Here’s a tune that tastes equally from the Allman Brothers and the Raspberries canteen. That’s a crazy hybrid, and maybe you have a better way to describe the mix, but nine minutes of jammy power pop is hard to wrap one’s legs around. On the other hand, it is epic. Not artsy, but big. I’m not sure the video helps, but it is obvious and not without interest.
Do you remember President Nixon. Or the bills you have to pay?
We finally watched Twenty Feet from Stardom, the documentary about backup singers that was a must-see hit a couple of years ago. It’s pretty delightful, and also sad, as the women who learned to sing in church eventually see their bigger dreams of solo success fizzle.
The movie finally settles on Darlene Love’s compelling story for its big emotional finish, and that’s fine, but it also downplays the success story of Luther Van Dross, who can be seen in this video from New Years—as 1974 turns into 1975—backing up David Bowie on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Years Eve. Vandross is the chubby fellow on the left.
Vandross successfully escaped the gravity of the background singer role and had a successful solo career as a singer and producer, unlike the stories featured in the movie. That’s a sign that the movie is more a charming story than truth telling, but it’s worth seeing just to spend time with Love, the Blossoms, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega and many others. Their stories are really interesting, and inevitably tell a richer story than the one the movie chooses to focus on.
This clip is for Luther Vandross and yesterday, the day after David Bowie’s birthday. It is cool, a synonym for awesome.
We went to a party at a friends house tonight. One down the block. Many neighbors were there, and some other folks.
When it got a little later the lights got darker and music got darker, and there was dancing. But it was funny. There was a fair reason to question almost every dance tune in the mix. This was dance music from the time when I danced, so we had the Sugar Hill Gang, and Blondie, and Nena, and the great thing was everyone, from us old folks, to young adults to the kids, all danced and limboed. It was great.
It wasn’t a great mix of tunes, but it was a great party and the best song was one of Motown’s best. And one of pop’s greatest tunes. Can’t forget the motor city!
Alan Arkush’s first feature film was a Corman spoof of low-budget exploitation filmmaking called “Hollywood Boulevard.” Arkush later went on to semi-stardom, directing Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with the Ramones, a few years later.
But Commander Cody and crew was his debut, and the result was exuberant and as ragged as you would expect. Ramones fans may want to note that the Commander and his Airmen were reportedly (by Rolling Stone) busted in Nice, trying to get to the Hollywood Boulevard screening at the Cannes Film Festival, for having too much airplane glue on them when they tried to clear customs. Crazy, and clearly they didn’t know about carbona.
For some reason Stanley was hired to sing, without makeup, a coffee commercial.
And because we’re all about food.
I like themes, up to a point of course. This video has terrible video transfer and bad audio, but it does have some sense of how great that Food Glorious Foot song is.
From Oliver, but not as evocative as this crap.
This song was a hit in 1969, which means I was stumbling into adolescence and learning to delight in stupid rude puns (or what appeared to be so, at the time). This version, a song about food by the way, is contemporary (from October 2014), and Tony Joe’s voice isn’t quite so flexible, but it percolates anyway. And he has a nice buzzing solo, too. And Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, too. Plus Dave.
In my high school years, and into college, my band was Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. They were a country band that played the old style, no wimpy folk music here, and featured the Commander as big personality and boogie king, Bill Kirchen as most excellent rockabilly guitar, Andy Stein on the fiddle (one I touched after a show at Long Island University), the incomparable Bobby Black on pedal steel, and Billy C. Farlow as rockabilly vocal king.
The band’s roots were in Ann Arbor, though they ended up in San Francisco. But this clip is from a concert to support White Panthers leader John Sinclair, who was doing hard time for holding two joints when he wasn’t managing the MC5. The point was that drug laws were being used to muzzle political dissent.
The MC5, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bob Seger, and Alan Ginsberg, and many others, performed at this show.
I didn’t know this clip until today. For me this band is the exemplar, the ultimate. And this is the perfect weepy country song.
This is the elpee version. Better mixed and performed. Perfect.
Biologists who discover new species are given the privilege of naming them. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium discovered these deep sea snails.
“Because they look like punk rockers in the 70s and 80s and they have purple blood and live in such an extreme environment, we decided to name one new species after a punk rock icon,” said Shannon Johnson, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
And thus, A.strummeri was coined. More story here.
And here’s a band called the Snails covering (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais in 2010, in memory of Joe Strummer’s death, which came 12 years ago this week. Perfect.
