Ars Stupid, Vita Brevis

Here's a possibly -- hell, probably -- apocryphal story I've been meaning to share for a while.

But first, from 1958, please enjoy Richmond, Virginia's Rock-a-Teens and their great "Woo-Hoo," perchance the most sublimely stupid (or stupidly sublime) rock record of all time.




I don't know where to begin singing the praises of this one. Maybe the trash-can drum solo, which of course has never been equalled. Or maybe the lyrics themselves, which I reproduce here in their entirety, secure in the knowledge that the poetry survives the leap from the original magnetic tape to cold hard type here on the Intertubes.

Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo...

Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo
Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo
Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo
Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo
Woo hoo
Woo hoo
Woo hoo hoo hoo

The song itself is long since immortal; Quentin Tarrantino used a cover version, famously, in Kill Bill, and both the original record and several punk remakes of differing levels of manic intensity have shown up frequently in TV commercials over the last few years. I myself love it in all its permutations, obviously.

As for that possibly/probably apocryphal story -- it was relayed to me in September of 1965, during my first (and only) semester at Lake Forest College, by my long time chum Eric C. Boardman, who lived in the dorm room across the hall.

Anyway, as I heard it, the previous summer, one of the Chicago area AM radio stations was going to change formats (from Top 40 to something else, if memory serves). To publicize said switch, in the week leading up to the change, the station played nothing but -- you guessed it, "Woo-Hoo" by the Rockateens. What made it devilishly delicious, however, was that they would continually ID the song as something else, as if they were airing their normal Top 40 playlist, i.e. a deejay would say "And now "Here's 'Wooly Bully' by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs," and then on would come "Woo-Hoo." And then "Here's 'Help' by the Beatles," and on would come "Woo-Hoo."

Apparently, as I said, this went on for an entire week with everyone at the station gleefully deadpanning about it, including the receptionists at the station's switchboard who, when fielding the inevitable listener inquiries the prank engandered, would simply say "Yes, that was "Like a Rolling Stone' by Bob Dylan. Thank you for calling."

In fact, if Eric is to be believed, by the end of the week the "Woo-Hoo" thing was such an underground cultural sensation that you could see cars stopped at red lights all around Chicago, with everybody's windows rolled down, "Woo-Hoo" blasting from their dashboard radios, and the car's occupants convulsed in laughter and waving to each other.

Like I said, this is a probably apocryphal story, but I like to think that it did, indeed, happen. Certainly, it should have.

Thank You Jeebus, Thank You Lord

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Weekend Listomania (Special Patience Wearing Thin audio/video edition)

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means -- after a brief slacker interlude, Weekend Listomania is back, baby!!! Yeah!!!!

More to the point, my Oriental fruit smoothie taster (heh!) Fah Lo Suee and I will be off to beautiful downtown Kiron, Iowa where, in the interests of fair play, we will be crashing a small plane into the top floor of the house of Rep. Steve King (R-Amoral Asshat). You know -- just to see how he likes it when it happens to him.

That being the case, further posting by moi will have to be sporadic for a day or two.

In the meantime, then, here's a hopefully fun little project for us all:

Pet Peeves -- The Trend, Person, Thing, Group, Song or Whatever in Post-Elvis Pop/Rock That You Find or Have Found Thoroughly Irksome!!!

No arbitrary rules this time out; go nuts, frankly. And yes, we've probably done something fairly similar in the past, but it's so much damn fun, I really don't care. In any case, I'm pretty sure most of my candidates are new.

And totally top of my head Top Six is:

6. Brian Eno



Okay, I'll concede that the pretentious Brit baldie has done some estimable work as a producer over the years, and I've always really liked "Here Come the Warm Jets" and some of his other early stuff. But the real reason he completely gets up my nose is the goddamn New York Times crossword puzzle. In which he's appeared as the answer to a clue more times than "Asta" and "Toto" combined.

5. Post-Vanilla Fudge Heavy Rock Bands From Long Island




Trust me, there were thousands of such bands, each featuring a classically trained Hammond organ bore and a sub-Jeff Beck guitarist, in the Fudge's elephantine wake, and most of them played dances and frat parties at my old school between 1967-69, including the most famous of them -- The Hassles, featuring fricking Billy Joel. The Illusion -- whose "How Does It Feel?" can be heard above -- was probably the only one of them worth a damn, mostly because they had a bit more of a pop sensibility than the rest.

4. Songs Inspired, If That is the Word, By Michael McDonald's "What a Fool Believes"



Examples too numerous too mention, I think. In fact, a comedian/musical satirist I knew used to do a very funny medley of some of the worst of them back in the day; if memory serves, in his club act, DuPree's "Steal Away" was the principal offender.

3. Unaccountably Popular Yet Thoroughly Lame Twenty-Something Folk/Country Rock Bands



Fleet Foxes? Is this some kind of ironic Generation Gap joke that I'm missing? Because these guys are just freaking awful. Seriously, they sound like America without the cojones.

2. Bands With People Who Perform Shirtless



I don't know who exactly started this trend or when -- perhaps Jeff Beck, who famously used to wear denim jackets over a bare chest, thus earning Rolling Stone's prescient "Erect Left Nipple Award" back in 1968. But since then, it's just gotten completely out of control, and in the case of contemporary fashion plates like the singer of Fucked Up above, I think it's fricking gotta stop.

And the numero uno pop/rock pet peeve (and lord knows, they're hard to housetrain) absolutely has gotta be --

1. Bands Without Bass Players



You know, I like the White Stripes. I liked Sleater/Kinney (see above). Back in the day I even sort of liked the Cramps. But I'm sorry -- rock and roll is supposed to have a bottom end. And as far as I'm concerned, any more recent bass-deficient band at this point is either being pretentiously reductive or just goddamn lazy.

Alrighty, then -- what would your choices be?

[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- Theme: French Film Actress Who Best Exemplifies the Whole "Vive Le Difference" Thing -- is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could find it in your heart to go over there and post something snarky, it would help solidify my tenuous position with management. Thanks!]

Happy Birthday: Emitt Rhodes

While we're stewing over steve's latest conundrum, let's all pause a minute and wish a happy 60th birthday to the DIY king Emitt Rhodes. After some success in bands like The Merry-Go-Round, Rhodes got signed to a solo contract, but his label refused to release his first record. So he withdrew, built himself a studio in his parents' garage, and proceeded to make two just-about-perfect albums of early 70's pop. He was the keeper of the flame when the flame appeared to be gone, and he turns 60 today. Happy birthday, Mr. Rhodes!

An Early Clue to the New Direction: Special Duh! Edition

From 1967, please enjoy England's Sweetheart Petula Clark and her winsomely melodic ode to sensible self-preservation "Don't Sleep in the Subway."



I would just like to say for the record that this song, attractive as it is in a "Penny Lane" Goes Tin Pan Alley-ish sort of way, has always baffled me. "Don't sleep in the subway, darling, don't stand in the pouring rain"?

Seriously, lady, if the guy you're boinking is so stupid he needs to be reminded not to do that stuff, you probably need to set your sights higher, if you know what I mean.

In any case, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded the first reader who gleans the clip's relevance to the theme of tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.

Safety in Numbers

Excellent video news from the Windy City: Ace pop/punk rockers, Friends of PowerPop© and all around cool guys The Safes just made their national television debut!

Here they are on January 29th on WGN-Chicago (hey -- it's a SuperStation!!!) with the ultra kinetic and infectious "Fairy Tale Tomorrow" (from their debut album Well, Well, Well.)


As you can see, these guys are a terrific little outfit with charisma to burn, and they have boatloads of great songs. At the moment, they're world famous only in their home town, but if ever a band deserved to impinge on the national consciousness, it's them.

Incidentally, at this point I should note something I also noted the last time I wrote about them -- that they're the subjects of what's easily the cleverest and most artful group photo of the 21st century so far. (Note Brian Jones and company in the background. Heh heh.)


For in our friends in Austin, Texas I should also add that the band is doing a bunch of club shows at SXSW next month. Here's the schedule; if you stop in to see 'em, make sure you say hello.

MARCH 18:
Trophys 2008 South Congress Ave
The Liberty 1618 1/2 E 6th St
MARCH 19:
Lew's House 2610 Rio Grande St
The Liberty 1618 1/2 E 6th St
MARCH 20:
The T: Merrifield Records party

For more about these guys -- including links to where you can either download more of their music (from iTunes et al) or buy the actual CDs, go here ASAP.

You're welcome.

Compare and Contrast: The Ants Are My Friends

From 1963, and his legendary (and unreleased) Live at Carnegie Hall album, please enjoy voice of a generation Bob Dylan and his classic protest against an unfeeling world and an unjust society, "Who Killed Davey Moore?"




And from 1967, here's the butler from Family Affair doing his version.




Okay, having had a bit of cheap snark at the expense of both performers, I just want to go on record as saying that I was a huge Sebastian Cabot fan, and still am. But not because of Family Affair. Actually, Cabot forever won my heart in an earlier TV role -- as the larger than life Porthos in the wonderful syndicated 50s version of The Three Musketeers. A show, I should add, for which I can find absolutely no pictorial evidence, either via the Google or the YouTube, but which also starred Domenico Modugno as Athos. Modugno, of course, had the original Italian language international hit version of the classic "Volare."

And how I got from Bob Dylan singing about a dead boxer to a cheesy Italian crooner singing about I don't know what, I have no idea.

New New Pornographers

via The Weekly Feed, please enjoy "Your Hands" from TNP's forthcoming "Together," due out May 4th.

UPDATE: Neko apparently has a cartoon pilot for Adult Swim. Let's just hope it's better than My Dad the Rock Star!

Songs I've Just Realized I Can't Live Without: More Total Destruction to Your Mind

So sometime last week we were discussing Chicago indie-rock eminence grise Steve Albini (probably over at Eschaton, although it might have been here) and I was allowing how I thought he was a talented guy if something of a large asshole, in part because he thought it was funny to name one of his side project bands Rapeman. (Yeah, I'm aware he got if from a Japanese manga and thus it's like, you know, cool and ironic. Fuck him.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that the most important reason I think Albini's an asshole is because of what he did, wearing his "I am not a record producer" hat, to The Fleshtones' "Let's Go," the should have been a huge hit first track from what should have been that band's commercial breakthrough album Laboratory of Sound from 1995.




Seriously, this is one of the absolutely greatest rock songs and performances ever -- the right three chords, those strategically placed yelps of the title acting as a terrific hook throughout, the atomic energy level (that "The hell with radiation!" movie sample at the beginning is doubly appropriate) and perhaps the funniest and most bordering on genius lyrics about the appeal of cheap thrills/transcendence in the history of the music.

Let's get gone
Get completely fucked
Let's go crazy on angel dust
Let's go -- let's get out of here!
Let's get drunk
Let's get in a fight
Let's get into something really wrong -- that's right!
And let's get out of here!

Doesn't get better than that, frankly. And yet you listen to the version that Albini "produced" and it sounds like every crappy teenage garage band that ever taped itself on an old Wollensak in their parents finished basement in 1965. Seriously -- I weep when I hear this; it's still thrilling, obviously, but when I think of how good it could have been if somebody not Albini (or an asshole) had been in charge of the recording it's enough to make you want to go to Chicago and smack the little twit upside the head.

Oh well, Could have would have yada yada.

In the meantime, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that you can -- and definitely should -- stream/download the fabulous Fleshtones career documentary Pardon Us For Living But the Graveyard is Full (2009) over here. $10 -- Cheap! as they used to say at Mad Magazine.

I should also add that in the early 80s, the Fleshtones rehearsed in a studio two floors up from the one my skinny tie band used. One night, we took a break between songs, and all of a sudden the ceiling started to shake, violently, to the point where we were covered in plaster and going "What the fuck is that?" And then we realized -- it was the Fleshtones doing the loudest and most brilliant cover of the Yardbirds' "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" any of us had ever heard.

Needless to say, I was a fan from that moment on.

Monday Karaoke: Sing Along With Sam Shepard

Okay, here's another obviously self-indulgent installment of the on-going Project to Digitize Every Loud Noise I Ever Made in the Time Remaining Before My Death.

And this is the short version, BTW.

In June of 1970 I was getting some extra credits toward my B.A. in a summer theater program at what I usually refer to as An Unidentified College on Long Island. One of the pieces we were doing that month was a tragically avant-garde 1967 one-act called Melodrama Play by the then not-a-household-word Sam Shepard. The work itself, which I barely remember at this point (many drugs were being consumed that summer) concerned a Jaggeresque rock star, his twin brother, an unscrupulous manager and (I think) a murder of some sort. I got cast as the rock star, which is funny on any number of levels, especially considering that I looked like this; Jaggeresque really isn't the word that comes to mind.


Anyway, a song by the show's fictional rock star, entitled "Prisoners Get Out of Your Homemade Beds," figured prominently in the script; Shepard had provided shall we say idiosyncratic lyrics, but the music was apparently up to whoever decided to mount a production. The day we started rehearsals, the director (one of my profs) took me aside and said "Come up with a tune for for this. I've got two hours booked in the college radio station on Thursday, and you'll record it then." Considering I had never written a song in my life (nor have I since) this was rather a daunting challenge, as you can well imagine.

Fortunately, The Who's Live at Leeds album had come out a few weeks earlier, and I had been listening to it obsessively; using that as a template, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to come up with a stupid riff and a moronic three chord instrumental track that sort of fit Shepard's somewhat wayward words. Two of my musician friends from my garage band at home -- including my old pal Allan Weissman, who you may recall from this installment -- happened to be available, and so, with me doing a woefully inadequate imitation of Pete Townshend on guitar, we eventually found ourselves at the recording facilities of WCWP-FM, bashing out the tune in about as much time as it took to rehearse it once. As I recall, the engineer simply hung a single microphone in the vicinity of the band; there was no overdubbing, obviously. The finished product, however, met with the director's approval, and I wound up yowling to it on stage when we did the show a week or two later.

Cut to: sometime last January. I was reminiscing about all this with another old pal, and he let it drop that years back I had entrusted the original reel-to-reel tape of the song (the only one that ever existed) to him, and that against all the odds he still had it. And still playable, apparently.

So -- at great personal expense (actually, fifty bucks to a good engineer I know), here it is these four decades later, in mp3 form for all to hear. I also found Shepard's lyrics, which I have appended; feel free to sing them in the privacy of your own home, preferably while playing air guitar. You'll notice three strategically placed screams throughout the clip -- those are your cues for the beginning of each verse.

I should add that a version of this track with a vocal by yours truly has survived as well, but it will be available for public audition at approximately the same time that frozen yogurt goes on sale in Hell.


"Prisoners, Get Out of Your Homemade Beds"

Well early one day you got out of bed
And then you decided to go to sleep instead
So early one day you got back in the sack
And you fell fast asleep in your homemade rack
You don't know how you decided this
And all that you know is there's something you missed
But you don't know what and you don't know where
So you just stay put and go nowhere

Oh prisoners get out of your homemade beds
Oh prisoners get out of your homemade beds

Well early one night you got so very uptight
And you said this sleeping it just ain't right
But you couldn't at all decide what to do
But your eyes stayed shut with their homemade glue
But you couldn't hear your own voice speak
And you couldn't walk 'cause your legs were too weak
So you lay in bed crying to yourself
And your life's just out there hanging on the shelf

Oh prisoners get out of your homemade beds
Oh prisoners get out of your homemade beds

And now the night and the day are just the same
And now the light and the dark have no name
And you just lay in bed without no game
You just lay there sleeping without no fame
But when you awaken from your deep deep sleep
That bed will disappear and you won't even weep
You'll walk right outside without no name
You'll walk right outside from where you came

Oh prisoners get of your homemade beds
Oh prisoners get out of your homemade...heads

I must confess, cheesy as the track is, I still kind of dig the blatant steal from The Kinks at the end.