#rodd keith

[maxmundan]

Has to be heard to be believed. If you don’t know about the song-poems of the 70s and 80s, then you are missing out on some twisted brilliance.

[nicolnicol]

Today has been a bit chemicalsadstupid and slowmopey so I'm spending the evening listening to all the song-poems I can. They always cheer me up.

I don't think I'm ever laughing at the people who wrote these words, no matter how ridiculous and ham-fisted they get. I love that someone came up with a song, wanted to share it and decided to pay to do so. As opposed to songwriters and musicians (we know that they ARE songwriters or musicians), we know nothing about them, for the most part. I love the hack-job of so many of the session musicians, clearly doing dozens of these songs they may well hate in an afternoon, using the rock and roll cliches, feeling just a little off, in a way you can barely place. I love the mixture of enthusiasm and disinterest, which seems to have had their conventional roles (within the pop song world) reversed. Song poems always cheer me up.

[dustedmagazine]

Rodd Keith — Black Phoenix Blues (Roaratorio)

Sometimes good things take time, and so it is with Roaratorio’s Rodd Keith reissue campaign. There’s a lot to like about My Pipe Yellow Dream and Saucers in the Sky, the label’s previous efforts to honor the man who once was known to his family as Rodney Keith Eskelin. Both were, like Black Phoenix Blues, sourced from Rodd’s work turning lyrics solicited from the readers of pulpy periodicals into approximations of popular music in the late '60s and early '70s.

Aficionados call these things song-poems; Rodd and his buds called what they did song-sharking.

All three records thrive on the tension between Rodd’s knack for instantly devising sophisticated settings for words that violated most of the rules of commercially viable songcraft without even trying. What puts this one ahead are the handful of songs that are such emotional horror shows, you have to count yourself as blessed never to have been stuck in a dark corner with the people who wrote them.

Mind you, not everything is dire. I’ve been waiting for 15 years to hear the lead-off song, “Green Bermudas,” ever since Rodd’s son, jazz saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, used it to accomplish a sui generis cross-generational collaboration that was impossible in real life; Rodd died after diving off an LA overpass in 1974. The song is a trifle, a goofy tribute to a girl’s swaying posterior and its verdant wrapping. It's just the kind of song that turns song-poem collections into laugh riots. Rodd delivers it with good-natured lustiness that is true to the song’s spirit and betrays no contempt for the naivete of its construction. “Bus Driver Stop That Bus” is all cheap rhymes and banal observations but Rodd delivers it like Tom Jones going for the gold. He doesn’t always keep a straight face, though; Rodd mugs his way though the blues clichés on “The Game of Love” so outrageously that the customer who submitted the lyric asked for a redo.

A different kind of blues surfaces on the title song, penned by one Tshakajomo Zekekayzulu. Mr. Zekekayzulu seems to have been one to hold a grudge and his “Black Phoenix Blues” is a bitter takedown that assures the object of his enmity that even God can’t protect her from his wrath. He stands taller and meaner than Nick Cave’s nastiest protagonists because there’s nothing cartoonish about him; he’s mad and he’s out for blood. One hopes that Rodd’s cruel, committed delivery was sufficiently cathartic that he didn’t have to take it any further.

Even bleaker is “Sing My Death Note,” which is credited to one Charles Holloway, but comes across like Rodd’s own final farewell. Accompanied by amp buzz and gospelized piano, he confesses to whoring his talents and then lists the ways he can do himself in.  It would be pure pornography if it weren’t also pretty damned good. And it’s not the only death song on here; there’s also a nutty cowboy tune with a body count, and the record ends with a country-soul reach-out to Jesus that Rodd infuses with a fervor concealing the song’s clunky lines.

It’s at moments like this that Black Phoenix Blues makes the case that Rodd’s investment and skill, which made him a towering talent in a milieu that gladly accepted incompetence and prized impersonal expediency over skill, might also have been what brought him down. It’s one thing to be a hack if that’s all you can be; he could have been more, and he knew it.

Bill Meyer

[atlas-bugged]

Rodd Keith - The Eyes Have It (by EsotericArchives)

[teripops]

Rodd Keith- I Died Today

[conradtao]

Rodd Keith: "Shome Howe Jehovason Plays (version one)"

[unfriendlywitness-blog]

Rodd Keith - I Died Today

"Why Hundreds of People in Los Angeles Will Be Buried in A Mass Grave Today"

http://laist.com/2012/12/04/why_thousands_of_people_will_be_buried.php

[friendisland]

Rodd Keith - "I Dreamed Too Long Woke up Too Late"

Rodd Keith was supposedly the "Mozart" of the song poem genre, (aka the “send us your lyrics" industry) during the 60s and early 70s.  He was incredibly prolific and wrote literally thousands of songs set to other peoples lyrics.  In his later years he got heavily into psychedelics (the influence of which is reflected in his later work) before eventually falling from an overpass to die on the Hollywood Freeway in 1974. 

Allmusic bio.