Left – Snaketown Rattlers
Eastern Lounge has now well-and-truly re-established itself as an upper north shore institution, bringing musical diversity to a part of Sydney Spike Milligan might've described, as he did Woy Woy, as the world's only above-ground cemetery. This miracle is due to one impresario, in Dave Keogh. For the April edition of this monthly extravaganza (it's only bordering on overstatement), Keogh lined up two very different bands. Eclectic is the name of this game. But they shared a common heritage, inasmuch as both hail from the Blue Mountains, as does Las Hermanas, a 'fusion bellydance trio'. You might well ask. More on that subject a little later.
First up, Sideshow Annie. The band clearly sees itself as some kind of musical circus and Gillian Reynolds is, most assuredly, the ringleader. She normally plays blues harp but, due to a dastardly cold, we missed out on that. But we didn't miss out on her self-possessed, theatrical presentation. She's a voluptuous version of Stevie Nicks, gesturing and beckoning us to listen up to the band's blues 'n' roots-informed country-rock fusion, a sound well-and-truly embodied in Slingshot Baby, co-written by Gill & hubby, Eliot (a rock royal, having played in Matt Finish). With a big, spacious dirty guitar and dynamic drum sound (courtesy Lindsay Tebbutt, formerly of The Choirboys) focussed on toms and crash cymbal, Gill asserts her sassy vocal: 'she's a slingshot, baby, and you know she's gonna bring you down'. Tracey Edwards (bass) and Leonie Louise (rhythm guitar) harmonise behind her resplendently. It's an infectiously dark, but playful, (anything but Keith) urban cowboy song that resonates with retro riffing. Methinks I even detected a lick from The Munsters theme. Cloaks, daggers, rattlesnakes make the woman in question highly questionable company. After all, if I discerned the line correctly, 'she holds a grudge like cancer'. Thematically, it fits like a glove onto their album of late last year, Ghost Town, which it opens.
Anyway the Wind Blows is the second cut from the same album and another written by GE (Gill and El). It, too, catches on your consciousness like grass-seeds on your socks, with it's strummed acoustic guitar, loping rhythm, easy harmonies and, again, a very wide, open sound. A soaring slide break from El sends it skyward. With his jet black mane of hair and top hat, he looks like a rock god (and, let's face it, given his resume, he is), a kind of brunette Leon Russell. The song is almost anthemic, with a singalong chorus that echoes the go-with-the-flow sentiment of the song: 'any way the wind blows, I don't mind'. It's a kind of western ode to eastern philosophy. What goes 'round, comes 'round.
Cold Day In Hell is from the band's previous, eponymous album and has GE written all over it, too. Delta blues. Slide. The slap of a snare. It has the sound of a deep southern bar at midnight. Outside, I imagine, crickets chirp, frogs croak, 'gators lurk and, for all I know, lizards leap. Gill swaggers, shimmies and gesticulates, like Jagger and Joplin rock 'n' rolled into one sassy broad.
Thing is a G-whizz solo composition harking from the Slingshot Annie set too. 'I had a thing for you, you were a thing. You were moody, you were aggro, I meant you as a fling.' At face value, it seems like it might have its tongue firmly in its cheek, but methinks there's a darker tale told here. Things can turn ugly. El's pretty mandolin ain't but.
Long Way From Home is one of El's, also featuring his mandolin-picking. Gill jokes, 'get your red neck on'. It's knee-slapping, subverted country, with characteristically rich harmonies.
Give a Little is GE again, from the Cold Day In Hell ep. This sports a deeply funky blues groove (which has everything to do with Tracey Edwards badarse bass), with a gospel bent. 'For everything I have in life, I am truly grateful.' Perhaps we could all do to show a bit more grace and gratitude. 'For everything I have received, I am truly thankful. Look around me, what do I see? There's people far less fortunate than me. I see it in the subway. I feel it in the street. People scream without a sound.' Ain't that the truth?
Gill and El are also guilty as charged as co-writers of Guilty, from the latest. It's a yarn, in the tragic country style; true Americana on which my earlier Stevie Nicks comparison certainly isn't lost, given Gill's dirge-like vocal. 'The judge found her guilty; the jury found her mad.' Even now, in thirty-three of the United States, 'the court could hear her yell'. She screamed, 'take me down, down to my grave, and I'll pray to God, I'll pray he'll save my soul'.
Pixie Green, also from Ghost Town, is a compositional collaboration 'tween GE, Edwards and Louise, a slinky, brothel-creepin' blues with some tasty, jazzy guitar licks, about the proverbial girl in a red dress. 'Hey there, little pixie, are you out for the night? You got your red dress on and your hair's on fire; the boys turn left and right'.
Ghost Town, needless to say, is the title track from the new album, again by the Reynolds. It creaks to life with a primal tom-tom tirade, shadowy, reverberant guitar and eery, woo-hoo backup vocals. It's another song in a canon of cowboy songs that amounts to a veritable concept album. It's a carefully-contrived, evocative aesthetic into which a cover of the man in black's Jackson fits faultlessly. You might say it marries with the rest of their material feverishly. Well, you might.
GE's Little Gypsies opens the Sideshow Annie set. Put simply, it rocks. Think The Angels meets Lynyrd Skynyrd. 'Sometimes you can't trust your loved ones. Even the good ones turn to sin. Jealousy's the root of all evil. Money can sure bring 'em in. So dance little gypsies, won't you sing the blues? Mama's takin' off in the caravan.' What could be more rock 'n' roll than this cryptic but colourful lyric? It comes complete with blistering guitar breaks, raunchy bassline and punchy kick, snare, open high-hat combo to lock it down. Wake up and smell the smokin', guns 'n' roses.
The Devil Knows is GE's rockabilly blues that reaches all the way back to the demonic origins of rock 'n' roll. Elvis meets George Thorogood in this menacing walk through the garden of unearthly delights. 'May your soul rise to heaven before the devil knows your dead.' As I recall, it had a number of people up and dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, so to speak. It was a subterranean note on which to wrap.
Seeing Sideshow Annie is like walking back in time, into one of those forbidding tents behind the big top. The kind where one might find the dwarf-throwing, bearded lady, or such like. Characterful, tight, playfully dark and with theatrical asset Gill Reynolds up front, the Sideshow is a phenomenon waiting to happen. Any band with a debut album entitled Delusions of Grandeur clearly has no tickets on itself and is realistic about the lottery that is worldwide success, a fact of humility and self-awareness that qualifies its members as all the more deserving. Since 2006, when the band started, with Gill and El as its nucleus, they been quite prolific on the recorded (three albums and an ep) and live fronts. It hasn't gone unnoticed: SA has been on Rage, Triple J and FBI and, not to be underestimated, has music played on 73 (other) or more community radio stations across Australia, as well as in the UK and US. It's a readymade festival act, with the broadest possible appeal, so fingers crossed.
Preceding Snaketown Rattlers was Las Hermanas (Sandy, Kathy and Lara). They may dress like bellydancers, but there's a wealth of dance doctrines and other physical disciplines that inform their sensual moves, which are also mediated by improvisation. It's improvisation, actually, that in large measure defines tribal bellydance, a modern take on the traditional practice, the most current form of which was devised and developed by Carolena Nericcio, but whose roots attach to Jamila Salimpour. It's she who fostered the fusion of influences garnered from the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and India. The style even has an impact on costume: very much favoured are pantaloons, full skirts and bodices known as cholis. It can be performed to a promiscuous soundtrack: if I remember correctly, there was even a Led Zeppelin riff in the mix. Once again, trust Dave Keogh to bring us something right out of the box!
For Snaketown Rattlers, hi-octane jungle swing is where it's at. Imagine throwing New Orleans street sounds, big band, jazz, cowboy steel guitar, Jamaican dancehall, klezmer, rockin’ blues, rumba and reggae into a sonic blender. Of course, you'd have to throw in a heaping' helping' of expertise and experience, to boot, to come up with the Rattlers. About four decades' worth.
Take Neil Duncan, for example, who also plays with the Jews Brothers and Darth Vader. His is an heroic story. His first instrument is sax, but, thanks to lousing a bout with cancer, he lost an arm, so taught himself to play drums one-handed. If you close your eyes, you'd never guess. And if you keep 'em open, you'll see he's made almost unbelievably resourceful adaptations to emulate the sound of a drummer with both paws intact. Inspirational. And that's no sympathy vote. His technique, distinctive style and sound is the real deal; the man has feel. John Stuart has been a man of steel guitar for the likes of Renee Geyer, The G Men, big band Babalu, Rachel Hannan and the late, lamented Jackie Orszaczky. Sam Golding is one of the country's most adventuresome trumpeters, as evidenced by his association with bands including The Tango Saloon and The Mango Balloon. Upright bassist Andrew Ireland may be known to you from Andy 500. Collectively, chances are you'll recognise 'em as the backing band for gravelly blues croonmeister, Pugsley Buzzard. Each complements the other more than in many bands and musicianship is consummate. Collectively, they create a sound hitherto unknown. That's what happens when you put four evil (well, slightly bent, perhaps), inventive geniuses in a musical lab.
Italian Mambo, or Mambo Italiano, was written by one Bob Merrill, way back in '54 and first recorded by George Clooney's aunt, Rosemary. Much as Rosemary gave it oomph and raunch, The Rattlers' rendition endows, ironically, a little more Yiddisher flavour, even if it is about a girl who went back to Napoli, not Nur.
Lonesome Road hails from 1927. Written after the style of an African-American folksong by Gene Austin (lyrics) and Nathaniel Shilkret. Incredible as it may seem, especially for a song harking back so far, it might have sold as many as eighty million records, or more. It's certainly been honoured, having been recorded by everyone from Sinatra to Armstrong; not to mention the composer, Bing, Ella, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke and Dick Dale. So its genre-bending journey continues. 'Look down, look down, that lonesome road, before you travel on'; the song might counsel us to look, with caution, towards the future, but the style certainly allows us to look back.
Duke got it in one, back in '31, when he penned It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing. The Rattlers really give it some schtick and urge, as Ellington, I should think, fully intended. Let's face it, this a standard among standards (it was probably the first jazz song to mention swing in the title, for starters) and the Rattlers, for mine, do it similar justice to the original. What could possibly follow it, 'cept maybe Creole Love Call? Of course, this was another standard inextricably associated with Duke but, also, controversy. Ellington first recorded it in '27 (what is it about that year?) and was credited as composer the next year. But it turned out the melody is discernible in Joe 'King' Oliver's earlier composition, Camp Meeting Blues, which he recorded with his Creole Jazz Band in '23. The Duke's reed man, Rudy Jackson, had presented it as his own composition. Oliver tried to sue for royalties and composer credit, but failed on technical grounds. Unsurprisingly, Jackson got the boot, making way for Barney Bigard. So rock 'n' roll, yet it was jazz. Anyway, the Rattlers imbue it with all the haunting beauty it begs. It certainly gives Golding ample room to stretch out and daunt many a trumpeter.
Gershwin's immortal aria, Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, gets a workout too. As one of the most covered songs in the entire history of recorded music (more than thirty-three thousand renditions beggars belief), it's always a precarious selection but, again, the Rattlers know how to shake out all its languid sensuality and spirit-moving power.
Dark Eyes, also known as Black Eyes, (in French) Les Yeux Noirs, or (transliterated from Russian) Ochi Chornye (spellings vary) is almost indubitably the most famous of all that nation's romantic songs. It's mistakenly known as a Romani tune, for it has that feeling about it, but was in fact written by Ukrainian poet, Yevhen Hrebinka and Florian Hermann; 'though it was Feodor Chaliapin who took the song abroad, where it really took on. The Rattlers sound like ring-in gypsy folk in the playing, which is no bad thing, since that background fits so well with the image of 'dark and burning eyes, dark as midnight skies; full of passion flame, full of lovely game'. Is there a more stirring song in all popular music? In their inimitable style, the Rattlers seem to find both pathos and parody. Prekrasniy!
Exactly Like You is a swingin' little number from 1930, written by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, who you're bound to know from On The Sunny Side Of The Street, which was written for the same Broadway show. Louis Armstrong recorded it the same year and, since, it's been more a case of who hasn't than who has. The Rattlers reinvent as their own.
Likewise, Bei Mir Bist Du Schon (To Me, You're Beautiful) which, like so many of the band's other tunes, distinguishes itself by way of Stuart's incongruous pedal steel: Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda's Yiddisher masterpiece never sounded so Hawaiian. It's like putting pineapple on latkes: unusual, to be sure, but it kind of works. The sports a fascinating history and similar ubiquity to Exactly Like You and the Rattlers build-in a cool bass solo to boot.
What will Mr Keogh programme next? Stay tuned for the next episode of Eastern Lounge.
Eastern Lounge
April 2013
Venue: The Roseville Club | 64 Pacific Highway, Roseville NSW
Date: Friday, April 12
Tickets: $17 pre-paid | $20 at the door
Bookings: www.trybooking.com
