In the latest batch of news stories I wrote for charitable entertainment site Samaritanmag Rihanna gets a humanitarian award, a thousand days of protest songs are declared and disobedience is rewarded.
Ditch TV, the website I curated a bajillion video playlists for, is now RIP and apparently an impassable “insecure connection,” according to my web browser.
That’s ok, though. The work I did for them lives on.
Here are some of the playlists I did for them back in the day:
Chuck Berry, the true king of rock ‘n’ roll died yesterday in St. Charles County, Missouri. He was 90 years old.
Though Berry stopped touring a few years ago, I always held out small hope that I would get to see him perform live. Clearly that will never happen now.
While Berry will be lauded for his music, almost as much will be made about his mercurial and sometimes controversial behaviours and personality.
What’s absolutely clear is that Berry was a bigger-than-life music personality who won’t soon be forgotten.
I went through some of my old interview transcripts and found a couple anecdotes about Berry.
The first is an outtake from an interview I did with super-promoter Michael Cohl for a story at Huffington Post Music Canada. When the conversation turned to some of the stranger music personalities he’d dealt with in his career, Cohl was very discreet. He did, however, provide this one Berry-related tale:
“I think I’ve dealt with most of them,” said Cohl, of the most idiosyncratic entertainers. “I think that Rodney Dangerfield story’s pretty eccentric. So’s Bob Marley’s. I mean, listen, we’ve dealt with Chuck Berry. He’s nerve-wracking. He wants to be paid for every little thing. He wants to be paid per smile in some cases, but at the end of the day he says, ‘Don’t you worry, it’s an 8 o o’clock show? I’ll be at the building at 7:30 and have my money ready.’ And doesn’t want anyone to pick him up… so in some ways he’s the simplest, but the simplest can also be the most nerve-wracking because you’re sitting there and it’s 7 o’clock and you go ‘I have no idea where this guy is.’ He’s not in his room. He’s not in the building. He says he’s going to be here at 7:30… I wonder. Inevitably, he shows up.
“Yeah, he’s extraordinary, let’s face it. He’ll make you crazy.”
The other good Berry story I uncovered came from Triumph bassist Mike Levine, who I spoke to when the band released their Live at Sweden Rock Festival CD/DVD a few years back. Levine apparently experienced the unique challenge that is being the local band backing Berry.
Levine explained why in this outtake from my interview with him:
“I got a good Chuck Berry story,” said Levine. “I can’t remember the name of the band, but it was in the early ’70s and we were pretty popular, playing high schools and colleges and stuff, and we get a call from Queen’s University and they say, ‘Can you back up for Chuck Berry?’ And he’s playing here, blah, blah, blah, you play a set and you’ll back Chuck up, so we said, ‘Oh that’ll be great.’
“So we played our set. We’re sitting in the dressing room. We still haven’t met Chuck. About 10 minutes before show time he arrives and he opens his guitar case and there were three things in it other than his guitar: airplane bottles of liquor, a wad of cash, and a gun. And he said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to be playing tonight.’
“We go, ‘What do you mean?’
“‘Well, the place is sold out and I told the promoter I want more money or I’m not going on.’ Which I found out later he’s very famous for doing.
“So we were, ‘Well, just in case we do play, what songs are we going to do?’ And he said, ‘Just follow me.’
“We go ‘OK’ and the promoter comes in and Chuck wrangled an extra $5,000 out of him or something. Insisted on being paid in cash before we got on. He got everything he wanted. We got onstage and he’d turn around and yell ‘Johnny B. Goode, E. Count it in.’ We played all the songs. It went really good. We had fun. And after it was done he said goodbye, packed up his stuff and left.”
Flo Morrissey & Matthew E. White — Gentlewoman, Ruby Man
It’s fitting that British triller Flo Morrissey and American drawler Matthew E. White met for the first time at a Lee Hazlewood tribute night in 2015 because the pair’s new album Gentlewoman, Ruby Man has a clear “we want to be like Lee & Nancy” air throughout.
If it is an act of copycatting it’s a respectful one. Where Lana Del Rey gets her retro cues by searching through Jackie Kennedy photo archives on Pinterest, one gets the sense the 10 duet covers on Gentlewoman, Ruby Man were selected after exploring a well-curated record collection in someone’s rec room basement.
It’s not a total ’70s revival trip. The pair manage to turn Frank Ocean (“Thinking ‘Bout You”), James Blake (“The Colour In Anything”) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Heaven Can Wait”) tracks into effective grayscale mopers.
That said, Morrissey and White’s best work comes from their classic reinterpretations. Their take on Nino Ferrer’s “Looking For You” has even more gravitas when you know the French-Italian singer’s tragic story. It’s exceedingly difficult to mess up Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” and their version’s tinkling keyboard flourish will lock itself between your ears long after you listen to it. Even more addictive is Morrissey and White’s buoyant reimagine of the Grease theme song. Striped of its context as part of a musical and careful calibrated to avoid any American Idol talent show-type airs, “Grease” turns into a groovy, Feist-ian bedroom jammer. Best, though, may be the pair’s take on the George Harrison spiritual “Govindam.” At risk of Beatles blaspheming, this modern redo, complete with its winding, mobius strip rhythmic track, may perhaps be better than the original.
Arcade Fire, Blue Rodeo and Patrick Watson were among the acts we spoke to for episode four of the Polaris Podcast.
This episode was focused on four of the albums that received Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize designation last year.
Those were:
* Blue Rodeo’s Five Days In July, which won in the 1986-95 public vote category
* Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, which won in the 1986-95 jury vote category
* Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which won in the 1996-2005 public vote category
* Lhasa’s La Llorona, which won in the 1996-2005 jury vote category
Listen to the podcast via iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or Acast. Or right here…
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