Here’s a tune that Nicke Andersson plays only guitar on. At first I thought he was the guy on the left side of the frame wearing the hat, but then I realized that guy was playing right handed. Nicke arrives animated on a tiny TV to play his solo after the odd break, not really a bridge, with the gal singer.
What’s curious about her part, apart from the gang signing, is the way her lyrics borrow from Aerosmith’s Dream On, a song which doesn’t seem to have anything in common with this one. But maybe I’m missing something.
The video does a lot, really, with very little. Have a nice lunch! Perhaps Swedish meatballs and some ligonberries.
A woman in upstate New York is suing heartthrob Rick Springfield for the third time, claiming that during a concert he went into the audience, swung his butt around and knocked her unconscious.
This picture is a shot the woman took moments before the allegedly debilitating injury took place.
The two previous trials ended up with no decisions.
As you’ll see in the morning, if you follow this by the day part, I bumped into the Backyard Babies’ version of a particular tune last night that makes tomorrow’s Breakfast Blend. Which got me thinking about Dregen, the lost wonder of the Hellacopters, and all the ins and outs of Sweden’s hard rock wars.
The Backyard Babies are known, according to Wikipedia, as the band that introduced Sweden to degenerate rock.
This is the Backyard Babies biggest hit. It was featured in one of the Guitar Hero releases, and the video is kind of okay, even though it’s just the band playing the song on a roof in LA. That’s how energetic they are.
Another nugget that popped up for me while assembling Lindsay’s holiday disc was this absolute gem from Devo.
In fact, it is such a great cut, that I was sure someone (maybe even me?) had written about the band or song before, so I was surprised to see only indirect references to Devo within the Remnants archives.
I think history will prove Devo–particularly Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry (Gerald) Casale, the band’s driving forces–vastly underated, as a band, as songwriters, and as artists. For, what Devo did was much closer to rock and roll (I guess actually New Wave) theater than most bands. But, they were also very tight musically, as you shall see.
I found these two live versions of the ever intense Gut Feeling/Slap Your Mammy while looking for a good representation of the song, and they are both great, and interesting.
The first is from 1977, when the band was still pretty new on the forefront of Devolution. The film is rugged and jumpy, but the sound is ok, and the opening bass solo from Casale–who adds the great stage look of having a lefty player–is really great. You can see Mothersbaugh, as a singer/performer/front definitely has some chops.
But, check out how much tighter and polished the whole thing was three years later, after a serious cult following and a couple of discs and big time touring. By then Mothersbaugh was pretty well realized with this really mesmerizing performance.
Shilpa Ray plays the squeeze box, but her happy hookers are versatile. I bought this record back in 2011, on the basis of this song. The rest is spotty, the way music can be when the sounds and the ideas aren’t integrated. But I was reminded of Shilpa by Silke, for obvious reasons (guitars and sex and big voices aggressively fronted), and maybe because Silke walked through a world of legends, who created a sound and a style and it has endured.
It’s hard not to see the expression of those sounds and styles today as derivative and nostalgic, even if the players weren’t there then. Unless the players are so strong they can send you back in time. This song almost gets there.
I was driving around the other day, attempting to complete last minute holiday errands when the “hot lunch” came on the local representation of the hard rock station.
“The Bone” is the local pathway to bands like Black Sabbath and Rush and Def Leppard, who I admit are not my faves on one hand, but on the other do offer the crunch of guitars.
The “hot lunch” is just an hour of said groups with a theme suggested by the DJ, and with listeners then calling in their requests.
This particular edition of the “hot lunch” featured songs that had whistling, and the set kicked off with the great and goofy Hocus Pocus by the Dutch band Focus.
Spearheaded by killer guitar player Jan Akkerman, this was the band’s only real foray onto the American pop/rock scene, but so off beat and silly a song it is, punctuated by blasts of Akkerman’s wizardry, that the whole song is just one great goulash of fun.
Part of the shtick was also provided by keyboard player/flautist/yodeler Thjis van Leer.
Yeah, yodeling, flute, bridges with drums, and even whistling along with, as noted, those searing and interesting Akkerman solos.
Christmas–in fact the holidays at large–is an excuse for excess.
I was trying to think of a fitting tune as such, that would reflect the panoply of things that represent the season–food, drink, gifts, money–while also remembering that for Diane and me, Boxing Day will be the actual gift exchange with the family for the first time. That is because Kelly, Lindsay’s sister, has to work the holiday and cannot get away. (It was the same Thanksgiving, the first holiday where she was so grown up she couldn’t get home because of work, so it is fine to stall a day.)
For some reason, the thought of Boxing Day must have triggered my thoughts of the band Boxer, and the song All the Time in the World. While checking out versions, I was reminded of Mike Patto, who headed the group Boxer, and played with Spooky Tooth, a band full of great musicians, but one that never really caught on in the states.
An art rock group of sorts, SpookyTooth included such personage as Chris Stainton, Henry McCullough, Greg Ridley, Mike Harrison, and Gary Wright.
In reviewing this information, I was reminded of the song The Mirror, from the album of the same name, released in 1974. I was in love with ELO at the time, and when I heard the song The Mirror, I thought it was close to perfect.
Fortunately, within three years, punk would arrive and save me from the horrors of second generation prog rock. In fact, when I played The Mirror, while concoting this piece, I was sort of surprised that I ever liked it at all.
Certainly the song is heavily influenced by Gary Wright and the Dreamweaver phase, and I do like the arpeggio guitars and the drums, and even synths, but the words? God help me, and the chorale influenced singing during the over-indulgent bridge makes awful even worse.
Still, an interesting look at Brit psychedelia during the era of Elton John
Mike Patto left Spooky Tooth to form Boxer, and I remember buying their album Below the Belt when it came out, not so much because I loved the band but rather because I thought the album jacket would make the record collectable someday (I was right as it goes for between $75-$100 on Ebay). I do think though, that this had to be what Christopher Guest and Michael McKean and Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner were thinking when they were imagining the jacket of Smell the Glove.
Either way, curiosity got the better of me, so I pulled up All the Time in the World and it was actually sort of raw, but a lot better than The Mirror.
Which I guess isn’t saying much.
Hope your seasonal excesses don’t get the better of you, and if you are doing the gift thing tomorrow, happy Boxing Day!
I posted this one last year. I think it may have come out last year, which would have made it contemporaneous. Then.
This year it is history, but the gods honest truth is that on this Christmas morning this song once again sums up for me my feelings about life and holiday and family and fucking friends and family dying of cancer and thankfully sometimes miraculously surviving, in what seems to me an incredibly catchy and lucid and honest way.
Your mileage may vary, but for me Tracy Thorn nails it, and makes me grieve with joy. What could be more generous and wiser than that?
The intersection is a songwriter and guitarist who used to sing in the 90s with the Ass Ponys, whose third Nirvana-tinged album from 1994 I own, and who now plays and writes and sings with Wussy. Chuck Cleaver is his name, and he’s a guy from Cincinnati who has never stopped indie rocking.
