Like Liberace, Korla Pandit had a television show. Debuting in 1949, it was the first all-music show on television. On each Adventures In Music broadcast, Korla Pandit used his prodigious skills at the keyboard to transport his audience to exotic lands on clouds of black and white incense. His persona as a mystic man of the East was no more authentic than the Italian actors who played Indians in old Hollywood westerns. But his doe-like eyes, enigmatic smile and bejeweled turban, not to mention his mesmerizing playing, turned many a suburban living room into a temporary temple of swaying, bejeweled dancers, and midnight rides through the desert on camels.
One thing is certain: after listening to this 1987 recording by Negativland, you will know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union. Inspired impostors of a different sort than Pandit — at the very least, sonic pranksters — Negativland was famously sued by the band U2 for trademark infringement for their album of U2 parodies, boldly titled U2. Time Zones is a masterful feat of audio collage that captures the subterranean hell-scape of 20th Century talk radio, while managing to be hilarious at the same time. ELEVEN.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first big gospel star, though some religious groups were uncomfortable with her use of electric guitar and willingness to play her ‘music of light’ in the ‘darkness’ of nightclubs and concert halls. She’s often called the ‘Godmother of Rock and Roll,’ and her guitar playing shows why. Fledgling rock stars like Chuck Berry and Little Richard sat at her knee, and listened and learned. They sought to infuse Tharpe’s irresistible energy and inspired showmanship into their own music. I love her queenly carriage entrance in this video, and the gutsiness of playing electric guitar (superbly) outdoors on a rainy day.
There was a time when you could catch something on late night TV, maybe half-awake while sitting in the glow of its flickering light, and see something that, later, you’d never be quite sure you actually saw. And pre-internet, pre-YouTube, and pre-VCRs, you might never get to find out if you did see it or not. Jack Stauber’s animated videos, with music and voices also done by Stauber, have the feel of those uncertain TV recollections. Cooking with Abigail‘s grotesque Claymation serves up a hypnogogic fever dream of old-time cooking shows, leering old men, and a fig whose plea for sympathy and forgiveness may haunt you for longer than you’d like.
Don’t be put off by the commercial H- B.O. of the promo tagged onto the end of this video. Having survived celebrity, stalkers, cancer, and Lyme disease with his creativity intact, John Lurie is the real deal. And the ‘end’ of the video presented here is not really the end. In the third season of Lurie’s HBO show Painting With John, Potato! starts as what seems like the casual telling of a personal anecdote, then spirals into a twenty-minute, fully animated fabulist epic. Perhaps the best part of Painting With John is that you actually get to watch him paint while he spins yarns, grouses about things, and ponders the relationship of life and creativity in a way I can best describe as soulful.
While Sister Rosetta Tharpe urged us onto the Gospel Train of Glory that carries nothing but the righteous and the holy, Tricky roars into the station on a fire-breathing locomotive powered by the intricate rhymes and imagery of rapper Rakim, and the vocals of Martina Topley-Bird. The band turns Lyrics of Fury into a puffing juggernaut of sound. But the highlight is Topley-Bird’s exhilarating delivery of Rakim’s words of warning to those who might seek to defeat him.
Thus ends the latest installment of Radio 96, one that hopefully serves as a reminder that music may not save our souls, but it certainly helps us hang onto them, in these increasingly puzzling and precarious times.