Nobody else sounds like Morphine, which is a good thing. But I always like hearing them.
Night Music: The Undertones, “Wednesday Week”
Sounding rather sixtiesish and a lot less punk rockish. Loved their early singles, this song doesn’t sound at all familiar.
OBIT: Bob Casale
RIP
Night Music: Marianne Faithfull, “Ruby Tuesday”
With clips from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve.
Good Night Music: Pay Attention To Me
My last two posts generated zero commentary and I’m pissed. So I’m heading back into stranger waters.
Here’s a band called Avant Gardener. Bob Ross, a local DJ who introduced me to punk by mixing early punk into his traditional hard rock Saturday night radio show (a daring thing to do in those early days when many Yankees didn’t take kindly to punk rock) played this.
Avant Gardener never made an album. This appeared on the very good early 10″ comp Guillotine, which also contained X-Ray Spex “Oh Bondage Up Yours.” They also had a single/EP, pictured here, which included a few other songs on that I can’t remember, because I loaned it and several other albums and singles to a real punk rocker.
He went by Tony T (real name Tony Miller). He was from the Lehigh Valley, but was in LA for the beginning of LA Hardcore and spent time at the legendary Masque club. We played in a punk band together here for a while (Frog C – named for “The Frog” from Courageous Cat), before he took off back to LA, with my borrowed records, of course. A friend of mine ran into him bouncing at an LA club in the late 1980s and recently I found out Tony died a few years ago from a local record store owner who said Tony’s dad came in one day to sell Tony’s punk stash (perhaps including my records).
Anyway, I could listen to this twangy Avant Gardener guitar drone forever; it’s hypnotic. Dig the thump of the spinning record at the end, a sound I had kind of forgotten about.
Please, somebody comment on this or else I’m gonna start threatening GG Allin shitting videos.
Time Waster: Outside the Frame
In 2007 there was a challenge issued on the b3ta.com board for artists to render what happened outside the frame of popular album covers.
The results are many and some will make you laugh.
Night Music: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Like, Long Hair”
I’m down in Williamsburg Virginia, and, well, Mark Lindsey and his band dressed up in those period costumes, just like everyone in the historic park here.
I wanted to find a song less obvious than Kicks, but while I like listening to their other pop songs (the songs are good, the guitars and harmonies strong), and I own the vinyl of their greatest hits album, Kicks is the song of theirs that really stands out. Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill for the Animals, but when Eric Burdon didn’t want to sing it they passed it on to the Raiders.
The thing I learned about Paul Revere and the Raiders today is that they were actually started by a guy named Paul Revere, an organist, who played in a few different bands with Mark Lindsey before they named themselves Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1960. They released their first hit, “Like, Long Hair” in 1961, the title refers to the Rachmaninoff riff it starts with (this was back when classical music was referred to as long-hair music), but Revere was doing community service in a hospital at the time to work off his Conscientious Objector status, so he was replaced on the band’s first national tour by Leon Russell.
Their next hit single was a version of Louie Louie that may have predated the Kingsman’s hit version, recorded in the same studio.
The group didn’t start wearing the costumes until after the start of the British Invasion, which played directly into the band’s name and their musical style, which they reshaped in the wake of the sounds of the Beatles and Yardbirds and others.
Good Night Music: Swag
There was a lot of power pop talk over the weekend which prompted me to dig out this old chestnut and give it a spin. I actually like power pop quite a lot, though it genuinely has to have some power and drive for me, but I’ve favored the harder stuff for some reason the past couple of years.
This one-album (Catch-All) band had a guy from the Mavericks, a guy from Wilco and, what probably prompted my attention the most, Tom Petersson, the bassist from Cheap Trick (ironically, they’ve been pretty ignored on this site thus far). Then I found this:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1444501/cheap-trick-bassist-no-swag.jhtml
The album’s real Beatle-y and jingly-jangly, but very well done. According to the Amazon reviews, too well done for some. Here’s a song called Louise that I liked upon hearing for the first time in years:
Night Music: The Replacements, “Takin’ a Ride”
I’ve been listening recently to a set called The Replacements “The Complete Collection.” As you might imagine, it seems to have just about everything the Replacements recorded and released on lp or ep. Don’t ask me about bonus tracks or anything, the draw here seems to be all the discs in track order, from the first to the last. (If you want rarities and alt versions, check out this site.)
I remember seeing the Replacements’ first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, in some record store when it came out. Great title, for sure, but I’ve never owned it and didn’t get into the band until later, when everyone did. So sue me.
So the other night I was making some food and I started at the beginning. The first song on Sorry Ma is called Takin’ a Ride, and it is mind blowing. First of all, it’s fast. The drums hurtle right at you and the guitars pizzicato and roar and then pulsate like a siren, while Westerberg seems determined to say it as plainly and as quickly as he is able. The effect is transfixing, even if his voice sounds a little like a box being crushed.
This is a tune that starts out sounding like the Clash, chugs like Blue Oyster Cult, suddenly becomes vintage Modern Lovers, embraces the Heartbreakers, and then explodes with some of that good regular rock music from the 70s that bubbles out of the gutter and reaches greedily for the bright lights. What teenage boys in suburbia dream of instead of disco. For a bunch of goofball fuckups, this is some powerfully ambitious songmaking. Tommy was only 14 at the time. Maybe they didn’t know any better.
And it seems like every song on this album is like this, a million ideas and sounds, all of them played as hard as they can, as if this was their last chance. Their only chance. Maybe because it almost was.
PS. One thing about the (digital) boxed set is that it sounds great. YouTube is not nearly as alive. I’m assuming the masters were cleaned and remixed, but in fact after a little digging around it doesn’t seem like much push was put behind this. Whatever. I have it streaming on Google Music All Access, and it’s getting plenty of play in my house. The Replacements albums I did own, Let it Be, Pleased to Meet Me, All Shook Down, came out during my cassette years. Ugh.
Night Music: Ben Harper, “Get It Like You Like It”
Once again, I found myself listening to KTKE the other day when this Ben Harper song came on. Only, I did not realize it was Ben Harper, sounding to me like some kind of cross between Prince’s Raspberry Beret and anything out of the Band’s catalog.
Harper is so interesting.
Clearly, he is a killer guitar player, and has so many influences that drive his music which I think is the result of exploration of whatever groove he is feeling as anything. And, I guess that is a good thing.