Category Archives: night music

Night Music: Ramones, “Suzy Is A Headbanger”

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This came to mind because I just watched the Frontline doc about the NFL and CTE, a disease apparently caused by repetitive impacts to the head. The show does a stately and fairly orderly recitation of the facts, and the efforts by some doctors at Boston University working with the wives of former players afflicted with the disease to get the NFL to acknowledge there is a problem. The League has been doing a dance around the issue for 20 years, no doubt in part because (as one player in the program says) what kind of game would football be without the collisions?

What kind of band would the Ramones be without those banging drums and guitars? One that comes up with exceptionally clever melodies and lyrical strategies, as they do on this one. The audio is only fair, but when the volume is up it doesn’t matter that much.

Night Music: Black Uhuru, “General Penitentiary and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”

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Marley is obviously the king, but when I was growing up Sly and Robbie ruled. And they produced and played on this Black Uhuru track, and many others, by a lot of artists. I saw Black Uhuru many times, they were often around NYC, and they were aways awesome. One of the greatest live shows I ever saw was Black Uhuru in that club that was beneath the flagship Barnes and Noble annex, just killing. No video will suffice, but this works.

Night Music: Arctic Monkeys, “I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor”

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Everclear put me in mind of the Arctic Monkeys for some reason, though I wouldn’t claim this is a great song. But it does the job, it rocks and rolls, shouts loudly and gets it out in a fairly small but energetic amount of time. I’ve always thought that the Monkeys’ vocalist often sounds just a bit removed from the song, a bit more explaining where maybe there should be expression, but it doesn’t matter on this one. I resisted, don’t believe the hype and all, but I lost and bought the record.

Night Music: Mary Wells, “You Beat Me To The Punch”

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Earlier today I signed up for a music referral service called My Jams (I think). And posted a clip of the Crystals performing Da Doo Ron Ron on a TV show, with fantastic go go dancers. But I can’t figure out how to transfer that clip to this site, so I’m abandoning it.

And rather than double post the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” the greatest rock song of all time, today, I thought I’d instead shimmy into a really great Smokey Robinson song performed by the fantastic Mary Wells.

Night Music: The Box Tops, “The Letter”

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For a part of the summer between Elementary School and Junior High School, I was in love with a girl who was moving from seventh to eighth grade. Yes, an older girl.

I remember the joke that she told the night we (a bunch of boys and a bunch of girls, coincidentally) all slept out in our (adjacent) backyards. A girl is wearing a big dress. Someone says, I admire all your petticoats. She says, Oh no, I just teased my hair.

It took a while for us boys to understand (we weren’t thinking about pubic hair, I’m sure, and probably didn’t really know what petticoats were either), and while I can’t say it’s funny, I do remember. I think that counts.

We had some fun times that summer, surely driven by her and her friends enjoyment teaching us elementary school kids about growing up and our enjoyment learning, but at some point she and her family went on holiday to Cape Cod. We said we would write, and I did. Immediately.

So did she, but there was of course the lag before the mail was delivered. It seemed interminable. In those days of waiting, I sang along with what was the top hit in the country, everywhere. I’m not sure what the mailman thought, me and my friends trailing him like pilot fish, but when her letter came it was, um, a reminder that we were just kids.

But The Letter is still a great song.

Of course it turns out that the song was sung by Alex Chilton, who eventually became a great rock artist.

Night Music: Iris Dement, “Let The Mystery Be”

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“Teenage Superstar” last night started a Night Music series of my favorite songs. For a while I’m going to post the stuff I really like.

Today Lawr sent an email to the group asking if we’d heard the John Prine tune, “In Spite of Ourselves,” sung with Iris Dement. Well yes, I said, but that put me in mind of this one, one of my favorite songs of all time. The album recording might be tighter, but part of Iris’s great talent is making herself available to her audience, which the video gets a little of.

Night Music: The Vaselines, “Teenage Superstar”

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The Vaselines were a short-lived Scottish band in the 80s who broke up after the release of their first album in 1989, and then got sort of alternative famous because Nirvana covered three of their songs. Sub Pop released all their recorded works in The Way of the Vaselines, in 1992, which is how I came to know them. It’s a terrific album full of catchy gems recorded with passion and a brilliant original sense of the sound of a pop song. “Teenage Superstar” is a fine example of a hooky melody, noisy accompaniment and radio-friendly lively vocals leading to recorded nirvana. Funny and snotty and clever, too. One of many on the disk.

Night Music: Quasi, “Our Happiness Is Guaranteed”

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Janet Weiss is a killer drummer. She’s probably better known for her work in Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag, but I first saw her as a member of Quasi. Quasi is a two-piece band out of Portland Oregon, with an unusual organ/drum alignment. Kind of like White Stripes with organ instead of guitar, and a drummer who can kick ass, royally. The organ player, Sam Coombs, used to be married to Ms Weiss, and he’s an action figure on stage, often using his body and the principles of levers and balance to make things happen. I first saw them live opening for Elliott Smith and they were a delightful surprise, partly because of the novelty of the performance, partly because the songs are pretty good, and partly because the rhythms were excellent. The sound on this clip is mediocre, but you get lots of video of Janet Weiss playing.

To hear the song for real you’ll want to find the elpee mix.

Night Music: The Breeders, “German Studies”

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The Breeders, as a concept, was a band Kim Deal and her twin sister imagined when they were kids, and they learned how to play so they could make it a reality when they got older. But Kim Deal’s adult life has been divided between her work with the Breeders (whose great album Last Splash is 20 years old this year, and they’ve been touring and playing it in its entirety) and the Pixies (as well as a detour with her solo band, the Amps, whose one album was played a lot on my cassette player when it came out). So Breeders albums have come out with lengthy intervals in between each release. The most recent, from 2008, is called Mountain Battles. Winding down our week of authentic sounds, please note that it was engineered by Steve Albini.

But it is perhaps useful to point out that Kim Deal started her own recording purity movement, called All Wave, which abjures any use of computers or digital equipment, up to and including mastering. Presumably not including CD production. Mountain Battles sounds just fine streaming digitally out of my computer into my headphones (Grado analog), but I bet the vinyl version sounds better.