Never Grow Old: R.I.P. 2018

Date

January 11, 2019

Miracler

Toby Barlow

Location

Detroit

Happy Happy 2019, Miraclers! 

I miss you guys! And I miss your mixes. I really miss them. Should we get back to making 'em? Let me know what you think. My schedule's gotten better lately, so I'd be up for it if you were. 

By the way, Blogger is a buggy little bastard, and its newest trick is turning some copy randomly red, so when you see RED TYPE in any copy below, please know it's an unrequested, unfixable gift, very bright gift.

For now, I give you the one mix we CAN count on here, year after year. Where would we be without our Minister of Miracle Maker Mortality? So much love and gratitude from Your Hostess to Toby for the research, artist/track deciding (drumroll please for his Aretha choice!), track purchasing, sequencing, writing, and all the other shenanigans that went into creating this sweeping 22-song opus for us this year. And then there's all the other ones, too. If you really want feel mortal, take a stroll down Grim Reaper Lane to past RIP years: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015,and 2016 and 2017.

A single request of you: If you dig this mix, please leave a little comment below—That's it! Oodles of thanks, XOK And with that, may I present...

NEVER GROW OLD: RIP 2018

Algia Mae Hinton was born in 1929. She was an African American blues guitarist out of North Carolina. She passed away just last February. She was black. She was a woman. She lived in the South. If you’re up against anything, well, imagine what Algia must have been up against. And so get over it.

And while you’re busy imagining things, imagine being a lonely suburban housewife back in suburban Kansas City when the movie “Love Story” came out. It was so mainstream, everyone saw it. This tune was everywhere, probably being piped in through speakers down at the Hamburger Hamlet while little girls played with the umbrellas in their Shirley Temples and wondered why their mommy looked so sad. So unbelievably romantic. Too romantic, really, for America. No wonder everyone started having affairs. And got divorced. And messed up everyone’s lives. The composer who destroyed our country with this song, Francis Lai, was born in Nice, France. And he died in Nice, France.

As Doug Patterson likes to point out, there is nothing better than on this earth than the Staples Singers. Yvonne Staples passed away in April. Now I believe only Mavis is left. Go watch “The Last Waltz” to see the whole wonderful family in action. And they’re probably the only ones on that stage who weren’t totally blitzed out of their minds on cocaine.

When I was a kid I loved to dance at my mom’s big crazy leftist DC parties. Mostly we danced to Motown. Which means mostly we danced to the Funk Brothers. Wah Wah Watson was a serious Funk Brother. So was Eddie “Chank” Willis. According to musicologists, the Funk Brothers played on more number-one hits than the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys combined. Maybe. But, certainly, more people danced to them.

Farewell Charles Aznavour. “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” Jean Cocteau.

When I was discovering punk rock and new wave as a lonely teenager, I was living in a little house up on the little mesa in Bolinas where you could barely get reception from Bay Area underground radio. That’s where I first heard The Residents and, man, The Residents were way too weird for me. They still are. But they were also important, they sound like they’re standing out there on the edge of town, on a pile of old electrical refuse, their giant eyeballs reflected in the oil stained puddles that glow and shimmer and stink. Rest in peace Hardy Fox, founding member and driving force.

Nokie Edwards was everything you loved about The Ventures’ sound. So, in a sense, he invented everything you feel about Southern California and surfing and rock and roll at a certain time. And when I was growing up, I also thought the sound was new wave. Which is funny, because if you listen closely, he’s actually playing country.

(While we’re on the subject of country, Roy Clark died. I always thought Roy Clark was Oliver Hardy to Buck Owen’s Stan Laurel on the old Hee-Haw show. I never thought that show was particularly funny, but I watched it a lot.)

Okay, stop everything, this song, this song, I mean, right? Jesus, have things always been this screwed up? Or was there some golden era around 1872 when everything was maybe pretty good? Anyway, Dennis Edwards, who sang lead for the Temptations, passed away. Damn it.

The Jive Five. Doo-wop. These guys were tenacious. They started in the 1950’s and were still recording bumpers for Nickelodeon up through the 1990’s. We like to see that kind of hustle. The group was started by Eugene Pitt who just kept it going. Hard to believe anything could stop him.

Speaking of unstoppable, Little Sammy Davis traveled through the south playing medicine shows with the likes of Ike Turner, Albert King, and Earl Hooker. He played with Muddy Waters. Little Sammy made it till he was 89. Some people just muscle through.

Tony Joe White. I was torn whether I should put this song or “Polk Salad Annie.” The latter is a better pop tune in some ways. But this particular number captures something that floats out there in the aura just beyond what a pop song can normally do. But go listen to Polk Salad Annie too, cuz it’s a good drinkin’ and fuckin’ song.

Alan Longmuir was the bass player for the Scottish band The Bay City Rollers. In 1976, at the peak of their popularity, Alan was fired from the band. Their manager claimed Alan was unstable and had tried to kill himself. 40 years later Alan died after a holiday vacation in Mexico. Fun fact: they named their band after Bay City, Michigan totally randomly. Pretty much just threw a dart at a map.

Scott Hutchinson’s songs for Frightened Rabbit always sounded like they were written and sung by a really very unhappy fellow who probably wasn’t going to stick around for long. And, sadly, he didn’t. But his music is still pretty damn lovely. In small doses (if you listen to a lot of it at once it might make you, um, very depressed.)

Both The Fall and The Buzzcocks were UK bands that never quite made the leap over to our shores the way other punk bands did. Maybe that was for the best. They stayed cool instead of being ruined by America’s habit of playing everything to fucking death. Speaking of death, RIP Mark Smith and Pete Shelley. (By the way, back in the pre- MTV days, the video for Pete Shelley’s solo hit “Homosapien” used to play before Rocky Horror midnight screenings down at the Key Theater in Georgetown and that was a totally formative cultural moment for me.)

Okay, I don’t love the Cranberries. So, a bittersweet goodbye to Dolores O’Riordan who was sort of a stand-in vanilla Sinead O’Conner before we replaced Dolores with the tougher, cooler Shirley Manson. But I don’t mean that with any disrespect. Like all of us, to paraphrase boxing great Joe Louis, she did the best she could with what she had. And this is a pretty decent tune. While we’re on the subject of people who passed and whose music we didn’t absolutely love, one of the Lynyrd Skynyrd guys left, so did a key member of The Moody Blues and one of the guys from Foghat. You get the picture.

But you gotta love Lovebug Starksi. Come on. He came out of the Bronx with all the guys from The Furious Five. He worked the rooftop roller rink in Harlem in the 80’s. He may have even coined the term “Hip-hop.” He had a good run and died while moving speakers out of his Vegas apartment.

Lowrell Simon pulled together the band The Lost Generation with some Chicago friends. You can feel them trying to ride the Curtis Mayfield vibe on some of their stuff. Point is, there was a lot of good soul floating around back in the day, shit we don’t even know about.

When Koko Taylor died back in 2009, the mantle of “Queen of the Blues” was passed onto Denise LaSalle. Not sure who has that particular crown now that Denise has left.

I saw the Neville Brothers in 1989 at the Warfield Theater and it was, not surprisingly but also, at the time, for me, very surprisingly, nothing short of a completely religious experience. Charles Neville played sax with his brothers, a skill that particularly shines on this Grammy winning tune. Seriously, these guys were so amazingly good.

Another fun fact: George Orwell, who coined the phrase “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves” died when he was only 46. The fucker never even got to 50. So there you go. When Conway Savage died at 58, the keyboard player for The Bad Seeds looked like someone who didn’t just play all those dark Nick Cave songs, he fucking lived them. Keith Richards can survive, sure, but turns out not everyone else can.

Finally, Aretha. Lots of people here in Detroit have Aretha stories. I have a few. Some light. Some a little darker. But all of them make you respect the woman for what she did. Liz and I saw her perform one summer night a few years ago. She came on late. She dropped her fur on stage mid-song. The river shimmered behind her. And that night, as far as I could tell, she owned the whole entire world and everything was beautiful. 

Mix is UP. Check your email for the current password. Please comment! Just click on the 'Comment' button below the post and write something. See you back here or on our members-only Facebook page soon. XOK