Rubber City Review

The first real band I joined (“real” meaning paid gigs) was The Warsaw Falcons, a neo-rockabilly outfit based in Cincinnati. I was fresh out of college and just landed a job downtown, editing a magazine for the screen printing industry. So I needed the gigs more for mental health reasons than income.

Our main weapon was our fearless leader, David Rhodes Brown, a great singer and songwriter who also happened to be a one-man wrecking crew on guitar. It always amazed me how he could play the right notes and even actual chords while his limbs were flailing in every direction. And the spectacle of a man well over six feet tall prowling the stage like a mad hyena only added to the buzz surrounding our band.

Thankfully, Dave had a mild-mannered sidekick, Tom Schneider, who played sax and sang lead on a number of songs, including a few he wrote. Since we didn’t exclusively play originals, Tom and Dave would go through a painstaking process to find fairly unconventional songs to cover – mainly to create the illusion that everything we did was fresh and new.

I touched on one of those tunes here, a slow-burning number by Conway Twitty called Lonely Blue Boy. We also covered Trying to Get to You, a song originally recorded in ’54 by an R&B group called The Eagles and reinterpreted by Elvis the following year during his groundbreaking sessions at Sun Studios. Other gems included Rip It Up by Little Richard, Shame Shame Shame by Jimmy Reed and Break Up by Charlie Rich.

Which brings us to Ricky Nelson and the shit-hot rockabilly sides he recorded with legendary stringbender James Burton.

Back in the late ‘70s, I prided myself on being somewhat of a purist when it came to blues and rockabilly. Why listen to Clapton cover Robert Johnson or Skip James when you can go directly to the source? And Ricky Nelson… wasn’t he some slick, preening star of a crappy TV show that my older siblings used to ridicule?

Well, I’ve since learned that a puristic approach to music is essentially useless (hell, it’s fun to hear Mick Jagger ape Muddy Waters). And one of my first lessons along those lines was finding out about songs like Believe What You Say and It’s Late that featured Nelson’s seemingly effortless vocals framed by Burton’s blazing leads: Believe What You Say

Tom and Dave jumped all over Believe, which quickly became one of the Falcons’ show-stoppers. And that sent me searching for other rockabilly tunes by baby-faced Nelson and the dangerous guitslinger Burton, who somehow made his Fender Telecaster sound pretty and menacing at the same time.

On paper, the combination seemed highly improbable. Born in Dubberly, Louisiana, Burton started playing professionally at the age of 14 and eventually joined the staff band of the famous Louisiana Hayride radio show in Shreveport, where he backed up country stars like George Jones and Johnny Horton. Meanwhile, Nelson – a native of Teaneck, New Jersey – was growing up under the hot glare of Hollywood studio lights as a child actor on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” featuring his real-life parents and siblings. But Burton and Nelson obviously shared a deep appreciation of Elvis Presley and the hillbilly music that inspired his first recordings at Sun Studios.

Kirkland, Nelson and Burton

Burton arrived in L.A. in ’57 to do some shows and sessions for rockabilly singer Bob Luman (My Gal is Red Hot). At the same time, a 17-year-old Nelson was making his first forays into the music biz, having covered Fats Domino’s I’m Walkin’ and a few other tunes for the jazz-based Verve label. Nelson caught Luman’s band rehearsing for a rock ‘n roll movie and apparently liked what he heard. Shortly after that, Burton received a telegram asking him and bass player James Kirkland to perform on “Ozzie and Harriet” as part of Nelson’s backing band. Before long, they had severed ties with Luman and went all-in with Nelson, who then signed a lucrative five-year deal with Imperial Records (thanks mainly to Ozzie Nelson’s considerable clout). Burton even moved in with the non-fictional Nelsons for a couple of years before he found his own place to stay.

The best of Nelson’s Imperial recordings – mostly featuring Burton, but also including a few with monster picker Joe Maphis – are available on Ace Records’ “Rockin’ with Ricky” (you also can find many of these cuts on “Lonesome Town: The Complete Record Releases, 1957-1959″). “Rockin’” includes a few syrupy duds, but most of it is top-shelf rock ‘n roll. And Burton, who already had cemented his status as a guitar legend with a vicious solo on Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q, was clearly at the top of his game: Shirley Lee

Actually, some of the best moments are in the more polished, tightly arranged numbers, where Burton’s twisted guitar seem almost subversive. You get the sense he was openly mocking the background singers and other sappy flourishes. Just for the hell of it, I spliced together a couple of solos on this next sample: Burton solos: Oh Yeah, I’m in Love/Stop Sneakin’ Around

But there’s plenty of raw meat to go along with the pop-flavored desserts. Among other blues and rockabilly standards, Nelson and band even cover Little Walter’s number one R&B single from 1955: My Babe

And call it heresy, but Nelson’s version of Milk Cow Blues may be my favorite of the many takes on this age-old standard: Milk Cow Blues

Burton stuck with Nelson all the way through 1967, when he gave in to a steady gig on the TV show “Shindig!” and a lot of well-paying session work in L.A. (he was a member of the hallowed Wrecking Crew, a group of hard-bitten studio musicians who contributed to thousands of hit songs in the Sixties by artists ranging from The Monkees and Nancy Sinatra to The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel).

In 1969, Burton signed on with Elvis Presley and was a fixture in his band until the King’s untimely demise in 1977. He also was a founding member of Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band and spent 16 years touring and recording with John Denver. In 1990, Burton moved back to Shreveport, where he continues to perform – mainly to raise money for his charitable foundation, which provides musical scholarships and instruments to children and young adults.

On the other hand, Nelson was cut down at the young age of 45 – victim of a rickety aircraft that also killed six other members of his entourage, including his fiancee and bandmates (the pilots somehow survived). Nelson had experienced some success since Burton’s departure – including a Top 40 hit with Garden Party in 1972. And although his career had been in limbo before the crash occurred on New Year’s Eve in 1985, he rarely failed to deliver live and consistently surrounded himself with first-rate musicians.

Since my buddies in the Falcons turned me on to Nelson and Burton, I came across a few other musicians who couldn’t get enough of the Imperial singles. But the greatest validation of their place in rock history came during one of my chats with cousin Robert Quine, who is responsible for some of the most distinctive and uncompromising solos you can find on any instrument, in any genre.

Rob’s playing sounded like no one else, but I knew it was informed by early rock ‘n roll. So I asked him something along the lines of, who were some of your first influences? And what sent you down the path of pursuing a life-long career as a guitar player?

His response surprised me at first, but then made total sense. He said he started to get serious about the guitar when he first heard James Burton playing with Ricky Nelson.

Nelson and Burton on video… Nasty solo by Burton on this one – a cover of Ray Charles’ number one R&B hit from 1955:

Thank god Nelson was a star on a hit TV show – lots of great footage on youtube. Here’s a clip of Nelson and Burton screwing around on acoustic guitars:

Robert Quine backing Richard Hell

My cousin Robert Quine was a bona fide guitar hero (number 80 on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” – right after Cliff Gallup of Be Bop a Lula fame and before Derek Trucks). But I wasn’t aware of his playing until a couple of years after he blasted his way into New York City’s vibrant punk scene with “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Blank Generation/Richard Hell and the Voidoids with Robert Quine

In the liner notes to “Spurts: The Richard Hell Story,” a very thoughtful Hell had (hath?) this to say about what you just heard: “It sounds to me like the solo is coming from another dimension. I don’t know if it has any relationship to anything in history. Though of course everything does, and that solo specifically refers to certain records Quine liked.”

I was raised on jazz, blues and bluegrass music, so punk rock wasn’t something that I naturally embraced. Then a college buddy took me to CBGB in New York’s seedy Bowery area to see The Dead Boys from Cleveland (even though I could’ve driven a couple of miles from my mom’s house in Akron to see them at the Crypt).

The first thing I noticed when we walked in the club was the disproportionate number of people jammed into the back of the room, by the bar. Meanwhile, a big bouncer separated the “hoi polloi” from the empty VIP section, which was the entire expanse of the club (in other words, about 30 feet) in front of the stage. Must’ve been a showcase gig for a record label. My buddy and I did some quick thinking and convinced the bouncer that we were reporters from some rag back in Ohio, and we grabbed a table up front.

The opening act (name escapes me) made quite an impression when the lead singer tossed his mic over a pipe hanging from the ceiling, pulled the cord back down around his neck, hung himself in the air for a few seconds and then collapsed on stage. That, my friends, is rock ‘n roll! The Dead Boys’ set wasn’t nearly as memorable, although we were invited backstage by a band member’s mom for some birthday cake. I have to say, seeing a middle-aged matron and her friends handing out birthday treats to Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome was a surreal experience, especially in that shithole.

But I was glad to visit an American rock shrine, the place where bands like the Voidoids, the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Television, the Talking Heads and Blondie defined New York City punk and new wave in the late-‘70s.

Robert Quine was probably the least-likely rocker of them all. Born in Akron in 1942, he went to a prep school in the area, eventually earned a law degree (from Washington University in St. Louis), and even passed the Missouri bar, but never practiced law. Rob (his parents called him Rob, so I did too… most everyone else called him Quine, which I didn’t for obvious reasons) probably shared a few stray genes with his famous uncle, Willard Van Orman Quine – a brilliant philosopher whose work in analytics and “semantic holism” remains an essential touchstone for deep thinkers around the world. Just don’t ask me what it all means.

Rob moved to San Francisco in 1969, where he first met Lou Reed while taping a gig by Reed’s influential band The Velvet Underground. Rob was obsessed with the band, and his tapes of several performances in the Bay Area and at Washington University were released in 2001 as a 3-CD set called “Bootleg Series, Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes.”

He landed in New York City in ’71, where he wrote tax law treatises for a publishing company, worked at a film memorabilia shop and eventually fell in with a rag-tag group of downtown musicians, like fellow guitarist Tom Verlaine (Television) and Richard Hell. Then “Blank Generation” set the stage for Rob’s strange musical odyssey, which included studio work for Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull, Matthew Sweet, avant-gardist John Zorn, R&B legend Andre Williams, and many others.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Someone once described him as looking like a “deranged accountant,” which pretty much nailed it. He usually wore a sport jacket and almost always wore shades, even indoors. And he was quite a bit older than most of the folks he played with (although Reed also was born in ’42).

I never saw Rob play live, but I visited with him several times at his parents’ house in West Akron. His dad, Bob, and mom, Rosalie, were good friends of my parents and also were close with my sister Mary and her husband, Chuck, who lived a block away from the Quines. Bob had inherited his father Cloyd’s business, Akron Equipment (mostly tire molds), but he apparently had little enthusiasm for management and especially the brutal realities of labor relations. He retired at the first opportunity and spent the next 30 or so years of his life traveling the world with his charming and colorful wife Rosalie (she grew up in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn and claimed to have been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in her younger days, which seems almost quaint today when you consider the horrors of 9/11).

By the time I met Rob, the Voidoids had already imploded and he’d gained greater notice as Lou Reed’s guitarist. Critics fawned over Rob’s solos on “The Blue Mask,” which was widely viewed as a return to form for Reed after years of abusing various substances. Although I can’t say that “Mask” is one of my personal favorites, I’ll admit that anyone who records a solo like this has balls of steel (Rob claimed that Reed annoyed him so much in the studio that he could barely contain himself when they rolled the tape on this one): Waves of Fear/Lou Reed with Robert Quine

Rob recorded two more albums with Reed – “Legendary Hearts” and “Live in Italy” – before he left due to differences that were probably personal as well as musical. He told me the record company sent a test pressing of “Legendary Hearts” to his parents’ house in Akron, and he was so infuriated with the final mix (some of his guitar parts were mixed out altogether) that he grabbed a hammer, walked out on the driveway and smashed the record into little pieces.

Rob would spend a couple weeks in Akron every year, mainly to decompress and get away from the indignities of life in New York’s Lower East Side, back when squatters and drug dealers were taking over empty buildings (he said he was mugged twice just taking out the garbage).

Rob’s social skills were somewhat lacking, to put it kindly. Rosalie would invite us over, but I think Rob would’ve been perfectly content spending his time in Akron without seeing a soul other than his parents. He would barely acknowledge my presence when I first showed up, then when he realized I wasn’t leaving right away, he’d reluctantly engage in a little conversation – mostly quick responses to my questions about his guitar playing and influences.

But once he decided I actually knew what I was talking about, we were off and running. His stories (like the driveway incident) could be hugely entertaining, and he had a wonderful way of describing other artists – his rants about Lou Reed were priceless – and the recordings that really inspired him.

I was surprised to find out he had a jazzman’s sensibility and a deep, heartfelt appreciation of the blues. He actually took a few lessons from the great jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney, whose work with Stan Getz alone was enough to make him a legend. And you can hear a little of that jazz influence in Rob’s later recordings with Zorn, drummer Fred Maher and percussionist Ikue Mori. Here’s a cut from “Painted Desert,” Rob’s 1997 collaboration with Mori: El Dorado/Ikue Mori with Robert Quine

Rob’s first great inspiration, though, was the country-influenced string-bender James Burton, who made Ricky Nelson’s rockabilly sides far more legitimate than they should have been and eventually settled into a comfortable living as Elvis Presley’s main guitarist. Although he seldom played it straight, Rob seems to pay tribute to Burton in this strangled solo from Reed’s “Live in Italy”: Betrayed/Lou Reed with Robert Quine

Rob with The Hound (far left), WFMU studio

Rob told me he had a blues radio show when he was at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and one of his favorites was Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. He also loved Jimmy Reed – which I also found surprising, given Rob’s shrieking, atonal solos with the Voidoids and the other Reed. On another occasion, he asked me if I’d heard of Ted Hawkins, the former street musician from Venice Beach whose warm, soulful voice seemed to convey a world of sadness. Once again, I was floored… Is this the same guy who shredded his way through Love Comes in Spurts?

During one of Rob’s visits to the Rubber City, my sister Mary and I stopped by and asked him if he wanted to head up to Kent with us to see the legendary 15-60-75 (aka The Numbers Band). I could probably spend the next 12 paragraphs or so trying to describe the Kidney Brothers and their amazing legacy in Northeast Ohio (future post?). But if I had to offer a brief description of their four-decade career, I’d say they play highly original, somewhat eccentric and often frighteningly intense blues-based music – basically street poetry for rubber rats. Here’s a little taste, recorded live in ’75 at the Cleveland Agora when the Numbers opened for Bob Marley during his first American tour: About Leaving Day/15-60-75 The Numbers Band

Back to Rob and our invite… he threw us another curve by agreeing to go. We strolled into the Numbers’ main home, JB’s, which smelled a lot like Marley’s dressing room, and stood near the stage to watch an especially riveting set. I thought their guitarist, Michael Stacey, would recognize Rob – his playing seemed to have that punk-rock edge to it. But Rob went mostly unnoticed. Although he kept glancing over his shoulder (with shades on, of course) in an odd kind of way, like he was expecting some crazed Kent State student to jump on his back and start pummeling him. Just when I thought we should whisk him back to the security of his parents’ house, he admitted that he enjoyed the band and really appreciated us dragging him along.

The last time I saw Rob was after his father passed away – probably around ’99. By then, he’d married a lovely woman named Alice, who was everything socially that Rob wasn’t. She appeared to be his complete support system, which Rob sorely needed given his paranoid nature and darker tendencies. He had just bought the complete Columbia studio recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, which was playing in the background. “What do you think of this?” he asked. I told him I was working my way through it too and loved virtually everything Miles recorded in the Sixties. He nodded quietly, way beyond the point of being phased by our shared tastes in music.

In 2003, Alice died suddenly at their Soho loft (for an intense account of this event and others involving Rob, check out this piece by The Hound – one of my favorite bloggers and probably Rob’s closest friend when he was living in NYC). Without Alice’s love and support, Rob went into a tailspin, and he died from a heroin overdose less than a year later.

Rob is conspicuously absent from the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, which probably suits him just fine. But he remains a major influence on younger musicians like my nephew Dan, who once took the short walk to Bob and Rosalie’s with guitars in hand to jam with Rob.

Dan Auerbach on Robert Quine… “Pat (Carney) and I had just formed The Black Keys and signed a deal with Fat Possum. Meanwhile, my dad browbeat Rosalie into letting me stop by to meet Rob, who begrudgingly agreed to do it. I’m sure he was expecting a high school kid with a shredder guitar and a Limp Bizkit CD. Then I showed up with a couple of Japanese Teisco Del Reys and some stuff by Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford. He walked out of a really dark study, with his shades on, and complained that he had a hangover and a headache – could’ve been in withdrawal – but once he saw those guitars he took off his shades and his eyes lit up right away.

“I played him ‘All Night Long’ by Junior, who he’d never heard of, and he was completely blown away. Then we talked for a couple of hours about music and even noodled around on guitar together. He told me everything he did was just a variation on Chuck Berry. He also spoke fondly of (guitarist) Marc Ribot… said he was very grateful for all the gigs that Ribot lined up for him. Of course, Pat and I later brought Marc in to play on ‘Attack and Release,’ along with Pat’s uncle Ralph.” Ralph Carney and Robert Quine played together on Tom Waits’ classic album, “Rain Dogs” (along with Keith Richards) – an unusual connection with The Black Keys that’s rarely mentioned.

“Robert used a Peavey solid-state amp [Dan prefers tube amps], which made sense when you consider the sound he became known for at times – so jagged and in your face. A lot of punk-rockers’ guitar playing came across as ‘fake’ aggression… Robert had the ability to be atmospheric and airy or aggressive and edgy but in a ‘real’ way… and in a style that became all his own. Probably all that pent-up rage from getting sent off to prep school by his parents!”

They got together again after that, and Rob encouraged Dan to look him up in New York City. “He said he’d always been in the phone book – spelled ‘Kwine.’” But Dan never had the opportunity. “We had our first sold-out show in New York in 2004, I think it was at the Roseland Ballroom, and I was really looking forward to having him at the show. But he passed away right before we hit town.”

One of the tragic realities of Rob’s passing is that he never had an opportunity to collaborate with Dan in the studio. But Marc Ribot’s biting guitar on Oceans & Streams gives us a sense of what could have been: Oceans & Streams/The Black Keys with Marc Ribot

Robert Quine on video… Nasty guitar solo from a night with Lou Reed, 1983. Lou needs to work on that Clint Eastwood impersonation.

Welcome to Rubber City Review.  It’s not intended to be Akron-centric, but I should probably kick things off by asking the question:  When it comes to roots-rock and other mutant forms of modern music – Devo, The Black Keys, The Cramps, Chrissie Hynde, The Numbers Band, Tin Huey founder and Tom Waits sideman Ralph Carney, punk guitar trailblazer and former Lou Reed sideman Robert Quine, Vaughn Monroe (Vaughn Monroe?  More on that later)… what makes Akron so damn special?

Growing up in Akron, I always felt that “bastard stepchild” vibe when I talked to hard-core Clevelanders.  There was never a sense that they were missing out on something by not taking the 30-minute drive south to check out Akron (although I can’t say that our meager live music scene was much of a draw).  Maybe we just had a little more to prove.

You could argue that the lack of a vibrant music scene forced many aspiring rockers into the garage – or, in the case of the Keys, literally underground – where they could tinker like mad scientists without fear of failure.  How else could you explain this hidden track on The Big Come Up? 240 Years Before Your Time

I’ve also heard that legendary late-night TV host Ghoulardi (aka Ernie Anderson, father of indie director Paul Thomas Anderson) had a huge impact on a young Erick Lee Purkhiser of Stow, OH before he morphed into psychobilly king Lux Interior of The Cramps, and that members of Devo were devotees as well.

Akron writer David Giffels expands on the Ghoulardi influence in the book “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!”:  ”The Ghoulardi aesthetic seemed to capture a much broader and more significant notion:  Akron and Cleveland were a noirish sci-fi movie.  In Cleveland, it was steel.  In Akron, rubber.  But both places were defined by aging brick factories with round chimneys that breathed fire and smoke.”

Purkhiser also was under the spell of local DJ Pete “Mad Daddy” Myers, whose fast-paced chatter drew listeners into a carny sideshow of space-age sound effects and oddball rock ‘n roll… Songs like Teenage Machine Age by The Travelers, or this classic by Link Wray…Rumble

(Many examples of Mad Daddy in action here)

The Mad Daddy

In the late ’50s, Mad Daddy became an underground fixture in Northeast Ohio — occasionally hosting sock hops in his patented Dracula outfit.  But he never caught on at his next stop, New York City, where he eventually killed himself with a shotgun.

Now, I could go on at great length about The Cramps and the seductive powers of guitarist Poison Ivy (and I probably will down the road), but I’ll let this video clip speak for itself… You can almost hear the spinning sound of “the Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers, who wrote this one back in 1930!

I love the TV show host at the end… Just another day of depravity at the station!

As this clip suggests, if there’s a common musical influence that connects all these bands, it’s probably rockabilly – which makes sense, because Akron’s rubber factories pulled in a lot of folks from the South who had little trouble adapting to a more urban environment.  You can hear some of that influence in Robert Quine, who was a huge fan of Ricky Nelson’s guitarist James Burton.  I’ll go straight to the source on this one – Burton’s blazing solo on Susie-Q by Dale Hawkins… Susie-Q

About 30 seconds of pure goodness… and cowbell to boot!

Since Chrissie Hynde moved back to town (part-time), her music has taken on a harder, more rockabilly edge — which is especially evident on this cut from Break Up the Concrete… Don’t Cut Your Hair

Maybe there’s something in the air, emanating from the primordial ooze of the Cuyahoga River.

But one thing is clear – there really isn’t anything you could remotely define as an “Akron Sound.”  The most obvious reason is that we never had a major studio in town with a forceful personality like Sam Phillips or Berry Gordy running the show.  Hell, Hynde didn’t even find her sound until she moved to London, and you could argue that The Numbers Band has never been properly recorded (Dan?).

And that sense of disconnect brings me to the odd man out – Vaughn Monroe, also known as “Old Leather Tonsils” and “The Baritone with Muscles”…

Back in 1920, Monroe was just another young punk with a rubber rat for a father.  He lived around the corner from my dad in Akron’s Goodyear Heights neighborhood, created by its tire-building namesake to house a small army of plant workers and their families.  But he eventually became one of the best-selling artists of the Forties – a big-band vocalist who wrapped his warm baritone around hits like Let it Snow and this one, Ghost Riders in the Sky… Riders in the Sky

I’m sure Monroe’s huge success appealed to my father’s belief that hard work and a modicum of talent can take you anywhere.  Here’s to Vaughn Monroe, the Godfather of the Akron Sound!

This just in from our Florida Bureau (brother James)… an entirely different take on Ghost Riders in the Sky — from Ned Sublette, author of “Cuba and its Music” and “The World that Made New Orleans” (more on those two books here):

Bonus video from Dan… We share a love of the late, great bluesman Freddie King.  I’m partial to his “surf-blues” recordings for the Cincinnati-based King label in the early-’60s — tunes like Hide Away, widely covered by blues bands around the world, and this one… Sen-Sa-Shun

But Dan came across this gem from Freddie’s later years, probably around 1972.  Watch him work out on Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine.  I like how he takes his time strapping on his guitar, tosses off a perfect blues lick, and then kills it!