revisionist doo-wop

maybe sun ra continued to use doo-wop elements as he "advanced" (ugh that word, but you know what i mean) into his own version of jazz? that would be interesting. the art ensemble of chicago sometimes used r&b elements in the mix, but in a way very very different from the other folks mentioned on this thread--there isn't a hint of ironic distance in their appropriations, i think.

in any case i'll have to pick up that cd, thanks for the tip!!

amateurist, the best i can do is make a tape of it. i don't have a cd burner connected to my record player. interested? email me.

I've only seem him once, in Ann Arbor, and I don't know what sort of recordings he has. But I swear by the awesomeness of that one show.

P-Funk, as an outgrowth of the Parliaments, was and remains very doo-wop based.

Favorite nouveau doo-wopper of mine to search for: The Tymes' "You Little Trustmaker." The "doobie-doobie" bass part used to knock me out as a kid. Nowdays when I listen to it I imagine I can hear the exact moment when doo-wop vocal soul morphed into disco.

who is/was "mig" -- his/her posts here are wonderful.

also where can i find these matt bauder doo wop tunes?

there were a lot of bands in the new york punk and postpunk orbit that were fascinated by all things 50s and early 60s that pulled what to me are an astonishing number of doo-woppy moves but to them may have simply been basic tools of rock and roll, if a bit kitsch

am thinking of Bomp! Records, the Aural Exciters, people like that

Interesting thread. I might be wrong, but I've always assumed that the early '60s doo-wop revival (concurrent btw with the 1962 "oldies weekend" depicted in American Graffiti) was mainly a Belmonts-spurred white Italian thing, what with Vito and the Salutations and all. Am I wrong about that?

Also, a couple records people haven't mentioned here are the Belmonts' great 1972 comeback-w/o-Dion album Cigars Acapella Candy (which Greil Marcus put in his top 10 of the decade) and the 1982 compilation Everything Old...Is New Again on the (I assume only briefly extant) doo-wop revival label Ambient Sound, on which four or five new or revived or never-disbanded doo-wop groups each did an original song and covered a song by a current performer like Jackson Browne or REO Speedwagon ("In Your Letter," as much as doo-wop homage as the Billy Joel one mentioned above) or Joey Ramone ("Doreen Is Never Boring," which I'm pretty sure he wrote for the occasion.) Some or all of the groups each put out their own full albums on the label as well. The comp (which I used to own and wish I still did) and one or two of the single-group LPs made a couple critics' top ten lists that year, then were never much spoken of again, as far as I can tell.

Nostalgic doo-wop references show up through a lot of '70s and '80s pop and country music too. Here's something I wrote on the Rolling Country thread earlier this year, about the Every Which Way But Loose soundtrack, from 1978:

There's another "instrumental" that actually consists of doo-wop voices, not unlike the doo-wop homage toward the end of the Move's rocking nine-minute "Feel Too Good" off their fun 1971 Looking On LP. Makes me think somebody should do an EMP project on ironic/nostalgic doo-wop homages on '70s non-doo-wop records someday. (Though not me.)

Years later there's also Grizzly Bear, who some fans seem to claim are "doo-wop influenced," though (hater that I am) I don't hear that at all myself.

i have some of those ambient sound LPs, e.g. two by the jive five. there was a CD-era comp too, a reissue of the best stuff, but i imagine this too is OOP. these LPs get very warm reviews in one of the dave marsh-edited volumes of the rolling stones record guide. this inspired me to buy them. they are just OK, the highlight being the jive five's excellent and surprising version of steely dan's "hey nineteen."

but these albums are contrary to the spirit of "revisionist doo wop" as i tried to define it upthread. they are extremely sincere, straightforward, sensitive "updatings" of the classic sound. there is nothing distanced, impish, ironic, faintly over the top about them.

i don't know if i ever stated this pithily upthread, but what interests me most are the doo wop pastiches by '60s rock acts who are identified with the counterculture -- since as soon as these start cropping up, i think a line is drawn, across which there is no going back and forth. maybe this is obvious? it seems one interesting barometer of some larger changes, i guess.

i can hear the grizzly bear thing, but frankly it seems more just a beach boys-esque interest in vocal harmony. doo wop has a very limited and identifiable set of chord structures that they don't seem very interested in.

here's a great 1982 article by robert palmer about the ambient sound phenomenon:

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/arts/doing-all-right-by-doing-doo-wop.html

and here's the ambient sound CD, for about $5: http://www.amazon.com/YOURE-YOUNG-TWICE-Ambient-Doo-Wop/dp/B000NYXE4M

anyone else remember this nickelodeon spots with the voice of the jive five's eugene pitt?: http://vimeo.com/2703001

Ben Tausig posted on ILX??

ben tausig wrote a really awful and uninformed hatchet piece about alan lomax when the latter died. frankly tausig seems like a pretentious poseur.

what i want to know is who is mig?

A Russian pilot?

Didn't the Ramones write a song for one of those Ambient records, "Doreen Is Very Boring" or something like that?

yes

ben tausig wrote a really awful and uninformed hatchet piece about alan lomax when the latter died. frankly tausig seems like a pretentious poseur.

Haha, okay. I've never read any of his music writing, but he's one of the main reasons I got into crossword construction, so.

Ah, "Doreen Is Never Boring." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPBR8sB1W30

There was also a thread about Songs That Use The Doo Wop Progression" but I can't find it.

Sorry, that thread is gone, must have been sandbox or 17 days stuff.

Don't know who mig is. Maybe Michael (I?) McGonigal?

On that thread I posted about the Love song "7 And 7 Is," which ends with a (nuclear) explosion and than a few seconds of ironic doo wop chords. As if in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, they would go back to basics and listen to doo wop.

Didn't Sha Na Na play at Woodstock? Before they become a joke. How does that figure into this?

All I can find out about mig is that his real name is Mitch G., he's American, and he was born in 1973.

how did you find that out?

name's mitch g.

still looking for a good handle after being smacked by mitchlastname and i thought skinny jet name would be horrorshow.

― mig, Thursday, May 1, 2003 4:00 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xmas eve eve, '96, 23 yrs old, that year i had been finally getting into the fall, they seemed more and more to be the rome towards which all my musical roads were heading [classic postpunk, 90s lofi and noise & shoegaze, 80s brit synth, 60s garage rock, and krautrock were my interests]. i lived in iowa and had a hard time finding their stuff, especially the good things - back then everything 77-79 was oop. anyway i met up with my family in sacramento for the holidays and spent a very long day on bus pilgrimage visiting record shops in sf. i ended up buying about $120 worth of fall cds, including perverted by language - and i played this first, cos it had the best title, cover art, and date [1983 being the link, supposedly, between their really gonzo stuff none of which i'd heard yet, and the more accessible late 80s stuff].

it was about 8 pm, i was supine up in a loft type area in my uncle's giant cedar cabin-mansion surrounded by govt. land, looking out the windows on 3 sides and ceiling to an endless maw of firs and the stars like bite marks. the first song [eat y'self fitter] was like an andy kaufman joke, alternately funny then not then funny again because it keeps going. its minimalist structure seemed like a narrow chute which i fell down into the harrowing see-the-bruise-colors-whirl-inside-your-retina crash of the next song, the neighborhood of infinity, which became, and still is i think, my favorite song of all time.

i don't really know why that song does it for me, but it just seems to be the most menacing, cryptic, razor-vined inca object at the heart of a borges story left in a jungle, too heavy to lift maybe, or explicative of the future death of someone i have never heard of. i had that feeling then, and still get it, of little chills; we all get this on songs we like a lot, and i get it stronger and more pleasurably with this than with anything else. i also get a sort of rush of dream-associations, like when you remember a face you saw in a dream you had the night before, and that makes connections for you.

― mig (mig), Thursday, July 22, 2004 6:00 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Too bad he didn't choose an anagram of his name as his screen handle.

I just started listening to Dawn of Doo Wop. Fantastic stuff. My favourite song is probably I Sold My Heart To The Junkman.

Speaking of revisionism, isn't there a story about that, that The Bluebelles released a version that was actually recorded by somebody else?

I am sooooo confused as to why jaymc reposted all that. Nice read, though.

If you have to ask...

Sha Na Na's woodstock performance is some crazy bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxaLLwyr6I

counterrevolutionary rocksteady

we've discussed it, and it's less "revisionist" than "earnest homage," but let's face it this song is beautiful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XgQhMPeEQ

though are those really backup singers on the record or is that billy joel multitracked to infinity?

now that distance between that video and the present day is greater (!) than the distance between the video and the music it is paying homage to, the video and song has revealed itself to be just as authentically moving and beautifully crafted as many of the doo-wop records to which it was no doubt compared unfavorably in 1984.

also sudden unexpected nostalgia for those 80s music videos that actually had nice-looking, well-choreographed tracking shots and an editing rhythm that actually lets you see stuff, etc. see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E

also christie (sp?) brinkley is stunning.

i dunno why but for some reason i'm expecting joe piscopo in jerry lewis getup to pop out at any moment in these videos.

it's a reasonable expectation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAIX96v1mI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6A6oTFdcw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspGqdwcbQs

thanking amateurist for reposting the Nickelodeon doo-wop interstitials... I missed the link upthread and they are great. I'm not sure if, as a kid, I really grokked that they were meant to be an homage to anything, as opposed to just, like, weird wacky music that fit the strange visuals. Maybe I did, though.

That Neil Young song is also great, wow.

those nickleodeon bumpers (esp the one w/ the pineapple singing falsetto) never fail to make me smile

also jonathan richman in the era when he was touring/recording w/ the rockin robins is very akin to that nickelodeon stuff in the childlike sense of fun with which he appropriates doo wop stylings

surely the neil young song is as much or more an homage to rockabilly and the poppier side of country than it is to doo wop

finally sometimes that fleetwood mac song up above is my favorite fleetwood mac song ever--but again, to be precise the harmonies and melody sound more like lou christie or gene pitney than doo wop to me. similar to some stuff on bruce springsteen's tunnel of love LP in that way

maybe i'm splitting hairs

this is more ink spots/orioles-type R&B stuff (which predates doo wop) but ian's post inspired me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoidXDF_vuA

IIRC that's the robins (of smokey joe's cafe, etc.) under an assumed name.

so maybe not orioles but clovers/early coasters/clyde mcphatter-type stuff

I suppose it's a little off topic for this thread, but the characterization of "I'm Glad" was this:

"basically doo-wop taken straight, without any overt indications of ironic distance"

I guess I'm just thinking that there was no reason that someone like Beefheart would have even considered the question of irony with that song, especially given what one seems to read about '60s L.A. (perhaps specifically East L.A.) culture.

And thinking back, "I'm Glad" never seemed to me to be something that stuck out stylistically on that album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-n5vG2SjJY

so was kenny cool enough to come up with this intro? i want the facts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edHhe8HyekE

anybody got his home number? he'd probably just take credit for it even if he didn't come up with it. that bastard.