Jonny's Spot

fuckyeahtommilsom:

fuckyeahtommilsom:

Save Marsh Mimes - Baby Rodeo

See more Baby Rodeo posts Listen/purchase album on bandcamp

foundmusic:

Barbara and Ernie - Somebody to Love

From their only album, Prelude to…, 1971. Found inside the Smif-N-Wessun song “Wrektime”.

A rock classic gets a neat rare-groove makeover from a bunch of jazz cats: Barbara Massey and Ernie Calabria, Grady Tate on drums, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, Eumir Deodato on orchestration, and produced by Joel Dorn. (Elsewhere on the album you can find Keith Jarrett and Chuck Rainey.) Barbara’s got some decent pipes but it’s all about the production on this thing, a slow build from Ernie’s bass (in just one channel) on up to a full band with multi-tracked vocals. Bonus points for the piano string-rakes and creeping synth, as well as Barbara’s imitation of a siren at the 3-minute mark.

P.S. For anyone confused about the meaning of A Serious Man, it can be found quite plainly within the lyrics to this song.

foundmusic:

Scott Walker - Mathilde

From the great 1967 Scott LP, his first since leaving the Walker Brothers.

I had a weird dream last night or this morning. It was rather long, covering the events of an entire day, but the only incident that survived translation to consciousness involved rooting around a crowded video store at the end of my block (in real life, the same 5th Avenue storefront that a shitty barbershop now occupies). The store was full of movies I’d never heard of, catalogued first by genre and then by country; in place of VHS tapes were endless racks of small cardboard sleeves encased in plastic. A clerk lurked somewhere outside of my attention. Whatever wandered through the windows made for the only available light.

I was searching for Estonian horror movies and failing. Every other country had at least two films to its name: Russia, Poland, Romania, Georgia, Albania, on and on. Each title seemed magical/terrifying. Anything I could have picked would have been a revelation. I was determined to find Estonia, but there was no Estonia; Central Europe stretched out to the wall, and suddenly I was in Finland.

However, I was surprised and delighted to find quite a bit of Estonian pornography.

This isn’t the first dream like this I’ve had. A particularly vivid one in January 2009 had me wandering through an enormous warehouse during a ’70s horror/’70s porn/vintage synthesizer convention, while an X-rated movie called Midget City Heat played on screens set high in the corners of the rooms. (There were no midgets in the movie; the sex scene I saw involved a bearded white gentleman and a fat black lady.) In another, more recent dream, I discovered a porn merchant operating out of a tent in Chinatown and made several trips there, hiding my purchases in the closet of my childhood home in Nashville. Yet another dream consisted only of the movie (I was present as spectator): an incredibly violent exploitation film in which a hulking Jim Kelly/Black Dynamite type sought gruesome revenge on some people for something or other by torturing and dismembering them. All of these dreams are consistently colored: deep, saturated, slightly purplish: a phenomenon that never occurs elsewhere in my unconscious mind. With the exception of the last one, none of them are outright nightmares, but they are all tinted with unease.

I spent a significant portion of my life as a young man browsing alone through video rental shelves—at least as much as I spent in record stores. In both cases, they were magical places. Each album/movie was a promise, a world spread wide open. I was and am very interested in escape, and it was crucial for each document to essay an experience different from my own—the more foreign, the better. My favorite movies—Suspiria, Eraserhead, The Thing, et al—showed me things I’d never seen; all the better that I’d rented them based on box art alone, and they’d kept their promises. This search for The New informs every work I take in. As my dreams indicate, horror and pornography offer the most New Things to me—at their best, they both work on the same primal level—but I try to look everywhere, and if I find Something New—even for one scene—I can be very forgiving of its surroundings. As in movies, so in music.

Anyway, blah blah blah. The thing I love about “Mathilde” is how Scott Walker sings this song (written by Jacques Brel but fortunately not translated by Rod McKuen) as if riding into battle. After a military fanfare sketching out Walker’s arrival on horseback, he begins barking out orders to his friends and loved ones:
—-
Mama, do you see what I see
On your knees and pray for me
Mathilde’s come back to me
Charley, don’t want another beer
Tonight I’m gonna drink my tears
Mathilda’s come back to me
Go ask the maid if she heard what I said
Tell her to change the sheets on the bed
Mathilde’s come back to me
Fellas, don’t leave me tonight
Tonight I’m going back to fight
Wretched Mathilde’s in sight
—-
Brel and Walker have taken a theme pretty common in popular music—the love a man has for a woman who makes him miserable—and blown it right the fuck up into high melodrama, driven by the military-style brass, leaping strings (seriously, bonus points for whoever charted out those strings), and Walker’s operatic vocal. He is facing certain doom upon Mathilde’s bosom, but he is driven to meet her; indeed, the song ends with:
—-
My friends, don’t count on me no more
I’ve gone and crashed through heaven’s door
My sweet Mathilde’s here
Once more, once more
—-
and the music thunders to a halt. Walker has been shot to death by the enemy, his lady. Fantastic.