The centerpiece of King Sunny Ade’s new album, “Live at the Hollywood Palace” (Hemisphere/IRS), is an epic version of one of his earliest songs, “Ja Funmi.” It tells the story of Ade himself, born Sunday Adeniyi in 1946 to a Nigerian royal family who opposed his decision to drop out of school and become a musician.
“My family didn’t recognize that I was not in school until I made my first record,” he says. “I became a rebel among them, and they asked me not to tell anyone that I was from a royal family. Only recently have we become friends again. I don’t drink or smoke, I’m not into politics, and they are happy with me now.”
It is a humbling anecdote coming from one of the world’s great musical ambassadors, a guitarist, singer, composer and band leader who has recorded more than 80 albums. His 1982 album “Juju Music” (Mango) was North America’s official introduction to a West African sound with roots in the 1920s, originally featuring percussion, voice and acoustic guitar.
By the time Ade began performing juju in the ’60s, it had evolved into a polyrhythmic big-band music, dominated by talking drums and electric guitars, as opposed to the horn-inflected highlife music also regionally popular. Ade developed a distinctive shimmering guitar style that some Western listeners have compared to Jerry Garcia’s, though the West African says he never heard the Grateful Dead guitarist and was influenced by native players.
In addition to his dexterity as an instrumentalist, Ade was an innovator, introducing pedal steel, vibraphone and synthesizer to the juju vocabulary, instruments that only heightened the exotic, otherworldly feel of his music.
“Whenever I tried something new, I always played it at my nightclub (in Nigeria) to see the reaction of the people,” Ade says. “If they like it, I put it on my records.”
It was Ade’s allegiance to his core audience that caused him to abandon recording for Mango after three increasingly Westernized albums a decade ago. “With `Aura’ (in 1984) I came into some areas I didn’t like,” he says. “If I change so much, how could I explain it to the people back home? I stick to my roots. If you don’t, you just play dance music.”
The quicker tempos on “Live at the Hollywood Palace,” which may surprise fans of Ade’s mellower mid-’80s releases, come in response to what the band leader calls “the faster pace of music all around the world. We had to elevate the beat-they ask for it back home.”
Although there are contemporary concerns in Ade’s lyrics, he views his music as celebratory. “I am watching the World Cup and I see how sport combines people, he says. “The same with music, it is a bandage for the whole world.”
Ade brings his 18-piece band, the African Beats, to Park West on Saturday.
– Indie-rock bands can be even more incestuous than their mainstream contemporaries: An innovative record like Sonic Youth’s “Sister” or Slint’s “Tweez” has been known to inspire imitators by the dozen within a couple of years. Which is why the Grifters seem to come out of nowhere with “Crappin’ You Negative” (Shangri-La), one of the best albums of ’94, indie rock or otherwise.
Actually, “nowhere” is Memphis, which has a music scene “that still thinks it’s about the 1920s,” says singer-guitarist Dave Shouse with a laugh. “It’s Delta blues to Charley Feathers, Sun, Stax, and Tony Joe White … we listened to a lot of Tony Joe White and Howlin’ Wolf, real characters, before we cut this record.”
The influence of those outsize personalities can be heard on Shouse’s over-the-top “Skin Man Palace,” in which he plays the role of the “Mambo king, wrapped tight in my tarantula skin.”
“It’s like a short-film idea, this guy trading skins in the junkyard with Oriental rickshaw babes, using teeth as dice,” Shouse says.
The Grifters’ songs coalesce around the disparate sensibilities of the pop-oriented Shouse, the “voodoo, from-the-gut” style of Scott Taylor and Tripp Lampkins’ classic-rock obsessions, while Stan Gallimore navigates from behind his drum kit.
“Our main influences are each other, because we have such vastly different backgrounds,” Shouse says. “There’s a lot of yelling and screaming, and then an idea gets put through the laundry. When someone makes a mistake, we try to explore it instead of fix it.”
The band’s live performances are part of the laundering process, as songs change shape and feel nightly.
“We feel much better about a song when we allow it to mutate a bit,” Shouse says. “The record is like a document of where the song was on that day. But each time we play it, it can take a different turn because no one is shackled. Live, things get more brutal, funkier, out of hand. We’re usually a little unscrewed by the time we get on stage.”
The Grifters headline Friday at Lounge Ax.
– Of all the comments made by the various Eagles to justify the $120 tickets for their performances next Thursday at the World and next Friday at Alpine Valley, here’s one to savor from Glenn Frey: “If somebody really complains about ticket prices, I’d say, `Don’t buy the Italian sunglasses this month.’ “
– Meat Loaf, who roars into the World on Saturday, will have his 19-year-old daughter in the band, but not his longtime producer and songwriter, Jim Steinman, the auteur of the two multiplatinum “Bat out of Hell” albums that are the bookends of Loaf’s career.
“I’d love to have him in the band, but he can never tour because he could never get to the show on time,” Loaf says. “He sleeps through everything.”
After the first “Bat” album went through the roof, the follow-up was to be recorded in 1979, but the singer quit “because it wasn’t our record anymore, it was becoming Jim’s record.”
He says he nearly quit again last January as the recent “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell” was piling up sales.
“When everyone saw the record was No. 1, it became about what everyone was owed, it became about money,” Loaf says. “But everyone backed off because I can verbalize what’s bothering me better. Before I could only yell and scream.”
