a conversation with larry applebaum and uri caine

This is an extended interview, over an hour long. But Uri was one of the more enlightening forces in my development, and he really goes into how one moves through a tradition, develops his own place, and the value of deciding for yourself what your musical priorities are even as people tell you what you should do or how you should operate your career.

If you have a short attention span, this may not be for you. It's an hour long and shot with one camera. In addition, it gets technical in spots. However, if you're into the stuff, it's fantastic.

Valley, Mon Amour

This week, I shall make the trip over the hill, or more accurately, across the Cahuenga Pass, and back to Hollywood. Found a small place I can afford without a roomie.

I really love the Valley. In many ways, it's what I think of as Los Angeles. I don't think of Silverlake or wherever as the end-all. And despite everyone I know making sure I think Hollywood circa 1980 as the greatest place of all time, the Valley is the place where normal Angelenos live and work. Just as are La Puente, Downey, and other similar "bedroom communities". Hipsters have dumped all over the Valley, but it's a real place with real people and not just diletants.

The Valley has been referred to as "America's Suburb" and that may well be true. Enough exterior shots from the sitcoms of our collective youth are here -- most famously The Brady Bunch. Every morning, I walk past the school seen on Malcolm In The Middle, various places I know from Columbo, and on and on. I had memories of the place before I even got here. I've made more records here than anyplace else, too, including what will likely be my last jazz disc (a duo with Bob Dorough, coming soonish).

I'm suited to the Valley. First off, I hate the beach with a fiery passion. The Valley is a great place to go running. Another thing -- there's a ton of mid-century arctitecture here, in tact, and in some inobvious places, like Pacoima, where Big Jim's Family Restaurant is still a great burger and an even better salad bar. Fried ice cream for desert. There's all kinds of 50's/60's retail and eatin' space, some googie, some nouveau western, art deco, some slyly space age. A walk down Magnolia Blvd east of Cahuenga is full of indicators as to how optimistic Los Angeles was after WW2. The apartment buildings and motels point to a sense of playfully exotic entitlement. The names -- Belle-Mar, Dlophin Cove, Laurel Grove -- evoke something tranquil and languid. Probably a way to offset that many days in a summer bake to over 100, and there's no place to hide from the sun.

(Issac Newton Van Nuys, the guy for whom you know what is named, bought the land, divided it into lots and made sure to show it and sell it before mid-February, 1911. Of course, Van Nuys was built practically on the Tyrone Wash, so it could and did flood like nobody's business from the onset of rain.)

I briefly lived just north of Van Nuys, in Panorama City, on Blythe St, basically a gang stronghold. Not long after I left, a drug-related firefight broke out in the building.

North Hollywood/Valley Village has been most of my home for much of the past few years. I first came here in -- I think -- 2004. I was married, and we found a one bedroom in a 50s building on Tujunga, right across from North Hollywood Park (the place in "I Used To Love California"). Indie Coffee had just opened on the NW corner of Lankershim and Magnolia. I loved the neighborhood, my neighbors, the local businesses, all of it. I'd go running every day and notice buildings. Even when I didn't live close to it, I stayed close to it. The Iliad Bookstore is in part of my LA Tour, every bit as much as any known landmark the tourguides show. So are some favorite old houses along Camarillo St, where Bing lived (in a gorgeous home that was razed in the 60s). There's Bob's Big Boy on Riverside, next to that is my favorite Starbucks. Paty's is right there, good omelettes. Go west to Riverside and Lankershim, and there's the Chase bank where you can always spot sitcom actors of the past depositing their checks. The place is a bonanza after the Beverly Garland autograph show. Everyone who ever got killed on Star Trek is there the Monday after, depositing their merch money. There's also Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee, the greatest video store of all time, on Vineland.

Hollywood doesn't exactly want for cool, unique stuff. Spend a day with Art Fein and your head will spin. Everything from cemetaries to hot dogs, records to lampshades, the whole nine.

But because I discovered the Valley by walking around and compiling my own star map (so to speak), I feel a unique personal thing about it, and leaving to move back to the other side of the hill tugs at my heart strings a little.

a valentine to radio, pt 1

Before I remember recognizing any single song in life, I remember radio. I remember loving it before I knew words. I remember knowing how sweet radio was.

If you were born after about 1975, the radio I speak of is an Old Testament creature. The arrival of MTV circa 1982 and the breakthrough of "college radio" revolutionized everything. Not for better, not for worse, but definitely different. There were little patches of the Old Testament left through the 1990's, but it's pretty well gone now.

A young person -- of my generation -- had a very serious attatchment to radio. If a young Philadelphian was at all into music, no matter what kind, he identified himself with his radio station. Radio stations in the western states started with a K -- KRLA, KDAY etc, and back East started with a W, but no self-respecting fan ever said all four letters. The W was silent. My first radio station was Wibbage 100 -- WIBG -- a local Top 40 station that played a wide cross-section of R&B and pop. This was where heard the records I first remembered by name -- "Downtown", "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Sally Sayin' Somethin'". Here's a whiff:



An important rite of passage was one's first radio of his own. Not a handmedown, nor a clock radio, but an independent object. I acquired mine in Cub Scouts, through selling Burpee Seeds. Somehow I remember Boy's Life magazine being a big part of the hook up.

My radio was a 4" olive green square AM transistor radio with an earphone. Not hi-fi. It ran on a 9 volt battery, and it made everything sound like it was recorded over a telephone. I didn't care. It was my private radio, tuned to HAT. WHAT-AM to you. Home of Sonny Hopson, the Mighty Burner.



AM radio is worse than a wasteland now, and FM isn't much better. But in the days of the Mighty Burner, it was the Magic City, with manic energy, night life, cool talk, live commercials (for everything from discoteques to used tire lots), and up to the minute music. Getting there first was part of the job.

Phila's main R&B station as of 1971 was WDAS-FM. The station's pre-eminence coincided with the rise of Gamble & Huff's golden Phila International hit era. The station served the label well, and Gamble & Huff's status as the greatest hitmaking engine of the period gave my city status as the Capitol City of R&B. Hence, a great many notable records were given their first play on DAS.

In the 1970's, music was still mysterious. The amount of it on TV wasn't huge. There was Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and Midnight Special. In both cases, bands played live. For lipsynching, there was Soul Train and American Bandstand. Saturday Night Live still had interesting music. The punk era brought a few more shows in, too. But radio was still king.

During the Bicentennial Summer (1976), Philadelphia was at the center of the universe. The most awaited album since Sgt Pepper -- Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life -- was set to drop in time for back To School sales, which it turned out to be a few weeks late to do (it came out a week before my 11th birthday, which was 10/4/65).

The summer was abuzz about that record. What was on it, who was on it, all that -- totally secret. But as a Bicentennial treat, DAS would be playing a song from the record on Saturday 7/3, at 9 pm. It would be the first song from the album ever aired.

I was staying with my grandmother in South Philly a lot that summer. She lived on Hicks St, a tiny, narrow street just past 16th St, which ran uninterrupted through most of South Philly. She was nearly blind with a bad back, so we stayed to narrow streets wherever possible. Brightly lit, no cars.

In those days, everyone sat on his stoop with a radio, and DAS was one of the big stations in that neighborhood (along with IBG and FIL). You could walk down Hicks St and not miss a minute of DAS back then. Unless the Phils were playing.

On this night in 1976 -- I'll never forget this -- we had gone to the Melrose Diner, my grandmom had coffee. She liked to dunk a donut. I always had rice pudding back then.

Walking home north from Snyder Ave, crisscrossing through the small streets, everyone was sitting out on the stoop, radios plugged in to save battery power, and everyone waiting on the new Stevie Wonder. Turning onto Hicks at Moore, the opening bass notes of "I Wish" gradually became audible. It was dark, humid, we were walking slow. I can still smell my grandmom's cigarette smoke. It all felt like a movie. There was red, white, and blue crepe paper and decorations all over, and school girls were jumping rope in time, and high school kids started dancing in the middle of Hicks St, like it was a giant asphalt dancefloor. It was crowded by the time we crossed onto Morris, and crammed with exuberent bodies by the time we were at Tasker. Butterball (the DJ) had to play it three times in a row, and as I looked all the way north toward Federal St, it was a block party, with Stevie Wonder, firecrackers, and plastic herald trumpets.

All because everyone was waiting by the radio. It is one of the most cherished musical memories I hold.

Ska Ska Ska

Those who know me will tell you, I have a funny relationship to so-called world music. I don't have any Ladysmith Black Mambazo in my collection, can't stand the damn Buena Vista Social Club etc, but I'm a pretty big fan of calypso music through the sixties, Yiddish music, and ... a lot of Jamaican music. Not all, mind you. I'm not cut out for dancehall, and I'm not the biggest Bob Marley fan around, either.

Unfortunately for us, nobody turned on a tape recorder (or a disc or wire recorder) in Jamaica until about 1951, so their legendary jazz scene wasn't really documented. The first studio there was operated by a guy called Stanley Motta, who cut a style called mento, which is the Jamaican version of calyspo. It's more folky, funky, stringed-instrument based and loose-limbed than the more famous Trinidadian stuff. After Motta, another mogul-in-waiting, Ivan Chin, cut a bunch of mento with his group, Chin's Calypso Sextet.

Mento almost had a superstar, Lord Flea (Norman Thomas).


Lord Flea got signed to a major American label (Capitol), made a real good LP, and was featured in a crappy teen flick, Bop Girl Goes Calypso (1957), which starred Bobby Troup and Judy Tyler, known best as the leading lady in Jailhouse Rock Sadly, Flea died in 1959, something to do with his kidneys. Other mento practitioners made it into the next phase of Jamaican music -- ska.

Ska was horn based, with walking bass and skanking guitars. It's forebear was obviously the shuffle rhythms on such records as "Keep A Dollar In Your Pocket" by Roy Milton, which were really popular among local "sound system" dee jays, who spun at dances around Kingston.


Ska has had a longer and more complex development than most Americans know. Its roots are jazz and jump blues, and -- seriously -- ska was in its way the most singular modern blues form. At this point it is hard to think of ska that way, but to hear "Midnight Track" by Owen Gray is to hear Wynonie Harris' West Indian cousin, so to speak. Ska was often referred to as "bluebeat" in its heydey.




John Lennon referred to the instrumental break on the Beatles' "I Call Your Name" as 'the bluebeat part'. Go to 1:10 in this clip and check it out.


The core band of ska -- the style's Funk Brothers analog -- was the Skatalites, several of whom first met or played together in The Alpha Cottage School, a sort of reform school for wayward boys. Influential singer Desmond Dekker also metriculated there. The Skatalites played on most of the influential ska records. At Alpha, they learned how to sightread music real well, and they considered themselves jazz musicians. Listening to the solos on the records on which they played, we see they were really good jazz players.


Ska was gangster music. The very influential Prince Buster was a real live tough guy, and one of the most charismatic artists of ska's golden period.



By about 1965, the sounds of soul had supplanted jump blues as the core influence on Jamaicans, and the smoother rocksteady took over. This Delroy Wilson record is a nice example.


About 13 years later, the Specials would reinvestigate ska in a whole new way, one that would make them the greatest band of their era.