A friend from Iowa sent this oldie rocker.
Which led to this oldie.
Onomatopoeia Twins
A friend from Iowa sent this oldie rocker.
Which led to this oldie.
Author Archives: peter
The Tar Babies: A Sampler
The guitarist from the Tar Babies, Bucky Pope, has a new album out with a band called Negative Example. Ben Ratliff tells me so in the NY Times. He calls Pope “one of the great non virtuosic guitarists of the era.”
Here’s a Tar Babies song, Rockhead.
Here’s another tune.
Well, actually, it’s hard to tell who are Tar Babies and who are other bands called Tar Babies. But this is their first release, a 12″ put together from sessions produced by Butch Vig and Bob Mould. It’s a much heavier headbanging sound than the funk-inflected tunes above.
Tar Babies were from Madison Wisconsin in the 1980s. They reformed in the 90s for an elpee, and then played some more in the Aughts as the Bar Tabbies.
The only Negative Example album I could find on YouTube was this cover of the Beach Boys Disney Girls.
Signe Toly Anderson Died the Same Day as Paul Kantner
The chick singer on the first Jefferson Airplane album, Signe Toly Anderson, died the same day as Paul Kanter.
ABC News has a nice story about her. She left the band because it was too hard to tour with a baby, and she had a baby.
Grace Slick joined the band and brought fire and confrontation and hit songs.
But Anderson sung on this one from Takes Off!
Mastodon, Blood and Thunder
I don’t listen to that much metal, of any type. It would have suited my 15 year old head, but didn’t exist them (as far as I knew). Deep Purple filled that space a year or two later.
So, I saw the movie the Big Short today. It’s a fun and energetic telling of the story of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown, with goofy period costumes (a la American Hustle), and lots of music, a la Scorcese and his imitators.
It also has Christian Bale playing an autistic genius MD with a thirst for metal. And a need to drum when things go bad. Almost all the writing and acting in the movie is on the mark, but Bale (as he often does) is above and beyond, not only chewing the scenery but making you (me) believe it needs to be chewed. That is, unostentatious ostentation.
I don’t listen to much metal, but one of the metal bands I like is called Mastodon, and they’re in the movie. Which is a good excuse to revisit this one. (And go see the movie. It is actually fun, and if you aren’t mad about the financial industry and government, you should be, with blood and thunder!)
Photos by Chris Stein
A nice set of pictures of Debbie Harry taken by Chris Stein can be found here at Slate. Here’s a detail from the photo that makes me want to check out the whole book:
Paul Kantner Has Died.
Jefferson Airplane were a giant San Francisco band, and Paul Kantner had a lot to do with that, but when I just read that he’d died today, I thought of this song.
It’s from an album by Paul Kantner, branded as Jefferson Starship called Blows Against the Empire. As an idealist 17 year old with a bent to sci fi it hit pretty much every beat in my book. Well, except for the rock one.
But the album has it’s rock-ish moments, too.
But the song I like best is the folkiest, written by Rosalie Sorrells.
In any case, Paul Kantner was a nexus for all the psychedelic San Francisco musicians, who collaborated on this album, and many other projects, that were made as art and agitprop rather than commerce. Blows Against the Empire is the one project of his that captured me. You can hear the whole thing here.
He did not have anything to do with We Built This City. RIP.
Lauryn Hill, Lost Ones
Everytime I hear news about Guantanamo I think about the song Guantanamera, which Lauryn Hill’s sings on a Fugee’s elpee.
But when I think about Lauryn Hill I think of this song, the first track (apart from the silly skit tracks–whose idea was that?) on her great album (if you get rid of the skit tracks, which you can do) The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
I also think about taking my daughter to the Brooklyn Museum when she was three or so, to a show about rock ‘n’ roll, and she toddled through the exhibit and hugged Fugee Wyclef Jean’s Fender, which caused some serious grief among the guards. Hey, it’s their jobs and rightfully so. To this day she has not hugged another guitar in a museum, but she’s started to work out the chords on our electric.
Stranger In My Own Home Town
Some years ago I stumbled across a great album called Poet of the Blues
Mayfield should be most famous as the writer of the massive Ray Charles hit song, “Hit the Road Jack,” but that song isn’t on Poet of the Blues. Charles signed him to Tangerine Records, where he wrote other hits for Ray, and this song, which was made a hit by Elvis Presley in 1970, on his Back in Memphis elpee.
I didn’t know about this song until today, since it also is not on Poet of the Blues, and I have to say that if I’d only heard the Presley version I would probably wouldn’t have wondered about who wrote the song. It sounds like one of those big star blues jams, fun and all, but without a signature.
But signature is what Percy Mayfield had, always, and especially when he sang. Here’s his version of Stranger in My Own Home Town, which is deeply satisfying, but makes me want to hear Jerry Lee Lewis’s version, too.
Josh and Iggy Riff on Colbert
Gardenia.
News: Josh Homme and Iggy Pop Have an Album!
It’s coming out in March!
You can read about it here. I know you want to.