Robert Palmer: S&D

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.

I like Sneaking Sally Through The Alley but my favorites are Pressure Drop, Double Fun and Pride. Everything that comes after Riptide is kind of meh.

The trend is irreversible.

Hopefully yes!

i bought pride a couple weeks ago and have been playing it almost every day. the drum programming is insane. i'm obsessed with the title track. one song even sounds like a prototype for lifelike/kris menace sidechain house

ugh anyway "say you will" and "the silver gun" have a big boisterous low end + synth flickers/gurgles that remind me of maximalist post-crydamoure french house (or even some nudisco)

but the vocals and songwriting are the big draw of this album (besides previously mentioned drum programming). the first music i got into when i was 2 or 3 yrs old was stuff like hall & oates, wham!, tears for fears.. i would have played the shit out of pride if i had had it then.

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.

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.