Wednesday, April 24, 2013

This Is Your Song For....April 24th, 2013: The Rascal King (Live) by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Back In Plaid....

I guess it’s appropriate, after what happened last week, that my randomizer comes up with a track from one of my favorite Boston bands playing one of their bigger hits at a legendary show.  And it’s a track about one of the most notorious Boston politicians who ever lived, an example of the sort of graceful-but-tough-as-hell sensibilities we all saw on display during that horrific experience.

Let’s Face It, the album where ‘The Rascal King’ first appeared, was as big as the Bosstones would ever get.  Partially bouyed by one of those periodic surges of interest in ska music that hits the cultural zeitgiest every decade or so and bolstered by the eminently hummable lead single ‘The Impression That I Get,’ the album gave the band extensive exposure on alternative rock, AOR and--to my surprise at the time--Top 40.  This was just as the creep of the dance sludge that passes for Top 40 was gaining a foothold, so Dickey Barrett and his crew hit at the very last moment where pop music was open to alternative styles, and they exploited it like their life depended on it.  The success of Let’s Face It prompted the Bosstones to release a video compilation, appear on Saturday Night Live and--God Help Me--the prime-time Sesame Street special Elmopalooza, where they danced with the Count.

Yes.  I watched a Sesame Street television special.  Deal with it.

This comes from the excellent album Live From The Middle East, a recording of their annual year-end Boston concert-cum-holiday party.  The album as a whole gives you a great sense of the energy and enthusiasm that the Bosstones brought to their performances, and it’s a great little artifact of how the band was at the height of its power.  It’s also a snapshot of the classic line-up before the group fractured, as slowly over the next three years members left to form other bands or, in one case, to obtain their degree from Brown University.

Apparently, the song is about James Michael Curley, a notoriously corrupt but notoriously popular Boston politician who served as mayor four times (he was once re-elected mayor while serving a prison term!) and ultimately became Governor of Massachusetts.  The song is peppered with oblique and direct references to Curley’s life; Hell, the chorus begins by citing both the title of his autobiography and the Edwin O’Conner novel that was inspired by his colorful career.  Curley’s impact on Boston life is still clear to this day, and the Bosstones manage to address how ambivalent his former constituents are about him.  The song, after all, never comes out on one side or another about whether Curley was a crook or a hero...as Barrett puts it, ‘in the end they knew his name,’ and that might be all that matters.  I wonder if a parallel could be made between Curley’s tightrope walking between rogue and saint, and the way the Bosstones briefly did the same thing, striving towards popularity while trying to stay faithful to their ska-core roots.

After a break in the mid Oughts, the Bosstones are back on tour--and you can see Dickey Barrett every night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where he plays Ed MacMahon to Jimmy’s Johnny Carson.

Here’s the video, which features footage from the film based on that Edwin O'Conner novel, The Last Hurrah.

And because I feel like it, here's Dickey dancing with the Count...

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

This Is Your Song For....April 3rd, 2013: Summer In A Small Town by Cleaners From Venus

If there ever was a Doctor Who of pop...this is him.
Most of you have never heard of The Cleaners From Venus (well, most of you who aren’t hardcore power pop fans, or deep devotees of 80‘s British pop in general).

There’s a reason for that.  Cleaners was primarily the brainchild of former Plod frontman Martin Newell.  Newell was so traumatized by the way Plod has been mistreated by its label that he retreated into Britain’s music underground.  Thus, The Cleaners self-distributed their albums in an age when self-distribution was difficult to make work, sending out cassette tapes that could be bought through ads in music magazines.  Newell, mostly with drummer Lol Elliot, managed to produce nine albums between 1981 and 1990, and each one is a weird microcosm of popular music styles--a typical Cleaners From Venus track, even with all the tape hiss, can sound like something out of the Britpop invasion, or the Mod movement, or classic middle-period New Wave.  It’s bizarrely timeless in its OCD-like tendency to jump the tracks, and any of these albums are recommended.

Which brings us to today’s song, which was taken by a retrospective collection called Golden Cleaners, and shows that Newell was an excellent storyteller as well.  Starting with Martin’s chant of ‘not go mad, not go mad, not go mad’ it tells the story of a traveling salesman spending a day in the titular small town and sitting in a cafe reflecting on how the music he loved as a child has mutated into something that terrifies him.  He keeps telling himself he can leave any time he wants, but seems horribly fascinated with how punk rock, psychobilly and other forms that make up the new soundtrack of this season indicates that ‘the Golden Age is not the present one.’  We get the impression that this man wants to escape from this world, but is resigned to continuing to move through it.  

What continues to floor me is how this feels so much like something out of the 90‘s years before the pioneers of the Britpop movement picked up their instruments.  Newell’s vocals are, in their phrasing, so reminiscent of such bands as Carter USM that it’s uncanny that they were recorded ten years prior.  The shimmery guitar work seems to evoke the cleaned-up sound of the Jesus and Mary Chain--except that I’m pretty sure that the J&M Chain wouldn’t popify itself for another couple of years from when the original source of this song, Under Wartime Conditions, was released.  There are half a dozen other bands I can cite--but almost all of them are bands that didn’t reach prominence until years later.  This song, and other Cleaners songs, seem to have tapped into something universal that we all find in pop music.  Newell, in his desire to pursue his own muses, may have hit upon this weird Cradle of British Pop Civilization, and we’re all the better for it.

Martin Newell, God Bless Him, is still alive and out there.  While his last musical contribution of note is a jazz album from 2004, The Light Programme, he continues to write (both musically and literary) and provides inspiration for all the wonderful artists who decide to travel down more unconventional paths when getting their music to the public.

Obviously, there are no official videos extant--but here’s the song anyway.