Until reading about the recently deceased Southern pop-soul-country singer-songwriter Joe South I had no idea he wrote “Hush,” the best song Deep Purple ever recorded. Did you know that? This puts a serious dent in what little admiration I have for Deep Purple, but that’s beside the point.
I knew South first and best as the man behind the first song and second-best version of any song called “Games People Play” (The Spinners‘ different song known by the same name being the best version). Learning that South wrote not only “Hush” but a favorite country-pop song of my youth, “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” increases my appreciation of the man’s body of work. What a great title/lyric that song has; I think of it a few times a year when I hear my kids, friends, or coworkers whine about any of life’s expected hardships.
I also learned that South’s career stretched back to the 1958 novelty hit “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor” and that he wrote Billy Joe Royal‘s “Down in the Boondocks.” And he played guitar on Bob Dylan‘s Blonde on Blonde and some of Aretha Franklin’s greatest hits. Not bad for a guy I’d had pegged as a sub-Box Tops 1-hit wonder.
Today’s Last Man Standing is posted for selfish reasons. You know how important the movie Easy Rider was to my development. The references to that movie in the middle of this video for Dead Milkmen‘s “Smokin’ Banana Peels,” presented here through the eyes of Beavis and Butthead, was a great thrill. Other examples of musical/rock video references to the movie are not springing to mind. I’m not sure if this LMS has any legs beyond this initial entry. If there are other references of this sort I would like to know about them and have them handy for future reference. Thank you.
I had to spend 2 hours tonight sitting through a yearly league meeting for coaches in the youth soccer league in which I coach. As always, it was hell. As always, it was a 150-(mostly) man example of the fact that a good deal of kids don’t so much grow into adults rather than grow into oversized kids. One coach brought up the pettiest complaint of the night, saying that his club’s field does not have enough sideline room to allow the coaches to stay a minimum 6 feet from the playing field. He took the most pindick attitude I’ve witnessed in a good 35 years (“pindick” being a term I haven’t thought to utter in that same span), ending his whine by staring straight ahead, without blinking, and asking the league’s board of stressed-out volunteers, “So what are you gonna do?”
“Give you a wedgie,” I muttered from a few rows away, loud enough for my club’s fellow coaches to hear.
Yes, my newfound perspective on maturing is evident when I look in my own mirrors.
Thankfully I got home just in time to watch the one bit of the Democratic National Convention that I’d hoped to catch: Michelle Obama‘s speech. Without delving into my half-assed political views, I’ll simply say that Michelle blew me away. Has anyone ever spoke so freely about love from the podium of a party’s national convention? It was like Woodstock in there.
Musically, I got a charge out of hearing her walk out to Stevie Wonder‘s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” We’re a music blog. As we did for the Republicans, it’s important we keep a keen eye on the musical proceedings at the Democrats’ convention. What other musical moments did I miss? What’s coming in the next couple of days? I’m going to need your help, because there’s only so much of these pep rallies I can handle. Thanks.
True Confession #1: Until last week I never owned The Minutemen‘s legendary Double Nickles on the Dime. For what it’s worth I own another Minutemen album, but it’s not the same. Over the last 5 years I have purchased a few of my favorite tracks from that album, but I’ve always felt guilty about not owning their entire double-album masterpiece. I know, I bought a digital download of a record that was meant to be enjoyed in its vinyl gatefold glory. At least I’m finally digging this album all the way through for its incredibly fluid, aggressive playing and—yes—integrity. I will no longer have to quietly step out of the room whenever a lovefest for the album breaks out among close personal friends such as machinery and hrrundivbakshi.
True Confession #2: I cannot tell a joke to save my life. A traditional joke with a punchline, that is—I don’t want anyone getting the idea that I’m not otherwise incredibly funny. My inability to pick up the traditional joke-telling tradition has affected my ability to enjoy music that is constructed in what I believe is a punchline-based format.
Hearing the music of Frank Zappa was probably my first exposure to this style of song construction. There used to be an advertisement for either the Apostrophe album or a coming Zappa tour on one of Philadelphia’s FM stations that featured that bit about not eating the yellow snow. There was some other excerpt about moving to Montana. Yuck, yuck, for sure, but those sort of lyrics were so far removed from what I’d been listening to! I ended up buying Apostrophe a few years later (actually I stole it, as part of the wild 70-album heist that a college friend’s old high school friend let us pull off in the suburban mall record store he managed), confirming for myself how foreign those snippets of lyrics first sounded on that radio spot. I got Captain Beefheart‘s Trout Mask Replica the same night I acquired the Zappa album. Beefheart pulled that trick as well, but his punchlines were usually completely absurd and delivered in a less self-conscious, ain’t-I-funny tone than what Zappa used. Beefheart and his crew struck me as truly weird.
American punk bands out of the loosely knit “hardcore” scene must have included a lot of Zappa and Mad magazine-loving jokesters. Their songs were loaded with punchlines, where the band would stop playing and the lead singer would utter some sardonic or self-deprecating quip. I’m going to depend on you, readers, to list your favorite punchlines from that scene and others. That stuff is still too foreign and uncomfortable to me to contemplate further than I already have. The practice itself, mind you, is not uncomfortable. My sense of discomfort derives from the shame I harbor over my inability to deliver a punchline.
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Minutemen_Double-Nickels-On-The-Dime_13_Political-Song-For-Michael-Jackson-To-Sing.mp3|titles=The Minutemen “Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing”]
The floor is open, should you choose to fill it, with your thoughts on rock ‘n roll punchlines. What are the most memorable ones that come to mind? The best? The flops? What are rock’s earliest examples of this practice of songwriting?
I’ve always championed The Wolfgang Press. I’m not sure where your basic RTH-er is going to stand with this challenging lot. It has been said that “if you filled a room with Talking Heads fans, got them drunk and played a few Wolfgang Press discs, loudly, the congregation would go ape before they had time to rescue their cool.”
Weighty and primal, always changing, they were cast from PiL-type gloom backgrounds but there has always been something darkly humorous about this trio. Lead ranter Michael Allen was a brooding goofball who comes across like a dreadlocked Nick Cave. His spoken-howl lyrics and the band’s bottom-heavy, textured experiments moved from cacophony to minimal to soul-tinged to (admittedly not so successful) dance-floor funk.
TWP is not for the easily intimidated. Swaggering but self-doubting, full of fire and brimstone, choosing odd songs to cover, permeated by 4AD atmosphere, and always visceral, always confrontational…what say ye?
The All-Star Jam is a place to pass along links of interest, news, and all sorts of things that just happen to be on your mind and that don’t have an outlet in your daily social circle.
You may recall our excellent interview with producer/engineer Roger Bechirian (Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, The Undertones, Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker, and the rest of the core two thirds of my teenage record collection). I’m proud to say we were way ahead of the curve in probing the depths of this man’s mind. Recently my favorite music magazine, Tape Op, followed our lead and interviewed the man. A Tape Op web exclusive bonus bevy of photos from Becharian’s personal archive of these legendary recording sessions is available here. Check it out! Of special interest for more than a few of you, I bet, are some excellent photos showing the mic set-up on drum kits for the likes of Pete Thomas and Terry Williams.
Townsman Al passed along a link to an interesting post from musician Robbie Fulks‘ website, a piece entitled “too much goddamned music.” As Al has mentioned before, Fulks would make a great participant here in the Halls of Rock. Let’s give a shout-out to this guy! Here’s just one of many great passages from his thoughts regarding the all-too-well-known process of attempting to cull a gigantic record collection:
If only we who produce music could trim the dross before it goes to market. We can’t, because it takes money and luck and a lot of trial-and-error to come up with the quantity of music from which good is likely to emerge, and even then the good may only stand out in the fullness of time. Meantime, we need the resources to experiment and to fail, repeatedly. The Cloud serves us admirably here. The artiste can put his efforts in the public square more quickly and cheaply than ever, and his followers can choose to subsidize the art without taking on the clutter. Attractively designed physical media can store and memorialize the small edge of this that proves valuable. That is, the songs fight out the first few rounds in the digital realm, and some time later are crowned with the honor of preservation in a more permanent and sensually appealing format. At first glance it may look cruel to consign a lot of effortful music to a likely digital oblivion. But most of our 78s and 45s are gone and forgotten, along with the devices on which we played them; and of course no music in human history before the late 19th century is on record — a loss that is philosophically mournable but that we all live with easily. And reducing the plasticware leads to elegant gains. Long after the Beatles are dead, your shelf may display a dozen playable Beatles objects but only one by Ringo Starr. The rest of Ringo’s songs will have magically vanished into the nether-regions of the Cloud, or somehow turned to water and nourished an arid subcontinent.
I know we’ve got our Facebook pages, our Twitter accounts, and telepathic apps on our smartphones. That’s all great, but finding such nuggets through our assorted social media streams can be a chore. For every rock nugget posted on our social media streams I might have to sift through 99 photos of the healthy, exotic meal one friend ate last night; how adorable another friend’s kid is; or how outrageous a statement a public figure recently made in public.
