Musical Fruitcake

Canned Heat is a blues-rock/boogie band that formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The importance of the group lies not only with their blues-based music, but with their efforts to reintroduce and revive the careers of some of the great old bluesmen, and their improvisational abilities.

The group was led by Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson (guitar, harmonica, vocals) and Bob Hite (”The Bear”) (vocals, harmonica). Henry Vestine (a.k.a Sunflower) also played guitar and was an ex-member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Larry Taylor (”The Mole”) (best known up until then as The Monkees session bassist), was their studio bassist, (joining full time through 1970), along with drummer Frank Cook for their first album. Canned Heat took their name from Tommy Johnson’s 1928 “Canned Heat Blues”, a song about an alcoholic who has desperately turned to drinking Sterno, which is generically called canned heat.

Soon after they recorded this song the band appeared at the August 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Festival with their performance appearing in both the album and film release.

Info from the Canned Heat Website:

In an incongruous move, the band next released a Christmas single. The “A” side, “The Chipmunk Song,” paired Canned Heat with their Liberty labelmates, the Chipmunks. The “Chipmunk Song” wasn’t actually the same song as the Chipmunks’ similarly titled 1958 chart-topper, but it was a good-natured boogie containing humorous dialogue between Bob Hite and the Chipmunks (Simon, Theodore and Alvin… named after executives at Liberty). The “B” side entitled “Christmas Blues” was a slow, blues melody with de la Parra on piano and a lyric written by Skip Taylor in less than five minutes.

LISTEN TO MP3:

DOWNLOAD:
Canned_Heat___The_Chipmunks_-_The_Chipmunk_Song.mp3

BONUS:

Here is the trailer for one of the Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing Alongs. This one is “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”:

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Posted by Jef Elf on January 1st, 2007 at 4:38 pm
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