Okay guys -- as you know, a certain Shady Dame and I are currently relaxing in scenic Montreal, in the heart of darkest Canadia.
I won't bore you with the details, and I certainly won't do any cheap jokes à la française, so let's get down to the business at hand toot sweet.
To wit:
...and your favorite (or least favorite) post-Elvis pop/rock/soul or country song specifically referencing an actual geographical location -- OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES -- is...???
No other arbitrary rules, vous êtes les bienvenus, and just be grateful I'm giving you the chance to include Hawaii and its environs.
Oh, and in case you're wondering (and long-time readers will not be surprised to learn) but my personal nominee has got to be "The Boulevard de la Madeline." That oh so sad and beautiful song by the original (i.e., listenable, before the hippie hits happened) Denny Laine-era Moody Blues.
And yes, that's me at said address, on the first trip to Paris I got to take with the aforementioned Shady Dame.
It's a sad day in Paris
With no girl by my side
Got to feeling so badly
Like a part of me died
It would have been
So good to see her
I never thought
She wouldn't be there
There's no girl standing there
And there's no one who cares
And the trees are so bare
On the Boulevard de la Madeleine
Ah, c'est tellement romantique, n'est-ce pas?
Discuss. Which is to say -- what would your choices be?
And have a great weekend everybody!!! See you upon our return!!!
Okay, I'm a HUUUUUUGE Hollies fan, and this clip is a new one on me.
That's from the I'm sure very interesting (but not reviewed by us) 1963 Brit film It's All Over Town; the song itself was the B-side of the lads' wonderful version of Maurice Williams' oft-covered hit "Stay."
An early Graham Nash-Tony Hicks tune, apparently. I should also note that the drummer is original guy Don Rathbone, who was replaced soon after by the incomparable Bobby Hicks for all the Hollies's subsequent classic hits.
Pretty amazing, no? And damn -- what are they, like 12 years old in that scene?
Coming tomorrow: A guaranteed fun Weekend Essay Question!!!
From sometime in the 'aughts, please enjoy a commercial for Outback Steakhouse featuring a lyrically rewritten remake of "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)," the admittedly infectious song originally unleashed by deceptively monikered indie poseurs Of Montreal. (And by deceptively, I mean that the band was from Athens, GA, fercrissakes.)
So why do I bring this up, you ask?
Because, as I suspect at least one of my perceptive readers has already guessed, a certain Shady Dame and I are winging our way today to Montreal itself. Excuse: vacation.
But don't worry, we'll be back on Sunday, and fear not: new Thursday and Friday posts are already written and in the on-deck circle.
And hey -- if anything interesting or alarming happens to us during our brèves vacances dans le Nord, I'll keep you posted.
[I originally wrote and posted this back in 2007(!), but I had totally forgotten about it till I chanced across it by accident recently. I think it's swell on several levels, and I'm gonna figure some way to get it into that alleged Greatest Hits book I have coming out one of these days. In the meantime, enjoy. -- S.S.]
Self-indulgence alert: This is a piece I've wanted to write for a long time (and tried to on a couple of earlier occasions, without success). So I hope you can ignore the fact that this is a really awful lead-in to what will be, I hope, a heartfelt tribute to somebody I never actually met, in the saying "hello!" to sense, but who I found absolutely unforgettable nonetheless.
Okay, the short version: Sometime in late 1979 or early 1980, a friend took me to see a band called The Swinging Madisons at some dive or another in NYC. Said band was fronted by a very talented and interesting guy named Kristian Hoffman; he's had a long and estimable career since then (you can read more about it over at his website HERE) but at the time I knew about him only from his tenure in the pioneering power pop outfit The Mumps, with Lance Loud (of PBS-TV An American Family fame).
Anyway, the Madisons turned out to be absolutely terrific. Hoffman affected a sort of drolly ironic Vegas lounge act look, like a sort of party animal Bryan Ferry, but the music was something else -- first-rate hard-rock verging on pop, with a nice mixture of witty original songs (a psychedelic pastiche called "My Mediocre Dreams" that lived up to its title and the hilarious post-feminist anthem "Put Your Bra Back On") plus some wonderful re-imagined covers, including an echo-drenched and hiccup-ed rockabilly version of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" that worked simultaneously as send-up and homage.
But the icing on the cake was the Madisons' guitarist. Her name was Alison East and -- barely out of high school -- she remains THE greatest rock and roll stage foil (or second banana, if you will) I ever saw, and I mean The Greatest. An utterly improbable cross between Lucille Ball and Joan Jett, which is to say an adorable comedienne with killer comic timing and gunslinger guitar skills, she managed to be compulsively watchable without taking anything away from the band's more traditional visual focal point, although as much as I loved the Madisons' whole act that night, it was East -- mugging shamelessly throughout their too short set -- that just reduced me to mush. In any case, when the show was over, my friend asked if I wanted to go backstage and get introduced, but I was in serious I'm-not-worthy mode and so I declined the offer, a decision I have regretted ever since.
You're going to have to take most of the above on faith, I'm afraid. No video document of the Madisons stage act seems to have survived, and until the photos below (from a gig around the same time as the one I saw) surfaced a few weeks ago (courtesy of ace shutterbug Steve Lombardi, who kindly shared them) I'd never seen as much as a snapshot of Alison. These don't do her justice, necessarily, but I think they do catch at least some of the antic spirit I saw on that cramped stage on the night in question. (PS: If you want an mp3 of The Madisons' surprisingly straight cover of Janis Ian's "Society's Child," which will give you a good idea of Alison's fabulous Jeff Beck/Mick Ronson-esque guitar chops, e-mail me and we'll talk.)
The postscript to the story, and again, the short version: As I suspected they might, the Madisons soon got signed to a hip indie label (Select), and in 1981 they released a well-received EP (now alas out of print, although last I looked there was a vinyl copy available over at Amazon). Said EP, however, was done without Alison, who bailed just prior to the record deal.
And then I heard...well, I'll let Kristian tell it (from his band history over at the website):
I met her [Alison] at CBGB's at a Cramps concert, liked the way she looked, and asked her to be in my planned 'joke' band, but the joke was on me! This chestnut haired, shag-headed, white tux be-clad bon vivant was a glam-metal genius on guitar. So much better than I deserved! She single-handedly lifted my 'joke' into the realms of 'rawk'. She was so good, she turned The Runaways down! (Didn't want to relocate.) My band got popular so quick she started to get leery; it was just supposed to be a goof, a side project. She was already about to quit...when she was stricken with cancer, and died at age 19! What a tragedy! We were so young, it was so unexpected; we all went into shock -- not like a few years later when AIDS rendered the death of a youthful cohort routine, if no less painful.
Like I said, I never actually met Alison East, in the saying "hello!" to sense. But forty odd years later, it seems to me that she changed my life a little anyway. And so it's nice to finally share this sort of goodbye.
From 1964, please enjoy The Beatles and their utterly sublime and guitar driven "I Feel Fine." (The first example of guitar feedback on a pop record? No man can say!)
And in a brand new (2024) fan-produced stereo mix that's guaranteed to make you, in John Lennon's immortal phrase, dance around your room in wild abdomen.
Seriously, if that doesn't get you happy for at least a couple of minutes, consult your physician. And Beatles purists can, frankly, bite me.
Meanwhile, because I love you all more than food, I'm also including a record that we know, definitively, inspired "IFF," -- i.e. it's been documented to have been in John's personal record collection at the time. I refer, of course, to Bobby Parker's wonderful 1961 hit "Watch Your Step."
This has several layers of irony, first of all because Parker's record is pretty obviously inspired by Ray Charles "What I'd Say." The folk process in action, ladies and germs.
Secondly, as I've mentioned in these precincts on previous occasions, in Max Weinberg's wonderful 1984 book The Big Beat -- a collection of interviews with some of the greatest rock drummers of all time -- r&b session guy extraordinaire Bernard "Pretty" Purdy claims that he overdubbed and replaced the original drum tracks on several Beatles records, including "I Feel Fine." When pressed by an incredulous Weinberg, Purdy insists that Brian Epstein brought Beatles master tapes to New York City where the overdubs were done, and that Epstein hushed the whole thing up, thus explaining why Purdie never got the credit he felt he deserved.
This is, to put it charitably, a rather dubious claim for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that the recording technology of the time would have made it extremely difficult to have achieved the substitution with the requisite level of seamlessness.
That said -- if anybody can listen to the newly mixed "IFF" above without concluding that the drum performance is the work of one Sir Richard Starkey, I have some bridgefront property in Brooklyn I'd like to discuss with you.
So I went back and read the lyrics to "Dawn of Correction" - the answer record to Barry McGuire's Top Ten 1965 protest hit "Eve of Destruction." By a studio group called The Spokesmen.
"DOC" was seen at the time as the ultimate anti-hippie song.
But in light of where we are now...It's wild at how far the MAGA Goons have gone.
Complete verses here - check the underscored/bolded lyrics:
You tell me that marches won't bring integration
But look what it's done for the voter registration
Be thankful our country allows demonstrations
Instead of condemnin', make some recommendations
I don't understand the cause of your aggravation
You mean to tell me, boy, it's not a better situation?
So over and over again, you keep sayin' it's the end
But I say you're wrong, we're just on the dawn of correction
You missed all the good in your evaluation
What about the things that deserve commendation? Where there once was no cure, there's vaccination
Where there once was a desert, there's vegetation Self-government's replacing colonization
What about the Peace Corp. organization?
Don't forget the work of the United Nations
Whew.
Wow indeed.
I mean really -- I remembered "DOC" as a laughable right-wing unhip Archie Bunkerish piece of shit, but upon relistening it seems like...jeez, the voice of sensible reason, at least in the context of the times we're currently enduring/living in. Kind of a mind boggler, actually,
And speaking of mind bogglers, have I mentioned that "DOC" was written by -- wait for it -- the team of John Medara and David White, who earlier wrote Danny and the Juniors' immortal anthems "At the Hop" and "Rock-and-Roll is Here to Stay"(!) and (later) Lesley Gore's proto-feminist(!) classic "You Don't Own Me."
Have I said wow?
Okay, moving right along, and politics aside, I must confess that I wasn't a fan of the original Barry McGuire record.
I thought the lyrics were trite, McGuire's vocal an unintentional parody of earnest folkie bullshit, and that the instrumental backing (granted, by the incomparable Wrecking Crew) was vastly inferior to the kind of then current Dylan-inspired folk-rock I dug, i,e, The Byrds or The Turtles.
In fact, my old band The Floor Models used to do an obviously tongue-in-cheek live version of it back in the day -- courtesy of our twelve-string genius Andy Pasternack, who switched one of the lyrics to...
"You may leave here for four days in space/
But when you return you can't find a parking place."
Heh.
Bottom line is, I never took the original as anything more than borderline kitsch. Until, that is, this 1984 cover by New Orleans punksters Red Rockers showed up on my MTV..
...and blew me away. I mean -- that's just fucking great, on every level. And I remember thinking -- why didn't we have the smarts to do it like that first?
Oh well. C'est la vie.
Which leads us to the weekend's business. To wit:
(A)...and your favorite (or least favorite) post-Elvis protest song (or topical song in general) is...???
And (B)...as recorded by who???
My fave, in case you haven't guessed, is Pete Seeger's great anti-nuclear war song. In the version by some mook whose name rhymes with Sleeve Nimels.
And from 1997, it's Meredith Brooks and, er, a "Bitch" of a different collar, if you'll pardon the rather too forced Oz joke.
I bring this up because I had completely forgotten the Brooks song until yesterday, when it came on the sound system at my local watering hole and I thought -- is Alannis Morissette making a comeback?
In any case, I decided that it's pretty cool that there are actually two different great guitar-driven rock songs with the same moniker.
Well, okay -- a great one and and a not terrible one.
Interesting historical irony: Apparently Brooks opened for the Stones in Argentina in 1998 on two consecutive afternoons, and on day one she got booed off the stage for some reason. The following day, she was booed off again, but before exiting, she performed her "Bitch" as a Fuck You! to the audience. I have not been able to determine if the Stones did their "Bitch" later in the show.
In case I haven't mentioned it previously, the incomparable Willie Nile has a brilliant new live album out...
...and as you can see, I am honored to have my review -- succinct and, I think, accurate -- gracing the shrinkwrap.
Here's my favorite track, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." An epochal rocker (originally on Willie's 2021 studio album of the same name)...
...that not only kicks major ass but whose lyrics do total justice to the great sci-fi film of the same name. (The 1951 original, not the misbegotten Keanu Reeves remake).
Long-time readers are aware of my enthusiasm for Willie's work; I remain convinced that his eponymous 1980 debut LP is one of the great folk/rock/punkish/jangle artifacts of its decade, and he's made several others easily in the same league. I should add that a glorious live show he did soon after said debut with his non pareil original band (recorded in Central Park for a radio broadcast that aired in NYC on the old WNEW-FM, if memory serves) is also eminently worth hearing; a CD of it can be ordered at Amazon over HERE, along with the rest of Willie's extensive catalog, and -- of course -- the new one.
BTW, if you're a creaky old person like me, and can't quite make out what I said about Live at Daryl's House Club -- as immortalized in that attractive yellow cover sticker -- without reaching for your reading glasses, just click on the photo and enlarge it. Sorry, I'm too lazy to reproduce it as text here.
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