Please Understand Me, Everything's All Right...

Crossing Jerry Lee Lewis with Joe Strummer.

Most of my friends in college had bizarre musical obsessions.

For me, the most bizarre was my friend Lisa, who liked country music. I'd never met anyone who liked country music before, so talking music with her was like taking graduate courses in psychology and anthropology. And while I understood (in theory anyway) that rock and roll had roots in country, rhythm & blues, and folk, I usually ignored the country part. (With the exception of rockabilly, which I always liked better when it was played really fast.)

So Lisa would try to get me to listen to Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and Flatt & Scruggs and I'd try to get her to listen to the Stray Cats and the Ramones. She'd roll her eyes when I'd go see punk bands and I'd go off to study when she'd play her Tammy Wynette and Merle Haggard records (each marked in a corner of the back cover with her initials and a small sketch of a flower). We found a few areas of musical common ground: we were both lukewarm about the Eagles (too country for me, not country enough for her) and both liked Johnny Cash. We each had love/hate relationships with the Byrds (but she tolerated the early folk-rock records and I put up with the later country-rock albums).

Lisa also was from the South (and majored in philosophy, which she said followed naturally from a childhood spent listening to Hank Williams); I must confess that I'd sometimes get into late-night philosophy discussions with her partly to hear her accent when she pronounced "Schopenhauer."

One more thing about Lisa: she loved Joe Ely.

Ely, who grew up in Buddy Holly's hometown of Lubbock, Texas, started playing steel guitar as a pre-teen and was touring with his own country groups before he was old enough to drive.

Lisa mentioned that Joe Ely was playing in a local dive bar and she was shocked that I said I wanted to go.

I was actually shocked that she wanted to go. Because I knew something about Joe Ely that Lisa didn't.

While he was trying to break through as a straight-forward country act, he was befriended by Joe Strummer and spent a year opening for the Clash.

This invigorated Ely's live show and gave his country music a definite punk rock feel. His first studio album after touring with the Clash Musta Notta Gotta Lotta crackles with punk energy rearranging the DNA of 50s rockabilly.

Ely's live show was much more rock than country, which made Lisa angry. She thought I'd somehow tricked her into going -- even though it was her idea. We had a huge fight after that concert and our friendship never really recovered. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Years later, I was in one of the few surviving stores that sold used vinyl. While combing through the E's, I found a copy of Joe Ely's Musta Notta Gotta Lotta. I thought about the concert and the fight with Lisa. Then turned the record over and found Lisa's initials and a familiar sketch of a flower in the lower right corner.

I thought about how the record had traveled thousands of miles over more than 10 years to wind up in my hands. I wondered who else had listened to it and tried to intuit if they preferred the rocker Joe Ely to the country singer Joe Ely.

I thought about buying the record to honor my former friendship with Lisa.

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad way to honor Lisa.

So I put Joe Ely back.

And bought a Hank Williams record instead.

That's not a name, that's a major appliance

Three important things about John Hughes:

1. Molly Ringwald picked the wrong guy.

Yeah, Pretty in Pink is a great movie and one of best teen comedies ever. But...

Molly Ringwald's Andie shouldn't have wound up with Blaine, the rich and shallow preppy with the fancy car and flashy clothes.

Andie was a new-wave chick who loved music and hated everything conventional, so how would it make sense for her to ignore Duckie (the guy who knew her the best, who liked the same music and the same clothes, who understood every nook and cranny of her soul)?

Isn't it just wrong for her to go with style over substance? (And let's ignore the now painfully obvious fact that Duckie is clearly in the closet and might be better off winding up with an Andy instead of Andie.)

In the original ending, Andie and Duckie do wind up together. But test audiences hated the ending, so the studio poured tons of money into reshooting it to get Andie and Blane together.

This always seemed wrong.

Hughes must have thought so too because he took the exact same story, flipped the sexes of the characters in the love triangle, and emerged with Some Kind of Wonderful. Only this time, the movie had the right ending -- instead of choosing the popular rich kid with the right clothes, blossoming ugly duckling Eric Stolz winds up with his dorky opposite-sex best friend Mary Stuart Masterson (who liked the same music and knew every nook and cranny of his soul).


2. John Hughes rocked the multiplex.

Music was important to John Hughes. So important that The Breakfast Club opens with a quote from David Bowie's "Changes."

Hughes and his music supervisors had amazing taste in music (Echo and the Bunnymen, Suzanne Vega, Simple Minds, New Order, Paul Young, the Specials, Oingo Boingo, the Vapors, Kajagoogoo, and on and on) and used that music as effectively as anyone making movies in the last 40 years.

The songs he chose became iconic overnight -- even if none of us would ever have Spandau Ballet or OMD perform at our prom.

The music industry thought so, too and gave Hughes his own record label for about ten minutes in the mid-80s. (The label never amounted to much, possibly because Hughes himself seemed to have outgrown teen pop entertainment by 1988 and would try -- with much less success -- to establish himself as a more grown-up writer and director.)

Kelly Stizel, in PopDose's Soundtrack Saturday feature looked at the music from Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. Take a look.

3. John Hughes movies matter.

But not because of the plots -- they tend to be really simple (parents forget teenager's birthday) and somewhat familiar (he likes her, but she likes someone else).

And not because of the dialogue, although it's often funny and memorable ("I can't believe I gave my panties to a geek").

It's because of the characters. Hughes wrote great outsider characters and treated teenagers as multi-dimensional human beings.

Between 1984 and 1987, Hughes created a series of unforgettable teen comedies (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful). And while the movies featured jocks and geeks and sportos and sluts, Hughes knew instinctively that people are more than their cliques and labels.

We related to his characters because they were complicated, funny, and often misunderstood. Yes, Hughes had an affection for outsiders. But, more importantly, he understood on a deep and instinctive level that all teenagers are outsiders.

RIP.

Link for Gmail subscribers.

2009 Beatle News

Let me check a calendar -- is it 2009 or 1969?


I've spent the afternoon rounding up news on the Beatles (with full awareness of the irony that there even is news about a band that broke up nearly 30 years ago, half of whose members are dead).

Burning up the Internet in advance of the re-released, remastered Beatles albums (16 available in stereo, 13 in mono) and the Beatles Rock Band game are these little tidbits.

The first full-length clip of a song from Rock Band is "Birthday" and you can see it here.

Matt Hurwitz gives an early review of the sound quality of the new remasters (h/t to Steve Marinucci on Examiner.com.)

Beatlenews.com reports that a "new" Beatles song is ready to be released. When the three surviving Beatles were finishing the Anthology project in the 1990s, Yoko Ono gave them demos of three John Lennon songs. Two -- "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were reworked with additional instrumentation and vocals from Paul, George, and Ringo and released on the first two Anthology CDs. The third track "Now and Then" was worked on, but not finished. Reportedly, McCartney has been working on the track off and on for the past two years and really wants it to be released.

And finally, there's this: the possibly fake, long rumored "Revolution (Take 20)" -- a much stronger, gentler, and more accessible pastiche than "Revolution #9" leaked onto the Internet a few months back and is available here on YoutTube:


Thinking your August won't be complete without 5,400+ words on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but don't know where to go? Drop by Then Play Long, where Marcello Carlin is reviewing every #1 album in the U.K. from July 1956 on. (It's hard not to love a blog that takes on such a single-mindedly obsessive task, then sticks to it -- so far for nearly a year.)

And finally, because if you love something enough you have to be willing to risk destroying it, here's Dead Lazlo's Place doing a punk cover of "Eleanor Rigby." Yeah, baby.

The Ramones on Lithium and Ukulele

I scour the internet for weird shit so you won't have to.

Exactly 25 years ago today, I walked into one of the great used record stores in the college town where I grew up and bought four Ramones albums on vinyl. They were cutouts from Portugal (for reasons I never quite understood) priced to move at $1.99 each.

Thinking today about that store (sadly long gone), I couldn't help but wonder what the Ramones would sound like if the band was on Lithium reminiscing years later about their favorite hangouts that were now closed. Here's an approximation (with extra cello goodness):


That kind of bummed me out, so I turned (as I'm sure you do) to the upbeat sounds of a Japanese ukulele master playing "I Wanna Be Sedated" while Mr. Bean looks on. Wonder no more:


If you need a palate cleanser after all that weirdness, get out your cutout Portugese vinyl. Or the next best thing -- the Ramones sitting around a table eating cereal while Joey sings and the world goes crazy around them (link for Gmail subscribers).

The Road out of London Runs Through Canada (and Sweden)

Ever wonder why London is so expensive?

Are you craving music that wears its love of power-pop on its sleeves? Looking for something catchy but substantial? Wondering what would happen if the Raspberries and Big Star had a baby in Toronto?

The answer to all these questions is Luke Jackson and his video for "Goodbye London" (my new summer 2009 favorite song and video). Goodbye dodgy Thai cuisine, indeed!

Apparently, London is so expensive because the people compete for scarce resources not just with millions of other humans, but also with every bit of graffiti on every last wall (link for Gmail subscribers):


Jackson, by the way, is a Canadian singer-songwriter with a fondness for Swedish music whose new album ...And Then Some was recorded in Sweden (in a vintage studio with all-analogue equipment to bring out the crunchy power-pop of the songs).

And while I've never lived in London, this song makes me want to move there for a while just so I can play this song over and over again right before I leave.

The animation -- a combination of stop-motion photography and traditional 2D drawings -- was done by Murray John, who also did this cool UK commercial for a newspaper CD giveaway.

Video Bonus: "Come Tomorrow": More great power-pop from Luke Jackson.


Text Bonus: I wish I'd written these two phrases about ...And Then Some: It's "so catchy it just might need a flu shot" and the album sounds "like Teenage Fanclub if they were lost in Scandinavia and developed a taste for string sections." But I didn't write them -- Paul Zimmerman of First Coast News (in Jacksonville, Florida of all places) did... and the entire review is worth checking out.

Update: My bad. Luke Jackson is actually originally British and relocated to Canada a few years ago.

Genius is Pain

No one listens on the left of the dial in the middle of the night.

So if you happened to play something that used profanity, chances are no one would notice. Or so went the reasoning of the soon-to-be-dismissed DJ on one of the eight college radio stations I could pick up in Junior High School.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Although it may be hard to believe these days, Rolling Stone magazine and the National Lampoon were once serious cultural touchstones (and considered "dangerously subversive" by mainstream society and the media).

But let me back up further.

The 60s ended with a series of enormous events, any one of which would be enough to set off pop-cultural earthquakes: astronauts walked on the moon (or on a soundstage in Arizona, depending on what you believe), Woodstock brought half a million people to a farm to listen to music in the mud, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge into shallow water at Chappaquidick Island (simultaneously killing a female campaign worker and his chance to ever become President), Monty Python's Flying Circus premiered on British television, and the Rolling Stones hired the Hell's Angels as security for a free concert (where the Angels killed a stoned Black guy with a gun who may have been trying to make Mick Jagger's fantasy of being assassinated while onstage come true).

And also the Beatles had kind of broken up, but were keeping that fact under wraps until they could finish the Let it Be album with Phil Spector.

Paul McCartney finally spilled the beans a week before his first solo album came out when he issued an "interview" (conducted by and with himself) where he declared that the Beatles had broken up. John Lennon, who wanted to announce the breakup himself months earlier but had been talked out of it by Paul, was pissed.

Lennon and Yoko Ono went to Los Angeles and underwent "primal scream therapy" with Arthur Janov. Lennon was encouraged by the sessions to confront his past traumas and he channelled some of that energy into his first real solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, a record of stark, powerful, confessional songs unlike anything that came before (or has come since).

Lennon also gave a sprawling interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone where, over the course of nearly three hours, he put down George Harrison, called Paul's album "rubbish," insulted Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, and talked openly and candidly about his past and his talent. The interview took the happy mop-top Beatles image (and even the hippy-dippy, peace-and-love psychedelia of the Beatles' later years) and tore it apart. Lennon's words are shocking in their honesty and sometimes make him seem like a huge jerk. You can hear the entire interview (unedited except for boosting Wenner's off-mike questions) here.

Around the same time, Harvard grads from the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine launched the National Lampoon. The Lampoon immediately hit a chord with the counterculture, who were desperate for comedy that spoke to them (unlike the sanitized comedy on American television, which seemed permanently stuck in the early 1950s). Sex, music, war, protest, and drugs were all fair game for the Lampoon, which took particular delight in satirizing rock stars (in all their glorious excesses).

The National Lampoon magazine led to off-Broadway reviews, a radio show, and a handful of records featuring writers and performers like Tony Hendra, Melissa Manchester, John Belushi, Michael O'Donoghue, and Christopher Guest. The first and best of the records was National Lampoon's Radio Dinner (which has now been out of print for a shamefully long time).

All of which brings me back to Junior High. Years after the Beatles broke up (and years after Radio Dinner came out), I was listening to a college radio station late at night when the DJ decided to play a National Lampoon song that I've thought for years was called "Genius is Pain." The real title is "Magical Misery Tour" (and most of the lyrics are taken from Lennon's own words in his Rolling Stone interview).

Although I wasn't familiar with all the references, I recognized instantly how biting and funny and sad this was (and how much it must have meant to fans of the magazine, who had to be completely torn up over the Beatles breaking up).

So from that night in Junior High until today, I remembered that National Lampoon parody but had never heard it again. My used-record store searches were doomed because I was searching for the wrong song title (and probably just glossed over the title "Magical Misery Tour"). But now, thanks to the YouTube, here it is (in all it's very NSFW glory and with my added warning not to play it around young children).


Later, I learned that the DJ was kicked off the air -- not for playing a record filled with dozens of profanities (that part, apparently was fine), but because the program director didn't think the song was funny. (To be fair, the program director also didn't like Monty Python, the Rutles, and the best of early Saturday Night Live, so his judgment definitely should not be trusted.)

Kongulo Kab

The Internet Was Made For Stuff Like This.

No, not porn.

Two years ago, Hidden Fruit (Gen Stevens and Chris Pattinson) and Just So Films (Jonny Madderson and Will Evans) came up with an idea that would either be completely brilliant or totally stupid. Hire a London cab, put famous musicians in the back seat and film them performing one song in one take with no editing and no overdubs.

This isn't an idea that can sustain for 60 or 90 minutes, but it makes a perfect 3-5 minute diversion. Ideal for the Internet.

There have now been more than 90 of these Black Cab Sessions (their slogan: One Song, One Take, One Cab), most great examples of the wonderful results you can get from a good idea and a budget in the high single digits. The series trends heavily towards indie rockers (Death Cab for Cutie, the New Pornographers, Okkervil River) but also features some old school rock stars (Brian Wilson, Richard Thompson).

The performances range from giddy to ghastly (there's no room for a full band and nowhere to hide performance weaknesses in a London cab), but many of the performers take a goofy glee in singing from the back seat of a cab driving through busy city streets.

One of the more recent episodes features Iceland's own Hafdis Huld, who seems to be having so much fun (despite being stalked by a crazy street person) that it should be against the law. Here she is singing her ode to Alain Robert (the French skyscraper climber nicknamed "Spiderman") Iceland's #1 hit single "Kongulo":

Hafdis Huld from Black Cab Sessions on Vimeo.

(See the official video for "Könguló" here.)