For weeks I had a blown speaker. At first I was busy, then I was lazy, then I started digging on Roxy with a single channel, and otherwise hearing little things I had missed in songs I knew very well. You should try it with Roxy, or with one of the great dense production albums like Exile or Layla or – check it out – Cry of Love. Hendrix ain’t on youtube except for live stuff (some of which is great), and I hope that forces everybody who doesn’t own it to buy that album. I think it’s his best, which ain’t saying much unless you go for that oh wow doodling that stops all his other albums in their tracks. Makes me wanna drop Orange Sunshine into my eyes and become a strobe.

So finally I broke down and bought new ones. Actually, my sweet baby bought ’em for me today. Vic thinks of everything and makes me do things I like. So I hauled the box down to my cave and spent my usual befuddled half-hour trying to assemble the wires and plot an installing strategy. Detatching the old stuff proved impossible withour a forklift – cables running behind my massive desk-bookshelf-table-for-four – so I had to cut the wires.

The key new piece is a subwoofer. That threw me. I know mono and stereo and even remember quadraphonic but three speakers is new to me. When I hear subwoofers on the street I always have to take a shit – there’s the generation gap right there – but I have to admit the setup sounds great. We’ll see if I make it to the bathroom tomorrow morning.

Jimi live before he began indulging himself:

When rocknroll started selling in the mid-50s, there were lots of head-scratching media pieces. There was one interview with the perpetually smiling Fats Domino, who said, “What they call rocknroll, I been playing in New Orleans for 15 years.” And he was. He had 11 Top 10 singles when the competition was a lot stiffer (not that there wasn’t ALWAYS plenty of shit on the radio). All of them are at least fun, some are great. If this thing lets me post my two faves here goes. You could hardly imagine a simpler song than “My Girl Josephine,” which proves everything.

This one I like just as much. That rocking swing thing will never die.

He made people happy. You can’t have a better tombstone than that. RIP

I have to admit that I’ve never heard the last “Clash” album. Without Mick Jones they aren’t and can’t be The Clash and Strummer had some nerve pretending otherwise.

This Bill Wyman guy amazes me. How can anyone be so knowledgable and so clueless at the same time? Of course a lot of this has to be pure opinion, but I think the story of this band and therefore their best songs is simple: they started, they had talent, they developed their abilities to the fullest as much or more than any other rocknroll band ever, and they declined. But at least they declined experimenting rather than repeating themselves, musically anyway. As for the lyrics, the politics that began so refreshingly honest quickly devolved into boilerplate leftism. But even in decline they came up with a few more great songs.

To me it is completely and utterly obvious that the best Clash song is Complete Control.

I’m a fool for these riffs and this song. When I saw them they weren’t so good, or rather they were good when they actually played but spent too much time cheerleading the crowd, or trying to. Don’t tell me to clap my hands and stomp my feet, make me clap my hands and stomp my feet. Like this, and may I say “look out.”

Another cover, a song I wanted to do for decades. I was in a short-lived band called the Femme Fatales in 1981-82, with three girl singers fronting a hard pop/punk band. We played one gig, at CB’s, right after Christmas. I had a cassette off the board that was a remarkable document. The band was nails – me on guitar, Johnny Er on bass, the great Nicky D’Amico on drums and Andy Towns on keyboard and writing the songs. The girls sounded great at practice but on stage they couldn’t hear themselves and were awful. I had no idea. It was always really hard to hear the vocals on that stage, even close to the monitors which I was not. All I knew at first was that the band was nails and that the audience reaction was tepid. About three songs in I figured it out. We were just too loud, which was always the problem with girl singers in rocknroll bands: unless they screamed they couldn’t be heard above the volume. That was then, now it’s a piece of cake with technology. But the band broke up in acrimony right then, too bad because we had another gig a week later at the Left Bank in Mt. Vernon. Which we played with me and Andy singing. I had a tape of that too which is long gone, and I was eager to keep going as we were. but Johnny Er was brought really down cuz he had high hopes for the original lineup, and because he wanted to play guitar.

Anyway, I was trying to talk the Femme Fatales into doing this tune, which I always thought was just begging to be punked up. And finally I got my chance. It was recorded a couple of weeks ago but I accidentally posted the rough mix instead of the final mix. So here it is done as well as I can do it. Lead vocals Cecilia Webber, backups by Claire Webber and Nikki Bechtold, drums by the great Bill Stevenson, bass by Chris Beeble who also twirled the dials, guitars by me. Needless to say, turn it up.

https://girlsnextdoor.bandcamp.com/