Click play to start listening. The first song has about a 30 second intro. Be sure to listen to this!

The first song is a style of music they call “Afrique,” in this case from Ghana. The name of the song is based off an old African proverb. It’s a pretty killer style of music that’s a lot like some of the stuff coming out of Congo and other central African countries that actually reminds me a lot of the early reggae that was coming out of Jamaica in the 70′s. So, rest assurred a lot of us missed that boat but if you want to catch another one just as good, check out some of this music… For more info about the artist, google “Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Afrika 70.” You can hear their organs and pianos. These songs, though relatively recent, fit right in with that old 70s mantra and “the analog,” as discussed on other posts (click “the analog” category to the left for more info).

Second song: the old famous hit originally written by the heroin addict (still battling the drug), Gil Scott-Heron from Detroit. Gil has a killer kind of zapped-out voice but most (including me) find the bulk of his tunes to be a little blander than they should probably be. Gil had major problems with heroin use to the point where it basically ruined him, and his music is largely representative of that unfortunately. This version of the song is a smoother, more upbeat, lively, and soulful version sung by the powerful Esther Phillips. The song is really about what heroin can take away from a community. You should really enjoy it, and the words are very powerful.

The reason I mention heroin use so much is the drug is such a reoccurring demon in so many of these artists that it was a real problem. Also, heroin use, which is a real killer, was widespead in the 70′s in particular. It wasn’t uncommon to find 2-3 dead bodies a day in a tenement in New York in 1971 from people who’d OD’d or gotten bad drugs or both.

There are also some real powerful movies about this as well. Check out the 1973 film Serpico with Al Pacino (this movie is unreal), the fairly recent move American Gangster with Russel Crowe and Denzel Washington about the first big black mafia guy, which is also parts of the story of Serpico from a different angle. Or some of the “Blaxploitation” movies from the early 70′s.

The country was in really bad shape back then. Not only was all that late 60′s stuff and the resignatioon of Nixon very very fresh but the cities were plunging into deep corruption and crime and aweful drug use. New York is actually pretty clean these days. Back then you literally couldn’t go into some parts of town or under certain bridges or whatever, for fear of being raped or murdered or whatever. Also, something like 90% of New York’s cops were on the take during this period.

There will inevitably be a “blaxploitation” post or two coming shortly. This is a trend in black music and film from then. In fact, that Esther Phillips song I first discovered of one of the blaxploitation film chonologies. It yielded 90% aweful films but yielded yet another pretty killer a American black music/culture wave that my guess felt probably a lot like rap music was in the 80′s, sort of ambiguous and weird and new and no one knew if it would stick around. This wave, though, either died or perhpas through its progressions parts of it sort of morphed into disco music. This music is also about 90% crap too, but that 10% actually was some killer songs and trends. A popular star out of it, for example, was Isaac Hayes and his soundtrack for Shaft, which was also a “blaxploitation” film about a strong charaismatic super hero ladies man private dick, who was kicking asses in the slums and drug culture of the cities of the US, against the junky crime ridden inner city.

Another film that plays against that is the famous Taxi Driver with Robert DeNiro, which is basically about how the slum of the inner city can make someone crazy.

If you want to see another movie about how fucked up inner city corruption and drug use can be, about the deepest dregs of a cop gone bad, check out the film Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel. He plays such a rotten, evil motherfucker in this movie, it is almost sickening. And amazingly powerful. I love Harvey Kietel so I have a feeling there will be a post or two about him too…

The analog is rooted in the old school. An old gauge that sweeps and might not be 100% right but is probably pretty close. A mechanical device, of or pertaining to a mechanism that represents data by measurement of a continuous physical variable, as voltage or pressure.

The famous analog keyboards that make up a crux of the tunes on this site:

Hammond Organ – B3 & variants – “The Hammond” or anything mentioning “B3″
The Wurlitzer Electric Jazz Piano (what Ray Charles played) – “The Wurlitzer”
The Fender Rhodes Electric Jazz Piano (what Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea played) – “The Rhodes”
The Hohnet Clavinet – “The Clav” or “The Clavinet” – Funky!

and a few others but these take the cake though…

A good honorable mention is the Moog, the first electric synthesizer which was also analog…

Now, some samples (click play to listen):

- Bill Withers, Use Me Up. Exclusively using the clav…

- The Disco Track 9 is a song off the Boogie Nights soundtrack affectionately known as “track 9.” The main instrument is the clavinet once it gets into the breakdown. Sorry, this is a long, very repetitive song but good stuff… The echo-ey “Riders on the Storm” sounding instrument is the Rhodes piano as well.

- Soulive, Uncle Junior. This is a good Hammond Organ-heavy song… There are only three guys playing; the organ player is also playing the bass.

- Chick Corea, Fickle Funk. A good Fender Rhodes-heavy song by Chick Corea…

- Beastie Boys, Namaste – Good example of the Wurlitzer in action…

– Hugo Montenegro and His Orchestra – Moog Power.mp3

- And finally, a song that ties them all together… Chameleon by Herbie Hancock & The Headhunters. It was common practice to have some or all of them and play them all. Sometimes 2 at a time, one hand on each such as Herbie Hancock does. If you listen carefully, you can catch them all in there. Anything really really “scratchy” or echo-ie like the sound of a rubber band is the Moog. The solo at about 8 minutes in is him on the Rhodes. It is really hard to pick them all out, so fear not…

* * *

Now some video:

Here’s a Wurlitzer demo some dude made off youtube:
( You’ll notice some similarities between it and the Rhodes as well… )

And here is a youtube video of a Rhodes in action. He’s just showing off a pedal there but it doesn’t change much (an effect he’s messing with called “vibrato”).

And finally, here is a live version of Herbie Hancock playing Chamelon Live in 1974. I found a bunch of copies on YouTube but never found a full length one. I uploaded this full length version that used to be on YouTube (so I was wondering where it went) but they shot it down because it’s too long (about 14 mintues) so I uploaded it to Vimeo.

When I first saw this, it blew my mind… Enjoy…

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.

These are some of the popular, legendary Coltrane ballads. The smooth, soft, touching songs that just jam; the legendary Coltrane. These are some of his most famous.

The oddest thing is I wasn’t really that into Coltrane until relatively recently (post college, since about 2001).  I grew up playing the saxophone and by high school I was hitting pretty hard with the jazz music and a lot of my influences came from then or even by early college. 

I had plenty of vinyl, I had copies of my old man’s “My Favorite Things” (one of the most famous jazz albums of all times) but hadn’t gotten that into Coltrane. It was actually Miles, and my favorite album of all time (which is still right up there, was Mingus: Live at the Bohemia, that I was much more in to.

Charles Mingus

Anyway, here is a little John Colrane soul on this post’s music player.   Coltrane was sort of tall and thick.  Big round head and rounded nose, bulbus eyes.   There were really only about 8 years that he was in his damn prime according to me.  He had plenty of good stuff and a lot like Hendrix, I think he was in the war that’d ended by then.  By ’52 he was doing some pretty near stuff, and by ’58 he was playing some of the most incredible and soulful Jazz music in history.  Which is why we all know his name.

He, like Miles, struggled with heroin badly.  It sounds messed up but I think his music was pretty heavily influenced by the pain that this drug brought him.  It is just so soft, so touching, and unreal…

This was back in college.   We were maybe 19 or 20 at the time…  Two good friends and I went to Taos, New Mexico for a month-long ski trip over winter break. Pretty quickly it became the worst ski trip ever. The first day out, Sean tore his ACL only to go home a couple days later. Evan developed brutal food poisoning (after recently returning from Ecuador), and I snapped a ski first or second run out.

We were all close to best friends from boarding school and this was our last real adventure together and really the last time all three of us would be together. It is funny how even the best of friends can grow apart from each other.  More about this below…

It never snowed beyond the 6″ that first day, making for a piss-poor early winter when were were there. So we basically resorted to bumming around there and Las Vegas New Mexico and a little village called Rociata where Evan’s family had just moved to from Connecticut. In the end, it was a neat trip, but really long and slow and sort of painful for a variety of reasons.

About the second week in, growing up back east (its funny how things like this can be so rare for some people) I had never seen a rare FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser before and sure enough there was one on the side of the road right in downtown Taos.

FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser

I was driving at the time and screeched to a halt to check it out as we had nothing better to do. We started poking around and it was really funky… It was completely covered in NM red clay, bald and worn and totally beaten up but still running, New Mexico style.. Huge holes through the front fenders that you could put your arms through but not that bad. Or so I thought…

We poked around some more and sure enough it was actually for sale, there was a sign that had fallen off the dash under the front bench seat long ago. It’d probably been for sale for months I imagine with little to no one paying attention to it, including the owner. It had badly expired plates, but looked like it was fully functional sitting in a little dirt pad just off the side of the road. It was a ’72 or so, the old 3 on the tree style shifting transmission. And old school Land Cruiser, the famous old work horse station wagon from Toyota.

We called the guy up and it belonged to some NM riff-raff and it turned out the cruiser was sort of like the village bicycle, even belonged to some guy called “Kramer” at some point the guy kept mentioning for some reason. But in my eyes (I owned a beat up FJ60 at the time, in college in Vermont) it was a gem. The rear window was busted or blown out so someone had built a wooden barrier behind the back door with a piece of plexi glass to see with your mirror. And when we started it it had a bad rod knock. But ran and drove with a max speed of about 25-30 at max power and piss poor if not non-existent old cruiser drum brakes front and rear (they sure don’t make them like that any more).

So we negotiated, I tried to trade my back pack but the guy luckily said no (I still have and love the backpack) and ended up getting it for close to what we had to our names I think, I bought it for $225 with the agreement that me and the friend with food poisoning would split it later. Also, we had to return our borrowed Jetta shortly and would be without wheels (which had become our lifeblood with no snow), so it was actually exactly what we were looking for.

The cruiser eventually became the highlight of the trip. For example I am a die hard skier but really remember little of Taos the ski area. I remember meeting the author John Nichols (who wrote the Milagro Beanfield War), who is old friends with my old man, at a cheap diner, with the cruiser..  He had just married and divorced his 5th wife I think, a 20-something Mexican and she’d taken him for everything he was worth. He was driving a beat up old late 80′s small Dodge pickup.  He arrived wearing jeans he’d probably been wearing for 5 days, it looked.  I remember from the few times I met him when I was a kid that he took out his upper retainer which held 2 or 3 fake teeth, from when he played hockey at Loomis Chaffee Academy in New England.   He was older than I remember him, at this point in his late 50s or early 60′s. And I remember he was awesome, and so down to earth versus what I had come to remember from only distant childhood memories of the great writer John Nichols, and what an honor it was to meet him in all of his humbleness. And he also dug the old cruiser and our little adventure; he really thought it was cool that we had bought and were tooling around in this old POS…

And I remember the funky New Mexico land scape, and how barren it was. The encroachment of box stores like Block Buster into the funky down and out town of Las Vegas. I remember the little adobe house Evan’s family was living in, which had the address “House behind Church, Rociada NM.” And I remember most of the days there oddly having a cold, hazy and cloudy feel.  Odd for New Mexico.

Anyway, the Land Cruiser basically saved the day. We eventually returned the borrowed Jetta and the Land Cruiser was our only wheels.  We ended up spending most of our time bombing around Taos related to the no snow, and stayed at a family friends of Evan’s parents near town. This family was very cool, modern back east New Mexico hippie transplant types, but authentic and not phony. Where they lived they had a lot of land, off a gnarly road to the north. They already had a parked fire truck and a number of old non-rusted decrepid vehicles they had acquired which was also cool.  So we cruised around, and the day we were supposed to leave Taos (with this hairbrain idea to drive the cruiser down to Las Vegas to Evan’s parents place–a bad idea with an engine with a knock), the engine had a significant loss of power and change in noise and we knew it was about toast. It limped down to about 15 mph max and could not longer make it up the mildest hill. So we called the family with the fire truck and asked if we could store it there and they said yes. The Jetta and Evan’s parents reammerged to pick us up and we actually used the extra power of the Jetta to get the cruiser to the property of these people and parked it. That night, I flew home and returned to college in Vermont (’72 FJ55 even dotted my sig for several months on some of the Land Cruiser sites & boards).  But I eventually forgot about it all…

*   *  *

Years go by and Evan and I had long lost touch.  Sean, the guy with the torn ACL, had his own bouts with the desire to ski from the year he lost from the ACL tear, that this trip took from him too.  He eventually took a year off college to live in Crested Butte and ended up living in Lake Tahoe, and we still keep in touch regularly.  We were also roommates my senior year at college.

I had lost complete touch with Evan and still thought he was in Siberia still (literally), finishing his masters degree.  He is crazy enough to actually get his masters degree in Siberia.  He’d perfected a dialect of Russian, he reported last time we spoke, that was good enough that most people thought he was from a different part of the country.  This is funny because this is how he carried himself at boarding school with a Southwestern accent and a big belt buckle, even though was from Connecticut.  When we next spoke, probably 4 years later, he told me the story of having to headbutt a Russian in a bar fight he’d started by accident over some beautiful woman, to escape with his life.  In Siberia.  And today, he is an assistant professor at University of Kansas in some sort of foreign studies.

Anyway, post our last discussion, I had received an email saying something along the lines of, “oh yeah, you remember that old Land Cruiser?”   I had forgot about it enough that I didn’t even remember to ask about it.  I also assumed it was probably still up on that property in Taos, New Mexico.

“A couple of months after you guys were out, we went up and pulled it off of the property.”   And he went into the specifics of actually repairing the damn thing.  Little did he know old Land Cruisers had become a life obsession for me by then (I’ve already owned three more of those old rare FJ55 wagons).

He said he’d bought a little mig welder and started cutting out panels here and there.  He’d basically gotten almost completely done with a complete frame off restoration on the pig back to original 1972 specs!  The only thing he’d done beyond stock was a modest swap to a 3 on the floor instead of on-the-tree which is beyond understandable.   He wrote, “you have no idea how much time and labor I put into it.  FJ55′s as you know have a flimsy roof so I cut the roof out of an old Ford van with ribbing in it and installed that into the FJ55.  It is all primered and I have the engine all ready to go and to put into it.”   And he sent pics…

The old bomber from Evan Emmott...

*   *  *

So, I should have known and suspected as much because his Dad and older brother had an old MG British Sports car, at the time, at his parent’s warehouse.  They sell/sold at the time yarn out of a warehouse in Las Vegas New Mexico and had the car stored there.   They’d restored the MG to about 90% but never put back together other than the shell of the car.  We were checking it out back then, I recall, and I remember thinking how cool it was and admiring the quality of their work.

And..  They did the same with the old cruiser.   Last we spoke Evan in Kansas and it was still in that restored minus final paint, ready to go back together, oddly in about the same shape as that old MG.  He had learned how to use an english wheel, which is the ultimate metal worker’s tool and the pinnacle of metal forming ability in my opinion; what the motor cycle builder Jesse James uses to build gas tanks from scratch, and a tool from the early last century.   He’d sucessfully and cleanly adapted the ribbed Ford van roof into the FJ55 roof to give it some structure, and the photos showed really good work…

And he wrote “I forgot, I still owe you $112.50!,” which I had completely forgot about meaning that in a sense I still sort of “own” this old beast…     Payback’s a bitch Evan if you’re still out there.  Just kidding, it would be my pleasure to give you this old FJ55 after the work you have into it.

*     *     *

And basically that’s about it..  Someday, when I finish this next round of restoring my old FJ55, I plan to cruise on down sometime when Evan is home and check out that old FJ55 and see how its going, and maybe help get it running again if its not yet.

The old email from Evan when we first got in contact again…

Dear Andre:

Howdy! I was looking on the internet for a new carburetor for the FJ-55 and I saw your name pop up a whole bunch of times on Birfield, which I still don’t fully understand how to use, so I thought I would see what’s up.

I am an instructor in the History Department at Kansas State University for Modern European and Russian history while I work on finishing up my Ph.D. That’s going OK. I was in Moscow for the summer, and got to do a bit of traveling around in the countryside, and then in the Caucusus, too. The Caucusus was great–bought a couple of nice tribal rugs, which are really pretty, and tried to stay away from menacing bearded men with Kalashnikovs.

I attached a couple of pictures of the Iron Pig out in NM. I am almost finished, but I have only been working on it sporadically as time and money allows. The lastest thing I did was replace the roof, since the old one was terribly stretched, and pretty rusty, and basically just a piece of junk overall. I skinned a roof off of a junk-yard Ford Econoline van because it had a series of parallel ridges pressed into it for strength, which the 55 series does not. After just getting the roof skin, I cut out ten inches of width from the middle and then about a foot in length, and pieced it back together so that the roof fit onto the Pig, and then it was glued and welded back together with a spot welder so as not to distort the metal. I wasn’t sure if that would really work, but since the roof was already off the Pig, too, I figured at worst I could always put a rag top on instead. But, it worked out fairly well. Other than that did a lot of metal-patching to fenders, quarter panels, replacing floor panels, inner fenders, basically just about 40-50 percent of all metal in the entire vehicle. But, I got a lot better at welding. So, it’s getting there…

The motor is totally rebuilt and key-starts, but I need a new stock carburetor. Do you know where I could find one? I don’t really want a rebuild, or a new aftermarket type, like a weber, but the original for a F-series engine. I would appreciate any help you could give me.

Let me know what’s going on with you.

Best,

Evan