An audio version of Amoeba Music's award-winning weekly video series "What's In My Bag?" which features artists and tastemakers sharing what they found at our record stores in Hollywood, San Francisco & Berkeley, CA.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
16:00
Elvis Costello goes record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. The legendary English singer/songwriter shares his depth and breadth of musical knowledge, from favorite Motown group The Four Tops and jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins to country storytellers John Prine & Merle Haggard and Latin musicians Jorge Drexler & Natalia Lafourcade. Elvis Costello's 49th Anniversary Edition of his debut album My Aim Is True is out now via Universal Music.
Elvis Costello's picks: • The Four Tops - Live! (LP) • Sonny Rollins - Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings [Box Set] (LP) • Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya (LP) • John Prine - Prime Prine: The Best Of John Prine (LP) • Roman Kachanov & Vladamir Tarasov - Treasures of Soviet Animation Volume 1 (BLU-RAY) • Donny Hathaway - Giving Up b/w Jealous Guy [Promo] (7") • A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (LP) • Jorge Drexler - Bailar En La Cueva (LP) • Natalia Lafourcade - Cancionera (LP) • Merle Haggard And The Strangers - Mama Tried (LP)
Featured Artist: Elvis Costello
Editor: Brendt Rioux Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern Producer/Director: Craig Miller Assistant Director: Derich Heath Cameras: Aaron Araki, Derich Heath Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler
Follow Amoeba Hollywood on Instagram Follow Amoeba San Francisco on Instagram Follow Amoeba Berkeley on Instagram
SPEAKER_02
Hello, I'm Elvis Costello. I'd like to thank you for joining me here in Amoeba on Hollywood Boulevard, where I am gonna be looking into what's in my bag.
SPEAKER_05
Make me a miracle, man.
SPEAKER_02
It's lovely to be here, it really is. I mean, I'm a longtime fan of Amoeba and I was just remarking on how incredible it is that there's such a richness of inventory here. Yeah, honestly, where um I received my education, I don't have any musical education except through records. So I had access to them when I was a boy because my father was a singer on the radio. So he brought a lot of singles through the house to learn, you know, hit parade tunes, and of course I was the beneficiary of that. So I've always been used to handling vinyl and I collect 78s, and and but coming in here is a bit dangerous. You know, the first one I was really thrilled to find. I only heard about yesterday from the gentleman who helped put it out. The Four Tops Live.
SPEAKER_08
But with a different feeling since you've been born.
SPEAKER_02
To come on something like this is was my favourite Tamil group when I was a kid. Maybe because Levi Stubbs sounded like a person that you might actually meet. Peddie Kendrick from the Temptations or Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wilder, they obviously had come from another planet that we didn't live on. What you needed to have a party when I was 15, 16 was Motown Sharkbusters Volume 3 and Tighten Up Volume 2 in Rocksteady Reggae collection. So to find this, which is right in the prime period 66. And you know the funny thing is the four tops, like a lot of the Motown X, did Broadway songs in their set. And on here, the first track is Fascinating Rhythm. Fascinating rhythm, do do to George Gershwin.
SPEAKER_05
Fascinating rhythm, I'm all over making mode and up by the flood.
SPEAKER_02
You can't hurry, love. They're doing another Motown Act song, which was right in the charts then, you know. Of course, then it's the same old song, Baby I Need Your Love, and and then Reach Out, which was a hit right at that moment. So it's a wonderful snapshot of them being entertainers.
SPEAKER_08
With the love that we see you.
SPEAKER_02
Obviously, originally a Motown record, but it has been brought out of the archive. This is on Elemental. And I have to say, you have to give credit where credit's due, you know, because people are a bit inclined to think the big corporations don't have appreciation of the riches. They have thousands, if not millions, of titles. And obviously they can't all be in the spotlight at the same time. One of the things I I do is I put together sets, as we have a new one called the 49th Anniversary of Mime is true, and it has things that I've kept from view for 50 years because I felt too self-conscious about them. Now I feel is the right time to let them out. Let everybody hear how did you get to that first record?
SPEAKER_09
Why must it always be the less I see of you, the more I kill.
SPEAKER_02
And then just up on the shelf was this. Look at that. Sonny Rollins in 1959, and in Europe at that. He's doing standards like love letters, like How High the Moon, and then he's doing jazz compositions as well. The first track on this is St. Thomas, which really is quite a famous piece. There were times when jazz was more appreciated in Europe than it was in America, certainly rewarded lots of musicians of the generation before Sonny Rollins. Dexter Gordon lived in Europe, Ben Webster, I believe, Coleman Hawkins worked there. There's an interview on here which I'll be really looking forward to.
SPEAKER_09
I find that bass and drums gives me the proper support that I need without the chords that a pianist plays, which sometimes gets in my way and hinders my ideas.
SPEAKER_02
Sonny Rollins embraced so many different types of music, and this is a lot of repertoire that appears on a lot of his recordings. Like a lot of musicians of this time, they would revisit the theme depending on the company they kept and the circumstances. He's got Kenny Clark on drums who lived in Paris. And Henry Grimes on bass, which is pretty thrilling. And of course, most importantly, Sonny Robbins. He was here with us until just moments ago. But he'll never be very far away. I got two that kind of go together. They're a little bit sad. But these two go together because I'm really pleased to see this record has been reissued.
SPEAKER_05
Life will find you.
SPEAKER_02
This is somebody, you know, who did what he did in a relatively short period of time. I'm very grateful for that. I only got to meet him once. He was a splendid fellow.
SPEAKER_06
Just make us be brave. Make us play nice. Let us be together tonight.
SPEAKER_02
He faced what he faced with tremendous wit and courage. More importantly, anybody that writes a song called My Shit's Fucked Up is okay with me.
SPEAKER_07
Yeah, yeah, my shit's fucked up. It has to happen to the best of us. The rich folk suffer like the rest of us. It'll happen to you.
SPEAKER_02
Again, a reissue which I'm glad to see. I didn't pick one John Prime album, I picked this collection because this one contains, of course, Sam Stone, Illegal Smile, Donald and Lydia, all from that same first record. I wanted all of these on a fresh vinyl.
SPEAKER_04
Like sunshine feeding daisy. Like the love hidden deep in your heart.
SPEAKER_02
There was a time when this guy with an acoustic guitar was being appreciated and taken to the broader audience in the way that in my grandfather's era, you know, those songs, when they were popular, they were recorded by all the artists of the day. Obviously, Angel from Montgomery is known through Bonnie Raitt's version.
SPEAKER_10
Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery. Make me a poster of an old rodeo.
SPEAKER_02
And souvenirs. This is a great collection. I'll look forward to hearing that tonight.
SPEAKER_10
Broken toys and faded colors.
SPEAKER_02
I'd spent a lot of time watching anime with one of my 19-year-olds who's really into it. His brother is a scholar of horror. It's good, it opens my mind to the art inside horror and in manga and an anime. That this I saw on it and I thought, this has got to be worth us all sitting down. This is Soviet animation volume one, The Mystery of the Third Planet. Who knew? It's got to be worth watching one afternoon. Usually you find uh there's some sort of surreal aspect because of the medium. And look at this character here. What the hell is going on with this duck character? Singles are good here. Look at this. I just pulled this out and it was it's a promo and it's Donnie Hathaway. A Van McCoy song on one side giving up.
SPEAKER_03
So hard to do.
SPEAKER_02
John Lennon's Jealous Guy on the other side. That's a great find. But to have the single of it, that's great.
SPEAKER_07
I didn't want to hurt you.
SPEAKER_02
You forget how long ago it is that records came out. This music, which was new to me, because it came after I began in music, it's now got its own history that people want to summarize. So, like, I see this on a shelf out there, which I probably have on CD, I guess. I don't think I had it on vinyl. So Tribe Call Quest, I mean, this is this is one of the great records. And here it is on vinyl again. This is fantastic. When hip-hop was defined for the broader pop audience in the mid-80s, that was ignoring that it had sort of always existed. But the forms of accompaniment were different. So you can find records going back to the 1920s that essentially are storytelling with some sort of rhythmic foundation. You've got to think about the Last Poets. The Last Poets records are like they're very tough, they were a documentary, you might say, or they were broadsides. And that predates public enemy by 25 years. So that that, if you're aware of those, if you haven't heard them, you should hear.
SPEAKER_08
Time is a ship on a merciless sea, drifting toward an abyss of nothingness until it can be retarded for its own destiny. Time is an inanimate object, playing and playing and playing with no justification for believing.
SPEAKER_02
I just like the relationship between jazz and poetry that this marks, along with sound innovation. This is the one with Ron Carter on. I mean, right there you got the recommendation. Like a member of the second Miles Davis, great band with Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams, and Helderby Hancock. Ron Carter is on this record. And I mean that's a great thing. And I love this record.
SPEAKER_00
Thanks a lot, Ron Carter. Check it out.
SPEAKER_02
This is my friend Orgadre Xler, great songwriter. Uruguay lives in Madrid. To humble us all, he's also a qualified doctor before he was a musician and a poet.
SPEAKER_04
No es que yo no sé qué ser.
SPEAKER_02
He's a beautiful guitar player, and he was one of the musicians who appeared on a record that Sebastian Creesson and I worked on called Spanish Model, which took my second album, This Year's Model, and removed from the multitracks the thing that had been holding it back all these years, my voice. I was asked to remix one of those songs and heard the possibility of a different style of singing that revealed different things about the lyrics, and somewhere I made a jump into time and space, and because Sebastian is originally from Argentina and as multiple Latin Grammy winning producer, I knew he knew a lot of singers from Latin America, and I said, Could we do this remix thing with every one of these songs? And he said, Let me think about it. Yes. And that when we did. The artists were from Colombia, from Puerto Rico, from Spain, Cuba, and many of them wrote the lyrics themselves. They translated it. Ugh Grasla was the one who was the most rigorous. He really talked about the complexity of Spanish lyricis. The rhythmic pattern of Spanish poetry is as unique in its culture as, say, Iambic Pentamato of Shakespeare, or say in Italian, the language of Dante. He's knowledgeable about that, and he can make it so you can all understand it, and then he can sing it. He said, Well, by the way, I'm nominated for a couple of Grammys for this song called Takate, and I'm obliged to perform. So the plan is you're gonna write verses in English and you're gonna sing with me. We did a performance on the Latin Grammys when he played acoustic and I played electric, and we had eight people, I think, in his band, all playing Ableton touch pads, but no click track, all in real time. And it was great. And then he made me go and sit in the front row with him while he won two of the biggest awards of the night. I sit next to Rosalia. I couldn't believe it. I've never had so much fun at a record industry thing. And he's such a modest guy. He also introduced me to this artist, Natalie La Foucade. And this is, I think, the most recent record. I saw her in Carnegie Hall. Jorge was gonna sing a song with her in the second half of the show. She walked out with two attendants, and the train of the dress was extended to the edge of the stage. She was like a character out of a, you know, historical epic. And then her technician came out and gave her a Spanish guitar, and she played the entire first half of the set.
SPEAKER_01
De la verdad que en aquella simples cosas como respira.
SPEAKER_02
I'm just marveling, one at the theatre of it, two at how much command she had. And then the second half was a mixture of rhythmic music. Jorge came out, they did a number. She's just unbelievable. Last one in What's in My Bag? Well, this is Merle Haggard, but look at that cover. It's just so great. Kind of looks a little bit like Jimmy Rogers, and there's Mama.
SPEAKER_10
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied. That leaves only me to blame because Mama tried.
SPEAKER_02
And again, he's doing tremendous songs. He's doing Green Green Grass of Harm, which we knew it by Tom Jones in England, so didn't even know it was a country song, really.
SPEAKER_04
It's so good to touch the green green grass upon.
SPEAKER_02
He wasn't kidding about. When he was singing from Prison Life, he had actually been in there. Not overnight, for littering or something. You know, he'd actually been in there for robbery or something when he was a kid. He's speaking from a you know an experience which a lot of country music is folk music, it's old life. It's just a great, great collection. I just love his voice so much. They're in a male record that ain't worth having.
SPEAKER_10
Just as easy as I went wrong.
SPEAKER_02
Thank you so much. We're so honored to have you in today. I'm pleased to have a chance to do it. Thank you.
