Record #15: "You Know I'm No Good" by Wanda Jackson

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?

Record #14 : "The Laughing Policeman" by Charles Penrose

This one's a recent acquisition for me, found in a Morningside charity shop for a paltry amount of money. This is a very old song (more on which later), but this record itself is early-to-mid sixties, by the looks of it, packaged up with George Formby's "The Window Cleaner" and Stanley Holloway's recording of "The Lion and Albert" (which, incidentally, was read brilliantly by Jarvis Cocker a few years ago) Both of these date from the mid-thirties, making this a sort of pre-war jolly singalong ep. The Laughing Policeman was recorded a decade earlier, but still fits the era, the last days of the music hall. Thing is, it's not actually Mr Penrose's song at all, although he took credit and money for it. It's an homage to/ rip off of (delete as applicable) George W. Johnson's 1890s hit "The Laughing Song" which thanks to the wonders of the internetron you can listen to here (there's a few different versions there because wax cylinders had to be recorded individually back then, meaning he had to sing it again and again and again to record a large number of copies.) He was marketed as The Laughing Darkie (hey, at least they acknowledged he was black!) because of his powerful, musical laugh - the very thing copied by Penrose a few short years later. However, they're both long dead and buried now, and every piece like this helps redress the baance a tiny bit.
I've chosen to focus on this song, because it's the only one of the three I wasn't familiar with, although I'd heard of it, if you see what I mean - the laugh was used recently in an advert for woodstain f'r'instance. It's been a popular children's song for decades and it chills me to the bone.
In the age we live in of course the author is dead, pop culture is king and no excuses are needed for anachronistic unlikely interpretations but even were this not the case I do not think much effort is required to subvert this ditty into a terrifying vision of a totalitarian society where coppers arrest you and say things like
"He said "I must arrest you!"
He didn't know what for.
And then he started laughing
Until he cracked his jaw."

My better half, upon hearing the song, which she was previously familiar with, gave it some thought and suggested that the eponymous rozzer was a gentleman who struggled with his mental health, but I hardly feel that that ameliorates the situation any. However it was a popular request on bbc children's radio for years and years, meaning that for many people it's closely related to childhood, innocence and the trustworthy Reithian wireless.
In which case, what the blazes is it doing paired up with When I'm Cleaning Windows? I know it's tame stuff, but it was banned by the bbc for years (not that that was uncommon before the war, or indeed after it - mentioning God was enough, so this was definitely out. Max Miller was banned for years in the fifties after telling a joke on the BBC, the punchline of which was "I didn't know weather to block her passage or toss myself off." He must) have had an inkling that wouldn't go down too well)
The Formby song is juvenile, certainly, but it's not a children's song the way the other two are. Maybe the record company were feeling giddy after the Chatterley ban was lifted or something, or maybe they just had a bit of extra space on one side, I don't know.
I still feel terribly disquieted by this song though, I think because I don't have any subconscious associations for me, it carries no cultural baggage, it's just a man laughing...
...while he bangs people up.

Record #13 : "Eri Un'Abitudine" by John Foster

An odd one, this.
It's an Italian cover of "Can't Get Used to Losing You," which was a big hit for Andy Williams in 1963. As far as I can tell, this is from the same year, cashing in on the Italian language market, and seems to have been a big hit. However, it was never a hit in Britain, indeed, as far as I can tell it was never even released here, so how it came to be in Glasgow is a mystery.
If you look at the picture above though, you'll see that a different song seems to be claiming to be the A-side, namely "La Marcia Dell' Amore." I've found a copy of it on Youtube (which cuts out before the end), but, confusingly, the video features a version of the sleeve which seems to relegate it to the flip


I fear I'm getting sidetracked.
John Foster these days probably answers more readily to Paolo Occhipinti, the name his mother gave him and under which he carved a successful career as a journalist when he wasn't pretending to be British to satisfy a cultural yearning probably started by those four Liverpool denizens, covered in some detail in a blog linked to the right of this post. That's him in the first video, with the NHS specs. I think he does look a bit like an English Woody Allen, but for the cover they went with a picture of this rosemary Leach-a-like, perhaps thinking it would add a touch of glamour to the proceedings.
This brings me quite nicely around to why I bought the thing. It came from one of the 2nd-hand record shops around the west end of Glasgow off Byres Road, although I forget which one and - I'll be honest with you - I bought it purely for the inscription on the front. As far as I can see, it says
To Johnny / a modern song for a / modern boy - / Regards / Frenca
(the name is a guess.) This is also half of the reason I chose Eri as the a-side. It is the side of the physical record with an 'A' on it, but also, it is (IMHO, YMMV) the much more romantic song of the two. I love stuff like this because there's a whole story there, of which we know nothing. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that Frenca brought the record from Italy and gave it to Glasgow boy Johnny, who is the 'modern boy,' which is an odd compliment. I'm almost prepared to accept the song as modern, but it doesn't really sit right either. What happened to their relationship? How did the record end up in the shop? It's impossible to know.

Later footnote)
Coming back to this later (apologies!) I wonder if it was a romance at all - perhaps she just liked the song. Still, it's a nice present to have, although a proper killer for after an affair has soured (see also - mixtapes)

A Quick Plug

Just a quick and shameless plug for The Shelf-Preservation Society, a blog about our kitchen activities written by myself and my long-suffering better half. It's in the links on the right, please check out the others there etc etc etc
kisskiss

Record #12 : "Dirty Mind" by The Pipettes

The Pipettes eh? Remember them? Of course you do. I thought this was great at the time, about 2005. Bizarrely, it sounds quite dated already to my jaded ears, more of which later.
First though, in case you don't know, or have forgotten (and who, indeed, can blame you), The Pipettes were a retro-with-a-knowing-wink, polka-dot clad girl group. They had a few hits and a line-up to rival The Fall in its fluidity.
They owe their existence, in a way, to the KLF. Their book The Manual was, well, a manual for how to get a number one hit without musical talent, following their experience with "Doctorin' The Tardis."
(Normally I'd link to the video here, but you wouldn't thank me if I did.)
Julia Clark-Lowes decided to construct a girl band (Pipettes = laboratory equipment = manufactured y'see) and the result was The Pipettes, except that by the time they had hits (Dirty Mind being the first) she'd left to form another band. (They're called The Indelicates. I( saw them live last year and thought they were pretty awful, although nothing like The Pip's)
Her replacement and the others (Gwenno! Rosay! RiotBecki! as album-opener-cum-signature-tune We Are The Pipettes put it) had a run of singles, an album and then, mostly went their separate ways. (Gwenno is still in the band, with two others brought in at various times as replacements. Whether or not they still sing the song I mentioned in my previous parenthetical aside (I seem to have even more than usual, today), and what they do with the lyrics if they do, I don't know sadly)
Anyway, this was their first hit. It seems to have peaked at #63 in the hit parade, but it felt like a hit - it was certainly played in indie discos and the like, and I should know, I was playing it. Memphis Industries, which was riding high at the time because of The Go! Team's success, was the record ;label, and in the packaging they've put in a lot of effort in mimicking the 1960s Columbia sleeve, an example of which illustrates Record #6 below, complete with exhortations to read the Record Mail and buy Record Tokens. The reverse of the sleeve also has a rather good advert for a "Memphis Industries Hairdryer" (reproduced below) with prices in LSD. The two follow-up singles used a variant on this, but in different colours with matching colour-coded vinyl inside, which was great, but less authentic - 60s singles were usually black. The vinyl's not the best quality, but I've had ropier, certainly sounds fine to me.
It's retro, but knowing, affectionately tongue-in-cheek retro.
That's the sort of thing that doesn't date very well at all, of course and listening to this alongside the Phil Spector stuff it owes most too it's paper-thin.
I think we all knew that at the time secretly though, but allowed ourself to be carried along with it because they did the whole thing with aplomb. They looked great, you could pick a favourite (RiotBecki, if anyone's interested) and you could dance (The 7-inch of Pull Shapes had the dance moves on the back!) and they were always upfront about their manufactured origins.
There was a time when their early, non-album singles were worth a bit of money (I've seen them go for £30-50) and this one was worth a wee bit more than the other ones from off the album. I imagined this had calmed down a bit but looking on ebay just now I found that Pull Shapes made £20 while a copy of the first recording of Judy (pre-album) numbered 28/1000 failed to sell at just under £19. I can only assume that a couple of people got carried away but it only serves to confirm my point from a few posts back that rare does not = valuable. There's a buy it now of this single at £8 which is the high side of about right.

Record #11 : "Magpahi" by Magpahi

(a scan of the record will appear here, but the scanner has been Put Away in the guest bedroom, and there's a guest in it, sleeping. I wanted to gt this up tonight though because I'm offline for the weekend. Apologies.)

Right, well, a little preamble. The thing about 7 inch singles is that they have 2 sides, A and B. I've made the decision in writing this blog to focus on side A and ignore B. There are some great songs on the b-sides of these singles, but I'm not currently concerned with them. Today's offering is an ep, of 6 tracks, 3 per side. I've put a video of the first 3 up, but my comments concern all of them. If you like the 3 in the video, you'll like the other 3. plus, it's still available and not terribly expensive - consider yourselves encouraged to purchase.
Anyway this another one from my folky-nothing pile of records, and it's on Bird Records which seems to be another offshoot of the mighty Twisted Nerve-Finders Keepers collective. What I do know is that they specialise in whispy fey sounding folk, usually sung by pretty girls who like books and are usually shown in a pastoral idyll, or at least a back garden, in their publicity shots. This is very lovely wheezy lo-fi stuff, and therein lies the problem - I'm not sure how audible this is on the video, but there are a couple of cricks and pops on the record, and some distortion of her high notes. My equipment (record playing equipment, stop sniggering at the back there, you) is a bit cobbled together but I've played it on a few different systems and it's definitely on the record itsself. I've also not had it very long, and it was like that when I bought it new. In other words, it weren't me guv. I've no idea though if it's a problem with the pressing or if it's just that it was recorded onto a tape recorder made of whimsy through a microphone made of beard - it's very much a bedroom job and very charming it is too.
What I should've done, clearly, is emailed the record label setting out my concerns in a slightly more professional manner and taken it from there. I didn't though, and now it's too late. I'm not unduly exercised about it though, because it's minor and has become part of the record for me.
I'm not going to claim that distortion and pops make the record sound better, merely that they don't irritate the way a skipping cd, or indeed a skipping record do. The idea that noise in the quiet bits of vinyl is inevitable is nonsense within a realistic time-frame, so long as you look after them, just like a cd, or an ipod. After years you will start to get a bit of crackle in the run in and out grooves, but they'll withstand a hell of a lot and still play. It's not that they sound better, they just become part of your life, picking up noise along the way.
This is what people are talking about when they talk about liking the crackle of vinyl, not losing all the subtleties in a blizzard of sonic snow. Noone likes that. Well, someone probably does, but he's an idiot.

Record #10 : "My Sharona" by The Knack

No topicality this time, but a link to the last record I posted, as I bought them both in the same place at the same time, as it happens.
This is one I've wanted to do for a while, but been unsure what to say about it. It's another example of the 7 inch single being the perfect form for greatness. Some of their other songs are quite good, but they're crucially not as good as this one. Good Girls Don't, their follow up single which was a hit in the US but not here in the uk, sadly falls into the latter category.
That needn't concern us, however, for the brief span of time I am giving the band today.
I love this song, and have loved it for a long time, but have never considered that it might be about someone before, I just thought it was about finding a pretty girl and being, well, generally excited.

Not only is it about a real girl, she's really called Sharona and you've already seen a picture of her where she's not wearing a bra.
Sharona does seem the sort of name you'd make up because it's fun to sing (and, based on how long I've been singing along to this, I should know) but she seems to be reconciled to it, having the address www.mysharona.com for her personal website, from which we learn that
"Sharona was only 17 when she was immortalized in the Knack's 1979 hit single "My Sharona". Sharona believes that "'My Sharona' has had an impact on my ability to understand the entertainer's mind, there's something simpatico. You've got to care to the n'th degree. You can't drop the ball for one minute." I sell "the most emotional product on the market, because a star's home is their only safe haven."

She now works, you see, as a high-end estate agent and does seem to be quite respected with it. Interestingly, the guitarist claims that he wrote the song for her when she was only sixteen, so either it was written some time before it became a hit, or he lied on her website to make herself sound a bit better. She was certainly a lot younger than Doug Fieger, the aforementioned guitarist who would have been 26 or 27 that year.
This being 2010, some if you might be drawing unsavoury conclusions about him and her involving the words "jail" and "bait." I don't want to encourage or condone those thoughts, but it had occurred to me when reading up on this, that it might have been politic for him to at least disguise her name a little, or at least suggest that if she insisted on being on the cover, she should at least put some underwear on.
Thing is, though, they didn't, it was a massive hit at it doesn't seem to have done her any harm, so let's say no more about it.
I've been thinking for a while whether it's better to have a few smaller hits and fade away or have one huge hit that defines you. I went to the band's official website to see if I could glean any idea of their relationship with the song, whether it was an albatross around their necks or not. If you haven't clicked on that link yet, see if you can guess which song plays as their intro. No, it's not Baby Talks Dirty. That they even have a website as a going concern is due almost entirely to My Sharona, and hopefully they're accustomed to and comfortable with that. If you're in The Knack and can't bear to even think about this blasted song, then well done for reading this far, and please god get in touch and I'll rewrite the damn blog post.