I’ll start things off: Status Quo. For better or for worse, they seem to have been ubiquitous among a generation or two of British bands while making little to no impression on US audiences. Beside “Pictures of Matchstick Men”, from their early psych incarnation, did anyone in the US ever hear their popular UK boogie music without tracking it down in cutout bins? Once tracked down, did it ever make a positive impression on any set of American ears?
Feel free to speculate on why these artists were unable to make the jump across the pond.
Bill Murray was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien last night. I’m a bit disappointed that, 11 hours later, no one has yet posted a YouTube clip of his appearance, but I did find another clip that will do the job of illustrating my concern. Go to around the 3:53 mark (or watch the excruciating if occasionally funny intro, if you want to hate white folks at Blooz festivals).
Conan must have been hipped to this performance. He brought up the fact that Murray can only play “Gloria” on guitar and asked if he would perform it with the Max Weinberg 7. Murray, ever the showman, readily complied. He kicked off the song playing at least one totally wrong-sounding chord. After about two rotations through the progression, Conan’s guitarist covered for him, and they pulled down Murray’s guitar in the mix. As is the case in this Blooz fest clip the second chord in the progression seemed to be the culprit. This has raised at least two questions:
1) Isn’t the chord progression to “Gloria” E-D-A? That’s how I’ve played it for the last 30 years.
2) If so, does Murray have no idea where to fret a D chord? I know his guitar at the Blooz fest isn’t perfectly tuned, but it can’t be that two different guitars have intonation problems around the D chord only.
A third question might be, Does anyone in the entertainment industry break the news to Bill that he doesn’t even know this one song on guitar?
I read the news today, oh boy. Neil Hefti died! Neil Hefti was, of course, one of the greats in the world of TV theme composition. Among his stellar accomplishments in that field was the theme for “Batman.”
In addition to the tune just being a flat-out *rocker* of the first order, I’ve always felt it possessed one of the greatest drum sounds on *any* recording, teevee theme or not. This factor pushes it up to the top of the list of teevee themes, sez me. So I’m sending my loving memory of Neil Hefti into the ring to claim the belt for the theme to “Batman.” Who’s got a challenger? Who thinks there’s a TV theme song that rocked harder than Hefti’s “Batman”?
Townsman Mwall suggested we take up the broader discussion of a rock artist’s relevance, or lack thereof, in a separate thread. Great suggestion. I’m bringing his comments from the ongoing XTC/Nonsuch discussion to The Main Stage. Here’s what Mwall had to say. Add to the man’s thoughts as you see fit!
The concept of relevance/irrelevance is certainly worth saying more about at some point, and debating, perhaps in another post. For me it usually begins at that point at which a band starts making albums that no longer contribute significantly to the value of their own musical legacy, or at best (which I guess is under discussion here re XTC) are dotting a few final i’s and crossing a few t’s. It tends to correspond, although not always exactly, with that same moment at which any new fans of the band (of which there are likely to be fewer and fewer) tend to “discover” them as something to look back at. If you first heard the Stones in 1988, for instance, you still don’t think that 1988 was “when they were really great.”
Here are some moments like that: Graham Parker after The Real Macaw, The Stones after Tatoo You, REM after… well, what? I’ll be damned if those later albums aren’t so deeply indistinguishable that I’ve never bothered to tell them apart.
There’s no tomorrow, Dodgers fans. Until Shane Victorino unleashed his inner soldier and tied the game with a line-drive homer and then Phils manager Charlie Manuel dipped into his canvas lp bag and pulled out Matt Stairs, Professional Hitter, and his Stone-Cold Steve Austin theme song to dash the Dodgers’ hopes of claiming home-field advantage, Joe Torre was pumping up the jams just fine for the home crowd.
Torre’s not been afraid to toy with his playlist. For Game 4, Torre inserted Juan Pierre, who from his Marlins days was a truly-despised-yet-appreciated thorn in the side of the Phils, in center field. Matt Kemp and his at-bat intro tune were not getting the job done, despite what Kemp had to say about his tune’s power:
“Your walk-up music is everything to you. It’s your at-bat, man. It gets you ready. It gets you going, and they gotta play it loud so you can feel it and get hyped. Get hyped, boy … it is what it is. When a new song comes out, I usually think if that would be a good walk-up song. That is how I did it in the past: ‘That would be a tight walk-up song.’ It always changes.”
Pierre not only brought his mad, pesky, small-ball skillz to the lineup but this bad azz walk-up diddy:
Kemp wants to be a punk; Pierre is – in the good way that can benefit a his team’s battles in the NLCS. Pierre was 2-3 with a double and a run scored, but his sparkplug effort out of the 8-hole (too little, too late in Torre’s playlist, if you ask me) was overshadowed by the work of his counterpart in center:
But that’s yesterday’s news. Tonight there’s no tomorrow for the Dodgers unless Torre can dig deep into his canvas record bag and pull out the perfect mix. Perhaps he’ll find a killer German import-only B-side to rock the dancefloor and bring the series back to Philly. Let’s see what Joe’s remaining options might be after the jump!
I’m a huge fan of XTC. I consider their run of albums from Go2 through The Big Express one of the most impressive runs of albums in rock. I even think Skylarking is a pretty great album, although I don’t wholly embrace its constricted production. However, I was never a fan of Nonsuch. I tried to like it for a few months and finally decided to cast that devil out of the house!
Click here for a fascinating look at a band in the studio at a time when they forgot to change the batteries in their bullshit detector. (Unfortunately, this is one of those YouTube videos that the owner will not allow other sites to embed, so you’ve got to go to his specific URL.)
Does anyone in this studio look uncomfortable with the mess that’s being put down? All that’s missing is a nodding Derek Smalls, stroking his beard nnd pulling on his pipe.
When people tell me they don’t “get” XTC – or think they stink, I figure this must be what they’re hearing. I ask Townspeople who don’t get XTC, Is this what you’re hearing?
