Anticipating Apple’s naming scheme, the Clash invite Allen Ginsberg on stage at Bonds in 1981 for a punk poetry session.
I found this on the pleasekillme.com website, an analog to the excellent Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain oral history of punk.
I think Allen’s pretty much right about it all.
Lucinda Williams has a new album out, called Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. As these things go in the modern age, she’s releasing it on her own record label. I don’t know what happened to Lost Highway, but that seemed like it should have been a home forever.
Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is a double album, which is too much at this point. She’s one of my favorite performers and songwriters, but in recent years she’s become more of a boogie franchise than a songwriter. Not that that’s a bad thing. But how many folks are still writing great songs by album No. 12?
Lucinda used to write great songs. Now she writes pretty good words for pretty good riffs. There’s a big difference, but the latter isn’t bad, especially when the band is lively and tight.
There is something else about this album that struck me. The sound is incredibly present and bright. Maybe it’s compression, at least some, but it also feels like the microphones are wired hot, getting every bit of sound and reverb, and pressing directly to, um, my stream. The room feels alive, ready to pop, and that makes the music sound live-er than it sometimes is.
That was coming over Google Music. This YouTube clip has a bit of that, too, when you turn it up. But mostly it has a rock-solid band boogying rock solidly, and one of my favorite musicians and songwriters working out.
I liked the first U2 album, in large part because of this song, which feels like it is going to spin out of control, but it never does, all the while rueing the day that control was lost.
This live version doubles down on that conflict, and maybe signifies why this rock band has always come across as more in control than ecstatic. I love the way Mr. Vox yanks his sweater out of the public’s hands, and uses that as a way to wade gently back into the fray topless.
I’m reading the second volume of Karl Ove Knaussgard’s My Struggle, a novel that reads like a memoir, but is narratively satisfying. Like a novel. In the book the teenaged and young man Karl loves Ian McCulloch and Echo and the Bunnymen. So I played some of the songs today, trying to recapture what it was about those early 80s bands from the UK (also U2 and Joy Division and Simple Minds and Tears for Fears and many others) that just didn’t grab me.
Many were very popular, and critically acclaimed. I don’t know. I did like the Cure. But when I listen to this (and even the best early U2) I feel like I’m listening to a folk rocker who got loud. The words and the singer’s elongated syllables are what matter, and things like syncopation and melody are laminated by atmosphere. These songs don’t feel like songs, exactly, even though clearly they are. In fact, they’re passive aggressively anthemic, with ringing chords and patina-ed vocals and drums that walk along with you, rather than getting into your head and bashing it.
Nice enough tune, but not enough tune.
I should say that I chose to write here about what I don’t like about this style of rock tune from a certain time. This wasn’t meant to be a fair evaluation. That wasn’t the point. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments.
My buddy Moe moved to Germany to get married. He was one of the Warren Street All Starz, our stickball team, which convened every Sunday in a parking lot on Warren Street and Greenwich Street back in the days when nobody lived down there near the World Trade Center.
We all had nicknames. Moe’s was the Name Changer. If you had a nickname and wanted a different one, or if someone thought someone should have a different nickname, Moe had to approve.
Moe sold books and spent a good part of his time traveling around the world, going to book trade events. Moe worked for a book company, Schocken, that had the rights to Franz Kafka’s novels, and we called our parking lot ballfield Kafka Park. When Moe wasn’t in New York on a Sunday he would phone in to the pay phone across the street from Kafka Park. Collect. We always accepted the charges.
Moe fell for a German woman named Julie, and they married. Moe moved to Hamburg, where he learned German by watching TV and going out to eat with Julie’s friends. At some point he sent me a 45 of a record by a group called Trio. It was a goofy bit of catchy electronica, in German, that was utterly lightweight and internationally jaded (read: louche) at the same time.
The chorus translates as I love you not and you don’t love me. Too sexy for my turntable.
A few years later the song popped up in an ad for the Volkswagen Golf.
Will the All Starz get back together?
Loud rock from 2000 Sweden. This is a fine original from the Hellas! I’m putting this on my birthday playlist, even though for purists this is the Hellas in commercial mode. Good for them! I hope it paid off their student loans.
Good no nonsense video, too.
I didn’t know about this record until today, or maybe I forgot because I never heard the music until now.
In 1970 Duane Allman started recording a solo album, using what would become the Allman Brother’s original rhythm section (Butch Trucks, Jaimo, Berry Oakley). You can hear them all on this tune. Plus Duane, who was producing with Johnny Sandlin.
I don’t know what happened, but the tracks ended up being finished by Johnny Jenkins, a singer and guitarist who also had a band called the Pinetoppers, which was the first band Otis Redding sang in. Sweet on that. According to Wikipedia, Duane bailed on the sessions to record the first Allman Brothers album, which included brother Gregg as vocalist.
There’s a great version of Dr. John’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters” and a fine take on a song called “Voodoo in You” written by a guy named Jackie Avery, that was covered a few years later more heavily by the Atomic Rooster. But that’s a Blend for another day.
This is a J.C. Loudermilk blues, that has all the signature elements of an Allman Brothers song, plus a little farm….
This is a love song. An awkward and crude one, but a girlfriend of Bon Scott can’t possibly have been as pissed as this girl friend was (supposedly) after Bon wrote this love song, according to legend (and Wikipedia).
Or maybe values were different in 1975. Hmmm. I was alive then, hanging with girls who had balls, so I don’t buy that. You didn’t have to read Betty Friedan to know which way the wind was blowing. Bon Scott, certainly, got it.
AC-DC has had a rough week. Drummer Phil Rudd had some issues with the police in New Zealand this week, though he seems to have been absolved of the most troubling charges. The band has an album out next month. I think there’s a tour coming, though who knows what happens if Phil is jailed (he’s not out of the woods).
Whatever happens, She’s Got Balls is more about respect than pandering. Good for ya, Bon.
I don’t follow the traffic here closely. Who cares?
But I do check in to make sure everything is working, and I noticed today that there was a spike in interest in a Swedish punk post I put up last spring.
That post led to a fantastic cascade of Swedish punk rock references, one of which was Turbonegro’s Staten Och Kapitalet. Read the thread for the whole story.
Yesterday, Stevie Wonder launched a big tour celebrating Songs From the Key of Life, the first album of his I didn’t get into. The show got a rave review from Jon Pareles in the Times, and I listened to the album today and it’s really excellent.
But it isn’t as excellent as the albums that led up to it. So let’s hit the hay with one of those.
