I just got this the other day and it's pretty new, so for one post only, the blog is in danger of becoming just another review site. I won't talk too much about that song then, except to make the obligatory note that it's an Amy Winehouse cover and to say that I keep listening to it over and over again. That's not my video up there and not me larking about with a puppet neither.
Wanda Jackson though is amazing - I'm a big fan. She was (indeed, remains!) a rockabilly star in the fifties, but she didn't want to sing songs about how dreamy her man was.* There weren't really any rockabilly songs about strong women (not a term I like, but I mean it literally - the you-mess-with-her-and-she'll-destroy-you sort of strong) so she went and wrote her own. Here's one from 1958(!)
Skip forward 50 years now. This 7 inch was put out by Jack White (of White Stripes fame) on his Third Man record label, and he plays guitar on the b-side. I want you to hold on to what I said about Wanda, for a paragraph or so while I talk about Jack White, who seems to be a very busy man these days. About a year ago he debuted Dead Weather, another musical project with himself on drums, sundry Raconteurs on rhythm and whatnot, and Alison Mossheart from The Kills on vocals. At the same time he also opened up his new recording studio-cum-business plan. Third Man has rehearsal space, a recording studio and a little shop to sell the products of the former two - primarily 45s. They've released a series of them in uniform designed sleeves - artist photographed on a blue background, as above (possibly done on-site - he has a darkroom in there too) and very nice they are too, I have a couple of them. White acts as producer on them and sometimes plays on them. It's easy to see the advantages - it gives him control, it makes the recording process cheaper, and it allows him to record whoever he wants.
It's a great thing he's doing, but Jack White's New Business Idea is essentially Sam Phillips's Old Business Idea. Sun Records would record anyone who came along in essentially the same way I've outlined above, with the exception of the playing - Phillips was not a musician. The ethos and mechanics of it was essentially the same. Sun famously launched the careers of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, so I guess Phillips was doing something right.
Wanda Jackson never recorded for Sun, but her boyfriend did. She dated Elvis around 1955-56, and he was signed to Sun until 1955. The dates don't quite marry up though, sadly from the point of view of this post, the two don't coincide.
Third Man and Wanda Jackson are a good match though, that's my point.
That this set-up has come round again doesn't really surprise me, with all the advantages I outlined above plus the added ease of distribution that Sam Phillips couldn't take advantage of - you don't have to go to Memphis, you can buy the records from your divan (or wherever you browse the internet from.) In view of the mess the major labels seem to be in (and when I say "the major labels," I really mean EMI, (which of course incorporates Capitol Records, Virgin Records, Apple Records, Blue Note, Mute, Harvest, Heavenly, Parlophone, Regal Zonophone and a bunch less well-known) who are owned by a private equity firm and millions of pounds in the red. When it was recently announced they might sell off Abbey Road**, tellingly, it was believed. That's how messed up they are, currently) - it looks like this sort of set up, replicated to similar scale all over the world, might be a valuable model for the continuation of a facet of "the music industry" - ie, getting recorded music to consumers- which is odd, but fine with me.
*didn't want to sing those songs exclusively. I know there are songs in her catalogue like Mean Mean Man, but that was her choice, that's the point, she could and did choose what to sing.
**they've already closed Olympic studios, which were stuffed to the gills with heritage and equipment, but no real faff was made over that because some scousers never named an album after it. Sad, isn't it?
