Delightful.
Thanks Jayne!
Lunch Break: Santana, “Oye Como Va”
Delightful.
Thanks Jayne!
VIDEO: AC/DC, “Highway to Hell”
Great video. Good production values. Excellent foley.
Night Music: Pubic Image, “Seattle”
Johnny’s best attribute is his hatred. Here’s a clip where he seems to be totally into making a new wave song a hit.
Night Music: The Allman Brothers Band, “Stormy Monday”
Not authentic, using the Bobby Bland charts rather than T-Bone Walker’s originals, as if I even know what that means.
What I know now is that this is perfection. What I knew then was that this music made high school tolerable.
http://youtu.be/1gDhR1R3S0s
Steveslist – Top 5 Songs Of 7 Minutes Or More
I’m tired of doing Good Night Music, so I’m starting something new – Steveslist, which will consist of five songs or bands or whatever in some category I make up. Sometimes I’ll put them in order, sometimes not, when it’s too difficult.
Disclaimer – These aren’t about Beatles vs. Bob Dylan vs. Rolling Stones. These aren’t necessarily the “correct” choices that you can find on every other internet or magazine list. These aren’t about who was the first to do this or that. Steveslist doesn’t care. These are about what I reach for and what turns my crank and what makes me smile.
I couldn’t rank this first list, so here they are, in alphabetical order:
Don’t know why the studio version wasn’t on youtube when I last looked, but it’s there now – way better than any of the live versions. White Reggae at its finest with a hard edge. Not even sure where else to find that combo.
Who can make a 12-bar blues exciting for over seven minutes? The MC5. Damn straight.
Trumpet? Cheesy bossa nova from my mom’s 1970’s home organ (remember when every housewife had one in the living room?)?. What a groove. This song could go on forever as far as I’m concerned.
Listened to this album in the car yesterday and it’s what gave me this brilliant idea. Enough said.
Makes me want to fuck on the floor and break things as much as anything punk.
Night Music: The Specials, “Friday Night, Saturday Morning”
I was a great fan of Karel Reisz’s film, Friday Night, Saturday Morning, a prime example of English kitchen-sink drama. The movie was based on a novel by a writer named Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote the excellent Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
I was also a great fan of the Specials, who in this case do a fine job echoing Sillitoe’s themes, with a song that makes my mouth feel cottony every time I hear it. With no regrets.
Song of the Week – Shotgun Down the Avalanche, Shawn Colvin
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
I recently read a blog post by music industry insider Bob Lefsetz (The Lefsetz Letter) about the new Rosanne Cash album, The River & The Thread. (He liked it.) He mentioned that the songs were co-written with her husband, John Leventhal, and went on to say that Leventhal “worked his magic most famously on Shawn Colvin’s debut, still my favorite album of the nineties, even though it was released at the tail end of 1989.”
That comment was enough to inspire me to blow the dust off a SotW essay I started years ago on Colvin’s “Shotgun Down the Avalanche” – a song off said debut Steady On that Leventhal produced and co-wrote with Colvin.
This is a lovely song with the “avalanche” serving as a metaphor for the fragility of a faltering relationship. (Stevie Nicks conjured up a similar image with her classic “Landslide.”) In fact, it’s about her relationship with Leventhal!
I love you so much and it’s so bizarre
A mystery that goes on and on and on
This is the best thing and the very most hard
And we don’t get along
After countless appeals
We keep spinning our wheels
On this mountain of new fallen snow
So I let go the catch and we are over the edge
You have left me nowhere to go
The song is beautifully arranged and performed by Colvin and Leventhal. Colvin has described getting the sound she wanted by tuning “the low E string down to D so when the verses and chorus hit the major V, a D chord, the bass would ring out.”
Steady On contains many other fine songs that had the benefit of some terrific supporting musicians including Bruce Hornsby (piano), Rick Marotta (drums), Soozie Tyrell (fiddle player now with Springsteen’s E Street Band) and Suzanne Vega (background vocals).
Enjoy… until next week.
Lunch Break: Nina Hagen, “TV Glotzer”
I think it possible that the first time I heard the word punk in a rock sense was hearing The Tubes’ White Punks on Dope in the summer of 1976. Or maybe I should go through my basement full of Interview and NME mags to find an earlier citation.
Well, I know Alan Vega is credited with first usage, from years earlier, but whatever. I loved the Tubes song, which of course has nothing to do with punk rock and everything to do with glam, and which isn’t really available on YouTube, but this cover is a reminder about just how flamboyant and alive the rock scene was in a city like NY (or Berlin) in 1978.
Yeah, punk rockers, but they gladly shared the space with theatrical personalities like Nina Hagen and Klaus Nomi and bands like the Tubes. And at that queer moment in history there was no AIDS and the dominant culture thought the next big thing might come from anywhere, and everyone would embrace it. Like this:
Night Music: The Cure, “Friday I’m In Love”
I was on a long drive on Monday and this song came up on the radio. I felt for sure I knew the band, if not the song, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Elizabeth suggested it might be those guys who did I’ll Melt With You. I knew their name, Modern English, but a quick search showed it wasn’t them. Try Googling “Friday I’m in love” and you end up with a lot of other references that have nothing to do with this song.
Searching YouTube later, once back in wifi land, the mystery was quickly answered. The Cure. Robert Smith’s unforgettable voice hadn’t rung a bell, at least in part because this usually morose singer and writer is singing a song that seems so happy. It has a Mersey Beat jangle and does sound like the best of the poppy 80s English pop bands, like Modern English.
It’s certainly a good song for a Friday.
VOTE IN THE COMMENTS: Beatles vs. Stones
I’m reading this book, called Beatles vs. Stones
The New York Library is having a debate, with Mike Meyers and some other folks facing off on this hot issue, on February 27th, at Lincoln Center.
In anticipation of that, Gothamist has a post today declaring the Beatles clear winners, by comparing three truly awful late Stones songs no one has ever heard of to Revolver, Abbey Road and The Beatles. It’s worth listening to the Stones songs just to make the question somewhat more interesting.
For my part, I listen to the Stones much more than the Beatles, even records I played out decades ago, but without specific criteria it’s a tough choice between them. Seems likely the Beatles were the more creative while bridging the transition from early 60s pop forms to rock, while the Stones were more influential twisting blues and r’n’b forms into rock and pop music going forward into the future.
In any case, giving the Stones demerits for continuing to write material, no matter how crappy, long after they could have stopped trying, doesn’t seem fair. Especially when the other guys, the non-aligned Beatles, made plenty of crap music as solo artists. But it does make me wonder why the Stones they didn’t recognize how awful so much of it was and have the self-respect to bury it. Could their taste have become that rotten?