Archive for the ‘music’ Category

We have nothing to fear but Trump himself

Posted: March 19, 2020 in music
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Greetings! I hope you are well, well-washed, and well-stocked with the essentials of life: shelter, food, water, toilet paper, coffee, music, pets, family, friends, and access to Chessbase.com, which is covering the candidates’ matches for the men’s world chess championship in Yekaterinburg, Russia. (The eight candidates are playing face to face, but without spectators.)

Here in Portland, Oregon, the supermarkets are full of stuff no one wants. The only frozen vegetables I can find are cauliflower and gefilte fish. My neighborhood center has stopped:


6 p.m., Tuesday, March 17. I stood on the center line for almost two minutes.

But I found the silver lining!

Here’s a list of all the things for which we can thank Covid-19:

  1. Renewed attention to the study of corvids, especially crows, ravens, rooks, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers.
  2. Donald Trump has a bad case of Sudden-Reality Shock Syndrome.
  3. Young people are asking old people if they need help. What I don’t like is that they keep asking me.
  4. I haven’t received a rejection from an editor since March 13.
  5. My commute to work is a breeze.
  6. The next chessboxing championship is still scheduled for April 18 in Paris.

 

Year 9 (2019) of Run-DMSteve was a bumpy ride

Here’s an index to what I managed to post:

Retirement

RIP Run-DMIrving

RIP Peter Tork

More tilting at windmills

Forgotten bands:

Attention must be paid

The Beau Brummels

Gene Clark

The Flamin’ Groovies

Ashford and Simpson

The Beat

Bonnie Hayes

Take care of yourselves. Wave from a distance at everyone you love. Special D just made curtains for my new home in the garage.

Random Pan of the Day
Empire Records (1995)
This unremarkable film is set in a record store in the 1990s. No one is tattooed, no one has phones, and the black customers have been locked outdoors. The 15 songs on the soundtrack are mostly easy-listening alt rock, with a few heart-pounders by obscure acts: “Here It Comes Again” by Please, “Sugarhigh” by Coyote Shivers, “Circle of Friends” by Better Than Ezra, and “Ready, Steady, Go” by The Meices. They’ve got an edge, though all of these bands have dumb names.

The only truly memorable song is “This Is the Day” by ’80s romantic synth stalwarts The The. (Their cousins are And And And.) “This Is the Day” plays over the final scene. It’s the only song from Empire Records that gets any airplay today. Naturally, it’s not on the soundtrack.

The pretty, interchangeable young people who work at Empire Records spend most of their time hurting each other’s feelings. I don’t know how I got through the whole thing. Because I was waiting for something better? With Renée Zellweger, an 18-year-old Liv Tyler, a bald Robin Tunney (a year before The Craft and 11 years before The Mentalist), and Tobey Maguire (whose scenes were deleted). Avoid. But don’t avoid The The’s album Soul Mining (1983).

Bonnie Hayes: Brave new girl

Posted: February 27, 2019 in music, Record reviews
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Good Clean Fun

Bottom line:
Forgotten bands finishes with Bonnie Hayes, who emerged from the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s and with Bonnie Hayes & The Wild Combo produced an ’80s landmark that was buried by bad breaks and marauding girl groups.

Moment of glory:
Hayes has supported herself as a musician, songwriter, record producer, and songwriting teacher since she left high school. She has written for Bonnie Raitt and Robert Cray, but she’s also written for Cher and Bette Midler. OK, a girl’s gotta eat.

The one album to own:
Good Clean Fun (1982). If you don’t like this record, you don’t like yourself or your so-called life. There are just as many hooks, high spirits, and musical chops on this platter as on the debut efforts by her ’80s competition:

The Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat (1981)
“Our Lips Are Sealed”
“We Got the Beat”

Bananarama, Deep Sea Skydiving (1983)
“Shy Boy”
“He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’ ”
“Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)”

The Bangles, All Over the Place (1984)
“Hero Takes a Fall”

Book of Love, Book of Love (1986)
“I Touch Roses”

Salt-n-Pepa, Hot, Cool & Vicious (1986)
“Push It”

I like The Go-Go’s, Bananarama, The Bangles, Book of Love, and Salt-n-Pepa. But Bonnie Hayes was just as good and in most of these cases probably better.

Talk about bad breaks:
Yeah, let’s talk about them. Hayes’ record label lacked the muscle to promote her disc. They couldn’t even give her a decent album cover (exactly what happened with The Flamin’ Groovies). What the heck is that cover supposed to be? Bonnie doesn’t even look like herself. She looks like Elizabeth Warren.

On top of this inability to execute, the director of Valley Girl (1983) chose two of Hayes’ songs for the movie – “Girls Like Me” and “Shelly’s Boyfriend” – but the soundtrack wasn’t released until TEN YEARS LATER. And when it was finally released, Bonnie Hayes wasn’t on it!

(These two songs finally appeared on More Songs from Valley Girl. Who buys a record called More Songs from Valley Girl? Would you buy More Songs from 2 Fast 2 Furious?)

“Shelly’s Boyfriend” is a 300-word story about teenage love that beats the crap out of anything these other groups dished up all those years ago:

Girls will be girls
And boys will be boyfriends
You go around the world
Shelly, in the end you will see
It is not all that they led us to believe it would be

Good Clean Fun is not just a good record from a forgotten band, it’s a forgotten minor masterpiece. It’s catchy, it’s fun, it’s musically and lyrically advanced, and if you listen to or buy just one of the records I’ve been writing about in this series, I hope you’ll make it this one.

Other Bonnie Hayes records worth listening to:

Brave New Girl

Brave New Girl (1984)
Show me the woman who doesn’t look good dressed in an American flag! The perfect title for an album released in 1984. Shorter and not as good as her debut, with way too much reliance on the synthesizer; “Wild Heart” sounds like a Prince outtake. But it rewards multiple spins, especially the title cut, the Cyndi Lauper-like “After Hours,” and “Night Baseball.”

Love in the Ruins (2003)
Uneven, but Hayes rocks harder than I’ve ever heard her. It’s a very ’90s kind of hard rocking, built for people who never liked grunge. Don’t miss “Keeping the Hum Going” and “Money Makes You Stupid.”

What’s next:
What I realized as I was writing about forgotten bands is that I could extend this project into forever. It’s a black hole for human attention. We already have the internet for that.

Where, for example, do you draw the line? (A former boss, who never mastered his native language, used to say to us, “Where do you cross the line?”)

If I had continued this series, I would’ve backtracked to the early ’70s and Fanny, which may have been the first all-woman band. Then I was going to get into some cage matches:

  • ESG (“UFO”) vs. EMF (“Unbelievable”)
  • ABC (“Poison Arrow”) vs. MFSB (“T.S.O.P.” and “T.L.C.”)
  • The Jaggerz (“The Rapper”) vs. Fischer-Z (“Remember Russia,” theme music of the Trump administration)

I would’ve tackled the free-for-all of funk bands from the early ’70s, particularly any band started by George Clinton. I would’ve untangled that amorphous blob of English New Wave bands that all begin with a C: The Chameleons, The Charlatans UK, The Church, Crowded House.

And then there’s the ultimate question about U.S. band The Call: political rockers or secret Christians?

I was planning to end with Diesel Park West, a British band of the ’80s and ’90s. There’s only one point to make about them, so here it is. At first hearing, they don’t appear to be of much use to anyone. You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? You sure have: They are U2 without The Edge and with Bono turned down about 50%, just like your microwave.

But this, it turns out, is Diesel Park West’s strength. DPW produces the perfect background music when you need the front part of your brain for thinking. It’s all the comfort of U2 without having to engage with U2.

Achtung, babies. Thanks for reading and see you next time, hopefully with exclusive Run-DMSteve news.

The Beat: Based on a true story

Posted: February 23, 2019 in Concert reviews, music
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The Beat

The bottom line:
I’m stretching the forgotten-bands rules even further this evening. I originally wanted to nominate only those bands with track records – that is, more than one good album. But not tonight’s guests. Though they produced just one superlative album and one underwhelming reprise (and some forgettable tracks with a different lineup of musicians), they are the only forgotten band I can’t forget because I went to one of their concerts.

Until 1978, when I saw them, my most transformative cultural experiences were seeing Herman’s Hermits (The Who opened), The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Harlan Ellison, and Kurt Vonnegut (Donald Barthelme opened). I thought this LA power pop quartet was playing in the same league as Springsteen et. al. and obviously destined to change the world.

There’s no way to prove that they didn’t, unless you can compare notes with your twins from Earths 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Vital personnel:
Paul Collins, singer, songwriter, guitarist. Collins came from a band called The Nerves. His Nerves bandmate Peter Case formed The Plimsouls, who had a hit, “A Million Miles Away,” on the Valley Girl soundtrack, which has an odd connection with the next band in this series.

Their story:
Their story is about the same as that of every other grouping of cisgender Caucasian males who formed a band so they could drink, catch and release girls, and avoid gainful employment. They just happened to be better at it (better at the music part, I don’t know how they fared with these other factors) than 85% of the other cisgender Caucasian males who tried the same thing.

Their story is completely uninteresting, except for a comment from a Mr. Jerry Kaufman of Seattle, Washington, who notes that The Beat were, for a brief time in 1979, enough of a force to make a band in the U.K. change their name from The Beat to The English Beat when they toured in North America. In 1982, when The Beat from the USA belatedly returned for their follow-up, The Kids Are the Same (turns out they weren’t), they had fallen so far behind The English Beat that to stake out new territory they called themselves Paul Collins Beat. That didn’t help.

I can think of only one other artist who had a three-year gap between her first and second albums – Cyndi Lauper: She’s So Unusual (1983) and True Colors (1986).

My story:
Once upon a time in 1978 (all I recall about the season was, it was dark), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to a show at a boxy space that may have been called the Box or the Space or the Square Brick Thing. It was near the Central stop on the Red Line, if anyone from that era or any time-travelers among my subscribers can enlighten me. The opening band was a local favorite, The Real Kids.

The Beat came on late, about the time I collapse in bed these days, and they were raw, vulnerable, biting, aggressive, love-sick, and swaggering. They had a dual mission: Force everyone onto the dance floor and say kaddish for all the rock ’n’ roll that had come before them. They lit each song off the last one like a chainsmoker.

As far as I can remember the set list, you can find it all on the one album to own, The Beat. “Different Kind of Girl” and “Rock N Roll Girl” got some play on the nascent alt-rock stations of the day, but not enough to propel either song anywhere near any list kept by Billboard.

The Real Kids were also good, though they complained a lot about the sound. They startled me because they looked to be my age. Until then, guys in the bands I saw were older than me. They played a song called “Just Like Darts,” which in Boston is pronounced “Just Like Dahts.”

Jonathan Richmond of Jonathan Richmond & The Modern Lovers was on the floor with the rest of us. (One of the Kids had played in his band.) Richmond is a New England legend, author of that immortal ode to Boston and teenage drivers, “Road Runner,” which you may know from the Greg Kihn cover. I always thought Richmond was insane (have you ever listened to “Road Runner”?), but in 1978 he had the charisma of Bill Clinton or George Clooney, or Bill Clinton and George Clooney. That night, he was lost in the music. He was also lost in the embrace of my best friend’s girlfriend. That’s how good this show was.

At the end of the show, I walked out of the Square Brick Thing with my ears ringing and the cold air hitting my flushed skin and feeling as if I’d been to the moon and back. I’d like to report that my girlfriend and I had sex in a car in the parking lot (someone else’s car), but while this plan was considered it was also rejected.

Final word:
The Beat were the U.S. version of their Irish contemporaries The Undertones, but nowhere near as funny and with far less success. It’s a compliment to be mentioned in the same sentence as The Undertones. Not bad for a forgotten band.

Ashford and Simpson: Remember me as a sunny day

Posted: February 22, 2019 in music, Record reviews
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Ashford and Simpson discography

The bottom line:
I’m stretching the rules of the forgotten bands game with this choice, because songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson are remembered – but only by writers and music nerds.

Songwriters don’t become famous unless they become famous performers. Just ask Bernie Taupin, the lyricist behind Elton John. Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson, and Carole King (but not her former husband and writing partner, Gerry Goffin) began as writers but broke as performers.

Their story:
Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson met in a gospel choir and were songwriting partners and performers for 50 years until Ashford’s death in 2011.

Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell sang “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” Ashford and Simpson wrote all three.

“Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor” were two signature tunes for Ray Charles. He can thank Ashford and Simpson.

Ten of the 11 songs on Diana Ross, the first Diana Ross solo record, were written by Ashford and Simpson.

“I’m Every Woman,” Chaka Kahn’s first hit after she left Rufus? Let me see, I knew it a second ago…oh yes, Ashford and Simpson.

“Stairway to Heaven”? No, they didn’t write that one, but if you’ve been following the legal battle over “Stairway” it could be that Led Zeppelin didn’t write it either.

Ashford and Simpson recorded a long line of their own albums. I’ve listened to them all, though after awhile I only gave each record three tracks before moving on. Their work is good-natured, and our heroes sing like angels (Simpson’s range is astronomical, and Ashford knows that a good husband always backs up his wife), but the music is mostly waterlogged disco.

All these albums with the couple’s happy photos on the covers – is there a meaning here? Yes there is, and I didn’t have to work too hard to find it.

The music of Ashford and Simpson, the music they wrote for themselves, stands for partnership, commitment, and, as another writer who made his name as a performer, Lionel Ritchie, once wrote for Diana, everlasting love.

Moment of glory:
Writing for Gaye, Charles, Ross, and Kahn should be glorious enough, but I’ll pick sharing their 1996 release, Been Found, with poet Maya Angelou.

The one album to own:
Diana Ross. (The first one, with “Remember Me” and her cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Her record company named three albums Diana Ross.) Want an Ashford and Simpson just for Ashford and Simpson? I’d advise against it, but you might try their last record, The Real Thing (2009), which was recorded live in a small club.

Tomorrow, forgotten bands continues with a band that intersected with my personal universe.

Last train to Torksville

Posted: February 21, 2019 in music
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I’m back from my away mission. It wasn’t the away mission I would prefer to go away for. Some guys go to New York, London, Paris, Munich. I go to Fall River, San Jose, and Merced. Merced. Fall River without the glitter.

If I owe you an email, I’ll reply after I finish this post.

If I owe you a letter, I’ll write one at the next monthly meeting of the typewriter club. Yes there is a typewriter club, and yes I go to their meetings. So long as those folks own typewriters, I don’t have to.

If I owe you a sext – no I don’t, I sent it from the airport!

Our series on forgotten bands continues tomorrow. See, I didn’t forget. But I am going to condense the nonsense, because I have other stuff to do and I’ve been having second thoughts about resurrecting some of these people.

RIP Peter Tork.

But the porpoise is waiting
Good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

Surprise: “The Porpoise Song,” the psychedelic valentine from Head, a song that was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, is a favorite of headbangers. Middle-aged doom-dwellers Trouble perform one of the better covers. Give it a chance – there’s some awesome shredding at the 2:45 mark. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, Peter.

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