From the Vaults

Larry Williams: Bad Boy (1959)

15 Jan 2016 | 1 min read

In his exceptional study of the Beatles All These Years; Tune In – the first of three intended volumes, this only taking us to the start of '63 – Mark Lewisohn confirmed (via recordings unavailable to mere mortals) what most already suspected: that John Lennon was a natural born rock'n'roll singer and more than just an intuitive picker of songs but also an inspired one. In... > Read more

Dion: Born To Be With You (1975)

12 Jan 2016 | 1 min read

In the world outside the US, most people seem to only know Dion for a couple of classic hits like Runaround Sue and The Wanderer in '61. It appeared Dion and his kind had been washed away by the British Invasion -- but Dion made a return with the ballad Abraham, Martin and John in the late Sixties. American fans knew him for much more -- Dion and the Belmonts in the late Fifties and... > Read more

Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA demo (1982)

11 Jan 2016 | 1 min read

The recent box set The Ties That Bind; The River Collection showed how Bruce Springsteen was so prolific in the period when he was writing what became the double album The River. Once all those songs poured out -- about 60 in all -- and he'd done 18 months of touring on the back of the album he returned to his home studio trying to re-think what his phenomenal success meant. And what was... > Read more

George Harrison: Ding Dong Ding Dong (1974)

31 Dec 2015 | <1 min read

When George Harrison released this well produced but lightweight song in December '74 on his album Dark Horse, he held great hopes that it would become a New Year's Eve anthem. He'd actually recorded it around the time of his previous album Living in the Material World and sent an early mix to David Geffen with a note which read, "It's one of them repetitious numbers which is gonna... > Read more

Teleclere: Steal Your Love (1983)

28 Dec 2015 | 1 min read

Say, "Seattle" and music people will say some variation of grunge or Nirvana. Pity. That's like thinking that Liverpool in the 21st century is still those black'n'white bomb-blasted streets that were imprinted in the collective imagination some half a century ago. Seattle and the Pacific Northwest had a whole lot more going for it before and after Nirvana -- as is... > Read more

Becky Lamb: Little Becky's Christmas Wish (1967)

21 Dec 2015 | 1 min read

In 2003-04 John Michael Montgomery's Letters From Home was one of the biggest hits in America -- although its success there didn't translate internationally. But if you check the clip below -- not the official video, many people adopted it as their own and posted personalised You Tube versions -- you will see why: America was in a war and this sentimental but nonetheless strangely moving... > Read more

Freddie McCoy: Spider Man (1966)

11 Dec 2015 | 1 min read

Despite the bottomless section of Elsewhere entitled From the Vaults being replete with oddities, obscurities, lost non-classics and dumb comedy stuff, a quick search reveals a gap. There is no vibraphone track. We rectify the omission with this energetic track by Freddie McCoy recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio for McCoy's Prestige album of the same name. McCoy was a star in... > Read more

Pushtwangers: She's Blind (But I Don't Mind) (1986)

8 Dec 2015 | <1 min read

We make no apologies for going back down the path of Swedish punk and garageband rock from the Eighties because . . . Well, because we have the double CD entitled A Real Cool Time Revisited which we bought at the Abba Museum/Swedish Music Hall of Fame in Stockholm and it is chock full of "guldklimp" (which I think is Swedish for nuggets, and that is the word we were looking for,... > Read more

Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder: What's That You're Doing? (1982)

7 Dec 2015 | 1 min read

The reissue of Paul McCartney albums continued recently with expanded editions of his largely unloved albums from the early Eighties, Tug of War ('82) and Pipes of Peace ('83). At the time they sprung hits and radio songs -- Take It Away, Ebony and Ivory with Stevie Wonder off the former, Say Say Say with Michael Jackson on the latter -- but attention on Tug of War also turned to Here... > Read more

Sylvester Weaver: Guitar Rag (1927)

16 Nov 2015 | 1 min read

Blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver was -- until someone finds another earlier -- the first man to have slide guitar recorded, and this tune -- along with his Guitar Blues laid down at the same time -- was one of the first blues instrumentals to be recorded. Born in Louisville, Kentucky some time before the dawn of the 20th century, he first recorded in '23 while in New York but his recording... > Read more

Dan Bao Vietnam: Rider in the Sky (date unknown, Nineties?)

12 Oct 2015 | 1 min read | 1

The albums in the Rough Guide series can offer world music as a kind of portal into a very different culture and consciousness. And even when world music artists take on tunes which we might recognize -- perhaps even especially when this happens -- it can be like being beamed into an alternate reality. This piece -- a live treatment of Ghost Riders in the Sky as if re-imagined by the... > Read more

Julia Lee: Don't Come Too Soon (1950)

21 Sep 2015 | <1 min read

Very soon Elsewhere is going to essay the life of Julia Lee, a Kansas City singer and pianist whose style roamed across boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues and downright dirty blues . . . as in the case of this innuendo-filled song whose origins and writer are lost in the mists of time. Lee enjoyed the double entendre -- and often the single entendre if there is such a thing -- and among her... > Read more

Louis Armstrong: Why Did Mrs Murphy Leave Town? (1970)

17 Sep 2015 | <1 min read

At the very end of his long career the great Louis Armstrong seemed rather detached and indifferent to the material he was playing. He'd scored huge and cross-generational hits with Hello Dolly and Wonderful World and seemed to be searching for direction. After all, he'd done it all. You wonder who thought a country'n'western album was a good idea however -- but in '70 an album appeared... > Read more

Nina Simone: Cottage For Sale (1957)

15 Sep 2015 | 1 min read

At the very end of the Keith Richards' doco project about Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll, we see Chuck sitting quietly with his electric guitar (pianist Johnnie Johnson mostly off camera, see clip below) singing the beautifully wistful Cottage For Sale. It was a reminder of two things: That despite all the evidence which preceeded it in the film (and what you may know about his... > Read more

The Creeps; She's Gone (1986)

14 Sep 2015 | 1 min read

One of the chief pleasures of being a fan of garageband rock -- that retrogressive genre between primitive pop and raw rock -- is that you never have to be surprised. Garagebands sound much the same today as they did in the Sixties. If you loved the sound of the Sonics in the Sixties then Dead Moon in the Nineties were going to deliver up something familiar and equally enjoyable. That... > Read more

National Lampoon: A prog-rock epic (1975)

6 Aug 2015 | <1 min read

If you enjoyed the parody of a feminist anthem Elsewhere posted some time back (the terrific I'm A Woman) then you've clearly got a sense of humour and might just be up for this. From the same album Goodbye Pop (which skewered drippy Neil Young, soppy soul and c'n'w) comes this stab at the pretensions of prog rock. If I recall the liner notes about this song (and you can guess it was... > Read more

Barbie Gaye: My Boy Lollypop (1956)

3 Aug 2015 | 1 min read

Because we are so used to hearing the most famous versions of songs -- like Blue Hawaii by Bing Crosby which pre-dated Elvis by more than two decades or Al Jolson's earlier version of Are You Lonesome Tonight -- it can come as a surprise to hear the original song before a famous name or a freak hit took it into the wider domain. So it is with My Boy Lollypop which was a massive... > Read more

David Peel and the Lower East Side: Up Against The Wall (1968)

2 Jul 2015 | 1 min read

New York's David Peel was living proof of the adage, "It isn't what you know, it's who you know". And how you could milk that association -- however brief -- for all it's worth. He was also one of those "only in New York" guys. In the late Sixties when this insightful if reductive piece of political rhetoric was recorded, he was a street busker in the city who sang... > Read more

Eddie Bo and Inez Cheatham: Lover and Friend (1968)

1 Jul 2015 | 1 min read

When Cosimo Matassa died in September 2014 there were lengthy obituaries for a man whom many may never have been aware of. But as a record producer he defined the sound of his hometown New Orleans on recordings from the Forties onward and was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. He probably could have got in on just two songs alone, Fats Domino's The Fat Man and Little... > Read more

Hambone Willie Newbern: Roll and Tumble Blues (1929)

30 Jun 2015 | 1 min read

The provenance of some blues songs is so obscure as to be impenetrable. Many would know Rollin' and Tumblin' from the rock version by Cream in the late Sixties where the credits simply had it as "Trad". The song -- in various versions -- dated back four decades prior to Cream when Roll and Tumble Blues was recorded by Willie Newbern during his sole recording session in 1929. He... > Read more