The classic rock line-up is of course: Vocalist, Guitarist, Bassist, Drummer. Keyboardists tend to be fringe players. Beyond that, apart from the odd notable saxophonist, if you need some horns or strings to give your record a bit of an epic orchestral sound because you’ve run out of other ideas by the third album, then you bring in the session musicians.
Brass is generally more suited to the swing or funky wings of popular music, but occasionally there have been rock bands who’ve made good use of the blowy instruments. Here are four examples.
Dexys Midnight Runners will be forever immortalized by wedding disco floor-filler Come On Eileen, but the band’s 1980 debut album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is revered amongst music journos and other assorted chin-strokers and twaddle-talkers. Geno is the best-known track from it, with its memorable brassy riff, but I think Tell Me When My Light Turns Green is even better…
Message to You Rudy. Bit obvious this one, but so what? Ska trombone legend Rico Rodriquez, playing here with The Specials, is still going strong in Jools Holland’s band at the age of 76….
Love’s album Forever Changes is one of pop’s beautiful oddities. Beloved by ongoing generations of music fans, it only reached number 154 on the Billboard album chart on its release in 1967. Arthur Lee, the band’s black hippie leader, had a chequered career which included a spell in prison for illegal possession of a firearm and a glorious late critical and commercial comeback, at the peak of which, in August 2006, he died of leukemia.
Labouring under the stupid title Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale, this is my favourite track from Forever Changes. It has a lyrical gimmick whereby the start of each verse is the end of the previous line, but more importantly, a stunning use of mariachi-style horns.
Humphrey Lyttelton, jazz trumpeter, Daily Mail cartoonist and Radio 4 comedy quiz show presenter outlived Arthur Lee by a couple of years, dying in 2008. He continued to do all sorts of interesting things right up to the end of his life, including playing on Life in a Glasshouse, the closing track of Radiohead’s 2001 album Amnesiac. Here he is playing live with them, along with fellow jazz musicians Jimmy Hastings and Pete Strange.
+ 1 hour out here on the Iberian Peninsula, but your quartet shook the eye-crust from my sangria-sodden frame. Costa-del-Crime looks a bit frayed these days, with the Brits and Micks staring into the middle-distance, negative equity staring back at them. With houses and cars you take 50% off the already reduced asking price and, likely as not, it will be accepted. This amuse-bouche has recently been extended to take in (if you have the brass neck) the local restaurants. Call for ‘la cuenta’ and simply make them an offer.
Great to see/hear Humph mixing it with the kids…..
Blimey I’d never have the nerve to haggle over the bill, postprandially. Glad you’re enjoying yourself M.
Back in a time when wooly mammoths roamed the North of England, I developed an enthusiasm for the twangy guitar of Duane Eddy. I saved long and hard for enough dosh to buy Eddy’s latest LP. My enthusiasm lasted all of forty five minutes as rapid-onset monotony took hold – one twang sounded much like a hundred others. But the record had a major redeeming feature – a wonderful sax played by Steve Douglas, a member of Eddy’s backing group, and later one of the great session musicians. He went on to play on several Beach Boys albums, including ‘Pet Sounds’, and performed as a session man with Presley, Dylan, Franklin, Ry Cooder, the Ramones, and many more. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 – in the ‘Sidemen’ category.
Here’s an example of Douglas transforming the mundane into something memorable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=296wS9ome4M
Great stuff John – though I wonder how they feel about getting in as ‘sidemen’…
Now and again that leafy, meandering rat run, the lane of memory (music for the pondering of) gives indigestion, annoyance at the memory lapse, deep seated in my case, and the we met at eight, we met at nine style discussions, difference of opinion,,heated words,,blows..sulks, well you know, don’t you.
Brit, bloody Dexy’s midnight runners and ‘C’mon Eileen’ bores into the noggin like a boil on the botty, ditto The Specials ‘A message to you Rudy’, took me years to realise that it was Rudy, not Lucille.
John, saw Eddy live playing that, an 18″ circular saw is more musical and what was it the theme music of again?
Mahlerman, sounds a good time for a spot of canny investment, shades of the Algarve in the late seventies.
I really do love ‘Come on Eileen’. “But not us… we are far too young and clever….”
Malty, it was the theme to the US television series ‘Peter Gunn’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gunn
A couple of favourites in that selection, but Geno is one of my all-time (I’m afraid I know it by heart). However, I’ve always found Come on Eileen a mix of embarrassing and irritating – and Rowlands went downhill from there!
I’ve had second, more nuanced thoughts about Come on Eileen. I think I may have liked it when it first came out but went off it after hearing it two or three million times at the bitter end of the disco.
Disco’s bitter end was for me a relief, disco’s sweet beginning was the dawning of that realisation that I was too old for this stuff,
The disco only has a bitter end, of course, if you’re going home on your own…
Well you could always add Springsteen into the mix, both wth the E-Street Band
and the Seeger Sessions band – haven’t seen a band that size playing for a long long time……………
Yes the Seeger Sessions were great. Particularly like ‘How can a poor man stand such times as these’.
Noooooo.
It’s Southside Johnny & The Asbury Dukes, surely.
That Dexys track has aged well, don’t you think? I remember buying the LP (vinyl) when it came out in 78 or 79 but don’t suppose I’ve played it for — what, 25 years?
(You know you’re not young when you can write a thing like that. You know you’re rreally not young when you can write it with scarcely a frisson of shock.)
I wonder how people called Eileen feel about the Ooraaooraa-ay number? My youngest is an Eileen and she loves it at the moment: but something tells me that could change.
I bought the SFTYSRs CD a few years ago, having given up on ever being able to play the vinyl again, and it does still sound terrific. I sometimes sing along to it very loudly in the car. Why not treat yourself, old fella?!
Great stuff. I’ve still got my copy of Searching for the Young Soul Rebels somewhere, and I’d almost forgotten how much I miss seeing Jerry Dammers bobbing up and down behind a keyboard!
Dexys’ debut album is good but their 1985 album, Dont Stand Me Down, is easily their best……the 12 minute third track – This is What She’s Like – is on a par with anything on Pet Sounds