Idiot's Delight tonight

[womzilla]

If I spend Saturday evening at home, I try to listen to Vin Sclesa's Idiot's Delight, a four-hour freeform show combining chat with interesting people with music from Vin's exhaustive rock-and-jazz library.

Tonight, he has had two guests. The first was singer Syd Straw (formerly of the Golden Palaminos, etc.). A fun interview, and a lovely voice.

The other is Ken Emerson, whose most recent book, Always Magic in the Air, was recently recommended by supergee. This is a history of the "Brill Building" songwriters, who created a large percentage of the interesting pop music during the period between the first flourishing of rock'n'roll (1954-58) and the British Invasion (1963-on); a longer review appeared in The New York Review of Books late last year.

Emerson also wrote a book about Stephen Foster (Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture), and the crossover is that Straw sang what Emerson considered to be the definitive version of one of Foster's songs, "Hard Times".

Anyway, the vast majority of the show has been an exploration of Always Magic in the Air, and has been an utter delight. It should show up in WFUV's Idiot's Delight archives sometime in the next few days, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the less-explored portions of the early history of rock-and-roll--the parts that fell between the cracks.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Damn! I collect versions of "Hard Times." I would have loved to hear Syd Straw's.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

I have wanted this book to exist for years! Thanks for the notice!

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

This is a history of the "Brill Building" songwriters, who created a large percentage of the interesting pop music during the period between the first flourishing of rock'n'roll (1954-58) and the British Invasion (1963-on)

Want it want it want it

I am a guy who checks out old Bobby Vee LPs to see if they have otherwise unrecorded Goffin-King songs on them...

A woman in my neighborhood was working for a while in the Brill Bldg. and said that Paul Simon still has an office there (presumably from his days as 1/2 of Tom & Jerry).

Hard Times (for These Times)

[(Anonymous)]

Kate and Anna McGarrigle do a fine version of this song on the soundtrack to Ken Burns's "Civil Wars" series.

It was Ken Emerson who got me to listen seriously to the Kinks in the late 1970s, via his essay on the group (containing such lovely phrases as "a pop Marxist -- no one since Balzac has insisted on the importance of class" and a stunning contrast of the Kinks's versus Herman's Hermits's version of "Dandy") in *The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.* Curiously enough, teasers for the volume appeared in *Rolling Stone* itself, Ellen Willis on Janis Joplin (Willis made me a CCR fan with her essay in the volume) and Greg Shaw on (dramatic pause) Brill Building Pop. The subject definitely deserves a book of its own, and Emerson sounds like the man to do it justice.

Let's turkey trot! declares the Anonymous Sparrow.