No Joy, Hawaii

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A random find on YouTube, this sounds so much like Sonic Youth at the start I almost stopped. But the video is strange and sensual, and the song such as it is comes and goes and is perfect for the video (or maybe it’s the other way around). Song with video? Video with song? I don’t know.

I posted because their first live show was with Husker Du’s Grant Hart and their first record was produced/mixed by the Raveonette’s Sune Rose Wagner.

Royal Headache, “High” and “My Own Fantasy”

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This song is pretty good.

These guys are from Australia and seem to have found a way to make the virtues of straightforward rock feel uniquely their own. It helps to have a great singer, this one is named Shogun, and catchy clever songs.

Plus, Royal Headache is a good name for a band.

Update: Here is an interview with Shogun that is not your typical rock singer interview.

 

Back To School, The Amen Break

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My friend Julie sent me this post from Open Culture about the Amen Break.

What is the Amen Break? It started out as a drum break on a b-side of a 45 by a R&B band called the Winstons, performed by GC Coleman. The a-side won a grammy for best R+B song that year. The b-side became the most sampled six seconds in music history. The link above has the whole story, and it’s long and worth it, I think.

At least that’s the sell here. The video is fun and scholarly about sampling. The influence of the Amen Break is more on hip hop, it seems, and UK street styles that have too many qualifying names to remember, but have to do with drum and bass.

I’m sympathetic to Mr. Reynold’s analysis about current copyright law, but he doesn’t do a great job of selling that part of the story. But who cares?

For me, the cool idea is that a drummer in a band in 1969 created a sound that crawled through all of our culture, and became classic. And we know it.

Here’s the original of Color Him Father, which is awfully sweet.

 

Song of the Week – Heavy Weather Traffic, Katydids & Idea, Bee Gees

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

My car still has a cassette deck in it. Really. Yeah, I’m not a car guy. I buy something reasonable and drive it into the ground. My 2006 Toyota has 120,000 miles and is still chugging along.

About a month ago I was rooting around in my music cave and found a big, old box of cassettes. I decided to plop it into my backseat and reach back to randomly grab something to listen to on my work commute. (An old school version of shuffle play.)

One day I played an album by the early ‘90s British band Katydids. They were formed by the duo of Susie Hug (vocals) and Adam Seymour (guitars). The first song on their eponymous, first album is today’s SotW – “Heavy Weather Traffic.”

Katydids, was produced by the great Nick Lowe. We all know that he only associates himself with quality projects. In this case it’s just solid guitar rock with top notch vocals and clever lyrics.

As I listened to “Heavy Weather Traffic” for the first time in about 20+ years there was something about its main riff that seemed very familiar to me. It was bugging me for hours. I finally decided that it reminded me of the Bee Gees “Idea” from their 1968 album of the same name.

I’m still not 100% sure this is the song I was trying to place, but now that I reacquainted myself to “Idea” I really liked what I heard. I didn’t intend for this post to feature more than one song but “Idea” is too cool not to share. If you only know the Bee Gees from their Saturday Night Fever incarnation, you’re in for a big surprise.

Put this one into the book as RESTORED.

Enjoy… until next week.

John Lennon is Dead.

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We know that. He died upteen years ago tonight. I was at a theatrical production called In Praise of Wine, with my friend Helen, and I praised wine too heartily. As we were leaving the theater we learned that Lennon had been killed. It was terrible, and then I went to sleep.

In the ensuing days it was hard not to troll the Lennon mourners. We thought they were sentimental, and they didn’t care about us at all. Drinks were thrown.

And I’m pretty sure that nothing constructive happened. Except maybe we all, even the most hippieish, thought that Imagine was treacle.

Which is why, on this anniversary, I land on Instant Karma. It’s an insistent song, but the words are as limp as those of Imagine or Revolution. It seems to be the tune that the rockarazzi have settled on as John’s legacy. Whatever.

But it really isn’t that good a song. It’s a slow slog through angry retribution, and while I would hope it introduced the concept of Instant Karma to the world, Google instant karma and you see no John Lennon song for pages, the world has passed it by.

Which leads me to the 45 I bought when the Beatles broke up. It’s meta to a fault, but it’s way more fun than Instant Karma or Imagine or How Do You Sleep, the songs that make me regret poor John.

Okay, a little more fun, because of the beat.

OBIT: Holly Woodlawn

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holly_1Holly Woodlawn was a movie star back when I was in high school. She was on the cover of the Rolling Stone, an amazing picture I can’t find, but one that certainly mixed up a young person’s head about the possibilities in this world.

When I was in high school we ate up Paul Morrisey’s trashy movies, Flesh and Heat, Dracula and Frankenstein 3D, some of which starred Holly Woodlawn.

When I heard that she’d passed yesterday I recalled the long and ridiculous dialogues she and Joe Dellasandro had in Trash, Holly’s nasal insistence the opposite of glamorous, but at the same time so full of its own sense of value, so real, that it also felt brave and heartening and hugely personal.

Vincent Canby got it right in his review of Trash in the New York Times:

“Holly Woodlawn, especially, is something to behold,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times, “a comic book Mother Courage who fancies herself as Marlene Dietrich but sounds more often like Phil Silvers.”

Which is why her place in rock ‘n’ roll history is cemented by these lines:

Holly came from Miami F-L-A,

Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A.,

Plucked her eyebrows on the way,

Shaved her legs and then he was a she.

She says Hey babe,

Take a walk on the wild side

Said hey honey

Take a walk on the wild side.

You can read her New York Times obit here. The Rolling Stone obit is here.

 

 

There’s Great And There’s Uniquely Great

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I first heard this in the summer of 1969 but it was released in March of 1967. A few months before Sgt. Pepper. The big songs in March 1967 were Ruby Tuesday, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields, and Happy Together. The Supremes’ Love is Here and Now You’re Gone also made it to #1 and is a better record than any of them but that’s another story.

Denise Fumo of all people introduced me to Heroin. I was 14 and madly in love with Denise but she only liked me as a friend. I was ready for some miserable music. Denise had many older boys in pursuit including the lifeguards, one of whom played it for her, and by the way that’s what I call sophisticated pickup technique. Denise was floored, bought it and played it for me, and thus I learned that there was more to this music thing than I thought.

Anyway, this song is every bit a product of 1967 as the others. And you Sgt. Pepper fans, which sounds more visionary now? Heroin by a mile.

Another thing is that Lou Reed covered the song more times than he could count, and he never came close to playing this song. That’s because of Mo Tucker and John Cale and Sterling Morrison. We used to play it in practice in Fun No Fun and did good things with it but not like this.