Bands I Hadn't Heard Of/Listened To If Not For The La's

[Ming-8L]

Oasis - Never even heard of them before The La's
Michael Head - all bands/solo
The Coral
Digsy/The Sums
Cast
The Real People
The Jam
Paul Weller - seriously
Mashmellow Overcoat
Cami/The Reverbs
Ian Prowse/Amsterdam
Stone Roses
A Northern Soul
The Fernweh
Icicle Works

[jcalz216]

Everything Michael Head has lent himself to: The Pale Fountains, Shack, the Strands, not to mention his current project, the Red Elastic Band. Same thing with Edgar Jones and all his work, although the Stairs and one of his solo albums, Soothing Music for Stray Cats, apply here. And as for Captain Beefheart, a big fave now, I wouldn't be listening to his stuff nearly as much as I am if not for Lee, Mike Badger, and at least a half-dozen others I seem to recall. Arthur Lee and Love; can't forget them!

Now that bands are mostly out of the way, I may as well drop this off here, since the La's are the ones I owe it to the most. My favorite genre of music doesn't have a name per se, since it's that lovely flashpoint where late big band began to mutate into early rock and roll, a roster that includes names like Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Bill Haley, et al. You could even include a musician such as Cab Calloway, depending on how you can reason when "rock and roll" began. A lot of what I love about work like this is that it's transitory, fleeting--so on the cusp of something entirely new that it dazzles almost all who listen.

Perhaps the biggest one, though, isn't a real band but a fictional one: a band I'm writing into a novel I'm at work on, who are playing live at a Halloween party. While there, they record their debut album in the style of MC5's Kick Out the Jams. They achieve Lee's subjectively "perfect" sound because of a time warp that almost no one realizes they're all within. Their album sounds "timeless" because of this. ("How do they record it?" you ask. No comment. You'll have to buy the book after it's released. ) My point is, I have to write all the lyrics for the songs that will appear therein, and Lee helped me to appreciate alliteration and assonance/consonance in addition to matters of composition via the Kitchen and Crescent tapes. It is a horrifying thing, that we enjoy what he (in his subjectivity) considers unfinished, but seeing the songs from Kitchen to Crescent to imagining what ad-libs and/or scats may be the lead guitar parts. Listen to his wailing in "Ladies and Gentlemen" again; those sound like sustained notes on a lead guitar.

I'm not sure if I made sense with that last one, but why not? "The importance of being honest..."

[Tony]

I get it, I agree, I've always thought on those tapes Lee sings whatever is integral to the song. Like Fishing Net on the kitchen tape, he stops to scat the drums, and the vocals on Ladies and Gentlemen seem to match the notes of the intro, I always took at as music rather than simply vocals

He's often sang solos, eg. Busker version of TSG, recent ish house party version of Feelin'