Let's Go Surfing

mp3: The Gamblers - Moon Dawg!
mp3: The Gamblers - LSD-25

Today we have two early surf classics which I couldn't describe better than Billboard magazine did on 23 May 1960, under the title Moderate Sales Potential: Moon Dawg - pounding piano spotlighted on frantic r&r ditty; LSD-25 - effective guitar solo work on pounding r&r instrumental.

The Gamblers were a Los Angeles studio band consisting of session musicians, many of whom went on to bigger and better things. Moon Dawg is reasonably well known as it's been covered a bunch of times, but the b-side, LSD-25, brings this record its notoriety. You see it's the first musical reference to that particular substance, which became a major artistic inspiration and influence. But don't expect to get even an inkling of psychedelic rock in this tune, as apparently the title was just something the guitarist read in a magazine and thought sounded cool.

The Pied Piper Sings His Song

mp3: Billy Williams - The Pied Piper

This is one of those tunes that, upon first listen, I just knew I had to have. Given the subject matter it's appropriately infectious, especially the vocal purring. Such a fun song. It was written by either Eddie Cochran or Lee Denson, who released it late in 1956 on the Vik label. Billy Williams' version came out soon after on Coral. Now believe me, I don't intentionally try and relate everything back to Elvis, it just seems to happen, but it's Denson who taught him to play guitar when he was just a boy growing up in Memphis, Tennessee. Now you wouldn't have wanted me to keep that all to myself, would you? So enjoy this great version of The Pied Piper and if anyone has the Lee Denson rockabilly original, I'd love to hear it.

Bee-Millennium Tension

mp3: Elvis Presley - I Got Stung

Bees are the best – buzzing around, pollinating crops, making honey, stinging things – what more could you want from an insect? I'm contemplating turning this blog into one that specialises in bee songs. I wonder how them bees are going with that CCD thing. Right now the whole issue seems to be overshadowed by a somewhat larger problem to do with carbon and the climate. Can someone who has been around for a while tell me, has the western world always been on the very brink of disaster? I can only remember the end of the cold war when we were just a button push away from nuclear annihilation. I don’t recall a massive end-is-nigh vibe in the early 1990s, unless you paid credence to alien conspiracy theories. But later on came Y2K, threatening to mess with everyone's computers and drop planes from the sky. Pre-millennium tensions were realised early in the next decade when some planes did "drop" from the sky – I think we’re still on at least an amber alert because of that. Recently, there's been pig flu, which I definitely thought would make medical face masks The Sartorialist’s trending look this winter. And before the cold war there were real wars, big ones – so I think I’ve answered the question myself. Anyway, at least we have Elvis. Here he is singing, metaphorically, about a time a bee stung him.

A Evil Bumble Bee

mp3: Lavern Baker - Bumble Bee

This is my new favourite find, the complete embodiment of what I'm looking for in a 45rpm record. Kooky beat, backing vocals, upbeat tune, tough bluesy lyrics, about bumble bees; it really ticks all the boxes. I'm not overly familiar with Lavern Baker but I did notice that this track's arranged by Jesse Stone, someone I was recently introduced to through an incredible version of Crawfish. Turns out he wrote Shake, Rattle and Roll amongst many other achievements. But I'll try not to get sidetracked because all this post needs to be concerned with is Lavern Baker's absolutely incredible 1960 release about a bumble bee, a evil bumble bee.

All Along The Motorway

mp3: Savage Grace - (All Along The) Watchtower

No prizes for guessing why, but there's a glut of 'album of the decade' lists currently bopping around the internet. A record that would have made it into these type lists of last decade is surely DJ Shadow's Endtroducing. Although now sounding dated in parts, anyone who was following new music will concur that, at the time, it was like nothing else. Testament to which is the fact that it took so long for others -- the likes of RJD2, The Avalanches and J Dilla -- to come up with something comparable using similar techniques. To create Endtroducing, Shadow used only samples. Samples he dug real deep to find. While some hip-hoppers were still recycling James Brown beats, Shadow was excavating weird European psych and cutting up Metallica.

A clever DJ has complied together, with some subtle mixing, a number of the more obscure tunes that Shadow has sampled over the years. It was during listening to one of these ace mixes that I first laid my ears upon today's offering. Rockers from Detroit, Savage Grace, do a splendidly excessive and spirited version of All Along The Watchtower. It's just the final scream that was sampled; not on Endtroducing but rather its follow up, The Private Press. You can examine the results on YouTube.

Diddify II

Here's another Spotify playlist for all those lucky folk in spotifiable countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain); just to prove that I don't listen scratchy ol' 45s all of the time.

Spotify Playlist: 000

More Louder

mp3: The Nashville Teens - Tobacco Road
mp3: The Nashville Teens - All Along The Watchtower

They weren't from Nashville, nor were they teens; at least not when these two tunes were recorded. Like Torture from the previous post, Tobacco Road was written by John D. Loudermilk. It was released in 1964 and became a reasonable sized hit for The Nashville Teens in both the UK and US. Interestingly, it apparently features the sizzling hot guitar of session gun for hire, Jimmy Page; as witnessed in the searing opening. All Along The Watchtower was a much later release, from 1968, but this particular record would have only been in the shops from 1969 when Decca reissued them together for some reason.