Weekend Listomania (Special Post-Oscar Edition)

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Make a Wish Foundation director Fah Lo Suee (wink wink) and I will be off to lovely Corning, New York and the palatial estate of former Congressman Eric Massa [D(?) -Embarrassing Loon]. Not really sure what the occasion is, although we've been invited to go snorkeling. I presume he has a really big indoor swimming pool.

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:

Best or Worst Use of a Post-Elvis Pre-Existing Pop/Rock Record in a Film or Flick!!!

No arbitrary rules whatsoever this time out, you're welcome very much. And, yes, you can also include the record you'd love to hear used in a film or flick that in fact hasn't done duty yet.

And my totally top of my head Top Seven is:

7. George Thorogood and the Destroyers -- Bad to the Bone



This song became a major annoyance within days of its first release in 1982, but by the time it showed up in the bar scene from Terminator 2 in 1991 it had long since crossed over into full blown Please Kill Me Now territory. Since then, I've lost track of how many times it's been used on the big or small screen, and to say I never want to hear it again is to severely understate my loathing of it.

6. The Beach Boys -- Don't Worry Baby




From the finale of the otherwise unmemorable Drew Barrymore romantic comedy Never Been Kissed. The song's better than the movie deserved, obviously, but I got kind of misty the first time I saw the scene anyway.

5. Mott the Hoople -- All the Way From Memphis




From Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, with Alice's bratty little kid lying between the speakers of his portable stereo blasting Mott's glam anthem. Forever fabulous, as they say.

4. Rob Laufer -- Do You Fly in Your Dreams?




This song just fricking slays me, and has since the moment I first heard it on Beatlemania alumnus Laufer's major label debut in 1996 (that's him as Paul on the left); to my ears, it's what prog-rock always should have sounded like but, alas, never did. I'm not sure what particular kind of film it would work best with, but if ever a rock record deserved the phrase "cinematic," this one is it.

3. Harry Nilsson -- Jump Into the Fire



As heard in the above scene from Goodfellas (along with "Magic Bus" and "Memo From Turner" and "Monkey Man"). Seriously, I never particularly even liked the song, but it's simply perfect here -- by the end of the sequence, you feel as jumpy as Ray Liotta's coked-out mobster.

2. Dion -- King of the New York Streets



Why this one (from Dion's amazing Dave Edmunds-produced Yo Frankie album in 1989) hasn't been used in a movie already is beyond me; frankly, I can't listen to it without visualizing a credit sequence. "People call me the Scandalizer/The world was my appetizer/I turned gangs into fertilizer/King of the New York Streets -- we walked tall..."

And the numero uno (in this case unfortunate) celluloid singalong, there's no getting around this I'm afraid, is...

1. David Bowie -- Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

	David Bowie - Cat People .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

As heard recently in a crucial scene in Inglourious Basterds. It's no secret I'm not much of a Bowie fan, and I didn't particularly like "Cat People" in the movie of the same name back in the 80s. But for me, anyway, its use in IB was incredibly jarring; Tarantino is usually really good with found music, but I think this was a serious miscalculation on his part.

Alrighty then -- what would your choices be?

[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- theme: Best or Worst Movie Mad Doctors!!! -- is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could find it in your heart to go over there and leave a comment, snarky or otherwise, it would help bolster my argument with management that I'm working pretty damn dirt cheap. Thanks!]

Weekend Listomania (Special The Big Apple Video Edition)

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Oriental concubine secretary Fah Lo Suee and I are off to the Windy City (that's Chicago, to you rubes) to discuss some sort of political appointment with Governor Rod however-you-spell-his-last-name (what do you want from me, it's vaguely ethnic). I understand his lovely wife will be putting her two cents in as well, so it should be a colorful weekend, although no doubt we'll have to pay to play if you know what I mean.

In any case, as a result, posting by moi will necessarily be somewhat fitful for a few days.

But until then, as always, here's a fun project for you all to contemplate:

Best Post-Beatles Pop/Rock Song/Record About/Referencing New York City and Environs in Title or Lyrics!!!

Okay, no arbitrary rules here, but if you nominate any version of "New York, New York" I will come to your house and kill you AND your family.

Okay, that said, my top of my head Top Seven would be:

7. Dirty Boulevard -- Lou Reed



From the New York City album, obviously. One of Lou's sharpest lyrics, I think, and his cosmic sense of timing on the chorus is a marvel.

6. Tonight, Tonight -- Smashing Pumpkins



Okay, if truth be told this has no connection to New York whatsoever except that it's where Smashing Pumpkins were playing at the time. Thus, we mark the official end of our ongoing project to shoehorn Billy Corgan and his pretentious cueball noggin into every Weekend Listomania theme no matter how tenuous the connection.

You're welcome. Incidentally, I've got an unopened DVD of the Pumpkins most recent two-disc live video collection, "If All Goes Wrong," if anybody wants it. First person to e-mail me...

5. King of the New York Streets -- Dion



From his unjustly overlooked Yo Frankie album in 1990, mostly produced by Dave Edmunds. Proof that Dion's a great songwriter, not just one of the greatest rock voices ever, although the last line has always struck me as a copout.

4. Six O'Clock -- The Lovin' Spoonful



I know, I know, "Summer in the City" would be a more obvious pick, but this one just feels so much like NYC when I lived there. Actually, so do a lot of Spoonful songs -- "Rain on the Roof" comes to mind as well.

3. New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones - Fear



The great Lee Ving on vocals, much beloved of John Belushi.

2. Christmas in Hollis -- Run D.M.C.



That Hollis, Queens, bitches! God, I love this song.

And the number one Big Apple record, it's not even close so don't give me any goddamn attitude, obviously is --

1. New York's a Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around) -- The Tradewinds



"My woody's outside...covered with snow." That's future Ringo Star associate Vini Poncia, mastermind of the greatest NYC surf song ever, singing lead on Shindig.

Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?

[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania (Theme: low budget flicks!] is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could see your way to going over there and leaving a comment, it helps keep me in good with management. Thanks!]

Weekend Listomania's Greatest Hits: Special The People's Republic of the Big Apple Edition

[I originally posted this one back in 2008, but I've changed some of the song choices and revised it a little. In any case, it just seemed appropriate now that my fellow Jews and I have elected a Commie mayor in NYC who is going to bring about what all of us really want -- to restore the city to the state of nightmarish dystopia seen in crappy 1970s potboilers like Death Wish. -- S.S.]

Best Post-Beatles Pop/Rock Song/Record About/Referencing New York City and Environs in Title or Lyrics!!!

Okay, no arbitrary rules here, but if you nominate any version of "New York, New York" I will come to your house and kill you AND your family.

Okay, that said, my top of my head Top Seven would be:

7. Dirty Boulevard -- Lou Reed



From the New York City album, obviously. One of Lou's sharpest lyrics, I think, and his cosmic sense of timing on the chorus is a marvel.

6. Incident on 57th Street -- Bruce Springsteen



In this early (1975) radio performance especially. If you don't get Springsteen after listening to this, there's no hope for you.

Honorable mention:

53rd and 3rd -- Ramones



Dee Dee's poignant ode to giving it away on Third Avenue. Well, not exactly for free.

5. King of the New York Streets -- Dion



From his unjustly overlooked Yo Frankie album in 1990, mostly produced by Dave Edmunds. Proof that Dion's a great songwriter, not just one of the greatest rock voices ever, although the last line has always struck me as a copout.

4. Six O'Clock -- The Lovin' Spoonful



I know, I know, "Summer in the City" would be a more obvious pick, but this one just feels so much like NYC when I lived there. Actually, so do a lot of Spoonful songs -- "Rain on the Roof" comes to mind as well.

3. New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones - Fear



The great Lee Ving on vocals, much beloved of John Belushi.

2. Christmas in Hollis -- Run D.M.C.



That's Hollis, Queens, bitches! God, I love this song.

And the number one Big Apple record, it's not even close so don't give me any goddamn attitude, obviously is --

1. New York's a Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around) -- The Tradewinds



"My woody's outside...covered with snow." That's future Ringo Starr associate Vini Poncia, mastermind of the greatest NYC surf song ever, singing lead.

Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?

PPPDA: Editorial, Bomp! #18

This is a really interesting time capsule of reasoning concerning what Greg Shaw saw as the inevitability of Powerpop. There are some curious underlying assumptions, but I like his broader argument about the pendulum of the music scene. Why, though, do we think he misread the path of punk so dramatically? Very curious.

The graphics are original.

From Bomp! # 18, March 1978, Special Issue on PowerPop.


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Welcome to BOMP #18. In this issue, we're going to do something few rock magazines have ever done; something so audacious, so presumptuous, that we'd never even dream of doing it if not for the fact that we've already been doing it for 8 years and this is no time to stop! That's right, we're going to totally ignore what's going on in the center ring of the rock arena, and cast our gaze over to the wings where the next act is warming up...

In musical terms, of course, there is seldom the kind of abrupt change from one thing to another that would make it easy to perceive trends in clear sequence. Rather, a new trend starts as a rumbling at the fringe, builds gradually to a peak over a year or two, then slowly fades. Right now a good half-dozen trends are variously rising or falling, but that doesn't concern us here. We're more interested in the latest rumbling; it started a few months ago, and now it even has a commonly accepted name: Powerpop.

The term is not new; you hear it more and more these days, as though people were looking for a way to describe something, and each hitting on it spontaneously. But like "punk rock" a year or two ago, it's used so loosely that it has no real meaning. I happen to think it has, or ought to have, a very definite meaning, because to me—again, like punk rock—a record either has it or it doesn't, and by making the effort to define it, we can maybe understand what makes it unique, giving us all a better handle on what exactly is behind this trend.

Trend? Perhaps it's a little premature to be talking about what will be coming after punk rock, when punk itself has barely begun to dent the edges of America's fossilized musical consciousness. The best punk records are only just now being heard, and the best groups only starting to get the recognition they deserve, so the last thing I want to do is deflate their sails. But as your faithful pop commentator, I must report what I observe... .

OBSERVATION #1: Things are changing. Fast.
Our notion of the rate of change in pop is based on having just lived through 8 of the most sluggish, static years in history. In fact, this is an abnormal condition. When pop is healthy, things happen so fast that no one can keep up. Consider the Beatles. From the release of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to the recording of Sgt. Pepper was around three years. In that time, they had about 15 albums released, went through at least 3 periods in their music—each of which changed the world completely and inspired thousands of imitations—and while this was happening, the surfing trend reached its peak, turned into hot rod music, inspired folk-rock, which led into and coexisted with punk rock, all of which then metamorphosed into acid rock and flower power, while at the same time white kids had discovered blues and founded a whole school based an that hybrid, along with the beginnings of other forms of eclectic rock and art rock, in America, England, Australia and Europe.... And that's just the major trends of 1964-67! The number of interesting, collectible rock records from this period is probably well in excess of 10,000, but nobody knows for sure—too many classics, overlooked in all the hysteria of the time, are still turning up.

The thought is somewhat staggering when you consider it, but this I believe to be the normal state of pop. Obviously, despite all the excitement and activity that's been brought into the pop scene by the New Wave, this is only the beginning. It's been 2 years since.punk rock got strongly underway, and in that time not more than 300 records, in the broadest definition of New Wave, have come out.
The pace is picking up, with a sort of snowball effect. It would be foolish to think that we'll have another 2 years of the same kind of punk rock that's fashionable now.

Observation #2: Punk rock can only go so much further.
Punk rock as we know it today was created with a built-in obsolescence. It was a form of shock treatment, a necessary therapeutic stage between the lobotomized atrophy of the early '70s and the kind of healthy organism pop will hopefully be by the early '80s. It served, to switch metaphors, as our battering ram into the fortress where the idiot prince has been hoarding the dead King's wealth. Like a battering ram, its purpose was to concentrate tremendous force an a narrow point, to drive a wedge through rotting timbers. It's served that function well. The qualities we loved it for—loudness, deliberate stupidity, calculated offensiveness, violent rejection of everything passe and boring—helped it make the dramatic break with early '70s rock culture that was so necessary, brought the media coverage that spread the rhetoric that recruited more and more kids to the movement, all that and more. But those same qualities gave it a limited lifespan. A lot of people now are tired of hearing the same "one chord wonders" do the same thing, record after record. I don't mean the acts like the Ramones who write songs you can identify with and care about over the years; I mean all the anonymous new bands a greedy industry, mainly in England, has rushed onto vinyl. There is a glut of second-rate product that's driving this stage of the movement to a rapid close.

OBSERVATION #3: An awful lot of the new, unrecorded bands one sees in clubs or hears on demo tapes these days are moving away from the established punk sound, toward a more pop approach.
It's dangerous to give out these tricks of the trade to the initiated, but I'll tell you this one: the easiest way to spot a new trend a year or two before it breaks is to look at the most interesting new groups making the rounds of the street scene, and see what they have in common. While the record industry is asking itself whether New Wave will be a passing fad, we laugh because we know that every young musician starting up a band in 1977 dreams of joining the New Wave, and we also know that each succeeding wave, new ideas, new trends come in.

* * *

Now let's examine another aspect of this emerging trend called Powerpop. Like, why is it happening? We know by now (see editorial on Rock Theory last issue) that nothing happens randomly; there are historical forces at work, in rock as in everything. Let’s go back to the dialectical theory of rock history explored in my BOMP #13 editorial, which suggested that within rock there are polar extremes that beget their opposites in a never-ending cycle. At one end hard rock: raw, powerful, rebellious, straight off the streets. And at the other, pop” clean, studio-crafted artifice, light, unthreatening. There's no suggestion of "good" or "bad" here—a choice between the Bee Gees and The MC5 would be meaningless, except in terms of personal taste.

My feeling has always been that the best music comes toward the center of the pendulum's swing, when rock contains strong elements of pop; and pop of rock. Example: Olivia Newton-John is pop, and so is Abba. Black Sabbath is rock, and so is The Move. Some are so right-down-the-middle that neither approach predominates: Raspberries, Badfinger, Beatles, Dwight Twilley. For some reason, such artists are my enduring favorites.

It's no mystery of course; if both approaches have qualities of merit, then combining the best aspects of each should logically produce a superior product. But human beings are not always so rational informing their musical tastes, and Program Directors seem to insist human beings actually like records that combine the worst elements of two or more musical styles (turn on your radio right now and verify this).

We've traced how in the late '60s the rise of "underground" music and media led to the exaltation of the rock extreme, while pop was condemned and virtually eliminated except when it crept into the work of already-accepted artists like the Beatles. It was possible to maintain the pretense of a complete rock culture without pop because of the diversity even within one extreme: rock encompasses everything that is loud and heavy as well as everything spontaneous, free-form, jazz-influenced. Everything from Ten Years After to Mahavishnu. And at the same time, there was one form of pop allowed in: country-rock. So the pop quotient was filled by the likes of John Denver, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. Most of this was as light and ephemeral as any other pop, but they called it "mellow" and, well, we all know what was wrong there.....

This phase hit its peak in 1969-71 when all we had was heavy metal on the one hand and mellow moods on the other, with hardly anything in between. In 1972, observing this, I began suggesting a return of the pendulum to the middle ground, and called it the '70s Pop Revival. Indeed, groups like the Raspberries and Badfinger were then providing superb, examples of what '70s rock could be with the proper injection of pop consciousness; as did the glitter bands which came out of England the following year. The story of these bands and what went wrong with their movement will be told elsewhere in this issue. For now, if we grant that a Mod-Pop trend of some sort was afoot in '73-'74, and continued well into the early stages of Punk (the New York scene was moving strongly toward mod fashion when the Punk style of Johnny Rotten/Richard Hell took over abruptly some time last year), and bands like the Flamin' Groovies were at the forefront of the European new wave until about the same time, it can be seen that the Punk explosion was really an untimely interruption of another movement that was already well underway.

Let's consider that possibility. The Mod-Pop revival was in accordance with rock theory and historical trends. Punk Rock, as we saw last issue, was created consciously by a relatively small number of fanzine-influenced people, and is indeed the first example of a trend that was deliberately launched by rock fans. This explains why it made its appearance “out of sequence” as it were. If this be the case, what ought to happen as the initial mania of punk rock dies out is that the Mod-Pop revival will resume, incorporating the most valuable elements of punk. The result will be late '70s Powerpop.

Here's something else to think about. The reason 10,000 records by rock groups were issued during the years of Beatlemania is because the record industry saw profits there. For a record to come out, somebody has to put it out, and although independent recording today is a viable alternative, the floodgates won't open for New Wave music until some of the groups starting having hits. Big hits. Every record company in the world is poised to throw everything they've got into the New Wave at the first sign of this. And let's face it, the really big hits are not going to be two-chord records about tearing down the British social system. Really hard rock has never had the mass-commerciality of pop, and it will be acts like the Ramones, the Jam, the Boys, Dwight Twilley, 20/20, Cheap Trick, etc., who will crack the charts and have the first hits. Radio wants to play New Wave records but they don't want to offend their mass audience with crude, obnoxious music. They're waiting for Powerpop. And so are the kids of America—all 40 million of them.

Let's give it to them......

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I believe that this is Richard Hell + Leif Garrett = Pete Townsend, but I'm not sure. A little help?

An Early Clue to the New Direction: Previously Unheard Stereo Mixes of the Gods Edition

From 1958, via the 2000 box set King of the New York Streets, here's the imcomparable Dion DiMucci, doing business with The Belmonts, and a wonderful two-channel version of perhaps the greatest of the great doo-wop hits "I Wonder Why."




Actually, the above is a minute or so of session chatter. "I've got phlegm!"

Here's the actual song.



God, I love this record; Greil Marcus called the opening bit "teenage glossolalia," which pretty much nails it, and then it just keeps getting better.

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

Cahiers du (Bronx) Cinema

And speaking as we were yesterday of the incomparable Dion DiMucci, whose music I have been listening to (in awe) a lot lately, please enjoy -- from sometime in the early 90s -- an absolutely wonderful unplugged performance (from an equally wonderful series of shows staged by DJ and all around swell guy Vin Scelsa at the much-mourned Bottom Line) of Dion's epochal "King of the New York Streets."

The Vin Scelsa intro.



The Man himself.



I wrote about the studio version of this -- from Dion's Dave Edmunds-produced 1989 album Yo Frankie -- a while back, and I'll say now what I said then: I can not imagine a more cinematic song.

It boggles my mind, in fact, that some smart filmmaker hasn't already appropriated this for the credit sequence to a gritty New York crime drama.

Jeebus, you can practically visualize the thing playing out as you listen to it.