Category Archives: best

The Perfect Christmas Song.

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I posted this one last year. I think it may have come out last year, which would have made it contemporaneous. Then.

This year it is history, but the gods honest truth is that on this Christmas morning this song once again sums up for me my feelings about life and holiday and family and fucking friends and family dying of cancer and thankfully sometimes miraculously surviving, in what seems to me an incredibly catchy and lucid and honest way.

Your mileage may vary, but for me Tracy Thorn nails it, and makes me grieve with joy. What could be more generous and wiser than that?

Night Music: Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues”

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In my high school years, and into college, my band was Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. They were a country band that played the old style, no wimpy folk music here, and featured the Commander as big personality and boogie king, Bill Kirchen as most excellent rockabilly guitar, Andy Stein on the fiddle (one I touched after a show at Long Island University), the incomparable Bobby Black on pedal steel, and Billy C. Farlow as rockabilly vocal king.

The band’s roots were in Ann Arbor, though they ended up in San Francisco. But this clip is from a concert to support White Panthers leader John Sinclair, who was doing hard time for holding two joints when he wasn’t managing the MC5. The point was that drug laws were being used to muzzle political dissent.

The MC5, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bob Seger, and Alan Ginsberg, and many others, performed at this show.

I didn’t know this clip until today. For me this band is the exemplar, the ultimate. And this is the perfect weepy country song.

This is the elpee version. Better mixed and performed. Perfect.

Night Music: Warren Zevon, “Accidentally Like a Martyr”

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It’s Hall of Fame time and yesterday I signed up for Facebook group trying to elect Warren Zevon into the RnRHoF.

Which is stupid. It’s stupid to worry about who is in any Hall of Fame, and the RnRHoF is particularly silly.

But I’m in favor of Warren Zevon becoming immortal.

Oh, he’s dead? Well fuck that then.

This is a great song. It may be a perfect song. Even though it definitely qualifies as LA Rock. Woah!

Late Night Music: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, “Bad Reputation”

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I know we had some Bad Reputation chatter here recently, but I’d never seen this video until tonight.

It’s not a great video, but it does take on EMI and Virgin, the way the Sex Pistols did. What’s more important is that this is a fantastic song, burnished in my head from watching Freaks and Geeks (you should!).

Breakfast Blend: Wild Tchoupitoulas

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Lawr’s post about the Neville Brothers reminded me of a great show I saw at the Bottom Line in NYC some 30+ years ago. The draw was the Wild Tchoupitoulas, a band of Mardi Gras paraders who made a stomping rocking record of parade chants that seemed, despite their lavish costumes, more organic and rocking than anthropological.

It was a show that had the whole club up on its feet, dancing in the aisles, strictly against NYC cabaret laws. Dancing against the law! Powerful stuff, like Footloose!

What I didn’t understand at the time was that not only was the Wild Tchoupitoulas’s band the venerable New Orleans group, the Meters, but the band’s album was the launching point for the Neville Brothers band, who were the opening act that night. Dressed up in parade costumes, who knew?

I only put this together because a few years ago I went to see the Nevilles, who still perform a fine set of NO funk, too polished because that’s what the popular ear wants. And they talked about getting together 30 years earlier, which is when I’d first seen them at the Bottom Line, at which point they seemed like grizzled vets.

In part, because some of them were.

But the seeds of the Nevilles were born in the Meters, who included Art and Cyrille. Good god.

Breakfast Blend: Elvis Costello on Letterman 1982

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The Attractions were touring supporting Imperial Bedroom, the album that Columbia promoted with the headline, Masterpiece?

I saw the band on the pier by the Intrepid, and then got a call from my friend Robin. Her neighbor was a writer on the Letterman show, and she had tickets to see them in the studio on Letterman’s show. We went. You can see them here. Thanks Robin.

The reason I landed on this is I’ve been playing that album a lot lately. I hadn’t revisited it for years, partly because of that Masterpiece? dodge. The weird overselling and the record’s effete literary musicality caused a problem. You can’t say you love this record without saying you’re some king of fancy boy. Unless you’re brave.

I love this record. The Attractions were a fantastic band, and the songs and arrangements on this elpee push them to create lively melodic music that can only, sometimes, be called Beatles-esque.

But the record really doesn’t rely on pretension. This isn’t XTC. There’s lots of air and delicious melody in the arrangements. Beatles engineer Geoff Emmerich produces this one, and the sound is precise and rich, full of detail, but each layer adds nuance, not complexity. This is art rock that is art, but doesn’t sacrifice the straight forward perspective of rock, even if the tunes mostly rock only in spurts.

And then there are Costello’s words. He’s a writer of too many words, sometimes, but when they’re pared back, as they actually often are, especially on Imperial Bedroom, he’s also a writer of uncompromising personal directness and vividness. The two songs on this Letterman clip are lyrically bold and personally revealing.

And this live version of Beyond Belief shows the rock heart at the core of Imperial Bedroom.