Vintage Track: Faye Adams “The Hammer”
New Jersey native Faye Adams had a string of R&B hits in the early-to-mid 1950s. Born in 1923 as Fay Tuell, she began her career at age five alongside her two older siblings as the Tuell Sisters gospel group, regularly appearing on Newark radio broadcasts. She became a staple of the NYC nightclub circuit after marrying Tommy Scruggs in 1942. However, it wasn’t until legendary R&B songstress Ruth Brown spotted Fay during a performance in Atlanta, nearly a decade later, that the singer earned an audition and was subsequently signed to Herald Records.
Under her new stage name Faye Adams, the singer quickly found success fronting the band of labelmate Joe Morris. In 1953, the group released a pair of singles that reached number one on the U.S. R&B charts: “Shake A Hand” and “I’ll Be True.” The former would be Adams’s biggest hit, sitting atop the charts for eight weeks. She continued to have moderate success both as a solo performer and with Morris’ band over the next couple of years. By January of 1955, Adams had sold more than 2 million records for Herald.
By the end of the decade, the public’s demand had shifted from traditional R&B to the rock n’ roll stylings of Elvis and his African American predecessors. As a result, Adams gave up the game and headed back to New Jersey to focus on family, rediscovering her gospel roots. Adams earned a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in 1998 for her contribution to the genre.
Her single “The Hammer” has been included in a terrific new compilation called Jukebox Mambo. The compilation is available in a stunning book featuring six, 10″ vinyls on Jazzman Records. Jukebox Mambo is available on CD and digital download for the non-vinyl enthusiast. “The Hammer” was originally released in 1956 as the b-side to “Anytime, Any Place, Anywhere.” The track is bookended by Adams’s haunting howls, with the band working itself up to a confident saunter in between. Listen to the track and check out the packaging for Jukebox Mambo below.
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Written by Rob Peoni
Album Review: Allah-Las ‘Self-Titled’
“We live in a post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history. And at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters.”
-Bruce Springsteen
Critics have written an understandable narrative around Allah-Las’ debut, self-titled LP that centers around an argument that the band’s sound is of an earlier era. Each review comes with a requisite laundry list of comparisons that chronicle the godfathers of late 1960s garage rock. Fellow Indianapolis writer Justin Wesley summed this up as well as anyone in his excellent review for The Silver Tongue, saying: “The songs get more lived-in with every obsessive listen; soon enough, you’re assuming a rewritten history where Allah-Las had a string of late ‘60s #1s, and you know their iconic history from Little Steven’s Underground Garage, vintage super 8 films, tell-all bestsellers and their late-career resurgence as touring relics.”
This is true. There are certainly traces of The Zombies, The Kinks, The Byrds and a litany of more obscure references in the analog production found on Allah-Las. My dispute has nothing to do with the validity of these comparisons, but rather the assumption that garage rock is something of an earlier time. For 50 years, the genre has been a mainstay in popular music, albeit with relative swells in relevance. At this point, it’s an essential element in the compound that forms our understanding of American culture. As such, bands like Allah-Las serve less as revivalists, and more as participants in an ongoing conversation.
By the same logic, we don’t consider pulling over for a roadside cheeseburger a nostalgic return to 1950s car culture. Cheeseburgers are no more of that decade than garage rock is of the one following. They’re timeless – part of our DNA. It just so happens that Allah-Las is no ordinary debut, characterized by a romantic sloppiness and an excess of fuzz. It’s informed, polished, and deserving of consideration with artists whose work defined the genre, which makes the comparisons all the more tempting.
The songwriting is as timeless as the tube amps that carry it to fruition. On the murder ballad “Busman’s Holiday,” lead singer Miles Michaud crafts a tale of a soldier’s return home to discover his woman in the arms of another man. The storyline is as readily applicable to 1945 or 1975 as 2012. Women are everywhere on this record. “Catalina” contains all of the crystallized regret of The Stones’ 1971 classic “Dead Flowers.” Follow-up “Vis-A-Vis” is a meditation on the sweet, innocence of young love and the pangs of longing that an old photo can inspire. Even the Spanish-tinged instrumental “Ela Navega” calls to mind a tipsy tango in the courtyard at dusk.
Garage rock may not be as cerebral as jazz or as old-timey as the railroad songs that inspired Dylan, but for those of us under the age of 60, this sound is as much a part of our heritage as anything created in the public houses of New Orleans or hills of Appalachia. Grab Allah-Las’ self-titled debut on CD or vinyl from your local record store. Download via iTunes.
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Written by Rob Peoni
Album Review: PremRock ‘Mark’s Wild Years’
With the type of year hip hop is having in 2012, it’s no surprise that the genre is opening more lanes than ever. So much so that it didn’t seem the least bit strange to me that New York rapper PremRock decided to release an album completely inspired by Tom Waits songs. While there might not seem to be a lot of similarities between Waits’s music and hip hop, PremRock and his cast of talented producers found a way to twist Waits’ words, concepts, and sounds into a cohesive collection of songs that both build on Waits’ legacy and firmly establish PremRock as one of the best MC’s in the game.
While I’m only casually familiar with Tom Waits’s music, PremRock is clearly a big fan. Every song title and the majority of the music on Mark’s Wild Years is taken from Waits songs, and it’s not just a bunch of random PremRock songs over Tom Waits samples. PremRock preserves the soul of every Waits song, simply putting his own twist on the established material. This style of composition, combined with PremRock’s intricate flow, give this project a lot of potential for replay value, from both the album itself as well as from the original Waits songs. The creative concept had me pulling up all the Waits songs I wasn’t familiar with on Youtube to hear how PremRock interpreted them. PremRock and his producers consistently manage to strike the right balance between creating something original while remaining true to the source material.
I featured the lead single “Step Right Up” in a Rapper to Watch post for Thought on Tracks last month, the song’s up-tempo feel and brilliant, straightforward use of the Waits original by Yuri Beats make it the perfect introduction to the project. Waits’s “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” is flipped into “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Prague” on one of the albums best beats from Steel Tipped Dove. PremRock strips the framework from the Waits song down and rebuilds it in an eerie setting that allows him to flex his improving knack for detail oriented storytelling. “Temptation” is one of my favorite Waits songs, so it’s fitting that PremRock’s version comes with a verse from one of my favorite MC’s, billy woods. Zilla Rocca supplies one of the album’s many, great piano-driven beats and woods cleverly namedrops Brandon Weeden in his expectedly excellent appearance.
The Yuri Beats produced “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, with its sing-along chorus, is the most fun song on the project and also seems pretty central to PremRock’s live-in-the-moment message found throughout Mark’s Wild Years. PremRock shows off his versatility on “She Took All My Money”, metaphorically discussing the effects of alcohol abuse over yet another great beat from Steel Tipped Dove.
The album closes strong with possibly the two best songs in “Drunk On The Moon (Ain’t Got You)” and “Dirt In The Ground”. On the former, frequent PremRock collaborator Willie Green utilizes the melody from the Waits original perfectly and PremRock pens one of his best songs to date, sounding as comfortable on the mic as he ever has while reminiscing on lost loves from a pub bar stool. The song may be the best example of what PremRock has in common artistically with Tom Waits and shows why he thought (correctly) that this project would be such a good idea. The album closer “Dirt In The Ground” is a soulful capper to what amounts to an extremely ambitious project from the New York MC. The song and the album are both the type of music you’d expect to be made by someone more established in their craft. Even though PremRock is essentially giving this album away, its consistent quality in the wake of last year’s excellent collaboration with Willie Green. Both releases prove that he is here to stay. Listen and name your price for a digital download of Mark’s Wild Years below.
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Written by John Bugbee
Thought on Tracks 