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JPJ wrote:Thanks Lemmy.What was the first rock'n roll song?I think McCracklin's Reelin'&rockin' from 1950 is a good contender.Chuck Berry probably heard that song more than a couple of times...

bamwc2 wrote:Jack Klugman

Lemmy Caution wrote:Charles Durning

"He was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day and his unit’s lone survivor of a machine-gun ambush. In Belgium he was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he bludgeoned to death with a rock. Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Mr. Durning was among the few to escape.

"By the war’s end he had been awarded a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, having suffered gunshot and shrapnel wounds as well....

"“I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” [Durning told Parade in 1993]. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.”

"They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept."

Your head is like a yoyo,
Your neck is like the string,
Your body's like camembert
Oozing from its skin, yeah.

Your fanny's like two sperm whales
Floating down the Seine,
Your voice is like a long fuck
That's music to your brain, yeah.

Your eyes are two blind eagles
That kill what they can't see,
Your hands are like two shovels
Diggin' in me.

And your love is like an oil well,
Dig, dig, dig, dig it,
On the Champs-Élysées, yeah.

She chose aesthetic expansion over chart success at nearly every turn.

That independent spirit can be seen in the musicians with whom she chose to collaborate, including the Art Ensemble (the free-jazz collective that featured her then husband, the trumpeter Lester Bowie), the World Saxophone Quartet and David Murray in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Cinematic Orchestra in the 2000s.

Her early 1970s solo gem "Free" harnessed the power of the funk and soul music by Sly & the Family Stone, the Staple Singers and James Brown, and although that album wasn't a hit at the time, it's one of the overlooked pleasures of the era.

Like much of her music after the late '60s, "Free" showcased a spirit that preferred loose, spatial structures to the constraints of pop songs. In that role, in fact, Bass' voice and lyrics often were the structure, especially when anchoring instrumental chaos.

Lemmy Caution wrote:I'll have to look for Fontella's tunes with the Cinematic Orch.