#rock 'n roll

[fidjiefidjie]

Alors, on danse ?! 💃🕺

Source: X

👋 Bel après-midi

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The marquee at the Brooklyn Fox Theater reads "Alan Freed In Person, with The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Frankie Avalon, The Kalin Twins, The Elegants, The Danleers and more plus screen fare," August 29, 1958.

Photo: Popsie Randolph via Getty Images/ABC News

[soullust]

dream job: groupie in the 70s

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger playing and singing during a torrential downpour at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on Halloween Night, 1981.

(Rock n Roll Mania)

* * * * *

“There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz - that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.” ― Keith Richards, Life

[spheresofdesire]

Led Zeppelin - Brandy & Coke (Trampled Under Foot) (InitialRough Mix) Room 14

Um ... ummmm ... YES and THANK YOU

[breezingby]

Stevie Ray Vaughan ~ Shake 'n Bake.... (Austin City Limits 1983)

[songs2aiart]

System of a Down - Kill Rock 'N Roll

“Eat all the grass that you want Accidents happen In the dark” https://youtu.be/ta60vyWdS5Q

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

KEEP US ON THE ROAD IN '82 -- FROM THE MOTÖRMUSIC LIVE ARCHIVES.

PIC(S) INFO: Mega spotlight on assorted concert shots of English rock and roll band MOTÖRHEAD, performing live during the band's "Iron Fist" UK tour at Afan Lido, Port Talbot, Wales, UK, on April 1, 1982. 📸: Andrew King.

All hail the Motörmasters -- "EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE!!"

Sources: www.flickr.com/photos/watt_dabney/5212912700 & Wikimedia (2x).

[periodically80s]

[bearfoottruck]

So, I learned that Dickey Betts of The Allman Brothers died yesterday, so in memoriam, here's my favorite song by the group.

[dustedmagazine]

Little Richard: I Am Everything (Magnolia)

How does one tell the story of an artist as influential as Little Richard? The same way you tell the story of the Universe, by keeping it simple: A long time ago there was the Big Bang. 

Little Richard: I Am Everything, a new documentary directed by Lisa Cortes, presents Little Richard’s existence as an analogous cosmic event. Rock ‘n’ roll as we know it exists because on December 5, 1932, Richard Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia.

Cortes isn’t the first to frame Little Richard in terms of cosmic energy. As Nick Tosches once put it, “[v]ia his pure white-energy raunch and total over-simplification, [Little Richard had] the power to make people say 'fuck it' and turn their backs on their own control conditioning and just go out and debauch and catch a glimpse of the violent, drunken, loving, dancing Universe.” I Am Everything is similarly reverential, but the power of the film stems from its focus on Little Richard’s strange, conflicted human experience. 

Growing up, Little Richard, as he would later be nicknamed, was scolded in church for singing too loud — an impressive feat for a Pentecostal. He exuded a preacher’s charisma and even as a young boy parishioners asked him to pray for them. When he started playing piano, he banged on the keys the way that Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an early influence, banged on her guitar. The idea, Little Richard said, was to drum away at your instrument until you reached “the peak.” 

The nature of that “peak,” would remain a lifelong tension. That erratic blurring of sexual and spiritual extasy, one of rock music’s central paradoxes, is what made his music both threatening and irresistible. 

Fans of Little Richard specifically and rock history in general are likely familiar with the raw information that I Am Everything offers. But in addition to the more expected talking heads —  Mick Jagger, John Waters, Billy Porter — some fresher contextualization comes from Black, queer academics and music historians. “The south is the home of all things queer” says writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson, and she means “queer” in every sense of the word. Homosexuality was illegal, as was drag (the maddeningly circular nature of culture emerges as one of I Am Everything’s subtler themes) but the edges of that reality were “soft.” Little Richard performed with minstrel shows and on the vaudeville circuit, sometimes appearing as Princess LaVonne. 

Like many raised in the church, Little Richard always suspected that rock ‘n’ roll was the Devil’s music. That persistent belief, Jagger notes, “can’t be much fun for those involved,” an observation that further emphasizes how heavy Little Richard’s baggage was in comparison to some of his imitators. 

In 1957, the story goes, Little Richard saw Sputnik in the night sky and interpreted it as a sign from God to repent. He enrolled in Bible school, hosted a buy-back/burning of his records, started making Gospel music, and married a woman. Over the course of his life, he would waffle between publicly denouncing homosexuality and embracing it. As one commentator puts it, “He was good at liberating other people by example, he was not good at liberating himself.” 

Little Richard didn’t come from nowhere: Artists like Billy Wright and Esquerita heavily informed his flamboyance. But it seems most everyone else came from him. Jimi Hendrix, of course, got his start in Little Richard’s band. The Beatles opened shows for him when, as he said, “only their mothers knew their names.” Paul McCartney developed his wild yelp by imitating Little Richard, and Jagger copped his stage moves. 

When Little Richard is given his due, he’s credited with inventing not only rock ‘n’ roll but helping to invent the teenager. Greil Marcus called it “Little Richard’s First Law of Youth Culture:  attracting kids by driving their parents up a wall.” As Waters puts it, “the first songs that you love that your parents hate are the beginning of the soundtrack to your life.” In a recent New Yorker profile Paul Schrader, another artist pulled between the spiritual and carnal, recalls his mother smashing the radio after catching him listening to rip-off artist Pat Boone. One imagines that if it had been Little Richard, she might have burned the house down. 

Eternally offered a kind of ambient credit by musicians and critics, the lion’s share of the specific attention (and money) is paid to the (often white) artists Little Richard inspired, or who arguable just straight up stole his shit. (In terms of respectful homage, there’s a chasm between McCartney’s “Long Tall Sally” and Boone’s “Tutti Frutti.”) It’s as if the man is at once too bright to look at directly, and too Black and queer and alien to fully acknowledge. 

He often made his rightful frustration known. In one clip, Little Richard and David Johansen, fully in his Buster Poindexter era, present the 1988 Grammy for Best New Artist. Little Richard, usually unpredictable on live TV, says of Johansen’s pompadour, “I used to wear my hair like that. They take everything I get. They take it from me.” He opens the envelope and declares himself the winner. It’s a joke but it isn’t. “I have never received nothing,” he continues. “Y’all ain’t never gave me no Grammy and I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock ‘n’ roll and they never gave me nothing. And I am the originator!” He gets a standing ovation, which is something, but it isn’t enough. 

Almost every review of the film mentions this moving, uncomfortable scene, because it teases out one of Little Richard’s most powerful realities. He didn’t always seem to know what he was supposed to be doing, or even who he should be, but he always knew what he was worth. 

Margaret Welsh

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Great balls of fire! Atop a piano, Jerry Lee Lewis gives a rip roarin' performance at the Café de Paris in New York, June 10, 1958.

Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images/Fine Art America

[woeismywaffle]

Y'know since the new Skybound comics are apparently gonna crossover with G.I. Joe I wonder if we're gonna see Skywarp with Rock 'n Roll again

[angeloftheodd]

Elvis Ginjirotchi and his blue suede shoes 💙

Tamagotchi Video Adventures (1997) 🥚🪐

[spheresofdesire]

Buckethead - Jordan live at the Culture Room

I lied about going back to normal classical posting.  Next time  

This guy is freaking amazing.  Around the 1:15 mark he just .... wow.  No words.  They say he plays about 1,000 notes in a minute and a half.  Yeah.  I believe it. 

My new hero.