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Safety Tip: In addition to being a place to blather about anything, All-Star Jam is a swell place to alert us to technical difficulties!
Have a super day!
Dec 102008
Dec 102008
As I mentioned yesterday, I finally picked up Warren Zevon‘s largely overlooked Sentimental Hygiene, his 1987 release with members of R.E.M. and other guests that signalled a return to form following a particularly long and intense period of drug and alcohol abuse, even by this hard-living cynic’s standards. Five years after Zevon’s unexpected premature death by lung cancer (who didn’t think he would OD?), this album stands as a bookend to the artist’s typically other overlooked work, 1980’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. Considering I’m listening to this album for the first time ever and it sounds exactly like every other album I’ve ever heard by the guy, my initial thoughts follow in cut-up fashion. My thanks to a variety of critics and bloggers, who did the heavy lifting and posed, sometimes unintentionally, a couple of piercing questions.
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Dec 092008
This popped up on my Google Reader shortly after firing up my computer this morning. What a great way to start the day; Christmas comes early for Anglophiles!
Dec 092008
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The Fireman is Paul McCartney and this dude “Youth” who played bass for Killing Joke and gained more rep with his “ambient house” collaborations with Orb.
Unbeknownst to moi, they started collaborating in 1993 and have realease a total of three albums, 1994’s Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest and 1998’s Rushes. I haven’t heard a single thing from these but understand they are heavily electronic and might not even include lyrics.
Can anyone shed some light on these for the class?
This new one Electric Arguments showed up highly praised on eMusic. I gave it a whirl and like it more than anything he has been involved with in a long, long time. It starts out pretty far away from electronic but by the second half gets pretty deep.
Track 1 Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight
Very little in the way of anything Beatles, at least not overtly except for:
Track 2 Two Magpies
And by Track 11 we’ve gotten here: Is This Love
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Dec 082008
Here’s Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football, shortly after 11:00 pm, 28 years ago today.
Here’s the way Howard and all of us would have preferred to have remembered John Lennon on Monday Night Football.
Dec 082008
The RTH Xmas record is the 15 best Xmas songs as nominated by you: the villagers of Rock Town Hall.
Here are the rules: You nominate a song for inclusion. The moment another villager seconds your vote, it’s in. We keep going until we have 15. This becomes the Official (Mod? [Mod – Why not, provided my favorite rockin’ Xmas song is included?]) Rock Town Hall Xmas Album.
This process should leave us with a pretty great mix tape or iPod playlist to pair with a single malt and drown out the shrill caroling of crazy Aunt Bea from Winnipeg.
I am going to start us off with a song I think should have no trouble at all being seconded; “Fairytale of New York,” by The Pogues.
Dec 082008
I love pub rock. There’s no clear definition of the style, but it was a mid-70s British phenomenon, a back-to-basics trend that was never wildly popular, a precursor to punk, and many pub rock musicians carried on into the punk era. Brinsley Schwarz is probably the best-known exponent of the style, which I think of as a mixture of black and white musical genres – rock, R&B, country, folk, and pop. The conversation between black and white is what rock & roll is all about to me, and pub rock was a peculiarly British take on that conversation.
I’m going to write an irregular series about pub rock here, and I want to start with a man who could be called one of the progenitors of the style. He was also a player in what could be called the secret history of rock & roll.
Jim Ford is one of those legends that almost no one knows about. If he’s known at all it’s because he wrote the song “Niki Hoeky,” which was recorded most famously by Aretha Franklin on the Lady Soul album. Here’s Bobbie Gentry doing “Niki Hoeky” on the Smothers Brothers TV show. Note the authentic Cajun mise en scene:
Ford’s other claim to fame is that Nick Lowe has cited him as his biggest influence. But let me back up a bit and give a little background on Ford himself.
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