Song of the Week – O My Soul, Big Star

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

I have to write about Big Star this week. Why? Because it was meant to be. I’ve been stumbling across Big Star/Alex Chilton references for several weeks now and I can take a hint.

In August I came across The Onion’s A.V. Club article on the band. A few weeks later I saw a Salon article called Mike Mills: “I discovered Big Star the same way I discovered much of the music I love ¬— by listening to Peter Buck’s record collection”.

Finally, the reunited Replacements appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on September 9th, and what did they choose to perform? You got it – the song they wrote for their hero “Alex Chilton”.

My choice for a Big Star SotW today is “O My Soul.” It could be something different tomorrow because I love this band so much I have a new favorite every time I listen to their albums.

Mark Deming captures the beauty of this song in his AllMusic.com review:

On Big Star’s second album, Radio City, the departure of co-founder Chris Bell left Alex Chilton as the group’s sole guitarist, and the album’s first cut wasted no time in pushing his ragged-but-right instrumental style to the forefront. “O My Soul” is a gloriously messy hodgepodge of slashed-out R&B rhythms, psychedelic chord twists, and smart pop melodicism; the melody, fractured as it is, swerves all over the place, but Chilton’s breathless forward momentum (as well as the propulsive energy of drummer Jody Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel) keeps the tune on track, and the cut is one of the most exciting (and most curiously funky) in the Big Star catalog. As for Chilton’s lyrics, he seems to be having as much fun with his words as with his music: “I can’t get a license/To drive in my car/But I won’t really need one/If I’m a big star” is typical of the cheeky, surreal wit, though the refrain, “Never you mind/Go on and have a good time,” sums up whatever “message” he has to offer.

If you enjoy this song and want to learn more about Big Star and Alex Chilton, be sure to click on the links provided to read the articles. Also, there’s a very good documentary about the band that came out last year called Nothing Can Hurt Me. It’s available to stream on NetFlix and here’s a review of the movie from The New Yorker.

Enjoy… until next week.

Breakfast Blend: Bob Mould

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Here’s some live footage with some pretty muddy audio of Bob Mould playing in Atlanta in 1990. Peter Buck plays on Cinnamon Girl, though diffidently. But despite the limitations, Mould is boss and clearly this was a show to see.

Night Music: Rage to Live, “Enough Is Never Enough”

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ragetolive69628As is the case with all collegiate rock, influence rules. The Hoboken band Rage to Live introduced me to the great, brave, sordid novels of John O’Hara (he wrote one called Rage to Live).

Rage to Live was founded by Glenn Morrow, who was a writer for New York Rocker magazine, and a founder of Bar None Records (Rage to Live’s first album was Bar None’s first release).

The only song I could find from them was this tuneful thing, which is distinguished by its assertive vocals mixed up high, and a genuine organic hook. This music dates from the mid 80s, a time when disco and hardcore and synthpop were tearing up the world of rock. This is a time when I listened to a lot of music from Jamaica and Africa, but also a time when smart pop-rock bands like Yo La Tengo, Rage to Live, the Silos and many others emerged.

They sounded awfully good.

KISS my Griffin

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To say I feel guilty from having been so pulled away from here is sort of rhetorical.

And, I see posts of some great tunes being spotlighted (and there are some I wanna get out there too).

Life seems to be slowing, thankfully, but, while dozing off last night, the Family Guy where Lois and Peter go to a KISS-fest was on. So, funny.

Anyway, this clip is really the only thing out there worth displaying, but it is indeed pretty good (was thinking of you Steve:  maybe Perry is right and we should get a room?).

More to come. Miss you all.

 

Breakfast Blend: Friday On My Mind

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I first heard Jonathan Richman on the Beserkely Chartbusters album, which included some new Modern Lovers (not the original band) recordings with some of the other bands the Beserkely label were offering. This was the first recorded version of Roadrunner, in 1975, to be released.

In 1976 Beserkely licensed the John Cale produced Modern Lovers sessions and released them. I have no idea which version John Lydon heard before his audition, but the Cale version, titled “Roadrunner (Once)” was a hit in England in 1976. But some NYC record mavens were listening the year before, especially to the tunes Government Center and New Bank Teller, which were different.

But Beserkely was created mostly out of frustration that a Bay area rock band called Earth Quake wasn’t breaking large. The first single the label released was Earth Quake’s version of the Australian band the Easybeat’s 1967 hit Friday On My Mind.

This live version is less, um, concise than the single, but I have to say, for me this is rock ‘n’ roll and remnants, too. I love this band and the video. Less so the pants.

But if it’s Friday, we shouldn’t ignore the far more economical and Mod Australian Easybeats version.

It is a great song. Portugal. The Man should cover it. Or Lorde.

Night Music: Cream, “I Feel Free”

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Looking for something a little Scottish, while the vote is counted, I discovered that Talking Head’s David Byrne was born in Scotland. But somehow Cream’s Jack Bruce and his song, I Feel Free seems a better fit. He’s a Scots, too. No matter how things turn out.

Breakfast Blend: The Gray Album

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The whole “album” is here:

Night Music: Portugal. The Man, “Modern Jesus”

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I don’t know anything about this band. Wikipedia says they’re a rock band from Wasilla Alaska. No word if they’ve gotten into any punch outs with the Palins. The music on this cut isn’t rock. There’s lots of electronics and the vocalist is doing a blue-eyed soul thing, and then when they get into chorus it gets kind of over overlaid and sonically compressed, like modern hit songs. Not rock. The album this is from, Evil Friends, was produced by Danger Mouse, who got famous mixing up the Beatles White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album. He called it the Gray Album, and it was pretty good, but the work of a studio artist, not a hacker. Then he made that giant hit Crazy, with CeLo Green.

In any case, the lyrics on this song are great, “the only faith we have is waking up,” the attitude is strong and I like the vocals and the song itself. And the video is fab. This may be the sound of a rock band turning into a pop band, but I like it.

Night Music: The Modern Lovers, “I’m Straight”

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I found this song a few years ago. I think it is an outtake of the Modern Lovers album John Cale produced, but I don’t know that for sure. It reflects something of what Gene pointed out about Jonathan’s busking days.

What I know for sure is that Richman soon after the Cale sessions rejected the negative vibes he was giving off with great songs like She Cracked and Pablo Picasso and wrote and performed a few great albums of perky and twee tunes that were also really fantastic.

But I’m Straight is a song from derangement, though it erupts from great discipline and an obvious challenge.

It is not a great a pop song or rock song by any stretch, but as a heartfelt expression by a songwriter it stands very naked and tall. And weird.

Night Music: Grateful Dead, “Friend of the Devil”

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I’ve had many friends who were Dead Heads. I once rode on an Amtrak train north of NYC that was full of Dead Heads going to Syracuse, if I remember correctly, for a giant show at the Orange Dome. Beautiful people, but not me.

But I also think that the Dead, and Garcia and Lesh and no doubt others I’m not thinking of now, are great American rockers. Two drums? That’s good. More guitars? Can’t hurt. They did that early in the game.

They were always loud, always rhythmic, but they did move from innovative surrealism to smart social satire, as the years passed. And they got famous for two perfect albums of restrained country rock (Working Class Blues, American Beauty) and exquisitely long live jams that lent themselves to derangement via whatever hallucinogen was nearby.

I think those two albums are close to perfect, and while I write this I wonder why that happened then (and didn’t happen before or after). But for tonight: