Friday Three Times

Today we're at one of those bloggers standby types of post, songs named after the day of the week that we've arrived at- Friday. The weeks seem long at the moment and Friday is always welcome. Two of the three Friday songs today have connections to recent Bagging Area posts and the third has a connection to an album that came out this year and has been largely unnoticed. 

Friday number one- The Replacements...

Love You Till Friday (Live at Cabaret Metro 1986)

The Replacements were Minneapolis contemporaries of Wednesday's postees Husker Du and were considered to be the ones most likely to make the jump to a major label- a more palatable, classic rock 'n' roll sound- The Replacements were quite capable of scuppering those kind of expectations by their own willful self- sabotage. In 2023 a remixed and re- issued box set version of their 1985 album Tim was released, a remix that actually made the songs entirely new, the really poorly mixed mid- 80s album totally redone and better for it. There was a live disc, The Replacements kicking the arse out of their own songs at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago in 1986, of which Love You Till Friday was their second song, rattled off in between the ridiculous and the sublime, between set opener Gary's Got A Boner and third song Bastards Of Young. And that's The Replacements all over. 

Friday number two- Jack Kerouac...

Friday Afternoon In The Universe

Jack Kerouac's On The Road was the subject of a Saturday Soundtrack post a few weeks ago. Friday Afternoon In The Universe is from a very long narrative poem Kerouac wrote called Old Angel Midnight, a 'monologue of the world' Kerouac dreamed up in Tangiers in 1956 and then began in a notebook while staying in a cabin with Gary Snyder later the same year. Kerouac called it Spontaneous prose, naked word babble and automatic doodle writing. A judge in a censorship case called it a prose picnic. Whatever it's called, Friday afternoon in the universe is a good time and place to be in. 

Friday number three, Half Man Half Biscuit...

Friday Night And The Gates Are Low

In 1995 Wirral's finest released their second album Some Call It Godcore. Friday Night And The Gates Are Low is a lamentation for Friday night football, Tranmere Rovers playing in the rain in front of a small crowd and the 'bastard slip of a sub's ruined my weekend'. Nigel signs off with 'Friday night and I just love complaining/ And no I haven't got anything better to do'.

In the summer of this year HMHB released their sixteenth album, All Asimov And No Fresh Air. I will return to it- its very much business as usual, in other words thirteen slices of customary laugh out loud lyrics coupled obscure references to modern life and some genuinely moving moments. If you haven't heard it, you really should. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Jack Kerouac's On The Road was finally turned into a film in 2012 by Walter Salles (who had previously made The Motorcycle Diaries, an account of a youthful Che Guevara based on Che's book about travelling round South America). Other people had shown an interest in making a film out of On The Road- Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights back in 1979 and attempted to start shooting in 1995 but abandoned it. Before that Kerouac himself wrote to Marlon Brando to do it. Brando never replied. There was interest from Gus van Sant with Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt lined up to play the main roles but nothing got off the ground. 

Coppola eventually hired Salles and Salles started shooting in 2010 with Sam Riley as Sal Paradise/ Jack Kerouac and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty/ Neal Cassady. Riley had played Ian Curtis in Control, the Joy Division film. Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi, Kirsten Dunst and Elizabeth Moss were all singed up, so it's an all star 2010s cast. The film looks good, the cinematography is good, the world of late 1940s USA and Mexico looks authentic, the attention to period detail is spot on. It feels like the 1940s, you can almost smell the cigarettes and the sweat, the grease of the engines, the tarmac, the streets of Denver, Jack's boots...

Much of filming was down on the run, on location, Salles in a car with a handheld camera alongside the car with Sal/ Sam and Dean/ Garrett inside. Hedlund described it as 'guerrilla filming' which sounds like it should be exactly what On The Road needs on the big screen. Despite this, there's something at the heart of the film that never quite connects, it never catches fire in the way it should. Hedlund is great as Dean as is Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Sam Riley's Sal/ Jack is decent if too much on the sidelines at times, not involved enough. As a film it looks good and some of the scenes work but overall it's too polite and doesn't capture the energy of the novel. Still, I liked it enough when it came out- I went on my own to a daytime screening at the Cornerhouse and have seen it at least once since then on DVD. 

On The Road is probably unfilmable really- the narrative, such as it is, doesn't really fit the standard three act arc and a version of On The Road that was entirely Kerouacian would be an impressionistic arthouse blur of road, poetry and jazz. 

The soundtrack though is very enjoyable, nineteen tracks that work really well as a whole piece- which is the sign of a good soundtrack. There are some period pieces (Slim Gaillard, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Son House), some instrumentals by soundtrack composer Gustavo Santaolalla and two minutes of Kerouac reading, mumbling, from the novel. 

Sweet Sixteen is fifty seconds that opens the soundtrack, the cast singing in a car, the sound of rubber tyres on tarmac and engine noise, a scene setter for the album. 

Sweet Sixteen

Roman Candles is  one minute twenty two seconds of rattling percussion and jazz piano from Gustavo Santaolalla, named for Kerouac's famous description in the novel- 

'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles'

Roman Candles

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker made Salt Peanuts in 1941, a bebop tune written by Gillespie with the vocal interjection of the title surrounded by trumpet, piano, double bass and Parker's alto sax. Charlie Parker was one of the key inspirations for Kerouac's writing, the reason he got the legendary roll of paper to feed into the typewriter so he could type without having to stop. 

Salt Peanuts

Son House's Death Letter Blues is a postcard from the distant past, Delta blues sung and played by one who lived it. Heavy. 

Death Letter Blues

'I don't think anyone can hear me, can you hear me now?', Kerouac mutters at the start of this, before finding his rhythm, 'New York, 1949...' and starts narrating the road trip and the search for Dean's father which is what Dean/ Neal is looking for all the time- an absent alcoholic father- and the perpetual motion that is at the heart of the novel. As a result the two minutes of Kerouac reading from On The Road on the soundtrack are an affecting and effective way to end it. 

Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road

The film and the novel both end with the unfinished search and Jack's reflection, back in New Jersey...

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

Monday's Long Song

'They're selling postcards of the hanging/ They're painting the passports brown/ The beauty parlour is filled with sailors/ The circus is in town...'

So begins Desolation Row, the final song on Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, an album that has a claim to be Dylan's greatest (it opens with Like A Rolling Stone and each song that fellows matches that song for songwriting). It was the second album Dylan released in '65. The second! He put out Bringing It All Back Home in March which was recorded in a few days in January. Highway 61 Revisited took a little longer to record- a few weeks from the middle of June before an end of August release. In a world where bands/ artists take years to write, record, release and then promote and tour an album the fact that Dylan put out these two within six months of each other is staggering. To prove he was on a roll, he recorded the songs for Blonde On Blonde in January 1966 and released that one, a double, in June. 

Desolation Row is eleven minutes long and eleven verses  and packs an entire world of characters and scenarios into it, a portrait of a world on the brink and breaking down. Dylan responded to an interviewer by saying Desolation Row was in Mexico, 'just across the border', but this was at a 1965 press conference and we shouldn't take anything he said at a 1965 press conference at face value. Al Kooper reckoned it was in Manhattan, a rundown stretch of Eighth Avenue. Kerouac's lonely mountain top fire watching hut that inspired Desolation Angles may have been in there too. The cast of characters in the song includes a blind commissioner, Cinderella, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood), a jealous monk, Dr. Filth and his nurse, the Phantom of the Opera, the hunchback of Notre Dame, Casanova, Nero, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, the agents and the superhuman crew, and the passengers on the Titanic. There are riot squads, people making love or expecting rain, electric violins, heart attack machines, insurance men, broken doorknobs, kerosene, people being killed with self confidence, people's faces being re- arranged and new names given to them... it's a vast song, panoramic and kaleidoscopic, Dylan's mid- 60s urban poetics that may mean everything and may mean nothing. 

Desolation Row

Charlie McCoy's guitar parts add so much to Dylan's acoustic strumming, a pretty addition that seems deliberately at odds with the roll call of horrors in the lyrics.

Cat Power, never one to shy away from an ambitious cover version, covered Desolation Row in 2022 and released it a year ago, December 2023, extending Dylan's eleven minutes into twelve. 

Desolation Row

Cat didn't just cover Desolation Row. She covered the entire 1966 Dylan concert (long thought to be the Royal Albert Hall but actually Manchester's Free Trade Hall, the famous gig where Dylan goes electric in the second half and an audience member shouted 'Judas' at Dylan). 

As a bonus, sort tying the two artists together, this is a fan made video of footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucian Carr and others on the streets of New York in 1959, with Cat Power's Good Woman as the soundtrack, a song that packs an emotional punch in the vocal performance, the words and the guitar playing. 

Kissing The Cotton Clouds

Shari Denson, friend of mine I've never met but know on Facebook, is a photographer and has taken loads of great pictures of bands playing in and around Manchester. Last year she put on a one- off exhibition in a slate park under the Mancunian Way which I missed but looked really good. A week ago on Facebook she posted this picture, a shot taken at Cotton Clouds festival a couple of years ago. Shari asked 'does anyone recognise either of these gorgeous folk?'

It is a stunning photograph, a moment in time caught. I don't know which band the couple are watching, it looks like daytime so presumably a band lower down the bill. They're a good looking couple, photogenic and sexy and they embody that freedom you have when you're young. He is caught up in the performance happening to the left of the picture, she has noticed the camera and glanced at the shutter, looking straight at us. Both are in the moment, together but with a different focus. Some of Shari's friends said the woman looks a bit like Madonna and the man like Jeff Buckley. Another suggested it could be from an 80s film, this one maybe...

Shari said that if she were her, she'd want the picture printed and on the wall, ready to show her grand-kids in several decades time. This generation have so many photographs of themselves, they document themselves and their lives constantly almost without thinking about it. I've got very few photos from my teens or twenties. We only really started taking photographs regularly when we had children. Selfies weren't really a thing until phones and cameras became brought together in one object.

Since the original thread a week ago I think the man has been identified but on the night she posted it another friend Karen said that in some ways she hoped they wouldn't be found, that she liked their anonymity, she didn't want to know who they were- 'Mystery is everything sometimes, right?' In some ways I agree- without names they are a kind of every couple, young and unfettered.

Karen said that when the couple who were in the famous photo in Times Square at the end of World War II were named and their stories known it ruined the photo for her. Both lived into their nineties. The woman, Greta Friedman, said that the sailor, George Mendonsa, didn't ask to kiss her, he just grabbed her. According to Greta it wasn't romantic, more a drunken celebration, and today that strikes a very different tone.

More happily, the couple from the sleeve of the Woodstock album were found forty years later and happily were still together.

It also made me think of this photo taken in New York in the mid- 1940s,a snapshot of Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs near Columbia University. One of the books I've read about the Beats, it might have been Carolyn Cassady's autobiography, wrote about this picture and said that the only person who is in the moment is Jack, meeting the gaze of the lens. Hal is looking at Allen, Allen has his eyes closed, frozen slightly, Burroughs too. Jack is there, alive and looking back at us, tuned it. Shari's photo is similar- a better photo too- him intensely looking elsewhere and her looking down the camera at us.

Cotton Clouds takes place, or took place, at Saddleworth near Oldham and has been played by The Coral, Sugarhill Gang and Nick Heywood in 2017, Sister Sledge, Starsailor and The Orielles the following year and Peter Hook, Alabama 3, The Wailers and Tim Burgess last August. I think the promoters have since gone into administration and it probably wouldn't have happened this year anyway.

I'm assuming that Cotton Clouds was named after the line in Elephant Stone, a song that is one of The Stone Roses finest moments. I'd take Elephant Stone over the entire Second Coming album, it's unaffected, weightless and heady-

'Burst into heaven
Kissing the cotton clouds
Arctic sheets and fields of wheat
I can't stop coming down'

Elepahnt Stone is a technicolour burst of northern psychedelic, the words and guitars in a rush to unfold and Reni's drums driving everything on, the sound surfacing only for a breather with the 'seems like there's a hole/in my dreams' before diving back in again.

Elephant Stone 12" Mix

Tristessa

On Saturday night while The Chemical Brothers were block rocking the Other Stage at Glastonbury talk on Twitter turned to the then Dust Brothers 1994 Xmas Dust Up, a cassette given away free with the NME in December 1994. The tape was mixed by Ed and Tom, a window rattling, volume- all-the-way-up, seven song mixtape.

Side 1
The Dust Brothers- Leave Home
Bonus Beats Orchestra- Bonus Beats
The Prodigy- Voodoo People (Dust Brothers Remix)
Depth Charge- Shaolin Buddha Finger

Side 2
Renegade Soundwave- Renegade Soundwave (Leftfield remix)
Strange Brew- One Summer ('Lektrik Dawn Dub)
Manic Street Preachers- La Tristessa Durera



Just looking at the sleeve and reading the tracklist transports me back to this cassette causing difficulties for the speakers in a red Nissan Micra back in 94/95- it used to get played a lot for a while.

Bonus Beats Orchestra was Tom and Ed Dust/Chemical under another name. Depth Charge were ace, the 9 Deadly Venoms album was trip hop and big beat before either really got going, and chock full of samples from martial arts films and horror movies. I've posted Renegade Soundwave before and the Leftfield remix is particularly good. Strange Brew were a duo from Manchester, one half of whom, Jake Purdy, lived down our street when we were kids. We'd long lost touch by the mid 90s but used to knock around in a gang all the time in the mid 80s. Funny to have a little childhood, local connection with a free NME cassette. Helpfully someone has transferred their copy of the tape digitally and uploaded it to Youtube. The beats sound quite timelocked but as a whole this still sounds fairly fresh I think.





The Dust Brothers would become The Chemical Brothers not long afterwards. Their remix of La Tristessa Durera was done while still Dust and isn't subtle-  squealing noises from the start, various samples from Ed and Tom's pile of odds and ends, lots of sirens and James' vocal. La Tristessa Durera- the sadness endures forever- was written by Richie taking the point of view of a war veteran wheeled out once a year on Poppy Day as a 'cenotaph souvenir', poverty causing him to sell his medal. It is one of the best early Manics songs, showing behind the eyeliner, shock quotes and bluster there was some genuine talent.

La Tristessa Durera (From A Scream To A Sigh) (Chemical [Dust] Brothers Remix)

Whither Goest Thou America?

I appreciate that here in the UK we don't have too much room to shout at the moment, being led as we are by the most incompetent government since the end of the Second World War who are attempting to put into law, by most reckonings, the most disastrous political decision any major western country has taken in the same period. But, as the question at the top of the post asks, 'whither goest thou, America?' When Jack Kerouac asked the question in On The Road it was in a different context but still, the question stands.

In the last two weeks alone Trump has-
* legitimised a brutal dictator who uses torture and murder against his own people, orders assassinations of those in his government who he falls out with and who has used forced starvation to bring the population to heel.
* professed admiration for this dictator, praising him as a a man whose people listen when he speaks and said he wants the same from the American people
* removed the USA from the United Nations Committee on Human Rights because it criticises Israeli policies against the Palestinian people
* continued to support a policy that has led to toddlers being imprisoned in cages on the USA's southern border

This is the normalisation of anti-democratic practices by the US government. We know from history where this leads. It's never too late to shout about it. One of the things David Byrne talked about between songs on Monday night was about how at his shows in the US they had a table in the foyer to register people to vote there and then, and about how important it is to get people to engage, to vote in local elections and national ones. It beats 'Hi, how are you?' (response usually a big cheer) and 'this is a new one' (response, a trip to the bar or the toilet). Unless Trump abolishes elections in the next 2 years (as his new friend in North Korea might advise), he is removable and defeatable. Same over here. We've got to rid of these people. The chorus of this 2006 Jarvis Cocker song is truer now than it was when he wrote it...

Running The World

' I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" "Whither goest thou?'

In 1997 an album called Joy Kicks Darkness was released, a spoken word tribute to Kerouac by artists including Michael Stipe, Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, John Cale and Juliana Hatfield and also featuring surviving Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This track is Joe Strummer and Jack Kerouac together. 

MacDougal Street Blues

No! Say It Loud, No!

Today, Pete Wylie. Yesterday The Vinyl Villain published a post on the third member of The Crucial Three- Pete Wylie and his Mighty Wah! a blogpost so comprehensive and with comments so good I rewrote my planned post for today. So instead of what I had partly written I'm revisiting a version of a Mighty Wah! song I have posted before, a brilliantly executed re-edit of The Mighty Wah's The Story Of The Blues (Part 2) from the Edit Service people. A long electronic drum intro, the female backing vox and then Pete Wylie's spoken part, including that quote from Jack Kerouac- 'I remember something Sal Paradise said 'the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody of the land and were just rootless fools'' and Wylie's message, 'you've got to hope for the best and that's the best you can hope for' and ultimately say 'No!'. If you love the original, you'll love this too. Promise.



By the way, I apologise for the appearance of the letter U and the number 2 in close proximity in the picture accompanying this post.

And Don't You Come Back No More

Today's song is from the mid 1970s, roots and rockers reggae's golden period, and celebrated deejay Big Youth (pulling a wheelie too- I could never get the hang of that). Hit The Road Jack was written by Percy Mayfield in 1960, possibly inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road (but opinions seem to differ on this). Ray Charles had a hit with it in 1961 duetting with Margie Hendricks- she kicks him out cos 'it's understood, he's got no money, he's no good'. Big Youth recorded his version in 1977- the year two sevens clash.

Hit The Road Jack

Good Woman

Ages ago a friend lent me a Cat Power lp- I can't remember which one but I listened to it and decided it really wasn't my cuppa tea. I don't think I stuck with it very long. I found this clip recently- footage of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the streets of New York in 1959, soundtracked by Cat Power's Good Woman. Which I now love. The vocal and ever-so-distorted guitars, and with some lovely backing vocals. Some plucked strings, a dash of harmonica maybe. The right side of melancholic.



It's good when a completely different context allows you to hear something differently and get a different response. I may have to go  and buy the album.

Good Woman

Death Letter, Hot Water

We are into day 5 of enforced Victorian living- come and film us Channel 4. Our boiler stopped working on Sunday- no central heating or hot water all day. It is not easy to fill a bath with the kettle and a few pans. The boilerman came on Monday and said our expander unit had popped causing the system to trip out. He's ordered a new one but no sign of it yet. We have two portable radiators and an electric fan heater Mrs Swiss had when I first met her (and it wasn't new then). On Sunday night we bathed at friends. Boilerman did a temporary fix for us, emptying the kitchen radiator to act as an expander unit. This has, since Monday evening, provided intermittent heat and some hot water. Some as in not enough. I got those faulty boiler blues.

Son House's blues song Death Letter plays in the film of On The Road and hearing it on the big screen last week reminded me of its power and beauty. Two clips for you...

This one, undated, but I'm guessing 1950s (?)



And this one from 1970...



And without wanting to come across as one of those authenticity blues bores, they just go to show that lights, staging, films and projections, heck, even having a guitar that's in tune, are all a little superfluous at times.

On The Road Again

I went to see On The Road the day before yesterday, on my own in the afternoon. I dunno if this is the best way to go to the cinema or just a bit sad. The day before I took the 9 year old daughter to see Ice Age 4. I think On The Road shaded it. I enjoyed it, despite what the critics have said. It is a tad overlong and there is a coffee table element to the jazz and the clothes and the good looking cast and there is also a little truth in the reviews that said watching people drink, take drugs and have sex is pretty boring but even so I thought it was a good effort and better than I'd been led to believe. The film looks good, the scenery frequently stunning, the period details spot on, the cinematography beautiful. Sam Riley is good as Sal Paradise, the eternal observer looking for stuff to write about and on a search for kicks, but I half expected him to turn into Ian Curtis at any moment and start doing the jerky dance. Tom Sturridge (Carlo Marx/Allen Ginsberg) steals most of the scenes he's in despite some clunky scripting and the female leads of Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst are excellent. Mostly though, for a film based on a book that has narrative but no real plot, no three act formula, no twist, no denouement, none of the things that 'make' a film, I thought it worked. It was watchable, funny, absorbing in parts, and to me (no film critic admittedly) Walter Salles made a decent job of a book long considered unfilmable.

Ice Age 4 tells the continuing story of three animated prehistoric friends- a sabre toothed tiger called Diego,a woolly mammoth called Manny and a sloth called Sid. The continents are drifting apart leading to all kinds of japes and capers, plus there's a crew of animal pirates and a teenage mammoth called Peaches learning about friendship.

Friday Afternoon In The Universe

Beatnik Monday

Jack Kerouac and Joe Strummer together from a 1997 album Joy Kicks Darkness where a load of indie beat types set Kerouac to music. Sure to put a spring in your step this morning. Or a shuffle.

MacDougal Street Blues

The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones

I first read On The Road in the summer of 1989, aged 19. I loved it. It didn't get me hitch-hiking across North America but I went on to read loads of other Kerouac novels, biographies, and then onwards into Burroughs, Ginsberg and the rest. Kerouac's work is full of contradictions- some of it is almost unreadable (Dr Sax say), some of it just has to be read for the writing rather than any sense of narrative. He famously typed On The Road in a three week Benzadrine fuelled binge on a non-stop roll of paper. It had to be widely edited to make any narrative sense. For all the wanderlust and adventures and search for kicks, he spent his life with the apron strings to his mother firmly uncut. He tried to balance the booze, partying and excitement with a spiritual quest, settling for Buddhism and his own version of Zen. When fame hit him, ten years after writing the book, he soon found he couldn't cope. Held up by the hippies as the King of the Beats he criticised, even loathed, the 60s counter culture and died an alcoholic in front of the TV in Florida. But the sense of freedom in his best writing, the lyrical nature of the verse, the attempt to 'write jazz', the trip to Mexico in On The Road, The Dharma Bums, parts of Desolation Angels, are all beautiful and romantic and inspiring.

Long considered unfilmable, Walter Salles, has had a go at it (starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen). The trailer below looks right but you just can't tell from a trailer how good a film is going to be. It got mixed reviews at Cannes in the summer. I'm kind of looking forward to it when it gets released this December.



Kerouac recorded several albums, sometimes reading his work alone, sometimes reading it accompanied by jazz musicians.

Jack Kerouac Reading On The Road