Richard Linklater made a movie called Dazed and Confused, after the Led Zeppelin song, about high school kids partying on the last day of school. His new movie is called Everybody Wants Some!!, after the Van Halen song, about college kids partying on the first day of school.
Like most Linklater films there is lots of chatter. In this case the bros in the movie are members of the best collegiate baseball team in Texas, and they talk about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, as well as much else, as they compete in everything they do.
I haven’t seen Dazed and Confused in a long time, so I won’t compare the two movies. What I can say for sure is that Everybody Wants Some!! is warm and funny and exuberant, brilliant and surprisingly deep in an offhanded and precise way (with beer and a bong). Highly recommended.
Plus, it got me to hear My Sharona with fresh ears. Not bad.
I read a lot of news about Steve Miller and the Black Keys and the Hall of Fame induction that happened in my home town this past week. Yawn.
But looking at it a bit more closely there are two important streams of thought:
The Black Keys were pissed that Steve Miller didn’t really care who they were.
And Steve Miller pretty directly explained why the RnR HoF process is even stupider than those of us who only pay partial attention think it is.
So, Miller is an asshole for dissing the Black Keys and a hero for taking on the Rock ‘n’ Roll HOF foundation? I’m not sure how to do the math, but I personally give him a lot more credit for railing against the machine than I do the Black Keys dissing an artist.
The other night I woke up somewhere in the middle of what should be deep sleep time, turned on the tube to ease me back into the arms of Morpheus, and in the process stopped at the Palladium channel, which is all concerts and music all the time.
As it happened, I stumbled into a long late night broadcast from Glastonbury a couple of years back, and this song and band.
I am not too sure about the band name, but this song is really nice and dreamy. And, the guitar player does some fun stuff with his 12-string on an axe that looks like he found it in a pawn shop (which is good).
I posted about Jimmy Webb’s song Wichita Lineman, or rather Freedy Johnson’s version of it, a few years ago here. But today is the day for appreciating linemen (actually it was yesterday, but close enough), this seems like a good time to take a look at the Glen Campbell version, which was a No. 3 hit in 1968 (No. 1 on the country charts).
Campbell is backed on the record by the Wrecking Crew, of which he was a member.
Reading about the Campbell version, I learned about the many other covers of the tune. Most surprisingly? Kool and the Gang.
Jazzy instrumental, hard to not think of the lyrics though it goes to a totally different place.
The inspiration for the song, according to the Wikipedia entry, was a lineman working atop a telephone pole who Webb saw while driving across Oklahoma and brooding about a failed romantic relationship. Webb imagined himself on the pole, talking to his gal, his heart breaking. Webb called the image “the picture of loneliness.”
As noted, because of the bigoted nature of Okie from Muskogee, I have always had a tough time with Merle Haggard, no matter who he played with, or what he wrote.
But, this answer to Okie, by the Youngbloods was always strong in my heart and made me think there was at least an artistic “fuck you” pointed back at Merle and the song. Olema is a little town near the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, a beautiful area in Northern California.
My friend Angela found a version of the Modern Lovers’ Old World today which is pretty swell. I mean the video. This is one of rock’s greatest albums, and Warren Loft’s videos, at least the three I’ve seen, capture the music’s kinetics and precision and depth. I’ll be watching the rest of them, but what better way to start than Roadrunner.
Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan first made their name in the music business as the creative force behind The Turtles. They scored a number of Top 40 hits with the likes of “Happy Together,” “Eleanor,” “She’d Rather Be With Me” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
Their albums, part parody, part serious, generally were well received by critics but didn’t chart so well with the public. (They were largely a singles band.) One, Turtle Soup, was produced by Ray Davies of the Kinks.
By the early 70s Volman and Kaylan had had enough of The Turtles. They assumed the aliases of Flo (the Phosphorescent Leech) and Eddie due to contractual obligations with The Turtles’ recording label (White Whale) and joined forces with Frank Zappa for a series of albums – 200 Motels and Fillmore East – June 1971 (1971), and Just Another Band From L.A. (1972). That ended when Zappa was injured at a London concert in 1971, so the boys made a series of Flo & Eddie albums for themselves.
Today’s song of the week is “Keep It Warm” from their fourth album, Moving Targets (1976).
Musically “Keep It Warm” is a Beach Boys parody (dig the “Good Vibrations” reference about 2:30 in) mixed with grim lyrics that reflect the then current evening news headlines of the mid 70s.
Elect another jerk to the White House
Gracie Slick is losing her door mouse
Take her off the streets and keep her warm
Kill another whale with your power
Or shoot a bunch a kids from a tower
Snipe them in their cars, blood keeps them warm
Starting in the 70s Flo & Eddie began singing harmony/background vocals for other artists. They were regulars on T. Rex albums including Electric Warrior and The Slider. They also sang on songs by Alice Cooper, Blondie, the Ramones, Stephen Stills and Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), among many others.
In recent years they’ve been doing summer “shed” package tours. I saw them a couple of times with the “Hippiefest.” This season they’re out with The Cowsills, The Spencer Davis Group (I assume sans Stevie Winwood), Chuck Negron (of Three Dog Night), Mark Lindsay (of Paul Revere & the Raiders) and The Gap Band including a couple of stops in New York in June and California in July. They’re still a very funny duo so you might want to check them out if they’re in a town near you.
As a young aspiring hippie it was easy to disdain Haggard’s epic “Okie From Muskogee,” but at the same time have the Grateful Dead’s version of Mama Tried on replay on the phonograph. I actually listened to a lot of Haggard back then, he was one of the great country songwriters who escaped categorization. And Mama Tried is just a fantastic song.
This tune was Haggard’s last Top 10 country chart song, one of 71 he had in his career, from back in 1987.
It is crazy draft season in the Fantasy Baseball world, which I guess my mates and I have been preoccupied with, meaning less rock’n’roll verbiage, I am sorry to say.
I had been thinking about a handful of songs to post about, but this morning I was getting my teeth cleaned and some lovely early 20th Century English classical music–a la Ralph Vaughn-Williams–came on. It was pretty soothing, but was followed by some pretty frantic piano concertos by Chopin.
Julie, who was cleaning my choppers, noted the change was not so gentle, but when I think of classical pianists, my brain goes elsewhere.
I am sure that though my parents did drag me to to the symphony and opera way too early (I was five my first symphony) my first real conscious memory of classical music comes from the great early Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies that often employed great classical pieces when telling a story.
However, the first such images that popped into my aging head were from films, first, out of the great Robert Zemeckis’ film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which somehow manages to merge animation with action, with film noir and said Looney Tunes.
The great late Bob Hoskins plays the shamus Eddie Valliant, who tries to unravel the mystery of cartoon death and conspiracy, and his work takes the detective to the “Ink and Paint Club,” where this fantastic sequence takes place (it features one of the best one-liners ever with Daffy Duck making a definitive statement about working with the disabled).
But, the other piano craw that sticks is always Chico Marx. Groucho and Harpo were much more screen hogs than Chico, but Chico was a wicked punster and straight man, and like Harpo could play the harp, and Groucho the guitar and ukelele, Chico could tinkle the 88’s.
As in check this out. Brilliant. Funny. Wonderful.
