Rock Town Hall’s Department of Translation has uncovered the meaning of scrolling text at the foot of a 1970 video of Blood, Sweat & Tears performing “And When I Die.” For years translators have been unable to crack this lost Japanese dialect. Until now! The exact translation, which is believed to be a running commentary from an unidentified Japanese rock analyst, follows. Continue reading »
About 5 years ago I finally bought the standard Hall & Oates greatest hits collection, Rock ‘n Soul, Part 1. It was clear to me that there was no killer Hall & Oates album to be had, and for the right price I was will to bring home a hits collections that included some ’80s turds by an artist I liked best in the ’70s. Beside, as ’80s hitmakers went, I could live with my share of Hall & Oates hits like “You Make My Dreams” and “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).”
Over the years I kept feeling like something was missing from the collection of five or so Hall & Oates songs that made buying this hits CD for the right price. I listened to clips from each of their earlier ’70s albums in search of the hit that was not included, but it was not until I got to the band’s 1980 “New Wave” album, Voices, that I found the song I was missing: “How Does It Feel to Be Back.” Although the third highest-ranking song on the album (behind “You Make My Dreams” and the presumably-also-left-for “Part 2” cover of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”), the song did crack the Billboard Top 30 and it was in regular rotation on Philadelphia radio in its time. Listening to it now, it still stands up as a pretty stately power pop song, if not the most immediately catchy song in their catalog.
It’s funny how that song has lost its place in the band’s catalog, and I wonder if there are other hit songs you feel have suffered this fate owing to their not being included on an artist’s first greatest hits collection, perhaps with a Part 2 left long ago on the drawing board.
To coincide with Bruce Springsteen‘s latest run of historic concert performances, Rock Town Hall will run a series of works of art commissioned specifically for Our Sacred Chapel of The Boss, located on the campus of RTH Labs. We hope that these images will aid you in praising Him and His E Street Band. At this time we ask you to cleanse your soul and prepare for the coming days’ blessings. Thank you.
I guess for being an all-around good guy eMusic rewarded me with 50 bonus downloads that I need to use by the middle of November. These are on top of my standard 30 downloads/month. I’ve enjoyed my eMusic subscription over the last 2 years for enabling me to build a collection of mostly instrumental and foreign non-rock music that I otherwise would rarely take a chance on. For instance, I’ve been able to download everything available by one of my favorite minimalist musicians, Terry Riley, whose music I’ve been collecting since the pre-digital age. As for stuff I otherwise would have been reluctant to take a chance on you may recall my excitement over new additions to my collections, thanks primarily to eMusic: that Ethiopian stuff, Amon Düül 2…
I’ve downloaded just about that entire 20-CD collection of Ethiopian stuff and all of the Terry Riley I could get my hands on that I didn’t already own. I may be crossing the line if I go any further than the four Amon Düül 2 (and one Amon Düül) records I’ve already dowloaded. The question for the Hall is, Where do I go next?
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Make this space your woman.
In the recent Car Crash thread, Townsman dbuskirk revealed that he used have Mick Jagger’s comment about busting a button on his trousers, from Get Yer Ya Yas Out, as his outgoing voicemail message.
At one point, I had Junior Brown’s intro to “Party Lights” as my outgoing message (a cappella “I’m a guy who likes to party”). While living in San Francisco, for about a week after the big earthquake in ’89, my outgoing message was “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake” from R.E.M.‘s “End of the World As We Know It.”
On a blog full of rock nerds, Dan and I can’t be the only ones who have sunk to this level of geekiness. Come on, now is the time to fess up: What did you have? I know at least one of you had to have “Hanging on the Telephone.”
I like The Boss a bit, but I generally can’t stand his long, romantic, working class-hero ballads: “Thunder Road,” “Sandy,” etc. When I saw Him and His E Street Band at the soon-to-be-demolished Spectrum in Philadelphia, on His tour supporting The River, I was strongly annoyed by most of the first 2 1/2 hours of his set, especially when he played the title track from his new release and all the Philly and South Jersey Boss fans in attendance stood on their seats and waved their lighters. Ugh.
Finally he played “Born to Run,” “Rosalita,” and that “Devil in a Blue Dress” medley. Finally the show was a lot of fun. For some reason, today, I was reminded of some fun Boss songs that never appeared on his real studio albums (if memory serves), like “Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” (if that’s the actual title), and his versions of “Because the Night” and “Fire.” How much more would I have liked The Boss if he’d released more of that stuff, no matter how clunky it might have been produced, on his real albums rather than all those lighter waving make-out songs? The answer is At least a bit better. The more journeyman bar band songs by The Boss the better, as far as I’m concerned!
Do you have an artist you might like better if the unreleased and b-sides you’ve heard by said artist actually appeared on their studio albums instead of the more typical fare that never impressed you?
