I’ve been listening to the album that takes its title from this song a lot, for months. It is a great elpee, which we’ll have to commune with later. The album doesn’t seem to be streaming, but there is this live version of this dark and resonant song. Ignore the hair, dig the tune.
Friend of the remnants and WFUV DJ Evan Davies posted tonight somewhere that he’s never played this fluffy rocker on his show. And now he has.
Shame he went Scientology, it seems, but this moment is pretty fine.
https://youtu.be/IQfwgzoiq4c
I learned about Louis Cole today. He’s a drummer, and a singer, and apparently a night owl who can splay with the best of them.
I’ve got no argument this is great in any genre I know, but I’m old and for new music this seems awfully personal, catchy, not derivative, and maybe too slick.
Think Beck’s Midnite Vultures.
A different kind of blue-eyed soul.
A personal essay by a Rolling Stone writer about his band needing a new name, featuring Jello Biafra a little, and a lot of really bad band names. Though I like Smash 45s. Silly fun to read.
He’s pissed. The sound isn’t great, but the spirt is clear.
Here’s the original version. Better sound, and you can get the lyrics if you click through YouTube.
Looking at the picture sleeve, which I think I have a version of, the A-side was I Want You Back. How about that cover?
I saw this new film last week with friends. None of us knew much about the film, it had just opened, but it was Nico, about whom good books have been written, and who sang three songs on the first Velvet Underground album (the banana one). We knew that Lou Reed hated her, that Andy Warhol added her to his house band perversely, and our favorite song of hers was a cover of Jackson Browne’s melancholy These Days. Rael thought the trailer was a stinker.
But the movie was very good. Most notably, Trine Dyrholm acts and sings as if she’s living the part of the mordant junkie who can’t help but talk about how she feels and why she lives. But the movie makes excellent narrative choices that pile up, like leading with Nico’s These Days, and then moving on to her much broader music made in an atmosphere of chaos and imprecision.
This review on Slate by Carl Wilson does a good job of explaining the film, and puts it into the context of many other movie bio pix that don’t follow the form of Ray and Walk the Line. Read that, see the movie, and I’ll leave you with this. Not a spoiler, but a game changer in the film’s narrative, surprisingly enough.
I think the first four Graham Parker albums are first rate. He made two monumental R+B elpees with the great Rumour, and Squeezing Out Sparks is tuff New Wave when that had to be the choice (if you wanted be heard).
The Real Macaw was the point of my departure. Not because the songs aren’t strong, but at some point a songwriter’s best stuff is used up.
But listening to this all these years later, this is an ambitiously universal song about love and how those you love will fuck you over. And you have to be brave if you want to have anything. Too long, for sure, but it eclipses all sorts of shorter tunes that ask much less of us.
I like it, but all I want to say is listen to Heat Treatment and Howlin’ Wind. Turn it up loud. It is rarely better.
I like this song. Courtney gets didactic, which I don’t like. And she doesn’t do a great job of pronouncing the name Syracuse.
So, didactic means calling out city planning, which is a topic worth discussing.
Anyway, I keep playing it. Catchy.
