Song of the Week – Way Down Now, World Party

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

Today’s SotW was written by another guest contributor, Steve Martin (no, not that one!). Steve moved to SF from Staten Island, New York in 1979 (which pert near makes him a CA native) to attend San Francisco State University where he had a college radio show called the “Esoteric Dinosaur.” His favorite musical experience is the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. His musical interests cut across many different genres but tend more recently toward “Americana.” When he’s not listening to music he is working at the Oakland Coliseum where he has been a Facility Manager for the last 26 years.

World Party is a “band” started by Karl Wallinger in 1986 after 2 years as a member of The Waterboys. World Party is essentially a Wallinger solo project. He plays most of the instruments himself in the studio and tours with a variety of different musicians.

They had a string of FM radio friendly hits in the late 80’s and 90’s that showed Wallinger’s influences including The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Prince. (They recorded a version of John Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”) He wrote and recorded the original version of “She’s the One” that later became a hit for Robbie Williams.

Goodbye Jumbo was World Party’s second album (1990) and featured many of Wallinger’s signature catchy hooks, including “Way Down Now” that reached #1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart.

The sardonic lyrics are sung with a voice mildly imitative of Bob Dylan. The music drives a solid beat all the way through and culminates just past the 3:00 mark with “whoo-whoos” that are a direct link to the Stones “Sympathy for the Devil.”

In 2001 Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm but he was able to return to musician’s work again after 5 years of rehabilitation. He is currently writing and recording at his studio in England.

Enjoy… until next week.

Obit: June Foray (September 8, 1917, July 26, 2017)

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June Foray certainly does not spring to mind as a name anyone would associate with music, let alone rock’n’roll; however, she was an integral part of the aging of the Boomer Generation.

June, who passed away a couple of days ago, just months shy of the Century Mark, was the voice of the following cartoon characters:

  • Rocket J Squirrel
  • Natasha
  • Granny on Looney Tunes (owner of Tweety)
  • Nell Fenwick
  • Witch Hazel
  • Daisy Duck
  • Mother Magoo
  • Betty Rubble
  • Cindy Lou Who (How the Grinch Stole Christmas)
  • Jokey Smurf

And, a host of other voices, participating in a list of shows that is, to say the least, overwhelming.

I am indeed a huge fan of animation, dating back to the first Jay Ward show, Crusader Rabbit wherein at the age of six I got my first puns. Crusader Rabbit featured a two-headed dragon named “Arson/Sterno” which didn’t really mean anything to me. I knew what Arson was, but it was a cartoon. (There was also a villian named “Dudley Nightshade,” a pun I never got till I was a lot older!)

One evening my mother was having a cocktail party and she had a chafing dish that needed a Sterno can to keep the contents warm and I saw her prepare the dish, read the label and a light went off in my head (it might still be going off).

From that all the cartoons of my youth became the filter for my  viewing and reading and interpretation of literature and movies and TV, for it not only taught about puns, but also how characters define themselves, often by action and name. Additionally, I got the author gets to play with characters and names and situations to emphasize things like irony, hypocrisy, and many other personality traits.

As I delved deeper into literature as an undergrad, then grad student, and learned that Charles Dickens, for example, was among the best at portraying his characters as round or flat, modifying their names in deed and action. So, I got that the Arson/Sterno tradition was pretty old, going back at least to Chaucer in the English language.

I still watch toons. I love Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers and Adult Swim in addition to old Looney Tunes because they still push art in areas where live action human stuff cannot go.

Are they important? Just listen…

RIP June, and I hope where you are is as much fun as the shit you created!

Alice Cooper Connoisseur

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Good story about Alice Cooper, fame hound, meeting Andy Warhol, fame hound, and buying one of Warhol’s Little Electric Chair silk screens.

Fast Forward 50 years and Alice discovers a multi-million dollar work of art in a tube, never having been displayed after he bought it for $2500.

Today Alice says it makes sense that he bought it, even though he doesn’t remember it, because he was in a fog of drink and drugs. Shep Gordon says it totally made sense for him to buy it, because his girlfriend liked it, the electric chair and all. And what a happy ending!

 

Song of the Week – Easy Street, Edgar Winter Group

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Brothers Johnny and Edgar Winter were born in Texas and encouraged by their parents from an early age to pursue musical interests. They performed together as children. The elder, guitarist Johnny, was the first to break out with a recording contract with Columbia Records in the late 60s.

Edgar (keyboards and sax) played in Johnny’s bands but struck out on his own in 1970 when he received his own recording contract and formed Edgar Winter’s White Trash. In 1972 he formed a different group, The Edgar Winter Group, that included guitar hero Ronnie Montrose and singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Dan Hartman. The album they released, They Only Come Out At Night, reached #3 on the Billboard Album charts and spawned two hit singles – “Frankenstein” (#1) and “Free Ride” (#14).

For the follow up album, Shock Treatment, Winter recruited Rick Derringer who had the hit “Hang on Sloopy” as a teenager with the McCoys to replace the departed Montrose. This album has gone down in rock history as a disappointment. But that’s really unfair! Not only is it a very good album all the way through, it actually reached #13 and had a top 40 single (“River’s Risin’”).

My favorite song on Shock Treatment is “Easy Street”, today’s SotW.

“Easy Street” was written by Hartman but includes one of Winter’s best performances, both vocally and on alto sax. The sax solo perfectly embodies the sleazy, swagger of the bluesy rhythm (in 6/8 time) and nighthawk lyrics. Hartman’s bass is solid too.

Enjoy… until next week.

Galaxie 500, “Blue Thunder”

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Again, Spotify drops a band and album on me I never heard of. This one came up on my “Discover Weekly” playlist, and I looked the guys up on Wiki and it seems there is some relationship between the band and The Reverend Horton Heat, but I could not track it down.

Galaxie 500, named wonderfully for the car, released this song and album (On Fire) in 1989 and it is sort of sweet melancholy and haunts in the same way Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark–which I call music to slit my wrists too and is go-to when I am sad–does.

I guess Blue Thunder is in a minor key because that does seem to help but man, I cannot pinpoint, and the song and album just get to me. I am not even sure of the words in this one as the mix is thick and the words sort of mumbled/slurred, but shit, I do like it a lot.

Song of the Week – I Don’t Like You, The Regrettes

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The Regrettes are an LA based foursome – three women and a guy – that play a punk influenced brand of power pop that frequently references 60s girl groups.

The SotW is the lead track, “I Don’t Like You,” from their recently released album titled Feel Your Feelings Fool!

Lead singer/songwriter Lydia Night (real name?) has a vocal style that sounds like a crossbreed of Amy Winehouse and Chrissie Hynde. The songs have more hooks than an angler’s tackle box.

Lyrically, Night is as straightforward as you can be. Nothing she has to say passes through a filter. In an interview with Todd Martens, published last August in the LA Times, Night shared this:

“I feel like everyone in this generation right now is in denial about their feelings and about who they are and what they like and what they don’t,” she says. “Everybody is just kind of really scared to be honest and to be open and to be different and original, especially with our youth and people my age and people in high school. The people I’m surrounded by? People are scared to have real feelings and to actually be affected by certain things.”

Check out this “between the eyes” put down from “I Don’t Like You.”

I know I said that you are cute and said I like your eyes
But your eyes look too much, mine have looked away
You say hello, I say goodbye
I never meant to make you cry, wah, wah, wah

I’m really sorry that I have to let you down
I’m really sorry that I’m turning this around
The things I said before at the time were true
But now the truth has changed because I don’t like you

Is the “wah, wah, wha” taunt really necessary? Isn’t it cruel enough to blurt out “I don’t like you” over a Sex Pistols chord progression (“Cause I want to be [anarchy]”). (Though I must admit I dig the touch of adding that little Beatles’ reference in the first verse.)

Feel Your Feelings Fool! is a fun party album. Judging by the album cover with the band floating on a giant, pink birthday cake, that must be the vibe The Regrettes were going for.

Enjoy… until next week.

Baby Driver

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Just saw it tonight. The premise and previews seemed so dumb, but the reviews have been so fantastic, I could stay away no longer.

The flick is dominated by music and my favorite scenes are driven by Neat Neat Neat and this, interestingly enough, two of the few songs that play in their entirety.

I wanted very badly not to like Baby Driver, but stopped fighting and started enjoying probably a half-hour in (perhaps Neat Neat Neat is when I threw in the towel).

I never had this Focus album. Did any of you? I’m guessing it’s one of those that completely sucked besides the title track. Go Scandinavians! Go Thijs Van Leer!

Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions”

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Green Onions holds a particular place in my life.

Certainly, prior to Booker and the MGs releasing the hit in 1962, I had many brushes with the radio and records.

I loved Little Star, Peggy Sue, Sorry, I Ran All the Way Home, the Happy Organ, and Red River Rock among great tunes released prior to Green Onions, but that was before I had a radio in my room, or our family had a phonograph player let alone a stereo.

Meaning I had no regular or consistent means of channeling the hits of the day aside from Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan.

The summer of ’62, however, we went to Lake Tahoe for a week, staying at a University of California family camp. I was nine then, and  The Locomotion, Runaway, and Sherry were all huge hits that lived on the juke box in the dining room at camp where the collegiate staff ruled the roost at night.

That made it great for my brother and I to hang with the kids we had met, and listen to those great songs as the entry to regular exposure of pop music, something that then never left.

That fall I entered 6th grade, and also began Hebrew School, being just a little ahead of three years before my suspected Bar Mitzvah date. Hebrew class was held at our Temple, and usually one of my mates in school who also attended car-pooled me with them while either my mother, or Cantor Cohn, whose son Ron was a great friend, would ferry me back home.

But, on one particular day, Miriam Costa, a neighbor from across the street whose family’s life has criss-crossed with mine in strange ways over the past 55 years, was there to take me back to our house.

I was quiet riding in the car, and Mrs. Costa had the radio on, and truth was I wasn’t paying that much attention save suddenly Green Onions came on and that is the first time I clearly recognized a song on the radio I had heard, and identified it by name and performer in what became my ridiculous mental data base of music trivia.

So, the song has always held a special spot in my heart.

Well, last week I was watching the wonderful Barry Sonnenfield film Get Shorty, a movie I also dig a lot and during an airport sequence, Green Onions came on the soundtrack.

Knowing that I had heard the song in both American Graffiti and The Big Lebowski, I began to wonder just how many films had included the great instrumental as part of their production.

So, I went to the Independent Movie Data Base (IMDB) and discovered 34 movies and TV shows had borrowed the song, which I think is kind of a lot.

It is a great tune, and, it both reminds me of Miriam Costa, and also of my love of song really kicking into full gear just after that fall, when my brother and I got a little Packard Bell radio for our room, while our parents purchased a Philco phonograph player and there was no looking back.