You know what I’m talking about! The All-Star Jam is the place where you can strut your stuff.
Phil Everly, the thinner, straight-haired, more severe-looking member of the Everly Brothers, has died at 74 of complications from COPD. I love the Everly Brothers the way I often don’t allow myself to love a group. Usually, for instance, once I love more than 5 songs by any artist I’m first introduced to through the radio and a double-album greatest hits collection (as was the case with the Everly Brothers), I obsessively read up on their history, buy a bunch of the albums, watch a documentary… This was never the case with the Everly Brothers. I simply loved hearing their music. Maybe the supposed bad blood between the brothers made me shy away from reading too deeply on them. I didn’t want to spoil the harmony in my head. Maybe all the references to country music I was likely to find seemed daunting. Maybe Phil, who may have been a saint of a guy for all I knew, simply scared me. He always looked like he’d bite John Fogerty’s head off if given the chance. Hell, I’ve never even seen that reunion concert video from the 1980s that Dave Edmunds, I believe, helped organize. (Maybe coincidentally, Edmunds is another artist I like a lot whose personal journey holds no interest for me.)
Anyhow, I think the Everly Brothers were fantastic. A few years ago I filled in the gaps in my greatest hits collection, with some tracks from albums they put out during their forgotten years. I did a Saturday Night Shut-In on this subject, almost 3 years ago to this date. You can revisit that episode here.
I know there must be dozens of examples of Doppelganger Rock – that is, a song by some less well-known (or even utterly obscure) artist that sounds, upon casual listening, just like a more famous one. For the sake of clarity and specificity, I don’t include mere soundalike singers. Rather, it’s more the overall vibe of a band or artist that is evoked by the musical doppelgangers. The singer doesn’t have to be an exact copycat as long as the performance, upon first listen, makes you think immediately of the more famous artist.
OK, actually I can only think of three examples off the top of my head right now. The first and perhaps most obvious one is New Jersey-based early-Beatles copycats the Knickerbockers singing “Lies” in 1965:
It occurs to me that not everyone will agree that a certain performance sounds like another artist, so for my second example, “Sweet Sweet Heart” by pre-Vibrators outfit Despair in 1973, I won’t say who it reminds me of. Whaddayathink?
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Something entertaining for your evening if, like LMKR and myself, you’re gonna have 2 or 3 beers and hit the sack to read a book by 10 tonight.
RTH Saturday Night Shut-In, Episode 123
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The List (after the jump):
I have lived in Ireland for the last 14 years, but I am originally from Chicago. One thing I’ve noticed from living on this small island is the sense of national pride extended over cultural exports that achieve any sort of recognition abroad. U2 is the prime example from the rock world because of its massive commercial success alongside a sense that they were a proper group (unlike more recent boy band exports) doing it their way and earning some critical accolades along the way (from the likes of Rolling Stone, the UK music press, RnR HoF, etc).
More baffling is the elevated status given at home to the late Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy) and Rory Gallagher. Personally, I see them both as footnotes in rock history, but in Ireland they are major chapters. To some extent, I get it: there weren’t any Irish rock stars until the late ’60s, and very few in the ’70s, so just the fact that these guys made it to the big time during the “classic” period of rock history is worth recognizing. But it goes much further than that. Gallagher is considered nearly as important as Hendrix, while there is a statue of Phil Lynott on a major street in the center of Dublin.
(To be sure, dying young helps. People are getting sick of U2. Had they died in a 1990s plane crash, there would now be a Lincoln Memorial-esque monument to them in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.)
To borrow from the sports world, this kind of “homerism” does seem natural, but try as I might, I can’t find an analogue when it comes to Chicago or Illinois. There is some sort of Chicago blues museum/foundation there, but rather than being funded by a civic or government organization, it was founded by the daughter of Willie Dixon using funds from her father’s successful legal actions against Led Zeppelin. I don’t think the broad swathe of citizens living in northern Illinois rate Muddy Waters, Smashing Pumpkins, the band Chicago, or Cheap Trick any higher than the rest of the general population does.
Hence the question: Is this musical homerism—overvaluing home-grown artists—in Ireland simply a result of it being such a small country? Or does it exist anywhere (on a local level) in the US or UK?
Martin Scorsese is on my shit list this holiday season. Big time. I used to run out to see Scorsese movies as soon as they were released. The Last Waltz is a major reason I’m still so obsessed with rock ‘n roll. At 17, I sat in the second row of a packed theater for Raging Bull. The two of us knew exactly what that movie was getting at. I simply mention that movie to her to this day and our bond is confirmed. He didn’t miss a beat with left turns, like The King of Comedy and After Hours. Even The Color of Money paid off.
I walked through picket lines to see The Last Temptation of Christ. I saw Goodfellas the day that came out, in the company of E. Pluribus Gergely and our soon-to-be brides. What a movie! Then came Casino. As soon as I saw the trailers for that movie I thought, “This looks like a rehash of Goodfellas. I just saw Goodfellas, and I don’t need to see a Scorsese movie with Sharon Stone!” Scorsese entered his midlife crisis years, in which the greatest director with minimal need for women in his films suddenly started chasing all the blond cheerleader types who wouldn’t give him the time of day when he was in high school: Jessica Lange in Cape Fear, that preposterous version of an already mediocre B-movie; Michelle Pfeiffer in that film of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; and Cameron Diaz in that 19th century Irish mobster near-musical, the most blatant cheerleader grope of Scorsese’s career.
Leonardo DiCaprio has replaced Robert DeNiro as the director’s go-to guy. I’ve got no beef with DiCaprio. He can be really good. He was great in Catch Me If You Can. He was really good as Howard Hughes, in that mostly unnecessary Scorsese movie. He’s great at playing an engaging creep, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do anything beside that. He doesn’t give off much emotional range, at least not in the Scorsese movies I’ve seen him in. Now Scorsese’s cast him as an asshole investment guy from the ’80s in The Wolf of Wall Street. Three of hours of the ’70s scenes from Goodfellas set in the ’80s, instead. Three hours of hotshots snorting coke off hookers’ asses. Hey, it may be a fantastic movie, but I get no sense that it’s going to deliver the redemption that was at the heart of all the great Scorsese movies. It looks to me like another Casino, another movie in which Marty’s characters toss Benjamins around and the camera pans in quickly, just because he can do it and we can’t! It looks to me like another midlife crisis movie from an 80-year-old master who should make one more film with DeNiro before they both die. I need my Scorsese to calm the fuck down and make a 2-hour meditation on death, with DeNiro playing an old man version of one of his classic Scorsese characters. No blonds. No Irish-Catholic gangters from Boston. No DiCaprio. No offense to blonds, Irish-Catholic gangsters from Boston, and DiCaprio. The movie must check in at less than 2 hours 15 minutes.
A few days ago the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” came on the radio, and I couldn’t change the station fast enough. I have come to loathe that song, even more than I dislike “Angie,” despite the fact that I don’t mind the music of “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll,” its groove, it’s production. I just seems like the Stones’ version of Casino, like they felt they’d worked long and hard enough and just wanted to trade Sharon Stone an Oscar nod for a roll in the hay.