The Refreshments

Steadily churned Rock 'n'Roll, of the type Mr. Berry built into evergreen luminescence. Group singalong voices, rendering hooks that cannot be declined, wave one and all to join in celebrating liberty from that damned torch.

Video: "Bye, Bye Belinda"   

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Brandon Wayne & His Lonesome Drifters

The broken everyman's shoulders slumped, as he leaned against the Seeburg. A nearly empty bottle of house whiskey was his sole pal. Digging in a pocket, he fed another coin into the juke, and selected Brandon's latest. For the seventh time.

Video: "Swimming in the Bottle"   

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Kyle Lacy

The Record Hop!   vinyl, CD, digital

(Lacy Records)

The quiet joy that animates young Kyle's features, as his fluttering digits deflower frets, communicates that he very much digs his jump down, turn around musical existence, and wouldn't live differently for a dollar and a quarter. Jazz grooves, Rockabilly-inflected rompings, Blues graspings, and ground-level rhythms gyrate like shameless fun shake-'em-ups. All the wild while, the tipped-brim slew at Kyle's elbow gives up icy-cool jumpin' that has dancefloor folks executing gran mals one song, and exchanging belly rub intimations, the next. 

Ahmet Ertegun would slap a contract on the desk.

Recommended: "One Trick Pony," "More Than That!," "Cryin' and Shakin'," "Lucky Ducky," "Love Spectator," "Everlasting, Everchanging," "Two to Tango," "Playing in My Head," "Give Back My Name," "What is Hip?"

Videos: "One Trick Pony"   "More Than That!" (official video)   "Cryin' and Shakin'" (official video)   "Love Spectator"

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Angela Tini

Here Comes Trouble

(Rum Bar Records)

Downtown streets must have been calm; all the cool cats were makin' the studio scene to raise up this bonfire.

Their swingalong-matches rank included Carl Sonny Leland (piano/organ/production/arranger), Deke Dickerson (bass/sax/backing voice), Tommy Harkenreider (guitar), Zander Griffith (upright and electric basses), and Josh Collazo (drums). The ace Dynaflos happened by, too, and flipped tops on their own Ronsons.

Local fire-fighting boys were on standby.

Star Miss Angela wove her elegant witchcraft betwixt all the motivatin' Jazz and Rhythm & Blues airs. Hers is a magnificent fashion that punches across the cool-to-hot spectrum, with smoky glamour whispers, mellifluous sailings, and Ruth Brown-caliber beltings that could scorch holes through cement-brick walls.

Asbestos alligators are presently opening their wallets.

Recommended: "Can't Stop Me," "Too Many Secrets," "Honey Never Spoils," "Forty Cups of Coffee," "Tout Doucement," "Every Night," "Turn Me Loose," "Here Comes Trouble," "Don't Let Me Down," "Never No More," "Good Thing," "Confess," "Not Lonely for You"

Videos: "Can't Stop Me,"   "Too Many Secrets"   "Tout Doucement"   "Here Comes Trouble"

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The Record Collector 

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Collectors' Choice Music

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Jo Carley & the Old Dry Skulls

"Lover Love Spell" / "Only When the Moon is Full"   CD or digital album

"The Zombie" (Reanimated)   digital track

(Voodoo Shack Records)

Herein slink ghastly, ghostly rhythms. The calcium chassis atop which "Lover Love Spell" reclines is a spooky, tease-dance Calypso one, whose infatuated tale-teller looks to voodoo potions for successful conquest. Flip "Only When the Moon is Full" and solely digital "The Zombie" creep in like cursedness. The former issues a frontal sax moon hymn; the latter claws up through fresh sod, driven by kick insistance and yelps that enrapture.

Were root doctors ever to summon forth a washboard...

Videos: "Lover Love Spell"   "Only When the Moon is Full" (official video)   "The Zombie" (Reanimated)

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Righteous45

Weirder Beards  two-track digital release

(Righteous Records)

Coffee house overheads were hushed. Bereted daddy-os and thickly mascaraed shapes-in-drapes clicked fingers appreciatively, as never-would-be Ferlinghettis streamed consciousnesses on the tiny stage. Brother Theodore would soon made his headliner appearance. But first, the juke made with these.

Videos: "Weird Beard"   "The Goatee's Gotta Go"

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Creativity tears open straitjacket   

Among those loudly critical of burgeoning Rock'n'Roll, were old guard musical rivals who watched resentfully as the upstart's popularity bloomed.

Author James Wierzbicki, in his 2016 Music In the Age of Anxiety, recorded that songwriter/orchestra leader/ASCAP member Billy Rose termed nascent Rock'n'Roll songs "obscene junk, pretty much on a level with dirty comic books."

Per Wierzbecki, other notable avowed foes of the new music included Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Bob Crosby, Mel Torme, and Paul Whiteman. Commendable talents, all. Just not terribly open-minded in music appreciation.

Ol' Blue Eyes, jacket slung over one shoulder, was caustic: “It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd - in fact, plain dirty - lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth..."

Broadway composer Meredith Wilson (of Music Man renown) notoriously derided Rock'n'Roll as "utter garbage" that "should not be confused with anything related to music or verse."

Scolds were surely apprehensive about personal career sustainability, given the change in public preferences then unfolding. Too, they must have been embittered by success in their field accruing to those they regarded as inferiors, both musically and socially.

Their hidebound, rigid definition of musician -- someone able to read and reproduce on a moment's notice any notes in any style set before them -- was passing from common acceptance.

Skilled professions did have requirements, true, and not unreasonably so. Only someone knowledgeable of human anatomy, for instance, could be an effective surgeon. Likewise, no man ignorant of matters automotive could legitimately banner himself as a master mechanic.

But strict definition robbed music of its artful nature, its inherent capacity for individual and cultural expression. Musical notes were never red bricks, to be impersonally troweled into arrangement however befits utilitarian requisite.

By inflexible accounting, music was merely a profession of no more spiritual consequence than carpentry. In that view, musicians are interchangeable journeymen without individual perspective or worth. Machines, not men.

In honest and real folk musics -- whether Country, Blues, Rock'n'Roll, or any variant -- human expression not circumscribed by formula or regimentation was lifted up for salute.

Common people were and remain as entitled to creative outlet as anyone. The art they formed from personal experiences, in styles they found appropriate, were as valid as any issued from classroom lecturns.

This is not to depreciate technical proficiency. Some of the most enjoyable, worthwhile musicians, then and today, display breath-stealing abilities. We appreciate accomplished musicianship, and vigorously applaud its makers.

But virtuosity isn't necessary for someone to open up and pour their life into a song. Indeed, passion can sometimes be blocked by technical obsessiveness.

In Rock'n'Roll's embryonic seasons - also long before and since - music gave folks a way to make their own statements, in their own ways. Finger-wagging dogmatists urged straitjackets be respected. Damn them all.