...if you were writing this here blog, your first candidate of choice for a future Weekend Listomania or Essay Question would be...?
The short version: A certain Shady Dame and I are heading off on vacation (Paris and the South of France) next Wednesday, and I want to have all of that week's entries ready to go before we leave.
Only problem is -- gee whiz, as The Everly Brothers would have it -- I'm totally stuck for a theme for next weekend's post. Think of it as pre-TSA pre-check writer's block, although that's transparently an attempt to get me off the hook for being the indolent slacker that I self-evidently am.
In any case, I'm turning to you readers for a helping hand here.
From 1978, here's the charmingly monikered Johnny G. and his irrepressible ode to generational warfare, "The Hippys Graveyard." (As in "I don't want to go to...").
I actually had this -- one of the very first singles on the then fledgling Brit label Beggars Banquet -- when it first came out, and I used to play it constantly to taunt some of my friends who weren't quite getting with the late 70s punk/New Wave program. Sadly, I lost it, along with most of the rest of my seven inch vinyl collection, during the Great Girlfriend Crisis of 1980.
As for Johnny G., he was an ex-pub rocker who, like Nick Lowe (although obviously on a less exalted level) had some brief rock biz success in the early 70s and then managed to find himself find himself a niche in the briefly eclectic wake of the Sex Pistols.
Anyway, it's way catchy and pretty funny still, I think; certainly, it's one of the more unjustly forgotten artifacts of its era.
I should also add that I have long since forgiven Mr. G for having mispelled the word "hippie's." 😎
She's 19 going on 20, and she's from North Carolina.
She doesn't seem to have a website yet, and I don't know any more biographical stuff about her, but as you can see, she's the real deal musically and she's got charisma up the wazoo.
There's some issues going on with her -- involving an AI simulation and copyright infringements -- which I'll try to get the lowdown on for you guys and post about down the road; meanwhile, you can listen to/purchase some more of her music over at Bandcamp HERE.
A reader informs me it has been 10 years to the day since I last posted about world's greatest Norwegian power pop thrush Vibeke Saugestad.
Obviously, that's way too long, so here's a fabulous new (well, actually eight months old) song from her and her ace band.
Man, if that doesn't put a smile on your face, you really need to seek medical attention.
And I should add that I really really dig the Beatles-ish French Horn at the end of the song. 😎
I should also add that you can find out more about her, and hear more of her music, over at her official website HERE.
BTW, the fabulous bass player in the clip is Vibeke's hubby (an American, as are apparently the rest of the guys in the band). And the clip was filmed in her backyard in Beacon NY, where she now resides.
[Okay kids, I'm aware that the following has little or nothing to do with the raison d'etre of this here blog, so I crave your indulgence. Hey, I've had a long week. 😎 -- S.S.]
The short version: Sometime in the early or mid-70s, I was fortunate enough to see a performance by the late great comedian Dick Shawn, at -- of all places -- Max's Kansas City, a tragically hip rock club which you old-timers will remember was the very definition of a small room. Shawn was very very funny and as always wildly original, but it was the act's conclusion that has stuck with me. It was performance art before the phrase had been coined -- a long (easily 20 minutes) surreal monologue (with background music) called "The Massa," and it grew wilder and more physical as it went along. On one level it was a parody of a certain vein of sentimental Civil War claptrap, especially the movie version of same, but it was about much much more and when it was over I realized that I had just seen something truly great.
I have been looking for a video version of it for ages, and today I finally found one -- from a 1954 appearance on the old Steve Allen show. Okay, not really -- it's only snippets, at the beginning and very very end of a routine otherwise about pop singers doing opera. Still, I think you'll agree that it's a tantalizing fragment, and in any case, the whole clip gives you a pretty good idea of Shawn's comic genius.
And now, as you may have guessed, all of this leads us inexorably to the subject of the weekend's business. To wit:
...and the greatest performance by a non-musician artiste -- poet, comedian, actor, monologist, mime(!), whatever -- you yourself have personally witnessed live is...?
Discuss.
No arbitrary rules here, which is to say, it doesn't have to be a solo act, i.e. if you saw something like Richard Burton's Hamlet on Broadway, you're allowed to nominate it. And yeah -- you actually have to have seen it yourself in a club or theater, not on home video or in a movie. And don't try to sneak any athletes in there, or I'll come to your house and thrash you soundly.
I should add that after Shawn, my pick would be this guy, who I saw doing a show at Paramus High School (opening for Phil Ochs, I kid you not) sometime in the late '60s. But that's a story for another occasion.
From the 1999 album More Oar -- an all-star tribute to Moby Grape auteur Skip Spence's weirdo 1969 solo record Oar -- please enjoy fab gear Brit folk-rockers Diesel Park West, and their utterly gorgeous cover of Skippy's "All Come to Meet Her Now."
That's pretty much my favorite track on the tribute, and not just because the song being remade is pretty much the best (i.e., most fully finished) thing on Oar. An album which -- if we're being honest about it -- is shall we say wildly uneven (i.e. it becomes increasingly unhinged and chaotic as it goes on).
DPW's remake, however, is ecstatically Byrdsian, and actually improves on the original. Which is to say it sounds like what a carefully worked out version of the song would have been if it had been recorded by Moby Grape themselves.
Now excuse me -- I gotta go listen to the Robyn HitchcockMore Oar cover of "Broken Heart" and cry a little for what might have been if Skippy hadn't ended up completely nuts. 😎
From 2015, please enjoy outlaw country icon Ray Wylie Hubbard, along with the toothsome Carson McHone, and their quite amazing ode to a "Chick Singer Badass Rockin."
Reason I bring it up is because after I posted last Friday's essay question about sexism in rock, a Facebook friend of mine sent me the above (which I was previously unaware of) and suggested it might be relevant in some way to the discussion. To which I can only add "wow."
Hey -- "Joan Jett is a goddess"? I think we can all agree on that...😎
From the March 28th episode of the recently premiered UK version of SNL, please enjoy long-running London-based alt-rockers Wolf Alice and their insinuating ode to "White Horses."
I'm embarrassed to admit I was not previously familiar with these kids, who've been a huge deal in their homeland and elsewhere since 2010. I'm not sure how to describe them genre-wise, although some wag used the phrase "the lovechild of folk and grunge" (which seems apt), and I'm not completely enamored with Ellie Rowsell vocally channeling Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries (although god, she -- Rowsell -- is inarguably one great looking babe). That said, as is obvious from the clip, the group totally rocks, and since seeing it I have become a serious fan.
I should also add that -- unlike most of the so-called musical acts on the original American version of the show over the past couple of years -- Wolf Alice is actually a real band who is actually doing all their own singing and playing, unlip-synched, un-autotuned, and completely for real live.
And boy, is THAT refreshing.
Hey Lorne -- how about retro-exporting this aesthetic back to your show in the States?
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