About halfway through the recent RTH Zoomfest, somebody brought up the topic of the Replacements, kinda/sorta as a “butwhatabout” response to a typically outrageous EPG suggestion that nothing good came out of the 1980s as far as music was concerned.

Townsman cdm gamely offered to put together a Replacements playlist that he thought might win EPG over, or just put what he thought was the Placemats’ best on display, or provided a succinct overview of the band’s output, or something. We moved onto other topics, touching on — oh, I don’t remember; it was all a bit of a blur after someone started gabbing about Wishbone Ash.

Anyhow, the Replacements blah-blah inspired me to cue some of their music up for my afternoon walkabout, and I chose an LP I remembered somewhat fondly: “Pleased To Meet Me.” Sadly, I was surprised by how much of it just kinda sat there for me, after about 25 years.

Having said that, there were two tracks that still sounded sublime to these ears: “Alex Chilton” and “Skyway.” I’m not going to bother posting a link to “…Chilton,” because I feel certain Gergles will find a reason — probably having to do with the gated reverb on the snare — to hate it. Neither am I going to post “Skyway,” because E. Pluribus Gergely’s tastes, by his own admission, run closer to things like Christopher Cross and Poco than the Replacements.  So instead, I’m posting “Sharing the Night Together” by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Company.

EPG, I demand that you explain the beauty and the brilliance of “Sharing the Night Together” by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Company!

Greetings! I’ve always carried around a certain amount of guilt for having introduced the brainless fun and games that, in my view, contributed to the sickening of RTH (Mercury Version). So it’s with no small amount of trepidation that I unleash my latest bit of tomfoolery on our nicely recuperating RTH. Despite my fear of derailing the healthy, thoughtful discourse that we seem to be enjoying, it seems to me that — in between dutifully foraging for fruits and berries, painstakingly poking termite mounds with broken twigs, and performing complex mating and dominance displays — us monkeys also need a few moments of scratching fleas, yawning, and nibbling on the crusty bits we pull off of each others’ anuses. And it is in that spirit that I introduce my latest creation, entitled simply: What Is It?

In the game of “What Is It,” your job is simple: I, the Quizmaster, will provide you with a list of names of things — bands, albums, tours, infamous behaviors, hair styles, quotable quotes, guitar nicknames, what have you. Some may be real; most will be fake. Your job is to tell us what you think the things are. Your answers don’t have to agree with mine, and they don’t have to correctly identify the “real” things in the list, if in fact there are any. Just answer, to the best of your ability, the question: What Is It?

Example — I say: Bow-legged Ida. You say: The name Jim Dandy gave the washboard he played in Black Oak Arkansas. Got it?

Here we go:

I’ve seen a couple of stories the past week from artists talking about their songwriting process. I love reading and hearing about how artists wrote a particular song.

First, there’s this Guardian piece with Nick Lowe talking about the writing of “Cruel to Be Kind.” Great little piece, but Nick may regret sharing this memory:

Ian Gomm, from the Brinsley days, had taught me the triumphal chord at the top of the song, where I sing “B-a-a-ab-y, you gotta be cruel to be kind”, so he has a co-writing credit.

Friend of the Hall Gomm posted this article on his Facebook page and recalled adding more to the song than that single chord.

A richer article written by the song’s author itself, Peter Holsapple of The dB’s, appeared on our Rock Town Hall Facebook page, courtesy of the excellent Steve Hoffman Music Forums. It’s actually a 2008 New York Times article about the song “Love Is for Lovers,” the single from the band’s third album, Like This. Maybe we even covered this back in 2008, but hey, “It’s COVID-19, Jake.” It’s interesting to read Holsapple’s aspirations for the song and the confluence of circumstances that he felt went into its failure to even sniff the charts.

These are both good tales, but what’s your favorite songwriter tale about the writing of a song?

On a related note, I wish there was a Boomer edition of the podcast (and now Netflix series) Song Exploder. which is all about the writing of a song. My problem is that so many of the artists are youngsters way outside my tastes that I really have to focus to appreciate what these people put together. Although I’m exhausted by paying attention to some milquetoast artist like Bon Iver telling me about the creation of his boring song, I usually do appreciate the process. To give you an idea of how much I hunger for a version of this podcast with artists whose music I dig, the Netflix series episode with REM and “Losing My Religion” was a relative godsend for me. Some of you may know how I feel about REM and that song.