WNEW | Where Rock Lives

Founding Father: John Hammond

Too many fathers of rock have been lost to the mists of time, so join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' every Saturday as he reminds us who helped to set the groundwork for the music we love...

What do Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan have in common? They were all discovered by the same prolific talent executive, John Hammond.

In the early 1930s, after dropping out of Yale and writing for the British music publication Melody Maker, Hammond became a freelance record producer, working at Columbia. He brought together Benny Goodman with influential collaborators Charlie Christian, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton, all of whom played in Goodman's sextet, a racially integrated group in an era when Jim Crow still persisted. He arranged the first recording sessions for Holiday and Basie's band, and in 1938 and '39 organized annual concerts at Carnegie Hall known as "From Spirituals to Swing." The shows presented a wide variety of jazz and blues performers, some of whom had never appeared on a major stage before.

After military service in World War II, Hammond came home to find the Swing Era over, replaced by bebop, which Hammond never embraced. It would be the late 1950s before he rejoined Columbia and signed Seeger, Franklin, and Dylan. Other officials at Columbia were unimpressed with Dylan, and nicknamed him "Hammond's Folly," at least until the hits began. Hammond produced both the original recordings of both Blowin' in the Wind and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. Another Hammond project in this period was the reissue of Robert Johnson's legendary recordings from the 1930s. (Hammond had tried to book Johnson for "From Spirituals to Swing," not realizing the bluesman was already dead.) King of the Delta Blues Singers was released in 1961; a second volume followed in 1970. In 1972, Hammond auditioned Springsteen, eventually signing him to a contract. Jazz guitarist George Benson was another Hammond signee. Hammond retired from Columbia in 1975 at age 65, but continued to listen for performers who had it. His last major signing was guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, and he's listed as executive producer of Vaughan's 1983 debut album, Texas Flood.

"I heard no color line in the music," he wrote of his experiences in the 1930s, and he never did. Hammond's intention in organizing "From Spirituals to Swing" was to bring important black artists to the attention of white audiences. He remained a fighter for racial justice throughout his life. By the time he died in 1987, the music business had come a long way from the days when Goodman's racially integrated sextet was not welcome onstage in certain parts of the country.

Have something to add to the mix? Share your thoughts below or read through Founding Fathers past...

Forgotten Favorites: 'Grand Pecking Order'

Some albums are just too good to let slip away beneath the sands of time, so each week Bill Melville pulls one out, dusts it off and offers it up for your renewed consideration ...

The list of bass virtuoso Les Claypool's side projects runs long, but only one represents a true supergroup. The same collaboration also marks the most transcendent of Claypool projects.

Eight years have passed since Oysterhead dropped Grand Pecking Order. The lineup could have been snatched from a jam band fan's dream -- the Primus founder teamed with Phish singer/guitarist Trey Anastasio and Police drummer Stewart Copeland for this blast of smart, funky rock. The convergence of these three master musicians plays out like the Basement Tapes reflected through a funhouse mirror.

Still, all three possess distinct styles, and whether they could work cohesively was questionable -- until they released Grand Pecking Order, that is. The tracks and mostly fun and light-hearted, no egos intrude, and the listener is left wanting more.

While Little Faces opens with a tone close to Anastasio singing a Primus song -- Claypool's bass-play has that tendency -- variety spruces up the rest. The partnership soars on the poppier Oz is Ever Floating, with Claypool and Anastasio working well as a vocal duo. They prove this song after song, both effortlessly switching from lead to backup and back again.

Shadow of a Man veers closer to Primus than anything else here, but the band's beauty lies in its ability to straddle those extremes. Anastasio's Radon Balloon pulls the sound into Phish territory, restoring the balance. Birthday Boys takes a speedy acoustic beat that warms under Anastasio's smooth delivery. The lesser songs are usually the shortest, so the band never gets bogged down by missteps.

Nothing else hear challenges like Owner of the World, a perfect closer for a band that amazingly surpasses the sum of its parts. This is one of those encore-ending songs, when the puts everything into those last chords.

Barely noticed by the music mainstream, Oysterhead went as quickly as they arrived. In subsequent years, Primus, the Police and Phish all reformed to tour again. Oysterhead came together at Bonnaroo 2006 - the Police headlined the festival, and Oysterhead's other members are Bonnaroo stalwarts.

But Grand Pecking Order remains their sole recording that sets the bar precariously high for other alt-rock supergroups.

Got memories of your own from this hidden gem? Share them in the comments section below ...

Video Classics: 'Rock the Casbah'

To honor WNEW's legendary Firecracker 500, every day we are highlighting the music that populated the 1991 and 1996 lists, with classic videos, live performances and little-known facts about the songs and how they came to be...

While it is unclear whether or not the Clash's 1982 hit, Rock the Casbah was written specifically about the  Ayatollah Khomeini's ban of rock music in Iran, it makes a good story, and is so often told that it bears repeating here. While the song doesn't mention Iran or any other Islamic nation, specifically, it tells the story of a Middle Eastern nation where rock music is banned, then goes into a fantastic account of how the people defy the order and rise up to dance in the streets. The military is sent out to stop them, but instead join in the revolt, fighter pilots playing rock music in their cockpit radios. It is one of the very few songs in rock's discography to deal (however tangentially) with Middle Eastern affairs in a light-hearted manner. Even so, the fact that a punk band was dealing with any ideology other than anarchism was unusual. Still, the Clash were more political than most punks, and became known as 'the Thinking Man's Yobs.'

Rock the Casbah appeared on the album Combat Rock, and became the band's only Top 10 hit, reaching #8 on the U.S. charts. It comes in at #457 and #401 on the 1991 and 1996 Firecracker 500 lists, respectively. According to the liner notes, the song had its genesis when manager Bernie Rhodes heard the Clash record an excessively long album track and complained 'Does everything have to be as long as this raga?' (referring to the Indian music style known for long, complex songs). Joe Strummer wrote the opening lines of the song "The King told the boogie-men 'you have to let that raga drop'" and the rest came soon after.

The video below for Rock the Casbah is typical of the Clash's low budget efforts, but for all that, it comes off pretty well. Filmed in Austin, TX, it features local actors playing an Arab and Jew rocking through the streets (as well as being followed by an armadillo). The U.S. Air Force became an unwitting participant when two jets landing at a nearby air base were caught on film and used to accompany the line 'the king called out his jet fighters'. After the jump, check out a version of the song as it was performed live, which sounds substantially different from the studio version (even allowing for the relatively low quality of the tape).

  

Click, Clack, News ...

Sometime it keeps us awake at night, but we love the juicy nuggets we get from our 1942 teletype machine, clattering away here in the Fusion 45 home office (or as we sometimes call it, the Home-O).

You can swing over to Chris Cornell's website to get wind of some additional dates that have been added to his current tour in support of Scream, his new album releasing on March 10th. Tix go on sale February 27 for westie dates in Vancouver, BC, Portland, Seattle and up and down Cali. You can also see a cool animation of Chris demonstrating some wholly un-rockstar-like behaviour: smashing a guitar. My my ...

Running on Evidence

According to a press blurb released on Monday, "the United States District Court for the Central District of California has denied the motions of Senator John McCain and the Republican National Committee to dismiss the lawsuit brought by singer/songwriter Jackson Browne for the unauthorized use of Browne's voice and famous song Running on Empty in a presidential campaign commercial."

You'll remember Jack got a little P.O.'d back in August when the McCain Gang did that commercial trashing Barack Obama's energy policy. Apparently, the judges in Cali covered their ears and yelled "we can't hear you, we can't hear you" when the 'publicans claimed they were covered under "the First Amendment and/or copyright's fair use policy (or whatever...)."

I'm on the List. No, It's Just Fusion. No Last Name.

I'm pretty well out of the loop on who the hot celebs are these days. I recognize only a few from Sir Elton's guest list for his annual Academy Awards party on Sunday. Quincy, Keifer and Whoopi were all there and, let's face it, if you need a last name to be recognized in Hollywood, then you're really not all that anyway. Elton's annual bash raised 4 million samoleans for AIDS research.

Release Me. I'm Begging You, Release Me

Last and, yes, very much least, Englebert Humperdinck has announced that tickets for his cancelled March 14th concert at the Spotlight 29 Casino in Coachella Valley will be honored for a "grand return" in October. Relieved housewives and bored husbands will get their chance to see the "King of Romance" in full regalia on October 24th. If you've not gotten your tickets, just pull your RV off I-5 and visit the Spotlight 29 gift shop and Madge will help you. There's plenty of free parking.

Ben Kweller Visits WNEW For Interview and Acoustic Performance

Changing Horses is an album 5 years in the making – after all, it was ready in 2004. But Ben Kweller wasn’t ready to unleash this countrified masterpiece on us until the time was right. It’s brave to step outside your comfort zone and produce something yourself that you die hard fans will love and open yourself up to a whole new audience. Our friend Ben stopped by the studio on his current tour to talk about the new album and play some songs for us. Being a Texan, you would expect country music to be part of his DNA, and this album clearly shows that it is. But how did the album come to be? What triggered a whole country album versus putting a single country song on a rock/pop album? Ben has the answer, Listen Up:

Turns out that for those of you who read Mark Twain, you already are familiar with the title Changing Horses. For those not familiar, you might think that the title implies him “changing horses” from making rock music to country music. To each his own I guess, but here’s the real story behind the title, Listen Up:

Here’s the first of three songs Ben performed for us here in our WNEW.com studio, this is Things I Like To Do, Dig it:

Things I Like To Do

Top Ten: Riffs

Top 10 Lists: Letterman made them famous, the Internet made them commonplace, but WNEW makes them rock! Resident music pseudo-savant David Thomas brings you a classic rock Top 10 every week for WNEW's List-o-Mania ...

I’m sure that you all remember grunge. Some grating guitars, some whining, then the good bit, the really good bit, then more strumming and free-form complaining, and back to the good bit, the really good bit. The joke’s not mine – it’s far too good for that – it’s from Spitting Image, and it teaches a lesson.

Before Kurt Cobain and his cohorts saved the world from Country and Western, there were songs that were good bits from end to end (except, occasionally for the bridge, like the dumb one in Woman from Tokyo). Songs based around riffs. The competition’s unusually stiff in this category, and some fine acts didn’t make the cut (sorry Aerosmith, David Bowie, ELO and Joan Jett), but here are ten examples of exceptional quality rocking:

10. The Cult: Lil Devil
The Cult kept me company through much of Oklahoma and Missouri; Heart of Soul is particularly moving in the rain in the Ozarks; and there are more fine Cult songs than I can easily relate. Some are odd,some are souly, others are Gothish, and one quotes Rutger Hauer’s dying speech from Bladerunner. But this number, recorded two albums before the band pared itself down to the creative yet inimical pairing of Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy, is them at their riffiest.

9. Judas Priest: Living After Midnight

The Priest have a love of riffs that exceeds even mine – I wouldn’t have overwritten Johnny B. Goode with one – and they demonstrate it with uncompromising percussion, and fine guitar work from Messrs. Tipton and Downing. Halford doesn’t go all falsetto either, which is a plus.

8. AC/DC: Highway to Hell

By the time AC/DC released their Highway to Hell album, they’d been a working band for six years. Here, fronted by their second singer, the great Bon Scott, they perform the thematic sequel to It’s a Long Way to the Top (If you Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll) on Dutch TV. The riff’s one of the best and the band never surpassed this form.

Video Classics: 'With or Without You'

To honor WNEW's legendary Firecracker 500, every day we are highlighting the music that populated the 1991 and 1996 lists, with classic videos, live performances and little-known facts about the songs and how they came to be...

In recent years, Bono has seemed more the activist than the musician, jetting all over the world advocating for causes he believes in. And many of U2's hits certainly have their political edge (no pun intended), such as Sunday, Bloody Sunday, covered recently by Video Classics. With all the politicizing, it is sometimes easy to forget that behind it all is a band that crafts some really exceptional songs, and at those times it helps to take a look at a U2 single where there is no 'message', just the music, like With or Without You.

The lead single to their enormously successful album The Joshua Tree, With or Without You also has the distinction of being the band's first #1 hit in the United States, where it spent three weeks at the top. It was their first song to see broad release as a CD single, is their second-most-covered song, and one of their most popular songs overall to date. It achieved spot #201 on the 1991 Firecracker 500, falling to spot #246 on the 1996 list.

The song itself is one of U2's most overtly emotional songs, and Bono generally adds even more emotionality when performing it onstage. The lyrics are romantically bittersweet, the singer proclaiming to his love repeatedly that he cannot imagine living 'with or without you.' It's an emotional quandary which in the hands of less-talented bands might come off as overwrought, but U2 manages to pull it off. Also of interest is The Edge's use of a device called the 'Infinite Guitar', which allows him to sustain notes he has played indefinitely, giving his part a reverberating, ethereal quality that supports the vocal track quite well without overpowering it.

The music video made for With or Without You would be a fairly straightforward performance video of the band onstage if not for the dreamy, langorous heavily-artistic visual effects. For a live performance (albeit edited), check out after the jump for U2's offering from their show in Boston in 2001.

  

Rock 101: Best Original Song

Not everyone is a rock expert, so here is your weekly Thursday primer on the events and happenings that shaped Rock and Roll from J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

In many ways, the Oscars are the last refuge of old-time showbiz, and the Motion Picture Academy's attempts to adjust to the fact that it's not 1955 anymore can be amusing. This is rarely more evident than in the award for Best Original Song. When the people who vote for the category have the chance to pick something by one of the big guns in movie songwriting, like Alan Menken or Tim Rice, or a big ballad from a Disney film (and the two are often the same thing), the sighs of relief are audible coast to coast. In recent years, Oscar has frequently been unable to find the standard five nominees for the category -- this year, for example, there were only three, two from Slumdog Millionaire and one from WALL-E. Few recent Oscar winners have become actual hits, so it's clear that the award doesn't matter much anymore in the everyday world of rock.

That's not to say that rock and its associated genres have been shut out entirely. In 2006, Melissa Etheridge won for I Need to Wake Up from An Inconvenient Truth. In 2005, the hip-hop track It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp, from Hustle and Flow, won out over two more conventional nominees, and in 2002, Lose Yourself from the Eminem flick 8-Mile, took the statuette even though the big song from the Best Picture-winning musical Chicago was nominated. Lose Yourself was also the last Oscar winner that was also a big radio hit, going to #1 in the States and 24 other countries. In 2000, Bob Dylan's song Things Have Changed from Wonder Boys took the prize. In the new millennium, rockers including Elvis Costello, Sting, U2, Paul Simon, and Paul McCartney have been nominated without winning.

In the 1990s, Disney dominated, with songs from animated films winning six times. Notable rocker nominees included Aimee Mann, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, Bryan Adams, and Neil Young, whose song Philadelphia was nominated in 1993, the same year Bruce Springsteen won for Streets of Philadelphia. Springsteen was nominated again in 1995 for Dead Man Walking, but didn't win. The 1998 Aerosmith hit I Don't Want to Miss a Thing, written by Diane Warren, also got a nomination.

Oscar winners were more likely to become radio hits in the '70s and '80s than they have been recently. From 1981 through 1987, the winner of Best Original Song also topped the Billboard singles chart in the States. Non-winning rock nominees in the 80s were Jon Bon Jovi for Blaze of Glory, and the guys in Survivor for Eye of the Tiger. In the '70s, winners tended to be the sort of generic pop song that had won the award since it was first presented in 1934 (The Way We Were, Evergreen, You Light Up My Life --really). The only rocker to score a nomination in the '70s was McCartney, for Live and Let Die in 1973, yet by that year, the kids' music had already invaded Oscar's space. At the 1971 Oscars, Isaac Hayes, performing in a suit of gold chain mail, took the prize for the theme from Shaft, appearing in America's living rooms like a visitor from another planet. (There's online video of Hayes accepting his award, but none I can find of his performance, alas.) Although Oscar winners and nominees had been radio hits before 1971, no rock or R&B performer had ever been nominated before Hayes.

This year's Oscar winner for Best Original Song was Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire. Hear it here, unless it's been yanked by the copyright police.

Not the way you heard it? Add your thoughts below or check out Rock 101s past...

A.M. Nuggets: New Riders, Railroad Earth and Larry Keel to Play Keswick Theater, Friday 3/7

This just in from our good friends New Riders of the Purple Sage:

With the band heading back out on the road next weekend, we want to let you know about a real special evening on March 7th at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, Pennsylvania. This amazing evening of music will feature Railroad Earth along with Larry Keel, who will open the show. Head on over to the www.thenewriders.com for the details and all the rest of the shows.

For more from the New Riders check out our interview with bandmember Michael Falzarano, and hit up their tour page to see when they'll hit your town.

Steal This Book! Appetite for Self-Destruction - Our Interview With Author Steve Knopper

If I could illegally download this book I would. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age is author Steve Knopper's chronicle of what went wrong in the music industry as the mp3 and Napster came to life at the turn of the millennium. A well-known story already, Knopper offers fresh insight on what went down, gleaned from contacts deep within the record labels and the music media. What makes it really interesting is Knopper's tales of earlier record industry blunders (remember those big cardboard boxes CDs used to come in?).
Steve Knopper called in for an interview about Appetite, and offered his thoughts on where the music biz is headed now that the "digital age" is beginning to mature.

DISCLOSURE ALERT: This book is published by the good folks at Simon & Schuster, which is owned by the same megacongolmerate as WNEW.com. But that doesn't cloud our editorial judgment - it just means we get free copies to give away! Click here if you'd like to win your very own copy of Appetite for Self-Destruction. Or just illegally download it to your shiny new Amazon Kindle 2...

Needle Drop Olympics

Back in the days when needles were necessary to listen to music, a fellow radio-programmer-in-the-making and I would do something called the Needle Drop Olympics. We'd grab all the records we could find around the college radio station, all the beer we could fit in a brown paper bag and camp out in the station's production studio listening to music. We'd put a record on the platter, drop the needle in the middle of the first song and hear what we could hear. The limit was 10 seconds per cut then we'd go on to the next. Drinking notwithstanding, we actually kept a log of what we liked, what we predicted would be a hit and what we panned mercilessly.

On eMusic, you can "drop the needle" on song samples anywhere on the site and become an Olympian yourself. And it's free. I decided to do a little dropping myself on some recent releases from eMusic's country/folk section:

Alfselder Ratssanger
Album: 30 Jahre Alsfelder Ratssanger
In the strictest sense, I guess German drinking songs are the purest form of folk music, but John Gorkathis ain't. I think they said Auf Wiedersehen in the last song, but I'm not sure.

Angel Miller
Album: Who I Am
Who you are is another pretty face who sounds like 150 other country-singer-wannabees. And your version of Bridge Over Troubled Water is, at best, sacrilegious.

Brigitte DeMeyer
Album: Red River Flower
Much more interesting than the aforementioned Ms. Miller. A little like Bonnie Raitt, a little like Shelby Lynn, benefiting from contributions from Al Perkins and Buddy Miller. Not enough to invest my last 16 credits this month, but certainly not offensive.

Crash Alley
Album: Swag
I don't know that I've ever heard a full song by Slipknot, but this is what I imagine they sound like. Pretty funny that they're categorized as Rock, Metal and Live Country/Folk. Ooops... (Nowhere Land is actually pretty cool...it has uncharacteristically melodic...).

Fred Piek
Album: Vroeger Is Terug
I had heard on the news that Vroeger is Terug, but I didn't know someone had done an album about it. Can't understand a word they're saying but the melodies are kind of nice.

Freight Train Deluxe
Album: Women Music And Trucks
Belying one of the ugliest album covers in the history of all music, the music isn't half-bad. The production sucks but the songs, stuff like Eighteen Wheel and a Padded Room, are OK.

Kenny & Amanda Smith Band
Album: Live And Learn
I skipped over Gerhard Obwegeser to get to this one, a straight-ahead bluegrass record. I've heard a lot of bluesgrass-influenced music lately -- I love my recent discovery: Trampled By Turtles -- so I'm up to my fiddle in high lonesome sounds. This one sounds a little like Alison Krause and I'm not big fan ...

The Brainchild
Album: Me And My Mate
PAYDIRT! A band worth listening to! A group of Brits with a nice round interesting sound that reminds me of somebody and nobody at the same time. There are only two cuts available on eMusic so go give 'em a listen at their MySpace page. They do an interesting version of Radio Ga-Ga amongst their other stuff. Like 'em!

Needle drop complete!

News Blast: Barenaked Ladies Singer Quits, Band To Continue Without Him; Live Interview With Band at 4:00ET Today

Today it was announced that Barenaked Ladies lead singer Steven Page is leaving the band. Page is a founding member of the Ladies and has performed with the band since 1988.
The band will continue on and remaining member and co-lead singer Ed Robertson will give his first interview on the future of Barenaked Ladies today at 4:00pm ET on WBMX-FM in Boston. Click here to check out the interview LIVE today at 4:00pm.