45s and Under

Lunch Trek

2012-01-27T07:00:00.001-06:00

Epics Made Easy: Njal's Saga, Chapter 3

2012-01-26T12:57:00.001-06:00

Previously: Hrut Herjolfsson, now engaged, sets sail with his Uncle Ozur to claim an inheritance in Norway. Riding a favorable wind, they reach the country in three weeks.

After a shout-out to King Harald Grey-Cloak and a short list of his forefathers, the story turns to the intrigues of Queen Gunnhild, Harald’s mother and a woman of influence. According to Ozur, she controls the fate of Hrut’s inheritance. “I know Gunnhild’s nature,” Ozur warns. “The moment we refuse her invitation, she will hound us out of the country and seize all we own; but if we accept, she will treat us as handsomely as she promised.”

Hrut asks to become the king’s retainer. Harald, unimpressed, nonetheless yields to his mother’s high opinion of the visitor and tells him to return in a fortnight to take up his duties. Meanwhile, he’s to stay in Gunnhild’s tapestry-filled hall. A night of drink and Gunnhild states that Hrut is to lie with her in the upper chamber—alone. “Such matters are for you to decide,” says our shrewd and amenable Viking. After two weeks in the love nest, Hrut gives the queen fine cloth and furs, then returns to the king—with thirty men, just to be safe. On Gunnhild’s suggestion, however, Hrut is granted a place of high honor.

Next time: Enter . . . Ulf the Unwashed.

45s: Tipping points

2012-01-24T11:34:00.020-06:00

Throughout pop history certain artists have combined an inexplicable run of success with historic suckdom. One or two probably occurred to you at the very moment you landed on the period at the end of that sentence. Said acts pulled a train of hits through an era. Today they, and the hits they spawned, stand as watchwords for nostalgic kitsch, at best, and cultural assault, at worst.

Yet, yet, in the list of their hits lurks a mostly forgotten song that takes them into a still deeper level of badness. When you hear this song it makes you think, My God, they're even worse than I thought.

I have no pithy term to apply to this concept, nor to the offending song. But the phenomenon deserves study.

Target: Billy Joel
After a dalliance in metal, Joel broke through as an inoffensive singer/songwriter who tried to keep that vibe going even as he became an adult contemporary colossus. But he ran out of gas after 52nd Street or during The Nylon Curtain and, his own creativity tapped, filled vinyl by cannibalizing the history of pop music. New Wave, doo wop, Springsteen, Fifties pop, Phil Spector, the Four Seasons, reggae (!), hard rockin' early Beatles--the man was voracious.

My God!: Going just on my level of antipathy, I'd choose "You're Only Human (Second Wind)." I find the background vocals to be transcendently grating, and the overall song sounds like the theme to a Jim Belushi-Whoopi Goldberg comedy that fortunately remained unmade. Also, the Human League did the same thing better the next year. But I cannot in clear conscience pick on a song written for suicide prevention. Frankly, I'm conflicted about hassling Joel at all, as the guy has been treated for depression more than once in his life, and was friendly the one time I spoke to him. As I am obviously a soft-spined weak ass, I will forgive "You're Only Human" and instead pin the My God! label on 1984's dire "Keeping the Faith," his 12th or so Fifties homage and a hit mostly forgotten after its run up the charts. Double negative vibes for a video that showed off Christie Brinkley (we get it, dude) and gave Joe Piscopo a cameo.

Target: Lionel Ritchie (solo)
If you lived through the 1980s, you can call off a Lionel Ritchie playlist that sounds like a list of felonies. "All Night Long." "Hello." "Stuck on You." The "We Are the World" disaster. "Dancing on the Ceiling." That's enough to condemn anyone.

My God!: Yet, yet, "Running with the Night" takes the man even further into Perdition. You can picture Lionel in the studio with the tape ready to roll. He's got his fists balled in excitement. This is where I want to get edgy, he tells the musicians. No more of that "Stuck on You" treacle. I want hot! I want dangerous! Then these collected professionals--they include Steve Lukather of Toto and (choke) Richard Marx--deliver what a person with synesthesia would hear as the color biege.

"Running with the Night" admittedly subverts some of what I'm getting at. Most My God! songs come late in a run of hits, when all the bandwagon jumpers have made their leap. But "Running" followed up "All Night Long," the first mega-single from Can't Slow Down. Still, it fits our concept as it seldom got airplay after its heyday. "Dancing on the Ceiling" came later, but if you'd like to become the first My God! purist, we'll choose it instead. Cover artists for "Running" include available-via-this-TV-offer-only giant Richard Clayderman. 'Nuff said.

Target: Phil Collins/Genesis
I read that Collins, having purchased the Alamo, sits in his Swiss chalet and wrestles with the black dog due to the abuse rained on his career. Looking at his singles list from a historical angle, I'd say that, for my money, nothing plumbs greater depths than what he inflicted on an innocent public back in the 1980s. He seems like a pleasant enough sort in a Ringo way, though. It couldn't have been easy to hold onto a sense of humor after years of contact with Peter Gabriel.

My God!: Only one thing saves "Another Day in Paradise" (with David Crosby on backup, no less) from worst-of-the-decade honors: ninety other hits were just as bad, and that's too many certificates to print out. The song doesn't work for our purposes, alas, because everyone remembers it, indeed puts their fists to their temples and screams gibberish about "that homeless song" if it's mentioned. The thing is, I can't pinpoint one Collins song that's extraordinarily bad. There's a spectrum, with aggravating ballads on one end and "Another Day in Paradise" on the other, but he maintained a very consistent level of suckdom. I'm going to go with "Take Me Home." Not as obscure as "Don't Lose My Number," but the drum machine mania makes it worse, and it was the last hit single released off an Eighties mega-album. Honorable mentions to Genesis' "Invisible Touch" and all the Collins/Genesis songs with tonight or the letter a in the title.

Target: Huey Lewis and the News
My favorite thing about Huey Lewis and the News is that they beat Ray Parker Jr. out of a pile of cash for the latter's appropriation of "I Want a New Drug" for the Ghostbusters theme. That you'd rip off Huey Lewis and run with it on a high profile piece of product--I mean, the lack of taste on display is actually surpassed by the lack of ethics, and the stupidity dwarfs both.

Huey and the News broke with the inoffensive "Do You Believe in Love?" but Sports launched a thousand hits (and 10 million units). "Hip to Be Square," a regrettably memorable song from the Fore long play, came near the end of their string and has since been immortalized, in proper cultural context yet, by Christian Bale in American Psycho.

My God!: "Stuck with You." Because Billy Joel didn't wear out the old time music homages. Even worse when you consider it worked the same themes as Orleans' "Still the One."

Target: Bryan Adams
Philanthropist and vegan, so archetypically a Canadian his middle name is Guy, Adams started out as a fill-in singer for Sweeney Todd (more or less replacing Nick Gilder) at age 15. Aided by craprepreneur Mutt Lange, Adams flourished all over the Eighties before closing out his salad days with two culture-halting mega-ballads: "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You," a single that sold in historic volume; and "All for One," the Adams-Sting-Rod Stewart super team-up meant to remind us of the Three Musketeers. That very serious trio could've really used a Porthos. I assume Meat Loaf was unavailable.

My God!: The ballads are unforgettable, and therefore unsuitable for our project. "Please Forgive Me," a 1993 song released in utter defiance of every music trend then bearing fruit, had less of a hold on memory in the U.S. I could never hear 1985's "Heaven" again, either. But I will, probably while tied to a chair at a wedding in Hell.

Epics Made Easy: Njal's Saga, Chapter 2

2012-01-22T22:47:00.004-06:00

Previously: the stepbrothers Hoskuld and Hrut had a disagreement about the morals of Hoskuld’s daughter, Hallgerd, who according to Hrut has “thief’s eyes.” Also: many ancestors were mentioned, including Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Olaf Peacock.

CHAPTER 2

Hoskuld and Hrut set out for the Althing, Iceland’s parliament. Hoskuld insists his stepbrother find a wife and suggests Unn, daughter of the mighty chieftain and lawyer Mord Fiddle. “I like the look of her,” says Hrut. “But I do not know we are destined to be happy together.” You ain’t kidding, Hrut. Mord, too, is dubious, and he isn’t buying Hoskuld’s brotherly hype. Hrut admits, “love makes Hoskuld exaggerate my virtues.”

Mord insists on a dowry of sixty hundreds, a price explained in a boggling footnote that says a hundred refers to 120 ells of woolen cloth and that this translates to various numbers of livestock. The translator helpfully runs the numbers and comes out with a dowry of 80 cows. Hrut, owed a fair amount of land and already owner of a trading ship, agrees to the price and is betrothed to Unn.

On the way home, however, Hrut learns that a sizable inheritance awaits him—in Norway. Enemies, alas, threaten to seize the money. But if Hrut leaves Iceland to claim the cash it’ll wreak havoc with the date of his wedding. The longhouse is rented, the skalds hired, it's a mess. Hrut asks Mord for an extension. His future father-in-law agrees to wait three years to give his daughter away. Thus protected, Hrut sets sail, for some reason with everything he owns, and heads for Oslo Fjord.

NEXT TIME: Queen Gunnhild wants what Hrut’s got, and it has nothing to do with cows.

Epics Made Easy: Njal's Saga

2012-01-19T22:44:00.002-06:00

Epic literature forms a vital part of Western culture. To be able to reference one of these foundational tales is a short cut to convincing others of your superior intellect. Yet who has time to read this stuff? Not you. Epics Made Easy offers a chapter by chapter breakdown of the stories that made us what we are today: semi-literate technophiles addicted to team sports and reality television. First up: Njal's Saga, an anonymous account of events that took place in Iceland around the year 1000.

We begin with the marriage prospects of Unn, daughter of renowned lawyer Mord Fiddle; and of Hallgerd, a looker who kicks off a long career as a troublemaker by inspiring a rift between two brothers. We start with actual Saga text, as translated by Magnus Magnusson, just in case you need a quote to pass an exam. The 45s and Under breakdown will begin with Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 1

The narrator informs us that: ...Hoskuld had a daughter called Hallgerd, who was playing on the floor with some other girls; she was a tall, beautiful child with long silken hair that hung down to her waist. Hoskuld called to her, “Come over here to me.” She went to him at once. Her father tilted her chin and kissed her, and she walked away again.

Then Hoskuld asked Hrut: “What do you think of her? Do you not think she is beautiful?”

Hrut made no reply. Hoskuld repeated the question. Then Hrut said, “The child is beautiful enough, and many will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief’s eyes have come into our kin.”

Hoskuld was furious; and for a time there was coldness between them.

NEXT TIME: Hrut goes wife hunting and finds out that a woman costs lots of fabric.

45s: Essence o' classic rock

2012-01-17T21:54:00.004-06:00

“Never Been Any Reason,” by Head East (1975)
Written by Mike Somerville

Blockhead classic rock, Illinois style, and it’s got all the ingredients you demand: a lead singer with some shriek in his voice, a tubby and balding band member with a bad beard, slick multi-tracked chorus, cocaine and sweet lovin' references, and a then-de rigueur synth redeemed by a riff five hundred feet high. It’s the kind of accessible, familiar-but-not-overused song an unimaginative movie would use for an aerial shot of Woody Harrelson's van driving down a highway. Kind of like the Doobie Brothers’, um, “Driving Down the Highway,"

Though labeled hard rock, Head East leaned toward the pop end of that vaguely defined genre, eschewing the heavier Deep Purple areas of the spectrum in favor of becoming the heartland answer to Thin Lizzy. Now that I think about it, you could transplant the "Never Been Any Reason" riff into "Jailbreak" and come out with a fairly similar piece of music. In fact, Somerville must've tapped into some ur-noise from the collective unconscious with that guitar. Every time you hear the intro, it takes a second to ID the song as "Never Been Any Reason," because a dozen other classic rock standards start in kind of the same way. I'm not suggesting anyone stole anything. Rather, I'd suggest Somerville's riff is Distilled Pure Essence of classic rock, and that he, too, drew upon the same well as others to create the kind of magic that keeps a song on FM radio for almost forty years.

Head East played its first show in Carbondale, Illinois in 1969. After personnel changes and a grind through the club scene, the band coalesced in Champaign and recorded their breakthrough Flat as a Pancake in Pekin, a musical mecca near Peoria. Do-it-yourselfers with a vision, the band put out Pancake on its own label and it did okay enough to net them a deal with A&M. A reissued version sporting "Never Been Any Reason" as a hit single sold over half a million copies.

The band continued to move steady if unspectacular product for most of the decade. In 1978 their version of "Since You Been Gone" beat both Cherrie Currie's and Rainbow's to the shops, though Rainbow--fronted by Deep Purple founder Ritchie Blackmore, then hungry for some o' that mainstream pop gravy--had the biggest hit.

The industry-wide turn against classic rock took down Head East in the early eighties. But fear not. The classic rock format kept "Never Been Any Reason" alive long enough for the band to come back as an oldies act in the 1990s. Seriously, people, if you score one hit, you can live off it forever. They're still out there today, bringing the rock to cityfests and casinos in the company of Eddie Money and Uriah Heep.

Lunch Trek

2012-01-13T12:10:00.001-06:00

45s: Message from Funk Judas

2012-01-11T12:01:00.001-06:00

"Easy," by Faith No More (1992)
Written by Lionel Ritchie

Bands covering pop for kitsch value had not yet devolved from mild nostalgia-tinted amusement to weary not-againedness when alt-metal pioneers Faith No More released this single during the aftershocks of the grungequake. Their 1992 disc Angel Dust is a schizophrenic, over the top fusion of every kind of music then in the air. So why not a non-album single that covered Lionel Ritchie? Truly the band had foresight, for they already realized that an entry in the Train Wreck Cover sub-genre required maximum clash between the public's perceptions of the source material and of the covering artist.

FNM played it semi-straight, as you had to, and we all knew they were goofin', as we had to. Flattering the listener as an irony-drenched insider moved units in those days. Say no more: "Easy" went to the top echelons of the Australian and UK charts.

FNM puts down a recognizable version twisted just a bit by bent keyboard bits and tongue-in-cheek ethereal choruses. The guitar is also predictably (and thankfully) heavier. Mike Patton, meanwhile, leaves Lionel Ritchie in the dust for vocals, and Patton's not even serious. He throws down the most obvious wink to the savvy by turning Lionel's pre-bridge "oooh" into a who-cut-the-cheese "ewwwwww" that offers his opinion of the material. (The video makes it clear, too.)

All in all, FNM remains the coolest band to honor the song with a cover, not that there's huge competition since "Easy" turned into a standard for Idol/America's Got Talent auditionees hoping to cadge spectrum-wide votes by tapping the soul-as-mixmastered-through-country stylings of the Commodores original.

At first glance it's tempting to say that FNM pioneered another Train Wreck trope: going as low as possible, low, that is, according to the then-moldering body of criticism provided by Boomer writers, the arbiters of taste and What Was Right in popular music since the Sixties. Of course, it turned out that at least some Nineties musical sensations sincerely enjoyed the Carpenters and KISS and didn't consider "Seasons in the Sun" the end of civilization.

But FNM could have done worse than "Easy" and still remained in the Lionel Ritchie catalog. Much worse. Few artists damaged Eighties radio like that guy, though in pure commercial terms his timing was excellent. The Hey-There're-Black-People-Who-Don't-Scare-Me! meme had begun to run free down Main Street America around the time Ritchie went solo, and he handled the soundtrack for the new colorblind USA while Cosby provided the laughs. Compared to Ritchie's Reagan-era output, "Easy" was Cole Porter. But maybe FNM tried "Penny Lover" and kept laughing too hard.

Rough Draft: There's a riot goin' on

2012-01-08T16:21:00.000-06:00

An outtake from the appendix in my forthcoming Blackhawks history. Made an outtake because it has nothing to do with the Blackhawks.

The Richard Riot, one of the NHL’s more colorful if appalling events, takes place on March 17, 1955. Four days earlier, the short-tempered Rocket Richard takes exception, as we say in the business, to a high stick to the noggin from Boston’s Hal Laycoe. Once the play is blown dead, Laycoe drops the gloves to settle things in the time honored manner. A bloody Richard eschews fisticuffs and proceeds to crack Laycoe about the head and shoulders with his stick. Once disarmed, Richard finds another stick to continue the assault—this happened a total of three times—and then slugs referee Cliff Thompson into unconsciousness. As regards the latter, Richard was a repeat offender, having already slapped a ref in December. After the game, Montreal players bar the door against a phalanx of Boston’s finest until Bruins officials convince the police officers to stand down.

NHL president Clarence Campbell suspends Richard for the rest of the season. Fans of the Habs angrily denounce the punishment as nothing less than an attack on French Canadian culture via the humiliation of the greatest Francophone player. Others, however, wonder how Richard got off so easy considering he laid a beat down on a ref. Despite death threats, Campbell attends Montreal’s traditional St. Patrick’s Day game on March 17. Fans pelt him and his staff with eggs, vegetables, and—here's a nice Gallic touch—pig’s feet. The crowd is so out of control that even Montreal’s players are nervous. Police intervene when a fan punches Campbell, then a tear gas bomb explodes, and then authorities order the evacuation of the building.

Once outside, the crowd goes on a rampage—stores looted, cars overturned, fires started—that injures 37 people and causes tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Richard goes on TV to ask for calm in two languages while Montreal’s forfeit of the game costs them first place. Everyone blames everyone else, French-speakers use the treatment of the Rocket as a rallying point for 1960s civil rights protests, and the next season Montreal gets Richard back and wins the first of five straight Stanley Cups.

45s: Don't call it a comeback

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

“December 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” by The Four Seasons (1976)
Written by Bob Gaudio and Judy Parker

Sometimes you can't predict which song will have a thirty-five-year shelf life.

Propelled by a disco beat, some funk-as-funk-is-understood-by-white-people guitar work, and a polished pro performance, "December 1963" told the tale of a boy with a high tenor losing his virginity. Unlike many of the Four Seasons' early-Sixties hits, "December 1963" had vocals from the drummer and bassist, with usual front-man Frankie Valli saving his immense range for the refrain.

"December 1963" is more than another oldie. It still gets airplay on good time music stations beyond the oldies format, at suburban summer fun-fests, at weddings and corporate events. In other words, it's a kind of super-oldie that, in transcending the memories of its original audience, has become an ongoing part of pop culture rather than a mere relic.

One can reasonably ask, "Why 'December 1963' and not 'In the Year 2525?'"

The song's resurgent popularity had its roots in the 1991 release of the popular "Grease Megamix." By imposing an overpowering dance beat on faux-greaser music, the Megamix prepared the public to accept similar treatment of the Made in Jersey real thing. Three years later, "December 1963" hit again in a dance mix version that powered the step-aerobics classes of millions of young women.

It's hard to imagine that Jersey Boys exists without the group's unusual 1990s comeback. Not to say the 4S had failed to show staying power in the past.

In the months following December 1963, a lot of American groups became so much wreckage smoldering inside the blast radius left by the British Invasion. But the Four Seasons continued to have hits despite being chained to a record company driven to the brink of bankruptcy because Introducing... The Beatles had dropped into its lap and it didn't have the money to print enough albums to meet demand. One way or another, the Fab Four destroyed all comers.

Valli added some ostensibly solo hits that basically used the Four Seasons mafia as backup. But by the late part of the decade an even greater shift in musical tastes—toward serious themes and groovy musicianship—had made the Seasons as out-of-date as pompadours. A star-crossed alliance with Motown led nowhere but Valli, still assisted by the FS crew, began scoring hits on his own as the American record-buying public abandoned seriousness and desperately grasped at the twin messiahs of nostalgia and uncomplicated pop.

Valli's "My Eyes Adored You"—a ballad rescued from the Motown dead end—put him back in the public eye about the time an available-through-this-TV-offer-only greatest hits collection reminded people the Four Seasons had existed. (The Beach Boys and Connie Francis, among others, benefited from the same kind of product.) Disco, the great resurrector, then gave the Seasons and the world "Who Loves You," a crib of a Telly Savalas catch phrase and a very jive product indeed.

Valli went on to contribute the title song of the Grease soundtrack, and he and Travolta may have been the only performers in that entire project who acted anywhere near their age. Fifteen years later, the dance mix. A generation (or two) later, Broadway glory.

No doubt the Four Seasons will fade once more. But given the success of Jersey Boys, and the fact people keep holding corporate events that promise dancing, repeated revivals are inevitable.

The Banners Way

2012-01-02T13:00:00.009-06:00

Friends,

Mixed feelings fill my soul as I watch my colleague Ron Paul ascend to the Near Presidency of the United States. Here could have been Dag, think I. After each of my earlier runs for the country's top office, dating back to my bruising underdog campaign versus the Koch Brothers for Fringe Candidate of the Season in 1980, I always had to eventually concede that my ideas remained too far ahead of my fellow citizens. But I persevered because each year seemed to bring the hungry electorate closer to my politico-philosophical bosoms.

It is not that Banners misjudged what strange ideas people might vote for in 2011/2012. To the contrary, I had laid the foundation for another high-energy run at saving Our Nation--printing Banners bumper stickers to sell at gun shows, publishing Tract #437 ("The Corn Dog-Hip Hop Connection"), and turning out a whole new line of sandwich boards for my followers to wear on street corners.

I admit, though, that even then I doubted. Yes, Your Leader is occasionally human! But cold logic shook me, for once. The fact was, Ron Paul had already co-opted so many of my positions that I suspected entering the fray would fragment our overlapping followings into armed (and I mean armed) camps.

For instance:

ITEM: We both have vowed to crash the economy to inflate the value of our gold reserves.

ITEM: We both believe in vesting all power with the states in the hope that empowered local governments will bring back debt slavery, child labor, the 80-cents-a-day wage, sedition acts, moonshining, periodic war with Mexico, and many other now-lost practices that once formed the backbone of our mighty nation.

ITEM: We both believe in racial equality yet built organizations to introduce socially awkward white men (only) to white women (only) with no self esteem--in Banners' case a dating service, in Ron Paul's case a libertarian cult connected by newsletters and a complex system of vocal and visual cues that draw from the reserved rhetoric of the John Birch Society and the scintillating fashion sense of Ayn Rand.

But I intended to go forward nonetheless. Banners is no quitter, especially when he believes Iowans may turn up in double digits to hear him pitch his latest DVDs.

In an ironic turn, however, I was injured in a rural way. I refer of course to my Banners Red Cattle Sperm business. As my longtime readers and listeners know, our brand of bullish swimmers was chosen by prophecy superstar Hal Lindsay as the sperm most likely to conceive the sacred and unblemished Red Heifer.

Unfortunately, one of the herd, Lord's Load, became agitated during the Tuesday morning procurement session. Let me just say it was a bad time to have a hangnail. The goring went unnoticed at first, as I was consumed by the idea that the Red Heifer's appearance will open the gate--or at least the construction site--to a Third Temple, the Second Coming, and a First in Show for Banners at the great 4-H meeting in the sky.

When I awakened after the blood transfusion, the doctors told me I could not even think about conducting an arduous political campaign. They also said I had received blood from strangers. I was outraged. The tattoo on Banners' chest specifies drawing from my private blood supply in case of accident. Did I have a Notary Public stamp my skin for nothing? But that was not the worst of it. A basket of Get Well flowers had already arrived. There, on a card decorated with gold leaf, Ron Paul had written: "Don't you make enough money from what comes out of the back of a bull?"

Damn your eyes, Ron Paul.

Dag Banners is an author, think tank founder, entrepreneur, proud former Amway representative, and the world's only survivalist motivational guru. His syndicated column and shortwave radio program go world wide.

Lunch Trek

2011-12-29T22:28:00.000-06:00

Lunch Trek

2011-12-19T00:55:00.002-06:00

Lunch Trek

2011-12-17T13:20:00.001-06:00

Lunch Trek

2011-12-15T10:15:00.000-06:00

45s: We are all peppers now

2011-12-14T22:23:00.011-06:00

“Makin’ It,” by David Naughton (1979)
Written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris

One of the beautiful things about pop music is that anyone can do it. Looking back over Top Forty history, you see all kinds o’ strange heads popping up. There are singing nuns and chipmunks, cartoon characters and Japanese mumblers, classical guitarists and popcorn machines, even the odd marketing guru with a CB radio.

One of the secret ingredients behind American Idol—though, granted, less necessary than its recognition of (1) human narcissism and (2) the very American desire to succeed in music without having to play before hostile audiences in honky-tonks, strip clubs, bar mitzvahs, middle school assemblies, county fairs, and/or the Apollo Theater—is the time-proven fact that any person with a reasonably competent voice and good dental work can have a hit.

I’m sorry, especially for all the genuinely talented people who will never have one, but it’s true. It’s just not that hard to cover up vocal sins. All you have to do is layer a voice in strings, multi-tracked vocals, echo, and whatever other fantastic technology studio engineers developed for Ringo Starr.

Still, it’s hardly news that talent means less than that holy moment known as The Big Break.

That brings us to David Naughton. Naughton was one of those pop culture figures to get his break via commercials, an odd but hardly unheard-of route to fame. Having invited the world to “be a Pepper" for the physician soda of the same name, Naughton moved on to more respectable (?) television, starrin’ in the sitcom Makin’ It as the disco king of Passaic, New Jersey. No, seriously.

The show lasted about as long as a coffee ad, but the theme song? Top Five, a very bad pop-dance tune sung across limited range but with great energy. Naughton's production team, perhaps hoping to not tax his talents, asked for a flip side of "Still Makin' It." Yet if "Makin' It" fails as art, it succeeds as a TV theme song, if for no other reason than Naughton tried hard.

The chorus works in that got-a-song-stuck-in-my-head kind of way. That and the aforementioned disco beat--in this case one that sounded like a nuclear-powered popcorn popper--were all Top 40 radio demanded in those days. If sung by a good looking guy in a satin jacket on Bandstand and Solid Gold, all the better.

Having hit a homer with his first song, Naughton wisely retired from music and moved on to full-time acting. He most famously battled lycanthropy in An American Werewolf in London, giving him a second pop culture distinction: he starred in the one John Landis movie that people consider good. Nowadays he's one of those familiar-faced troupers you see covering up crimes on the Law & Order franchises. It's easy to think of Naughton as a pop culture footnote. But let's see him instead as evidence anyone can come out of nowhere, or even Passaic, and have a hit. Because that's as American as it gets.

Selected statements made by James Brown in the long version of "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing," presented out of order

2011-12-12T23:09:00.006-06:00

Shape up your bag, don't worry about mine

It's neither white or black, it's a fact!

Get yourself a gig and get off of that thing

I got to, I want to, I musta

If you're gonna get down and be a man and help the people--then we're together

You can't tell me how to keep my business sound

Good God!

If you don't mean it don't be in it

Bobby, the groove is so great here, I want the engineer to keep the tape runnin'

If it's black or white, it's right

Don't tell me how to do my thing, when you can't-can't-can't do your own

Good luck to you, Mister Loud and Wrong

Shape, shape, sh--hard for me to say sometimes ... Shhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape

We gonna do somethin' funny right here

Show everybody you're trying to be right on

You can't tell me [James Brown scream] how to use my mess [uhn!]

Is he marching? Is he marching?

He jivin' ... he oughta get himself a gig

Don't tell me how to do my thing and you ain't doin' nothin'

We gonna stop real quick and rap a little [minor uhn]

You just can't use me, like a woman throw away her dress

Talkin' black and livin' all the Negro he can

I'll do my own thing, I don't need your help, brother

45s: "Dreamin'," by Cliff Richard

2011-12-11T20:23:00.003-06:00

A couple of weeks ago I heard Cliff Richard's "Dreamin'," on the overhead music at ... well, I don't recall, I was so blown away that I had completely forgotten the song. Even as I ... well, shopped or waited for the state to judge my emissions or whatever I was doing, I thought, how can I sing the chorus to a song that has not crossed my mind in over 30 years? It's a rhetorical question, natch. We can all do it. As expressed elsewhere on this blog, pop songs are really just thyroidal advertising jingles. It's their job to burrow into your skull and burst forth after years, like those desert mosquitoes that only hatch after a once-in-a-decade rainstorm.

Back in the '80s, any American publication that mentioned Cliff Richard inevitably added something about how Richard's UK superstardom had never translated across the Atlantic. Richard, a hit-maker since Elvis's Army days, had begun his career as a genuine rocker, one of the few Brits in the pre-Beatles era to make that work. By the late 1970s, though, he had become a venerable symbol of lumpen mediocrity, and unwritten in the music writers' musing was the imponderable mystery of why American consumers--a rabid market for lumpen mediocrity--would lock him out.

Not surprisingly, those music writers mostly had it wrong. True, Richard had only scraped the lower areas of the U.S. charts in the Sixties. He then entered a Christian period--death for good pop music--and demolished any chance in the cred-obsessed U.S. market by touring with preacher to the presidents Billy Graham and singing in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Still, Richard eventually scored a short string of American hits. His modest success began with 1976's "Devil Woman," a solid enough guitar rocker that's not to be confused with ELO's "Evil Woman." Richard really never topped that song in terms of chart position or (God knows) quality. But he did follow it up. The Xanadu soundtrack paired him with Newton-John for "Suddenly," as bad a ballad as any inflicted upon us in that blighted decade. He also hit with "We Don't Talk," a toppermost of the poppermost that's the aural equivalent of a bag of Peeps: chewy, lacking in substance, and utterly synthetic. Of course, it sold by the metric ton and, also of course, a copy resides in my iTunes file.

Less remembered, but along the same lines: "Dreamin'," not to be confused with Blondie's "Dreamin'." It's an entry in the stalker pop genre, with the narrator singing to a woman who doesn't know he's alive. Lyrically it's trite, a guy walks in the middle of the night, he's dreaming, etc. But lyrics are besides the point with this kind of product. What you want is that ad jingle refrain. Duct tape the song together with a riff of some kind, put a big name on it, and hope it's just novel enough to get attention. Richard does his part on that last score by crying out "Woman!" at numerous junctures, a creative choice that's meant to express bluesy passion but instead comes across as Eric Cartman ordering his wife to get in the kitchen and make him pie. At least he didn't say "Mama."

Cliff Richard doesn't need a blog to mock him, though. U.K. residents start clubs to do that. Not that it affects his epic success. Richard is something like a British Cher--unchanging and perennial, and without a hint of shame. Except much bigger. Like Cher he conquered TV in the Seventies. Though his film career is not as distinguished as Cher's, unlike her he conquered the stage by opening Time, a show that went on (without him) to become one of those West End musical extravaganzas that never closes. He's got the knighthood, the Christmas singles, the soul duets album, the Wembley triumphs, the 8-CD boxed set, and all the other totems possessed only by those at the very highest level of celebrity. Not to be confused with art.

45s: Rasping for air

2010-06-15T05:00:00.007-05:00

"Total Eclipse of the Heart," by Bonnie Tyler (1983)
Written by Jim Steinman

Having moved on from man-mountain mouthpiece Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman took his Wagnerian aesthetic and compellingly weird sentence structures into the larger pop world and entered an alliance with then-forgotten Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler.

Tyler (nee Gaynor Hopkins) had scored a hit in 1977 with the roots rocker "It's a Heartache," and at the time DJs and unimaginative journalists had labeled her "the female Rod Stewart" because of her raspy voice, a product of vocal cord surgery and Tyler's subsequent refusal to rehab her voice by not using it. Her timing was perfect even if her pitch was not. Tyler happened along when the world needed a new Rod Stewart, for the old one had already begun one of rock history's longest descents into perdition, a journey he continues today like a fright-wigged Dante trapped on a treadmill.

By the early 1980s, though, Tyler was already rooted in history as a one-hit wonder. Enter one of the most distinctive plaintive piano intros of the era.

Steinman, the mad Prospero behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, once more conjured a ballad powered by gigantic choruses, seismograph-shattering percussion, and a level of overwrought emotion that outside of the music industry gets one committed for observation. Never one to skimp, Steinman added extra sorcerous juice by employing pros like Rick Derringer and various E Street Band members.

Steinman (left): always subtle

What hooked the public on "Eclipse" remains a matter of speculation. But that Turn around, Bright Eyes refrain is so strangely hypnotic that it must be at least part of the answer. No recording exec in his right mind would have approved a five-minute single with that kind of bizarre and lengthy intro, had Steinman and Meat Loaf not scored with similar material already. I'm not even sure it could get onto Broadway.

Tyler, meanwhile, attacked the lyric as gamely as one could ask. And you better be game because Steinman stacks his trademark drama-by-opposition sentences higher and higher (and higher):

Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I'm only falling apart

Okay, that's really good. But:

And we'll only be making it right
'Cause we'll never be wrong together

And:

Once upon a time there was light in my life
Now there's only love in the dark

These are simply lines no one else would write (for better or for worse, depending on your point of view). Indulge me, one more:

I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks

Ho, man.

To say nothing of the title. Virtually any other songwriter, or writer in any medium, would reject that outright. But if you know who wrote it, you're not surprised. You might even grant that it works. I give him credit for taking the chance. Like him or hate him, Steinman would never write a song called "Partial Eclipse of the Heart."

Tyler did not quite have Meat Loaf's powers of projection, alas. Not surprisingly she labored to stay a recognizable part of the proceedings as the song whipped itself into a hurricane. No matter. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" topped the charts anywhere people spoke English and became one of the monster-selling singles in a decade known for generating unheard-of sales figures. It's lengthy encampment in the Number One position also kept another Steinman extravaganza, Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," from the top spot.

A featured performance of "Eclipse" on Glee introduced the song to new listeners, no doubt guaranteeing more work for the still-trouping Tyler and an injection of cash for Steinman's Bat Out of Hell IV: I Am Wheezing and In Pain.

45s: Spoken word glory

2010-06-13T22:00:00.003-05:00

"Big Bad John," by Jimmy Dean (1961)
Written by Jimmy Dean and Roy Acuff

Of all the people who have risen to Top 40 glory, none to my knowledge went on to make a far bigger fortune selling sausage except for the now-late Jimmy Dean.

Dean had been in the sausage factory known as the music industry for years when, with his label itching to drop him, he came up with a tall tale straight off a Johnny Horton* B-side. "Big Bad John" used a classic trope of fiction--a stranger comes to town. John, like Gatsby, provoked dark whispers involving murder, in John's case of a guy who had fallen out with our titular hero over the affections of a Cajun Queen.

The song's pop success exceeded even that of its run on the country charts. Yes, in the early 1960s, a spoken word tale could break the bank, and "Big Bad John" would not be the last. Lorne Greene, sideburned patriarch of the Bonanza gang, scored another a couple of years later.

Why "Big Bad John" (or for that matter Greene's "Ringo") captured the public imagination remains a question for anthropologists. It's got a sort of ominous tone, and Dean's winsome drawl. I believe it moved units foremost because it's a good story but also because it busts the good rhymes:
And a crashin' blow from a huge right hand
Send a Louisiana feller to the Promised Land
(Big John)
A welcome shift in public taste toward actual music ended the spoken-word trend, but Dean's career lived on. Topping the charts always proves one's worth to the Moguls of Showbiz, and those mysterious poohbahs slathered the affable Dean in some of the greatest show business gravy our pop culture can provide.

He guest-hosted The Tonight Show. Headlined in Vegas. Was handed a couple of TV variety shows in an era when country-and-western artists rarely received such an honor (?). And, in a real coup, played the Howard Hughes knockoff in Diamonds Are Forever, a Bond film chock full of features as mythic as Big Bad John: high-kickin' bikini-clad bodyguards, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, and of course, the moon-buggy.

By then Dean had broken with music industry tradition and actually found a way to avoid penury. Fame provides a hell of an entrepreneurial edge, as does the production of highly-processed meat products, and Dean parlayed his advantages into a brand of tasty sausage and an empire of indifferently-staffed restaurants. In doing so he accumulated a sizable fortune and a wife twenty-five years younger. As a bonus (as if the man needed more!), he kept a bit of a public profile via ads for his products.

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* Though a rockabilly pioneer, Horton made his biggest splash singing folk novelty songs about the Battle of New Orleans and the need to sink thyroidal German battleships.

Glengarry Gary Coleman

2010-05-28T19:00:00.003-05:00

Though not inclined to believe Gary Coleman had much impact, I can say I remember the first time I saw him.

He appeared on an episode of Good Times. I believe he played a friend of Janet Jackson's character. Memory is a tricky thing, but I'd swear he wore a suit, as in suit-and-tie. Here he came busting in the door with the puffiest cheeks in child-star history, seemingly ageless in that he was as cute as any top-tier child actor but also strangely old, for his face had an elasticity found only in vaudeville veterans, and in people with multiple personality disorder.

Whatever he did in the Evans' apartment electrified me, and I daresay it electrified many. I can recall the neighborhood kids still in shock the next day as we rehashed the episode. Who was that kid? we asked. We repeated all his words, laughed again and again.

I mean, look, he killed. Maybe you had to be eight to appreciate it. But his appearance was so awesome it may have provoked such gales of honest audience laughter that the editors kept their finger off the sweetening button. There was frowning. Cheek puffing. Crossing of the arms. Even the cast members seemed in awe of the comedic hurricane in their midst.

Alas, Coleman hit his artistic peak at that moment. After some guest roles and a failed pilot or two, he became the franchise on Diff'rent Strokes, the first in the extremely-white-people-adopt-black-kid sub-genre of sitcoms. People compared his timing to that of Jack Benny and Richard Pryor. And, amazingly, this was not hyperbole. He was a natural. Norman Lear had put him on $1000/month retainer until he figured out what to do with him.

Like millions of kids I watched the Strokes. As was the case with much of the TV of my youth, I was numbed and hypnotized rather than actually entertained by the show.

It had about all you could ask from a network comedy, though: a catch phrase (even better than "Heyyyy" or Arnold Horshack's ejaculations), one funny actor, untalented but inoffensive other kid stars, and yet another of the single fathers that in TV land (and in TV land alone of all human cultures) dominate the single-parent household demographic.*

The mainstream adulterated Coleman, as it does all. His five minutes on Good Times was funnier than anything in the entire multi-season run of Diff'rent Strokes, was funnier than all the laughs on the latter show put together. What followed doomed him. He became beloved, and then tied to a show that as time went on flailed through every sitcom cliche (marriage of single father, introduction of even younger kid, the horror that was the Very Special Episode).

Thus, by the time Diff'rent Strokes ended, Coleman had worn out his welcome. There was no hope of a second act. A decade's worth of pop culture pablum had buried his five minutes of Good Times genius for good. Coleman went on to flashes of tabloid notoriety and life as a punch-line. The Broadway blockbuster Avenue Q even decided to humiliate him on a nightly basis, for reasons known only to those who find puppets entertaining.

But how could it be otherwise? Coleman's life was a study in the grotesque thing that is American celebrity. And that being the case he, like so many others, proved you can never fall so far that some clever asshole won't kick you again.

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* That the dad was the former neighbor on Maude confused me, by the way. The last time I had watched that show, Rue McClanahan had greeted Mr. Drummond at the door wearing nothing but plastic wrap. I had trouble reconciling that image to the man interacting with Arnold and Willis.

Chipmunks to the sea

2010-05-27T10:00:00.001-05:00

In the world of zoology, rodent experts speak of the strange cycle of population crashes. Every so often, a rodent species will run wild with its breeding. Then, bang, there is a die-off. The phenomenon influenced the legend that lemmings decide every years to march to the sea and drown themselves en masse, presumably after selecting a Lemming Adam and a Lemming Eve to stay in the burrow to carry on the species.

Gardening and general anal-retentiveness keep me aware of the local rodent population here at the Satellite of Love. And right now, there isn't much of a population for me to resent. I've had one group of pots or another out for about three weeks now, and all of them out for about a week. This includes an herb garden of nine cubic feet (on wheels, but that's another story).

Knock wood, not a single plant has been damaged by rodents. This is unprecendented. I would have thought it impossible.

Granted, I have leaned toward smellier plants than in the past, in part to drive away animals. Fragrant herbs, cayenne pepper, garlic, and onions have rooted all around the place. But the flowers—often victims in the past—are as abundant as always. Yet, no damage.

In addition, I've added a crop of sunflowers this year, and we all know how the creatures of the earth, and in the case of the squirrel of the tree, love to dig up tasty sunflower seeds.

Again, no damage.

I can say—based on admittedly anecdotal observation—that I do not see many squirrels or chipmunks. Not only in my yard but during my grudging attempts at exercise. Whereas last year the squirrels in particular seemed to swarm the yards, the parks, everywhere. I see squirrels, and chipmunks, too, but only as solo foragers, and not nearly every time I look out the window.

My budget doesn't allow me to subscribe to rodent-oriented journals, so I have no idea if the scientific community has noticed what's happened, or if a crash has happened at all. Still, I'm curious.

Of course I'm not complaining. I like owning a small animal trap but I'm glad I don't need it. The lack of a large rodent population, however, has changed the entire character of the spring. No angst. Less swearing (short of the onset of muteness I'll never be 100% non-profane). No reseeding ravished pots. Larger-than-usual pre-plantings for this time of year, and more of them succeeding.

If only I hadn't left all the basil out in that thunderstorm. It's not nearly as satisfying to swear at myself.

Found

2010-05-25T08:00:00.001-05:00

I was never able to make the commitment to Lost so the big finale had no real effect on my life. But from a creative standpoint I'm interested in whether or not the show satisfied its fans, and a few friends tell me the Lost crew did at least an okay job in wrapping up things.

That so seldom happens with serial TV dramas. Kind of odd, as the last ten years have been the golden age of serial TV drama.

But I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of the task. At some point these shows must become impossible to conclude. Clearly the writers/producers made up large parts of the storylines as they went along over a period of years. Characters conceived as minor became major. Actors left or died. Plotlines took on a life of their own.

Chaos, then, inevitably ensues. So unless a head writer/show runner/producer went in knowing where it all was headed—and then had the discipline to hold to that for five or six or seven years—it just seems that dramatic closure is, at best, only semi-possible (i.e., a few characters and threads get it, and everything else dangles or blows up).

Such a conundrum, for example, afflicted Battlestar Galactica in its final season. And I think BG followed a pattern commonly seen when a serialized series ends. Some of the finale worked, some of it didn't but was at least moving, some of it was undercooked or outright stunk, and some of it was just left alone because (I'm guessing) there was no time for the staff to work it out.

I will say one thing about Lost: I caught a few episodes over the years (always reruns late at night), and admired how they always went to a commercial with maximum dramatic tension. Always. And it was sharp every time. I'm sure I just haven't seen the episodes where it was strained or dumb, but I'm guessing—from purely anecdotal evidence and the show's popularity—that the batting average was fairly high. That is hard to do even when you have alternate realities and time travel to work with.

Diver down

2010-05-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

Fate gave Ronnie James Dio an operatic voice perfect for heavy metal, yet took back a bit of that gift by forcing him to pay dues, and keep paying them even through his success.

His recording career began in the late 1950s. After knocking around and learning the craft, he helped put together what came to be Elf, a blues-based rock outfit that found its way into a regular opening gig for then-hard rock gods Deep Purple. Just making that step took Dio about ten years. He entered his thirties (!) as a respectable opening act, but an opening act nonetheless.

Dues paid, Dio entered the orbit of Ritchie Blackmore, one of rock's greatest abuser of musicians, a man who fired seemingly hundreds of players over the years, and had a role in chasing away so many members of Deep Purple the band kept a revolving door on the tour jet. Blackmore had gone so far as to slag his own band's most recent album and drafted Elf (minus the lead guitarist) to create the subtly-named Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow.

Dio was the only person to survive Blackmore's attrition process. For three albums Dio did his best to make Rainbow a legit ass-kicking act. But creeping pop ambitions entered the scene. Members of Rainbow (whoever they were that week) no doubt put on cowls and gathered in the studio to ask Satan to save them from lameness.

Satan, alas for them, was having none of it. Blackmore announced his intentions to grab the pop-metal Big Money. Dio left...

...and landed in Black Sabbath, then in the process of firing metal legend and dribbling substance abuser Ozzy Osbourne from the coven.

Dio then proceeded to pull off a breathtaking perfecta.

First, he achieved the impossible by being a credible replacement for a deified vocalist in a deified band.

Second, he did it while simultaneously fronting a very successful side project, Dio.

Having conquered as brand name and solo bandleader, Dio embarked upon a steady transformation into metal elder statesman. In later years, he managed to share Sabbath with the occasionally sentient Osbourne. Oz performed under the Black Sabbath name; Dio teamed with Sabbath's musicians as Heaven and Hell.

Now he no doubt enjoys an afterlife of leisure and occasionally offers advice to Satan. "Let's give Tipper Gore an itchy rash," you can hear him saying. Lucifer replies, "Done," and leaves him to watch the Yankees game in peace.

45s: Red, dwight, and blue

2010-05-06T08:00:00.002-05:00

"Nikita," by Elton John (1985)
Written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Cold War pop was a genre, and Elton John, having turned musical omnivore to keep his career alive, delved into it and made "Nikita" his contribution toward world peace. Though it baldly lays out a gay crush, and further telegraphs its intentions by using (then-closeted) George Michael on background vocals, "Nikita" was transformed by the popular hive mind into a straight love story (no doubt helped by the video) despite the use of an obviously male first name. The popular hive mind has immense powers of denial when it wants to enjoy a song.

"Nikita," like a lot of the songs Reg wrote with Taupin, goes on and on, clocking in at just short of five minutes—lengthy even in an Eighties pop milieu that foisted many a bloated 45 on the world. Major annoyances include a bridge that lasts forever and said bridge's faux-ethereal vocals. Always the pro, however, John softens up the listener with the kind of expert emotional build he and Taupin had perfected years earlier.

Despite its success, however, "Nikita" in a sense brought the Elton John timeline to an end. Afterward he became an institution, albeit one who tirelessly used that position to benefit good causes.

John had, like many of his peers, sputtered in the late 1970s. Not only was the disco phenomenon laying waste to careers and popular taste, but he suffered through various personal apocalypses related to substances, finances, and emotions. That could distract anyone, of course, and for the first couple of years of the 1980s John had little luck getting airtime in the U.S.

Alas, his weakness for elegial balladry started his career rolling again. His Lennon tribute "Empty Garden" tapped into the always-massive Nostalgic Sap demographic. Then he worked a similar maudlin vibe with "Blue Eyes," and from there he was off like a running and be-wigged marlin. The biggies: "I'm Still Standing" and "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" and part of "That's What Friends Are For," the last proof that the road to listening hell is paved with good intentions.

"Nikita," however, basically marked the end of Elton John's career recording original hit singles.

He still got on the radio, of course. But after "Nikita" he started to mine the old back catalog, with a live reprise of "Candle in the Wind" recored with an orchestra. In the future he would split his time between more such repurposings and superstar duets with the likes of George Michael and Aretha Franklin. By the dawn of the new century, he had survived a decade as a Disney cash factory and one of the British press's fave celebrity grotesques. But nothing stopped him. After a detour through Broadway he landed in Vegas—talk about inevitable, he had the costumes down in 1973—and continues to spend his summers propping up Billy Joel at stadia near you.

45s: Down, down

2010-04-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

“Leader of the Pack,” by the Shangri-La's (1964)
Written by George “Shadow” Morton, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich

An absolutely insane song, three minutes of garment-rending with motorcycle noises thrown in, all carried on Mary Weiss’s grief-soaked voice, “Leader of the Pack” is the greatest song in the dead teenager genre, worthy of its referencing by the likes of the New York Dolls and the Damned, and something you should download right now. You get the picture? (Yes, we see.)

From the moment Weiss wails, 'I met him at the candy store,' the song takes off into a level of bathos usually reserved for those under observation. There's love. There’s a disapproving dad. There’s a chillingly sincere “Look out look out look out look out!” right before the sound of a crashing bike and shattered glass. And don't get me started on those background vocals.

Yes, the revving motorcycle engine is hysterical in a different way. But any of vices are offset by the utter lack of saccharine. Virtually all dead teen songs are horrid with sentimentality and string-laden grief. The Shangri-La's, though, man, they told it like it was, they shed tears (Weiss supposedly cried while recording it), and then they were gone gone gone gone gone amidst thundering instrumentation and shattered dreams.

Bonus trivia: there are unconfirmed reports that Billy Joel, then doing session work, played on the song, though the principles deny this is true. The universe will just not let Billy Joel be cool.

† Like the dead teen classic "Tell Laura I Love Her," this song is connected to über-popster Jeff Barry. He's another of those figures with footprints through pop history: one of the songwriting masterminds behind the girl groups, an early producer for Neil Diamond and the Monkees, co-writer of “Sugar Sugar,” in all a writer or co-writer on dozens, if not a couple of hundred, hit songs.

45s: It's never winter

2010-04-23T07:00:00.002-05:00

"December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)," by The Four Seasons (1976)
Written by Bob Gaudio and Judy Parker

Sometimes you can't predict which song will have a thirty-five-year shelf life.

Propelled by a disco beat, some funk-as-funk-is-understood-by-white-people guitar work, and a polished pro performance, "December 1963" told the tale of a boy with a high tenor losing his virginity. Unlike many of the Four Seasons' early-Sixties hits, "December 1963" had a vocals from the drummer and bassist, with usual front-man Frankie Valli saving his immense range for the refrain.

"December 1963" is more than another oldie. It still gets airplay on good time music stations beyond the oldies format, at suburban summer fun-fests, at weddings and corporate events. In other words, it's kind of a super-oldie that, in transcending the memories of its original audience, has become an ongoing part of pop culture rather than a mere relic.

One can reasonably ask, "Why 'December 1963' and not 'In the Year 2525?'"

I would argue its resurgent popularity had its roots in the 1991 release of the "Grease Megamix." By imposing an overpowering dance beat on faux-greaser music, the Megamix prepared the public to accept similar treatment of the Made in Jersey real thing. Three years later, "December 1963" hit again in a dance mix version that powered the step-aerobics classes of millions of young women.

It's hard to imagine Jersey Boys exists without the group's unusual 1990s comeback. Not to say the group had failed to show staying power in the past.

In the months following December 1963, a lot of American groups became so much wreckage smouldering inside the blast radius left by the British Invasion. But the Four Seasons continued to have hits despite being chained to a record company driven to the brink of bankruptcy because Introducing... The Beatles had dropped into its lap and it didn't have the money to print enough albums to meet demand. (One way or another, the Fab Four destroyed all comers.)

Valli added some ostensibly solo hits that basically used the Four Seasons mafia. But by the late part of the decade an even greater shift in musical tastes—toward serious themes and groovy musicianship—had made the Seasons as out-of-date as pompadours. A star-crossed alliance with Motown led nowhere but Valli, still assisted by the FS crew, began scoring hits on his own as the American record-buying public abandoned seriousness and desperately grasped at the twin messiahs of nostalgia and uncomplicated pop.

Valli's "My Eyes Adored You"—a ballad rescued from the Motown dead end—put him back in the public eye about the time an advertised-on-TV greatest hits collection reminded people the Four Seasons had existed. (The Beach Boys and Connie Francis, among others, benefited from the same kind of product.) Disco, the great resurrector, then gave the Seasons and the world "Who Loves You," a crib of a Telly Savalas catch phrase and a very jive product indeed.

Valli went on to contribute the title song of the Grease soundtrack, and he and Travolta were the only well-cast performers in that entire project. Fifteen years later, the dance mix. A generation (or two) later, Broadway glory.

No doubt the Four Seasons will fade once more. But given the success of Jersey Boys, and the fact people keep holding corporate events that promise dancing, repeated revivals are inevitable.

45s: Sonny Limbo? Really?

2010-04-22T05:00:00.001-05:00

“Key Largo,” by Bertie Higgins (1982)
Written by Bertie Higgins and Sonny Limbo

If this was adult contemporary, why did anyone grow up?

Whereas other balladeers of the time looked like your music teacher, Higgins just sounded like him—his look was all sensitive bearded love man, and naturally he posed for his album cover shirtless. It’s hard to award any song worst-of-its-decade honors when anti-talents like Matthew Wilder and Richard Marx tormented Top 40 listeners, but this three-minute definition of insipid makes Higgins a real contender. Not content to reference one aged Bogart film, Higgins also threw a song called “Casablanca” onto the same album. The public fortunately quit buying by the time he reached his planned eight-minute song cycle built around “The African Queen.”

Video, video: The tropical wind is blowing. The beard is perfectly groomed. Bertie is driving a speedboat.

45s: Mama Pia!

2010-04-20T23:00:00.002-05:00

“When the Rain Begins to Fall,” by Pia Zadora and Jermaine Jackson (1984)
Written by Peggy March, Michael Bradley, and Steve Wittmack

Not just an incomprehensible pairing, but proof of the universal law that celebrity always duets at its own level. The theme song of Pia’s vanity film Voyage of the Rock Aliens, “When the Rain Beings to Fall” bobbed perilously close to the Top Forty in 1985†—three years before the film’s release. At the risk of complimenting Pia for the first time in her life, her voice wasn’t any worse than a decent Cher impersonator, making her about average relative to what has found its way onto the pop charts since 1955. And that’s not bad for the trophy wife of a zillionaire Svengali-mate.

As for Jermaine, to make fun of his participation is to forget that it’s plausible his father forced Number Two Son to do the song in order to repay a Corleonesque debt. The recording's status as a bizarre found object gives it greater virtue than Jermaine’s string of forgettable R&B solo hits or the Victory album, the latter best known as Michael’s gift of an early retirement to his male siblings. Still, we salute Jermaine’s professionalism. Having performed since your third trimester for an abusive father no doubt helps you dig deep when you’re asked to harmonize with Pia Zadora.

† It topped charts across Europe, however. Not as bad as Japan, but…

Addendum: One can ask what possessed the writer of this blog post to buy the forty-five of "When the Rain Begins to Fall" sight unseen (and song unheard) back in 1984. It had nothing to do with Zadora's alleged status as a B-grade sex symbol. I can say with all honesty her look--let's call it bubble-bodied-hobbit--did little for me. If you think that shows taste, let me mention that the statement comes from someone who at the time considered Nancy McKeon a primo celebrity crush.

Not Nancy McKeon

As a budding 45ologist, however, I sensed the sheer epic fuck-upedness of a Zadora-Jackson duet. It got worse, by the way. "Rain" was accompanied by an overdone seven minute mini-movie music video that featured a hilarious dance-fight between Jermaine and a post-apocalyptic gang leader who looked like he'd dropped out of a cologne ad. And let us reiterate the entire project had its origin in a film called Voyage of the fucking Rock Aliens.

Of course, Zadora knew from bad cinema. She famously made her film debut in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, always considered among the worst movies of all time; and in yet another strange pop culture confluence, the film came out the same year Pia bowed as one of Tevye's daughters in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. Perhaps she learned poor (over)acting from Zero Mostel?

In short, there is no way "When the Rain Begins to Fall" should be anything but the worst record ever stamped onto vinyl. Yet it is on the frontier of listenable, assuming you have any patience for mid-Eighties techno dance music. Not quite there. Let's not go too far. But Jackson is a pro and Zadora gives it her all. If that confirms she lacks the least self-awareness, she at least deserves credit for trying.

I will now take credit for giving Pia Zadora her first compliment.

Earthquake in Yushu

2010-04-14T23:16:00.003-05:00

It is an odd feeling to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and find out that the tragedy in the news that morning affects one personally.

While sleepwalking through my Carnation Instant Breakfast, I saw on TV that an earthquake had struck Tibet. Online I was thunderstruck to see the area affected was Yushu. That may be the only city in western China I know anything about. For the past two years, I've sat on the board of an organization that oversees a girls school in Yushu. The young women come from the countryside, specifically, from the Tibetan herding peoples of the region, and the school is dedicated to giving them an education that includes job and language skills, and information on family planning and basic health.

The goal, to put it in Americanized terms: empowerment through education.

The school was masterminded by a Tibetan named Asang (he goes by one name). These days Asang lives in Evanston, Illinois. Some years ago, after his sister died in childbirth, Asang essentially walked out of Tibet. After an arduous and lengthy journey, he made his way to India, got an education, and met an American woman in the area to study. They married, he moved to the U.S., and in part to honor his sister's memory Asang organized the Yushu school.

The first class had ten young women. I've seen and interacted with some of them via Skype. Now I've learned, via Asang, that not all of them survived the quake. And I find this ... incomprehensible.

Heartbreaking, too, 0f course. But since I learned of the disaster at 5:30 this morning I have returned over and over again to how it at once seems so big I cannot get my mind around it, so unreal, and yet on an emotional level nothing but real. Every time my thoughts turned to the school today I ended up staring into space, overwhelmed here by feeling, there by a hunger to understand. Always I remembered seeing the young women and their teachers bunched around the camera.

I have no idea if those I saw on the computer screen--or in the very recent picture above--are among the dead. In fact, at this moment I have no idea how many of the students died or were injured. I only know that the school is destroyed, that some of the girls at least are missing, that two children Asang and his wife Nancy hoped to bring to the U.S. are no more.

Donations to Asang's meditation center.

45s: You missed a spot

2010-04-12T04:00:00.001-05:00

“Rub It In,” by Billy “Crash” Craddock (1976)
Written by Layng Martine, Jr.

A one-joke novelty song from a countrified Neil Diamond, “Rub It In” provided radio listeners a few minutes of harmless innuendo when they weren’t celebrating the nation’s bicentennial. About half the country-pop songs of the period sounded something like “Rub It In,” so when pondering why Crash broke from the (six-) pack, you have to give credit to the good-natured sleaze, that being the only kind legal in the state of Tennessee.

How dumb is “Rub It In?” Dumb enough that Ray Stevens produced Layng Martine’s original. But it’s entertaining on its own level and, thankfully, Craddock is in on the joke.

Like a lot of ‘70s country stars, Crash actually began in pop music. After a period as Australia’s top teen idol—Craddock is from North Carolina, by the way—he fell on hard times. He regrouped, however, and following in the footsteps of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dickie Lee and many others not named Lee, he tried out the pasture on the country-and-western side of the music industry. A cover of “Knock Three Times” revived his career right on schedule and he spent the Seventies as a bona fide country sex symbol. He’s still around today and very, very tan.

45s: Tupulo solid gold

2010-04-10T05:00:00.001-05:00

“Honey,” by Bobby Goldsboro (1968)
Written by Bobby Russell

Astonishment number one: this song knocked “Dock of the Bay” out of the top spot on the pop charts.

Astonishment number two: it appeared on Goldsboro’s tenth album. He recorded ten albums—and no doubt this massive world-wide hit greased the skids for a bunch more. The Beatles barely managed ten albums!

“Honey” frequently appears near or at the top of all the Worst Song Ever lists. That Lawrence Welk and Jim Nabors covered it attests to the song’s awfulness. But why is “Honey” so historically bad? Goldsboro’s syrupy delivery and the soaring faux-angelic choruses are indeed grotesque, but that could be said of hundreds of songs (many of them big hits).

Is it because he looked like a cross between Bilbo Baggins and the kid in Almost Famous? No. Is it because he refers to his true love as “…kind of dumb and kind of smart?” No, believe it or not. It’s the lyrics. Any sample must be held to four lines, in the interest of public safety:

I came home unexpectedly
and found her crying needlessly
in the middle of the day.
And it was in the early spring
when flowers bloom and robins sing,
she went away.

It gets worse. Angels descend to get Honey. Tears from clouds rain down on a flower bed that she loved. And so on. Even in a culture that bought “You Light Up My Life” by the million and handed Whitney Houston a fortune to squander on drugs, “Honey” achieves an extraordinary level of bathos. Of course, it continues to bring joy—or something—to millions.

Addendum: In 2010, Goldsboro reached another life pinnacle by appearing as one of the Time-Life Infomercial Stars. His assignment: pop hits of the Sixties. Those wondering whatever happened to Goldsboro might be surprised to see he’s undergone a total physical transformation into a non-hobbit grown man and youthful-looking sixtysomething.

When it comes to moving the Time-Life product, Goldsboro brings the same confidence and energy that more thoroughly anonymous figures provide on DVDs about buying a time-share. It’s transparently insincere, mind you. Unlike, say, Barry Williams, he’s not just happy to have a camera on him. But Goldsboro’s inoffensively friendly in a third-rate megachurch minister sort of way and if you do get sucked in, you’re only out $149 in four easy payments. Try to find a time-share in Aruba at those prices.

Pros

• Looks way, way better than he did in the 1960s
• References Glen Campbell’s old TV variety show
• Shows no ill effects of being on a flight hijacked to Cuba in 1971

Cons

• Having recorded “Honey” and lived forty more years confirms there is no God
• Loses sales focus by pimping a “Stars of Yesterday” cruise at the end of the infomercial
• Damages youthful mien with either a helmet-hair perm or a hairpiece imitating same

Behind the music

2010-04-09T16:00:00.001-05:00

In the wake of Malcolm McLaren's demise, let us ponder a list of the most influential non-musicians in rock history. With your permission, allow me to exclude two classes of people: attention-grabbing star-fuckers (William Burroughs, Salman Rushdie); and producers who themselves were working artists, ala George Martin or Steve Albini, or ace songwriters, ala Mike Chapman or Barry Gordy.

A working list is below, with contributions from Reader Mark. It is an ongoing project, so if tempted to send insults, send suggestions instead. For now we'll list nominees at Z-A.

Jerry Wexler
Jann Wenner
Andy Warhol
Gladys Presley
Bruce Pavitt
Colonel Tom Parker
Malcolm McLaren
Greil Marcus
Annie Leibovitz
Buddy Holly's pilot*
David Geffen
Ahmet Ertegun
Brian Epstein

* Perhaps the first member of a sub-category that includes pilots for Otis Redding and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Marvin Gaye's dad, a long list of drug dealers, and Sonny Bono's skiing instructor.

Watch the stars come out and throw up

2010-04-06T22:00:00.008-05:00

A friend emailed me a YouTube clip from the ancient clash of gods that was Battle of the Network Stars. Not Gabe Kaplan leading a relay team, but an obstacle course race between Kristy McNichol and poor, gangly Melissa Gilbert. In case you're wondering, McNichol channeled her tomboyish vibe into athletic glory and sent the Little House crashing onto Gilbert as if Half-Pint was the Wicked Witch of the Prairie.

ABC's secret weapon

Though helpless with laughter, I summoned the strength to click on a related video from the same episode: an obstacle course death match between Michelle Phillips and Adrienne Barbeau, with Phillips victorious despite injuring her ankle on the wall climb and despite Barbeau's clear advantage in getting one's bust across the finish line.

The clip contained so many levels of awesomeness I can barely stand it. As it is the 1970s Telly Savalas, of course, makes a cameo, having risen from team captain in the early contests to Howard Cosell's co-host here. But there's more genius, much more.

The fact Barbeau cheats at the start.

The closeup of Phillips' injury "treatment" and Cosell treating the event so somberly you'd think Secretariat needed humane destruction.

All of us agreeing as a nation that Michelle Phillips was on a network show that didn't really exist just so she could provide BOTNS with more over-the-top sex appeal.*

And then, as I was on the verge of wetting myself from mirth, I ventured into the YouTube comments. Someone noted that Philllips later stormed back to beat McNichol on the O-course! Someone else replied, "She beat Kristy McNichol? Wow." As if Kristy McNichol was the Michael Jordan of the Network Stars!

* Perfect casting, by the way. The blond dreamsicle versus the boldly ethnic ballbuster. All they needed was a fresh-faced Midwesterner--North Dakotan Cheryl Ladd, say--and Cosell's heart would've exploded.

Addendum: ABC definitely qualifies as the 1991 Philadelphia 76ers of the BOTNS franchise, for this was one fucked-up roster.

Ubiquitous team captain Gabe Kaplan went to war with the cripplingly-jiggly Suzanne Somers, dubious specimen Penny Marshall, Ladd, and an unpromising male line-up of the callow (Parker Stevenson), the Jewish (Billy Crystal), and the mountainous (Victor French), plus no-doubt tug-of-war anchor Fred "Rerun" Barry, whose dance performances make me believe he could outrun any these people.

Still, unless Barry's other nickname is "Jim Thorpe," I just don't see that group matching up with CBS's macho front line of Kevin Dobson, James MacArthur, and Lyle Waggoner; or an NBC wrecking crew that included Robert Conrad, Patrick "Man from Atlantis" Duffy (presumably the swimming winner), Larry Wilcox, and comedic lummox Peter Isacksen. I mean, Lance Kerwin is the only weak link, and you figure Conrad made him water boy after the first practice.

45s: Powers of attraction

2010-03-29T07:00:00.001-05:00

“Magnet and Steel,” by Walter Egan (1978)
Written by Walter Egan

Late Seventies retro magnificence, the best eighth-grade dance anthem imaginable, Walter Egan’s claim to fame was pure SoCal pop that went beyond slick to a frictionless surface plausible only within the realm of speculative fiction.

If you wanted to break a song in 1978, there was no better way than to get Lindsey Buckingham to produce and Stevie Nick to team with him on background vocals. They swing in the early Sixties spirit of things and as they do listeners get a sample of what the Grease soundtrack would sound like if it featured good music.

Egan, an unknown, no doubt benefited from having Nicks-Buckingham to sell the single to DJs and radio programmers. That may have caused long-term problems, however, as Egan never quite managed a follow-up on his own. Had Nicks stuck around the studio, maybe things would have gone better for both of them. Not only did Egan fade, but she went on to incomprehensibly duet with Kenny Loggins, a decision most of us blame on her drug problem.

45s: Long lonesome highway

2010-03-27T05:00:00.001-05:00

“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” by the Bob Seger System (1969)
Written by Bob Seger

To grow up in the Midwest a generation ago was to become sick of Bob Seger at a young age. But with the hindsight one gains through many years’ worth of accumulated regrets, Seger’s career provides hope for us all. Here was a career minor leaguer who in defiance of naysayers and the law of averages broke through and hit fifty home runs.

Seger first recorded as a high-schooler in 1961 at the studio of Del “Runaway” Shannon. He spent the Sixties running through various bands, compiling influences and setbacks, and generally paying dues. Local Detroit success came his way, and in 1969 went more-or-less national with “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” your basic rollocking good time backed by the requisite late-Sixties screaming electric organ. The song struck a blow for roots rock in a time of great musical ridiculousness. But when the mainstream embraced the total singer-songwriter mellow, rock retreated to the strange frontiers of ur-metal, prog, and Zeppelin. Seger, meanwhile, boarded a tour bus headed back to the salt mines.

Over the next six years he became a demigod in Detroit and remained a guy most everywhere else. He used the time wisely, however, coming up with several of the songs that helped propel his Live Bullet double album into gold record-dom. Live Bullet was the end sum of one of the 1970s surest career strategies: tour in ballbusting fashion to build a following and then break big by releasing music recorded in front of your cultish public. Peter Frampton, REO Speedwagon, KISS, J. Geils, Joe Cocker—it was about as close as you could get to a sure thing.

But, for whatever reason, the gods wanted to keep Seger humble. He famously played to a crowd of a few hundred people the day after (some accounts say the day before) selling out the 80,000-seat Pontiac Silverdome. Bob must’ve passed the test, though. In 1976, his album Night Moves sold a million or two and the title track has been on the radio ever since. For the next seven years he released music destined to fill a billion hours on FM radio.

45s: Never compromise

2010-03-25T07:00:00.002-05:00

“The Freshman,” by the Verve Pipe (1997)
Written by Brian Vander Ark

Hipsters and rock critics love to sneer at songs like “The Freshman,” but you go ahead and love it if you want. I do. It’s the antimatter version of bubblegum, like David Cassidy or N’Sync singing about causing a girlfriend’s eating disorder.

Thirteen year-old girls deserve their own music, too—music that is ohmygod so devastating, so real, so brimming with that brand of Absolute Truth as presented by all the shows on the CW. And “The Freshman” is brilliant enough to appeal to them by flattering their high school freshman status while at the same time telling a tale of the collegiate kind, a milieu far enough away to seem exotic to the underclasswoman still struggling through braces and gym class.

The lyrics bring all the drama you could want, too. Love. Suicide. Refusal to compromise. And of course abrogation of responsibility, repeated again and again and again. I can’t be held responsible—I fall for it every time. One of the great dead teenager songs, “Patches” for millennials.

45s: DeFranco DeLovely DeLight

2010-03-24T11:00:00.002-05:00

“Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat,” by the DeFranco Family (1973)
Written by Michael Kennedy and William Hudspeth

Younger readers will recall the boy band phenomenon of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But as the golden age of Greece influenced glorious Rome, so too did the early ‘70s teen idol craze create the template for the boy band invasion. In that ancient time, every girl had her favorite. David Cassidy was the androgynous longhair Californian. Bobby Sherman had the nice-oldest-brother-next-door vibe covered. The Jackson 5 represented African-Americans and the Osmonds that large contingent of American white people seemingly devoid of ethnicity.

The DeFranco Family, meanwhile, roared on behalf of the overlooked Italian-Canadian community. Fronted by pre-pube crush object Tony D., the DeFranco Family sang “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” onto the charts and into every book of kitschy singles ever written, including this one.

As so often was the case with bubblegum, it was a class act all the way. The supporting DeFrancos stole its high harmonies from the J5 and laid down Brady Bunch-level choreography. Studio aces the Wrecking Crew handled the music. Throw in aggressive management and it was Hitsville, population them.

What’s with Tony’s delivery, though? On the verses he sounds like he’s downplaying, an unheard-of creative choice in a genre that depends on refined Deep Emotion. Tony shows more life on the chorus, but—and this is admirable in its way—never goes over the top. I mean, compared to Donny Osmond he’s Lou Reed.

That arrangement, meanwhile, throws incongruous acid rock flourishes over a big drum sound. I don’t know if it’s good, exactly, but something different is going on—a new bubblegum flavor, maybe not as exotic as tamarillo or cashew fruit, but definitely wild raspberry.

The DeFrancos seemed headed for steady Vegas work, or at least a TV variety show, but it never worked out. The follow-ups did okay only and their Svengali manager dashed with the cash. The latter, alas, is a pop tradition even predating teen idols.

Alvin and me

2009-06-11T20:21:00.003-05:00

This morning, I realized that a chipmunk had invaded our house.

This presented a new pest control problem for me. I've dealt with a lot of varmints over the years in my various domiciles, but chipmunks were new. Would they eat poison pellets? Could they be driven out my back door? Did I really want to dispose of one stuck to toxic glue?

I don't like mice, but I understand them. They avoid humans and I can play a long game of killing them with poison. Chipmunks, though, LIKE humans. And not just the food. I know because when I woke up this morning one was crawling across the bed. I flicked my leg and sent it sailing across the room.

How much would a chipmunk in the bedroom not work for my wife? I cannot in words express such a massive amount of not-workedness. So I went to the hardware store and bought a metal chipmunk trap to capture the tawny rodent alive. Forty bucks! But I considered. With poison, you wait. A live trap has a chance of immediate results--immediate as in, before my wife gets home from work. And I admit deep down I've kind of wanted a metal animal trap in the past. No reason. Just another irrational desire related to hardware.

I baited the trap with peanut butter and granola. Ten minutes later, bang. It took me longer to *set* the trap. I walked the unhappy chipmunk to the forest near the golf course down the street and turned it loose. We were both happy at the parting.

45s: Dystopia rock

2006-09-21T07:30:00.002-05:00

"In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans
Written by Rick Evans

In keeping with this week's unintended sci-fi theme, and because I heard it on the radio this morning, let us ponder one of the strangest of Top 40 hits, a folk-pop look into the future that, as such, may be a genre in and of itself.

Not that rock hasn't looked into grim futures from time to time. Pink Floyd's Animals does so at album length. If memory serves, Rush went there a few times and promised deliverance at the grasping hands of Our Returned Savior Ayn Rand. Bowie worked more in space themes than outright dystopia, but we'll throw him in here. We will not count Eurythmics' soundtrack to 1984, however. Not until that day George Orwell gets co-songwriting credit and a share of the royalties.

There were others. But rarely in the Top Forty.

It's hard to imagine who heard this song and thought, "Hit-fire!" The lead vocal sounds like someone imitating an old man, Gabrielesque horns come out of nowhere, there's a not-even-groovy strumming beat to carry us through the centuries.

I grant you, the lyrics ride a great gimmick. From 2525 to 3535 to 4545, and so on. Almost Schoolhouse Rock in its simplicity and catchiness. Then you've got your "Exordium and Terminus" subtitle. Sounds very important, very heavy, if we may use some of that hip lexicon of the time. Last but not least, you have titanium-strength word power like this:

In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth
Won't need your eyes.
You won't find a thing to chew.
Nobody's gonna look at you.

Heavy, indeed.

Mind you, this wasn't just a Number One song. "In the Year 2525," by a couple of guys from Nebraska never heard from since, sold roughly eight million copies. It was one of the biggest-selling singles of the entire 1960s, if I may use boldface. It sold beyond every Beatles hit except "Hey Jude" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand." It hit Number One in multiple countries. Yea, I dare to state in print that it even approached the massive worldwide love lavished on Staff Sgt. Barry Sandler's "Ballad of the Green Berets."

The success truly baffles. From the sound of it, people were in a bad mood in 1969. I don't get it. Look, I can see where you'd be thinking about the future. Zager and Evans scored at the same time a rockin' little three-piece led by Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. But I was under the impression that the Moon Landing provided a moment of optimism. Even the people who considered it staged should at least have granted that Armstrong's performance took movie magic to a new level.

But perhaps it is easier to accept that it was simply a confusing time. Lord knows, it's either that explanation or we must wonder if there was a manifestation of some forgotten mania left out of the late edition of Extraordinarily Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. For Zager and Evans followed the "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" at the tops of the pops, before giving way to "Honky Tonk Women." The summer of 1969, better known as Postmodern Mind-Fuck #403.

Update: Reader Stu points out that Bowie's Diamond Dogs album has three 1984-themed songs on it (including one called "1984"). We thank him for his input. DD is admittedly not an album I know well; when I rummage Reader Stu's CD collection for some weekend Bowie, I always borrow Heroes.

While we're here, I suppose I should also lump in Floyd with Eurythmics when it comes to paying Orwell royalties. Animals is, famously, a take on Animal Farm. Let us now turn it over to WKRP in Cincinnati for the classic take on the album:

(Mr. Carlson enters the DJ booth. Pink Floyd's "Dogs" plays throughout the scene.)

Fever: Gripping music, huh?
Mr. Carlson: Yeah, that's good all right. What's the name of that orchestra?
Fever: Pink Floyd.
Mr. Carlson: Oooh, is that Pink Floyd? (Listens.) Do I hear dogs barking on that thing?
Fever: I do.

Space hippy jam band

2006-09-17T04:00:00.002-05:00

Star Trek, original recipe, is getting a makeover.

Re-recorded soundtracks.

Touched-up special effects.

As with most fans, this event puts my inner purist at odds with my 21st Century Man. On the one hand, the $18 per episode budget gave Trek a distinctive patina of cheesiness that is, well, endearing. If the computer wizards use contemporary F/X to make the space ships look good, how then to explain the cardboard-and-Lite Brite bridge? Bones McCoy using a Mr. Microphone to cure disease? Scotty's toolbox of widgets purchased by Paramount gofers at Japanese trade shows?

I suppose I care less about re-recording the music. Mind you, I think it the most unnecessary of the new elements, though I might feel differently if I had Surroundsound stereo with my TV. Even the music presents problems, though. Should we not, in the interest of consistency, update the Space Hippies with Radiohead rather than their current sound, i.e. that of a track from a Jack Webb spoken word album of spoof folk tunes?

As for the visuals, well, this worries me. Again, we must blame George Lucas for something. The man apparently spent twenty years of his life waiting for the chance to make the Death Star explode in a cooler way. (By the way, this obsession proves that Lucas really doesn't haven't a head full of art films he's always wanted to make. Clearly he spent 1975-2003 wondering how to redecorate Mos Eisley spaceport, not explore new cinematic frontiers.) Having broken down resistance to computer retouching of iconic space opera, Lucas thus cleared the way for Paramount to do the same with Trek.

Man, he's got himself one growing pile of cultural war crimes.

Granted, worrying that the orange planet will look orangier, or that the Enterprise might seem capable of actual flight, are purist arguments. I can put them aside. After all, I like oranginess. I want to believe the Enterprise can turn it up to Warp Nine, whatever Scotty's complaints about the inadequate laws of physics. And the Galileo VII could use some work.

But you know it won't stop there. Imagine the next round of alterations. Can you doubt they'll excise Shatner's season three love handles? Oil up Sulu even more (maybe at Takei's personal request)? And you know there's already the temptation to make over the sweaty-looking Klingons of 1967 into the bizarre (if more plausible) species afflicted with Klingon Pattern Baldness that was brought to us in recent decades.

Scotty using profanity. Koenig exchanging his Beatles 'do for dreads. "Better" uniforms. Alberto Gonzalez's reinterpretation of the Prime Directive. I hope Paramount can control itself, that this is not a slippery slope.

45s: Crooks and criers

2006-07-11T09:00:00.002-05:00

"Runaway," by Del Shannon
Written by Del Shannon and Max Crook

At some point in my pre-teen years, I learned that rock and roll history went back further than Frampton Comes Alive. Probably this epiphany took place when, out of curiosity, or while sick with chicken pox, I put my parents’ copy of the American Graffiti soundtrack on the turntable. One of the early blockbuster music compilations, the AGS helped fuel the I Love the Fifties revival that used up so much of America’s time in the mid-1970s.

Short review: I thought the rockingest song was "Party Doll," by main man Buddy Knox (with the Rhythm Orchids—an ur-psychedelic band name). But my favorite far and away was Del Shannon’s "Runaway." Even though I could not quite figure out how someone in 1961 got his hands on a song featured on my neighbor’s Bonnie Raitt album.

It would be difficult to find a more dire year in rock than 1961. Teen idols, bland song interpreters, a castrated Elvis, Motown was mostly over the horizon—that our youth did not run lemming-like to the sea remains a miracle. But the action at the top of the charts was quite listenable. Dogs abounded, sure, but you did have "Please Mr. Postman" and Ben E. King and Dion and the Orbison epic "Running Scared."

You also had "Runaway," a fantastic number from the moment the organ-falling-down-a-staircase opening fills the AM dial. It’s haunting. It’s got boss echo. It’s in minor chords! Shannon is revved up from the first word, like he’s been told he has one take and then the studio gets turned over to a local jazz combo cutting a single for the saxophonist’s grandma.

By the time he throws himself into the chorus he has forgotten to be jittery.

By the time the bizarre and unforgettable organ solo takes over—did we really need the Doors after this?—Shannon sounds too drained to cry another Why? Why? Why?

Any piece of crap can be a classic. This is a great song.

A guy named Max Crook came up with what we know today as one of the most famous instrumental breaks/organ freakouts in rock history. Rather than crib, let me throw it to this lovingly researched article for a few details:

Max Crook took a small guitar contact microphone and wedged it onto the soundboard of the studio's Steinway grand piano with a piece of newspaper. "I then started setting up all of these little 'boxes.' Needless to say, the entire studio came to a halt. Everyone came out of the control booth and gathered around me to scope what I was doing. They were maybe hoping to pick up a trick. But in those days, I had all of my equipment camouflaged, because I didn't want anyone to steal my ideas. I hooked up a 'box' that had a hole on the top. What that did was control slap echo. I arranged it myself with a garden spring, and when I played a note on the keyboard, it would fade out: 'wap, wap, wap, wap.' I could control the speed and amount of feedback. It wasn't reverb, it was true echo."

Thirty-seven years later, in Del Shannon's small hometown of Coopersville, Michigan, Crook revealed his secret keyboard to del's legion of fans at the annual summer tribute. "The Musitron is a three-octive, monophonic (single-note playing) keyboard with a slide on it that will allow me to play at a range of two-cycles-per-second up to beyond human hearing. Also, I can bend the notes, which was something uncommon at the time for mini-keyboards.... I can tune it to anything. I built the Musitron out of a variety of things. A clavioline was part of it, but I also threw in some resisters (too early for transistors), tubes from television sets, parts from appliances, and other such household items. That's basically what it consisted of."

Shannon learned his trade in bars and the Army, tough training grounds where a powerful voice had to make up for not only poor acoustics but, in the military’s case, regulations against cool haircuts. Though "Runaway" made him an international star, the song was only the first of a half-dozen hits that included "Hats Off to Larry"—also good, and maybe the only pop tune about someone named Larry—and "Little Town Flirt." His best-known follow-up, though, was "I Go to Pieces," a big hit he wrote for Peter and Gordon during the British Invasion.

His path crossed strange territory on its way to tragedy. During the early Sixties he recorded fellow Michiganer Bob Seger before anyone else. He was also the first American artist to cover a Beatles song ("From Me to You"). Over the years he survived an alliance with Rolling Stones producer/fuck-up Andrew Loog Oldham, battled alcoholism, ventured with Darin-like determination into psychedelia and garage rock, and was shepherded through comeback attempts by the likes of Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty.

Shannon, like Roy Orbison and many other contemporaries, developed a rabid and long-lived fan base in Europe, particularly the U.K. That kept him in front of audiences until he took his own life in 1990.

45s: Byrdman

2006-07-10T08:00:00.002-05:00

"Listen to Her Heart," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

I don’t know why I dislike Tom Petty so much. I like the Byrds. I own the first Traveling Wilburys album, not that I’m exceedingly proud of this. As roots rockers go Petty isn’t nearly as uninteresting as, say, the John Mellencamp avatars.

Petty has been a familiar voice and vaguely albino face for thirty years now, ever since "Breakdown" and its spooky guitar part became an instant part of classic rock radio. I remember my intro to him well. One day my dad explained the phrase "damn the torpedoes" to me while smashed out of his mind and driving at high speed on the so-called British side of small-town streets. I admit, listening to "Don’t Do Me Like That" at high volume during a state of abject terror can turn you against an artist’s music. Look what happened to Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

Whether on road trips or ten-minute errands, the sound of a Petty song sends me elsewhere on the dial faster than anything this side of the Aerosmith comeback years. Those of you with a classic rock station on one of your vehicle’s buttons recognize "Listen to Her Heart" represents only one of about fifteen Petty offerings on the cock rock playlist, and that it gets played a lot less often than "Don’t Do Me Like That."

So here we are.

I have of late contemplated a change in personal outlook. "You caught me in a transitional period," if I may quote Samuel L. Jackson to Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction. The new outlook, in brief, would be a transformation into a positive person. Not the relentless positive charge of an infomercial trying to convince you that eternal happiness depends on healthy bowels, but at least a peek into the lighter side of life, an alliance—temporary or permanent, I don’t know—with that side of humanity that sees the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. In with the Mary Richards, you dig, and out with Lou Grant.

In the interest of accentuating the positive in my new Anthony Robbins manner, I’m going to proclaim this Petty nugget a good verse:

You think you're gonna take her away
With your money and your cocaine
Keep thinkin' that her mind is gonna change
But I know everything is okay

Mention of cocaine: funny. Rhyming "okay" with "cocaine": howlingly suspect, yet excellent—in other words, poetry in the best rock tradition.

Declared "America’s band" by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, compared favorably with Springsteen by same, Petty and the Heartbreakers have clearly impressed someone. The man has a fan base. No doubt many of the fifty-three year-olds show up for his concerts in leather jackets bought especially for the occasion, wear them afterwards for a few days and embarrass their teenaged children. But Tom continues to tour and people continue to care.

I’ve heard he puts on a good show. I’ll never know. I try to avoid going into the fetal position in public.

45s: Snowbirds are white

2006-06-27T10:00:00.002-05:00

"You Won't See Me," by Anne Murray
Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

In it's natural form I think it's one of the great overlooked Beatles songs. You have a spirited Paul vocal. Then there's "...the line's engaged." Finally, and best of all, note the use of both of the band's nuclear options: the harmonies and a Lennon climbing counterpoint vocal, not as good as the same on "Getting Better," yet right there with the second and third chorus of "Hello, Goodbye."

Square songbirds of the early 1970s, for all their faults, knew to steal from the best. (Or their managers did.) Karen and Richard Carpenter not only covered "Ticket to Ride" in maudlin fashion, they covered the Beatles cover of "Please, Mr. Postman." Ronstadt used the songbooks of Neil Young, Roy Orbison, Warren Zevon, hell, everyone, and even stuck around long enough to cover Elvis Costello.

Anne Murray, oddly or impishly, went with, well, the Monkees and Loggins & Messina.

I am not an Anne Murray fan, by any means, but I find certain things about her charming. Like the fact she sold millions of records in a visual culture despite resembling a very nice schoolteacher.* Like being the only pop star on record (as it were) from Nova Scotia. Like having a voice about as clear as you can get this side of John Denver. Jerry Seinfeld opened for her in his early days. That's fairly cool, to the extent cool can apply to Anne Murray, though, really, a duet album with Glen Campbell when he was cool isn't cool enough?

Enough subtle tying of a Canadian to low temperatures.

Tonight I heard her "You Won't See Me" at the grocery store. I can't expect the Beatles version in such a setting, so I shamelessly sung along, only pausing to let those slick choruses richochet over the foreign food aisles and back into the Rita Coolidge songs that spawned them.

It's all very bland and overproduced. Murray effortlessly puts her powerful voice to work, doesn't go for a big note on the fade, really never changes out of that gear we all recognize as "seasoned pro."

To be honest, what we have here is, for her fans anyway, good-time music. (There's another Glen Campbell ref, for the four of you who want one.) But I reckon it superior to those super-sweetened ballads. I mean, she clearly connected to "Danny's Song," and it might have benefitted radio listeners had she let in that kind of emotion more often. Then again, John Denver always did that, and talk about being careful what you ask for.

____

* She did actually teach PE for a year.

45s: Jaded glory

2006-06-19T10:00:00.002-05:00

Stay around long enough in the rock game and it happens. That advice to write what you know becomes a crutch to save you from the fact that you said everything you had to say on the first two albums. Certainly your real life offers little fodder. A boatload of platinum discs hang on the paneled walls of a "music room" the size of Equatorial Guinea. You have had your one night Grammy Awards gang-bang and found out those seven little statues not only fail to fill the chasm in your sold-out soul, but cannot be melted down for gold, and damn that Carlos Santana for telling you otherwise. Look across the bed and you see the actress or supermodel you married—a living, breathing, bulimic mockery of all the hours spent trying to convince interviewers you’re a regular guy.

In other words, it really is your beautiful house. It really is your beautiful wife. My God, what have you done?

As no one can relate to an introspective examination of such a life, and as you have mined your teen yearnings and ex-girlfriends already, little is left. Except what put you on top of the world and Christie Brinkley. Rock and roll. Glorious, generous rock and roll.

When you sing a song about the Glory of Rock and Roll, it is time to admit Your Career Is Over.™

Way back when, releasing a song on the Glory of Rock was a genuine act of rebellion. When Chuck Berry threw down, "Hail, hail, rock ‘n roll," he was saying he stood with an attitude and an outlook that a majority of Americans despised. Parents feared it as a force that weakened wills and dampened panties. Clergy thundered against it as a menace equal to that of fluoridated water and the Devil’s Weed the reefer. Disapproving white people dismissed it as "jungle music;" disapproving black people watched as the money they deserved went to appalling neuters like Pat Boone. The old generation of musicians denounced it as stupid and bestial—Steve Allen, one of our least humorous comedians, proved it when he read aloud Beatles lyrics on TV talk shows. Even the industry preferred so-called vocalists, preferably familiar ones, or newcomers aping the familiar ones.

As late as the 1962 or so a lot of folks thought it possible to eradicate rock and roll from the face of the earth. It couldn’t be more persistent than polio, right?

It ceased to become an overt act of rebellion soon after, as rock became the new synthesis. After all, there was not much of a need for the rock antithesis to waste time on the Top 40 thesis—consisting as it too often did of "Red Rubber Ball" and songs from Camelot.

But it was not yet a symbol of artistic bankruptcy. Led Zeppelin, for example, managed a lot of good noise after "Rock and Roll." For a brief time nostalgia rock, a related genre, proved a seller—"Crocodile Rock" being one aggravating example.

I don’t know exactly when the song about the Glory of Rock became a cry for help. The Who’s "Long Live Rock" tempts me, despite being in on the joke. Decline set in, sure, but Who By Numbers showed too much ambition to damn them as trendsetters in this particular genre. I know, I know, but if Who Are You gave us "Sister Disco," it also had a title track that rocked the monkey’s shit the first million times I heard it.

So I’m going to say j’accuse to the Rolling Stones. Mind you, "It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)" is good rocking fun. Humorous, even. As with the Who, the nominee in question did not mean the end of the band’s interesting output—after all, Some Girls awaited. But clearly ennui had set in.

Others, however, have somewhat less of a resume, and therefore less of an excuse.

"Rock and Roll Fantasy," by Bad Company
Pound for pound, band for band, few have generated more bad rock that Paul Rodgers. In this late Seventies hit, the storied supergroup of second-raters throws together nonsense lyrics, gratuitous licks, and Rodgers' usual spirited (and nothing else) vocal to conjure forth an all-too-real aural nightmare. Dimbulb cock rock that even Foreigner would've rejected (well, until about 1981).

"Rock On," by David Essex
Did you know that Essex was Che in the original cast of Evita? Me, neither. Alas, age and airplay have been about as kind to "Rock On" as to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Though clearly the song did not end Essex’s career—he did a number of stage spectaculars in the 1980s—it did short-circuit the chance for a greatest hits album here in the U.S. Like most songs that charted in 1974, "Rock On" flirts with novelty, and not in a good way. Cribbing from the track list of the American Grafitti soundtrack, Essex references "Shout!," "Blue Suede Shoes," and "Summertime Blues"—all in the same sentence. The semi-weird strings deserve a small compliment.

"Rock and Roll Part I," by Gary Glitter
In a sign of improving civilization, this song’s too-lengthy tenure as a sports arena anthem recently ended. Unfortunately, it took a double-conviction on child molestation charges in Vietnam to do it.

"It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me," by Billy Joel
By 1980, Joel had followed a familiar arc. He started out, with limited success, crossing singer-songwriter with a sensibility drawing more from Tin Pan Alley than Dylan. After the fluke hit "Piano Man" and the necessary retrenching period, Joel penned a few self-conscious epics—"Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" being especially beloved. I still can’t figure out if he wanted to be Springsteen or the late Sixties Paul Simon. Then the Grammy Coronation. Punchy rock-pop followed, much of it on a concept album, 52nd Street, that no one recognized as such.

To the extent Joel had interesting ideas—and personally I don’t think they were nearly as interesting as his success suggests—the era ended around "Just the Way You Are," a legit attempt to write a standard. Some believers claim that the Glass Houses singles showed artistic calisthenics. Why becoming a simulacrum of Wings represents this, I have no idea. Certainly "It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me" bridges Joel’s artistic pretensions with his phase as a purely craft-oriented hitmaker. All that followed was derivative, the doo-wop tributes and the Springsteenian "Allentown." In fact, he had already ripped off an E Street Band sax solo for "It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me." I guess I figured out the answer to my question.

"Old Time Rock and Roll," by Bob Seger
As with the Joel song, this came at the peak of the artist’s career. You know what they say. Nowhere to go but down. I don’t hate Seger, though as a Midwesterner you have to make fun of him if you have any illusions of cred. But I despise this song. In fact, I despise it as much as any rock song ever recorded. If I ever have to be placed in a body cast (God forbid), I would insist the physician plaster an automatic pistol into my hand so that if this song came on I could go Elvis on the radio. "Old Time Rock and Roll" appeared on Stranger in Town, the follow-up to Seger’s big breakthrough Night Moves. After that came Against the Wind and the title song suggests just how tired Bob was feeling. Increasingly minor hits lay ahead, as well as the ongoing theme of a series of truck commercials that, pray God, will die soon, lest I have to quit watching football.

"Jukebox Hero," by Foreigner
A weird band, Foreigner. Poll rock fans over thirty-five about their Top Ten bands ever and less than 1% of respondents would mention Foreigner. Yet the band charted many hits and a related poll would undoubtedly find that virtually everyone had owned a Foreigner album at one time or another.

When one studies Foreigner’s hits—not that I have (cough, cough)—it’s hard to spot a song that is noticeably worse or better than the others. They all hovered at a certain level devoid of originality and lacking a single musician good enough to inspire a cult. Would you call that mediocrity? Hell, I guess it might be the definition of mediocrity. "Jukebox Hero" rates this list not only as a tribute to the Glory of Rock but to the Glory of Being A Rock Star, a separate and even more obnoxious genre. Commercially, Foreigner hit its peak here, largely thanks to "Waiting For a Girl Like You," at the time the song that spent the most weeks at Number Two on the Billboard charts.

But these troupers weren't finished delving into cliché. Having embraced such a sure sign of decline as the Glory of Rock, the band took it one step further on the next album with the aural equivalent of a white flag: recording with an African-American choir for no particular reason.

45s: Out in the country

2006-05-03T08:00:00.002-05:00

"Maggie's Farm," by Bob Dylan
Written by Bob Dylan

"Junior's Farm" by Paul McCartney & Wings
Written by Paul McCartney

"Sex Farm," by Spinal Tap
Written by Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins), Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel), and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls)

Farm productivity
Maggie's Farm is probably a profitable piece of land, if the work is so hard people write groovy folk songs about it.

Junior's Farm? Good for laying low and nothing else. While our pop culture shows many examples of good men (and bad) hiding out on farms—Shane, for instance, or Witness—they at least had to do chores. Repair fences, build barns, that sort of thing. How hard is McCartney really willing to work? If the effort put into the lyrics of this song are any indication, not very.

Scratchin' at the henhouse, pokin' hay, silos bein' raised high. Clearly, a lot is happening on the Sex Farm. Tractors and pea patches are also mentioned; I dare not contemplate the double-entendres suggested by the latter. Workers on the Sex Farm deserve their cornbread and TV at the end of a hard day. And I mean hard.

Harmonica, the people's instrument
Gratuitous amounts out at Maggie's Farm.

None on Junior's spread. It could only help.

There's a different kind of blowing—excuse me, blowin'—on the Sex Farm.

Working conditions
The National Labor Relations Board needs to check on Maggie's Farm. Scrubbing the floors may be honest labor, but clearly all her relatives are assholes. Fines for slamming the door? Paid in spare change? Pa puts his cigar out on your face? Can't those National Guardsmen do anything?

I don't know that anything happens on Junior's Farm, however. Nor do I understand why McCartney feels so exhausted after hanging out in casinos and going to the grocery store. Clearly, all the "Let's go" business has little to do with genuine physical effort.

I'd say conditions are pretty awesome on the Sex Farm.

Experience
Dylan's cult has traced his every move and meal since 1961, so we can definitively say he's never done farmwork, unless we count that day Joan Baez made him carry mulch.

As "Fixing a Hole" tells us, McCartney enjoyed repairs on his Scottish farm; as the cover of Ram suggests, he had no fear of livestock, either. That he has written numerous songs about his dogs cinches this category in his favor.

The Tap has minimal experience. I mean, "Hosing down your barn door"?

Immortality index
"Maggie's Farm" is a classic, one of Dylan's best-known songs and pretty funny to boot.

"Junior's Farm" lacks personality even relative to the rest of the Wings ouevre. It lacks comprehensibility relative to the rest of rock and roll, and that's saying something.

My personal favorite Tap song, though I'm aware the majority opinion leans toward "Hell Hole" or "Big Bottom."

45s: Soulless wonders

2006-03-31T05:00:00.002-06:00

"High Enough," by Damn Yankees
Written by Jack Blades, Tommy Shaw, and Ted Nugent

On occasion, my financial advisor tells me it is time to raise some income fast. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a little short this month. "The good life costs," she says. Etc. Because I am me, I pound out some writing, or wash some dishes, or put down the bag of quarters meant for laundry on a bird named Muy Diablo at the local cockfights. If I were an aging arena rocker c. 1989, though, I'd call a member of Night Ranger and suggest we record a power ballad of such breathtaking soullessness that cassette tape will not reproduce it. Indeed, to this day, Jack Blades cannot see his reflection in a mirror. True story!

Pure craft can, of course, get you a record deal, no inspiration necessary. Add to that a sales history in former lives—Blades in Night Ranger, Tommy Shaw in Styx, the Nuge as the Nuge—and you draw enough marketing support to take a shot at MTV. But whatever was going on musically in 1989, it is hard to believe there was a demand for Damn Yankees. Aerosmith, superior as both frauds and moneymakers, had come back; Guns 'N Roses, a genuine Real Thing, ruled the world. Yet the musical confusion of the time was such that a second-tier band's bassist, the second-banana in a defunct art rock band, and a guy second-generation-removed from Java Man could so transparently work on behalf of their 401(K)s.

"High Enough" was insidious. Ballad part here. Power part there. Cue the love-song cliche—"There's a fire in my heart"—and layer on some nonsense metaphor—"To fly me over yesterday," a line only Albert Einstein could use with authority. As for that guitar solo, Nugent proves he can play in his sleep.

Nothing is left to chance or, God knows, to subtlety. The emotional climax has the whole power ballad menu of soaring harmonies, building melody, and Nugent's guitar at full screech. Then the Yanks unleash a synth hurricane that whooshes into the headphones and carries off what remains of their shame. If "High Enough" has not moved you by this point, you have either sociopathic tendencies or good taste.

It is hard to be disappointed in a member of Night Ranger. For God's sake, that's the name of someone's first band, but it ceases to be cool around age fifteen. It took the better part of Boogie Nights to redeem the group's one memorable song from being forever confused as a late release from Loverboy. So Blades is just showing consistency.

Shaw is another story. Yeah, yeah, I make fun of Styx, too. But Styx is a classic rock standard bearer for Illinoisians, not unlike Nugent or Seger for natives of Michigan, and thus for me appeals on a purely tribal level. If Styx can be defended—and I make no such claim—I present to the jury Shaw's straight-ahead cock rock like "Fooling Yourself" and his good harmony voice. Having been at the top, and endured plenty of bullshit† from Dennis DeYoung, Shaw might have wanted another shot. But this?

Speaking of shooting, nothing but nothing explains Nugent's participation. No one ever accused Ted of originality—fortunately for them, as I don't think he would appreciate it. It doesn't get any more rock than a (literally) red-meat conservative with a confessed taste for teenaged girls who hit the stage in a Tarzan outfit. Yet Nugent's sense of humor deserted him here, just when he (and we) needed it. Or did it? Maybe that's why he looks so amused in the video. Instead of singing about pussies purring he can't believe he's getting away with this shit. Who can blame him? Like the song says, "Yesterday's just a memory," and the Motor City Madman acts like a man at peace, confident no one will remember the song, and sure that this month and for many months ahead the bills will get paid.

Video, video. Is that Ted's barn?

As uninspired as the song. In fact, certain shots almost show the cases of beer bought with the video budget. Nugent expresses the apathetic mood best by chewing gum behind a shit-eating grin. The rest of the band, including the drummer, perform for the camera. At least there's no dry ice.

† Damn Yankees deserves one DeYoung-related grain of redemption. Shaw told Behind the Music that for a time the Yanks paused in their stage show while Nugent played the first few chords of "Babe," in order to drive the audience into raw-throated rage. A hurt DeYoung later confronted Shaw about it, and the Yanks desisted; but you could see Shaw still thought it was kind of funny.

45s: Feelin' Groovy

2006-03-30T08:00:00.002-06:00

"What I Am," by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians
Written by Edie Brickell and Kenny Withrow

In 1988, "college radio" meant many things. None were more important than "superior to mainstream radio." As the mainstream was Phil Collins, however, that phrase means little; such a definition also includes truck-driving songs and beer jingles. College radio was, of course, far more—the launching pad of 1990s Alternative Nation, for one thing. A gathering place for second-generation hippies, for another.

Some punk-besotted critics sniffed at college radio. God forbid there be music from people able to (1) enunciate, (2) play their instruments, or (3) ovulate. Unfortunately, the artists hurt their own cause by converting so many old rhetoric assignments into songs. To her credit, Edie Brickell has rolled her eyes over wordage like "Choke me in the shallow waters/Before I get too deep." Suzanne Vega, we await your confession.

Smoothly played, and then impeccably polished at the Geffen hit factory, "What I Am" was inescapable in its heyday, a hit with the students and the contemporary adults, and thus on heavy rotation up and down the radio dial. Folk-rock (or if you prefer folk-pop) always has a following. Certainly this was less abrasive than anti-folkies like Michelle Shocked, while at the same time it stayed blissfully free of any message. Are you kidding? It made no sense at all.

The band acquitted itself all-too-listenably, in particular with the understated guitar. Perhaps here we have a case where commercialism made a contribution, for it is easy to imagine that the New Bohos, like all Dead-influenced musicians, longed to be a jam band. Consider the result if the song’s neo-groovy wah-wah guitar solo went on for eighteen minutes. "What I Am" would never have hit the charts, and I would instead have to write about Tracy Chapman.

As for Brickell, well, when articles mention a singer’s "unique phrasing," and it’s not about Frank Sinatra or Willie Nelson, be careful. Part of Brickell’s appeal as a singer in those days was the fact you could sing as well as her, if not better. "What I Am" reaffirmed the idea, dearly held in rock, that anyone can make a bundle with a hit song, something we had forgotten in the years since other community college poets like Jim Morrison made the scene:

I'm not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I mean
Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box
Religion is the smile on a dog

In the wrong hands such, uh, material would have come across as the misheard lyrics of a Patti Smith composition sung by the least self-aware coffeehouse singer in Austin. Yet Brickell played it smart. Her singsong indulged neither gravity nor outright goofiness. Either would have turned "What I Am" from hacky-sack soundtrack to major buzzkill. Accident? Or canny design? It is hard to attribute the latter to any twenty year-old, as that is the age of Maximum Seriousness. Then again, maybe Brickell was just that groovy.

When it comes to the women's revolution in rock, Brickell obviously deserves no praise compared to, say, a Chrissie Hynde. But she and the other Earnest Young Women of the late 1980s deserve some small recognition. Not a statue or their name on a major hydroelectric project. Not quite that. After all, every revolution has its share of second-raters. You need them, too. Because when the movement becomes the mainstream, they'll far outnumber the true believers.

Video, video. Leggy hippy sways in front of five guys who look like they would rather play jazz fusion. All in all, a video as inoffensive as the song and thankfully lacking in "cinematic" values, plot, or mushroom-cloud imagery. Due to its heavy airplay, "What I Am" made Brickell a poster child. She was the neo-hippy chick you wished you were dating or, if you already dated a neo-hippy chick, she was a friend’s far-cooler girlfriend, a woman who scored better weed, took fewer meds, and was less apathetic regarding her hair (wherever it grew). So cool she did the cute album art! No doubt today Brickell still doodles cat pictures and tells her kids to avoid MSG and hand-crafts her husband's holiday cards ("Dear Art, Good luck with the acting career, hahahahaha!").

Requiem for a Buckeroo

2006-03-28T06:00:00.002-06:00

Like many people, I knew Buck Owens best from his epic stint as co-host of Hee Haw. Perhaps unlike many people, Hee Haw reruns were a constant part of my upbringing, and therefore I have witnessed far more hours of Buck than, say, Michael J. Fox or Ted Danson, neither of whom played a smokin' red, white, and blue guitar. I can't say I'm any expert on his music. Like Tolstoy and single-malt scotch, it's something I've wanted to explore, and haven't gotten to yet. But he was a little part of my life, even if it was for the wrong reasons.

Buck was an amiable co-host, pretty good at faking laughter at skits he hadn't seen, and, as I learned in adulthood, a major country and western figure. No yokel, this man. Owens helped invent the so-called Bakersfield sound, a rockified style out of California that mounted one of the first major artistic challenges to the pop-country hegemony established in Nashville. (He shared the distinction—and one wife—with Merle Haggard; Haggard also played bass in one of Owens' early Sixties combos for a few weeks after getting out of prison.)

Owens knew four instruments, including sax, before he taught himself guitar at sixteen. Twice a father at aged 20, he paid his dues playing for Bakersfield oil workers. Going electric opened up some session gigs, but he got buried by the Fifties rock avalanche and went into radio. In time, and with brilliant collaborator Don Rich in tow, Owens went back to music and owned the motha.

His first Number One, "Act Naturally," is a terrific song—upbeat despite the subject matter and genuinely humorous to boot. Of course , it's better known in its Beatles incarnation, as Ringo's song on Help!, but no tears are necessary. Owens tore off a Beatlesque fifteen straight country #1's, including a B-side and an instrumental. The cover also helped Owens get the attention of rock fans. Eventually he played venues like the Fillmore West, even Carnegie Hall. CCR reffed him. Buck even recorded his own version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water," a rite of passage in the early Seventies.

Gary Kaufman, in a Salon piece I printed out and kept for years, summed Owens' decade up:

He was no poet. His lyrics were simple and direct, relying more on clever wordplay than deep insight. Merle Haggard had since stepped out of his shadow to become the bard of the working man. (Not to mention marrying Bonnie Owens, who had a few minor hits of her own.) George Jones was a far better singer, and even his own boy Don Rich was a better guitarist. But Buck Owens owned country in the '60s.

Owens broke ground by opening a studio, founding a song-publishing business, and recording whole albums that made a statement—virtually unheard of in country at the time.

As he bought up radio stations, Owens also went multimedia and headed for the big exposure offered by TV. After doing okay with a TV show of his own, he landed on the cornpone Laugh-In that was Hee Haw. According to my All Music Guide, Buck initially only had to shoot a couple of times a year. The producers then sprinkled his bits into later programs, leaving Owens a lot of time to pursue his career for real. Alas, the death of Don Rich was a huge blow to his music but, more significantly, to his personal life. That tragedy and Owens' typecasting as the Hee Haw yuckster eventually undercut his career.

Lean years followed, though he continued on the TV show. The sound he pioneered became hip again at the end of the 1980s and Dwight Yoakam, one of his truest heirs, helped Owens back on the comeback trail. Since then, Owens regained his cred and a lot of the respect lost over time. As it should be. Buck Owens, RIP.

You're the Charlie Brownest

2006-03-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

Reader Crispy brings up a pop moment:

I don't know why, but the synapses in my brain fired an arc across mylong term memory and I remembered a scene from the show The White Shadow. In it, the entire team were a band playing at a school dance. What were they playing? "Charlie Brown", the '50s novelty song. A predominantly black, inner city high school basketball team in the late '70s was playing "Charlie Brown."

I was a big White Shadow fan the moment I saw Coach Reeves once played for the Bulls. If memory serves, the show had a pic of Ken Howard with real Bulls center Artis Gilmore, a man with one of the supreme 1970s sports 'fros. My White Shadow post could run to 10,000 words, but for now let me throw out a few points: (1) way ahead of its time, not only one of the decade's best dramas but a forerunner to today's dramas with large casts and a blurring of episodic and serial television; (2) Salami driving the Motel California--genius; (3) was everyone on the team was named after a president?

Chrispy's note, however, did not ring a bell. I went to the all-knowing oracle. The Internet revealed to me that the Carver stalwarts, in fact, sang "Charlie Brown" and in the shower, though I don't think they did both at the same time.

Let me add my voice to the chorus of disbelief: you've just passed through ten full-on awesome years of soul music and these poor disadvantaged kids have to sing "Charlie Brown????" Look, no offense, but I have to think, at the very least, Earth, Wind, and Fire. I don't expect a granny network like CBS to okay Parliament/Funkadelic, or to pay for the rights to Stevie Wonder's latest, but a Fifties comedy song with a wacky sax? The actors must've been very let down. Then again, the execs probably wanted them to sing Loggins and Messina.

One must ask the obvious question: how is it possible that the people most responsible for shaping our pop culture were so laughably out of touch with pop culture?

45s: Lust on Your Diners Club

2006-03-22T10:00:00.000-06:00

"We’ve Got to Get it On Again," by the Addrisi Brothers
Written by Don and Richard Addrisi

I first heard "We’ve Got to Get it On Again" twenty years after its appearance in the Top Forty. I picked up one of the then-new Rhino Have A Nice Day compilations. Volume Eight, to be specific. I wanted to prove to myself that "Sylvia’s Mother" by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, one of the childhood oft-plays on my old plastic record player, actually existed. (Unfortunately, it does.)

On the charts, the early 1970s continued the chaos of the previous decade, except those noisy counterculture types took themselves out of the running through dying, disbandment, or taking enough heroin to kill a whale (though not a David Crosby). A strange democracy emerged to throw the Osmonds next to Aretha on A.M. playlists. Novelty songs proliferated; one-hit wonders flourished. Not an abundance of risk-taking to be heard, mind you, but there’d been enough of that. The masses the Sixties were supposed to liberate turned out to want a diet of weepers and toe-tappers and singalongs, with a great like Al Green thrown in to deflect the wrath of a Vengeful God.

One of the safest and therefore most popular undercurrents of the time was supper club pop. Truth to tell, this sub-genre flowered amidst the counterculture in the martini-soaked soil of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, in Herb Alpert’s brassy kitsch, and in a Top Forty still tolerant of show tunes. To the horror of the world, however, the same dirt yielded triffids like Engelbert Humperdinck, with the invasion led by none other than Elvis Presley, a neon-lit He That Must Be Obeyed reborn in spangled jumpsuits and cotton candy hair.

As the Sixties, its Bacharach, so the Seventies, its Fat Elvis. But a pair of brothers—scions of a trapeze act, and set for life after penning the Association mega-hit "Never My Love"—wisely reached into a different honey pot for inspiration.

Any mention of the Addrisi Brothers’ 1972 hit—and there aren’t many—brings up the supperstars of the supper club, the Righteous Brothers. Certainly Don and Dick Addrisi paid their dues. Their first Vegas gig came in 1958, two years after Lenny Bruce (!) helped them get a manager and a year before a minor hit landed them on American Bandstand. As their authorship of "Never My Love" shows, they had a knack for the kind of love songs that lend themselves to orchestration and slick production—two hallmarks of the supper club genre. If the photo in the Have A Nice Day liner notes is indicative, they also brought the Presleyesque jumpsuits and hair to the candlelit table.

"We’ve Got to Get it On Again" rolls out Righteously with a "mmm mmm mmmmmm". There’s enough echo to suggest a recording session at Lascaux Cave Studios. A rise-and-bass-drum-plunge—shorthand for Pure Instant Drama—sucks the listener in. You don’t do this sort of thing without horns. The Addrisis bring ‘em out on a chorus infectious enough to require quarantine. Hear that tambourine in your right earphone? How about that acoustic guitar? Who says the Sixties ended?

Whichever Addrisi sings lead has an agreeable jingle singer sort of voice. The second—perhaps it’s the first double-tracked?—works the higher range on harmony without resorting to Vegas bathos. In fact, the brothers stay in control throughout, defying Wayne Newtonian physics by expressing emotion with inflection rather than screaming. Wonder if that confused ‘em in the showroom.

The lyrics admittedly fall short of Bacharach/David. You’re hardly plowing new ground when you rhyme "desire" with "fire," not that it bothered Bruce Springsteen. But the brothers rally in mid-song, beginning verse two with more Pure Instant Drama and a jolt of Sex:

We never laughed
We used to know so many happy songs
We never kissed
In the penetrating way that used to turn me on

In a far better universe than our own, Karen Carpenter drops "penetrating" into "Superstar."

For those unfamiliar with the song—presumably everyone—here’s the chorus:

Once there was fire in our lives
Silver sparks that used to fly
We’ve got to get it on again
Work it out together
Learn to love again
We’ve got to make a try

Not exactly poetry, but passable for the genre, and certainly more bearable than dumbassery like "Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me." Why does a song like "We’ve Got
to Get it On Again" peak around Number 30 while Mac Davis, mixing the same
popcraft with seven herbs and countrypolitan spices, goes to the top of the charts?

The alchemy of public taste rejects all attempts at understanding. You may as well ask why supper club pop is usually, despite its name, rubbery whitefish instead of prime rib.

The Lou that you do

2006-03-18T05:00:00.000-06:00

In my ongoing search of late-night TV for future role models, and the achievement of Zen thereby, I have come across the greatest of them all. Idol, thy name is Lou Grant.

Smart, unapologetically grouchy, a functioning alcoholic in a tough business, limited physically in attractiveness but willing to get in there and pitch—I feel like we have so much in common now! Mr. Grant clinched my respect in that famous episode where he must fill in for Ted Baxter, who is at the moment on strike (reluctantly) with his co-workers.

The first night Lou suffers a terrible case of stage fright and humiliates himself before all of Minneapolis, including his much-amused staff watching at a bar.

Having learned a lesson, Lou prepares for the second night with several drinks before air time and, in that drunk’s fantasy common to our mass media, performs like a seasoned pro while under the influence. This includes additional belts during the commercials.

Mary is amazed, the FCC is none the wiser, and Ted is threatened to see a real man delivering the news in his place. As he should be. I mean, Lou Grant doesn’t hate Ted because he dislikes people. On more than one occasion, for instance, Mr. Grant expresses that Murray is a great newswriter. He hates Ted because as a real man he is offended that a preening incompetent like Baxter succeeds.

And real man describes Mr. Grant. At turns angry and self-pitying, but clearly good at his job, bluntly honest, and funny, he puts our contemporary "real" sitcom men to shame—yeah, I mean neo-Fred Flintstones like the King of Queens and Belushi, or the mama’s boys on Everybody Loves Raymond, a show where the only real man is Ray’s wife.

I’m not saying every supposed real man on TV sitcoms has to conform to the Lou Grant archetype (even if two of the funniest—Red on That 70’s Show and Hank Hill—do to varying degrees). That wouldn’t fly on Scrubs, for instance. I’m just asking that alleged real men act more like Lou and less like stereotypical crumb-covered proletarian slobs. Do you think any of those buffoons, those third-rate Kramdens, could survive a divorce, let alone emerge from one to date a swingin' Mary Richards and teach her a new meaning to the phrase, "You’re gonna make it after all?" As if.

Of course, Mr. Grant cleaned up and headed to L.A. to do drama. Not as funny then, and certainly his dressing habits improved, but his going legit doesn’t dent my respect in the least. We all mellow. He kept several virtues and you can tell he still hates spunk. That’s what matters.

45s: Thar she often blows

2006-03-16T04:00:00.000-06:00

Sailors have provided songwriting grist ever since Australopithecus played the drum solo from "Moby Dick." Usually rock songs of the sea are a salt-scented twist on road imagery, The Greatest Cliché in Rock™. On selected other occasions the genre provides a chance to salute 19th Century opium junkies beloved by the songwriter while he/she was an undergrad. Such is the case, for example, with Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," though I can't remember if Coleridge gets thanked in the Powerslave liner notes. Let us survey this hoary rock tradition in drive-by, or rather sail-by, fashion.

"I'm Your Captain," by Grand Funk Railroad
The pride of landlocked Flint, Michigan, beneficiaries of a baffling popularity seemingly based on the perception they were a harder-rocking Three Dog Night, GFR (later Grand Funk) put together a, uh, varied career with songage that ranged from bland cock rock like "We're An American Band" to one of the many remakes of "The Locomotion." Truly their bloated FM-radio masterwork was "I'm Your Captain," GFR's journey into Coleridge and seagull-sound effects. What does it have? Glad you asked, sailor. Suspense! Pipes! Yearning for dry land! To say nothing of the aforementioned seagulls, symbols of either death or deliverance, and of a happy ending, assuming either of those events is cause for celebration.

"Sail On, Sailor," by the Beach Boys
This gem, part of the driftwood that floated out of Brian Wilson in the late Sixties, was laid down in the post-Brian years—a time in the Beach Boys' career variously described as "underrated," "forgotten," or "hit an iceberg." The product of at least five writers*, admirably sloppy, indeed sung by temp band member Blondie Chaplin after Dennis Wilson laid down one take and went surfing, "Sail On, Sailor" is a contrast to the lush Brian Wilson arrangements, but a real nice melody shines through. Real nice? It's the last Beach Boys single worth listening to, not only for its quality, but as a hint of directions the group might have taken had numerous impossibilities happened. Like Brian staying straight and sane. Like Mike Love being less of a megalomaniac asshole. Or Dennis taking music seriously. Or dogs not licking themselves, or real pudding being fat-free, or gravity being optional.

* This is disputed by one of them, Van Dyke Parks.

Old Spice Theme Song
Pipes are underused, aren't they? Not that Jethro Tull should take that as encouragement for a comeback. An instantly recognizable little ditty, and great for whistling, too! Though that guy is only a sailor in an alternate universe governed by the rules of a J. Crew catalogue. The Skipper on Gilligan's Island is more plausible.

"Orinoco (Sail Away)," by Enya
The "I Want To Hold Your Hand" of New Age music. In the early 1990s, many people were stunned to hear some unknown named Garth Brooks was selling billions of records. Before Garth, and in a more hobbit-friendly genre, the explosive-and-baffling phenom was Enya, Kate Bush if Kate Bush listened to "Rhiannon" non-stop for eighteen years, the first New Age superstar (you sit your ass down, Yanni), owner of a voice of some uniqueness and a vibe borrowed for every movie with swordplay that has come out since the turn of the century.

Were you aware the song has verses? I wasn't. "Orinoco (Sail Away)" is about many exotic places with coastlines. Mind you, I only know this because I looked up the lyrics on the Internet. Though I've heard it hundreds of times courtesy of party hosts, girlfriends, and generally amok Karma, I wasn't really aware a song with lyrics and everything existed outside of that hypnotic motha of a chorus.

Really a fascinating pop culture phemonenon, in a bent way I cannot articulate. On her last album she and her lyricist invented an entire language for her to sing in. And Floyd thinks they were high concept. Slate has a take worth reading. Stunning trivia: "Enya has sold more records than any Irish artist besides U2..." The elf-like Van Morrison hangs his head.

"Come Sail Away," by Styx
Proving this sort of thing has always sold, here's "I'm Your Captain" with the gulls replaced by synthesizers and Death replaced by UFOs. (Trading up? You decide.) Dennis DeYoung starts us out in a ruminative mood. It is immediately blasted to pieces in a messed-up British accent that would get you flogged on a Royal Navy vessel. This gives way to so-called rockin' as angels from flying saucers—that's right, Whitley Strieber, angels from flying saucers—invade the song. Just incomprehensible. Even "We Will Rock You" related somewhat to "We Are the Champions." Worse still: DeYoung using the word lads. Damn your eyes!

"Beyond the Sea," by Bobby Darin
Darin was no stranger to the life aquatic. "Splish Splash" gave him one of his biggest hits. A more sophisticated number, "Beyond the Sea" took Darin into Nelson Riddle territory, a journey so terrifying he soon went off the deep end—pardon the term—before an unsuccessful reinvention as a folk singer later in the 1960s.

"Brandy," by Looking Glass
She wears a braided chain, made of finest silver from the north of Spain. I don't know if this was a groovy pop group with a good producer or a Blood, Sweat, and Tears knock-off with a lot of luck, but "Brandy" is justly a fixture on oldies radio (one of the few). Whiskey, smooth-talkin' sailors, and the sea—you better believe she saw its rage and glory. Great chorus, too.

"Sail On," by the Commodores
Getting mellow after laying down the funk. I'm so mellow thinking about it I'm giving something related to Lionel Ritchie a pass for the first time and moving on to...

"Cool Change," by the Little River Band
Getting mellow with whales and albatrosses. But mere cabin boys of kicking back compared to....

"Sailin'," by Christopher Cross
Anyone could have a giant hit or three in the early Eighties, unless they were good. Chris Cross made John Denver look like John Lydon. A brief-lived phenomenon thanks to an early-career Grammy coronation, Cross delivered just what the Grammy committee likes: sales (no, not sails). If my memory's right he had an all-star cast helping him out—recent Doobie Brother Michael McDonald comes to mind—and it could be that Cross was one of those studio figures who leveraged big-name friendships into an album deal, ala Toto. Otherwise, I am at a loss to explain such hugeness. Particularly the appeal of that voice. I would make a joke here if I weren't having a seizure.

Updated: Don Henley also appeared on Cross's first album. Jesus, it's like the Nexus of horrors where they imprisoned General Zod.

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," by Gordon Lightfoot
Now here's your captain. Written from the other side of Lake Superior, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" unleashes numerous forces of nature: the thunder of the Lightfoot voice, the hurricane west wind of Lake Superior, some absolutely ringing electric guitar. The truest sea shanty to hit the Top Forty since Eddie "Boom Boom" Cannon's "Sea Cruise" (the song that brought the fog horn to pop radio), "Edmund" crashes and sprays for an epic seven-plus minutes of complex lyrical structure and the daring decision to not even use rhyme:

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go it was bigger than most
With a crew and the Captain well seasoned.

I know, the real rhyme here is "pride" and "side." That sort of thing is nothing in a folk song, but on AM-radio it is a level of complexity equal to the rhetoric of Aristotle. And Lightfoot knows no fear on the straight-up rhymeology either, as one verse later he's playing "feelin'" off of "Cleveland." This song is everything "I'm Your Captain" and "Come Sail Away" wants to be. And it's true!

Lem

2006-03-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

In brief, so as not to turn this into an official Death Pool blog: writer Stanislaw Lem died the other day.

Unlike the media, I'm not going to label him a "science-fiction writer"—not that I have anything against that trade. It's just Lem transcended sci-fi about as much as Kurt Vonnegut or J.G. Ballard does. He used the plots and settings, the space stations and rocket ships, the astronauts and the demented AI tinkerers. But while obviously seduced by scientific and philosophical ideas, Lem's real landscapes, at least in the non-comic novels I've read, were interior. Though we cannot know all the workings of the Nobel in Lit committees over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if Lem is the only "science-fiction writer" to have gotten serious consideration over the years.

Solaris is his best-known and most respected work (at least in the West). Both difficult and heartbreaking, that book. Love and regret here, the intersection of fear and wonder there. Others appreciated him more for his satires like His Master's Voice, an insider account of the human foibles you'd expect when you gather a bunch of geniuses into an enclosed place. Lem also worked broader humor—think sentient potatoes and a revolt of robot washing machines—but usually stayed on the darker side. A unique writer and a major figure outside the States. RIP.

Thursday News Wire

2006-03-08T08:00:00.000-06:00

Because I'm too tired to blog fo' real....

World music icon Ali Farka Touré RIP. Farka means "donkey," a relevant nickname for a survivor, as in only survivor of his family's ten kids, of a lot of jobs before turning to music. His Talking Timbuktu, another of the Ry Cooder world music collaborations, found listeners here in the 1990s, but he'd already been around awhile. A fascinating life, even if you know nothing of his music. Bonus saying from his native Mali: "When you give your trousers to a monkey, the trees will end up with lots of scarves."

Record labels commit to committing slow suicide. You like downloading those early singles off forthcoming albums? Better start liking something else, 'cause the labels are tired of you not spending money on their full-length CDs. Not only does the decision reflect a short-sighted obsession with banking on a few huge blockbuster releases, it will just encourage illegal downloading. You know, that thing where no one makes money. Another excellent decision! Let's bring back reel-to-reel next!

Elvis' scarf roadie dead. Charlie Hodge, by name, guitarist known for bringing the King his water and tossaway scarves, by game.

Yanks continue to foil British Invasions. Why can't the can't-miss Brit bands make it here? The Wall Street Journal, and no I'm not kidding, tells us why via Coolfer. (The entire subscription-only article is in the Coolfer comments.)

Not so special

2006-03-07T05:00:00.000-06:00

If you go to the Museum of Television and Radio, know what you want to see. Or else you’ll end up like me, looking through the database in search of just what it is from the history of television you feel like watching that afternoon.

And wondering how you ended up choosing an episode of the Midnight Special from 1975.

Just selecting from the Midnight Special universe was hard enough. Choose a classic-era Zeppelin performance? Or indulge the urge to experience Postmodern Mindfuck #574, i.e., an episode that featured host Richard Pryor interacting with the likes of Marvin Hamlisch, Olivia Newton-John, and Wolfman Jack?

I think you know the answer.

As a child, I saw a lot of the Midnight Special. My dad worked nights. On Fridays, my mom waited up for him. Hating to be alone, she allowed her nine year-old son to hang out, too. Once Johnny Carson ended, the Special was introduced by the cartoonish Wolfman Jack. On occasion it featured that good rock ‘n roll the older kids listened to—and, more often, that pop I devoured as fast as Top Forty radio could spew it out. Seeing an episode again these years later was—if I may slangify here—a gas. A minor gas, neon maybe, but enjoyable, and a welcome empty-headed contrast to the 9/11 news coverage I also checked out.

Richard Pryor kicked things off from a place in the audience. The audience, you dig, was sitting on the floor. The sideburns were many and the bras were few! After a few minutes of joshing with Richard Pryor, Jr., the host introduced Bobby Blue Bland, a man able to throw down soul so effortlessly you can actually spare a moment to concentrate on his tangerine suit. Suddenly, what began as ironic viewing turns into actual enjoyment!

Not for long, however. When we cut to the fresh-faced ONJ (she’s as cute as about eight buttons), it all goes downhill. The woman is clearly in a darkened hall. One red-haired guitarist, having lost a bet, stands in for her entire band and fakes playing guitar about as well as Justine Bateman. (With far less enthusiasm, too.) ONJ performs two of her big hits, "Let Me Be There" and "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)". On both the redhead must lip-sync the deep voice that echoes ONJ on both hits. I bet he got very drunk after the taping.

Alas, when Pryor reappears he tries to act as if ONJ is on a nearby stage. Oh, Richard. Why did America ask a man of your gifts to do these things? And The Toy?

Pryor’s comedy must also suffer canned applause appearing out of nowhere. Just explosive applause—right in the middle of a joke! Or a mention of white people! Or black people! Or anything! Jesus. Hadn’t TV been around awhile in 1975? Didn’t they know how the volume nob worked?

Even the Wolfman—in his own way a genius—endured poor editing. Here the din of applause that greets the name "Linda Ronstadt" is as absurd technologically as it is conceptually. Also, the audience members surrounding the Wolfman are so obviously NOT IN THE SAME AUDIENCE Pryor is hosting.

Finally, and with some regret, I must say the shared Pryor-Hamlisch moments came off as less mindfuckish than hoped. Pryor was gentle, Marvin a pro—a nerdy Jewish pro in a powder blue turtleneck with a jacket of apparently-virgin dark blue denim. He performed the themes from The Sting and a mostly-instrumental The Way We Were, with Marv giving us a taste of his voodoo by singing the last verse. Did I mention the museum's consoles gave you fast-forwarding power?

Appealing to the widest possible audience was part of the Midnight Special booking strategy. And talk about a rainbow coalition. In addition to the performers mentioned above, the other guests were Boz Scaggs, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and blaxploitation auteur Melvin Van Peebles taking a weird turn as a singer. Did the director of Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song really dance so badly?

The world is now like bad dope

2006-03-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

Back from out of town and checking in with Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, activist folkster and surprisingly good friend of now-disgraced congressman Randy "Duke" "Top Gun" "Don't Call Me Richie" Cunningham:

But the two men hit it off at the convention, mostly because Cunningham agreed with the stated goals of Yarrow's organization: To reduce “the emotional and physical cruelty some children inflict upon each other by behaviors such as ridicule, bullying and – in extreme cases – violence.”

At one point during the convention, Yarrow sang his famous song “Day is Done” and invited Cunningham on the stage.

“I gave him a big hug,” Yarrow recalled. “He said, 'That's the first time a man has hugged me since my dad.' ”

I expected something more like, "Save that shit for the trees, commie." No, no, just kidding. If there's one brave stance to take in this world, that's to say you love kids. Because kids are pariahs, our most oppressed and hated minority group, miniature and despised.

Whoa! Not so by everyone! This tidbit surfaced later in the article:

In November, when Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors, Yarrow got in touch and asked what he could do to help. More than three decades ago, Yarrow had his own legal problems when he was convicted of making sexual advances toward a 14-year-old girl, a crime for which he served three months in jail.

Fortunately, if you're a folk singer sent to the big house the other inmates just assume you got busted for a protest or a labor uprising.

(News tip from Reader Stu)

Knotts of freedom

2006-02-27T06:30:00.000-06:00

Some referred to him as Don Knotts. But truly he was The Knotts.

I like to think of Don Knotts as one of those very American things that baffle foreigners. Tired blue-collar guys in Lagos kick back with a cold one to watch reruns and what do they see but this rubbery creature, genderless and possibly hairless, running around with an unloaded gun, a caricature of overstuffed authority simultaneously burdened with delusions of grandeur and pants that won't stay up.

"What the hell is this?" asks one worker.
"American police show," says his friend.

When it comes to sitcom icons, few surpass The Knotts' performance as Barney Fife. Let me add that I make this statement as not much of an Andy Griffith Show fan. To me that show was to sitcoms what Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was to kids' programming: wholesome but horribly boring, more likely to elicit feelings of antsy "When does the show start?" anxiety than the comforts-of-home vibe cultivated by its creators.

But Barney Fife rocked Mayberry's house. He was akin to (among a thousand others) the John Cleese character on Fawlty Towers: authoritarian and helpless, incapable of learning from his mistakes, exasperated that those around him give him nothing but pain and disrespect as he tries to lead them to the Promised Land of Order. Of course, Barney was nicer, and basically honest, so the comparison only goes so far.

The Knotts' Barney was a giant in the long line of sitcom Nortons. These are the colorful go-to supporting cast members entrusted with getting laughs and being wacky. On bad shows the Nortons overwhelm everything—soon they're on t-shirts, and the audience applauds when they appear in an episode and, worst of all, they have a catch phrase. Scientists call this the Fonzerelli Effect.

On good shows, though, Nortons are part of the fabric. As in the case of, well, Ed Norton, or his grandchild Cosmo Kramer. (Think about it. They even walk in the door the same way.) One of the genius aspects shared by The Honeymooners and Seinfeld is that the entire cast can, when necessary, rise to the level of The Norton. Frankly, I think Costanza was even more hilarious, more out of control than Kramer.

Your Johnny Fever, your Sue Ann Nivens, your Latka, your Kelso and your Dale (of King of the Hill) and your Jackie (of Roseanne)—here we have Nortons doled out in just the right amounts. So it was with Barney, a man kept in check by laid-back Andy and put in his place by life's circumstances. You don't just write a character like this. You need a talented person to fill them up. I like to think later sitcom writers at least took a nod from the judicious use of The Knotts and crossed out that extra rib-wrecking howler for their own Nortons.

Let us all hail The Knotts. So much a part of things I didn't even feel it necessary to include a picture. Barney or Mr. Furley, he's there for you mentally. RIP.

Chills, sweats, cheese, and lumberjacks

2006-02-26T08:00:00.000-06:00

Yet more oddities and trivia found while writing about malaria. More here.

In the 1800s, Wisconsin lumberjacks came to believe that a case of gonorrhea protected a man from malaria. 'Jacks would make sure they caught a dose before heading south for the winter to log in Louisiana's malarial swamps.

Here's a surprise: the German army tried to use malaria as an agent in biological warfare. When Allied soldiers landed at Anzio, south of Rome, in WWII, German forces stopped the pumps used to drain the nearby marshes and released larvae of the malaria-carrying Anopheles labranchiae. Though pinned down in what was now a heavily malarial area, Allied forces foiled an epidemic through disciplined use of anti-malarial drugs. But Italian civilians living nearby, lacking medicines, suffered a great deal.

Pioneers and immigrants unlucky enough to catch malaria sometimes turned to Dr. Sappington’s Fever Pills. Before the Civil War, the pills could be bought for a dollar a box (for twenty-four pills). Sappington wisely mixed in licorice to cover up the bitter taste of quinine, the active ingredient. In its heyday the company turned out half-a-million boxes per year, until the Civil War drastically reduced quinine supplies in the U.S.

Twenty percent of the people in Staten Island, New York had malaria in 1900.

Explorer Richard Burton used a quinine-opium-sloes medicine to fight malaria in Africa. It was, alas, inadequate, and he kept catching fever.

The synthetic dye for the color mauve was accidentally discovered while a college student searched for synthetic quinine. Mauve made the student very rich and he retired at age 37.

The word "abracadabra" was part of an anti-malaria magic spell in ancient Rome.

Lord Byron had malaria. So did George Washington. It is possible Lincoln suffered from it, too, though his fever may've been typhoid. Incidentally, Lincoln's family was almost wiped out by something called the "milk sick." I have no idea what that was.

A major malaria epidemic once took place at Archangel, a Russian city at a latitude
comparable to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Mussolini's marsh-draining projects are still credited with driving mosquitoes from the swamps south of Rome. While this created new farmland, it also led to the demise of local water buffaloes that contributed milk to a much-loved flavor of Mozzarella.

Bonus disease coverage: Strange new Chikungunya fever loose on French island

How many verses must a man sing before he can refill his glass?

2006-02-19T06:00:00.000-06:00

Through whatever combination of factors, I have often found myself at parties where someone busts out a guitar. It took awhile, but I slowly realized that every time this happened, regardless of setting or the kind of party, the guitarist played "The Boxer."

Over the weekend, I attended a birthday party. The guest of honor was turning eighty and her son the rabbi came in from out of town to celebrate. Very nice. That a guitar found its way into the proceedings did not surprise me, as the son, we'll call him Rabbi J., has a significant profile in the Jewish community as an entertainer. Concerts, CDs, the whole megillah, if I may throw down a little Yiddish.

Taken up as I was with conversation and much sampling of wine, I wasn't aware of the guitar until I heard Rabbi J.'s voice singing in the now-crowded living room. Maybe he had been playing awhile. But I didn't really pay attention until he started playing "The Boxer."

The more religious songs came later.

What elevated "The Boxer" to this status as a party-and/or-campfire perennial? I can understand that people got sick of "Blowin' in the Wind" or "Norwegian Wood," particularly the latter, which was forced on me constantly when I attended sitar camp.

Frankly, I have no answers.

You give me fever

2006-02-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

Oddities and trivia found while writing about malaria.

From the time Jamestown was founded in 1607 until 1624, five out of every six colonists died, most within the first year after arrival. Malaria was a major cause of death. I feel compelled to mention, parenthetically, that starvation killed the most people and reduced Jamestowners to cannibalism in 1608-1609.

One of the malaria parasites can live in the human liver for up to five years.

In the late Middle Ages it was believed touching a corpse healed illness. Mothers with sick children crowded around a gallows waiting for hanged criminals to die.

The Ingalls family catches malaria in the book Little House on the Prairie.

Samuel Baker was one of the less-remembered British explorers of Africa. Not only did he set off to discover the source of the Nile, he did so in the company of his wife. Along the way he encountered tribal civil war, malaria, near-starvation, and at one point an African chieftain who made it clear to Baker that he would have to swap Mrs. Baker for a "good-looking" virgin if he wanted the explorations to continue. (Mrs. Baker’s long blond hair made quite an impression.) In time the Bakers were stranded by local wars and ran out of quinine. Ever indefatigable, and needing some relief, Baker jury-rigged a still to get alcohol from potatoes.

Albert King—a physician best known for treating Lincoln at Ford’s Theater—was one of the first American doctors to claim (correctly) that mosquitoes transmitted malaria. Colleagues, however, considered the mosquito theory preposterous. King challenged the malarial city of Washington, D.C. to hang a wire screen around the entire capital to a height equal to that of the Washington Monument.

World War II soldiers first refused to take Atabrine, a synthetic antimalarial drug. One of the main reasons was the (false) rumor that it causes impotence.

The city of Ithaca, New York wasn’t malaria-free until 1905. It took Staten Island until 1908. In 1933, 65% of the people in the Tennessee River valley carried malaria parasites—a rate equal to heavily malarial areas of Africa today.

In 1485, a never-before-seen disease called the "English sweat" hit Britain. Some considered it worse than plague because of the high death rate and the fact it could kill within twenty-four hours of onset. It struck four more times over the next century. The disease’s identity remains unknown.

A personal favorite. In the early decades of the 20th Century, a treatment was developed to help syphilis patients (usually in an advanced stage of the disease) get better—or at least quit getting worse. Doctors injected syphilitics with the common and (usually) non-fatal form of malaria caused by the parasite Plasmodium vivax. The idea was to allow malaria to raise the patient’s body temperature—malaria takes a person up to 105-degrees F.—and "burn out" the syphilis. Once this was done, the doctors administered a cure for malaria. Clinics for such treatment were opened around the world.

Eat to the beat

2006-02-16T09:00:00.000-06:00

A postscript to the Peter Benchley post. Terrific stuff:

Jaws is a pulp collage—a how-to guide to writing airport literature. Start with heavy-handed symbolism: The seaside town the shark will terrorize is called Amity. Next add ungainly metaphor: "The past—like a bird long locked in a cage and suddenly released—was flying at her, swirling around her head, showering her with longing." Finally, throw in a charmingly awkward lovemaking scene: A couple "thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand." The novel opens with that ardor, and after its climax, the still-naked woman slips into the ocean, becoming an opening course for the shark circling below. At first, the shark takes a rather leisurely approach to its meal. It moves slowly beneath her, as if surveying a chandelier. Then its jaws close on her right foot, snapping it off at the bone. The woman screams once, then is pulled below. Game on.

That's a twenty-footer

2006-02-13T11:00:00.000-06:00

Jaws author Peter Benchley has died.

Congdon loved the idea, but said Benchley was reluctant to start the book because he couldn't afford time away from his journalistic work. So Congdon got him $1,000 as a down payment, in return for an initial submission of 100 pages.

"Ninety-five percent of it was jokey stuff, because he thought that was the way you do it," said Congdon, who dismissed a longtime publishing legend that the book was heavily edited and as much his triumph as Benchley's.

"But the first five pages were wonderful. There were no jokes. I wrote heavily in the margin: `NO JOKES.'"

Though Jaws may not be the worst novel I've read, I cannot think of one I'd rank below it. Ever since fighting through it about ten years ago—after finding an old edition at a library sale—I've subscribed to a theory that, when it comes to contemporary novels, average-to-mediocre books make the best movies. In fact Jaws really shares the credit for that trend with two rough contemporaries, The Exorcist and The Godfather. One crucial difference is that The Exorcist and The Godfather are compulsive guilty pleasures, almost un-put-downable, The Exorcist because of suspense, The Godfather because it is at once a grand tale and a hokey piece of Don-worshipping melodrama intercut with salacious subplots like the too-large vagina of Sonny's mistress.

Whereas mainly Jaws strikes me as a so-so story that seems in the end to do little more except say Matt Hooper deserves to be eaten because he sleeps with Brody's wife. Or wants to. I can't remember.

For film fans, the most interesting aspect about reading any of those books is to see what the moviemakers changed and, in particular, what they left out. Valid criticisms of Spielberg aside, and there are many, he knew that Jaws was a clunker of a story and very wisely kept little more than the names and the shark. Sure, the filmmakers created the dumbass ending to end all dumbass endings. But since I can't even remember how Benchley finished the novel, I won't criticize for lack of comparison.

Benchley went on to noble works. He was active in conservation. Of barely secondary importance was The Deep, another seafarin' tale that unleashed a moist Jacqueline Bissett onto movie screens.

Wife finally completes decades-long project of reducing dead husband to triteness and irrelevance

2006-02-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

Green jeans

2006-02-10T05:00:00.000-06:00

Of late I have browsed The Physics of Superheroes. Having read comics in my youth (and for an embarrassingly long time thereafter), I had some questions. Alas, the book does not include much about one of my favorites, the Incredible Hulk. But in the last section the author reprints some popular questions from his students and one of these, thank God, is, "What's up with the Hulk's pants?"

The author mostly admits the Hulk's pants stay on because the Comics Code mandates they must.

I, too, have pondered this mystery. Not necessarily that the Hulk's pants stay on. But that Bruce Banner always seems to Hulk out while wearing purple pants.

Not many men wear purple pants on a daily basis. I live in one of Chicago's gayest neighborhoods, and even here not that many men wear purple pants, period. Furthermore, Banner doesn't strike me as a particularly flashy dresser. Maybe he was a flamboyant Richard Feynman funky scientist-type in some alternate Marvel universe. But even then, purple pants every day? That suggests an unstable mind more than unstable molecules, unless Bruce is doing some pimpin' to supplement his scientists' pay--and speaking of supporting yourself, does the Hulk eat, and if so, what's his caloric intake in a day?

This is, by the way, one more bit of proof the TV Hulk lived in a slightly more rational universe. Lou Ferrigno always wore torn jeans. I wear jeans pretty much every day, so I can understand how a drifter like Bill "David Banner" Bixby kept himself clothed. The utilatarian People's Fabric is fairly cheap to replace and fairly easy to find. If only Banner had known about cycling pants.

45s sidebar: Talk normal, continued

2006-02-09T16:00:00.000-06:00

Pop music's normalcy period, discussed in detail. Introduction here.

The Captain and Tennille
The look: In her heyday Toni Tennille had a becoming foxy suburban mom vibe. A suburban mom possibly amped on amphetamines? Well, yes. But a lot of them are. As for the Captain, he was pleasant-enough looking, I suppose, suburban in a way as well, maybe that guy who tinkers with electronics equipment in his garage all the time. Alas, using a captain’s hat as your look inevitably invites comparison to (1) Old Spice commercials and (2) the improbably obese man stranded on Gilligan’s Island. Good thing someone as laid-back as the Captain—a man marooned behind a piano—had that firecracker to put out front. Though she should’ve asked for top billing.

Really, only three songs from the C&T ouvre require attention. The first, "Love Will Keep Us Together," was—put away all sharp objects—the bestselling song of 1975. Tennille had a solid enough belter’s voice, but here it’s undercut by a very annoying backup group. At the other end of the career was "Do That To Me One More Time," a ballad in the Melissa Manchester area of our musical culture, and not in a good way, if that’s even possible.

But if you have a song like "Muskrat Love" on your resume, anything sounds genius by comparison. Remember, this song featured rodent noises. Not the Alvin, Simon, and Theodore kind, either. Here at 45s and Under we do not throw around phrases like "One of the worst hits of the 1970s" willy-nilly, because the day will come when it’s time to write a post called "Worst Hits of the 1970s," and I want that to have authority.

"Muskrat Love" was one of the worst hits of the 1970s.

Rupert Holmes
The look: Here’s the high school music teacher your mom is dating. Sweater? Check. Sunglasses that get shadier in sunlight? Oh, you know it. Our advice? Break up the relationship before it gets serious and you end up as a guinea pig listening to his Wagnerian stage play cycle.

In the 1980s Holmes won a bundle of Tony Awards for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a musical of a famously unfinished Charles Dickens novel. I believe this was the play where the audience voted for the killer. The important thing is, Broadway success kept Holmes from building much of a pop career on "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," a song that never fails to garner votes during barroom discussions of bad pop tunes. No argument. Points given, however, for using the phrase "my old lady."

Neil Sedaka (Comeback Version)
The look: Shockingly sexless and ageless.

During one of those "available on TV only" CD commercials, the viewer sees a hilarious image of Sedaka performing five seconds of his big Seventies hit "Bad Blood." Stubby and seemingly without gender, wearing a tight sweater that looks like it came from a boutique called "Knitted by Nearsighted Grandma," Sedaka busts out a kind of ur-Travolta move—one leg out, opposite index finger pointed in the air. This so lacks basic rhythm it recalls the way it looks when I, a very white man, attempt to do the George Jefferson Walk.

Still, in that clip he could pass for thirty or sixty or any age in between. He just comes across as… rubbery. Unfinished. One of the intermediate forms William Hurt assumes in Altered States. And yet normal.

For his comeback, Sedaka wisely threw in with Elton John, the pop monster of the moment. Always in sync with normalcy trends, Sedaka wrote the aforementioned "Love Will Keep Us Together," making his 1975 a very good year indeed. Perhaps Elton didn’t give out costume suggestions, though, for when it came to performance, Sedaka fared best at the piano, wearing whatever Jersey mafioso hat he pulled from the closet that day and smiling at the camera.

I’ve heard that Sedaka could be an unpleasant guy in real life, that he basically screwed or upstaged the Carpenters at every opportunity during their tour together. But he always looked like such a nice boy! And I mean that in my nearsighted grandmother voice.

Bonus Sedaka trivia: As Sedaka is kind of a pop Kevin Bacon, a few highlights must suffice here. He had a hand in forming The Tokens, later legendary for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Before alienating the Carpenters he wrote "Solitaire" for them. Members of 10CC produced his comeback album. Finally, and perhaps most notably, Sedaka is one of only two people to have big hits with two radically different versions of the same song—in his case "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." The other? Use these clues: Duane Allman, heroin addiction, Patti Boyd Harrison, you don’t want to hear it again.

Alan O’Day
The look: Difficult to get a handle on, but after looking at that picture, I bet it includes a Hawaiian shirt.

Alan O’Day has a lot to answer for. Not "Undercover Angel," though. While it is pretty middle-of-the-road stuff, it had the sense to riff off Charlie’s Angels—we admire bald commercialism here—and it also shares an odd synchronicity with Gary Wright’s "Dream Weaver," a real solid pop song, overdone "dreamy" sound effects notwithstanding. Whatever your opinion on "Undercover Angel," it is by any standard a hundred times better than the songs discussed in the next paragraph. Canny of O’Day to save the best for himself.

O’Day’s rap sheet goes back to the earlier Seventies, when he penned the remarkably aggravating "Rock and Roll Heaven"—a song that combined the worst aspects of maudlin nostalgia mining with the kind of grocery list referencing Don McLean should’ve made obsolete once and for all. Switching gears, O’Day started exploring the realm of the un- or possibly semi-conscious with Helen Reddy’s "Angie Baby." Peeping Toms, insanity, hints of bondage—Helen, when you’re singing a song Cher would pass up, your career has problems.

[Addendum: A little Net trawling turns up that Cher really did take a pass on it. Whoa. Again truth trumps mockery.]

Robert John
The look: Phil Collins’ younger brother working as a saloon keeper in a Seventies "revisionist" Western.

Work on that image for a moment.

I’m not going to make too much fun of John. The man was working manual labor when an old producer rang him up and suggested one more go at a music career. It was an era of falsetto, what with Barry Gibb having sang or written or produced every hit of the previous twelve months. "Sad Eyes" is one of those songs I always imagine turn up at karaoke bars, as drunk Koreans do not fear the utterly unsingable.

Grammy Davis, Jr.

2006-02-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

One of the problems with posting on pop music is you feel obligated to say something about the Grammy Awards. And in order to say something with even a shred of integrity, you feel obligated to watch the Grammy Awards.

Well, I don't have that kind of commitment, or that kind of stomach. I am tempted to wriggle out of my responsibility by pointing out that I concentrate on older music, that the Grammys exist outside my bloggy purview. Ah, if only. Last night's program featured—my sawces tell me—Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, the inevitable Springsteen, the equally inevitable U2, James Taylor, and the Sly Stone appearance that every no-talent morning DJ in America spent forty-five minutes giggling about today. So much for my excuse.

Turning to Sly Stone. First, the funniest thing I read about the appearance this morning, courtesy of Troy Patterson at Slate:

The most hyped moment regarded the possible emergence of funk pioneer Sly Stone from wherever it is that he dwells. At the climax of a cluttered medley sung by a subpar supergroup, Stone showed up looking the very model of a postmodern major genius/recluse—a blond mohawk like a vast coxcomb, a silvery jacket like a 24th-century lab coat, sparkly belt, wraparound shades. This is how Gravity's Rainbow cultists want Thomas Pynchon to look.

If you think this post can top that paragraph, save your time and quit reading.

While I agree it is unusual for a 61 year-old men to sport a towering blond Mohawk, I would also propose that more of them should do so.

Many of the reports of Sly's performance, particularly his leaving before it was over, mention "bizarre" behavior, hint that perhaps Sly was not living up to the hype.

Look. I saw Joe Namath hobbling out during the Super Bowl festivities last weekend. Joe Willie looked pretty good in that pickled, pleasingly sleazy way of his. But I didn't expect the man to suit up and lead the Jets down the field. For God's sake, Sly Stone didn't emerge from retirement, he emerged from a fog of obscurity so thick it has defeated our nostalgia-obsessed celebrity culture for decades. The clip I saw suggests a man who has no heart for performing anymore. Maybe that is why he got out of the business, why he devoured whole pharmacies in the first place, way back when. Does he not deserve a break? Let's compliment him for refusing to play rock star at an age when it is never BUT NEVER becoming. He showed up. That's a fucking miracle.

At least Jim DeRogatis had the sense to note it was sad. It reminded me of seeing Waylon Jennings near the end of his road: he was carried onstage, couldn't convincingly fake playing guitar, and the band had to use up half his allotted time with an instrumental jam of "Baker Street."

Compare Sly to, say, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. Jesus Christ, is there anything these two decrepit old frauds wouldn't do, including a revival of Grease or fronting the orchestra at Auschwitz or opening a boat show? I suppose it is some justice that they've reached the point where they are no longer worthy of comment by the media.

45s sidebar: Talk normal

2006-02-08T18:00:00.000-06:00

As we know, anyone could score a hit in the 1970s. Think the runners-up on American Idol are marginal talents? Circa 1972 those guys/women sold a million copies. It got worse as the decade progressed. Via some evolutionary mechanism still little-understood by science, people who looked normal—shockingly, paunch-sucked-inedly normal—swarmed the radio.

What explains this phenomenon, this defiance of the laws of nature? Was it a reaction to multichromatic Sixties freakdom? To the spacesuit costumes and gold lamé of soul and funk? Maybe it was all KISS’s fault?

Let me pause to state that "normal," while shocking in a celebrity context, is not used here as a prejorative. Rock/pop is, once and forever, the People’s Music—a label befitting a form of cultural expression influenced by marginal demographic groups like blind black men, musical hoboes, ex- truck drivers, and gay Manhattan songsmiths.

Indeed, the man credited with kicking off the rock era was not only normal looking but overweight. Cop, salesman, Today show weatherman, Pullman conductor—Bill Haley could pass for any of them. And he ushered in the greatest threat to America since Communism and fluoridated water! Yet his flashy but basically non-threatening persona—compare to Little Richard for imagined impact on Middle America—paved the way for his music. And ours.

The 1970s normalcy invasion, while born of obscure origins, undoubtedly influenced an important evolutionary adaptation: the music video. No more would America tolerate the rotundity of a Barry White. Visual attractiveness—or in absence of same calculated flamboyance that became momentarily hip—suddenly surpassed musical considerations in importance. Hell, it surpassed musical aptitude, and that’s never been a prerequisite for Top Forty success in the first place.

As the Darwinists tell us, adjustment requires crisis. If normal looking pop singers caused such an evolutionary leap, we must surmise that the much-derided disco "threat" was minor by comparison.

We study pop’s greatest squares tomorrow. One sentence: Neil Sedaka tries to dance. Tune in.

Thoughts about the Rolling Stones' performance at the Super Bowl

2006-02-06T05:00:00.000-06:00

Why is Charlie Watts in the Popemobile? Wait, I guess he's only protected on two sides. From the looks of those plastic dividers they've turned back a fair amount of gunfire already.

Jagger's hamstrings. While it is a slam-dunk to make fun of the Stones, I bet we could count on one hand--and I'm talking world population here--the number of almost-63 year-old men able to move around like that. My dad just turned 61, and he couldn't move that well unless we ran live current through him. Bravo. Were Jagger and Richards put on earth to prove once and for all that (relatively) clean living out-survives Keef's inaccurately-labeled "lifestyle"? If so, it may take a while to learn the answer, as neither of them will die for at least thirty years.

Music. Ehh, "Start Me Up," and Mick didn't finish the line "You make a dead man come." Ehh, one off the new album. Ehh, "Satisfaction."

[UPDATE: According to the news wires, ABC censors were responsible for the edit on "Start Me Up." Probably they could have left it in. The people in the habit of protesting such things have never heard of orgasms and would've missed the reference.]

Question. Is it just me, or does Ron Wood actually look better than he did twenty years ago?

Observation. Nice gimmick pulling back the tongue to reveal the crowd.

Avoiding Brian Jones Syndrome

2006-02-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

Long-time readers know this blog takes no stand on religion except one: Bono is the Messiah. Tonight Sixty Minutes replayed the Ed Bradley interview with him as part of its surrender to the Super Bowl. As I watched, a thought occurred to me. It is amazing indeed that a band can put together a 25-year stretch in the music business. Mind you, a stretch where they’ve maintained some relevance the entire time.

More amazing? Twenty-five years with no breakups and no replacement members. The same four guys on the first album are the same four guys touring today.

Is this unprecedented in the history of rock?

Virtually no band (as opposed to individual) from the early era of rock and rock-influenced pop lasted long enough on the charts to contend. Look at the British invasion bands. A relatively early breakup ended the Beatles, premature deaths that took the Stones and the Who (later on) out of the running. We'll get to the Kinks below. Motown’s vocal groups—and let me say I’m not sure they even count—usually averaged less than a decade before members left to for solo careers, the Great Beyond, or missions to become the black Barbra Streisand.

Psychedelia? The unkillable Dead shed Pigpen McKernan, the first of their drummers, in 1973; and the Jefferson Airplane, having burned through an entire roster before success, only survived in its original "White Rabbit" lineup until around 1970. The death-touch of Stephen Stills requires no elaboration.

Few Seventies bands survived into the Eighties. Hell, few from 1970 survived until 1975, and few from 1975 until 1980. As for the celebrated rock upheaval of the decade, well, most punk bands couldn't string together a tour without a death, let alone a calendar year. As for the decade's most derided trend, few if any disco bands outlasted the genre's crash or the televised drawing-and-quartering of Maxine Nightengale in 1980.

Cock rock fares no better. Eagles? Several personnel changes. Floyd? Legendary crash of original band mastermind, though the transformation of the band from psychedelic popsters into arena rock monsters changed them so much one is tempted to allow that the band deserves a new origin date after Syd Barrett’s departure. (We call this the Fleetwood Mac Excemption.) But then they recorded an album about Barrett, destroying the impression they had moved on. Excemption denied.

This brings the timeline to the 1980s. Incredibly, the Kinks appear to be with us. Let us here pause to admit their potential admittance to the longevity fraternity requires dismissal of certain disqualifying factors on technical—albeit valid—grounds.

First, members of the band trying to kill each other does not count unless someone actually dies, nor do injuries or criminal charges related to such incidents. Second, if a band member is injured via act of God, unforeseen medical condition, or vehicular misadventure, and then temporarily replaced, there is no penalty. Third, adding members is okay—we do not penalize for ambition. Finally, temporary resignations due to burnout or because the band’s leader is a controlling asshole—while much harder to overlook—WILL BE ALLOWED, because I myself have a hard time putting up with controlling assholes unless said asshole is me.

Of course, the bassist quit in 1969. That can't be overlooked. You're out, Ray.

The anarchy of the early 1980s produced many fine bands, particularly away from the Top Forty. But, again, few survived—the early years of a decade do take a toll. In time, however, two emerged as strong contenders for the longevity title: REM (credited with a 1981 debut dating to their release of "Radio Free Europe" as an indie single) and U2 (1980’s release of Boy).

The contest went neck-and-neck for a long time. In 1995, a strange tour evidently mounted on a series of Indian burial grounds threatened REM’s place. Three of the four band members suffered health problems serious enough to require surgery. But it wasn’t until 1997—after a solid sixteen year run—that Bill Berry’s retirement put the band out of contention.

At a twenty-five years, then, U2 rules the rock roost. No resurrection necessary.

Whip it while you work...

2006-01-28T01:00:00.000-06:00

Q: Are we not men?
A: We are prepubescent children.

DEVO, one of the ’80s most innovative and iconic bands, has partnered with Disney Sound to bring their hits to a new generation with 'DEVO 2.0,' a combination CD/DVD package set for release on March 14th. The original members of DEVO rerecorded ten of their old songs (some with revamped lyrics) and two brand new ones with DEVO 2.0, a group of five talented kids aged 10-13.

“The concept is about the energy and aesthetic of DEVO being passed like an Olympic torch to a new generation,” said DEVO frontman Gerald V. Casale, who directed all 11 newly created music videos on the DVD. The platinum-selling band handpicked kids Nicole, Jackie, Nathan, Michael and Kane to don the famous “energy domes” and become DEVO 2.0; unlike the original DEVO, DEVO 2.0 is a co-ed affair, with lead singer Nicole and keyboardist Jackie lending diversity to the DEVO chemistry. “I’m honored to be the new Mark Mothersbaugh!” declared Nicole.

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut: I knew getting old would be bad, but not this bad.

Only band that matters

2006-01-27T16:00:00.000-06:00

All in the Family Stone

2006-01-27T15:00:00.000-06:00

The transom brings a rumor: Sly Stone's return to the world. Forerunner of funk, fusioner of Beatlesque pop with R&B groove and just about everything else besides, Sylvester Stone spun out into a lengthy drug haze and more aborted comebacks than the Whig Party. Now he may be lending his aura to the train-wreck that is the Grammy Awards.

While I don't track Sly's movements closely, it's been a solid twenty years since I heard any word of him. Back then he was supposedly clean (for the hundredth time), ready to groove and leading a new band called the One-Eyed Jacks. At that point Sly had only been gone about a decade. That was the statistically outlier for a comeback bid in the age before irony ruled and Sonic Youth rehabilitated Karen Carpenter.

Being immersed in black music at the time, I was excited. Three reasons: (1) I was young and therefore naive; (2) Sly sounded coherent during the radio interview I heard; (3) I thought maybe he had heard Prince finishing what he started and wanted back in for some of the glory.

For all I know Sly went straight from that interview to a Buick with coke in the ashtray. Whatever happened, he virtually vanished from the landscape. I vaguely remember a cameo when the band got its Hall of Fame Induction. If memory serves, though, Sly was unable (or unwilling) to perform. When PBS did its History of Rock & Roll miniseries back in the Nineties, Family Stone bassist Larry Graham—himself The Shit—sort of stood in for Sly, just as he had when he led the band through a few Family songs at the HOF.

Probably Sly's beyond performing. Still, it'd be nice to see him. Even on the Grammys.

Rating the Time-Life Informercial Stars

2006-01-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

Barry "Greg Brady" Williams (70s Music Explosion)
The geniuses at Time-Life wisely scoured the has-bin for a representative of America’s kitschiest decade. Good thing they didn’t pick Leif Garrett. An old pro, Williams lays on the pitch with admirable enthusiasm, while at the same time subliminally expressing that he’s in on the joke that is him. He is also the most comprehensible choice for a host in the T-L stable. After all, this is the kind of gig a Barry Williams does. Bonus points for remaining long and lanky at age 50—the way he looks is shocking in a good way. No T-L host wears a better shirt, either.

Pros
• Self-awareness
• Not Leif Garrett
• Semi-dead ringer for fellow cryogenics guinea pig Lindsey Buckingham
• Excels despite being saddled with transparently disinterested sidekick

Cons
• Only peripherally a music performer
• Distracting "groovy dad" vibe
• Pretty much dogged by buff Christopher Knight in those workout informercials

Kenny Rogers (Superstars of Country)
I assume that anyone shilling for Time-Life is doing it for the money, even Barry Williams. No problem. Bald selling out is fine with me, as long as we all agree that it’s bald selling out. But how can it be possible that Kenny Rogers—the Gambler!—needs money?

This man put together one of the most calculatedly successful careers in pop music history. He started making hits in the late 1960s, throwing down pop-psychedelia before transitioning to quiet countrypolitan. After a dry spell and a long huddle with his People, he returned as a country force, cutting hit after hit after hit. Not content with mere wealth, he made a play for Hugeness, recruiting the golden touches of Barry Gibb and Lionel Ritchie, the Midas of Mediocrity. Circa 1981 Rogers was as big as it got. Believe me, it’s no joke he performed on "We Are the World." Virtually no one else on that record could match his sales. Never mind that his manager set the whole thing up. In Kenny's case, he didn't need a connection. (Kim Carnes? Maybe.)

In other words, Kenny Rogers was so successful they named one of Neptune’s moons after him. How did it come to pass that he’s introducing a clip of "my good friend" Dolly Parton on late-night cable television? Even more embarrassingly, on CNBC? One is tempted to blame investment problems. Kenny Rogers Roasters went through the dreaded restructuring in the late 1990s despite inspiring a Seinfeld episode. History shows us that fast food empires, like car dealerships, suck down celebrity cash at a furious rate. Yet it’s difficult to believe any investment short of buying Mozambique could drain the cash reserves of a pop monster like the Gambler.

Is he trying to prove he has no shame? Didn’t Six Pack settle that?

Pros
• Still looks like Kenny Rogers
• Wriggled out of advertising the Hee-Haw boxed set
• No hot poultry involved
• Doing better than Lionel Ritchie

Cons
• Seems barely able (or willing) to stand
• Must suffer having clips of his younger self introduced by anonymous blond co-hostess.

Vanessa Williams (Ultimate Love Collection)
Though an attractive woman, I would not use Williams’ name and the word "warm" in the same sentence. If properly limbered up, she could tear out your heart and rip out your throat simultaneously. Under her regime, the Ultimate Love Collection is yours for four easy payments and if you know what's good fer ya.

A pro’s pro, this Williams performs her Time-Life duties with a slickness not even the Gambler can muster—it’s easy to imagine her buzzing through the taping on the first take if she hadn’t been forced to beat a number of the line-flubbing nonentities assigned to sit next to her. In fact she’s so cool her parts, with proper editing, could be used to sell almost anything from toothpaste to nerve gas.

Pros
• Better looking now than when Miss America or scandal-ridden ex-Miss America
• So capable she doesn’t need sidekick
• Was not sexually harassed during film shoot with now-current California governor
• Triple threat of movie actress-singer-infomercialist

Cons
• A little intimidating for 2:30 a.m.
• Under no circumstances do you believe she knows what songs are on the nine CDs

Bobby Vinton (Lifetime of Romance)
This makes sense. Not that we’re putting Vinton down. The Polish Prince parlayed a string of love songs—many featuring blue in the title—into, well, a lifetime of romance. His loyal fan base started out as women who found Neil Diamond too daring. In later years they flocked to Branson to hear "Blue Velvet" one more time, unaware that David Lynch had transformed the song forever, indeed unaware that David Lynch or films with sound existed. Proving his ethnic cred, Vinton’s freakish 1970s hit "My Melody of Love" now is played at every Polish wedding, and probably a few christenings.

Unfortunately, his Time-Life performance is undone by one of the worst hairpieces in celebrity history. Shapeless, frizzy, quite possibly a hair replacement surgery gone horribly wrong—it distracts and it compels. Come to think of it, the eyes look bad, too. Never get your plastic surgery in Branson.

To his credit Vinton seems genuinely interested in what he’s selling. Certainly he gets shown in the clips enough times, so often it suggests he had saturation airplay written into his contract. Of course he’s not as smooth as the Time-Lifers with acting experience. Then again, he has the worst of the blond sidekicks. Imagine that middle-aged woman in the elevator who spontaneously (1) tells you about her relationship with Our Lord and (2) tries to sell you real estate.

Pros
• More alive than most of the people on this commercial
• Probably knows good stories about Bobby Darin

Cons
• This is a step up from Branson

Peabo Bryson (Classic Soul Ballads)
Though I offer no opinion either way on Peabo’s singing, he has a fine voice for infomercials. Fate and Time-Life have cast him to dispense nine CDs of get-laid music. There ain’t no Perry Como here, brother. I find Peabo pleasant but forgettable—nice to have on the TV, but not really able to pitch with Vanessa Williams’ intensity or Rogers’ superstar cred. That said, he puts off a pillow talk vibe I can see appealing to viewers. Whatever the effect of his singing voice, his speaking voice has plenty of bed in it. On the one hand that’s not a bad thing when you’re on heavy rotation after midnight. On the other, the sociopathic loners watching don’t have anyone to share the sheets with.

Peabo also benefits of a tightly-focused product. Longtime viewers know the songs on Lifetime of Romance range all over the place, from Andy Williams to Stan Getz to Charlie Rich to something called Mr. Acker Bilk. Not the case here. Fortunately, viewers only get five seconds of each song, for such highly-concentrated blasts of Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Luther Vandross—the Murderer’s Row of the missionary position—are too much for most of us. I’m frankly surprised T-L can dispense this product without a license.

Pros
• Excellent voice
• Non-offensive
• Somewhat strikingly bald

Cons
• Music will only make you feel lonely
• Non-offensiveness due in part to charisma deficit
• Somewhat strikingly chunky

Monday News Wire

2006-01-16T06:00:00.000-06:00

Gene Simmons adds race car obsession to history's longest midlife crisis. The KISS bassist/glam freak is ambassadoring for IRL (Indy cars, as in Indy 500). For Zod's sake. This is akin to Rundgren joining two-fifths of the Cars. You're Gene Simmons! You're cool! Don't adulterate it!

Flaming Lips new album imminent like an onrushing meteor. Will they play cruise ships again? Bonus: Wayne Coyne promises an on-stage space bubble.

DeFranco opens primo performing space... in Buffalo. The city, not the animal.

Pollard promises drunkenness, two or three dozen songs. Rock's most legendary beer cooler to tour.

The Madden File

2006-01-13T08:00:00.000-06:00

Correspondent Chrispy checks in:

You probably already know this detail from the Dave Madden file, but Danny Bonaduce in real life saw Madden as a sort of fun uncle figure. I guess to help get him away from Bonaduce's dire family situation, Madden would let him stay over on weekends, get drunk with him, hangout. Lest you imagine a Neverland Ranch situation, all participants say nothing below the belt occurred and that Madden didn't play that way. Bonaduce said later that Madden probably saved his life. Ten points.

[Oh, man. And you freakin' KNOW Madden had a wet bar in the house, possibly in place of a kitchen. Madden's drink of choice? I'm thinking Canadian Club, maybe Jim Beam. I'm guessing the Duce drank whatever was in the cabinet. —KC]

Ask the Bolshevik

2006-01-13T07:15:00.000-06:00

Dear Bolshevik:
Last night I had a double-celebrity dream: Telly Savalas and Ellen DeGeneres. Despite an obsession with Telly, he'd never entered my subconscious before. Fortunately, this appearance featured not only him, but his brother George (aka Demosthenes). During the dream I went to an apartment where Telly and George appeared to be going over some accounting figures. Both looked just as they do on Kojak reruns, right down to the clothes (spiffy for Telly, rumpled for George). We shot the shit awhile. Then Telly said he had to leave to go work on a case.

I expressed to George that it was great his brother still solved mysteries at his age. George replied that it was "unofficial" police work. I got the idea he meant Telly was just a crazy old guy acting like a police detective. That made me sad.

The Ellen DeGeneres part of the dream is too sexual to share here, and involves me losing her to a much-younger Latin or Indian guy, but let's just say that my subconscious believes she has a hairy butt—downy white hair but hairy—and leave it at that.

Thoughts?

A: The Savalas Brothers—band name alert—what an awesome subconscious duo! I'm convinced that the Telly archetype was still active when you moved into the Ellen phase of the dream. There was a symbolic connection between his bald head and her hairy butt—a.k.a. the head-butt dichotomy. The head should be hairy, the butt should not. And yet the symbolism was reversed, and in some sense it was in real life too: Telly's bald head was a symbol of power and masculinity in the 70s, when virtually every pop icon was resplendent in flowing locks. As for Ellen, she might not really have hair on her buttocks, but there's something different going on down there.

[Reader Tony providing voice of The Bolshevik.]

Friday News Wire

2006-01-13T07:00:00.000-06:00

Salon writer sings praises of Jack. More signs that the once-vital webzine needs to pay for better writers. I won't lie. Our local Jack franchise surprised me this morning with a play of the Beatles' "It's Getting Better," stuck right where they usually play their third Billy Idol song of the wee hours ("Mony, Mony," usually). But that was a rare moment of pleasure.

Before the evisceration, a quote from the story:

It's been so long since I turned on the radio and felt any element of surprise; I don't even mind that as often as not, the surprise isn't a good one. One moment I'm putty, wailing along with Patti Smith or Led Zep, the next I'm spanked back with a dose of Huey Lewis. But when I tune in and he offers the playfully erotic call-and-response teaming of "Brick House" and "I Want Candy," I think, I don't care if it's just a random, computer-generated thing. Jack, you get me.

This paragraph doesn't really show what Jack provides in, say, a given hour. It's more like impressions culled from a week's worth of radio listening, with a memory block on the unending plays of already exhausted format mainstays like "Roxanne." More and more it seems to me—and I admit I listen less and less—that the format has a base playlist as restricted and boring as any other oldies station, but jazzes things up a bit by tossing in, say, two songs an hour, from out of nowhere (that would be the Patti Smith mentioned above).

We'll be live blogging us some Jack soon to prove these and other points. If they ever go an hour without playing Genesis, that is.

Fripp of King Crimson fame making sounds for your software. Everytime you download an attachment you'll get an eight-minute guitars-synth raga.

iPod in yo' pants make you need to dance! A control panel on the right hip kind of rocks. Pricing Levi's at $200 seems kind of antithetical to what the company has always represented, but no doubt they look at the absurd prices others get for the People's Fabric and want a piece of the pie. Sure it's an item guaranteed to show up on I Love the 00s, when the iPod seems novel to Americans able to download music directly to their head, but as blogger John Carroll points out, a bigger point is that the iPod has spawned an ecosystem (his term) for allied products and accessories. Why not Levi's? My question: laundering such jeans. Will the iPod become a Nano if you use hot water?

Kill the redhead

2006-01-11T07:00:00.000-06:00

We have a sort of low-rent version of TV Land here in Chicago called Me TV. Shows spontaneously run backward, or stop altogether, or you see the black screen with "AD #1" just before one cast of Mission: Impossible is replaced by another, or—particularly vexing to me—another Starsky & Hutch comes on when I'm ready for Kojak.

Last week I landed on The Me and like a revelation, like a diamond bullet right through my forehead, I found another of my role models for middle age.

Reuben Kincaid. Dubious swinger, Partridge Family booking agent, and of course, constant tormentee of PF bassist Danny Partridge. As played by sitcom pro and Laugh In alum Dave Madden, Reuben lived the dream as a swinging single, jumping from hotel room to hotel room, always with a stewardess on his arm and a turtleneck-sports coat ensemble the color of a condiment. Best of all, Reuben wore the bitching eye covers to bed, a strange detail that caught my attention as a kid and still made me laugh last week.

Reuben had it hard, too. When Danny wasn't interrupting Main Man's sleep, he was always dragging him out of bars. Was a 10% cut worth this shit? You know, maybe. Chicks dig a man in show business, especially a player.

Virtually no TV show pushing empty entertainment calories passed without a Madden guest shot. Being a familiar face, he did all the anthologies from Love, American Style—tell me he wore the flannel pajamas—to Fantasy Island. But he excelled at sitcoms, though to my knowledge never played another character named after a deli item.

Ah, the smell of it!

2006-01-09T07:00:00.000-06:00

While out in the world I caught a pleasant whiff of a forgotten odor: after shave. Mind you, I live in one of the gayest areas of a major American metropolis, and am thus used to males what smell purty. But this was after shave, not cologne—the commoner's scent. Or perhaps I should say commodore’s scent, as I believe it was Old Spice.

Whatever happened to after shave? Is it still widely used? Or does it belong to that part of the consumer economy we refer to as Old Man Products? Time was—I continued in my thoughts, clearly trying to avoid work—when after shave companies went in for saturation TV advertising, particularly during manly programming like cop shows and sporting events. Though I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I did in my youth, most of what I do watch consists of cop shows and sporting events. On the rare occasions I see an ad for a scent it is for a young men’s cologne, all of which have EXTREME or an X in the name.

Anyway, within forty-eight hours of all these thoughts, I saw a TV ad for Lectric Shave.

Lectric Shave! The glow-in-the-dark liquid that looks like alien blood but smells sweet as manhood itself. Then I remembered… Lectric Shave didn’t even come close to controlling the market. Joe Namath peddled Brut, or as Broadway Joe said, "the great smell of Brut." Meanwhile, the strangely Japanese-themed Hai Karate suggested its users would be transformed—into chick magnets, yes, but also into Popeye, as they became unaccountably aggressive. Bruce Lee died for this?

Of course the champion was Old Spice. What great commercials. Some male model in a turtleneck wanders the streets in a temperate port—never a hellhole like Calcutta or a city of stews like Hamburg. As he walks he turns female heads with his scent and dimples. Where did this foxy, clearly unbuggered yachtsman set sail from? the women asked, as the familiar flute or other sea-pipe tune played in the background. He’d throw the jacket over his shoulder, forego the tests for parasites, and head over to Her Place for, heh heh, shore leave. That Old Spice could cover the odor of a man long at sea proved its amazing powers.

A search of the Internet points out that Old Spice remains on sale, that Brut has outlived Namath’s dignity and is a cologne, not an after shave.

By the way, not much has changed. Like the after shave ads of yore, the new Lectric Shave promises sex as well as poor spelling. It would be more pungent (yet more truthful) to say it promises the first name of Auric Goldfinger’s pilot, but we’ll settle, for a post about Lectric Shave is pungent enough. And, being newly alerted to men’s fragrances, I soon noticed that ads for a new cologne called Axe (note the X) crib Hai Karate’s gimmick. The latter once hinted its customers needed martial arts to fight off the women; and sure enough the guys in the Axe commercials are pursued as if they’re Beatles. This in addition to the mental connection—chop with hand, chop with axe, and so on. Weak.

Monday News Wire

2006-01-09T05:00:00.000-06:00

Howard Stern debuts; world survives. Not a joke: he has hired George "Sulu, Master Navigator" Takei as his announcer.

Woman steals to fund Elvis obsession. Amateur! Others would kill for him! He is your king, ingrate!

David Lee Roth replaces someone else for once. Howard Stern, if you haven't heard. What's less likely, and you must choose one: Diamond Dave touring anew with Van Halen, or the fact he's delivered three babies as an EMT?

Will Strokes survive the third album test? We don't know, either.

Black people fail to succeed in country music, settle for dominance everywhere else. I'm white, and I'd feel silly in those hats.

Friday News Wire

2006-01-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

Stunning: Cowsills singer a Katrina casualty. Barry Cowsill's body was fished out of New Orleans in late December. For those unaware, the Cowsills were the late Sixties Rhode Island pop band—Barry, five siblings, and their mother—that inspired the make-believe Partridge Family. Hits included "Indian Lake" and the theme from "Hair," plus "The Rain, the Park, and Other Things," a rare example of what might be labeled bubblegum psychedelic music.

Lou Rawls, RIP.

Barry Gibb buys Johnny Cash's house. Will he redo the kitchen?

New York AG probes download prices. And we all now how painful that can be. The sooner the Internet destroys record labels, the better. For God's sake, they've had years to get a handle on downloading, to make money from it, to absorb it into their Borg collective. Miffed with Apple? Quit bitching and, you know, compete.

Slate on forgotten 2005 album gems. I'd forgotten there was a group called Fannypack.

Thursday News Wire

2005-12-15T06:00:00.000-06:00

Dylan uses newly found power of comprehensible speech to host radio show. He'll join the XM roster with a weekly show featuring music "apparently selected by himself." I don't know what this means. Unrelated: I took the link from the Independent, and the top story on the sidebar concerned the very British issue of badger control.

Excommunication now hip again—rock and roll! Start a breakaway sect that ignores celibacy rules and the ban on same-sex nuptials? A tribunal meets to throw your ass into the fires of hell. Molest a dozen boys? You know the answer. Will the burning be broadcast live on Fox News? You know that answer, too.

Google debuts music section today. Tired of heating up that search engine and getting Michael Stipe fan fic? Burgeoning nuclear superpower Google wants to help. A new feature points the brave searcher to lists that tell you what song is on what album and to legal downloads, should one be so inclined. Yes, this is our contribution to the mindless hype. Christmas season is the time for it.

Monday News Wire

2005-12-12T08:00:00.000-06:00

"Unchained Melody" lyricist not rich enough to buy Denmark. In fact he had to work a real job in engineering. Warning if you love this song: it was written for someone named Cookie. Here in Chicago that means in ugly, ungainly TV clown. Maybe it doesn't have such negative overtones for others, though.

High IQ File: Brill Building Confidential. Ah, showbiz glamour:

The process by which the songs happen remains mysterious even when the circumstances are laid out. Consider one day in the collaboration of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, in the fall of 1960: somehow, between Carole looking after their six-month-old baby and taking Don Kirshner's call about how he needed a song for the Shirelles by tomorrow morning and then going out to play mah-jongg, and Gerry doing his day's work at the chemical plant and meeting up after work with the bowling league and then coming home late to find Carole's message on the tape recorder along with the rudiments of her melody, somehow—separately, and then by the end of the evening working together—the two managed by 2 AM to produce a song called "Will You Love Me Tomorrow." The Shirelles recorded it, with the violin and cello backup that been added as an afterthought, and it went to number one, the first record by a black female singing group ever to do that. The record has not stopped playing for forty-five years; a good enough day's work. The matter-of-factness of the process is belied by the slow-burning passions that the song has continued to release.

Warning: Tony Orlando is quoted. Worse, so is Theodore Dreiser.

Postmodern Mind-Fuck #8814: Barbeau to play Judy Garland Off-Broadway. In Des Moines, if there's any justice. Granted, we all want to stretch. And frankly, I'd pay Broadway prices to watch Adrienne Barbeau model sweaters for two hours. Let's face facts, though. However enchanting the Barbeau pipes (not a euphemism), the leap from playing a cable TV snake dancer to one of the most distinctive voices in American pop music history may be, mmmm, overly ambitious. Not that we doubt! But perhaps the intermediate phases of evolution should be explored first. Just saying.

Floyd's Gilmour to play depressing music for appreciative Germans.

Apple cultists turn iPod Mini into collector's item.

Sunday News Wire

2005-12-11T07:00:00.000-06:00

Gurdjieff boxed sets hits this universe. No doubt the greatest Armenian mystic-hypnotist in rock history, The Gurdj played a mean harmonium, too. When not bedding female acolytes he channeled the music heard at Jesus's monastery during the Son of Man's lengthy lost years (from childhood to age 30). No, seriously. For those who won't read the story, we provide the lede:

I once owned David Koresh's Voice of Fire, but I sold it because Koresh sounded like a second-rate Jackson Browne. However, the same cannot be said of Charles Manson. His Lie: The Love and Terror Cult contains some truly great '60s folk-pop, such as "Cease to Exist," a tune the Beach Boys did a gorgeous rendition of and renamed "Never Learn Not to Love."

"Second rate Jackson Browne"??? How do these assholes get followers?

When boxed sets go bad. Or, how Rhino lost its touch. We'll return to this topic at length soon. But this story almost convinced me to scoop up the Sire Records box. Don't read if you can't resist owning a collection that ranges from Depeche Mode and Talking Heads through Echo & the Bunnymen and on to the late, lamented (by me, at least) Throwing Muses. And if you can't resist, uh, burn me copies, okay?

Richard Pryor RIP. The word "genius" gets overused in America. Here's the rare time it applies.

Satan Is Strong: Eagles pull in $38 mil touring California only. "Hello, Salinas! Any Steinbeck fans here tonight?"

Bob Mould has a blog. Get ya some Sugar.

Contemporary blues often competent, rarely transcendent. But we could say the same about Christgau.

The Tate Gallery

2005-12-09T04:00:00.000-06:00

We have our idols in youth, others in adulthood. I need not yet contemplate those for middle-age, but I do so anyway, in case that passage occurs during a week when I’m too busy to find a replacement for Speed Racer.

The first man on my list: Larry Tate, Darrin’s boss on Bewitched, played by the aptly-named David White.

Contemplate his genius. Though handicapped by spongy hair, a hilarious ‘stache, and an obvious drinking problem, Larry Tate runs a successful ad agency with the help of crack staff like Darrin Stevens. What I love about Larry is that he’s a perfect sitcom boss. He just shows up at Darrin’s home, announces he has a problem, this account is collapsing or that never-addressed issue with the wife is exploding.

Needless to say, Samantha Stevens is the perfect sitcom wife—nay, perfect, period. First, she’s a witch, so the bills will always get paid. Second, she’s Elizabeth Montgomery, a stone-cold fox. Third, and this is most pertinent, whenever Larry shows up in a lather, Sam’s first words are, “Can I get you a drink?”

Does Larry ever say no?

My hero.

Postscript: the universe is in a Larry Tate cycle right now. I had verbally expressed my admiration for Tate after I caught five minutes of Bewitched on a local “oldies TV” station. Mere days later, I was channel-surfing and stumbled onto an antique episode of The Untouchables. A gangster planned to get out of the rackets—a gangster played by David White! Looking just like Larry Tate, by the way.

It gets weirder. His ambitious gun moll girlfriend? Elizabeth Montgomery.

One more level of weird—stick with me. Tuesday night, I stopped for perhaps the first time ever on The Gilmore Girls to find Ma Gilmore preachifying on the lameness of Nicole Kidman's Bewitched remake—a lameness she blamed on the fact the movie left out Larry Tate. She did a solid sixty seconds of outrage on this.

December 8, 1980

2005-12-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

John Lennon’s death was the first random culturally significant misfortune I can remember. In those days my sound system was a cheap tape recorder, my medium of choice the static-filled Top Forty stations out of distant Chicago. I came home from a friend’s, cued up the recorder to maybe get the latest Blondie or Journey tune—despite the fact any song I wanted was played three times an hour—and heard unending Lennon.

I was familiar with the man. My parents were Boomers. Mom’s Andy Williams records aside, the family listened to rock and pop all the time, focusing on the debut Dire Straits album under the headphones or singing along to Air Supply in the car. But Beatlemania predated me. Only by hearing entire radio stations turned over to Lennon’s music—and the stunned remembrances of the otherwise vacant disc jockeys—clued me in to the fact a Big Event had taken place.

When I rushed downstairs I saw my dad hunched in front of the television. I told him what happened. He didn’t even respond. Very atypical. Few things had an effect on him that he allowed the world to see. Sons sense the inner lives of their fathers more than they understand; indeed one of the necessary tragedies of fatherhood is that you cannot explicitly share that inner life while a son is young (a tragedy compounded in many cases when this becomes a habit and you cannot share it even when he grows up). Dad never mentioned what he thought of the news. Never has. Never had to.

Thursday News Wire

2005-12-08T05:00:00.000-06:00

Don Ho alive after putting life in hands of mad scientists. If stem cell procedures prolong the life of Don Ho even one day, surely the technology is worth looking into. As well as being an institution, Ho is a treasured historic relic, a living link to that fabled and strange subculture called Show Business. Let's not make the poor man travel to Thailand when it's time to clone him.

Paul McCartney and the curse of being the only grownup in your band. You have to give Paul credit. He loved being a Beatle at a time when Lennon had visions of artistic transendence, when George was four years into despising it, when Ringo was, well, Ringo. Without his enthusiasm for being part of the Biggest Thing Ever, the Beatles might've collapsed after the death of Brian Epstein, instead of just having a collective midlife crisis (to which Paul, it must be said, contributed the Apple fiasco and a bit of the India madness). It's always seemed to me one of the major tensions was that John had abdicated leadership at the same time Paul's skills came in line with his ambitions, changing the band's dynamic. Paul took the reins. John never thought he relinquished them while at the same time he wanted to be free, the kind of contradictory behavior that makes Lennon forever fascinating as a troubled person. And George! Meanwhile, here he is, on the road to enlightenment and seeking to make the Big Two a Big Three.

Anyway, the link offers a working musician's view. Recommended.

Speaking of Beatles, are we out of things to say about them? Apparently. Not the Cute One's new solo album, though.

High IQ File: Peas' mega-hit not just bad but evil. Certainly it's aggravating and ass-obsessed. But it's also interesting in that the song became a huge hit before being released as a single thanks to downloading (revolutionary medium) and, incredibly, radio (mummified medium). A little sample insight:

For all the brow-furrowing about the precise, Pavlovian engineering of hit singles, pop music is a wholly unpredictable, unstable enterprise. Lazy artists catch lightning in a bottle, bizarre throwaway jingles are greeted as bursts of quirky ingenuity, and puffy bits of melodrama accidentally become the catchiest thing ever. This is the weird appeal of the radio (or however you get your populist fix): Anything—good, bad, or otherwise—can sound genuinely perfect for a summer. If an Awesomely Bad pop song survives a few years and enlivens a party sometime down the line, so much the better.

Pretty much everything this blog stands for, in other words.

Sinead serious about reggae. As she is about everything. A little late on this story. All apologies for the staleness. Thirty seconds in the toaster should help it.

That ain't klezmer

2005-11-30T21:00:00.000-06:00

The high-paying private command performance is one of the more interesting dark corners of the rock world. As the mass media has reported, and the blog world has photographed, defense contracting mogul David H. Brooks (not the New York Times columnist) tossed an epic bat mitzvah over the weekend that featured Kenny G. horning away for arriving guests, and performances by the kind of talent list that usually gets together to save waterlogged Asian countries. As if forty-five acoustic minutes from Tom Petty and then a sweet blast of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry wasn't enough:

The party cost an estimated $10 million, including the price of corporate jets to ferry the performers to and from. Also on the bill were The Eagles' Don Henley and Joe Walsh performing with Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks; DJ AM (Nicole Richie's fiance); rap diva Ciara and, sadly perhaps (except that he received an estimated $250,000 for the job), Kenny G blowing on his soprano sax as more than 300 guests strolled and chatted into their pre-dinner cocktails.

"Hey, that guy looks like Kenny G," a disbelieving grownup was overheard remarking, though the 150 kids in attendance seemed more impressed by their $1,000 gift bags, complete with digital cameras and the latest video iPod.

And there were Jumbotrons. Did we mention the Jumbotrons?

I will leave the pooh-poohing to those idealists who believe that defense contractors have souls, or rock stars shame. That said, I do feel the need to wonder aloud the obvious question: would a 13 year-old girl have any interest in the majority of these performers? No, wait, I meant the other obvious question: do the majority of these performers need the money? Besides Joe Walsh? I mean, okay, it's obvious he's got a lot of neurological damage to repair, and those black market stem cells don't come cheap.

Granted, if a millionaire defense contractor called me up during a time of war and offered me seven figures to play a bat mitzvah, AND I could use the open bar, AND I could hit on foxy Jewish suburban moms, then hell yes I'm performing, I'm performing with koalas on a trapeze, I'm performing in the sexual sense of the word, if necessary. But I am me. All that I own and all that I am, and this includes my kidneys, doesn't equal what Nicks put up her nose on July 8, 1978.

No judgment here. It merely interests me that, for example, Henley and Nicks, a pair of people all over two of the hugest-selling albums ever, would leave the hot tub in Telluride and backyard Chinese garden in Taos (respectively) to shlep to Manhattan for, let's just pretend, $750K. I know even they can't be infinitely rich. Nor can the others mentioned. Infinite is big. But can it be worth it? I mean, really? What if someone shouts for "Leather and Lace"? Then is it worth it?

No doubt I underestimate the expenses of the Boomer rock star lifestyle. That Chinese garden doesn't grow itself. I like the idea of multi-millionaires serving other multi-millionaires. "Follow the money." The rest, as the wise ones say, is commentary.

Tuesday News Wire

2005-11-29T22:49:00.000-06:00

The unbearable unbearableness of being Billy Joel. Or listening to him. The uneven rock writing on Slate spikes high and hilarious with a tale of one fan's disillusionment with Long Island's gift to supermodels. A taste:

All this came to a head in my freshman year of high school when I discovered Elvis Costello, who, a friend informed me, "writes songs about why people like Billy Joel are just so bad." I didn't want to believe it; surely, I told myself, it was possible to be a fan of Costello and Joel, both of whom, after all, had a way with a tune. Later that year, I went to my first Costello concert. Midway through the show, Costello sat down at an electric piano and began playing a series of cheesy cocktail-jazz chords. "I'd like to sing a Billy Joel song for you now," he said dryly, as laughter rippled through the audience. "It's called 'Just the Way You Are.' " When I returned home that night, all the Joel albums got stuck away in the back of a closet.

The article ties in with the new Joel boxed set, eighty (!) tracks of singer-songwriterdom, odes to exhausted 1950s nostalgia, and Tourette-ish tours through history. But when you've got eighty tracks, you can toss in your heavy metal experiment, your reggae version of "Only the Good Die Young"--in other words, just about everything.

I've always found Joel an interesting example of a musician who, for all his sales and an avid fandom, had a chance to be a contenduh and... missed. In his case, and here I'm agreeing with the article, I think it's because he could never accept the limits of his talent. Joel can do pop melody. But the man simply cannot rock. He cribbed Springsteen's blue collar vibe and sax solos. No go. He tried synthish New Wave stylings. Also no go. He went back to freakin' doo-wop. No go, no go, no go, even if he did sing all the parts. Probably the closest he came were with a couple of his New York vignettes, songs that at least had the virtue of earnest storytelling and some not-bad whistling. Some good writers built careers around tunes that share a chapter with "Just the Way You Are" in the American pop songbook. Pianist, know thyself.

Rock Hall of Fame surprises world with good picks. I am giving Skynyrd a break here, because they're the Led Zeppelin of the South (Red Zeppelin?), and maybe the Hall can redeem its existence by having Neil Young induct them.

It's clearly a transitional year, as the Hall cleans up past oversights in preparation for the upcoming avalanche of college radio/indie icons. Years after Ozzy used his last coherent sentences to lambast the Hall, Black Sabbath is in. Some have noted the lack of respect for metal on the Hall ballot. While Sabbath should be in, who, for the love of Satan, deserves to share the metal display? Deep Purple? Blue Oyster Cult? Dio? I don't know, kind of borderline, aren't they? The stage couldn't hold all of Purple's frontmen anyway.

Miles Davis isn't rock, Bitches Brew is just one album, but what the hell, he arguably has a place on the Mount Rushmore of American music. Put him in the Baseball Hall of Fame while you're at it. I'm a Blondie fan, and thus on-board. The Sex Pistols require no comment.

Jerry's toilet up for auction. Given his diet, that had to be a much-abused bathroom furnishing.

Smart man praises Loggins & Messina. Yes, it happens in America. Warning: you'll have to scroll.

Having an iPod is not enough.

Martha Stewart blockbuster holiday box features caroles, hymns, recipes. Forget Blackie Lawless; the real WASP is back!

Sunday News Wire

2005-11-27T06:00:00.000-06:00

Teen People and those Neo-Nazi cuties. If it wears nail polish and sings, it must be worthy of a profile in Teen People. But please, at the publicist's request, let's leave out the love songs to Rudolf Hess, the famed secretary for Mein Kampf who, in one of WWII's weirder moments—and that's saying a lot—parachuted into Scotland without the Fuhrer's orders to make peace with the British.

Lynx and Lamb Gaede are twin pop star-white supremacists, big in Idaho, and lookin' to break through to the Big Time. Long story short: after seeing a feature about the twins on Primetime, the edgy geniuses at Teen People decided to give some play to the girls. It got out, there was horror, and the magazine killed the piece. As one blogger succinctly put it: Black babies, both of them, by 19.

A New York Daily News editorial slapped down their stage mother thus:

It is only in the court of public opinion that Gaede can be held to account for polluting her daughters' little brains and starving them of a belief in human equality. Someday, they might well look back on her with horror. For now, she deserves a national shaming.

No argument, but the real issue here is that the story got so far through the Time, Inc. editorial machinery that the Teen People web site put up a teaser (since removed). And mind you , this wasn't an expose; in fact the story got attention because someone at the magazine told Frau Gaede that it would run without "certain words." That would be bummerish words like "hate" and "Nazi" and "supremacist."

A junior staffer is going to get canned over the promise. But, Jesus Christ, what SENIOR STAFFER okayed a feech on a neo-Nazi pop duo? The thriving "white nationalist" music scene deserves a look, but a fluff piece? What's next, the Cool Lifestyles of the Polygamy Girls story on living in the Utah town that throws out all the teen boys to reserve the new meat for the middle-aged men? Fashions of Suicide Bombers? Awesome Cannibal Side Dishes For Your Sleepover?

History-minded addendum: The white supremacist affection for Hess is truly odd, for here was the most hapless of the Nazi leaders, a prison buddy of Hitler's and by many accounts a repressed homosexual (oh, the sad irony). Maybe it is because of his long imprisonment, where he became simultaeously a neo-Nazi icon and a pity case. My theory is that it's easier to find rhymes for "Hess"—mess, oppress, wore a dress—than "Heydrich."

Michael Jackson releases anti-semitic rant in bid to become even more repulsive. It's working.

Chicago's Jeff Buckley tribute draws cultists, raves. A well-kept secret is out. The bummer: this place is three blocks from my home!

Milwaukee restaurant owner "Arnold" "Pat" Morita RIP; gave Anson Williams first break. Morita was also very funny during the early episodes of M*A*S*H. That is, the only period anyone on the show was funny.

Biggest LPs 100 years ago today

2005-11-23T07:00:00.000-06:00

George Will (spoken word)
"Airplanes: A French Boondoggle"

Bingham Sisters
"Opium Yum Yum"

Prof. Elias Johan Waynestutter
"Recording of Brawling Irishmen"

George Will (spoken word)
"Why Child Labor Is Good for Our Youth"

Enrico Caruso
"Live At Budokan"

Herbert Jefferson Waverly
"Done Killed All the Indians Rag"

George Will (spoken word)
"Women: Too Hysterical and Moody To Vote"

Wednesday news wire

2005-11-23T06:00:00.000-06:00

Hanson oppressed by The Man. When I first heard of this I slapped my head and thought, "The albino twin sons of Rick Nelson survived and want a comeback." Of course, that was Nelson, of "Love and Affection" fame. Wrong family, wrong era, wrong everything. The sibs in question are the "Mmm Bop" boys beloved of women now in their Twenties but, you got it, they want a comeback. The Man, unfortunately, does not take the platinum-selling band seriously. In response, Hanson has put out a documentary chronicling their frustrations and, you saw this coming, they've gone indie.

Thirty years after Born to Run, Jon Landau still insufferable. Fortunately, this article doesn't mention him. It's all over the genius of the concert DVD, though:

What's so great about it? Let's start with the hats.

Springsteen, the skinny, scraggly-bearded street gypsy... sports a Rastaman-style oversized wool cap to go with his gold-hoop earring and leather jacket.

His band mates Clarence Clemons, Roy Bittan, and Steve Van Zandt - now "Little," then "Miami" - go for a snazzier sartorial strategy. They're macked-out in broad-brimmed pimp hats - the latter two are in open-necked shirts, Saturday Night Fever-style, while the Big Man sports a white bow tie.

I was thinking the Boss stole the hat from Sly Stone, but Rastaman works, too.

Chris Whitley RIP. Shocker. Only 45 years old.

Move over, former paradigm: iTunes the seventh-leading music retailer. Finishes ahead of Tower and Borders. But Satan is still strong, for Wal-Mart remains No. 1.

Rundgren to join half of the Cars. Best-known member Ocasek is not interested; soundalike (but singer on their best songs) Benjamin Orr is deceased. With Paul Rodgers already scooped up by Queen, what's left but to get a semi-cultish idiosyncratic guy like Todd Rundgren to front your new wave oldies act before it moves into a third decade of defunctitude? In the story Rundgren hints he's a little sick of people who want a Utopia reunion. Todd, baby, that's not what this is about. Just tour by yourself, shit, you can play all the instruments, and you don't need to be covering "You Might Think" at your age, no one does—something Ocasek clearly understands. It's not that the Cars were bad; it's just that you really can't have a reunion without two of the main guys in the band. Even the drummer won't come back! Better that you entitle the show, Rundgren Sings the Hits of the Cars, and get Elliot Easton to play guitar while you wear big sunglasses. If you really want to get in the spirit of the band, bleed yourself of all charisma whatsoever. But when it comes down to it, come on, you're Todd Rundgren. If you really need to pay the bills, there are telethons. Let us help.

45s: Guilty pleasure Seventies super-hits

2005-11-21T05:00:00.000-06:00

"My Maria," by B.W. Stevenson

The few people who remember B.W. Stevenson mistakenly think he sang "Convoy." (That was C.W. McCall.) Depending on who you ask, "Buckwheat" Stevenson was either a bluesy rocker wrongly steered onto a country label or a minor figure in country music’s Outlaw movement, the loose alliance of independent and shaggy C&W legends like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. If the latter, Stevenson is so minor that the All Music Guide to Country doesn’t list him in its 500+ pages.

He was a hard-luck case. After paying the dues, Stevenson recorded "Shambala," a sure hit—but, unfortunately, for Three Dog Night. But he broke through in a far more charming way with "My Maria," two minutes-and-thirty seconds of pure gold. This countrified rocker shows off an excellent voice that moves from Hank Williams, Jr.-like depths to a near-yodel on the chorus. The Tex-Mex in the arrangement adds unexpected encouragement to shake some ass. I only list "My Maria" as an embarrassment because my enthusiasm for it leads me to make over-the-top statements on its behalf. I will control myself and just say it's a hell of a great 45.

"When Will I See You Again?," by the Three Degrees

The Three Degrees once appeared on Sanford and Son as the (Redd) foxxy vocal trio managed by Fred Sanford. How a Philly soul group got to Watts was left unexplained. Why anyone would chose a codger like Fred to oversee their business affairs stretches the bounds of dramatic license.

Though the group had minor hits, the Degrees got their big break thanks to Soul Train host Don Cornelius. When the World’s Greatest Voice asked Philly soul masterminds Gamble & Huff for a theme song, the result was the hit "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)," an early disco touchstone by MFSB with the Three Degrees lending vocals. Soon after the Three Degrees turned loose "When Will I See You Again" on a grateful radio audience. Atmospheric, and with a terrific lead vocal and multi-layered misty sea of the ooh/ahh we demand of vocal groups, it is instantly recognizable from the first note. A subdued and groovy organ—fighting through the inevitable strings—keeps us on-course for a big emotional finish. This is what ABBA might sound like if ABBA had soul, and I mean that as a compliment.

Bizarre addendum: Like many minor soul groups, the Three Degrees maintained their popularity in the United Kingdom long after fading in the U.S. In fact, the hits continued into the mid-1980s. So beloved were the Degrees that they were guests at the Princess Di-Prince Charles wedding.

"Silver, Blue and Gold," by Bad Company

A reader once asked why this blog is so negative. Was I the blogger who cannot love? I admit, I wondered over the answer. I solicited a suggestion for what I might do to begin to balance the scales. The suggestion: take on the challenge of praising a song by a band I constantly make fun of.

That brings us to Bad Company, the most successful of Paul Rodgers’ many projects and his karmic reward for turning down the chance to join the lengthy list of Deep Purple ex-vocalists. Being a Midwesterner, I have never lived out of range of at least two classic rock stations, and Bad Company defines the genre. (As the saying goes, it doesn’t have to be good to be a classic.) I heard "Silver, Blue and Gold" for years before I knew who did it. The song always sounded to me like watered-down Allman Brothers—I never bothered to investigate who or what that might be. I’m not proud of this, but I find the "Don’t forsake me ‘cause I love you" break hard to resist, possibly because it’s the only line in the song that isn’t a cliché. Well, almost. And it’s unlikely "My rainbow is overdue" will be repeated enough to become one.

Monday news wire

2005-11-21T04:00:00.000-06:00

Bono proclaims own immortality. A friend once perfectly summed up U2's Rattle and Hum: "They're assholes, but they know they're assholes. They revel in it!" Indeed. Sometimes, in my generous moments, I have wondered if that hasn't been an ongoing tongue-in-cheek act, because I can't quite believe Bono would say this 100%seriously:

The Irish rocker also predicted that his music will still be around in 100 years, explaining that his songs occupy "an emotional terrain that didn't exist before our group did."

Mind you, I hope he's serious, because such a boldly expressed deficit in humility would leave me gasping in laughter. While I appreciate his charity work—sharing a table with Jesse Helms can't be easy if you have all your chromosomes—and have come to feel awe for the band's demolition of their exhausted trademark sound with Achtung Baby, I continued to laugh at Bono as the greatest Rock Star of our time, even as I suspect that underneath he is dicking with me.

Note, I didn't say best singer, best frontman, best nothin' musical. But as a celebrity, he embraces the Rock Star image so totally it almost has to be self-caricature. Doesn't it? Charity work, star-fucking, hiding Salman Rushdie (himself a caricature of an Important Writer), turning up at every Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame function including the changing of the urinal cakes—truly, Bono leaves no cliché untouched. To paraphrase the Emperor Palpatine, we will watch his career with interest.

Glitter resurfaces, seems to still be disgusting. "Rock and Roll Part II" is a malignant enough legacy, but word out of Vietnam is that Gary Glitter has allegedly continued his pedophilic tour of the developing world. If found guilty of rape, he faces long years in Vietnam's no-doubt progressive prison system or even the death penalty.

Capitalist system, crazy collector says early Zimmerman poetry is worth $78,000. Like any of us want our college poetry unearthed.

Link Wray and the Springsteen connection.

45s: Three the hard way

2005-11-11T23:00:00.000-06:00

The superfluous third greatest hits collection is almost by definition a sign your career is over, for how many artists can keep the hits comin’—or the lungs breathin’—past a Volume Two?

Before going on, let’s first define "greatest hits collection" by the process of elimination. We don’t mean the unending repackaging of greatest hits in the indiscriminate bargain-basement found-it-at-a-truck-stop way record companies do ill to the likes of, say, George Jones or Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Nor do we mean Very Best or Essentials collections. Nor do we mean the cynical rifling of the same body of songs for almost-yearly "new" hits discs, a habit pushed beyond good taste by the Who and John Lennon’s widow.

In other words, the greatest hits disc we refer to is official and multi-million-selling. In the case of the Eagles (Volume One, or the Abstract Skull Album), it is the best-selling album of all time.

Those artists venturing beyond the numbers used in binary language employ certain ingredients in the recipe. Take Billy Joel. He uses as a centerpiece a freakish late-career hit—"We Didn’t Start the Fire"—then mixes in a couple of songs missed in previous collections—"Keeping the Faith" and "An Innocent Man"—and fills it out with tunes that were only hits in the most generous application of that abused adjective. Of course, there’s also a Dylan cover. That’s a must.

Elton John, the personification of shamelessness, has also scored the hat trick. To his credit, though not to the public’s, his Volume Three does contain more hits than filler. Not blockbusters, but plenty of recognizable Eighties fare like "Sad Songs" and "Nikita," along with "Mama Can’t Buy You Love," the last coke-fueled trickle of his earlier glory days. No Dylan, but then, no tributes to Princess Di, either.

Speaking of Dylan, he covers himself gratuitously on his own Volume Three. While he undercuts my thesis by including stone-cold classics like "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Hurricane," he is a special case, and not a hitmeister in the conventional sense, anyway. Not to be outdone, however, Dylan does fulfill one of a Volume Three’s classic criteria: the new, unreleased song! (exclamation point not mine). Yeah, like there’s not enough unreleased Dylan floating around.

Others, in brief….

Madonna’s Volume Two substitutes for a Three because (1) it includes her Evita era, and show tunes are a sure sign your career is finished; and (2) she released one of the truly great greatest hits albums and should be called out for tampering with perfection. "Ray of Light" could have waited until the two-disc Essentials album…. It’s astonishing the Beach Boys made it past a Volume One, let alone to a third disc covering their ill-fated Brother label. Join them on a rudderless journey* beginning after Brian vanished into the sandbox and ending with the band’s sad elevation to oldies act and ego-gratification vehicle for Mike Love.… Manilow? That one word says it all.… Then there's John Denver, with the inevitable Placido Domingo providing the Grandstand Duet endemic in the Volume Three genre…. We do not insult Conway Twitty on this site—well, except for his perm. While any artist should retire after their Greatest Hits Volume Three, Twitty showed true class by dying…. Please welcome George Michael and Elton John pinch-hitting on Queen’s baffling third package. Though the Elton-Axl Rose duet might've redeemed it...
_____

* A trustworthy friend swears to me some of the Brother stuff is good. If true, a collection of it sounds like a wiser investment than finding all the albums. Any disc with "Sail On, Sailor" cannot completely suck.

This post is an entry in the series Helpful Signs Your Career Is Over. The first is here.

Off-topic weekend post

2005-11-11T10:00:00.000-06:00

John Fowles, a "cantankerous man of letters," died November 5, at age 79. If asked to come up with a list of, say, twenty favorite novels, not that anyone will ever do so, I can think of only two writers with a chance at placing two books: Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, and Fowles.

Many readers rightly beware the description "postmodern novel." Fowles, if he did nothing else, proved such a novel could be actually readable by writing The French Lieutenant's Woman, a dandy of a book. Obsessive love, Victorian Era naturalists, out-of-nowhere cameos by famous poets, a daring conclusion—that's entertainment, and I am not being ironic in the least. As for The Magus, it remains, ten years after, one of the most amazing reading experiences of my life. I've pondered that book for hours, but have not picked it up again for fear of corrupting my intitial dizzied, awestruck reactions. Let me add I don't pretend to have understood more than about fifteen percent of it. I look forward to a re-reading later in life to see if I can add a few percentage points more.

In short: The French Lieutenant's Woman is readable and enjoyable; The Magus is more cryptic, quite a project, actually, but a hell of a mind-fuck, too, and the main character is a cad, always an enjoyable scenario. Yes, Fowles is now a dead white guy. But some of them, even a few of the postmodernists, knew how to write.

Stop your sobbing

2005-11-10T20:00:00.000-06:00

Massive computer problems in the process of being solved.

Gord's watery gold

2005-11-10T19:00:00.000-06:00

We ring the bell twenty-nine times for this, the anniversary of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot, of course, immortalized the event in one of the most unusual songs to ever hit the Top Ten, a epic fourteen verse motha that pays attention to factual detail and should not be attempted by anyone with respirtory problems. I am not proud of this lapse in historical memory, but for years I thought the song, in the great folkie tradition, had to do with some long-ago event. I don't know what, the expulsion from Arcadia or the War of 1812, at any rate, something pre-Civil War. I was shocked to learn shipwrecks, for God's sake, still took place as late as the 1970s. Hurricane westwind or no, the Great Lakes form a decidedly unromantic group of waters, too unromantic for a Lightfoot song, certainly, and I say this as someone who lives about two football fields from her lapping and polluted shores.

Then again, if we're still dealing with pirates, there's gonna be shipwrecks. By the way, pirates--pretty cool. Sonic weapons--awesome! I don't want many jobs on the cruise ship, but gimme the chance to blast nogoodniks with a concentrated beam of, what, Jackson Browne? Mariah Carey? Liz Phair? Does Cheney know about this thing?

Off-topic midweek post

2005-11-03T07:00:00.000-06:00

Discussed: changes that occur when you drink two fertility-enhancing glasses-a-day of lukewarm Chinese herbs with the taste and the consistency of clay.

The toilet silts up after urination.

My yang is raging.

I now boast 1.2 billion sperm, but virtually all of them are male.

Good side effect: every morning I experience Coleridge’s hallucination of Kublai Khan. Bad side effect: dry mouth.

The city keeps tearing down my yurt.

Lately I have the unwise urge to discuss concubines with my wife.

Harmony with the universe? Really dull.

I say things like "Doesn’t Yao Ming look like a Chinese version of Drago from Rocky IV?" and other Chinese-themed statements that are best kept to myself.

I’m literally shitting bricks. Upside: I've begun to carve The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Yesterday I put an ad on Craigslist entitled "Wanted: Eunuch Manservant."