Robert Palmer: S&D

Destroy: "Simply Irresistible". Au contraire, Bobby.

destroy: his television fandom

Destroy: yeah, so, um.

R. Palmer also gets credit for being a massive Comsat Angels fan and in fact persuading Island Records to sign them for a time in the late eighties. Good deal.

also, did anyone notice Kanye's all female orchestra on this weeks Saturday Night Live w/the slicked back hair?

Destroy: "You're Amazing," "Simply Irresistable," and anything in which strings featured prominently.

Ah, here it is:
Robert Palmer's "Johnny & Mary": C or D?

D: "You're Amazing," similar title but inferior in every way imaginable

listening to his best of now.

he was great!

The Island 50th anniversary issue of MOJO rated Pressure Drop. I downloaded all his 70s albums and was pleasantly surprised. His first album made beautiful use of The Meters, and his cover of "Pressure Drop" might be the best aside from the original! The other albums are just as great. "What's It Take" is a particular favorite from Secrets. The production is uniformly clean and excellent. Hanging out in Jamaica and the Bahamas with money, women, good looks and good music, it must have been nice to have been Robert Palmer in the 70s. These albums should totally be reissued. The last three are listed as reissued by Universal in 2007, but I haven't found a trace of them.

Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley 74
Pressure Drop 75
Double Fun 78
Secrets 79
Clues 80

I put on Clues on my iPod recently, still can't believe how great that album is. "Sulky Girl" is just so bang on-the-money bad ass it defies words. That's like...on a whole other Tina Turner level of bad ass or something. I went through a bit of phase with Palmer some years back, probably should revisit.

My parents' first date was a 70s-era Robert Palmer concert, which I take as a positive sign for my life in general.

It seems like Universal may have canceled the scheduled reissues, because I seriously can't find anything. I did find a box set of Double Fun, Clues and Some Guys Have All The Luck for $21 at CD Universe. Like the first two albums which are also available, they're probably not remastered. It's connected to Adult DVD Universe so you can add to your order the Dave Navarro-produced porn, Broken, starring Sasha Grey (upcoming star of Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience). Palmer's ghost would likely approve.

Jesus god Robert Palmer rocks.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Saturday, 10 May 2003 07:43 (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cosine

Addictions Volume II is pretty uneven as far as compilations go, but the remix of Sneaking Sally is worth checking out - funk guitars from here to who knows where.

So, how interesting were his '70s LPs? (Haven't read this thread yet, actually; maybe there are answers up above.) Anyway, been listening to Some People Can Do What They Like, a Christgau C+ that hit #68 in Billboard in 1975 (his third charting album but first one to go Top 100), and I really like Side Two, a lot of which actually reminds me of War, of all bands -- especially "What Can You Bring Me" and "Hard Head." And then "Off The Bone" seems deeply indebted to African music, years before Paul Simon/David Byrne/Peter Gabriel had the same idea. He also covers (and gets his first charting single out of) the Belafonte calypso "Man Smart Woman Smarter" on Side One; seems like Palmer maybe had a thing for regularly remaking real or imagined Caribbean songs (mostly reggae I think) before he broke big, but I'd need to research the specifics more; might be wrong about that. Covers Don Covay ("Have Mercy") and Little Feat ("Spanish Moon") here, too.

just got his first one "Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley" and it's pretty fucking rad. total mix of Dr John and Sly & the Family Stone. especially that 12minute last track "Through it All There's You". could easily be on There's a Riot Going On

Jaxon upthread, five years ago. I need to get that one. And yeah, Dr. John + Sly = War, more or less. (Remember liking "Sneaking Sally," the song, when college radio used to play it back in the early '80s. Also seems like Palmer started out pretty prolific -- three LPs between 1975 and 1976, which was the actual year that Some People came out.)

A little surprised you haven't found the Vinegar Joe albums while Austin scrounging. He was kinda overshadowed by Elkie Brooks. There's a YouTube video of the band in Germany, hysterical if only for the Deutsch introduction of "Proud to Be a Honky Woman."

I listened to "Clues" today for the first time in one million years (back in the day, it was my older cousin's favourite lp), and I quite liked it.
Strange how all those synths sounded so familiar after all this time. The Gary Numan cover is awesome but there's plenty of nice little songs like Woke Up Laughing.
Next stop should be Sneakin' Sally, I presume.

machine-tooled electro-boogie

wrt genre exploitation, robert palmer always was there first and was pretty good at it. each album was just slightly ahead of the wave imo. like on that thread above? palmer invented 80s huey lewis in like 1979 (bad case of lovin you).

His taste in electro R&B was exceptional.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6H9Y1H_RRg

i've listened to 83's Pride (where 'you are in my system' comes from) more than any album in the past 3 months. so amazing.

it's got a tropical, r'n'b, new wave vibe that i'm in love with. other stuff in this vein i've been digging are Rough Trade, Via Afrika, Belle Stars, Grace Jones, Rupert Hine

and he sings in Urdu!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWCsc5Jf-eo

this one kills

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWLn9Cvhp5Y

"Silver Gun" is truly amazing - must get this too.

Decided Double Fun from 1978 isn't as compelling as Some People Can Do What They Like -- lots of dead space, most pointless being a cod-reggae cover of "You Really Got Me." But I like "Every Kinda People" (#16 single, Palmer's first real hit, optimistic like early Sly or happy War songs); "Night People" (good smart cover of Lee Dorsey's great New Orleans disco move from the year before, written by Alan Toussaint); and "You're Gonna Get What's Coming" (a true hard rock song -- definitely used to hear this on rock stations back in the day, but had no idea it was him; probably figured it was Bad Company or somebody like that.)

The cover always freaked me out as a kid -- never seen such amiable rakishness.

SPCDWTL is a really great album...'One Last Look' is one of the great blue eyed soul tracks and his version of 'Spanish Moon' pisses over the Little Feat version for me...shame people only think of him as some sexist old crooner...much better than that IMHO....

i love dorsey's night ppl, i didn't know palmer covered that one too.

just got his first one "Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley" and it's pretty fucking rad. total mix of Dr John and Sly & the Family Stone.

yes! listened to it for the first time last time and it's like the best Little Feat album there never was. which now makes sense

wiki sez: 'Palmer is backed by The Meters and Lowell George of Little Feat. Multiple reviewers have commented that Robert sings confidently on this album despite being backed by more accomplished musicians such as Lowell George, Art Neville and New Orleans singer-songwriter Allen Toussaint.
Recorded in New Orleans, Louisiana, New York, and Compass Point Studios in Nassau'

Sneakin' Sally is great: Get Outside is such a great song and the final 12-minutes long track is truly hypnotic in the best way possible. Also he covered From A Whisper To A Scream, one of my personal faves.

Ten years gone today. Love his music and lots of what I've heard about him as a person, not least the story where one of his girlfriends walked into his hotel room to find him taking a bath wearing a full length leather coat and drinking from a champagne bottle.

On the day he died, I saw a Delorean parked (legally) in a handicap spot. Seemed symbolic.

Reports published after his death were coy about what brought on his heart attack. Drugs?

good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X683kO4ZcKA

oh wait that's the remix/remake

this is the one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdWTy9TwvZ8

am I wrong to hear some african guitar music influence on this one or is it one of those funny confluences?

Nope. In the liner notes to the greatest hits album on which this resides he mentions the very thing. My first exposure to this music btw.

that's good to know. but oddly the african influence seems more pronounced on the version _not_ on the greatest hits thing.

anyway, i feel vindicated. a good feeling.

palmer made some of the more thoughtful (and tuneful) art-pop of the period. he doesn't get enough credit for this.

glad the Todd Terje-Bryan Ferry cover of "Johnny and Mary" is exposing people to the song.

He was at his best with electro R&B. I can't think of any white Englishman who would show the restraint, taste, and production choices with which "You Are in My System," "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On," and "Tell Me I'm Not Dreaming" are lavished.

yeah, nice drum and synth programming on those. why don't we just crown him god and devote the rest of our lives to his name?

pride (the album) is so awesome, i like it much better than Clues.
the gary numan cover on clues starts off awesome and then just gets ridiculous. I wouldnt have minded a whole album of angsty apocalyptic palmer.

he acquits himself so well on this tricky Jermaine-Michael duet. He doesn't go for histrionics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0QpPbnxexY

rp was the greatest curator of music from like sneakin sally to late 80s. he was always 1/2 step ahead in bringing sounds to pop. i like clues better than pride, but i like the meters' stuff off of sneakin' sally better than almost anything else- in a genre that isn't really my thing.

and he always seemed to have figured out how to live better then anyone, save for an ilxor or two.

"than." oh and also i disagree on that song where he disses fitness chicks, cause they rule.

great youtube, that keyboard solo is close enough for jazz. :)

didn't little feat back him on some of dem early albums or am i just fantasizing? there are more than a few albums I wish little feat were on (the wild the innocent and the e street shuffle for starters).

yeah, Palmer's first album has Lowell George playing all over it (plus a Little Feat cover and another LG co-write) and his second album has pretty much all of Little Feat as his backing band.

The Andy Taylor memoir has a couple anecdotes about the Taylor boys partying and booching with Palmer, whose dress and hair sense and ability to look impeccable after a night of partying surpassed Bryan Ferry's apparently.

Some People Can Do What They Like (1976) is tremendous. some funky funky shit.

Yeah the Little Feat/Palmer combinations are amazing (on top of everything else). I said elsewhere that great as that Little Feat box set is a dream box would have included a slew of their backing sessions for others and the Palmer stuff is top of the list. Phill Brown, producer/engineer for a ton of folks, had some great anecdotes about those sessions in his book Are We Still Rolling?

And they backed up Akiko Yano on her debut album

you know i hadn't noticed before today (when I listened to the album on headphones) how bizarre/awesome the female backing vocals on "hey julia" are... "doodle doodle doo..."

anyone know how the whole little feat/akiko yano/hosono collabs came about?

just listened to the yet-to-be-mentioned-on-this-thread "best of both worlds" for the first time in years and, damn, those are some weird chord changes. he briefly changes keys in the middle of each verse, from B to D, in a way that's unexpected, awkward and pretty damn cool.

as for his interest in african, caribbean, brazilian, etc. music, here's a pretty good interview where he delves into it with some musical depth.

really enjoying Clues and Pride

somehow I never knew about Clues. What a great album.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5bg0lxba4KQmBhWe3nKHUB

Link to Alfred's recent writeup since he hasn't gotten around to it yet:
https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/he-needs-all-the-world-to-confirm-best-of-robert-palmer/

i somehow managed not to hear "every kinda people" until like two or three years ago. what a great song! i love the steel drums. definitely the sort of soft rock i go for.

Yet he wrote a few terrible tunes.

Hearing this for the first time and digging it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdWTy9TwvZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7tMoOJbc-A

I never knew he used to cover "New Day Rising" live

Another one for the "I can't believe this exists" file: Palmer covering Motörhead's "Eat the Rich" live in 1988.

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

Well, the embed didn't work, but here's the link...

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

Totally believe it. This man loved performing his record collection

The crazy/awesome part to me is that "Eat the Rich" is a song from 1987, which means Robert Palmer was an active Motörhead listener.

His fake Lemmy is hilarious.

He covered The System's "You Are in My System" a year after its release too.

His live "New Day Rising" was late-'80s too, no?

yep

Was near his Comsat Angels period iirc.

This man loved performing his record collection

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, April 19, 2022 4:01 PM

Well put.

I have a soft spot for his cover of “pressure drop”

Happy birthday. He was capable of dubbed-out shit like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xccGP7IfgjI

I feel he is on the cusp of a new hipster crush.

Wow this is fantastic…a stripped down version of a track that would appear on the Power Station’ album…and bonus Adrian Belew mention/solo…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3uUkZKXzcM

Somehow in his wiki bio:

A quiet man in his personal life, Palmer was uninterested in most of the excesses of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, although he was a very heavy tobacco user who smoked as many as 60 cigarettes a day

Here is Palmer in the opening seconds, showing uninterest in most excesses of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1UBS5ZL7Hs

From the Phill Brown book:

As we finished the album the whole subject of the budget became a bit of a sore point. Despite the early attempts to keep costs under control, Some People Can Do What They Like turned out to be the most expensive album so far for Robert, at about $75,000. We had used 28 days of studio time for tracking, overdubbing and mixing, 22 reels of 2-inch multitrack tape, 10 reels of 1/4-inch mixing tape, and an unknown number of boxes of cassettes and razor blades. Twenty-three musicians, two engineers, three assistants, one producer and one model had been employed, not to mention Robert himself. Then there were fees for house rental, cars, hotel accommodation, flights, meals, hire equipment and per diems. Oh... and a cocaine bill for Robert of $10,000.

Green Gartside has an anecdote from his long 2019 radio interview where he praises Palmer as an R&B obsessive and, contrary to stories, an exceptionally courteous man. Palmer called him sometime in the early '00s to rave about another obscurity. Green was like, "Robert, where are you?" Palmer was standing in the ocean with a cell phone, like Al Pacino in The Insider.

There's a lot about Palmer in Guy Pratt's memoir too, all of it very fond.

Pratt on Palmer:

These were fabulously debauched times, although they were never keen on you leaving the house, figuring they had all the gourmet food, cocktail ingredients, narcotics, firearms, films and musical equipment anyone could ever wish for.