Ladies and gentlemen, from 1972, here's the one and only album by Milkwood. An acoustic guitars and harmony outfit so lame they make America sound like Rammstein.
So why do I bring up this less than a musical milestone? Because the guys in Milkwood were Ric Ocasek, Ben Orr and Greg Hawkes.
Starting in 1978, of course, you knew them better as New Wave icons The Cars.
You can download the album here. And trust me -- as hard as you listen, you will not be able to detect a chinchilla of that band's trademark melange of Buddy Holly-ish pop, steely avant-gardisms and punk-ish minimalism.
Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Oriental nafkeh metaphysical adviser Fah Lo Suee and I will be travelling to the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC for the annual batshit insane wingnut festCPAC 2009 Conservative Forum and Cattlecall.
I'm currently scheduled to host a seminar entitled "Rachel Maddow and the Lesbian Plot to Sap Our Precious Bodily Fluids," but I may be sitting in at the "Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System" forum as well. [Author's Note: That last one is absolutely real. Swear to god.]
In any case, posting by moi will necessarily be sporadic for a few days.
But in my absence, here's a fun project for you all to contemplate:
Most Memorable Post-Beatles Song With Either the Word Week or a Specific Day of the Week In Its Title!!!
Self-explanatory, obviously, so no arbitrary rules this time. Although if you try to sneak in Loudon Wainwright's "April Fools Day Morn," or "Wild Weekend" or something similar, I will come to your house and taunt you unmercifully. Okay? We're talking either Monday through Sunday or the actual word week.
Incidentally -- without having checked the archives (which is more complicated than I want to think about, frankly) it occurs to me I might have done something kind of similar to this not too long ago. if so, please forgive my incipient senility and a workload that would be crushing for a college kid on meth, let alone a senior citizen.
Thank you.
Okay, here's my totally top of my head Top Seven:
7. Groovy Tuesday -- The Smithereens
From Especially For You, which remains one of the great underrated albums of the 80s. This is a recent solo performance by head 'Reen Pat DiNizio, and it's so good I can almost forgive him for being a winger.
6. Sunday Morning -- The Velvet Underground
Lou's big Brill Building move on the Velvets' otherwise kinda scary debut LP. Seriously -- this is so pretty, the Monkees could have covered it.
5. Saturday Night -- Kaiser Chiefs
Not a fan, particularly, but in the absence of anything relevant featuring Billy Corgan's pretentious cueball noggin, I thought it appropriate to have something recorded in the current century.
4. Eight Days a Week -- The Beatles
From the non-canonical American LP Beatles VI. As Cameron Crowe famously said of something else, you still can't buy a better record.
3. Sunday Girl -- Blondie
You know, it's not exactly a secret that I'm a sucker for a woman in a man's dress shirt and tie, but -- and I've never seen this clip before -- she was really to die for, wasn't she?
2. Lazy Sunday -- Small Faces
One of the most evocative "knickers up at the pub" songs of 60s Brit rock. And those little psychedelic breaks in the middle, with the chimes and organ, are just exquisite, doncha think?
And the numero uno 7 Jours Par Semaine song of them all, c'mon for a change I'm not exagerrating here and there really can't be any doubt about this, obviously is --
1. Friday on My Mind -- The Easybeats.
C'mon -- you knew this was gonna be the one, right? Great song, and the amazing thing is that it's not even their best, although that remains a fairly well-kept secret outside of Australia.
Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?
[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- theme: most memorable cop flicks -- is now up over at Box Office (inspired by the radically new transfer William Friedkin did for the Blu-Ray version of The French Connection). As always, if you could see your way to going over there and leaving a comment, it would convince management that I'm worth the vast sums of money they're paying me. Thanks!]
From 1977, here's a killer live version of Elvis Costello's angsty blue collar manifesto "Welcome to the Working Week."
It is perhaps worth pondering that at a mere 1:22 minutes in length, "Welcome" may be the greatest shortest first track on a debut album in rock history.
It is perhaps also worth pondering that, as usual, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded the first reader to glean its relevance to tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.
I've been posting Ernie Kovacs videos over at Box Office of late, and reader MBowen was just kind enough to point me to this wonderful tribute to the Great Man from what probably shouldn't have seemed a surprising source.
That's the Loud Family, whose 1994 debut, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, remains perhaps the closest that anyone in our lifetimes will come to an artistic equivalent of The White Album. In any case, I always knew LF honcho Scott Miller had good musical taste, but obviously he's just a smart guy period.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the real life Smell the Glove cover.
In case you've never heard them, Boxer were a sort of supergroup (lead singer Mike Patto was one of the best r&b influenced vocalists to come out of the original British Beat boom, and guitarist Ollie Halsall was good enough to play with The Rutles) whose debut LP (on Virgin, where they were apparently a priority of Richard Branson) came out in 1975.
It's a great album, but it stiffed at the time, and not just because the band's vaguely progressive pop was about to get wiped out by punk. I mean, that cover -- how clueless would you have to be to not get that some people might legitimately find it...uh...offensive? Sheesh.
Anyway, there's one song on the record in particular, the fiendishly catchy and propulsive "All the Time in the World," that I absolutely adore, and not solely because it includes the immortal lyric "There's a moose on the loose."
Senators and independent concert promoters took turns at a hearing Tuesday slamming a proposed merger of two of the biggest forces in the music industry -- Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Live Nation Worldwide Inc.
"It seems to be monopolistic, plain and simple," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. "This is not the American dream, as the companies' witnesses might have you believe."
The Senate's antitrust subcommittee grilled chief executives Michael Rapino of Live Nation and Irving Azoff of Ticketmaster and solicited input from concert promoters on how the industry would be affected.
"This merger is vertical integration on steroids," Jerry Mickelson, chairman of concert promoter Jam Productions in Chicago, told the committee. "The amalgamation of these two companies into one should make them the poster child for why this country needs antitrust laws."
But Rapino and Azoff presented their case as two companies trying to weather the recession as best they could, creating a new model for the music industry in the process.
"The economic foundation that supported artists in the past is crumbling," Azoff said. "We cannot just cling to the old ways. This merger will allow the live music industry to avoid repeating the mistakes of the record industry."
Azoff and Rapino said their companies, by combining, could eliminate $40 million in inefficiencies.
"We have an opportunity to create a truly modern business by merging these companies together, something we can't do alone," Rapino said.
But Mickelson and Seth Hurwitz, co-owner of 9:30 Club and I.M.P. Productions in Washington -- who both use Ticketmaster for their events -- told the committee they feared a merger would result in Live Nation, a competitor, gaining access to their sensitive information and benefiting financially from fees added to their ticket sales.
"Our competitors would be receiving income from every ticket we sell," Mickelson said. "They'd have access to our ticket sales information, they'd have access to our customer databases, they'd have access to the terms of our ticket agreements."
I must confess, until this weekend, I knew nothing of the 1967 British hit "Days of Pearly Spencer" or its auteur, folkie David McWilliams.
McWilliams died in 2002, and according to that Wiki link, over the years he suffered somewhat from comparisons to Donovan (I don't much hear it from that song, I should say). He was pretty well known in Europe, though, and "Pearly Spencer" was apparently a much bigger hit in 1992 for that guy from Soft Cell.
In any case, my friend David Klein, currently doing business over at the terrific music blog Merry Swankster, sent me the link to the audio of this the other day, and I was immediately taken with it. (The song was apparently arranged and produced by the late Mike Leander, who did the string stuff for Marianne Faithfull's original "As Tears Go By" and the Beatles "She's Leaving Home.")
Dave says he hears a sort of Ralph McTell "Streets of London" before its time. Me, I get an uncomfortable whiff of Bob Lind and "Elusive Buterfly of Love," but there's something compelling about the damn thing I can't shake.
What do you think? (BTW -- if you want an mp3, give me a holler).
Ticketmaster faces a Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday about its plan to merge with Live Nation, but at least the company managed to resolve its conflict with the state of New Jersey just before the hearing takes place.
Bruce Springsteen's home state settled with the ticketing giant after fans filed thousands of complaints that Ticketmaster gouged them and others by directing them to its secondary ticketing market, TicketsNow, which offered tickets marked-up hundreds or even thousands of dollars above their asking price on the first day in which they were available.
As penance, the company paid New Jersey $350,000 and promised to compensate approximately 2,200 people who were overcharged as part of the flap, according to the Wall Street Journal (whose article can't be read without a subscription). Their means of compensation is a bit odd; out of those 2,200 disgruntled Springsteen fans, 1,000 will be entered in a random drawing to receive permission to purchase two tickets to another show on the tour without having to pay Ticketmaster's notoriously onerous convenience fees (so that's how you avoid those fees: by winning a lottery?).
In addition, Ticketmaster must erect a better wall between its primary and secondary ticketing businesses and must prove that it is selling its tickets first to the primary market, as opposed to injecting them directly into TicketsNow, whose auction style bidding generally results in higher prices.
This kind of crap really pisses me off. It kills me to have to pay a service fee to "Ticketscalper" and I always attempt to buy at the box office whenever possible to avoid them. What are the artist's responsibility in all this? Should they be concerned that their fans are getting ripped off and not getting a fair chance to purchase tickets? Guess I'll just stick with smaller venues.
Former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, Hanson'sTaylor Hanson and Fountains Of Wayne bassist AdamSchlesinger have formed a new band, Tinted Windows.
The group has recorded its debut album at Stratosphere Sound Studios in New York, which Schlesinger and Iha co-own with Ivy'sAndy Chase. The set is expected this spring on a label to be announced.
Tinted Windows will play its first major show at Billboard's South by Southwest showcase, to be held March 20 at Pangaea in Austin, Texas.
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