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My review of America's Lost Band, the splendid new documentary -- nay, rockumentary -- on Sixties garage gods The Remains is now up over at Box Office.
You can (and should) read it here.
GUNS N' ROSES: Use Your Illusion I and II (GEFFEN)
As just about everybody in the world has heard by now, the new Guns N' Roses double album Use Your Illusion -- sold as two separate discs or tapes for reasons known only to God and W. Axl Rose -- is the most successful pop artifact-as-cultural-event since...well, since 1967 and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. But is it any good?
Not particularly, alas. Strictly on statistics, this sprawling 2-hour marathon seems needlessly excessive, a set that wasn't conceived as some kind of organic whole but feels instead like thirty songs the Gunners had lying around and randomly threw together. Which isn't to say there isn't an overall lyrical theme: there is. In song after song we hear that the world -- mostly women (not GNR's preferred term) or occasionally rock critics (some actually named in the admittedly funny "Get in the Ring") -- is out to ruin these guys' breakfasts, making them mad as hell, and it's our turn to suffer. Earth to GNR: Pique is a pathetic concept to build an album around.
There is music here too, of course, and in fairness it's not a total loss. Both GNR and producer Mike Clink seem incapable of slickness, which these days is refreshing, and there are lots of moments here -- even in the bizarre cover of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" -- where everybody works up a phenomenal head of hard-rock steam. True, nothing is terribly original, but as pastiches of the Stones, Aerosmith, and (maybe) Lynyrd Skynyrd go, these are often pretty effective. The ballads, on the other hand, are pretty ugly, in the band's trademark faux-Beggars Banquet way ("November Rain," for example) but I doubt that even fans really care that much about the ballads anyway. As for lead singer Rose -- well, he performs about the way you'd expect from somebody who thinks Rob Halford (of Judas Priest) is the pre-eminent rock vocalist of our age. Probably you need to see him dancing onstage to appreciate his work here fully.
Listening to the album(s) straight through, of course, it seems pretty obvious that it's as representative of this band's world view as we're ever going to get. Chutzpah or greed alone can't explain their releasing 152 minutes of music; clearly, GNR poured their hearts and souls into the making of Use Your Illusion and that leads us to a larger question -- specifically, how come these guys are the most successful rock-and-roll band in the world right now? My guess is that it's simple, that compared to the competition (bands like Poison or Motley Crüe) GNR comes off as real, as genuinely dangerous. That's what we've always wanted from our rock stars, and GNR delivers it in spades. Unfortunately, their new album is an epic temper tantrum, the aural equivalent of a bratty three-year-old banging a spoon on his highchair.
So what does its enormous success say about the culture we all share with the band? Frankly, my dears, I don't think we want to know. -- Steve Simels
Thanks to today's technology, the Beatles' late lead singer John Lennon is being featured in a new TV advertisement for charity, twenty-eight years after his death. The singer's widow, Yoko Ono allowed the use of voice and images of her husband for One Laptop Per Child Foundation, which is campaigning to supply computers to children in the developing world. The commercial used the same digital technology as in other advertisements that brought back deceased celebrities like Jim Henson and Fred Astaire.
Above the rooftops...the full moon dips its golden spoon. I wait on clip clops...deer might fly. Why not? I met you...
A medical study conducted by an Australian scientist suggests that the heavy-metal practice of headbanging to fast music can cause head and neck injuries, The Guardian reported. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, Andrew McIntosh, an associate professor at the School of Risk and Safety Sciences at the University of New South Wales, writes that flailing along to a headbanging song (with an average tempo of 146 beats per minue) can cause "mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75 degrees"; at faster tempos the risks can range from headaches to strokes [emphasis mine].
"Take “Viva Viagra”…please. If my late friends, Doc Pomus and Morty Shuman, who wrote “Viva Las Vegas”, were alive today, I’m sure they would be amused by the lyric, but I doubt if they would have ever given permission for it to be used...
When I see the Seabond ad for denture adhesive using one of my favorite oldies, “Bye, Bye Love”, with new lyrics that include, “Bye Bye, ooziness”, I fight throwing my bong at the TV!...
Finally, the one that really gets to me the most, is the Barclay’s ad that features “What The World Needs Now Is Love”. Maybe it’s because the song has such a strong significance for me. It was a song my friend, Jackie DeShannon, sang to me from the studio as she was recording it, after I had open heart surgery -- it's one of the most inspiring songs ever written..."
While the spotlights were firmly trained Monday on Jay Leno, his NBC late-night colleague-in-training Jimmy Fallon was busy making news of his own. In the first installment of his official video blog, Mr. Fallon, the former Saturday Night Live star, announced he would take over hosting duties of NBC’s Late Night franchise on March 2. He also confirmed the rumor that the hip-hop group The Roots would be the house band for his new show, introducing them on his blog as “the greatest band in late night.”
You already know the idea behind Frank Sinatra's new album: The Chairman of the Board remakes some of his signature tunes with the original arrangements and some famous guests -- Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Carly Simon, Tony Bennett -- singing along. And you've probably heard the word-of-mouth on the results: Sinatra sounds like Joe Piscopo doing Sinatra, it's obvious the star and the collaborators weren't in the studio at the same time, and some of them -- U2's Bono, Gloria Estefan -- have about as much business doing standards as Sinatra would have doing heavy metal. All that's true, I'm afraid, but it doesn't prepare you for the unholy mess that is Duets.
Sure, the audible reality here is that Sinatra is simply years past it (and not just in vocal quality -- the magisterial phrasing of yore seems ossified, too.) And yes, the celebrities -- even the ones like Bennett who are on Sinatra's stylistic wavelength -- are essentially extraneous; thanks to the impersonal, un-interactive way Duets was recorded, they're more or less reduced to filling in the blanks Sinatra deigned to leave for them. But all that's really beside the point -- it's the concept behind the album that is monumentally wrong-headed. These songs were never intended to be call-and-response duels between superstars; they were written (by people who knew what they were doing) to be sung by an "I" to an audience. And so what we get here isn't some sort of historical meeting of the minds but rather a Wagnerian apotheosis of the celebrity musical numbers from old Fifties TV variety shows, the kind of show-biz exhibitionism that regularly matched up Odd Couples From Hell like Dinah Shore and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
That such an undertaking (and aesthetic) is rightfully obsolete these days seems not to have occurred to anybody involved with the making of Duets, but it's why, despite the high-profile talent involved, the album is pretty much unlistenable. On every level -- beginning with the tacky Leroy Neiman cover -- it was born kitsch. -- Steve Simels
DREAM SEQUENCE
Why Mexican wine specifically? I set out to see if I could discover the reason, but first I had to find some actual Mexican wine. I’d been hearing for years that the wines of Baja, California were getting better and better, but when I scoured local liquor stores to find examples, I came up empty. Chalk it up to New York’s liquor stores being so small, or maybe Baja wines are still too obscure.
Eventually, I stumbled on a bottle at LaNell’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a place that specializes in organic wines, female-made wines, and New York State bourbons. The wine was a Jubileo 2005, made in Guadalupe, Baja, Mexico, a desiccated valley with 20 wineries, 40 miles southeast of Tijuana. The wine is a Meritage, which means that it’s a Bordeaux-style red made with a combination of grapes (usually including cabernet sauvignon and merlot, among others) permitted by California, U.S.A.’s Meritage Association. The winemaker is Laura Zamora, who qualifies as something of a Mexican winemaking superstar, and some of her vines – which require no irrigation, a big plus in Baja’s arid climate – are 60 years old, making them Mexico’s oldest.
A lawyer for Michael Jackson said that the pop star might be too sick to travel to London to testify in a suit filed against him by a Bahrainian prince. Sheik Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa, second son of the king of Bahrain, filed suit against Mr. Jackson seeking repayment for money he gave to Mr. Jackson beginning in 2005, including $2.5 million dollars to cover Mr. Jackson's legal bills during a child-molestation trial in Los Angeles that year; Mr. Jackson contends those payments were gifts.
A lawyer for the sheik plans to play in court a song written by the sheik and recorded by Mr. Jackson as proof of their close collaboration.
It was a full evening of pop with strong sets by support acts The Plastic Hearts, The Dreadful Yawns, Pale Hollow, The Jellybricks, Triggers, Sky Dragster, and The Infidels, but the crowd was clearly there for Blue Ash. The reformed group featured the original front line of Jim Kendzor on lead vocals, Frank Secich on guitar and bass, and Bill "Cupid" Bartolin on lead guitar. The band ran through an energetic set peppered with rock and roll chestnuts as well as a sampling of cuts from their classic LP No More, No Less. I should have made a set list, but frankly, I was having too good of a time!
Following are a few snaps from the show. I understand that there are also some video clips here at YouTube too. Cheers!
Frank on bass.
An idiosyncratic blog dedicated to the precursors, the practioners, and the descendants of power pop. All suggestions for postings and sidebar links welcome, contact any of us.