Ray Davies performed “You Really Got Me” on the Late Show with David Letterman on Nov. 18, backed by a full choir.  You can hear the studio version of this on The Kinks Choral Collection.  This is easily one of the best albums of the year.  And check out the drummer on this clip!

Ray Davies official website

The Pointer Sisters had an enviable run at the top of the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Their hits included “Neutron Dance” and the most famous cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire.”  The albums that all of these songs appeared on were produced by 1970s über-producer Richard Perry.   One of the most successful music producers ever, Perry was no stranger to the upper reaches of the charts – he produced the hit albums Ringo (1973) for Ringo Starr, No Secrets (1972) for Carly Simon and many others.

Oddly, one Pointer Sisters album with Perry at the helm made no impression at all – in fact, when Priority was released in 1979, it disappeared virtually without a trace.  The sisters were still riding high off the No. 1 smash “Fire” and its album Energy from the previous year when Perry took them into the studio for this followup.

Priority is of interest because its songs are all rock covers – the Pointers tackle tunes by Ian Hunter, Bob Seger, Graham Parker, Richard Thompson, the Band and the Rolling Stones.  And Perry surrounded them with hot L.A. session musicians like guitarists Waddy Wachtel and Dan Dugmore, drummer Rick Marotta (all of them played with Linda Ronstadt), Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne and, on a few songs, Stones pianist Nicky Hopkins.

Of course, with all of this high-powered artillery, the songs do rock.  After the intro to Seger’s “All Your Love,” you expect Ronstadt to start belting it out.  But the Pointer Sisters (they take turns on lead vocals) get lost in the shuffle – they seem rather clueless as to what to do with Hunter’s “Who Do You Love” or Keith Richards’ signature “Happy.”  The one that does seem to work is “The Fever” by their old buddy Bruce Springsteen.

Undaunted, Perry and the sisters would rebound in 1980 with “He’s So Shy,” in 1981 with “Slow Hand,” and in 1984 with the blockbuster album Break Out (with “Neutron Dance,” “Jump (For My Love)” and “I’m So Excited.”   I once gave a cassette copy of Priority to somebody in a bar band, suggesting they learn some of these songs; after doing so, they did rather well for themselves.  But they eventually broke up – like the Pointer Sisters.

MP3: “Who Do You Love?”

MP3: “Happy”

MP3: “Blind Faith”

MP3: “(She’s Got) The Fever”

The Pointer Sisters official website

UPDATED: With more fine wine toonage, thanks to our readers!

My very good friend Randy Fuller has a really cool blog that is not about rock and roll.  It’s about wine, but he wrote an excellent piece recently on rock and roll wines.  Actually, it’s about good wine in bottles with rock and roll labels – Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is there, so are the Rolling Stones, and even a Woodstock poster bottle.  As I said, very cool, and you can read it here.

I’ve known Randy for many years now, we went to college and high school together and even back then I knew him as a wine connoisseur. My tastes in wine ran mainly toward the red, namely Ripple Red and Thunderbird Red Label.  Randy had a more adventurous palate, seeking out the exotic and poetically named Annie Green Springs.

Any time you spent an evening with Annie Green Springs you always had to save the last dance for the porcelain maiden, hugging her inviting curves as you relived – and re-tasted – everything you had for dinner and lunch and possibly for breakfast about 18 hours earlier.  And I always found no matter how much you puke, the tender toes of Ripple still dance along your palate, even as you encounter the earthy nose of those Jack In The Box tacos you had for supper.

One very hot and humid Labor Day weekend, when I was still living at my parents’ house, Randy and I were assessing the merits of a few bottles of fine wine when suddenly I had to make room in my stomach for more wine.

Unfortunately, the door I thought was the bathroom was really the front door (now this is my own house) and my vomit settled warmly upon the front porch.  Many hours later, I was awakened by a crash and a torrent of violent cursing – from the unfortunate paper boy who slipped on the puke.  Somewhere an ex-paper boy is loading his deer rifle for a trip to the mall, and I’m very sorry about that.

Of course I have very fond memories of dear MD 20/20, the nectar of the ghetto.  Silky smooth on the tongue and available in a rainbow of colors, a typical “Mad Dog” experience was very much like drinking gasoline that somebody pissed in.  Although this fine wine had some very attractive flavors (“Electric Melon” comes to mind)  my favorite was always the down-home “Red Grape Wine,” which smelled a bit like merlot – that someone spilled in a dumpster.  Many a night I felt the warm embrace of dear 20/20, as it beckoned me to a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl Bed Spin and finally punched my round-trip meal ticket before kissing me goodnight.

Well, enough of this bullshit – if you want to read about wine go see my friend Randy Fuller at his Now and Zin website and explore the pleasures within.  You will find this is a man who knows his wine, and I’ll drink to that.

Now and Zin – the website

And these are for the connoisseurs:

MP3: “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Richard Thompson

MP3: “Nightrain” by Guns n’ Roses

MP3: “Talkin’ Thunderbird Blues” by Townes Van Zandt

MP3: “Ripple” from “Sanford and Son”

MP3: “My Baby Got Drunk” by Paul “Wine” Jones

MP3: “Wine Do Yer Stuff” by Commander Cody

MP3: “Thunderbird” by Slim Gaillard

MP3: “Spill The Wine” by Eric Burdon and War

MP3: “Wine” by James Luther Dickinson

MP3: “Red, Red Wine” by Neil Diamond

MP3: “Backslider’s Wine” by Jerry Jeff Walker

MP3: “Wine” by the Electric Flag

MP3: “Wine With Dinner” by Loudon Wainwright III

MP3: “Cooking Wine” by Alkaline Trio

MP3: “Night Train” by the Viscounts

MP3: “Thunderbird” by the Nightcaps

MP3: “Kiss Me, I’m Shit Faced” by the Dropkick Murphys

MP3: “Lust For Vomit” by the Pogues

MP3: “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead

MP3: “California Wine” by Dale Watson

MP3: “Mad Dog 20/20″ by Teenage Fanclub

MP3: “Drinking Ink Splink” by Andrew Tibbs w/Dave Young’s Orch.

MP3: “Drunk” by Jimmy Liggins & His Drops of Joy

MP3: “Wine With Dinner (Night Cap)” by Loudon Wainwright III

Ghetto Wine website

This Wikipedia entry is also pretty hilarious

Guess this is the sort of stuff you will find under the tree this Christmas – if you have been bad.  I’d rather have a gift card, you know?  Anyway – here are some new efforts from Big Superstars who are still trying to get your hard-earned money this holiday season, although you need it way more than they do.

Norah Jones has sold a zillion albums but she has really put out only four, and The Fall is certainly her liveliest album to date.  She’s kinda wanting to put that “chick with the smoky voice sitting at the piano plunking out ballads” thing behind her but on The Fall she only halfway manages that.  This stuff doesn’t rock, not by a long shot, but “Stuck” starts out with a guitar plucked from Neil Young (or John Lennon) and finds Norah kinda cranky about breaking up with her boyfriend (she really did, with songwriting collaborator and bass player Lee Alexander – make that former collaborator and bass player).  “You Ruined Me” has a nice little country skip, and “Man Of The Hour” closes everything out with Norah’s best vocal yet.  Nice, especially if you’re a fan, but nothing really revolutionary.

MP3: “Stuck” by Norah Jones

When I saw the cover of John Mayer’s Battle Studies I thought for moment he was a young Morrissey.   And that’s who he kinda sounds like here: the fadeup into the first song “Heartbreak Warfare” lets you know you’re in for tough sledding through 11 slabs of Mayer-iffic mood mud.   It’s all pretty much like the John Mayer boilerplate stuff we’ve heard before, with maybe a few more Dave Matthews rips tossed in.  Mayer even tries a cover of “Crossroads” (using the Cream model) but that’s pretty namby-pamby too – if this guy would just cut loose on guitar he might be pretty great.  The obligatory big single, “Half Of My Heart,” a duet with flavor-of-the-month Taylor Swift, is OK but instantly forgettable and “War Of My Life” sounds like it was recorded right after John listened to a U2 album.

MP3: “Half Of My Heart” by John Mayer w/Taylor Swift

Nothing like a big, loud album for Christmas and it looks like Paul McCartney may take the prize this year.  His two-disc Good Evening New York City might seem like yet another live set from a guy who’s put out too many already – but surprise!  It really rocks.  In places.  There’s a truly fierce “Day Tripper” that rips off even faster than the original, while “Paperback Writer” and “Lady Madonna” sound pretty good too.  Paul pays tribute to his fallen Beatle bandmates with George Harrison’s “Something” and John Lennon on “Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance.”  Those songs, and the finale “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/The End” generate some genuine excitement but – and there’s always a “but” with McCartney – warhorses like “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be” and “Yesterday” are beginning to sound a little shopworn.  And Jesus, for “I Saw Her Standing There” he lets Billy Fucking Joel on stage!  Cut out the crap like that and this would’a been a decent one-disc cash-in.  But you gotta love a rock star who wears suspenders on stage.

Ray Davies takes a much quieter approach to his catalog with The Kinks Choral Collection, revising a handful of Kinks classics with a 65-voice choir providing background vocals.  Believe it or not, this album rocks harder than anything else here.  I might as well just say it – Ray Davies is a better songwriter than Paul McCartney, although his bank account may not show it.  But this stuff is awesome: “Waterloo Sunset” is perfect with the choir, “Celluloid Heroes” is even more tragic and the six-song skip through Kinks klassic Village Green Preservation Society is, uh, classic.  And yes, “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night” do indeed rock, as does “Victoria.”  This is great.  Thanks, Ray.

MP3: “Celluloid Heroes” by Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Chorus

And we’ve waited long enough to review Christmas In The Heart by Bob Dylan.  Yes, it sounds like the Mitch Miller Orchestra and the Ray Conniff Singers backing up a singing frog.  And yes, you probably need a few eggnogs to get maximum enjoyment out of this album.   But if you listen closely, you hear something really rare from Bob Dylan – a sense of humor.  And Bob has agreed to donate every single penny he makes off this album to feeding hungry people, some of them hopefully in this country.  The more I listen to this album (sober) the more I like it.  So lighten up, have a few eggnogs and let Bob and me be the first to wish you a Merry Christmas.

MP3: “Must Be Santa” by Bob Dylan

The other day my sister brought home one of her friends from the fast-food place where she works.  Betty is her name, and she and my sister went out in the back yard to get some sun.  I really like the way Betty wears a bikini, and I really like her taste in music: while they were out in the sun I “borrowed” one of Betty’s albums that she brought over, Road Food by the Guess Who.

The Guess Who are those Canadian boys who had all the hits back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  You know, “Share the Land,” “Undun,” “No Time” and of course, “American Woman.”  They were not so well known for their albums, but I don’t know why.  There’s a lot of good stuff on Road Food, which is from 1974.  The Guess Who had been goin’ for a while, since the early 1960s, and had a handful of hits by the early 1970s.  Keyboardist Burton Cummings, who sang on most of these, had actually joined the band after original lead singers Chad Allan and Bob Ashley left.  Cummings wrote most of those late 60s-early 70s hits with guitarist Randy Bachman, but by the time of Road Food Bachman had left (to start Bachman-Turner Overdrive) and was replaced by guitarist Kurt Winter.

This album was supposed to be some sort of concept piece – about life on the road – but the songs, written by Cummings and Winter, fly off into the ozone and don’t much stick with the theme.  A couple of songs were hits, including “Star Baby” and “Clap For the Wolfman,” the latter featuring a cameo by Wolfman Jack.  “Clap” went all the way to No. 6 and was the Guess Who’s last chart hit.  The album is short (nine songs) but there are a couple of Guess Who-style deep tracks that are pretty good: “Attila’s Blues,” the country-rock-ish “Pleasin’ For Reason” and the title song.

The concept isn’t helped by the fact that the record label confused the LP’s Side One and Side Two when they mastered the CD for Road Food;  the last four songs on the LP become the first four songs on the CD.  Anyway, the seven-minute epic “Ballad Of The Last Five Years” covers a lot of ground, going from bluesy to jazzy behind Cummings’ pounding piano and his smooth voice.  The strings make this song sound, to me, kind of like an Elton John tune.

After this album, Winter left the band and the Guess Who rapidly disintegrated.  Cummings went on to a successful solo career and Bachman didn’t look back either – original bass player Jim Kale now owns the Guess Who name and tours with a band that includes original drummer Garry Peterson.  They have had occasional full one-shot reunions (mostly in Canada) but nobody will ever recapture the magic that this band had back in the early 1970s.

Talk to a Guess Who fan (if you can find one) and a lot of ‘em will say Road Food is their favorite album.  Others will go with So Long, Bannatyne (1971) or Rockin’ (1972).  Whenever I need a Guess Who fix, I always pull out Road Food – it may not be nutritious, but it’s oh so good.

MP3: “Star Baby”

MP3: “Attila’s Blues”

MP3: “Ballad Of The Last Five Years”

MP3: “Don’t You Want Me”

The Guess Who official website

“Must Be Christmas” is the new Christmas polka from Bob Dylan, off his album Christmas From The Heart.  It kind of shows what happens when Bob hosts a wild party at his house and everyone gets a little drunk.  In the video, Dylan is dressed up like Tom Petty for Halloween … it’s still pretty damn funny.  And Bob has agreed to donate every penny he makes off the Christmas album to charities that will feed hungry families over the holidays. This is, incidentally, one of the greatest Christmas songs ever: listen closely, and as Bob is reeling off names of Santa’s reindeer he throws in some U.S. presidents too.

Bob Dylan official website

At age 14 I was a huge Paul McCartney fan and would always here him talk about how he idolized a guy named Buddy Holly. I had no idea who Holly was or where he was from. Then in 1978, The Buddy Holly Story hit theaters with Gary Busey in the title role. I remember seeing Busey in the goofball cross-country comedy “The Gumball Rally” and thought I would give the movie a shot. 

The film (which I found out later was more fiction than fact and had angered both family and friends of Holly) blew me away. I saw it three times in a week and five times in all.  Busey was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Holly, but the best part was the music. Music I had never heard before.  Unlike other movies, the tunes were being played live by the actors. No lip-syncing. Busey on guitar, Charles Martin Smith on bass and Don Stroud on drums really brought songs like “Rock Around with Ollie Vee,” “That’ll Be the Day, “Rave On” and “It’s So Easy” to life. An excellent move by the director because lip-syncing to the original tracks would not have done the film justice.

Even though Holly’s final show in Clear Lake, IA before dying in a plane crash was a recreation of what the director “thought Holly would want to do” and not what he actually did, it still ranks for me as one my favorite cinematic scenes. Busey’s rendition of “True Love Ways” rivals the original and his take on “Not Fade Away” during the “Clear Lake Medley” of hits is still the best version of that song I’ve ever heard.

“The Buddy Holly Story,” while not exactly true all the way through, still brings to life one of the greatest figures in rock and roll and shows us how great Gary Busey was before he went crazy.

“Not Fade Away” – The Buddy Holly Story

“Rock Around with Ollie Vee/That’ll Be the Day” – The Buddy Holly Story

“Live at the Apollo” – The Buddy Holly Story

This is a time-lapse of Pearl Jam performing for an “Austin City Limits” taping on Oct. 3.  The episode premieres Saturday, Nov. 21.

This time-lapse was created from photographs taken every 6 seconds from 9:09AM – 11:29PM.  More than 10,000 images were taken to create the video.  If you notice Eddie Vedder performing on stage before they seem to begin the actual show, that is during rehearsal. They rehearsed for about an hour. Yes, that is Ben Harper with him.

Check your local listings for “Austin City Limits” on PBS.

Isaac Payton Sweat, far right, at the Winchester Club

In the mid-1960s I had a paper route in my hometown of Groves, Texas, and every day it took me past this two-story, tar-papered building with a sign saying “The Black Kat Club.”  Some days I’d hear loud, raucous music coming out of the wide-open second story windows.  Sometimes it was the blues, sometimes it was a cover of a pop song, it always sounded great.  One day I came by with my newspapers and the musicians were outside smoking cigarettes.  One of them asked me if I would give him a newspaper, and I did.

As I handed it to him, I noticed this guy was the whitest man I had ever seen.  His skin, his hair, his eyelashes, everything was pure white.  There was another guy who looked just like him, too.  “They’re albinos,” said one of the band members, “they’re okay.  What’s your name, my name is I.P. Sweat.”  To a 10-year-old kid, that name was even funnier than the two albino brothers named Johnny and Edgar.

Almost 20 years later, I would meet up with Isaac Payton Sweat again.  He had tasted fame – but not fortune – with his regionally popular recording “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”  Sweat really had not come far from the Black Kat Club near Port Arthur;  he was a popular guy in Houston dancehalls but no place else.  “Cotton-Eyed Joe” had only earned Sweat a few hundred dollars in royalties, so he sued his former manager.  That case didn’t work out, and neither did the nightclub Sweat opened, “I.P. Sweat’s Cotton-Eyed Joe Club.”

Over in Louisiana, Cajun musician Rockin’ Sidney (Simien) had a breakout hit with “My Toot Toot,” and other regional musicians like Jo-El Sonnier and Zachary Richard were whooping it up with people like John Fogerty.  Urban Cowboy the movie had created a fad and there were mechanical bulls everywhere.  By the late 1980s country music had become a huge business – the Judds and Reba McEntire slicked up the music and the twang seemed almost like an affectation.  People had stopped coming to Gilley’s, and the monster club closed in 1989.

Ikey Sweat was working hard, writing and recording new music.  He cut a song called “A Redneck Is The Backbone of America” and a handful of other tunes, hoping to attract a major label contract.  Inspired by the success of Houstonian Clint Black and San Antonio native George Strait, Sweat hoped to get airplay on country radio.  He didn’t.

Sweat in the late 1980s

Sweat tried to sue radio stations in the Houston area for conspiring to keep him out of the spotlight, but that went nowhere.  Frustration mounted for Sweat, and he even checked himself into a hospital for what he later said was exhaustion and depression.  Sweat’s second marriage also seemed to be in trouble.  In the spring of 1990, Isaac Payton Sweat filed a divorce petition against his wife Sharon but she apparently never got the papers.

On June 23, 1990, a gunshot rang out in the garage of Isaac Payton Sweat’s Houston-area home.  Police found the singer dead from a gunshot wound through his left temple, and a .25-caliber pistol near his left hand.  An autopsy found no traces of gunpowder on Sweat’s hands.   The gun, some sunglasses and car keys were found near Sweat’s left hand but the singer was right-handed.

Sharon Sweat was indicted for murder and the case almost went to trial in 1992.  Experts were set to testify that Isaac Payton Sweat could have been murdered, another would say that he most likely committed suicide.  However the case against Sharon Sweat was finally dropped for lack of evidence before it went to trial.  Many people, particularly friends and family of Isaac Payton Sweat, believe she got away with murder.  The house where Sweat died burned down, and although authorities promised to investigate the case further nothing ever came of it.  Country music became bigger and bigger, and artists who scrambled around Texas dancehalls in the 1970s and 1980s became international superstars.

Isaac Payton Sweat helped create the big “Urban Cowboy’ movement in the 1980s but never tasted any of the fame and fortune that others did.  If you look on the internet you can find remembrances of Sweat by his friends and fans, and you can still collect some of his songs.  If you listen closely you hear a talented musician at the top of his game, his voice full of youth and hope and the promise of good times.  It is the voice of a long-gone era in Texas – a voice that, sadly, few people even remember.

MP3: “A Redneck Is The Backbone of America” by Isaac Payton Sweat

MP3: “Lovin’ On Backstreets” by Isaac Payton Sweat

Isaac Payton Sweat MySpace page

The Winchester Club in Houston (picture at the top of this post comes from this website)

I.P. Sweat

In June 1980, the beautiful and the glamorous made their unlikely way to the sprawling Gilley’s honky tonk in Pasadena, Texas, to attend the premiere party for the movie Urban Cowboy.  New York socialites squeezed into tight jeans and Hollywood types wore western shirts with silk scarves around their necks, and everyone spilled out onto the hardwood floor to dance.  Many times that night, Gilley’s Urban Cowboy Band played the song “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” and people shuffled their boots along the floor and yelled “BULL SHIT!”

Good times, but one thing was wrong with that picture.  The guy who should have been singing the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” was nowhere to be found.  Where was Isaac Payton Sweat?

In the early 1980s, Isaac Payton Sweat was known as the “King Of the Cotton-Eyed Joe.”  He certainly had the biggest hit with the old song – whenever it was played, people from El Paso to Orange would shuffle out onto the dance floor.  In the days after disco, the song would point the way to the next big fad that Urban Cowboy would embody.  At the Winchester Club in Houston Sweat, with his Sweat Band (later called the Cadillac Cowboys), reigned as one of the city’s most popular performers.

There are many versions of “Cotton-Eyed Joe” out there, the song has been around since at least the 1940s.  But as performed and recorded by Isaac Payton Sweat, the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” became a honky-tonk call to arms.  Starting out the song like a square dance, Sweat invites dancer to “grab your partner and do-see-do,” then the fiddles and beat kicks in.  This version was unique because it invites people to yell out “BULL SHIT” as they step lively.  Then the music speeds up to get the dancers into a lather, then the song inexplicably slows down into a “Schottische,” a European folk dance.  In that era,  Schottische went with the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” like Lone Star beer went with barbecue – you didn’t ask, you just danced.

Sweat cut his popular version of the traditional “Cotton Eyed Joe” at the tail end of the outlaw country music movement of the 1970s.    But he was frustrated first that the song, despite being a breakout regional hit, never earned him much money.  And he was also disappointed that the song never really helped him break into the big time.

It’s not that Sweat was a novice in the music business: a native of Port Arthur, Texas, “Ikey” played banjo and guitar in his teens and joined a couple of rock bands while in high school.  Even as he entered college at Beaumont’s Lamar College, Sweat played with a number of bands and finally linked up with schoolmate Johnny Winter in a band called the Crystaliers.  In the late 1970s Winter, now a big rock star, invited Sweat to play bass in his current band and together they cut the 1978 blues-rock classic White Hot and Blue.

Touring the country with Winter, Ikey Sweat saw the music business shifting gears so he quit Winter, cut his hair and went country.  He cut a version of the traditional “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and it became a hit after it was played on country radio stations in Austin, Dallas and Houston.  But the hit record didn’t earn a penny for Sweat – he got no royalties because his manager at the time told him he cut the record for a flat, one-time fee.  A year after Hollywood’s elite danced the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” at Gilley’s, Sweat finally re-recorded the song for a 1981 album with other attempts at dance hall hits and some of Ikey’s original country songs.

In the living room of his Houston apartment in the early 1980s, I interviewed Isaac Payton Sweat for the Port Arthur News.   He was frustrated that no radio station would play his many followups to “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” he bitched about his then-manager fumbling the ball to get his version of the song on one of the two Urban Cowboy soundtrack albums and he bemoaned the royalties he never received from  his hit record.  But he was also upbeat: he planned to open his own club, “I.P. Sweat’s Cotton-Eyed Joe” and he played some of his original songs, including another planned dance hit, the “Joe Bailey Roll.”

Life seemed like it was finally beginning to look up for Isaac Payton Sweat in the mid-1980s.  But before long it would take a dark, tragic turn.

MP3: “Cotton-Eyed Joe/Schottische” by Isaac Payton Sweat

MP3: “Walkin’ Slowly” by Isaac Payton Sweat

MP3: “I’m Gonna Kill Ya” by Isaac Payton Sweat

MP3: “Little Foot/Hokey Pokey/Bunny Hop” by Isaac Payton Sweat

MP3: “Honest I Do” by Johnny Winter (from White Hot and Blue)

MP3: “E Z Rider” by Johnny Winter (from White Hot and Blue)

Isaac Payton Sweat MySpace page