RnR07 Love is strange

A series on rock 'n' roll has to include the great Buddy Holly. We are spoiled for choice but this one is not so much of a rock 'n' roll number but a very attractive piece of work later overdubbed to great affect in the late sixties.

RnR06 Roll over Beethoven

Haven't quite forgotten the Rock n Roll series. This is ELO doing the Chuck Berry number in a fairly obvious way. It's a bit long but quite impressive.

RnR05 Jungle Rock

Among several incomplete series on this blog is one on Rock ' n' Roll tracks (See RnR). This one I like for a good beat and good words.
American Mizzell had a brief and unspectacular career in the late fifties and early sixties then became a preacher with a restorationist group. Jungle Rock resurfaced in the seventies. My own favourite version is by The Replacements. More here.Well, I was walking through the jungle just the other night
I heard a big rumble and I thought it was a fight
Stopped for a listen and I had to move my feet
It was a jungle drummer doin' a knocked out beat

Jungle, jungle rock
It was a knocked out beat and I had to move my feet
It was a Jungle, jungle rock

Well, I moved a little closer just to get a better view
I saw a chimp and a monkey a doin' the Susie Q
A 'gator and a hippo was a doin' the bop
And the big black drums was making me hop

A fox grabbed a rabbit and they did the bunny hug
And the old grizzly bear was a-cuttin the rug
The Camel was jitterbugging with a kangaroo
And everything moving with a ring-dang-doo.

RnR04 I hear you knocking

This was nearly the first a single I ever bought back in the seventies. I bought something else instead in the end. It is again a strange choice in some ways as this is a fifties blues song only later done in the rock and roll style in the seventies. (This live version doesn't quite do what the single does but gives the idea. The studio version included a litany of fifties stars - Fats Domino! (who covered the song) Smiley Lewis! (him too) Chuck Berry! Huey Smith!) Oh yeah, Dave Edmunds it is - and he's Welsh.

RnR03 Nutrocker

I suppose messing around with the classics is just what people do. This version of Tchaikovsky's ballet piece The nutcracker appeared in 1962 and was performed by Kim Fawley and other session musicians. It is one of several attempts at this sort of thing, of which this is the best. The track gained a new lease of life in the seventies when Emerson, Lake and Palmer (whose whole career was based on this sort of thing) so appropriately used it as an encore to their famous live rendition of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

RnR02 Summertime Blues

Summertime Blues came out in 1959, the year I was born. It is by Eddie Cochran (1938-1960), a lesser known American icon from the early days of Rock n Roll and one of several to die tragically young – in a car crash. The record was one of a small collection of 45 rpm records that we had at home – most inherited from an older cousin but some donated by the man next door who worked with juke boxes (these had no centres so Summertime Blues must have come from cousin Gill). I must have first become aware of the record after buying my first single ever (on my own that is – I'd bought Beatles singles with my mother upstairs in TV shops – this one was from downstairs in Boots). The single was Ride a White Swan by T Rex. The flip-side had 2 tracks – the excellent Is it love and a conga driven (and inferior) version of Cochran's hit (many others have covered it including The Who).
The strength of the original is its powerful acoustic rhythm, staccato delivery, brevity, strong lyric (though not one I could ever identify with despite trying) and the use of the bass voice (something I've always been a sucker for) at the close of each of verse. Cochran (with co-writer Capehart) has taken the best of black music and presented it in an instantly accessible and infectious style. The lyrics seem effortless and simple now but as a youngster I remember struggling to get certain things – like “cos you didn't work a lick” (not an expression I knew then). It took me ages to understand the line “If you wanna use the car to go a ridin' next Sunday”. If you wanna use the car to go a ridin' next Sunday then what? A comma can be very important. “If you wanna, use the car to go a ridin' next Sunday”. That's quite apart from the alien notion of such a young man driving his parents' car!
I've checked out Cochran's other material and this really is the best. It took 45 minutes to write but 50 years on and nearly 40 since I first heard it, what simple pleasure it has given down the years.

RnR01 Woodland Rock

(Watch out for Laurel and Hardy)
I was thinking about doing a series on Rock'n'Roll numbers (yes, I know) and wrote one thing. Then someone mentioned this track (Woodland Rock). Though from the seventies it's straightforward Rock'n'Roll but with a parody twist (I think the guitars are going backwards too). I think it was on the 'b' side of the hit single 'Hot Love'.

There's a man on the corner
got his head in his hat
he dances like a gypsy
so he must be where it's at.Do the rock, do the woodland rock
let it all hang out ev'rybody shout
do the rock, do the woodland rock.The wind is the thing
that makes the body swing
it brings you up and takes you down
and treats you like a king.
Met a little Momma
she was sweet,
she was gone
she's got legs like a railroad
face like the sun.
Wind is in the willows
my house is up a tree
the seas of change are flowing
I want everybody freeto do the rock, do the woodland rock
let it all hang out ev'rybody shout
do the rock, do the woodland rock.Met a little Momma, etc
Ally bally bash bam rock-a billy boomDo the rock, do the woodland rock
let it all hang out ev'rybody shout
do the rock, do the woodland rock.