Show #404: "The Eggman Collection #129"

NOTE: The annual R.I.P. show for the musicians and singers we lost in 2012 will air next week, not this week, as stated in last week's program.
The Eggman Collection is basically a big potpourri of every song I've ever liked in my life...EVER! It's literally a huge mixing bowl full of songs written onto tiny pieces of paper. Over 20,000 songs that I've been compiling for the past 20-plus years of my life. Every song I've ever liked has gone into this bowl, and every three weeks I draw them out one-by-one and play them for you in no particular order. A mix of everything and anything I like, no matter what genre, era, style or year of release...if I like it, then I'll play it! No repeats of the same song ever! Tune in tonight (Friday) at 10pm EST for the 129th installment of The Eggman Collection and hear bands and artists like: The Who, Groundhogs, The Warlocks, Zen, Hasil Adkins, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Hooterville Trolley, The Family Tree, Blossom Toes, Klaatu, Gryphon, Friends, Manfred Mann, Central Park, Love, The Beatles, The Zipps, The Collectors, The Ballroom, Sacros, Kansas, and many others!!

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Live every Friday night at 10pm to 1am EST on WSCA-LP 106.1 FM, Portsmouth Community Radio!

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Egg

Last week I posted on my music blog about the common (British) origin of several classic American songs including "St. James Infirmary," "Streets of Laredo" and "Dying Crapshooter's Blues,"  which in various forms have been batted around blues, country, jazz, folk and rockabilly circles for decades.

I included versions of those tunes in my latest podcast Honky Tonk New Year.

I'll re-post the blog entry here for those who like looking into the history of old songs. The stories I link to below are well worth reading.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2012

Earlier I was re-reading Sarah Vowell's 1999 essay on her continuing awe at the American classic song "St. James Infirmary."

Cab Calloway sang the song in a Betty Boop spoof of Snow White

This song gave me the shivers then and it gives me the shivers now. Not just because it’s a morgue scene, not just because of the cold body lying there on a table instead of a
bed, but because of the chill of the man’s words. Hearing it as a young girl, hearing it before I ever fell in love myself, it frightened me because of the way it shoots down
the idea of love as a true possibility. If you need love in part to know you’ll be missed when you’re gone, what does it mean if your sweetheart stands over your icy corpse and — instead of wishing to rejoin you on some astral plane – fantasizes about impressing his buddies with a big dumb coin?

Vowell mentions several versions of the song: Louis Armstrong's, Cab Calloway's, Bobby "Blue" Bland's, even the '90s group Snakefarm's trip-hop version.

Re-reading the Vowell piece reminded me of a piece by Rob Walker in Gambit Weekly, which traced the song back even further. It's a direct descendant of a British folk tune called "The Unfortunate Rake" -- which is about a young man who apparently was dying from venereal disease. Other offspring of "The Unfortunate Rake" include the cowboy ballad "The Streets of Laredo" and Blind Willie McTell's "The Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues."


Writes Walker:

Sometimes, as in "Bad Girl's Lament," the ballad is about the woman, but basically follows the same pattern (an early mention of St. James' Hospital, a closing request for "Six pretty maidens with a bunch of red roses, six pretty maidens to sing me a song ..."). You won't find many of these exact same words in the most typically played version of "St. James Infirmary" today, but this at least is a back story that makes some of the latter's sentiments perfectly logical: The singer makes a jealousy-tinged boast and turns quickly to thoughts of his own death because his "baby" just died of VD. Dig?

A common thread is the wild fantasy of the narrator's grandiose funeral for himself.

Here's a few versions of the song. Like Vowell, I still get the shivers from some of these.









Two of my country heroes singing "Streets of Laredo."


This is one of my favorites: Ian McShane as Al Swearengen  singing "The Unfortunate Rake" in Deadwood.

I liked about half the songs on the latest Oh Sees album. They are great live. Not sure what Kanye will do with them, but it probably won't be permanently damaging.

yeah, thee Oh Sees are overrated anyway.......and who the fuck is Kanye West?????

http://getbent.fm/post/20294880257/kanye-west-to-produce-next-oh-sees-album

don't know what to think... it's funny and sad in the same way...
even i'm not into the oh sees nor K West.... 

Check out the brand new Vicious Visions podcast posted today. It's full of cool stuff from 2012: http://garagepunk.ning.com/profiles/blogs/vicious-visions-1

Nobody told Blue Cheer how to play a Rock'n'Roll song , not even when they were two men in their sixties and one in his fifties , criss-crossing the map in a white van , sometimes to play for 50 people , but, I'll check this out .

First, I have to say that 2012 has been a super exiting year in terms of music, and also that I LOVE making list. So many good LPs went out this year. Here is my Top:

Natural Child - For The Love Of The Game

Natural Child - Hard In Heaven

Le Kid et Les Marinellis - Les Jolies Filles

The Cry - S/T

Guantanamo Baywatch - Chest Crawl

The Tough Shits - S/T

Paint Fumes - Uck Life

White Wires - WWIII

Black Jaspers - Scum Of the Moon

Cheap Time - Wallpaper Music

Dagger Eyes - S/T

Crusaders of Love - Take it Easy but Take it

Gentleman Jessie - Leaving Atlanta

Top EPs:

Denney & The Jets - Slick Rick

Primitive Hearts -S/T

Top 7'':

Cozy - Cola Shock Kids

No Tomorrow Boys - Animal Eyes

Warm Soda - Reaction

Oh yeah, I'm 100% sure that I am forgetting a bunch of good releases. So I guess those are my favorites! And also, Am I the only one that has been disapointed by Ty Segall this year?

Bogus, it wasn't archived at way back.

Whomever owned the domain probably stopped paying for the hosting. That's most likely what happened to it!

Hi There,

Way back in 2005 there was a website dedicated to the lyrics of all time favourite sixties garage punk songs.

This pool was alimented by worldwide contributors...but one day this website disappeared and I wonder to know if someone knows what happened to this website ?

Maybe all these written songs are on another spot on the web ?

Super thanks in advance. Oktay

Andy,
maybe you got me wrong! It´s not new stuff to me, au contraire.
I used to dance a lot to this tunes ´till a couple of years ago in Berlin at electro-swing parties especially when Sound-Nomaden where dj-ing.
They used to play lots of Parov Stelar!! They are great! Agree!!
I was curious to see if anybody else in here like or knows them and 
i should have known, YOU would be the one!! :)

I´ll check the Kid Koala's album, thanx!

Andy Climax said:

Wow! Parov Stelar. Blast from the past there. 'Coco' is a great album. I haven't thought about him for years. great tune. check the 'Coco' album, you won't be disappointed. reminds me alot of mid 90's Coldcut or Hextatic. If you get the chance to hear Kid Koala's new blues album, take it. luuuuuverly!

 

Jake Bugg live on new years eve. Stunning!

Wow! Parov Stelar. Blast from the past there. 'Coco' is a great album. I haven't thought about him for years. great tune. check the 'Coco' album, you won't be disappointed. reminds me alot of mid 90's Coldcut or Hextatic. If you get the chance to hear Kid Koala's new blues album, take it. luuuuuverly!

Oh, that´s kind of crossover to me. Freakish stuff!

Let´s see if any one of you guys dig this kind of electro-swing:

Check these guys out. Not new but just got sent this. Amazing stuff

Looks great but most (all ?) of these tracks have already been comped elsewhere (Strummin' Mental, Surfers Mood, Satan's records compilations, etc...).

Yeah , like a throwback to The Monkees if they'd been doing HEROIN , instead of just The Frotis. Kidding aside , My beginnings  were similar , but , prior to '79 , there were also exploitation mags on Punk , I remember looking at them in the bookstore. But , what little Punk Rock I was hearing before 1980 was also on Dr. Demento's show , tho' I remember more stuff like The Flying Lizards than The Ramones or The Sex Pistols. ONCE , I HEARD A CLASH SONG ON THE RADIO , BEFORE THEY HAD A HIT. The Rock station played their version of "I Fought The Law" when it came out , here , in '79, in the afternoon , just to let their listeners hear what was going on with this Punk Rock stuff in The UK. They were NOT allowed to make it a habit. This was Dallas , we did'nt have a WXRT or a Rodney on The Roq , but , a rescue was in order in the form of DJ George Gimarc .

I CLICKED ON THE CONNECTION TO 50'S AND 60's Rock , too , when I was finally able to hear this stuff , in earnest (Though I'd read and heard of said connection.). The look was cooler , and more referential to those eras , as you could still get great old clothes (What "Vintage" used to be called.) in thrift stores and mostly affordable boutiques. The first local bands I was seeing (Telefones , Ft. Worth Cats , Ejectors , Chef Physique , Jetsons , Frenetics.)referred to the 60's Garage sound without being Retro 60's bands.
 
James Porter said:

I was twelve years old. For me, it was a combination of (a) reading Creem magazine, (b) listening to Dr. Demento's syndicated radio show, and (c) some of the more accessible "new wave" bands were starting to make minor inroads that year (1979).

I should also add that I was a fan of 50s and 60s rock, thanks to oldies radio. Punk and new wave, to me, sounded like a return to those bygone eras. Looked like those bygone eras, too. At a time when the typical rock star looked like THIS:


...the typical punk rocker looked like a throwback to the Monkees:

^^^This may appear to be standard rock star attire now, but for the mid-late 70s, hair this short looked almost stark.

I didn't get into punk....It got into me and has bin there ever since 'Vive le Difference!'

 I WON'T LIE , I LET MY EGO GET WAAAAAY AHEAD OF ME WHEN I WAS SINGING WITH A WORKING BAND. BUT , I ALSO LET MY EGO BE TAKEN DOWN A NOTCH , BY AGREEING NOT TO PLAY GUITAR , WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN. "REAL MUSICIANS" ALWAYS ASK ME TO JUST SING, INSTEAD. HA HA !

This is why I'm a solo act , or , if you wanna generalize , a "One - Man Band". Mine is the only ego I need to worry about , and it does'nt get much strokin' in this here town.

I must have worked with an easier-to-deal-with class of singers.  I always found I could get them to stop the egotistical rants by simple rattling my car keys at them.  No wait, those were drummers.  Sorry.  I've worked with a few dictatorially-minded singers, but my theory was always that it was their asses out there on the front line, that they were the ones who were gonna take the brunt of the hate if we sucked up there, so they had the right to voice opinions a little louder than the rest of the band, maybe.  A little.  But I've definitely known the Naziesque lead guitarists, too.  Their deal always seemed to be nothing more than their own mistaken notion that they were geniuses and that the rest of us should genuflect in their presence.  

Ramones, 50's rock'n'roll, 60's punk, early Black Flag,  or the combination of those 4  things...

Thank you Dave.

Yeeeeeeaaaaah !!! Of course I love "good ol' Northwest-style breaks" !

Give me as  many ear-tearin' breaks, ass-kickin' riffs and mind-blowin' licks as you want !

But pleeeeeeeeeaaase, no endless crappy solo. I know you're the best musician around but I don't care about your great ability and fabulous velocity !

Keep your finger tricks and give us kicks !

dave said:

Yep 100% agree !

Andy Climax said:

Anyone mentioned 'the soul' yet? Lets face it we all know when a song is bullshitting us. When the soul and the gnarl are in perfect harmony then we gotta groove!

just found this, and that's pretty good !

lugnoro - oga for oga