Wednesday, July 10, 2013

This Is Your Song For....July 10, 2013: Beat.It by The Link Quartet

It's Hammond-rific!
Today...it’s Hammond Organ based instrumental rock!

Yes, that’s a thing.

I didn’t know myself until this morning.

Technically, the proper term for it is ‘Hammond Beat,’ and it refers to groove and rock based instrumentals where the central instrument is a Hammond organ.  The brainchild of Paolo Negri, the Link Quartet was formed in 1993 and has been putting out these slightly spacey, slightly surfy tunes ever since--save for a three year break in the oughts.

I’ve been getting into a lot of surf music lately, spurred on by my love of Los Straitjackets to explore both the pioneers of the form and more contemporary practitioners.  Because of the uniquely artficial sound of the Hammond, the Link Quartet seem similar but apart; it’s almost as if Negri and his bandmates have found the crossroads where surf rock and the exotica lounge crowd meet, creating a fusion that gives us something akin to a jam band for hipsters--more controlled, less meandering, but with that spirit of improvisation still very much alive.

I don’t know where I got this track from--my guess is it’s another one of those mp3s I lucked into through my weekly download of the Revolution Rock radio show--but what I’ve heard has intrigued me enough to investigate this heretofore unknown-to-me subgenre of music a little more.

Here's the song, so you can decide for yourself if it's for you....


Sunday, July 7, 2013

This Is Your Song For....July 7, 2013: In My Garage by Kim Fowley

You're never too old...
Today....a little something from the guy who brought us The Runaways.

Kim Fowley wrote and produced this song as a single in 1978.  By that time, he had already had his fingerprints on the face of rock and roll in his position as a producer, songwriter and manager.  Amongst the long list of people whose career he had helped along or revived are The Soft Machines, Kiss, Helen Reddy, Gene Vincent, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and Kris Kristofferson.  Hell, he would be honored by me solely for his role as a co-writer on Warren Zevon’s first solo album.  Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was seeing something in five aspiring female performers and putting them together as The Runaways.  Now don’t get me wrong--Fowley didn’t create the fivesome of Jett, West, Curie, Ford and Fox out of altruism; he had already been looking to form a female band to be his mouthpiece and was unsucessful until he met Joan Jett, but the impact that little act had is undeniable.

Given how this is the guy who wrote songs for the prototype for Riot Grrl, it’s surprising how gentle this song is.  In this song, Fowley is pretty much trying his hardest to channel Bob Dylan with his kinda wavering vocals and simple acoustic guitar composition; I have to wonder if the opening lines ‘The King of The Gypsies is on my radio/he said goodbye to rock and roll and I kept saying no’ is a direct reference to Dylan himself.  And to be fair, there are a couple of moment where those vocals border on parody.  But the song itself, probably written as Fowley was contemplating the move he was going to make to Australia to search for the next Beatles, is kind of a cool mission statement.  He talks with some passion about how the future of rock is happening right now somewhere out there, ready to be discovered.  It’s a hopeful song in spite of its mournful pace, as he says that he can hear the new heroes of rock  ‘who I’ve never heard of/and who have never heard of me’ in his garage.  I just get this picture in my mind listening to this song of Fowley sitting back in his office popping cheap cassette tapes one after the other into his deck, leaning back and marveling at some of these new sounds coming from these small spaces all across the country.

Fowley is still out there--he was integral to bringing the story of the Runaways to the big screen in 2010--hosting a radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

You can here the song here.