It is hard to appreciate just how on top of the Remnants Peter is till he leaves for a few days.
Meaning guilt is enough of an impetus for Steve and me to acknowledge the void, and to try and fill it up a tad.
So, I thought I would turn to a band I really have loved over their career, who have a great body of work, and yet who have barely merited a whisper in Remnantland.
I was a fan with my first listen to Radio Free Europe, and with their third album and the song Fall on Me the issue of buying their next disc sight unseen was beyond settled.
I do have all their albums, and I think I put their brilliant Automatic for the People on my essential 30 or 50 or however many albums we listed a few years back.
For a sample, I picked a rocker from the great Monster album, a song fostered by a news miscue elicited by Dan Rather, but not meant to be heard by the viewing public when he asked “What’s the frequency Kenneth”, ostensibly of the sound guy on the news show. This is kind of a fun live version, with a couple of different performances spliced together.
For a second piece, a live treatment of the beautiful Man on the Moon that concludes said Automatic for the People as perfectly as does The End wind up Abbey Road.
I think of this song a lot, and that’s n0t a gimmick.
I’ve been reading the novel My Struggle, and the fictional young Karl Ove Knaussgard (not the writer, who shares his lead character’s name), is left alone for the weekend by his father. The year is 1985. On the first night alone he eats a lot of shrimp, drinks some beers, and then walks the street of his town listening to Iggy’s Lust for Life and one of the later Roxy Music albums on his Walkman. He marvels that with the music filling his head the sights he sees, the people working in stores and driving in cars, seem to be in an entirely different world than the one he’s living in. Later on that night, after perhaps a few too many more beers, he falls in the love in an earthshaking way with Hanne, a Christian girl who says she cannot fall in love with him. It is one of the three or four real loves, he recognizes, that he will have in his life.
The novel I cannot recommend highly enough. The song is a classic, but one that has become a little bit like wallpaper. Is it a car commercial? Or from a hip film? Or from a not so hip film? This is a song that has been iconized and exploited beyond redemption. But if you can cut through all that and turn it up, you will be awed. (This clip has the wackly poetic lyrics, too, which are a nice reminder of how loopy a great song can be. Just like hypnotizing chickens.)
I want to write a big article on some great rock oral histories, but I forget how to post pictures. Ah well. Maybe someday.
Got a new used car a little over a week ago and it has the best car stereo system I’ve ever owned, featuring a Rockford Fosgate sub. (Remember when we were young and up on high-end stereo equipment?)
Cranked the criminally underrated Masters of Reality debut album (in my Top 10 – I forget where) and this one really hit me. Just a crunching killer of a riff. The dated 80’s glam women in the video are amusing too.
More former Dil Tony Kinman from the really good read Left Of The Dial:
“I would not compare the Ramones album to what I consider the single greatest moment of rock ‘n roll history. It’s in Little Richard’s recording of Lucille. Little Richard is screaming so loud that he overdrives his mic. On the hit version, there’s actually distortion recorded on that. I don’t care if you are even recording for a shitty indie punk rock label. Punk rockers would not let that happen, nowadays. That was a major hit song by a major hit performer of the time. I am speechless just thinking about it. To me, that is the single greatest moment because of what it is, which is incredible, how it sounds is great, and because of the context. He’s overdriving the mic, but the way things were back then was, ‘C’mon Richard, that sounds good enough. We’re done here. Let’s go, man, I’m thirsty, or whatever, or we better get to the gig.’ The era, the primitive rock era and the way those guys worked back then. . .And to this day, that song still has more truly astonishing passion and emotion in it, real terrible energy in it, than anything that has come since.”
I can’t hear distortion in this, but I think I know what he means. Maybe it’s shitty youtube or something. I especially like watching the drummer here. He amuses me:
Then, it occurred to me that Little Richard reminded me a lot of a character out of my childhood. Cesar Romero’s Joker (always will be my favorite Joker). The wild eyes, the hair, the maniacal smile. If Romero’s Joker wasn’t at least partially influenced by Little Richard, it’s a helluva coincidence. Even the moustache (which I always loved that Romero kept even under the Joker makeup).
The Biletones have had as busy a summer–one that has compounded just how crazy my day job has been–playing no fewer than five gigs since June, with one more benefit ahead mid-October.
Demanding or not, it is big fun, not just playing, but playing live is among the greatest feelings I have experienced.
Unfortunately, because the band does have day jobs and busy lives, we only manage practice once a week, and with that many performances on top of one another, we have pretty much kept the same set list all summer.
And, needless to say, we have become sick of most of the songs we play, no matter how much we might like them at the core.
Since there is roughly a month between the last two shows this run, we did troll one another for song suggestions, coming up with roughly ten tunes new to us to throw onto the possibles for the October soiree.
One that made the cut was The Boss’s Prove it all Night, a great cut from his equally great Darkness on the Edge of Town record.
Darkness made my Essential 50 albums, and it clearly stands as my favorite Springsteen album amongst a very strong body of work.
Say what you will about Springsteen, being a superstar, dismissing his “art” due to his fame along with the spectacle of arena rock that follows him, but, mark my words, his band is as strong and tight as any other group whoever hit the stage, and no one is more dedicated–performance by performance–to delivering a quality and entertaining show to his minions as is Springsteen and his cartel.
Similarly, Bruce is an excellent song writer, penning a variety of numbers over the years that do indeed explore the angst and uncertainty of life that we associated with rock’n’roll. In fact, because Bruce and his band have endured, we have seen him grow and reflect upon life, not just as an artist, but as an aging and maturing one who accepts his life and fate and is able to translate that experience into songs that hit a chord with his audience.
If there is a problem with Bruce and the band, he has a voice, and they have a sound that seem to make it hard to break out. Rarely do the songs from album to album differ in essence and approach as say the Stones do when you compare Aftermath to Beggar’s Banquet to Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.
True, Bruce has had his more than interesting explorations, such as the uber-satisfying Nebraska but as noted, the essence of the band has been constant over the years, and thus I think as a result he gets dismissed a little.
In fact, Springsteen and the band have been largely missing from this site (there are other bands too I have thought of that deserve reminders of just how good they are) so I thought I would try to right.
The clip below is and excellent example of the Springsteen way, which is basically concocting a four-minute gem for an album, and then blowing it into a ten-minute tour de force live.
What is different about this clip, is that Bruce is the lead guitar player, and he delivers killer notes and tone (thank you Mr. Telecaster!). Roy Brittan also provides a lovely keys in this treatment, but the guts all go to Bruce.
I first heard Jonathan Richman on the Beserkely Chartbusters album, which included some new Modern Lovers (not the original band) recordings with some of the other bands the Beserkely label were offering. This was the first recorded version of Roadrunner, in 1975, to be released.
In 1976 Beserkely licensed the John Cale produced Modern Lovers sessions and released them. I have no idea which version John Lydon heard before his audition, but the Cale version, titled “Roadrunner (Once)” was a hit in England in 1976. But some NYC record mavens were listening the year before, especially to the tunes Government Center and New Bank Teller, which were different.
But Beserkely was created mostly out of frustration that a Bay area rock band called Earth Quake wasn’t breaking large. The first single the label released was Earth Quake’s version of the Australian band the Easybeat’s 1967 hit Friday On My Mind.
This live version is less, um, concise than the single, but I have to say, for me this is rock ‘n’ roll and remnants, too. I love this band and the video. Less so the pants.
But if it’s Friday, we shouldn’t ignore the far more economical and Mod Australian Easybeats version.
It is a great song. Portugal. The Man should cover it. Or Lorde.
I’ve had many friends who were Dead Heads. I once rode on an Amtrak train north of NYC that was full of Dead Heads going to Syracuse, if I remember correctly, for a giant show at the Orange Dome. Beautiful people, but not me.
But I also think that the Dead, and Garcia and Lesh and no doubt others I’m not thinking of now, are great American rockers. Two drums? That’s good. More guitars? Can’t hurt. They did that early in the game.
They were always loud, always rhythmic, but they did move from innovative surrealism to smart social satire, as the years passed. And they got famous for two perfect albums of restrained country rock (Working Class Blues, American Beauty) and exquisitely long live jams that lent themselves to derangement via whatever hallucinogen was nearby.
I think those two albums are close to perfect, and while I write this I wonder why that happened then (and didn’t happen before or after). But for tonight:
Cosimo Matussa also engineered/produced this one, which is just a perfect pleasure. I can remember the first time I heard it. I’d bought a compilation of early New Orleans music, curious about these oldies that weren’t on the radio. It was full of great tunes, but this is the one that beckoned over and over.
That was 1947. Some say it was this Fats Domino tune from 1950.
I always thought this Joe Turner tune was the one, but obviously this was a process.
The unifying thing here, however, is that all three tunes were recorded in Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans, with Matassa engineering.
Jerry Lee Lewis cut his first demos in that studio. Frankie Ford’s iconic New Orleans tune Sea Cruise was recorded there. Little Richard’s hits? Matassa recorded them.
If you were alive in the late 60s and all of the 70s, you were fed industry folderol about new bands constantly. That was the old way.
There were no zines, no alternative press (unless its origins were political), and no internet. Obs.
But there was radio promotion, touring, and the rock press, which was just beginning to take the music and the artists seriously, if you can believe that. And making lots of money selling ads against its content. No grousing about that, just the observation that one of the reasons things blew up after the Beatles showed everyone how is that small industry became a big one for a while, and while doing so it got the feel of being something new.
I’m sure I learned of Quicksilver listening to this great song on the radio. They have some other good ones, and seem from this vantage to be one of the better more forgotten bands in our history.
