Rock On.

from todays Guardian

Richard Williams on the king with an Ace up his sleeve

I wish, now, that I'd spent more time at Ted Carroll's Rock On stall, hidden away in the Golborne Road market at the top of Portobello Road in London. This was at the dawn of the 1970s, long before fashionable affluence began to emigrate to the north end of Notting Hill. There was nothing fashionable about Ted's record stall, founded on his purchase of a couple of thousand 45s on the London American label from a dealer in his native Dublin at a flat price of threepence-ha'penny each and sold to the likes of me for pound or two, depending on rarity, along with a dollop of conversation.





Ted was a large, bearded, bespectacled man who loved rhythm'n'blues and rockabilly, and had acquired a sufficient comprehension of their value to enable him to increase his retail empire first by adding a stall in Soho market and then, in 1975, by opening a full-scale Rock On shop around the corner from Camden Town tube station. Before long, his outlets had become the equivalents of New York's House of Oldies and Village Oldies, places where young musicians hung out, drinking from the fountain of the eternal rock'n'roll verities.
One way or another, it was inevitable that Ted would start his own record company, in the great tradition of retailers whose direct experience of their customers' purchasing habits provides a quality of market research denied to the suits in their corporate HQs. Ted's first label was called Chiswick and is remembered for such releases as the Count Bishops' Train Train and the Keys to Your Heart by the 101ers, featuring Joe Strummer, redolent of the time when the pub-rock of north and west London was starting to mutate into the full-blown punk movement.

In 1978, Carroll and his associate Roger Armstrong started a second label, called Ace, to handle reissues of recordings, many of them cherishably obscure, licensed from the original companies and repackaged with the expertise of true aficionados. It was with this project that they found lasting success. In the 30 years since Ace started out by assuaging a thirst for the sinister guitar instrumentals of Link Wray, the label has mushrooomed to encompass virtually every style of American vernacular music, from Kentucky bluegrass to northern soul and beyond, entertaining and instructing generations of listeners in the process.

The rich story of Carroll, Armstrong and their labels is well told in the new book Ace Records by David Stubbs (Black Dog, £19.95). Copiously illustrated, it shares a fondness for good visual material with the company's own art directors, who understand the appeal of an original label design or an evocative period poster. It is an appeal that speaks across frontiers: in Zagreb last year, I wandered into a record shop where at least half the stock bore the Ace imprint.

Among Ace's most recent releases are an anthology of the early-70s recordings of the New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint, a compilation of the early-60s work of the great producer Bert Berns (including the Isley Brothers and Solomon Burke), and a 1983 set of railroad-inspired guitar sketches by the late John Fahey, one of the rarer items from Fahey's own Takoma label. The item most likely to attract attention, however, is a two-CD set titled Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan, a selection of 50 tracks from the series that has given Dylan a new career as a disc jockey. Put together with Dylan's blessing, it juxtaposes the likes of Slim Gaillard, Bo Diddley, Merle Haggard, the White Stripes, Memphis Minnie, the Stanley Brothers, Otis Rush, Mary Gauthier, Dinah Washington, the Donays, Geraint Watkins, Aretha Franklin, Jack Teagarden, Joe South, Billie Holiday and George Jones in such a display of love and scholarship that it could also stand as a symbol of the adventure that began at that obscure little market stall all those years ago.

· Ace Records by David Stubbs is published by Black Dog. Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan is out now

Ace Catalogue

Ted's Top Ten

45s
Baby I Love You So - Joey Weaver & The Don Juans (Fortune 825)
Kokomo Me Baby - Danny Boy (Tifco 824)
Gypsy Girl - The Staccatos (Syncro 661)
Alabama Shake - Barry Darvell (London HL 9191)
Sufferin City - Johnny Copeland (Atlantic 2542)
You Got Me Whistlin - Johnny Fuller (Checker 899)
Tongue Tied Jill - Charlie Feathers (Meteor 5032)
I Could Never Be Ashamed of You - Jerry Lee Lewis (Sun 330)
Mystery Train - Junior Parker (Sun 192)
Prisoner of Love - James Brown (King 5739)

LPs
Michael Hurley - Armchair Boogie (Racoon)
Dykes - Greatest Hits ~ Funky Broadway (Original Sound 8876)
Rolling Stones - First Album (Decca LK 4605)
Various Artists - We Sing The Blues (London HA-P 8061)
Ike & Tina Turner - Greatest Live Show on Earth (Warners WM 8170)
Soundtrack - EasyRider (Dunhill DSX 50063)

Letters From Arcadia

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

You Dancing?

The Best Magazine You've Not Heard Of Yet...

Sitting around with your mates moaning about how magazines aren’t as good they used to be – it’s almost a national sport in this country for men of a certain age. It’s all about the supposed 'heyday' of the NME and how amazing it was back when there were four weekly music magazines in the UK; about how brilliant Select was back in the day and “didn’t the Observer magazine actually used to run things that you wanted to read of a Sunday”? What a perpetual disappointment it is, logging all the wrong turns that magazines make – your magazines, those ones that you're stupidly loyal to. Several pints later the argument ends up about how much better you’d do it had you just got A) the time, B) the inclination and C) a huge conglomerate willing to put your crazed pub bore ramblings and deranged beer-mat doodlings out and onto the shelves of into WHSmiths in Swindon train station. Annoyingly, it’s just that last point that eludes me...

As a lifelong magazine junkie, I now find myself increasing drawn towards American magazines. For starters, there is a massive plus in that you are a lot less likely to be confronted by waffle about whoever you’re supposed to care about this week, be it Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong or the bloke from Bloc Party (that’s got to be a good thing). For seconds, music magazines over there are allowed to conduct themselves with a level of intelligence much closer to our broadsheet press. Rolling Stone, always a political animal, has just put Barack Obama on the cover (they did the same for John Kerry and Howard Dean in the last Presidential election, not that that really helped). Their main politics correspondent, Matt Taibbi, is a man so forthright and forceful in his opinions, he’d make the good Dr Thomson blush - someone well worth following if you’re vaguely interested in reading about the labyrinthine, murky world of American government alongside your above average Britney Spears off-the-rails cover story. Another favourite is LA based freebie, Arthur, which has long flown the freak flag for nu-folkers, doom metal heads and acid eaters the world over. The fact that Arthur is still here is a something of a miracle of bloody minded determination – when the magazine was folded a while back, head honcho Jay Babcock bought it from the publisher and forged on, creating the ultimate 21st century free press success story (the magazine and back issues are distributed online as a free PDFs).



Chicago based Stop Smiling is the best magazine out there that you’ve never heard of yet. For reasons I’ve yet to understand, you don’t see this magazine in British newsagents or even in Borders. Tagged as “the magazine for high mind lowlifes”, Stop Smiling has been a labour of love for its editors, JC Gabel and James Hughes, for over a decade now. Their editorial approach is best described as “if you don’t ask you don’t get”. Printed in colour with a textured matte finish, each issue of Stop Smiling is whip smart and uncynical, a lesson in how to keep your head when everything else around you is dumbing down. The last few years have seen them run exhaustive cover story interviews with the likes of Lee Hazlewood, Jay Z, William Eggleston, Cat Power, The RZA, Kurt Vonnegut, Ricky Gervais, Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Robinson & Lynne Ramsey (if that sounds like a lot of magazines, they print as many as 3 different covers for each issue, often covering a load of different audience bases). Their recent Stax Records 50th anniversary issue was labelled “An Ode To The South” and was just that – everyone from the Kings Of Leon to the Mayor of New Orleans came to the party. This is also a magazine that hasn’t forgotten the art of a great cover shot - it came wrapped in a picture of the Stax record store in Memphis, all fizzing neon, proudly displaying the slogan ‘Soulsville USA’. If that was the Guardian Weekend magazine you were picking up, you’d be convinced you’d died and gone to some kind of magazine heaven.

The latest issue of Stop Smiling, a Jazz special, just arrived in my letter box. The covers are alternate classic black and white photos of Ornette Coleman, Bobby Hutcherson & Eric Dolphy. It’s like being walked through the aisles of a great specialist record shop by people who know what they’re talking about. An article about Sun Ra and Moondog (“Costuming The Super Anti Hero”) brilliantly cuts to the chase by focusing mainly on their clothes. The cover strap line is a bold as brass commandment – “Start Appreciating America’s Greatest Art Form”. Can you imagine Uncut holding off from someone from the pantheon of acceptable old duffers that they rely on and doing that instead? Hopefully, one day someone will collect together back issues of this magazine and put them in a book. That day, people will look at it and wonder where it’s been all their lives. Get the jump on them early by seeking it out now, you won’t regret it.

Robin Turner, Socialism Magazine

Bitches Brew, working with Miles Davis

Teo Macero, October 30 1925 - February 19 2008

Teo Macero was undoubtedly one of the most influential producers in the history of recorded music. Although he first came to prominence as a tenor saxophone player and member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Composers' workshop, Macero is most well known for his work as a jazz producer with Columbia Records from the 1950s through the 1980s, producing some of the best work of Dave Brubeck, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, and especially Miles Davis. With Davis, Macero pushed jazz through several changes, from the cool jazz of Kind of Blue to the grand orchestral gestures of Sketches of Spain, finally ushering jazz and popular music into the electronic age with his landmark work on Davis albums like Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way and A Tribute to Jack Johnson among many others. The experimental cut-and-paste method of production which he used on these albums helped put the producer-as-artist on an equal footing with musicians in creating a piece of recorded music, and paved the way for future generations of groundbreaking producers from Herbie Hancock to Prince Paul.



thanks to Rofey

The Taking Of Pelham 123

great film, tonight, 6.10, Channel Five

Kitchen Sink Dramas

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greeness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin, 1967


Notes:
Oh, dear Mr Larkin, that terminally melancholic librarian who weathered residencies in Leicester, Hull and Belfast; Poet Laureate
refusenik; misanthropic bachelor; we can hardly blame you for being such a miserable sod for much of your quiet, bookish life. And yet how glad we are that on a spring morning some forty years ago you woke up feeling such uncharacteristic optimism and penned 'The Trees'. (Let's not forget that Larkin also gave us poems about empty station platforms, toads, hospitals and Prestatyn). However, spring did appear to be, if not his favourite, his strongest seasonal muse, like so many poets before him. We may be slightly premature as far as the current weather goes (snow predicted across the UK tonight), but the cherry
blossom is already out on my street. For this, for the sheer sumptious beauty of Larkin's words, and because it's Kitchen Sink Dramas'co-director Julia's favourite poem in the world, we release our
inaugural Reading Room post into the world with some verse to defy the most winter-jaded of us all. Enjoy. It also happens to be World Book Day. Riffle some pages.

Love

Jemma and Julia

P.S. Please feel free to forward this post on to any friends you think might like it. To become a member of The Reading Room and receive our monthly literary bulletins all they need to do is visit The Reading Room page on our website and enter their details. No purchase necessary!