Category Archives: peter

Richard and Linda Thompson, “Wall of Death”

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Different than the metalchoreography. This was from Shoot Out The Lights, my first brush with Richard and Linda Thompson, in 1982. A breakup album, they toured together to support it and I saw them at Lone Star Cafe, when it was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 13th Street (with the big lizard on the roof). There was palpable negative energy between them on stage, but when I hit the bathroom later they were hanging out by the Asteroids machine and there was the eau d’ herb about. I spent the next few years working slowly through the back catalog, which is uniformly fantastic, while Richard went on the rampage as a solo artist, releasing a lot of music in the 80s. But all starts here.

Wall of Death Lamb of God, “Who Cares About the Name of These Songs”

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Screenshot 2015-05-14 21.43.16

This one is in honor of Mad Max Fury Road, another Australian export. There is great tension in the buildup here, and after the dance starts it goes away. Nice.

This seems to be a thing.

This one is called insane, but it seems a little sad.

This is funny.

Bob Mould, Tomorrow Morning and Kid With a Crooked Face

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I missed this loud performance of new songs on David Letterman last February. There is something tonic in hearing this much noise on mainstream TV, even if Mould’s melodies are so narrow that it’s hard to tell where one song starts and the other begins.

And that bass solo sounds a little too much like the theme from Friends for comfort, but the rest is as comfortably loud as Danzig on Mothers Day.

Warren Zevon, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”

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Warren Zevon’s last appearance on David Letterman’s show, as he waited for his final taxi. And we wait for Letterman to ease off into retirement.

Hot Chocolate/Stories, “Brother Louie”

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It was the cover of this tune, by Stories, that was a big hit in the US in 1973. The arrangements of the songs are different. Hot Chocolate has more of a soul feel, with flangy guitars and strings, while Stories rocks the guitars more, but the biggest difference in this story of interracial love is the point of view.

Hot Chocolate wrote the song, so you have to give their version primacy. In Hot Chocolate’s version, contrasting vignettes of Louie and his gal at their respective parents’ homes, and their fathers’ spoken word intolerance demonstrate that there is no difference between black and white in the worst possible way.

Stories version changes the story, as it were. Louie brings his black gal home and there is some kind of unspecified scene. That’s it. Gone is the equal opportunity prejudice, as well as the strings and the spoken word. In Stories’ version the white parents are the bad guys, in a vague way, and they shouldn’t be. You know what I mean?

I remember at the time hearing that this song was an answer song to Richard Berry’s Louie Louie, which is apparently not true.

Louie C.K. adopted Brother Louie as the theme song for his show, Louie, in which he plays a dad in an interracial marriage that is now defunct. Interestingly, the show uses the Hot Chocolate arrangement of the song, with vocals by Stories’ Ian Lloyd.

Hot Chocolate: Errol Brown is Dead

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The band Hot Chocolate had a handful of hits in the US over a short period in the 70s. But they had more than a score of hits in the UK over 30 years, which has to be of interest to those who track popularity. Or unpopularity.

Hot Chocolate’s singer, Errol Brown, died yesterday.

I’ve written about Hot Chocolate here. And here. And elsewhere.

But I didn’t really know the story. The Guardian has a bit of a story today about Brown and the band, and why they meant so much to England.

I want to leave this post with the song that got Hot Chocolate signed by the Beatles to Apple Records, which I learned about today. It’s a wacky Carribean version of Give Peace a Chance that John found out about, and which led him to sign the band. Crazy.

This post scrapes the surface of Hot Chocolate and Errol Brown. If you hear anything you like, dig deeper.

Lunch Break: The Isley Brothers, “Ohio/Machine Gun”

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The anniversary of Kent State, May 4, 1971. I posted the original during the demonstrations in Ferguson Missouri. Some history about the protests and shootings.

Slayer, “Seasons in the Abyss”

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We’re fans of Cory Schwartz in these parts, and he posted this tune today on Facebook. A tribute to Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who died two years ago today.

I like to think Cory posted this cut because today’s Kentucky Derby winner was American Pharoah, owned by an Egyptian expat (echoing the video’s theme, or enhancing it), but untimely death is an equally appropriate trigger.

I didn’t know this song until I listened to it four or five times today, and I’m a little challenged by the question, What the fuck are they going on about. I recognize every emotion as part of the teenage kit, but the video makes me wonder about the Crusades, and their relation to the angst of the young today.

Maybe a topic for further exploration.

LINK: Album Covers Suitable for Hanging in a Gallery

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Screenshot 2015-05-02 13.39.54I’m not sure about the premise of this slideshow in the Guardian, that these are the album covers that should hang in an art gallery, but it is a good reminder that album covers were an important part of listening to music back in the day of albums.

The big art of an album cover was a message about the product, often a statement about intentions or aesthetic purpose. Or just a lark, but one that connected the artist with the fans.

We lost that when we moved to CDs, and while vinyl sales are up, the vinyl elpee is no longer the face of a musical artist. That image has fractured into many competing versions, each shaped and colored for its particular audience. Which is why I think looking at nice reproductions of these album covers feels so fresh.

Newly Found Documents at Albert Hall… Involving the Beatles!

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Show that the Hall was peeved about the Beatle’s song, “A Day In The Life.”

Click here to read the story.

I wanted to link to the Milli Vanilli version recorded live at Albert Hall, with Jeff Lynne and PJ Harvey, but it isn’t on YouTube.

This video is terrific, which I hadn’t seen before, and which warrants a listen again to a song we’ve all heard too many times. But the psychedelia and pop song craft I hear here is worlds apart from what came after. Get out of here XTC! The noises in this song are economical, the language plain and straight forward (which still leaves plenty of room for weird). I was glad to watch it, even if I would have preferred Milli Vanilli at this point.