I’ve posted about Kathleen Hanna before. She was a leader of the Riot Grrl fanzine and band scene in the early 90s. There is a movie out about her, called The Punk Singer, which scored an 88 at Rotten Tomatoes.
In recent years she’s had a band called The Julie Ruin. Their album is a mixed bag, but this is a good one.
And let’s end with something of a Ted talk by Hanna at a show at Joe’s Pub in NY a few years ago. Good fun.
I hoped to end with a song by a band called Muttonchops, but such a thing does not seem to exist on You Tube.
I read a good review of this band’s “punky” new record last week and waded in. These guys are from Scranton PA, and the band’s name is the phonetic spelling of the German word for troubadour, which is kind of what gives here. You would hope that the sons of coal miners and refinery workers would be clawing (or digging) like mad to escape the brutal lives their parents lived as they struggled to get their little honeys into college and away from a life of Walmart and picking scabs off the inside of their various orifices. Kind of like Steve, who hails from around those parts, but no.
This kind of punk is really singer songwriter pop bleating catchy tunes above some well struck drums and jangly-hard guitars. I listened to a bunch of Menzinger’s songs and this one is the best I heard, but if you like it you might find something you like more in their catalog. If that’s the case, I’d suggest you try harder. There’s no reason to settle for competent fake punk.
By the way, I tried to be grumpy about the video but I couldn’t. Perfect.
Hmm, Menzingers, kind of like telling jokes about men. Kind of like that video. Brilliant.
Why it’s a classic album cover created using emoji!
A story at Fast Company explains how the novelist Wesley Stace, concurrently the singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, has been creating these clever little icons of iconography and tweeting them out.
Didn’t guess the above album? Follow the link for the answer and more clever examples. Follow him @WesleyStace.
Last week we did a little nostalgic walk back to the lovely-and-cleverly-named Veruca Salt, and their high profile song (was it a hit? in indy circles it was), Seether.
It was a pretty good pop rock meld, not too heavy, but clever enough for college kids to get.
Now, 18 years later, Veruca Salt is back.
They re-launched on Conan, and here’s their aged version of Seether.
Not terrible. Not awful. If I was their friend and they were playing in a bar that wasn’t too far from my house and I didn’t have other plans, I would go see them. And I would appreciate that they are smart enough to know that they can’t reproduce the magic. They’re engineering the magic, again.
And hoping to cash in. I expect the hoping part isn’t in play. Promoters know they can generate lots of dough off our idiotic romance with our past.
Or maybe it isn’t idiotic. Maybe that nostalgia is a serious part of our personalities. We all have the bug.
Since we’re on a roll with Lee Michaels’ posts, I thought I’d resubmit a SotW I originally wrote in November 2012 for the email distribution list I had prior to joining this blog.
Does anyone remember Lee Michaels? If you do, it’s probably either from his very good third album Lee Michaels (recorded live in the studio accompanied only by his hefty drummer, Frosty) or his top 10 hit, “Do You Know What I Mean”, from “5th”.
But I fell in love with his 1968 debut Carnival of Life through an introduction I remember fondly. My 7th grade best friend, Mark P., had a much older brother that was attending Manhattan College in New York City. Albert had his own car with an 8-Track tape deck in it… and very good taste in music. He also liked to drive, and gas was cheap, so now and then he would take Mark and me on long rides to nowhere, just cruising and listening to tunes.
It’s where I first heard Zappa’s Freak Out, The Band’s Music From Big Pink, and The Who’s Tommy. Not bad. And though Carnival of Life isn’t nearly as “important” as those albums (nor has it aged as gracefully), it still holds a warm place in my musical memory. That aside, it is still a pretty rare record that commands a decent price in psych record collecting circles. (Check out the prices they want for the CD on Amazon!)
So let’s give a listen to the title track, “Carnival of Life.”
On this song Michaels plays his trademark Hammond organ and harpsichord. But I chose this cut because it also includes some pretty nifty guitar work by Hamilton W. Watt.
So where is Michaels now? If you really want to know, check out his wacko personal web site:
The punk band from Australia that I remember best are the Saints, whose album (I’m) Stranded is a fearsome noise. But watching videos of the band just now, their dominant theme seems now to be boredom. But maybe that’s singer Chris Bailey’s affect. This one, from their second album, is pretty hot.
By their third album they were onto something a little jazzy. Nice.
But it was (I’m) Stranded, out before there were Sex Pistols and the Clash, that won them attention for raw energy and speed. Classic.
It is always difficult to hear a new band in a new context and get a good idea about what they’re doing.
Radio Birdman ruffled some feathers back in the late 70s into the 80s. As alt-pop culture in Sydney this is important. As indie records culture in NY this means somthing, but how important it is overall is why we’re talking about it.
So, listen, and let’s try to figure out what comes next.
Peter posted last week on the ever-fun Lee Michaels (sigh, no relation unfortunately) and his biggest hit, Do You Know What I Mean?
I was a big Michaels fan back then, and I think I saw him at Winterland and Sound Factory and various little northern California venues four times with my childhood friend Stephen Clayton.
I never saw him play with anyone but his great and behemoth drummer, Bartholomew Smith-Frost aka “Frosty.”
Further, I always remember he was barefoot, and from what I could see, his feet were really dirty (even back then, he was a stoner after my own heart).
I remember loving Michaels’ first pair of albums–Carnival of Life and Recital–after which he released Barrel, the work the artist insisted was his first real album. That is because Barrel was just Michaels and Frosty whereas the first two efforts featured the likes of studio-men Eddie Hoh and Hamilton Watt and friends.
The problem is as much as I liked Michaels and Frosty live, similarly I thought those first two albums were full of great tunes and some decent crunch and psychedelia.
The song I picked here is Streetcar which was my fave on that first Carnival of Life album.
As I was searching for Michaels information to assemble this little ditty, I did come across his website, which is kind of a hoot in a “peace and love I am a bit of a scattered stoned out hippie but that doesn’t mean I am stupid or anything” way.
