I posted about the wonderful Kinks song, Berkeley Mews, a mash up of rock and beer hall styles that was the b-side to Lola, a couple of years ago, partly because I loved the line quoted in my original post. It just seemed too perfect.
And it was. Turns out the word “shitty” should be “chilly,” and when you listen that way it surely is.
But shitty is better.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
I got to thinking about this small but fun band I followed in the Village back in the 70s tonight. The Fleshtones.
Good name! I Google and I get endless videos of the Fleshtones making a living in France, like Jerry Lewis.
But this is what this band looked like when they were young.
Here’s another power-pop band that isn’t totally in the thrall of their influences, so they’ve gotten a fair amount of press (which goes to show that something isn’t dead). I do hear different influences in each song, but the quotes are slippery, shadows of sounds that are in my head but hard to put a anvil or stirrup on. Which means some of the songs I kind of like because they remind me of Graham Parker or Rage to Live, while others, like this one, sound like they might work (with a little work) in an arena.
This one sounds like the hardest song Joe Jackson ever recorded.
I found this band (in the New York Times, thanks Ben Ratliff) from Australia. And they’re really good.
Here’s a song that sounds like a Gary Puckett thing.
But that’s not all they do.
Here they go classic.
Not venally. I like this band.
A random find on YouTube, this sounds so much like Sonic Youth at the start I almost stopped. But the video is strange and sensual, and the song such as it is comes and goes and is perfect for the video (or maybe it’s the other way around). Song with video? Video with song? I don’t know.
I posted because their first live show was with Husker Du’s Grant Hart and their first record was produced/mixed by the Raveonette’s Sune Rose Wagner.
This song is pretty good.
These guys are from Australia and seem to have found a way to make the virtues of straightforward rock feel uniquely their own. It helps to have a great singer, this one is named Shogun, and catchy clever songs.
Plus, Royal Headache is a good name for a band.
Update: Here is an interview with Shogun that is not your typical rock singer interview.
My friend Julie sent me this post from Open Culture about the Amen Break.
What is the Amen Break? It started out as a drum break on a b-side of a 45 by a R&B band called the Winstons, performed by GC Coleman. The a-side won a grammy for best R+B song that year. The b-side became the most sampled six seconds in music history. The link above has the whole story, and it’s long and worth it, I think.
At least that’s the sell here. The video is fun and scholarly about sampling. The influence of the Amen Break is more on hip hop, it seems, and UK street styles that have too many qualifying names to remember, but have to do with drum and bass.
I’m sympathetic to Mr. Reynold’s analysis about current copyright law, but he doesn’t do a great job of selling that part of the story. But who cares?
For me, the cool idea is that a drummer in a band in 1969 created a sound that crawled through all of our culture, and became classic. And we know it.
Here’s the original of Color Him Father, which is awfully sweet.
We know that. He died upteen years ago tonight. I was at a theatrical production called In Praise of Wine, with my friend Helen, and I praised wine too heartily. As we were leaving the theater we learned that Lennon had been killed. It was terrible, and then I went to sleep.
In the ensuing days it was hard not to troll the Lennon mourners. We thought they were sentimental, and they didn’t care about us at all. Drinks were thrown.
And I’m pretty sure that nothing constructive happened. Except maybe we all, even the most hippieish, thought that Imagine was treacle.
Which is why, on this anniversary, I land on Instant Karma. It’s an insistent song, but the words are as limp as those of Imagine or Revolution. It seems to be the tune that the rockarazzi have settled on as John’s legacy. Whatever.
But it really isn’t that good a song. It’s a slow slog through angry retribution, and while I would hope it introduced the concept of Instant Karma to the world, Google instant karma and you see no John Lennon song for pages, the world has passed it by.
Which leads me to the 45 I bought when the Beatles broke up. It’s meta to a fault, but it’s way more fun than Instant Karma or Imagine or How Do You Sleep, the songs that make me regret poor John.
Okay, a little more fun, because of the beat.
Holly Woodlawn was a movie star back when I was in high school. She was on the cover of the Rolling Stone, an amazing picture I can’t find, but one that certainly mixed up a young person’s head about the possibilities in this world.
When I was in high school we ate up Paul Morrisey’s trashy movies, Flesh and Heat, Dracula and Frankenstein 3D, some of which starred Holly Woodlawn.
When I heard that she’d passed yesterday I recalled the long and ridiculous dialogues she and Joe Dellasandro had in Trash, Holly’s nasal insistence the opposite of glamorous, but at the same time so full of its own sense of value, so real, that it also felt brave and heartening and hugely personal.
Vincent Canby got it right in his review of Trash in the New York Times:
“Holly Woodlawn, especially, is something to behold,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times, “a comic book Mother Courage who fancies herself as Marlene Dietrich but sounds more often like Phil Silvers.”
Which is why her place in rock ‘n’ roll history is cemented by these lines:
Holly came from Miami F-L-A,
Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A.,
Plucked her eyebrows on the way,
Shaved her legs and then he was a she.
She says Hey babe,
Take a walk on the wild side
Said hey honey
Take a walk on the wild side.
You can read her New York Times obit here. The Rolling Stone obit is here.
I found this Bob Christgau story about seeing Elvis Costello and the Roots a couple of years ago, when their album Wake Up Ghost came out. It’s a fine record, but what made my eyes open was his description of their cover of the Specials Ghost Town.
Here it is.
Sound is crap, but it is sweet. Here’s the original version, which EC produced, and has a lot more air.
