Straight Outa Compton (Prequel): “The Cisco Kid” by War

They started out in 1962 as The Creators, and in 1968 changed their name to Nightshift when they became the backing band for Deacon Jones, the great Rams/Chargers/Redskins defensive end who fancied himself as a singer. About a year later they were recruited by old-school record producer Jerry Goldstein and ex-Animals singer Eric Burdon to form War. With Burdon up front they had a good deal of success (“Spill The Wine”); Jimi Hendrix’s last appearance on stage, the night before his death, was with the band at Ronnie Scott’s. Then Burdon left the band mid-tour due to ill-health and War proceeded on their own to become one of the smarter responders to the gauntlet that Sly Stone had laid down.

The World Is A Ghetto was America’s biggest-selling album of 1973 – its demographic was largely black and Hispanic, and this was supremely refreshing in the middle of the white, middle-class, introspective world of Laurel Canyon; if anything, the multiracial, multicultural and socio-political set-up of War was a far more accurate and comprehensive picture of what early seventies Los Angeles was really like, despite what the segregationist nature of seventies FM rock radio might prefer you to believe.

“The Cisco Kid” was the album’s opening track and first and bigger single and certainly helped win them the Hispanic crossover vote. Ostensibly a tribute to the fifties television series which depicted two Robin Hood-style desperadoes on a mission to do justice to the poor and fight against The Man – although the show’s star Duncan Renaldo was actually Romanian, the titular hero was immediately perceived and received as Hispanic – the song rolls on in a seductively patient mid-paced manner, cleverly altering its arrangement with every sung/chanted line. Its funk sneaks into your backbone. The song’s tale, however, has a much wider subtext; on examination, it is clear that it is really about the fight against institutional racism. No wonder it doesn’t get revived in the newly and cruelly divided world of 2018.

Date Record Made Number Two: 28 April 1973

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2

Record At Number One: “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando And Dawn

UK Chart Position: None

Comments

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...

A Pre-Emptive, Though Hopefully Temporary, Bowing Out: “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” by Elton John

This isn’t quite the last piece of music I’ll be writing about before taking a long break from writing this blog (and most other things) – there’s one more song tomorrow that I’ve been persuaded to write up before I disappear – but the situation is this; I am imminently due to go into hospital for major surgery to treat a long-standing and hugely-annoying hernia. This should have been sorted out years ago but for reasons too tedious to document it’s only being sorted out now. It is going to be a long, fairly complex and in places possibly pioneering procedure. I am being operated on by world-class surgeons whom I trust implicitly and there has been much liaison between my local hospital (where I’ll be going) and the hospital where I myself work to enable this to happen. However, I have to warn you that the procedure carries a fairly high risk of what medical people call “morbidities,” mainly to do with breathing and cardiac issues, for which I will be closely monitored in I...

Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Search This Blog