant efficiency and discipline. Brown wiggled and wriggled through “Out of Sight,” and then moaned that he was a “Pris-oner…pris-oner of love.” To prove it, he falls to his knees and begs: “Please. Please. Please.” Not “Please Please Me,” as those happy young Beatles were singing somewhere, but an excruciating, agonizing, pitiless, please, please, please…please don’t go.
And so he didn’t. The kids didn’t know the routine yet: This was not the Apollo Theater. The band vamps, James Brown falls to his knees, an aide puts a cape over his shoulders, the more sensitive in the audience wonder if an ambulance should be called…then Brown throws down the cape, spins back to the microphone and continues. The scene repeats, and repeats, the tension rising and subsiding and increasing with each cycle. It goes on for…a long time. The minutes don’t matter—there were a lot of them. But no, the conjurers trick here is that while he is on the stage at the crest of “Please Please Please,” time stops. It just stops. Seconds, hours, days later, whenever the spell is over and he’s really left the stage, it is the viewer that is almost too drained to continue anything resembling a normal routine.
You think Mick Jagger was nervous backstage? Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones were terrified. Those at the tapings—or at least processors of the legend, you can’t trust anyone these days—say there was a rather long delay before they took the stage. Let the electrons stop pinballing.
When they finally arrive, they look like boys. But the pieces fit. If you ever wondered what the Rolling Stones were like with Brian Jones on guitar, along with Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, this is the place to see it. Of course, the Stones were never soloists, and especially not with this material: At the time, they were still largely a R&B club band: Their set contained Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” Irma Thomas’ “Time is On My Side” and Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now.” And yet it was a watershed moment for the Stones: they found they had enough skill to address adversity, and enough guts to raise their stagecraft to the level it needed to follow James Brown. The way they did it was to also plead with the audience. But while James Brown put on a show, a performance, Jagger found he had the ability to reach individuals, staring into the eyes of those in the crowd and establishing intimacy in the moment.
A different dampness pervaded: Not James Brown’s sweat, but something emanating from the young ladies startled and thrilled by Jagger’s leer, which wasn’t as confident as it would become. As the triumph is savored to the jam of “I’m Alright” (permutating into the Isley Brothers “Shout”), Brian Jones looks delighted. After all, the Stones were his band as much as Jagger’s. Jones would be dead in five years, drowned in his own swimming pool, kicked out of the band, having taken too many drugs for even the Rolling Stones to tolerate. (Imagine that.) On this day in 1964, the future looked unlimited.
And why wouldn’t it? Because what really sinks in about these performances is that neither the Rolling Stones, nor James Brown (nor the Beach Boys, nor Marvin Gaye, nor the Supremes for that matter) had peaked. The Stones hadn’t even really gotten beyond nursery school as songwriters: “Off the Hook,” the only real original of their “T.A.M.I.” set showed promise. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “The Last Time,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” the 1965 hits that would make them superstars, were not yet in their repertory because Jagger and Richards hadn’t written them yet. Soon they would rival Leiber and Stoller as the second greatest songwriting team of the rock era (after Lennon and McCartney), but at “The T.A.M.I. Show,” they were prodigious students.
Likewise, savvy, studious professional that he was, James Brown probably watched the Rolling Stones come close to matching him after one of the great performances of his career, and said, I’m never letting That happen again.
So the next year he invented funk.
He picked up the tempo, tricked up the rhythm, punched up and pulled in the horns. That next year, 1965, James Brown had “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and “I Got You” and kept rolling on a winning streak that changed the future of music: funk. Rap. Brown until the day he died he was merely unstoppable.
Who knows what secrets were traded backstage at “The T.A.M.I. Show”? But there had to be a reason that the next year, 1965 was the arguably the greatest year in pop music history. That year Bob Dylan was prepared to plug in to the rock’n’roll priesthood, Otis Redding and southern soul would join Motown on America’s radios and dance floors, that the Beach Boys, or at least Brian Wilson, would lock up his surf board and explore more intimate oceans. All of which would make the Beatles say: "We've got to top them all again," which they more or less did with "Rubber Soul." “The T.A.M.I. Show,” so seemingly innocuous at the time, was both the end of the world as we knew it, and the dawning of a new era. It's really something to see: Lum-dee-lum-dee-li-eye!
Google News
Labels: A Brief History of Rock, feminism, James Brown, Lesley Gore, rock music, Rolling Stones, surf music
