The guy I’m working up a duo act with picked Kicks as a song which I sing and I can’t honestly admit I had ever paid much attention to the song until recently. The corny, heartfelt “stay away from drugs, girl” message is pretty funny.
Reminded me of (in usual backwards fashion) this classic off the first Vibrators album (which made my Top 50, I believe). The only early punk song I know about being good. RIP Paul Revere:
No. 6 greatest rock riff?
When someone requests The Smiths, this is the one that came immediately to mind, which is in a similar vein. Thanks to Scott for the request.
Is this a good place for my two cents about the Smiths? Probably not. People love them, and I merely like them. I like the hardness of the drums and the ringing of the guitars. I like the quirky melodies, and Morrisey’s point of view. It’s all kind of shambly and personal and hooky, too. Still, I merely like them. I can’t really say why. The only thought I have about it that makes any sense is that they write half songs. I love the first half of Shoplifters, for instance, but by the time we’re halfway through I want to move on to something else. Bands and performers I really love, that doesn’t happen.
I kept thinking about the Cooder version with, apologies to Steve on his birthday, a lot of accordion. Here is a live version.
To thwart Peter’s scheme of total domination.
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.
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.
When Patti Smith was awarded the Swedish Polar Music prize in 2011, her song Dancing Barefoot was sung by two up and coming sisters from the suburbs of Stockholm who go by the name First Aid Kit.
The incantatory power of that song gets me every time, but I wonder what Patti is thinking. Her visage is stern, but it’s hard to believe she is being hypercritical at that point. And by the end she too seems caught up in the power of her song and the loveliness of the harmonies and then the audaciousness of the poetic recitation (and maybe the length of her history, at this point).
The incantatory power of Dancing Barefoot bubbles up in this clip from Rockpalast TV in 1979, too. I’ve watched many Rockpalast TV clips and don’t recall being aware of the audience, particularly, but in this churning version of the song, which wouldn’t be out of place at a Quicksilver Messenger Service show, the audience suddenly breaks through and Patti has to handle the mess, and she does. It is very strange theater that comes with a terrific vocal performance and her very solid band. Plus, she blesses the pope!
Swedish. One of my favorite artists of the new millennium. (Posted about his appropriation of the Mamas and Pappas here some months ago.) And this is real night music, about deciding to take a cab home from a party when you don’t have much money. Albeit in Gothenburg.
I’ve been listening to Graveyard’s Hisingen Blues for the last month and it’s a dandy of an album. Definitely my Summer of 2014 album for sure, even though it’s from 2011.
Random thoughts:
1) Was gonna post a couple other more “grab you right off the bat” songs but never got around to it. This one turns out ultimately to be my fave. Once it creeps in, it doesn’t go away.
2) Hisingen Blues has been such a wonderful album experience for me. I now enjoy the whole thing entirely and know the flow. I anticipate the next song. It’s a wonderful thing, baby. If any of you guys can pull your heads out of shuffle-land, I highly, highly recommend this selection.
3) These guys STILL EXIST believe it or not. They were in the states not too long ago playing Coachella, but I missed the boat. Please God, let them survive as a band for another trip to the US. (Who wants to go with?)
4) Tell me who they remind you of. Obviously, this song is pretty Zeppy, but there’s other stuff there. I can’t pinpoint it.
5) I usually favor the Gibson/Marshall guitar sound, but this isn’t that. These guys are Orange (the latest thing in hard rock, I guess) men, but I love it.
6) This song’s about heroin, no? Bonus points.
7) The voice as an extra instrument: When the singer belts out the melodic scream immediately following “Tonight a demon came into my head” (yes, a demon came into his head), it hits me as hard as any lyric.
8) Checked out some reviews and stumbled upon this: “Earlier this year, the much-anticipated Hisingen Blues topped the Swedish album chart, outselling even the ballyhooed return of Britney Spears.”
Sure must be nice to have the masses care about quality music, huh? (Maybe I wouldn’t like it, kind of like everyone screwing your girlfriend.) Anyway, maybe I need to move to Sweden. Something’s definitely different there musically.
OK, here goes:
The one cover song on X’s fourth album, New Fun In The New World, is their version of Otis Blackwell’s tune Breathless.
Breathless was a giant hit for Jerry Lee Lewis. One of my favorite songs of his.
But Breathless was also the name of Jean Luc Godard’s first feature.
And was also the name of a sort of remake by the once underground filmmaker Jim McBride, who turned a film about an American girl in Paris loving a French gangster into a film about a French girl in LA loving an American gangster.
X did the cover for the money and promotion, but as you can see in the clip, they perform it brilliantly. And differently. And this one of the great rock songs, no matter whose version you hear.
But we’ve opened up a can of it here. Godard meets McBride. Blackwell meets Jerry Lee Lewis meets X.
There is more to be said.
I could write about the way John Doe and Exene Cervenka fuse metaphor with rhythm in changing ways. And the way X’s songs always seem to approach pop rhythms or melodies, but then back off, chopping off the part that’s easily likeable and giving their energy to the part that’s different. But I don’t have to. Listen.
From Under the Big Black Sun, which they were playing in Soho tonight.
