Katie Lee - Songs of Couch & Consultation (even more liner notes)

Arizona native, Katie Lee was born to a Tucson building contractor and his wife, a professional singer, in the boom years of inter-war properity. Indulged from an early age, her father schooled her in bushcraft while mother coached her in breath control & vocal technique. Ravine and desert exploration figured prominently in a happy childhood. She learned songs from the local cowboys, and sang with her youthful peers around campfires lit beneath the stark desert sky.

Hardship years of the great depression abruptly sundered family fortunes; and this pre-adolescent pioneerwoman was entrusted her share of breadwinning chores. By the age of 12, she was regularly striking out for frontier wilderlands of the Sonoran Desert, behind the wheel of the family's Model A Ford. The wild pigs & jackrabbits she brought down with her .22 calibre rifle helped in the feeding of hungry kinfolks. In Winter, East Coast carpetbaggers hit town on a seasonal holiday jaunt; Lee's family rented out their home on the city fringe and took more modest lodgings in the centre of town - saving the difference for Summer months.

If this erstwhile Arizona Cactus Flower was something of a tomboy, she maintained a dilligence at piano lessons (but abandoned ballet - pirouettes made her dizzy). Graduating from Arizona State University with a BA (drama major, English lit minor), Lee married early & impetuously, to a shavetail from the nearby Davis-Monathan Air Force Base. 3 months later her husband was posted South to Guatemala. Lee adventured after him in pursuit, arriving in Mexico with one of her girlfriends. With the help of some local friends, she obtained a visa for the border crossing. Shortly after reunion with her husband, she was pregnant. She made the return trip to home. Her husband followed not so long afterwards, but the marriage faltered and a new son was not enough to save it. The pair divorced.

With junior entrusted to the temporary care of her own mother, Lee made West for Hollywood. By day, she worked as a secretary for one-time silent matinee idol, Mary Pickford, on the United Artists lot. At night she worked at the Pasadena Playhouse; sometimes as a set decorator but more often acting. She also practised over her guitar pickings. Before long she discovered that her ex-husband, newly remarried, had effected something of a custody coup - seizing their son, and adopting him under Florida law. Lee would not see her child for the next 4 decades and the grieving weighed heavily upon her. For several years she attended Jungian therapy by way of reconciling herself to this trauma.

Despite screen testing & securing bit parts in Hollywood features, Lee enjoyed more success on the nation's airwaves. Fellow Arizonan, Andy White, was scripting for NBC-syndicated The Great Gildersleeve, and helped her to an audition. A romantic foil for the eponymous lead, "Katie Lee, the Green Mountain girl" became a regular and popular guest on the show. By 1953 she'd figured in some of the most successful radio serials of the day: in addition to The Great Gildersleeve, there were spots on Halls of Ivy, The Railroad Hour, and One Man's Family. For a time, she was music director for the weekly Bell Telephone Hour. These were transitional years for US broadcasting, and Lee made the leap to live television along with some of the programs she'd voiced for; appearing in Armchair Detective, the first live drama telecast from Los Angeles.

In a paradoxical sense it was her popularity on radio that pushed her towards a career in folk music. A rendition of her Girl In The Wood signature on The Great Gildersleeve won her sackloads of fan mail far in advance of what the show's lead had ever received, and he agitated for her removal. Her discovery of Glen Canyon, rafting down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, recovered her awe for nature, and awakened her rage at its despoliation. Disgusted at last with the pretence of this epicentre of industrial entertainment, it was Josh White and Burl Ives who provided some robust mentoring and advice. With Ives' help, she launched herself on a national tour of nightclubs and coffee shops. She researched traditional musics at every opportunity, haunting libraries and scrutinising broadsides and songbooks for folkloric materials to adapt and perform.

In 1956 Lee was performing at Murray Franklin's nightclub in Miami when Bud Freeman called long-distance from Hollywood. Would she like to record an LP of folk music? At curtain close she headed east in her Thunderbird.

(etc etc etc...)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

The Shower Scene From Psycho - Exploding Hits! (liner notes)

1986, and I am a hormonal hillbilly. For pocket money, my school holidays are spent driving a combine harvester in ever-diminishing circles within expansive heat-hazed paddocks. And I have just discovered that record stores also retail music which will never be broadcast on the local AM radio, or feature in glossy teen mags. Mostly, what I buy is cassettes (my first turntable is still a year away). And in my burgeoning avidity for Australian independent music of the day, I buy all the split-sided series of Cooking With George compiles. Much of it is unremarkable, but two tracks by The Shower Scene From Psycho enjoy household high-rotation. It's compelling power-pop! In my adolescent naivety, I imagine the tracks are original compositions. And I puzzle over the identity of the androgyne vocalist: man, woman, or cartoon mutant?

More than 20 years later, the recordings archived here still describe a stunning collision of eccentric creativity and aesthetic extremes. The avant-pop atonality is embellished with raucous guitar riffage, and punctuated by charmingly wry DIY concrete FX. It begins with a studious intention to deconstruct and subvert the pop tradition, but the hooks have been retained and accentuated. The covers are extravagantly wrought; the originals convey a haunted existentialism.

(etc)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Pete Seeger - Rainbow Race/Now/Young vs. Old (liner notes)

The paradox of the United States of America is the historical problem of “democracy” as an idea and an ideal. Liberty & justice – but not for all. Settled partially by religious dissenters fleeing persecution in their homelands, the new freedoms they sought were seldom extended to the native inhabitants, or people of colour, or the poor, or even women. Thus had precursor “model Republics” (Athens, Rome) also been designed to exclude the toiling majority from the privileges of citizenship. Welcome to the new world...

But just as those settlers fled across the Atlantic lake, so they also carried with them the seeds of fresh dissentings: the germination of new and revived ideas about civic virtue, and a universal franchise in the government of their lives. Enlightenment scrutiny of the social contract was underway; the rebellion that began in those 13 colonies made the return trip to France and beyond.

And perhaps this is the reason for a nation birthed from revolution, but whose rulers have so often been in terror of even modest reform. Sometimes those fears have extended to the arts. In the modern era we recognise attempts at centralised control of culture as the mark of a totalitarian state, but Pete Seeger is not the only US artist to have suffered government injunctions.

Seeger proceeds from New England privilege, and a scrupulously Calvinist dedication to mission. He shares the progressive politics and ardour for music of his parents and stepmother. Father, Charles, had been forced from a position as Foundation Professor of music at the Berkeley campus of UCLA, due to his public opposition to US involvement in World War I; later he taught at Juilliard. Stepmother, Ruth Crawford, was both a prominently atonal modernist, and an early champion of US folk music traditions.

If Pete Seeger enjoyed the benefits of this patrician background early in his life, what is remarkable is where his subsequent experience has led him. Mentored by Huddie Ledbetter & Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who schooled him in the instrumental techniques of guitar and banjo... Friend & fellow traveller to Woody Guthrie, with whom he shared proto-beat highway wanderings and a busking minstrelsy... Colleague to John Lomax at the Library of Congress, working at the preservation and revival of a neglected musical heritage. By his twenties Seeger had achieved the synthesis of dual vocations as a social activist and musical performer: an effective partisan for the culture and concerns of ‘just plain folks’.

Seeger came of age in a halcyon era for US politics: the New Deal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was an extended, but singular, moment, which sought to reconcile progressive ideals to the preservation of a (kinder, gentler) capitalist economy. In many respects, subsequent US governments delivered a Great Leap Backwards. 17 years on the blacklist sundered one promise of Seeger’s early career – the limelight prominence of chart success – and reconfirmed him in the bardly chronicling of causes which were seldom popular.

These 2 CDs gather Pete Seeger’s final recordings for Columbia label. Initially signed by John Hammond in the early 1960s, his presence on the Columbia roster leant the company a considerable prestige (it was reportedly the reason that Bob Dylan joined him as a labelmate), but Seeger’s aversion to mercantilism and strongly-voiced political opinions made his records a difficult prospect to market. A national television blacklist was only lifted in 1967, after an outraged campaign in the US national press. Columbia sales reps struggled to fit Seeger’s work to existing markets, and senior executives were rarely sympathetic to his paladin altruism.

(etc)

available now from the Omni Recording Corporation


Elsewise! Seeger gets his apology

And: more good news

Biff Rose S/T (liner notes)

Johnny Carson: “He’s a composer, a performer, a philosopher, an electric carrot... arrgh, a charming guy - would you welcome: Biff Rose...”

Beloved by David Bowie and the Manson family, reloved by a crew of contemporary troubadour types (Devandra Bernhardt et al), Biff Rose hails from an eclipsed tradition of vaudeville artistry. It was talking pictures on large and small screens alike that put an end to all that quick-witted stagecraft, but just as they took so they also gave back and so for a while every US television station had its own humourous but topical singer/songwriter declaiming away and (sometimes) working over the ivories by way of accompaniment.

Well, Biff Rose is (or was) a bit like that; he was on television, some. Writing for stand-up guy George Carlin at first... Also: performing on variety shows hosted by Mort Sahl... tho’ Rose himself prefers the notional company of peers like Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley... (Huh?) OK... This stuff may be of some kind of significance when thinking on the work of our current Rose: the cuss words and provocative antagonism. These folks are and were the “loyal opposition”: exponents of the inflammatory arts of liberal-baiting and iconoclastic put-ons.

Anyways! His early works (especially those 2 late ‘60s LPs) betray his counter-culture sympathies and an Oedipal tension... Moreover: a boisterous good humour, and the laid-bare heart of a gentle, tender person. He is a terrifically accomplished pianist – stride-style audio slapstick, tho’ balanced with a virtuoso attention to phrasing. There’s a genuine delicacy of touch and timing, to match the intimacy of the earnest, heartfelt lyrics. The wry sardonicisms invite comparison to Tom Lehrer - who is a laughing mad cat likeways - but Rose graduated from Lehrer’s sophomore wit long years back; even his funny songs are invested with a romantic poignancy.

(etc)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Hugo Montenegro - Mr Groovy (liner notes)

Sunshine delirium with an electronic edge

"I'm an experimenter in music. I am interested in enhancing the musical experience by utilizing dramatic effects" – Hugo Montenegro

Gratuitous guru of the groovy glee-club, Hugo Montenegro cooked the Western world’s nearest equivalent to the kind of ‘marsala’ composition so famously wrought on the Indian subcontinent by the likes of Rahul Dev Burman. No instrument is safe, and the human voice is the most ubiquitous instrument of all. Like Burman, Montenegro was adept in writing for a choir of wordless vocals; jazz-scat stylings via the innovations of their soundtrack compeer, Juan Garcia Esquivel... “Babada!”

Born to a modest New York family, World War 2 and a tour with the US navy provided youngster Montenegro with a G.I. bill place at the Manhattan School of Music. Here he applied his lessons in composition to the dance band he led outside of class. After graduation, a second tour-of-duty saw him arranging for the band at the Newport naval base; ultimate return to civilian life found him working as staff manager for Columbia Record’s king of saccharine strings, Andre Kostelantz, and Montenegro’s earliest LPs are subject to this regrettable “pazz and jop” influence.

By the dawn of the HiFi era, Montenegro was on staff at Time Records label, leading large ensembles through stomping covers of erstwhile standards like Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King (from the particularly choice Bongos And Brass LP). Work at Columbia Records had also brought him into the orbit of Harry Belafonte, and through the early and mid-60s Montenegro was arranging and conducting for Belafonte’s elaborate live performances. As Producer of Belafonte’s The Midnight Special LP in 1961, he hired a fledgling Bob Dylan as session harmonica player – but the gruelling rehearsal schedule proved too much for the aspirant star, and Dylan reportedly quit after recording only a single track...

By 1966, Montenegro had relocated from New York to Hollywood and was writing and recording soundtrack music both for Columbia Pictures, and Columbia’s television company, Screen Gems. Contracted to score Hurry Sundown for Otto Preminger, he brought Belafonte back into the studio to record the film’s theme. Other assignments on Western B-films followed; by 1969 he was scoring star vehicles Charro! (Elvis Presley) and The Undefeated (John Wayne). Around this same time, Montenegro’s staccato double-time adaptation of 50s West Coast jazz to an amplified rhythm section - fuzztone guitar and surf drums swinging a bossa beat - made him as responsible as anyone for 60’s spy-jazz style. 2 LPs worth of music from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series suggested him to the producers of the Matt Helm franchise, but between scoring The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) Montenegro enjoyed perhaps his most unlikely commercial success.

(etc)

...one of the (many) great things to admire about that cover: the "Goodies" typeface.

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

(liner notes) Malvina Reynolds... Sings the Truth

Conscientious refusenik within the belly of the U.S. monster, Malvina Reynolds sometimes puts me in mind of Lillian Gish’s character in Night of the Hunter. Adoptive Mother to a fragile human flotsam set adrift by the “Great" Depression, her home the concluding and compassionate refuge to a raggedy Hansel and Gretel’s down-river transit through the heart of Amerikan darkness; modest in resource, but steadfast in her principles – she’s warm, if a little awkward, and possessed both of a great affection for her fellow humans and a respect for the bounties of nature. And for all of this, she does not retreat from an absolutely feistiness in defence of what she takes to be sacred.

Reynolds, the Unitarian atheist, seeks for & recovers the dignity and divinity of all living things. Born in the first year of a century of total war, she testifies to the best and worst of human behaviour. A keen intellect lends her work a playful quality and its occasional sharp, acerbic humour. An instinctive socialist, she proceeds from that honourable antimonian tradition of left-wing Jewish émigrés - now largely eclipsed and forgotten - to which the progressive strands of North American civic life owe so much.

(etc)

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

(liner notes) In All Honesty - The Stonemans

Fresh-off-the-farm, this cotton pickin’, finger clickin’ goodness derives from a crew of honestly good & real-life Beverly Hillbillies. In his own springtime of youth, elder of this musical clan, Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, hailed from the Blue Ridge mountain margin of the Appalachians Range. An itinerant labourer and amateur musician of formidable dexterity and invention (too poor to afford a store-bought autoharp, he fashioned one instead from the ruins of a broken piano), in the middle years of the roaring twenties he cut out for the bright lit big city of New York after figuring to better upon an early Henry Whitter record that he’d chanced to hear. In the next several years, the sides he etched to shellac for the Okeh and Victor labels would provide a defining moment for the “regional music” sound: Country Music, by contemporary reckonings, but back then no such thing was known to exist! By 1927, he’d prompted his producer, Ralph Peer, to follow him back out for the return journey; in the process Peer came to make the earliest commercial recordings of the original Carter Family, and Mississippi yodeller Jimmie Rodgers, at the Bristol Recording Sessions. Even if they were shortly to be eclipsed by these stellar careers that launched in their wake, it was Pop & his wife Hattie (with her own considerable chops on banjo and fiddle) theyselves who inaugurated this “Big Bang of Country Music” that first surveyed the field for our listening delectations...

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

The Stonemans on YouTube:

from The Road To Nashville (1967) - imdb entry

(liner notes) Country Moog/Nashville Gold - Gil Trythall

A single cyclopean eye winks from the apex of a hotwired haystack. The landscape is etched like a circuitboard; the new frontier is electronic, and these recordings describe the point at which the folk traditions of acoustic & digital eras play at their innocent capers and courtship…

In a year and an era of youthquake upheavals, 1968’s Switched-on Bach was an electric shock that convulsed the U.S. music industry. Created on a prototype Moog synthesizer, Wendy Carlos’ LP was the first classical recording to go platinum (and double), and won her 3 Grammies the following year. That success launched a wave of “Switched-On” albums directed at other audiences - jauntily synthesized cover versions drawn from the familiar back-catalogues of successful songwriters, like George Gershwin and The Who. It all culminated someplace in the seventies with the giddy ascent of Popcorn into the higher reaches of international charts, but that Hot Buttered hit was the exception that proved a rule… Inbetweentimes, most of these records had blazed into unremarked and rapid oblivion, but among the good and the bad there are more than a few genuinely inspired recordings. 2 of the most singular are by Gil Trythall.

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

Gil Trythall's software is available for D-L, here

(liner notes) The Electric Lucifer - Bruce Haack

How does a transcendental inventor, working at playfully hep music for small humans, come to create an inspired outsider monsterpiece like The Electric Lucifer? There is a considerable sympathy for the devil in these grooves, but it’s not by way of sophomore satanism. Rather, Bruce Haack’s record is testament to a more ambiguous archetype: mythical figure of Prometheus, the titan who fell to earth, bringing the gift of fire to man – a visitor from the stars, who elevated hairless apes beyond their hunted beast origins...

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

more infos on Bruce Haack, here