That’s Eddie Harris and Les McCann performing “Compared To What” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in June of 1969. People who don’t know who’s who often assume that Eddie Harris is the piano player, because he’s the star of the show in this video. But Eddie Harris is the saxophone player. It’s his trio, so he gets top billing. Les McCann is the guy pounding the horse teeth and singing. The song had a little revival when Scorsese put it in the soundtrack to Casino. It’s not listed on the Soundtrack album, but it’s in the movie. The video also features Benny Bailey on trumpet, Leroy Vinnegar on bass, and Donald Dean playing drums. I remembered Leroy Vinnegar’s name from his tenure in the Jazz Crusaders, but if you look at his Wiki page, he played with an amazing list of jazz artists beside them. He’s even playing on a Van Morrison record somewhere.
I rather enjoy the song’s generally disaffected outlook. Then again, the topics broached in the song are 55 years in the rear view mirror. Still, generally disaffected is about the only way to get through this life. If you’re not generally generally disaffected, I don’t think you’re paying enough attention.
Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:
Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!
Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.
So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!
Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.
So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!
Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.
Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.
I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.
Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.
You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.
The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.
Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.
I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.
It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.
The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.
What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:
Maybe you prefer the later versions:
By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.
People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.
I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.
So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.
Well, I’m informed that they did call George Jones the Rolls-Royce of Country Music, but I’m not sure it fits. A Rolls is posh. A Rolls isn’t for driving, it’s for being driven in. And a Rolls is British, and that’s way out of bounds for George. I understand the sentiment. Pretty much every country singer wanted to sing like George Jones. Calling him a Cadillac might seem like faint praise.
More to the point, George was a serious wildman. He stands stock-still, his lantern jaw moving in Clutch Cargo fashion, his hair laid out with a spirit level, so you might be forgiven for thinking that man in the Nudie suit must be a taciturn sort of fellow. But he was anything but. He was an ex-Marine, a famed hellraiser, a skirt chaser, and occasionally had to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the hospital to dry out. He, ahem, liked to drink a bit. A bit of a still at a time.
No, his voice was clear and powerful, butter and a headbutt at the same time, so he’s no Rolls-Royce. We can do better than that, nickname-wise. Once, his wife tried to keep him from going out and getting drunk, and she hid all the car keys, and went to bed. When she woke up, George was missing. She drove eight miles on the highway to the next town, to the closest place he could conceivably get drunk at, and found George sitting at the bar. Their riding mower was parked out front.
The John Deere of Country Music. There, I fixed it.
El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:
Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:
Be handsome
Be attractive
Don’t be unattractive
Works in espanol, too.
Tag: 1960s
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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