Category Archives: link

Night Music: Chin Chin, “Da Doo Ron Ron/My Boy Lollipop”

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I fell in love with the early 80s Swiss band Chin Chin a couple months ago, based on their fine album, Sound of the Westway. But you’ve surely read my rantings here, here, here, and here.

It was only after actually downloading the entire album (I would have bought it if it was available), I learned that the gals’ first recording was my nominee for greatest song of the rock era. The Crystals Da Doo Ron Ron, of which I’d only posted the Searchers version here previously.

Chin Chin’s version clearly understands how great this song is, but it isn’t a full statement. They weren’t really a band when they recorded it. It’s thrown off the way the Sex Pistols tossed off Roadrunner in their first meeting. Songs they all knew and liked. On different scales, portentous.

Frank Owen’s Personal History of Manchester Punk

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Screenshot 2015-03-01 15.26.50

I feel like I’ve read some of this elsewhere, but Frank Owen was there and does a fine job describing the mayhem and machinations out of which came The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Morrisey and The Worst, among others. Some of it is the big picture, but there is also the personal:

“The Perry Boys had snuck up behind me and one of them had hit me over the head with a specially sharpened Levi belt buckle, leaving me lying on the concrete in a halo of my own blood. They probably would have kicked me into a coma if it wasn’t for my PVC-clad friend Denise Shaw, who stood over six feet tall in heels and dressed like a fetish model. She saw the incident and rushed over to fight off my attackers with her handbag.”

The Perry Boys were kids from the Council Houses, who hated the punks. Mark E. Smith wrote a song for the Fall about them:

Kim Gordon: Touring With Your Ex

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Screenshot 2015-02-24 15.25.43Kim Gordon was Sonic Youth’s bass player for 30 years, until she and husband Thurston Moore split up. Moore, 52, had found another woman. Gordon has now written a memoir, Girl in a Band: A Memoir,
and this excerpt is a description of the band’s last show at a festival in Brazil. It’s a weird and naked document, with a side-eyed look at the rock ‘n’ roll life that feels very real and unfiltered.

The first tune they played that night was an oldie. Let it be your soundtrack.

Ms Conception

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Patti_Smith_in_Rosengrten_1978Patti Smith did an interview with Alan Light back in 2007, when she was promoting her album of covers, Twelve. For whatever reason (he wrote a news piece, not an interview at the time) the interview got filed, and has now emerged on Medium’s Cuepoint. It offers a quick  and insightful overview by Smith of her career, which is worth reading, and it ends with this, which is excellent:

Alan Light: What do you think is the biggest misconception about you?

Patti Smith: The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to return to the public eye in ’95 or ’96 when my husband died. We lived a very simple lifestyle in a more reclusive way in which he was king of our domain. I don’t drive, I didn’t have much of an income, and without him, I had to find a way of making a living. Besides working in a bookstore, the only thing I knew how to do was to make records—or to write poetry, which isn’t going to help put your kids through school. But when I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” and I just want to get Elvis Presley’s gun out and shoot the television out of their soul. How could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.

I’m not a celebrity, I’m a worker. I’ve always worked. I was working before people read anything about me, and the day they stopped reading about me, I was doing even more work. And the idea that if you’re a mother, you’re not doing anything—it’s the hardest job there is, being a mother or father requires great sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, and to think that we weren’t doing anything while we were raising a son or daughter is appalling. It makes me understand why some human beings question their worth if they’re not making a huge amount of money or aren’t famous, and that’s not right.

My mother worked at a soda fountain. She made the food and was a waitress and she was a really hard worker and a devoted worker. And her potato salad became famous! She wouldn’t get potato salad from the deli, she would get up at five o’clock in the morning and make it herself, and people would come from Camden or Philly to this little soda fountain in South Jersey because she had famous potato salad. She was proud of that, and when she would come home at night, completely wiped out and throwing her tip money on the table and counting it, one of her great prides was that people would come from far and wide for her potato salad. People would say, “Well, what did your mother do? She was a waitress?” She served the people, and she served in the way that she knew best.

LINK: The Boyhood Soundtrack

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I finally saw the Richard Linklater movie over the weekend, though not in a theater, unfortunately. Which meant that living room distractions crept in, and we stopped a couple of times to eat dinner, and then later to eat dessert.

The movie has a shambling narrative that is anything but slack, but doesn’t turn on the classic arc. This is a movie about a boy becoming an older boy, tweaked by the healthy and impressive gimmick of being shot over the course of the 12 years it takes to get from there to here.

Linklater is a rock ‘n’ roll fan, of course. His second movie is named after a Led Zeppelin song, and his first movie became the name of a music streaming service. And as you might expect, there is music all over the place in Boyhood. For one thing, the boy’s dad is a musician, at least he is at the start, and lots of time is spent in bedrooms and cars, places where music plays.

What struck me after seeing the movie, however, was how little of the music I knew. Some of that is because the opening song was by Coldplay, who i’ve never really listened to much, and some is because I didn’t listen to that much indie rock and rap in the aughts. But the music is an important part of the film anyway, and I wasn’t bothered by it’s general unfamiliarity to me.

blackalbumJack Hamilton has a story in Slate today that, while somewhat pretentious, I think really gets to what’s so excellent about the Boyhood soundtrack. If you get past some of his “oooh-critical!” language, he comes to describe the scene where dad gives boy a copy of the Beatles’ Black Album powerfully and gets it exactly right.

If you haven’t seen the movie and that doesn’t make sense to you, you only have one option. Go see the movie. In a theater, if you can.

Night Music: Hans Condor, “I Can Make a Lot of Money”

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This has been a sweet week for the discovery of rock ‘n’ roll. A week ago I’d never heard of the Chin-Chins or even had the notion of Swiss punk rock.

And a week ago I’d never heard of a rock ‘n’ roll band from Nashville called Hans Condor.

So far I haven’t found a copy of the Chin-Chins’ album, so I’m stuck playing the tunes one at a time on YouTube, which is fine, but after fixing Google Music All Access or whatever it’s called, the Hans’s Sweat, Pizz, Jizz & Blood went into heavy rotation. It is a fantastic piece of guitar rock songwriting, crudely recorded and lacking a real rock singer (he’s a shouter), but the band is so good and clever with the arrangements that these awesome swingy arrangement-y things emerge from the murk and remind me, anyway, of all the history of this music these guys are playing the life into. SWJ+B was released in 2010, shortly after which the band broke up. They’re now back together, with a new drummer named Ryan Sweeney, and I suspect he won’t be quite as punchless as the similarly named outfielder who recently played for the Cubs. Here’s an interview with a blog called West Ghost Media. They seem like nice guys who write rocking songs with good lyrics.

I posted what may be the album’s best song and the best video the other day, but the album is full of delights. I feel like this is the album the Box Tops would have made if they were starting today, rather than 50 years ago. Or maybe the album the Replacements would have made if they were starting out today, rather than 30 years ago.

The same love of soul and country music, filtered through a rock ‘n’ roll heart.

Here’s a tune called I Can Make Lots of Money.