Boneyard Media

So I was having this conversation with my friend Kendell Kardt, who’d just seen my earlier post about the Klowns, and then he started talking about a session he once played for legendary Klowns producer Jeff Barry, who was a friend of Rig’s first drummer, Tom Cerone. Well, friends, it turns out that the session was for this song called “Sugar, Sugar,” the same one that spent a whole month at #1 in ‘69 and which you know by heart. And so here I am in a position to reveal to the world that the faceless “studio musicians” mentioned often by those pop historians who want to make it clear that cartoon characters didn’t really play on those records, were - in the case of the Archies’ quintessential hit - the guys from RIG. Kendell, sitting at the Wurlitzer electric piano, remembers this comment from Mr. Barry clearest: “Throw in some more of that Jamaican horse sh*t!”

Update: More commentary from Kendell: “Maybe we should have let Jeff Barry produce the Rig album. But we were too stuck up for that.” That’s a generational thing. My generation, weaned on a much more aggressive level of pop culture commercialism, positively revels in the prefab aspects of the Archies, Monkees, and their ilk, while they make the previous generation’s hair stand on end. Let’s not even talk about today’s youth generation, who’s probably never even considered the idea of a song’s appearance in a commercial as being just a tad bit germy and who will be writing doctoral dissertations on ringtones.

I’m getting pretty excited for the Goran Bregović show, which will happen Wed., June 17 at the Bass Concert Hall at the U. of Texas campus in Austin. If you’re in town, down miss it - Bregović is bringing along his sizable backup band and his show is an upbeat and visual Balkan extravaganza you won’t soon forget. Bregović is Yugoslav rock royalty - he founded the Bosnian group Bijelo Dugme (White Button), which reveled in regional musical and lyrical folk motifs and pretty much ruled the south Slavic roost during the ’70s and ’80s. From the late ’80s onward, he’s become a prolific film music institution. The folks who brought us Borat, in fact, nicked all kinds of snippets from GB’s backlog for that film’s soundtrack. Bregović’s recent albums, though, including this year’s rollicking Alkohol, are straight up, non-film-oriented musical affairs.

The Austin Public Library has been doing a wonderful thing, hosting free screenings of five films featuring the scores of Bregović at various branches. Time of the Gypsies (1989) and Čaruga (1991) have already come and gone, but you can still catch the following:

And don’t miss my radio show, The International Folk Bazaar, this Thursday at 11 AM, where I’ll be featuring an hour-long Bregović career retrospective and giving away free tickets.

Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today, which isn’t to say I wasn’t feeling perfectly fine before. I’m back in the USA again after a 17-day tour including Beijing, Harbin, Shanghai, Wuxi, Guiyang, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai, which is really a bit too much to process at the moment, but here’s a top ten:

* The enormity of Zhonghua and my minute-by-minute perspective shifts.
* Guangzhou, as in I-Heart-Guangzhou, where I played a proper bar gig and had big fun at the Ping Pong Art Space.
* Checking out the Dragon Boat Races in the Panyu district - an adequate fix, being so far removed from the stock car action back home - and being interviewed about it on TV.
* The bizarre mixture of keystone kop driving and complete lack of road rage.
* The fabulous Free Sound Record shop in Beijing - the oasis for Chinese independent music - where I once again found everything I wanted and got hooked up with everything I hadn’t known I wanted.
* Bad luck highlight: leaving my camera at the very tail end of my tour in a Beijing taxi.
* All the kids from northern Harbin all the way down to southern Zhuhai, who turned up and tuned in and made the entire experience such a pleasure.
* All the American and Chinese foreign service officers who knew how to take such good care of a lowly folk singer.
* Squid, jellyfish, eel, sea cucumber, preserved goose eggs, and turtle blood noodles, to name just a few.
* “Hǎo yī duǒ měi lì de mò li huā…”

I’ve just gone off to China again, this time courtesy of the US Embassy, giving little performances and talks (mostly to university audiences) about definitions and functions of American folk music. Most of the programs end up being 50% talking and 50% singing/playing, with lively Q and A at the end.

I’m really reveling in the hodgepodge aspects of the programs, playing Cajun, Tex Mex, ragtime, Hawaiian, bluegrass, and tossing in a few of my own - and to such receptive audiences, to boot. A recent one in Harbin featured an ad hoc classical guitar showcase featuring me and one of the audience members.

The audiences have been a real delight - enthusiastic, interested and intelligent - and their perspectives are so different. (Campfire songs? Johnny Cash? Better explain a little bit.) I’m also trying to take full advantage of the opportunity to investigate more Chinese rock/folk/pop and to understand how some of the stuff I’ve gotten into ranks according to the tastes of these college kids.

Two of my favorite unexpected post-program questions:

Audience member: “I’m very surprised that you didn’t mention the famous American song ‘Copacabana’ in your presentation.”
Me (busted): (Break into an a cappella rendition of “Copacabana,” which I happen to love.)

Audience member: “I was hoping you would explain why the Backstreet Boys are no longer popular in America.”
Me: “They still reign supreme in the charts of our hearts.”

One of the distinct pleasures of grade school malingering, I remember, had to do with watching Sesame Street, the show I’d supposedly outgrown, and keeping it my little secret.

Read my review of Michael Davis’s Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street here.

Starting May 14, my “Folk Bazaar” radio show (which also answers to the name “Folk Bizarre”) will expand and relocate to a new time slot - Thursdays from 11 am to 12 noon. You can hear the show in Austin, TX on 91.7 FM, KOOP, but if you’re anywhere else in the world (or even Austin), you can catch a live stream at koop.org. It’s free form folk all the way, but I do tend to sidestep current Americana and give preference to the dusty, obscure, odd, and/or foreign. Check out previous playlists here.

There’s a loosey-goosey sort of deism going on here that I can’t help but nod at. “I really do believe there’s a god somewhere,” the always-red-hot Rance Allen Group sings. Yes, he/she may be a Star Trek prankster in a laurel wreath and toga, and he/she may be 1 out of 47, but I’ll be darned if he/she isn’t up there.

The Rance Allen Group - “Up Above My Head”

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Dennis Allen from Laugh-In is the sad sack doing this SS clip. OK, I’m sending the VW on its way now.

The drummer just thought it was stupid.

I guess the VW door’s officially open now. Here’s Leo Sayer doing his first hit, which peaked at #2 in the UK. We know it better in the US as a #4 hit for Three Dog Night from ‘74.