Billy Stewart and Summertime: Sultry Goes Banger

Summertime: A song, I’d argue, that’s one of the sexiest to ever scrape a chord and float on drawn breath. 

For the inspired listener, the song’s traditionally sultry and languid journey into the earhole can drip straight to nipple and flap, thicken the pipe, and dry the mouth ever so. With a libation or two, what panty or zipper could resist the urge to drop? Summertime does all of this with an old fashioned and naïve grace and subtlety AKA as metaphor and double entendre. More contemporary expressions perfer the direct (like Cupcakke). While I can appreciate the brevity and laser focus of directness, there’s an argument to be made when the brain is left to do some of the work itself. The best art—be it an advertising headline, jokes, a plot device, entendre, etc.—always has layers. So, when the lyricist refers to fish and cotton as a stand-in for horny, the effect goes much deeper. Add to that, the song’s glistening descriptions of a world popping out all over with fecundity and a turgid impatience: It’s a boojie and banger universe where there just may be something for every body—but you’d better act now, it’s a limited-time offer:

Summertime/And the livin’ is easy/Fish are jumpin’/And the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich/And your ma is good lookin’/So hush, little baby/Don't you cry

One of these mornings/You’re going to rise up singing/Then you'll spread your wings/And you'll take the sky/But ’til that morning/There’s a’nothing can harm you/With daddy and mammy standing by

A word about the source material: For those who don’t know, Summertime was from the operetta Porgy and Bess—with a libretto based on a 1925 novel by Dubose Howard. It’d be easy to dismiss the material as more white appropriation of black culture but the work’s immortality, and the only reason we’ve any interest in this anachronistic work now, is wholly due to the career-peaking tunes of George Gershwin and lyrics by his older brother Ira. 

Just to note: Howard received praise for presenting black culture without condescension—no small achievement in the 1920s, a time when minstrelsy still wasn’t even a corpse yet. (Shirley Temple did it in 1935.) Howard had gotten props from no less than poet Langston Hughes. 

Back to the song: Despite my argument for the song’s potent swirl of aphrodisia, Billy Stewart’s 1966 rendition has none of that. His has way too much bounce and agitation, way too much Las Vegas showroom in the arrangement for much sexy: This version is for standing up and moving, not laying down. But what Billy Stewart does do is freebase the tune with a hyper-exuberance that’s like blue crystal meth onto the song’s original edible vibe of cannabis passion potion—a feel the original composers had clearly intended. Between his violent alveolar tongue trill that starts the song, and his ululating vocal run that ends it, in between we have four minutes of pure high impact aerobic joy.

Early in his career, Elton John was in a band that had opened for Stewart. On Elvis Costello’s television show Spectacle he told a story of a night when an audience member had foolishly thrown something at the 300+ pound singer as he was singing. Stewart dropped his hulk off the stage and chased down the evening’s anarchist. 

It is that very same kind of intense spunk that’s all over this song. That spunk will force exhilaration into your earhole by the fistful.

Song Reassignment Surgery: Bold Covers, 1

Take 5 (Paul Desmond), 1959: The Dave Brubeck Quartet

The brilliant guitarist Marc Ribot and his Ceramic Dog rhythm section take a sonic ball-peen hammer to this otherwise dusty and overly patinated American standard. Ribot’s fingers leave little of the original. Instead, he treats the tune like a textbook, leaving his highlights, notes, and doodles all over the pages. The original rhythm remains, if less recognizable, and the melody gets battered and deep-fried like a county fair Twinkie. By the time he gets into deep space with it, what’s left kind of skips off towards Neptune.

As a pilot, Ribot has never navigated anywhere straight, but if you’re prepared, the trip will be extraordinary.

And here he slaps the @#$% out of Duke Ellington:

Icons in the Orbit of Karl Denson's Tiny Universe

So who’s carrying the stank funk buckets of the 70s masters? Who’s casting a cosmic slop worthy of Sly Stone, Slave, The Gap Band, and Funkadelic?

Karl Denson may be a contender.  Maybe it’s his vintage (b. 1956), and journeyman trips around the sun with Lenny Kravitz, Blackalicious, Blind Boys of Alabama, and The Rolling Stones. His has been a career worthy of being called illustrious.

When it came to sculpting the sound for his own joint, you can assume his record crates are loaded with the above iconic classics. Like his 2019 album with the band Tiny Universe suggests, it’s an influence that digs into the dog of his jam I’m Your Biggest Fan like foxtails. While he’s no Sly or George Clinton at the mic, he floats well enough across the groove and offers enough jazzy space in his changes to sink a pocket respectably deep.

For those longing for the otherwise neglected harder edges of 70s funk, Denson is giving them props and abundance they rightfully deserve. Tour Spotify and you’ll find no shortage of classic funk pretenders and dilettantes – particularly those peddling Zapp’s brand of synth clappy disco. Even among the betters in the field – here’s a list of somebody’s idea of the worthier candidates – most are a long way from rising to Denson’s elevation.

When it comes to the hard funk bucket, Denson delivers.

I Should Fly Soars

This Oakland based, self-described “sister caberet” duo was active from 2006 to 2009. Their bio blurbs include terms like “noise witch,” HBIC (Head Bitch In Charge), and positive expressions of body hair, gender fluidity and pronoun eschewal.

This song, from their 2006 debut album, isn’t emblematic of their sound so much – sounding here like a hempier Pentangle channeling through Nashville – but it’s one of their best.

See for their Bandcamp, band site, and their individual pages: Zoe Boekbinder and Kim Boekbinder.

I’m guessing the video isn’t canon.

(Hey) Joe Returns to Kill Again

Songs of the folk tradition can have long umbilical cords stretching back hundreds of years.  (This one is over 800 years old.) More recently, a song like Streets of Laredo has a musical and lyrical DNA that can been traced to Irish ballads and British sea chanties from the19th century. In America, these Anglo progenitors of tune- and wordsmithery were added to a cultural gangbang of cowboy ballads and laments on the American frontier. A tradition built on a platform of African American cowboys, Mexican troubadours, and even a wank by way of New Orleans. By 1924, all of this cultural spunk ended up in the mouth and pen of cowboy singer Frank H. Maynard who was bestowed with Hey Joe’s official attribution by a journalist and academic. What exactly was Maynard’s contribution we’ll never know but before him there was likely a hundred years of curation by, and with the fingerprints of, others. So, music of the folk and minstrel traditions, and likely all music to a degree, is like a whorehouse child – aside from its mysterious progenitors, there was also a lot of stepparenting. Such is how culture is made.

This is also the history of Hey Joe, though less plains, deserts, and ocean crossings and more of an urbanized terrain – coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs. Joe also has the parentage of many donors. After this trajectory of borrowing, thieving, plagiarizing, and various appropriation, we’re left with the hard polished nugget that has been through the mouths of hundreds of recordings and performances.

And while the family tree may not be nearly as leafy as Streets of Laredo, thanks to attorneys and publisher privateers, Joe’s paternity was also forced into the possession of a stepfather with one name: Billy Roberts, a California-based folkie who’d register the song’s copyright in 1962.

Then comes Dino Valenti: Best known as the composer of The Youngblood’s Let’s Get Together (still a much-used song for period soundtracks) and Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Fresh Air, Valenti would be sent to Folsom Prison from a police shakedown and a marijuana possession charge. To pay for his defense, Valenti sold the rights to Let’s Get Together for $100. While at Folsom, Valenti would meet Billy Roberts who at the time was playing with Johnny Cash’s band when he famously played there. Valenti would talk Roberts into transferring the rights to Hey Joe to help him woo the parole board with his status as a working musician. The ruse worked and Valenti was released and soon would be peddling the song to Los Angeles record companies. Mira Records would be the first to buy. 

At Mira Records, and the reason we know the song at all, was the Angeleno garage band The Leaves. Their version would at last free the song from the folk clubs and put it on the radio with their hit 1965 recording. Their version that would be the conduit that brought Hey Joe to Jimi Hendrix’s attention. His iconic version would appear less than a year later.

After Hendrix, the tale of the gun-wielding rake of the song would receive many injustices from voices and fingerings of many along the way. Yet, it still bears the spunk of its stepparents The Leaves and Hendrix.

And then in 2002, Robert Plant and his rootsy outfit Strange Sensation offered a revitalized and reductive slow-burn take of the erstwhile overworked jewel. In Plant’s retelling, the circle of fifths refrain was diluted, droning and other non-bluesy elements were offered, and a nod of tribute to the Stratocaster of Hendrix. All coming together to gave this Joe an understated power that patiently bides its rage until nearly the end, waiting almost four minutes before releasing the full furious extent of its, er, payload.

After 55 years – and 36 after Hendrix – dusky Joe once again is fired from a gun worthy of his caliber.



And Billy Roberts; the father no one remembers:

Bambi Bongo

It may’ve started here. Bambi wins.

Flyer Crush, Pt 2: Jamie Reid

Nearly as important as the sound were the visuals, just as explosive as that distinctive spit-drenched, ear-bleeding wail of pure yet refined rage and inseparable from their brand – Johnny Rotten’s couture by Vivian Westwood, Malcolm McClaren’s surrealist business management – including that performance to the House of Parliament from a boat and the scheduling of the band‘s US tour through bars in the South. And even with all of that, the graphic menace of Jamie Reid was essential.

Reid’s first splash with the Pistols began with his sleeve for the God Save the Queen (1977). His proto-imagiac punk style would rise to become iconic and the ur-image of the DIY punk aesthetic. Years of hastily assembled Xeroxed images for multitudes of garage bands on both sides of the Atlantic would follow. It‘s safe to say Reid’s work owed a heavy debt to the work of Frank Zappa and Carl Schenkel.

More recently, Reid hooked up with mainstream guerrilla art bomber Shepard Fairey - seen in the two pieces at bottom. You’ll also note from the below, Reid’s later work tended toward the self-parody – perhaps intentionally – and his political messaging could be a bit trite and precious, but no matter, the early work still stands as a monster.