This is your Rock Town Hall—and Ray Cooper’s, too!
If you’ve already got Back Office privileges and can initiate threads, by all means use your privileges! If you’d like to acquire such privileges, let us know. If you’ve got a comment that needs to be made, what are you waiting for? If you’re just dropping in and find yourself feeling the need to scat, don’t hesitate to register and post your thoughts. The world of intelligent rock discussion benefits from your participation. If nothing else, your own Mr. Moderator gets a day off from himself. It’s a good thing for you as well as me!
In this week’s edition of Saturday Night Shut-In your host, Mr. Moderator, gives his vocal cords a rest. Yes, it was one of those weeks that required countless teleconferences, the hounding of lagging vendors, and other fun stuff at the office. We’ll let the music do the talking. A playlist will be made available after you have a chance to listen without prejudice.
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/RTH-Saturday-Night-Shut-In-39.mp3|titles=RTH Saturday Night Shut-In, episode 39]
[Note: The Rock Town Hall feed will enable you to easily download Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your digital music player. In fact, you can even set your iTunes to search for an automatic download of each week’s podcast.]
Maybe this has happened already in the history of rock, but if not, can Rock Town Hall collectively design the Zardoz of rock?
I know some of you find director John Boorman‘s 1974 sci-fi flick starring a ponytailed, Zappata-mustachioed Sean Connery running around in a silk diaper/mankini through a world full of identically built hippie handmaidens wearing loose-fitting halter tops “interesting,” but any time I see this film I’m stunned that a post-Bond Connery would appear in something this, uh, interesting. We’re talking the Ultimate James Bond here, so if we can’t find a major band or solo artist coming off their best-known series works to release a ridiculous, futuristic concept album, let’s create such a scenario.
I’m not the world’s greatest fan of The Who‘s Tommy, which can be seen as a pretty ridiculous concept, but there’s some great rock ‘n roll on that record. The post-Saturday Night FeverBee Gees‘ doing the Sgt. Pepper‘s movie may come close to what I’m looking for, but that debacle was centered around the movie—and even at their commercial peak most of us wouldn’t have expected much more artistically out of the brothers Gibb. Nothing ever released by Styx qualifies. That band blows. I need a post-Bond—level Titan of Rock running around in a musical mankini.
I look forward to the beast we identify and/or create.
One key point from Noel Murray’s rebuttal: Reynolds may regard Jack White as some sort of analog purist poseur, but the majority of earthlings who rock out to “Seven Nation Army” don’t consider it a throwback. It’s considered a key rock song of the ’00s. No one hears that song and thinks back to 1971, except maybe some sticks in the mud who may comment on a rock blog;)
To my ears, putting aside the issue of the nonexistent bass, White Stripes couldn’t have been a more fan-friendly throwback unless he’d been backed by the Delaware Destroyers. Does Oats and the “majority of earthlings” who constitute His Generation actually hear the music of White Stripes as “visionary?” Where do you fall on the issue of Jack White: Throwback or Visionary?
I look forward to your comments—and members of the Bad Attitude Club can check their bad attitude at the door!
In 1984, at the birth of my personal Too Cool for School Era, I must have avoided a movie called Electric Dreams, with a synth-pop soundtrack and a plot revolving around some icky new thing called “home computing,” like the plague. Or maybe the movie was a flop, with limited release and an early exit from theaters. Today, I don’t recall this film ever having existed. I also don’t recall this Jeff Lynne song and video from the soundtrack. We’re talking HVB’s Holy Trinity of Rock material! (Do you remember this, hrrundivbakshi?)
To celebrate this (at least, personal) discovery, today’s Last Man Standing seeks meta-rock video song videos, that is, songs about videos with accompanying rock videos. Songs about videos that do not have an accompanying video are not eligible. Songs about film (eg, Duran Duran‘s “Girls on Film”) are not eligible, even if accompanied by a rock video. This may be the shortest RTH LMS challenge ever—or most likely you will dazzle me with your collective knowledge!
