Rainer's Top Ten Commute Spins of 2025

 

Moving out of the homeless-poop-and-puke-spattered heart of the ghetto in 2024 meant that I wouldn’t be able to walk to work in the morning anymore, but the upside is that my drive time gives me more of an opportunity to listen to my music collection. (Yes, for the record, I am an old man who still collects and listens to CDs.) Here, in chronological order of original recordings, are my favorite road picks for 2025:

Andre Williams – “Rib Tips and Pig Snoots”: Rare and Unreleased Au-Go-Go Soul 1965-1971

Song titles like “Jivin’ Around”, “Do It”, “Sweet Little Pussy Cat”, “Rib Tips”, “Pig Snoots”, “Chicken Thighs”, “Loose Juice”, and “Soul Party A-Go-Go” pretty much let the prospective listenership know up front what this Andre Williams brother is all about – namely, having a good, rowdy time. These aggressive, sleazy, and greasy soul and funk recordings, with their raspy vocals, lettin’-it-all-hang-out brass, and consistent danceability, are essential listening for fans of the genre. Those who enjoy this raucous material will also want to seek out the similarly fun album Whip Your Booty!, which collects Williams’s seventies output with the group Velvet Hammer.

King Curtis – That Lovin’ Feeling (1966)

I’ll always have vivid associations with this easy listening classic from saxophone master King Curtis, as it happened to be the album I had on as I slowly drove through a dangerous snowstorm to get to court on the day my bullshit criminal charge was finally dismissed. Selections range from country tunes “Cryin’ Time” and “Make the World Go Away” to pop standards “Spanish Harlem”, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, and the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” and “Michelle”. Curtis’s rendition of “Moonglow” is as dreamy as it gets, and his cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” is anything but devoid of emotion. For those interested in hearing the saxophonist’s funkier side, Instant Groove (1969) and Live at Fillmore West (1971) are highly recommended. Curtis recorded the latter at the peak of his powers, a few months before he was fatally stabbed outside his Manhattan home.

Allen Toussaint – What Is Success: The Scepter and Bell Recordings (1968-1970)

Singer, songwriter, and producer Allen Toussaint, one of the quintessential voices in New Orleans music, ranges from gently funky pop to country-rambling instrumental whimsy in this appealing set of recordings. “Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky”, “From a Whisper to a Scream”, and “What Is Success” are immaculately crafted, and each song in the collection boasts consistently creative arrangements. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, “Number Nine”, “Hands Christianderson”, and the piano-and-organ-ensouled “Gotta Travel On” demonstrate Toussaint’s knack for easy listening material, while the unexpectedly classy, romantic, and moody piano flourishes in the midst of an otherwise countrified instrumental track unassumingly titled “Pickles” prove his capacity to surprise listeners with his choices. Covers of hits featured here include “Working in the Coalmine” and a mambo-ized take on the Champs’ “Tequila”.

Irma Thomas – Live! New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 1976

Irma Thomas, for those who don’t know the name, is the Soul Queen of New Orleans whose searing 1964 cover of “Time Is on My Side” set the template for the version the Rolling Stones would release later the same year. This excellent 1976 live show finds her dabbling in disco with “Lady Marmalade” and revisiting slow-burning sixties hits like “It’s Raining”, “Ruler of My Heart”, and “Wish Someone Would Care”, the latter of which furnishes the crown jewel of this set with its raunchy spoken interlude of trash-talk ruminations on the differences between the sexes. “Anything you men think you can do, we manage to do it better. […] And every time you men two-time, we women can three. […] Every time you men three-time, we can six, and our back don’t hurt when we get through!”

James Booker – At Onkel Po’s Carnegie Hall: Hamburg 1976

One of the greatest personalities to emerge from the New Orleans music scene in the twentieth century, pianist James Booker was a tortured yet humorous virtuoso who was equally at home playing Frederic Chopin, Ray Charles, or the Woody Woodpecker giggle. This document of one of Booker’s European tours finds him leaning heavily on New Orleans inspiration, with covers of Huey “Piano” Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu”, Fats Domino’s “All by Myself”, Earl King’s “Let’s Make a Better World”, and Allen Toussaint’s “Life” sitting alongside original compositions like the sassy “One Hell of a Nerve”. There is also, of course, the de rigueur performance of “Junco Partner”, a rollicking Louisiana lowlife anthem first recorded by James Wayne in 1951 but which Booker made into his own signature number since nobody ever did it better – or with more druggy embellishment. Amusingly, the Germans who put out this CD botched the track listing in keeping with their national character, turning “Let’s Make a Better World” into “Let’s Make a Better Work”.

Iggy Pop – Zombie Birdhouse (1982)

 Produced by Blondie’s Chris Stein, Zombie Birdhouse is one of Iggy Pop’s idiosyncratic new wave albums and features such memorable tracks as the rousing “Run Like a Villain” and the weirdly optimistic “The Horse Song”. The savage “Eat or Be Eaten” and the austere “Life of Work” – a perfect cold-weather morning commute track – evoke a world of harsh competition and perilous survival, as does the energizing “Ballad of Cookie McBride”, which bears a strong thematic affinity to “Old Mule Skinner”, an underappreciated 1983 demo that would show up on the two-disc Iggy odds-and-ends compilation Nuggets. “Watching the News” conveys alienation from world events, while the freakish disco track “Street Crazies” blurs the line between social consciousness and exploitative flippancy. (One can’t help but wonder, too, if the cartoonish “Bulldozer”, with its line “Run that girl over”, would find a fan in the Israeli bulldozer operator who murdered Rachel Corrie.) The work of Jack London informs aspects of Iggy’s vision and “I was influenced by Haitian art a lot,” he told San Antonio journalist Ron Young after Zombie Birdhouse’s release: “I used to just go to hang out there. First I went to see the art one time, and then I just fell in love with the place. […] But there was something, when I saw the depression, the total depression and total misery and total impotency […] how far people can really be pushed, then I started thinking about the connections between that and here [in the United States], and I said, wait a minute, this is the same place.”

Link Protrudi and the Jaymen – Hit & Run! (1987-1989)

Combining material from the Fuzztones side project albums Drive It Home! and Missing Links, this compilation entertainingly showcases Rudi “Link” Protrudi’s enthusiasm for rock guitar legend Link Wray, with high-energy covers of Wray compositions like “Rawhide”, “Mr. Guitar”, and “Rumble” as well as worthy pastiches by Protrudi and the Jaymen such as the gritty “Chicken Choke”. Closing Hit & Run! is the group’s rendition of the 1966 Batman TV theme, taking its cue from the version Iggy Pop recorded at the Paris Palace in 1979 but ratcheting the camp factor even higher with a live dramatization of homosexual tension between the Caped Crusader and Robin. As the back cover blurb puts it, “Forget about the whole goddamn ‘surf’ revival fer chrissake!!!! Link Protrudi & the Jaymen were whippin’ up the meanest, grungiest instro-raunch this side o’ Link Wray while those guys were surfin’ their mommy’s tit!”

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Live and Crazy (1988)

The 1984 New York show documented by the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and the Fuzztones Live release was diverting – and noteworthy, as well, for the singer’s updating of the ingredients of “Alligator Wine” for the eighties, throwing “a case of AIDS” into the pot along with the baked barbecue gorilla ribs and other items – but that set offers a measly four songs featuring Jay. The 1988 Paris concert captured on Live and Crazy, even if not superb from the standpoint of musicianship, constitutes a much more generous package, with eleven songs that find Jay pleasantly stuck in the fifties, hitting the expected highlights of his own material, like “I Put a Spell on You”, “The Whammy”, “Yellow Coat”, and the politically incorrect “Hong Kong” – which largely consists of bizarrely spit and snorted faux-Chinese gibberish – and also throwing in some loose takes on the oldies “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, “Ain’t That a Shame”, “Little Bitty Pretty One”, “Goodnight Sweetheart”, and “Tutti Frutti”. The backing band at times sounds a little drunk or bored, but Jay is versatile and on fire, the chaotic, freewheeling feel of the show being a big part of its charm. The singer’s teasing interactions with the French crowd are lively. “You must be dangerous, Monsieur,” he tells an excited man in the audience who shrieks in sympathy with Jay during “Constipation Blues”.

Southern Culture on the Skids – Ditch Diggin’ (1994)

There is arguably a hipster condescension to Southern Culture on the Skids’ lurid appropriations of white-trash stereotypes, as in “Chicken Shit Farmer” and “My House Has Wheels”, but there is also a great deal of genuine love for the country pop idiom, as evidenced by “Put Your Teeth Up On the Window Sill”, which celebrates the pleasures of dentureless dalliance; and the apocalyptic toe-tapper “The Great Atomic Power”, even if not convincingly pious, also evinces affection for the rustic gospel sound. “Too Much Pork for Just One Fork” and “Ditch Diggin’” are solid bawdy rockers, while “Tunafish Every Day”, “Wig-Out”, and “Rumors of Surf” are accomplished homages to sixties surf rock, a preoccupation further demonstrated by their excellent cover of Link Wray’s “Jack the Ripper”. Ditch Diggin’ remains a highly diggable listen for the rockabillies, psychobillies, and southern rockers of the world.

Brian Setzer ’68 Comeback Special – Ignition! (2001)

I’ll always associate this album with the summer of 2001 – the seemingly carefree calm before 9/11 – which I spent with my grandmother, who had broken her foot and needed somebody to get her groceries and do things for her around the house. The disappearance of Chandra Levy and her relationship with California Representative Gary Condit was the attention-hogging scandal in the news at the time and Brian Setzer was doing the talk show circuit to promote his new album Ignition! Setzer’s performances were awesome, but I never got around to buying the album until this year, nearly a quarter of a century later (sorry, Brian!). Eschewing the swing aesthetic of the previous few years, Setzer gets back to rockabilly basics here with tough but slickly produced revvers like the title track and “Hell Bent”, another highlight being the heroic rendition of “Malagueña” that closes the album. As expected, much of the thematic emphasis is on longing for a lost American past – most explicitly on “’59” – but Ignition! itself, as one of the parting shots of pre-9/11 pop culture, is now of a vintage to warrant nostalgia.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.