From the Vaults

Doris Willingham: You Can't Do That (1968)

23 Jun 2025 | <1 min read

We've posted a track at Elsewhere previously by this soul singer, but she was Doris Duke then. Between being born Doris Curry and Doris Duke, she was Doris Willingham and had worked in Motown's New York office and as backing singer for Nina Simone. You'd think that would have meant she was well placed for success but it wasn't to be, not even with slice of shouty soul. That came... > Read more

Sneaky Pete Kleinow: You Are Here (1973)

16 Jun 2025 | <1 min read

Although Sean Lennon talked up John Lennon's Mind Games album when releasing the 2024 expanded box set with numerous mixes and such, it was – in its original form – a somewhat disappointing album with a few real nuggets and some filler. But among the many discs in the reissue was an album called Elemental Mixes which were just certain parts of the songs isolated. Among them... > Read more

Diane Hildebrand: You Wonder Why You're Lonely (1969)

9 Jun 2025 | 1 min read | 1

Record Store Days can make a major gouge in my bank account, but even so there were always some accidental bargains in my bag. While waiting in the queue at Southbound Records a few years ago with some pricey gems I found myself by their discount bin and so, idly flicking through the selections, I . . . Yes, the album by Diane Hildebrand made itself known to me for a number of reasons:... > Read more

Karen Dalton: God Bless the Child (1966)

2 Jun 2025 | 1 min read

The new wave of folk artists have belately come to Karen Dalton, who palled around in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties with the likes of the young Bob Dylan (who was hugely impressed with her singing and guitar playing) and Fred Neil. It's said that she is the subject of Robbie Robertson-Richard Manuel song Katie's Been Gone on the Basement Tapes with Dylan. She was also admired by... > Read more

The Chicks: The Rebel Kind (1966)

26 May 2025 | 1 min read | 2

New Zealand has no great tradition of political pop or rock. All those years of high unemployment during the Flying Nun heyday . . . and who mentioned it? Very few. Even the Springbok tour in '81 barely generated a whisper from musicians. (Riot 111 here being the noble exception.) And during the Vietnam period? Barely a dickey-bird . . . aside from, oddly enough, mainstream pop... > Read more

Tupac Shakur: Picture Me Rollin' (1996)

19 May 2025 | <1 min read

Is there a more sad song in the retrospect than this, after Tupac (assailants "unknown") was gunned down? The great poet of rap gets into a beautiful low, confidently cruising but melancholy groove while giving himself some big-ups because, after all, those punk police have passed on and now we need to picture him at the top of his game . . . Yeah. Rolling . .... > Read more

Spencer Davis Group: I'm a Man (1967)

18 May 2025 | 3 min read | 2

Down the years – from Mairzy Doats in 1943 to Springsteen's Blinded by the Light three decades later (“madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer”) – lyrics have been open to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. For years I thought Manfred Mann's Ha Ha! Said the Clown was “the horse hit the town”. I'd been ready for Dylan's surrealism.... > Read more

Eddie Hinton: I Want a Woman (1986)

12 May 2025 | 1 min read

Alabama-born Eddie Hinton (1944-95) is hardly a household name but was one of the great Southern soul songwriters and sessionmen. As a Muscle Shoals musician he played guitar on scores of sessions (for everyone from Aretha Franklin to Boz Scaggs, Elvis to Solomon Burke) and was a prolific, if under-recorded, songwriter. His most notable hit was Breakfast in Bed, a co-write with Donnie... > Read more

The Waikikis: Nowhere Man (1968)

5 May 2025 | 1 min read

It is a well known fact that Honolulu and Liverpool have much in common. Both are port cities and . . . Err. Maybe not. But the emotional and physical difference didn't stop the Waikikis from adapting a bunch of Beatles songs into their distinctive Hawaiian style. Not that there was anything unusual in a band adapting the Lennon-McCartney songbook into their own voice, there are... > Read more

Betty James: I'm a Little Mixed Up (1961)

28 Apr 2025 | <1 min read

Careers can been pretty short sometimes, witness the case of Betty James out of Baltimore who played the club circuit with her husband on guitar and son on bass. She was heard by a couple of ambitious entrepreneurs --Bobby Johnson and Joe Evans -- who had her record I'm a Little Mixed Up for their New York label Cee Jay. It became a hit in the city but Chess Records in Chicago heard it,... > Read more

Big Boy Groves: Bucket o Blood (1962)

22 Apr 2025 | <1 min read

Most songs inviting you to club promise a great night with dancing and drinking and fun times to be had. Ervin Groves from San Diego promising nothing of the sort with this song. In fact this is one club which sounds like it would be a must to avoid because of the bodies stacking up. The mention in the opening lines to the Chicken Shack is a reference to a song by Chris Kenner... > Read more

Hotlegs: Neanderthal Man (1970)

14 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

It's not unusual for studio experiments to end up on records, less common that they become the record itself -- as was the case with this single. To backtrack a bit. The successful British songwriter Graham Gouldman who had penned hits for Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today), the Yardbirds (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You) and others ran into a dry spell in the late... > Read more

(Warning, from vinyl so has enjoyable surface noise)

Ma Rainey: Toad Frog Blues (1924)

7 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

Few would have described Ma Rainey (1886 - 1939) as one of God's finest creations. Her pianist Thomas A. Dorsey said charitably, "I couldn't say that she was a good looking woman". In Francis Davis' The History of the Blues; the Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to Robert Cray he writes, "everyone else who knew Ma Rainey described her as pug ugly, a short and... > Read more

Van Morrison: On Hyndford Street (1991)

31 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

By the time Van Morrison released his double album Hymns to the Silence in '91, many of his longtime followers had moved on -- some disappointed by so many uneven albums, some just having enough Van in their lives. Over two discs, Hymns to the Silence was just too much Van, and even the most generous reviewers had to note many songs were not a patch on the Celtic soul he had previously... > Read more

Maxine Brown: Funny (1961)

24 Mar 2025 | 1 min read | 1

There's something very satisfying about don't-care-anymore songs. The world is awash with the luvvy stuff but every now and again a song comes along which says, "Yep, but I'm over you". An Elsewhere favourite is Solomon King's exceptional Happy Again which really put that grand passion into perspective. Yeah, I loved and I lost and am hurt. But jeez, life goes on and I'll get... > Read more

Bob Dylan: Positively 4th Street (1965)

17 Mar 2025 | 1 min read | 2

When you have guitar, a voice, a studio and an expectant audience -- and some degree of vitriol to be delivered -- why would you not fire off this bitter salvo at former friends you might feel (rightly or wrongly of course) who have betrayed you? Not many songs begin with such an arrestingly confrontational lines as, "You got a lot a lotta nerve to say you are my friend, when I was... > Read more

Mavis Rivers: Farewell Samoa (1950)

10 Mar 2025 | 2 min read | 1

Because her career as singer was mostly in the United States -- where Sinatra apparently called her the purest voice in jazz -- Mavis Rivers was for many decades after 1953, when she made the first move from Auckland, more respected in New Zealand than actually heard. Yet in her brief period in Auckland -- the family originally from Apia, Samoa arrived in Auckland in 1947 when she was in... > Read more

Judy Henske: Wade in the Water (1963)

3 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

One afternoon somewhere in the early Nineties a terrestrial TV channel played the 1963 movie Hootenanny Hoot, a lousy film cashing in on the folk music phase but full of cameo performances by the likes of Johnny Cash, The Gateway Trio, George Hamilton IV and . . . Some forgettable others. I walked out of the room at one point to make a cup of tea but was pulled back by the most... > Read more

Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy: Thriller (1987)

24 Feb 2025 | <1 min read

The late Lester Bowie (who died in '99 age 58) was very serious about some things -- he was part of the politically and socially active AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians -- but also had a sense of humour. In a profile/obituary at Elsewhere -- under a title borrowed from Frank Zappa, "Does humour belong in music" -- we noted one of his pieces (designed... > Read more

The Blue Stars: Social End Product (1966)

17 Feb 2025 | <1 min read

This country may not have a great tradition of protest songs but there have always been songs of dissent, anger and, from the late Fifties onward, teenage rebellion. One of the first – a punk single 10 years before punk -- was this by Auckland's Blue Stars. The angry young man who won't fit in with society's plan. These days one line needs some explanation: “I don't... > Read more