Category Archives: Music

BandMaker.com

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I think we can all agree that the hardest part of having a successful rock band is coming up with a good name. You can always find a drummer or a lead singer but a good band name… very difficult. Fortunately, there are no shortages of websites to help with this critical task. At BandMaker.com you plug in some words and get some recommendations. I think you can do the same thing at WORDLAB but I got distracted browsing their list of 4,000+ names for rock bands. A few of my favorites:

  • Adjustable Waistbands
  • Viral Bunny
  • Twinkie Spore
  • Turd Cribbage
  • Tim Tation and the Quagmire
  • Stool Patrol
  • Sandy Muff
  • Rock Paper Sisters
  • Nuclear Winter Squash

I wanted to try my hand at some names but came up dry. So I pulled a few from my tag cloud (sidebar)

  • Anonymous Audio
  • Blackberry Brush with Near Greatness
  • Coffee Zone Consciousness
  • PowerPoint Prison Santa
  • Smoking Spam Tattoos

Let me know if you decide to use one of these.

Stagger Lee

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This morning my friend Bob gave me a copy of the death certificate of Lee Shelton, who died in the prison here in Jefferson City, MO, of tuberculosis in 1912. Shelton was an African American cab driver and pimp convicted of murdering William “Billy” Lyons on Christmas Eve, 1895 in St. Louis, Missouri. [More on Shelton at Wikipedia]

The crime was immortalized in a popular song that has been recorded by numerous artists. Here are just a few:

  • Grateful Dead
  • Tom Jones
  • Pat Boone
  • James Brown
  • Neil Diamond
  • Fats Domino
  • Dr. John
  • Bob Dylan
  • Duke Ellington
  • Woody Guthrie
  • Bill Haley & His Comets
  • The Isley Brothers
  • Huey Lewis and the News
  • Taj Mahal
  • Wilson Pickett
  • Sam the Sham
  • Ike and Tina Turner

You might need a Blip.fm account to listen to the two versions I’ve linked above.

Song of @fezmonger

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Going for a bike ride and leaving the phone behind.
Keep the ratings up and don’t forget to roll
the credits when you’re through.

It is days like this that I wish
I had a café lifestyle
and not the sit in front of a computer
life I have today.

The train is running extra slow today.
Not a surprise considering
the rain tends to jack it up.
Gonna be a looong ride home.

This train is moving
a bit slower than I would like.
At this rate we won’t reach basecamp by tea time

And it begins again. I hope the train shows up soon
my cloud cover is breaking up
and it looks to be a hot day ahead

Sitting on the train platform in a warm LA night.
At least the smoke has cleared out…
I’ll be back here tomorrow

The damn couch keeps calling my name.
I’m trying to get something… hell anything, done today
but a nap sounds so very nice

The lines above were compiled from random tweets by Jason Rogers. No words were added or deleted. I did break lines as spirit moved. I hope someone with music in their soul can make this sing.

Pomplamoose

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I haven’t listened to a song on the radio for a long, long time. Six months? Longer. It’s all iTunes and Pandora these days. I discovered a link to the song above on @fezmonger ‘s Twitter feed. He found by way of @planetnelson.

I really like the video. The girl is almost too cute to look at. The guy seems ecstatic in his joy. I do wonder if the song was really recorded in the bedroom, as it appears. If so, Big Label Music is cold-in-the-ground dead.

PS: Yes, I am aware of how much video I’ve been posting of late. Not sure why. Coincidence, if you believe in such a silly thing.

“Official” Song of Kennett, MO

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I’ve posted this little ditty a few times but it’s buried deep in 4,000+ posts. So here it is a again, tagged and categorized, for your listening pleasure. The song was recorded sometime back in the ’60’s (?) to promote the town (and the sponsoring businesses). Feel free to download the song, re-post, spread it far and wide. May it play for a 1,000 years.

Kennett, My Home town (MP3)

Narvel Felts, the pride of Bernie, MO

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Just learned that Narvel Felts will be performing at the Missouri State Fair on August 19 (part of the Country Gold Tour). According to Wikipedia, Narvel is 70, so it’s good to know he’s still performing.

narvel1-2

Here’s a couple of photos from his younger days, taken in the studios of KBOA in Kennett, MO (circa 1950). L-R: JW Grubbs (Bass Guitar), Leon Barnett (Lead Guitar), Narvel Felts (Guitar & Vocals), Bob Taylor? (Drums), and Jerry Tuttle (Saxophone & Steel Guitar).

Wikipedia: “Narvel attended Bernie High School, Felts was discovered during a talent show at the school. He had been encouraged to participate in the show by some of his classmates, and it just so happened that a talent agent was attending the performance at the time.

Felts recorded his first single “Kiss-a Me Baby” at the age of 16, and his career skyrocketed with the help of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash. Narvel Felts enjoyed modest pop success in 1960 with a remake of the Drifters “Honey Love” which earned a low position on the Billboard Hot 100. He went on to release such songs as “Lonely Teardrops” and “Pink And Black Days”, but it wasn’t until the 1970s when he began enjoying success on a national level as a country singer.

His first major hit came in 1973, with a cover of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away”. Felts’ version — No. 8 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles chart in September 1973 — was mid-tempo country compared to Gray’s blues version. The follow-up single, “All in the Name of Love,” just missed hitting the top 10 in December 1973.”

I’d been working at the radio station about a year when Drift Away got Narvel some notoriety and he came by the station to plug the record. It’s was a big deal for Kennett, Missouri. Narvel had beautiful hair.

Fists getting airplay on BBC

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A few months ago I received an email from a young man in the UK, asking permission to use a photo he found on my flickr for the cover art for his band’s new single (Cockatoo). I said sure and please keep in touch. And he did.

“The vinyl version of the single’s out now and is doing really well. The photo has certainly done it’s job and intrigued people. We’ve had lots of national airplay from the BBC and lots of new opportunities have been popping up all the time which is obviously very exciting.

We did a single launch in this big DIY arts space called The Arts Organisation in Nottingham. There was talk of doing a Steve Mays photo reel featuring a whole raft of the photo’s to be projected on walls and stuff but we didn’t have enough time in the end and felt that we’d be taking the piss a bit in terms of permission to use them.

Here’s 23 seconds of that show that somebody took on a phone (I’m the short guy wearing the black jacket and white T-shirt btw):

We’d love to send you some copies of the single in the post if you’d like. Posterity and all that. Let me know where to send them and we will. That said we certainly wouldn’t be offended if you’d rather we didn’t. Once again thanks for everything.”

James and all of Fists

Ah, to have my life become the backdrop for an edgy British pub band…

I’ve added the Fists blog to the sidebar for wonderful passages like this:

“…if you want to go on a slightly wrong night out then you should go to Wildside which is this once monthly cock/sleaze/glam rock revivalist night at Junktion 7 in Nottingham. It’s mostly filled wall-to-wall with dysfunctional hard rockers who get crazy drunk whilst getting emotional about it not being 1986 before dropping to their knees for an Eddie Van Halen solo and then disappearing into the toilets to have sex and drink Jack Daniel’s and fall out with each other due to fringe scene claustrophobia. It’s like going to a special zoo that houses dying musical sub-cultures and is one of my favourite nights out.”

Okay, but I like to be home no later than ten p.m.

Eagles concert

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The Eagles provided the soundtrack for an important period in my life. Equally true, I assume, for others in the audience at last night’s Eagles concert. A lady sitting near us wasn’t born when the Eagles hit it big, but grew up listening with her parents.

The boys had to strain to hit a few of the notes but the memories were picture perfect. I like to think it’s more than Boomer nostalgia that keeps filling auditoriums for Stones and Eagles concerts. Which of today’s big artists will still be filling the seats in thirty years?

This photo was taken from the Cessna 350 as we flew over. But I’m not really complaining. We could see the jumbotron screens and music was loud enough, even from a couple of thousand feet.

It was a good show. The guitar licks alone would have been worth the price of the ticket.

30 year old party pic selected for Fists cover

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“This is a bit of a strange request. My name is James Finlay and I’m in a band called ‘Fists’ who’re based in Nottingham, England. We make ramshackle-y, lo-fi pop music and are about to release our debut 7” single on a small independent record label (also based in Nottingham) called Hello Thor (not much on their web page at the moment unfortunately)

The reason I’m mailing you is because everybody in our band has become obsessed with your Flickr photo set for the Basement Diaries blog and we wanted to find out if you would be willing to grant us permission to use one of your photos for the cover of our single? We’re releasing the single as a download on iTunes and as a strictly limited edition vinyl pressing of 500 copies. Naturally we would credit you for the photo on the record, we would obviously send you over some copies too and we could also offer some money as well but are pretty limited financially as we’re a small DIY operation who is paying for almost everything ourselves from our day jobs.

The photo we’d love to use if possible is the one of the gorilla in boxing gloves taken at a Halloween Party in (1980). We love the grainy 35mm quality, the colour palette and the sense of fun and mystery. The song we’re releasing is called ‘Cockatoo’ (I’d be very happy to send you an MP3 of this so you can have a listen and decide if you think it’s appropriate). Thematically it’s about fantasies of freedom and escape as seen through the eyes of a caged bird (the ‘Cockatoo’ of the title). Obviously this doesn’t really have any obvious relationship with the photo particularly but I don’t think that matters too much. If you are happy to let us use it we’d obviously send you over the design before we got the covers made up for approval.

If you’re not interested then no worries and thanks so much for your time and also for sharing the photos in the first place. If there’s anything else you’d like to know first then please give me a shout.”

Kind regards,
James

This is what I love most about the web. The man behind the gorilla mask is Barb’s brother, Lew. Don’t recall who is sitting the chair. And I’m pretty sure the beer is a Stag (shudder).