My buddy David will recognize this one.
It’s smoother than Fidlar or the SonsofLouReed, but I’m down with it anyway. Driving while impaired is all about avoiding accidents. Gimmee all ten minutes, please.
Category Archives: pop music
Night Music: The Searchers, “Da Doo Ron Ron”
I’m on record saying that the Crystals Da Doo Ron Ron is Rock’s Greatest Song.
Maybe I need to elaborate. A perfect rock song needs to be simple, needs to be about sex, needs to allude to sex, needs to sustain the big beat.
What I like about the Crystals’ version is the epic sound, courtesy of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.
What I love about the Searcher’s version is that the play and sexual innuendo persist, I think because that’s a part of the song.
Journey Into The Internet K-Hole
The two pictures I’ve posted here are of famous rock bands back in the 80s that I found in a post at the Internet K-Hole. It seems that every few months babs posts a collections of snapshots from the 80s, mostly, of kids on skate boards, bands, kids at dances, kids surfing, an occasional nude, kids hanging, kids wearing band t-shirts, kids at the beach, kids with guitars, etc. The pictures are captionless, without context, sometimes adjacent ones relate to each other, but often they come from across the country at seeming random, certainly taken by different photographers, but they seem to tell one artful story, a memoir of a generation, about what it was like to be 16 and 20 and 24 back in the 80s.
If babs posted weekly, we’d get a lot less done.
Ht to dangerousminds.com.
Night Music: The Rutles, “With A Girl Like You”
I remember seeing the Rutles mocumentary, All You Need Is Cash, back in 1978, and being quite fond of it. A story about it in the NY Times last week sent me to YouTube, where my reaction was of a somewhat different sort. What I remembered as cute parody back then, plays as alternative Beatles tracks now. As Paul Simon says in the Times’ story, “it is more of a panegyric than it is a satire.” I think maybe the confusion stemmed from the title, which sounds satirical. Meanwhile, the music is so much like the Beatles sound that on the surface on crummy speakers it can almost pass.
That’s why Neil Innes, the songwriter, paid when the Beatles’ publishing company sued. And why these songs are a pleasure to hear even today.
Night Music: Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, “Young Girl”
This is not an endorsement of this song. But when I was 12 it was a giant hit, and I loved it. But I had limited funds, being 12 and all, and I remember spending an evening in the record department at some local department store while my parents shopped, trying to decide between Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the Grass Roots, the American Breed and the Who Sell Out.
Here’s Young Girl. I think it’s the record version synced to video from the Ed Sullivan show.
I cannot faithfully reproduce the arguments in favor and against each record that I made that night. I do think I bounced the Who because I didn’t actually know their songs. I just liked the cover and knew they were cool. I also know I held each album, reading liner notes, getting a feel, a number of times. It was agony. I ended up buying the American Breed album, which contained a really excellent one-hit wonderish tune called Bend Me Shape Me. But what interests me now is that both Young Girl and Bend Me Shape Me feature classic rock band configurations and lots of offscreen horns. This is not unlike the window dressing of other instruments and sounds on every one of the Top Hits of 2013, which include lush orchestration and giant beats to pump up their profile.
That’s what people want now. Then, I made the right choice. All the same difference.
Today, of course, I own both the Who Sell Out, on vinyl and CD, and Petra Hayden Sings The Who Sell Out, on CD. And nothing by the band my buddy Bobby Grecco called the Union Crap or the American Breed. But I can listen to all of them whenever I want.
Hot 10 Pop Songs of 1968: OMG!
This is the year of Paul Mauriat.
1. Hey Jude, Beatles
2. Love is Blue, Paul Mauriat
3. Honey, Bobby Goldsboro
4. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding
5. People Got to be Free, The Rascals
6. Sunshine of Your Love, Cream
7. This Guys in Love With You, Herb Alpert
8. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Hugh Montenegro
9. Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkle
10. Tighten Up, Archie Bell and the Drells
I was 12 and I thought Love is Blue was insipid but pretty. Kind of the same with Honey. Hated Herb Alpert.
The rest of this list is A and B list to THIS day. Soft stuff, not rocking except for Cream, but solid. Real songs, not product.
The question is whether one likes these tunes because they first heard them when they were 12, sleeping outside at night so they could listen to their portable transistor radios without getting scolded or told to go to sleep. Certainly my affection for Honey is sentimental. Really sentimental.