I was looking for the appropriate clip to express my thanks to the active and lurking members of Rock Town Hall. I found the following. I think you’ll agree that it’s about as beautiful as sentiment as one human can express through a computer screen. Thanks, and enjoy your holiday weekend (these wishes extend to those of you not being thankful for the conquering of the New World).
Sam wonders whether it’s time to bury the hatchet with Dave.
Townsman dbuskirk was overheard reporting the following find from the depths of Rock Town Hall’s Research & Development department!
Marc Mundy, “How Can I Marry This Language”
I can’t remember the last time a song has captured me like this but it reminds me of that ultimate hopeless teenage obsession I had with “My Sharona”. It just broke and neither my local drugstore, The Ames, nor The K-Mart (my three record outlets in the summer of 1979) had it in stock, so I was stuck waiting by WCAU-FM so I could hear it once an hour.
This went on for a few weeks until my parents finally had to drive to the mall to get something and I could finally buy the single, with the foxy Sharona in the wife-beater picture sleeve and the faux Beatles label.
But I digress. The song I can’t stop listening to currently is by obscuro, private press rocker Marc Mundy, “How Can I Marry This Language”. Born in a showbiz family, raised in Cyprus, and brought up on Mediterranean radio that featured sounds from Istanbul, Cairo, and Tel Aviv, Mundy ended up in Greenwich Village in the late ’60s. He married a Turkish looker and in 1970 recorded his only album, with his wife on backing vocals and an unknown cast of her Turkish cronies on
back-up.
Although one has to get accustomed to a accent that sounds dangerously close to Borat, this song has been short-circuiting its way into my idle thoughts almost hourly for weeks. It’s that chorus, where he breaks into a wordless vocal that seems to approximate some ancient folk melody, that just kills me everytime.
Not that everything around it isn’t fantastic, that crazy stuttering Moon-like drumming, the stop-start rhythms with the kissing sound, the lyrics about asking for a woman’s hand in a foreign language, and the fact that it is one of those “3-minute zingers” (2:57 actually) recently talked about on some uptown blog, it all has me smitten like a schoolboy.
I’m like everyone here, I love the rock and roll of this era, but why listen to yet another Beatle-ish/Kinks approximation when I can listen to a song as confounding as this?
Rock Town Hall apologizes in advance for the Prince-directed video that is used to represent Jimi’s last great single.
It’s a truism that the live bill briefly pairing The Monkees with opening act Jimi Hendrix was the most mismatched live bill in rock. Of course, at the heart of this mismatch was the fact that the headliners were a concocted, confected bubblegum band put together to serve a tv version of a fictional American Beatles while the opener was soon to make his mark as the Greatest Guitar Hero of the genre, a true artist and visionary. However, Jimi Hendrix and The Monkees had more in common than initially met the ear.
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Some of you know the Last Man Standing drill: we post one (1) answer at a time in response to the game’s question until no other answers are possible. The Townsperson who posts the last possible answer wins the patented RTH non-prize! More importantly, the winner get’s to strut around as if he or she just had awesome sex the night before. Past Last Man Standing winners will back me up.
As for today’s question, we’re looking for songs that sound like nothing else a band or artist ever did or would do. A few ground rules to keep in mind (please pay attention, those of you who complain that the rules too often shift):
Clear enough? Let the games begin!
Try building atop this opening volley: Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”!
Our lips had been sealed regarding the details of the 3-CD Big Dipper anthology, Supercluster, discussed here with guitarist/singer Gary Waleik a few weeks back. Now the ink has dried on the band’s deal with Merge (click title of this thread for full details)! Start saving for the March 18, 2008 release! Here’s a sample of track from Heavens–not burned off my scratchy vinyl record!
Big Dipper, “She’s Fetching”
It’s been a while since we shared selections from the RTH Mailbag. As you know, sometimes we receive mail that readers deem unworthy of our Comments section but important nonetheless! We agree. In fact, sometimes these comments are extremely instructive and worthy of a public airing. At Rock Town Hall, there’s always room to learn and grow. So, let’s get down to business!
Regarding what we thought was a rare ZZ Top performance found on YouTube that was posted a while back, a reader informs us:
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