Echo and the Bunnymen was a post punk, new wave band from Liverpool, England. The band earned very favorable critical notices here in the US, but never seemed to make a really big splash even though they received some considerable airplay from college and alternative rock radio stations.
Does anyone remember the ads for their fourth album Ocean Rain that boldly claimed it was “the greatest album ever made?” US record buyers felt otherwise – it only reached #87 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.
Despite that over exaggeration, Echo was a very good band with a bunch of songs that I really like. Their first album, Crocodiles (1980), contained my favorite and today’s SotW, “Do It Clean.”
Ian McCulloch was the artistic leader of the group, but as this garage rocker shows, it was the rhythm section of drummer Pete de Freitas and bassist Les Pattinson that really had the balls.
And that’s important because the lyrics are pretty weak — a lot of gibberish that’s probably a drug reference. But this song is really all about getting the body to move, and that it does (at least for me).
For several months my daughter Abby has been imploring me to listen to the music of Leon Bridges. I wasn’t intentionally dismissing her suggestion; it was more a case of my early onset Alzheimer’s that was keeping me from checking him out. But eventually I got with it and gave him a listen.
Have you heard him yet?
Bridges is a 26 year old, Texan soul singer in the mold of 70s era Al Green. He was pretty much unknown just a few months ago, but a popular performance at SXSW and May spot on Later… With Jools Holland helped push him into the spotlight.
His debut album, Coming Home, was recorded at home in Fort Worth, before he signed with Columbia – some of it recorded on an artificial putting green in a local bar – with the help of White Denim’s Austin Jenkins and a few other home town pals.
Today’s SotW is “Better Man.”
It is a smooth soul ballad about a man pleading for a second chance after doing his woman wrong (a well-worn theme in R&B). The record is captivating in its simplicity and openness, giving it a timeless gospel/soul feeling.
In a time when so much popular music is dependent on synthetic beats, it is refreshing to hear some real music.
Thanks, Abby, for hipping me to Leon Bridges. You know your daddy’s taste in music very well.
My appreciation for Neil Diamond has always been a mixed bag. The sequin jump suited performer of the 70s always struck me as tacky and cornball. His invitation by The Band’s Robbie Robertson to perform at The Last Waltz seemed out of place. (Robertson was his neighbor in Malibu and produced his 1976 album, Beautiful Noise.) He was the one guy that didn’t seem hip enough to fit in with the rest of the musicians on the bill. That Neil Diamond – to me – is just karaoke kitsch.
On the other hand, he wrote some songs that I really like and respect; especially some of his mid-sixties songs recorded for the Bang label. Today’s write up features two of them as covered by other artists.
The first is “Solitary Man” by Chris Isaak from his album San Francisco Days (1993).
The original by Diamond was released in 1966 but didn’t make the Top 40 until it was re-released in 1970, when it reached #21.
In an interview in the July 2008 (#176) issue of Mojo, Diamond discussed how producers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry prodded him to write songs with more depth:
“Solitary Man was my first song where I tried to really raise the level of my songwriting. It was inspired by the Beatles’ song Michelle, which was also written in a minor key. I don’t think I’d ever written a song in a minor key before, it was the first and it kind of broke the dam for me.”
The next SotW is Urge Overkill’s version of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” that was featured in the film Pulp Fiction.
Diamond’s original hit #10 in 1967. The Urge Overkill version and its association with Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction gave Diamond some badly needed hip credibility.
In the late 2000s, Diamond dialed up his cool factor even further by working with producer Rick Rubin to record a couple of critically acclaimed albums – 12 Songs and Home Before Dark. You probably recall how much Rubin’s golden touch helped Johnny Cash reach a larger, younger, hipper audience in the latter years of his career.
Michael Hurley has been making traditional American folk music since the mid 60s. So then, how is it possible that you (probably) never heard of him? Well that just ain’t right.
He’s 73 years old and has been putting out albums consistently from 1964 up to present day, mostly on small independent labels.
He was one of the three acts on the 1976 compilation album Have Moicy! that also included cuts by the Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones. This album has earned massive critical acclaim – most famously selected by the Village Voice’s music critic Robert Christgau as “the greatest folk album of the rock era.”
To be honest, I did not become familiar with the record back in the bicentennial year. In fact, I really can’t remember exactly when or how I finally got acquainted with it. But it is one of those records that you can listen to a thousand times and it never lets you down. A couple of the most popular songs on the album are “Midnight in Paris” and “Griselda.” But my favorite song, and one of today’s SotW, is “Sweet Lucy.” (And I swear that has nothing to do with the fact that I named my older daughter Lucy.)
It’s a funny story about a guy and his “old lady” (sorry for the anachronistic expression, but hey it’s 1976 remember) going on a bender.
In 1994 Hurley released his 13th album, Wolfways. That album contains today’s second SotW, “I Paint a Design.” It first appeared on Hurley’s 1988 album Watertower as a solo performance. But he decided to redo it with a full band on Wolfways and I like the newer version better.
Christgau weighed in again. This time he panned Wolfways, but awarded “I Paint a Design” his Choice Cut designation – defined as “a good song on an album that isn’t worth your time or money.” Kind of harsh on the album but the song does get into your head and won’t leave. The female background vocals kill it.
The song is used very effectively over the closing credits of Ray McKinnon’s Academy Award winning short film The Accountant (2001). It can be viewed in three parts on YouTube starting here:
Any of you under 30 years old might relate to the comparisons made between Hurley and Devendra Banhart. In fact Banhart is a fan and Hurley released two of his more recent albums on Banhart’s Gnomonsong label. Hurley’s songs have been recorded by several other more current acts that are also fans – Cat Power, Espers, Vetiver, and The Violent Femmes among them.
He does most of his own album cover artwork too. Check it out.
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
Today’s SotW is the 500th song featured since this thing started in February 2008. Thanks for your continued feedback and support. T
I recently finished another great rock music history by Greil Marcus – The History of Rock ’N’ Roll in Ten Songs (Yale University Press, 2014). It’s a terrific book and I highly recommend it if you like intelligent, intellectual rock history.
The first song he chooses is “Shake Some Action” by the Flamin’ Groovies.
The Flamin’ Groovies were a San Francisco based band that formed in the mid 60s and lasted through the 70s as the core band. Different configurations gigged until 1992 and there have been a few reunions in the 2000s. This band never achieved the fame they deserved as pioneers of the power pop genre.
“Shake Some Action” was the title song from their fourth album, released in 1976. The song was produced by Dave Edmunds, a British pub rocker that is no stranger to cutting a pop hit.
Marcus makes his case for “Shake Some Action’s” importance in the history of Rock ‘N’ Roll thusly:
‘The story told in “Shake Some Action” is complete in its title – though in the song it’s a wish, not a fact, a desperate wish the singer doesn’t expect to come true. The words hardly matter: “Need” “Speed” “Say” “Away” are enough. It starts fast, as if in the middle of some greater song. A bright, trebly guitar counts off a theme, a beat is set, a bass note seems to explode, sending a shower of light over all the notes around it. The rhythm is pushing, but somehow it’s falling behind the singer. He slows down to let it catch up, and the sound the guitar is making, a bell chiming through the day, has shot past both sides. Every beat is pulling back against every other; the whole song is a backbeat, every swing a backhand, every player his own free country, discovering the real free country in the song as it rises up in front of him, glimpsing that golden land, losing it as the mirage fades, blinking his eyes, getting it back, losing it again – that is its reckless abandon, the willingness of the music, in pursuit of where it needs to go, where it must go, to abandon itself. “You have to go into a crowd and do something they can’t,” [Neil] Young said that day in 1993. “Some of them are hearing it and some of them aren’t, but it doesn’t matter. The idea is the tension.”
In “Shake Some Action,” the tension is there from the first moments – that count is a count to the end, the dead end, the door you’ve locked from the inside and can’t open, and the whole song can feel like an attempt to escape the tension, to let it dissipate, until the musicians no longer remember that the theme that kicked them off was fate. Here, every element in the music is a leap. As different parts of the song slow, as others pick up speed, depending on where you are, which wave in the song you’re riding, the sense of imminent loss can disappear – and then the singer drops back and there is a guitar, more than a guitarist, replacing the story you’ve heard with one you haven’t.
It’s what the singer is afraid of losing defined now purely in the positive, as flight, as freedom, in Norman Mailer’s words loose in the water for the first time in your life, because no matter how many times in how many pieces of music you are swept away at the instrumental passages in “Shake Some Action” can sweep you away, it’s always the first time. When the guitarist steps onto the magic carpet of his first solo, it is a picture of everything the singer is certain is slipping away from him, but it is not slipping away, it is present, you can hold it in your hand, see it glow. At the end, the guitarist again steps forward – and while the notes played might on paper be the same as they were before, in the air they are speaking in a different tongue. The drum roll that has tripped the song into the instrumental passage that will end it has tripped it over a cliff, and you feel not the worth of what the singer wants, but what it was worth, before it vanished, before it went back beyond memory, into fantasy, as if desire never had a face. Is that why you have to play the song again, to make it come out differently? Or because you can’t live without that beat?’
Alright!
I can’t end this post without answering the question I know you all have – What are the other 9 songs? Marcus often makes his case by discussing multiple versions of a song but I’ll just list the originals:
Transmission – Joy Division
In the Still of the Nite – The Five Satins
All I Could Do Was Cry – Etta James
Crying, Waiting, Hoping – Buddy Holly
Money (That’s What I Want) – Barrett Strong
This Magic Moment – The Drifters
Guitar Drag – Christian Marclay
To Know Him Is to Love Him – The Teddy Bears
Today’s SotW is “When Things Go Wrong” from the eponymous debut album by Robin Lane & the Chartbusters.
Although this album didn’t come out until 1980, Lane already had an established pedigree in the music business. The daughter of Ken Lane (Dean Martin’s pianist on The Dean Martin Show) and wife (for a couple of years) to The Police’s lead guitarist Andy Summers, Lane performed folk rock around LA in the late 60s and early 70s. She caught the attention of Neil Young who brought her in to contribute that haunting harmony vocal on “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long)” from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
Somewhere around the mid/late 70s Lane moved to the east coast and ended up in Cambridge, MA where she hooked up with the Chartbusters — Asa Brebner and Leroy Radcliffe (who had been with Jonathan Richman and the post “Roadrunner” Modern Lovers), Scott Baerenwald and Tim Jackson.
With the Chartbusters she played a brand of harder rock that often led to comparisons with Pat Benatar and Heart. But she always seemed to me to be closer to Chrissie Hynde.
I saw them perform live in Boston a few times and remember that their three guitar attack was exhilarating.
When their album came out, I remember being very confused by the cover art. It didn’t seem to fit the band I had seen live. Warner Brothers seemed to try to soften their street cred by putting her in spandex (Pat Benatar again) and a stupid stripped sweater. I read an interview with Brebner and he seemed to agree.
“I still cringe at that album cover, which I think largely sunk us as a candy-ass major label contrivance to those uninitiated to our music. The music itself was watered down enough so it could not overcome that basically cosmetic impression that the casual record store [browser] would garner on seeing it in the bins. It didn’t represent us, and I felt cheated.”
Lane & the Chartbusters went on to put out a fine 5 song, live EP and a second album, Imitation Life (1981), but they never garnered the acclaim that they deserved. Damn that album cover!
In 2014 her drummer bandmate Tim Jackson, produced, directed and premiered a film called When Things Go Wrong – Robin Lane’s Story that documented her work. Hopefully it will receive a general release sometime soon.
Today’s SotW is a guilty pleasure dating back to 1974, the year I graduated from high school. Maybe it’s that connection that keeps the song so fondly in my memory. It is “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” by the fake band Reunion.
A few months ago I wrote a post about the Pooh Sticks. On their web page (thepoohsticks.blogspot.com) they did a countdown of their top 50 songs. “Life Is a Rock” came in at #17.
Joey Levine, the song’s lead singer, was also involved in other fake bands including bubblegum music giant The Ohio Express (“Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy).
This single established the template for songs with scores of cultural references spit out in a machine gun like, rapid fire delivery. R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” (1987) and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989) followed in a similar vein.
Listen closely… some of the references are pretty hip for 1974, bubblegum music fodder.
I just learned that Phil Austin of the Firesign Theatre has passed away. He was 74. Although the Firesign were not musicians, they’re brand of comedy epitomized the spirit and culture of Rock ‘n Roll.
When I was in college, my roommates and I listened “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” (and all of their other routines) endlessly. We knew and could recite the dialog by heart.
I brought one of their films (Everything You Know is Wrong) to campus and once did a 4 hour Firesign marathon on WZBC (Boston College radio).
I also finally got to see the group perform at Boston’s Orpheum Theater, I think it was the late 80s (could have been early 90s). They were great sports, letting the audience recite all of their most popular lines.
Since Peter Bergman died in 2012, the Firesign Theatre is down to two. That is sad news.
RIP Phil (Nick Danger) Austin. You will be missed.
The Undertones were a late 70s/early 80s rock band from Derry, Northern Ireland. Their brand of three chord pop punk led to comparisons to Sire label mates, The Ramones. Their songs dealt primarily with teen subject matter, mostly girls and such. (They steered away from political subject matter such as the violence and conflict they were surrounded by at home during “the troubles.”)
They gained their first notoriety when the influential British DJ John Peel championed the band by playing their first single, “Teenage Kicks”, twice during one radio program. He famously named it his all-time favorite song – in fact, a line from the song (“Teenage dreams so hard to beat”) is inscribed on his gravestone.
Today’s SotW is the lead off cut from the band’s second album Hypnotized (1980). It is the tongue-in-cheek titled “More Songs About Chocolate and Girls.” It also pays tribute their other Sire label mates, Talking Heads, whose second album was called More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978).
It comes on with a catchy guitar lick and friendly reggae lilt. It could be a peppier cousin to The Clash’s version of “Police and Thieves.” Later, lead singer Feargal Sharkey implores with his unmistakable warbly vocal:
Sit down, relax and cancel all other engagements
It’s never too late to enjoy dumb entertainment
I have to admit that I’ve never been a big fan of heavy metal or its offshoots. My college roommates loved Black Sabbath. I just didn’t get it. Hair metal? Speed metal? Not for me. Over time I did open up to it a little. There was a time that I couldn’t stand AC/DC, but I love them now.
But there are always exceptions and that brings me to today’s SotW, “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely” by Hüsker Dü.
Hüsker Dü was a post punk band from Minneapolis. They played a brand of hardcore speed metal, but with less screaming and more melody. They were a power trio with two terrific songwriters in Bob Mould (guitar/vocals) and Grant Hart (drums/vocals), and Greg Norton on bass.
“Don’t Want to Know…” is a Hart song from the band’s 1986 major label debut, Candy Apple Grey. It’s another in the long tradition of Rock music break-up songs.
I’m curious to know exactly how you are
I keep my distance but that distance is too far
It reassures me just to know that you’re okay
But I don’t want you to go on needing me this way
And I don’t want to know if you are lonely
Don’t want to know if you are less than lonely
Don’t want to know if you are lonely
Don’t want to know, don’t want to know
The day you left me, left me feeling oh so bad
Still I’m not sure about all the doubts we had
From the beginning we both knew it wouldn’t last
Decisions have been made the die has been cast
The phone is ringing and the clock says four A.M.
If it’s your friends, well I don’t want to hear from them
Please leave your number and a message at the tone
Or you can just go on and leave me alone
Hüsker Dü never achieved the commercial success they deserved. When I listen to their records (an amazing six albums – two of them doubles – and two EPs released between 1983 and 1987) I can’t imagine a Nirvana or a Green Day without them. (In fact, Green Day recorded “Don’t Want to Know…” for a scrapped MTV pilot called Influences.
