Category: 1985-1989

“Las Amarillas” (1988) – Los Lobos * Produced by Los Lobos * Label: Slash/Warner Bros. 

Los Lobos topped the charts in 1987 with their polished-up vintage T-bird version of “La Bamba.” Perhaps drawing inspiration from the scene in the eponymous movie where Ritchie Valens hears the song’s traditional incarnation (performed by Los Lobos as a late fifties cantina band), they went unplugged for their follow-up album La Pistola y El Corazon, a nine-song folklorico album that clocked in at only twenty-five minutes and featured striking cover art by George Yepes.

Seven of the tracks are traditional, while the other two are trad-sounding originals. The best information you can get about the album is in the February 1989 issue of Frets magazine, in which the band gives background on each of the songs and their instrumentation.

Cesar Rosas identifies “Las Amarillas” as a primitive huapango from the backwoods of Guerrero, where “you use a drum instead of a bass, two nylon-string guitars, and two violins.” In a 1988 review of the album in the Los Angeles Times, Victor Valle writes that the song “goes into a territory of passion some Mexicans may not even recognize,” with “allusions to beaks that peck and nests that squeeze,” giving Rosas’ vocal “the earthy eroticism of Campesinos ignorant of puritanical shame.”

Not mentioned anywhere is the song’s coda, where Louie Perez’s floor toms shift into a pulsing 4/4, David Hidalgo plays the Native-American signifier riff of old westerns on his violin, and band roadie Mouse de la Luz, on bells, sounds out the melody to the Hamm’s Beer “Land of Sky-Blue Waters” theme. 

 

“Rymoka String Band” (1985) – Rymoka String Band * Produced by Gef Lucena * Recorded by David Fanshawe * LP: Spirit of Melanesia* Label: Saydisc

The sound of Papua New Guinean string band music lolls and rolls with acoustic guitars and ukes favoring 6th chords. How to characterize the cultural ear for that sound? The effect on me is that life is “all sixes,” six of one and a half dozen of the other, so why get uptight? Listen to what I mean in this track on SayDisc’s Spirit of Melanesia compilation.

It’s credited to the Rymoka String Band, whom the late British composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe captured as part of his enormous archive of worldwide field recordings. The liner notes explain that the performance happened at the 6th anniversary celebrations (July 28, 1985) for Passam National High School, where a string band competition took place, and that Trudi Egi and Vincent Raka, students from Tubusereia, organized the group.

They won, and Fanshawe writes that “this number, one of my favourites, was especially recorded in the cool of the evening in the chapel.”

And now, permit me to get uptight. This particular track, sung in Tok Pisin, a mixture of Pidgin and English, surely sounds like what Fanshawe’s talking about. (The only recognizable word is “1985,” sung in English.) But on another compilation, ARC Music’s Music of the South Pacific, a different track appears, which is also titled as—and credited to—“Rymoka String Band.” This one’s lyrics are sung in English and they also sound appropriate for an anniversary.

Such untitled/anonymous treatments pop up plenty in field recording collections, as though we’re expected not to take any individual song too seriously and view them more as phenomena than compositions. So I guess I’ll just call them “Rymoka String Band (2:20)” and “Rymoka String Band (2:40).”

“Rymoka String Band”
 

“Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” (1985) – Daniel Johnston * Written by Daniel Johnston and Bill Anderson * Produced by Pam Peltz * Cassette: Continued Story

The suspicion is that when heartache happens to a Texas male, the mental George Jones jukebox lights up. That’s why the title of Austin savant Daniel Johnston’s “Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” looks like something defiant. But a listen reveals that it’s already too late. No, he hasn’t begun singing in the manner of the East Texas icon, nor is he necessarily drinking too much or missing important engagements. He’s just a woman-sick subject who’s trying to wrap the blues around his head, and he’s chanting those words as an incantation that might chase the existing affliction away.

Johnston, whose level of cult notoriety had upticked after appearing on IRS Presents The Cutting Edge on MTV in August 1985 (in a ragtag episode focusing on Austin), wrote the song with Bill Anderson of the band Texas Instruments, who also plays lead guitar on it. Musician Pam Peltz plays the role of the unattainable, inscrutable female. Stubbornly crude as it is, the track sounded to Johnston regulars like a beefy upgrade.

“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right)” (1986) – The Jazz Butcher * Written and produced by the Jazz Butcher * Label: Glass Records

There’s a type of British ’80s indie rock that’s appealing to American listeners precisely because of its fuzzy and exotic phrasing, wit, and eccentricity. This track by Oxford’s Jazz Butcher is a good example. The attach-a-rap at the beginning, the sort we heard too much of in those days, distinguishes itself by talking about egg-to-potato ratios (sorry, can’t help), while later in the song we hear about the BBC’s Channel 4 and feeling as “sappy as the late George Brown,” a Labour party politician who’d died in 1985 and who bore the Monty Python-esque full title of George Alfred George-Brown, Baron George-Brown.

After the opening rap, though, this song has the power to sink deep into your psyche and do actual healing duties. The main gist is that, in spite of “big questions,” you will inevitably, whenever [choose a doomsday scenario] happens, be all right. You can play ethical ping pong with this – are you receiving this message from a standpoint of privilege, or are they delivering it from one? Do they minimize the potential for misery from any given doomsday scenario? Perhaps, but the healthiest philosophical or religious outlooks will assure that, regardless of what may happen, you will be all right.

“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right),” with an emphasis on the “big questions” section, served as the opening theme for Rich Hall’s Onion World, a talk show that ran on the Comedy Channel from 1990-91. The E.P. it appeared on was billed weirdly to the Jazz Butcher v. Max Eider, alluding to an apparent rivalry between band leader Pat Fish and band member Eider, who would depart after the two came to blows at the end of 1986. But it was all right – they later reunited. After this release, the band would sometimes bill itself as the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy.

“No New Tale to Tell” (1987) – Love and Rockets * Written by David J (words) and Love and Rockets (music) * Produced by Love and Rockets * 45: “No New Tale to Tell” / “Earth Sun Moon” * LP: Earth Sun Moon * Label: Beggar’s Banquet * Billboard charts: #18 (Rock Tracks)

Although they were offshoots of Bauhaus, who were goth rock royalty, Love and Rockets (named after the Hernandez Brothers cult comic) offset their alt aura with a certain bloke-iness. The sounds and personae leaned toward hooks, power chords and male camaraderie, but then leaned further still toward socially trangressive, “going against nature” subject matter.

The lean was the thing. Their 1987 “No New Tale to Tell” is exhibit A: an acoustic chord sequence strums its way through a paradoxical harmonic minor neighborhood (like the Flirtations’ “Nothing But a Heartache”) with a halt-then-skitter cadence like we hear in Manfred Mann’s (not Sweet’s) “Fox on the Run.” If you draw dot-to-dot lines on its notes as played on the bass guitar (D-F-C-A on the fifth and third frets), you get a leaning column, an italicized lower case L, as in “leaning” (not straight) and “love and rockets.”

The title refrain nods toward Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun” motif and the lyrics equate the complications of human nature with the complexities of a flower. Natural but hardly black-and-white. This was a favorite theme of theirs, cf. “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)” and also “Holiday on the Moon,” wherein the lyrical theme of “having a wonderful time” pairs up with with pop music’s traditionally mopiest sequence (Im – VI – VIIb – Im). Love and Rockets’ formula, surprisingly, seemed more palatable to American radio, who gave them the attention that the stations in their native UK did not.

P.S. That’s British flautist Mel Thorpe taking the solo, not Ian Anderson, as you might have suspected.

 

“Go Lil’ Camaro Go” (1987) – Ramones * Written by Dee Dee Ramone * Produced by Daniel Rey and Dee Dee Ramone * LP: Halfway to Sanity * Label: Beggars Banquet

The Ramones and car songs are among America’s greatest exports. “Go Lil’ Camaro Go,” from 1987 — one of the Ramones’ less celebrated eras — is a merger of those two products. Debbie Harry’s vocal contribution reminds us that upper-register female voices in the car crash records of the early sixties signified angels warning of impending tragedy. Songwriter Dee Dee (not to be confused with the Dee Dee of Dick and Dee Dee) also installs a set of healthy “papa oom mow mows,” knowing that all songs with such machinery turn into classics.

“The Race” (1988) – Yello * Written by Boris Blank and Dieter Meier * UK 45: “The Race (video mix)” / “The Race (sporting mix)” / “Another Race” * Produced by Yello * Label: Mercury * Charts: UK singles (#7), US dance (#33)

When you attach the description of “dance duo” to images of the two severe-looking Swiss men who formed Yello, you laugh. The music’s funny, too, but the humor never diluted any of their muscular club-clout. When “The Race” revved up in 1988, with its myriad remixes, clock-in times, and a video showcasing their distinctive visages, they’d already become global discotheque vets with such tracks as “I Love You” (1983) and “Oh Yeah” (1985). Its instrumental hook came directly from Gino Soccio’s “The Dancer,” a disco smash from 1979, which either accounted for Yello’s dance chart success or confirmed Soccio’s absence from recent memory.