Archive for the ‘music’ Category

Alarmed

Posted: June 2, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Electric Folklore Live
The Alarm
1988

If in 1988 you had wanted to make a movie about U2’s early years, you could’ve hired The Alarm to play them. They were Welsh, not Irish, but they were all inspired by The Clash and were intensely righteous. The Alarm sounded like U2. They sounded like U2 on the day they strummed their first note and I’ll bet they sound like U2 today. Middle-aged U2.

The Alarm were good. They weren’t built for a marathon, like U2, and they weren’t able to evolve, like U2, but they could be magnificent in a sprint. Like U2. Plus the gentlemen in The Alarm had serious hair.

The Alarm

Electric Folklore Live is The Alarm’s answer to U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky (1983). On the first three tracks they go head-to-head with U2’s legendary live album and emerge with a draw, including one first-class pop song: “Rain in the Summertime,” a bouncier version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (by, of course, U2).

Sadly, Electric Folklore has three more songs, and the quality drops like a ball rolling off a table. Well, that saves time! Once you’ve played the first half of Electric Folklore Live, put that record down and go check out two other songs by The Alarm: “The Stand” and “Sold Me Down the River.” Then I recommend you go directly to the album that The Alarm failed to record but U2 did: The Joshua Tree (1987).

If The Alarm came to Portland and played the Oregon Zoo Amphitheatre, I would probably go. The tickets would be way cheaper than tickets to U2.

Random Pick of the Day I
Siouxsie & The Banshees, Kaleidoscope (1980)
If you want an artist who can whip up a mood of despair and sometimes carry a tune, Siouxsie is your girl. I enjoy these glimpses of hopelessness because I’ve spent so much of my life working in corporate America. Feeling buoyant, joyful, vivacious? Give Kaleidoscope a chance to let some of the air out of your life.

Random Pick of the Day II
John Cougar Mellencamp, Uh-Huh (1983)
John Mellencamp’s early career was a struggle. His record company changed his name to Johnny Cougar and forgot to tell him. Sorry, kid, our bad. All of his early albums feature glamour-boy photos of him as if he were David Cassidy’s smarter younger brother. Critics dismissed him for sounding like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Seger, and The Rolling Stones. I refused to buy his records. How do you survive such a storm of disdain?

Mellencamp can’t write as insightfully as Springsteen, Petty, etc., and thanks to my boycott he was practically living out of a cardboard box. But he was persistent. By 1983 he had managed to sneak his real name onto his albums. Critics were reconsidering his work. Even I started to like him.

Uh-Huh is a good place to start some Mellencamping. It has some solid songs in the first half, particularly the opener, “Crumblin’ Down.”

Random Pick of the Day III
R.E.M., Life’s Rich Pageant (1986)
Once or twice a year I trip over Life’s Rich Pageant and I ask myself, How did I get here? How do I work this? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! Then I ask myself, Why do I own this record? It packs several things I dislike inside one jewel case:

  1. Music by R.E.M., the most self-important, humorless band of the 1980s. (USA division – U2 takes the title in the U.K.)
  2. Michael Stipe’s monotonal, monocultured voice. You get more emotional nuance from Weird Al singing “Another One Rides the Bus.”
  3. The song list is hard to read plus it’s in in the wrong order double plus it doesn’t mention the one song that was a hit.

But then I start to play it and by the time I get to the last track I’m eager to hear the first one again. R.E.M. had an immense talent for being boring, which is why I forget them for most of the year. But it’s hard to imagine an ’80s Hall of Fame jukebox that doesn’t include at least half of what’s on this disc, including “Cuyahoga,” “Hyena,” “Begin the Begin,” and that hit I mentioned, “Superman” (the one song they didn’t write and that Stipe doesn’t sing).

No Trump jokes tonight. I was making myself ill.

 

Almost famous

Posted: June 1, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Boomtown
David + David
1986

David Baerwald and David Ricketts were Californians with musical roots in Bruce Springsteen’s The River. They called themselves David + David on Boomtown, their only album.

David Baerwald and David Ricketts should not be confused with David Whitson and David Phillips, two Texans who also recorded one album: the country-rock A Song for You. Those Davids called themselves David & David.

David + David and David & David should not be confused with the David and David who are two guys at my postcard club. Those are way other Davids.

David + David’s Boomtown is a chronicle of folks going nowhere during the Reagan years. Springsteen and David + David are good at observing losers, but only Springsteen can find their nobility. Springsteen’s people may be headed for defeat, but they’re going down in a last-chance power drive. David + David’s people are slipping quietly into that dark night.

Time has not helped this record, unless you swoon over synthesizers. As singers, the Davids are serviceable. They don’t take chances, except once when they rap, but it passes quickly. They’re the infielder you send into the game in the sixth inning when your regular guy pulls a hamstring. And the song “Ain’t That Easy,” sung from the point of view of an abusive boyfriend, is creepy. The romantic violin doesn’t help.

However: The writing often pops. On “Swallowed By the Cracks,” the line “We would talk through the night/about what we would do/if we could just get started” is a descendant of Pink Floyd’s “No one told you when to run/you missed the starting gun.” On “Heroes” they rhyme “bad guitar players” with “dewy-eyed teenage dragon slayers.”

The opening track, “Welcome to the Boomtown,” briefly broke into the Billboard Top 40. It’s the kind of song that college radio stations adore…for a couple of semesters. It’s also the only song I know with “succulent” in the lyrics:

So I say, I say welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
All that money makes such a…suc-cu-lent…sound

I guess time travel really is possible, because after tripping over “Welcome to the Boomtown” recently, I not only recognized it, I was immediately transported to a drizzly night in Seattle in what must’ve been the late ’80s, waiting in the doorway to get into a Ballard club with Special D. The club was playing a mixtape, and “Welcome to the Boomtown” drifted out of the PA system like a lost soul.

This record is worth a listen. But maybe not on Date Night.

Naturally, the first name of the man who produced Boomtown was Davitt.

Same era, different results
Wall of Voodoo, Call of the West (1982)
The Nails, Mood Swing (1984)

Wall of Voodoo’s specialties were alienation, hopelessness, and robotic laments. Singer Stan Ridgway sounded a lot like The B-52s’ Fred Schneider. When I first heard their song “Tomorrow,” I thought it was The B-52s. “Tomorrow” is a catchy tune with a galloping rhythm à la Men At Work’s “Down Under.”

Wall of Voodoo would be a whisper today, known only to ethnomusicologists, were it not for “Mexican Radio.” The guitar explodes off the starting block and the lyrics leave fun syllables in your mouth:

I wish I was in
Tijuana
Eating barbequed iguana
I’d take requests on the telephone
I’m on a wavelength far from home

The Nails had some serious skills, and Marc Campbell, their singer, had a big, distinctive voice. Their material was not up to their talent. They generally kept things dark and quirky, but they brightened up on “88 Lines About 44 Women.”

Deborah was a Catholic girl,
she held out to the bitter end.
Carla was a different type,
she’s the one who put it in.

There’s humor in this song, as well as motels, money, murder, madness, but it all ends sweetly:

Judy came from Ohio,
she’s a Scientologist.
Pomegranate, here’s a kiss,
I chose you to end this list.

Boomtown isn’t as good as Springsteen’s debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, but it showed potential. And yet nothing happened. Wall of Voodoo and The Nails together released 10 undistinguished albums. Why not David + David? Timing? Connections? The turn of an unfriendly card? “Mexican Radio” and “88 Lines About 44 Women” will live forever on comps of ’80s music. “Welcome to the Boomtown” will not.

My only thought here is that “Mexican Radio” propels and “88 Lines” makes you laugh. “Welcome to the Boomtown” haunts. When excavating the past, which would you’d rather be? Propelled, amused, or haunted? And that’s not haunted as in “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” but haunted as in somebody’s going to die. Alone.

Well, what’s fame anyway? David Bowie wrote a bitter song about it, but he said later that he didn’t care anymore. “I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.” And the chance to lead the Republican Party. I’d prefer a seat in a restaurant.

 

Ain’t that peculiar

Posted: May 31, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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The Complete Motown Singles, 1959-1972
Various artists
2005-2013

In 2005, Universal (which owns Motown) began re-releasing every Motown single ever made. Volume 1 covered 1959-1961. The end of the series, volumes 12A and B, covered 1972. These 14 years set loose a tidal wave of 2,000 songs. When I heard about this, I was STOKED.

Sadly, most of the songs I swam through in this series are not good. For every famous track by Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles there’s a Who’s Who of the ignored and the unknown. There are also plenty of lackluster tracks by Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc. Some of those songs didn’t deserve obscurity (Barrett Strong’s “Money”), but most are right at home in that unlit cul de sac.

The first couple of volumes of this series are interesting in that they show how Motown founder Berry Gordy was willing to try anything to produce a hit song. (Even surf.) AllMusic.com opines that hearing the classics alongside the not-so-classics helps us to hear the former in their original context and appreciate them anew.

But the boys (it’s mostly boys) writing for AllMusic.com are nerds who are still living in their parents’ basement. They have nothing better to do than listen to 2,000 songs, most of which had the staying power of a Republican governor running for president, and argue over bass lines, back-up singers, and catalog numbers.

What I discovered with these comps, each of which has about 150 songs, is that I only have so much time left on this planet. I tried listening with deep attention, but it would take me months to digest 150 songs, and anyway I have to go to work in the morning. I started clicking Skip after 30 seconds or a minute of something that struck me as uninspired or derivative so I could wade ashore at last with a good song. And you know what? I appreciate the classics just fine!

I don’t want to skip 15 forgotten tracks to get to “Indiana Wants Me,” then do it all over again for “Ball of Confusion” and “War” (which I did with the 1970 edition). Sure, “Indiana Wants Me” is above average, but in this crowd it’s a towering inferno!

Today’s lesson: Producing a hit record is harder than Chinese algebra.

Any one of these volumes is worth a chunk of your time. They’re like your own personal radio station. Except if you owned this station, you’d yell at the program manager, “You’re fired!” Sad.

Random Pick of the Day, barely
Various artists, Blue Note Salutes Motown (1998)
Twelve Motown classics redone by a major-league lineup of jazz musicians. The results are mostly quiet…too quiet. The voltage meter jumps modestly with guitarist Earl Klugh’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” However, the female chorus tells us three times that they heard it “on” the grapevine. If you can’t get something as simple as a preposition right, I suggest you go back to your seat and study. Another guitarist, Charlie Hunter, tries to get his arms around “You Keep Me Hanging On.” He manages to let all the anxiety out of the song, plus he gets upstaged by the vibes player.

There are two tracks I can recommend, both originally from Marvin Gaye. The first is organist John Patton’s “Ain’t That Peculiar” (which is so good that Blue Note should salute John Patton). The second is “What’s Going On,” which belongs to the sax player, Adam Kolkers.

Two tracks aren’t much out of 12, but these two are good enough that I’m keeping the disc.

(Shot of redemption: This isn’t Motown, but Charlie Hunter triumphs with his cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” on his 1995 album, Bing Bing Bing!)

 

I don’t know if the cotton is high, but our hedge sure is

Posted: May 30, 2016 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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As I write this here in the United States, we’re nearing the end of the three-day weekend devoted to Memorial Day. This is my favorite holiday, the holiday with an entire summer up its sleeve. The weather has been abfab and the house projects ended well, without the traditional two extra trips to the hardware store. The writing flowed, the dog charmed everyone at the beach, and as always the music is the best.

We trimmed two of the hedges that border our yard. Whenever I hack my way into these walls of vines, leaves, branches, and the mysterious dark spaces loved by raccoons I remember again why the Germans hid behind them on D-Day.

We sorted through shoeboxes of old photo prints, slides, and negatives. (What can you do with negatives today? Sew them into a Victoria’s Secret sarong?) Here’s a photo I found that stands in for my mood this afternoon. It’s Emma, our first dog, on a hike called West Cady Ridge in the Central Cascades of Washington, probably in late spring 1995:

The joy of being a dog
The joy of being a dog.

Of course, what’s a holiday weekend without a box from my Dad? Among the treasures I don’t know how I ever lived without were four spindles of string from the 1960s:

Spindle City
Free to good home, moldy atmo included.

All this string (one spindle holds twine) comes from an age when packages were routinely strung up. Pies, cakes, and donuts from a bakery always arrived in a flimsy cardboard box tied with string. Packages from department stores and even supermarkets were often hog-tied as if they might bolt if they had a chance. Four spindles of string – nothing’s getting away from me now.

If you live in the United States, I hope your Memorial Day weekend has gone at least as well as mine. I mean that sincerely, whether you support Donald Trump or a rational human being. Thanks for reading along, and welcome to: Big Week!

Random Pick of the Day
Miles Davis, trumpet, Gil Evans, arranger and conductor, Porgy and Bess (1959)
The highlights are what you’d expect – “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” – but the whole album is grand. Do you believe in heaven? If there is one and you end up there, you’ll be hearing this disc a lot.

Random Pan of the Day
Bad Religion, 80-85 (1991)
These Southern California political punks are harder-hitting than The Ramones, but 30 years on both bands have the same problem: Every song sounds the same. Thirty years have turned Bad Religion into a Weird Al parody of themselves. It doesn’t help that the drumming reminds me of Fred Flintstone’s feet slapping against the pavement to make his car go.

If you had lived in SoCal in 1980 through ’85, these 28 tracks would fill you with nostalgia; you’d be back on the streets in no time, though you might not remember what it was you used to do there. I couldn’t get all the way through them, but I must honor Bad Religion for the title of their 1983 debut: How Could Hell Be Any Worse?

 

I’m super-freaking because our next president might be a bad-tempered, orange-tinted Teletubby who doesn’t have the brains God gave a walrus. Other than that, I’m good.

Posted: May 7, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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It’s about fucking time I said this, so here it is, plain and simple, because I am through holding back:

I love Rick James!

I first met the late Mr. James in a parking lot in Boston. In that summer of 1978, when I thought punk was a joke because I believed in something lasting (disco), I lived near the urban campus of Northeastern University. One hot, humid evening I walked past the parking lot where a black fraternity had set up a fortress of boom boxes. At that moment all of them were playing James’ “You and I” from his first album, Come Get It.

I was funkedelicized!

Later on they played A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” but come on, I’m being serious here. That night I learned that Rick James knew how to make you shake your moneymaker. Even when his albums are stupid – and there’s enough stupid in his collected works to suck the salt out of the Great Salt Lake – there’s usually something I want to dance to. What that man couldn’t do with a guitar, a cowbell, and thigh-high boots!

(Just don’t get trapped in the tar pits of his ballads. What’s that, Rick? You’ve been hurt by love before? How long is this going to take? This must be how the dinosaurs died.)

I saw him in concert the following year when he was touring after his second album, Fire It Up. “Love Gun” and “Come Into My Life” are the worthwhile numbers on that disc. I kept finding one or sometimes two songs on each album that could turn a dance floor into the disco inferno that The Trammps promised but couldn’t deliver. On Bustin’ Out of L7, that song is “High on Your Love Suite/One Mo Hit (Of Your Love),” which begins as more “You and I” but burns holes in your superhero underwear by the end of its 7 minutes.

By the end of the ’70s, it was clear that Prince had ambitions greater than James’, but it wasn’t at all clear that Prince had the talent to make that happen. In fact, Rick James in 1978-79 was one of Donna Summer’s few worthy adversaries.

Here comes Rick James’ ultimate, amazingest, most awesomest album
James stumbled into the new decade with Garden of Love, which was overrun by his ballads. If you enjoy scraping barnacles off a hull, this is the album for you. Meanwhile, Prince released his first good album, Dirty Mind. How would James respond?

He counter-punched with Street Songs and that immortal study of human sexual response, “Super Freak”!

No disco comp can receive the coveted Orthodox Union Kosher Certification if it doesn’t include “Super Freak.” But Street Songs is so much more than this stupid song. I’m lying. Most of these tracks are dull, including “Fire and Desire,” James’ duet with his former girlfriend Teena Marie. It doesn’t have the fire and desire of Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell or June & Johnny Cash or even Daryl Hall & John Oates.

But the album opens with the impact of Hillary Clinton plowing into a bar fight while waving a bicycle chain over her head. If you heard “Give It to Me Baby” and “Ghetto Life” in a club you’d knock over your table and your date to get to the dance floor. “Give It to Me” even has the “Thriller” bass line, and Michael Jackson didn’t release Thriller until a year later. These two songs are in the starting lineup in the World Series of Funk.

You could explore James’ catalog past Street Songs, but why take the risk? As with Duran Duran, you only need a few of Rick James’ songs. And you do need them. You know I’m right. Don’t get all super freaky on me.

Come Get It, 1978
Fire It Up, 1979
Bustin’ Out of L7, 1979
Garden of Love, 1980
Street Songs, 1981

Oh yeah: Please vote for Hillary.

Random Pick of the Day
Funkadelic, Maggot Brain (1971)
George Clinton, the founder of Funkadelic and Parliament, knows how to get all up in your face. Maggot Brain is like Sly & The Family Stone turned to 11. “Super Stupid” is superior to the entire Grand Funk Railroad oeuvre and good enough for Jimi Hendrix. You could disintegrate Coldplay or Tears For Fears with this one song.

The mesmerizing title track was the centerpiece of this album. It has no lyrics so I can’t tell you what “Maggot Brain” means. My guess is that he was saying fuck you. That would also explain the cover photo. This is one of the most unappealing jackets in the history of vinyl record jackets.

The guitar solo on “Maggot Brain” would make doves cry.

Random Pan of the Day
Adele, 19 (2008)
Come back when you’re 25.

Oh shoot, she did!

 

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