It's been an interesting musical week. It started with an impromptu Moody Blues retrospective, ended with a listen back to Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and included a great story from Spike Lee about his father, bassist Bill Lee.
The Moody Blues concert was prompted by the passing of founder, Ray Thomas. The Moodies always seemed a little out of step with the musical trends of their day. Too smooth for rock and roll or even traditional blues, too much orchestration for purists and too cerebral for Top 40 radio. Still they had the chops and the talent to create their own sub genre and their own following that grew into a trend.
Their first big hit, "Go Now" in 1967 is a distant echo of their later orchestral symphonies and complicated rhetoric. But regardless of the production values they added, they never lost the knack for a good hook. My personal favorite is from The Question,
It's not the way that you say it
When you do those things to me
It's more the way that you mean it
When you tell me what will be.
When it comes to interpreting lyrics, no one could do it better than Johnny Cash, especially in live shows. (Of course he could pen some memorable ones as well.) So it's always good to hear him get his due as he has this week with stories about the 50th anniversary of his live album, "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison." He took a big gamble to force Columbia Records to record and release it at a time when his career had fallen into one of its periodic eclipses. Boy did it pay off.
It's been a regular on my turntable several times a year since I found it a discount department store in the sixties for the nice price of $3.67. Listening to it again is like opening The American Songbook and realizing how the country-rock and alt-country got started and dozens of singer/songwriters owe him huge debts.
It's with some embarrassment that I admit that I never realized that Spike Lee's dad was a legendary bass player who wrote folk-jazz operas, scored Spikes' films and performed with Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. In a recent radio interview, Spike shared a story about what happened when Bob Dylan went electric. At the time Bill Lee was making a good living backing Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Theodore Bikel and Dylan. It was his bass line on Puff The Magic Dragon, according to Spike.
Bill Lee refused to make the switch to electric, on principle, and his work dried up to the point that his wife had to go back to teaching school to support the family. When Terry Gross asked Spike if he had any regrets about his dad's choice, Spike replied: "Never."
And finally, as long as we are remembering music legends, here's a story from Wayne Cochran, the legendary front man for The C.C. Riders with the eye-popping blonde pompadour. In the early 1980's, David Letterman asked him where he got the raspy voice needed to sing the blues.
"You gotta sound like you're hurting a little. I used to tell people, 'Just tie yourself to a donkey, let him drag you for about six months across a desert. When you stand up, you can sing the blues.'"
