More from Urgh! A Music War.
Category Archives: Lunch Break
Lunch Break: Invisible Sex, “Valium”
I was watching clips from the punk/new wave movie Urgh! A Music War, a British movie that came out in 1982 that featured filmed live performances of a lot of bands you’ve heard of, and Invisible Sex.
According to the Urgh! Wikipedia page, this performance of Invisible Sex appears to be the only time they ever played live and they left behind no other released recordings. In 2008, however, a guy named Tom surfaced on the Urgh Yahoo page claim to be Gene Axe, the band’s guitarist. There is a page here, which features less than clear writing and a collection of known facts about the band. The most interesting is a list of the supposed band members names:
Gene Wow: Lead vocals
Gene Yus: Keyboards
Gene Axe: Guitar (Probably Tom Toomey)
Gene Machine: Female dancer
Gene I: Drums
Gene Junction: Female dancer
Gene Tee: Saxophone
Ranking Gene: Male dancer, fire blowing, percussion, “keeper of the stash”
Banana Gene, AKA Gene Banana: Bass
And then there is Valium, which is tons of fun.
Lunch Break: Ry Cooder, “He’ll Have to Go”
I kept thinking about the Cooder version with, apologies to Steve on his birthday, a lot of accordion. Here is a live version.
LINK: Welcome to Megadeth, Arizona
Robin Sloan Bechtel writes about how she and few others created the Internet’s first rock band site for Megadeth, 20 years ago this month. Gee, times have changed.
Plus a little something for lunch:
Lunch Break: Worried Man Blues
This trad tune has been recorded by just about everyone. I first heard it by Bob Dylan, but the Carter Family did a definitive version.
I had always thought this folk song was the perfect expression of 20th Century American angst, in that understated down home way. But I didn’t know Devo thought so, too.
Lunch Break: I Didn’t Know the Dead Played…
Baba O’Riley and Tomorrow Never Knows!
Lunch Break: 99 Balloons
Speaking of new wave.
Lunch Break: Alex Chilton
So, on the Tonight Show, the Replacements say their song, Alex Chilton.
When it comes to Alex Chilton, for me, it all goes back to this:
That clip was recorded in the plaza at the World Trade Center on July 14, 2001.
Lunch Break: Freddy King, “In The Open”
I found an album of The Sonics early recordings yesterday, a disk full of live performers that the father of the band’s Parypa brothers recorded at their shows in the early 60s. Larry Parypa went through the recordings and selected 20 tracks for This Is…The Savage Young Sonics. These are lo-fi recordings of a juvenile rock band well before its prime, but it is surprising how much fun this collection of mostly instrumentals is. Not that it beats the band’s classic period elpees.
If there are YouTube clips from this record, I couldn’t find them. What I could find is one of the tunes the Sonics cover, Freddy King’s In The Open. I like vocals, the voice as instrument and all that, but I could listen to this all day.
Lunch Break: Jens Lekman, “I Know What Love Isn’t”
More Swedish darkness, with a pop twist, sort of. A ballad.