One of my favorite bands of my high school years, though not a big favorite among some of my friends. But among my best friends, the ones who read R. Crumb comix and, well, shared a sensibility that saw a future in that truckin’ past mutating into whatever awful future seemed to be in store, and loved Symphony Sid Page’s fiddle playing, this was gold.
Today, when I load a new musical device I make sure to get some Dan Hicks on there. Deep ties indeed.
In the comments to my post about our tastes for pop music being set when we’re teens, more or less, Gene said: “OK, but ALL pop music is retro now – there haven’t been any cultural changes in more than 20 years, which is unprecedented since pop culture entered its modern phase in the early 20th century.”
I would have agreed with him until my daughter started in middle school. There she met a whole cohort of teen musicians. These guys (in this case they’re all guys) play piano and guitar and saxophone and drums and sing really well, but in their spare time they write and record dubstep.
And I have friends whose sons also record dubstep and go to EDM concerts where all the music is spun by djs with computers. I know, I know, we hate this sort of music, but to say that ALL pop music is retro now misses the point that the pop music that is listened to by the youth today sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Most of it, hey-get off my lawn, doesn’t even sound like music.
Talking about the charged music of one’s youth, both Rufus’s Tell Me Something Good and Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing, as well as Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions album and Kool and Gang’s Wild and Peaceful album, served as a heated soundtrack to youthful explorations both physical and mindbending that are to this day indelible.
I listen to You Sexy Thing now and I wonder why in the heck they inserted those strings, but in my memories of long ago all I hear is the funky guitar and the pleading naked vocals.
If I put on my objective hat today the song is overproduced and undercranked, but through the lens of youth’s underproduction and overcranking, it is sweet indeed.
Mark Joseph Stern, at Slate, who is still in his 20s, explains why the music we love as teens (from 12 to 22) is the music we remain most passionate about our whole lives.
The fact that this is pretty much true we see in evidence with almost every post here at Rock Remnants, and we all have a lot more water under the bridge than Stern does.
I’m sure his explanation isn’t quite the whole of the answer, but in general terms it feels pretty much right (and it involves brain imaging!). What came to mind for me, one of those teen moments, was a memory of reading in Lisa Robinson’s Hit Parader magazine, maybe when I was 13, about Jerry Lee Lewis’s song Breathless as the apotheosis of rock ‘n’ roll.
I went to the music store in my home town and found a copy of the single in the oldies section, and probably paid a quarter for it. If memory serves it was b/w High School Confidential. I brought the 45 home and put it on the fat spindle on my cheap record player. I was tremulous, with heightened expectations, almost giddy I recall. I anticipated something incredible, and when I pushed play, I got something I’d never heard before.
Bye bye Herman’s Hermits, hello better stuff of all sorts. I’ll never forget that and now I know better why.
This one goes out to my friends Jane and Pete, who are looking to rent a place in Washington DC (job change) and rent out their place in Red Hook in the Hudson Valley.
If you’re in the market in either place, let me know.
I fell on this tune tonight, however, because we were having a little hootenanny after dinner and I ended up singing on this one. It’s hard to sing voice chorus verse and not get monotonous, or corny.
I’ve heard the Leadbelly version many times, he wrote it, but I fell in love with the song because of Ry Cooder. Never heard the Joplin version until tonight, but she sang it with heart when she was but a child (20 years old). It’s plenty good.
I’m a bigger Pixies fan than my fellow remnants, but tonight a few of my family sucked down the utterly ridiculous and sometimes majestic Fight Club movie, which cannily uses no pop culture of any sort during the film itself. (Except for a marquee plug for Brad Pitt’s Seven Years in Tibet, late in the film.) But does latch onto this fine Pixies tune in the end credits.
For those of us still interested in the question about great songs, this isn’t one of those. This is a fine performance by a charismatic band on a very serviceable tune which amounts to a series of satisfying touchpoints, rockwise.
In other words, it’s not Debaser. But I’m happy to hear it at any time.
It just looks like it. Here’s the story at Gothamist. Not tha A for Anarchy symbol in the logo. Click for larger.
This is an old Lucinda Williams song that Johnny Cash apparently covered for the American sessions he recorded with Rick Rubin near the end of his life. The great thing about the American sessions is that Johnny hobbled through scores of songs and marked every one of them his own.
I think the musical arrangement here is bold but hamhanded, and Cash’s performance is a little wispy at times, and the whole abandoned thing is haphazardly mixed, but a fine song shines regardless, as it does here.
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
Today is the official 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency in 1974. But as far as I’m concerned, yesterday, August 8th is the true anniversary because it was on prime time TV the night of the 8th that he announced to the country that he would resign at noon the next day. I remember where I was when that news broke… do you?
I was at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion tour concert. The band had left the stage abruptly. At a time before smart phones, we in the audience just waited for them to come back out, unaware that something historic was unfolding. At least not until Graham Nash came back out onto the stage and announced “Nixon has just resigned” to the cheers of the largely anti-war crowd.
That 1974 tour was just documented in a new boxed set that was released in July. In a recent interview promoting the recordings Crosby said:
The most memorable moment for me was the Aug. 8 concert at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. While we were on, President Nixon went on TV and said he was resigning the next day. When we heard backstage, we went bonkers. Graham announced it to the audience and the place went completely up for grabs. It was a moment of complete and utter joy, that a dark cloud was finally lifting and everyone there had somehow been a part of it. We immediately performed my “Long Time Gone.”
If I had a copy of the bootleg from that night (I know one exists) I would make it the SotW. But I don’t so instead let’s give a listen to “H2O Gate Blues” by Gil Scott-Heron.
Scott-Heron was a poet/rap pioneer and improviser with a strong political bent. “H2O Gate Blues” is a classic example of his work. This monologue is 8 ½ minutes of an intelligent and blistering attack on the Nixon administration – its politics and policies.
It’s amazing how so many of his words from 1978 still ring true today and that makes it a perfect SotW for this historic day.
Enjoy… until next week.
