From 2018 and the just released Paul Williams tribute album White Lace and Promises...
...please enjoy the incomparable Cait Brennan and her fabulous one-person cover of "An Old Fashioned Love Song."
Faithful readers will recall that I was lucky enough to discover Cait's music...
...back in 2016, upon the release of her genius debut album Debutante.
This new track, which as I mentioned features Cait performing all the instrumentals and vocals, can (and should) be pre-ordered from indie label Curry Cuts over HERE.
And BTW, if you can't get the player to work, here's a link that should work: https://app.box.com/s/odx4p37zdijy05y6b336ot2xdev2npl0
From 2018, please enjoy Jeff Matthews and the most incredible song of all fucking time -- "SelfieDeathPlunge."
I think we've all known the feeling.
BTW, a big tip of the PowerPop hat to our good friend Sal Nunziato, who posted this at his invaluable BURNING WOOD blog on Monday, and from whence I stole it.
From I'm not exactly sure when, please enjoy the utterly incredible Lydia Loveless and "The Water."
Hadn't been aware of this one till yesterday, when friend of PowerPop Capt. Al played it on his intertube radio show, but sweet jeebus -- everything I hear from that Loveless kid just knocks my socks off.
An excerpt from what appears to be a very cool documentary about Graham Nash and The Hollies and the late 60s.
If I haven't mentioned it, the original Hollies are pretty much one of my top five bands of all time. The Floor Models used to cover "Bus Stop," and really well, and I've always said that playing it in front of an audience was one of the greatest thrills of my adult life.
From an interview with McGuinn in the current edition of MOJO (the one with the White Album on the cover, and the magazine's 300th issue):
Q: What is your favourite Saturday night record?
A: Well, I'll probably be watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix. It's Australian, a period piece – the music is 20's jazz, speakeasy flapper music/
Here's my favorite song from the show, as heard on the first of its soundtrack albums.
"Sailing on a Sunbeam," by Des Toohey and Frank Coughlan.
Corny as hell, obviously, but there's something ineffably appealing about it anyway.
Oh, and if the player doesn't work, here's the share link: https://app.box.com/s/8nqze42qfk4e5tauyv6oqwo56592lbos
Because nothing says Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody! like a deeply embarrassing Elvis Presley song...
..co-written by Ed Wood Jr.'s girlfriend Delores Fuller.
True story: The 45 of this...
...was actually on the jukebox at my college snack bar, and one night I loaded it up with two dollars worth of dimes and played the song 20 times in a row. As an experiment to see how fast I could clear the place. Pretty damn fast, if memory serves, BTW.
From his just released album Tambourine Alley, please enjoy the annoyingly talented Marc Platt...
...and his should be a hit single "Make Your Amends."
Marc, who by the way is a genuine mensch, used to be in an absolutely sensational 80s L.A. band called The Real Impossibles, who were in the same general vein as The Plimsouls and every bit as good; I got to know him when Zero Hour Records, the Australian home of the fabulous Floor Models, put out a Real Impossibles compilation (which I highly recommend and you can and should order it over HERE). I should add that it is a source of some pride to me that he and I are labelmates.
I should also add that you can -- and very definitely should -- download Tambourine Alley, which is so good that it makes me want to quit trying to make music, over at Amazon HERE.
Singer/songwriter/guitar virtuoso and all around great guy Peter Spencer...
...a genius friend of mine from our old days in Greenwich Village, is in the hospital awaiting triple bypass surgery after a heart attack on Thursday.
Here's "Casanova's Waltz," one of my favorite songs from his quite amazing catalogue.
Yes once I had money and lovers
Once I had teeth in my jaw
But why have adventures except when you're old to tell stories
That fill your companions with awe?
I shall die here of boredom
I shall die here of boredom
Get better soon, Pete. We here at PowerPop are lighting multiple metaphorical candles for your speedy recovery.
From 1970, please enjoy the late great Aretha Franklin and her astounding version of "Son of a Preacher Man."
I am embarrassed to confess that I hadn't heard that until last week, when friend of PowerPop Capt. Al played it on his intertube radio show.
I should also add that, like any right-thinking sentient humanoid, I am a huge fan of Dusty Springfield, and think that her hit recording of that song is one of the greatest things ever.
That said, Aretha's take on it is just on a whole other level.
Say what you will about it, but it's better than that Pat Boone heavy metal album from the 90s.
I should add, that while I hate "You're Having My Baby" as much as the next person, Anka always had more on the ball than any of those other post-Elvis pre-Beatles teen idols of the Happy Days era. For starters, he was a good enough songwriter to have written this genuine classic.
And he was also the subject of the first great rock documentary film, Lonely Boy...
...which is an artful and genuinely perceptive meditation on the price of stardom.
But don't worry -- I still hate "You're Having My Baby."
Had a nightmare last evening and threw myself out of bed, whacking the shit out of one side of my head. Which aches like crazy. This is the fourth time in as many months, BTW.
Regular non-throbbing postings resume on the morrow.
I've been a fan since his work on Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do, but this one, which I hadn't heard till recently, is really really amazing. And for some reason, it seemed oddly relevant to the events of this week.
According to the New York Times, Hardy Fox (one of the founding members of the San Francisco music and multi-media collective The Residents -- maybe) has died at age 73.
The above song is one of the most accessible tracks(!) from the Residents' 1977 EP Duck Stab, which is where I first took notice of them, and which apparently was their first brush with above-ground success, albeit on a limited scale. Apart from the music itself, one of the things I most loved about the record was it was one of those 7-inch vinyl artifacts that could have been pressed at either 33&1/3 or 45 rpm, and there was no indication anywhere in the packaging as to which speed was the correct one. In fact, it sounded good either way.
I should add that, thanks to the Times obit, I have just learned two fun facts about the band.
The first is the origin of their name. It was chosen after sending a demo tape, anonymously but with a return address, to Warner Bros. Records. The tape was rejected (quel surprise) and returned, addressed to “Residents.”
I was also flummoxed to discover that their 1986 version of Hank Williams’s “Kaw-Liga,” which sampled Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”...
...sold over 100,000 copies, which is pretty darned astounding for a bunch of avant-garde provocateurs on an indie label.
In any case, RIP Hardy Fox. Now resident of a better world, one hopes.
Anthony Lane has long been my favorite film critic, but this meditation on the just released Bohemian Rhapsody may be his masterpiece. I am reprinting it, in toto, for those of you unfortunate enough to lack subscriptions to The New Yorker.
Take it away, Anthony!
Extra teeth. That was the secret of Freddie Mercury, or, at any rate, of the singular sound he made. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a new bio-pic about him, Mercury (Rami Malek) reveals all: “I was born with four more incisors. More space in my mouth, and more range.” Basically, he’s walking around with an opera house in his head. That explains the diva-like throb of his singing, and we are left to ponder the other crowd-wooing rockers of his generation; do they, too, rely upon oral eccentricity? Is it true that Rod Stewart’s vocal cords are lined with cinders, and that Mick Jagger has a red carpet instead of a tongue? What happens inside Elton John’s mouth, Lord knows, although “Rocketman,” next year’s bio-pic about him, will presumably spill the beans.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” starts with the Live Aid concert, in 1985. That was the talent-heavy occasion on which Queen, fronted by Mercury, took complete command of Wembley Stadium and, it is generally agreed, destroyed the competition. We then flip back to 1970, and to the younger Freddie—born Farrokh Bulsara, in Zanzibar, and educated partly at a boarding school in India, but now dwelling in the London suburbs. This being a rock movie, his parents are required to be conservative and stiff, and he is required to vex them by going out at night to see bands.
If the film is to be trusted (and one instinctively feels that it isn’t), the birth of Queen was smooth and unproblematic. Mercury approaches two musicians, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and Brian May (Gwilym Lee), in a parking lot, having enjoyed their gig; learns that their group’s lead singer has defected; and, then and there, launches into an impromptu audition for the job. Bingo! The resulting lineup, now graced with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) on bass, lets rip onstage, with Freddie tearing the microphone from its base to create the long-handled-lollipop look that will stay with him forever. Queen already sounds like Queen, and, before you know it, the boys have a manager, a contract, an album, and a cascade of wealth. It’s that easy. As for their first global tour, it is illustrated by the names of cities flashing up on the screen—“Tokyo,” “Rio,” and so forth, in one of those excitable montages which were starting to seem old-fashioned by 1940.
As a film, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is all over the place. So is “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a song, yet somehow, by dint of shameless alchemy and professional stamina, it coheres; the movie shows poor Roger Taylor doing take after take of the dreaded “Galileo!” shrieks, bravely risking a falsetto-related injury in the cause of art. Anyone hoping to be let in on Queen’s trade secrets will feel frustrated, although I liked the coins that rattled and bounced on the skin of Taylor’s drum, and it’s good to watch Deacon noodle a new bass riff—for “Another One Bites the Dust”—purely to stop the other band members squabbling. The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody. When Mercury tries out the plangent “Love of My Life” on the piano, it’s impossible not to recall the great Nigel Tufnel, in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), playing something similar in D minor, “the saddest of all keys,” and adding that it’s called “Lick My Love Pump.”
The funniest thing about the new film is that its creation was clearly more rocklike than anything to be found in the end product. Bryan Singer, who is credited as the director, was fired from the production last year and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, although some scenes appear to have been directed by no one at all, or perhaps by a pizza delivery guy who strayed onto the set. The lead role was originally assigned to Sacha Baron Cohen (a performance of which we can but dream), although Malek, mixing shyness with muscularity, and sporting a set of false teeth that would make Bela Lugosi climb back into his casket, spares nothing in his devotion to the Mercurial. The character’s carnal wants, by all accounts prodigious, are reduced to the pinching of a waiter’s backside, plus the laughable glance that Freddie receives from a bearded American truck driver at a gas station as he enters the bathroom. With its PG-13 rating, and its solemn statements of faith in the band as a family, “Bohemian Rhapsody” may be the least orgiastic tribute ever paid to the world of rock. Is this the real life? Nope. Is this just fantasy? Not entirely, for the climax, quite rightly, returns us to Live Aid—to a majestic restaging of Queen’s contribution, with Malek displaying his perfect peacock strut in front of the mob. If only for twenty minutes, Freddie Mercury is the champion of the world.
Needless to say, a certain Shady Dame and I are going to see this tomorrow.
Gaga is adorable, and she does a killer Edith Piaf cover in act I. But the original songs -- with the exception of this one --
-- are totally generic/mediocre, and eventually it dawns on you that the theme of the film is "When will the Bradley Cooper character finally wash his hair?"
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