Steve Moyer named Rock Remnants. Our talks were beer besotted nights, but our confluence was Rock Remnants.
The band Steve was in, Follow Fashion Monkeys, were huge in their local Lehigh Valley environment, and are gradually emerging as the history of Lehigh Valley hardcore emerges.
This band pushed their way to attention and success with rigorous playing and intelligence and that ineffable something more than striking songwriting, incisive propulsive guitar, and a killer rhythm section, something Andy Gill’s obits are calling genius. I might say talent, but whatever. This is their first single.
Read a bit about them in the upcoming shows list, and played their 2019 record. Good stuff. I won’t say this is the best, but it captures what they’re doing, a rock-soul mix that’s pretty irresistible because, songs are good.
Singer Steve Martin Caro has passed. Read an obit.
I spent a couple of days in Miami back in the 70s with a friend, visiting a woman who said this song was written about her. I had my first Cuban sandwich that week, too.
I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t the Lefte Banke?
EDIT: This Wikipedia entry suggests my friend’s friend wasn’t being truthful. Or was mistaken.
The first one is I’m a King Bee, so there are some surprises. This isn’t the usual countdown, these are faves, with a surprising number from Their Satanic Majesties Request. I mean, an appropriate number. Enjoy.
Neil Peart, who wrote the lyrics for this one plays drums, too, died this week. This is probably Rush’s biggest hit, and I can’t say I know them well enough to get subtle. But he was a giant.
There is this place in Soho, in New York City, that has more than three million vinyl records for reference by researchers and movie studios and whatever. Really.
They’re being priced out because it’s valuable space and old records aren’t returning the $ per square foot that’s possible.
So, the Times wrote about this.
Good, interesting story. But here’s the deal. Why is this massive collection housed in NYC, where rents are big. That’s legacy thinking. My advice, send the albums to Pennsylvania somewhere, or the Catskills, and have a smaller public facing NYC exhibition space to draw folks in.
Everything worthwhile doesn’t have to be huge. It just needs enough support to sustain.
And since Mr. George built a little bit of his fortune on records, here’s a great one (though not rock):
I wrote about Ellen Foley’s very excellent Spirit of St. Louis, an album of her boyfriend Mick Jones’s songs, some written with Joe Strummer. And most of it played by the Clash as her backing band. Some will disagree about the excellent part.
Another odd collection is Wendy James’s debut elpee, Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears, from 1993. James was the singer in a new wavey band called Transvision Vamp that I don’t really know. After that band broke up she somehow ended up recording a solo elpee with all the songs written by Elvis Costello, some with his then wife Cait O’Riordan. Like Spirit of St. Louis, this is odd music that veers from punky riffs, to rock, to artsy new wave, and like Spirit of St. Louis, I find it very captivating.
London’s Brilliant, like many of the songs, appears to be self-referential, a song for James to sing that also describes her place in the rock world at the time the record was made. It is one of those co-written by O’Riordan. And perhaps I should warn you that it totally cops (and admits to copping) the guitar riff of Clash City Rockers.
