1968's The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp is one of the psychedelic eras's most eccentric little treasures, full of whimsical numbers that will make you smile. Among them, the bouncy single "One in a Million", written in 1965 by drummer Michael Giles with an apparent nod to Ray Davies. Like the album itself, "One in a Million" failed to sell any copies.
The might have been the end of the story. But of course the Fripp in Giles, Giles and Fripp is Robert Fripp, one of prog rock's greatest guitarists. When the trio met multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, it was only a matter of time before they formed a new band. Out would go bassist Peter Giles for the stronger vocalist Greg Lake and McDonald's friend Peter Sinfield would also join to handle lyrics, lighting and PA. It was Sinfield who coined the name of the new band, King Crimson.
From there things would get decidedly less... cheerful.
No hard feelings between the brothers. Peter Giles would join his brother and Ian McDonald in 1971 on the magnificent McDonald and Giles album.
Rather than approaching this theme with the standard "songs with million" in the lyrics/title, I decided to educate myself just a little.
Question 1: what is the certification level given to records that sell 1 million or more? The answer is a little more complicated than I was aware of. If you know the answer to this question, more power to you. Fact is, there are different requirements for singles and albums. As a music aficionado, you likely know that <Certified Gold> requires 500K in sales, and this is true for both singles and albums (but $1 million in sales at the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price). Howsomever, <Certified Platinum> places a 1 million threshold for singles and a 2 million bottom line for albums (again, with a minimum total income based on the MSRP).
Diamond status takes the stakes up to 10 million, and then gets even more complicated when we get into Digital Downloads.
Question 2: the first <Gold> record? The first "gold" label was awarded to Glen Miller's <Chattanooga Choo Choo> back in 1942 (probably rightly so) - but it was an "in-house" award that was only later adopted across the board by other labels. My understanding is that the RIAA only came into being after this point in time. You could check out the RIAA website, but I'm not so sure I would rely on their info based on their past public performance.
But - being the powerhouse that they are, we need to pay some attention to the RIAA, and after they got on board, they awarded Perry Como and Elvis Presley some of their first "golds".
I'll go back on my word just a little by relying on the RIAA website: they say that the very first Platinum record was Johnnie Taylor's <Disco Lady>. I confess the name meant nothing to me, but adding in my experience of where music was at at that time - highly plausibly "gold".
And from there ... the rest is probably what you are already aware of .. The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd .... [I couldn't possibly list them all]
Folk seem to be suggesting there aren't that many songs about millions, so it was with some relief I tapped into my i-pod search and and found, well, over a handful, mainly to do with miles, dollars or, as this one, tears. And delighted too I was to find this song, an artist I had somehow forgotten about of late, and, indeed, seems also to have been overlooked in the wider world of fame and fortune. Time to discover!
Kasey burst on to my consciousness back in the late 90's, in her 20's, her debut coming at me with a blast of raw, gutsy heartfelt C&W pathos. Country and western australia that is, as she hailed from,(actually south) australia, rather than the West Texas Lucinda tinted tones she reminded me of, albeit a younger and more innocent Lucinda. Her first album, 'The Captain', was an absolute scorcher, if one discounts her years of active service in her 'family" band, honing her chops under the capable supervision of her father, himself a name in australiana. It probably did no harm that world famous in my world, hopefully yours, husband and wife duo, Buddy and Julie Miller, were involved. Indeed, she soon eclipsed his custodianship, a run of records alerting her to international ears, with, notably, a duet with the aforesaid Lucinda appearing on her 2nd solo outing. Hell, her first 2 tours of the USA were supporting, first, Lucinda and, secondly, Emmylou Harris. The 2nd album, 'Barricades and Brickwalls', took her further, if not a better record, getting close to the sales of another australian, sales wise. The titular song from this piece comes from said album.
I was sort of surprised, whilst researching this piece, that she has a subsequent 9 releases, many performing just as well. Somehow these didn't seem to hit the radars I rely on back in the UK. I was aware she had married, and that she had become a duo with her husband, one Shane Nicholson, but none of their material had intrigued. They have since separated. The good news is that she has this year produced a new album, 'Dragonfly', which, on a first spotify, sounds and seems well much a return to form.
I feel bad suggesting there has been a fall away from grace, as, for all I know, maybe there hasn't been, but, irrespective, she's back on my register and I commend her to yours.
For our new theme, I went to YouTube and did searches for what seemed to be likely titles for songs. I am somewhat embarrassed that I had never heard of Jim Boyd until I did that. Boyd is identified in most references to him on line as a Native American singer-songwriter. He was certainly that. His roots were on the Colville Reservation in Washington state, where he was an important member of the tribal council. But, on the strength of this song, Boyd deserved to be more widely known. True, A Million Miles Away expresses the yearning many on the reservations feel for a better life somewhere else. But the theme of the song is more universal than that.
I am reminded of a book I would like to recommend, Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie. Alexie is a novelist. He has achieved a level of fame where he no longer has to be called a Native American novelist, although he gives voice to Native American concerns in the book. In fact, Alexie and Boyd became friends, and even wrote songs together. Reservation Blues is about a group of young Native Americans who form a band and try to use their music as a way off the reservation to a better life. In the end, they are unsuccessful, and they have to go back to the life they knew. There was eventually a movie version, and Jim Boyd was on the soundtrack. Boyd’s music was good enough to stand with anything ever posted here, but I’m guessing most of our readers didn’t know about him either.
Musically, someone could probably have a hit with A Million Miles Away by turning it into a power ballad. I can hear in my head just where the band would come in with drums, bass, and screaming electric guitars. Boyd doesn’t do that, and the song simmers intensely all the way through as an acoustic ballad. To me, the song is better for it, but subtlety is not how you get onto the charts.
Unlike in my last post, there is no need for make to make the case for The Golden Vanity as a folk song. Instead, the song and the versions offered here give a great example of the folk process. What are now traditional songs once served a role in society that is filled now with far less artistry by tabloid newspapers. In a culture that was mostly illiterate, songs like The golden Vanity were how the masses got their news. As stories like this got told and retold, different singers would add their own agendas to the lyrics. The Golden Vanity may have begun as a tale about a specific sea captain. The singer might have left him unnamed, secure in the knowledge that his audience would know who he was. But the song is also a tale of the unfairness of the class structure of British society. There are versions that present the tragic conclusion as inevitable, citing how impudent the cabin boy was to expect to be rewarded for his efforts. The universality of the main theme of the song assured it a long life that extended well beyond the life of the people it was written about. So the enemy is often a “Turkish Revelry”, but sometimes it is a Spanish ship. Likewise, it is important to some singers that the enemy deserves their fate, so there is a verse that describes them as sinners, playing cards and shooting dice as they sink into the sea. Rory Block gives us a lyric where the crew give the cabin boy an honorable death, as if the teller is a former shipmate struck by pangs of guilt. It is unlikely, in the actual event, that the captain would have allowed this, but it puts the blame on him alone for what happened. Gordon Bok and crew give us an exchange between the captain and the cabin boy that exposes the villainy of the captain for all to see; here, the reason the cabin boy does not take revenge is an act of class solidarity.
Another aspect of the folk process is on display here as well. All three versions here are recognizably the same song. But Rory Block and Bok, Muir and Trickett take very different approaches musically, although both are ballads. Sam Kelly turns the song into an uptempo burner, and it really cooks. As these songs pass from news items to parts of the traditional culture, each new artist uses their unique talents to put the song over the best way they can. There are times, like this one, where there never becomes an “official” way to do the song, so each artist must make it their own. I could have presented many more versions, including classic takes by Pete Seeger, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Peter Paul and Mary, but the versions I have chosen suffice to illustrate the point.
In 1986, a year that jangly guitars were still all the rage on college radio stations like mine, Washington D.C.'s Tommy Keene released one of the year's finest power pop albums. Songs From the Film was Keene's major label debut. Produced by Beatles audio engineer Geoff Emerick, it's a collection of straight ahead tunes that grow on you ten, twenty, even thirty years later.
I caught Keene's act from the back of the 9:30 Club in his hometown a year or two earlier and I wasn't impressed. From the back of the room, he looked like Alan Thicke. In my hometown of New Orleans, the Jesuit owned TV station had replaced David Letterman with Thicke's show Thicke of the Night. We hated Alan Thicke. So that counted as strike one. Keene's reedy voice reminded me of Let's Active's Mitch Easter who seemed to be constantly replacing female bandmates taller than him. Strike two. And the songs may have sounded too straight forward to a guy like me, who considered himself a music snob. Strike three.
Then, in 1984, Tommy Keene released a pair of EPs on the Dolphin label that sounded great with the kind of songs I liked to play on my college radio show ( Back in the USA MC5, Marshall Crenshaw, the dBs, R.E.M., The Byrds, The Beau Brummels, the garage rock bands from the Nuggets Compilation, you get the idea). One of them, Run Now, produced by T Bone Burnett and Don Dixon, topped the Village Voice Pazz and Jop EP poll and is now included on the Songs From the Film CD.
Keene never made it big. But take a listen to "Gold Town" and you'll be left wondering why.
purchase [Lulu] [Un] fortuitously, this comes more or less upon Roger Moore's demise. I had already started in on this topic when I read the news this week about his passing. More than once, the James Bond series has shown its affinity for gold: the word appears in more than one film title: Goldfinger, GoldenEye, The Man with a Golden Gun. And the metal itself appears even more often - you know, the root of all evil. Ask yourself: Why does one rock dug out of the ground have such value? Go figure. Gold ... Silver... Diamonds and more. The James Bond film series is a serious production process - not least the selection of its music - both throughout each film, but more emphatically, in the film's intro section. Over the years, the honor of singing the films' intro music has fallen to the top of the pop: Paul McCartney, Louis Armstrong, Nancy Sinatra, Carly Simon, Rita Coolridge, Tina Turner ... the list goes on and on. Kind of like how the list of Bond films that include <gold> goes on and on. The Bond <gold> selection I highlight spans a number of musical genres, but there seems to be an over-arching theme to them all: lots of [studio] production. I don't mean to necessarily place this in a bad sense. In fact, the Bond music over-production is appropriate, but it's obvious. That's probably a given for anything Bond - the whole operation is tightly managed - and that's part of what makes the series classic. Herewith, 3 golden Bond theme songs:
A theme within a theme—two “Gold” related posts about 1980s Richard Thompson side projects. To follow up last week’s post about the Golden Palominos, this week we look at French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson, a more traditional “supergroup” in form, if not sound or popularity. FFKT released two albums, 1987’s Live, Love, Larf & Loaf, from which today’s featured song comes, and Invisible Means, released in 1990.
Thompson is both a personal favorite, and a SMM regular. His cohorts in FFKT, though, are somewhat lesser known. John French is a drummer, although he contributed some vocals to the project, and is probably best known as “Drumbo” from Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Fred Frith, best known as a guitarist, although he mostly played bass and violin in this group, was a founder of the English avant-garde rock group Henry Cow, and has played with and produced a wide variety of mostly experimental and unconventional musicians (including Golden Palomino Bill Laswell). Frith is Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Mills College and is also a writer. Henry Kaiser is another experimental guitarist and ethnomusicologist whose body of work stretches across the spectrum of jazz, rock, electronic and world music.
As could be expected from this crew, Live, Love, Larf & Loaf is an eclectic set of music which seems to also reflect the members’ off-kilter senses of humor. The album includes, among other things, experimental, noisy songs, an Okinawan folk song, a version of the Beach Boys' “Surfin’ U.S.A.” played in the style of Chuck Berry before descending into chaos, and a few songs that sound like slightly twisted Richard Thompson songs.
“Killerman Gold Posse” is one of these, a song about a London youth gang, in which Thompson recounts the gang’s practices of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, although he notes that “the poor are we, and the poor are we.” However, the narrative is interrupted by a chorus, which sings, “We are children, please don't take our freedom away.”
It is an odd song, and one that probably is exactly long enough at 1:47.
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