Nicholas F. Centino's Author-Curated Razabilly Playlist

A hybrid of country music and rhythm and blues, 1950s rockabilly is loud, raucous, and rebellious. Rockabilly music, recognized as one of the earliest iterations of what we now know as rock and roll, is responsible for launching the careers of musicians including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Now, decades after the genre’s midcentury heyday, a vibrant scene for rockabilly musicians and fans thrives in the Latinx metropolis of Los Angeles. While the genre is dominated by white people outside Los Angeles, within greater LA, Latinas, Latinos, and Latinx peoples make up the critical mass of the Rockabilly scene.

Despite the eponymous name, LA’s contemporary Rockabilly scene embraces a broad range of roots music, including not just rockabilly but also jump blues, western swing, and others. While all the tracks cited here are excellent, the following playlist is best thought of as an audio companion to Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene rather than a “best of” compilation. As such, each track was selected to provide particular insight into the scene and the sensibilities of its Latina/o/x participants.

Listen on Spotify

“Power of the 45,” pts. 1 and 2
Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys

There is no better way to kick off this playlist than with the ambassador of Southern California roots rock himself: Big Sandy. A fixture of the contemporary international Rockabilly scene for well over thirty years, Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys draw on a broad family tree of musical lineages. Featured on their 2006 album, Turntable Matinee, “Power of the 45” pays homage to those lineages and legacies as enduring capsules of joy and memory shared among friends and family. Pay close attention to the band and artist names dropped as the music fades out at the end of part 2, including, among others, rockabilly legends Sleepy Labeef and pioneers of the Chicano Eastside sound Thee Midniters. Stick around after that and you will be treated to a hidden acoustic rendition of their composition “Spanish Dagger.”

“The Hippy Hippy Shake”
Chan Romero

While Richie Valens is remembered as the quintessential Latino 1950s rocker, he was only one of several Latino rock and roll musicians on the national stage in those formative years. Chan Romero, a Mexican American teenager from Montana, was recruited by Bob Keane to be Richie’s heir after Valens tragically lost his life in 1959. With their growling guitars, relative obscurity, and the cultural resonance of the lead singer, songs by Romero, especially “My Little Ruby” (1960), are tailor made for the Latina/o/x Rockabilly scene of Los Angeles. Released in 1959, Romero’s signature tune, “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” would later be covered by the Beatles in their 1963 performance on the BBC.

“Dance in the Rain”
Luis and the Wildfires

Helmed by Reb Kennedy, Wild Records has been taking the international Rockabilly scene by storm since the 2000s, introducing a global audience to young Los Angeles musicians and performers, many of whom are Latina or Latino. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, Luis Arriaga brings an unbridled energy to his music, providing a sight to behold on stage and a sound to be enveloped by on tracks such as 2010’s “Dance in the Rain.” Speaking to the broad retro tastes embraced in the Los Angeles scene, the Arriaga turns to a hypnotic post-rockabilly sound to craft an organized chaos.

“La Plaga”
Los Teen Tops

As demographics continue to shift in contemporary Los Angeles, migrants bring legacies of popular music from their nations of origin. A cover of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “La Plaga” (1959), by Los Teens Tops, typifies an archive of 1950s rockabilly tunes interpreted by Latin American artists in the 1960s. This soundscape formed a familiar musical terrain that appealed to first- and second-generation immigrant youth from Mexico and Central America discovering the Rockabilly scene in the 1990s and 2000s.

“‘Til the Well Runs Dry”
Wynona Carr

With a big brash sound, “Till the Well Runs Dry” is a vocal- and horn-driven number that begs listeners to dance. Given decades of solidarity and interethnic cultural exchange, it is little surprise that African American jump blues from the 1940s and 1950s dominates the playlists of many DJs in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly scene. In the 1950s Carr was signed to Specialty Records, a Los Angeles–based record label that launched the careers of musical icons including Little Richard and Sam Cooke.

“Boy with the Angel Eyes”
Vicky Tafoya and The Big Beat

Drawing on the soulful legacy of Chicano lowrider oldies, “Boy with the Angel Eyes,” like other, similar songs, is a sharp departure from the hiccupping, guitar-driven sounds of rockabilly. Nevertheless, that cultural and emotional connection keeps the Inland Empire’s Vicky Tafoya ever-present in the Los Angeles scene. Often adorned in zoot suit slacks and crowned with an elaborate 1940s hairstyle, Tafoya draws on rich elements of Chicanx cultural memory in her performances, covering fan favorites such as “Angel Baby” alongside her original material.

“How Low Do You Feel?”
Ray Campi

Substitute teacher by day, rock star by night, Ray Campi enjoyed a career that represents the longevity of the rockabilly revival in Los Angeles. An original 1950s performer, Campi was rediscovered by Ronny Weiser (Rollin’ Rock Records) in the 1970s and continued to perform rockabilly until his passing in March 2021. With its foot-stomping call-and-response structure and taunting guitar riffs, “How Low Do You Feel” (1979) is a classic of the Rollin’ Rock era of Los Angeles rockabilly.

“Rosa Maria”
Moonlight Cruisers

Epitomizing the Latina/o/x transformation of the Los Angeles Rockabilly scene in the early 2000s, the Moonlight Cruisers, Pachuco Jose y Los Diamantes, and other such bands peppered their performances with straight-ahead cumbia tunes. Cumbia, a working-class musical genre originating in Columbia and expanding to other parts of Latin America, is simply the go-to party music for many Latinas/os in the Los Angeles area. Listen closely, however, and you will hear the distinctly rockabillyesque picking of Al Martinez behind the lyrical delivery.

“Parachute”
Thee Lakesiders

Representative of possible new and divergent directions that retro-Chicanx music can take in (post-) COVID-era Los Angeles, Thee Lakesiders’ “Parachute” (2018) is a melancholic rumination invoking intense feelings of loss and yearning. The duo’s pachuco/a aesthetics synchronize with their self-conscious interpellation of cultural memory and resistance in the postindustrial landscape of LA. Available as a 45 rpm disc, their latest work, “Can’t Fool Me Twice/Show Me Love,” was released in May 2021.

www.utexaspress.com

Biographer Fred Goodman Remembers Lhasa de Sela

An artist in every sense of the word, Lhasa de Sela wowed audiences around the globe with her multilingual songs and spellbinding performances, mixing together everything from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, chanson française, and South American folk melodies. Tracing de Sela’s unconventional life and introducing her to a new generation, Fred Goodman's book Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the first biography of this sophisticated creative icon.

Lhasa de Sela was born on September 27, 1972, and on the anniversary of her birth, biographer Fred Goodman pays tribute to her and her legacy, revealing the ways her unorthodox life shaped her creativity. Following Fred Goodman's tribute is his curated playlist that serves as a musical introduction to America's first world music chanteuse [ Spotify | YouTube ]. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the latest book in our Music Matters series and publishes November 11, 2019.

Remembering Lhasa de Sela

By Fred Goodman

More info

The singular, otherworldly American singer Lhasa de Sela—who wrote and recorded in Spanish, French, and English and performed songs in nearly a dozen other languages—would have turned forty-seven on September 27. A spiritual and artistic pilgrim, she possessed an insatiable hunger for knowledge and left behind a musical legacy culled from her unique affinity for the romantic, mystic, and cerebral.

Beginning with her first album in 1997, Lhasa’s multilingual songs and her spellbinding shows made the singer-songwriter a sensation in Montreal and Europe. But even today, nearly ten years after her death, her work and individuality have yet to register with listeners in her homeland. Contradictory and complex, Lhasa was both a naïf and a melancholic, a pixie with an enduring apprehension of life’s hardships as well as its magic. In the course of a heartbreakingly brief career of just thirteen years and three albums, she worked her own musical turf, part Edith Piaf, part Tinkerbell.

She came by her artistic and spiritual wanderlust honestly. Raised in a family of bohemian nomads, Lhasa was born in an unused Catskills Mountains ski chalet in Big Indian, New York, twenty-five miles northwest of Woodstock. The attending hippie doctor, shirtless and in overalls, focused most of his medical supervision on splitting a gallon of Gallo burgundy with the expectant mother. Beautiful and healthy, the as-yet unnamed baby was wrapped in a blanket; with no cradle to hand, she slept in a dresser drawer.

Her peripatetic life began just a few days later, when the family was kicked out of Big Indian and set off for Mexico. But it wasn’t until five months later that her parents finally found a name they felt suited their new daughter. Having read Timothy Leary’s popular handbook on LSD, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the couple then tackled the original Buddhist tome that had inspired Leary. Along with providing a spiritual guide to navigating bardo, the state in which a Buddhist’s consciousness sits suspended between death and rebirth, the book told of the holy city of Lhasa, built high on the Tibetan plateau. The name means “place of the gods,” and somehow, those rarified heights and aspirations felt like an appropriate christening and wish.

“They were incapable of having a middle-class life,” Lhasa de Sela would say years later when asked about her mother and father. “Their parents were well-off, but they were the black sheep of their families. They took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and took incredible risks.”

Raised in a converted school bus crossing back and forth between Mexico and the United States, Lhasa and her three sisters were homeschooled and grew up without a telephone or television. And while their parents rejected the bulk of mainstream America’s material and social assumptions, they were fierce about instilling in their children an unquenchable curiosity, a deep devotion to spiritual and intellectual advancement, and the veneration of creativity.

“What was really passed to us in the way we were raised is that life is an interior search,” says her sister Miriam. “A lot of soul-searching and trying to be truthful to your intuition. And in a very vague way trying to trust something that’s invisible. I would have to say that was a huge part of Lhasa’s life: constant self-searching.” That spiritual and intellectual search would, in turn, illuminate her writings and performances.

An exhilarating childhood, it was also a life of uncertainty, isolated and lived without nets. The month that Lhasa turned eight, she was living in a broken-down bus behind an Exxon station in Elk Grove, California. Her father was picking melons by day and rebuilding a replacement engine salvaged from a junkyard by night; Lhasa and her sisters studied with their mother in the mornings and worked gathering tomatoes in the afternoons. On her birthday, there was a Raggedy Ann party in the bus; Lhasa’s mother made a doll, her sisters crafted a piñata, and friends provided a Raggedy Ann cake. As an adult, Lhasa would tag it her most memorable birthday.

Though lived close to the bone, that unorthodox upbringing proved a petri dish for nurturing a family of extraordinarily focused iconoclasts and autodidacts. Lhasa’s sisters would go on to careers as circus performers—a tightrope walker, a trapeze artist, and a gymnast—with Lhasa at one point taking a break from her own career to join their circus troupe in France. A loner at heart, Lhasa would always remain somewhat estranged from society at large; her unusual upbringing and the lessons imparted by her parents—particularly, that life is an adventure not to be missed—left her unable to fathom the lack of curiosity and discipline in so many of the people she met. “She kind of fit in everywhere but also nowhere,” says her half-brother, Mischa Karam.

At the age of twelve, Lhasa heard Billie Holiday for the first time and became obsessed with transforming herself into a singer. A move at nineteen to Montreal, with its thriving dual French and English music scenes, broadened her perspective. Lhasa’s unique ability to incorporate whatever came her way, forged in that unlikely, supercharged childhood, would lead her as a musician to make use of anything she deemed moving and meaningful, from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana, jazz and fado, chanson française and South American folk melodies. She had an eye for the authentic, an unfailing ear for the heartfelt.

Though she was likely this country’s first world music chanteuse, Lhasa nonetheless remains virtually unknown in the United States. In recent years, reggaetón and Spanglish pop hits such as “Despacito” have worked their way into America’s pop lexicon, but that wasn’t the case twenty-odd years ago, when Lhasa released her first album, the all-Spanish La Llorona. A musical séance calling up ghosts from a long-lost world of legend and romance, the album became a bestseller in Canada and made her a star in France and much of Europe but never registered here. Her trilingual second album, The Living Road, was one of the United Kingdom’s most critically lauded albums of 2003, and critics there acclaimed Lhasa “a multilingual global diva.” Her continuing American anonymity feels inexplicable. “The language really did not make any difference,” observed the Canadian music journalist Nicholas Jennings. “What she was putting forth transcended language, she was such an intense performer. She had all the depth of emotion of an actress or an opera singer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

As ambitious as she was artistic, Lhasa had set her eyes on conquering the United States. She didn’t imagine her time was running short. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, Lhasa nonetheless continued to plot an American tour while writing and recording her only all-English album, 2009’s Lhasa. But for Lhasa, America would prove a dream that has yet to come to fruition: she died at her home in Montreal on New Year’s Day, 2010, at the age of thirty-seven.

About the author: Fred Goodman is a former editor at Rolling Stone whose work has appeared in the New York Times and many magazines. His previous books include the award-winning The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce.

Spotify Playlist | YouTube Playlist

www.utexaspress.com

Annotated Playlist by Casey Rae for 'William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll'

The most transgressive of the Beat writers, William S. Burroughs was also something of a clandestine agent in the development of rock ’n’ roll—a spectral figure who haunted the cultural underground and helped usher it into the mainstream. Naked Lunch, Junkie, and The Wild Boys remain fixtures of bohemian bookshelves the world over. From the Beatles to punk to today’s remix scene, Burroughs helped accelerate an evolution in sound that continues to reverberate across genres and eras.

More info

Burroughs’ biography has become as legendary as even his most celebrated novels. Here was a homosexual drug addict, born in the Gilded Age, who killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell and wrote infamous prose featuring orgasmic executions, shape-shifting aliens, and all manner of addicts, sadists, and creepy crawlies. But there exists a real person within the legend, a man who exhibited genuine kindness and hospitality to those who knew him, including many of the musicians appearing in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll.

It’s not hard to see how Burroughs’ writing—exploding with disquieting, even ghastly, imagery—might serve as fodder for music genres like punk, heavy metal, and industrial. To be sure, it is within these subcultures that the majority of present-day Burroughs acolytes are found. But his anti-establishment attitude and unconventional personal habits also found favor with such artists as Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and countless other musical innovators. This playlist captures only a sliver of the artists who were directly influenced by Burroughs; the descriptions below are a sliver of that sliver. To get the whole story, you’ll want to grab a copy of the book.

Find the full playlist on Spotify | YouTube

“East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”—Duke Ellington

William S. Burroughs was actually not much of a music aficionado. Well, that was his standard line, anyway—the reality is that he had many friendships with musicians and felt affinity for rock ’n’ roll’s anti-establishment attitude and shamanic potency. Nevertheless, his personal tastes were more in line with the songs he heard growing up, including this 1927 composition from Duke Ellington, which name-checks Burroughs’ childhood hometown. Ellington’s big band music is raucous and sly, with bold melodies and a streetwise swing. It’s not hard to picture Burroughs’ fictional stand-in, William Lee, skulking through urban streets as this tune blares from open tenement windows. “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” was covered by Steely Dan some four decades later, which is not their only connection to Burroughs—the band members were huge fans who took their name from a state-of-the-art dildo described in Naked Lunch.

“Tombstone Blues”—Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan became a Burroughs obsessive when he first got his hands on a copy of Naked Lunch as a young man. The author’s quicksilver abstractions opened up new creative possibilities for Dylan, whose work only became more abstract, caustic, and surreal. “Hey, you dig something like cut-ups? I mean, like William Burroughs?” Dylan asked interviewer Paul J. Robbins in a conversation published in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1965. D. A. Pennebaker’s early Dylan biopic Don’t Look Back shows the songwriter giving a how-to on cut-ups, which Dylan claimed he didn’t actually use for lyrics due to the need to rhyme. That’s debatable, but we do know that Dylan sought out Burroughs for a face-to-face encounter in a small café in Manhattan’s East Village in 1965—a meeting recounted in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll. Not long after, Dylan aggravated the folk music cognoscenti with an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. That same year saw the groundbreaking album Highway 61 Revisited, which contains the song “Tombstone Blues.” Another Burroughs fan, Iggy Pop, spotted what might be a reference to Burroughs: “I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill / I would set him in chains at the top of the hill / Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille / He could die happily ever after.”

“Eleanor Rigby”—The Beatles, Revolver

In 1966, Burroughs was 52 years old and living in Great Britain. It’s hard to picture this taciturn relic of the jazz age serving as inspiration to the psychedelic minstrels of the mid-sixties. And yet the fabbest of the fab, the Beatles, put Burroughs on the cover of their kaleidoscopic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His wan visage appears alongside several dozen luminaries, including Mae West, Aleister Crowley, Lenny Bruce, Aldous Huxley, and Carl Jung, to name a few. Burroughs’ experiments with tape manipulation were inspiring to Paul McCartney, who set the author up with a makeshift studio in a flat owned by Ringo Starr. Burroughs and McCartney would chat about computers making the music of tomorrow, as the future Knight of the Realm listened to Burroughs’ sonic experiments such as the 20-minute “K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens.” As McCartney told Q Magazine in 1986, “I used to sit in a basement at Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello.” Burroughs even got to witness McCartney composing “Eleanor Rigby.” Of the Beatle, Burroughs later said, “I could see he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and prepossessing. Nice looking young man, fairly hardworking.”

“Casino Boogie”—The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street

Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards—the latter of whom was persuaded by Burroughs to try the infamous “apomorphine cure” for heroin addiction—used the cut-up method on choice Stones lyrics, including “Casino Boogie” from the 1972 album Exile on Main Street. “It's in the style of William Burroughs,” Jagger explained to Uncut in 2010. “We just wrote phrases on bits of paper and cut them up. This is the conceit.” And reflecting on the 1983 single “Undercover of the Night,” Jagger said, “I'm not saying I nicked it, but this song was heavily influenced by William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, a freewheeling novel about political and sexual repression.” Burroughs was hot and cold on the Stones, but he did attend the band’s tax exile farewell party in 1971. “I remember Keith Richards talking to me and I couldn’t understand one word he said,” Burroughs recalled. He did reserve some praise for Jagger, however. “I had admired his work, what I’d heard of it, and I also admired him because of the pressure he was under,” Burroughs said. “There’s something about Mick that arouses great antagonism in a certain kind of person, the cabdriver-hardhat-redneck strata throughout the world, and to be able to stand up to that and be able to maintain his equilibrium and cool, as he certainly has, is quite something.” At one point in the 1970s, Jagger was even considered for the lead in a film adaptation of Naked Lunch, but the project never got off the ground (the David Cronenberg-directed version arrived in 1991 with Paul Weller as Burroughs stand-in William Lee).

“Take Me With You, My Darling, Take Me With You”—The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka

Burroughs was a longtime appreciator of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a group of Sufi musicians based in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco. Burroughs initially encountered the Master Musicians while living as an ex-pat in Tangier in the 1950s, and promoted their music for the rest of his life. In 1968, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones surreptitiously recorded the Master Musicians while on a trip to Morocco. Jones tinkered with the tapes in the studio right up to his death in 1969, experimenting with effects, splicing audio, and playing sections in reverse. Even though the Stones had already booted Jones out of the band, they released Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka on their own vanity label in 1971. Liner notes were provided by Burroughs, who described the record as “the primordial sounds of a 4,000-year-old rock 'n' roll band.” The music of the Master Musicians is intense and entrancing, with piercing tones from a reed instrument called the rhaita and the relentless thrum of hand drums. This is the sound of Burroughs’ fabled Interzone—a treacherously liminal locale from Naked Lunch.

“Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”—David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Burroughs’ influence on David Bowie was profound and enduring—so much so that an entire chapter of William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll is devoted to the topic. Bowie was a dyed-in-the-wool Burroughs fan who embraced the author’s outré prose and creative methods. “That guy messed me up when I first started reading him in the late ’60s, and I've never gotten over it,” he recalled. Throughout his career, Bowie employed Burroughs’ cut-up method in his lyrical compositions. “It seems that it would predict things about the future, or tell me a lot about the past,” he remarked in 1974. “I suppose it’s a kind of Western tarot.” Bowie was particularly fascinated by Burroughs’ lifestyle. A drug user and homosexual at a time when society treated both activities with outright enmity, Burroughs spent much of his life dodging authorities and rankling the establishment on multiple continents. Bowie’s identikit aesthetic was informed by Naked Lunch, which boasts a coterie of characters who morph and evolve with little adherence to narrative logic. He looked to The Wild Boys for his Ziggy Stardust persona, which also borrowed from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. “They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs with their Bowie knives,” the singer said. Bowie was also interested in Burroughs’ occult outlook, where random chance is used to uncover and amplify subconscious intent. The two artists first met in 1975—their conversation becoming the basis of an article in Rolling Stone—and Bowie continued to revere the author until his own passing in 2016.

“Heroin”—The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico

Burroughs was an essential part of Lou Reed’s creative makeup. A shrewdly insightful writer, Reed rendered potent truths about the human condition in terse, economical prose. Like Burroughs, Reed chronicled desperate characters and squalid situations while refraining from moral imposition. The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” captures the anxiety of the addict, and is a direct descendant of Burroughs’ Junkie. Even more obvious is “Heroin,” a micro-symphony of self-destruction: I have made the big decision / I'm gonna try to nullify my life / 'Cause when the blood begins to flow / When it shoots up the dropper's neck / When I'm closing in on death / You can’t help me now, Reed mumble-sings as drummer Maureen Tucker mimics an accelerating heartbeat. Reed said Burroughs was “the person who broke the door down . . . he alone had the energy to explore the interior psyche without a filter.” He claimed Burroughs “changed my vision of what you could write about, how you could write,” which makes perfect sense to anyone who has heard his work with the Velvets and solo. Burroughs and Reed had mutual friends but the two didn’t actually meet face-to-face until 1979. By then, Burroughs had become a fixture in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There, in his windowless, three-room apartment at 222 Bowery, he held court among the musicians, intellectuals, writers, and junkies littering the scene like discarded show posters strewn across the sidewalk of nearby nightclub CBGBs. The Reed-Burroughs confab—at turns hilarious and provocative—is covered in detail in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll.

“Land: Horses”—Patti Smith, Horses (Legacy Edition)

Patti Smith was not only influenced creatively by Burroughs, she was also part of his inner circle and remained a close friend until the author’s death in 1997. Though her music wasn’t precisely punk, Smith heralded the New York scene in the early-to-mid-1970s. Her fearless performances helped restore rock’s primal drive, which had been diluted by musicians more concerned with instrumental virtuosity than connecting with audiences. Smith, too, was obsessed with Burroughs. “He's a hard guy to get into bed, that's why I like him,” she said. She initially encountered Burroughs as a visitor to the infamous Chelsea Hotel, where the older writer would stay while in town. “Burroughs showed me a whole series of new tunnels to fall through,” she said. “He was so neat. He would walk around in this big black cashmere overcoat and this old hat. So of course, Patti gets an old black hat and coat, and we would walk around the Chelsea looking like that.” Smith would go on to sprinkle Burroughs references in her work, including “Land: Horses,” which features a character named Johnny on loan from The Wild Boys. Over the years, Smith and Burroughs developed an affectionate relationship. “I had the biggest crush on William,” she said. “Really, a big one. And I used to even daydream about, you know, he would fall in love with me and we'd get married.” Smith also keenly observed Burroughs’ stealth influence on music and culture. “He’s another Bible . . . so many things come from him,” she said.

“Six Six Sixties”—Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Funk Greats

Formed in 1975, Throbbing Gristle terrorized British society with an incendiary mix of abrasive sound and provocative theatrics. Members Genesis P-Orridge, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Chris Carter invented an entirely new genre—industrial music—and their modus operandi owed everything to Burroughs. Using tape recorders to play back abrasive noise alongside electric instruments in intensely jarring performances, the band blended the primal energy of punk with occult ideas. Throbbing Gristle borrowed imagery from humanity’s history of mass violence and donned paramilitary outfits embossed with a menacing symbol of their own invention. Burroughs took a shine to the group, going as far as to write a letter of support for a cultural grant and offering further assistance when P-Orridge faced charges for sending postcards that UK authorities deemed obscene. “He helped us when we got all the legal action against us, with a lot of recommendations and advice, of what to do and what not to do, and to be polite, and not try and turn it onto a big battle,” P-Orridge said. Few have done more to advance Burroughs’ magical mindset than P-Orridge, who maintains a worldview directly imparted by the author.

“The Priest They Called Him”—Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs

“Heart-Shaped Box”—Nirvana, In Utero

“There's something wrong with that boy,” Burroughs said following a meeting with Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain in 1993. “He frowns for no good reason.” Cobain initially discovered Burroughs as a teenager, furtively reading dog-eared library copies of Naked Lunch and Junkie in between ditching class and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t just a lifestyle crush; he was also taken by Burroughs’ pioneering work with cut-ups. In an interview shortly after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” catapulted Nirvana into the mainstream, Cobain referred to Burroughs as his favorite author and called the cut-up approach “revolutionary.” On the 1991 European tour for Nevermind, Cobain’s sole piece of luggage was a small bag containing Naked Lunch, which he had recently rediscovered at a used bookshop in London. Cobain even released a record with the author in 1991. “The Priest They Called Him” features Cobain’s junk-sick guitar weaving webs of feedback around Burroughs’ laconic croak to arresting affect. Not long after, Cobain asked Burroughs to appear as a crucifixion victim in the video for “Heart-Shaped Box.” Burroughs declined the offer—he would not be depicted as dying on film—but he did give Cobain a standing invite to visit him at his home in Lawrence, Kansas. Nirvana tour manager Alex MacLeod recalled a visit that took place in 1993: “William made him feel at ease very quickly. There was definitely a connection on an artistic level. I think William saw a lot more in him than Kurt even realized.” Burroughs was fond enough of Cobain to send him original artwork on his birthday; sadly, this did not become tradition, as the younger artist killed himself in 1994.

Casey Rae is the director of music licensing for SiriusXM and a longtime music critic whose work has been featured in a wide array of publications. His commentary on technology’s impact on creators has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Billboard, and other media outlets. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a course developer for Berklee Online, Rae is also a musician and played with several bands in the 1990s.

www.utexaspress.com

Two Author-Curated Playlists for Go Ahead in the Rain

Originally posted to Largehearted Boy, these curated playlists by NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR Hanif Abdurraqib—author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest—offer insight behind the music of A Tribe Called Quest, drawing from the music that inspired them and their sampling. Hanif writes:

I felt like it would be easier to pick a handful of Tribe Called Quest songs that I loved. Instead, I wanted to pick songs that showed the sounds Tribe was pulling from, and I wanted to pick songs by artists who committed themselves to building on Tribe's legacy in the years they weren't active. This book is, largely, about lineage and about how music can build pathways of curiosity and knowing. So, it made sense to populate a playlist with the music that Tribe chased after to make their own.

Playlists

Giveaway

Spin these amazing playlists and don't forget that we are giving away ten copies of Go Ahead in the Rain! Subscribe to our email list by this Sunday, February 10th at midnight for your chance to win some book love by Valentine's Day!

Book Tour

Catch Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain tour this spring and summer!

Praise for the Book

Reviews 

View more on Bookmarks

• New York Times: “[W]arm, immediate, and intensely personal...This lush and generous book is a call to pay proper respects not just to a sound but to a feeling.” 
• Washington Post: “[R]iveting and poetic…Abdurraqib’s gift is his ability to flip from a wide angel to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer, slipping out of the timeline to deliver vivid, memoiristic splashes as well as letters he's crafted to directly address the central players, dead and living.” 
• NPR: "Go Ahead in the Rain is at once an extended critical essay, a hip-hop history, and a series of love letters to A Tribe Called Quest, and particularly to the group's two star MCs, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. . . . [Abdurraqib] has a seemingly limitless capacity to share what moves him, which means that to read Go Ahead in the Rain, you don't need to be a Tribe Called Quest fan: Abdurraqib will make you one. His love for the group is infectious, even when it breaks his heart."
• Mancunion: “Abdurraqib...manages to write about music by making his language a type of music. He pays homage to A Tribe Called Quest in the only way fitting, with flow and charm and emotional rawness.” 

Interviews

• Nylon: “In his personalized approach to the group’s musical legacy, Abdurraqib articultes how the group helped to define his personal growth, helping readers appreciate the power that our favorite acts have in helping us create a durable sense of identity.” 
• Columbus Alive: “Fans of Abdurraqib’s writing will recognize his ability to seamlessly weave together stories about multiple, often disparate topics. Whether he’s reminiscing about his failed attempt to master the trumpet as a child, or geeking out over the history of sampling in hip-hop, or dissecting a 2011 Tribe documentary, each story serves the larger purpose: recounting the life of A Tribe Called Quest through a fan’s eyes.” 
• Student Life (from Washington University in St. Louis): “Thursday night, as poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib stepped behind the podium to read, the room was overflowing, with people crammed into the aisles and standing practically in the hallway to hear him read pieces that touched on everything from a fight in a New Haven pizza parlor to spades to the criminally overlooked Mary Clayton.” 
• Pittsburgh City Paper
• Bookin’ w/ Jason Jefferies Podcast
• ShutdownFullcast Podcast
• The Opus Podcast (about Jimi Hendrix). 

Excerpts 

• Longreads: “The Paths of Rhythm” 
• Los Angeles Review of Books: “From Chapter Ten: Family Business” 
• Full Stop: “The Low End” 

Listicles

• Lit Hub: “12 Books You Should Read This February”: “…the book promises to be a stunning blend of author and subject.” 
• Austin360: “Pop Culture Coming in February”: “The outstanding poet pens an ode to one of the greatest groups of all time.” 

Winter Institute Recaps

• Shelf Awareness: “’I would hope that folks in the back would move up closer,’ [Abdurraqib] said. “You don’t have to sit on the floor, but you can if you want. If we can all make a pledge to get closer to each other…Is that something we can do? If I come down there, can you come up here?’ The open space quickly filled with book—and music—people. As he says, the idea of a sample ‘is to hear the world differently.’” 
• American Bookseller’s Assocation: “’That’s why books should be written,’ he said. ‘If we’re lucky, we’re building a life for ourselves just by existing and being in proximity with people who we love and care about. We’re building a life that deserves to be echoed into some corners after we’re gone.’” 

Book Trailers

www.utexaspress.com

Beach Boys Obscurities, a Playlist by Tom Smucker

Spotify Playlist: Beach Boys Obscurities

for Why the Beach Boys Matter by Tom Smucker

Fifty plus years on, it’s easy to catch the big hits and classic cuts associated with the Beach Boys. But some of the tracks and session outtakes that have received less attention can also add insight into the influences and influence of the greatest American white pop group of the last half of the twentieth century.

Surfin’ An early studio attempt at what became their first release on the independent Candix label, simple acoustic white doo-wop that stumbled upon a metaphoric gold mine—surfing. Postwar lower middle-class suburbia may have been racially segregated, but the airwaves were not, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York, where white teenagers could listen to black R & B. Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys were listening and soon collaborating with each other, and with Brian Wilson’s help, Jan and Dean produced the first surfing song to hit the top of the charts, “Surf City.” The origin of this explosion was doo-wop.

Surfers Rule It’s all in place here with the solos, the harmony chorus, the surf guitar breaks, and the over-the-top ecstatic falsetto borrowed from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, acknowledged in the last half minute. The Beach Boys would make this falsetto a part of their own musical signature, most famously at the end of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” But Frankie was first.

The Lord’s Prayer The flip side of the “Little Saint Nick” Christmas single, unavailable on an album for twenty years. This song marks the high point of Beach Boys acapella harmony singing and is the tip-off that their vocal inspiration came not only from doo-wop and pop jazz, like the Four Freshmen, but also from midcentury middle American Protestant congregational hymnody. Minus the lyrics, this essential musical reference would reappear throughout their career, most obviously on “Our Prayer” from Smile, first released on the 20/20 album.

In the Parkin’ Lot Here that wordless, post-Christian Christianity frames and thereby dignifies a song about making out in your car before school. Some lyrical interpretation for non-boomers: The couplet “here comes the news/ there’s no time to lose” refers to the format of Top 40 radio in the early 1960s. Obligated by regulation, stations would commonly break for five minutes of news before the hour. So when you heard the news come on, you had five minutes before the bell rang at the start of school.

There’s No Other Like My Baby Like the Beatles, the Beach Boys can be understood as a male girl group, appropriating traditionally feminine-at-the-time attitudes towards romantic idealization, vulnerability, and self-worth. This is a studio outtake from the Party sessions, as they work through the Crystals hit.

Don’t Talk String Overdub Pet Sounds was so dense it put off some listeners, but it pulled in others. Just one little layer here of string-section heaven. For those who got pulled in, dismantling the density on Pet Sounds Sessions turned out to be a moneymaker for Capitol Records in the long run.

Let’s Go Away for Awhile Brian Wilson and his accomplices could quote classical music on Pet Sounds (see preceding track), but the real heart of his genius was the ability to fuse the profound, shallow, vulgar, sentimental, and dramatic on this one instrumental. And oh, the chord changes!

Wind Chimes When I want some perfectly executed, stoner, hippie, late 1960s, Southern Californian pop, my first choice is always something from Smiley Smile, and this is only one example.

You’re Welcome A Smile snippet, the B side of the “Heroes and Villains” single, an oddball, upbeat, minimalist, nearly acapella, vocal harmony gem.

Think About the Days Brian relies on a wordless “Our Prayer”–style harmony vocal to open the 50th anniversary reunion CD That’s Why God Made the Radio.

Pacific Coast Highway Then he sets up the conclusion of the album with this short bit about driving alone in his car along the California coast, watching the sun set over the ocean.

Summer’s Gone The Beach Boys’ most sustainable, reusable metaphor—summer—is refashioned as an autumnal acceptance of the winding down of a career, and perhaps a life. Turn up the volume at the end to hear the waves lapping on the beach.

Guess You Had to Be There Brian teams up with talented young Country star Kacey Musgraves to sing about one wild weekend or Brian’s entire late 1960s biography or both. To my ears, this is the first time a Beach Boy has successfully incorporated Country instrumentation and sentiment into a Beach Boys song. Something new.

Dirty Computer Afropunk goddess Janelle Monae samples Brian and his wordless harmony backgrounds to set the tone on her opening track. Further proof that he is moving from being remembered as chronicler of a specific time and place to an innovator and contributor to pop music as a whole.

Summer in Paradise Meanwhile, the lackluster title track from the out-of-print CD by the Mike Love–led Beach Boys touring band got reworked in concert, and a UK release with an additional verse, probably by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, became a high point of the Mike Love Beach Boys set list. This live version churns along neatly tying together the Beach Boys idyllic portraits of summers past with a plea for environmental justice. Mike’s Chuck Berry–inspired feel for word play propels the verses leading up to Bruce Johnston’s energized contribution to McGuinn’s verse. Make America Great Again, fight climate change.

www.utexaspress.com

A Musical Biography of Chrissie Hynde

By Adam Sobsey

The lead and title track on the new Pretenders album, Alone—sorry, let’s back up a little. Did you know the Pretenders still exist? They released their tenth studio album last fall, and they’re touring the US behind Alone right now, opening for Stevie Nicks. This is no reunion gig. It couldn’t be, anyway. Two of the original band members died of drug overdoses in the early eighties, after the band made their second album, and the Pretenders have gone through numerous lineup changes in the third of a century since. The only constant—and what a constant—has been Chrissie Hynde, that iconic, beloved rock great famous for the brass in her pocket. (She dislikes that song.)

Hynde is sixty-six. She may be a living legend, but she doesn’t live like one. The American

More info

expatriate (she hails from Akron, Ohio) has long resided in the west London district of Maida Vale, where she bought a house in the early eighties. It’s a quiet, residential, unostentatiously tony part of the city where she can go out and about in public and, like any longtime denizen of a comfortable neighborhood, be mostly left—to return to where we began—“Alone.” The song opens with Hynde speaking rather than singing over a pulsing rock backing track. Her voice is lazy and laconic, as though she’s yawning and stretching her way out of bed in the late Maida Vale morning:

What am I gonna do today? Walk to the newsagent, check out the war zone, check the listings, see what’s good on. Oh, there’s one I’ve been wanting to see. Anyone up for a movie? I am.”

If not, no problem: she’ll go to the theater by herself, singing, “I’m at my best, I’m where I belong, alone,” one of the few rockers in history to sing the praises of solitude. Hynde has been a long-walker since her youth, and it’s easy to imagine her continuing on from the newsagent “along by the canal,” as she described Maida Vale’s well-known waterway in an earlier Pretenders song (“You Know Who Your Friends Are,” from 2002’s Loose Screw). The southern part of the neighborhood is also known as “Little Venice.” Houseboats are moored there, near the graffiti “sprayed across the tunnel walls” and “the remnants of last night’s reverie.”

Does she ever walk to Ladbroke Grove? It’s just two miles northwest of Maida Vale along the canal, and it’s where Hynde’s fledgling career took its first major steps back in the mid-seventies. Despite Ladbroke Grove’s proximity to her current home, it’s a very different part of London. Even its years of quite evident gentrification haven’t entirely buffed the scruff off the neighborhood, which is the legendary gravitational center of the original London counterculture. Ladbroke Grove was immortalized by Performance, Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 cult film starring Mick Jagger, and much more darkly that same year by Jimi Hendrix, who died of a drug overdose while living in the area. For a decade, from the hippie mid-sixties into the punk fever of the seventies, Ladbroke Grove was where London came to drop out and turn on—and especially to tune in. Music was always central to the scene. Eric Clapton formed Cream here, and—fatefully for Chrissie Hynde—the space rock pioneers Hawkwind were born in Ladbroke Grove in 1969. That band’s early seventies leader, Lemmy Kilmister, later connected Hynde to the original members of the Pretenders.

Before its bohemian bloom, Ladbroke Grove had been an outpost for Rastafarians drawn there partly by its cheap housing. When punk recolonized the area in the mid-seventies, its adherents soon found common cause with reggae as marginalized black-and-white comrades against gray English conformity. You can, of course, hear reggae in the music of the Clash, who formed in Ladbroke Grove while Hynde was living there as a starving artist in her pre-Pretenders days. (She befriended them and tagged along on their first tour.) It was then and there that she likely wrote “The Phone Call,” “The Wait,” and “Tattooed Love Boys”—all soon to be on the Pretenders’ debut album—along with an uncharacteristic country lament called “Tequila,” which wasn’t committed to record until 1994’s Last of the Independents.

By then, fifteen years after forming her band, Hynde was making her second comeback a decade after making her first with Learning to Crawl (1983) following the deaths of Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon. In 1994, the top ten singles “I’ll Stand by You” and “Night in My Veins,” both cowritten with a pair of professional hitmakers (or schlockmeisters, if you prefer), restored Hynde’s popularity, but she and the Pretenders haven’t had a hit since. Most casual listeners consider them disbanded, and if they think of Hynde at all, perhaps it’s as a venerable retiree.

Hardly—and this objection is the springboard for the following playlist (and, partly, for my new book, Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography). It may be true that “domesticity is the enemy,” as Hynde wrote in her 2015 memoir, Reckless, but her struggle against it has continued to yield music. The Pretenders’ ¡Viva El Amor! (1999), Loose Screw (2002), Break Up the Concrete (2008), and her solo debut Stockholm (2014) are rich and strong albums. She also collaborated with a Welshman named JP Jones on the album Fidelity! (2010), and spent time last decade in South America playing with Moreno Veloso, son of the legendary Caetano. She has never stopped making music. 

Notions of Genre Soundtrack Playlist

More info

Much of the writing in film studies published today can be understood as genre criticism, broadly speaking. And even before film studies emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s, cultural observers within and beyond the academy were writing about genre films and making fascinating attempts to understand their conventions and how they speak to, for, and about the culture that produces them. While this early writing on genre film was often unsystematic, impressionistic, journalistic, and judgmental, it nonetheless produced insights that remain relevant and valuable today.

Barry Keith Grant's new edited volume with Malisa Kurtz, Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory, gathers the most important early writing on film genre and genre films published between 1945 and 1969. In the spirit of appreciating genre film, we asked Barry Keith Grant to curate a playlist of iconic music from genre cinema. Enjoy this fun whirl through movie history through its music.

“Back in the Saddle Again” – Gene Autry: As might be expected, a sense of nostalgia informs the discussions of the western in Notions of Genre. Autrey sings this song – his signature tune from 1939 – in the film of the same name, and it has everything going for it: cowpokes checking their saddles, the comic sidekick bumbling about, Hollywood cowgirls decorating the mise-en-scene, and a yodelling riff later used by Frank Zappa in “Montana.”  Gene never misses a beat broadcasting his show from his ranch, even as he deals with the nefarious owner of the local copper mine. 

Listen here.

“Beware The Blob” – The 5 Blobs: A novelty song inspired by the classic science fiction movie The Blob starring Steve McQueen as the brave teenager whose warnings initially go unheeded by the authorities. It’s silly little melody is a certified earwig, worming its way into the brain like the blob in the film oozes through the air vents in a movie theater. The tune—written by none other than Hal David and Burt Bacharach—is part of a proud tradition of novelty SF tunes that include such masterpieces as Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater,” The Ran-Dells “Martian Hop,” and the Boss Tones’ “Moppity Mope.”

“The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” – Georgie Fame: Bonnie and Clyde is one of the latest films discussed in Notions of Genre. Its impact was extraordinary, not just in cinema but influencing other areas of popular culture such as fashion and music. A number of recording artists—even mellow Mel Tormé—capitalized on the film’s popularity by waxing tunes related to the infamous duo. But the best is Georgie Fame’s short pop hit. Fame, who has collaborated with Van Morrison on some of the latter’s projects, was a jazz musician disguised as a British Invasion pop singer. Listen to those lyrics just rhythmically role off the tongue, like Walt Whitman’s poetry.

“Moon River” – Jerry Butler: A standard composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, it won the Oscar for Best Original Song in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The song evokes Mercer’s childhood in the American South, the line about “My huckleberry friend” specifically evoking the 19th century world of Mark Twain on the Mississippi. There are innumerable versions of the song, but Jerry Butler’s version from 1961 was a top chart hit even before Mancini’s was released. Butler, the original lead singer of The Impressions, would seem miscast, but his soulful interpretation lends a black perspective to the song that is entirely different from Andy Williams’ iconic but vanilla treatment.

An Afrofuturist Guide to the Cosmos

By Paul Youngquist

He came from Saturn. He traveled the space ways. He created better music for a better world. Sun Ra’s reputation as an inspired musician is finally on the rise. But Sun Ra was much more than that: a poet, a prophet, and an activist whose medium was sound. “I

More info

would hate to pass through a planet,” he once said, “and not leave it a better place.” He did just that, if the stunning body of recording he left behind is any measure: hundreds of LPs, miles of tape, and countless fan recordings of concerts, radio broadcasts, and interviews.

He created a cosmos of sound. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism explores its origins and aims: the places that inspire Sun Ra’s music and the spaces it opens for new ways of living, especially for African Americans. As a black man from Birmingham, Alabama, who moved to mid-century Chicago (to speak in earthly terms), Sun Ra experienced first-hand the indignities of racism and segregation. He created a better future by composing music and writing poetry. His glorious achievement makes him the granddaddy of Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement dedicated to imagining new black worlds.

The only way into the future for Sun Ra is through space age sound. This playlist follows the long arc of his career with the “Arkestra,” the name he gave his shape-shifting band. From inner city to outer space: Sun Ra’s exploratory music moves from the familiar to the otherworldly and back again. It was always a collaborative voyage involving diverse musicians, audiences, and supporters, financial and spiritual. You’re part of it now. Listen with an open heart. Imagine a better tomorrow.

“Super Blonde”: The Sun Ra Arkestra’s very first release, a 45 rpm single appearing in 1956. “Super Blonde” reappears a year later on El Saturn’s first LP, Super-Sonic Jazz. The tune announces the arrival on planet Earth of a formidable ensemble, skilled in the herky-jerky rhythms of bebop. The harmonized head, coming after Sun Ra’s mid-tempo piano intro, is pure Charlie Parker. Boppers beware!

“Spaceship Lullaby”: Rehearsal tapes contain wonders, and Sun Ra always had tapes running. In the mid-fifties he coached several doo-wop ensembles. The singers here called their group The Nu Sounds, and Sun Ra arranged their harmonies. In this case he wrote their lyrics too, including phrases appearing again in later Arkestra recordings: “zoom, zoom, up in the air,” and “interplanetary melodies.” The Nu Sounds’s space trip takes a dangerous turn when the singers must fly through the sun to arrive at Saturn.