Uncle Okey's Extra Dark Wax Trax

birchoak

Hi-Fi Nut
These are the liner notes for a custom mix I made for my best friend. I haven't heard back from him yet, so I don't know if he liked the CD or not. He is a bit absent-minded, so I'm not too bothered. I'll post the first one; if people like it/are interested, I'll throw up more.

1. Hey Joe, cover by Willy DeVille, 1992.
[Billy Roberts claims to have written Hey Joe in 1962. Disputed. We will never know who wrote it.]
For a musician who fronted the house band at New York City’s CBGB* club, birthplace of the punk rock scene, Willy DeVille is an unlikely candidate for a salsa take of the hard boiled, shoot-my-old-lady rock wailer that has surged like molten iron out of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar for close to fifty years now. Opening with a cheerful salsa rhythm, the tune initially seems safe enough for both old people and babies, then dips into a sinister cautionary tale about a cheatin’ woman and the lethal nature of jilted love, then springs back to the benign salsa refrain. It is joyous, horrifying, then inexplicably festive again, DeVille mocking the wildly vacillating passions of people who are in lust but not necessarily in love. Joe’s ordinary day rapidly devolves into a search for a handgun, and you can almost see him strutting down the hot sidewalk, spray of roses cradled in his arms and cartoon robins circling his head, then Angry Joe, furrowed brows, clutching a cold steel forty-four as he stalks the alleys for his betrayer, black clouds over his head.

*Country, BlueGrass, and Blues, to further confuse things.
 
Ok, next song:

2. Hurdy Gurdy Man, cover by Eric Mercury, 1969 [Written by Donovan, 1968].
Donovan’s unsettling ode to all that is strange is about as far from soul as Iggy Pop is from a shirt, but Canadian Eric Mercury pours his manly sweat all over it in a successful attempt to set fire to Toronto. This is a piece of eight from Captain Kid’s darkened treasure chest, a thing I can guarantee you absolutely no one has ever heard, and perhaps Mercury’s hot sliver of gold should be kept that way, lest entire coffee shops of sunscreened millenials choke on their paninis upon hearing that first, blistering chorus.
 
VYNULADIKT, you are the wind beneath my wings--ha ha.

3. Good Time Joe, by Link Wray, 1974.
Link Wray is best known for his unnerving electric guitar in Rumble, a rock instrumental so influential that Pete Townshend once said, ”Without Link Wray and Rumble, I never would have picked up a guitar.”

Yeah, that Pete Townshend.

Okay, let’s get this straight: no Link Wray, no Goodbye Sister Disco, Behind Blue Eyes, My Generation, or Baba O’Reilly? No The Who? I’m picturing Pete Townsend frying donuts or scraping paint off someone’s summer house on the Isle of Wight and it seems like an awful waste of talent, like Luke Skywalker running a hot top machine instead of wielding a light saber. While we have Link to thank for Pete’s subsequent mastery of rock music, Wray’s work is nearly as prolific and diverse as Townsend’s, also inspiring Fellow Fret Fondler Extraordinare Jimmy Page.

After Wray contracted tuberculosis in the Korean War, doctors removed one of his lungs and informed him he’d never sing again. Shawnee Indian by birth, and much tougher stuff than those assessing him, Wray went on to do a whole bunch of singing, candy-ass surgeons be damned.

As the studio version of Good Time Joe begins drifting from your speakers, you think, are those steel drums in there, in the back? You’re not completely sure; it’s subtle, but as Wray fully unsheathes his sonic sword of crunchy electric awesomeness, you have undoubtedly been exposed, as surely as Townsend and Page were.
 
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