A Yankee Playlist

Introduction

This is just a few songs with the word "Yankee" in the title. This is Wiki's words on Yankees.

For some reason, the first record on the playlist was just in my head, and on checking it seems quite difficult to get hold of if you look in the wrong places although the price has dropped significantly since yesterday, but there is a vinyl copy on it's way to me via Discogs.

Jane Aire and The Belvederes - "Yankee Wheels" - Single

This starts off as an ominous stomp, which is no bad thing, but the chorus is damned near perfect and this was one of those singles that I bought as soon as it got released, though I did buy a hell of a lot of records on the Stiff label, though they rejected The Bok when we sent them a demo cassette that you can listen to here.

Jane Aire (real name Jane Ashley) was a talented singer from Akron, Ohio whose career got started outside her homeland, courtesy of a single on Stiff Records, "Yankee Wheels".

Aire’s backing group The Belvederes were, in reality, a London group called The Edge, who came about when guitarist Lu Edmonds and drummer Jon Moss left a brief and unrecorded incarnation of The Damned in 1978.

I could not find much on the band but this was taken from this article:

In "Copendium" Julian Cope has this to say about the song:

Thirty-two years ago, the British music press fell in love with a bunch of bands from Akron, Ohio, and the fifteen-year-old Jane Aire was the one whose innate punkiness got to all of them. Stiff signed her for this sleazy, wheezing, avant-garage debut single, and its strangely staggering, piano-led no-wave/Mike Garson- ness and strangulated lead guitar have haunted me ever since. The mad, unsung genius behind this single was one Liam Sternberg, whose piano and songwriting should really have been investigated further from the evidence of this recording.

The Skids - "Working For The Yankee Dollar" from "Days In Europa"

The Skids, Dunfermline's finest, putting into song what many of us felt then and still feel now. It's a great song with the sadly missed Stuart Adamson (who died in 2001) on guitar who left to form the wonderful Big Country.

David Lee Roth - "Yankee Rose" from "Eat 'Em And Smile"

Some AOR Poodle rock from David Lee Roth. Very formulaic metal with some wild wah-wah on the guitar. I've heard worse.

Show Of Hands - "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)" from "Arrogance Ignorance And Greed"

This is a cover of a Bob Dylan song from his "Street Legal" album. I was surprised at how many covers of this are on YouTube.

Dylan has told several somewhat contradictory stories about the origins of "Señor". When introducing the song in live performance in 1978, he told the story of how "he was on a train going from Mexico to San Diego and how a strange old man got on the train, and Dylan felt the urge to talk to him. Apparently, the story told in the concerts started off fairly simply and gradually expanded adding the notion that when Dylan finally did want to talk to the man, he had gone".[3] Rolling Stone quoted Dylan as describing the man on the train as "150 years old… Both his eyes were burning, and there was smoke coming out of his nostrils".

Another time, Dylan introduced the song by saying it had been inspired by actor Harry Dean Stanton with whom he had starred in Sam Peckinpah's 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Finally, in an interview accompanying the Biograph booklet, Dylan said it was "about the aftermath of when two people who were leaning on each other because neither one of them had the guts to stand up alone, all of a sudden they break apart". He added, "I think I felt that way when I wrote it".