I have the UK version of this just about perfect pop song, so perfect it reached No. 56 on the Billboard charts, down in the basement. It has the little hole, not the big one US 45s have, and a picture sleeve. A reminder that the first punk explosion was followed by a wave of jangly power pop. Or maybe they were happening at the same time. Starry Eyes landed in 1978. It was the Records’ only hit as a band. They did contribute a hit to the Searchers’ 1979 comeback.
This is the worst song on Who’s Next, the Who’s fifth studio album and the one they were touring behind when I saw them live the only time, in Forest Hills at the tennis stadium on July 29, 1971, about a month before the album was released. The opening band that night was Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. Voules voux avec moi!
I bring it up because I heard Baba O’Reilly today, and was reminded just how perfect this elpee was. The Soong is Over is the worst of it, by a long shot. I can live with that, something has to come last.
I really don’t talk about The Hydromatics nearly enough on this blog. Listened them on the way to church this morning, which often requires a Hydromatics-like CD so I can manage to arrive only 10 minutes late instead of worse since I live 35 minutes away from the church.
Mighty Hellacopter guitarist/vocalist Nicke Andersson drums in this band and keeps his mouth shut for the most part, which is how Peter would have it. Love the way the verse vocal grinds against the instrumental part, which just keeps chugging along on its own.
Parts Unknown is one of those albums that everyone should know, but no one does. I have a bunch of those.
I’m moved to defend this one by my Remnant compatriot Gene, who ripped it a new one earlier today.
I think Gene is totally wrong. This is the last song credited to the Beatles to attain No. 1. It is a reminder that celebrity had a lot to do with the band’s dissolution, as did Yoko and Linda.
Whatever. I love this song, an early pop song about how being a pop star isn’t always excellent. That’s meta, but prescient, too. And it bops and hops away.
I guess if you hate Yoko this tune is a challenge, but in the history of the Beatles this is the final stab at collective myth making. And that myth making was from the heart.
Only the world was watching.
This song is not on any regular Elvis Costello album. The first time I heard it was at a friend of my girlfriend’s house somewhere in Connecticut, on a record I was embarrassed I didn’t know existed, a bootleg, and it made a mighty impression. I played it over and over and over that day, and have ever since. When you watch recent live versions you can see how a performer can lose the meaning of the song. But this original is one of the great songs about architecture.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote a long story for the New York Times Magazine published April 13 of this year, called the Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, about looking for two women who recorded a handful of songs in 1931 (or maybe 1930) that still resonate today, but whose biographies have been lost. Sullivan first learned about them in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about blues enthusiast and cartoonist, R. Crumb.
It is an oddly shaped bit of writing, partly because it starts out describing a void (the missing women), then floats through the world of serious blues enthusiasts, before actually getting into the actual story. These researchers have scoured the planet for old 78 recordings, and traveled from town to town trying to document the lives of the musicians who played this music locally but never came to national attention.
One unlikely hero in the story is Paramount Records, a large record company which was run by business folks, not enthusiasts. Untethered from aesthetic judgment, Paramount cut a wide swath through the south, recording everyone they could get their hands on, thus creating a sizeable library of the sounds of the time that would otherwise have been lost. It was in this sweep that they found Geeshie and Elvie, two blues guitar playing singers, and brought them to a recording studio outside of Milwaukee for their only recording session every.
Using material from perhaps our most tireless blues researcher, Mack McCormick, and aided by a young woman named Caitlin Rose Love, who hoped to spend her days working with McCormick, but didn’t, Sullivan gives shape to a vast and ungainly subculture, the art that spawned it, and some very particular stories about the blues life, the South and the ways history is filtered, found and sometimes lost.
You can play the music while reading the piece, but here’s Geeshie Wiley’s amazing Last Kind Words Blues.
Here’s the video:
This is one of the pop machine’s weirdest songs. And clearly the Kinks did not embrace the pop machine, though they took the money.
Any way, give me pop languor and I’m all in.
This song, like many Kinks songs, lay in the middle of English-y vaudeville shtick, which seems cheap. And at the same time, they hit the nail on the head, socialwise and hookwise and humorwise, which is one reason why they endure.
My memory is there was a lot of hoopla when Johnny Winter’s eponymous elpee was released in 1969. I think he had signed a big contract and of course there was the whole albino thing, but what I remember most was falling in love with the sound of Winter’s guitar playing and voice, and the variety of arrangements on the record, jumping from Chicago to the Delta to Texas and back north again. I didn’t know that much about the blues then, but this was a revival record that satisfied in a wholly American and authentic way.
As I learned more, listening to more of the original players, I came to admire this record even more. There was nothing wrong with the Yardbirds and John Mayall, the Stones and Led Zeppelin, nothing wrong at all, but they sounded mediated in a way that this record doesn’t.
And on an autobiographical note, there was the morning when a gang of housepainters were working out in the hallway when I woke up. College kids from Stony Brook University, which was nearby. painting our house. I woke up and hit the play button on my stereo and the first bits of this tune growled out, and the boys raved. There was nothing cooler for an eighth grader to have a bunch of college kids digging your style.
As Winter moved to more popular stuff, along with his brother, I lost touch with Johnny and Edgar except on pop radio. But this record did the trick, from start to finish, getting me into the Blues for real
