The Sponsors — In and Out of Love

from Sponsors (1982)

The Sponsors, formerly known as the Handgrenades, were a Long Island group that hit the CBGB’s circuit in the late 70s and early 80s alongside bands like the Heartbreakers. They cut this LP in 1982 at Skyline Studios, on 31st St. in Manhattan, with Andy Shernoff of the Dictators producing.

The vocals, my friends, are delicious. “In in in out in in and out of love…”

Read an exhaustive bio at the Free Music Archive (and grab one of the album tracks..)

Khalil Ahmed — Qayamat Vol. 1 with Nighat Akbar, Mehnaz, Mehdi Hassan

from the original soundtrack to Qayamat (197?)

More great music from the East—this track is from Lollywood composer and music director Khalil Ahmed, written for the film Qayamat: A Love Triangle in Afghanistan. What a beat. I can’t find much about the film except for this bizarrely-written wikipedia entry, so I’m not positive about the title or the date.

This track from the glorious Hindustani Vinyl. Worth spending a few hours combing the archives there…

Bridget St. John — Moody

from Hello Again: A Collection of Rare Tracks

This is the stuff Laurel Canyon dreams are spun from. Let’s-go-shopping-for-wind-chimes music. Shall-we-drive-to-the-beach music. Who’s-packing-the-picnic-blanket music.

Came across this ray of 70s sunshine yesterday while perusing the Motherlode over at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. I can’t find a date for this particular track but I believe it’s from ‘77-‘79, and it comes from a Japanese comp of rare recordings, many of which are retooled versions of earlier material. Hat tip to the blog Dirty Funky Situation for this gold.

B.T. Express — Do It Til You’re Satisfied

from Do It Til You’re Satisfied (1974)

Here is some extremely chewy disco-funk from the “Brooklyn Sound” of the 70s—the group known first as Madison Street Express, later Brooklyn Trucking Express. The spoken word call/response on this track is nothing short of genius. Their other big hit, ‘Express,’ features someone blowing on a wooden train whistle. Also genius. And surely not a coincidence that the album hit #1 on the Soul charts.

This also happens to be the primordial funk from which crawled the smoothly evolved R&B of Kashif (he was keyboardist for the band for a stint in the mid 70s, though doesn’t appear on this album).

The cover is not a platform from the JMZ line, as I’d originally imagined. Instead, as the train sleuths (and former Long Island Railroad conductors) over at Railroad.net have determined, those beautifully ornate railings once graced the Nostrand Ave LIRR station. Trains. An obsession of mine, I’ll admit. My biggest unrealized fantasy as a 9-year-old, nose buried deep in Model Railroader magazine, was to build a train set that would displace everything else in my parents’ garage. Never say never…

Judee Sill — Crayon Angels

from Judee Sill (1971)

Sometimes you gotta mellow out with a little California folk. Judee Sill is a good place to start—solid fingerpicking, a honeyed voice, maybe too polished for some. She wasn’t around for long—she died of a codeine overdose less than 10 years after releasing this album.

In the meantime, she opened a tour for David Crosby and Graham Nash, was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone and released one more album, before dropping out of the music business to work as a cartoonist. (Not totally out of left field—her mother’s second husband was an animator for Tom and Jerry)

Apparently the Fleet Foxes cover this number live, though I don’t think I’ve seen them do it.

UPDATE: everygreatsongever says:

Here’s Pecknold doing it alone in a Black Cab Session: blackcabsessions.com/in…

Arpadys — Funky Bass

from Arpadys (1977)

Let’s get this week rolling in the right direction with some hand-clapping French disco from Arpadys. Headed by bassist Sauver Mallia and drummer Pierre Alain Dahan of the dancefloor titans Voyage, Arpadys pumps out a near-perfect union of fretless bass and synthesizer, sparkling space jams by which to sip espresso on your next commute to Andromeda.

Moths — <3

video by Synesthesiae Films

Moths’ ode to love, from the Unholyrhythms/Cactus Mouth V-Day production, the We Fall Apart mixtape. The footage is lifted from Antonioni’s desert masterpiece Zabriskie Point, filmed in and around Death Valley.

The real-life romance between actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin was more tragic than anything else. Shortly after the filming of the movie, they joined the Mel Lyman Family, an LSD-inspired urban commune, run by Mel Lyman himself, a former banjo picker and harp player in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band.

Daria left soon thereafter due to the severity of cult life and married Dennis Hopper. Things went from bad to worse for Mark. <stop reading now if you’re squeamish> After donating his $60,000 in film earnings to the cult, he landed in prison in 1973 following an ill-fated Boston bank robbery, intended to secure more funds for the cult. He died in jail in two years later under suspicious circumstances, after a 150-pound barbell crushed his neck, at the age of 27.

via la3eheure

Cheryl Dilcher — Goodbye

from Special Songs (1970)

Cheryl Dilcher grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and after writing a handful of songs she started porting her 12-string around to college campuses in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to play gigs. Soon she hit the Greenwich Village folk scene, playing a weekly residency at The Back Fence (one of the few old outposts still there today).

This track, off her debut album, has such a great melancholy feeling, probably from that unbeatable major seventh chord she strums, and her plaintive vocals. Who knows if the lover she wrote it for ever heard it, and regretted running away.

William S. Fischer — Gurea Da

from Akelarre (1972)

Have you ever been in an elevator and heard tinny sounds so impeccably arranged you realize someone, somewhere must have actually played on that elevator music, and maybe even written it? This is that music for me.

It kicks off with a Stubblefieldian breakbeat, but don’t let that lead you astray. No, this track from jazz session arranger William S. Fischer isn’t going James Brown funky time — it’s piped straight from the elevator speakers of a 1970s concrete-and-fiberglass building, where carpet lines the walls, a “vision of the future” so obsolete it’s hard to imagine people ever thought the future would resemble it at all. (And makes you half-wonder if we just haven’t arrived there yet.)

The flute is the star of the show here, the instrument voted most likely to appear on a public television special about conserving water for a Better Los Angeles. The little squeaks from the Moog are amusing as well, and together with the flute, paint a perfect picture of urban content.

All the tracks on this album are Fischer’s funktified reinterpretations of traditional Basque folk songs and dances, if you can imagine that. (Akelarre means “coven” in Basque) Go check out a copy of the album at your local Vinyl4Giants.

Onuma Singsiri (อรอุมา สิงห์ศิริ) — Mae Kha Som Tam (แม่ค้าส้มตำ)

from The Sound of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam from Thailand, 1964-1975 (2010)

Soundway Records delivers this groovy set of music this week — a weird hybrid of traditional Thai music with Western instrumentation, from the 1960s and 70s.

This particular track, which has the appetizing title ‘Papaya Salad Merchant,’ has a hypnotizing rhythm that’ll grab you right away. And Onuma’s sinuous vocals will tie you up in it even more.

I know nothing about Thai vocal stylings so I can’t say if this tune would be considered Luk Thung or Molam. But here’s DJ & producer Chris Menist, who compiled this collection, on Luk Thung, in an excellent article at Spinner:

‘Luk-thung’ is a very broad term, a generic term for the bulk of Thai folk-influenced music. Modern luk-thung I’m not into, personally. It doesn’t quite have the experimental feel of the stuff on the album, the hybrid of old Thai folk and modern instrumentation. This is a crossover point where it wasn’t quite folk but wasn’t really Western-influenced, either.

Wikipedia says Molam’s characteristic feature is “the use of a flexible melody which is tailored to the tones of the words in the text.” If any Thai music experts want to chime in now, please do.

Listen to samples and buy vinyl and mp3s of The Sound of Siam at Soundway.

If you want to hear more from Onuma Singsiri, you have to visit Monrakplengthai, a goldmine of Thai music and culture.

Arnaud Rodrigues — Sete De Setenta E Oito

from Som do Paulinho (1976)

Yeah, I know.. I have a soft spot for the sounds of Brazil in the 70s. This is a great track from Arnaud Rodrigues, comedian, actor, and as it happens, quite an accomplished songwriter too. He’s also part of the tropicalia jesters Baiano & Os Novos Caetanos, whom I posted about recently.

Anyway this track starts with fireworks, a celebration, and then those backing vocals come in. The sounds of disco trying to crawl from the primordial soup. Lovely, really.

Can’t say the same for his outfit on the cover…that’s where the comedy comes in, I guess.

Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National — Okwukwe Na Nchekwube

from Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife Afro Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-76

Soundway Records with a beautiful two-disc set of highlife and blues. The slower tunes on this set, including this one by Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National, are sublime.

This is slide guitar used to its best effect…a feeling of drifting, of floating, of flying.

Ron Wood — Far East Man

from I’ve Got My Own Album To Do (1974)

Beautiful, beautiful ballad, driven by fantastic dirge-like guitar work from the Stones’ Ronnie Wood. He teamed up with George Harrison on this track (it also appears on Harrison’s 1974 album Dark Horse)

The whole album’s worth a listen — an all-star 70s cast, including several Stones (Mick & Keith), Rod Stewart, George Harrison and a bunch of great session musicians. The sound is huge…reminiscent of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

Sachiko Kanenobu — Blue Fish

from Misora (1972)

A friend passed this album my way recently, and I’m happy to have it. Misora apparently means ‘beautiful sky,’ and Sachiko Kanenobu is generally acknowledged by most English-language bloggers (who are probably all cribbing from the same material on record sites) to be one of one of Japan’s first female singer-songwriters, signed at 18 years old to Japan’s first indie label, Underground Record Club.

Such sites also have her taking off to the US to marry an American music critic (Paul Williams) just months before this album hit the shelves in 1972. In America she started a family and fell into relative obscurity, only to be urged in the early 1980s to take up recording again, by none other than science fiction writer and family friend Philip K. Dick. She released a followup album to Misora in 1992.

At any rate, Kanenobu’s songwriting on this album is superb, and she was adept enough at channeling late 60s / early 70s California to make the tunes feel familiar, despite the language barrier. (You’ll find some pedal steel on my other favorite track, ‘Leave it to Time.’)

The deep bass drum hits and lilting guitar lines that start off Blue Fish were driving me crazy earlier — I was trying to figure out just which Neil Young song they reminded me of. I ended up with Down by the River (1969) but I’m still not entirely convinced. If you have a better idea let me know.

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, looking all doey-eyed. What man would NOT be inspired by this mustache.