This Week’s ‘Greatest Hits’

My Five Favourite Riff Stories

Noah Levy, who likes ‘all things music’, asked me to kick off a new series, to write about my five favorite Riff pieces, and why I chose them. No pressure then! Out of the many writers on The Riff, how do I whittle down a list to just five that made an impact on me? It was a challenge, so picking up the gauntlet Noah has thrown down, I came up with these five.

Kevin Alexander — This Week’s Heavy Rotation #16

Having joined Medium in early 2021, one of the first things I discovered on The Riff was Kevin Alexander’s ‘Heavy Rotation’ programme.

The image immediately grabs the reader: a cute little guy thumbing through music books and album covers while listening to his dad’s heavy rock collection on headphones. My son did a similar thing, but he’d be listening to The Wombles and Ultravox, a strange mix, whilst studying dinosaurs.

Each week Kevin takes readers on a trip into his past, selecting songs from his former playlists. Like him, I enjoy nothing better than a road trip listening to favourite songs, even if it was only twenty miles to watch my son play a soccer game against another school team.

Sometimes Kevin will surprise me with songs I’ve not heard, or have forgotten about. John Hiatt’s ‘Slow Turning’, for instance. There’s a definite exaggerated hiccup followed by a repeated Not Fade Away in the song. Is that John paying a subtle tribute to Buddy Holly? Anyhow, it did the trick, Kevin, as I’ve been listening to a lot of John Hiatt recently.

By reading Kevin’s Rotation each week we learn a little more about him and his past. In this episode, I discovered he worked in a record store one time and has a fascination with roofing crews using nail guns.

I know he works at an airport, loves aeroplanes, writes about them, and can’t wait for the travel industry to re-open. Amen to that.

He also likes to run red lights whilst listening to Bad Religion’s ‘Give You Nothing’. When I lived in Cyprus, running a red light was the norm, even if the cops were about. So, Kevin, grab a flight over to the Mediterranean and show them Cypriots what you can do!

Christopher Robin — Your Music Legacy

Christopher Robin’s story struck a chord: road-tripping listening to cassettes. I enjoyed how he wrote about his dad’s love of music, how he bonded with him through music, eventually gigging with him, and how he’s still trying to bond with his own children through music.

It caused me to reflect on my road trip cassette past, and evenings spent going through a collection of vinyl, some going back to 1958, and converting individual songs to tape.

Some cassettes would be over-loaded with 50s music — Buddy Holly — Bo Diddley — Chuck Berry — Eddie Cochran — Elvis — Little Richard, and Ray Charles to add a little finesse to that raucous mix.

Others would contain 60s/70s music of The Beatles, The Stones, Free, Fleetwood Mac (the Blues band, not that other lot), Steve Earle & The Dukes, Linda Ronstadt, and as many different versions of ‘La Bamba’ as I could find.

Over time and a few complaints, I would have to include cassettes featuring Deep Purple, CCR, Robert Palmer, and Elton John for my wife, and a lot of Midge Ure and Ultravox for my son to listen to on long tedious journeys to get to our summer holiday destination.

When my son joined the Army at eighteen, he borrowed my wife’s Ford Escort car to travel to boot camp in the south of England. The day he left, he emptied the glove compartment of all the rock’n’roll tapes and told me he wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

Then he paused, took the Midge Ure tape back, and added it to a box full of Iron Maiden cassettes. After hugs, he drove off with ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ blaring out down the road. I bet the neighbours out tending their pristine gardens loved that!

Twenty-five years on, my son still listens to Iron Maiden, but The Beatles and 60/70s music have drifted into his repertoire. Keep believing Christopher, as one day the penny will drop. Kids, eh?

Gary Chapin — Tom Waits Top 5 Sad Bastard Songs

I reckon Gary Chapin and I could be mates, drinking beer all night in some shit-hole of a bar, discussing Sad Bastard Songs.

With this story, Gary got me listening again to Tom Waits and I thank him for that. I only have one old cassette of Tom’s, ‘Rain Dogs’ from 1985. ‘Downtown Train’ was my favourite song of ’85. Stunning vocals, clever minimal guitar work, and an impressive video filmed in black and white. The nineteen tracks are mostly downbeat, but not in the same Sad Bastard Song league as the five Gary selected.

My wife once accused me of being morose, using less colourful and industrial language:

“You do listen to some morbid stuff, and your record collection is full of dead artists. It’s all songs about dead dogs, divorce, drunkenness, failed relationships, and folks going to gaol.”

In response, I told her it’s far worse than that. Country legend Bobby Bare says his teeth’s gone bad, his toilet’s on the blink, heavyweights today can’t hit, and his dog’s puked on the front porch.

Now that’s the Sad Bastard truth cos I’ve listened to Bobby’s song, ‘(Man with a) Yard Full Of Rusty Cars’, many times trying to understand what it must feel like for a once active guy to get old and lonesome, never seeing anybody to talk to, and living in some out of the way rural part of America. The dog being sick is a fib, but it could’ve happened.

Sad Bastard Songs sell records. Who in their right mind is gonna buy a happy song, and which record executive would be dumb enough to produce one? Only Sad Bastards would do that.

I mean, did Hank Williams ever make any money out of anything but Sad Bastard Songs? You’d never get Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly singing anything but Sad Bastard Songs.

I love the Blues, where, thank heaven, there are a hundred years of Sad Bastard Songs to explore and listen to.

It’s true my early album collection in the late 1960s consisted of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Patsy Cline, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding (now he could sing a Sad Bastard Song), who all died way too young.

Listening to Gary’s selection of Sad Bastard Songs makes me realise what shitty lives some people endured, and how fortunate I have been to avoid falling into the trap of despair, ruination, and succumbing to hard liquor.

Before I started reading The Riff, I never used profanities or bad language.

James Jordan — Sam Phillips And Cultural Appropriation Created Rock and Roll

I’ve read a few of James Jordan’s articles on Medium. I can tell from reading his stories about Bob Dylan, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bluegrass, R&B and Rock’n’Roll, that he’s passionate and very knowledgeable about music.

He covers a lot of ground in these stories, and I find new things all the time, or nuggets I’d forgotten about, in his writings. It often makes me reflect on where I was, what I was doing at a particular time in my life, when I read through them. It also makes me dig out albums gathering dust in my den, that I haven’t played for years.

In his story about Sam Phillips, James explains how in a time of racial segregation in the USA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, some radio stations played only white music, others only black music, and a few played both. Sam Phillips was one of the first to mix them together by recording black and white musicians at his Sun recording studio.

Buddy Holly said that without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

When Elvis broke through, his style of music seriously threatened the monopoly Country & Western Swing had on the music industry, and what the majority of radio stations in the USA were playing at that time. Sam Phillips has to take credit for that, as without Sun Records, there would be no Elvis.

In early 1955 in Lubbock, Texas, where Buddy Holly opened the show for Elvis, and after watching him sing Arthur Gunter’s ‘Baby Lets Play House’, Buddy recorded a demo of that song shortly afterward. His band ditched the mandolin and fiddle. He borrowed $600 from his brother Larry, bought a lime green jacket, Fender Stratocaster, and Fender Bassman amp, went on the road, and never looked back.

Within a year, kids all over America stopped playing the music their parents listened to and started buying the records of white artists who were emulating the music of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard.

James, you are correct. Sam Phillips was a visionary and the genius who fanned the flame that ignited Rock’n’Roll.

S.W. Lauden — Interview: Will Birch

I first read S.W. Lauden in another publication, Illumination. It was the title of a work of fiction that caught my eye, drawing me in to read the opening chapters. ‘That’ll Be The Day: A Power Pop Heist’ is a crime novel about a guitar picker fresh out of the State Pen on a mission to settle a score. It’s a page-turner with music and Beatles references running through its pages.

S.W. is clearly interested in the British music scene of the 1960s/70s and power pop in particular, as he covered that subject so well in another article for The Riff.

In his interview with Will Birch, they discuss some of the greatest bands who got their start on the British pub scene.

In the 1970s and early 80s I saw a lot of pub bands, made up of hard-working lads — plumbers — car mechanics — van drivers — teachers — policemen. They’d rush home from the end of a week’s work, grab their Axe’s, dash down to The Mucky Duck (The Black Swan), and just enjoy playin’ live music all night long!

It’s true, many a pub spawned some decent and some half-decent, bands which would then go on to make it in the music business. Those who got major record deals by playing in Ye Olde English Pubs were John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, and Squeeze.

Squeeze is a band whose live performances typify the kind of band I’d be watching on a Friday night at the Ship Inn in Ann Watson Street, Hull. They capture perfectly the frenetic energy, vibe, and feel of the overcrowded pub scene. There is even a reference in their music to Harold Robbin’s book for literary types like S.W. to dwell on.

I would like to thank Noah Levy and the guys at The Riff for producing such a thought-provoking and interesting publication.