One For The Weekend: Clete Grayson and the Thurston Trio

Here's a swingin' spin on an Eden Ahbez classic by Clete Grayson and crew featured on Angela Wheeler's Retro-Obscuro #155.  

Listen to Angela Wheeler's Retro-Obscuro #155 mix right here. Check the track listing below. 

Retro-Obscuro #155

The Clefts - Come On

The US Group - Little Bit Of Something (Is Better Than A Whole Lot Of Nothing)

Art Roberts - Give Her The Ax, Max

Barrel House Blott - Chicks, Going Crazy

The Four Evers - If I Were A Magician

Debra Ferrara - These Boots Are Made For Walking

Clete Grayson And The Thurston Trio - Nature Girl (Nature Boy)

Cecil Foutch And The Keys - Big Wheel

Jerry Woodard And His Esquires - Romeo And Juliet

Milt Herth And His Trio - Herthquake Boogie

Shooby Taylor (The Human Horn) - Indiana

The Jury - You'd Better Be On Your Way

Edd Byrnes - Like I Love You

Lynn Cornell - Like Love

Curley Jim And The Billey Rocks - Rock And Roll Itch

Dick And Dee Dee - Boys And Girls

The Emotions - Come Dance Baby

The Sweet Acids - That Creature

Don McKnight And The Debonaires - Strange

Jesse James Sims - Jesse Loves You

The Johnny Otis Show - Willie Did The Cha Cha

Eddie Boyd - Where You Belong

Napua Stevens - I Want To Learn To Speak Hawaiian

Huey And Jerry - Little Chickie Wah Wah

The Tree Stumps - Jennie Lee

Larry Bright - Bloodhound

Roy "The Hound" Hall - Flood Of Love

Harvey And The Phenomenals - T.G.I.F.

Debbie Lori Kaye - Could That Be

The Olympics - I'll Never Fall In Love

David Clayton Thomas And The Bossmen - Brain Washed

Junior Thompson With The Meteors - Mama's Little Baby

Kenny Walker - You're Puttin' Me On

The 4 Of Us - You Gonna Be Mine 

4th Street Exit - Strange One

Jack Turner - Stark, Staring Madly In Love

Little Billy And The Essentials - Steady Girl

Los Ovni's - Please, Please

Nolan Strong And The Diablos - You Are

Mike Hanks And The Del-Phis - I Think About You

Nick Waterhouse hits Lee's Palace, Sunday

Nick Waterhouse returns to Toronto to present songs from his latest album, The Fooler at Lee's Palace on Sunday night. 

Here's the scoop on The Fooler...

The title of the sixth album from Californian singer-songwriter Nick Waterhouse is more than just the name of one of its tracks. The Fooler is both a clue and a red herring. The Fooler is the observed and the observer, narrator and subject, truth and lie. The Fooler is the shadow and reflection of a city the artist knows sufficiently well to wander with his eyes closed, and a place which very possibly never even existed. The Fooler is not so much an unreliable narrator as a constantly shifting perspective.

The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it’s a lot. Recorded by Mark Neill (Black Keys; Los Straightjackets; Dave Cobb) in Valdosta, Georgia, it’s a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizens. “Many of the stories come from a feeling of plasticity,” says Waterhouse. “What is memory? What is time? What is love between two human beings like in this imaginary city? A phase shift occurred writing this record. I had a breakthrough in how to tell stories in songs, like an epiphany. I started realising how I could bend time in a lot of the things that weave through the record. I have a perspective as a narrator now, instead of being the occupant of the songs.”

Waterhouse released his debut album, Time’s All Gone, in 2012. His last record, Promenade Blue, came out in 2021. In his music you will hear echoes of things you might think you know, or believe you remember, filtered through the lens of a unique artistic perspective. You will hear rhythm and blues, garage rock, radio soul and wee-small-hours balladry – but reconfigured, made new. In Waterhouse’s music, the time is both now and then. The past is the present is the future. The sound is classic yet unclassifiable.

The Fooler was produced by Neill in his Soil of the South studio in Valdosta, Georgia. A former room in a ballet school, Soil of the South is in the great tradition of American studios such as Chess and Sun. “Not the place that looks like a spaceship, more like the place that looks like a dentist office in 1965,” says Waterhouse. They tracked the album fast near the end of 2021. A further handful of days for overdubs and mixing early in 2022 and it was finished. “Making this record was like going to see the kung fu master on the mountain,” says Waterhouse. “You can probably draw a through line from my first record to this one, but this is something else entirely. The sonic landscape Mark designed is so much further into space, with reverb and depth.”

The result is a record that offers up new riches and fresh perspectives with every spin. From the hidden corners of ‘Hide & Seek’ and the roadhouse soul of ‘Play To Win’ to the primitive, attitudinal, chugging two-chord thrill of ‘Late In The Garden’, it builds inexorably to the drama of the title track and pulsing roll-and-rock of the final pay off, ‘Unreal, Immaterial’. Play it once and it sounds immediately like a collection of great songs. Play it again – and you will – and it feels like a novel or film slowly unveiling its secrets, kaleidoscopic in its narrative complexity. “Especially during this record, I started just becoming what Allen Ginsberg called a pure breath,” says the artist. “I was becoming pure breath with my ideas.”

Get tickets for Nick Waterhouse's show at Lee's Palace on Sunday (April 28) right here. Check out a couple of clips below. 

 

Happy Birthday Tom Waits!

Celebrating Tom's birthday with an Iggy Pop chat (check the link below) and Tom's Fernwood 2 Night appearance from 1977.

Iggy and Tom press play on some fave tunes for each other and discuss them for two hours right here.  

Happy Birthday Eden Ahbez!

Remembering Eden Ahbez with the trailer for the As The Wind documentary and songs from the Wild Boy oddities comp