Word: raye
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...link back to the awful sense of abandonment envisaged by Coleridge in The Ancient Mariner, "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," or in their case a sculpted ship on a sculpted ocean. Who else would envisage, as a symbol of progress, an object like The Last Ray of Hope, 1968--a pair of Westermann's Marine-issue boots, polished and waxed again and again to a perfect, obsidian-like blackness, in homage to Maxim Gorky's remark that a strong pair of boots "will be of greater service for the ultimate triumph of socialism than black eyes...
...with the gusto of a kid playing in an attic. He gleefully cobbles past, present and future into a supercool fantasy of classical Japanese art, Hanna-Barbera, expressionism, anime, '60s film and '50s modernism, just for starters. (His dystopian future city looks like hell as designed by Charles and Ray Eames...
...After four verses of 12-bar blues, the song rollicks into some of Charles? swingin? lounge piano, then returns to the vocal, in a squealing release -"Say, have you heard, baby/ Ray Charles is in town/ Let?s mess around till the midnight hour/ See what he?s puttin? down" -that prefigures no fewer than three Atlantic songs: Charles? own "Let the Good Times Roll" and "Mess Around" and Wilson Pickett?s "In the Midnight Hour." The song ends with generic barks ("Come on! Come on, child!") that are pretty much grunts with consonants. A listener needs no English...
...What?d I Say" was Charles? biggest hit at Atlantic -the company must have issued three or four versions of the song, including on an album called "Do the Twist With Ray Charles" -and the conclusion of his career segue from rhythm to rock. But he was just getting started. His really big band LP, "The Genius of Ray Charles" (with arrangements by Ralph Burns and the young Quincy Jones), teamed him with veterans of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington outfits, and he proved he could play with the big boys, winning their respect after initial skepticism. It also...
...uptempo bluesy charts (usually 12-bar blues) found the ideal blend of honking sax solos by King Curtis and the singers, who had distinct comic personality: Gardner?s lead tenor in a vaudeville vibrato of fear and trembling, Bobby Guy?s smart-guy growl (a nastier version of the Ray Charles tout-voice), Dub Jones? mindshaft bass delivering the cool catchphrases (as parent: "You better leave my daughter alone" and "Don?t talk back!"; as Charlie Brown: "Why is everybody always pickin? on me?") The Coasters? hits were loud, terse, vivid and un-sit-down-to-able: baby, that...