Crate Dig: John Fahey/Peter Lang/Leo Kottke (1974)

Somewhere in the endless stream of Liza Minnelli albums and worn-out Camelot soundtracks at Park Slope's venerated Record and Tape Shop, I came across this totemic countercultural gem. Rugged, paunchy -- and, in Fahey and Lang's case, already balding when this album was released in 1974 -- these cats were the unlikeliest of hippie idols (the rising sun and pliant birds of the cover completely notwithstanding, of course). Aside from their atypically self-reliant spirit (Fahey owned the independent Takoma Records long before creative control was fashionable) and dexterous mastery of fingerpicked blues stylings, what tied these musicians together was a commitment to virtuosity that exploited the spectrum of diffidence -- thus obviating any appearance of "virtuosity" in the textbook sense. For Fahey and his fellow "American Primitives", the unclassifiable and nebulous was a signpost to such genres as protean noise rock (Fahey's final recordings), New Age (Kottke's 80s output), and traditional blues (the motif that recurs throughout Lang's career).

Released five years after Takoma's greatest success (Kottke's debut, 6 and 12-String Guitar), this compilation was released with the consumer in mind; indeed, Kottke appears courtesy of Capitol Records. Listening to the bluesy "Cripple Creak" and "Red & White" today, it's difficult to fathom the guitarist's eventual retrenchment into Windham Hill somnambulance, although he probably was always the closest to Leon Redbone of the lot. Lang is even more of an anomaly, having eschewed music for a career as an animator throughout much of the 80s and 90s, and his playing is characterized by a certain hesitance here. While "St. Charles Shuffle" and "When Kings Come Home" are shamelessly derivative of Fahey and Kottke to the point where they come off as rote exercises, those strands converge into a highly individual style on the culminating "Thoth Song", a laconic melange of psychedelia, whitewashed folk, and traditional blues.

Although he never attained the relative commercial prominence of Kottke, Fahey -- a garrulous academic (he held a graduate degree in folklore studies from UCLA) and cult hero whose musical interests dovetailed more with the Velvet Underground than whatever the fellow adherents of Swami Satchidananda (his guru of circumstance) were listening to at the time -- emerges as the most commercially-oriented of the three on this release. "Revolt of the Dyke Brigade" is the guitarist at his effusive best, mixing front-porch bluesiness with caustic humor, but "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean" and "In Christ There is No East or West" constitute the dirgelike pap that necessitated the punk revolution. It's a marvel that Fahey couldn't carry a tune, or else these songs would have been indistinguishable from the products of the L.A. hit machine of the epoch. (Fahey would soon rebound with 1975's Old Fashioned Love, a bloozy collection of ragtime and jazzy pop that may be his best effort.)

All in all, John Fahey... is a satisfactory introduction to the American folk vanguard of the 1970s. Whether this is anybody's cup of tea amid the bravado of 2009 is anyone's guess, but the enduring popularity of Fahey amid younger listeners and Kottke's relentless touring schedule (he's playing the Hamptons soon) suggests that fingerpicking guitar is here to stay.

Crate Dig: Legends of Benin

Bordering Nigeria and Burkina Faso, Benin exemplifies the plight of third world nations in the post-colonial era. With half of the population living under the international poverty line (a measly $1.25 a day), the fact that this nation has emerged as a musical hotbed over the past three decades is all the more amazing. After the Kerekou regime began to loosen its totalitarian stranglehold in the late 70s and early 80s, musicians influenced by trends in African-American and Jamaican music were finally accorded the chance to record. These primordial attempts are captured on the recent Legends of Benin compilation, currently a staff pick at Sound Fix Records in Williamsburg.

The richly textured nature of this compilation is quite evident in the programming, which opens with the ersatz reggae-meets-Calling Out of Context Arthur Russell of Gnnonas Pedro, weaves its way into a straightforward early 70s James Brown pastiche -- down to the grunts (El Regno Et Ses Commandos' "Feeling You Got") -- and culminates in the pan-African JB/highlife/juju fusion of Antoine Dougbe's output ("Kovito Gbe De Towe" is the standout here). It's quite remarkable stuff, and unlike other Afrobeat recordings that seem strained by commercial concessions, this is the pure stuff. With the influence of Afropop looming heavily over many of today's most popular groups and the original artists no longer subject to occidential pillaging, it wouldn't be surprising if this compilation elicited a mini-Buena Vista Social Club ripple and brought these artists back from obscurity.

Crate Dig: Make It Last Forever by Donna McGhee

Another find in the bins at Academy. Long due a reappraisal, Donna McGhee is a Zelig-like presence who toured or recorded with the likes of Chaka Khan, Teddy Pendergrass, the Fatback Band, and numerous Patrick Adams ventures in the halcyon days of disco. Blessed with a urbane, azure tone that blended well harmonically and owed little to the gospel-derived histrionics that were in vogue among lead vocalists at the time, she was seldom accorded the opportunity to record in her own right. One of the few extant examples of her artistry (Adams's productions were quite meticulous by disco standards, and we can only wonder if discarded tracks or scratch vocals by McGhee for his seminal "Weekend" are lying around in a vault somewhere), Make It Last Forever (1978) is a periplum for a sound that never was, blending debonair orchestral funk and gritty guitars redolent of Stax Records with McGhee's louche vocals. As the progenitor of "sleaze disco", the downtempo title track was a significant underground hit, enjoying early-morning play in scores of pre-Giuliani all-night dance clubs throughout the boroughs for years to come. (Nevertheless, many purists will cede to disco-funk outfit Inner Life's relatively concurrent recording of the song with diva Jocelyn Brown; an unreleased remix of this version by Larry Levan, adding proto-electro flourishes, has been described as the venerated SoHo DJ's secret weapon.) No less significant is "I'm A Love Bug", a fairly crass sellout attempt in the tradition of Marvin Gaye's I Want You that nonetheless retains more charm than, say, "I Love the Nightlife". (Along with "Make It Last...", it was excavated for the popular Deep Disco Culture series a few years back.)

After a moderate hit with "You Should Have Told Me", remixed by freestyle wunderkind Jellybean Benitiz, McGhee promptly fell off the radar for several years. Her MySpace indicates that a new album is in the works, but in the meanwhile, delve into some of the deepest disco ever recorded... gauche cover typesetting not included.

Crate Dig: Disco 3000 by the Sun Ra Arkestra

With a plethora of record stores in Brooklyn, odd things invariably wash up. Each week, Crate Dig rescues a dusty slab of overlooked vinyl from the bins. This week, we look at avant-garde jazz impresario Sun Ra's Disco 3000, found at Academy Records in Williamsburg.

Like Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, and even Frank Zappa, Sun Ra was and remains a figure whose veneration and critical cachet has always exceeded any conventional notions of popularity. By far the most outre performer to ever appear as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Ra (nee Herman Blount) and his Arkestra big band drew upon the cacophony and clangor of free jazz but never lost sight of swing's rhythmic foundations. All the while, the band foregrounded their use of electric -- Ra was an early devotee of the portable combo organs popularized by 60s garage bands -- and electronic instrumentation, relative exotica that only served to emphasize the Arkestra's penchant for Egyptological themes. Long before George Clinton and the P-Funk collective submerged their cliquant funk in Star Trek-influenced self-mythologizing, Ra -- who claimed that he was a messenger from Saturn and had experienced contact with extraterrestrials some 10 years before the Roswell incident, a story that even his closest associates found to be spurious -- and the Arkestra explored science fiction tropes as a metaphor for the plight of African Americans and, inferentially, gays. (Ra was nominally homosexual, but most evidence suggests that he was a functional asexual, perpetually shy and consumed by the rigors of touring & composing.) By the 1970s, however, Ra distanced himself from black power and black nationalism even as the Arkestra remained primarily black, claiming that all people were "puppets and pawns of some greater force"; interestingly, the Arkestra -- which received reviews from the hippie press that ranged from extremely desultory to mildly bemused -- enjoyed a modicum of popularity as SoHo's experimental loft jazz scene began to coalesce, culminating in the national exposure of the SNL performance.

Recorded live in Italy around 1977, Disco 3000 -- the title mocking the percieved futurism of late-period disco -- captures the mature Arkestra at its absolute zenith. Having integrated synthesizers, female dancers, and conservative use of drum machines into their arsenal, with Ra's personal set-up alone extending to three keyboards, the reductionist would merely classify them as a thinking man's agitprop P-Funk. But even as the stage show grew more elaborate, the music -- as minimalist as it was discordant on earlier releases like Atlantis, essentially presaging the no wave/new music fusions of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca -- is a cornucopia of sound here, evoking the metal-tinged avant-garde jazz-funk (how's that for critical largess?) of Miles Davis's mid-70s ensemble in its ingenuous exploitation of unusual timbres (rest assured, the drum machines do not sound like drum machines) and coruscating harshness. For jazzers well into middle age, this is intense music, setting a precedent for the continued activities of Chatham, Branca, Lydia Lunch, and Sonic Youth today. As with Davis's live albums of the epoch, the song titles are fairly arbitrary, although hints of standards like "We Travel the Spaceways" and "Geminology" can be discerned in the primordial ooze.

Shortly after this recording, the Arkestra would decamp to Chelsea, where their celebrated engagement at the Squat Theater would draw various members of the avant-rock cognoscenti (John Cale, Nico) as the effects of their innovations began to be felt in rock music. Sun Ra would continue to record and tour until his death in 1991; a reconstituted Arkestra has continued to tour in time-honored jazz tradition, spreading the gospel to a new generation of jazz aficionados .

Crate Dig goes to Park Slope: Sounds of the Slope (1980s?)/Update on Record and Tape Center

Alright, here's a real curio.

Until they closed a few years back (in 2006, as I recall), Park Slope's Sound Track Records was one of the borough's finest purveyors of those near-obsolescent plastic discs known as CDs. (I don't recall much vinyl, although all of the extant evidence suggests that they were one of the last holdouts before the resurgence of the late 00s.) Their selection of cassettes (even more obsolete, naturally) was probably unmatched in the entire tri-state area after Tower Records closed; indeed, my father -- whose distaste for the nabe's perceived air of hoi polloi and perambulating strollers was well known -- would occasionally drag me there after an afternoon at the Central Library, scouring the racks for a coveted copy of Television's Adventure. He rarely bought anything, but it was always fun.

Alas, old miserly enthusiasts like my dad were the kind of people who inadvertently took Sound Track out of business, leaving Record and Tape Center on the corner of 5th and 9th as this music junkie's main dealer when I was working at the Central Library in high school. Whereas Sound Track halfheartedly attempted to modernize, the owner -- a crotchety neighborhood legend by the name of Tony -- continued to preside over a dimly-lit melange of soul/funk/disco LPs, Laurel & Hardy DVDs, and loose $1 Prince CDs... someone's idea of a culture junkie's dream. Although going away to college and the mp3 revolution have precluded me from visiting Tony's cramped record shack, I try to make a point of visiting at least once a year. As the dearth of record stores in Bay Ridge and the Heights fully attest, when you lose a cumudgeonly holdout like Tony, the neighborhood loses a more than a slice of its vibrancy.

Thus, I was quite disheartened to read reports in the Brooklyn Paper (cough) and numerous blogs a couple of weeks back stating that Tony's venerable shop was scheduled to be evicted in late June, the end result of an overzealous landlord. Tony -- full name, Tony Mignon -- vowed to remain in his space, and the ornery guy succeeded... in a left-handed way. According to recent reports, the store is moving down the block to a new space -- leaving one of the city's best sources for used vinyl in business.

Which leaves us with Sounds of the Slope. Long before the neighborhood became a mecca for displaced Manhattanites, emigre trendoids, and baby clothing boutiques, Park Slope was just another working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood -- the kind that artists naturally gravitated to for its low rents and quiet atmosphere. Native sons (and daughter) the Shirts, one of the semi-forgotten bands that played alongside the Ramones and the Talking Heads at CBGBs, used to hang out with Greenpoint blues band Rice Miller on Ninth Street, as I wrote about in a Music Junkie column next year. With that in mind, I was hardly surprised to find this vintage record -- released by the enigmatic "Sound Track Records", and release no. number 19 (!) to boot -- while digging through my girlfriend's father's record collection this weekend. Along with the band Ninth Street, the mysterious anthology includes recordings by a number of folk, punk, and new wave groups.

So... any reminisces of the Seventies/Eighties Park Slope music scene? And how many more of these privately-pressed Sound Track anthologies are floating around out there? Feel free to comment.

Crate Dig: Donny Hathaway Live

Every week, Brooklyn Music will post a review of an old album retrieved from the depths of Brooklyn's abundant – if increasingly obsolete – record stores. This is the inaugural post.

Best remembered for his series of hit duets with Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway was a man of multifarious talent. Before embarking on a singing career in his own right, he was a prolific arranger and producer, primarily working out of Chicago for Curtis Mayfield's Curtom Records. Some freelance work for Aretha Franklin had introduced him to Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records (who would later write about the musician’s numerous eccentricities, including his penchant for French serialist composers, in his memoir Rhythm and the Blues); shortly thereafter, he signed Hathaway in yet another attempt to fill the massive void left by Otis Redding’s death in 1967. (Redding’s initial heir apparent, James Carr, was notorious for his alcoholism and schizophrenic behavior.) Although he never enjoyed Redding’s mainstream crossover success, Hathaway was a formidable presence on the R&B charts in the early seventies – as a solo performer with “The Ghetto” and in collaboration with Flack – while his stage show rivaled the departed master’s revue in sheer tenacity. Hathaway’s inimitable stylings on the Fender Rhodes electric piano would have a pervasive impact on funk, fusion, and disco productions of the decade, establishing a sonic counterpart to the wah pedal.

Recorded at the Bitter End in the Village sometime in 1971, Donny Hathaway Live finds the singer using the stage as an alembic, transforming what could have been a perfunctory greatest hits show into a jazz-influenced workout. A cover of “Jealous Guy” matches Bryan Ferry’s, and a 13 minute excursion into “The Ghetto” is a touchstone for the increasingly rhythmic sounds that were to follow in the decade. Indeed, artists as diverse as India.Arie and Stevie Wonder have cited the album as an influence.

Hathaway committed suicide at Midtown’s posh Essex House hotel while on the comeback trail in 1979. But his legacy lives on in samples, reissues, and the occasional slab of old vinyl.