If It Isn't Scottish, It's Crap: Special Beach Boys New Year's Eve Edition

From November 1964, and their epochal Christmas LP, please enjoy the incomparable Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, and the humongous dickitude that is Mike Love and their incomparable a cappella rendition of that Scottish New Year's eve song whose title escapes me.

With an extra special holiday message from Denny at the end.

And if you're out tonight, please drink responsibly. Or not. After all, you guys can do anything you want -- you're college students!

The Hiccup Song

I did not previously know this existed.

And while it has an undeniable relevance to the medical conditions that have been kicking my ass since Saturday, if I ever encounter the people who wrote and recorded it, I guarantee I will put a bullet through their brain(s).

Thank you.

U2 Sings Their Ode to the Medical Condition That Has Been Kicing My Ass Since Saturday Morning.

Which, I might add, was the last time I was able to leave the house. God, it's annoying and deeply uncomfortable.

Seriously-- apart from barely being able to sleep or eat, the worst indegestion in the world(!), non-stop hiccups, and having everything spinning mst of the time, I've thrown up in a really explosive painful way twice in the last two days. For the first time in thirty years.

In short -- none of my post Christmas experiences have been any fun whatsoever.

Regular, non-kvetchh musical posts return on the morow, the Lord wiling.

Hey, In a Pandemic, a Boy's Gotta Have a Hobby!

From his just released solo album McCartney III, please enjoy the cutest surviving ex-Beatle and his delightful "Find My Way."

As you probably know, as he did with his previous two solo records, Paul did did everything on it at home by himself.

In any event, it's nice to know in these trying times that Macca's still got it. The rest of the album, which you can find for free on YouTube, is darned good as well.

A Lump of Coal Week (Best Rock/Soul/Pop Xmas Songs of All Time) Part III : Special "It's a Three Way Tie!" Edition

From the David Letterman Show in 2014, Darlene Love!

And from Shindig in 1964, The Beach Boys!!

And finally, from South Park in 2010 --- it's Kyle!!!

Have a great holiday weekend, everybody!!!!

A Lump of Coal Week (Best and Worst Rock/Soul/Pop Xmas Songs of All Time) Part III : Special "It's a Tie!" Edition

And now today's Holiday Hit Parade of Horror!

George Michael/Wham's "Last Christmas"...

...and Mariah Carey's possibly even worse...

...which is so appalling I can't even type its name.

Swear to god, everybody involved in those two songs on any level deserves to burn in the sulfurous fires of Hell.

Tomorrow -- something, er, nicer.

A Lump of Coal Week (Best and Worst Rock Xmas Songs): Part II -- Special "The Shop Around the Corner" Edition

From his 1993 album The Greatest Living Englishman, please enjoy actual greatest living Englishman Martin Newell and his fiendishly ingratiating ode to "Christmas in Suburbia."

I should add that the first time I heard that song was -- presumably in 1993 -- when friend of PowerPop and moi Sal Nunziato was blasting it over the sound system at my then neighborhood record store NYCD.

And since if memory serves I've never said it -- hey, thanks Sal!!!

We Interrupt "A Lump of Coal Week" to Bring You The Only Good News of 2020

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson tells you about his forthcoming re-edit/re-model of The Beatles Let It Be movie.

Wow. Seriously, wow.

[h/t Eric Boardman]

A Lump of Coal Week (Best and Worst Rock Xmas Songs): Part I -- "Tried to Smoke A Rubber Cigar" Edition

From the absolutely fantastic 1991 alt-rock Christmas compilation A Lump of Coal -- thematic unity, people --

--- please enjoy the incomparable Odds and their gloriously Crazy Horse-ish version of "Kings of Orient."

Those guys are gods in Canada, BTW.

But hey -- Canada, right?

Let Me Be Perfectly Frank About Frank

There's a very interesting piece in the current New Yorker about a forthcoming documentary on Frank Zappa.

Which you can read over HERE.

I should add that Zappa was obviously a very amusing guy, so I have no doubt the film will be worth seeing.

I should also add that Zappa and his music otherwise sucked hippo root, IMHO. He was the world's most tedious guitarist, and as far as I'm concerned, he wrote and recorded exactly one really good song.

And I say this as somebody who, as you can see above, spent an hour in a hotel room interviewing him. Which because I love you all more than food, you can also read about over here.

Have a great weekend, everybody!!!

And On the Last of the Eight Crazy Nights....

...please enjoy, from 2018, nice Jewish guys Six13 and their incomparable "Bohemian Chanukkah."

I think it not implausible to say that somewhere in heaven, Freddie Mercury is laughing his non-Jewish ass off over that.

Regular actual non-parodic rock-and-roll posting resumes on Friday, i.e. the Sabbath the morrow.

[h/t Bekka]

And in Honor of the 7th Day of Red Sea Pedestrian Week...

...please enjoy, from 1990, the incomparable 2 Live Jews and their classic (parody of a once controversial rap record) "Oy! It's So Humid."

"Octogenarian Mutant Ninja Myrtle." It doesn't get any better than that.

On the Sixth Day of Hanukkah, My Sheyne Medele Gave to Me...

From 1981, please enjoy nice Jewish boys Gefilte Joe and the Fish and their seasonal holiday classic "Hanukkah Rocks!"

Transferred at great personal expense by somebody (not me) from the original blue vinyl Jewish star shaped EP, which as far as I know has never been officially released on CD. Alas.

To Err is Truman. Er, Human. Er, Whatever.

On SNL last Saturday, Bruce Springsteen hit a massive clam on guitar. At the 4:33 moment of the clip.

And there's lots of other raggedy things about the performance. Like occasionally pitchy vocals, not quite right sax, blah blah blah.

But who freaking cares?

And why, you ask?

Because (A) It's a gorgeous song, passionately rendered...

...and B) FOR ONCE THE MUSIC ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE IS ACTUALLY, HOW YOU SAY(?), LIVE!!!

I should add -- play this one loud.

Good Yontiff, Pontiff (An Occasional Series): Special Where Have You Gone, Judah Maccabee? Edition

From his 2000 Rhino box set retrospective...

please enjoy nice Jewish boy Tom Lehrer and his classic seasonal ode to "Hanukkah in Santa Monica."

Have a great weekend, everybody!!! Or...

...hobn a groys opruteg, alemen!!!

The Next Time Somebody Tells You We Need to Do Something About the Police...

...remind them that when we do we get stuff like THIS piece of shit.

Okay, I'm going to hell for that joke.

Is This a Great Country or What?

From the Talk of the Town in the current issue of The New Yorker.

A DAD-ROCKER IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT

Back at the Harvard Crimson, Biden’s Secretary of State nominee, Antony Blinken, dreamed of being Lester Bangs.

By Nick Paumgarten

When Joe Biden tapped Antony Blinken, a veteran of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, to be his Secretary of State, a quick batch of thumbnail bios noted that he was a “guitar aficionado.” Did this mean that he was a connoisseur of the object itself—a collector of fine guitars? Or that he knew a lot about guitar players? Or that he was an ace player himself? The clickbait-industrial complex quickly discovered that Blinken had a Spotify page, with two singles he’d recorded two years ago, under the handle (and pun) Ablinken. So here was another dad-rocker Pro-Tooling his sideline musings and chord changes into presentable foist-it-on-your-friends form. As someone with connections, money, and letterhead, he’d had help along the way. He’d played with Alex Chilton, from Big Star, and Grant Hart, from Hüsker Du, and Jeff (Skunk) Baxter, the session whiz known for his work with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, as well as for his expertise in the field of missile defense. Blinken was also in a band with a couple of journalists and the former Obama spokesman Jay Carney. They had a bad-pun name (Coalition of the Willing) and a nice-ring-to-it genre (wonk rock). The Spotify tracks were called “Lip Service” and “Patience.” Jokes wrote themselves, as they will. One sensed, in the spasm of media excitement at this bit of late-boomer geek normalcy, the giddiness, in microcosm, over a restoration at Foggy Bottom.

Blinken’s friends have been calling the task he faces there “the Great Undoing.” Taking on the doings and non-doings of the past four years will be a knotty task, not least because the current Administration has recently kept doing new things, or allowing things to be done, that could be hard to undo. Like most people his age, Blinken, as a pre-Internet kid, presumably has his fair share of non-undoable but hard-to-dig-up juvenilia. But some of it has made the digital leap. In the early eighties, at Harvard, Blinken wrote dozens of columns in the Crimson about politics and foreign affairs. His collegiate opining should not imperil a Senate confirmation; he was no radical firebrand or real-life Alex P. Keaton. His hottest take, not unprescient, was that the Olympics, owing to cost and politics, should be permanently relocated to Switzerland.

One also finds, interspersed with Council on Foreign Relations boilerplate, a few instances of rock criticism: juvenilia’s juvenilia. Here was the future diplomat as aspiring Lester Bangs. He didn’t gut anyone; he didn’t pull a Jon Landau, who at Blinken’s age boldly swatted down Jimi Hendrix in Rolling Stone. This was 1981-82, an odd in-between era for rock music. As Blinken, a Beatles and blues man, wrote, also not unpresciently, “Record sales are way down, new and true talent rare, and it takes prehistoric monsters like Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills and Nash to deliver the goods.” Nor was this period a career peak for the artists he took up: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, the Who. (It may have been one for his lone comer, Marshall Crenshaw.) Still, Blinken would contribute more to the genre than any of his future predecessors at State. There is no record of Mike Pompeo or Warren Christopher going to the mat for Tiny Tim or Deep Purple. Perhaps they didn’t know that if you wrote reviews the labels sent you freebies...

You can read the rest of it over the New Yorker HERE. It's pretty freaking hilarious, but I guess something like it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Loud Songs of Innocence and Experience Say So Much

From just a few weeks ago (sort of), please enjoy "Trespassing" by The Blakes.

Which is one of the most killer huge-guitars/and harmonies slices of power pop I've heard in this otherwise awful year.

Of course the story is more complicated, as you can imagine. And I was unaware of it until last week, when the following e-mail arrived at Casa Simels.

Hey Steve:

I was doing a little surfing and found some of your posts and your blog "Floor Your Love".

I recently wrapped and released a new project I thought you might be interested in.

I'm not sure if you remember a band called The Blakes, but if you don't, it was an over the top power pop ode to our love of Jellyfish that I was in right before we started Readymade Breakup in 2003.

Well earlier this year I dug up four half-finished Blakes recordings from back in the day. They were supposed to be the follow-up to The Blakes' debut EP, but we never got a chance to complete them. Then just before the pandemic, we finally finished them up with both the original members of The Blakes as well as members of Readymade Breakup. Leave it to 2020!

We've been calling it Readymade Blakeup. It's four more songs in the vein of The Blakes: big guitars, thundering drums, stacks of vocals, with a twist of that Readymade crunch, jangle and strum.

You can follow the link HERE to check it out (free downloads are available directly at the site). The EP will remain free for all, and if you're feeling it, please consider helping us spread the word. Thanks!

Okay, short critical bottom line -- this stuff is absolutely fantastically great, and I can't believe nobody hipped me to these guys previously. I mean -- wow, this is to die for.

Have I mentioned that I love my phony baloney job sometimes?

David L. Lander 1947- 2020

With Harry Shearer, his colleague in The Credibility Gap, here's their screamingly funny rock version of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?".

Yeah, I know most people remember him as Squiggy, but he was so much more than that.

I should add that the album he did with the CG for Reprise in 1973...

...is without question the greatest comedy record of all time. Order it HERE and be changed.

A Day Late, But Not A Dollar Short!

The great singer/songwriter/guitarist Kimberly Rew turned 69 yesterday.

In honor of that milestone, please enjoy (belatedly) -- from the fabulous 2000 album Tunnel Into Summer -- Rew's gorgeous ode to the "Simple Pleasures."

I should add that a) no more melodically insinuating, emotionally touching, guitar-driven slice of power pop has been delivered to the public in this century.

And b) it is one of the great regrets of my adult life that I never got a chance to cover that song on stage with The Floor Models. Man -- playing that bass part would have been more fun than anybody should be allowed to have with their clothes on.

Have a great weekend, everybody!!!

Book 'Em, Danno, Murder One!

From 2000, please enjoy the greatest titled album of all time...

...and from it, Australian surf purists The Alohas and their killer instrumetal...

..."Dagnabit."

Have I mentioned that this is the greatest titled album of all time?

And May All Your Birthday's Be Paisley!

From 1968, please enjoy The Idle Race -- featuring pre-Move/ELO auteur Jeff Lynne -- and their quite delightfully psychedelic "Happy Birthday."

And in a remarkable coincidence, today is actually the birthday of a certain Shady Dame of my acquaintance.

Happy Birthday, babe! And BTW, I'm assured the dozen roses I ordered will be delivered sometime around noon!

Your Tuesday Moment of Words Fail Me

From their just released debut album, please enjoy fabulous Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell's new band band The Dirty Knobs, and "Fuck That Guy."

A fabulous song, I'll think you'll admit, that's even better named than the band itself. Which is really saying something.