Thanks for your patience everyone and especially those who have ponied up for a paid subscription.
We’re working on getting the shows re-edited so we can move the full versions behind our Substack paywall and replace the iTunes/Spotify etc versions with 35 minute previews.
With 400+ episodes it’s quite a daunting bit of work. But progress is being made.
With that out of the way I thought I’d share some of the music stuff I’ve been reading and listening to lately.
Paul Williams, too pop for me as a kid
I love Ace Records and their songwriter series. We’ve all been programmed to think of music as the work of performers, but IMO pop is as much a product of the songwriters as anyone else.
Understanding that, Ace’s Songwriter series has compiled excellent collections of the work of such legends as Pomus & Shuman, Lieber & Stoller, Goffin & King, etc etc many of which I have in my collection.
But I’m especially intrigued when they collect the works of songwriters I’ve dismissed or ignored and Paul Williams certainly fits that bill.
He’s someone I first became aware of in the 1970s when he was as likely to be a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island as he was to pop up on the Merv Griffin Show behind a piano.
As a hard rocking white boy, I dismissed his work for The Carpenters and other pop artists out of hand.
As I’ve matured and been able to admit that songs like “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie are more than guilty pleasures, they’re well crafted pop classics.
So I’ve placed my order for the new Ace Records comp.
We've Only Just Begun - The Paul Williams Songbook
Ace Records (Songwriter Series)
I’ve linked directly to Ace Records rather than Amazon because they’re great and I think you should support them.
The Four King Cousins
The Paul Williams research led me down a fascinating rabbit hole about one of the artists featured whom I’d never heard of before: The Four King Cousins.
Turns out the Cousins were a spin off from a more established act, The King Sisters who in turn were kind of the Mormon version of the great Boswell Sisters in the 1940s.
Well, more like the Kings were acolytes of the Boswell Sisters, who were the first white girl singers to really swing. The Boswells famously worked with Bing Crosby and inspired the whole wave of 1940s swinging sister acts led by the Andrews Sisters.
The Fall of the Black Keys
I’ve also been paying attention to the collapse of The Black Keys summer arena tour. Stephen Thomas Erlewine covers it well.
Prince’s birthday
Prince’s birthday got some good coverage. Here’s Nelson George’s take.
Of all the musical forces that defined the ‘80s I had the most unusual interactions with Prince Rogers Nelson, that bold singer-songwriter-producer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He would be in and out my life quite a bit in “the Me decade,” I’d have no interaction with him for years after, and then he’d become my unlikely benefactor in the 21st century.
And Nick Hornby’s:
"It was Prince’s birthday yesterday. As you may or may not know, my most recent book was about Dickens and Prince, two gifted and wildly productive superstars; they were both criticised for being over-productive. A critic famously took Dickens to task for writing “too often and too fast…he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick” - and that was after his first book. (Mate, you ain’t seen nothing yet.) Brutally hard work and no sleep killed both of them. Dickens died from a stroke, and Prince died from an overdose of opioids, needed because of the chronic pain he endured from all those hyper-kinetic shows. (On tour, he frequently used to play two a night, one in a stadium, and then afterwards a secret gig in a club, sometimes until five or six in the morning.) Selfishly, I’m glad they churned it out. I still haven’t read everything Dickens wrote, and it would be impossible to get through everything Prince recorded: some estimate that there are eight thousand unreleased songs in his vault. New albums are still being released every year.
Reconciling with The ‘Mats
I’ve also returned gingerly to reading music books. There for a bit I’ve over done it and combined with the stress of my main business failing I had to take a break.
I’ve been grabbing tomes I had lying around that were about bands I was already familiar with. Including Trouble Boys, Bob Mehr’s excellent biography of The Replacements.
(Note that clicking that link and buying the book will kick back a commission to me.)
This was a bit of healing for me as I’ve gone from being a huge fan of their early work in the 1980s to a passionate hater of Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson and everything they put out after signing with Sire Records.
Having initially been in the complete thrall of Dave Marsh and The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1982 edition), I reacted hard in the other direction and developed a reflexive hatred of critical darlings like Bruce Springsteen, Big Star and the Replacements.
Learning from Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life that the ‘Mats were the absolute opposite of the DIY punk ethos made me like them even less.
Reading allegations that Westerberg had been extremel callous about the death of Bob Stinston — had in face insisted that a freshly clean and sober Stinson drink before getting back on stage with the band — made me positively loath the guy.
So reading Mehr’s balanced bio helped me get over that to a certain extent.
I still think everything they recorded on Sire was weak and lame but I have reconnected with the early work and enjoy it as much as ever.
This James Baldwin quote kind of sums up my feelings about Paul and Tommy.
Thanks for reading and thanks more to those who are financially supporting the show.