Andy Beta is a talented freelance writer that is currently working for The Village Voice, Time Out, City Pages, Perfect Sound Forever, and Seattle Weekly. He has also written in the past for Sound Collector, Incursion, ND Magazine, Luna Kafé, and Pitchfork Media.

In 2001, I wrote some 1,700+ words on Lee Dorsey’s forgotten Yes We Can for the Sound Collector Audio Review, an album I called a “triumvirate of Naw’leans power,” featuring Dorsey with writer/producer Allen Toussaint and the Meters as backing band. I traced the album back from a cover of Dorsey’s “Riverboat” that appeared on Van Dyke Parks’ 1972 album, Discover America. A producer par excellence, Parks worked with everyone from the Beau Brummels to the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, Ry Cooder to Rufus Wainwright, not to mention crafting the columnated ruins domino of Brian Wilson’s Smile.

Parks’s own distinct solo albums sound like mixes that reflect such eclecticism. I noted in SCAR that an album like Discover America is cobbled from “whatever music and themes he happened to be pondering at that point in time…picking up the shuffling rhythms of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Barbados…[and paying] homage to icons like Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, J. Edgar Hoover.” It also has messages for UFOs, a Genet-like ode to G-men, steel band rave-ups of Sousa, ladies that look like Jack Palance, and a few covers. Recently, I was overjoyed to finally find the original calypsos that formed the core of that album, performed by a singer tellingly called “The Lion.” These originals can all be found on the fine FDR in Trinidad comp.

The Lion– Bing Crosby

What could be the missing link between Duke Ellington’s jungle growl big band and Jungle-based grime? Trinidadian calypso, of course! (And before you think I’m crazy, check Honest Jon’s fine UK calypso and dancehall comps for implicit parallels.) The Lion was one of the more successful calypso singers, and had a stage name that could trump others like The Tiger, Lord Executor, or Attila the Hun. Weaving against the tropical lilt of his backing band, he employs a sing-song
style that flashes a tough felicity and confident drawl that anticipates both righteous Rastas like Big Youth and the contorted, heavily-accented flow of Dizzee by half a century or more. Some lyrics are political, others preach “vitalogy.”

Here The Lion shouts out the Mills Brothers, comments on the nature of fame, touches discreetly on race in Hollywood (from the vantage of the islands), and embraces pop culture and its subsequent cult of personality as his band samples melodies from the hit parade while his woozy croon anticipates ODB or any bubble-crunk type throaty thuggery.

[buy a Lion album here]

Little Feat– Sailin’ Shoes

A big up to Yancey Strickler for selecting Little Feat a few months back here. Purportedly Parks wrote this with Lowell George, or vice versa, but this is one of the truest drug songs, period, on one of the most slept-on 70s rock albums. Melding delta blues slide to New Orleans second-line rhythms, George linked two American music forms that had never jibed before, and he’s still underappreciated as a guitar player. The playing is nimble, just this side of jittery.

“Sailin’ Shoes” has all the anticipation of that first bump, that ephemeral appeasement that coke has on ‘heads, the ho-hum dancing lady that pales in comparison to the next line, the ridiculous lingo and conspiratorial code that goes with the territory, all delivered with a hep restraint: “Cuz if you if, I’ll lay it on the line…” File it next to J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine” or Nilsson’s “Coconut.”

[buy Little Feat stuff here]

Lee Dorsey– Riverboat

I’m obsessed with sounds that transform into what they are meant to describe. It makes me love INA-GRM stuff, lyrebirds, synths set to “stalagtite,” Robert Wyatt’s sung trumpet lines, pre-dad Mills Brothers, Sacred Harp singing, or more recently, how Petey Pablo raps like a revving bike on “Get on dis Motorcycle.” This may be my favorite example though, as the Meters become a
riverboat inside Cosimo Matassa’s studio. “The horns bleat out steam and smoke, the wah guitar warbles like eddies alongside the boat. Drums cycle and churn like pistons, hi-hats hiss, and Dorsey floats on it all,” I wrote back then.

Dorsey implores only that the world never stop turning, that the festivities never cease, even though enormous cycles of war and death are around us. Every mmm-hmmm and oh-oh-oh is an ecstatic prayer, splashing up from the Mississippi’s continuum as it plays. And this riverboat ride, eternal in my head each time through, lasts only two and a half minutes.

[buy Lee Dorsey stuff here]