Media Maxi-Pad

Interrobang - "Sex Obsession" 12"

2012-02-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

"Who's selling all their Mark Harp records???"

!?/Interrobang 12"
Sex Obsession/We Have the House Surrounded (Harp-DeJong)
(Big Man Music, 1989)

"Best Local Single" - City Paper, 1989

On Saturday, Amy Linthicum once again scored another vinyl record by her ex-husband, the sorely missed guitar legend and all-around musical genius Mark "Harpo" Harp (born Mark Linthicum, 1957-2004), when she found this mint condition, sealed 12-inch single in the local music bin of Normal's Books & Music in Waverly. "Who's selling all their Mark Harp stuff?," Amy wondered out loud.

She well remembered this record, dating from Harp's Interrobang days in the late '80s when, like many others in that synth-friendly era, he put down his guitar and started playing with various electronic toys and gizmos. 12-inch extended play Electro Pop dance records were the lingua franca of the decade, and Harp was an early fan and subsequent master of the medium, which emphasized big beats and repetition of simple lyrics, often mixed with sampled soundbites; in many ways they were the precursor to today's even more extended and sophisticated digital mash-ups.

"Interrobang" was the moniker Harp gave his collaborations with Mike DeJong when the two were messing around in his living room learning about sampling and beatboxes. Released as a (size matters!) 12" in 1989 on the (size matters!) Big Man label, the A-side "Sex Obsession" was named "Best Local Single" by the Baltimore City Paper "and got some airplay somewhere."

Sex Obsessed: "Peyton Place"

Not only size but length matters on the 12" A-side, which goes on for 8 plus minutes as the boys sample heavy from what Amy recalls was the 1960s TV series Peyton Place (the classic ABC melodrama that, inspired by the Brit soap Coronation Street, ran from 1964-1969 and launched the careers of Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow, among others). That would explain the references to "Mike" (Dr. Michael Ross, played by Ed Nelson) - "Is that you Mike?" "Oh, it's you Mike!" - and the obsession with, well, sex. Like the 1956 book and 1957 film of Peyton Place, the television series was considered sex-obsessed for its times, though the more controversial issues in the novel, such as incest, gave way to less scandalous plots like, oh, teen pregnancy.

"Sex? Yes! Mike? No!...Sex? No Mike - it's impossible!" - I'm sure Harp enjoyed this little injoke with Mike DeJong, who when not sampling sounds played keyboards and sax in too many Harp bands to remember. The song ends with the musicians' laughter drowning out the PP samples "Do you love me? That's impossible!" and "Sex? That's ridiculous!"

On the web site 24 Hours w/Mark Harp, Harp himself described the B-side "We Have the House Surrounded" as "Me and Mike DeJong in the living room learning about samplers and stuff." It starts off with a voice announcing "This is high fidelity," a sample taken off one of the many stereo demonstration records he collected. It then starts sounding like a bass-heavy Art of Noise big beat percussion workout, with Harp intoning "We have the house surrounded/Come out with your hands up" in what Amy characterizes as his charmingly thick "Bawlmer accent." Thematically, "We Have the House Surrounded" seems of a piece with another Harp law enforcement song, 1991's rap-parody "Cop Killer" - the latter one of the rare ditties featuring his then-wife Amy on sampled vocals (she alternates between letting loose blood-curdling screams and querying "Really?").

Related Links:
Normal's Books & Records
24 Hours w/Mark Harp
"Sex Obsession" mp3
"We Have the House Surrounded" mp3

Buzzcocks - "A Different Compilation" (*****)

2012-01-30T08:34:00.000-08:00

Buzzcocks
A Different Compilation
(Cooking Vinyl, 2011)

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Pete Shelley: “The original records now sound like demos. These new versions, honed by years on the road, showcase the songs as we know they should be, the way we know audiences love to hear them.”

Steve Diggle: “What were songs of sophisticated innocence are now songs of experience. ‘Harmony In My Head’ and ‘Why She’s A Girl From The Chainstore’ now have a full panoramic view!”

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Founding Buzzcocks Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle have taken their most popular songs over the last 30+ years and not just remastered or updated or played them live; rather, they've gone back to the studio to rerecord their back catalogue to showcase what the songs sound like now as played by the contempo 'cocks: Shelley, Diggle, bassist (and Steve Winwood lookalike) Chris Remmington and drummer Danny Farrant.

That said, I always thought Buzzcocks got it right the first time round - the songs represented here are as good as it gets in terms of punk-pop music and lyrically the sonnets of Manchester's Shelley are always reliably clever when they're not being downright brilliant (typical verbal gem from "Whatever Happened To?": "Your emotions are a compact case you carry") - leading to the inevitable question: Why buy these songs again?

The answer is twofold. The main reason to buy A Different Compilation (the first new Buzzcocks release since 2006's Flat-Pack Philosophy) is to experience what a Buzzcocks concert 30+ years later sounds like - which is still GREAT! All the excitement of a live show recorded with today's technology. Pete's voice is basically the same and Diggle's guitarmanship has only gotten better, and both guitars are beefed up with that Green Day Dookie-wall-of-sound metallic k.o. that kids today totally dig. The second reason is, well, this really is a different kind of compilation, one in which the "older, wiser" 'cocks can offer variations on their time-tested themes. An added riff here (like the wacka-wacka backbeat strumming on "Why Can't I Touch It?"), an extended solo there (e.g., "I Believe"). Even Buzzcocks tire of playing their greatest hits the same way every night and variety, that spice of life, keeps it interesting for them as well.

Steve Diggle gets to showcase seven of his songs, as well as two collaborations with Shelley ("Promises," "Fast Cars"), including adding a little Stuart Adamson-flavored electric guitar riff to the mostly acoustic closer "Love Is Lies," which makes it sound now like a Big Country song. The new recording of "Why She's a Girl From the Chainstore" is particularly inspired, while the beefed up guitars in "Autonomy" and "Harmony In My Head" lend these hard-rocking Diggle ditties a Wagnerian sturm und drang epic-ness. And the rerecording of "Alive Tonight" (the song celebrating "armchair groovers"!) marks at least the third time Diggle's recorded this one (it was originally released on 1991's Alive Tonight EP as a Stone Roses-influenced slice of neo-psychedelia, followed by the grunged-up 1993 Trade Test Transmissions album version).

And then there's Shelley's masterpiece "I Believe." The last "great" single from the (1978-1980) golden era Buzzcocks is here turned into a virtual set-closing jam session, with Diggle and Shelley's guitars duking it out for an extended three minute solo, with Chris Remmington and Danny Farrant both getting solos as well. That's new and certainly worth hearing - I would have made it the last song on the CD, but Diggle's acoustic "Love Is Lies" works well as a catch-you-breath cooldown after I Believe"'s guitar workout, kind of like The Beatles's "Her Majesty" on Abbey Road.

My only quibble with the compilation is the absence of a decent recording of my fave Buzzcocks song "Times Up," which was one of the four original recordings released on their 1977 Spiral Scratch EP. But two other spiral scratches, "Breakdown" and "Boredom," are showcased here and have never sounded better.

Finally, no dis to Danny Farrant, but listening to this set also reminded me that there's no substitute for original drummer John Mayer. Danny Farrant is an excellent drummer, but John Mayer is arguably one of the top 5 rock drummers of all-time, one who seemed to have an extra gear when it came to lightning-fast rolls. I think he may even have had an extra limb or two that gave him the ability to beat out that extra measure in Buzzcocks songs. Still, he's gone and Farrant is probably as good a sub as possible.

The songs:
1. Boredom
2. Fast Cars
3. I Don't Mind
4. Autonomy
5. Get On Our Own
6. What Ever Happened To?
7. When Love Turns Around You
8. Why She's A Girl From The Chainstore
9. Why Can't I Touch It?
10. Alive Tonight
11. I Don't Know What To Do With My Life
12. You Say You Don't Love Me
13. Turn Of The Screw
14. Noise Annoys
15. Breakdown
16. Promises
17. Love You More
18. What Do I Get?
19. Harmony In My Head
20. Oh Shit!
21. Ever Fallen In Love (with Someone You Shouldn't've)?
22. Orgasm Addict
23. I Believe
24. Love Is Lies

Starry Eyes: UK Pop II (1978-79) *****

2012-01-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

Various Artists
Starry Eyes: UK Pop II (1978-79)
(Rhino, D.I.Y. Series, 1993)

My MLK Day shopping score of the day (well, after nabbing the last two pairs of Medium 60-40 Cotton-Poly Blend Men's Pajamas at WalMart for my 7-fresh-PJs-per-week-wearing dad!) was this Rhino "D.I.Y." compilation of UK punk and powerpop singles from 1978-1979, which I picked up for $5.99 from the Soundgarden used record bins. I thought maybe I had it already, but he who hesitates is not only lost but also not worthy of the name "hoarder," so I took a chance and am glad I did because it turns out that all of Rhino's excellent 1993 D.I.Y. series titles are out-of-print and hence expensive and hard to come by except for used copies.

I have most of the tunes included here - as a card-carrying Punk and Powerpop enthusiast, I have everything by Buzzcocks and The Undertones and most of the other groups on vinyl 45s or albums (e.g., The Yachts, Bram Tchaikovsky, The Jags, The Records, The Tourists - the latter featuring future Eurythmics Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart) - so this was a score mainly for car- and boombox-listening convenience, not to mention the half dozen tracks that were truly obscure/rare and probably unavailable anywhere else but this compilation: Belfast's Starjets ("Schooldays"), Dublin's The Radiators (who no doubt resent being lumped in with "United Kingdom" bands and whose leader Phil Chevron went on to join The Pogues; "Let's Talk About the Weather"), Leeds' The Squares ("This Is Airebeat"), Manchester's The Distractions ("Time Goes By So Slow" - one of the first singles on Factory Records), Glasgow's The Zones ("Mourning Star"; Zones bassist Russell Webb and drummer Kenny Hyslop later joined The Skids), and London's Mod revivalists Purple Hearts ("Millions Like Us").

The Jags: "Back of My Hand" 45

And I really, really wanted a digital version of my Jags 45 "Back Of My Hand (I've Got Your Number)" (UK #17) because not only is it a great powerpop song, it's also one of my favorite Telephone Songs (if only for the lines "I'm not a fuck machine, a 1960s dream" and "When I call you I get a stack of lies/You whip them out before you dry your eyes," the latter line sounding to my ears like "You wipe 'em out before you dry yer ass" thanks to singer Nick Watkinson's oft-indecipherable brogue).

Watch The Jags play "Back Of My Hand (I've Got Your Number" (TOTP)

You see, every pre-New Millennium pop band worth its salt either had a Girl's Name Song, a Car Song, or a Phone Song in their setlist and, yes, I compile those sort of playlists (especially Phone Songs - from The Marvelettes' "Beechwood 4-5789" and Wilson Pickett's "634-5789" in the '60s to ELO's "Telephone Line" in the '70s, and Tommy Tutone's "Jenny (867-5309)" in the '80s to contemporaries like Lady Gaga's "Telephone").

The compilation takes its title from The Records' bitter anti-Record Biz rant (set to possibly the most beautifully disarming jingly-jangly 12-string guitar chords ever) "Starry Eyes," but it's another Records' tune, Will Burch's "Hearts In Her Eyes" that is of greater interest here, because we get to hear it covered by an original, 1st Gen powerpop band (then just called "Merseybeat"), Liverpool's The Searchers.

And speaking of Merseybeat, there's even an answer song to Liverpool's famed beat group-inspiring river in this anthology: "This is Airebeat" by The Squares. The Aire river runs through Leeds and though no anthemic "Ferry Cross the Airey" song emerged to rival Merseybeat's place in history, "This is Airebeat" ("This is Airebeat for deadbeats/This is Airebeat for sound freaks/Airebeat it's so neat/Airebeat keeps me off of the street") amused John Peel enough to get played on his radio show, which led Sire Records to sign the Leeds lads - Paddy Hogan (bass & vocals), Brian Hogan (guitar & backing vocals), and Kev Bates (drums, maracas, organ) - in 1979.

Listen to The Squares play "This Is Airebeat."

Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams" is a great pop song that belongs on another Rock Songs List - to wit, songs about inflatable girlfriends. Add it to the short list alongside The Police's "Be My Girl Sally" and Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music paen to the emptiness of opulence, "In Every Dream Home a Heartache."

"Girl of My Dreams": Cheap, portable, lightweight & never talks back!

And, lest I forget, there's the fun single "Where's the Boy For Me" by The Revillos, the band (named after a cafe in a Marvel comic) singers Faye Fife and Eugene Reynolds formed after the breakup of (the Jo Callis-led) Glaswegian New Wave retro-rockers The Rezillos - whose Can't Stand the Rezillos has been called by some (OK, well, by one!) The Greatest Rock & Roll Record of All-Time. (I still rue missing The Revillos when they played Baltimore's Marble Bar back in the 1980s! What could I possibly have been doing more important than that?)

Watch The Revillos play "Where's the Boy for Me?"

Needless to say, the all-femme post-punk Mo-Dettes are great fun as well, and years of enjoying "White Mice" on various punk/D.I.Y. compilations such as this led me to purchase their 2008 anthology The Story So Far, a digitally remastered reissue of their lone 1981 album plus some bonus tracks. These gals, fronted by Swiss singer Ramona Carlier (who sounds like she either has a speech impediment or is singing with a mouthful of food), were once London squatmates of Joe Strummer and Sid Vicious. Guitarist Kate Korus (nee Katherine Corris) was a Yank and an original member of The Slits, while bassist Jane Crockford went on to marry Daniel Woodgate of Madness and drummer June Miles-Kingston ended up playing with Fun Boy Three, Everything But the Girl, Thompson Twins, and The Communards. They also did a song about the Kray Twins, which would have made them OK in my book even without the gem that is "White Mice."

Watch Mo-Dettes play "White Mice."

Besides all the great music on offer, the Starry Eyes liner notes are quite nice and accurately point out the massive late '70s influence of one Elvis Costello who, though not appearing on this compilation, clearly influenced the fierce rock, rapid-fire clever wordplay, and mumbly invective of The Jags and Joe Jackson. And I like the observation that the members of XTC (whose Colin Moulding-penned "Life Begins At the Hop" appears here) "grew up to make the most quintessential English records that are loved everywhere but England."

"Starry Eyes" Tracks and Artists:

1. Ever Fallen in Love? - Buzzcocks
2. Get Over You - The Undertones
3. Yachting Types - The Yachts
4. Is She Really Going Out With Him? - Joe Jackson
5. Schooldays - Starjets (bonus track) *
6. Girl of My Dreams - Bram Tchaikovsky
7. This Is Airebeat - Squares
8. Life Begins at the Hop - XTC
9. Up the Junction - Squeeze
10. Back of My Hand (I've Got Your Number) - Jags
11. Let's Talk About the Weather - The Radiators
12. Starry Eyes - The Records
13. Mourning Star - Zones
14. Millions Like Us - Purple Hearts
15. Time Goes by So Slow - Distractions
16. Hearts in Her Eyes - The Searchers
17. Where's the Boy for Me? - Revillos
18. White Mice - Mo-Dettes (bonus track) *
19. So Good to Be Back Home Again - The Tourists

"Starry Eyed" Videos:

Watch Buzzcocks play "Ever Fallen in Love" (live).

Watch The Undertones play "Get Over You."

Watch The Records play "Starry Eyes" (live)

Watch Squeeze play "Up the Junction."

Watch XTC play "Life Begins atthe Hop" (TOTP)

Watch Joe Jackson play "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" (TOTP)

Watch Purple Hearts play "Millions Like Us."

Watch Starjets play "Schooldays."

Watch Radiators play "Let's Talk About the Weather."

Watch The Tourists play "So Good To Be Home Again" (TOTP)

Watch The Yachts play "Yachting Type."

Listen to The Searchers play "Hearts In Her Eyes."

Listen to the Distractions play "Time Goes By So Slow."

Listen to The Zones play "Mourning Star."

Listen to Bram Tchaikovsky play "Girl of My Dreams."

The Graham Gouldman Thing (1968) *****

2012-01-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

Graham Gouldman
The Graham Gouldman Thing
(BMG-UK, RCA-US, 1968)

The Players:
Graham Gouldman: vocals, acoustic and lead guitars
John Paul Jones: bass
Clem Cantini: drums

The Capsule Description Thing: The Graham Gouldman Thing was the debut album by singer and songwriter Graham Gouldman. Gouldman had already written hit singles for Herman's Hermits ("No Milk Today" and "Listen People"), the Yardbirds ("For Your Love," "Heart Full of Soul," "Evil Hearted You"), the Hollies ("Look Through Any Window," "Bus Stop") and Wayne Fontana ("Pamela, Pamela", "The Impossible Years") and on this album Gouldman delivered his own versions of some of those songs as well as other new compositions. Gouldman, who would later become a founding member of 10cc, recorded the album at Olympic Studios in London, a studio that would later be extensively used by Led Zeppelin. It was recorded with the assistance of John Paul Jones and Eddie Kramer, both of whom would also achieve considerable success with Led Zeppelin. All songs composed by Graham Gouldman.

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"From behind the counter of a gents' outfitters shop in a grimy Manchester suburb to a place in the front rank of the world's leading songwriters in three years. This is the achievement of Graham Gouldman - six feet, rangy and dreamy-eyed...There are many great artists who have paid tribute to Gouldman by recording his music...Citations and reviews also pay tribute to the melodic invention and distinctive style of what has become known as the Graham Gouldman Thing." - Original sleeve note, 1968

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Birds of a Feather

Graham Gouldman entered the pop scene at age 19 with "For Your Love," a song he wrote while working behind the counter at Bargains Unlimited - a men's clothing store near Salford Docks in Manchester, England - and which would eventually make its way to The Yardbirds and provide them with their first (and biggest) hit. Bargains Unlimited was Gouldman's day job; by night, he was gigging with his semi-professional local band The Mockingbirds, whose drummer was none other than his future 10cc bandmate Kevin Godley (whom he'd met while rehearsing at the Jewish Lads Brigade in north Manchester). The other 'birds were the aptly named bass player Bernard Basso and guitarist Steve Jacobson.

The Mockingbirds

"I was sleeping most of the time because I'd been gigging with the Mockingbirds the night before, and then during the day when I'd got any spare time I'd write in the shop," Gouldman recalled. He favored "soulful" minor chords, explaining that "Major chords seemed pale and white. We used to go to the synagogue which must have had some sort of influence, the melodies there were very beautiful, mournful and aching."

Gouldman explained, "I used to shut up the shop at lunch time and sit in the back writing. I’d sort of dabbled a bit in song-writing but I had a band and we wanted to make a record and so we went down to Denmark Street - Tin Pan Alley was Denmark Street, where all the songwriters were - in London, and went round all the publishers trying to find a song. And anyway we didn’t get any songs that we liked or we weren’t given any songs period and the Beatles had started and I thought ‘well, I’m gonna really have a crack at song-writing.’ I had dabbled a bit but they were really my inspiration and gave me and I think gave a lot of other people the courage to actually do it. We all wanted to be like the Beatles...most of us anyway."

Beatles-inspired fledgling songwriter Gouldman had written two songs for the Mockingbirds that he thought had potential, "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)" and "For Your Love," the latter envisioned as their first single. The mental giants at the record company, however, turned down "For Your Love" and instead chose "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)" to be the Mockingbirds' first single. "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)" did nothing for Gouldman's band but Mockingbirds manager Harvey Lisberg - who also managed Herman's Hermits and would later go on to manage 10cc - was so impressed by "For Your Love" that he advised Gouldman to offer it to the Beatles.

"I said, 'I think they're doing alright in the songwriting department, actually'," Gouldman replied with considerable understatement. "What he was thinking was that they did covers of Motown songs and rhythm and blues stuff." The Beatles's publishing company passed but, undeterred, Lisberg gave a demo of the song to publisher Ronnie Beck of Feldman's, who took it to the Hammersmith Odeon, where the Beatles were performing on a Christmas show. By coincidence the Yardbirds were also on the bill at the venue and Beck played the song to their manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, and the band.

With the lone exception of their guitarist, the Yardbirds loved it. "They were a blues band who wanted some chart success so they'd started looking around for outside material. It was a simple as that," Gouldman told Andy Morten in the liner notes to The Graham Gouldman Thing. "[Georgio Gomelsky] played it to them and it fitted into what they wanted to do."

In fact, the Yardbirds would go to parrot many of its unusual (for its time) songwriting traits - the minor chords, the slow-fast/start-stop tempo changes, the droning (almost Gregorian) harmonies - in their subsequent chart efforts. The Yardbirds' recording of "For Your Love" peaked at No. 3 on the UK charts, selling two million copies worldwide and becoming their highest charting single in the US at No. 6. And it also famously caused their blues-purist guitarist Eric Clapton to leave the 'birds' nest and join John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in protest at this new "commercial sound."

"That song, I think I read somewhere, was kind of responsible for Eric Clapton leaving the Yardbirds – he thought ‘I can’t play that, it’s too poppy’," Gouldman recalled in an interview with Alan Thompson for the BBC Radio Wales program I Write the Songs. "I think it was more like the last straw rather than any other reason, because the Yardbirds had wanted to get a hit record and they were playing rhythm and blues, and they were a fantastic rhythm and blues band and when they made this change to being commercial, Eric couldn’t take it and he left. And," he added facetiously, "they got another crap guitarist - Jeff Beck, and then Jimmy Page."

Rumor has it that another factor contributing to Clapton's departure was "Slowhand" having to recreate the song's harpsichord on a 12-string guitar when performing it live. It would later be handily handled by post-Clapton "crap" guitarist Jeff Beck, as shown in the clip below.

Watch the Yardbirds play "For Your Love."

Though "For Your Love" may have been the final straw that caused Eric Clapton to leave the Yardbirds roost, it was undoubtably the song that helped propel the Yardbirds from being just another London blues-rock band into a chart-topping commercial pop presence, ushering in the sonic experimentations of new guitar whiz Jeff Beck and beginning what would blossom into a fruitful songwriting relationship with Gouldman.

"I saw The Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and and he just blew me away. To me he was and still is the ultimate player, so it was very exciting to be working with them," Gouldman told Andy Morten. "They ended up doing two more of mine and another one they didn't finish. I wrote those with them in mind." Those two Gouldman followup hits for the Yardbirds were "Heart Full of Soul" (UK #2, US #9) and "Evil Hearted You" (UK #3).

And so began a two-year period when Gouldman had the "Midas Touch" writing hit songs for other pop groups. The next act to reap chart success from Gouldman's songwriting pen was The Hollies. Inspired by the the view looking out a railway carriage on one of his trips to London to peddle songs, he wrote "Look Through Any Window." "They had separate compartments then," he told Bob Stanley (a member of the pop group Saint Etienne who writes the fantastic blog Croydon Municipal), "a great environment for writing."

Hollies Hits in Transit

"Look Through Any Window" - co-written with Charles Silverman and originally offered to the Country Gentleman (a group fronted by Gouldman's friend and frequent musical collaborator Peter Cowap) - was "placed" with the Hollies by his manager and became a Top 5 hit for his fellow Mancunians. But it was "Bus Stop" - specifically written with The Hollies in mind - that became their breakthrough U.S. hit, reaching #5 on the Billboard Top 100. Gouldman also offered The Hollies "Going Away," which was ultimately recorded (though never released) by Manchester's Toggery Five.

1965 was a busy year for Gouldman, with his manager Lisberg placing "I'm Gonna Take You There" with Dave Berry, "A Little While Back" and "Why Say Goodbye" with The Shindigs, and several singles for Columbia recording artist Little Frankie.

By the time 1966 rolled around, it was the Harvey Lisberg-managed Herman's Hermits who started recording Gouldman gems, including the singles "East West" (#33 UK), "Listen People" (US #3), and "No Milk Today" (#5 UK). The Hermits would later look to Gouldman's "Ooh She's Done It Again," "It's Nice To Be Out in the Morning," and "The World Is For the Young" to use on their Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter soundtrack LP and '67 B-side "Marcel."

Bowled Over: Hermits Hermits tip their hats to Graham Gouldman's hits

Still later, Gouldman would even write a Yardley cosmetics promo jingle for Herman's Hermits, "The London Look," which they released as an EP in 1968: "See the country vicars and the city slickers, pearly kings and noble dukes. Everybody moving, everybody grooving. They've all got The London Look ..."

Country vicars and city slickers - all have The London Look!

But Noone's Hermits weren't the only musicos to cut their teeth on Gouldman gold that year, as Wayne Fontana took "Pamela, Pamela" to #11 on the UK charts, while the St. Louis Union recorded "Behind the Door," P. J. Proby and Toni Basil (yes, Toni Basil!) both recorded "I'm 28," Friday Brown cut "Getting Nowhere" (actually just a retitled version of "I'm 28"), The Downliner Sect added their rhythm and blues stylings to "The Cost of Living" (credited to Gouldman-Lisberp-Peter Cowap), and The High Society (a Gouldman studio concoction) released "People Passing By."

1967 saw Cher record what Gouldman would later deem a "great version" of "Behind the Door" and a post-Yardbirds, pre-Jeff Beck Group Jeff Beck recorded "Tallyman" - a title suggested by Gouldman's dad. "Because of my connection with [Herman's Hermits producer] Mickie Most," Gouldman explained to Andy Morten, "Jeff Beck ended up a song of mine after he left The Yardbirds. This is one ofthose songs where my late father used to help me with lyrics quite a lot. He should get a little bit of the credit."

The Shadows recorded "Naughty Nippon Nights" the same year, while (future 10cc bandmate) Eric Stewart's Mindbenders (who Graham would later join on a brief touring stint) covered Gouldman's "Schoolgirl" (which was banned by the BBC for its subject matter: teenage pregnancy), and Down Under rock star Normie Rowe (the "Ozzy Elvis" whose career was never the same after he was drafted for the Vietnam War) had a comeback hit with "Going Home," which rose as high as #7 on Australia's Go-Set chart listing. Gouldman also found time to release his own "Stop! Stop! Stop!" - a rare instance of him adapting a Northern Soul/R&B style.

Gouldman's own band The Mockingbirds were still around during this period (though by this time they'd left EMI to join Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label), but success still eluded them - even when Gouldman tried to emulate the style of more popular groups, like The Yardbirds. Encouraged by the commercial success of The Yardbirds' "For Your Love," The Mockingbirds released the very Yardbirds-sounding "You Stole My Love" (with a young Julie Driscoll providing backing vocals) on Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label in 1965; not surprisingly, it would later be covered by the Yardbirds themselves in 1966.

"You Stole My Love": Out-Yardbirdsing the Yardbirds

Listen to The Mockingbirds play "You Stole My Love."

As Andy Morten characterized it in his The Graham Gouldman Thing liner notes: "One of Gouldman's best songs of the era, it almost out-Yardbirds The Yardbirds with its powerful melody and shifting tempo changes, beautifully rendered by a fierce Giorgio Gomelsky production and an ethereal Julie Driscoll backing vocal to boot. Despite being rightly recognised as a classic slice of mid-'60s Britpop these days, back then it merely became the third Mockingbirds single to do nothing." Or, as Gouldman put it: "It seemed that every song of mine we recorded failed and every one we gave away was a hit. I thought maybe that's the way it's going to be, although I didn't let it bother me."

Graham Gouldman relocated to the United States in 1968, where RCA Victor - encouraged by his hit-making track record for other artists - quickly signed him to a contract and molded him as a solo act. RCA let the maestro loose in the studio to record The Graham Gouldman Thing, wherein he played and sang his versions of the past hits he wrote for other artists, as well as some new songs like "My Father," "The Pawnbroker" and "Who Are They."

The album was originally intended to be produced by Peter Noone (whose Herman's Hermits had already reaped the benefits of numerous Gouldman-penned hits), but in an interview with Alan Betrock (reprinted on the CD), Gouldman explained:

"It was supposed to be something like the artist produces the writer, but he wasn't there on any of the sessions - though he is credited as producer. I did the whole thing with John Paul Jones who arranged the tracks, played on it and also helped produce it. It was an important project for me at the time; I put a lot of work into it." This concern is shown by listening to the album, which exudes tasteful arrangements and thoughtful production. Favourites are the hits like 'Bus Stop' and 'For Your Love,' but all the tracks have something interesting to offer. The orchestral arrangements on 'No Milk Today' and 'Upstairs Downstairs' are particularly refreshing. Strangely enough, the album was not released in the UK, and despite a heavy US promo campaign, didn't sell much to Americans..."

"I think Peter [Noone] came to the first session, had to leave early, and that was it," Gouldman remembered. "He never turned up for any of the sessions. He did us all a favour in the end because that left myself, John and Eddie Kramer [ominipresent engineer in-chief at London's Olympic Studios]. Clem Canttini played drums, John played bass, I played acoustic guitar and some lead guitar. That was the team that made the record...Some songs were made with just me, John and Clem, and some were done with a full orchestra, live. In those days you'd write the song, give it to the arranger, the arranger would write all the parts, you'd spend maybe an hour getting the sounds together and another hour getting a good performance, another hour doing the vocals and that was it. Because it was only a four-track it didn't take long to mix it. That's why these guys were so hot. I used to see John and he'd come in with his guitar in one hand and his amp in the other, plonk it down and say 'right, what are we doing?' and he'd be off. Then he'd go off and do the same thing in another studio. And we were all doing that, that's how records were made. Some of the best records ever made."

"Listening to it now," he later told Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley, "the first thing I notice is how good it is to hear real instruments. (Arranger) John Paul Jones loved strings and woodwind - you hardly ever hear woodwind anymore...Some things worked beautifully, especially 'Bus Stop'...It got nice reviews, but didn't set the world on fire." (Indeed sales were modest, with Gouldman later commenting that the album sold more upon its reissue in 1974 at the height of 10cc's fame than it had in the previous six years combined.)

Stanley christened the album's orchestral rock sound "Baroque Majesty," one influenced in equal measure by both Bach and The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby." I call this sound "Chamber Pop," a late-60s fusion of classical and rock music prevalent in the songs of The Walker Brothers and bands like The Left Banke, Rolling Stones, Procol Harum, Love, and The Beach Boys. And nowhere is this more in evidence than on the opening track, "The Impossible Years"...

The Graham Gouldman Thing - Side 1

1. "The Impossible Years" - 2:38

These are the impossible years
A girl must endure, adrift on the ocean
Left with her unspeakable fears
The torture of doubt and pent up emotion
New temptations, strange sensations
A great new world for explorations

An interesting song in that it takes the unusual (for a youth-oriented pop song) narrative point of view of a father trying to understand his teenage daughter and "show her the way" through the "impossible years" of adolescence when "the young bud comes to flower." I mean, it's pretty clear what we're talking about here, with lines such as:

When does the young bud come to flower
It's petals are plain with color exciting
When does the one sun choose the hour
To change the green shoot to beauty inviting
Girls are growing
And without knowing
They're the seeds that we've been sowing

Musically, "The Impossible Years" clearly shows the "baroque" or "chamber pop" influence that became so prevalent on the British airwaves in the wake of The Beatles' "Yesterday."

Wayne Fontana - yet another Mancunian artist drawn to Gouldman's work - recorded a version in 1967 that only achieved minor success in Australia; Fontana had more success in 1966 with Gouldman's "Pamela, Pamela," which he rode as high as #11 on the UK pop charts.

Wayne Fontana - "The Impossible Years"

Listen to Wayne Fontana sing "The Impossible Years."

Listen GG sing "The Impossible Years."

2. "Bus Stop" - 2:24

Bus stop, wet day, she's there, I say
"Please share my umbrella"
Bus stops, bus goes, she stays, love grows
Under my umbrella
All that summer we enjoyed it
Wind and rain and shine
That umbrella we employed it
By August she was mine

Though the Hollies had already recorded Gouldman's "Look Through Any Window," they achieved their greatest chart success with "Bus Stop," a song he had written specifically with them in mind and which they took to #5 on the U.S. Billboard Top 100.

"We were supporting The Hollies at Stoke Town Hall," Gouldman explained to Andy Morten. "They'd already recorded 'Look Through Any Window' and said that if I came up with anything else, they'd love to hear it. I remember playing 'Bus Stop' to Tony Hicks and Graham Nash in the loo there as it was the quietest place we could find. They said they loved it and told me to make a tape. In those days if they said they'd do it, they'd do it and they'd do it quick. It was recorded and was out just a few weeks later. Things were done much quicker because you weren't waiting for the artwork or the video. There was a quick turnover and things were much more exciting because of that."

Fellow '60s British songsmith Tony Hazzard claimed he was so impressed by "Bus Stop" that he was moved to write "Ha! Ha! Said the Clown" for Manfred Mann in 1967.

Watch The Hollies play "Bus Stop."

Watch GG play "Bus Stop" (2011).

3. "Behind the Door" - 3:38

Behind the door of every house
In every street, in every town
A story is unfolding, a story is unfolding
Of love and hate...remorse, love's fate
Of hopes and fears and smiles and tears
Of dreams that lie emoldering

GG's melancholy, minor-chord drenched "Behind the Door" - perhaps the first-ever song to rhyme "unfolding" with "emoldering" (much less use this obscure term for - um, what exactly is emoldering?) - was first recorded by Manchester "freakbeat" mod rockers St. Louis Union, one of three singles (the others were a #11 UK cover of The Beatles' "Girl" b/w their version of Otis Redding's "Respect" and "East Side Story" b/w "Think About Me") they released on Decca Records in 1966.

Originally called The Satanists, the St. Louis Union won a recording contract after winning a Melody Maker beat band contest (where they drubbed a fledgling Pink Floyd!). They would later appear in the Spencer Davis Group movie The Ghost Goes Gear (1966), in which they performed "I Got My Pride" and "Show Me Your English Teeth" (great title!). According to Wikipedia, St. Louis Union keyboardist David Tomlinson - rechristened as "Dave Formula" (pictured right) - resurfaced on the late '70s New Wave scene as a member of (erstwile Buzzcock) Howard Devoto's Magazine, new romantics Visage, Ludus, and Luxuria, and also worked with Tuxedomoon's Winston Tong. (So there you have it, punk fans: the somewhat tenuous connection between Graham Gouldman and Buzzcocks!)

Across the pond, a young Cher also covered "Behind the Door" in 1966 (#94 US Billboard Hot 100).

Listen to Cher sing "Behind the Door."

GG's version of the song is notable for its tempo change - two-thirds of the way into this orchestral maneuvers in the dark, it shifts gears and turns into a sprightly rocker - only to return one again to its somber fade.

4. "Pawnbroker" - 3:02

Under the sign of the old pawnbroker
There rests a man with our past success
All that I value is in his keeping
He is the guardian of everything I possess
Everything I possess...

In on Monday, out on Friday
I'm the only one to blame
Waiting for that Thursday's payday
Every week it's just the same

Over Flamenco-style guitars and a sped-up Bossa Nova beat, Gouldman authors the best pawnbroker song until, well, until The Ramones' "Chinese Rock"! With incredible detail, Gouldman describes both the man and the trade in faded dreams...

Behind the grill wearing gold-rimmed glasses
The old man values the cost of fears
Trumpets, guitars, pearly concertinas
Assigned orchestra, lamenting four wasted years

Until the song's final resignation to endless debt:

Under the sign of the old pawnbroker
Trail all the losers in life's contest
Some hurry back to redeem their pledges
My promise, I'll redeem, the day that I'm laid to rest

Listen to GG sing "Pawnbroker."

5. "Who Are They" - 2:03

Drip dry dress, unshrinkable
Who can they be?
They're you and me - they're we

Gouldman showed his social conscience on a number of his mid- to late-60s songs and "Who Are They" is no exception, lyrically concerning itself with the world of 9-to-5 squares - "the faceless mass on the merry-go-round" who are too busy "getting wed, going to bed/Two kids to feed and the mortgage ahead" to ever accomplish anything. "So much to do, yet nothing's done. What a shame," the song concludes. This one makes me think of the future that awaited Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field at the end of Karel Reisz's 1960 "Kitchen Sink" drama Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

6. "My Father" - 2:47

My father knows more than I'll ever know
My father's been places I'll never go
I want to know - want to know all the words and phrases
I want to show - want to show his fine airs and graces
If only it were me

The greatest influence on Gouldman's mid-60s songwriting golden era was his father, Hymie Gouldman, aka "Hyme the Rhyme" in deference to his frequent lyrical assistance (Hymie was also an amateur playwright). "My father was a songwriter," he told Bob Stanley. "'No Milk Today' was one of his titles. He used to call himself 'the mechanic' - I'd bring him a broken lyric and he'd go 'D'you write them son? Ttcchh! Come back at five o'clock.' He used to say 'art for arts sake, money for God's sake' [later to become song appearing on 10cc's 1976 album How Dare You!]. I nicked that off him, too."

Though he sings of how much he'd like to emulate his dad, by the songs coda he realizes that "it's no use being somebody else":

On my own two feet, I've got to meet
The world alone, I'm on my own
Just me - independent and free
The son of my father

Gouldman later referenced his dad's passing in the song "Ready To Go Home." Originally appearing on the 1995 (Graham Gouldman-Eric Stewart edition) 10cc album Mirror Mirror, it would later surface on Gouldman's solo album And Another Thing (For Your Love/Dome Records, 2000). Gouldman commented, "This was written not long after my dad died and it reflects my feelings at the time. I suppose I was trying to put a positive slant on his passing, remembering all the things we had done together and his artistic legacy to me. The last verse of the song best reflects my feelings on this. This song has been recorded by many artists and remains one of my favourites. Very emotional."

This is my favorite song on the album and one tied with Fire's "My Father's Name Was Dad" on my list of all-time greatest Pater Familias pop songs (narrowly edging out B-Rock & The Bizz's "My Baby Daddy").

Listen to GG sing "My Father."

The Graham Gouldman Thing - Side 2

7. "No Milk Today" - 2:15

No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn
But all that's left is a place dark and lonely
A terraced house in a mean street back of town
Becomes a shrine when I think of you only
Just two up, two down, just two up, two down

Hymie Gouldman told his son that "No Milk Today" would make a good song title and Graham followed this sage fatherly advice to write what would become a Top 5 hit for Herman's Hermits. It was notable as the first Herman's Hermits single to feature orchestral arrangements and, in an interview with the "Forgotten Hits" newsletter, lead singer Peter Noone said, "Personally I think 'No Milk Today' is Herman's Hermits' best recording, and perfectly captures the moment and the feel of Manchester terraced houses and what was the end of a British era."

Herman's Hermits recorded "No Milk Today," "There's A Kind Of Hush" (US #4, 1967), and Ray Davies' "Dandy" (US #5, 1966) all on the same day at Lansdown Studios. "This was in the period where we had just stopped using The Hermits on the recordings and were using the best musicians available to us to try to keep up with what had suddenly become The British Invasion," Noone recalled. "We were supposed to deliver 48 tracks a year to MGM so we were always scrambling to catch up. I recall that John Paul Jones played bass guitars (an upright and a fender bass) on the tracks and was also responsible for the arrangements, which I dare say are brilliant on all 3 tracks but I know he liked 'No Milk Today' and I would suggest that his arrangement turned this perfect Graham Gouldman song into a hit."

Noone would later comment that, given all the great songs Gouldman wrote, he should have asked him to join Herman's Hermits in their heyday. Hindsight is golden...

Watch Herman's Hermits play "No Milk Today."

Now listen to GG play "No Milk Today."

8. "Upstairs, Downstairs" - 2:17

Upstairs every night
There's a boy listening to his radio
Downstairs just one flight
A girl waits patiently...
Each one knowing that the other is there
Each one hoping that the other will dare
To climb the first stair

Another song covered by Gouldman fan Peter Noone and his Herman's Hermits, who included it on their critically lauded 1967 album Blaze.

Herman's Hermits: "Blaze" (1967)

This perky pop song finds Gouldman crooning like Paul McCartney as he recounts the story of a boy and girl living in the same building who keep waiting for one another to make the first move. A happy boy-finally-meets-girl ending is guaranteed...

No more lonely
Girl and boy have met
The upstairs room is
Advertised to let
Now these two have met

Listen to Herman's Hermits play "Upstairs, Downstairs."

9. "For Your Love" - 2:34

Though the Yardbirds wrote many of their own songs as a group, it was Gouldman who wrote many of their biggest hits, though he wasn't always sure when he had struck gold. As he explained to BBC Radio Wales host Alan Thompson, "I think sometimes this knowing you’ve written a hit single or not, I’ve never been able to predict it. I mean there’ve been songs I’ve either written or co-written and you’ve thought ‘that’s a hit’ and it hasn’t been, and vice versa. It doesn’t always, I mean you have a feeling about a song sometimes and sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong but I don’t know whether the writer or the artist is the best judge."

The Yardbirds were certainly sure. Drummer Jim McCarty recalled that Gouldman's songs "...were always very original. Very interesting songs, very moody, because they were usually in a minor key, the ones we did, anyway. 'For Your Love' was an interesting song, it had an interesting chord sequence, very moody, very powerful. And the fact that it stopped in the middle and went into a different time signature, we liked that, that was interesting. Quite different, really, from all the bluesy stuff that we'd been playing up till then. But somehow we liked it. It was original and different."

Yardbird Chris Dreja added, "We owe a lot to that song because it sort of pulled us out from national to international and set the template for us - that time change in the middle, the weirdness of it."

Gouldman's friend Paul Thomas had played bongos on The Mockingbirds' version and the Yardbirds copied his percussion verbatim. But Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith added a number of changes to Gouldman's original song, including the use of a harpsichord (replacing Gouldman's acoustic guitar intro), which was played by session muscian Brian Auger (later to achieve solo fame and with Julie Driscoll in Brian Auger and The Trinity, whose biggest hit was the Dylan cover "This Wheel's On Fire" - which, incidentally, later became the theme song for the BBC comedy series Absolutely Fabulous). In an August 2009 interview with Uncut magazine, Gouldman admitted: "The harpsichord was an absolute stroke of genius. The record just had a weird, mysterious atmosphere about it."

As for Graham Gouldman's version, he nixes the bongos and harpsichord altogether in favor of piano and a stately Church organ that wouldn't be out of place on a Prociol Harum record. It's a clever "alternate" version that's kind of funky in its own way.

In 1965 Gouldman's band The Mockingbirds had a regular warm-up spot for BBC TV’s Top of the Pops, which was transmitted from Manchester and the songwriter recalled how odd it was to hear his song being associated with the Londoners: "There was one strange moment when The Yardbirds appeared on the show doing 'For Your Love'. Everyone clamoured around them – and there I was just part of an anonymous group. I felt strange that night, hearing them play my song."

Many others have followed suit to cover "For Your Love," including the pre-Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham Fleetwood Mac, who included it on their 1973 album Mystery to Me and even released it as a single.

Watch the Yardbirds play "For Your Love."

Now watch GG play "For Your Love" (2011).

10."Pamela, Pamela" - 2:11

Pamela, Pamela, remember the days
Of inkwells and apples, and sick and sore plays
Where little Brer Rabbit kissed Pooh in the wood
And Fluff was the cat that sat on the rug

"Pamela, Pamela" was Wayne Fontana's final single, which placed as high as #11 on the UK singles charts.

Listen to Wayne Fontana sing "Pamela Pamela."

This classic example of the period's "fringe psychedelia-meets-dancehall vaudeville" British Cup of Twee-ness namechecks everything from A.A. Milne to Laurel and Hardy. And Gouldman's vocal is delivered with vintage Donovan BBC Radio enunciation.

Oh, Pamela
I remember so well
When Laurel and Hardy were shown at the flicks
With sticky red lollies on splintery sticks
Pigtails and ribbons and crushes on miss
Secret discussions about a first kiss
But you were young
And everything was new
Impatient to do things you couldn't do

Watch GG play "Pamela Pamela" (2011)

11."Chestnut" - 3:23

Gamine chestnuts modeling in Antonioni's "Blow-Up"

Somebody accurately described this funky instro as sounding like the kind of Swinging London party music they'd play in Antonioni's Blow-Up. It's great and, dare I say, downright groovy! As one critic astutely remarked, it would make Stax guitar ace Steve Cropper proud.

At one point the jam features Gouldman reciting a brief schoolbook elocution exercise that sounds like something the Bonzo Dog Band's Viv Stanshall would sing circa the Keynsham album:

If all of us were doomed to die when we'd lived a minute
I think I know what Ann and I would wish to happen in it
We'd let our 60 seconds run where chestnut blossoms harden
Some early morning in Kensington when Spring is in the garden

The song then features a dueling flute sequence that would not be out of place on Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die LP.

Listen to GG play "Chestnut."

***

In retrospect, Andy Morten writes:

The Graham Gouldman Thing catches our hero in a period of transition, between his stint as an internationally successful 1960s pop hit-maker and as a menber of a hugely successful 1970s art-rock band, when he was experimenting with any number of projects and saying 'saying yes more than saying no.' The album has gained an enviable reputation among '60s pop and psych fans as something more than just a curio in its creator's estimable canon. It's a jewel of late '60s chamber pop and worthy of reevaluation.

Gouldman himself reflected that "I did it and sort of forgot about it. Had it been more successful I might have paid more attention. But I enjoyed making it and it was great working with the people I worked with but then that was it. It was finished. Done."

And then Gouldman's two-year streak of hit-making genius hit a snag. "You're like a conduit when that magic happens," he told Bob Stanley. "You think, how did I do that? What happened there? In 1968 I was still doing what I did, but I was out of sync with what has happening."

Still, as Morten writes, 1968 was an eventful year in Gouldman's life. He and Peter Noone opened a short-lived boutique in New York called Zoo, and Gouldman helped get his friends Kevin Godley and Lol Creme signed to Giorgio Gomelsky's Marmalde label, where as Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon they released the (extremely hard to find) single "I'm Beside Myself" b/w "Animal Song" in 1969.

But after a short spell in The Mindbenders, Gouldman decided to move to New York and the Kassenetz/Katz hit factory, where the money was good and second-rate (by his standards, at least) trash like (future K-Tel novelty compilation fodder) "Simon Says" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy" would be recorded under various group names.

"They wanted to legitimize themselves, find writers with more cred," he explained to Bob Stanley. "It was pretty horrible." He reached his creative (but not commercial!) nadir with a song he wrote for Freddie and the Dreamers called "Susan's Tuba."

"It was like [Mel Brooks film] The Producers - let's wrote the worst piece of shit imaginable!" The record sold a million in France. "I couldn't believe it. Where did we go right?"

And then Gouldman got the call that changed everything. Ex-Mindbender Eric Stewart was setting up Strawberry Studios in Stockport and wanted his friend to join him. Gouldman "boarded the next plane home, to join the ultra-successful band he'd always dreamt of," writes Bob Stanley. "I'd always wanted to play guitar in a band," he admitted to Stanley, "but I became resigned to the idea of being a writer. And then we started 10cc and that satisfied every aspect for me, everything I'd ever wanted to do."

Still only 23, the best was still to come for Graham Keith Gouldman. He still had plenty more tunes up his sleeve to make his father proud. He'd done what his dad had called "money for God's sake"; now it was time for the "Art for Art's sake."

Related Links:

Graham Gouldman music site: www.gg06.co.uk

Bob Stanley's wonderful "Afternoon tea with Graham Gouldman"

***

More GG-Related Music Videos:

Watch Herman's Hermits play "Listen People" on Telly.

Watch Herman's Hermits play "Listen People" from "Hold On!" movie.

Watch a Graham Gouldman Thing sampler homage (YouTube).

Hotlegs - "Thinks: School Stinks"

2011-12-13T06:52:00.001-08:00

10cc when they were 1 Million Years B.C.

Hotlegs - Thinks: School Stinks (Philips/Capitol, 1971)
Hotlegs - You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It
(Philips, 1976)

Musicians:
Eric Stewart / guitar, bass, vocals, synthesizer (Moog), arranger, producer
Lol Creme / guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals, arranger, producer
Kevin Godley / drums, percussion, vocals, arranger, producer
- Graham Gouldman / bass ("Today")
- Baz Barker / flute, violin
- Mike Bell / saxophone
- Ian Brooks / trumpet
- Rod Morton / tambourine
- Mike Timoney / organ
- Cheadle Hulme High School Choir / Vocals on "Suite F.A."
- Tony Harrison / String arrangement ("Today")

10cc fanatic Amy Linthicum bought vinyl copies of these two LPs online and then had them transfered to CD (thanks to Gary Gebler at Trax on Wax) for our digital listening convenience. All I can say is, "Hooray!" for Thinks: School Stinks is three-quarters 10cc (7.5cc?) at their prog-rock peak, two years before their titular 10cc debut album with Graham Gouldman. It is, in the words of one fan-critic, "the album many of us wished 10CC would make. It is largely devoid of the too clever for their own good lyrics and structures, the songs being simple, well crafted pop rock numbers."

I emphasize that last sentence because I think it points to the reason why the supremely over-talented band of musical brothers known as 10cc have been so criminally neglected by pop music historians. Could it be because they were too clever by far for their own good? Too multi-faceted (each member could write, sing, play, arrange, produce) to fit into rock 'n' roll's preferred pigeon-hole classification system of genres (pop, rock, soul, prog, AOR) and roles (i.e., lead singer, lead guitarist, drummer, etc.)

Amy's ears quite rightly heard a heavy Beatles vibe on Thinks School Stinks, especially the later Beatles albums released around this time period - specifically The White Album, Let It Be and Abbey Road. And, speaking of "Neanderthal Man," she astutely pointed out, "You know it's a '70s record when you hear a pop song with flute in it!" My ears found this album to be a synthesis of everything 1970s, with studio production values that rate Thinks School Stinks as a stereo demonstration record - in other words, it sounds great and uses virtually every production trick in the book, from cross-fades, cross-channel zooms (especially effective on Eric Stewart's guitar solos!) to layered overdubs, echo, strings, you name it.

OK, back to the plot...Thinks School Stinks is the album Mssrs. Kevin Godley, Lol Creme and Eric Stewart recorded as Hotlegs (Stewart coined the name in homage to the outstanding attributes of their sexy hotpants-clad Strawberry Studios secretary) to back up their insanely unlikely and massively popular (#2 UK pop charts, #22 US pop charts) reductio-ad-absurdum 1970 hit "Neanderthal Man," which sold two million copies worldwide.

Primal Stomp: "Neanderthal Man"

"Neanderthal Man" was as far from clever as a song could be, basically a sound check with a one-line lyric repeated for the duration of the song. It was so dumb, in fact, that it was the kind of thing that made bottom-line record company suits drool. Rock critic Dave Thompson picks up the story here:

In 1970, Kevin Godley, Lol Crème, and Eric Stewart were, alongside songwriter Graham Gouldman, the house band at the Strawberry Studios setup in Stockport, England. Gouldman was spending much of his time in New York, working as a contract songwriter for the Kasenatz/Katz bubblegum team - his partners remained at home, equipping the studio and testing the new equipment. It was during one of these tests, playing around with a drum kit and a new four-track recorder, that Philips label rep Dick Leahy happened by, heard what they were doing, and pronounced it an instant hit single.

"It" was a percussive experiment which evolved around a chant of "I'm a Neanderthal man/you're a Neanderthal girl/let's make Neanderthal love" and Leahy's instincts were correct. Restructured and released (under the name Hotlegs) in the summer of 1970, "Neanderthal Man" reached number 22 in the U.S., number two in Britain, number one in Italy, and ultimately sold over two million worldwide. The record was enormous. The Idle Race, heading towards the end of their brief but glorious career, wrested one final hit when they covered the song for German and Argentine consumption. Bandleader James Last included a version on his latest album; even Elton John, eking out a pre-fame career as a jobbing sessioneer, recorded his own distinctive version for a budget-priced collection of sound-alike hits.

Watch the "Neanderthal Man" music video.

"We thought we had it made," Godley thought at the time. "We were on our way baby!...We hit an unexpected nerve with 'Neanderthal Man.' It was one of those lucky accidents that turn into something both interesting and successful, without knowing how or why. When you go back and try to recreate the same circumstances it just doesn't work."

In his excellent glam rock history Children of the Revolution, Dave Thompson describes the events leading up to this unlikeliest of hits. In early 1970, Kevin, Lol and Eric were playing around with all the gear at their Strawberry Studios in Stockport, "strumming, wailing, and banging anything in sight" to test the new equipment coming into the studio. As Kevin Godley recalled to Thompson: "The first musical noises that had any cohesion...started life as an unorthodox drum test featuring fullkit overdubbed onto all four tracks, with Lol singing this spooky, retarded nursery rhyme that got mixed in via the bass drum mike. Like all the early work, it was driven by applied ignorance and adrenalin but we knew we had something. Unfortunately the track got erased but we liked the vibe so much we started again adding recorders, tone generator, anvil, backwards echo until it sounded like nothing else on earth."

Eric Stewart added: "Dick Leahy, from Philips, came in and said 'What the hell's that you're playing?' I said, 'It's a studio experiment; a percussive experiment.' He says, 'It sounds like a hit record to me - can we release it?' And we said, 'Yeah, okay. What should we call it?' 'Neanderthal Man.' And what should we call ourselves? Hotlegs.'We had a girl at the studio, Kathy Gill, who had very, very nice legs and she used to wear these incredible hotpants. Green, leather hotpants. So we called the group, ah, Hotlegs."

The flip side of "Neanderthal Man" was a song called "You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It," which later became the title of a 1976 Hotlegs compilation LP that simply rearranged the order of the songs on Thinks: School Stinks and added four more songs. The second half of the song "You Didn't Like It" would eventually evolve into the 10cc song "Fresh Air for My Mama."

"You Didn't Like It" - cover by Godley and Creme

Besides "You Didn't Like It," the "new" additional songs on You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It included "Today" (a reworking of a Godley-Creme song from their days as Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon), and both sides of the 1971 single "Lady Sadie" b/w "The Loser."

In between, Philips repackaged Thinks School Stinks as Songs (issued only in Britain, Germany, and Venezuela), omitting "Neanderthal Man" in favor of "The Loser" and "Today." According to rock critic Dave Thompson, Songs was Hotlegs attempt to nullify the "novelty hit" tag they were burdened with after "Neanderthal Man"'s surprising success:

Hotlegs broke through with a novelty hit, and they never lived it down. "Neanderthal Man" might have proven one of the most distinctive hits of 1970, but that's all it was -- distinctive, a thumping, crashing, grunting novelty its makers would rather have forgotten about completely. Certainly that was how it felt when they delivered their debut album, Thinks: School Stinks, and the suspicion grew even more intense six months later. Booked to open for the Moody Blues on a six-date U.K. tour, Hotlegs knew they could play up to the hit, and be laughed out of sight. Or they could play to their strengths, and maybe win the hearts of a few members of the headliners' audience. They chose the latter course and their U.K. record label, having long since abandoned any hope of any further hits in the "Neanderthal" vein, agreed to give it a go. Hence Songs, essentially a note-for-note reissue of Thinks: School Stinks, with one crucial difference -- no hit single. Both "Neanderthal Man" and the similarly jokey "Desperate Dan" were dumped, in favor of "Today" and the lovely "The Loser," and with the album's sleeve and title similarly revised, Hotlegs set out to try and gain some credibility. It should have worked. Even such minor surgery completely redesigns the album, planting it firmly on the edge of the soft rock boom, with the emphasis on the word "edge" -- even this early on, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were more or less incapable of writing a straightforward song, while Eric Stewart's guitar playing is seldom short of rock-god revelatory. But "Neanderthal Man" remained a hard act to follow, and Hotlegs were never up to the challenge. By the time they transformed into 10cc, a little over a year later, both band and its album were long, long forgotten.

Stunned by their success, Hotlegs set to work out the album of songs that they hoped would be the antithesis (or antidote) to "Neanderthal Man," Thinks: School Stinks. Their creativity at a peak, they were clearly inspired to try out all the gizmos the studio had to offer on this long player - and use them they did; in fact, Kevin Godley believes that he and Lol Creme built their first Gizmo guitar prototype during this period (though I don't hear it anywhere on this album). And they took their time, not completing Thinks: School Stinks until March 1971, a full nine months after the July 1970 release of "Neanderthal Man."

Thinks: School Stinks (March 1971)

Songs / Tracks Listing
1. Neanderthal Man (4:19)
2. How Many Times (3:57)
3. Desperate Dan (2:12)
4. Take Me Back (5:01)
5. Um Wah, Um Woh (5:30)
6. Suite F.A.: On My Way/Indecision/The Return (12:53)
7. Fly Away (2:43)
8. Run Baby Run (2:50)
9. All God's Children (4:55)

Total Time 44:20

The first thing that strikes ones eyes is the album cover, designed by Godley and Creme, which depicts a scratched wooden school desk. Alice Cooper must have liked it too, because two years later a similar cover adorned his School's Out LP.

Alice Cooper's "School's Out" LP (1972)

With the exception of the infectious tribal-chant rocker "Um Wah Um Woh," little on this album bears any semblance to the hit "Neanderthal Man" - and the semblance is mainly to do with both songs' irresistable catchiness! (The simplicity of both songs' rote-repetitive lyrical chants makes me think of boozy soccer fans singing away in the terraces; in fact, this may help explain the success of not only "Neanderthal Man," but of other UK terrace-singalong bands like Slade and Oasis - bands that make music easy to interact with in a large crowd). Rather, in the words of Dave Thompson, "Hotlegs revealed themselves to be a very melodic, very gentle musical concern, a far cry from the proto-industrial crashing of 'Neanderthal Man.'" Ah yes, from the primordial ooze of "Neanderthal" arose the evolved, melodic concerns of pre-10cc...

In the interim between hit single and long-awaited support album, Hotlegs' U.S. label Capitol became so antsy for a follow-up single that they released a second, slower (5-minute) version of "There Ain't No Umbopo" - a song Godley-Creme-Stewart had previously released in the U.K. under the name Doctor Father (and which was probably also recorded by Hotlegs under the moniker Crazy Elephant for the Kasenetz-Katz bubblegum factory in the U.S.) - in August 1970. Kevin Godley described "Umbopo" as "one of those runt songs that hung around looking for a home for a long time. Everybody liked it, but couldn't work out where it belonged. I remember Lol coming up with this cool open guitar tuning and two hypnotic chords and us writing the song at my parents' house...forever. It was a long song, about six minutes or thereabouts and it was eventually released under the name Doctor Father."

Alas, "Umbopo" was not a hit.

Doctor Father - "Umbopo"

Though a follow-up hit to "Neanderthal Man" was not forthcoming, Hotlegs returned to to the charts anonymously at the end of 1970. With Graham Gouldman joining them at Strawberry Studios, they backed John Paul Jones (not the Led Zeppelin bass player but a comedian-turned-singer who Kevin Godley said "had the most wonderful rich voice") on his Christmas hit single "Man from Nazareth/Got to Get Together." A subsequent court order injunction by Led Zep's John Paul Jones forced the comedian to change his moniker to John Paul Joans (in the US market, JPJ was simply renamed "Jones"). The single rose as high as #25 on the UK charts.

What's in a name?: John Paul Joans

Then, under the guise of the New Wave Band (yes, "New Wave" debuted in 1970!), and with former Herman's Hermit Derek Leckenby in tow, the trio released a cover of Paul Simon's "Cecilia" backed with "Free Free Free" on the Major Minor label. Eric Stewart's "Free Free Free" was the first track he recorded at Strawberry Studios; though Harvey Lisbery is listed as the single's producer, this was an Eric Stewart production all the way.

New Wave Band: "Cecilia"

As Dave Thompson continues:

Undeterred, the trio (augmented by Gouldman) undertook a short British tour supporting the Moody Blues towards the end of 1970, but little more was heard from Hotlegs for another year. Then, in September 1971, they released a new single, "Lady Sadie," while Philips repackaged Thinks: School Stinks as Songs...Songs did no better than its predecessor, and Hotlegs was abandoned -- less than a year later, of course, the three members plus, again, Gouldman, would resurface as 10cc and, this time, enjoy considerably more success. It was at the height of this fame that the Hotlegs material resurfaced once more, as 1974's You Didn't Like It Cos You Didn't Think of It compilation brought together all the previously available Hotlegs material.

Moody Blues & Hotlegs, 1971 Tour Book

Regrettably, the Moody Blues tour did little to win over new Hotlegs fans. As Kevin Godley mused, "Audiences were expecting 'Neanderthal Man' and we were playing Thinks: School Stinks. Consequently, any momentum evaporated, the phone stopped ringing, and it was time for a rethink."

At this point, I'd like to echo the sage observations of Bob McBeath, who under his nom-de-plume "Easy Livin," rated Thinks: School Stinks - and the four extra songs on You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It - as follows: "The tracks are pretty much all founded in the acoustic guitars of Crème and Stewart, with occasional additional instrumentation being added as required. The songs are all written by Godley, and Crème, with Eric Stewart also receiving credit on the majority. In some ways, this is the album many of us wished 10cc would make. It is largely devoid of the too clever for their own good lyrics and structures, the songs being simple, well crafted pop rock numbers."

Kevin Godley, in a 1976 interview with George Tremlette (author of The 10cc Story - one of only two books ever written about 10cc), said the album included songs and ideas that he and Lol Creme had intended recording in 1969 with entrepreneur Giorgio Gomelsky for his Marmalade ("the sound that spreads") record label. Gomelsky had named the duo Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, envisioning them as a sort of English Simon and Garfunkel, a notion Kevin Godley agreed with.

"Yeah, I can see that," he recalled to rock critic Dave Thompson. "The songs we were writing back then were kinda acoustic, rural-sounding stuff. When you're that kind of age, you are consciously copying someone, and we were probably consciously copying Simon and Garfunkel. It was only later in our careers, when we didn't really have too much time to think, that we started recording stuff that sounded like ourselves." Of Thinks: School Stinks, Godley added, "I still say that was a bloody good album. Most of the tracks were from the Frabjoy period and it's an interesting LP."

Eric Stewart, interviewed in 1976, recalled that Thinks: School Stinks presented a problem because it was so different from "Neanderthal Man": "It was totally alien to what people were expecting from us. It was a good record, a little ahead of its time. It was similar to the things we are doing now. It was very melodic with chord structures that hadn't been used before – and some of the sounds that we used on that album hadn't been heard at the time."

*** The songs ***

1. NEANDERTHAL MAN

Bob McBeath: "We open with the single "Neanderthal Man", an irritatingly catchy song which may not have much to do with 10CC, but it is undeniably fun."

2. HOW MANY TIMES

BMcB: "How Many Times" is a simple acoustic number with Crosby Stills and Nash like harmonies. Baz Barker adds some effective strings to the latter part of the song."

Midway through this song, a highly stylized string arrangement is introduced, recalling the type of orchestrations Marc Bolan was attempting in his pre-electric Tyranosaurus Rex days.

"How Many Times" was last single (released in the US) from Thinks: School Stinks. Unfortunately, it tanked on the charts.

3. DESPERATE DAN

"Desperate Dan" - a music hall piano-roll romp in the tradition of The Kinks (who name-check Desperate Dan in "The Village Green Preservation Society") or White Album Beatles at their most playful (think "Honey Pie," "Rocky Raccoon") - is Hotlegs' nod to the tough-as-nails (he shaved his beard with a blowtorch!), cowpie-loving Wild West character from Dudley D. Watkins's British comic strip The Dandy (which remains the world's longest-running comic strip, 1937-present!). And yes, a UK cow-pie (a meat-pie) is quite different from its US equivalent!

Desperate Dan corrals another cow-pie

4. TAKE ME BACK

Listen to "Take me Back."

"Take Me Back" is a mini-symphony of sound and, like "Suite F.A." anticipates later complex 10cc arrangements such "One Night in Paris" from 1975's The Original Soundtrack. It's a medley of three different motifs, starting off as a pretty ballad with Lol Creme and Eric Stewart's acoustic guitars recalling "Mother Nature's Son" from the Beatles's White Album. Then the middle passage turns into an Eric Stewart electric guitar workout, calling to mind some George Harrison solo from Abbey Road ("I Want You (She's So Heavy"?), only to return back to an acoustic outro.

BMcB: "Take Me Back" is another delicate acoustic piece which offers a further glimpse of the music of 10CC, the vocals once again being particularly notable. The structure of the song is interesting, as it shows a willingness to draw a number of styles into a relatively short piece.

5. UM WAH, UM WOH

Listen to "Um Wah, Um Woh."

An absolutely amazing song, and one in which the boys throw in everything but the kitchen sink, production-wise. Highlighted by a stellar Eric Stewart guitar jam-out in the middle.

BMcB: "Um Wah, Um Woh" is a rather unfortunate title for what is actually a pretty good pop song. It may not have the class of 10CC, but it also lacks some of the pretentious indulgences too.

6. SUITE F.A.

Listen to "Suite F.A."

BMcB: "Suite F.A." is a three part, 13 minute suite written by Godley and Crème. It is similar in structure to the "One Night in Paris" trilogy which appeared on The Original Soundtrack but with a greater emphasis on acoustic and orchestral sounds. There is no great complexity to individual parts, but mood does change frequently offering at least a hint of prog."

Personally, this makes me think of Side 2 of Abbey Road, which is an unmistakable influence. Godley, for one agreed, telling Dave Thompson, "We just kept going until we had an album, complete with our version of side two of Abbey Road, 'Suite F.A.'"

7. FLY AWAY

"Fly Away" was a reworking of a Godley and Creme song that had earlier been released on a Marmalade record label sampler, 100 Proof as "To Fly Away" by Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon - with writing credit erroneously credited to Kevin Godley and Graham Gouldman. Marmalade was the short-lived British record label started in 1967 by pop impresario Giorgio Gomelsky; its roster included the early Godley and Creme band Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, in addition to Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger, Blossom Toes, and others. The same duo also recorded a Graham Gouldman track for inclusion on 100 Proof, "The Late Mr Great" (about a gentleman whose timekeeping was so bad he missed his own funeral!).

In fact, Gouldman proved to be the connection that brought Kevin Godley, then still a student at art school, to Giorgia Gomelsky's attention. In Children of the Revolution, Dave Thompson describes how it all happened.

One day in 1969, Gouldman asked Godley to join him at a Marmalade session. The moment Godley opened his mouth to unleash his ethereal falsetto, Gomelsky offered him a record deal. It was, Godley laughed, the prequel to a nightmare.

"More than anything, I recall the life change. The scene is still vivid in my head. A three-hour drive, in howling gale, from one life to another, leaving behind three years at Stoke on Trent College of Art and heading for London, and a totally unknown future. I remember crying and trying not to show it as Lol drove my MG Midget out of the college car park. I was missing everybody there before we even hit the road. I also remember the hood of the car flying up and smacking into the windshield and nearly killing us, then operating the wipers by hand through a crack in the soft top.

Things were calmer in the studio, but only just. "Cut to Eddy Offord behind the control desk at Advision Studios. A small, dark space smelling of last night's session. A whiff of weed and Afghan coats. Very London. Very hip. There was an old Mellotron in one corner, Giorgia, big and rumbling, coming on like a hip Rasputin and me singing in a real studio. Intimidating, impossible, the beginning of everything. When he decided to call us Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, it was almost the end of everything."

The first song they worked on was "To Fly Away" and Godley recalled it was quite a challenging session. "It was the first time I'd stepped up to a microphone."

As Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, Godley and Creme began work on an album in September 1969, recording basic tracks at Strawberry Studios with Eric Stewart on guitar and Graham Gouldman on bass; their debut Marmalade single, "I Am Beside Myself/The Animal Song" was released by the end of the month.

"We were more confident for 'I Am Beside Myself,' which had brass arranged by Tony Meehan, late of the Shadows," Godley recalled. "Graham may have played on these sessions. Not one hundred percent sure, but I do remember Keith Tippett being vaguely involved."

Of the Marmalade period, Kevin Godley recounted to Dave Thompson, "We were one of many new artists on a very cool label. We were obviously thrilled when both records came out, but learned a valuable lesson when they promptly disappeared. The rest is more haze than history..."

Indeed, Marmalade folded soon after the Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon single and 100 Proof compilation LP, but Godley had no regrets and valued the experience working in a "real" studio, an apprenticeship that would pay dividends in future.

"Giorgio certainly had the right attitude. I'm not sure anyone really knew what they were doing, but I think his overriding concern was to document the music that was around; he didn't really think the rest of it through. Full marks to him for being around, though, because nobody else was doing it. He got a lot of bands recorded that no one else would touch."

8. RUN BABY RUN

"Run Baby Run" is a basic blues rocker in the Canned Heat style, driven along by an insistent cowbell (more cowbell!) and guitar boogie vibe.

The opening lines and percussive rhythm of "Run Baby Run" were later reworked to become the basis for "Art For Art's Sake" on the 1976 10cc album How Dare You!.

9. ALL GOD'S CHILDREN

"All God's Children" closes the album on a dreamy lullaby note, with Kevin Godley's angelic falsetto leading the harmony pack as he sings about sunny California (as only a Midlands-born Mancunian can!). Makes me think of "Golden Slumbers" from Abbey Road.

*** Extra Tracks from You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It ***

10. TODAY

I'm so glad Amy purchased the You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It LP, if only because it contains this exquisite gem that makes the whole album worth it, even if it only contains four new songs. (I like it because she did think of it!) "Today" features all four original members of 10cc, with Graham Gouldman strapping on his bass guitar to play alongside Kevin, Lol, and Eric.

As "Easy Livin" critic Bob McBeath observes, "The song shows that the transition to 10cc was complete, and actually ranks on a par with pretty much anything the quartet recorded under that name. The wonderful arrangement includes orchestration and a great synthesiser ending. For fans of 10cc this is a real lost gem."

Watch/listen to "Today."

11. YOU DIDN'T LIKE IT BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T THINK OF IT

Listen to "You Didn't Like It because You Didn't Think of It."

This song, the B-side of "Neanderthal Man," spawned not one but two future 10cc ditties. The first part is an early precursor to the title track of 10cc's 1976 LP How Dare You!, while the second part turns into an early run-through of "Fresh Air for My Mama" (from 10cc's self-titled 1973 debut album).

A future two-fer!

12. THE LOSER

"The Loser" was the B-side that probably should have been the A-side of Hotlegs' 1971 "Lady Sadie/The Loser" single. A slide guitar fan's wet dream, it makes me think of what Little Feat would sound like if they weren't so boring.

BMcB: "The loser" once again has the sound of an early 10CC song, the upbeat rock melody being basic but functional.

13. LADY SADIE

Released as a single in 1971 as a hopeful followup to "Neanderthal Man"'s success, "Lady Sadie" is a mid-paced funk number that McBeath, for one, thinks should have been left undisturbed. Kevin Godley called it "a faux Rolling Stones song that explored Eric's love of dirty blues guitar. It was so obviously other people's territory. It had a nice feel but it didn't chart. Probably didn't deserve to."

***

Looking back on Thinks: School Stinks, Godley told Dave Thompson, "It was great just to try to punch above our weight. It's not bad, but it's not us [10cc] yet, is it? At the time, we didn't recognize 'Neanderthal Man' for the inspired piece of nonsense it was. No tune. Stupid lyrics. 'We can do better than this, chaps.' We were young and subconsciously aping our heroes, like you do until the real you shows up, so 'Neanderthal Man' was this bizarre anomaly that pointed one possible way forward but we failed to see it."

Thank goodness.

In 2006, Godley sampled much of Thinks: School Stinks album for the mid-section of GG06's song "Son of Man" (GG06 being his band with Graham Gouldman, the two musicians once again a dynamic duo, just as before when they were '60s bandmates in The Mockingbirds). (Godley and Creme would later revisit this strategy on 1985's The History Mix Volume 1, when they sampled three 10cc songs as the song "Wet Rubber Soup.") "I could hear something of what we [10cc] eventually became, under all the other influences," Godley recalled later. "In truth, we didn't fully discover our own musical identity until we stopped trying so hard and started feeling."

Bob McBeath sums the LP up by saying, "In all, an album which should be part of the collection of any 10cc fan. There is a wealth of indicators here of how the sound of that band came about, not to mention some fine songs in their own right too. Personally, I rate this album higher than the majority of the 10cc albums which followed."

Now that's high praise, indeed! One thing's for certain: Thinks: School Stinks offers a fascinating look at where music was in 1970 and (especially on tracks like "Today") where four talented lads from Manchester would eventually end up. Or, as Dave Thompson put it. "Take one red-hot axe-man [Eric Stewart] steeped in the stew ofthe British beat boom and armed with a chart-topping US hit single [The Mindbenders' "A Groovy Kind of Love"]; add the best British songwriter this side of the Beatles [Graham Gouldman, author of "For Your Love," "Bus Stop," "No Milk Today," etc., etc.]; sprinkle on a couple of eccentric art students [Kevin Godley and Lol Creme] and lock them away in a studio of their own. God knows what you'd get today, and nobody was really sure what would happen at the end of the Sixties, either."

What you got from this mish-mash stew of talents and influences would eventually be called "10cc," a band that made some of the most beautiful, clever and complex music of their era. And on this album, you get to see three-quarters of that entity as a very promising - and very listenable - work in progress.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (*****)

2011-11-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
by Shigeru Muzuki
English translation by Jocelyne Allen
(Drawn & Quarterly, 2011, 368 pages)

I just finished reading Shigeru Mizuki's graphic novel - his first manga translated into English! - about his traumatic experience (he lost his left arm and most of his friends) as a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific during WWII, Onward Towards Our Noble Death (Soin gyokusai seyo!, originally published in Japan in 1973 and reissued in April of this year by Drawn & Quarterly). Though Mizuki is best known for his yokai (ghost) horror manga subjects (especially those involving one-eyed boy Kitaro of the Graveyard, or GeGeGe no Kitaro, pictured at right), it was this fictionalized memoir of his 1943-1944 tour of duty at Rabual on the island of New Britain (now Papua New Guinea) that serves as one of the best anti-war testaments of all time. Though fictionalized, it is a 90% factual gunki-monogatari (war-tale); Mizuki only took the liberty, for dramatic impact, of having all soldiers in his graphic novel perish, when in fact 80 survived.

Mizuki's style is characterized by "cartoony" characters (and I have to admit, even though he lists his cast of characters at the beginning of the book, I had trouble telling them apart!) set against realistically detailed background drawings, an example of which is shown below.

"Noble death," WWII Japanese style

Scenes like those above remind me of another anti-war graphic novel, one from the other side of the world: Jacques Tardi's chronicle of pointless slaughter in WWI, It Was the War of the Trenches (C'etait la guerre des trenchees, Fantagraphic Books, 2010). Tardi also realized the absurdity of sending "cannon fodder" soldiers to their deaths in pointless charges out of the fetid, rat-infested trenches of France during the Great War, a conflict in which retreating soldiers were shot as traitors for not willingly falling on their swords - an M.O. echoed over 20 years later by Japanese brass in the jungles of the South Pacific. Stanley Kubrick masterfully captured the French military's absurd notions of "honor on the battlefield" in his early masterpiece Paths of Glory. A "trenchant" Tardi panel is shown below:

"Noble death," WWI French style

Publishers Weekly's review of Mizuki's book noted, "Onward joins the growing library of gekiga published by Drawn and Quarterly. Gekiga, roughly translated as “dramatic pictures,” is a manga genre that often focuses on the serious and tragic nature of life and can be compared to American indie or alternative comics. Mizuki is the fourth creator of the group of mangaka credited with creating gekiga in the late 1950s, a group that also includes gekiga pioneers Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Seiichi Hayashi, and Susumu Katsumata."

Perhaps Mizuki's account of wartime horrors was his attempt to exorcize his own personal demons (and lingering guilt over having survived). As he writes in the book's afterword, Rabual was one of the worst places to be in WWII for Japanese soldiers, who were considered less than human, and where almost 11,000 of these "subhumans" died during one of the war's bitterest campaigns. As a new recuit, Mizaki was beaten repeatedly for, as one officer in the story remarked, "New recruits are like tatami mats. The more you beat them, the better they are."

"In our military, soldiers and socks were consummables; a soldier ranked no higher than a cat," Mizuki writes. "Officers, NCOs, horses, soldiers: in the military hierarchy, soldiers were not even thought of as human beings, We were instead creatures lower than a horse...But when it came to death, it turns out we were human beings after all."

In other words, only when ordered to die in a pointless suicide charge against superior enemy forces - to go Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths - did the soldiers actually exist in the eyes of the honor-bound military hierarchy.

"Whenever I write a story about the war, I can't help the blind rage that surges up in me," Mizuki concludes. "My guess is, this anger is inspired by the ghosts of all those fallen soldiers."

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War Is Over? If only!

Caterpillar

2011-11-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

Sametka (aka Caterpillar, The Velvet Caterpillar)
Animated by Zdenek Miler
Based on the story by Norman Colwin
(Kresleny Film, Prague, Czechoslakia, 1967, 14 minutes)
Released in the US in 1971 by Learning Corporation of America

I work at a large public library that still has hundreds, if not thousands, of videos in this, The Digital Age of the DVD. One of the things I most enjoy about shelf-reading "the Stacks" - the movable-shelves storage area that houses most of our educational videos - is discovering old and obscure videos for which there is little or no information. Usually, these are the blandest of the bland in terms of packaging and the scantest of scant in terms of the library's catalog record. I'm talking about a video for which there's basically a black VHS case and a title (typed on an index card!) - and, if I'm lucky, maybe a date of publication, running time, and one-sentence description (often inaccurate) in the library catalog. One such delightful recent discovery matching all of the above criteria was something called Caterpillar, "an animated fantasy about a caterpillar who dances his way to success and fortune as an internationally recognized performer."

Googling this title turned up nothing betyond what I had already learned. In fact, the title, release date, and running time were all inaccurate. But I like animation and I like discovering new videos in our collection on which no previous light has shone. Taking the video home, I was immedialy struck by its style, which I loved and which was distinctly European - this even though the video was credited to Learning Corporation of America - and its bright, simplistic animation and wordless narrative structure reminded me of Czech animator Zdenek Miler's Mole films; Miler, who is considered the Czech equivalent of Walt Disney, created dozens of wordless (for international market appeal) children's film shorts starring his little mole (or Krtek in Czech) between 1956 and 2002 for Prague's Kresleny Film Studio. And there was good reason why Caterpillar looked so familiar - it was a Zdenek Miler film!

Krtek the little Mole

The importance of "the Mole" to Czechs was underscored when Krtek was recently chosen as the mascot for NASA's space shuttle Endeavor - the brainchild of shuttle crew member Drew Feustal, who has indirect Czech roots through his wife. It's rather fitting, as Krtek had previously starred in a 1965 film and book adventure called Little Mole and the Spaceship! Zdenek Miler, now 90years old, was delighted by his fantasy becoming reality: “I never imagined anything like this for Krtek." Miler approved of a toy designed specifically for NASA and of Krtek’s mission logo (as shown below):

NASA's 2011 Little Mole logo

OK, back to Caterpillar...

Warning Film Scholars: there's hardly any information anywhere about this film. The most detail I could find on the Web as this forum thread by "DavidVillaJr" (surely not the FC Barcelona soccer star?) at the fedoralounge.com:

"Learning Corporation of America, 1971. The inevitability of change is revealed to a little boy in this animated tale of the caterpillar who danced. One day a little boy playing his harmonica, discovers a caterpillar who dances to his tunes. An entrepreneur discovers both the boy and the bug, and soon the dancing bug and the boy become big business all over the world. Suddenly, one day the caterpillar disappears. The boy searched everywhere, but could not find his friend. Then spring comes, and then one day a beautiful butterfly appears, dancing to the boy's tune. The boy decides to set the butterfly free. Primary to intermediate."

Even more intriquing was another thread at fedoralounge.com by Subvet642 that claimed "There is a live action version of the same movie starring Cary Grant. Once Apon A Time (1944) A Broadway producer finds fame with his new act - a dancing caterpillar."

Cary Grant bugs out watching a dancing caterpillar

Even weirder: it's true! How had I never heard of this Cary Grant film about a caterpillar that dances only to the song "Yes Sir, That's My Baby!"? A film directed by Alexander Hall with an all-star cast including Janet Blair, James Gleason (as McGillicuddy "the Moke"), Preston Sturges regular William Demarest (My Three Son's Uncle Charlie!), and Ted Donaldson as "Pinky" the mouth-organ-playing boy who discovers the caterpillar "Curly." Turns out that Once Upon a Time was originally a CBS radio play called "My Friend Curly" by Norman Corwin (from an idea by Lucille Fletcher Herrmann).

Watch the opening of Once Upon a Time.

Reading through the thread, I liked one fan's remembrance of how the boy-with-a-harmonica and his dancing caterpillar turned into an overnight, international sensation akin to the Beatles in the early '60s. As he described the boy and the caterpillar appearing on billboards all over the world, making their escape via helicopter from throngs of swarming fans, and even journeying to the Moon to play for astronauts, I knew the film was not only an example of classic animation, but also a cogent commentary on fleeting fame and the inevitability of change. Ah yes, like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, life's only constant is change. Or as Heraclitus put it back in the Classical Greek Age, "You can't step twice into the same river." Even George Harrison noted, via Eastern mysticism, that indeed All Things Must Pass. Which is pretty heavy stuff for the Primary to Intermediate set!

Dancing on the Moon: "One tiny step for man, one giant leap for mole-kind!"

But, as usual with my raging, caffeinated ADD, I have digressed. Back to Caterpillar the film itself. For your viewing pleasure, I have tracked it down on YouTube and included the video clips (in two parts) below:

Watch "the Velvet Caterpillar Part 1."

Watch "The Velvet Caterpillar Part 2."

Skinny and Fatty (*****)

2011-08-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

Blast from the past of "The CBS Children's Film Festival"

Skinny and Fatty (Chibideka monogatari)
Directed by N. Terao; written by Mitsuo Wakasugi and Seiya Yoshida
Cast: H. Sha (Kenkichi Komatsu), Y. Kataoke (Yuso Oyama)
(Japan, 1958, 46 minutes)
Watch entire film

Thanks go to Video Americain manager Scott Wallace Brown for tracking down a DVD-R version of this beloved chestnut from bygone days. Skinny and Fatty was easily my favorite movie from the CBS Children's Film Festival series, a 1967 television series hosted by the puppets 'n' puppeteer team of Kookla, Fran & Ollie. This 1958 children's film tells the story of chubby new-kid-in-school Oyama ("Fatty"), who is teased and ostracized until befriended by popular schoolmate Komatsu ("Skinny"), who shows him that he has to believe in himself and always try to do his best - even if he fails.

Skinny (Komatsu) and Fatty (Oyama)

Komatsu's attempt to help Oyama master the rope climb in gym class is particularly poignant, though not exactly tear-inducing this time around, viewing it 40 some years later.

Give 'em enough rope: "Don't quit!" Skinny implores Fatty

Like any good Baby Boomer, I was reared on KFO during the latter end of their original 1947-1957 run on NBC and ABC, probably first watching them in syndication in the early '60s (my childhood memory timeline really didn't start until JFK's assassination in November 1963 when I was 6 years old). But I really started to appreciate them when they moved to CBS to host this series featuring "films from all over the world especially for kids."

Behaving parents can watch, too!

As hosted by the "Kuklapolitan Players" - puppets Kukla ("doll" in Russian) and Ollie (aka Oliver J. Dragon), created and performed by Burr Tillstrom, and Fran Allison ( who had been working together as early as 1948, with the original puppet pair appearing even earlier in 1939) - this hour-long program featured dubbed, edited versions of foreign films that were suitable for children. And that's what made it so special to the pre-Globalization know-nothing nudniks of my generation, raised as we were on a map of the world that still listed almost half of Africa as "West French Africa."

The Puppeteer Team: Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison

The Kuklapolitan Players: Kookla, Ollie and Fran Allison

Sure, I was in elementary school by then, but I've always been visually oriented, and maps and books and National Geographic magazines were no substitute for seeing live-action kids from all over the globe eating, playing and studying in their native lands - kids who didn't look like me and who seemed to dress funny and eat weird stuff. I can safely say that everything I learned about foreign lands and cultures really started here (just as my friend Dave Cawley's lifelong fascination/obsession with All Things Japanese began with his exposure to '60s TV imports like Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, Astroboy, Marine Boy, Gigantor, Tobor the 8th Man,and Speed Racer); in fact, Skinny and Fatty was probably the first foreign film I ever saw, and certainly the first Japanese movie. (And this is probably where we all first saw The Red Balloon, a film everyone from my generation knows!)

Two things I noticed right off the bat watching the film again was how trend-setting Japanese school kids were, toting their books around in little messenger bags that today have become, along with mp3 players and cell phones, de rigeur accessories for all young people. The other was a scene where Fatty tries to squeeze through a fence to catch up to Skinny, but gets stuck, to comic effect. The very same scene would be reenacted years later by Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver and his pudgy pal Larry Mondello in American TV's Leave It To Beaver program. I also noticed, in the scene where Komatsu's family is moving to a new home, that the Japanese pack their belongings in straw, instead of boxes. So many little, incidental details - the taking off of shoes when the children visit one another's houses; the everyday tea ceremonies; the communal bathing in which two unrelated boys cleanse each other - unfold in the film's 45 minutes to be stored away in viewer's cross-cultural memories. The film also touched lightly on the class system, for while the two boys may attend the same school, the well-fed Oyama is obviously from a wealthy family, while Komatsu's family is poor and must move away at picture's end to find work in the far-away mountain region.

The film uses athletic achievement as a narrative arc to show how Oyama's growing confidence under Komatsu's friendship and tutelege helps him achieve newfound popularity and belief in himself. At first, Oyama humiliates himself climbing the rope, but by year's end he is able to team up with his skinny friend to win accolades at the annual sports and games competition festival.

When Oyama pouts "I can't!"...

Komatsu says "Just do it, Oyama!"

The following clip highlights Oyama's progression from failure to success in competitive sports.

And, as the blogger at everydayfamily.com observed, not only does Komatsu teach Oyama the values of courage, friendship, self-pride and risk along the way, but "with the subject of bullying so up front these days, Skinny and Fatty addresses the issue with subtly and beauty."

By film's end, Oyama has learned to stand on his own two feet and runs to the hills to shout his thanks to his friend who's now physically far away but still near and dear to his heart.

The Climatic Finale: "Komatsu! Thank you!"

According to Pop-Cult.com, "The CBS Children's Film Festival was an hour-long program appearing sporadically beginning in 1967, until it joined the early-Saturday- afteroon schedule in 1971...The show ran in this format until 1977, when it was reduced to the half-hour CBS Saturday Film Festival, without the charming hosts. It continued to air irregularly until 1984."

(Trivial aside: Mystery Science Theater 3000's Joel Hodgson cited the CBS Children's Film Festival as one of his inspirations for creating the concept of MST. "It was just one of those shows from my childhood that prepared me for fully appreciating the greatness of MST in the future. You got to see a lot of goofy films from other lands." Even the framework - with a human host and two non-human sidekicks (with MST's Crow and Tom Servo filling in for Kukla and Ollie) introducing the films and then later talking about them and performing little skits - was similar to MST.)

Pop-Cult.com and other sites believe the titles that follow represent a complete listing of all of the films and programs shown during the Film Festival's run:

Adventure in Golden Bay - Czech, 1956
Adventure in the Hopfields - British, 1954
The Angel and Big Joe - American, 1975
Anoop and the Elephant - British, 1972
Bag on Bag - Russian, ?
A Bird of Africa - Japanese, ?
Birds Come Flying To Us - Bulgarian, 1971
Black Mountain - Soviet, 1970
The Blind Bird - Soviet, 1963
The Boy and the Airplane - ?
The Boy Who Wore Spectacles - Soviet, ?
The Boy With Glasses - Japanese, 1962
Bunnie - Polish, 1973
The Camerons - Australian, 1974
Captain Korda - Czech, 1970
Captain Mikula, the Kid - Yugoslavian, 1974
Charlie the Rascal - Swedish, ?
Chipmates - British, ?
The Chiffy Kids - British, 1976
Circus Adventure - Dutch, ?
Circus Angel - French, 1965
Clown - Spanish, 1969
Cold Pizza - Canadian, 1972
Countdown to Danger - British, 1967
Cry Wolf - British, 1968
Carole, I Love You - French, ?
Danger Point - British, 1971
Death of a Gaudy Dancer - Canadian, ?
Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World - British, 1973
Doggie and Three - Czech, 1955
Egghead's Robot - British, 1970
Elephant River - Ceylon, 1956
Felipa: North of the Border - American, 1971
The Firefighters - British, 1975
Flash the Sheepdog - British, 1966
Flay Away Dove - American, 1982
The Flying Sorcerer - British, 1973
For Boys Only is For Girls, Too - Czech, ?
A Friend - Italian, 1967
Friend or Foe - British, ?
Friends For Life - Soviet, 1971
Funny Stories - Soviet, 1962
Geronimo Jones - American, 1970
Get Used To It - ?
Ghost of a Chance - British, 1968
Giamador - ?
The Giant Eel - Czech, 1971
The Goalkeeper Also Lives on Our Street - Czech, 1957
The Golden Fish - French, 1959
Gosha the Bear - Soviet, 1971
Hand in Hand - British, 1960
Headline Hunters - British, 1967
Heidi - German/Austrian, 1965
Joey - American, 1964?
John and Julie - British, 1954
The Johnstown Monster - British, 1971
Jumping Over Puddles - Czech, 1970
The Legend of John Henry - ?
The Legend of Paul Bunyon - ?
Lionheart - British, 1968
The Little Bearkeepers - Czech, 1957
The Little Ones - British, 1965
Little Pig - Chinese, ?
The Little Wooden Horse - ?
Lone Wolf - Yugoslavian, 1972
Lost in Pajamas - Czech, 1966
Lucy and the Miracles - Czech, 1970
The Magnificent 6-1/2 - British, 1967
Mauro the Gypsy - British, ?
Me and You, Kangaroo - Australian, 1974
A Member of the Family - British, 1971
Miguel's Navidad - Mexico, ? Miguel: Up From Puerto Rico - American, 1970
Mischief - British, 1968
Mr . Horatio Knibbles - British, 1971
My Father, Sun-Sun Johnson - Jamaican, ?
My Main Man - ?
Nikkolina - Canadian, ?
Nina and the Street Kids - Swedish, ?
Nunu and the Zebra - South African, ?
On Snow White - Czech, 1972
The Orange Watering Cart - Hungarian, ?
Paddle to the Sea - Canadian, 1966
Paganini Strikes Again - British, 1974
Pero and His Companions - ?
The Promise - ?
The Ransome of Red Chief - Soviet, 1963
The Red Balloon - French, 1956
Soapbox Derby - Canadian, ?
Scramble - British, 1969
A Seafaring Dog - Soviet, ?
The Secret - ?
The Seven Ravens - German, 1937
Shok and Sher - Soviet, ?
Shopping Bag Lady - American, 1975
The Show Must Go On - Soviet, ?
Six Bears and a Clown - Czech, 1972
Sirius - Czech, 1974
Skinny and Fatty - Japanese, 1959
Stowaway in the Sky - French, 1959
Strange Holiday - Australian, 1969
That's My Name, Don't Wear it Out - British, ?
Three Nuts for Cinderella - Czech, 1973
Thunderstorm - French, ?
Ticko - Swedish, ?
Tiko and the Shark - Italian/French, 1965
Tjorven, Batsman, and Moses - Swedish, 1964
Tony and the Tick-Tock Dragon - Hungarian, ?
Turniphead - Italian, 1965
Tymancha's Friend - Soviet, 1970
Up in the Air - British, 1969
The Violin - Canadian, 1974
What Next? - British, 1974
Where's Johnny? - British, 1974
White Mane - Frenche, 1952
Winter of the Witch - British, 1969
The Yellow Slippers - Polish, 1961

The best site for detailed information about these films, as well as sample video clips, is the Kuklapolitan Website's CBS Children's Film Festival page at kukla.tv/cbs.html.

Video:
Watch "Skinny and Fatty" in its entirety (46:32)

Related links:
CBS Children's Film Festival (The Kuklapolitan Website)
CBS Children's Film Festival film listings (Pop-cult.com)
CBS Children's Film Festival (Wikipedia)
1967 CBS Children's Film Festival Commercial (YouTube)
1972 CBS Children's Film Festival Commercial (YouTube)

The Rise and Fall of Michael Dane Star Traveler & the Black Velvet Express

2011-08-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Black Velvet Express
Where the Stars Kiss the Moon
(Flower Records, 2010)

Musicians:
Dane Williams: Vocals, acoustic/electric/slide guitars, Ebow
Michael Fiore: Acoustic/electric guitars
Gerard Moore: Bass guitar
Brian Hughes: Drums, percussion
Glenn Workman: Piano, keyboards

Artwork: Ron Komber

"There once was a note, pure and easy, playing so free like a breath rippling by. There once was a note - listen!" - Pete Townshend, "Pure and Easy"

Black Velvet Express' Michael Dane, Star Traveler is a concept album about the sci-fi adventures of the semi-fictional space-age explorer "Michael Dane" and his quest to bring peace to the universe through the power of music ("the Notes"). I say "semi-fictional" because Michael Dane is actually a conflation of the first names of BVE guitarists Michael Fiore and his longtime friend (and fellow sci-fi enthusiast) Dane Williams, who composed this musical soundtrack to compliment an original story written by Mike Fiore.

BVE's Dane Williams and Michael Fiore

Where the Stars Kiss the Moon came about, Fiore explains, "When I sat down late one night to write a song about one of my favorite sci-fi movies, Forbidden Planet." (The film is one of my personal faves as well, featuring one of the most unusual and sought-after electronic soundtracks of all time.) That song, "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon," became the title track for the subsequent CD.

Fiore film fave: Forbidden Planet (1956)

For years his pal Dane Williams - who Fiore met when Dane came to Baltimore to become part of a group called Voices, a concept band consisting of musicians from surrounding cities on the East Coast - had been saying that they should do a CD together and, after writing "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon," Fiore thought he had just the right project. A photographer friend suggested that Mike create an alter ego for the name of the band and call it "Michael Dane." Though Fiore had already settled on Black Velvet Express as the band name, he kept the idea in mind when he decided to write a sci-fi story (dedicated to his "beautiful wife Deborah," his family, and friends) to go along with his song. (The BVE CD contains a free digital copy of the story, which can also be viewed at BlackVelvetExpress.com.) More songs came - all written by Fiore save the Fiore-Williams collaboration "Lullaby Dream" - and thus the song "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon" and the story "Michael Dane Star Traveler" became a collaborative project between two friends, as well as a concept CD.

Michael Dane's ancestor: Ziggy Stardust

If the idea of a space-rock concept album makes your memory harken back to David Bowie's breakthrough 1972 album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, rest assured - it's no mistake. You see, Fiore and Williams wear their glam rock and melodic Anglo-pop influences on their sleeves, citing Bowie, T Rex, Mott the Hoople, Badfinger, Kinks, Stones, Faces and especially The Beatles (the "four Liverpool lads" name-checked in Fiore's tale as keepers of "The Notes" that once created worldwide peace and harmony) as guiding lights and mentors. "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon," which appears twice on the CD (in electric and acoustic versions), is as anthemic a song as Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" and its intrepid-but-lonely protagonist Michael Dane recalls the lost-in-space travails of Major Tom "floating in his tin can" in Bowie's "Space Oddity." (Michael Dane even travels with his three dogs, though no mention is made whether, like Bowie's, they are Diamond Dogs.)

Ground Control to Michael Dane (illustration by Ron Komber)

In fact, from the very first note of this (literally) fantastic song, one cannot escape the comparison to Bowie's Ziggy-era sound. The guitar tunings (both acoustic and electric) evoke none other than Mick Ronson...and the pace, the engineering, the production - it all seems like a time capsule from 1972! (And to this glam rock fan, that's a very good thing!) But the CD cover (and accompanying liner note and story illustrations) evoke an even earlier era, with Ron Komber's artwork recalling '40s and '50s sci-fi pulp covers (thematically more in tune with Fiore's original inspiration, 1956's Forbidden Planet).

Ron Komber's pulpish cover art

Okay, let's just to back-pedal a bit...all the way back to the '80s. You see, I hadn't kept up with Mike Fiore (shown below) since the days when he drummed for The Accused, an early '80s New Wave outfit that regularly headlined at The Marble Bar and Baltimore area clubs.

Michael Fiore circa 1980

Under leader David Cawkwell, The Accused were kind of a big deal at the time and were one of the few bands playing the Marble Bar circuit that actually released a record, 1980's acclaimed 4-song EP on E.S.P (shown below).

"The Accused" EP. Clockwise from L-R: Mark Morgan, Kraig Krixer, Mike Fiore, David Cawkwell

Sometime around 1983-1984, I worked with Accused bass player Mark Morgan (who's now a professional photographer) at the Music Liberated record store he managed in the basement of the old Towson Center Mall (where other musicians, like Montgomery Clift-lookalike Mark Renner of Boys In the River, also worked - Mike Fiore may also have worked for Music Liberated at their North Plaza or Saratoga Street locations, but I just can't remember through the lazy haze of memory lapse); that was really the last time I thought about the Accused until the unfortunate passing of original Accused guitarist Kraig Krixer in January of this year.

Batter Up: Kraig Krixer Memorial Mixer pixers

At the memorial get-together that followed Kraig's death, countless friends and musicians who played with him turned up at Perry Hall's Batter's Box on Belair Road (Krixer's favorite watering hole) to pay their respects, including his former bandmates David Cawkwell and Mike Fiore (seen below).

David Cawkwell and Mike Fiore @ Kraig Krixer Memorial

Through the wonder of Facebook, I kept in touch with Mike and he sent me a copy of Where the Star Kiss the Moon to see what I thought. I was surprised to see he wasn't listed as the drummer, but as the guitarist - and that he's pretty good! Who knew? In fact, the whole CD is top-drawer and professionally recorded (kudos to Jason George of Towson's Nice Package Productions). Along with Dane Williams' fluid lead vocals, twin guitar strummers "Michael Dane" are amply supplemented by journeyman area musician Glen Workman (Crack the Sky, Howard Markman)'s atmospheric, ethereal keyboards, Brian Hughes' crisp percussion and Gerard Moore's rock-steady bass backing.

The Songs:

1. Where the Stars Kiss the Moon (M. Fiore)

"Push the button, open the door/Yeah, I know what you're looking for
You've come to this forbidden place/Out here in deep dark space
I'll be waiting here for you/Where the stars kiss the moon

Please don't take my love from me/It's all I have, can't you see?
There's a monster inside my head/You can't hide in your silver sled
I'll be waiting here for you/Where the stars kiss the moon

It's been such a long, long time/All alone inside my mind
Way down here in deep dark space/You must leave this forbidden place
I'll be waiting here for you/Where the stars kiss the moon"

The inspiration behind this song is clear in the line "There's a monster in my mind" for it recalls the "alien monster of the mind" hatched from Dr. Morbius' subconscious that wiped out all life on planet Altair IV in the film Forbidden Planet (itself a sci-fi rumination on Shakespeare's play The Tempest).

"There's a monster in my mind..."

This is a lovely song that deserves to be reprised (which it is later on track 5). And I love the crisp electric guitar solo in the middle eight that is like a restrained Ronson riff.

2. Simple Love Song (M. Fiore)
This mid-tempo rocker with the boss backbeat and plentiful guitar soloing caught my girlfriend's immediate fancy; when she heard me listening to the CD, she asked "Who's this?" When I told her, she replied, "It's really good - I can move my hips to this!" She added she could probably hoop her way through a low-impact aerobics workout to the record!

3. Distant Lights (M. Fiore)

"Running away in the dark/Always afraid of getting lost"

Glenn Workman's keyboards are put to their most effective use on the lilting "Distant Lights" while the standout sitar-ish guitar motif recalls session man Reggie Young's sitar solo in B. J. Thomas' hit "Hooked On a Feeling"! (Oh, in case you're wondering, Young - who worked with Elvis and a long line of country artists, including The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson) - also played the sitar solo on The Box Tops' "Cry Like a Baby").

4. When Heaven Comes (M. Fiore)
"When Heaven comes, it's gonna come hard - Bang! Bang! Baby, bang bang!" A straight-ahead 4/4-on-the-floor rocker, and my choice for the "hit single." If "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon" is BVE's "Ziggy Stardust," then "When Heaven Comes" is the album's "Suffragette City."

5. Where the Stars Kiss the Moon (acoustic) (M. Fiore)
Reprised because it works just as well acoustically..a slower tempo, more mellow, more reflective feel. Just as "Rock and Roll Suicide" is the calm-after-the-storm following the rock-out of "Suffragette City"'s on Ziggy.

Watch "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon (Acoustic)" (YouTube)

Watch "Where the Stars Kiss the Moon" (Acoustic Demo version)" (YouTube)

6. Lullaby Dream
This guitars-only instrumental closes out the song cycle on a peaceful, uplifting note. I like how the guitars interplay and play tag with one another...the second guitar motif reminds me of the start of the Big Star song, "Watch the Sunrise" (from 1972's #1 Record) and I almost expected to hear the ghost voice of Alex Chilton chiming in.

And thus ends the song cycle - and Michael Dane Star Traveler adventure - that is Where the Stars Kiss the Moon.

Be sure to check out BVE's web site (www.BlackVelvetExpress.com), which allows fans to view the lyrics and register for a free cover art print, view the lyrics. The website also provides song samples and the ability to purchase the EP thru CdBaby.com., iTunes Rhapsody, and other digital distributors.

Finally, BVE's web site concludes: We hope that people, dogs and aliens get as big a “Bang Baby” out of this release as we had making it. Join us and take a star filled journey through the “Distant Lights.”

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Black Velvet Express Videos:
"Where the Stars Kiss the Moon (Acoustic)" (YouTube)

"Where the Stars Kiss the Moon (Acoustic Demo)" (Charles Funk Video)

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Other reviews:

"... I love the throbbing groove and spooky slide ... It sounds as if a hybrid of 60’s San Franciso Ballroom Rock and some Pre-Punk Snarl from NYC was tossed into a Spin Cycle with 70’s London Glam..." - Michael Molenda, Guitar Player Magazine

***

Where The Stars Kiss The Moon is an excellent concept EP/album containing several alternative rock/pop gems. The opening title track is a song of real beauty, a moving story about love and loss "out here in deep, dark space." Based on the classic 1956 Sci-Fi movie Forbidden Planet, it's a perfect marriage of lyrics and music with a haunting melody you won't forget (love the eerie intro!) It's later reprised as an acoustic version with an equally haunting sound and feel. If you love Bowie's "Space Oddity," you should love this one, too.

"Simple Love Song" and "When Heaven Comes" are straight-ahead rockers with blistering guitar solos, throbbing bass lines and pounding drums ("Heaven," especially, has a fierce, driving intensity) while "Distant Lights" has a darker and more pensive mood and feel to it (love the new intro and arrangement on this one, along with the eastern-flavored sitar-like solo).

"Lullaby Dream" is the closing track. It's an instrumental using guitars only which shift back and forth between G and D major, with layered chordal harmonies and a clean, sparkling solo - a pretty gem of a song with an uplifting vibe - a good note to end things on. - heliumbound

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Related Links:
Black Velvet Express (Official site)
Black Velvet Express (Facebook)
Black Velvet Express (MySpace)

50 Documentaries To See Before You Die

2011-08-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director." - Alfred Hitchcock

I taped the first two episodes (and watched the second one) of this five-part series on Current TV (it debuted August 2, 2011) that's hosted by affable documentarian Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me). While there may be a conflict of interest that Current TV boss Al Gore's doc An Inconvenient Truth is one of the nifty fifty (not to mention Spurlock's Super Size Me!), I certainly won't quibble. The series limits itself to documentaries made over the past 25 years, so you won't see Nanook of the North (1922), Salesman (1968) or Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) here - and that's fine, too. A line has to be drawn somewhere, especially for those of us who either suffer from ADD or who know Marc Sober (who, if he's reading this, is probably compiling his list of 500 documentaries to see before you die!). And Morgan Spurlock is just the sort of contempo figurehead to make this sort of program not only informative, but fun.

I like the framing device for the series, which has Spurlock traveling around the country to the towns and locales where the films or filmmakers are situated. In addition to showing highlight clips from each documentary, the directors and/or a panel of "experts" (fellow filmmakers, critics, pundits) offer commentary on the selected films. An added bonus is having Spurlock, in some cases, perform some "Where are they now?" follow-ups with some of the principles involved, such 13-year-old evangelist preacher-in-the-making Levi of Jesus Camp (2006), now 18 and with a full-on hipster goatee. Spurlock asks Levi the question we've all been waiting for: has he finally seen the Harry Potter movies his Christian ministry mentor Becky Fischer once branded as "Satanic"? The answer: Yes! "Those are great movies!" Levi enthuses. And Spurlock even pays a visit to meet Billy Mitchell, the "villain" of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007), at his video arcade; we learn Billy still has his "rebellious redneck" long hair and still hasn't seen the movie. Oh, and that he'd rather be Darth Vader than Luke Skywalker any day!

Spoiler alert! A quick Web search determined that the following films will be highlighted in what has been billed as Season 1 of this series (which promises that there will be more titles in seasons to come - yea!). I've only seen 20 of the titles listed here, so I've got some catching up to do!

•An Inconvenient Truth
•Biggie and Tupac
•Brother's Keeper
•Bus 174
•Capturing the Friedmans
•Catfish
•Crumb
•The Decline of Western Civilization
•Dogtown and Z-Boys
•Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
•Exit Through the Gift Shop
•The Eyes of Tammy Faye
•Fahrenheit 9/11
•Gasland
•Grizzly Man
•Hoop Dreams
•Inside Job
•Jesus Camp
•Madonna: Truth or Dare
•Man on Wire
•March of the Penguins
•Murderball
•One Day in September
•Paris is Burning
•Roger & Me
•Spellbound
•Super Size Me
•Taxi to the Dark Side
•The Kid Stays in the Picture
•The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
•The Thin Blue Line
•Touching the Void
•Waltz with Bashir
•When We Were Kings

I tried to embed some related videos, but Current TV has disabled that feature in YouTube and elsewhere. But here's series producer Tom Barbor-Might discussing how the 50 films were selected: "How the 50 documentaries were selected."

Related Links:
"50 Documentaries" (Current TV)

In the Canyons of Your Mind...

2011-08-13T12:27:00.001-07:00

you'll find the origins of Pete Shelley's "Boredom" guitar solo

I'm The Urban Spaceman/The Canyons Of Your Mind
(Oct/Nov 1968 Liberty LBF 15144)

In Mark Lamarr's recent BBC Radio special ("The Buzzcocks Story, Episode 1"), Buzzcocks guitarist Pete Shelley was asked how he came up with his brilliant reductio-ad-absurdum two-note solo in the song "Boredom," which first hit Britain's eardrums on the 'cocks' self-released 1976 Spiral Scratch EP. Pete referenced, of all people, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band! Specifically the song "The Canyons of Your Mind," which was B-side of their biggest chart success, 1968's poppy "Urban Spaceman" single (#5 UK Singles Chart). It later also appeared on the third Bonzos LP, Tadpoles (1969), which was mostly a compilation of tunes they had performed as the house band on the British television comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set.

"Urban Spaceman" was written by Neil Innes (who would later essay the John Lennon role of "Ron Nasty" in The Rutles) and on the flip side "Canyons of Your Mind," Innes himself played the purposely cacophanous, fractured and altogether off-kilter guitar solo (at the 1:08 mark of the three-minute song) that inspired a young Pete Shelley eight years later.

Watch the Bonzos play "Canyons of Your Mind" on British TV.

I never knew that before, and I'm a fan of both the Bonzos and the Buzzcocks! (No doubt, somewhere in cyberspace Bonzos buff Scott Wallace Brown of Video Americain is making tisk-tisk-tisk sounds and shaking his head at my folly as he reads this!)

Here's a 1980 live clip of Shelley playing "Boredom" for comparison purposes.

And be sure to check out Mark Lamarr's great two-part BBC 6 radio interview with all the Buzzcocks and principles:
The Buzzcocks Story - Episode 1
The Buzzcocks Story - Episode 2

2011 Natty Boh Film Festival

2011-08-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 30 2011 @ Fraziers on the Avenue
919 W. 36th Street, Baltimore, MD. (410) 662-4914
fraziersonthe avenue.com

The inaugural 2011 Natty Boh Film Festival was held this past Saturday night at Fraziers on The Avenue in Hampden and featured 16mm prints of vintage Natty Boh commercials (courtesy of Sam Fitzsimmons) - not to mention some Natty Boh DVD rarities from Atomic TV and the excellent documentary Mr. Boh's Brewery by Alex Castro, Harry Connelly and Lyle Hein - as well as live music about Natty Boh (and other quality-of-life essentials in the Land of Pleasant Living) by The Motor Morons, TT Tucker, The Beatoes (a special reunion for the former Baltimore eccentrics whose leader Chris Dennstaedt now resides up I-95 in Philadelphia), Mongolodian Glow, and some related songs by guest artists (at least I suppose so - I wasn't able to hang around for the full night's festivities because my girlfriend Amy had to get up at 5 in the morning for work!).

Although many troubadours took the stage on this night, I didn't hear anybody sing my favorite vintage jingle, the one once belted out in a Boh ad by a cartoon Lord Baltimore: “National Beer, National Beer, you’ll like the taste of National beer.” Though most people associate National Bohemian with the one-eyed Mr. Boh, there was a whole cast of characters in the Land of Pleasant Living and they were all given a shout-out in this song: “There’s Chincoteague oysters and crabs and clams, and fried chicken and Virginia hams, and while we’re singing, we’re proud to say, it’s brewed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.”

Likewise there was quite a cast of local characters on hand for the evening's festivities because in the Land of Pleasant Living and National Beer, "good things happen when you put the two together." I spotted Skizz Cyzyk, Bob Wagner, Teresa Dugan, Liz Abeth, John Ellsberry and even Ellsberry's erstwhile Dork Brothers (and former City Paper and New York Press art director) pal Michael Gentile, who was back in town from NYC for the occasion.

DORK BROS: John Ellsberry and Michael Gentile

But before the films came the tunes...

Down the Beatoe Path: Chris D. Returns to Charm City

The Beatoes open their tab at the Natty Boh Film Festival

First up were The Beatoes, featuring Chris Dennstaedt (Poverty & Spit) on guitar and vocals...

Chris Dennstaedt

...Charleigh Chadwick (The Livers, Pornflakes) on guitar...

Charleigh sez: "Love my Good 'n' Plenty!"

...Chris "Batworth" Ciattei (Go Pills, etc.) on drums and Mike Kiker (of Philly's St. James and the Apostles) on bass.

I really liked Chris D.'s t-shirt that said "Big Man Music," a reference to his dearly departed friend (and former Beatoe) Mark Harp (Mark "Harpo" Linthicum); my girlfriend Amy Linthicum (Mark Harp's former wife) certainly got a "big" kick out of it as well!

Big Man musician Chris and little music lover Amy

It was the first of two shout-outs this night to The King of Peru (who passed away before his time in 2004), as Sam Fitzsimmons ended his Motor Morons set by crying out his name and holding up Mark's guitar. It made sense on this night of remembrance of good things past, for Harp was every bit a part of Baltimore lore and legend as Mr. Boh (whose namesake libation is now brewed out of town by Pabst).

The Beatoes opened with "Beer Drinkin' Woman," an obvious homage to Mrs. Boh, aka "Natalie Boh" (doh! - if only Amy had remembered to wear her Natalie Boh t-shirt this night!).

Mrs. Boh: Beer Drinkin' Woman

Watch the Beatoes play "Beer Drinkin' Woman."

Next up was "Polyester" and "12-Bar Blooze" and probably some other tunes I should know (but the sound mix at Fraziers was a little, how should I say, funky?).

Watch the Beatoes play "Polyester" and "12-Bar Blooze."

Anyway, following are some Beatoes pix I took before running to the back bar for a Boh (oddly priced at $2.20 a can - obviously feeling the effect of the new city beverage tax hike). Oh, I also made a quick stop in the Men's Room, where I had to agree with this thought-provoking graffiti:

OK, back to the Beatoes...

"Hey Charleigh, how do ya hold this stringy thing???"

"Like this???"

"How about like this???"

"I see...ya lift it upright like this!" Chris D. says as a disgusted Charleigh Chadwick turns his back on him

"I see - you sling this thing over your hips!"

"Got it! Under control now! Ready to rock!"

"I'm so happy to be here, I'm glowing!" Chris effuses.

"Is it just me, or did someone turn on the infra-red light? We really must be cooking tonight!"

On with the Boh Show

And now for a word from our sponsors...

After the Beatoes finished their set and broke down their gear, a big screen was set up and the film screening started. Although there were some technical difficulties with the 16mm films that came from Motor Morons bassist Sam Fitzsimmons' private collection (the projectors were provided by Hampden's own audio-visual specialists, the Falkenhan's Audio Visual Service over on 34th and Chestnut Avenue), everyone enjoyed the vintage National Bohemian commercials that were screened.

The Fraziers crowd is mesmerized by the Natty Boh films

"Hey, we're turning black and white like these Natty Boh ads!" Skizz observes, while Amy quips "In that case, I hope Liz and I turn into animated dancing clam shells - though I'd be tempted to eat myself!"

As a backup, someone called former Senator Theatre owner (and current candidate for Baltimore City Council President) Tom Kiefaber to give a hand with the the screening, and Tom brought along a DVD of ads taken from the Atomic TV public access television show's "Atomic Cocktail Hours" episode as well as from the Mr. Boh's Brewery documentary - some of which I had never seen (like the French chef cartoon with Frenchy serving Mr Boh the "wet, cold and delicious" brew from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, a Preakness Stakes Boh ad, and the dancing clamshells of Maryland's capital, "Clamapolis"!).

I hope the Natty Boh documentary becomes available soon on DVD, because it promises to be chock-full of "extra feature" goodies like these vintage ads (the film transfers look beautiful!). Until then, this Atomic TV sampler will have to suffice:

Watch ATV's "Classic Natty Boh TV Commercials."

The Motor Morons

Next up were The Motor Morons - Jeff Bridges lookalike Sam Fitzsimmons on bass and vocals, "Wild Bill" Hagy lookalike Craig Stitchcombe (Judie's Fixation) on the skins, TT Tucker (Tom DiVenti, whose Baltimoronic pedigree goes back to late '70s punk rockers Da Moronics) on the guitar, Fred Collins on machines and vocals, Blade on vox and firestarter device (?) - who took to the stage in pitch darkness, all the better for the sparks to (literally) fly during their incendiary metallic K.O. set! Though the Morons have played just about every venue in Charm City over their long existence, I've most associated them with the annual SoWeBo Festival, where they've been absent the last several years; so it was good to see them back in a setting where their genius was once again fully appreciated.

Motor Morons make merry metallic music mayhem!

The Morons opened with "Another Girl."

Watch Motor Morons play "All You Want Is Another Girl."

I'm not as adept as Amy when it comes to discerning which Motor Moron song is which, but I'm pretty sure I heard "Urinal Cakes" and "No Brakes" in there, and probably "Big Truck."

Watch Motor Morons make more music mayhem.

Following are some Motor Moron pix I took.

Unfortunately, the Morons set was the last tune-age we would hear for the evening, as Amy had to get up early the next morning. But I'm glad Amy was there to hear Sam Fitzsimmons bid adieu to former Motor Moron Mark Harp (circa 1998-2004), holding up Harpo's 4-string guitar as he shouted "Mark Harp!"

Watch Motor Morons say goodnight @ Fraziers.

On the way out, we ran into Amy's friend Robyn Webb, who was playing pool in the adjacent room. We exchanged chit-chat about spotted dick and mushy pees - er, peas - since we all love British pub food (though Amy and I didn't discover spotted dick until we "spotted" it next to a packet of Asian "Cock Soup" in the Dundalk Giant's International food isle).

A blurry Robyn Webb and Amy Linthicum say goodnight as my camera battery runs out

What a fun night! But I have a question for the folks at Fraziers: since former milltown Hampden is becoming increasingly upscale and well-heeled, can we expect a National Premium Film Festival anytime soon? It was the "classy" beer of choice in this town for many years. Expensive? Yes. Extravagant? No.

Related Links:
Natty Boh Film Festival set on Flickr
Natty Boh Documentary
"Boh & Utz: A Love Story" (Smythe ad)
Atomic TV's "Classic Natty Boh Commercials"

Hot Brazilian Wax (*****)

2011-07-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

CSS: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Bitch

CSS
Cansei de ser Sexy
(Sub Pop, 2006)

CSS are:
Lovefoxxx: vocals
Luisa da Silva e Sá: guitar, drums
Adriano Ferreira Cintra: drums, guitar, bass, keyboards
Ana Rezende: guitar
Carolina Parra: guitar, drums
Iracema Trevisan: bass (left CSS in April 2008)
also: Maria Helena Zerba (keyboards on "Art Bitch"), Clara Ribiero (vocals)

Thanks go to my co-worker Holly for inadvertently turning me on to this band. We've been doing inventory at the library where we work, weeding out CDs with low circulation, so in the course of checking our stock, Holly handed me this disc. Who or what is CSS, we wondered? The cover was non-descript and the song titles, while sometimes vulgar ("Art Bitch," "Fuckoff Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show") gave no indication as to what type of music it was other than the generic "popular." So I checked it out and am glad I did, because I now love this band and have added this CD to my car's permanent play rotation!

"WE are CSS! Any questions?"

Turns out CSS is a Brazilian electro-rock band (one with an obvious debt to Daft Punk) from Sao Paolo whose initials do not stand for Cascading Style Sheets but, rather, "Cansei de ser Sexy" (literally "tired of being sexy" in Portuguese - reportedly inspired by a Beyonce interview in which she lamented the rigors of always having to be sexy). And the liner note photos of the band more than live up to the hype, as five out of six members are young, attractive "Girl from Ipanema" types. So yes, they are sexy in a Brazilian bikini wax way, but the CSS wax job truly burns - owww-ooooch! - with rock 'n' roll fervor. That's no doubt why Cansei de Ser Sexy won the 2007 PLUG Independent Music Award for Best Punk Album.

CSS go for the burn

There's also a dude in the band, Adriano Cintra, who I'm sure (being Brazilian) is also probably sexy, but doesn't do it for me like the ladies. But Cintro, a multi-instrumentalist/producer, is far from being CSS's token male member - he's actually the group's founder and chief songwriter.

The girls - and boy - of CSS

Though born in Brazil, lead singer Lovefoxxx (Luísa Hanae Matsushita) looks Asian and is of German, Portuguese and Japanese descent (as my girlfriend Amy is always reminding me, Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan, with roughly 1.5 million nipo-brasileiros).

Lovefoxxx performs at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 2011
(photo by Charlie Gallay/Getty Images North America)

She's a definite extrovert and apparently likes to body surf, as her performance at the recent Coachella Festival in Indo, California more than bears out, and she reminds me of Bjork in terms of vocal style and outlandish fashion sense (plus she seems more than a little crazy!).

Lovefoxxx surfs the crowd at Coachello Festival in Indio, CA
(photo by Charlie Gallay/Getty Images North America)

She's also very flexible (must do yoga?).

Lovefoxxx stretches the limits of stage performance
(photo by Charlie Gallay/Getty Images North America)

CSS: South America rocks South California at Coachella Festival
(photo by Charlie Gallay/Getty Images North America)

Guitarist Ana Rezende (shown below) is also a film director; she directed the band's "Off the Hook" video.

I think this is Ana, one of three or four CSS guitarists

CSS's sound has been called a "mishmash of '80s new wave, electronica, danceable beats, and cheeky lyrics" with "sounds like" comparisons made to Berlin, Blondie and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I also hear a sound compatible with fans of Metric, Hot Chip, Kraftwerk, Elastica and French electro-pop rockers Phoenix and Prototypes.

"We got your mishmash '80s pop right here, yo!"

Some Internet reviews allege that CSS are despised in their homeland, which is a shame - but then Brazilians can be overly critical and pretty unforgiving when it comes to national pride (just look at the "off with their heads!" reaction to their soccer team anytime they don't win the World Cup or Copa America).

"Bye-bye, Brazil: the world is calling!"

CSS got their biggest international boost when Apple featured their song "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex" (sometimes referred to, in its PG-13 version, as "Music Is My Boyfriend") in this "iPod Touch ad:

The song had been used in a promotion for the competing Zune media player a year prior (talk about Free Market pop exposure!) Due to the song's exposure in the US, it hit #63 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the highest charting single by a Brazilian band. By March 2008, the music video for the song amassed over 112 million views on YouTube, making it the most-viewed video on the site at the time.

And yet, they didn't appear on the radar of this aging analog anachronist until routine CD weeding duty one day at the library (needless to say we didn't get rid of CSS!). And, unforgivably, I missed them when they played in my own Baltimore backyard: yes, CSS played the August 5, 2007 Virgin Festival at Pimlico Race Course (where they played five songs, including a cover of L7's "Pretend We're Dead")!

CSS pop Charm City's cherry at Virgin Festival 2007

And even more unforgivably, I missed them when they played here at Ram's Head Live this past May, where my friend Karen Wall got her picture taken with the gals!

CSS pose with Karen Wall after their Ram's Head Live show

Several songs by CSS have been featured in mainstream media: "Meeting Paris Hilton" was featured in the Latin American broadcast of The Simple Life, "Superafim" was used in the Brazilian version of the Big Brother reality show, and "Computer Heat" was used in the South American version of the game The Sims 2: Nightlife, including a version in Simlish. Their songs "Alala" and "Off The Hook" have also been featured in, respectively, the video game Forza Motorsport 2 and FIFA 08.

OK, here the track-by-track breakdown of the album with videos to watch/listen so that you too may discover the joys of CSS. They may be tired of being sexy, but that's the only thing that puckers them out, as they clearly have Red Bull energy for rock and roll.

1. "CSS Suxxx"

The title song of the 2005 CSS Suxxx EP

The CSS anthem (as well as the the name of their debut 2005 EP) consists of "CSS suxxx" being repeated 80 times, with a coda of "Quem te convidou? Quem te convidou?" - in English, roughly "Who asked you?" I think this is CSS's riposte to their detractors and it reminds me of my favorite Dutch group Gruppo Sportivo's song "Blah Blah Magazines" wherein they lament critics calling them a derivative cross between Abba and Blondie and whoever: "Yes it's true we steal every tralala we hear/Yes you're right we're like The Monkees: we've got no ideas of our own."

Watch CSS play "CSS Suxxx" for the first time on their last concert in Brazil before a 2006 world tour.

2. "Patins"

Lovefoxx penned the Elastica-ish "Patins" to describe her previous (sexy) relationship with CSS band leader Adriano Cintra. Patins is Portuguese for "roller skates." I guess she's saying, roll with it, like Oasis once sang. Or maybe it's a Brazilian take on the Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster."

Watch/listen to "Patins."

Watch CSS play "Patins" live at Paredes de Coura 2007.

3. "Alala"

CSS "Alala" CD single (UK, 2006)

Sequenced right on the heels of "Patins" is yet another rollicking rocker that makes you wanna hit the dance floor with your roller skates on. Lyrically this popular CSS song and video is the equivalent of The Waitresses's teaser "I Know What Boys Like" ("You want but you can't have it"). The MeuKu reference is to the side DJ project of guitarists Ana Rezende and Luiza Sá.

Ah la la, Ah la la
Gimme Three wishes
I wanna be that
Dirtyfinger and his six bitches

Ah la la, Ah la la
Gimme
More too
I wanna be in that crazy band or Meuku

Ah la la, Ah la la
Would you be kind
Gimme one little more
And I'll be superfine

Ah la la, Ah la la
You're so cool
Can I be your friend?
I'lldrive you till the end
Cuz you know but you don't wanna
Cuz you want but you can't have it
Cuz you know but you don't wanna
Cuz you want but you can't have it

Ah la la, Ah la la
I'm so
Worried
I bought that posh clothing
But it still looks ugly

Ah la la, Ah la la
Am I stupid?
I'm doing the talking
But I don't get nothing

Ah la la, Ah la la
Alguém me avisa
Quando é bom parar
Defazer a íntima

Ah la la, Ah la la
You're so cool
Can I be your friend?
I'll drive you till the end

Cuz you know but you don't wanna
Cuz you want but you can't have it
Cuz you know but you don't wanna
Cuz you want but you can't have it

Watch CSS's "Alala" music video.

In his blog post "Cansei De Ser Sexy and Joss Whedon's Firefly," Joseph Kugelmass writes:

The song, “Alala,” like the rest of the songs on their debut album, is a mixture of things that have nothing in common except their relationship to hipsterism, as adjudicated by white males. So, we have a pulsing “electroclash” beat, produced and programmed to sound either trashy or lackluster, depending on your point of view. We have a female lead singer who’s from Brazil, looks like an Asian doll, and sings through a vocoder with something resembling a German accent. It’s the grocery list approach: we’re reminded of the torrid, passionate tropics; of the fascination of the Asian woman; finally, of how we’ve been meaning to listen to more Kraftwerk. She appears to be saying things about glamour, by using words like “dirty” and “superfine” and “cool.” The other songs name check, among other things, the indie band Death From Above 1979, and Paris Hilton, who CSS don’t like. Isn’t that amazing? They’re just like you and me!

To which I say to Joe Kugelmass: Get over it bud. Chill out and have some fun - it's only rock 'n' roll! Or, in CSS-speak, is fuckoff the only thing you have to show?

4. "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above"

CSS "Love and Death" single (Sub Pop, 2004)

CSS "Love and Death" single (Sire, 2007)

I initially thought this song title was an inspired existential blast of poetic brilliance about la morte petite, but now I hear "Death from Above" isn't a reference to orgasm or ontological angst, but to a Canadian dance-noise-punk band I've never heard of, Death from Above 1979.

Death from Above 1979: Toronto's trunk-ated twosome

That's OK; I still like it a lot. In fact, the iPod Touch exposure may have broke CSS in the States, but this is the signature song they can hang their hat on. Way cool, way stylish, this is the song I'd play to introduce peeps to the band.

Watch CSS play "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above."

Watch CSS play "Let's Make Love" on Live Jools Holland 2007.

5. "Art Bitch"

The song that begs the question: How does CSS really feel about artists? Is their response too subtle? (Um, I think not!)

Watch CSS play "Art Bitch" live at Paredes de Coura.

Listen to a non-LP version of "Art Bitch."

Lines like "Lick, lick, lick my art tit" and "Suck, suck, suck my art hole" tend to jump out at you. Is it too much to hope they'll someday sing this ditty outside MICA at a future Artscape festival? Just in case anybody's writing their thesis on this topic, here are the complete lyrics to "Art Bitch":

My art is called egocentric soft porno
Or maybe it's just narcisism
My one and only subject
Goes from something like anything but
Me ism

Wouldn't it be easier for Beardsley
He could drop the paintings
And photograph his penis
Or take pics of the chicks
Yeah, you know what I mean
Wouldn't it be easier for Escher
He could drop the match
And make it happen on his mattress
2 girls and a cam
3 girls and a cam
Put a dog there and you got polaroid scam

I ain't no art-ist
I am an art-bitch
I sell my panties to the men I eat
I have no port-fo-lii-o
Cuz I only show
Where there's free al-co-hol

I am so hardcore
I sell my crap and people ask for more
Call me re-vo-lu-tionaire
I poo on a plate and get it published on visionaire
What I do, it's called art-shit
And don't you dare make fun of me
Cuz everything I do was featured on the pages of I'd

I ain't no art-ist
I am an art-bitch
I sell my panties to the men I eat
I have no port-fo-lii-o
Cuz I only show
Where there's free al-co-hol

I ain't no art-ist
I am an art-bitch
I sell my paintings to the men I eat
I have no port-fo-lii-o
Cuz I only show
Where there's free al-co-hol

Lick lick lick my art-tit
Lick lick lick my art-tit
Suck suck suck my art-hole
Suck suck suck my art-hole

I ain't no art-ist
I am an art-bitch
I sell my panties to the men I eat
I have no port-fo-lee-o
Cuz I only show
Where there's free al-co-hol

6. "Fuckoff Is Not the Only Thing You Have to Show"

Show me what ya got!

"You wake up, you don't wanna live today/you make up, you wanna look good today/you break up, you feel like crashing down/you go to work, you wanna skip this round...you feel like you wanna change your life today/you feel bad cuz you didn't make it yesterday/you fall back...fuck off is not the only thing you have to show, I know, I know"

Some days you just shoulda stayed in bed.

Watch CSS play "Fuckoff" live at NME.Com.

7. "Meeting Paris Hilton"

The Bitch said yeah!

"I went to the Bitch, the Bitch was hot/She came to me and said, 'Do you like the Bitch, bitch? I said back, 'I wanna take you home Bitch, cuz I wanna treat you good, Bitch/The Bitch said yeah, the Bitch said yeah..."

"Are we still listening to 'Art Bitch'?" Amy asked upon hearing this song for the first time. When I told her it was the Paris Hilton song, in which the salacious scion of the Hilton hotel empire is referred to only as "bitch," she replied, "Boy, they sure like to say 'bitch' a lot! I though they were still talking about the 'Art Bitch'!" Astute observation theres, Ames, as Lovefoxxx utters the B-word more times than De Niro drops the F-bomb in Raging Bull. And that's really saying something!

Watch CSS play "Meeting Paris Hilton" live in Sao Paolo.

8. "Off the Hook"

CSS "Off the Hook" single (Sire, 2006)

Not to be confused with the Rolling Stones song of the same name, though it covers the same subject matter in a way. Funny how today this expression means somebody or something is beyond compare, while in pre-cell phone days of yore, it was a term of irritation. Mick got all pissy when he called his baby on the telephone, but "All I got was an engaged tone." His girl either didn't pay her bills or was yapping away incessantly to someone else - either way she cut herself off from the world. Likewise, Lovefoxxx laments the cut-off aloofness of people standing so still "people gonna think we're statues," and being alone in a crowd. "The silence is disturbin' me. People talk talk but I can't hear. I'm off the hook."

Mick's a Stone alone, can't get no ringtone

Watch CSS play "Off the Hook."

The "Off the Hook" video above was directed by guitar player Ana Rezende and filmed at the home of band members Carolina Parra and Adriano Cintra, where CSS recorded most of their songs for this album.

9. "Alcohol"

CSS say "Saude!"

"Is this a dream? No! Am a mouse? Am I an elephant? And I had just sliced your tongue. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee. Do you wanna drink some alcohol?"

CSS "Alcohol" promo single (Sub Pop, 2007)

Ah, the thought-provoking artist's muse, Alcohol. Something CSS are no doubt familiar with in the land of Carnival and caipirinhas (Lovefoxxx admitted she used to hit the stage piss-drunk in the early days until she started watching sloppy live video playbacks on YouTube!). This one bops along with a Zydeco-friendly party-hardy beat. Good times, indeed. Apparently, CSS had a music video contest for this song, because I found a whole bunch of different videos in YouTube. These are some of my favorites.

Watch the animated CSS music video "Alcohol" (directed by Nicaroda).

Watch another video version of "Alcohol" with onscreen lyrics.

10. "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex."

CSS split single (Lucky Egg, 2008)

"If music be the food of love, play on," said Shakespeare. CSS get a bit more specific and spell it out in three simple letters. The song that broke them in the States and, hence, the world. 'Nuff said?

Watch the official CSS music video for "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex."

11. "This Month, Day 10"
"If someday we get to meet again in a car crash, plane wreck, terrorist attack or maybe next thursday nite/Don't bother saying hi, I'll be rude, I'll be rude, I'll rude (woo-hoo!) - but only with you, only with you"

In other words: It's over? This break-up song cuts to the chase, literally, with Lovefoxxx threatening to additionally break up her lover's face, arms, legs, and teeth. Subtlety ain't her thang. No wonder Pete Shelley lamented "don't wanna end up like no nine-day wonder" (Buzzcocks, "Love You More") - he knew the razor cuts on day 10.

Watch CSS play "This Month, Day 10."

More CSS videos:

Watch CSS play L7's "Pretend We're Dead."

Watch CSS interviewed about underwear and Brazil.

Watch CSS talk about fashion.

Watch CSS play "Move."

Watch CSS play "Left Behind."

Watch CSS play "Rat Is Dead (Rage)."

Related Links:
CSS on Flickr
CSS on last.fm
csstv Channel (YouTube)
danieldroot's CSS Channel (YouTube)

Norton Records 25th Anniversary

2011-05-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

(1986 - 2011)

Ugly Things #31

I stopped by Atomic Books this weekend to pick up the latest issue (#31) of Mike Stax's always-essential low-fi retro music mag Ugly Things (get 'em when them come out, because back issues quickly start going for $40 and up!), an issue that was especially essential to buy because it had a history of NYC's Norton Records ("Where the loud sound abounds!"), now celebrating its 25th anniversary, as well as extensive interviews with its founders, Billy Miller and Miriam Linna.

Norton Records: dedicated to Truly Ruly Music

The Ugly Things masthead motto is "wild sounds from past dimensions" and it's particularly appropos for this ish, because nobody was better at discovering, celebrating, and rekindling interest in rock music fitting that description than Norton Records and its two-headed braintrust of Billy and Miriam - who followed in the footsteps of the pioneering Lenny "Nuggets" Kaye (and, to some extent, Greg "Who Put the Bomp?" Shaw) to make their own indelible stamp on garage, roots, "primitive," and insane-in-the-membrane American rock music.

Before the advent of CDs and the Internet, there were only fanzine and vinyl outlets for like-minded folks out to discover "wild sounds from past dimensions" (Hasil Adkins, Esquerita, Jack Starr, The Phantom Cowboy, Andre Williams, Ron Haydock, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Link Wray, Bobby Fuller, etc., etc.) and before Amazon.com and other delivery services, seekers and purveyors of said sounds had to gas up their cars and schlept their way across the country to parts unknown in search of audio booty.

Thankfully, Billy Miller (a kid from Queens, who grew up on Long Island) and Miriam Linna (a Canadian of 2nd-gen Finnish emigre stock from the nickel mining town of Sudbury who moved at age 11 to Ohio) met in the hipster melting pot of New York City and soon started filling the "wild sounds" and "truly ruly" cultural void in all the multi-media means available to them at the time: bands (Miriam was the original drummer in The Cramps and Nervus Rex, and Billy and Miriam both played in The Zantees and The A-Bones), 'zines (Miriam's Bad Seed and Smut Peddler; Billy and Miriam's Kicks), and finally...Norton Records!

I love Norton Records! Back in the day, just getting and flipping through their catalog was like discovering the Ark of the Covenant or sipping from the Holy Grail. It opened up a whole new world, much like RE/Search Books' similarly minded Incredibly Strange Music. They even put their phone number on the back page and in those pre-Internet days, you could call up and talk not to some clerk, but Miriam Linna herself! How cool is that?

As UT's Mike Stax writes, "Norton doesn't operate like most record labels. Run by fans for fans, it's the ultimate FAN label, a direct outgrowth of the rock fanzine culture of the '70s and '80s, and more specifically Kicks magazine, which Miller and Linna published from 1979-92. Back in its day, Kicks pretty much ruled the roost for music fanzines. Nothing else out there even came close."

What he said!

Billy and Miriam didn't just write about their heroes - people like Hasil Adkins and Esquerita - they befriended them and promoted them.

Hasil Adkin's Out To Hunch was the first "Norton Records" release in 1986. (The label was named after Art Carney's lovable character from The Honeymooners television show; originally, the label was named Kramden Records after called the Honeymooners Ralph Kramden.)

The Haze craze started here

And Esquerita got the all-star treatment (and a whole new legion of fans) in the legendary third issue of Kicks magazine - not to mention countless Norton Record releases and reissues.

After reading this ish, I started pulling out my Norton Records collection, which now includes CDs like the never-equalled audio brilliance of John Felice's The Real Kids (originally released on Marty Thau's Red Star label, where Miriam used to work). Next up, all those vinyl singles and long-players I bought back in the '90s...

'Nuff said! Mow scurry over to Atomic Books or get online and get this ish!

And be sure to check out Miriam Linna's "pre-Kicks boondockery" blog about living in 1970s NYC over at kickville66.blogspot.com. It's quite a good read and has lotsa great pix and video clips!

Related Links:
Ugly Things (www.ugly-things.com)
Norton Records (www.nortonrecords.com)
Nortonville (Norton Records news blog)
Norton Records on MySpace
Kicksville66 blog (Miriam's pre-Kicks blog))
Miriam Linna Zines (Accelerated Decrepitude)

Simon Reynolds' "Rip It Up" CD

2011-05-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
Compiled by Simon Reynolds, cover by Lotta Kulhorn
(V2, 2006)

I just got this import compilation and am loving it! It's a tie-in with the popular book of the same title by British music journalist Simon Reynolds, who hand-picked all 20 tracks on offer here. Like the 2007 Soul Jazz compilation D.I.Y: The Rise of the Independent Music Industry After Punk, it serves as an ideal primer to the era and the genre that Reynolds has definitively and exhaustively championed as the start of a real revolution in musical innovation.

All the usual suspects (The Fall, The Slits, Scritti Politti, Siouxie & The Banshees, and the "Sheffield Sound" contingent of Human League, Heaven 17 and Cabaret Voltaire) are here, as well as a few obscurities that had me stumped (Pulsallama? Fatal Microbes?). But I was most elated by the inclusion of the ultra-rare "Sluggin' fer Jesus," by Cabaret Voltaire from the Belgian-only release Eight Crepuscule Tracks (Interior Music, 1987) that utilized "found audio" sampling of infamous televangelist nutjob Dr. Gene Scott (the subject of Werner Herzog's 1980 German TV documentary God's Angry Man), who was always raising money to stay on the air for the sole purpose of raising money to stay on the air.

Dr. Gene Scott: "Nothing under $100: I don't want gifts tonight, I want sacrifice!

Herein is are Simon's postpunk Top Twenty, a setlist which begins and ends - or, rather, rips it up and starts again - with music by The Fall and The Fallen: from the Fall's 1982 single "Fiery Jack" to "Dumb Magician" by the Blue Orchids - the band Martin Bramah and Una Baines formed after falling out with The Fall in 1979.

1. The Fall - "Fiery Jack" (1982)

Erstwhile dock worker and full-time frontman Mark E. Smith called The Fall's music "Northern white crap that talks back," which I suppose was his way of describing their surly, working-class Mancunian mettle. In Rip It Up, Reynolds writes:

"'Fiery Jack,' the Fall's fourth single, offered a vivid portrait of one of Manchester's finest sons, the hard-bitten and indominable product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart who's spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible, a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might be another of Jack's poison's, judging by his refusal to go 'back to the slow life' and lines such as 'Too fast to write/I just burn, burn, burn.' Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was 'the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years,' he told Sounds. 'These old guys have more guts than these kids will ever have.' Jack was the lad who grew old, battered by hard work and harder pleasure, but who never gave up and never gave in."

Watch The Fall play "Fiery Jack."

See also: www.visi.com/fall (fan site)

2. Devo - "Praying Hands" (1978)

"The left hand's diddling, while the right hand goes to war!"

From 1978's Eno-produced debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Reynolds observes: "The album's most physically galvanizing song, 'Praying Hands,' was a stab at imagining a Christian fundamentalist dance craze." He quotes Mark Mothersbaugh explaining "Two of the biggest televangelists, Rex Humbard and the Reverend Ernest Angley, broadcast out of Akron. We saw how disgusting and evil these people were, and so we took delight in turning their cosmology upside down."

The Importance of Being Ernest, Televangelist style

Watch Devo play "Praying Hands" (Live, 1978).

See also: www.clubdevo.com (official band site)

3. Pusallama - "The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body" (1982)

Pusallama: the sound of 12 girls fighting over a cowbell

My favorite track is this obscurity, which alone makes this compilation an essential purchase! A minor cult and college radio hit, "Devil" is a song about a woman whose husband inexplicably starts barking and cursing and who seeks help from the witch who lives next door (the witch thinks he's possessed and recommends an exorcist), only to discover her hubby suffers from Tourette's Syndrome - and it's not covered by their insurance!

Pulsallama was a short-lived (yet apparently legendary) 12 piece all-girl percussion band who ruled Manhattan nightlife for a brief period between 1980-1982 and whose ranks included aspiring actress Ann Magnuson (pre-Bongwater), DJ Jean Caffeine and performance artist Wendy Wild. It grew out of the ashes of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side, a mock social club that Magnuson created during the zeitgeist of the early '80s Downtown NYC scene. Their sound has been described as "12 girls fighting over a cowbell." They released a handful of 12” singles on London's Y Records label and played regularly at Danceteria and Club 57, a church basement frequented by such Downtown scenesters as John Sex and Keith Haring. Jean Caffeine recalls, "Pulsallama was beloved for their rhythmic cacophony, theatrical stage antics, props and costumes, and their primal, yet glamourous absurdity. They had lots of fun, got their picture in Interview magazine and had 15 minutes of fame."

The blog lastdaysofmanonearth adds:

There were no guitars in Pulsallama. It was all bass, drums and vocals. On their scant recordings, the band added sound effects and other elements but at the core the sound was very tribal. Although the band was culturally a part of the Downtown NY scene, in retrospect their sound is more in synch with what was going on in the UK at the time with bands like Pigbag and Rip, Rig and Panic. Probably the biggest influence they had was inspiring Bananarama to form and even adopt a similar name while touring the UK.

From Bleeding Panda Blog: "In early 1982 they were asked by Elliot Sharpe to contribute a song for a flexidisc to be distributed in a magazine. Since it was a freebie, they decided to give him their most retarded song, 'May.' With portable tape recorder in hand, he came to their rehearsal studio to record May for posterity, but as soon as he arrived, the gals started brawling. The fighting became so intense it disturbed the derelicts outside, who began screaming and pounding on the door. The band snapped out of it and settled down to do the song. During the song, the drunks started banging and screaming again, or so it sounds. It's hard to tell; it might just be Pulsallama.

A couple days later they were off to Asbury Park to open for the Clash, where an adoring audience of 6000 showered them with coins and cups of beer."

Listen to Pulsallama play "The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body."

I have no idea who the dork in the above video is, but to see the official band video shot by Paul Daugherty, go to Jean Cafeeine's MySpace page (it requires you to sign in or create a MySpace account...such a bother!: http://www.myspace.com/jeancaffeine/videos/video/28379576

See also: www.facebook.com/pages/Pulsallama (Facebook page) and www.myspace.com/pulsallama (MySpace page)

4. Cabaret Voltaire - "Sluggin' fer Jesus Pt 1" (1987)

"Sluggin' fer Jesus" is one of eight crepuscule tracks by the Cabbies

The multimedia-loving Cabs - Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Wtaosn - already devotees of William Burroughs' cut-up text sampling technique and J.G. Ballard's dystopian future landscape imagery, led where Brian Eno and David Byrne would later follow on their avant-sampling release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. As Reynolds observed, "Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial-music cliche, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and and TV." Others towing the "found audio"-sampling line would later include Meat Beat Manifesto, The Shamen, Ministry, and so on and so on up until today's full-on Girl Talk samplemania...but it all started back here, folks (though not released until after My Life in the Bush of Ghosts came out, the Cabs had sampled televangelist Dr. Gene Scott during their 1979 American tour)!

Like the Beatles excitedly discovering American radio on their first visit, the Cabs were fascinated by American media, especially the Idiot Box. As Reynolds wrote:

"Visiting the United States for the first time in November 1979, they caught wind of the impending shift to the Right with Reagan and the born-again Christian movement, which inspired their second album, The Voice of America. 'We were fascinated by America, but aware of its darker side. A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven P.M. and there were only three channels. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted the money was to stay on the air.'"

Watch the Cabs play "Sluggin' for Jesus."

Watch Gene "God's Angry Man" Scott winding up his FCC Monkey Band.

See also: www.brainwashed.com/cv (unofficial fansite) and www.artdesigncafe.com (Stephen Malinder site)

5. Josef K - "Sense of Guilt" (1987)

Josef K were an Edinburgh band on the otherwise Glasgow-based Postcard Records label ("The Sound of Young Scotland!"), though one that didn't make it as big as their roster mates Orange Juice or Aztec Camera. Josef K was actually discovered by Orange Juice's Steven Daly, who convinced guitarist Malcolm Ross to change his band's name from TV Art to that of the protagonist in Franz Kafka's The Trial. And, like Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, Josef K were considered (in Mark E. Smith's term) "New Puritans" - which was kind of like the "straight-edge hardcore" of its time. They frowned on drugs, drinking, and laddishness (though speed was OK, as it had Mod street cred!).

I had never heard of them before reading Rip It Up, and had never heard anything by them until this, but must admit I like "Sense of Guilt." One Internet fan listed Josef K as yet another example of a great Scots band who (like early Orange Juice, The Fire Engines, and The Monochrome Set) set the template for Franz Ferdinand.

Josef K. actually formed a sort of alliance with Orange Juice, with the bands supporting each other on tours and sharing a similarity in sound and mission.

"Like Orange Juice, Josef K had a a clean image (sharp, monochrome syuits from thrift stores) and a clean sound. Both groups shared a penchant for the cerebral side of American punk, groups such as Television, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, the Voidoids...Inspired by Talking Heads 77 and the brittle clangor of Subway Sect, Josef K tried to get their guitars to sound as 'toppy' as they could. Says [guitarist Malcolm] Ross, 'It was just a matter of avoiding distortion and turning the treble up full. We liked playing rally fast rhythms, and you needed a really sharp sound for those to work. Using distortion meant you'd lose the effect.' Coiled and keen, barbed and wired, Ross's and Haig's guitars caromed off the fastfunk groove churned up by bassist davy Weddell and drummer Ronnie Torrance. 'In the very early days, it was just me playing guitar with Ronnie drumming up in his attic,' says [singer Paul] Haig. 'Ronnie'd always follow my rhythm guitar and we carried that on into josef K. He'd never listen to the bass, like drummers are supposed to.' The resulting 'strange chemistry' between Torrance's all-out exuberance and the abrasive flurry of the guitars gave Josef K their frenetic momentum."

"Sense of Guilt" appears on Josef K's Young and Stupid (1987) album, as well as the Entomology compilation.

Watch Josef K play "Sense of Guilt."

See also: www.josefk.net (unofficial site)

6. Scritti Politti - "P.A.s" (1979)

Words Fail Me: the "pre-language release" 4 A SIDES

Frontman Green Gartside was obsessed with language, especially on this track from the 4-track 4 A Sides 12" EP (Rough Trade, 1979). One of Green's "theory gods" was German philospher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued that all of humanity's problems "stem from our bewitchment by language." We see this today with words that obfuscate (like obfuscate!) and lessen the impact of their real meaning, such as "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture), "terminate with extreme prejudice" (kill), "collateral damage" (innocent civilians killed in military operations) - even in color-free code words like "urban" and "under-serviced communities" (African American) and "ethnically diverse" (non-White). In Rip It Up, Reynolds writes: "Green sings about 1920 in Italy and 1933 in Germany as moments when 'the language shuts down.' In his most honeyed, airy tones, he ponders the mystery of popular for totalitarian: 'How did they decide?/What was irrational/Is national!' Then he imagines mass unemployment making the same thing happen in eighties Britain."

Of course, the Nazis were masters of misused language. Even "The Final Solution" was a tip-toe around the word "genocide," while "work camps" ("Work will set you free!") were basically "death camps" by another name.

See also: bibbly-o-tek.com (the Scritti Politti source) and The Scritti Politti Workshop.

7. The Slits - "Spend, Spend, Spend" (1979)

The Slits: all told, an impressive body of work

I want to buy (Have you been affected?)
I need consoling(You could be addicted)
I need something new, something trivial would do
I want to satisfy this empty feeling

This empty feeling

Reynolds describes this anti-consumerism ditty from the album Cut as "doleful skank" with "sidling bass and brittle-nerved percussion perfectly complementing the lyric's sketch of a shopaholic vainly trying to satisfy this empty feeling' with impulse purchases." I love how the very next track is "Shoplifting," wherein the shopping impulse gets hep to the five-finger discount!

Watch the Slits play "Spend Spend Spend" on German TV.

See also: www.myspace.com/theslits (MySpace)

8. Fatal Microbes - "Violence Grows" (1979)

Honey Bane: vocals
Pete Fender: guitar
Scotty Boy Barker: bass
Gem Stone: drums

John Peel broke this dub-friendly band whose average age was 13, making "Violence Grows" part of his 1979 radio setlist. Reynolds classified them as belonging to the "messthetics" aesthetic, along with other London vanguard bands on the Rough Trade label such as Scritti Politti and The Raincoats. In Rip It Up, Reynolds writes:

"Another late-night hit in 1979 was Fatal Microbes' 'Violence Grows,' on which the baleful tones of fifteen-year-old punk Honey Bane survey London's frayed social fabric during what proved to be a banner year for street violence. Noting how bus conductors had learned to keep their mouths shut when thugs refused to pay, Bane taunts the listener, 'While you're getting kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway/Don't think passersby will help, they'll just look the other way.' Slowdrone guitar midway between the Doors' 'The End' and the Velvet Underground's 'Venus in Furs' swirls ominously behind her."

Fatal Microbes

Their first record was one side of a 1978 Small Wonder 12" split with the Poison Girls, sharing two songs apiece. It received a fair bit of airplay on the John Peel Show at the time and as a result was re-released as an EP with a third song, "Cry Baby" in 1979 on the same label.

A Taste of Honey Bane

Photogenic singer-babe Honey Bane carried on solo and by 1981 broke in the UK Singles Top 40 with "Turn Me ON Turn Me OFF," which she performed on Top of the Pops.

Topless of the Popless

According to the blog Siblingshot on the Bleachers, Bane went on to join anarcho-punks Crass (recording under the name Donna and the Kebabs), "who made much of her questionable teenage 'street chick' pedigree. When that failed to light up the charts, she did a few topless shots à la Wendy O Williams of the Plasmatics and hooked up with veteran wideboy of Sham 69 'fame,' Jimmy Pursey. It was all down hill from then on."

Watch "Violence Grows."

See also: www.myspace.com/honeybaneband (Honey Bane's MySpace page)

9. Robert Wyatt - "Grass" (1981)

Robert Wyatt? What seems to be an unusual inclusion in any "postpunk" anthology is justified by Reynolds due to the influence that long-haired "prog-rock" bands like Soft Machine (for whom Wyatt drummed), King Crimson, Can, and other experimental bands had on many postpunk icons, like John Lydon, Green, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and the like.

This tabla-tapping tune has a Near Eastern/Indian feel to it that would not be out of place on a George Harrison album, and it's no wonder: the band on this Rough Trade split single is the Bengali ensemble Disharhi (Abdus Salique, Esmail Shek and Kadir Durvesh), who perform their own song "Trade Union" on the flip (it also appears on Wyatt's Nothing Can Stop Us album). ("Trade Union," by the way, is a call to Bengali workers in England to unite under the Trade Union banner, a cause that surely appealed to left-leaning socialist Wyatt. According to the buggers.com blog, "Songwriter Abdus Salique had to leave East Pakistan in 1970 because of left-wing political actitvities, but continued his work in East London, where he became the spokesman for the Bengali community At the moment Abdus Salique is Labour Councillor for Mile End East. Trade Union is a protest song following the racist attacks on the Bengali community in Brick Lane, London, in 1978. Trade Union is not a missed encounter but a successful fusion of music and politics.")

"Grass" is actually a song by Scottish poet-eccentric Ivor Cutler (a card-carrying member of both the Noise Abatement Society and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society), who often collaborated with the mellifluous voiced Wyatt.

10. Siouxie & The Banshees - "Slowdive" (1982)

The first single from the Banshees' fifth album, the Mike Hedges-produced A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, which featured post-punk legend John McGeoch (Magazine, Visage, PiL) on guitar. Of this album, Reynolds wrote: "From its bejeweled, Klimt-inspired cover imagery to its exquisite textures, 1982's Dreamhouse marked the Banshees' plunge into fin de siecle decadence. Musically, the influences were English psychedelia: Beatles, Syd Barrett, Traffic, and the Gothic-bucolic Donovan of 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' and 'Season of the Witch.'"

Banshees bass/keyboard player Steve Severin's songwriting had apparently been inspired by reading British SF novelist J.G. Ballard's [then] latest book, The Unlimited Dream Company ("where the imagery is very lush, sensual, exotic"), resulting in what Reynolds claims is the band's "most adventurous and varied" album, one he characterises as "the perfect seduction soundtrack."

Watch the Banshees play "Slowdive."

See also: www.siouxsie.com (official site) and www.thebansheesandothercreatures.co.uk.

11. The Raincoats - "Only Loved at Night" (1981)

Gina Birch: Bass
Ana Da Silva: Guitar
Vicky Aspinall: Second guitar/violin

Reynolds writes:

"'Only Love at Night' is like a gamelan music box, the different patterns interlocking the intricate cogs. On this song, as with much of Odyshape, the group swapped instrumental roles (a common postpunk ruse to keep things fresh), with Aspinall playing bass and Birch contributing drony guitar while da Silva produces wistful chimes from her kalimba, an African thumb piano. Charles Hayward's clockwork percussion on the track, added after the fact, is decorative, just one of many parallel pulses."

Charles Hayward (from the band This Heat) was one of several guest drummers (Robert Wyatt was another) who filled in for departed original drummer Palmolive (Paloma Romero, who split to join the Slits) on the Raincoats' second album Odyshape, from whence "Only Loved at Night" is taken.

Watch the Raincoats play "Only Loved at Night."

See also: www.theraincoats.net (Official band site)

12. Young Marble Giants - "Choci Loni" (1980)

YMG: Music by introverts, for introverts

This classic "John Peel Band" (a description that begat a musical genre) was a Welsh trio comprised of brothers Stuart Moxham (guitar) and Phil Moxham (bass) and Phil's girlfriend Alison Statton (vocals) that, in Reynolds words, "went in for a kind of postrock pastoralism." "Choci Loni" is taken from their debut (and only) album, Colossal Youth (1980), which became one of Rough Trade's biggest-selling records of the postpunk era.

"Young Marble Giants' music exuded a spare stillness that felt wonderfully fresh in 1980. Conceived as a revolt against punk by founder and primary songwriter Stuart Moxham, Young Marble Giants' sound was partially inspired by the soft mood music of light classical and easy listening, fairground music, and 'cheesy organ sounds' such as the Wurlitzers at the old movie palaces. Moxham developed a dry, choppy, suppressed-sounding style of rhythm guitar using an ultra-trebly Rickenbacker and a technique called 'muting' (resting his strumming hand on the strings t dampen the vibrations), which resulted in a peculiar melange of Duane Eddy's twangy tremelo riffs and Steve Cropper's crisp rhythm guitar. His brother Phil's bass - high, melodic, often mistaken for another guitar - was a beetling, scurrying presence. Moxham describes the interplay between the two instruments as 'almost like knitting,' a strikingly unmanly metaphor that beautifully captures the quiet radicalism of YMG's music. The rhythms, generated from a rudimentary drum machine, were played live on a crappy-sounding mono cassette player. Augmenting this sparse sonuc palette were occasional keyboards and subliminal wisps of weirdness produced using a ring modulator or devices cobbled together by a tech-whiz cousin of Moxham's.

But what really made Young Marble Giants special was the low-key, almost spoken singing of Alison Statton. She was Phil's girlfriend, and in truth Stuart never really wanted her to join the band. Indeed, when NME readers voted her the eight-best singer of 1980, Stuart spluttered, 'But Alison's not a singer! She's someone who sings. Alison sings as if she was at the bus stop or something. A real singer sings with more control.' Inadvertently, he captured precisely what was so perfect about Statton's undemonstrative vocals: a seductive ordinariness, a cool pallor of tone. Her image - print dresses, white tennis shoes, ankle socks - also fit the music's aura of fresh-faced provincial naivete.

Moxham recalls seeking to create a sound 'like a radio that's between stations, listening to it under the bedclothes at four A.M...these fantastic short-wave sounds and snatches of modulated sounds.' Without knowing it, a lot of people had been waiting for a sound as subdued and insidious as this."

Watch YMG play "Choci Loni".

See also: www.youngmarblegiants.com

13. The Human League - "Dancevision" (1980)

Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh actually recorded this synths-only track that appears on 1980's Holiday 80 EP (and was also included as a bonus track on the Travelogue CD reissue) as "The Future," an ensemble predating The Human League by a several months. In Rip It Up, Reynolds quotes Martyn Ware as saying, "'When we started the Future, we were definitely on a mission to destroy rock 'n' roll.'" Ware had actually tried to play guitar, "but gave up in disgust when he learned that to stop his fingers from bleeding he'd have to toughen the skin by soaking them in alcohol." For Ware and company, the summer of 1977 wasn't about the Punk Rock movement with its humdrum trad instrumentation of guitar-bass-drums, but rather the time of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express - two records that "arrived to show Marsh and Ware the shining synth-paved path to tomorrow...the pair were convinced that synths and machine rhythm were the way to go. 'We were dead against doing anything with guitars, full stop,' says marsh. 'It became our manifesto: No standard instrumentation.'"

In the Future, Ware and Marsh used a Korg 700S keyboard synth and a Roland System 100 "patch player" drum machine to generate "alien noises and futuristic textures" over simple "one-finger melody lines." Third member Adi Newton was the one most interested in abstract sound experimentation using tape recorders and, with his art school background, introduced the band to Man Ray, Duchamp, and other Dada and modern art influences.

Marsh recalled that the band initially dispensed with even giving themselves names, calling themselves A, B, and C. "It was all very computer oriented and linked to this lyric composition program we created called CARLOS: Cyclic and Random Lyric Organization System."

Reynolds likens it to a cybernetic version of the automatic writing and cut-up text techniques pioneered by William S. Burroughs and Bryon Gysin. In the end, the Future abandoned the experimentation and tried going with Adi Newton as a vocalist but, Marsh and Ware soon realized, "Adi couldn't actually sing a note, and more to the point didn't really want to sing. He was more into voice as a weapon." Cutting him loose, Ware and Marsh opted to go singer-less - which is why "Dancevision" is an instrumental! Reynolds described the resulting instro as "sounding like a blueprint for Detroit techno with its neon lights glimmer and stringlike sounds evoking some ambiguous alloy of euphoria and grief."

Watch the Human League play "Dancevision."

This video parses clips from various films and documentaries illustrating what the Futurists were predicting for, um, the Future!

See also: www.blindyouth.co.uk (fan site dedicated to early Human League 1977-1980)

14. Thomas Leer - "Tight as a Drum" (1981)

Great industrial electronica from Glasgow, Scotland-native Thomas Leer's 1981 four-track EP, 4 Movements (the other tracks were "Don't", "Letter From America" and "West End"). None of the tracks were released as singles nor did any appear on an album. Leer often collaborated with industrial pioneer Robert Rental and later joined The Act. Released on ZZT (Zang Tuum Tumb).

Watch "Tight As a Drum."

See also: www.thomasleer.co.uk

15. The Associates - "White Car in Germany" (1981)

"The Associates' ambition wasn't going to be sated by being critical darlings and cult favorites. They wanted to be the Bowie or Roxy of the eighties."- Simon Reynolds

In 1981, the Associates released their eighth single, "White Car In Germany" b/w "The Associate." Both tracks appeared on their second album, Fourth Drawer Down. Amazon reviewer Jason Parkes of Worcester, UK comments that, "MacKenzie & Rankine's 'White Car...' appears to condense advances made by Can, Bowe, Eno & Faust in something like a pop-song - huge synths matching the Nietzschean-feel and centered in Europa." To augment the song's icy cool European aura, Billy Mackenzie's vocals were literally sung through a greaseproof paper and comb. Reynolds observes:

"One of the Associates' greatest songs, 'White Car in Germany' taps into the un-American 'Europe Endless'-ness of Kraftwerk and Bowie's Berlin trilogy. Mackenzie operatically declaims cryptic lines such as 'Walk on eggs in Munich' and 'Dusseldorf's a cold place/Cold as spies can be' over a metronomic march rhythm. There was definitely something Old World about the Associates' 1981 singles, an ancien regime atmosphere of fading grandeur."

Despite an eight-month run in 1981 of six single releases getting critical reviews, the Associates were dissatisfied. "At the beginning of last year I thought it was going to be the year of singles," Reynolds quotes Mackenzie recollecting in a 1982 interview. "And it was. The thing with our singles was that they got peeled off the turntable halway through! We want to keep our singles on the turntable this year."

The heavily Bowie- and Krautrock-influenced Edinburgh band disbanded in 1990 after four albums but re-formed a few years later. The band affectively ended with the Billy Mackenzie's suicide, at age 39, in 1997.

Bye-bye Billy

Depression and the death of his mother are believed to have contributed to Mackenzie's overdose from a combination of the antidepressant amitriptyline, temazepam, and paracetamol in the garden shed of his father's house in Auchterhouse, Dundee. The Cure song "Cut Here," written by Mackenzie's friend Robert Smith, is about his suicide.

Watch the Associates play "White Car in Germany."

See also: affectionate.bunch.pagesperso-orange.fr/ (French fansite)

16. The B-52's - "Give Me Back My Man" (1980)

The second single from the Wild Planet album, this is a somewhat unusual choice (as I can barely recall the B-52s being mentioned in the book Rip It Up), but one I won't quibble with, as it's one of my all-time favorite B-52s songs. "I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy - I'll give you everything I have in my hands!" Cindy Wilson begs, just "Give me back my man." Memorable riff by guitarist Ricky Wilson is driven along by Keith Strickland's steady beat.

Watch the B-52s play "Give Me Back My Man."

See also: www.theb52s.com (Official band site)

17. John Cooper Clarke - "Beasley Street" (1980)

A typically brilliant slice of verbiage from Mancunian poet Clarke's Snap, Crackle & Bop album. Clarke looked (and dressed) just like Dylan circa his 1965 UK tour, but the Bard of Manchester had a cockney accent and more of a punk snarl to his verses.

Watch JCC play "Beasley Street" on Top of the Pops.

See also: www.johncooperclarke.com (Official site)

18. The Specials - "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" (1981)

This one's from the Specials' deservedly lauded Ghost Town EP, of which Reynolds writes:

"'Ghost Town' turned out to be the most politically timely and momentous single since the Sex Pistols' 'God Save the Queen.' The single's three weeks at number one coincided withthe inner-city riots all across the U.K., verying Staple's warning about "people gettin' angry." The two superb tracks on the flip side of 'Ghost Town' made the whole record a kind of concept EP, representing three angles on the British way of living death. Lynval Golding's 'Why' addressed the racist thungs who'd attacked him outside the Moonlight Club the previous year, asking plaintively, 'Did you really want to kill me?' before the more belligerent Staple steps forward to shout down the fascist British Movement: 'You follow like sheep inna wolf's clothes.' Wonderfully wan and listless, Terry Hall's 'Friday Night, Saturday Morning' subverts the Easybeats' mod classic 'Friday on My Mind,' depicting a wage slave's dismal idea of big fun, which consists of sinking pints of lager at the discotheque while watching other people get lucky, then waiting in line for a taxi in the wee hours, clutching a meat pie in his hand, one foot planted in 'someone else's spew,' and wishing 'I had lipstick on my collar instead of piss stains on my shoes.'

The Ghost Town EP makes you wonder just how potent and unstoppable the Specials could have been if [Jerry] Dammers had allowed the other songwriting talent in the band to blossom."

Watch "Friday Night, Saturday Morning."

See also: www.thespecials.com (Official band site)

19. Heaven 17 - "I'm Your Money" (1981)

Heaven 17 (taking their name from A Clockwork Orange), was formed as a side project of the British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.), the production company formed by Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware after their departure from the Human League in 1980. Adding singer Glenn Gregory, their first release was 1981's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing," which reached as high as #45 on the charts, despite a ban by the BBC.

One blogger added, "The Heaven 17 single 'I'm Your Money' has dated well, proto-rave material with similar themes to tracks by Depeche Mode ('Everything Counts'), Pet Shop Boys ('Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money') & the Flying Lizards' take on 'Money.'"

Watch "I'm Your Money."

20. Blue Orchids - "Dumb Magician" (1982)

The compilation ends with the Blue Orchids, the post-punk neo-psychedelic band Martin Bramah and Una Baines formed after leaving The Fall in 1979. "Dumb Magician," the band's anthem (its mantra/chorus of transcendence - "the only way out is up" - was later quoted by fellow acidhead Julian Cope on his Autogeddon LP), appeared on the indie chart-topping album The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain) (1982), which Reynolds called "a magnificent album of acid-soaked neopsychedelia teeming with pagan and pantheistic poetry." The Blue Orchids supported Echo and the Bunnymen on their 1981 tour; Bill Drummond (Big in Japan, KLF) once observed that both bands were on a similar quest for "a glory beyond glories." The results were The Greatest Hit for the Orchids and Heaven Up Here for the Bunnymen.

Related Links:
"Rip It Up and Start Again" - the CD (Discogs)
Rip It Up and Start Again - the book by Simon Reynolds (Amazon.com)
Rip It Up and Start Again: The Footnotes

The Set-Up (*****)

2010-08-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Set-Up
Directed by Robert Wise
Screenplay by Art Cohn based on a poem by Joseph Moncure March
Cinematography by Milton R. Krasner
Music by C. Bakaleinikoff
Produced by Richard Goldstein
Cast: Robert Ryan (Stoker), Audrey Totter (Julie), George Tobias (Tiny), Alan Baxter (Little Boy), Wallace Ford (Gus), Percy Helton (Red), Hal Baylor (Tiger Nelson)
RKO Radio Pictures, 1949, 72 minutes, b&w

Caught this last night on Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials" - featuring TCM host Robert Osburne and his new film buff sidekick, Alec Baldwin - and couldn't stop watching it, even though I have the DVD buried somewhere in one of my DVD towers-o-Babel. Like Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Mike Figgis' Timecode (2000), it's one of those stories told in "real-time" narrative; that is, it's a 72-minute film recounting 72 minutes in the life of a lower-rung veteran boxer who's one punch away from some sort of resolution to his life of toil (which could be success, failure, retirement - or death). It plays out like a teleplay and its direction, editing, black-and-white cinematography, terse dialogue, and creative mis-en-scene are flawless.

My words can't do justice to just how great this Robert Wise film (his last for RKO) is, so I'll turn to one of my favorite film noir books, Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City:

Nicolas Christopher's essential film noir reader

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The Set-Up, directed by Robert Wise, is the only film noir I know of in which screenplay is adapted from a narrative poem (by James Moncure March). A surprising winner of the Critic's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949, the film is a curiosity for a number of reasons. For one thing, like Rope, it is set in real time. Seventy-two minutes long, The Set-Up chronicles seventy-two minutes in the life of an aging journeyman fighter, played brilliantly by Robert Ryan. Like other noir icons, including Robert Mitchum, Jack Palance, John Huston, and Tom Neal, Ryan in his youth had boxed professionally. The film is set as far from the fast lane as one could get, in a hellish town called Paradise City, which is depicted solely through its shabby rooming houses, greasy spoons, dark filthy streets, and most important, through the warrens of a rundown, sweltering arena. The Set-Up is entirely nocturnal, much of the composition black on black and brilliantly cut (Wise was Orson Welles' editor on Citizen Kane). The film is hands down bleakest boxing film ever made - certainly the harshest ever to come out of Hollywood. Even the criminals are seedy, small-bore types who play viciously for penny-ante stakes - no big-time promoters here, with diamond rings, cashmere coats, and limousines. And the crowds in every way exceed the coarse, vulgar stock players we find in other boxing films; here they are outright sadistic, with a blood-lust verging on hysteria. When the hero's left eye is swollen shut by punches in the climatic fight, a blind man in the crowd shouts to the other boxer, "The other eye, Nelson, close the other eye!"

Ryan plays a fighter who wants only to make enough money in his last fight to open a beer hall or cigar stand" that's about as far as his dreams carry. Very soon it becomes clear that that is much too far. His manager has sold him out, accepting a bribe and promising that his fighter will take a dive; furthermore, the manager has so little faith in his fighter that he doesn't even inform him of the arrangement! And it happens that the latter, having promised his wife this will be his last fight - and thus his last shot at that cigar stand - takes a terrible beating in the early rounds, but fights his heart out, rallies, and emerges victorious. He's very pleased with himself, a terrible weight lifted from his shoulders - but, cruelly, in this universe only a few minutes - until he realizes that the double-crossed crooks are waiting on him. They've sealed off every exit in the arena. Trapped, he's taken refuge in the ring, of all places, and there's a memorable shot of him from on high in which we see the enforcers sauntering down ever aisle, converging on him. Aerially, the arena appears in the form of an infernal mandala that has come alive, spinning in black space. The thugs give him a terrible beating, breaking both his hands in he end and tossing him into the gutter in front of a dance hall called "Dreamland," where his wife finds him. he can never box again, and its doubtful he'll ever put enough money together for that cigar stand. Maybe he ought to feel lucky that he's not dead; maybe not.

And that's it. There's no saga of rise and fall here - no parabola of any kind - as in Champion and Body and Soul. For this boxer, we see only the tail end of a downward spiral that began a dozen years earlier, when he set out as a club fighter and never broke into the ranks of the contenders, much less the challengers, for a championship. The Set-Up is less a morality tale than a nihilistic sprint that skirts the abyss. It is worth noting that in this film the fighter is in no way a kid from the slums who craves sharp clothes and a snazzy pad, but rather a low-key working stiff - he has the demeanor of a weary plumber or handyman - faithful to his wife in her drab dresses, uncomplaining, a clock-puncher who happens to labor, and be exploited, in a sweaty arena rather than a sweatshop.

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Oh, I'd be remiss not to mention a cameo in the arena audience by future Dennis the Menace TV dad "Henry Mitchell," Herbert Anderson. Other cast highlights for me were seeing the great Audrey Totter playing a nice gal (she wasn't always a femme fatale!) and, Dwight Martin as the uncredited "Happy Glutton" who consumes hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream, beer, and soda throughout the the climactic fight. And I wonder who the blood-lusting dame was who shouted out "Moider him!" in the fight crowd? What a sports fan! (In fact, The Set-Up's cast of "characters" is the kind of "lively" audience I tend to dread at my film screenings!)

Related Links:
Film Poetry: James Moncure March and the Roots of "The Set-Up"

Haack: The King of Techno

2010-08-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

Haack: The King of Techno
directed by Philip Anagnos
(USA, 2004, 56 minutes)

I only recently discovered electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack - thanks to a co-worker who alerted me to the fact that our library owned a number of his childrens albums in our "best-kept-secret" vault of phonograph records. Impressed by what I heard, I subsequently found a CD of his in a used record store (see my Hush Little Robot review), then found a used copy of an excellent 2005 tribute album to the man called Dimension Mix, that featured Beck, Stereolab, Fantastic Plastic Machine and others of that electronica ilk. I still know nothing about the man, other than he was Canadian who made electronic children's records (think Hap Palmer meets Kraftwerk), had a regretable name for a musician (a Haack musician?), invented/built/& played his own electronic musical instruments, and passed away in 1988. Oh, and he was apparently a product of his peace-love-and-Peyote-popping Hippy-in-the-'60s times, calling his friends "Starchildren" and confessing that while he didn't mind fame in the here-and-now, he was ultimately more interested in obtaining a "telepathic following." Tubular, baby!

But the missing link for me was finding a book or documentary something more in-depth than a mere Wikipedia entry. I found it - well, sort of - in the form of this so-so documentary by a director who admits he's not a documentary filmmaker. That said, this is, however, the only game in town as far as a visual record of electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack. Highlights are two TV appearances - on Gary Moore's What's My Line and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood - intersperced, unfortunately, with uninformative and unimpressive clips of no-name hipster musicians and DJs who smugly celebrate their discovery of Haack without any technical or historical insight beyond, "He was like, a genius man, I mean he was on Mr. Rogers." As they show off their aviator shades, tattoos, retro-psychedelic shirts, trendy facial hair-and-beard combos, and lava lamps, one never gets beyond the "I discovered Haack at at used record store" or "Friends turned me on to his tapes" insights. Only his fellow Juillard School of Music classmate, Ted "Praxiteles" Pandel, offers anything remotely analytical about Haack's music beyond its genius-making-kiddie-records Cool Factor, though the German group Mouse on Mars (Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner) come close to a serious discussion. But then Germans are always serious. After all, to folks from the land of Stockhausen and Kraftwerk, Haack is a kindred spirit whose machine-generated music is a logical progression of their beloved 20th Century electronic music.

The inarticulate hipster musicians interviewed irritated me beyond words; I wanted to rip their thrift store vintage clothing and pummel their meticulously-toussled-haired noggins with my fists, whilst shouting, "Shaddup and say something beyond how cool you are to know who Bruce Haack is!" And will someone tell Haack's friend/collaborator Chris Kachulis to put on a goddam shirt? The clip showing this 60-something, Boris Karloff-lookalike in a wife-beater undershirt shows off nothing but his simian-like hairy arms and shoulders and blotchy Leper Colony skin as he performs "Listen" in a subway station. (Chris, take a tip from Leonard Cohen - if you're pushing 70 and still performing, wear a nice shirt or suit!)

Though the film meanders on for another 10-13 minutes, it really has nothing more to say after 43 minutes (IMDB lists its official running time as 70 minutes, but my DVD was easily under an hour) - therafter sloppily and vaguely referring to the 2005 Dimension Mix tribute album that featured a few big-name electro-pop artists like Beck and Stereolab and Brother Cleve; unfortunately, none of those big names are interviewed, instead we get the guy who worked with the Beastie Boys (Money Mark?) and a bunch of no-namers. (And would it have hurt to do a title card with some info about the tribute album? How about a video insert of the album cover (even a draft copy)? The album came out in 2005 and this film was entered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, but, I mean, gimme something here to connect the dots for those of us who aren't in the know!)

Moreover, the film's greatest failing is that it never makes the case for its subtitle: "The King of Techno." It's just a glib catchphrase, like everything the hipster musicos utter.

One of the few extras on this DVD is a poorly-lit, poorly edited clip of the filmmaker speaking at a Sundance screening (did I see Skizz in the audience?), wherein he suggests that he wants to explore the full spectrum of Bruce Haack's amazing life in a narrative feature film with actors and such. Maybe he can pull off what a similar approach in Man in the Moon did for Andy Kaufman...but I doubt it.

Ultimately, this was a botched opportunity to say something about somebody who warranted the attention. I wish somebody like Skizz Cyzyk had made a documentary about Bruce Haack. He would have gotten beyond the surface and added some depth to this classic example of an "outsider musician" (Skizz's forte) rife for rediscovery by a new audience and rife for getting his due in music history beyond the Inner Circle of Hipster Cultdom. Still, it is all we have at the moment.

Related Links:
www.brucehaack.com

Burma!

2010-07-29T08:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Enemy ****
(dir. Val Guest, UK, 1959, 95 minutes)
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country ***
(dir. Anders Ostergaard, Denmark, 2008, 84 minutes)

Old Woman 1: "BURMA!"
Old Woman 2: "Why did you say Burma?"
Old Woman 1: "I panicked."
- Monty Python, "The Penguin on the Television Skit"

As happenstance happens, I found myself watching two films about Burma last night. You remember Burma, the country now called Myanmar by its almost-perfect military dictatorship (in power in one form or another since 1962), but storied in jingle (if not song) by Burma-Shave ads and in war stories by British vets of WWII. Think Thailand without the sex tourism or North Korea without the starvation. Bored by the increasingly paltry and polarized news offerings on CNN and MSNBC, I switched over to Turner Classic Movies and watched the superbly cast British war movie Yesterday's Enemy (1959) and, later, the Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ (2008) - the latter recommended to me by a refugee relief worker and subsequently added to my NetFlix queue.

Yesterday's Enemy

The scene is Burma during World War II. A small British brigade led by Stanley Baker comes upon a Burmese village controlled by the Japanese. The brigade wipes out the enemy, whereupon Baker discovers that the late Japanese commandant has a coded map secreted on his person. When a Burmese prisoner who can decode the map refuses to talk, Baker orders that two peaceful villagers be executed. Baker's actions seem cruel and extreme until it becomes apparent that the enemy is twice as ruthless as he. Based on a TV play by Peter R. Newman, Yesterday's Enemy is a brutal but insightful look at the blurred line between good and evil in wartime conditions.
- Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Yesterday's Enemy was a Hammer Studio film production featuring principals Stanley Baker, Guy Rolfe, and Leo McKern, that struck me as a very realistic depiction of jungle warfare. But as a war movie, it has an dark and existential bent that is rather uncharactistic for its time (the post-war 1950s being a time when most WWII films portrayed the Allies as indisputably Good and the Axis as indisputably Evil). For one thing, it features a war atrocity - the cold-blooded killing of innocent Burmese villagers (albeit in order to extract vital information from a suspected spy - in order to save British soldiers lives and thus, by the logic of this argument, save the lives of tens of thousands of grateful Burmese in the conflict) - raising the moral dilemma of "the rules of war" war and "obeying orders/questioning authority" and foreshadowing similar events in America's subsequent Vietnam War (My Lai, anyone?). When Baker's Capt. Langford and his men are later captured by the Japanese commander Yamazuki, played by veteran Korean-American character actor Philip Ahn (best remember as Master Kan on the TV series Kung-Fu)...

"Hollywood Asian" Philip Ahn as "Kung-Fu" Kan

...he has the same interogation technique used on him; when Baker tries to cop the "We're only here because you started this war!" moral high ground, Ahn reminds him of Great Britain's colonial wars of conquest in the Sudan, India, and South Africa and Baker's silence makes us realize, yeah, maybe everybody has dirty hands in an armed conflict once it gets underway. (Hmmpft! Take that soon-to-be-crumbling British Empire!)

For another, Leo McKern's cynical war correspondent character "Max" at one points angrily laments that all the killing and sacrifice will ultimately serve no purpose other than filling a memorial grave and getting a meaningless posthumous medal for one's widow and fatherless children to store on their mantle. The closing shot is, in fact, a memorial tombstone. (Point taken!)

Guy Rolfe played the film's moral compass as "Padre" the Priest. Rolfe - who was a direct descendent of John Rolfe, the British soldier who married Pocahontas - is fondly remembered by William Castle fans as protagonist Baron Sardonicus in Mr. Sardonicus (1961).

Guy Rolfe as Baron Sardonicus before...

...and after Botox treatment

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country

Burma VJ is a courageous but depressing documentary about a country every bit as "closed" as North Korea but one that doesn't get as much world attention - except for the occasional catastrophic disaster like the monsoon that devastated the nation in 2007 (during which "The Generals" prevented outside aid, more interested in their own survival than their own people's) - because they don't have nuclear weapons and can usually feed their people. It's also a film in which jumpy hand-held camera work is not an edgy you-are-there artistic technique (unfortunately still in vogue in today's indie cinema, especially "mumblecore" ones), but a necessity for staying alive. Burma's flirtations with democracy have been brief, consisting of student-monk protests in 1988 (their 9/11 was 8/8/88, the day hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the country to call for democracy) and the metta sutta prayer-chanting monk-led insurgency chronicled here in 2007 - both inspired by economic hardships (like raising the price of fuel by 500% in 2007), both brutally put down (3,000 protesters alone died in 1988). As General Ne Win said at the time of the first uprising, "When the army shoots, it shoots straight." (No kidding, General.)

The documentary's most striking update to the violence is the utter disregard for the traditionable untouchable monks, who are shown being beaten, disrobed, thrown into paddy wagons, and their temples ransacked. This disregard for passive civil resistance is capsulized in the footage of a dead monk's body floating in a muddy riverbank. Nothing in Burma, apparenntly, is sacred under the iron grip of the junta.

Metta Sutta-chanting monks ask: What's so funny
'bout peace, love & understanding?

The '88 protests did lead the dictatorship to hold elections in 1990, which 1991 Nobel Peace Price recipient Aung San Suu Kyi won in a landslide, but the results were nullified and she was - and continues to be - put under house arrest. In fact, she's has been under house arrest for 14 of the last 20 years.

OK, now you're probably wondering why a doc chronicling brave Burmese video journalists (or VJs - and very unlike MTV's VJ!) was made by a Swedish director, Anders Ostergaard. That's because in a land where there is no free press, the only way to smuggle info out is via the Internet (which can be shut down or filtered a la Google in China) or smuggling tapes to the West. In this case, the journalists documenting the protests and crackdowns belong to a guerilla organization called the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) that has contacts in Sweden.

While the rest of the world uploads videos to YouTube showing cute babies, playful kittens, or amateur porn, in Burma uploaded videos are of a more serious nature. They're literally a matter of life and death in a country where the medium is the message and the law of the land says "Kill the messenger."

Comic Noir: Sam Hill & Johnny Dynamite

2010-07-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

On a recent visit to BCPL's Cockeysville Library to grab more titles from their impressive graphic novel collection, I scored Dan Nadel's fascinating Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures 1940-1980 (Abrams ComicArts, 2010), the follow-up volume to his Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1969 (Abrams, 2006). Both Nagel books highlight the unheralded work of visionary comic books and cartoonists, with the author's stated goal of moving toward "a more open and inclusive understanding of what makes a compelling comic."

Dan Nagel's "Art": Time for rediscovery

Well for me the two most compelling comics were Harry Lucey's hard-boiled, wise-cracking gumshoe Sam Hill - the "Ex Ivy League halfback" private eye with a white streak in his hair and a sexy redhead secretary named Roxy - and Peter Morissi's Mike Hammer-inspired one-eyed "wild man from Chicago" who's as explosive as his name, Johnny Dynamite.

Like Sam Hill, Johnny Dynamite had a curvy secretary in Judy Kane, but after issue #4 he lacked Sam's extra eye and started sporting an eyepatch; in 1987 Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty resurrected the JD character for four appearances in their Ms. Tree comic, then created a 4-issue Johnny Dynamite homage for Dark Horse Comics in 1994.

Max Allan Collins rekindled Johnny Dynamite's fuse

Both pencil-and-ink tough guy sleuths date from the Mickey Spillane-dominated 1950s era of detective comics, but I like Sam Hill better because he's less violent and more stylized like the pulp dicks of the '30s and '40s. He's cut more from the mold of a Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe or Paul Pine, whereas Johnny Dynamite is more like Spillane's cartoonishly mean-spirited Mike Hammer (or Donald Westlake/Richard Stark's Parker) - a pure brutarian who seems to enjoy killing a little too much. And, unlike Sam Hill, Johnny Dynamite is completely humorless; he only cracks hard, not wise.

I don't know a while lot about comics - certainly not as much as my pal Dave Cawley, who can spot one panel and instantly tell you who wrote it, who drew it, who penned it, and what company published it (whether you ask for a cornucopia of detail or not!) - but I love the hard-boiled PI genre, so my research choices were either the perpetually wired Dave Cawley or the intrinsically wired Internet. I chose the Internet and found out the following...

Sam Hill by Harry Lucey
7 issues, 1950, MLJ

"What the Sam Hill?" Premiere ish intro.

Born in 1950, Sam Hill lived fast and died young, lasting only seven issues. I guess the reader mail didn't come in "heavy enough" (as pitched below in the premiere ish), which is a real shame because Sam Hill is a fun read - and an eccentric personality as well - how many PIs drank milk and wore bow ties (pretty distinctive - guess that was the "Ivy League" touch of "class"!)?

Sam Hill's talking to you, chum!

I like how every adventure was called a caper ("The Cutie Killer Caper," "The Double Trouble Caper," etc.) and featured a preview of each caper's dramatis personnae on the first page (e.g., "Roxanna...my indispensibe Gal Friday"; "Barbara Berkley...my lucious client"; "Rick Marks...Barbara's attorney"), not to mention the denouments that always seemed to find Hill flirting with his Gal Friday.

Dan Nagel writes that Lucey was influenced by film noir's "expressionistic angles" and probably Will Eisner's The Spirit, noting that his character's facial expressions and his panel-framing technique in presenting the narrative almost made words superfluous: "Remove the words from a Lucey story and readers still know precisely how each character feels and what that means for the plot. This strong technique makes Lucey's cartoon characters seem alive on the page like few others, and gives Sam Hill an urgency that raises it above its obvious genre and cinematic infleunces."

Creator Harry Lucey (1913-1979/1980) spent most of his career at Archie publishers MLJ, where he worked on Madam Satan, Magno, Crime Does Not Pay - and even Archie - between 1950 and 1970. In the 1960s he developed an allergic reaction to graphite and had to wear white gloves while drawing, and in the 1970s he contracted Lou Gehrig's disease, followed by cancer. He passed away in 1979 or 1980.

But he left behind these "7 Wonders" of Private Eye comics, as reproduced below:

Sam Hill #1

Sam Hill #2

Sam Hill #3

Sam Hill #4

Sam Hill #5

Sam Hill #6

Sam Hill #7

Johnny Dynamite by Pete Morisi
Comic Media, 1953-1954; Charlton 1954-1956

The early "Two-Eyed" Johnny Dynamite

Johnny Dynamite was created by writer "William Waugh" (nom du plume of Ken Fitch, who co-created Hourman and Tex Thompson for DC Comics) and artist Pete Morisi (1928-2003). Under the title Dynamite, Fitch and Morisi continued to write and draw the character until issue #9 (May, 1954), after which Morisi moved to Charlton Comics and revived the character between 1955 and 1956 under the title Johnny Dynamite.

According to the excellent online source Comic Vine (comicvine.com), "It ran three issues under that name, then three more as Foreign Intrigues, with Johnny retooled as a government agent..."

Johnny Dynamite turns Fed to battle the commies

Comic Vine continues the story: "...With #16 (November, 1957), [Charlton] dropped Johnny and took on the title Battlefield Action. As such, it ran, sporadically at least, until 1984, but Charlton never used Johnny Dynamite again." That's probably because Moresi not only left the series - he left the cartoon profession itself - at least for a while.

In 1956, Morisi became a NYPD police officer and started leading a double life. Because the NYPD forbade extracurricular work, he worked as cop by day and cartoonist by night. Using the pseudonym "PAM" (for "Pete A. Moresi"), he drew hundreds of comics for Charlton (like Thunderbolt and Montana Kid) up until 1976.

Of Morisi's technique, Nagel writes:

He was a master of moment-to-moment storytelling...each action, each pose, was fondly defined and crisply rendered so that a reader can't help but be immersed in his spaces. Morisi told his stories through a series of still images using every camera angle and filmic device he could think of. As if to accentuate the "screen effect, the panels all have rounded corners and there is nary a speed line, sound effect, or any of the other trappings in sight...his panels are crowded compositions full of close-ups on his hero's invariably agonized or beat-up face...the sheer crowded claustrophobia of a teeming city is always at the fore, and characters are always right up agaginst something, surrounded by buildings, trapped in rooms.

Though Johnny Dynamite remained lost for almost 30 years, he was rediscovered in the '90s by a fellow pulp comics fan. Comic Vine again picks up the story:

Widely regarded by fans of the genre as the best and most interesting of the 1950s comic book private eyes, Johnny Dynamite was a favorite of crime novelist and comics writer Max Allan Collins, one of Chester Gould's successors on Dick Tracy. Collins acquired the character in 1987, when many Charlton properties were sold. His first use of Johnny was as reprints in the back pages of his own Hammer-inspired character, Ms. Tree's comic book. Since then, he's branched out into new adventures from a couple of small publishers. His most prominent modern publisher is Dark Horse Comics, where Concrete and Hellboy started.

JD: Two-fisted (but one-eyed) action!

Related Links:
Johnny Dynamite (Toonepedia)
Sam Hill (Toonopedia)
Sam Hill @ Comic Vine (www.comicvine.com)
Johnny Dynamite @ Comic Vine (www.comicvine.com)

Save the Turtles (*****)

2010-07-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

The Turtles
Save the Turtles: The Turtles Greatest Hits
FloEdCo (2009)

Full Disclosure: All the hits are here but truth be told, I really bought this collection solely for the Chevy Camero commercial at the end, which remains my favorite Turtles recording of all time - and as hard to find outside of this compilation as...well...a 1960s Chevy Camero!

OK, everyone knows The Turtles, the Southern California folk-pop icons fronted by singer Howard Kaylan (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Andy Kaufman's alter ego, Tony Clifton) and singer-guitarist Mark Volman (think Jonah Hill with an Afro) who had all those radio-friendly Top 40 hits in the '60s like "So Happy Together," "She'd Rather Be With Me," "It Ain't Me Babe," "You Baby," and "Elenore," etc. They liked to say that they were only three letters removed from being The Beatles and, like the Byrds, had fashioned one of those "pet" animal species monikers (they even spelled it "Tyrtles" for a spell).

Flo & Eddie - or Jo & Tony?

In truth, they were musical chameleons, able to change their spots to mimic virtually any style, from folk (the Dylan cover "It Ain't Me Babe") and hotrod-surf (the spot-on Jan & Dean imitation "Surfer Dan") to down-and-dirty garage grunge (Warren Zevon's "Outside Chance," Kaylan's "Always There") and the innumerable tunes that captured the soaring harmonies and melodic perfection of the Beach Boys. Heck, they even imitated themselves on "Elenore," though few noticed the self-mockery (least of all their record label, which was more than content with a #6 hit).

Flo & Eddie today

But for the longest time Alpha Turtles Volman and Kaylan were merely Phlorescent Leech and Eddie, or Flo and Eddie for short, as the rights to their name and music were tied up by men in suits with law degrees wrangling over money. With the Suits unwilling to let Volman and Kayman be themselves, much less sing "Let Me Be," they turned to various ventures, including radio broadcasting (they were on K-ROCK, Howard Stern's NYC station, for a while), joining Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, and at one point in the '80s even resorting to recording background music for kiddie TV shows like The Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake (wowie zowie - from Zappa to kid shows, that's quite an aesthetic 360 turn!).

Flo & Eddie: Bear-ing their souls for the kids!

It wasn't until 1984 - after years of recording/touring with Zappa and as solo artists Flo & Eddie (speaking of which, I'm eagerly awaiting my twofer-on-one CD reissue of their brilliant Illegal, Immoral & Fattening/Moving Targets albums from FloEdCo) - that founding braintrust Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman legally regained the use of The Turtles name, and began touring as The Turtles... Featuring Flo and Eddie. (The "featuring" tag was probably added to their moniker because, instead of trying to reunite with their earlier bandmates, they began featuring all-star sidemen who had played with different groups - like Greg Hawkes of the Cars, who most recently appeared with them at the 2010 Dundalk Heritage Fair).

Flo & Eddie win the case!

But it wasn't until 2009 that they regained rights to their recorded music; they had always wanted to clean up the original recordings they made while under contract at White Whale Records in the '60s and the result is this greatest hits compilation CD that was was issued in 2009 on their own FloEdCo label and distributed by Manifesto Records. And clean it up they did, with all 20 of the selections here remastered under the personal direction of Flo and Eddie from the original master tapes.

One thing I noticed right off was the wide range of songwriting (the early Turtles recorded a score of songs by Gary Bonner and Alan Gordon of the East Coast band The Magicians, not to mention tunes by P. F. Sloan, Harry Nilsson, and their buddy Warren Zevon) and turnover of band members through the years. Other than mainstays Kaylan, Volman, and founding guitarists Al Nichols and Jim Tucker, the Turtles line-up changed quite a bit over the years - especially the rhythm section. The Great Turtles Diaspora saw bassist Jim Pons replace Chip Douglas (no, he wasn't featured on My Three Sons, but Douglas was a talented bass and keyboard player who went into record production, producing hits for The Monkees - "Daydream Believer" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" among them - before returning to produce Turtles records like "You Showed Me"); Pons would later join Flo and Eddie in Zappa's Mothers of Invention before leaving to start his second career as a film and video director for the NFL (he currently works for the Jaguars); veteran session drummer Johnny Barbata - himself a replacement for Joel Larson (who replaced Don Murray) - left to play with Crosby, Stills & Nash.

That said, if there's one Turtles collection you should shell out the bucks for, it's this modestly-priced greatest hits comp, proceeds from which actually go towards saving turtles at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, FL. Following are some of my track-by-Turtle-track observations.

1. "Happy Together" (Gary Bonner/Alan Gordon)
Their biggest ever hit and most remembered song, included here in the Numero Uno lead-off spot, as befits a #1 record. Written by the prolific songwriting team behind the NY band The Magicians, Gary Bonner and Alan Gordon, who also gave The Turtles the 1967 hits "She'd Rather Be With Me" (#3) and "She's My Girl" (#14), as well as the singles "Me About You" and "You Know What I Mean."

2. It Ain't Me Babe (Bob Dylan)
The Turtles debut single from the summer of 1965 rose as high as #8 on the charts during the Dylan-Folk Rock Craze Phase. Hey, it worked wonders for the Byrds' careers, as well. I still prefer Sebastian Cabot's version (available on Rhino's Golden Throats CD) better - but he sure couldn't hit the high notes like Flo and Eddie!

Mr. French hits a low note

4. "You Baby" (P.F. Sloan/Steve Barri)
Despite the opening jingly-jangly riff, the third Turtles single (#20, 1966) is noted for its new direction, moving away from that Folk Rock experiment and more toward high-octave harmony-laden pop in the vein of Frank Valli and The Four Seasons.

5. "Elenore"
Quoth the Turtle: "Elenore." A self-parody of themselves for the album The Battle of the Bands and still the only Top 10 record to contain the expression "et cetera." In fact, the only other "et cetera" song I can think of is The Smiths' "Sweet and Tender Hooligan."

6. "Let Me Be" (P.F. Sloan)
P.F. Sloan came up with the necessary folkie follow-up hit to "It Ain't Me Babe" on The Turtles second White Whale single, which reached #29 in 1965, still primo Top 40 turf. And it clearly adhered to their folk agenda of the time: tambourine, 12-string guitar, and a singer pleading for individuality, babe.

7. "She's My Girl" (Gary Bonner/Alan Gordon)
Another hit (#14, 1967) courtesy of The Magicians Bonner-Gordon team with an ominous opening.

8. "Outside Chance" (Warren Zevon)
Warren Zevon penned this garage rock beauty that starts off with a Beatle-y "Ticket To Ride" guitar lick before getting down-and-dirty, as one would expect from the volatile Z man. It was the first track new drummer Johnny Barbata played on, but its lack of success led to bass player Chuck Portz quitting the band, with Chip Douglas replacing him.

9. "You Showed Me" (Jim McGuinn-Gene Clark)
As a Byrdsmaniac, I naturally loved their emo version that appears on the album Pre-Flyte, but I gotta say, this one might be a tad better because of the spooky vibe and Chip Douglas' masterful production (though I could have done without all those melodramatic strings). But hey, enjoy both flavors - like Doublemint Gum, it can only double your pleasure, double your fun.

10. "Can I Get To Know You Better" (Steve Barri/P.F. Sloan)
White Whale wanted a follow-up to Sloan's "Let Me Be" sound, so they commissioned this, but The Sequel No One Asked For didn't chart. The first recording on which Chip Douglas appears.

11. "The Story of Rock and Roll" (Harry Nilsson)
Quite the studio production epic -think Brian Wilson producing the Raspberries "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" - but I don't like history lessons, especially when they include sax riffing like you hear leading into those commercial breaks on Saturday Night Live. But I guess it was appropriate for their concep album, The Battle of the Bands.

The Kinksy lost masterpiece

12. "Love in the City" (The Turtles)
Guitarist Al Nichol, perhaps influenced by The Lovin' Spoonful's current hit "Summer in the City," wrote this in 1967 and shared the credit with the rest of the band (which at this time included Kaylan, Volman, Nichol, bassist Jim Pons, and drummer John Seiter). This is one of two songs (the other is "You Don't have To Walk in the Rain") culled from The Turtles's 1969 release, Turtle Soup, the critically acclaimed record they recorded with Ray Davies of The Kinks that clearly shows the influence of Ray's 1968 concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. This was also the "democratic" album on which other band members - not just Kaylan and Volman - were allowed to sing their songs and share in the songwriting credits. Another Turtle Soup song, "Hot Little Hands," turns up on Turtle Tracks, the limited edition hits compilation sold only at "The Turtles...Featuring Flo & Eddie" live shows. (It's great - I'm glad Amy bought one at the 2010 Dundalk Heritage Fair show!)

13. "Me About You"
Another Gary Bonner-Alan Gordon tune that was also covered by The Mojo Men and The Lovin' Spoonful, among others.

14. "You Don't Have To Walk in the Rain" (The Turtles)
Great Beach Boys Farfisa-y intro to the strongest single off Turtle Soup.

15. "You Know What I Mean" (Gary Bonner/Alan Gordon)
Mark Volman describes this Bonner-Gordon song as "brilliant" and considers it "probably the best Turtles record ever made." That's really saying something - and it's hard to argue with him! The sophisticated production is Pet Sounds-worthy. The single reached as high as #12 in 1967.

16. "Sound Asleep" (The Turtles)
Issued as a single in early 1968, "Sound Asleep" was credited to the whole group, which at this point included Kaylan, Volman, guitarist Al Nichol, bassist Jim Pons, and Johnny Barbata.

17. "Making My Mind Up" (Ray Roberts/Gary Montgomery)
Gawd, this is SOOOOOO Sixties, like the theme song to a rock dance show that never was! Reminds me of Jay and the Americans singing the Love American Style theme.

18. "Grim Reaper of Love" (Chuck Portz/Al Nichol)
Folk Deathtrip Ennui. Serious-sounding but dated step into The Deep (a la Barry McGuire's Dylan-derivative, P.F. Sloan-penned attempt at social commentary "Eve of Destruction").

19. "Guide for the Married Man" (John Williams/Leslie Bricusse)
Love this song, love this 1967 movie (directed by Gene Kelly and starring Walter Matthau, Robert Morse, Inger Stevens, and Carl Reiner)! Before Star Wars there were frisky married men like Matthau just dying to commit adultery and swing in a suburban galaxy far away, and John Williams was there to play Pied Piper and lead the way. 1967 was also the year Williams earned his first Academy Award nom, but for scoring Valley of the Dolls - not A Guide for Married Man!

Bitchin' Camero

20. "Chevrolet Camero Commercial" (previously unreleased)
Lean and muscular, full mod with rally racing stripes, it's no wonder "the Camero will drive you absolutely wild!" As on "Surfer Dan" (B-side of their single "Elenore"), The Turtles return to their Crossfires surfboards-and-hotrods roots. The last voice you hear is their bud Warren Zevon!

Related Links:
www.theturtles.com (Official Site)

Bruce Haack - "Hush Little Robot"

2010-07-26T11:45:00.001-07:00

Bruce Haack
Hush Little Robot
(QDK Records, Germany, 1998)

I discovered this German import CD (originally released on Bonn's Normal Records) in the "Used Electronic Music" bins at Soundgarden and picked it up out of curiosity. A library co-worker whose boyfriend is into electronic music had mentioned that Enoch Pratt Free Library's children's records collection had several Bruce Haack titles on vinyl that she thought I might like because, well, they were weird. That's an understatement - both about the weirdness (we're talking about a guy who released a kiddie record called The Electric Lucifer!) and about me liking them! In fact, the Pratt has 10 Haack titles on vinyl, including The Way Out Record for Children (1968), The Electronic Record for Children (1969), Captain Entropy (1973), This Old Man (1974), Funky Doodle (1975), Ebeneezer Electric (1977), and four kiddie dance records on the Dimension 5 label (the '60s Dance, Sing and Listen trilogy and 1972's Dance to the Music). I had listened to Captain Entropy and was sufficiently impressed by its oddball factor, determining that Haack was a kindred spirit to Raymond Scott, and I rued the fact that I passed up grabbing the out-of-print documentary about him - Bruce Haack: The King of Techno - when I saw it for a mere $7 at Daedalus Books & Music (Doh! I thought it was about computer hacking!). (Click here to see a preview of this film on Amazon.com.)

I still know virtually nothing about Haack, other than he was Canadian who made electronic children's records (think Hap Palmer meets Kraftwerk), had a regretable name for a musician (a Haack musician?), invented/built/& played his own electronic musical instruments, and passed away in 1988. Oh, and I know the hipsters have discovered him because in 2005 artists like Beck and Stereolab and Brother Cleve of Combustible Edison appeared on a tribute album called Dimension Mix. Thankfully, he has a web site, www.brucehaack.com where the curious like me can learn more about his incredible legacy. I'm just wondering who, besides electronic music buffs like Abby's boyfriend, actually checks this stuff out of the library - because Raffi or The Wiggles it's not!

That said, here's a review of this album - which is apparently a compilation of 6 songs from The Electric Lucifer, ten tracks culled from This Old Man and The Way Out Record for Children, and two radio interviews - by somebody who does know about Bruce Haack. Namely, epinion reviewer Henry Thoreau...

Henry Thoreau's Thoroughly Thoreau Review of "Hush Little Robot":
from Bruce Haack: Pioneer of Elecronic Music

The year was 1970. An acquaintance played a bizarre Columbia LP, The Electric Lucifer by Bruce Haack. My ears pricked up delightedly as I heard “Farad” (an electronic voice) singing the opening bars of the initial, weirdly pulsating track, “Electric to Me Turn”:

Electric to me turn this night
Reflecting universal light
All I knew that should be true
Is reality in you
Turn, turn to me, electric.

The accompanying, all-electronic music struck me as far more intriguing, even, than that of Wendy Carlos and other purveyors of moog synthesizer music per se. While the moog was, in fact, employed by Haack for elements of The Electric Lucifer, what more so intrigued me was the cornucopia of never-before-heard ear candy via his own, homemade electronics which he’d pioneered in the 1960s for various LPs for children (all released on his own label). Complementing the music was the colorful, contemporary, cartoon-like artwork on the album sleeve and, no less, the notes on the reverse: unabashedly “far out” rhapsodizing by Haack about his vision of a perfected universe, one free of “hate and pain and fear,” and very much in keeping with the idealism and weirdness of the era. From the moment I first sampled his quirky genius, I was hooked—indelibly stamped a lifelong fan of Bruce Haack.

Trouble was, until recently, Haack’s music had virtually vanished after Columbia’s release of The Electric Lucifer. From the early 1970s until very recently, Bruce and his bizarre art had seemingly departed the planet for some other, more congenial dimension. In actuality, I subsequently learned that “Dimension 5” was the moniker he used (along with cohort Esther Nelson) for a long line of children’s albums that constituted the bulk of his output. Some of those are too puerile for adult ears, though the stylizations of the electronic music are consistently, unmistakably, and pleasingly Haackian. But interspersed among his works for the Sesame Street set are fascinating digressions and anomalies for adults that either have yet to be released or which were originally released only on the “Dimension 5” label with limited distribution.

Bruce Haack was born in an obscure Canadian village whence he derived his affection for nature, animals, and Indian culture. He was musically educated and active in New York City from the early 1950s through the early ‘70s; thereafter, he resided in West Chester, PA, continuing to produce music, but no longer “commercially successful.” He died unexpectedly in his sleep, apparently of heart failure, at age 57 in 1988. There remains a wealth of promising, recorded material just waiting to be mined for posthumous release; Mr. Praxiteles “Ted” Pandel, Bruce’s lifelong confidant, hopes to issue many more of those works eventually. (Very recently, the uniformly ingenious and masterful Electric Lucifer Book 2, created and recorded around 1979, has appeared on QDK, a German label.)

Hush Little Robot, an import CD via Germany, is currently the next-best thing to a complete reissue of The Electric Lucifer, as it encompasses six tracks from the latter, including the aforementioned “Electric to Me Turn.” As well, two brief 1970-ish “Campus Radio” interviews with Bruce are included. Finally, ten tracks from two of his children’s albums, This Old Man and The Way Out Record for Children, round out the disc. Among these is a remake of “Program Me,” an original track from The Electric Lucifer.

Personally, I would have preferred that The Electric Lucifer and This Old Man had been reissued in their entirety as separate CDs (The Way Out Record for Children interests me far less); while many of their respective tracks do coexist pretty effectively—displaying two modes of Bruce’s creativity--the partial, arbitrary melding of the two albums is, ultimately, not fully satisfying. But, as this is one of only two adult-oriented Bruce Haack CDs available (Electric Lucifer Book 2 is the other), it’s definitely worth adding to your collection. Unlike certain other “electronic music” releases, it should have wide appeal to music lovers of all ages and temperaments. While one may choose to skip two or three tracks, the many others will surely delight.

Hush Little Robot comprises eighteen tracks, as follows:

From The Electric Lucifer (1970):

Electric to Me Turn. Arguably Bruce’s signature song, this remains a favorite of mine. Quintessential Haack, lyrically and musically.

War. While this was undoubtedly inspired by the Vietnam War, it truly is a timeless commentary on all wars. The opening tones are somber and foreboding, with an incessantly beating snare drum suggesting the martial theme; suddenly, a cacophonous eruption bursts forth, followed by a caricatured military march whose decadent, carnival atmosphere escalates to an inexorable crescendo and a manmade Big Bang. Suddenly, a child’s voice proclaims, “I don’t wanna play anymore!” and a confused, disintegrating “fall out” descends, concluding the track.

Chant of the Unicorn. [Actually, this was originally titled “Chant of the Unborn;” I assume “Unicorn” is simply a blooper on this German reissue.] Inchoate “fetal” utterances—sounding rather “adult,” really--are backed by lively, slightly dissonant electronic percussion and other Haackian dance-like effects.

Incantation. Human voices are used for the first stanza, then Farad, the electronic songster, takes his turn. As with other aspects of the album, Haack borrows ostensibly Christian icons for his imagery, as with

Time told of Mary
Giving birth
Necessary
Planet Earth

In reality, I understand Haack was not himself traditionally “religious;” indeed, and thankfully, the general feel of the album is altogether catholic, not Catholic. As with Milton’s poetry, atheists, agnostics and believers alike can appreciate Bruce's eclectic visions.

Song of the Death Machine. The theme here seems to be that of a derelict “Death Machine” or master computer that has survived its misguided inventors. Like its progenitors, it blithely kills with utter detachment and calm:

Resting easy, meditating,
No anxiety, kill.
Senses relay information,
No hostility, kill.

No involvement,
Will communicate,
Primal memory, kill.
Resting easy, logic functioning,
Reason programming, kill.

Against the above lyrics Haack juxtaposes music evocative of childhood nursery rhymes (a characteristic and effective ploy throughout his career), which, in this instance, makes for a darkly ironic and chilling effect.

Word Game. Bruce Haack loved to play with words. Ted Pandel informs me that there is a body of poetry that may yet be published. Accordingly, this track showcases the Haackian fascination with words--their roots, resemblances, and “resonances.” Some of the juxtaposed terms employed in “Word Game” include:

Uni-verse / One Poem
Love / evolve
Re-volve / To love again
Live / evil
Lived / Devil

As usual, what makes such whimsy work is the continual inventiveness of the accompanying electronic music, which in this instance assumes a leisurely pace nicely complementing Bruce’s pseudo-etymological meanderings.

From The Way Out Record for Children (1968):

School for Robots. Here is another track that borders on the puerile. The music is interesting, nonetheless.

Rubberbands. A fairly good, all-instrumental track. This resembles many of the sound effects Bruce would employ two years later on The Electric Lucifer, though I can’t honestly say it’s that excellent.

From This Old Man (1974):

Note that Bruce created the This Old Man album ostensibly for children, but, unlike much of his juvenilia, this one is performed entirely by Bruce, sans his erstwhile cohort Esther Nelson. No insult to Esther, but Bruce did much better by himself. Indeed, while This Old Man supposedly is a children’s album, in actuality it is sufficiently “adult” that only a few tracks (e.g., “Elizabeth Foster Goose”) seem overtly on the childish side. And even those tracks are so satisfyingly inventive, both musically and lyrically, that surely most adults will enjoy them too.

This Old Man. Intermittently throughout the album, Bruce employs the gritty persona of a grizzled old man; initially, I found his mock old-man voice a bit contrived; but it’s gradually grown on me--somewhat. At any rate, the old-man narration only pops up at a very few points, and only for short intervals. As for the “This Old Man” track per se, it showcases some felicitous Haackian sound effects from Bruce’s homemade, 1960’s-era apparatus. The lyrics seemingly parody the old “Hush Little Baby” nursery rhyme, and, of course, the long-familiar “This Old Man” ditty:

This old man
He play one
He play for you
Electric drum

This old man
He play two
He play electric song for you

Now this old man
He play three
He play your head electrically
And when this record’s gone
You’ll find
This old man inside your mind

The lively complementary music saves this thankfully brief number, which merges well into the ensuing track, “Bods.”

Bods. The theme of this song is “body language.” Along with still more mellifluous electronic music, this number highlights Bruce’s proclivity for linguistic frivolity; the wordplay is whimsically winsome, as with:

Now when somebody looks you in the eye
That doesn’t always mean it’s a truthful guy
Sometimes it’s something like hypnosis
And sometimes it’s simply staring where your nose is.

Elizabeth Foster Goose. This “children’s” song is so cleverly composed that only the most constipated person--of any age--could fail to be charmed. Bruce’s insouciant narration is complemented by utterly enchanting keyboard harmonies.

Four Dances. While I could do without the “old-man” introduction, the four “dances” that ensue (including “Hush Little Robot”) evince Bruce’s penchant for catchy keyboard riffs and bizarre electronic sounds.

Wooden Bread. Here we are told of an arcane recipe, ostensibly from an old witch, for bread made from maple or hickory trees. By turns witty and jejune, this is not the strongest track on this compilation; nonetheless, it's sufficiently intriguing and engaging.

Program Me. Originally from the Electric Lucifer album, this is Bruce’s solo remake (the original featured other vocalists). Having heard its antecedent, I rather like this version. The theme is that a computer is the ultimate tabula rasa, a veritable child just begging to be programmed.

Shine On. This has its moments, but all the “fascinating” facts Bruce shares here (regarding the scientific properties of light) sound a bit too much like a gee-whiz science show for kiddies. A great track for Newton’s Apple fans; otherwise, a yawner.

Thank You. Here Bruce cleverly, graciously expresses his gratitude to the “many thousands of teachers and kids” who’d supported his children’s music over the years. With its mock-banjo backing and engaging melody, this makes for a brief and agreeable denouement for the compilation.

Note: Capping off the Hush Little Robot CD are two “Campus Radio” 1970 interviews wherein Bruce briefly discusses the making of The Electric Lucifer. The first of these has survived the years well enough; the second opens promisingly with remarks about the moog synthesizer versus Haack’s own homemade paraphernalia, but then the discussion digresses and gets inextricably mired in a bog of 1967-style, “groovy,” nonsensicality. Were he alive today, I wonder if Bruce wouldn’t be a tad embarrassed--or amused--to hear himself uttering the following observations:

“Touch is like, uh, togetherness, touching minds and touching bodies, and what a great way to make music. To aim the focus of your, uh, to focus your aim on touching a person's body, to bring together, and thus producing sound .... touching each other, and also touching ourselves without and within and, uh, also touching each other in harmony, which is great. In other words, this touch gimmick, as I have it, is actually producing sound when you are touching.”

I’d guess that most Haack fans will do as I do: listen once or twice to these interviews, then skip ‘em.

Until complete CD reissues (hopefully) appear for The Electric Lucifer and This Old Man (not to mention the heretofore unpublished portions of Haack’s oeuvre), the Hush Little Robot CD serves admirably as an introduction to the music of Bruce Haack. In the meantime, check out the recently released Electric Lucifer Book 2 CD (on the QDK label, and distributed by Forced Exposure.) If anything, the sequel--lacking even one bad track--is still better than the Columbia original! You can read about and order both Hush Little Robot and Electric Lucifer Book 2 via the following link: http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/haack.bruce.html

Related Links:
Bruce Haack Music (www.brucehaack.com)
Bruce Haack (forcedexposure.com)
Bruce Haack: Pioneer of Electronic Music
Bruce Haack (Wikipedia)
Haack on YouTube

Tommy Keene - "You Hear Me" (****)

2010-07-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Tommy Keene
You Hear Me: A Retrospective 1983-2009
(Second Motion Records, 2010)

I just got this 41-track double-CD retrospective of my favorite cult pop star this week and upon initial listen, I was ready to disown it because I thought it sounded so unfamiliar. But I was wrong; more than just a rehash of three decades-worth of recordings by Bethesda's influential guitar hero, it offers something different for the Tommy Keene completist (which I unabashedly am!). Once I got some perspective on what exactly I was listening to, I couldn't stop listening to it, even though I have most everything presented here. (Note: This is a review of the standard CD, not the bundled version that includes an additional 10-track bonus digital album. I wanted that but Amazon had a pre-order special of a mere $14.99 for the standard 2-disc edition and, well, I'm cheap!)

Basically this is the latest chapter in filling in the gaps of Keene's back catalog, updating the career retrospective that began with Alias Records' excellent The Real Underground (1993) - which covered Tommy's 80s output up through the 1992 Sleeping on a Rollercoaster EP and was highlighted by several unreleased tracks recorded with Steve Carr at Rockville's Hit and Run Studio ("Andrea," The Who's "Tattoo," "Dull Afternoon," "Don't Sleep in the Daytime," "Hey Man," the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action") that were otherwise only available on Alias' 1994 UK-only Keene comp Driving Into the Sun (which included only one "new" song: "Tell Me Something," later to turn up on a 2004 rarities compilation) - and Not Lame Record's woefully neglected treasure trove of outtakes (mostly from Songs from the Film and the still out-of-print Based on Happy Times), demos and other curios, Drowning: A Tommy Keene Miscellany (2006).

The problem was a dearth of information; Second Motion Records really should have released this retrospective with detailed liner notes - something like Tommy's informative capsule comments for Drowning - because early reviews and press releases claimed that there was only one "new" song on You Hear Me - an acoustic version of "Black & White New York," a song from Crashing the Ether (2006). But that's misleading.

See, I was in the shower listening to "Gold Town" (from Tommy's first Geffen album, 1986's Songs from the Film) when I jumped out, thinking something was wrong with the CD because the vocals were drenched in reverb and the beat seemed different, slightly slower and then it had that different ending - instead of ending on a guitar fadeout it ended on a drum beat, followed by a false ending and two more drum beats. Later, toweling off, I heard a way different version of "Don't Sleep In the Daytime" and started scratching my head. What the fuck, I thought, they released this record using the wrong masters!

I knew this was a remastered release of Tommy's back catalog and I started contemplating the countless examples of CD releases in the past in which the record companies messed up and used the wrong masters or alternate mixes (like the first Byrds CD), and I figured this was another one. But then I started researching it and found, on a discussion board thread from TK's Facebook page, Tommy's own breakdown of what was different on this release. Only then did I learn that "Gold Town" was a previously unreleased version produced by T-Bone Burnett. (It's interesting, but I still prefer the Geoff Emerick recording on Songs from the Film. But hey, it's another look at a classic tune...)

So, as a public service to other folks keen on Keene, here's my own breakdown of what's what (and from where) on You Hear Me.

You Hear Me: The Deconstruction
(Note: songs in bold = new)

Disc 1

1. Back To Zero Now
2. Mr. Roland

Tracks 1 and 2 represent the A- and B-sides of Tommy's first single from 1983 on Dolphin Records. The single was included in the 1983 re-release of his first (still unreleased) album, Strange Alliance (Avenue, 1982). "Back To Zero" is also available on the vinyl Places That Are Gone EP (Dolphin, 1984); "Back To Zero" and "Mr. Roland" also appear on the CD The Real Underground (Alias, 1993).

3. Baby Face

The first great Keene ballad, originally released on the Places That Are Gone EP and later included on The Real Underground.

4. Back Again
5. Safe In The Light

Two from the out-of-print Back Again (Try) vinyl EP (Dolphin, 1984). They also appear on The Real Underground CD.

6. Gold Town

The previously unreleased T-Bone Burnett/Don Dixon version from the original Songs from the Film sessions recorded at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, NC in 1984. Songs From The Film was essentially recorded twice, first with T-Bone Burnett and Don Dixon producing and then again with former Beatles producer Geoff Emerick for the version released on Geffin in 1986. Some of the Burnett/Dixon recordings were later released on the Run Now vinyl/cassette EP. Those tracks, plus a few more outtakes, were then included on the 1998 CD reissue of Songs From The Film. This one wasn't...until now.

7. Places That Are Gone
8. Paper Words And Lies
9. Kill Your Sons
10. Call On Me
11. Marilyn Monroe
12. Underworld
13. Astronomy

Tracks 7-13 are from the Geoff Emerick-produced sessions for Tommy's major label debut, Songs from the Film, originally released in 1986 and remastered and re-issued on CD in 1998. "Places That Are Gone" is a re-recording of the title track from Tommy's Places That Are Gone EP (Dolphin, 1984) that drops the sound-collage intro and goes straight into the music. "Places That Are Gone" also appears on The Real Underground (Alias, 1993) and the various artists compilation Poptopia: Power Pop Classics of the '80s (Rhino/Wea, 1997).

According to blogger Wilfully Obscure, a T-Bone Burnett version of track 10 - "Call On Me" - was recorded in 1984 during the first Songs from the Film sessions; would have been interesting to give that a try-out here, though the Emerick cut is pretty damned primo. Wil also claims that T-Bone produced a version of "The Story Ends" and something called "Fall Down Too" from these initial SFTF sessions. (T-Bone's "Call On Me" and "Fall Down Too" recordings are available in the 10-track bonus digital album bundle version of You Hear Me.)

14. Run Now

Title track from the 1986 Run Now EP, later included on the 1998 CD reissue of Songs from the Film. Though most of the EP was recorded in 1984 at North Carolina's Reflection Studio by T-Bone Burnette and Don Dixon, "Run Now" was a 1986 Bearville, NY-production by Bob Clearmountain. You can also see Tommy performing this song in the 1986 Michael Anthony Hall film Out of Bounds (it's also on the movie soundtrack album). But I gotta question why Second Motion didn't include the incendiary version recorded live in March 1986 at NYC's The World - the guitar-slinging workout that has become a staple of Tommy's concerts (usually a show-closer, along with the other encore "usual suspects": "Back To Zero" and "Places That Are Gone"), but still can only be heard on the out-of-print vinyl and cassette versions of the Run Now EP.

15. Nothing Can Change You
16. This Could Be Fiction
17. Based On Happy Times
18. When Our Vows Break
19. Highwire Days
20. Don't Sleep In The Daytime - unreleased Ardent version
21. A Way Out

Tracks 15-19 and 21 are from Tommy's final (and arguably best) Geffin album, Based on Happy Times (1989). The Tommy Keene group had disbanded after the Run Now EP and Keene headed down to the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis (home of Alex Chilton and Big Star) to record with producers John Hampton and Joe Hardy, who also played on the album (Hardy on bass and organ, Hampton on drums). The fruits of his labor would be this long out-of-print album. "Nothing Can Change You" was covered by the Goo Goo Dolls in 1998 and appeared on their certified gold three-track CD-single "Slide."

Though recorded during the same Ardent Studio sessions, track 20 is an unreleased version of "Don't Sleep In the Daytime" - more drum-driven and uptempo - that hasn't seen the light of day until now. A very different, more downbeat, version - recorded with Steve Carr at Rockville's Hit and Run Studio - appears on The Real Underground CD.

The melancholy beauty "A Way Out" (exquisite mandolin solo courtesy of R.E.M.'s Peter Buck) provided the coda to Based On Happy Times and works the same magic here, closing out Disc 1 on a reflective, quiet note - before the thunderous opening salvo of Disc 2 gets things rocking once again...

Disc 2

1. Love Is A Dangerous Thing
2. Driving Into The Sun
3. Down, Down, Down

Tracks 1-3 were originally released on the 5-song Sleeping on a Rollercoaster EP (Matador, 1992). Curiously, the song "Sleeping On a Rollercoaster" turns up only on The Real Underground (Alias, 1993) - or Driving Into the Sun (Alias, 1994) if you live in the UK. "Down, Down, Down" is yet another epic Keene ballad.

A live version of "Love Is a Dangerous Thing" is one of the 10 tracks in the digital-only You Hear Me bonus bundle from Second Motion.

4. No One In This City

The first song Tommy recorded after going bi-coastal and moving from Bethesda to his current home, Los Angeles. This sounds like a re-recording of the version that appears on Drowning: A Tommy Keene Miscellany (Not Lame, 2004). Maybe not...if not, this sure sounds good for an outtake.

5. Turning On Blue
6. Your Heart Beats Alone
7. Silent Town
8. Good Thing Going
9. Compromise

Tracks 5-9 are from Tommy's return to album-length form, Ten Years After (Matador, 1996). Recorded 10 years after his Geffin debut, get it? Totally rocking with a grungier, multi-layered guitar sound that should have put him squarely in the mainstream with a commercial hit. Just like Songs from the Film. Woulda, coulda, shoulda...but like Morrisey bemoaned, The World Won't Listen. Nestled amidst all the thunder was perhaps Tommy's most poignant ballad, "Your Heart Beats Alone" - a song that continues to move me every time I hear it.

10. Long Time Missing (live)

"Long Time Missing" originally appeared on Isolation Party. But this live recording is taken from Tommy's collection of live show recordings, Showtunes (Parasol, 2001).

11. The World Outside
12. Never Really Been Gone

Tracks 11 and 12 are culled from the superb - albeit out-of-print (natch) - Isolation Party (Matador, 1998).

13. Big Blue Sky

The lone track from the underrated The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down (SpinArt, 2002).

14. Black And White NY - unreleased acoustic version
15. Warren In The 60's
16. Lives Become Lies

Tracks 15-16 are from Crashing the Ether (Eleven Thirty, 2006). My least favorite Keene album, but represented here by three tracks (so what do I know?), with track 14 being a previously unreleased acoutic version of "Black and White New York."

17. A Secret Life Of Stories
18. Save This Harmony
19. Tomorrow's Gone Tonight

Tracks 17-19 are from Tommy's most recent release of new material, In the Late Bright (Second Motion, 2009).

20. Leaving Your World Behind - cover of a 20/20 song

Add to the long list of superlative Keene covers, a list that includes "Tattoo" (The Who), "Carrie Ann" (Hollies), "Shake Some Action" and "Teenage Head" (The Flamin' Groovies), "Einstein's Day" (Mission of Burma), "Hey! Little Child" (Alex Chilton), "Our Car Club" (Beach Boys) and, of course, Lou Reed's "Kill Your Sons." The original was an album track off 20/20's awesome debut, the eponymous 20/20 (Portrait, 1979).

***

So there you have it, Keenesters.

I just wish they had included more obscure stuff here for a mass audience that otherwise wouldn't hear such lost Keene gems as "Disarray" from the Big Deal compilation Yellow Pills Volume 1 (also included on Drowning: A Tommy Keene Miscellany), or that live version of Lou Reed's "Kill Your Your Sons" that can only be found on the vinyl and cassette editions of the Run Now EP, or "Run To Midnight," which Tommy recorded while on the Not Lame Records label and which is only available on the CD that came with John M. Borack's powerpop guidebook Shake Some Action (also published by Not Lame Recording Company).

And if you really wanna get obscure, why not "The Heart (Is a Lonely Place)" from the D.C. band compilation Connected (Limp, 1981). I know - it's all probably got to do with music publishing rights and licensing issues with all the various labels TK's been on over the year - and I won't even bring up the continued absence of anything from Tommy's long-buried Strange Alliance album (or the seven unreleased demos - "End Of The World," "In Our Lives," "Walking On The Street," "I'm Your Friend," "You Break My Mind," "Someone To Blame," "Foolish Mind" - from that album that remain on the cutting room floor, according to blogger Wilfully Obscure), much less the record itself. I'm just saying...

By the way: the 10-track digital-only album includes the following, and I suppose I will have to get this someday...just to be a completist!

Places That Are Gone (alt mix by Bill Wittman from Songs From The Film
Nothing Is Grey (demo 1982)
Stuck On A Ship (Demo 1983 from Dolphin Places That Are Gone EP)
Fall Down Too (Unreleased track from T-Bone/Don Dixon album recorded July 1984
All Your Love Will Stay (Home Demo 1999)
Eyes of Youth (Home Demo 1999)
Never Really Been Gone (Live in Chicago 1998)
Call On Me (Live at Campbell University NC - 1996)
Compromise (Live at Campbell University NC - 1996)
Love Is A Dangerous Thing / Brad's Boogie (Live at Campbell University NC - 1996)

Turtles - "Surfer Dan" (*****)

2010-07-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Turtles - "Surfer Dan"
B-side of "Elenore" 45
(White Whale, 1968)

What a great hotrod song - I think Baltimore's retro-stylists Garage Sale should cover it!

I only recently discovered this Turtles B-side on the greatest hits compilation Turtle Tracks that Flo & Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan) sell exclusively at their live shows (and which my girlfriend Amy wisely picked up - and got signed by the boys, too! - when they performed at the 2010 Dundalk Heritage Fair). It also appeared on their 1968 The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands LP. The Turtles had some badass B-sides - hmmm...come to think of it, Garage Sale could do a mean cover of "Buzzsaw" (the B-side of The Turtles' "You Showed Me" 45), too!

The Turtles started out in 1965 as a surf-rock group called Crossfires from the Planet Mars and on "Surfer Dan" they not only return to their roots but also update the early '60s hotrod-surfer lexicon to (tongue-in-cheekily) reflect the changing times of the flower-powery late '60s with lines like "He's a gremmie Maharishi in his baggies and beads." The result, like Surfer Dan, is so cool it knows it's cool.

Watch/listen to "Elenore/Surfer Dan" (YouTube)

"Surfer Dan" Lyrics:

Moving so fast you can't see him go by

Everybody's talking bout Surfer Dan
Doheny to Nirvana in his Chevy Sedan
Moving so fast you can't see him go by
(ooh....)

He's a gremmie Mahareshi in his baggies and beads
Super Stock surfer jock down to his knees
He's so ripped he can't see you go by

Surfer Dan someone that everyone knows
(he's so cool you know his cool is cool)
27 girls follow wherever he goes

Everybody's looking for Surfer Dan
Skinny Minnie, mom & dad and Uncle Sam
He's so cool they can't see him go by

SOLO (Whahooo, Wah, Wah Wahooo..)

Surfer Dan someone that everyone knows
(he's so cool you know his cool is cool)
27 girls follow wherever he goes
(Boss, Stoked, Groovy)

Everybody's talking bout Surfer Dan
Doheny to Nirvana in his Chevy Sedan
Moving so fast you can't see him go by
He's so ripped He can't see You go by
He's so cool you can't see him go by

Surfer Dan 6x