From the groundbreaking Rhino 1988 LP Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off, please enjoy the pneumatic Mae West and her avant-garde to the max version of "Twist and Shout."
As always, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded to the first reader who gleans the clip's relevance to tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.
From 1973, please enjoy "Wake Up," my second favorite track from Move maven Roy Wood's sublime solo album (he plays every note!) Boulders.
For years, I believed the story -- which I think the late Greg Shaw first recounted in his review of the album in my old stomping ground at the Magazine Formerly Known as Stereo Review -- that the percussion on this song, which is as poignant a post-Beatles love madrigal as has ever been heard by sentient mammalian ears, was achieved by its auteur dripping his own tears into a bucket. Alas, courtesy of the most recent issue of MOJO, I've learned that's your basic urban myth; Wood simply splashed water from a faucet. Like a normal person.
Curse you, MOJO, for your pernicious anti-Romantic influence!
In any case, it's still a gorgeous piece of music, and you can download it HERE; as always, if the authorization has expired by the time you get to it, just e-mail me.
As many of you know, I'm up to my elbows in a book project. I'm pretty excited about this one, and have gotten props and offers of help from a number of surprising corners (like the online conversation I had the other night with a pseudonymous facebook friend who turned out to be none other than Ira Robbins himself: still shaking my head over that one).
Most of the research so far has involved paging through old magazines--both dead tree and online--and clippings that I've been keeping for 30 years. It is a little sobering when you realize that you are, to a great extent, your own archive. But I've also got lots and lots of interviews, and promises of interviews, and I think this is going to be pretty cool all around.
Nevertheless, last night I found myself watching a pentacostalist history of John Alexander Dowie. For those of you unfamiliar with Dowie (and I'll bet that's almost everybody) he was a faith healer and evangelical leader of Scots derivation who believed that all illness was the work of Satan. Once you were saved, illnesses would simply disappear. Beginning in Australia, he then moved to California and then to Chicago, where he was denied church status at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. No matter: he tossed up a building across the street and started preaching there, eventually ministering to the relatives of the rich and famous.
Harassed by the Chicago authorities--primarily on postal and medical grounds--Dowie decided to establish his own city north of Chicago. The town he founded, Zion, IL, looms large in pop music history, for obvious reasons.
The odd thing about this particular documentary was its slant: Dowie's story is told my a minister who believes wholeheartedly in the process of Diving Healing, attributing Dowie's later meltdown to "doctrinal error." Somehow, I thought I was getting a PBS-style thing, but no, this film exhorts and expects faith from its viewers while it tells the story of this disappointed visionary.
From 1970 and their undervalued album Mad Shadows, please enjoy the incomparable Mott the Hoople and "Thunderbuck Ram."
I've loved these guys for years, and by that I mean since way before David Bowie got his grubby little mitts on them; if you've never listened to their pre-Dudes stuff, particularly the eponymous debut album or Brain Capers, your life is really the poorer for it. And speaking of life, it is one of the great regrets of mine that I will not be able to attend any of the reunion shows -- with the original lineup! -- they'll be doing in October at the fabled Hammersmith Odeon.
As for "Thunderbuck Ram," you can download it HERE; as always, if the authorization has expired by the time you get there just e-mail me, blah blah. Incidentally, there's a great story about the song; seems that when organist Verden Allen heard an early test pressing of it and found his opening solo totally buried in the mix, he actually drove to producer Guy Stevens' house, knocked on the door and punched him in the nose.
There's another cool Mott story in the current issue of MOJO. The raconteur is Kris Needs, the president of Seadivers, the Mott Fan Club back in the day.
ONE AFTERNOON in early 1974 there was a knock on the door. "There's someone here to see you," said my long-suffering mum, already tired of dealing with bulging post-bags and strange phone calls, as the family home doubled as Mott's Fan Club HQ.
A very pleasant Asian girl said she was Seadiver 262 attending Oxford's Lady Margaret College. Driving through Aylesbury, she recognized the road name from LP sleeves and wanted to meet the man she'd been corresponding with these past months. Her name was Benazir Bhutto, the future Pakistan prime minister who was assassinated on December 27, 2007. He favorite Mott song was "All the Way From Memphis."
Yesterday, as I sat down to grade some of the hundreds of papers forming a wall between me, life, the end of the semester, and the project I really want to be working on, I popped open Facebook, as is my custom.
My new Facebook buddy Dwight Twilley announced that he was in the studio, recording "I Will," but that he needed the lyrics. In less than five minutes, I'd sent him a link, others had sent him things to his inbox, and presumably he had the words he needed to record.
You know, Watergate whistle blower and all around hero for our time John Dean wrote a book about the Bush administration and its defenders recently called Conservatives Without Conscience.
Well, I just read a review of a music movie that's gonna be the source material for the first chapter of the sequel I am about to write -- Conservatives Without Hearts, Souls or the Brains God Gave the Common Ice Cube.
But first, the film's trailer, for a little context.
And the now the piece in question, as posted the other day at the truly appalling website of slatternly and batshit insane rightwing blogger Debbie Schlussel:
ANVIL!: THE STORY OF ANVIL
Not knowing that there actually was a metal band from the '80s called "Anvil," when I saw this movie, I thought it had to be a parody in the vein of "This is Spinal Tap." But, sadly, it isn't. It's a documentary about losers who won't wake up and won't grow up, to the total disregard of their families.
These guys are losers. The members of the '80s band are still--in their mid-fifties--unable to face the fact that they didn't make it. And they're still pursuing their dream, even though their style of music long ago became passe. And even though their long lush locks of hair are now scraggly fragments hanging from scalps that are covered with doo-rags, apparently to hide baldness.
I hated these people, and I wanted them to fail. Robb Reiner and Steve "Lips" Kudlow are the original members of Anvil, the rock group that had one hit in the '80s, "Metal on Metal." And they just can't let go of the fact that it didn't go beyond that. At the beginning, we see disgusting shots of them from their better years: Kudlow playing a guitar with a vibrator (wow, this guy has taste) and another shot of him in complete hairy, gross frontal nudity. Yuck.During the course of this movie, we watch these idiots trudge through Europe on a tour, where they are treated like dirt and, in many cases, no-one (or barely anyone) shows up to their gigs. Still, they don't get it. They leave their families for months on end and later beg and borrow to get funding for a 13th album, which they must sell on-line and out of their cars.
The best scene in the movie is when "Lips" Kudlow, in a bid to earn money to fund the album, works at the telemarketing firm of one of his superfans. We watch him fail miserably to telemarket sunglasses, as he unconvincingly tells someone on the phone that the sunglasses are the ones worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix." Yes, even "Anvil" superfan geeks have grown up and succeeded in the real world. But not "Anvil" band members, who just can't get it together.
Most annoying part of this movie--and there are many such parts--when both Kudlow and Reiner tell us how their parents were Holocaust survivors.
They survived the camps and escaped the Nazi ovens so their kids could do this?! Hilarious. And ultimately, very sad.
While I hated these people, the documentary is a great case study in narcissistic losers who don't grow up, even at age 56. And you gotta watch it that way to enjoy it. Memo to Anvil: Get a haircut. That is, the few hairs you have left.
Okay, for just a little more context -- over at his brilliant Some Came Running blog, my old friend and colleague Glenn Kenny had this to say about the film:
Yes, band co-founders and lifelong buds Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner are a little rough around the edges and have their goofy moments, but they sure aren't dumb, and they've got tremendous integrity. They're genuinely heroic, albeit on a level that most moviegoers don't get to see a lot.
Schlussel?
I hated these people, and I wanted them to fail.
God, what a wretched, emotionally stunted, totally lacking in anything resembling empathy for another human being piece of offal that woman must be. No wonder she's a wingnut....
Oh, and BTW -- that snarky crack about the Anvil guys being the kids of Holocaust survivors? I guarantee, there's a special circle in Hell guaranteed for Schlussel for that one alone. Although in her case, it'll be more like a reunion with Dad, if you know what I mean.
From 1971, please enjoy pretty much my all-time favorite Rolling Stones cover of a Chuck Berry song -- a fabulous live version of "Let It Rock."
This was the b-side of the Brit EP version of "Brown Sugar"; it also appeared on the Spanish LP version (pictured above) of Sticky Fingers, where it replaced "Sister Morphine" because the still dead Francisco Franco didn't like drug songs. The irony, obviously, is that he had problems with the ambiguously gay zipper cover (as seen in the rest of the world) as well. And yet none with the truly icky severed members graphic that replaced it.
As Mick famously observed in an earlier Rolling Stone interview -- censorship is weird.
In any case, you can download it HERE. As always, if the authorization has expired by the time you get to it, just e-mail me blah blah blah.
Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Oriental fille de nuit nutritional consultant Fah Lo Suee and I will be travelling to San Diego, California, home of lovely Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean. Miss Prejean is apparently so depressed about her treatment at the hands of Paris Hilton's brother that she has asked me to have relentlessly heterosexual relations with her to get over it, and by heterosexual I mean that nothing untoward will be allowed near either her hoohah or her woohoo, if you catch my drift.
That being the case, it will obviously take me at least a day and a half to warm her up, so posting by moi will necessarily be sporadic for the forseeable future.
But in my absence, here's a fun project for us all to contemplate:
Post Elvis Songs or Records That Changed Your Life!!!
Self-explanatory, I think, so no arbitrary rules this time. Except that we're specifically talking here about singles or album cuts, NOT whole albums (a topic for another time). Also, I'm disqualifying anything by the Beatles on the grounds that there are just too damned many tunes by the Fabs to choose from and that they're a little too obvious choices in any case.
Okay, and my totally top of my head Top Seven, in chronological order, would be:
7. The Rolling Stones -- It's All Over Now
The Valentinos original of this (featuring Bobby Womack) is superficially similar -- two guitars, bass and drums, and a singer up front -- but if you've ever heard it, you know that it's actually kind of jolly. The Stones rethink keeps the basic arrangement model intact, but the guitars are stripped down to ominous Travis-picking meets scrubbed metal Chuck Berry, and the whole thing is invested with a palpable sense of menace completely unprecedented in pop music at the time. Plus: the concluding fade-out, with those circular guitar riffs altered just slightly each time as the echo creeps in, marks (no doubt about it) the birth of the style and esthetic we'd later call Minimalism. Alas, in the 70s, that moron Phillip Glass went on to adopt it for four-hour operas, thus totally missing the point, but this is what it's supposed to sound like.
Bottom line: Hearing this under a pillow via transistor radio over WMCA-AM is when I decided that Andrew Oldham's liner note claim -- that the Stones weren't just a band, they were a way of life -- wasn't as asinine as it seemed at first.
6. The Byrds -- The Bells of Rhymney
If there's a more beautiful sound in all of nature than that of a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar well played, I have yet to hear it. In any case, this song -- even more than "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- is where the Church of the Rickenbacker opened. Four decades later, I'm still dropping by for services, if you'll pardon the perhaps inelegant metaphor.
5. The Beach Boys -- When I Grow Up
Obviously, it's melodically gorgeous and the harmonies exquisite. But it's also the first rock song (for me anyway) that combines adolescent angst and something like mature wisdom; when people say that Brian Wilson invented the whole confessional California songwriting school that people usually associate with Joni Mitchell or Jackson Browne, this is the song they have in mind, I think. Although "In My Room" or "Don't Worry Baby" are contenders as well.
5. The Miracles -- The Tracks of My Tears
This wasn't the first r&b record I loved, but it's the first one I bought and played as obsessively as I did any Beatles 45. Everything about it just killed me; the oddly sinister yet lovely sound of the guitars at the beginning, the way the rhythm section falls effortlessly into place, the sensual longing in Smokey's voice contrasted with the almost churchy background vocals...I still can't listen to it without thinking there's some detail I've missed, one that if I could only hear at last then some tremendous secret would be revealed. I suspect I'm not the only person who feels that way, BTW.
6. Jimmy Cliff -- The Harder They Come
A great song and a great voice, to be sure, and recognizably rock-and-roll, but at the same time it was indisputably...well, something else. If Sly Stone hadn't already titled an album A Whole New Thing, the movie soundtrack this astounding song derives from could easily have copped it.
3. Bruce Springsteen -- Spirit in the Night
The first time I heard this, the snare drum and near-mythic sax wail that open it hit me so hard that I thought I'd been wacked upside the head with a 2X4. Then I noticed the lyrics and had the absolutely eerie sensation that Springsteen had been reading my mail. Want to know what it felt like to be a a 20-something with no direction home in the early 70s? All you have to do is listen....
2. R.E.M. -- Radio Free Europe
Some records just have a vibe about them. Here's one (and the same can be said of Murmur as a whole) that has it in spades, a certain indefinable something that simply grabs you (or at least me) and won't let go. First time I heard it, I remember thinking it sounded simultaneously space age modern and as old as the hills. Still an apt description, actually.
1. The La's -- There She Goes
Like "Tracks of My Tears" years before, when this first came out I played it over and over and over again in the hope of finally being able to hear into the sheer sonic density of it. I still do, from time to time, and to this day I haven't quite figured out what that twelve-string riff means. Or why Lee Mavers' voice sounds so simultaneously familiar and eerie, Or, finally, who she is and where the hell she's going.
Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?
[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- theme: Great Cinematic Ghost Stories, Horror or Comedy -- is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could see your way to go over there and leave a comment, it would reassure management that like the woman in that hair color commercial, I'm worth it. Thanks!]
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