Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul
James Brown's 40th Anniversary Collection
by Michaelangelo Matos esq.
To appreciate the changes wrought by James Brown, to appreciate his importance and influence, all you have to do is turn on the radio (pop of R&B), or go dancing.
Roughly 70% of what you hear is a result, direct or indirect, or his innovations.
Like Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra, like Bob Dylan or Robert Johnson, like Hank Williams or Jimmie Rodgers, like Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles, like Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis, James Brown changed fundamentally the way music is made and the way we hear it. ...
Rosanne Cash at McCabe's
by Carl E. Baugher McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica is my favorite concert venue. A combination of guitar shop / performance space, the place only hold 150 people at capacity. The artists perform on the funky little stage at one end decorated with guitars hanging on the walls. ...
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This Perfect Record
by Lewis Shiner
Maria McKee has been around for over ten years, first with Lone Justice, then as a solo artist. I'd heard "Ways to Be Wicked" and "Shelter," I'd heard her backup singing and songwriting on Steve Earle and Robbie Robertson albums, and I'd even had friends recommend her to me. She was somebody I needed to pay more attention to someday.
This March things got taken out of my hands. ...
Braver Newer World and Brain Wave
(say this 12 times very quickly)
by Paul Williams
Honestly now, how many times in recent years have you heard a new album and found yourself (after a few get-acquainted listenings) falling in love with every different song on the album, start to finish, each a brand new and very special friend? Well, I know where you can find such an experience.
 Jimmie Dale Gilmore is not making a huge pile of money for anybody right now, so how important can he be in our 1990s American culture's scheme of things? (Marketing and celebrity rule the world. Not really. The problem is, for a lot of people, they seem to rule the mind.) I dunno. But I do know this Texas gentleman is one of the finer singers currently working (performing, recording, writing, singing) in the U.S. of maybe anywhere. That's important enough in my book, the tides of commerce be damned. ...
| In this issue:
- Michaelangelo Matos on James Brown
- Mark Hagan on the Sex Pistols
- Carl E. Baugher on Rosanne Cash
- Geoffrey Himes on the Bottle Rockets
- Lewis Shiner on Maria McKee
- Paul Williams on Jimmie Dale Gilmore
- Paul Williams on John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Plus subscription info and notes on the contributors!
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Sex Pistols in Front of You
by Mark Hagan
 We all have our own way of judging people and mine is the certain knowledge that anybody who expresses a preference for the Sid Vicious incarnation of the Sex Pistols doesn't have the faintest idea what they're talking about. Like 99% of the people whose lives were changes by the Pistols, I never saw them live. Like everybody not connected with their record company, I greeted the news of their refromation with a heavy heart, a good deal of cynicism and an absolute desire to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. ...
Bottle Rockets Time
by Geoffrey Himes
On October 20, 1977, the single-engine prop plane carrying Lynyrd Skynrd crashed into a swamp in Gillsburg, Missippi, killing the band's lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines. The crash decimated the group just as it was outgrowing its pigeonhole as a Southern-rock boogie band and was gaining an overdue reputation as the stomp-and-roar poets of American's rednecks and greasers.
In early 1978 -- after the funeral, the interviews and the lawyers -- the surving members of Lynyrd Synyrd decided to get away from all the nagging questions and familiar faces by flying to London where no one knew them and no one cared. When they landed, they soon discovered the hottest band in town was four skinny guys in their early '20s who called themselves the Clash. ...
EYEWITNESS REPORT BY PAUL WILLIAMS
EVENT: JOHN & YOKO RECORD "GIVE PEACE A CHANCE"
(FIRST "SOLO" BEATTLES SINGLE)
DATE: JUNE 1, 1969
LOCATION: ROOM 1742, QUEEN ELIZABETH HOTEL, MONTREAL
[Originally written for, and published by,
Q Magazine in London, 10/95]
I wasn't there as a journalist or a singer (I am not a singer), but three months earlier when Jann Wenner asked me to interview Timothy Leary for Rolling Stone, I had no idea that the end reult would be my four minutes and forty-nine seconds in rock and roll history, as an impromtu member of the "Plastic Ono Band" for the first ever solo single by a Beatle (#2 in the U.K. in July 1969), John Lennon's immortal anthem, "Give Peace a Chance."
Williams (right) at the Bed-In for Peace
The night before, in the Montreal hotel room where John and Yoko were having their second "Bed-In for Peace" (the first was two months earlier, on their honeymoon, in Amsterdam), John had taught the song to Timothy and Rosemary Leary, and me, in the company of Yoko and Derek Taylor, both of whom of course also sang on the record, recorded late the next morning in another room in the same hotel. ...
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Editor: Paul Williams
Staff Artist: Stephen Sloan. All the artworks in this issue are eraser carvings by Stephen Sloan, our new art wizard staring now.
Web Designer: Kathryn Cramer |
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Michaelangelo Mateo esq.
(James Brown epic) now lives in Seattle and is making his fourth appearance in Crawdaddy! As a 21-year-old JB fan in 1996, he is living proof that rock and roll and R&B recordings don't lose their immediacy and power when their "pop" moment passes and their original listeners get old and/or square. Besides JB and Nirvana and the Cardigans, this year he's listening to Imperial Teen and (of course) Moby, and the Fugees ("best hip hop I've heard in years").
Carl Baugher
(R. Cash live) is making his fifth appearance in Crawdaddy, is a frequent contributor to Stereophile, Goldmine, The Tracking Angle, Schwann Catalog, performs regularly in acoustic venues in the San Diego area and is releasing his first album later this year.
| Mark Hagan
(Sex Pistols report) lives in London, and says, "If you have a stack of Mojos around the house [yes I do; excellent magazine], you'll find my name attached to pieces on Dick Dale, Esquerita, The Mavericks, Bruce, Guy Stevens, Dave Alvin & a bunch of others. Makes a change from the day job -- head of programming for VHI Europe."
Geoffrey Himes
(Bottle Rockets) is one of those mysterious people whose writings on rock and pop appear in your local newspaper; he regularly writes about music for The Washington Post.
Lewis Shiner
(Maria McKee) just moved from Texas to North Carolina. He is the author of several notable novels, including Slam and Deserted Cities of the Heart. He won the World Fantasy Award in 1994 for his novel Glimpses, one of the best "rock novels" I've ever read.
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