From 1982, it's pretty much my favorite novelty record ever!
This is the work of a bunch of Baltimore musicians who did it as a goof and wound up selling close to 35,000 copies back in the vinyl days, which was pretty amazing for an indie single. What I didn't know, and only just discovered while Googling, is that one of them is powerpop god Tommy Keene, here doing the serious Boss riffage on lead guitar.
In any case, it pretty much gets Springsteen to a tee, I think, and you can download it here. As always, if the authorization has expired by the time you get to it, e-mail me and I'll be happy to send you the mp3.
In case you didn't see it, there was an interesting obscure-rock-band-finally-getting-its-due story in the New York Times on Sunday; the kicker is that they were an African-American hardrock/protopunk trio in Detroit about a decade before such a thing would be fashionable.
[Winooski, Vt.]
ON an evening in late February at a club here called the Monkey House, there was a family reunion of sorts. As the band Rough Francis roared through a set of anthemic punk rock, Bobby Hackney leaned against the bar and beamed. Three of his sons — Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian — are in Rough Francis, but his smile wasn’t just about parental pride. It was about authorship too. Most of the songs Rough Francis played were written by Bobby Sr. and his brothers David and Dannis during their days in the mid-1970s as a Detroit power trio called Death.
The group’s music has been almost completely unheard since the band stopped performing more than three decades ago. But after all the years of silence, Death’s moment has finally arrived. It comes, however, nearly a decade too late for its founder and leader, David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000. “David was convinced more than any of us that we were doing something totally revolutionary,” said Bobby Sr., 52.
Forgotten except by the most fervent punk rock record collectors — the band’s self-released 1976 single recently traded hands for the equivalent of $800 — Death would likely have remained lost in obscurity if not for the discovery last year of a 1974 demo tape in Bobby Sr.’s attic. Released last month by Drag City Records as “... For the Whole World to See,” Death’s newly unearthed recordings reveal a remarkable missing link between the high-energy hard rock of Detroit bands like the Stooges and MC5 from the late 1960s and early ’70s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and ’77...
This is a terrific story, the more so because it has a happy (if somewhat bittersweet) ending, and you can read the rest of it here.
And in case you were wondering, you can download the A-side of that 800 buck single here. I'm haven't quite made my mind up what I think of it, but as per usual, if the authorization expires before you get to it, e-mail me and I'll be happy to send you the mp3.
Ladies and gentlemen...from the genuinely psychedelic 1967 album The Parable of Arable Land by legendary Texas rockers The Red Crayola, we give you the epochal anti-war classic "Hurricane Fighter Plane."
And now, from the November 1992 issue of The Magazine Formerly Known as Stereo Review, here's the backstory.
NOISE IN THE ATTIC
"EVERYBODY'S in a band/They can't get enough of it," Pere Ubu once sang, and our more politically astute readers are no doubt aware that recent proof of this proposition has emerged during the current election campaign. I refer, of course, to the startling news that Tipper Gore, wife of the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee but better known for getting record companies to slap Parental Advisory labels on naughty rock and rap albums, played the drums in an all-girl garage band in the mid-Sixties. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Or maybe not. Actually, it's occurred to me that wanting to be a rock star is pretty much the universal fantasy of our age. In fact, when I researched the subject back in 1989, I was able to locate lots of nonmusical celebrities with rock bands in their closets. Some were willing to speak to me about it, among them Chevy Chase (a godawful group called the Chameleon Church, with a 1968 album on MGM) and Saturday Night Live's Kevin Nealon (several mid-Sixties garage bands with names like the Hallucinations and the Atomic Bombs). Others were less forthcoming, like Diane Keaton (who sang with a New York City band called the Roadrunners circa 1966) and the former Bush Administration drug czar William J. Bennett (who played guitar and sang with an Animal House-style frat-rock outfit at Williams College back in 1961).
My favorite celeb with a past rock life, however, is unquestionably Frederick Barthelme. These days Barthelme is a highly regarded member of the so-called minimalist school of fiction, and his work appears in tony outlets like The New Yorker. But few readers of his story collections Moon Deluxe and Chroma know that back in the acid-drenched Sixties he pounded the drums as a member of a band called the Red Crayola, or that he co-wrote such unforgettable songs as "Pink Stainless Tail" and "War Sucks."
The Red Crayola backstage at the Berkeley Folk Festival, 1967: From left, Steve Cunningham, Mayo Thompson, and Rick Bartheleme
"What happened," Barthelme told me in a not-at-all minimalist manner, "was [that] I had already been booted from architecture school [University of Houston, 1966] for a kind of too-wicked treatment of an architectural problem. So I was making pictures, and Mayo Thompson was a friend who had been in Europe for a year. And when he came back he decided we ought to have a rock-and-roll band.
"He and I and a guy named Steve Cunningham, who was a year or two younger, got together and started playing 'Hey Joe' and all that. And we sort of developed at the same time the psychedelic stuff was going on, and we used to play for hours and hours."
Once christened the Red Crayola, Barthelme and his fellow arty hippies began to garner a local reputation. Eventually, they got to do an album "because we won some kind of idiotic mall Battle of the Bands. It doesn't occur to me now that we won, actually, but we played in it and were heard by Lelan Rogers, who was a small-time producer and Kenny Rogers's brother-in-law."
The album, The Parable of Arable Land, on the Texas-based International Artists label [home to the better known LSD pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators], sold fitfully at best, perhaps because "the guy who did the recording recorded it in mono," Barthelme recalled. "We thought it was a good idea at the time."
Undaunted, the Crayolas went out to California in the summer of 1967, where one performance, at the Berkeley Folk Festival, has become almost legendary. "That's where Cunningham played the famous block of ice," Bartheleme explained. "He brought a block of ice on stage, put it on a stand with some aluminium foil under it, and miked the foil. It was an outdoor concert, and it melted attractively."
After their California trip, the Crayolas went back to Texas and "just broke up after that season." Mayo continued with another album called God Bless the Red Crayola, and later reappeared in Europe in the Eighties with, of all people, members of Pere Ubu.
Today, from his teaching post at the University of Southern Mississippi, Barthelme looks back at his brush with rock stardom. "It was pretty interesting," he recalled. "Of course, the idea that I was a rock star -- or even a qualified performer -- is, I think, a stretch. You understand I was the world's worst drummer...very far ahead of my time, but the world's worst drummer."
Still, history plays odd tricks, and after the first Red Crayola album was reissued in the late Seventies, some rock theoreticians actually hailed the band as unsung Godfathers of Punk.
"Mayo said something about that when he was in Europe," Barthelme told me, "that in England we were a proto-punk band, and people had heard of us and had the record." He reflected for a moment.
"I don't know if that's true," he said finally. "But wouldn't it be lovely to think so?" -- Steve Simels
A couple of brief notes by way of a postscript:
I originally wrote the above for Rolling Stone as part of a larger piece about celebrities with rock bands in the woodwork; I interviewed a bunch of interesting people for the story, including pre-rehab Insider host Pat O'Brien and the late Republican strategist/devil incarnate Lee Atwater, but the piece ultimately never ran because Jann Wenner thought the premise was somehow insulting. I got paid five grand up front, though, so I didn't really care what Wenner thought, and I was able later to recycle several of the interviews at outlets including Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, so the whole thing ended up being both quite wonderfully lucrative and marginally rep enhancing.
Also, since I wrote the piece, Arable Land has emerged on CD in stereo (despite Barthelme's mono-only claim); improved sonics notwithstanding, I hasten to add that it retains its period charm, and you can order it at Amazon if the downloadable song above piqued your curiosity. I really like it, myself. Finally, some time in the 90s, somebody put out an actual, quite well-recorded, live album of the Crayola's 1967 appearance at the Berkeley Folk Festival, featuring the aforementioned melting block of ice. I had a copy briefly and seem to recall it's actually a double CD; you can order it here if you have a little disposable income and a fondness for acid-infused Dada-ish art gestures.
Hi, and welcome to a new feature here at PowerPop: Movie Monday. I'm going to try and post every Monday on a different music movie and hopefully we can chat about it some.
This week, I'd like to start with a movie Thers and I watched a few weeks ago which has been, for lack of a better phrase, haunting me. It's a British indie film from 2007 called Control, which tells the story of the tragically brief life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide at 23 in 1980.
The film features Sam Riley, a musician himself, who strikes many perfect notes as this troubled young man. Riley is almost as beautiful and intense-looking as Curtis was, if more classically handsome. (Riley was a model for Burberry.) But it's in his performance, haunted and haunting, that he really shines. Curtis's vision, his rise, his illness, his infidelity, even his death, are presented so sympathetically--though not romantically--that they make perfect, if depressing, sense. The film is based primarily on Deborah Curtis's book Touching From a Distance, a filter worth remembering.
The film obviously covers a lot of the same ground as 2002's 24-Hour Party People, in which Riley was also supposed to appear (as The Fall's Mark E. Smith), but was left on the cutting-room floor. Wilson seems much more obviously calculating here, the bands much more his puppets, though I guess that's no surprise. Still, it recreates that same 1976 Sex Pistols Manchester show where so much of what would become Madchester germinated. And Joe Anderson, the crazy brother from Across the Universe, is Peter Hook, so there's that.
It's a good film, even though you already know how it ends. Highly recommended, but expect to think about it a lot afterward.
Ladies and gentlemen, shed a tear for the unforgivable STOOP SOLO
Truly the glammiest of all the glam rockers, Stoop was discovered by Rutles empresario Leggy Mountbatten, who also handled a stable of unnatural acts including Arthur Hodgeson and the Kneecaps, Les Garçons de la Plage (the French Beach Boys) and the Machismo Brothers. But his contribution to contemporary music has been cruelly lost in the mists of time (he died in a tragic gardening accident in 1977). Fortunately, you can watch a vintage TV performance here.
And as a public service, you can download "Star Time," a classic song from the sole solo Solo album How Could You?, here.
Well, it's Friday and you know what that means. Yes, my Oriental She Who Could Bop On My Shmeckel Pretty Good account manager Fah Lo Suee and I will be travelling to...well, I can't tell you, but it involves Ann Coulter, a highly skilled surgeon, and an endicronologist to be named later. Other than that, my lip is unfortunately zipped.
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:
Stupidest Post-Beatles Band Name Ever!!!
Self-explanatory, obviously, so no arbitrary rules this time, except it has to be a real band that actually charted. Some guys you knew in college named Rubella and the Dead Little Girl who played one gig at a frat party in 1988 don't count. Okay? Oh, and by stupid, I basically mean that the people who thought it up thought it was cool at the time, but they were sadly mistaken.
Thank you. And apologies if I've done this category before -- I'm old, I'm overstressed, and I'm totally out of gingko biloba.
Okay, here's my totally top of my head Top Five:
5. Spandau Ballet
These guys were the lamest ever, but the name was the last straw. Seriously -- why not Auschwitz Mambo? Or Treblinka Gavotte?
Assholes.
4. Shadowfax
Trust me, I thought this was a stupid name before I saw Lord of the Rings. And man, was that disconcerting -- "Why is there a horse in this movie named after a crappy 90s New Age band?"
3. Anthrax
Oh yeah, real cool -- name yourself after one of the all time loathsome diseases. Although, I must admit that after the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, I thought the new name they gave themselves -- Basket Full of Puppies -- was pretty funny.
2. Tool
I was going to go with Limp Bizkit, for obvious reasons, but on reflection I think this is even dumber. Dudes, why not just call yourself pud, for crying out loud.
And the number one dopey rock band name, c'mon, you're thinking exactly the same thing, obviously is --
1. Whitesnake
Racist, sexist and sublimely stupid. It's like the Trifecta of Embarassing Crap.
Awrighty then -- what would your choices be?
[Shameless Blogwhore: My parallel Cinema Listomania -- theme: most memorable adaptations of a literary classic -- is now up over at Box Office. As always, if you could see your way to going over there and leaving a comment, it would help convince management that I'm worth the exorbitant freelance rate I'm charging them. Thanks!]
From 1978, here's The Who, featuring the late Keith Moon and the more recently late John Entwistle, and their perhaps overexposed classic "Who Are You."
As always, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded the first reader who gleans the clip's relevance to tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.
And BTW, no, the theme is not "Rock Songs That Have Been Used as TV Theme Songs."
Alert readers may recall that back in January of last year, we sang the praises of the obviously babelonian Linda Laurie, auteur of the novelty hit "Ambrose Pt. 5." "Ambrose," of course, is a haunting tale of the tender love between a boy, a girl and a subway that permanently warped my childhood.
At the time, we chatted with the elusive chanteuse, who assured us that she would have an official website up at any moment. Alas, as of this writing, it has not materialized, but in any case, proving once again that YouTube is the single greatest development in the history of Western Civilization if not the universe, here she is as a contestant on the long-running TV game show To Tell the Truth, from February 10, 1959. She's the one on the left -- pretty cute, no?
If you've never actually heard "Ambrose Pt. 5," you can download it here. As always, if the authorization has expired by the time you get to it, just e-mail me and I'll send you the mp3. Be warned, however, that once you experience the song you may be changed in unfathomable ways.
Incidentally, the Peter Tripp panelist Marge Champion asks the contestants about in the clip was a then-famous DJ for WMGM-AM in New York City, who had recently stayed awake on the air, as a stunt for the March of Dimes, for an astounding 201 consecutive hours. I vividly remember listening to Tripp's broadcasts during that period on a crystal set I had in my bedroom (I don't think transistor portables had come into wide use at the time) and I also remember, with much fondness, that toward the end the poor SOB was obviously hallucinating. Actually, to this day, I think it's the coolest thing I ever heard on the radio.
Okay -- to quote Ian Hunter, I've wanted to do this for years and years:
Ladies and gentlemen, Willie Nile has a new album out and it's really fricking great.
Seriously, I've been promising myself that I'd say something nice and at length about Willie practically since the day I started posting here; it is to my everlasting shame that it's taken so long, but hey, better late and all that crap. So let me get the gushing out of the way up front and stipulate for the record that the man is a bruised romantic with the soul of a poet and the sly heart of a standup comedian, a brilliant songwriter, a riveting performer, and as natural a rock 'n' roller as has ever worn shoe leather. The fact that he is not, at the moment, a household word while James Blunt walks the streets a free man is not just a cultural crime but rather convincing proof of the non-existence of God. IMHO.
Okay, all that said, if you don't know Willie's work here's the short version. He first got discovered as part of the late70s/early 80s Greenwich Village Revival scene -- classmates included Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, and (a little later) The Smithereens -- and for a variety of (mostly dumb) reasons (only one of which is the fact that he's quite the wordsmith), got tagged as yet another New Dylan. His eponymous first album, for Arista, came out in 1980, and was (and is) an instant and genuine classic; upon its release he hit the ground running with a great band featuring a terrific stripped down three guitar folk-rock attack and a killer rhythm section including Fred Smith (from Television) and JayDee Daugherty (from the Patti Smith Group). If you never saw those guys in person your life remains the poorer for it, but if you go to Amazon, you can still find copies of a (sadly out of print) live album from an early 80s show in Central Park. Another Arista album followed in 1984, which had some good songs sabotaged by overblown production, and then (after recording an album for Geffen, I believe, that was never issued), he made an absolutely brilliant 1991 record for Columbia (guests included Roger McGuinn and Richard Thompson) that the label uncermoniously dumped the week it came out (the usual corporate bullshit was the culprit). "Heaven Help the Lonely," a killer video for one of the best songs, is still up over at YouTube, but since there's no embed code (more corporate bullshit) I'll just give you the link.
The rest of the 90s were a fairly fallow period, although there was a nice indie EP the next year, and Willie never stopped writing and performing. Cut to (I'm skipping a big chunk of the story, but only to get to the good stuff) 2006, when he put out the justly critically acclaimed Streets of New York, perhaps his best ever album; it featured the utterly chilling "Cell Phones Ringing in the Pockets of the Dead" (not a response to 9/11, although it got taken for one) and a gorgeous cover of The Clash version of "Police on My Back." Here's the vid for "Game of Fools," another cool one from the album.
A live album and DVD followed, and that brings us to the amazing new House of A Thousand Guitars, which drops (as the kids say) on April 14. I'm still digesting it, but on first listening it strikes me as being an utter embarassment of riches. The title song, over a pounding "I Fought the Law" beat and riff, references Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, The Stones, John Lennon, and John Lee Hooker (who's "gonna kick your ass"), and it manages the incredible feat of living up to the best of every one of them. It's also one of the most outrageous productions ever staged by a rock band, but you can listen to it and marvel for yourself (see below).
Okay, you can -- and most definitely should -- get the first three Arista/Columbia records on one two disc set here.
And as a public service, you can download "Vagabond Moon," the opening track from the 1980 debut album that turned me into an instant, raving fan back in the day, here...
...plus you can get the aforementioned leadoff title track from his latest here. [Author's note: As always, if the links have expired by the time you get to them, e-mail me and I'll send you the mp3s.]
What am I forgetting?....Oh yeah -- go preorder the new CD over at the official Willie website.
An idiosyncratic blog dedicated to the precursors, the practioners, and the descendants of power pop.
All suggestions for postings and sidebar links welcome, contact any of us.
