Wednesday 27 July 2011

Rubber Biscuit by The Chips

Rubber Biscuit by the Blues Brothers

Heere odda hilldidda hildhiruhah Juuuyr adda hilldadida jigguwah Hieere odda hittomamma jizzowazzah

Quick Hit 

“Rubber Biscuit” by the Chips (1956)
“Rubber Biscuit” by the Blues Brothers (1978)

The Chips were a doo-wop group in the fifties led by Charles Johnson. “Rubber Biscuits” was the first and most famous song they recorded. It was supposedly contrived while Johnson was at the Warwick School for Delinquent Teenagers, it was more of a minor East Coast break-out radio hit than a national hit. Mostly done in kind of a ‘scat’ style about the only things you can understand in the song sound like Johnson making fun of the food at the ‘School’.

Tuesday 26 July 2011

Skeeter Davis -- The End Of The World

I wake up in the morning and I wonder, Why everything's the same as it was. I can't understand. No, I can't understand, How life goes on the way it does.


Songs Everyone Should Know

“End of the World” by Skeeter Davis, 1962

If you were not heart-broken or at least a bit melancholy before you listened to this song you will be after. An anthem for lost love, this song’s lyrics cut straight to the heart.

Davis was a country singer who crossed over into the world of pop when the RCA single released in 1962 went to the top of the Billboard charts in March 1963. Sylvia Dee who penned the song also wrote successfully for Elvis and Nat King Cole. Long considered an excellent example of the ‘Nashville sound’ this was produced by Chet Atkins.

Sunday 24 July 2011

Joe Jackson - I'm The Man

Give me all your money cause I know you think I’m funny. Can’t you hear me laughing. Can’t you see me smile.

70’s Pick of the Week

“I’m The Man”, by Joe Jackson (1979)

Right around the time when Nike were becoming popular, people danced sort of pogo-style and we were transitioning from punk to new wave, there came a guy from England that had something different. I had the good fortune to see Joe Jackson live that year and it was a superb show. Not the roughness of the punk band 999 that had just played a few months before, we knew there was something refreshingly original about the guy. It was almost a sensitive punk; a commentary on real life.

On the album cover of what was his second album, Jackson appears as what they call in the U.K. a ‘spiv’, and as Jackson himself said they, “always wears a gross polka-dot tie and a pencil-thin mustache, and he's always trying to sell you a watch or something like that real cheap. I think people always want to put a label on what you do, so I thought I'd be one step ahead of them and invent one myself - spiv rock.”