Category Archives: memoir

Two Words Together: Travelin’ Blues

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Got up at 4 and left at 7 this morning, taking two days in West Virginia to try to help my confused high school senior Harmony figure out what she wants to do. We saw Fairmont State today, tomorrow WVU and Pierpont (a community college).

Picked all Beatles and Stones (and Graveyard Hisingen Blues, lest you think I’ve gone Salfino) for the 10+ hours I’ll be driving by the end of the day Sunday.

Had some real personal experiences with the listening on the way down.

First up was Rolling Stones Some Girls. Let me preface with this:

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/police/mc-upper-mount-bethel-child-porn-20150116-story.html

Tom Conroy graduated with me in 1982 from Moravian College. He lived on my floor my two years in the dorms and remained a guy I’d say hi to when he spent his final two years in a frat and I lived off campus.

Tom was a boisterous alpha male. He’s the guy who looked at the Sex Pistols poster I put up upon arrival and cracked, “You don’t really like them, do you?” and coined my college nickname “Punker.”

And it was in his room where we’d play hours of pinochle, always to his 8-track tapes. The ones I remember most are ELO’s Greatest Hits and Some Girls. I’m not certain the reason I picked Some Girls this morning had something to do with thinking a lot about Tom lately, but I’ll bet it is. It definitely hit me on the ride down.

I last saw Tom at a random Vet Stadium Phillies game years ago. His news story last week shocked the hell out of me. With all the similar news stories one reads these days, I thank God frequently that my sexual tastes run as common as can be – pretty faces, big tits and shapely asses on grown-up women. What a blessing.

Life is strange.

The song I remember Tom singing obnoxiously and often:

Next up, the Beatles For Sale.

Hadn’t listened to this for many years. I always gravitate toward the very early stuff or Rubber Soul/Revolver.

What struck me today (live version with Nicke Andersson singing):

I do believe this was the first rock ‘n’ roll song to light my fire. I was kindergarten age at most and I remember a considerably older next door neighbor boy (he later became a cop and eventually committed suicide if that makes the story more interesting) played this on his mom’s console stereo. Gun to my head (sorry), I can’t remember if it was Beatles or the Chuck Berry original.

But I do remember thinking, “Whatever-five-year-olds-think-instead-of-shit! This kicks the stuffing out of nursery rhymes and Sunday School songs!” Made me wanna do the boogie-woogie for the first time.

Finally, I ended the music portion of my drive with the Stones’ Exile.

For some odd reason, I hadn’t listened to this in many years as well. When I was most into it was the time in my life that I lived closest to a rock star. I was in a top local cover band, my girlfriend and I had broken up temporarily and I was dating a brunette hottie with a blond hottie friend who I think liked me as well. Meanwhile, my ex-girlfriend was constantly calling me trying to get back together and doing things like baking cookies and slipping them in my mailbox for me to find when I got home from work.

I keenly remember eating breakfast at a late-night diner with the two hotties and feeling completely on top of the world.

The soundtrack to one of the sweetest periods of my life:

Afternoon Snack: Neil Diamond, “You Got to Me”

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Again, I am minding my own business, working and steaming KTKE. when this Neil Diamond nugget from 1967 came blasting out.

I do remember liking it at the time, but don’t remember the terrific blues harp at all.

Weird with Diamond. I liked some of his earlier songs, but for sure, once my mother announced how much she loved the guy, that was it for me.

I hate to lump him with Billy Joel (ugh), and even Elvis, though the glitter parallel is kind of scary.

But, just like early Elvis, this early Neil is really pretty good (and, Neil should thank his stars that Chuck Berry gave him the form).

 

Lunch Break: Cream, “Deserted Cities of the Heart”

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I was lucky enough to see Cream in 1968, during their first big American tour. I was just 15, but they knocked me out. Oddly, the opening act was the Grateful Dead, who played Alligator for an hour, and that was it, making it really hard for me to warm up to the band for a number of years (Workingman’s Dead started the change).

They were great, and I do indeed love Fresh Cream, though curiously, nothing by the band made my essentials list.

Still, NSU, I Feel Free, and I’m So Glad are serious faves.

However, in deference to Lindsay’s “what I like to listen to when I am sad,” I grabbed my favorite Cream cut, Deserted Cities of the Heart, penned by Monsieur Bruce, and in honor of his passing.

From Wheels of Fire, which was produced by said Felix Papplardi (whom I believe played cello on the cut), this song rocks, is dreamy, and takes some unexpected form twists (I LOVE the doorbell/glockenspiel/whatever is channeled into the background as Clapton starts his solo).

Miss you Jack! You were great (and somehow, I cannot believe Ginger Baker outlived you).

I included both the haunting studio version with said strings and treatments, and a fairly blistering live take as well.

Night Music: The Who, “My Generation”

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My dad is old and he has lost almost everything that makes life worth living but his mind, which is still working overtime clocking the stuff that happens. But isn’t that great at enjoying the daily stuff that is happening outside himself.

I’ve spent much of the last week in the Sunshine State trying to figure out a way for him to live the best life he can in his decline. The hell of it is he can still be charming and funny, but the toll taken by his body’s decline means he’s often playing a defensive game. And he’s not that charming or funny, because even at his most expansive he’s thinking more about what he isn’t than what anyone else is.

It’s awful.

Plus, he’s pretty much constantly fending off those who want to strip him of his liberty, which is to his credit. Except that the facts of the last couple of years show he can’t really handle liberty. Given choice, he chooses badly (or at least, the way of the rotting flesh).

I think an 86 year old has the right to choose badly, as long as they’re not bringing those around them down too, and unfortunately he has a wife who is apparently incapable of escaping his vortex. So he’s not helping her, at the least.

Which makes me think I don’t want to ever get old. Oops.

LINK: The Black Album

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enhanced-buzz-wide-1538-1405955330-7In real life Ethan Hawke made a mixtape of his favorite songs by the Beatles during their solo career to give to his daughter, apparently after he and Uma divorced.

At the same time, over the last 12 years or so, he was making a move with Richard Linklater called Boyhood, which is the story of a boy from the age of five to 17. The trick of the movie is that it was shot with the same actors over a 12 year period. Ethan Hawke plays the boy’s father, and he presents him with the Black Album after the fictional couple, the boy’s parents divorce.

This article at Buzzfeed publishes the song list for three disc worth of tunes (too many), and the liner notes that Hawke gave his daughter and rewrote for the movie’s purposes. Beatles experts may have something to say about its interpretation of history, but I would say the whole thing is kind of lovely. Much nicer than How Do You Sleep?

Why Must I Be A Teenager In Love With Music My Whole Life?

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Mark Joseph Stern, at Slate, who is still in his 20s, explains why the music we love as teens (from 12 to 22) is the music we remain most passionate about our whole lives.

The fact that this is pretty much true we see in evidence with almost every post here at Rock Remnants, and we all have a lot more water under the bridge than Stern does.

I’m sure his explanation isn’t quite the whole of the answer, but in general terms it feels pretty much right (and it involves brain imaging!). What came to mind for me, one of those teen moments, was a memory of reading in Lisa Robinson’s Hit Parader magazine, maybe when I was 13, about Jerry Lee Lewis’s song Breathless as the apotheosis of rock ‘n’ roll.

I went to the music store in my home town and found a copy of the single in the oldies section, and probably paid a quarter for it. If memory serves it was b/w High School Confidential. I brought the 45 home and put it on the fat spindle on my cheap record player. I was tremulous, with heightened expectations, almost giddy I recall. I anticipated something incredible, and when I pushed play, I got something I’d never heard before.

Bye bye Herman’s Hermits, hello better stuff of all sorts. I’ll never forget that and now I know better why.

My Brilliant Career, as a model

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audiocover-smallIn 1981 my friend Max and his associate (and our friend) Kathy, made an advertisement for the magazine Max worked for: Audio.

I have no recollection of how the whole thing came together, but at the end of the day three members of the Warren Street All Starz stickball team, Rafael Pizarro, Fleming Meeks and moi, were cast. Fleming as the delicate consumer, Rael and I as the Mono Brothers, the wild beasts of the street.

The “record store” was set up in the Cooper Square loft of Janet, a friend of other All Starz members.

I remember brutalizing my hair with a pair of scissors, trying to make it as spiky as I could, before heading over to the shoot, though it doesn’t look that spiky.

The image tells the rest of the story. This episode did not prove to be a stepping stone to a new career.

audioad1981-small

RIP: Gerry Goffin, It Might as Well Rain Until Forever

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In 1958, I was first really hit by pop music and the radio. That is when I first heard Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue, at the tender age of five. There are other tunes from around that period of my life that I remember–Gypsy Woman, Little Star, Sorry, I Ran All the Way Home, Come Softly to Me–but at that age I also played with army men and cowboys and well, I did not own a radio. Not to mention the radios we did have were controlled by my parents.

But, it was in the summer of 1962, when I was 10 and we were at a family camp near Lake Tahoe, I heard the incredible machine gun drums and droning saxes of what was the huge hit that summer, The Locomotion for the first time, and if Buddy Holly was the first nail of my rock and roll coffin, that moment was second.

The Locomotion was penned by Carole King and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, and was the first hit for their Dimension record label, but in reality, the team of Goffin and King had been cranking out hits as members of the Brill Building for years.

The Brill Building was the songwriting haven for luminaries that included Lieber and Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, all of which is documented beautifully in the book Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson.

The Locomotion led to a request for a radio for the bedroom I then shared with my brother, and that Xmas we were given a white Packard Bell. As if that were not enough, our family also got a Motorola phonograph which played all speeds–16, 33.3, 45, and 78 RPM–of records.

We also got a copy of The First Family album, a political parody of the Kennedy family that was a huge hit at the time, and that started me on my path to collections of records and CDs along with a room full of musical instruments and playing in bands and pretty much a lifelong love of music in all forms. It started me on parodies, too.

Though I would have probably been hooked by music pretty soon anyway (I’m thinking had it not been The Locomotion, it would have been the Rockin’ Rebels Wild Weekend a few months later).

Wild Weekend was not written by Goffin and King, but it was a seriously rocking aong and one that hit me at the time like my mate Steve here notes KISS hit him. Don’t forget, I was just 11-years old then.

But, back to Goffin and King, among the wonderful hits the pair wrote are:

  • Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (The Shirelles)
  • Take Good Care of my Baby (Bobby Vee)
  • Might as Well Rain Until September (The Shirelles/Carole King)
  • One Fine Day (The Chiffons)
  • Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees)
  • Up on the Roof (The Drifters)
  • I’m into Something Good (Herman’s Herrmits/Earl-Jean)
  • Don’t Bring Me Down (The Animals)
  • (You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman (Aretha Franklin)

Now, you have to remember that at the time a lot of the rock and roll was laughable by today’s standards. The wonderful and visceral and sexual Little Richard, for example, was sanitized by the awful Pat Boone for white kids (remember too this music was burgeoning around the time of the Civil Rights movement in the early).

But, much like Hip Hop was developed by the African American community, and the form was then “appropriated” for even broader commercial exploitation (and believe me, I am not talking the Beastie Boys here) earlier, rollicking rhythm and blues was swiped a la Richard to Boone.

At the time, though, Tutti Fruitti as performed by Little Richard was akin to Jimi Hendrix humping his Strat-O-Caster, or Wendy giving Prince a quasi blow job in the Purple Rain film (she does play a Rickenbacker, though), or anything current from Beyoncé on out.

Still, pop music, which was not necessarily rock and roll, was similarly tamer, and more orchestrated, an off-shoot of Broadway and tin pan alley largely still without the dominance of the electric guitar. Though that was indeed coming.

And, whether it floats your boat or not, or if the songs sound horribly dated and silly, the tunes of Goffin and King, I think, are still just lovely little masterpieces, much in the same league of Phil Spector. In fact, John Lennon noted that he wanted his songs with Paul McCartney to of the same ilk as those of the Dimension duo.

I still feel Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is among the sweetest of love songs.

One of the things that always nailed me about this production is the beautiful tremoly rake of the electric guitar on the “one” of each measure. Such a simple and sweet effect, and one that has impressed me to the tune that I try to employ it often when I am playing rhythm guitar.

By the time Pleasant Valley Sunday hit it, the Beatles had come and guitars were happening and even Hippies were here, criticizing the plastic life of the suburbs, so Goffin came up with this:

Oddly this is a song I always kind of wanted to cover in some band or another.

So, last week, Goffin passed away at the age of 75.

Though I have been so remiss at contributing here at the site–it is hard once my work week begins to find time for much else, but, well, 185 more calendar days–I could not let his passing go without honoring and thanking just a great songwriter and influence on my life.

So, I will close with one other tune from the pair, and the one that introduced me to the voice of Carole King:

Thanks Gerry. Peace out.

 

Night Music: Sounds of Modification, “Darkness Fills My Lonely Heart”

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The first rock band I ever heard/saw live was the Sounds of Modification (the perfect band name for Nixon loving Long Island), who set up in the parking lot in Smithtown, outside Chess King (our jeans store) and rocked. At least a couple of them had been in my dad’s gym class at Sachem High School, and I’d met them, but now I was here with friends out on our own. When they played I stood as close to the band, who used a flat truck trailer as a stage, as I could, and was deafened by the volume. We walked home afterwards, overjoyed and exultant.

I’m awed that a song I heard that day I can hear again.

REAL REMNANT: A History of Early Andy Paley

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Andy Paley grew up in Boston and formed a band called Catfish Black with future Modern Lovers members Jerry Harrison (keyboards) and Ernie Brooks (drums). They renamed themselves the Sidewinders, added Billy Squier, and recorded an album produced by Lenny Kaye in the mid-70s. Cuts from the album, which is well worth hearing, are on YouTube, but you have to dig.

The highlight here is at the two-minute mark, when we see a closeup of the band on the back of the jacket and Andy plays an extended solo. They were regulars at Max’s Kansas City, Andy played guitar on Elliott Murphy’s Night Lights, and disappeared leaving little more than a trace.

After the Sidewinders, Andy and his brother Jonathan formed the Paley Brothers, signed with Sire and released an album produced by Springsteen’s engineer at the time, Jimmy Iovine. It’s a fantastic elpee, a staple on the Kreutzer turntable back in those days of collegiate love and squalor.

The brothers also recorded a cover of Richie Valens’ Come On Let’s Go, with the Ramones for the Rock and Roll High School soundtrack.

The Paley’s went on tour, opening in arenas for the similarly hair-styled Shaun Cassidy, but did not break out with the teenyboppers and did break up.

Andy played guitar on the Modern Lovers’ Back In Your Life album, which features Abdul and Cleopatra, and that live show at the Peppermint Lounge I posted last night (which reminded me of Andy and his career–which I’ve augmented by looking things up).

In the early 80s I was visiting a friend’s family’s big country house a little bit upstate in New York. A few of us went out to play croquet and ran into a long-haired guy knocking a ball around. I recognized Andy from his album cover, and we played. He was a friend of one of the cousins, I think. He was writing songs and producing Jonathan Richman records. Nice guy, though he loved to send people. But don’t we all?

I think he appreciated meeting some fans.