November 21 - I Thank You

I originally wrote and posted this Thanksgiving week 2008, but I am thinking it still holds up today... And reposting it is in the spirit of ZZ Top - after all they did release an album called Recycler...

It's Thanksgiving week here in the United States, and with that in mind, I start a series of songs about thankfulness - or sort of thankfulness. The first band out is that lil' ol' band from Texas - ZZ Top. It really is a shame that most people I grew up with only knew about them from flashy MTV videos with a spiffy car and scantily clad models. At that point they had almost abandoned their trademark blues/boogie rock and were all about click tracks, heavily treated guitars, and synthesizers. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but when you contrast songs like Gimme All Your Loving', Sharp Dressed Man, and Velcro Fly to classics like La Grange, Tush, and I Thank You (and the list goes on...), there's just no comparison if you ask me. 

Anyway - I would in all likelihood have been completely oblivious to the splendor of ZZ Top if it wasn't for Arve Hjalmar Holmen, who has been among my closest (if not the closest) friends ever since he decided that he wanted to take on the biggest kid in class upon returning to our school in sixth grade after a three year absence (that's what living on the wrong side of town for a few years can do to you). A teacher broke us up, which probably was for the better, as I was getting my rear whooped. We were taken inside and told to make nice, and the conversation that started that day has really not stopped - the pauses only get longer, as neither one of us lives in Norway anymore. 

I don't know where Arve got his interest in ZZ Top from or where he had heard them, but the result was that for every birthday and Christmas through middle school I bought him a tape of an old ZZ Top record. ZZ Top's First Album, Rio Grande Mud, Tres Hombres, Fandango, Tejas, Degüello, and El Loco all found their way into his collection of tapes - and I copied them to tapes of my own. Years later, after buying a CD player, the ZZ Top Sixpack was purchased as soon as I could afford it - but Degüello had to be purchased separately, and purchase it I did. It is packed with spectacular songs. I Thank You opens the album, and it hardly ever slows down. Yes, there are a few fillers in there, but most of the songs are so good that Degüello has to be ranked among the best ZZ Top albums. 

October 27 - Hi Fi Mama

Some legends are better left unexplored... Playing around with alter egos and solo concepts, Arve and I kept on returning to an idea where I would dress up in drag and call myself Hi Fi Mama after today's song. The opportunities seemed endless for how that could become quite the show - except I didn't have quite the guts to pull it all off. Who knows, with my hair out long again, it might not be out of the question, but I am thinking my beard may be just a tad disqualifying...

The lil' ol' band from Texas, ZZ Top, released their album Degüello in 1979. It was the first album on a major label (Warner Brothers), and it eventually sold to platinum. They had been together with the same line up as they still have since 1970, with Billy Gibbons on guitar and main lead vocals, Dusty Hill on bass and sometimes lead vocals, and Frank Beard on drums (and yes, he is the only one without a significant beard).

Degüello is just one in the line of seven albums that eventually would lead up to the massive success they enjoyed in the 80s with the release of Eliminator and Afterburner and massive MTV success with songs like Legs, Sharp Dressed Man, and Sleeping Bag (to name but a few). To me, their build up to the success is much more interesting - you can hear the evolution from a straight forward blues band on ZZ Top's first album to a much more technically experimenting band on both Degüello and El Loco (just listen to Manic Mechanic on Degüello and Groovy Little Hippy Pad on El Loco to hear how they are moving away from the straight up blues and boogie rock).

Today's song is a straight ahead rocker, with a horn section starring Gibbons on baritone sax, Hill on tenor sax, and Beard on alto sax - Hi Fi Mama remains one of my favorites - and also one of my favorite "what if..." moments. Also, please enjoy the plethora of double entendres...

June 8 - Mexican Blackbird

OK - so I have to admit that I probably shouldn't have been surprised about Arve's interest in country music. One of the tapes I got him for a birthday or Christmas present while in middle school (don't remember which, but I am fairly certain I did - although this might also have been one he picked up himself) was Fandango, which had one live side and one studio side, and on the studio side, there was this one song that he really liked a lot (actually he liked them all, I think - this is an awesome album). The way he described this song, you could tell he really felt the sand from the desert, and he tried to get me hooked on it. While I like the song, I thought there were better songs on the album, but listening to Mexican Blackbird there is no doubt where he gets his country voice from. It is a solid song from a great album.

January 10 - Fergus Laing

So it should start to be pretty clear that my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, to put it mildly. Some of it mirrors bands I have followed, while others mirror tastes of friends - and my interest in folk music from all around the world has been largely influenced by Thomas Ekrene with assistance from Johan Ludvig Brattås. The backstory for this interest is found under Radio Days: Resurrection - but the part I believe is missing is the fact that when I first moved to Bergen in January of 1995, the very first day in my student apartment I could hear the unmistakable guitar intro to La Grange by ZZ Top. I had no idea who lived next door, but I took La Grange as a good sign.

As I started working in Studentradioen - and more specifically as I started working with Thomas in Plog - I would frequently take one of the last busses home, and it turned out that Thomas was on the same bus. We walked separately - he had a gruff personality, and I had not yet established much of a rapport with him - and sat apart from one another on the bus, each listening to our own music. However, my jaw dropped when I saw that his key fit perfectly in the lock of the student apartment next to mine - the one that had played La Grange when I first moved in.

Eventually we started talking more, and we became friends, first and foremost united by a love for music, and he really started pushing his main drug: Richard Thompson. At first I was lukewarm, but I started warming up, and after I moved back to Trondheim for a while, he sent me a tape (or was it two) with some of his favorite Richard Thompson songs in good old-fashioned mixtape mode. And it worked... In addition to being one of the best guitar players I ever have heard (electric or acoustic), he is also a great songwriter. He has a very typical British dry humor, and his songs often appear depressive - but they are filled with very dark humor that you have to see through the grim depressive material. Add to that that he has written good old fashioned nidviser - very critical and satirical songs about living and real people - Madonna's Wedding about her renting a Scottish Castle to marry Guy Ritchie and Dear Janet Jackson about the infamous exposed nipple.\As one of the bonus tracks of his last album, Still, which came out last year, he wrote another song about an existing person, but since this person is a litigious current frontrunner for the Republican Party, the name was changed to Fergus Laing - but there is little doubt about who it is written...

January 3 - Daddy Doesn't Pray Anymore

Good music is good music regardless of genre. Back when I was in high school, one of my best friends announced that he and some classmates were starting a country band named after him in a traditional "danseband" stil: Arve Hjalmars. It was just for fun - or so I thought - but I have come to realize that while there was a massive dose of humor and timely 90s irony, there was a genuine interest in and maybe even love for country music at the heart of much of what he did (I dare not speak for the rest of the band - and I probably shouldn't speak for him either). And it rubbed off on me.

Arve had started turning my ear ever so slightly in a very stealthy manner as early as middle school, when his passion for ZZ Top filled my small Christmas and birthday present budget until I had purchased most of the ZZ Top cassettes with the orange "Nice Price" label at Playtime, the legendary record shop in Trondheim in the 1980s. I can hear the protests already - "ZZ Top isn't country." Taken as a whole, you might be right - they are still that lil' ol' boogie band from Texas - but there are gems in their catalog that can't be described as anything but country, for instance "(She's a) Heartbreaker" from  Tejas and "Mexican Blackbird" from Fandango. The thing is, not only were the songs country, but they were great as well.

So spurred by Arve's interest in country, which was further amplified by other bands' declared love for the music, I started looking around and exploring, and I found the country that I didn't care for was the country most often on the country charts and radio - the slick and overproduced country made more to sell than from the heart. Then there was the country that usually wasn't corrupted by Nashville, the country of the fringes, and I liked that. Mind you, I am aware that some of that might be by design, just like fast food companies are bringing in food designers to make their mass produced crap (which I admit to eating) look more rustic and artisan, but I still like it...

So during last year's Country Music Awards show, I was teaching my night class as I always do Wednesday night, and Christine was at home with a remote in her hand and space on the DVR, and she pressed record when Justin Timberlake (whom I greatly respect although his music isn't for me - the dude is immensely talented) and an unknown (to me) guy named Chris Stapleton performed, because she thought I might like it - and boy was she right! 

Good music is good music regardless of genre. Chris Stapleton isn't just good, he is great. When I look back at 2015, Traveller is clearly in the top 3 for me. It is an album I have played over and over again, and while I have a hard time picking just one song, the emotional cornerstone of the album is the gem "Daddy Doesn't Pray Anymore," a song he wrote about the passing of his own father. Listen carefully and you might really hear him choking up singing it - and, if you are like me, you might choke up right there with him...

Record Store Day Part I - Playtime

April 17 is Record Store Day, so I thought to myself, what better excuse to talk a little about the record stores that have played such a huge part of my formative years...

Playtime
The first record store I ever visited was Playtime. It was in an old wooden building downtown Trondheim that now houses the pub Three Lions. It pains me to see this former temple of vinyl turned into a house of worship for the anglofiles, but there really hasn't been a decent store there since they closed their doors in the late 80s or thereabout. When you entered the store, they had bins upon bins of vinyl - and they had the mandatory tape racks as well. This was where they kept all the new stuff - the things they still could charge full price for. When I started shopping there, I think the price was around NOK 70 per record or tape, but before too long, the price was around NOK 100, which is the price I remember paying most of the time - as long as the music was new.

While the main floor was nice and had all the important new releases - especially from the hair bands of the 80s, the basement was the holy grail. Nice Price albums were the main feature of the basement - they were older releases not selling that well anymore and discounted to NOK 49.50. Some were of more foreign origin. I still remember Mexican pressings of Kiss' Love Gun and Rock and Roll Over - and the Black Sabbath box set Hand of Doom, which I also believe could have been of Mexican origin, featuring the first four Black Sabbath albums on flimsy vinyl and without any of the original artwork.

Playtime was also where I purchased most of the presents I ever gave to people. My good friend Arve received many an old ZZ Top tape purchased in this basement - often even cheaper than the NOK 49.50. I think I got him most of the pre-Eliminator releases - and then I made good use of them myself. Copying records and albums to tapes was a very common occurrence, and I think my parents' basement still holds a huge box of tapes I made throughout my adolescence.

I also discovered new music there. I kinda liked what Phil Lynnott had done with Gary Moore (Out in the Fields was a huge hit for the two of them), so I thought I should pick up a Thin Lizzy album. I ended up with Live Life from 1983, which I thoroughly enjoyed, although it was not being recognized as one of their best. I also picked up a cassette once that set my tastes off towards the more progressive music. I had friends who really liked Deep Purple, and it was in the Playtime basement I realized that Ritchie Blackmore had formed another band after leaving Deep Purple: Rainbow. I ended up buying a tape that had a cool cover - the image of a hand coming from a stormy sea and grasping a rainbow. It was called Rainbow Rising. I did not know that the singer was the Holy Diver himself, Mr. Ronnie James Dio, so I was very surprised when I read the cover to find out who played in the band. While I liked the entire tape, the goosebumps appeared when I heard the final track: Stargazer. It still gives me the chills. And for that - and as a tribute to Playtime, which truly was the treasure chest of my youth - here is the original version as recorded by Rainbow in 1976 - and as a nice bonus, a version by Dream Theater from 2009 - eerily close to the original.

Dream Theater - from Black Clouds and Silver Linings:

Now Be Thankful (Fairport Convention)

My road to Fairport Convention goes through Richard Thompson, and I can guarantee you that both will be revisited in this blog, as I have gained an enourmous respect for both. However, in order to get there, I have to go back to the band that started my Thanksgiving series of songs - ZZ Top. I have already talked a little bit about the start of my civil service in Norway. What I didn't say was that I didn't last 16 months at Hustad Leir. As soon as 1995 rolled around - I had been at Hustad Leir for six months - I was able to leave for Bergen and an assignment at Centre for International Health (CIH), a research institute under the University of Bergen. I moved into a room at Fantoft Studentby, which essentially was an apartment style dorm room way outside the university campus and Haukeland Hospital, which was where CIH was located. I was nervous - I was on my own for the very first time, and although I had very good friends in Bergen, I was far away from home. Some of those nerves were mitigated when I heard familiar music through the wall - it was La Grange from ZZ Top's spectacular Tres Hombres album.

I had been living in Bergen for a very short time when my friend Vegard Nørstebø told me that the local student radio station, Studentradioen i Bergen, were interviewing - and that they were looking for engineers. Studentradioen was an all volunteer radio station - the only paid members were the editors - and I had background from Radio Ung in Trondheim, both as an engineer and a DJ, so I thought it sounded like a good idea. Vegard had already been working there for some time (we had both background from Radio Ung) and was enjoying it, so I saw it as a great way for me to get to meet people as well. I was able to join them, and among the shows I was the engineer for was Plog (the norwegian word for Plow - the noun, not the verb). Plog was an eclectic music program, drawing heavily from traditional music from all over the world - I envision the name as an indication that the music was whatever turned up after one had plowed all corners of the earth. It was hosted by cantankerous Thomas Ekrene - at least he appeared cantankerous to me initially - and I have to admit that I was a little afraid of him. After the show was over, both of us would walk separately down to the bus terminal, get on the same bus (still separately), and take it to Fantoft Studentby, where we both would walk separately to our rooms. Except his room turned out to be right next to me - and he was the guy who had been playing ZZ Top when I first moved in.

After a few weeks of walking separately to the same bus and then the neighboring dorm rooms, we finally started talking to one another. How it happened I don't remember, but the endresult was that we became fast friends - we played together in ad hoc bands assembled for Christmas parties and we eventually became roommates. And in the midst of all this, Thomas introduced me to Richard Thompson, the spectacular British guitarplayer who is a "musician's musician," one who rarely gets the acknowledgment he deserves by the general public, but who is revered by musicians in a variety of genres. The first song I heard was Shoot Out The Lights, and the first album I heard was You? Me? Us?, an ambitious double album produced by Mitchell Froom featuring an electric disk (voltage enhanced) and one acoustic disk (nude). The first Richard Thompson album I bought was Watching The Dark, a 3-cd set stretching from 1988 back to his beginning in a British folk-rock band called Fairport Convention. Among the songs from that time was a song written by Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick, Now Be Thankful, a beautiful ballad that seems to be a fitting song for Thanksgiving.

I Thank You

It's Thanksgiving week here in the United States, and with that in mind, I start a series of songs about thankfulness - or sort of thankfulness. The first band out is that lil' ol' band from Texas - ZZ Top. It really is a shame that most people I grew up with only knew about them from flashy MTV videos with a spiffy car and scantily clad models. At that point they had almost abandoned their trademark blues/boogie rock and were all about click tracks, heavily treated guitars, and synthesizers. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but when you contrast songs like Gimme All Your Loving', Sharp Dressed Man, and Velcro Fly to classics like La Grange, Tush, and I Thank You (and the list goes on...), there's just no comparison if you ask me.  On the other hand, there are good indications that they will get back to form again after signing to American Recordings and enlisting Rick Rubin to produce their next album.

Anyway - I would in all likelihood have been completely oblivious to the splendor of ZZ Top if it wasn't for Arve Hjalmar Holmen, who has been among my closest (if not the closest) friends ever since he decided that he wanted to take on the biggest kid in class upon returning to our school in sixth grade after a three year absence (that's what living on the wrong side of town for a few years can do to you). A teacher broke us up, which probably was for the better, as I was getting my rear whooped. We were taken inside and told to make nice, and the conversation that started that day has really not stopped - the pauses only get longer, as neither one of us lives in Norway anymore (both of us needed to leave the country to find wives). 

I don't know where Arve got his interest in ZZ Top from or where he had heard them, but the result was that for every birthday and Christmas through middle school I bought him a tape of an old ZZ Top record. ZZ Top's First Album, Rio Grande Mud, Tres Hombres, Fandango, Tejas, Degüello, and El Loco all found their way into his collection of tapes - and I copied them to tapes of my own. Years later, after buying a CD player, the ZZ Top Sixpack was purchased as soon as I could afford it - but Degüello had to be purchased separately, and purchase it I did. It is packed with spectacular songs. I Thank You opens the album, and it hardly ever slows down. Yes, there are a few fillers in there, but most of the songs are so good that Degüello has to be ranked among the best ZZ Top albums. 

The main riff is a pleasure to play - and from the following clip I believe it is possible to see how much they enjoy playing it themselves. This is from Essen, Germany and was recorded on April 19, 1980. I just watched their Live from Houston DVD, but I found it to be pretty bland and boring - all the edge was removed from it. However, back in 1980, when their long beards were still pretty new (and they had all just turned 30 the year before - much can be said about youthful exuberance). Oh - and the song was written by none other than Isaac Hayes...