Thursday, July 12, 2012

Jettin' Out to Rio

And some other sunny spots

I was listening to the rerelease of Nick Lowe's first record Jesus of Cool (retitled Pure Pop For Now People for the U.S. with a few track changes). It's a great two-disk set... although for some reason I couldn't find the second disk.

If I left it in a rental car in Alaska and you find it, please send it back to me.



This song mentions three of the major record labels from 1978.

Of the three:
  • CBS (Columbia Records in the U.S.) was sold to Sony in 1988
  • Arista was sold to a German company (which also bought RCA) that rechristened itself BMG. Arista operated as a label until it was eliminated in 2011 in a corporate reorganization, which Detroit staffers refer to as "going to the big Pontiac in the sky"
  • Only Atlantic still exists -- and that's probably because it already sold out to Warner Bros. in the late 1960s.
Funny how the world changes...

1 comment:

Who Am Us Anyway? said...

What a great song on every level. I forget where he said it, but I remember Nick saying how he knew very well what he liked in a rock song, it was just that not a whole lot of other people shared his opinion. I think it might have been in this great interview with Terri Gross; now I’ll have to listen to it again to find out. Which is no great chore (say what one may about old Terri; no one on the planet does a better job of interviewing musicians and songwriters …)