I promise you I haven’t thought of this song in a long time, though I think I own the 45. Still, I don’t have a story really, and can only say it came up today randomly while I was making dinner and it floored me anew.
Quote of the day (28 years later):
“She stands there like Bill Wyman
I am her biggest fan.”
The song came out in 1986, on the band’s first full length elpee, Especially For You. Opinion’s vary about the album, which sounds great, but also wears its influences fairly heavily. The most famous song from the album is Blood and Roses, which has a wicked bass line, an explosive lead guitar, and darkly foreboding lyrics. But was it a mistake for lead singer Pat DiNizio to adopt a style that was either Maynard G. Krebs or Brother Theodore or a combo of the two?
She has, as you can hear here, a big voice rich voice. A strong voice. This is from the album Musical Shapes, where she is backed by her husband Nick Lowe’s band. They’re an excellent band, she’s an excellent singer. I played this constantly back when it came out, and still have the vinyl in my basement, but it never caught fire with the public. Too retro, I’d say, but a couple albums later she was recording electronica, which wasn’t a good fit at all.
Turns out the best fit was country, but that came later.
Tom’s post yesterday of the Tom T. Hall song covered by the Drive By Truckers reminded me of this Iris DeMent song.
I was young enough I only knew a few people who went to Viet Nam, but I knew a lot who came back. Back then there was at least some lip service paid to the idea that everyone served.
Tom T. Hall and Iris DeMent both point out that the price paid was not born symmetrically. Some paid, others did not, often based on opportunity and privilege. Which perhaps helps us understand a little why there is a bit of distrust of government out there, from people who you would think would know better.
Patrick Davitt puts together BaseballHQ.com’s award winning and popular fantasy baseball podcast, and he’s a great fan of your rockremnants crew. In this week’s episode, available through iTunes and directly, we talked about baseball, of course, but also lots about rockremnants.com and why we’re here. I did my best.
It all goes back to some legendary evenings in Phoenix Arizona, sitting around and talking music.
Patrick is a fan of Rockpile, so he probably knows the band’s live version of Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock,” featuring Keith Richards on guitar, from the Bottom Line in 1978. But I didn’t. What fun!
Carlene Carter perhaps got famous first because she was June Carter’s daughter from her first marriage. You know, before she married Johnny Cash. But then Carlene went off to England to record her first album, with Graham Parker’s excellent band, the Rumour, and she earned some of her fame.
By the time of her second album, in 1979, she was writing songs with soon-to-be husband Nick Lowe and covering Elvis Costello’s great Radio Sweetheart. She also played a show at the Bottom Line where her parents were, supposedly, incognito in the audience, and where she indelicately introduced her song “Swap Meat Rag” by saying, “If this doesn’t put the cunt in country, I don’t know what will.” The story got prominent play in Rolling Stone at the time. Christian parents reportedly not pleased.
I’m not sure about the country part. The song is really a bit of shuffle, more a gentle boogie than regular country music, and fairly safe apart from the subject matter, which is handled discreetly.
This comes up today because I had a long chat with Patrick Davitt today, some of which will show up in this week’s BaseballHQ podcast (available at iTunes and baseballHQ.com) and it turns out he has a great love for the band Rockpile, who were the backing band for Carlene Carter’s third album.
He also told me a story about working in a record store in London shortly after Rockpile’s great Seconds of Pleasure album came out. He had the album playing on his Walkman one day and a woman came up to him and asked if it was his cassette that was playing. When he said yes, she said, “My boyfriend is in that band.” She was Carlene Carter.
Swap Meat Rag is a fine showcase for her strong voice, but it’s a bit of social cheese. She has written many excellent songs along the way, and her powerful vocals are a good match for her assertive tunes.
She has a brand new album out, which after one listen seems to be a meditation on death and the way families transform when members pass. Which is not to say it’s dark, really, but rather thoughtful and resonantly emotional, with songs that make that a pleasure rather than a trauma.
I suspect we’ve got some more Carlene Carter coming up soon.
It’s funny. WFMU added a station up here in the Hudson Valley, where I spend a lot more time in the car than I do in the city. So I listen to the radio more.
This cut was playing as I left the farmer’s market this afternoon. It’s the first cut on the first Mink DeVille album, Cabretta. There was some shtick to Willy’s persona, but he lived the romance of his music, and the arrangements and production and songcraft and performances on these first two elpees (Cabretta followed by Return to Magenta) was impeccable. And enduring. What a great song to hear on the radio by surprise.
I was at a museum the other day that was showing the work of Amy Silliman. She makes abstract paintings with some figurative elements, or maybe it’s the other way around. She also has some fun with words.
I liked her earlier more figurative and allegorical paintings more than the later, more abstract and cagey paintings she’s been doing in recent years. Though one series, 70 some odd rooms–painted from memory–in which she remembered feeling shame, resonated conceptually.
As a sidebar, Amy Silliman and someone else curated their own show of things they thought should be in the museum. This is an interesting idea, and I think helped me get a handle on what Sillman was about. But what I really liked about it was a video of John Cage, the experimental composer, appearing on the ancient TV show, “I’ve Got A Secret.”
Fortunately, the clip is on YouTube, so I can share it. The key thing to note is that this was a TV show broadcast in 1960. Dwight Eisenhower was still the president. Jim Crow laws still ruled the south. The US only had a few hundred advisors in Vietnam. The Beatniks were kind of old hat at this point. And John Cage was still a young man, resembling maybe the young David Lynch, with the same knowing smile and the same ability to present the outlandish with all seriousness.
This clip is not rock. Cage is hardly a remnant. But there is so much going on here (Cage has to rewrite the piece because the stage craft unions are unable to figure out how he can turn on the five radios in the piece, as the score dictates.) that I have to share.
I’m not sure what I think about the work. I kind of agree with the Herald Tribune review that’s quoted in the piece to show that Cage is taken seriously by music critics. He is no joke. But I love that this exists, plus the cigarettes, and am glad Amy Sillman introduced me to it.
I’m thinking about 1974 because this weekend there is a high school reunion featuring the Smithtown High School class of 74 out on Long Island. I’m upstate and can’t get away for what would be a fun time hanging with old friends. I wish I could.
Which got me thinking about the songs of our senior year. These are the songs, if I was there, I would hope would evoke tears and lovely hugs, which reminded us best of how much more civilized we are now than we were than.
So I started sifting through the top pop songs of 1994 and discovered that the first song I could embrace esthetically was also a killer dance tune and just one of an amazing album’s worth of songs in a variety of genres by a band that would late become emblematic of disco dreck. But that was later.
But for one album, called “Wild and Peaceful,” Kool and the Gang were not only a great funk band, a great soul band, a great jazz band, and a great pop band, but, um, a great band.
If I were able to get out to the Marriott in Islandia tomorrow night and join in a rocking dance floor, the first song I’d want to hear is this one. Hello all!
We could call this an obit, Johnny Winter died today, but I’m going to bed with this one tonight. His first album is one of my all time faves, full of highlights. This is the one I think of first.
Here’s a fun clip of the Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show, syncing to this tune in 1966. It doesn’t appear that any of group listed this one in their Top 10, probably rightly, but it is a catchy original tune that defies categorization. Reportedly one of the first songs to incorporate guitar feedback (can this be true?) and the first Stones song with a horn part, it was also supposedly one of the first songs Richards composed on the piano and can be seen miming the piano part in the video.
But in the recording it is Jack Nitzsche and Brian Jones who played the piano, with Richards on guitar.
And the lyrics are straightforward, mysterious and mysteriously salacious. Nicely done.
