RIP Doug Fieger

Is it so wrong to bring back the rainbow swirl?

Let's say it's 1979 and you've got a great band whose power-pop sound is the polar opposite of both the disco that's all over the radio and the underground punk rock radio is afraid to play.

Maybe, in the era where bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles are spending years in the studio and millions of dollars to make bloated albums, you record your first record for $18,000 in under two weeks.

Perhaps, by some miracle, you get signed to Capitol records -- and you agree to dress up in suits (like the early Beatles) and the photos on the front and back of your first record are reminiscent of iconic Beatle poses. Then Capitol agrees to bring back its discontinued "rainbow" swirl in the center of your records (to further remind people of their old Beatles records).

And let's say Capitol isn't shy about pushing the "new Beatles" story and the press isn't shy about pumping up those comparisons. And then maybe your first single goes to number 1 and both the single and album sell millions of copies.

And your second single is incredibly catchy, but the record company convinces you to record a "clean" version with sanitized lyrics in place of "getting in her pants" and "she's sitting on your face."

If all that happens, is it inevitable that you endure a critical and popular backlash (and a "Knuke the Knack" campaign) and people slam you for smirking? And do you help or hurt your cause by naming your second record But the Little Girls Understand?

30 years later, it's hard to believe both the hype and the backlash were as strong as they were. Sure, the Knack weren't the second coming of the Beatles, but they also weren't the next Bay City Rollers.

They created some wonderful power-pop records filled with songs that sound as fresh today as they did back then.

And one more:


Doug Fieger, lead singer (and chief songwriter) of the Knack, died yesterday at age 57 after battling brain and lung cancer for several years.

RIP, Doug. And thanks for the music.

Angioplasty on that Rock 'n' Roll Heart

We get it, Clapton, you're cooler than we are.

Yes, yes, you've got a million cool guitars.

And even when you stole the wife of a Beatle, he still remained your best friend (and was best man when you married the woman you stole from him).

And you've got a better phone than I do.

And you can even play guitar over the phone.

And Buddy Guy calls you when you're just hanging out (watching video of yourself on your cool phone).

But I gotta ask you two things: Does this damn commercial have to be on TV every five minutes?

And, more importantly, weren't you the guy who quit the Yardbirds because you thought this song was too commercial and you didn't want anyone to think you'd sold out?


Just sayin'.

Don't Be Evil -- Fail

Not Cool.

Recently a number of music blogs (written and run by great, amazing people) have been shut down.

Now I'm not talking about the guy who posted all 27 volumes of the Have a Nice Day series for anyone to download. Or the guy who posted the new U2 album the week before it was released.

I'm talking about music fans and enthusiasts who post one or two tracks they love by bands they love. These bloggers do more to generate interest in music than almost anything else (short of having songs placed in a teen drama on the CW). And recent studies have shown that people who download music from those blogs turn around and buy music by the artists they like in numbers far greater than the general public at large.

(Also, I should add, almost all these bloggers post MP3s for a limited amount of time or have prominent notices offering to take down any music on request of any artist or record company.)

So what do blog-hosting companies like Wordpress and Google (parent company of Blogger) do? They take down blogs without warning, without telling bloggers which post (or which piece of music) they object to (sometimes wiping out years of archives in the process), then tell bloggers they can have their blogs reinstated if they can prove they did nothing wrong -- which is basically impossible since they neglect to mention which posts or pieces of music prompted their actions.

Plus, in some cases, bloggers are posting music that was sent to them to be posted by the record labels or their representatives. Then, the legal team of those same labels complains to Google or Wordpress (which kills the blogs without bothering to investigate the complaints or determine whether the bloggers had permission to post the tracks in question).

In the past several months, this has happened twice to bloggers on my blogroll (to your left) and numerous times to other music bloggers.

The only possible response is this.


Seriously, Google -- is Franz Kafka running your company now?

What ever happened to "Don't Be Evil"?

Read more about it here.

Sometimes I Hate to be Right

Behind the Scenes at Clicks and Pops

I was in a drug store in the middle of the night, looking for baking soda and electrical tape.

And a song came on the store's sound system. A song I recognized, knew, loved.

A long time ago, a girl loved that song and hearing it again reminded me of the girl.

And there's a story that goes with the girl (and by extension, with the song).

So I came home, sat down at the computer, and started writing that story to post on this blog. The girl part was still fresh in my mind (even many years later). I knew the basics about the song and the band, but I wanted to get the details right, so I did some quick online research.

What I remembered was true -- first album a college radio hit with a new wave sound and a trippy title. Band member who later joined a much more famous band. Second album much more power poppy -- and it must have come out in 1981 because one of the songs had a reference to John Lennon and the circus surrounding his death. And then nothing. No third album, no indication of what had happened.

That's okay, that's enough for a blog post with the story of the girl and another band that should've been superstars in an alternate universe where good music is more appreciated. So I went on YouTube to see if I could find any of their videos. And, sure enough, there were their two minor hits.

I'd never seen these videos before. My only visual image of the band came from the photos on their two album covers. But watching them on YouTube, I suddenly realized something and my heart sank.

The lead singer had a mustache. More than that -- a porn mustache. But even more than that -- a Freddy Mercury porn mustache. And I knew then and there what had happened to the band.

Five more minutes of internet research confirmed what I somehow knew in my gut -- the lead singer died of AIDS about ten years after the band's heyday.

Sometimes I hate to be right.

And I thought about posting the blog entry anyway. The songs are still great, the story about the girl is still interesting (in the way that all stories about girls and songs are interesting). But I didn't want people to take away from this that the singer died of AIDS.

So... instead I'll put that post away for another time. And no, I won't say who the band was. Instead, I'll pull out my vinyl copies of their two albums and play them all the way through.

And I'll say a silent prayer of thanks to the band for the music. And let the singer know that he is remembered -- not for how he died, but for how he lived and the music he made.

Nilsson and the Hot Mess

Before it got alarming...

She was gorgeous and careless, a dangerous combination.

And six of us, all guys, all awake at 3:45 am on the first Tuesday morning of college, decided that her picture should go in the dictionary next to the phrase Hot Mess.

I'd like to tell you that she was evil incarnate. But she wasn't. She was smart and funny and had a sweet side that made you want to follow her into the depths of hell.

She told me at lunch one day that she was planning on breaking the hearts of exactly 13 guys that semester, then she'd ignore guys and devote all her attention to her classes. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


She loved Harry Nilsson and had all his records -- the great ones filled with songs marked by amazing music, dazzling wordplay, and sophomoric jokes as well as the later albums (with one or two decent songs and a bunch of drunken ideas whose flashes of brilliance were buried beneath long-stale humor that never quite worked). She'd frequently argue that his years of drunken partying with various Beatles were not wasted even if many of his songs from that period sound like he's wasted.

One by one, she broke exactly 13 hearts. Then, as promised, she turned her attention back to her classes and paid no attention to guys until the next semester. Her goals were different in our second semester. This time, she told me, she was going to break exactly 17 hearts. And so she did.


Sophomore year, she lived down the hall from me. And told me the number had risen to 19. She was drinking more and often was more mess than hot. But the guys still wanted to follow her into hell. (Amazingly, I wasn't one of them... but that's another story for another time.)

Her last semester, she told me she was going to break 41 hearts. But then a funny thing happened. She fell in love. With a guy who was a total jerk. He saw the hot and navigated away from the mess, but somehow overlooked the sweet and smart and funny. And he crushed her when he walked away without looking back or giving her a second thought.

And suddenly, she realized what she'd done to all the guys whose hearts she'd broken over the past four years. She locked herself in her room and played this song over and over for an entire weekend.


When she emerged, she said she wasn't interested in numbers or in breaking hearts anymore. She wrote personal notes to all the guys whose hearts she'd broken. More than one of them told her that apologizing wasn't enough, that she'd have to do something else. She listened to each of them, didn't argue, and didn't make excuses. Then she aced her finals. And applied to med school.

She married the next guy she went out with. And became a surgeon.

A heart surgeon.


[For more things Nilsson, check out For the Love of Harry.]

Another Perfect Pop Song

First in an occasional series.

I was just in an upscale crunchy-granola type supermarket (I swear -- I only go there for the artisanal cheeses) and I heard a familiar guitar riff -- the same guitar riff that's my cell phone ringtone -- over the store's sound system. And it occurred to me, then and there, "No Matter What" by Badfinger is a perfect pop song.

And here's a few reasons why:

• The opening guitar riff has a lilting headiness to it, but also a crunchiness that smashes through your ears like a wrecking ball.
  
  
• The lyrical pledges of eternal love are vague enough that everyone can identify with them, but never so vague or goony that they're embarrassing.
  
  
• The sheer joy of the singing is so infectious that it's bound to put you in a good mood. (And the way chorus blasts through from the verses and bridge is a triumph of pure wonder.)
  
  
• Badfinger might not be the Beatles, but for a while in the early 70s they were the next best thing.
  
  
• The harmonies alone can make the most cynical among us believe in true love again.
  
  
• Real (not synthesized) handclaps.
  
  
• I like to think Bruce Springsteen was talking about this album when he wrote "we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" (I'm pretty sure Bruce wasn't thinking of Badfinger, but the song's just under three minutes, so I'd like to think it's possible).
  
  
• My friend Holly (whose love of classic American composers like the Gershwins is only now starting to rub off on me decades later) says it's one of the best pop records ever. (And she actually met the Beatles, so she would know.)
  
  
• You can argue (and some have) that this song (and not anything by the Raspberries) invented the genre of power pop.
  
  
• The fake ending. (And the way I always count off the silence inside my head before the song starts up again.)

But here's the best reason why "No Matter What" is a perfect pop song:

As I turned away from the cheese in that upscale market, I looked down the gourmet cereal aisle. Six people were scattered there, scanning the shelves, each caught up in their own world, each looking for a certain cereal, each unaware of me (or the greater world around them). And, without realizing it, each of those people was unconsciously nodding their head in time with the song.


Elsewhere on the web: For the Love of Harry has an unreleased Nilsson song written to try to pump up LA baseball fans, Mister Pleasant tried to list his 100 Top Singles of all time (and then broke down and listed Sixty More), JB over at The Hits Just Keep On Coming talks Josie and the Pussycats (and the Jackson Five Saturday-morning cartoon series), and Any Major Dude With Half A Heart (after being bounced by both Blogger and Wordpress) set up his own domain.

Grace Under Water

It's a beautiful and desperate world...

I got an email a while back asking me to listen to a new album by Paul Dougherty. So I did what I always do when I get emails like that -- I sprung into action. And did nothing for a few months... until I was cleaning out my inbox yesterday.

I didn't really have high hopes -- but Dougherty's bio was interesting enough to make me give the music a listen. For the record, Paul Dougherty was born in Houston (where his dad sang soul music and played the Hammond organ) and grew up in Nashville (where his father became a session singer). Dougherty played in alternative and Americana bands, and now lives in Munich (where the album was recorded at his home studio).

That's all I really know.

But here's what I think:

Paul Dougherty wants you to think he's lost his faith.

His gorgeous Grace Under Water album is filled with songs about loss. There are opportunities missed, loves lost and lamented, morals tarnished, and faith tarnished. He sings about not wanting to let go, about wanting to believe (but not being able to), and about angels rising above while his own halo falls into the mud. The songs are unconcerned with boy-meets-girl, focusing instead on the bleak future of humanity.

But there's one catch -- Dougherty's voice drips with passion and optimism, even when his lyrics are tripping over themselves to paint a negative picture. He might want you to think things are grim, but Dougherty himself is overflowing with hope.

The album covers a bunch of different styles, ranging from almost-indie-pop to stark New Age to roots rock, but most of the songs fall under what used to be known as Americana or nu-country. Several songs here are directly addressed to his children (including the gorgeous opener "Zoe" and the gentle encouragement of "First Steps" -- which, come to think of it, might actually be aimed at listeners or even the singer himself). Other highlights include "The Craving" (which shows that teenage desire never really goes away, it just morphs into something more adult and harder to define), "The Line" (a song that sounds like it must have been written on a lonely late-night drive), and "Rusted Jesus" (a prayer to believe in something after rock 'n' roll has let you down).

Dougherty's voice is clear and sharp, but has just enough edge to remind you that this is a guy who's lived and suffered. He's come through the other side and wants to tell you the journey is hard, but ultimately worth the effort. (Because even if grace, look too many mortgages, is under water, things can always get better -- especially if we have great music to listen to.)

40 years ago, an album like this might have gotten a lot of radio play and Dougherty might have had a shot at singer-songwriter stardom (or at least the cult status of a Nick Drake). Dougherty likely would've been signed to a major label and (at the very least) played in clubs all over the U.S. to a passionate and growing fanbase.

But it's a different world, so Dougherty recorded and released the album himself (and if he's playing anywhere, it's likely to be in Germany).

Readers of this blog will recognize that I don't do a lot of reviews here -- this blog mostly focuses on music I know well and love (and the stories associated with that music). But Grace Under Water is a haunting and beautiful record that deserves your attention.

You can stream the entire album here and download it for free from his website. Better yet, if you like the album buy it from CD Baby (and therefore kick a few bucks over to the guy who wrote, sang, recorded, and released the album).