Rocky Roberts (Charles Roberts) was a onetime professional boxer turned singer who, along with his group The Airedales, helped introduce soul music to Italy in the 1960s.

Roberts got his start as the frontman in South Florida dance band Doug Fowlkes & The Airdales. But, it wasn’t until Fowlkes and Roberts joined the Navy and ended up in Europe that they encountered success as Rocky Roberts and The Airedales. Discovered by popular Italian deejays Gianni Boncompagni and Renzo Arbore, Rocky and his group became over-night stars. Rocky’s fluid dance moves and groovy fashion sense was a big hit with Italian teenagers.

In 1963, The Airedales disbanded and Rocky continued to produce hits as a solo act. Along with Stevie Wonder and Wilson Pickett, Roberts was the most famous Black singer in Italy during the mid-to-late sixties.He became a popular attraction on Italian television and even starred in a couple of movies. He sang the English version of the title track of spaghetti western classic Django. His popularity spread across the Continent to include France and Britain.

Roberts returned to the USA for awhile but eventually returned to Italy where he continued to perform up until his death in 2005 in Rome.

In Britain, his song ‘Just Because Of You’ was a hit among fans of mod soul and still gets played at Northern Soul all-niters.

While dripping with sartorial coolness, Rockey’s trademark sunglasses were not just for show. They covered up scar tissue around his left eye acquired doing his old boxing days. 

Rocky’s bandmate Jerry Armstrong recalls the early days…

[...] we formed the group while serving in the U.S. Navy at Boca Chica Naval Air Station, Key West Florida. We first practiced in the old base theater, beginning our trek in 1958. In 1959 we were transferred to the U.S.S. Independence, CVA-62 (Aircraft Carrier) and served aboard her until we were all discharged in 1962. We made two trips to Europe on the Indy and during the first trip entered a rock and roll contest in France and won first place. Eddie Barclay, the International Banker, saw us and liked us and signed us to a recording contract with his Barclay Records label. We later recorded for ATCO in New York City. While the band did well up and down the East Coast of the U.S. from Key West to New York City, we were most popular in Europe, with France, Greece, and Italy being countries that most favored our music. We cut several albums and EPs. In 1963, the band split and members went separate ways. Roberts took the band’s name and went back to Europe where he did very well in the music business with new members.

Here’s a little compilation of Rocky on film and video. It includes some footage with Jayne Mansfield from The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield and the theme song from Django.
 

 
Via Dorian Cope’s always interesting On This Deity website, we find that today is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Sex Pistols expletive-filled appearance on the Today program, December 1, 1976:

Today we recall the bizarre events of thirty-four years ago, in which television presenter Bill Grundy – clearly ill-prepared for the motley posse sat before him, and possibly himself quite drunk – half-wittedly and quite inadvertently handed to the already notorious Sex Pistols the kind of extraordinary media opportunity that was beyond even the wildest dreams of their Machiavellian manager, Malcolm McLaren. Goading the Pistols mercilessly and without good reason, Grundy then appeared genuinely shocked when the lawless (and law-breaking) Steve Jones – resplendent in Vivienne Westwood’s highly inappropriate ‘tits’ t-shirt – unleashed such a barrage of ‘fucks’ and ‘fuckers’ that this merely regional early evening TV news programme catapulted the Sex Pistols onto the national stage. Nobody outside London even saw it. What did they actually say? Overnight, the Sex Pistols legend grew enormous.

Within months, Grundy would be relegated to presenting a book programme on the radio; while the Today programme was cancelled soon after. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that the Sex Pistols were opportunists. But what an opportunity it was that the fool Bill Grundy had handed them. Indeed, we may now even feel pity for this hapless, smarmy half-cut oaf whose destiny it was to be cut down brutally by the fearless and flashing curses of Steve “Never Mind the Bollocks” Jones.

The clip below was put together from various sources. You always see a snippet of this appearance in every single documentary about punk, but never the full thing seen on British television that fateful day. Note future Banshees, Steven Severin and a white-tressed (and flirty) Siouxsie Sioux onstage with the group.
 

 
TONTO (an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra) is a massive electronic music production center built by Malcolm Cecil in the late 60’s and used on the two Tonto’s Expanding Head Band records, but most notably on the great early 70’s records by Stevie Wonder. Here’s a wonderful new clip of Cecil describing and demonstrating the mighty beast’s magical powers. Look, learn and (if you’re me) salivate.
 

 
More TONTO after the jump…

 
The last batch of unsold Miles Davis paintings will be exhibited at the Gallery 27 space in London starting this week. I’ve seen some of his art “in person” in the past and some of it is just spectacular, exactly what you’d hope paintings by Miles Davis would be like. Not a disappointment in the least. If I was in London, I’d definitely make time to see this. Via MOJO:

Miles Davis - jazz legend, trumpet guru and dab hand with a pencil - spent the last decade of his life creating swathes of drawings and paintings that for the most part have been kept away from the public gaze. Until now…

A new exhibition at Gallery 27 in London’s Mayfair will open on December 7 and is set to unveil his last remaining 100 original drawings and oil paintings.

“As with his music, his artwork changed continually,” says exhbitor Andy Clarke, “from rapid, motion-filled drawings of dancers and robots to his later more Tribal work in oils on canvas. In the early 80’s his muse was Giulia Trojer, from whom part of this collection derives. In the last few years of his life, alongside his last partner, Jo Gelbard, he turned to painting citing Picasso a great influence alongside his African heritage.”

Miles Davis London Exhibition: Original Paintings and Drawings by the Jazz Legend runs from Tuesday, December 7 to Saturday, December 11 at Gallery 27, 27 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG.
 

 

 
More Miles Davis on Dangerous Minds

 
Since the post about the individual tracks that comprise the Rolling Stones’ classic “Gimme Shelter” went over so well, here’s another in a similar vein, a track by track breakdown of “Helter Skelter” by the Beatles. 

This is probably as close as it is possible to be in the recording studio with the Beatles during the White Album sessions in 1968. Record producer Chris Thomas, then a “tea boy”/intern at EMI later said of this session:  “While Paul was doing his vocal, George Harrison had set fire to an ashtray and was running around the studio with it above his head, doing an “Arthur Brown.”

If you’re really bored you can open them all up in different windows and try to sync ‘em up…

First McCartney’s frenzied vocal. Superb! How do you improve on something like this? You don’t because It’s fucking perfection. “It’s coming down fast….!”
 

 
After the jump, hear the guitar, bass and drum tracks!

 
Here’s a touching story about New York City subway crooner, Geechee Dan, from the delightful mini series Playing For Pocket Change. This man has soul and then some. Rock on, Singing Dragon!

Playing For Pocket Change is a mini series featuring musicians playing on the streets and in the subways of New York City. Often overlooked and ignored, we find out who these people are and what makes them want play in the world’s strangest venue.

Watch Episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

 
The Carpenters were fucking awesome. I say that without a trace of irony. And here is the video for their entirely sincere late 70’s single Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day) which is goofy as hell, but man those vocals just melt me down to a puddle. Believe.
 

 
The original by Klaatu after the jump…

 
David Lynch is releasing two singles Good Day Today and I Know on the UK independent label Sunday Best, as he told the Observer his first solo release Good Day Today came to him unprompted:

“I was just sitting and these notes came and then I went down and started working with Dean [Hurley, his engineer] and then these few notes, ‘I want to have a good day, today’ came and the song was built around that,” he said. Unlike his famously ambiguous and non-linear films, the song is accessible and, he readily admits, has a catchy “feel-good chorus”, with undertones of angsty electro-popsters Crystal Castles or veteran dance act Underworld. Why did he turn to electro for his first solo single? “Well, I love electricity so it sort of stands to reason that I would like electronics.”

The full interview with David Lynch can be heard here.
 
 

 
With thanks to Tommy Udo
 

 
Holy shit is this revelatory. Wonderfully demonstrates how the Rolling Stones sound is more than just the sum of its parts, with the component tracks of one of their key songs, “Gimme Shelter,” from 1969’s Let it Bleed album.

The vocal harmonies of Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton are nothing short of astonishing, heard naked here. Clayton’s performance was one of the most significant contributions of a woman to a Stones number.  “Rape, murder; It’s just a shot away, It’s just a shot away…” Listen to what happens to her voice at about 2:30 to 3:00 minutes in. Fantastic! (Clayton’s great cover version of “Gimme Shelter” would enter the Billboard Top 100 charts the following year).
 

 
The separate tracks for bass, guitar, 2nd guitar and piano, and drums, too, after the jump…

 
I’ve always been a sucker for the distinct musical genre of “torch songs” and a huge admirer of certain torch singers. A torch song tells sorrowful tales of longing for a love lost, romantic misfortune and of life’s harsher experiences. I’d say that a torch singer must have truly lived to sing in a manner worthy of the definition, and in this way, it is often world weary voices (think late-period Marianne Faithful) or somewhat idiosyncratic vocalists who dominate the field. The dominant image of the torch singer is a woman bathed in a nightclub spotlight telling bleak tales of love, passion, betrayal and hurt.

The greatest torch singers are probably Édith Piaf, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday. Much of what Dusty Springfield sang and a lot of Cher’s solo material from the 60s and 70s would fall into the torch song category (such as her sublime tearjerker, “A Woman’s Story. which I have blogged about here before). Sade is certainly a torch singer. The pathos of Susan Boyle’s rather lonely backstory—coupled with Simon Cowell’s expert choice in material—would certainly put her firmly in the torch singer category. Amy Winehouse’s tabloid travails with drugs and alcohol make her an honorary member of this sisterhood, too.

Piers Ford, the proprietor of the The Art of the Torch Singer blog has a nicely “elastic” take on what makes a torch singer:

“Torch-singing is not limited by the genre of the music. It’s more about a sensibility evoked by a combination of the singer, her voice, the melody, the story, her performance and the lyric, that touches the listener in a special way. It’s a mood. A particular sound.”

In an interview with Cabaret Confessional, Ford offered this more nuanced definition of what makes a vocalist into a torch singer:

“[T]he ability to tell a story in song, with emotional conviction. Singers like these can hold a room in the palm of their hands, make the audience identify in a single note or word with the experience that they are singing about. It’s a very rare gift and not something that comes simply with being a professional singer. Acting comes into it, to an extent, but it’s also about using experience to render the lyrics authentic in that particular moment. I really don’t think you need to have experienced the clichéd excesses of a Judy Garland-style life to be an effective torch singer or cabaret performer, or even to have gone through the actual dramas that you might be singing about. But what the singers you mention – and many others I’ve encountered - all share is an ability to draw on their own life experiences to render a song “real”. Of course as the listener, you may or may not know something of their private lives. Sometimes that knowledge will make a performance more poignant, and obviously that’s what a lot of people are tuning into when they listen to the great torch singers – Garland, Holiday, Piaf. Perhaps it’s also partly why people turn out in droves for a Whitney Houston arena show, or why a low-key Amy Winehouse gig in north London excites such interest. But mostly, in the more intimate setting of cabaret where the torch singer really comes into her own, you’re responding to the honesty and clarity of an interpretation in the moment rather than the singer’s back-story and I think that’s where torch singing and cabaret coincide.

Elsewhere, Ford describes how torch singers, typically performing in cabaret settings, where food and drink was being served, had to pull out all the stops to get chattering audiences to pay attention. Cabaret would be the way to cut your teeth as a performer of this kind of music and I think this observation is a good one. Cabaret performers tend to flex different muscles when they’re before an audience than other types of singers, and so this, too, would be a big factor in how the form evolved. A torch song isn’t merely a love song, it’s something bigger, grander, deeper.

There are also several male artists who could be called torch singers: Gene Pitney, Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Antony Hegarty and perhaps the greatest male torch singer of all time, Marc Almond (who I have written about several times on Dangerous Minds) have all performed material that fits squarely in the genre, although we tend to think of females when the term is used.

It’s not a style of music that’s for everyone, I’ll grant you. Not everybody wants to listen to something weepy and depressing that will make them cry. But if you are someone who appreciates bleak songs of devastating emotional loss, may I point you in the direction of this incredible video for “Because You’re Gone,” from the new album, Genderful by Little Annie Bandez & Paul Wallfisch (Southern Records).

Little Annie—who has also recently been a collaborator with Antony and the Johnsons, Marc Almond and Baby Dee—does something so minimalist, yet so magnificent and powerfully moving here. I must have played this video twenty times yesterday listening to this song. Play this a couple of times before you move on (it’s short!), this performance is absolutely worthy of your attention, I promise you. This woman is an American cultural treasure, it’s a crime this has only had 10,000 views as of this writing. Video directed by David Merten.