Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night KPBS showed an unusual program in T. J. Lubinsky’s “My Music” series – and for once he actually spelled “My Music” the normal way instead of mashing the two words together with a capital letter in the middle in the style made (in)famous by computer programs (“MyMusic”). The title was My Music: Story Songs , and the copyright date is 2019. It was something unusual for a Lubinsky show, and that is that it’s all composed of film clips from the past. Usually Lubinsky would stage live concerts with the surviving performers from whatever era he was paying tribute to (though some of his live shows have been rerun since the passing of some of their greatest talents, including Little Richard and James Brown). Sometimes he would intersperse clips of performances by deceased artists with the live playing by the still-living ones – with the ironic results that the dead artists, seen in clips from th...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday I got to play through the four CD’s I’d ordered from Amazon.com that arrived yesterday (I had actually opened the door for the Amazon delivery guy, and so I was able to thank him for the delivery personally): the gospel album Packin’ Up: The Best of Marion Williams (a record I’d been curious about since I saw the film Fried Green Tomatoes, and got to watch her sing “Didn’t It Rain?” on screen towards the end of the film; alas, this performance was not on the soundtrack CD I got, though two other Williams recordings heard in the film were), The Bitter Truth by Evanescence, 4801 South Indiana Avenue by white blues singer-guitarist Joanna Connor, and a five-song EP called Zoom In by Ringo Starr, whom I’ve been referring to rather dismissively of late as “the other surviving Beatle.” Actually, of the three secular albums in yesterday’s package I liked Ringo’s best of all – and, perhaps...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Friday night at 11 p.m. I put on KPBS again for a Live from the Belly Up episode from 2014 – the Belly Up Tavern being the legendary venue for live music in Solana Beach that’s been open since 1974, though because of my transportation issues I’ve never actually been there. (I wonder how they’ve weathered the storm of COVID-19.) This show consisted of a rather loose reggae/ska/rap band from Santa Barbara called Common Sense – the owner of the Belly Up, Chris Goldstein, was featured on the program saying they’ve probably played there more than any other band, and they recorded their first album live there in 1994. The front man is Nick Hernandez, who was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with some slogans printed on the lower right side that were hard to read except at least some of them seemed to have to do with autism, and according to their Wikipedia page their current members are Hernan...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The 63rd annual Grammy Awards were telecast on CBS-TV from 5 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. – a nearly four-hour spectacle and the first time the Grammys had been staged under pandemic conditions. (In 2020 the awards season had conveniently ended before the lockdowns began.) It was a typically lumbering spectacle that reflected the changes in the music industry, albeit obliquely – with the rise of digital “streaming” as the main way most people consume music (which has, among other things, virtually annihilated most artists’ ability to make money from their recordings – host Trevor Noah joked bitterly during the evening that an artist’s total revenue from a hit stream ranges between $2 and $3, and earlier Mariah Carey had commented publicly that she was flattered that her song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was the top holiday song streamed in 2020 and she was flattered even though she made almost no money fr...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday I got two CD’s I’d ordered from third-party vendors through Amazon.com, the soundtrack to Fried Green Tomatoes and a collection by obscure late-1950’s rocker Chan Romero, who’s probably known for just one song, “Hippy Hippy Shake.” And virtually the only reason that song is known is it was a favorite of the Beatles – John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular – and though they never recorded it commercially the Beatles played it a lot in their club years in Liverpool and Hamburg and I believe at least two Beatles performances of “Hippy Hippy Shake” survive, one from the BBC broadcasts and one on the Hamburg tape from December 31, 1962. The December 7, 1963 Juke Box Jury program on the BBC includes the Beatles commenting on another cover of “Hippy Hippy Shake” from their fellow Liverpudlians, the Swinging Bluejeans, and they said it was good, remembered playing the song themselves at the...