Gavin B.

Orphan Artists Vol 1

Today we begin a periodical series titled Orphan Artists. I call them orphan artists because they are bands or individual artists who don't have sizable audience or critical acclaim they so richly deserve. Some of my profiles will be of contemporary artists who are currently working and others will be of bygone artists who were simply drowned out in the music industry's deluge of annual album releases and quietly ended their musical careers without fanfare.

The School


Photo above: The School

The School is a currently active band from Cardiff Wales who have released two albums since 2010 on the Madrid based label Elefant Records. The band is largely unknown in the United States but I'm told they're big in Spain which the record label's home. I'm not sure of the School's popularity in Great Britain, but I didn't see either of their albums on the UK indie/alternative music charts which I follow regularly.

The School's fixation on more innocent aspects of Sixties pop music is reminiscent of two Scottish bands, Camera Obscura and Belle and Sebastian. But the School's music has a more direct connection to the Phil Spector girl groups of the early Sixties and the UK female pop singers of the mid-Sixties like Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, Petula Clark & Dusty Springfield. In that sense, the music of The School has a closer link to Saturday Looks Good To Me, the experimental American indie pop band that wears it's Motown/Phil Spector/Brian Wilson on it's sleeve.

Prior to forming the School, lead singer & songwriter Liz Hunt gained some notoriety as the singer for The Loves, a less polished band with harder edge. Hunt has a sweet melancholy voice and The School is clearly vehicle that is better suited to her singing & songwriting talents. Liz Hunt's songs show an almost scholarly reverence for the Sixties pop idiom. A listener unacquainted with the School's music could easily mistake the School for an obscure Sixties band because of their adherence to the production methods used by the great producers of that era like Phil Spector, Joe Meek and Bruce Botnick. It's hard to stamp a date on the School's music without knowing the history of the band.

The School selected Ian Katt as their first producer who was a logical choice since Katt also produced the London based band Saint Etienne, who gained their reputation by fusing house music rhythms with catchy Sixties influenced pop songs.

Discography


Title: Loveless Unbeliever
Release Date: April 6, 2010
AMG Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)
User Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)


Title: Reading Too Much into Things Like Everything
Release Date: May 14, 2012
AMG Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
User Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)

The quality of the music is consistent over both the 2010 & 2012 album releases and either album can serve as a good starting point to those unacquainted with the School. The second album Reading To Much into Things Like Everything is my own favorite simply because I like more of the songs on it. I'm sure there are MB members won't like the School's music for any number of reasons. Most people either love or hate the sort of sunny retro-pop that is the foundation of the School's trademark sound.

The embedded song is That Boy Is Mine a selection from the School's second album Reading To Much into Things Like Everything

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Zer0

The weird thing I find with The School is that their albums sound really warm and exciting the first couple of times you hear them and then it wears off and they start to sound a bit cringe-worthy and cheesy. I must go back and listen to their albums again though to see f they have any effect on me.

I love indiepop when it's done right, Allo Darlin's self-titled album from 2010 is an example of this and it's one of my favourite albums of this decade so far. Nothing fancy, just simple bittersweet pop songs. I'm a big fan of Camera Obscura and Belle & Sebastian as well.

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Gavin B.

I agree with your thoughts on the short staying power of The School and there are many other bands that grow thin with repeated listening. What I do is take them out of play rotation when they begin to grate on my nerves & when I revisit the songs six months or a year later, I'll rediscover what I originally liked about them.

My threshold of tolerance for certain songs by '70s rockers like Japan, Roxy Music, Bowie, Cale and Eno really wears thin but their music always finds it's way back to my playlists because their music was such a big part of my life when I was a lad.

The only album by Allo Darlin' I own is last year's Europe which I adore. I've been meaning to download their debut album for awhile and your post will be the impetus for me finally getting the album. I read somewhere that Allo Darlin' is an Aussie band that relocated to London recently.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Zer0

I've a similar relationship with She & Him where I like their albums on the first two listens before they really start to grate, as much as I like Zooey Deschanel and everything.

I liked Europe but the first Allo Darlin' album is by far their best, some even consider Europe their sophomore slump. Their music doesn't sound forced in any way or have a novelty factor like what I find with some indiepop bands and that's what makes their albums stand up well to repeated listens. They're half Australian half English actually, and based in London. You can certainly tell that their frontwoman Elizabeth Morris is from Australia as her accent comes through nicely in her singing.

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Gavin B.

AMG wrote about Zooey Deschanel's aspiring vocal career with She & Him: Zooey's quirky and precocious persona began to wear thin for me around the time she reached the age of 30. In the United States she does a frequently aired 30 second commercial for the iPhone which makes me want to bullet in my brain rather than endure the torture of Zooey saying cute things to her iPhone app. UK internet comedian Paperlily does a funny satire of Zooey's iPhone ad:



"Quirky & precocious" are acceptable and often attractive traits for naive college coeds, but as a woman grows into middle age, those fashionably quirky traits of a school girl blossom into annoying personality disorders.

There thousands of female vocalists with more talent than Zooey, who earn their living singing for tips in the piano bar of a Holiday Inn motel. Zooey's only advantage is she's way cuter than all of them.

I don't understand my own pathological dislike of Zooey Deschanel. I usually have a high threshold of tolerance for fashionably quirky women who dress in fashionably quirky Bohemian apparel. But something about Zooey Deschanel stirs up the evil demon that lurks in the dark swamp lands of my subconscious mind.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

History of Soul Music Part II

The Stax Records Story

Stax/Volt Records was founded in 1957 in Memphis under the name of Satellite Records. Satellite by two white businesspeople, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. (STewart/AXton = Stax).

Early on most of Satellite's recordings were country music recordings which reflected the musical tastes of label co-owner Stewart, who played fiddle in a country music band. The move of Satellite Records into recording R&B artists was primarily the work of Rufus Thomas, a deejay on a black radio station, who was also a respected R&B singer in his own right.

In 1960, Satellite Records relocated it's studios into the abandoned Capitol Movie Theater, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, the heart of the Memphis black community. Jim Stewart opened the Satellite Record store next to the Stax studios which carried a full line of soul music on all labels, not just Stax. Satellite Records survives to this day in it's original location next to the Stax Museum, housed in the original Stax studios.


The legendary Stax recording studios in the mid 1960s

The workplace culture at Stax was a bit different from the fair minded, progressive but highly professional atmosphere at Atlantic Records in New York. Owners Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton often used the analogy of "one big family" to describe Stax Records, and portrayed themselves as the parental figures who took care of their "children", the black recording artists in their "family". Since Stewart and Axton were white Southerners, this characterization of their black artists appeared to infantalize them as helpless children. There were very few complaints from the artists because the reaction of a typical Southern white to a black soul singer in the early Sixties was hostile and often violent. By all accounts, Stewart and Axton paid out the royalties in a timely manner and gave their artists the creative space to grow. It should be said that Stewart & Axton treated Stax artists far better than the tyrannical Barry Gordy the black owner of Motown records who treated many of his black artists like field hands on a plantation.

The first release R&B release by Satellite Records was Cause I Love You a duet sung by Rufus Thomas & his daughter Carla. Alantic Records picked up the distribution rights to the single and the song sold 40,000 units, by far the largest selling release at Satellite Records to that date.

Atlantic's distributionship of the Rufus & Carla Thomas single laid the groundwork for a unique business partnership between Atlantic Records in New York and the newly started R&B label in Memphis.

The renaming of the label to Stax was a result of the newly formed business partnership with Atlantic Records.

Satellite Records didn't amount to much until Stewart & Axton partnered with Atlantic who had the distribution contacts, cash resources & technical expertise to transform Stax into a major label. By 1965 Stax Records had grow from a regional label into national label powerhouse with a roster of some of the leading R&B artists of the era.

In 1962, Stax created a subsidary label, Volt Records, primarily to accommodate their new star performer, Otis Redding. The newly passed federal law on payola was the reason for recording Otis on a subsidiary label. At the time, radio station programmers were banned from playing more than 2 songs by one single label in the airplay rotation at any given time, so record labels got around the ban by forming subsidiary labels, which technically complied with the language of the law. Atlantic formed the subsidary label Atco Records for the same purpose.

Otis was an extraordinary talent and by the time Otis was half-way through first audition song for Stax, owner Jim Stewart knew that Redding was the future superstar that would bring financial solvency to his struggling label. When Otis wrapped his first take of that first audition song "These Arms of Mine" Stewart practically leaped over the soundboard with a recording contract for him to sign.

As a result of the partnership Atlantic Records retained the rights to nearly all of the Stax Records back catalog between the years 1961 and 1968, after the Atlantic/Stax partnership was dissolved in 1968. That included the rights to the lucrative back catalog of Otis Redding at Volt Records. This may seem irrelevant, but keep that in mind because the financial future of Stax Records rested largely on regaining the rights to Otis Redding's music if the Stax/Atlantic partnership was dissolved.


Photo: Otis Redding brings down the house at the Monterey Pop Festival, six months before his death

For five years, Otis Redding was largely unknown to white audiences. Even though he was the top performer on the R&B chart, Top 40 radio (i.e. white radio) programmers refused to play Otis' records on the shaky premise that his raw signing style only appealed to black audiences. Otis finally broke through to a large white crossover audience following his barn burning appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Six months later, on December 10,1967, Otis was killed in an airplane crash while flying from Cleveland to a gig in Madison Wisconsin.

At the time of his death Otis was a superstar on black radio stations, sold tens of thousands records and was routinely at the top of the Billboard R&B charts. But prior to his death, most white Americans were still largely unacquainted with the music of Otis Redding... his highest ranking single on the Billboard Pop charts had been Try A Little Tenderness, which peaked at #25 in early 1967. His best selling album prior to his death was Complete & Unbeleivable Dictionary of Soul released in October 1966 and it rose to lower tiers of the Billboard Pop chart at #73.

Otis' white audience grew following his Monterey appearance in the summer of 1967, but it snowballed and turned into an avalanche after his death.

Otis became a far more valuable recording artist as a dead man than he ever was in his lifetime. In January 1968, Volt Records released his posthumous album (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, and the 45 rpm single of the title song became the first and only #1 single Redding ever had in the Billboard 100. It sold 4 million copies and a Volt's first anthology of Redding's recordings A History of Otis Redding, issued in the spring of 1967 before his death shot up the charts and sold 3 million copies world wide. This was in the era when Elvis and the Beatles were the only contemporary artists capable of selling more than 1 million units of an album worldwide.

What happened next between Stax Records and their Atlantic Records partners was a real shocker. In 1967, Warner Brothers "aquired' Atlantic Records. The entertainment idustry lawyers from Warner's pointed out to Stax owner Jim Stewart that he he had unknowingly signed away the rights to the original master recordings for all of Stax's Atlantic-distributed recordings. Stewart was under the impression that the ownership of master recordings in the Stax catalog would be returned to him if the Atlantic partnership was ever ended. The executives at Warner refused to return ownership of the Stax masters to Stewart.


Image: The original Stax logo (left) was designed in 1961 when the Stax/Atlantic partnership began. The modernized Stax logo (right) was designed in 1969, when Al Bell took over as president of Stax Records.

Stewart walked away from the Stax/Atlantic partnership and signed over the controlling interest in Stax to Paramount Pictures a week later. Stewart eventually sold his share of Stax Records to Al Bell who became the president of Stax Records. Under Bell, the Stax studio recorded some great soul music after Stewart's departure but the Stax limped along crippled by the loss of Otis Redding. Stax was completely under-capitalized without the cash flow of funds from the sales of Redding's lucrative back catalog of recordings. Isn't the music business fun?

Seven years after Atlantic withdrew from the partnership in 1968, Stax Records was insolvent and filed for bankruptcy.

Roster of Stax/Volt Artists

Rufus Thomas
Albert King
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
Eddie Floyd
Jean Knight
The Soul Children
The Staple Singers
Johnnie Taylor
The Dramatics (Volt)
The Emotions (Volt)
Otis Redding (Volt)
The Bar-Kays (Volt)
Isaac Haynes (on Enterprise, another Stax subsidiary)
The Mar-Keys (Satellite, then Stax)
Carla Thomas (Signed on Satellite, moved to Atlantic, then Stax)


Historic landmark sign in front of the old Stax recording studio which is now the Stax Record Company Museum & Archives.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Orphan Artists Vol 2


Glen Johnson, co-founder & leader of Piano Magic

I avoided Piano Magic's first two albums because I hated Glen Johnson's chosen name for his band. Call me shallow, but "Piano Magic" sounds like like an album title for an anthology of Liberace's greatest hits. There is probably some humorous irony in the band's name because there is no piano player in the band and most songs are centered around the otherworldly sounds of Johnson's guitar playing.

What caught my attention and perked my interest in Piano Magic was an 1999 AMG review of the band's third album Low Birth Weight. The review began with the following provocative declaration: Shields is the reclusive icon of indie rock who revolutionized studio production technology in the early Nineties. Shields' bold use of digitally processed guitar sounds made him a reluctant guitar god of indie rockers for the next two decades. So it really got my attention when AMG evoked the sacred name of Kevin Shield to describe the relative importance of Glen Johnson to the UK indie rock scene. I immediately headed down to my local indie record store and purchased a copy of Low Birth Weight.

Johnson originally composed the songs on Low Birth Weight as content for the soundtrack of a Spanish film it but the soundtrack project evolved into Piano Magic's third album. Since that album, Piano Magic's best albums share a similar cinematic quality. The music of Piano Magic is highly conceptual & experimental but nearly all of Piano Magic's songs have the unobtrusive ambience of music from a film soundtrack. It takes several listening sessions to fully appreciate the lush complexity of the music. Glen Johnson is a sly minimalist who's uncomfortable with brash displays of his technical mastery.

On the AMG comparison to Kevin Shields: Johnson's guitar playing doesn't sound like Kevin Shields and Piano Magic doesn't sound anything like My Bloody Valentine. Johnson's guitar sound is closer to that of former Cocteau Twin's guitarist Robin Guthrie. Like Guthrie, Johnson uses a reverb delay peddle, a digital sound processor and open guitar tunings to create cascading columns of guitar chords that have an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Both Kevin Shields & Glen Johnson have mentioned Guthie as a stylistic mentor and both have used Guthrie's bag of guitar tricks to shape their own highly individualistic guitar styles.

Piano Magic is structured as a musical collective with revolving door of musical contributors. Since the departure of Piano Magic's other two founders, Glen Johnson has become the glue that has held the collective together for the past sixteen years and by default Piano Magic has evolved into his own personal artistic statement. Johnson's role in the band is low key and a contingent of talented male and female vocalists are the front line performers. Johnson also shares the limelight with talented instrumentalists like Martin Cooper, Alexander Perls and Matt Simpson.

Piano Magic is hard to pigeon-hole in any given musical category. Their music has been compared to a wide and varied array of artists including This Mortal Coil, Pink Floyd, the Cocteau Twins, Eno and any number of bands associated with the shoegaze/dream rock/ambient music/post-rock categories of sub-genres. Piano Magic may be musical chameleon without a instantly recognizable trademark sound like My Bloody Valentine or the Cocteau Twins, but the music of Piano Magic has the same beguiling metaphysical qualities.

What Glen Johnson has most in common with Kevin Shields is a relentless perfectionism that's reflected in the shimmering sound quality of their production work. Both men literally spend months and often years, doing post-production tweaks, remixes, and overdubs of the music they're producing. Despite the post-production delays, Johnson has managed to produce 13 full Piano Magic albums in 16 years. By contrast, Shields has only produced 3 full length albums for My Bloody Valentine in 25 years. Shields critics have said his obsessive perfectionism has been a hindrance to his artistic development and believe he's wasted away his musical prime by spending 22 years completing a follow-up album to My Bloody Valentine's 1991 breakthrough album, Loveless.

Piano Magic does very little touring and attendees of their rare live shows say the band sounds completely different on stage than on their albums. On stage, Piano Magic plays with reckless abandon and the go-for-broke fury of a punk band... It's a sharp contrast to the moody ambience of Piano Magic's studio albums.

I'm not sure why Piano Magic doesn't have a larger group of fans in the United States. They probably have a larger contingent of fans in the UK, but Piano Magic gets very little coverage in the plethora of British indie pop magazines & Brit-pop websites that I follow on a regular basis. I don't recall seeing any posts on Music Banter over the years. (MB forum members: please correct me if I'm wrong about that).

Low Birth Weight (1999) is my personal recommendation for a starting point for novice listeners. It receives receives 5 stars out of 5 on my album rating scale. If you like Low Birth Rate then there's five other album releases you should check out:

Artist's Rifles (2000) 4 stars out of 5
Son de Mar (2001) 4 stars out of 5
The Troubled Sleep of Piano Magic (2003) 4 1/2 stars out of 5
Disaffected (2005) 4 stars out of 5
Pale Monster (2007) 4 stars out of 5

I haven't heard their latest release, Life Isn't Finished With Me Yet (2012) because I haven't seen available as a download from any internet music retailers and I couldn't find the cd issue of the album at any local record stores. Their albums are often hard to find because they've recorded on a seven different indie boutique labels and the retail distribution of their albums is erratic.

The first YouTube video The Fun of the Century showcases the vocal talents of Raechel Leigh and Hazel Burfitt, two female vocalists who teamed up to sing on most of the tracks of Low Birth Weight.



Glen Johnson is the vocalist on second song, Crown Estate. Johnson has a soft, world weary singing style and Crown Estate has the somber mood & haunting quality of an early Joy Division song.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Screen13

Cool stuff!

Some cool trivia info about Stax, Post Atlantic.

Besides the usual amount of great music, there were a few good stories through their time with Paramount (Gulf and Western) including the massive Soul Explosion promotion which included the double album collection of Stax legends as well as Dot/Paramount artist Mitch Ryder being allowed to do an album with Booker T's band with no problem (no contract disputes that usually surround such happenings), although sadly the album was under-promoted (Dot was more comfortable with soundtracks, I guess). With the Ryder story, I think he was given a choice between working with Andy Kim or working with Stax legends, and of course we all know that with the singer there was no second choice when Stax was mentioned.

Despite having plenty of major hits here and there, the saddest chapter of Stax's history with CBS through The 70's was the final years when there were some well-intended albums that were aimed for the K-Mart/Woolwroths marketplace which were a very ill fit with the rest of the music that was going on including albums by noted TV personalities Morton Downey Jr. (As Sean Morton Downey Jr. - I Believe America was the album) and Mike Douglas (Today, 1975) as well as child singer Lina Zavoroni (who sadly passed away after her battles with anorexia...as a kid, she could sing very well despite the cheesy nature of her album that was released through Stax in The US). Times were very rough, especially with a huge amount of under performing music released through it and it's gallery of sub labels including Volt, Enterprise, and Gospel Truth (the later being connected with The Rev. Jessie Jackson), and it was thought that more mainstream music would solve some of their problems which it did not. Although there were some major successes, including Wattstax, there were some ill fated projects including plans for a film division which planned four films, but I think only three only were completed, Darktown Strutters being a film that's noted in Urban Action history especially with it's appearance by The Dynamics and Distribution through Roger Corman's New World. Having to deal with bills from pressing plants and other business related problems soured any attempt to return to their former glory. Oddly enough, it was a hit single on one of the sub labels, Truth (aka Gospel Truth I think), Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman", that softened the ride to their first end.

College Rockers should also take note that Ardent, another Stax Sub, housed Big Star for their first two albums.

The final Stax album release of the 1970's I think was the two album set The Congressional Record of the Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy in 1975.

After Stax's announcement of going Chapter 11, Fantasy Records (home to Creedence Clearwater Revival) later picked up on the post-Atlantic years even going as far as releasing more compilation albums.

They returned in the Late 2Ks and are doing well after teaming with the Concord Music Group.

Gavin B.

I thank Screen13 for the knowledgeable follow up post to my Stax Records history. Part of my dilemma in writing these histories of the major soul music labels was limiting the content. If you write a blog post that exceeds 20 or so medium size paragraphs, you lose that 50% of readers who lack the attention span to read a longer piece.

My original unedited Stax history was 65 paragraphs but only a handful of people with a deep interest in soul music would have read the unedited version. I decided to concentrate on Stax's anchor artist, Otis Redding and therefore many important players in the Stax chronicles, like Booker T and the MGs, Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas and Albert King didn't get their due.

I'm currently editing the Motown Story which is the longer than both the previously posted Atlantic and Stax histories. Motown's sordid story under the rule of Barry Gordy is a compelling object lesson on how not to treat your artists, producers and front office employees. It's ironic that the only black owner of the three legendary '60s soul record companies was a ruthless tyrant who ran his record label like Idi Amin ran the nation of Uganda. There are so many compelling stories at Motown that I think I'll have to allocate two seperate posts to Motown, even after I complete the final edit. I'm hoping to get the Motown story posted by the end of this week.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Orphan Artists Vol. 3


Photo: Chicks on Speed

Chicks on Speed is a Munich based cyber grrrl trio who are more agit-prop performance artists than music artists. Much of their material lacks substance but there's an exciting surface to their music that's infectious. Their music is influenced by other less than polished punk era girl groups like the Slits, Au Pairs and Delta 5 and they have a talent for parodying the banal aspects of club culture, fashion and romantic relationships. Chicks on Speed is truly an international group comprised of a Munich born native, a New Yorker, and an Aussie.

I don't recommend a steady musical diet of Chicks on Speed to anybody, but I've always gotten a surge of phone inquiries whenever I played one of their songs on my radio show.

Recommended Recording


Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All (2000)
Gavin B.'s Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All is their 2000 debut album but there's been 2 or 3 interesting songs on each of the six albums they've recorded over the past 12 years.

Chicks on Speed's deconstructed cover of Grace Jones' Warm Leatherette



Chicks on Speed's version of Delta 5's 1980 feminist/punk anthem, Mind Your Own Business.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt