Just as the conventions of punk/new wave could make other bands sound good, if a little ridiculous, so could the conventions of disco. I’m not saying this is a great song or anything, but it’s fun to listen to the boys through the Donna Summers lens.
Here’s a tune that Nicke Andersson plays only guitar on. At first I thought he was the guy on the left side of the frame wearing the hat, but then I realized that guy was playing right handed. Nicke arrives animated on a tiny TV to play his solo after the odd break, not really a bridge, with the gal singer.
What’s curious about her part, apart from the gang signing, is the way her lyrics borrow from Aerosmith’s Dream On, a song which doesn’t seem to have anything in common with this one. But maybe I’m missing something.
The video does a lot, really, with very little. Have a nice lunch! Perhaps Swedish meatballs and some ligonberries.
Lindsay dropped this on my Xmas CD, in fact she led the mix off with it, and I really like it. A little quirky, with some really fun words.
(I will be checking out Parts II and III, which do exist, by the band.)
Shilpa Ray plays the squeeze box, but her happy hookers are versatile. I bought this record back in 2011, on the basis of this song. The rest is spotty, the way music can be when the sounds and the ideas aren’t integrated. But I was reminded of Shilpa by Silke, for obvious reasons (guitars and sex and big voices aggressively fronted), and maybe because Silke walked through a world of legends, who created a sound and a style and it has endured.
It’s hard not to see the expression of those sounds and styles today as derivative and nostalgic, even if the players weren’t there then. Unless the players are so strong they can send you back in time. This song almost gets there.
I learned about Dinah Washington from reading Paper Lion. I’m now prone to arguing that she’s the best of the great jazz vocalists of the mid-century, but there is no proof. And it’s hard to argue against Ella Fitzgerald’s range and tone and mastery.
But Dinah has much of that, and heart. It all feels.
All these thoughts about food and adolescent bands reminded me of this tune from around 1964 by the Beach Boys.
I was a huge Beach Boys fan, at least till the British wave first hit. And, I was always enamored of Pet Sounds from first listen, which was a few years into the arrival of the Beatles and Stones.
I saw the Beach Boys live four or five times, though, during their hey day (I was at the show that was recorded and released as The Beach Boys in Concert) and their Surfin USA album was the first album I ever owned (a departure from the purchases of singles, that had dominated my life and appetite previously).
That meant that I started to buy albums as well as 45’s for a while, and for sure I got new Beach Boys albums, including Shut Down Vol. II from which I got to know this song.
By 1966, the side of Shut Down II (I think it was the second side) was on the record player spindle, along with side four of Blonde on Blonde and some other stuff I put on to hear every night as I went to sleep.
I remember liking this song a lot back then but have not thought about it for years (the food references, brought it up, I guess) but I was amazed when I listened that it is really a pretty tight little pop tune.
Pretty good words. Good Chuck Berry chords. Fabulous harmonies. Though the dullest break/solo in the history of time. I mean, Carl Wilson lays a couple of licks down during the finale: I wonder why they didn’t have him throw those in earlier?
Anyway, food, and being 14 aside, this is a really nice number from an era now long gone. I have to say too, how sad hearing this makes me in way. I posted Brian Wilson on Saturday Night Live a while back. I noted how pathetic the performance was. In deference, surely, to how vibrant this stuff is.
Miss the real Brian.
One of my favorite songs about food. Folk music alert, from the album Have Moicy.
Jeffrey Frederick’s band was (is?) called the Clamtones. This one is from Have Moicy, too.
Wow. You get sick and wind down your main work career, missing. or better being distracted for a week or so and look how much you miss.
I got a lot of catching up to do on “posts ex facto,” but just before I disappeared, Steve wrote about listening to something and watching football, when the viewer suddenly switched on the Food Network.
Seems like Steve couldn’t get his fork around that.
Well, as an admitted foodie, and pretty serious cook, I can totally understand. I watch the Food Network as a staple–along with the NFL network, MLB network, TCM, and Adult Swim–checking out at least one complete show of something every day (I not only learn places to eat on the Network, but some pretty interesting and valuable cooking techniques).
But, the whole food/music thing made me think of food songs. Ode to Bobbie Joe sneaked in there, along with Mashed Potato, Hot Pastrami, and of course Gravy, but I went with the Kinks during their fabulous Muswell Hillbillies period.
Biologists who discover new species are given the privilege of naming them. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium discovered these deep sea snails.
“Because they look like punk rockers in the 70s and 80s and they have purple blood and live in such an extreme environment, we decided to name one new species after a punk rock icon,” said Shannon Johnson, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
And thus, A.strummeri was coined. More story here.
And here’s a band called the Snails covering (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais in 2010, in memory of Joe Strummer’s death, which came 12 years ago this week. Perfect.
When I was a kid I had the double live album, which just sounds good, like this. Now they’re in the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame.
