What’s on your mind? The All-Star Jam is the place to do your thing. It’s a great way for newcomers to break the ice and share something/anything that’s on their mind. Let it all hang out.
Mar 032012
Mar 022012
Check out this Head-era Monkees interview with longtime Philadelphia DJ Hy Lit. At the 4:07 mark, Mike Nesmith starts talking about the band’s next album, a proto-KISS solo album concept, in which each Monkee leads a side of a double album through his personal musical vision. Mickey Dolenz joins in with a note about his interest in electronic music and his Moog synthesizer, which goes way over Lit’s head. Soon after Peter Tork starts calling for an end to the interview. The late Davy Jones looks really cute.
Rock Town Hall asks you to imagine the track listing, in descriptive terms, including sequencing and real and/or imagined song titles, for this planned double album.
If you can manage any of that challenge, how would your Monkees double-album concept release have stacked up against the KISS solo albums?
Mar 012012
Today’s exercise in playing nice is courtesy of Townsman chergeuvarra.
We here in the Halls of Rock Town are sometimes taken to task for being overly negative, snarky, hyper-critical, and all too often, just downright rude. As part of our collective efforts to bring a bit of sunshine and light to the world wide web, we occasionally make an extra effort effort to find something good to say about, you know, stuff that is clearly godawful.
It is in that spirit that we embark on yet another effort to bring some positivity to our proceedings. Please spend some quality time with the video above, then—if you can—please find something nice to say about it. You’ll feel a whole lot better, I promise you.
I look forward to your comments. Just remember, if you can’t say anything nice about this video… please don’t say anything at all.
Mar 012012
The recent One-liners thread launched by Townsman hrrundivbakshi coupled with an ongoing super-busy streak at work seem to have brought what I consider an unwelcome yet wholly appropriate rock lyric couplet into my brain:
Get up and do it again. Amen.
It’s from some Jackson Browne song I deeply dislike. Is it “The Pretender?” I’m not going to risk listening to any Jackson Browne songs right now to verify the source, but it’s a recurring nightmare couplet that enters my brain as a form of gallows humor during tough stretches at work, then gets stuck there for as long as a week. For the first day or two it makes me chuckle, then it grates on me. Big time.
Do you have a recurring nightmare couplet that creeps into your brain in certain circumstances?
(As an aside, does Jackson Browne’s have more songs about how hard it is to work, how hard it is to get through the day, than he does days working an “honest” job? Didn’t he start out as a 16-year-old boy-toy and songwriter for Nico? Has he ever worked an “honest” job in his life? Is watching his roadies haul equipment across the country the closest he’s come to any form of non-artistic labor?)
Feb 292012
Looks like this is just breaking: Monkees singer Davy Jones has died of a heart attack.
Oh boy, who would have thought Davy would be the first Monkee to go?
The New York Times checks in.
Feb 292012
Need a refresher? After the jump…! Continue reading »
Feb 292012
Strange Days Indeed!
“I couldn’t believe it,” recounted popular Rock Town Hall moderator Mr. Moderator to an anonymous RTH Labs Hotline operator, “I was painting our upstairs bathroom while playing the ‘Elvis Costello’ channel on Pandora when a jangly song came on that sounded like something The Smiths might do…but it wasn’t the slightest bit annoying!” Mr. Moderator quickly placed the paint roller back in the tray, washed his hands, and ran to his bedroom stereo to see what was playing. Sure enough it was The Smiths’ “Is It Really So Strange?”, a song he couldn’t place ever having heard before, not even in women’s dorm rooms from his college days.
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/The-Smiths_01_Is-it-Really-So-Strange-John-Peel-session-12-2-86.mp3|titles=The Smiths, “Is it Really So Strange”]Mr. Moderator stood before the speakers and used all of his immense powers of concentration and critical thinking to see if he could determine that the song, like all previous Smiths songs he’d heard before, did in deed suck thanks to Morrissey’s whiny vocals and ill-defined melodies. But the song in no way sucked. He couldn’t even demean the song as “wimpy.” That’s when he called the RTH Labs Hotline.
“I’d tried liking The Smiths—even the slightest bit—over the years,” Mr. Mod explained, “but I was always put off by Morrissey’s aimless vocals and resentful of the mystifying ‘guitar god’ status granted to Johnny Marr.” He continues, “One week I even immersed myself in solo Morrissey records and found I liked them better than the stuff he did with The Smiths.” He then tried listening to The Smiths again but still couldn’t understand what people heard in those records. “The solo Morrissey stuff wasn’t too bad, though. Maybe it was the influence of Mick Ronson that gave him some focus,” he muses. “This Smith song, however, is as solid as the best of those solo records. Morrissey within the song’s rhythm, and I even like Marr’s guitar playing!”
RTH Labs is currently investigating why this particular Smiths song is so much better than anything else the Moderator has ever heard by the band. Your input will be added to the investigation.
