Beat Surrender

If you put the Who, the Kinks, Smokey Robinson, and the Clash in a blender, and added a shot of ginseng, you'd wind up with the Jam.

There are some inexplicable holes in my music collection. It amazes and astonishes me that I never owned a record by the Jam (although I wore out a cassette that had Sound Affects on one side and This is the Modern World on the other, listening to it every day as I drove to and from my first post-college job).

The Clash had the political cred and the Sex Pistols had the punk cred, but it's hard to think of any English band to emerge from the mid-1970s who had more musical cred than the Jam.

Initially, the Jam were considered yet another punk band. But their musical ambitions were always a little grander. They wanted to be a Motown band. And a Pub Rock Band.

And in an era when they're contemporaries wanted to bury "dinosaur" bands like the Who, the Jam secretly dreamed of being the Who. But they didn't entirely take that ambition seriously and were willing to mock their Who-obsession by calling their third album All Mod Cons. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


But then things changed. And the band started becoming a faster, more punk version of the Kinks, chronicling the uniquely British details of their lives. This made them superstars in the U.K., but ultimately probably made it much harder for them to break through in the U.S. (which they never quite did, despite incongruous appearances on shows like American Bandstand):


While their music always retained the same propulsive drive, they moved into more of a soul sound before finally calling it quits in 1983. Maybe all they really wanted was to finally be Martha and the Vandellas:


Paul Weller wound go on to found the Style Council and a solo career and his bandmates Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton wrote a book about the Jam that slammed Weller. Buckler and Foxton recruited a singer from a Jam tribute band and toured as "From the Jam" in 2007. Weller insists he'll never get back together with the Jam and described reunion tours as "just embarrassing and sad."

Maybe so. But to this day, when I'm feeling sad there's still nothing that cheers me up quite like the doomed-but-also-hopeful tone of the Jam's "Monday."

And (like the song goes) I will never be embarrassed about that again.

Happy Tax Day!

What to do with that tax-refund money burning a hole in your pocket?

Maybe blow 80 bucks on a special box (a Box of Vision, no less) and some booklets to hold re-mastered Beatles CDs due to be released later this year?

Because nothing says "I have way too much money" like buying one of these babies, specially built to hold CDs and Digipacks!

Of course, the CDs and Digipacks are not included, but if you've got 80 bucks to waste on this, you probably don't care...

They Call it "Dueling Banjos" for a Reason, People!

Before the Internet, I'd have had to learn about this stuff on the streets.

But now people can email me and I can search YouTube for... well, almost anything.

And so in some kind of harmonic convergence of weirdness celebrating misguided musical adventurousness, two separate people emailed me about versions of "Dueling Banjos" that feature the tuba.

I guess it has been a rough winter and everyone's gone a little stir crazy... so here we go:

Even I know that it's not cool to be barefoot in church wearing pants cut off at the knees, but tell that to the people in this Violin and Tuba version:


Flute and Tuba version:


And, as if that weren't scary enough, here's a version on pre-programmed Organ and Tuba:


This all makes me nostalgic for the days when Tubas were seen and not heard!

It's the End of the 70s....

Apparently, Los Angeles can convict celebrities of murder.

But only if it's been more than 30 years since they were famous (which explains O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake).

Spector, who dubbed himself the "first teenage millionaire" and invented the "Wall of Sound" with dozens of instruments dubbed down to mono tracks, produced amazing hits for the Ronnettes, Ike and Tina Turner, and others. In a Freudian slip that speaks volumes, he also famously claimed that the title "To Know Him is to Love Him" came from his own tombstone (realizing what he'd said, he said he meant his father's tombstone).

Spector is also the producer brought in by John Lennon to salvage the Let it Be project, which he did by overdubbing strings and pissing off Paul McCartney.

After a bunch of high-profile production work for Lennon and George Harrison in the 1970s, Spector was brought in to produce End of the Century for the Ramones -- an idea that was just crazy enough to work (although, in the end, it didn't).

Over the past 30 years, there have been widespread reports of incidents involving Spector pulling guns on various musicians. So when he was accused of shooting a woman in 2003, many people wondered why it had taken so long for someone to die because of one of Spector's guns. And sadly, he's better known in the past 20 years for his bizarre hairpieces than for anything musical.

It's the end, the end of the 70s
It's the end, the end of the century...

(Link for Gmail subscribers)

No Place Like Utopia

I was a big fan of Utopia.

Not the three-keyboardist prog period. And not the heavy metal period. But the brief New Wave/Power Pop period (which lasted from about 1980 to 1982).

A couple days ago, I heard "Set Me Free" by Utopia on XM Radio. It was like running into an old lover years after the passion had cooled. You can see things more objectively (the good and the bad) and hopefully you leave the encounter with some good feelings (and not still be crazy after all these years).

Adventures in Utopia was all over hipper radio stations in 1980, with its mixture of anthemic space ditties and straightforward pop-rock. Flush with cash from some afterschool job I can't remember, I bought the album new instead of hunting down a used copy.

The band was always seen as a Todd Rundgren side project (and most of its fans were Todd-heads), but it's secret weapon was always Kasim Sulton, who sang the band's one real hit "Set Me Free" (which barely crept into the Top 40 in 1980).


Utopia's next album Deface the Music was a collection of Beatle soundalike songs that sounded exactly like what might have happened if Todd Rundgren had joined the Rutles. In a masterstroke of shitty timing, the album came out just before John Lennon was killed. And suddenly the idea of clever fake Beatle songs seemed much less appealing (especially when compared to real Beatle songs people already knew and loved). I saw them at a club in Hartford touring behind this album; the show was half-full, but the concert was amazing. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


For the next few years, Rundgren alternated solo albums and Utopia albums with Utopia never quite breaking through and usually playing second fiddle to whatever directions or passions were important to Rundgren. Ironically, Todd's solo albums proved much more popular than Utopia records just as Utopia was finally developing a signature sound and group identity that wasn't based on Rundgren. But Utopia never regained the momentum they had in 1980 and each successive album was less successful (artistically and commercially).

Swing to the Right, a concept album that grew out of Reagan's election, failed to catch fire with audiences. Utopia was more notable for being a three-sided album than for the music itself (it came on two vinyl records, but the second record had side 3 on each side). The ironically named Oblivion sunk like a stone (perhaps because it traded the Utopia sound for a generic arena-rock sound that sounded like Asia on a bad day). I bought all these records; like a gambler on a losing streak, I figured my luck had to change (and the few good songs on each album kept my hope alive like an occasional winning hand). By 1986, they'd faded away which ultimately may have been a good thing (but it left me feeling like I was at a casino that closed just when I'd deluded myself into thinking my luck had changed).

Ironically enough, after college, I lived down the block from a club called Johnny D's; I always wondered about the place but never went inside. And then tonight, I found this video of Kasim Sulton singing "Libertine" at Johnny D's in 2008 and it sounds as good as it did back in the day.

Smells Like Teen Ukulele Spirit

I never really understood why people worshipped Nirvana.

Maybe eight ukuleles and tuxedos would help.


Or a swing arrangement by the "Havin' My Baby" guy (link for Gmail subscribers):


Or a banjo version from Patti Smith and Sam Shepherd:

Just Like Moses Malone

Squint your eyes, tilt your head, and she's a superstar.

In an alternate universe, Karla DeVito is a superstar.

You may remember her from the video of Meat Loaf's "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" (although it was Ellen Foley who actually sang on the song). Or from her song "We Are Not Alone" from The Breakfast Club.

But whenever I think of Karla DeVito, I think of her goofy and amazing debut album Is This a Cool World... Or What?, which came with a poster that had doodles, photos from her childhood, and handwritten lyrics. And the music was pretty great, Cyndi Lauder-esque goofiness, great pop musicianship from players like Anton Fig, Paul Shafer, and G.E. Smith, and powerful vocals that sounded like the love child of Kate Bush and Linda Ronstadt delivering a message from God. The album had a goofy song about a female pirate (perhaps explaining Broadway appearances to come) and some great covers (CCR's "Almost Saturday Night," the Grass Roots' "Midnight Confessions").

And then there's the title song. Which celebrates the coolness of modernity (circa 1981): French sunglasses, call-waiting, and a "house for my mother, just like Moses Malone." And she even dresses like a hippy chick, a Bobby Soxer, Alice in Wonderland, and a sad clown in the video. I dare you not to like it. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Karla DeVito might easily have become the Queen of MTV, but instead she followed Linda Ronstadt onto Broadway for a revival of The Pirates of Penzance. To capitalize, Budweiser made a commercial with DeVito singing a version of "Cool World" mashed up with the then-current Bud jingle (link for Gmail subscribers):


A year later, DeVito married Robbie Benson (her Pirates co-star) and had two kids. She recorded a second album in 1986, but the songs weren't quite as sharp and Bob Ezrin's slick, synth-heavy production bludgeoned all the humor out of the record (which never made it to CD).

The other day, I dragged my vinyl copy of Cool World out of storage. The poster is frayed, the cover is worn, the price tag is partially shredded (but hanging in there). But the music is still amazing -- a goofy, fun artifact from the alternate universe and coolest of all possible worlds, just before Karla DeVito became the Queen of MTV.

Just like Moses Malone.