Let’s consult the dictionary first. It’s dry as dust, but we’ll go with it for now:
Harmony /här′mə-nē/
noun
An orderly or pleasing combination of elements in a whole.
“color harmony; the order and harmony of the universe.”
True dat. But it’s only a good start. Let’s keep going. It has a more cogent definition in music:
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a “vertical” dimension and a “horizontal” dimension, and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form.
Yikes. That’s like Health Class in high school, trying to explain getting jiggy wid it. Doesn’t do justice to the topic.,
Ah, Squeeze. In ’82, they still might have been called UK Squeeze. There was another band in the US called Squeeze, (looks it up: Tight Squeeze) and they altered their name to avoid lawyer trouble and so forth. The suits got braver after a while and they dropped the “UK” eventually.
They were calling this sort of thing New Wave at the time. It’s the unholy love child of the Beatles and The Ramones. Like a lot of New Wave bands, Squeeze eventually didn’t feel like they had to thrash quite so hard to get over, and adopted a more sophisticated style of songwriting and performing. Lotsa New Wave bands morphed seamlessly into to the New Romantic movement. Squeeze’s contemporaries The Police and Elvis Costello kinda took the same approach, but ended up in Tin Pan Alley somewhere.
I used to play this song on the bass and sing the lead vocal. It’s got more chord changes than I generally wanna deal with while I’m pretending I know what I’m doing. It’s got more words than a Harold Robbins paperback, too, and until just now watching this video with the subtitles, I had no idea that one of the lines was “A panda for sweet little niece.” God only knows what I sang in there instead. No one ever called me out on it, though. I can mumble with the best of them.
A guy once ran up to the stage when we finished playing Pulling Mussels from The Shell, and shook my hand like a pump handle. He said, “That wasn’t any good, but I can’t believe you had the nerve to try it.”
We’ve featured a hearty handful of combos on this blog that resurrected old stuff and put their own spin on it. I nicknamed them Lazarus Bands, because they bring somewhat forgotten songs back from the dead. Leonid and Friends are another sort of cover band. They’re more like tribute bands than cover bands. They can play stuff just like the record. In this case, I can assure you that it’s not easy to play much of any Tower of Power record just like the recording. What Is Hip? might be the hardest one you could undertake.
Ah, Little Feat live in the seventies. Making the world safe for overalls, one Midnight Special at a time.
No, really. Overalls were a thing back then. Or painter’s pants. That was big, too. The girls wore duster jackets and overalls, too sometimes. Tube top, overalls, duster jackets, round tinted sunglasses, straight hair, and a pack of cigarettes was peak ’77 girl fashion.
That’s a lot of firepower on the stage there. Then again, everybody loved Lowell. Teddy bear of a guy. He had quite a trip through the musical world on his way to Little Feat on the Midnight Special. He appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour playing the harmonica when he was only six years old. At one time or another, he learned to play the flute, the guitar, the sitar, the saxophone, and various other instruments. When he was around 20-years-old, he was in a band called The Factory. They made a record or two, and almost got their head above water in the entertainment biz. Not exactly how you’d expect, though:
Mmm. Melody Patterson. Back in the day, when you tired of the Ginger/Mary Ann contretemps, you could fire up the Wrangler Jane/Ellie Mae druthers thought experiment. Anyway, people trying to get famous don’t turn down offers to appear on TV, even if they do change your name in the script to The Bedbugs. I’ll spare you their appearance on Gomer Pyle, USMC.
After that, Lowell started playing with The Standells. I was in a cover band in Massachusetts for a bunch of years, along with assorted lovers, muggers, and thieves, so I’ll bet I’ve played Dirty Watermore than Lowell George did. He probably didn’t like it any more than I did, either.
Then Lowell joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, of all things. Frank didn’t approve of drugs and Lowell did, which could be forgiven after watching that F Troop episode. They parted ways, but remained friendly. Lowell started Little Feat, and Zappa convinced Warner Brothers Records to put out their first album. It wasn’t a big success. It wasn’t until their third album, Dixie Chicken, that they had any mass appeal, if you can call it that. It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of proto-swamp rock, funk, and Nooawlins rhythm and blues. Lowell’s slide guitar stuff was his calling card. He got an original sound with audio compression and a Sears Craftsman spark plug socket from a wrench set.
His time in the limelight was limited, though. The drugs caught up to him, and his heart gave out when he was only 34 years old. He had a wife and three kids, so his friends threw a benefit for him: The rest of Little Feat, Jackson Browne, Nicolette Larson, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou, Bonnie Raitt, Michael McDonald, and the Tower of Power horn section all performed.
Speaking of the Mississippi, the lyrics to Dixie Chicken have a hint of Twain about them, don’t they? A sly little story, with a crusher of a punch line at the end.
Many years since she ran away
Guess that guitar player sure could play
She always liked to sing along
She’s always handy with a song
But then one night in the lobby, yea, of the Commodore Hotel
I chanced to meet a bartender who said he knew her well
And as he handed me a drink he began to hum a song
And all the boys there, at the bar, began to sing along
I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. – Frank Costello
Domi and JD Beck are an interesting duo. Domi is from France, although she has since recovered. JD Beck is a Dallas, Texican, but it didn’t seem to hurt him none. They’re both child prodigies. Domi was playing stuff when she was three, and was enrolled at a conservatory when was five. I have no idea when she found time to play Pokemon Go. Then again, like someone famous once said, I’d have a hard time believing that Mozart was a good pool player.
JD Beck was playing piano when he was five, and switched to drums when he was eight. A year later, he was playing gigs. That sounds familiar somehow.
These kids have something I don’t have, but have seen often enough to recognize it when it appears. They have a metronome in their head. No matter how far out on the syncopated branch they shimmy out, they always know where they are. Where the One is. Regular people have to count, and are prone to getting lost. These are not regular people.
I’m sure they’ve heard plenty of Weather Report records and other offbeat rhythm merchants, but they sound original to my ear. They’re entirely in a world of their own making. It’s an exhausting, calm place, isn’t it?
Tag: music
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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