FEELING ALRIGHT? - THREE DOG NIGHT
Feelin' alright?
I'm not feelin too good myself
Feelin' alright I'm not feeling too good myself
I like Three Dog Night and had an album of theirs in the early 1970s. It was a good band with good singers who did cover versions of some great blues and introduced me to the original blues writers and performers.
For some reason the song above came into my mind this morning and it was most likely because I was thinking about Richard, Shelley and Stephanie. I haven't had COVID thank Robert's god - I had three RAT tests in hospital during the week and was 'all clear'. I don't want to get it but it is worrying to hear of germaphobes like Richard getting it no matter what precautions he's taken. Maybe it was the maskless (cleanskin) chardonnay he drinks.
I'm not feeling so good myself but I feel a hell of a lot better now that I'm home. My plan for today is to move things (DVDs, PS games, computer connections etc) from the spare cupboard in the small lounge (which has become The Old Girl's 'woman-cave' since we put another TV in there where she can watch her romcoms, Marvel-type sci-fi films and other assorted stuff I can't stand). I'll move this stuff into the dresser I put in the shed last weekend and apologise for not having a photograph to show you. Maybe I can take one and update this post later.
Anyway, here's another Three Dog Night song to keep you going.
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME - THREE DOG NIGHT
They do a pretty good job on this song but it's not a patch on Sam Cooke's original.
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME - SAM COOKE
Cooke's version is more poignant not in the last because it's drawn from his personal experiences.
I hope that this isn't a downer given the news around the world so just remember:
It's been a long
A long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will
* A traditional saying and the most well known is "I'd rather go bling than see you walk away" the song written by Ellington Jordan and co-credited to Billy Foster and Etta James. It was first recorded by Etta James in 1967 and subsequently become regarded as a blues and soul classic.
The song has been covered by quite a few well-known musicians, some doing great versions like BB.King and Elkie Brooks and others mangling it like Rod Stewart and a whole lot of Britain's Got Talent-type wannabes.
Beyonce did a good job in the film Cadillac Records in which she played the part of Etta James:
Another quite powerful version is by Beth Hart who has a great voice and presence enough to do this song justice:
The first version I heard myself wasn't the original by Etta James, it was sung by Christine Perfect who was in the band Chicken Shack which I used to listen to in the late 60s and early 70s along with lots of other British R&B bands. I still like her version:
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Now I appreciate the sentiment in the song and the meaning of the song title as a failed love affair can be devastating, but I do feel that Ellington Jordan et al might not have enough of an appreciation of how devastating actually going blind is. I'm not blind and, touch wood (I'm superstitious) am not going blind but I do have poor eyesight and have to wear corrective eyeglasses. This has always been a hassle in day to day activities like sports, lovemaking, work, driving, swimming and, on the one occasion, getting the shit kicked out of me alongside Richard at a Wellington party (I had to hold on to my glasses so that the thugs didn't smash them as they were trying to do with my head).
I was listening to Dire Strait's Wild West End today (again). God I love this song - it's so evocative.
The lyrics are spot-on and this bit always 'gets' me:
And my conductress on the number nineteenShe was a honeyPink toenails and hands all dirty with moneyGreasy hair easy smileMade me feel nineteen for a while
OK, I was trawling through YouTube this morning (it is a rainy day) and discovered this clip:
It made me laugh and also got me thinking - "why do double bass players pull such funny faces when playing?".
The only double bass player I know, Richard (of RBB) does this:
That was with bowing.
In case you didn't know, that was without bowing. I apologise for any confusion this might cause if you are unfamiliar with technical music terms.
Well, that's all really. It didn't answer my question "why do double bass players pull such funny faces when playing?" but I'll leave you with this filler article from INVERSE by Mark Kauffman:
When the great B.B. King bent a nasty blues note on his guitar, it looked like someone was twisting his leg off.
There is a nebulous place where music collides with emotion, and for many musicians, this meeting of the mind’s sensory neurons, motor function, and cognition proves combustible, and whatever wells up is commonly manifested in a musician’s most noticeable feature: their face. Etta James, Neil Young, and Eddie Vedder all prove the case, and on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, Este Haim of the pop band Haim gave a truly impressive facial performance, alternating between grimaces and unfettered, wide-mouthed bewilderment. However neuro-complex the phenomenon may be, it’s likely rooted in our evolutionary past.
“Music in its history – the big, long history – never focused exclusively on the auditory component,” says Bill Thompson, who researches music and emotion at Macquarie University.
Millennia before the invention of the gramophone, back when music was never recorded and was always a live, intentional event, “music traditionally involved seeing and hearing and moving,” says Thompson.
Whether in the bowels of European cave or inside a raucous medieval tavern, music was wedded to expression, so it’s logical that our emotions are still inherently linked to our behaviors (sic) and actions.
“People are compelled by their own emotional response to their music, and that emotion is going to affect you much more than if you’re just merely listening,” Thompson says.
When one is performing, perhaps on a historic stage in front of a national audience — like Este Haim Saturday night — “it becomes a much more intense musical experience that will affect movement and facial expressions,” he says.
Darwin devoted six pages to human music in The Descent of Man, where he described an evolutionary basis for the human propensity for song, specifically as a courtship display to attract mates. 150 years later, The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger might agree, but modern neuroscientists think that music serves as much more than a wooing technique.
In the present day, we know that music powerfully activates our motor cortex – the part of the brain responsible for every movement we make – as we move our fingers, limbs, and mouths. Taken with a strong dose of emotional response to a meaningful tune, “this motor activity in the brain permeates your behavior (sic) and has kind of a cascade effect,” says Thompson. It’s little surprise, then, that Este Haim, while playing bass and singing her own music, is involuntarily overcome by the experience, and in her own, distinctive way, expresses it in seemingly exaggerated, though involuntarily facial expressions.
And this is precisely what we, the viewers, want to experience. “People flood to concerts, and they don’t want to close their eyes,” says Thompson. “They want to see how music affects the performer.”
This is good:
I just finished watching the three part 'documentary' GET BACK as remastered and brilliantly edited by Peter Jackson. Old Pete likes to do things in three parts and it works well for him.
The material he used was nearly a hundred hours of film footage and 150 hours of audio recording from the LET IT BE film exercise and he deconstructed, edited and reconstructed it over four years to create a great piece of work.
I never watched the original LET IT BE film and, by all accounts it was dire and, although using actual footage and recordings never managed to capture the spirit of the LET IT BE project.
It does take a bit of perseverance to get into this series - The Old Girl gave up half way through Part One. There's a lot of silly dialogue (multi-conversations), disjointed singing and playing and the whole thing seems a bit chaotic.
A lot of this was perhaps due to them talking and planning the pending album and concert in the cavernous Twickenham film studio where they were obviously uncomfortable. When they moved to their newly set-up Apple studio things improved considerably.
Even at Twickenham though, halfway through Part One (after The Old Girl gave up on it) something magic happened. The fragments of lyrics, chords and ideas for various songs - sometimes all jumbled together - started to take shape and a hint at the songs that came out on the LET IT BE and ABBEY ROAD albums emerged.
These guys were filmed creating their songs (of course they each would have worked on them individually, at home, overnight) in a pressure cooker environment having set themselves a deadline of 3 or 4 weeks from start to finish. The creative process was very interesting.
Some outtakes for me were:
I particularly liked how the rooftop concert was a late idea put forward by one of the production team after other more prosaic concepts were abandoned and the delight that McCartney showed when the idea was first put to him. Lennon also embraced the idea but Harrison was initially against it. Ringo I think didn't care either way. This to me underscored the project which was groundbreaking and the great way that, organically (again - I'm sounding like Robert and his bloody Socrates) the songs, the albums, the rooftop concert and the film 50 years later took shape. Early in Part One, one of them, McCartney or Lennon prophetically mused what people 50 years in the future would think of the project and how would they look. It was certainly groundbreaking and a brave thing to do made all the better by the fact that it wasn't contrived as these things would more cynically be done today. The vitality was captured well on film - and I'm sure that Jackson had a lot to do with this in his selection, editing and remastering.
This is a great bit of musical and cultural history packaged up by a home-grown master.
Steve Marriott was a little raver with the soul of a poet and lover. Sadly he died young (in his 40s). He might have reached his potential...
