Seriously, what’s wrong with you? That’s Milton Banana right there. Playing the drums. It’s really him. And you’re not currently listening to him. What’s your excuse? It better be a good one.
The guy practically invented bossa nova drumming. Well, important people like his mother said he did, I think. He’s, like famous. His Wikipedia page uses two sentences to illuminate his Banana-ness. If he was a nobody, they could have done it in one, surely.
Check out his discography. I love that after a few miss-starts with trying to come up with interesting titles for his lps, he finally gives in to his inner Banana and just names them Milton Banana, over and over. George Foreman got nothing on him.
What’s that? You do not possess any Milton Banana? Well, technically, no one can possess Milton Banana. Listen to him play. He’s already so possessed that he would require an exorcism just to tone him back to a regular jazz drummer. But in case you need more Banana than you currently hold, here you go:
I mean, just look at the guy:
Look at him. Drumsticks, Marlboros, and draft beer. A smile that could light up a bowling alley. A mesh shirt that could get any girl from Ipanema’s motor running.
I tell you people, you haven’t lived until you go Bananas.
They call it the Bo Diddley Beat. That’s Bo Diddley doing the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo didn’t want you to get confused about who was doing what, and let the audience know right off who was who. Hey Bo Diddley! If Bo ever had a publicist, I’ll bet he didn’t have to work overly hard. Bo was always a vertically oriented entertainment complex all by hisself.
That beat has a lot of names. Many people call it: shave and a haircut, two bits. If you’re playing in a band below the Gulf of Mexico, er, America, um, well, south or east of the Bay of Campeche, anyway, you might call it the clave rhythm. Some people call it The Hambone. It’s basically straight out of Africa. Others might have done something like it before him, but Bo made it his own thang, and rode it for all it was worth. He was the iPhone and the kleenex and the frigidaire of the beat.
Lots of other guys mined the same ore. There are too many to list. Here are some notable ones.
Buddy Holly
Johnny Otis:
The Miracles:
It’s even buried in the middle of these two, though you have to listen a little harder to hear it:
Bo had unusual tastes in guitars. He played cigar box guitars at first, and made them himself. When he got some notoriety, he started having others made for him, including a “twang machine,” built in the same square shape, but from a solid piece of wood with a neck bolted on, and a regular pickup configuration. I was in Gruhn Guitars in Nashville back in the day, and they had one of his twang machines for sale. If I’d have bought it, I could sell it and retire tomorrow. I think it’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art nowadays. I bought a Stratocaster instead because I was a broke-ass loser.
The guitar Bo’s playing in the video is his own design as well. Eventually, he had a guy who was laid off or retired or quit or fired or something from Gretsch guitars build the guitars for him. They had custom bodies with Gretsch necks bolted on, and Gretsch hardware. He called them Jupiter Thunderbirds. Bo gave one to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and you can often spot him playing one. Although I doubt he’s still playing the original much. In 2005, Billy convinced Gretsch to throw in the towel and started making Bo’s design in their factory. They call it the Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird.
That’s Norma-Jean Wofford playing her own Jupiter Thunderbird, singing, and shimmying in the Bo Diddley video up top. Somehow I’m reminded of this quote: Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.
It can be difficult to write about stuff from the distant past on the intertunnel. Interweb commentary will brook only two settings: I love it, or I hate it, and I hate you for liking it.
This can make it dicey to simply acknowledge stuff, and sometimes mention that it was popular for reasons that escape the observer. For instance, I wrote yesterday about 70s songwriters, and pointed out several influential examples. Almost without exception, I’d have turned the radio to another station if anything they wrote came blattering out of the speaker, Montego Bay notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate admire grudgingly acknowledge their popularity. And this is coming from a guy that has made money playing I’m a Believer in public.
So, don’t lose your shit when I start talking about elevator music. MOR, as in Middle of the Road. Easy Listening. It was pretty big back in the late sixties/early seventies. Mom used to listen to it while she vacuumed, for example. To this day, I can’t hear the Sandpipers without wondering where the Hoover backing track went.
Then again, I never hear the Sandpipers. That song was a hit on the regular charts. No, really. That version of that song. It was in the soundtrack of the movie The Sterile Cuckoo, which was more or less a hit, too, in that it made money. This was back when Liza Minnelli was the go-to choice for portraying painfully quirky, somewhat homely manic pixie dream girls. This is a power move when you’re born with deep sea fish eyes, but still have to work. And thanks, Mom and Dad!
I’m singling out the Sandpipers for calumny or kudos, depending on your lack of taste. But there were a lot of bandsgroups bunches of people doing the same sort of de-boned music for weak teeth at about the same time that rock music was becoming really loud and obnoxious and ubiquitous. Off the top of my head, there was The Association, and the slightly more pop-music 5th Dimension. Or (ugh) The Lettermen:
Precious and few are the times I could stand to hear that one. Man, those lyrics:
You don’t know how many times I wished that I could mold you into someone that would cherish me as much as I cherish you
That sounds like a guy that has shallow graves in his garden. Or maybe it’s just me.
It wasn’t all singing. There were tons of instrumental music records out at the same time. Jackie Gleason made a fortune on what he called aural wallpaper. Mantovani, Percy Faith, David Rose, Henry Mancini, and if you were in the mood for something wilder, Esquivel!
Closely related close harmony singing was everywhere for a while, too, until it disappeared just as quickly. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head was a very popular soft rock hit, but it’s the long sequences in the movie with nothing but vocal harmonies that fit in with, and somewhat energized the genre, even though many found them incongruous with the subject matter:
Mood music like the Sandpipers was easy to dislike, especially in retrospect, and became a punchline later in the seventies. Remember the Blues Brothers solemnly riding the elevator in the old Federal Building in Chicago with Muzak playing while the police and National Guard rally outside?
The easy listening crowd didn’t do themselves any favors by choosing very unwisely among the available pop songs to remake in their signature tapioca style. To wit:
Well, if it wasn’t for the Sandpipers, I never would have enjoyed the adolescent bliss of the mondegreen “One Ton of Mayo.” That’s not a lot to hang your hat on, but then again, it’s not nothing.
That’s Bobby Bloom with his Top Ten hit from 1970, Montego Bay. It’s a sunny little tune that’s mostly forgotten nowadays.
Bobby Bloom is one of those guys. They’re mostly anonymous, but they make the music business go, or they used to, anyway. The seventies was back when people still played real instruments and sang into microphones instead of mumbling into autotune machines. But don’t call him a one-hit wonder, just because you can’t remember another hit he had but this one, and you didn’t remember this one until I posted it.
He had other hits, too, but not so’s you’d notice. For instance, he wrote and recorded Heavy Makes You Happy, and it was a minor hit back in the day for the Staple Singers, too:
The secret sauce here was “co-writer” in the credits. Back in the day, lots of songs got written by songwriting teams. Some were long-term arrangements, like Brill Building piano bangers. Outfits like Motown had Holland-Dozier-Holland working behind the scenes. The Beatles were a songwriting duo, despite George’s occasional input. Writing stuff together seems to make pop hits more likely.
Bobby Bloom was a co-writing steam engine for a while. He half-wrote Mony Mony, for instance, and some Monkees songs. But it’s his co-writer for Montego Bay that’s really intriguing: Jeff Barry.
OK, just off the top of Wikipedia’s addled head, Jeff Barry co-wrote Doo Wah Diddy, Da Doo Ron Ron, And Then He Kissed Me, Chapel of Love, River Deep-Mountain High, Leader of the Pack, Sugar, Sugar, and (ugh) I Honestly Love You.
Oh Yeah. I almost forgot. He half-wrote Chapel of Love, Iko Iko, Walkin’ In the Sand, and Leader of the Pack. By the look of that list, Martin Scorsese must have to mail the guy a check every month.
Guys Like Jeff Barry and Bloom veered back and forth over the dotted lines between producers and writers and performers. Barry produced a bunch of Monkees albums, which needed more producin’ than they needed the Monkees, now that I think of it. He got dragged to LA to work on the Monkees TV show, and told Don Kirshner, the show’s musical director, he had a song in his pocket written by Neil Diamond called I’m a Believer. He produced the hell out of that to reach #1 on the charts. Lord knows who eventually taught the Monkees how to play it.
So where are we now? Bobby Bloom blew his brains out in 1974 while “cleaning his gun.” Uh huh. Montego Bay is still a desirable place to vacation, that is if you don’t mind living in an armed camp surrounded by a Mad Max world. And Jeff Barry is still alive, and as recently as five years ago, he was (co)writing music for the Lego City Adventures Nickelodeon TV show. I hope he enjoys many more years of shuffling out in his slippers and bathrobe to his mailbox, and fishing out the pile of residual checks from a zillion re-runs.
We were walking through the big indoor — well, something or other in Merida’s wonderful La Plancha park last night. More about the park itself another day. Anyway, there was a huge projection screen set up, with a karaoke thingie attached (I know, I know). There were thousands of people in this almost but not quite indoor pavilion/park/mall/museum/food court. And a little girl got up and sang along with this, and made me shed a tear of remembrance for my vanished, innocent childhood, and another one of amusement and hope for the future.
I was a musician back in the day. She got a round of applause bigger than I ever got. Serves me right. I did it for money. She did it for the love of it.
Tag: 1970s
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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