Not a Dry Seat in the House

"Let me hear you say 'yeah!' darlin'!!!!"

From disc four of the just released deluxe special edition of The Rolling Stones' legendary concert film Charlie is My Darling, please enjoy the aforementioned Stones somewhere in England in early 1965...

...and the best fricking version ever heard by sentient mammalian ears of Bobby Troup's ode to cross country travel (and one of the greatest songs of all time) "Route 66."



Some of the tracks on this new set have either been released before or fairly widely bootlegged, but this is (as far as I can tell) the first time they've been made available from the original master tapes.

And as you can hear, the recording quality is quite surprisingly good. It's real stereo, too, albeit with a less than 180 degree soundstage. (I suspect genius engineer/producer Glyn Johns deserves some credit for this).

More to the point, this "Route 66" -- strictly as a performance -- is pretty much ground zero for the Big Beat.

I'll go out on a limb even further: When people talk about the Stones as the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world, this single recorded artifact is prima facie evidence.

Nobody -- before or since -- has ever rocked this hard or as wonderfully.

I should also add that as great as Mick's vocal is, and as devastating as the Richards/Jones guitar duo is, and of course Charlie's good tonight...

...the secret weapon of the band is Bill Wyman on bass.

Listen to what he's doing, for jeebus sake -- nobody else and I mean NOBODY ELSE has ever managed to rumble apocalyptically and swing at the same time like the old guy does here.

Your Thursday Moment of Shocking Blue

Woke up this morning and for some reason my first thought was -- hey, you haven't posted anything about Shocking Blue in years.

So -- from 1970, please enjoy my bizarre obsession/greatest Dutch rock band of all time (yeah, yeah, I know about The Outsiders) the aforementioned Shocking Blue and their utterly magnificent "Never Marry a Railroad Man."

Featuring haunting vocals by the unfortunately late Mariska Veres and the song's composer Robbie Van Leeuwen doing a pretty funny impression of a guy playing an acoustic guitar on a Telecaster.



This is their best song, in my book, and they had a lot of hot ones, not just the ubiquitous "Venus." Of course, "Venus," which has been running continually as the soundtrack to some TV commercial somewhere since, oh, the late 80s, has ensured that the aforementioned Robbie Van Leeuwen never had to work a day in his life since then, so I won't dispute you if you prefer it. I should also mention that the equally late Kurt Cobain probably favored" Love Buzz," if Nirvana's cover of same is any indication.

In any event, there are quite a lot of Shocking Blue best-of CDs out there, and if you don't own one your life is the poorer for it, trust me.

Annals of Assholishness (An Occasional Series)

So the other day I was, as is often my wont, immersed in the great comforting warm bath that is the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, when the following interesting and alarming item caught my eye.

Chevy Chase Leaves Cast of ‘Community’
By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR.

Chevy Chase is leaving the NBC sitcom Community under a mutual agreement with the producers and will not appear in the final episodes of the season, Sony Pictures Television said on Wednesday.

Mr. Chase had expressed his unhappiness with the low-rated show’s storylines and had clashed with Dan Harmon, the creator and former executive producer of the series. The show returns for a fourth season on Feb. 7 and is still in production...Mr. Chase played Pierce Hawthorne, a bored, wealthy, older man who goes back to school.

And immediately I thought -- ah yes, Chevy Chase. Boy, that brings back memories.

And now a seemingly tangential digression whose rationale will become obvious in a paragraph.

Attentive readers with long memories may recall that back in March of 2009, when both this blog and the world were young, I wrote about a 1989 article I had done for Rolling Stone, one which ultimately did not run (for reasons I won't get into, except that Jann Wenner is an asshole) but for which I was nonetheless lucratively paid. The premise of the piece was that most celebrities, in all fields of endeavor, now tended to have rock bands in their pre-celebrity pasts. In pursuit of this thesis, I interviewed a bunch of interesting people, including pre-rehab Insider host Pat O'Brien, Marvel Comics auteur Roy Thomas, vice-presidential spousal scold Tipper Gore and the late Republican strategist/devil incarnate Lee Atwater.

One of the other celebs I interviewed for the piece was (you guessed this, of course) Chase. I did this because I was a fan, obviously, but also because he'd been a member of a band called The Chameleon Church, who made one LP as part of the ill-fated "Bosstown Sound" hype that MGM Records attempted to foist on an unwilling world in 1968.

I had heard the album, which while not terribly memorable was at the least pleasant by the standards of its day, and I also knew that Chase was a really good Jimmy Smith-inspired Hammond B-3 guy. More important, as the only writer on the planet who had said nice things about his 1980 solo album (this in the pages of the Magazine Formerly Known as Stereo Review), I thought we might have an interesting conversation about his musical career.

The shorter version of what happened is that we didn't. When I talked to him, by phone from the set of whatever bad movie he was making at the time, he was a thoroughgoing shit who could barely conceal his annoyance at having been tasked for the interview by whoever his long-suffering publicist was. It was a profoundly unpleasant experience, and the thing that particularly appalled me was what he said when I asked if he'd ever been in touch with his former bandmates. "No," he replied. "They wore faggy little suits, they wrote faggy little songs, and they were all junkies and they're probably dead."

Chevy Chase: A real asshole, in other words.

In any case, when I read that squib in the Times last week, it brought back, as I mentioned, a lot of memories. But it also moved me to revisit that 1980 solo album -- of which I alone, amongst those who walk upright, had said nice things in public -- after lo these many years.

Having now listened to it again, I must confess to you guys that I couldn't bring myself to actually download mp3s to share with you.

You can, however, stream the complete album, track by track, over here.

I suggest you start with the just barely amusing Chipmunks version of "Let It Be," due to the fact that the other cuts range from mildly unfunny to staggeringly unfunny to really fucking offensive and what the hell was anybody connected with this thinking?

Hell is Windows 7

Still having computer problems, but they will definitely be resolved -- one way or another -- by days end.

Regular, and extremely amusing -- trust me! -- posting will resume on the morrow.

Things That Blow Up Real Good (An Occasional Series)

Saw the new James Bond movie over the weekend.

Okay, that's actually a parody from a 70s National Lampoon; in reality, I saw THIS one over the weekend.

Which is somewhat less, er, phallo-centric. Heh.

Anyway, the short version of my Skyfall review is that it's not just by far the best of the Daniel Craig Bonds, it's pretty much the best Bond flick since Sean Connery hung up his hairpiece. Tons of fun, from jump, as they say.

Of course, I did think that Adele's title song was pretty much of a snoozer, although admittedly it was less ZZZZzzzzz-inducing than the 2008 Alica Keys/Jack White "Another Way to Die," a composition whose title described itself far too accurately. In any event, it remains a major cultural tragedy that Amy Winehouse didn't live to warble a Bond theme, given that she'd been genetically bred for just that task.

I will also stipulate that Skyfall gets mad props from me if only because of the coolest use of The Animals' "Boom Boom" in all of history. Let's just say that Javier Bardem's villain character has very interesting taste in music, somewhat along the lines of Robert Duvall blasting "Ride of the Valkyries" from his helicopter gunship in Apocalypse Now.

Found at Beemp3.com

Fun fact: Bardem's actually blasting the album version of the song, with the guitar solo excised from the more familiar hit 45. I was so stoked by this I actually got a little verklempt when his character got knifed in the back at the finale.

Portrait of the Critic as a Snot-Nosed Self-Important Little Shit

Still in computer/Windows 7 hell, but -- via a certain Shady Dame's Mac in one of the outer boroughs -- I simply had to share this with you guys.

So. Just before my entry into computer/Windows 7 hell, I got the following e-mail from a fine fellow named Steve Korte, who -- incidentally -- seems to have one of the coolest jobs in the world.

Dear Steve,

I enjoyed your reviews over the years in so many magazines. I’m the librarian at DC Comics and was doing some research on Justice League of America comics from the 1960s. Much to my surprise in JLA no. 63 (June 1968) was a letter from Steve Simels of Teaneck, New Jersey. I’m guessing that’s you.

If you would like a copy of the page from that comic, please let me know and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

All the best,
Steve

I remembered having written the letter, actually. As a matter of fact, back in the day, before I figured out that reviewing rock music was a great scam to get free albums, I was already aware that belittling the work of people far more talented than myself might be a viable career move. That missive to the editor at DC was one of my earliest and most embarrassing efforts along those lines.

In any event, thanks to Steve, you can now read the screed in question. Double click the graphic directly below that fabulous JLA cover and then prepare to have a good cheap laugh at my expense.

I can't tell you how sophomoric I find this blast from my past, but given that I actually was a sophomore at the time that I wrote it, I have decided to cut myself some slack after all these years.

That said, I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to the late Gardner Fox. Sorry, Gardner -- I was just an asshole kid.

The Machine Stops Part II: Electric Boogaloo

Still without a working computer at home; I am currently catching up on the Mac of a certain Shady Dame of my acquaintance.

Hopeful my PC issues will be resolved by the weekend.

In the meantime, I have something ready for Friday, so enjoy your Turkey Day until then.

And, also again -- pray for me.

Plus: Mumford & Sons totally suck.

The Machine Stops

My computer died suddenly and/or I'm in Windows 7 hell.

Back when or if this gets resolved short of suicide.

Pray for me.

Also: Mumford & Sons suck.

The. Greatest. Thing. Ever.

And speaking as we were last Tuesday -- on an episode of my chum Allan Rosenberg's Lost at Sea intertube radio show, which may be listened to at the vault link here (scroll down to the episode for 11.13.12, and trust me, I'm really hilarious) -- please enjoy brilliant beyond words satirical singer/songwriter Gregory Fleeman (doing business here with The Fleewomen) and the story of the epochal meeting of two guys with "Dead Twin Brothers."

The two guys, of course, would be all-time pop culture icons Elvis Presley and Liberace.



From the album The Right Tool for the Job, which can be obtained at Amazon over here.

I've written about Greg before, and I've loved this song since forever. But until last week I had no idea that this video for it existed, let alone that it was so...

Well. Let's just say, as is often my wont around here, that words fail me.

Mystery Cover Version of the Week: Special "If You Get This One, You're Good!" Edition

And speaking, as we were last week, of the recently nominated to the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Procol Harum, please enjoy "Boredom," one of the lesser known -- but nonetheless beloved of moi -- tracks from their 1969 album masterpiece A Salty Dog.

And from later that same year, please enjoy a relatively faithful cover of said song, albeit one that sounds rather a little too much like something you might have heard over a fruity rum drink at Trader Vic's...

...and I positively guarantee that you'll never in a million years guess who's the singer or the band.

Seriously -- it blew my tiny mind, and I'm not a young woman.

In any case, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize etc. etc. etc....



[h/t Sal Nunziato]