Richard Linklater made a movie called Dazed and Confused, after the Led Zeppelin song, about high school kids partying on the last day of school. His new movie is called Everybody Wants Some!!, after the Van Halen song, about college kids partying on the first day of school.
Like most Linklater films there is lots of chatter. In this case the bros in the movie are members of the best collegiate baseball team in Texas, and they talk about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, as well as much else, as they compete in everything they do.
I haven’t seen Dazed and Confused in a long time, so I won’t compare the two movies. What I can say for sure is that Everybody Wants Some!! is warm and funny and exuberant, brilliant and surprisingly deep in an offhanded and precise way (with beer and a bong). Highly recommended.
Plus, it got me to hear My Sharona with fresh ears. Not bad.
I posted about Jimmy Webb’s song Wichita Lineman, or rather Freedy Johnson’s version of it, a few years ago here. But today is the day for appreciating linemen (actually it was yesterday, but close enough), this seems like a good time to take a look at the Glen Campbell version, which was a No. 3 hit in 1968 (No. 1 on the country charts).
Campbell is backed on the record by the Wrecking Crew, of which he was a member.
Reading about the Campbell version, I learned about the many other covers of the tune. Most surprisingly? Kool and the Gang.
Jazzy instrumental, hard to not think of the lyrics though it goes to a totally different place.
The inspiration for the song, according to the Wikipedia entry, was a lineman working atop a telephone pole who Webb saw while driving across Oklahoma and brooding about a failed romantic relationship. Webb imagined himself on the pole, talking to his gal, his heart breaking. Webb called the image “the picture of loneliness.”
My friend Angela found a version of the Modern Lovers’ Old World today which is pretty swell. I mean the video. This is one of rock’s greatest albums, and Warren Loft’s videos, at least the three I’ve seen, capture the music’s kinetics and precision and depth. I’ll be watching the rest of them, but what better way to start than Roadrunner.
As a young aspiring hippie it was easy to disdain Haggard’s epic “Okie From Muskogee,” but at the same time have the Grateful Dead’s version of Mama Tried on replay on the phonograph. I actually listened to a lot of Haggard back then, he was one of the great country songwriters who escaped categorization. And Mama Tried is just a fantastic song.
This tune was Haggard’s last Top 10 country chart song, one of 71 he had in his career, from back in 1987.
We watched Bridge of Spies tonight. Spielberg working from a Coen Brothers rewrite. What could be bad?
It isn’t bad, but it is thematically and historically weak. Donald Trump would say, Low energy. And it’s a fine reminder about the Cold War.
But this Lou Reed song, which is a major theatrical event, trumps. (No pun intended.) Because of the guitars. (Squaring the circle, it’s from the album Berlin.)
The day after Diane Linkletter, daughter of the tv celebrity host, defenestrated herself while on LSD (a cautionary tale of the time in my junior high), John Waters made this cruddy movie, apparently while testing sound gear. It was never released as anything and the transfer here on YouTube is clearly the result of plenty of generations of VHS copies.
For me, despite all the production value problems, Waters and his actors (including Divine, as Diane), are technically clumsy but emotionally on it. This is like rock ‘n’ roll without music and rhythmic pleasure. But at times funny.
A campy and surprisingly, to me, excellent find, a jolt to the heart of parental paranoia.
This is a fantastic tune by Peter Perrett, the singer songwriter at the heart of the Only Ones. This is by his 1996 band, the One, and was released on an elpee also called Woke Up Sticky.
It makes total sense that between their like (love?) of drugs, their romantic perspectives (cut by jaundice), mastery of classic rock tropes, and ability to twist them to their visions, Perrett and Johnny Thunder would bond.
Covered by Come, perhaps unnecessarily but effectively, in a Peel Sessions show in 1993.
What’s striking about the difference between these two versions is first, Peter Perrett’s voice, which is distinctive, assertive, brash.
But also, while Come rock it hard, the original is full of production tricks. Shifts of focus, subtle volume emphases, this is record making, while Come are playing live. The only known cover of this excellently energetic and melancholy tune.
By Surka – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8345595
They keep dying, and they will keep dying. We will keep dying, I hope not too fast.
Keith Emerson was one third of a supergroup power trio that was huge in the early 70s, riding a crest of progressive pseudo-classical rock (along with Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues, King Crimson and many others) in the maw of punk. And then they were over, for a while.
ELP were notable for some very good songs, like this one, which includes a striking acoustic guitar part by Greg Lake, and also monstrous bombast at times, which was all part of the fun. These guys were rock stars at the height of rock stardom as an unalloyed privilege, which only makes them figuratively immortal.
I knew Lucinda Williams had a new album coming out, but I guess it’s already in stores (as if there were stores).
Bob Lefsetz wrote a glowing piece about the song Dust, which he found on Spotify in a recommended playlist. It’s a typical Williams rant of woe (inspirational lyric “Even your thoughts are dust”), and she does these darkly and with a sonic charge on all her albums since Essence, maybe, and while it’s hard for me to get fired up by them any more (even though I’m sure this is about the death of her father, a great poet, who died last year), Lefsetz is right that the two guitar parts are gorgeous and compelling, and the song is incantatory.
Plus, the drumming is fantastic and so important.
The guitarists are the great Bill Frissell and a guy named Eric Leisz, who has played in Clapton’s band. Here’s the song:
Nice, right?
Lefsetz’s glowing piece doesn’t stay glowing, because he discovered that if he wanted to hear the rest of the album he would have to buy a CD, and who does that (apart from Moyer)?
And he’s right. No album on Spotify. I subscribe to Google Music, and the album isn’t there either. This seems so backward!
But I wonder if Lefsetz gets the position of artists like Williams (and Iris Dement, too, who has a new album out only available as CD or downloaded files–for the same price). They have toured long and hard and in support of deep and solid bodies of work. Their audience is old, like me, and the chance of them having a big airplay hit that racks up Spotify plays are pretty small.
The business is in transition, and it kind of makes sense to me for artists like this to hold onto the old model, not stream right away, and see if they can make a go getting the physical media fetishists to pay real cash for their CDs.
They’ll have plenty of time to collect the tiny residuals checks from the streaming services later.
