One of my favorite songs of 2014 was by King Tuff (aka Kyle Thomas) hailing from Vermont by way of LA. His style of music has been described as “garage-glam.”
Today’s SotW, the title song from the album Black Moon Spell, shows that label is spot on.
The song sounds like it was recorded by the illegitimate son of Marc Bolan (T-Rex) and Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick). It has great big hooks and fuzzy guitar amplified through Marshall Stacks. This is serious party music. It doesn’t hurt that fellow grunge/psych/rocker Ty Segall viciously pounds the drums.
The lyrics conjure up some weird, ominous voodoo yarn.
I feel a sickness in your heart
Cuz you drank my witch’s brew
You were doomed right from the start
And you know I feel it too
I’d never heard of Dudes, a Jon Cryer as a punk road movie, until I posted the Vandals song Urban Struggle last night. The YouTube video I found of US was played over clips from Dudes, which looks truly terrible. So, I was disturbed this morning to discover that Dudes was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who made the documentary, Decline of Western Civilization, and Suburbia, a roughly made but excellent teen movie that takes place along the periphery of the LA punk scene in the early 80s.
Here’s a clip from Decline.
And I posted this clip from TSOL in Suburbia last year on Oscar night. It’s just a taste.
I didn’t follow the LA scene that closely, but songs made their way east. The Vandals were in the most excellent movie Suburbia, but this rodeoed into our lives a little earlier.
The Village Voice published this list in December, but I just bumped into it. The idea of it seems silly, but listening to the 10 songs there is definitely a hard noisy sound that the writer favors. And it is punky without being nostalgic, which means it has an attitude, which is good. What the 10 songs didn’t have were hooks, but I liked La Misma and played some of their other songs, which sound like the one in the list here, and the Hank Wood and the Hammerheads song made me root around for others. I like this one, though I suppose it is more throwback than others, it also stokes the pleasure center.
As I have written, there is not a lot of music Diane and I agree upon, but early AC/DC is one.
And, well, those of us here in Remnantland might have our differences in taste and style, but I can promise you all of us loved vocalist Bon Scott, who died 35 years ago yesterday, of what his death certificate said was “death by misadventure.”
I suspect Bon probably had a good laugh about that one somewhere the great beyond (or wherever).
Since A Long Way to the Top (my favorite AC/DC song) has visited here before, let’s filthy and chintzy.
With video from the TAMI show, and Lesley’s vocals, so you don’t really have to sing. But listen knowing that You Don’t Own Me was written by two guys, a great song about being a teen.
Never heard this until today. This is PJ Harvey and Bjork doing a version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, which starts slow but pays off. From 1994.
Way different than Chan Marshall’s folkie version, which I happened to see live in 2000 at the Knitting Factory. Nice sounding, but what’s the point? She doesn’t even say, I’m trying to make some girl!
Aw heck, Devo should be here, though the video is as misbegotten as Marshall’s version. Devo’s music tells the story, however. I bought the Satisfaction/Mongoloid single before Devo’s album came out. Couldn’t wait.
Patti Smith did an interview with Alan Light back in 2007, when she was promoting her album of covers, Twelve. For whatever reason (he wrote a news piece, not an interview at the time) the interview got filed, and has now emerged on Medium’s Cuepoint. It offers a quick and insightful overview by Smith of her career, which is worth reading, and it ends with this, which is excellent:
Alan Light: What do you think is the biggest misconception about you?
Patti Smith: The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to return to the public eye in ’95 or ’96 when my husband died. We lived a very simple lifestyle in a more reclusive way in which he was king of our domain. I don’t drive, I didn’t have much of an income, and without him, I had to find a way of making a living. Besides working in a bookstore, the only thing I knew how to do was to make records—or to write poetry, which isn’t going to help put your kids through school. But when I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” and I just want to get Elvis Presley’s gun out and shoot the television out of their soul. How could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.
I’m not a celebrity, I’m a worker. I’ve always worked. I was working before people read anything about me, and the day they stopped reading about me, I was doing even more work. And the idea that if you’re a mother, you’re not doing anything—it’s the hardest job there is, being a mother or father requires great sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, and to think that we weren’t doing anything while we were raising a son or daughter is appalling. It makes me understand why some human beings question their worth if they’re not making a huge amount of money or aren’t famous, and that’s not right.
My mother worked at a soda fountain. She made the food and was a waitress and she was a really hard worker and a devoted worker. And her potato salad became famous! She wouldn’t get potato salad from the deli, she would get up at five o’clock in the morning and make it herself, and people would come from Camden or Philly to this little soda fountain in South Jersey because she had famous potato salad. She was proud of that, and when she would come home at night, completely wiped out and throwing her tip money on the table and counting it, one of her great prides was that people would come from far and wide for her potato salad. People would say, “Well, what did your mother do? She was a waitress?” She served the people, and she served in the way that she knew best.
The Pretty Little Demons named Alison Mosshart one of their heroes. Mosshart was in the Kills, a rock band with a DIY vibe and spare sounds that included the guitarist James Hince and a drum machine and recorded from 2001 to 2011. Their last tour was opening for Queens of the Stone Age a few years ago, though they’re also reportedly working on a new elpee.
In 2009 Mosshart started the Dead Weather with Jack White, Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence. Like so much of Jack White’s ouvre, the cuts I’ve listened to from the Dead Weather have some great moments (the guitar solo in this one is solid), but the rock just doesn’t swing, it’s all fits and starts, angles and changes. If you can’t sing or dance along, and it doesn’t make you shout with it into the dark night, is it really rocking?
