I think Idiot Wind is meaner, by a smidgen, but I wouldn’t argue if you thought this song was the meanest song in all of rock.
In this clip Yoko and John try to explain it away. Hey, Give peace a chance.
New Rock (Grammys Edition): Sirvana, “Cut Me Some Slack”
I watched a little bit of the Grammys show tonight, before switching over to the fading Downton Abbey. But fading is way better than faded.
The show opened with Beyonce singing the drunk song about surfing, and it all felt a little like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, except Beyonce is noticeably more curvaceous. And it is only by outrageous analogy that maybe we all become Nazi officers watching her.
Jay Z appeared and it was nice to see them work together and even be a little affectionate, though they live such mediated lives it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s putting on the show. In any case, I suspect if Turbonegro was watching they got no erection. This was pure entertainment.
Speaking of that. Before the show started there was a commercial for a casino that used a Macklemore and Ryan song, that really inspirational one in which you hold your hands higher, to advertise their $50 free play. WTF? These guys are selling their songs for commercials?
And then, 20 minutes later, they were winning Best New Artist and hyping how they made their elpee independently. No label support at all. That sounds good, but not if you’re selling your hits for cheesy commercials for dubious products. Sure, endorse the Neutral Milk Hotel Mangum condoms. That’s hip. Offer a $50 rebate for casino gambling? Eat bad buffet.
The music I saw was all terrible. The best was a Keith Urban-Gary Clark Jr. collaboration on an insipid song that must have been Urban’s. Clark is an excellent rock guitarist and he got gritty on Urban and smoked him a little in their solo part, but it was more dispiriting because the better songwriter was pushed aside for the more popular country dude.
Which led to the Best Rock Song category. The nominees were an embarrassment of old. The Stones were nominated! Ozzy and his crew, too. The winner was this song, written by Sir Paul McCartney and Nirvana’s Dave Grohl, Krist Novacelic and Pat Smear. In this clip Sir Paul isn’t really sure about their names, other than Grohl’s, which is fair. My grandfather used to have the same problem with my girl friends.
So, the live clip lets you see how Sir Paul interacts with his youngers (guys pushing 50, right?). But the sound sucks. They didn’t win for that. They won for this:
Like everything Grohl is involved with, this works just fine as rock. It sounds like a Wings when they were most rockish, mixed with the breast-pounding vocal of How Do You Sleep and other Lennon tirades. And it’s good to see Sir Paul pounding it a bit.
Obviously, the selection of this tune as Best Rock Song of the year has no bearing on what the actual best rock song of the year was, but what was the best rock song of 2013?
Chris Spedding II
Actually my mind originally turned back to Chris Spedding due to Peter’s love of accordions and pogo-dancing, thus this video. Eighteen girls and none of them pogo dancing. It sure would be nice to see some pogoing from these days when bras were optional. Sorry, no accordions.
Quick Chris Spedding Post
Lawr’s “Wild In The Streets” post made me think of Chris Spedding, who was our guitar hero back in the day. Probably because he was somewhat obscure, at least to American folks, and he embraced early punk instead of trashing it. We used to think this song was all that and a bag of chips. Now it seems a bit tame and cheesy, though still enjoyable. The accompanying video is kind of cheesy, but helpful:
Night Music: Garland Jeffreys, “Wild in the Streets”
Feels like a million years since I posted one of these, when in reality it has only been a couple of weeks. But, travel and work and all that life shit kept me distracted and out of my groove.
However, during that hiatus, I remembered this great Garland Jeffreys cut from his 1977 album, Ghost Writer. I bought the vinyl when it came out (of course still have it) on the strength of both this song and the other tune on the disc that got radio play, 35 Millimeter Dreams.
But, I will save posting that tune for another day, for I have a fun theme idea for it.
I do understand that the Circle Jerks covered Wild in the Streets which is great, cos it is a terrific little cut. Note, if you are a fan of The Boss, there is also a YOUTUBE of a live version of the song with Springsteen playing along (it was part of a benefit for Parkinson’s Disease).
However, this version, with Jeffreys’ original band totally cranks.
Super Bowl Chili Peppers
I’ve been amused at how many times I’ve seen Anthony Kiedis in his Off! hat in reference to the Peppers playing the Super Bowl. It would make it the best Super Bowl halftime show ever if he actually wore it there. Do you think they’d let him wear it if he wanted to? It would be nice to forcibly expose the Beyonce and Lorde and Justin Bieber and Imagine Dragons goofuses to some cool culture.
Night Music: Jeremy and the Satyrs, “Mean Black Snake”
When I was in college, my friend Robin lived in an apartment in the village. Her neighbor was a guy named Jeremy Steig, one of those guys about whom there is a lot to know.
Jeremy’s father, the New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, is famously known at this point as the creator of Shrek. (Jeremy played the Pied Piper in the movie Shrek Forever After, Wikipedia tells us.)
Jeremy had a motorcycle accident long before I met him, which left him half paralyzed. He had to teach himself again as an adult how to play the flute, and uses a special mouthpiece in order to play.
In 1968 he formed Jeremy and the Satyrs, an early jazz-rock fusion band, with the bassist Eddie Gomez, the pianist Warren Bernhardt and others that made the eponymous record Mean Black Snake is from.
He later made a number of jazz albums, and one of his songs was used as a sample in the Beastie Boys single, Slap Shot (I know this from Wikipedia, too).
He was, when I met him a hyper man, constantly up and down, in and out of his, Robin’s and other apartments, working on ideas musical and artsy (he drew the cover art of the album), as well as taking care of the details of life. He was dramatic that way, but also a generous man, inclusive, engaged, funny, helpful, even if sometimes troublesome. It seemed, if I recall, that like a Satyr he was always horny, too, and talked about everything always.
At this time, in the late 70s, Jeremy had a girlfriend (Diana?) who was a belly dancer, and we went to shows in disco ballrooms in the Village, Jeremy and Eddie Gomez and a drummer or a machine backing up the belly dance with wild free-form jazz that sometimes morphed into a disco groove. It was nutty stuff, Jeremy passed his flute through a series of pedals that added delays and echo and looping, but it was not pretentious or hifalutin. Like Jeremy, the music was affable and soulful and handmade, very likable if you value more the exploration and the courage to do that in public than some preformed idea of what things should be.
KISS My Whatever
There have been more than a few discussions about KISS and their music and what is real rock and roll since we started up here around nine months or so ago.
For the record, I have seen KISS live, in 1979, and they did little or nothing for me (though I did get some great photographs of the band).
However, as I am about a decade older than my two friends who are the biggest fans of the band I know–Steve Moyer and Scott Engel–I will admit that just age and experience had a lot to do with my indifference to the band.
I got the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks when they were new, and then a few years later I lived in the bay area when the San Francisco bands hit it.
So, one of the things at play here is that the bands we love and which form the basis for our likes and dislikes, make their impression during our adolescence and in that context, I was too old for KISS.
That said, I still don’t really think that much of them as a band, but I also know there are those who hated the Moody Blues when they were my favorites, and well, look how Bob Dylan was received when he plugged in. And, all Dylan was trying to do was keep his art growing.
Anyway, over the past week, KISS has come to my radar in a couple of odd ways.
First, the previously noted Mr. Engel invited me to come play miniature golf in Las Vegas when we were both there for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association Winter Meeting.
The kicker was this pee-wee golf course is dedicated to KISS. Which kind of makes me like them (I love miniature golf) and kind of hate them (how much shilling does Gene Simmons need to do?).
However, a few days after I got home from Vegas, Diane and I were snuggled in bed, watching the tube before we fell asleep, and the Road to Europe episode of Family Guy came on.
Now, as with the miniature golf, I have mixed emotions. On one hand, again, sigh, KISS all over the fucking place.
OTOH, we both love Family Guy.
And, this episode was particularly sweet with us finding out that Peter is proud of his wife Lois for “doing” KISS (we find out as an aside that she also did the Geils band).
How can you not like that?
Song of the Week – Hudson Line, Mercury Rev
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
Back in 1998, Mercury Rev, a band from upstate New York was about to record their fourth album. Their first three had received some critical acclaim, but virtually no commercial success at home in the U.S.
The band fell into drug and alcohol abuse, sold most of their instruments and could see their demise rapidly approaching. With that as the backdrop, the band members — essentially Jonathan Donahue (vocals, guitars) and “Grasshopper” (guitars, clarinet) — assumed the new album, Deserter’s Songs, would be their last. But in Deserter’s Songs the band delivered a gem. It garnered high praise in the UK where it was voted Album of the Year by both NME and Mojo. But the album has still been heard by few here in the U.S.
Deserter’s Songs is a very quirky album of music. Less reliant on guitars, the band used keyboards (piano and mellotron), flugelhorns and even a bowed saw. They sound a bit like the Flaming Lips (especially the thin vocals) or My Morning Jacket, but with more dreamy orchestration.
The SotW is “Hudson Line.”
The tune is about getting out of New York City on the Hudson Line train up to the Catskills, where the album was recorded, to “get back to the land and set my soul free.” In fact, Mercury Rev was able to take advantage of their proximity to other Catskill musicians and recruited Garth Hudson (The Band) to play sax on “Hudson Line.” They also persuaded Levon Helm to play drums on “Opus 40,” another great track on the album.
Most of the cuts on Deserter’s Songs were written and sung by Donahue but Grasshopper wrote and sang “Hudson Line” so it has a slightly different feel from the rest of the album. It’s both bluesy and jazzy.
Deserter’s Songs should really be experienced from start to finish in one sitting. It is available on Spotify for your listening pleasure, so give it a try.
Enjoy… until next week.
Night Music: Neutral Milk Hotel, “A Baby For Pree” and others
I learned about Neutral Milk Hotel maybe 10 years ago, reading something claiming that their album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea was one of the greatest albums of all time. I listened and I liked it, but it has that overly busy arrangements, overly obscure lyrics problem that most psychedelica has. Plus, it was fussy and arty.
I filed it under XTC in my drawer of records I like well enough, I can see the appeal, but I’m not seduced.
After constant touring after In the Aeroplane was released, Jeff Mangum retired from show biz (or touring). Apparently he also had some sort of nervous period and went silent. Well, not completely, but he did not perform publicly until 2011, when he played at a benefit for a friend of his at a club in New York.
One thing leads to another, and last year the band that performed In the Aeroplane announced that they were going to tour again.
Many were excited. I was interested because I like stories like Mangum’s, of withdrawal and then reengagement. Plus, who isn’t interested in a cult favorite?
A few weeks ago my friend Julie invited me to see NMH at BAM, a few blocks from my house. Yes, I said, because I like hanging with my friend and because I know there are lots of folks hanging on the Neutral Milk Hotel.
My fear was that the show was going to be like the album, which is good but also fussy.
But the show was great. The clip I bring from another stop on the tour demonstrates the bands artsiness, plenty, but it also (if you turn up the volume) shows a kickass rhythm section and a rock sense. Plus horns, accordions and saw!
Muscular and eccentric, which sounded really good in the beautiful Gilman Opera House.