Thanks, Marc, for a great weekend!
We’ll fix that!
Many songwriters are guilty of asking us to “shake” something, but how come they so often ask us to shake something that’s not supposed to be shaken. For example:
Andre 3000 sings “shake it like a Polaroid picture”, which Polaroid insists is a terrible idea and will ruin your photographs
Sam Cooke sings “shake it like a bowl of soup”, which sounds less like a recipe for success, and more like a recipe for a mess.
Ray Charles sings “shake your tailfeather”, which is a nice in a metaphor kind of way.
The Gap Band sings “shake shake shake shake shake your booty at the disco”, which is repetitively literal.
The Bar-Kays sing “shake your rump to the funk”, which is even more explicit, though they should probably say “disco funk”.
Elmore James sings “shake your moneymaker”. We’re back in figurative land here, at least for most of us, but I can get behind this one, in a classic sense.
The Jacksons ask you to “shake your body down to the ground”. (Man, the late ’70s had a real resurgence of shaking. Or maybe I just have easy access to too much late ’70s music…)
And blues, because in addition to Elmore James, we have:
Lightin’ Hopkins asking his baby to “shake that thing” and Howlin’ Wolf asking to “shake like jello on a plate” and more simply “shake it for me”.
And of course, “shake your rump” was revitalized in the early nineties, when Wreckx-N-Effect dropped “to the funk” and added a bunch of nonsense syllables.
Sammy Bananas has an “Anna Stesia” meets Garth Hudson moment on Miss Fairchild’s forthcoming release: Thesis. Antithesis. Parenthesis. (Working Title).*
Daddy Wrall films from the closet.
*Please don’t take this as representative of the state of our music. When you have a genius like Mr. Bananas in the fold, you have to let him breath a little, before reigning in his brilliance. The final record will reflect this editing process…
James Brown has a song called “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)”. It’s fantastic. We’ve loved it for a long time. In fact, we nearly covered it way back in our high school days, when my brother was our saxophone player, and the keyboardist from our local version of Marty Culp* sat in with us. The pocket is just ridiculous. Listen:
*He was so much more, though. He had a van outfitted with a PA system, so when local churches had fairs, he could park on the street and perform “On Broadway” and “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” with his wife. He played organ at the local Catholic church. He had a lot of soul for a middle aged white guy, and Wrall rescued his musical note suspenders from the dump when he moved to Florida. He added a lot to our band and we love the guy.
Recently, we discovered the James Brown singles series, Volume 5 of which features “I Can’t Stand Myself”. The exciting part of this series is not even the music, because we already have most of that.* There are liner notes from that amazing resource Alan Leeds, James’ tour manager in the ’60s and early ’70s. He knows a heck of a lot about this stuff and can shed light on a lot of murky subjects. One murky area has always been The Dapps, the all white funk group that James “discovered”. Well, it turns out they play uncredited on this song, bringing hope to white soul musicians everywhere.
*Except the copious instrumental “singles” featuring James’ off key organ solos. Very entertaining in small doses; not so amazing for extended periods.
Well, there is one more thing that’s great about The Dapps: their guitarist plays the same guitar as me, color and all. It’s a fairly rare finish, so I couldn’t be more excited. Check it out:
