I don’t think you can buy The Beatles Again (aka Hey Jude), a vinyl collection of non-album tracks, as a distinct CD. It may have changed in recent years, but there was a long stretch when you also could not buy a distinct CD of Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ similar odds & sods collection, Taking Liberties. Soon, when all physical media are done away with, none of this will matter whatsoever and I’ll be grumpier than ever. Before this worse day comes, let me me bemoan the fact that not all the odds & sods collections of my youth are available as distinct packages in the digital age. I don’t like having those tracks split up as bonus tracks on various albums.
I’m pretty sure, meanwhile, that The Who’s Odds & Sods has always survived the digital age as a distinct product, right?
What odds & sods collections from the vinyl age do you most regret seeing broken up over the reissues of various original albums?
On a whim I went searching for video footage of Peter Blegvad performing anything from his 1983, Andy Partridge-produced album, The Naked Shakespeare. I’ve always loved this album. Colin Moulding contributes bass to a few songs. Terry Chambers may appear as well. I need to dig it out and digitize it.
Anyhow…to my surprise, I found a clip of Blegvad lip-syncing “Karen” on Top of the Pops, or some English show like that. The video is mildly not safe for work owing to the appearance of a tastefully naked butt.
Anyhow…rather that attempt to strike up an in-depth conversation over the works of Blegvad, I thought I’d do my part by simply exposing him to some of you and then launching a Last Man Standing on Name Songs. There’s one catch: We must list them in alphabetical order, beginning with my entry, “Karen,” a name that begins with the letter K.
It shouldn’t be hard to list a name song beginning with an L, M, N, O, or P, but we’ll see how far we get toward the end of alphabet. We will exclude the letter X from play. How many name songs are written to Xavier? (NOTE: If we can get through Z one time, we can consider eliminating that letter from play in the second round.) If we get all the way through to J, we will start over at K.
Got that? Let the first name song, beginning with L, appear in the Comments!
UPDATE: Comments are set to close sometime tomorrow (1/20/14). Consider the conclusion to this Last Man Standing a race against the clock!
Phil Everly, the thinner, straight-haired, more severe-looking member of the Everly Brothers, has died at 74 of complications from COPD. I love the Everly Brothers the way I often don’t allow myself to love a group. Usually, for instance, once I love more than 5 songs by any artist I’m first introduced to through the radio and a double-album greatest hits collection (as was the case with the Everly Brothers), I obsessively read up on their history, buy a bunch of the albums, watch a documentary… This was never the case with the Everly Brothers. I simply loved hearing their music. Maybe the supposed bad blood between the brothers made me shy away from reading too deeply on them. I didn’t want to spoil the harmony in my head. Maybe all the references to country music I was likely to find seemed daunting. Maybe Phil, who may have been a saint of a guy for all I knew, simply scared me. He always looked like he’d bite John Fogerty’s head off if given the chance. Hell, I’ve never even seen that reunion concert video from the 1980s that Dave Edmunds, I believe, helped organize. (Maybe coincidentally, Edmunds is another artist I like a lot whose personal journey holds no interest for me.)
Anyhow, I think the Everly Brothers were fantastic. A few years ago I filled in the gaps in my greatest hits collection, with some tracks from albums they put out during their forgotten years. I did a Saturday Night Shut-In on this subject, almost 3 years ago to this date. You can revisit that episode here.
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Martin Scorsese is on my shit list this holiday season. Big time. I used to run out to see Scorsese movies as soon as they were released. The Last Waltz is a major reason I’m still so obsessed with rock ‘n roll. At 17, I sat in the second row of a packed theater for Raging Bull. The two of us knew exactly what that movie was getting at. I simply mention that movie to her to this day and our bond is confirmed. He didn’t miss a beat with left turns, like The King of Comedy and After Hours. Even The Color of Money paid off.
I walked through picket lines to see The Last Temptation of Christ. I saw Goodfellas the day that came out, in the company of E. Pluribus Gergely and our soon-to-be brides. What a movie! Then came Casino. As soon as I saw the trailers for that movie I thought, “This looks like a rehash of Goodfellas. I just saw Goodfellas, and I don’t need to see a Scorsese movie with Sharon Stone!” Scorsese entered his midlife crisis years, in which the greatest director with minimal need for women in his films suddenly started chasing all the blond cheerleader types who wouldn’t give him the time of day when he was in high school: Jessica Lange in Cape Fear, that preposterous version of an already mediocre B-movie; Michelle Pfeiffer in that film of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; and Cameron Diaz in that 19th century Irish mobster near-musical, the most blatant cheerleader grope of Scorsese’s career.
Leonardo DiCaprio has replaced Robert DeNiro as the director’s go-to guy. I’ve got no beef with DiCaprio. He can be really good. He was great in Catch Me If You Can. He was really good as Howard Hughes, in that mostly unnecessary Scorsese movie. He’s great at playing an engaging creep, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do anything beside that. He doesn’t give off much emotional range, at least not in the Scorsese movies I’ve seen him in. Now Scorsese’s cast him as an asshole investment guy from the ’80s in The Wolf of Wall Street. Three of hours of the ’70s scenes from Goodfellas set in the ’80s, instead. Three hours of hotshots snorting coke off hookers’ asses. Hey, it may be a fantastic movie, but I get no sense that it’s going to deliver the redemption that was at the heart of all the great Scorsese movies. It looks to me like another Casino, another movie in which Marty’s characters toss Benjamins around and the camera pans in quickly, just because he can do it and we can’t! It looks to me like another midlife crisis movie from an 80-year-old master who should make one more film with DeNiro before they both die. I need my Scorsese to calm the fuck down and make a 2-hour meditation on death, with DeNiro playing an old man version of one of his classic Scorsese characters. No blonds. No Irish-Catholic gangters from Boston. No DiCaprio. No offense to blonds, Irish-Catholic gangsters from Boston, and DiCaprio. The movie must check in at less than 2 hours 15 minutes.
A few days ago the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” came on the radio, and I couldn’t change the station fast enough. I have come to loathe that song, even more than I dislike “Angie,” despite the fact that I don’t mind the music of “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll,” its groove, it’s production. I just seems like the Stones’ version of Casino, like they felt they’d worked long and hard enough and just wanted to trade Sharon Stone an Oscar nod for a roll in the hay.
For the last few years I’ve been picking away at a memoir, of sorts, on my formative life and musical experiences. For my own edification above all else, as well as a possible guidebook to help my sons understand why their dad is weird, I am examining how these experiences and the sounds swirling around me worked together to “save me” from the hazards of childhood, to set me on the path of becoming the man and rock nerd I am today. Suburban kid‘s excellent Dad Rock thread inspired me to share a current draft of an opening chapter, some of which you may have seen or heard in earlier stages of development.
My first music-playing device was a plastic, olive-green record player that was pleasingly textured on the outside, like stucco, nubby upholstery, or Naugahyde. Flip up the top and the plastic was beige—also textured, to better pick up smudges from my dirty hands. The turntable itself was brown, with a brown rubber mat to soften the blow of singles released from the multi-45 stem. I can’t remember for sure if the arm was brown or beige, but I remember my shaky hands were always challenged by lifting the arm and dropping the needle onto a specific album track. My beat-to-hell childhood 45s, these days crammed into my original orange vinyl box along with other singles picked up through the years, can attest to this challenge. The cord was a brown 2-pronged affair. I experienced my first electric shock on that cord when I left one of my shaky fingers slipped between the prongs as I plugged it in. Ouch!
I used that record player from the age of 4 or 5, playing “She Loves You” over and over, singing along with my speech-impeded “l” sounds (ie, She wuvs you…), through about age 15, when I’d long mastered consonant sounds. My uncle gave me my first stack of LPs as well as a box of 45s. The LPs included Steppenwolf Live, with that snarling wolf on the cover and Santana’s first album, with its sketch of a roaring lion that contained hidden figures and each Carlos Santana guitar solo deliberately articulated with a long, bended note, played high on the neck. He gave me The Band’s second album, which to this day is one of my Top 5 favorite albums ever, and about a half dozen Beatles records, including early ones through their then-recent psychedelic period, Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour. A year or two later I got Let It Be and the Beatles Again singles collection, the one with them dourly dressed in black and standing in front of a big door. I didn’t know “singles collection” from “proper” release, and thought nothing of the stylistic and sonic differences between “I Should Have Known Better” and the scorching single version of “Revolution.” The band members looked their coolest in the mustachioed, sideburned photos of their psychedelic years, so I “updated” my early Beatles’ albums, drawing the appropriate whiskers on the lads and the distinctive granny glasses on John.
