Category Archive

 By Max Conroy

Hong Kong Blues by Hoagy (ne Hoagland) Carmichael was recorded for Decca in 1942; he penned it and recorded it in ‘39 originally.   It’s a unique side recorded by one of the most highly regarded song writers of the first part of the last century.  Two of his biggest hits were Georgia on My Mind and the A side of this single Stardust. 

The song is a cautionary drug tale about “a very unfortunate colored man who got arrested down in old Hong Kong…for kicking Buddha’s gong.”  Kicking Buddha’s gong is a dated term for smoking opium. It took me a second to realize what he was singing about when I first heard the song.  It’s fairly subtle till the end of it where he actually mentions opium.  He doesn’t mention any specifics about the drug or his habit, only that he cannot leave Hong Kong for his home, which he tells everyone is in San Francisco, but is actually in Tennessee.  The geographic centering of the song is kind of strange in that he’s not from San Francisco but later in the song where Carmichael switches from the narrator’s third person to the first person testimonial, he keeps mentioning San Fran as his home.  Also, how would an unfortunate brother end up in Hong Kong in the 1930s? 

All of this gives one the impression that Hong Kong is opium addiction itself.  The only specific moment where you can really put yourself in his shoes is where he sings:

“Won’t someone believe me/I have a yen to see that bay again/But when I try and leave/Sweet opium won’t let me fly away.“ 

He’s asking his fellow opium enthusiasts in the den to take his desire to quit drugs seriously, but he’s obviously ignored. Also, the use of the word ‘yen’ is a pun here as it comes from the Chinese words for ‘addiction’ and ’smoke’.  Carmichael once described his voice “…as the way a shaggy dog looks…I have Wabash fog and sycamore twigs in my throat.”  His inflection and the first person voice in the middle of the song made me assume that Carmichael was black, so I was surprised to see a picture of him, white as can be.  Another strange thing about this song is that it’s difficult to discern exactly when he’s singing this in relation to his incarceration.  He doesn’t lament getting arrested and still has hope that he’ll make it home, so I’m inclined to think that he’s speaking before he got arrested. 

In the chorus he sings that he needs someone to love him.  When I first heard this, I thought that it was such a 1930s view of drug addiction that finding a good woman could save you from yourself and drugs, but if you listen to the rest of it, he’s asking to find someone that loves him so they can take his body back home.  Pretty grim stuff.  There’s also a part where he begs for fifty dollars to get home with, but one is left with the impression that he’d blow it on dope.

This music is great for the depressant glow of a burgeoning alcohol buzz, alone.  The white jazz comes out a bit more on Stardust, but it’s still worth a listen eighty-one years after it was written.

Hong Kong Blues:

Stardust:

by Cousin Geoff

Alright, one more fantastically awesome 80s Detroit sports 45 and then I promise I’m done for a while and will go back to more, um, serious takes on good music.  Maybe.

What can I say about this 45?  It was done by Gino Danelli in 1981, the same guy who put out Ain’t No Stoppin’ us Now/Tigers in ‘84.  Cousin Justin tells me that Gino still sings around Detroit these days.  I think that Gino’s next song should be about Cousins Vinyl’s rec league basketball team that was so sweet two years ago - we led the league in techs, ejections, and illegal alley-oop dunks.  We were surely on the same level as these other Detroit sports legends that Gino chose to sing about. 

This one is about Thomas Hearns, one of the most legendary Detroit boxers ever.  Nicknamed The Hitman, or the Motor City Cobra, Hearns still lives in the Detroit area, and is always at the Pistons games these days flashing around. I shook his hand there once.  I said, “Howya doin’ champ!”, as he walked by and he stopped and shook my hand and smiled.  What a great boxer - even though he lost, who could forget his classic fight against Marvelous Marvin Hagler, the most electrifying fight in history?  Known for his tall, lanky build and his aggresive flicker jab, Hearns won world championships in three different weight classes, and is truly worthy of a Gino Danelli song. 

listen to The Hitman, on Trio Three records: 

 by Max Conroy

I first heard about the Third Power on this site a long time ago when the Cousins did a write up about their bass player Jem Targal in response to finding a signed copy of his rare solo album Luckey Guy.  I downloaded Believe, the only album released by the Third Power and didn’t feel too bad about it because of the album’s obscurity; I believe that it isn’t too hard to track down on CD though.  The download that I got was ripped from a record and the guy recorded the second side first, which I didn’t realize till finding the vinyl a few weeks ago.  It doesn’t get much better than this if you’re looking for an aggressive, Grande-era Detroit power trio.  I’ve scoped this record every now and then for the past few years on EBay and it seems like every copy that I’ve seen was in Europe, which is odd since it only sold about 16,000 copies, mostly in the Detroit area.

Like the record itself, information regarding the band is pretty rare.  For the most part everything out there is very basic and states that the band formed in Detroit in the late 60s, were very loud, had a cult following, released one record, it flopped, they went their separate ways, the guitarist Drew Abbott went to play lead for Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, and Jem recorded Luckey Guy in the late 70s.  I did find an early biography of Jem Targal, their lead singer and bassist, on someone’s personal website.  The biography reads a bit strange, almost like it’s Targal speaking in the third person (pardon the pun).  According to the site, Targal was born in Ann Arbor, his father studied and taught at the University of Michigan, and when he was young his father accepted a position at the American University of Istanbul and moved his entire family there: ”There were seven families, all related, living in the house together.  Targal’s grandfather, a retired general, was there.  So, too, was Targal’s uncles.  One had been the head of NATO forces for seveal years; the other uncle was a professional wrestler.”  Sounds like a trip, man.  His family moved back to the Detroit area in 1951 and eventually many years later he met Abbott at Oakland Community College in a speed reading class.  Abbott taught Targal the bass and they formed several groups, met their drummer Jim Craig, a solid powerful drummer, and came up with the name the Third Power in the van on the way to their first show together at a club called the Fifth Dimension (a popular venue that had featured Hendrix and the Yardbirds).  Power trio…trio…third…third…power…like to the third power, man…get it?  The band moved into a farmhouse on Haggarty road, between 12 and 13 mile roads.  They were known for having massive parties at their place where rock icons like Rod Stewart and Badfinger would hang out.  The band kept playing around and became very popular in the Detroit area, playing shows with local acts like the Rationals, Seger, and the MC 5.  They signed with Vanguard, who also featured another Detroit act of the era the Frost, in 1969.  The album was produced by poet and blues scholar Sam Charters and came out in 1970.

I almost shit my pants when I saw it in the stack at Encore.  They pile up their new arrivals on the floor against the bins, in front of the register.  I was in there a few days prior to finding it and noticed that they had a massive pile of new arrivals and quickly paid for whatever I had gone in there to find, so as not to be tempted by whatever was in the new stacks.  A few days later I was walking in the neighborhood and decided to go back to see what was left in that pile, and there it was, perfect, in the shrink, bronze Vanguard label.  I bought that and Grant Green’s Alive! for $30 and the dude working there said bye to me using my name off of my credit card.  Respect, mon.  Irie!  I got it for $20; the price guide says $30 mint, but Popsike lists anywhere from $50 to $250 previously on EBay. 

  Read the rest of this entry »

by Max Conroy 

I’ve been getting into 45’s lately.  Up until about six weeks ago, I didn’t really get the idea behind buying singles.  Usually they are chewed up even though I think the fidelity is supposed to actually be better than 33 1/3 rpm records.  You pay for two songs; sometimes 45’s are free and sometimes they go for thousands, just ask The Cousins.  But for the majority of rock and soul’s existence, the single has been where it’s at, what made or broke artists.  Not until the mid-sixties did groups start making LP’s (Long Players) with the idea of making a work that had obvious continuity, with the car accident apex in the late sixties with contrived rock operas.  R & B records never really successfully mastered the album format in the vinyl era for the most part.  In the fifties and sixties, most R & B records were by and large compilation albums, consisting of a group of singles.  Often a hit would be on many different albums by an artist; see how many Wilson Pickett albums contain Midnight Hour for example or check out some Ray Charles hits.  There are definitely some exceptions to this point to be sure.  Justin recently hipped me to Millie Jackson’s Caught Up album, and the theme of that album is as subtle as a crowbar to the teeth: cheating and she’s not talking about political elections, but getting love at the dark end of the street.  Also, Curtis Mayfield records are albums.  Getting back to the point, even as records became albums, the single was king.  If an album didn’t have a hit, the record company wouldn’t provide advertising and the band or artist probably is one of your favorite cult bands now, but the artist has probably slept in a few gutters along the way.  The idea of a single has faded away and mutated over the years.  I can only remember buying a single on tape or CD a few times in my life.  But commercial radio has stayed the same over the years, playing singles, but instead of attempting to sell the single, they’re pushing album sales and concert tickets and lunch pails and everything else.  Payola has to still exist; I can’t think of any other reason for a radio station to play a song three times in an hour, which some do.  iPods, iTunes and iEverything are probably changing it all over again.  Shit, at that Sharon Jones show, Justin and I observed a DJ ’spinning’ tunes from his iPod.

I’m trying to figure out what it is about 45s that I’m suddenly attracted to.  As I write this, I’m coming to realize that I have been more into records lately that were either albums put together either entirely of singles or built around a few singles with some filler, so the jump to buying 45’s probably isn’t that large of a leap.  A 45 is the first appearance of a song, which gives it a certain cache, like somebody’s rookie card.  Also, a lot of music from the 50s and 60s is only available on 45 unless you want it digitally and if you’re reading this, chances are you’d prefer it on record.  Here’s an example that has fueled my appreciation for 45s and illustrates this point.  I got a copy of the latest Wax Poetics and read the Bobby Byrd obit. and was really interested in getting some of his music as I’ve been into James Brown heavily lately.  Byrd never released any studio records back in the day (he did put out an amazing live album called I Need Help), they were all singles produced by James Brown and so I went out and found the I Need Help single pretty cheap and was blown away. 

There are also plenty of examples where finding a bunch of singles by someone is easier and cheaper than finding the rare album that was released compiling these singles.  Case in point: Dyke and the Blazers.  

I’m working on finding the rest of the Funky Broadway album. 

Some 45s are also cool to have because they represent something historically, an era changing or the birth of a type of music or a record label.  Last Night by the Mar-Keys was the hit that launched Stax.  The record isn’t valuable, but I’m in awe of it every time I look at it for what it represents.  It’s also a great jam.

Some records have an interesting story.  Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price is a single that’s been written about in Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train and by Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock and Soul.  It’s a traditional song that most likely dates back to the mid 19th century about a gambler named James “Stacker” Lee.  The song is essentially about a gambler getting caught at cheating and blowing his accuser’s brains out.  The meaning of the song went from a cautionary tale about leading an evil existence to one celebrating the outlaw here.  Traditionally the song would include Lee being hung for his crime, but Price cuts the song down to stay in the single format and, in turn, deals only with the crime.  After this Stagger Lee represents, to use a quote from Marsh, “a bad motherfucker not to be trifled with.”  The song went on to become a black power anthem, covered by many R & B acts.  At the time Price was kept from appearing on American Bandstand because of the message and the song was also finding difficulty getting air play, so Price went back into the studio to clean it up and it went to the top of the charts.  Here’s the unedited version where Stack pops a cap in that sucker Billy’s punk ass. 

Some 45’s can also be incredibly valuable, but you’d have to ask the Cousins about that.  I’ve only recently got the bug and am content in finding records that I dig for some of these reasons.  I’m sure greed will play a part here soon.  Most of all, I like 45’s because you have that song, you truly own it as it was marketed and how these people recorded it, and sometimes the B-side is just as good.

Plumm 

jsREVIEW: 

Somehow, somehow, the a-side became a fairly huge hit in 1970 for this Detroit-by-way-of-Oklahoma funk/rock duo. It’s big and goofy, anchored by organ and drums, and sounds more like a showtune than anything coming out of Motown. I suppose, on some level, that the affirmative message resonated in the culture of the time, or something, but I just don’t get it (aside from casting this as the coda in my Godspell-meets-Hair musical to be fleshed out later). The false ending doesn’t help either, as one more spot of bombast on an already wadded track. The real reason to have it is the fantastic breaks— this was, essentially, an organ and drums duo, and when they strip away everything for the drum solo, you can hear hip hop right there.
The b-side is more subdued and fun, without the overproduction of the hit, a mournful lament with a shuffling beat under churchy hymnal organ. The chorus snaps with the irritability of an overtaxed working man who can’t take any more, whether it be love or employment. While the a-side may be better used for plunderphonics, the b-side is pure soul delight.

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