This Is Your Song For....July 10, 2013: Beat.It by The Link Quartet

It's Hammond-rific!

Today...it’s Hammond Organ based instrumental rock!

Yes, that’s a thing.

I didn’t know myself until this morning.

Technically, the proper term for it is ‘Hammond Beat,’ and it refers to groove and rock based instrumentals where the central instrument is a Hammond organ.  The brainchild of Paolo Negri, the Link Quartet was formed in 1993 and has been putting out these slightly spacey, slightly surfy tunes ever since--save for a three year break in the oughts.

I’ve been getting into a lot of surf music lately, spurred on by my love of Los Straitjackets to explore both the pioneers of the form and more contemporary practitioners.  Because of the uniquely artficial sound of the Hammond, the Link Quartet seem similar but apart; it’s almost as if Negri and his bandmates have found the crossroads where surf rock and the exotica lounge crowd meet, creating a fusion that gives us something akin to a jam band for hipsters--more controlled, less meandering, but with that spirit of improvisation still very much alive.

I don’t know where I got this track from--my guess is it’s another one of those mp3s I lucked into through my weekly download of the Revolution Rock radio show--but what I’ve heard has intrigued me enough to investigate this heretofore unknown-to-me subgenre of music a little more.

Here's the song, so you can decide for yourself if it's for you....

This Is Your Song For....July 7, 2013: In My Garage by Kim Fowley

You're never too old...

Today....a little something from the guy who brought us The Runaways.

Kim Fowley wrote and produced this song as a single in 1978.  By that time, he had already had his fingerprints on the face of rock and roll in his position as a producer, songwriter and manager.  Amongst the long list of people whose career he had helped along or revived are The Soft Machines, Kiss, Helen Reddy, Gene Vincent, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and Kris Kristofferson.  Hell, he would be honored by me solely for his role as a co-writer on Warren Zevon’s first solo album.  Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was seeing something in five aspiring female performers and putting them together as The Runaways.  Now don’t get me wrong--Fowley didn’t create the fivesome of Jett, West, Curie, Ford and Fox out of altruism; he had already been looking to form a female band to be his mouthpiece and was unsucessful until he met Joan Jett, but the impact that little act had is undeniable.

Given how this is the guy who wrote songs for the prototype for Riot Grrl, it’s surprising how gentle this song is.  In this song, Fowley is pretty much trying his hardest to channel Bob Dylan with his kinda wavering vocals and simple acoustic guitar composition; I have to wonder if the opening lines ‘The King of The Gypsies is on my radio/he said goodbye to rock and roll and I kept saying no’ is a direct reference to Dylan himself.  And to be fair, there are a couple of moment where those vocals border on parody.  But the song itself, probably written as Fowley was contemplating the move he was going to make to Australia to search for the next Beatles, is kind of a cool mission statement.  He talks with some passion about how the future of rock is happening right now somewhere out there, ready to be discovered.  It’s a hopeful song in spite of its mournful pace, as he says that he can hear the new heroes of rock  ‘who I’ve never heard of/and who have never heard of me’ in his garage.  I just get this picture in my mind listening to this song of Fowley sitting back in his office popping cheap cassette tapes one after the other into his deck, leaning back and marveling at some of these new sounds coming from these small spaces all across the country.

Fowley is still out there--he was integral to bringing the story of the Runaways to the big screen in 2010--hosting a radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

You can here the song here.

This Is Your Song For....June 15, 2013: Empires Ending (B Sides) by Koko And The Sweetmeats

I...I got nuttin'....literally.

This week, kinda dreamy garage pop from Seattle...if you can call it garage.

I don’t have a lot on Koko And The Sweetmeats--I got Sacrifice, the album this cut is from off of their Bandcamp page, where it was offered for a brief time for free, and is now available for a dollar--and it seems like these guys like to experiment. Sacrifice is composed of six songs that are interpreted twice, an A side and a B side version.  This is obviously the B side version.

They’re a four piece (although most of the publicity photos only feature two members, and the most I’ve ever seen in any photo is three), and they have enough of a following in their hometown to be named ‘Best Garage Band of 2011‘ by Seattle Weekly.

It’s odd to me that this band is considered ‘garage.’  When I think of a garage band, I think of something much punkier than this.  Koko and The Sweetmeats seem to owe a bit more to the layered sounds of 4 A.D and the head-down-low esthetic of Lo-Fi than the DIY anarchy of garage rock judging from this song.  They seem positively laid back, with a slight blown-speaker fuzz giving the guitars a decay that adds some body to the melody itself.

To be honest, there’s not a lot I can find in listening to this that I can take away from it, or that I can remark upon...sometimes, unfortunately, that happens with a random exercise like this.  It’s decent music, and the price can’t be beat. I know I have some readers from the Seattle area; maybe you guys can write in and tell me more about them in the comments space?

Apparently, Koko And The Sweetmeats announced an ‘indefinite hiatus’ earlier this year.

Here's a live performance by the band.  It was the only Youtube-y video I could find.

Signs Of The End Time: Maxwell's of Hoboken Is Fading Away

It didn’t look like a club.  It looked like a corner restaurant (because, in fact, it was).

It wasn’t really accessible, as every trip I took to it required me to take the PATH train into Hoboken, then walk about a mile to almost the very end of Washington Street.

It wasn’t easy to get home from, as a return from a show usually required a half hour or more of my sitting in that cold, funny smelling PATH train.

And yet, Maxwell’s was my favorite venue during that long, long period where I was going to see live music three or four nights every week, stumbling home at three or four a.m. to get about two and a half hours sleep before heading off to work.  I loved the fact that the performance space was roughly the size of a largish den.  I loved the fact that--at least during that period of my life--it was the only venue that was air-conditioned.  I loved that if you showed up early enough, and I am one of those people who is perpetually early, you could position yourself in a certain corner of the dining room and listen to that evening’s headliner doing their soundcheck.  I loved the intimacy of the place sometimes resulted in one of the acts interacting with you before or after the show.

And now, as of July 31st of this year, it joins such landmarks of my misspent youth as The Comic Book Art Gallery, Pinky’s, The 59th Street Forbidden Planet, The Continental, The Ritz and CBGB’s as a thing of the past.

To be fair, I have not been to Maxwell’s in a very, very long time.  I think the last time I was in its hallowed halls was when, for my birthday, I ventured out to see Stan Ridgway perform in support of his Black Diamond album.  Somehow, my friend got word to Stan that it was my birthday, and he pulled me up on stage to play that flute-thing on ‘The Big Heat,’ signed a set list for me that I have posted above my work station to this day, and invited me to be his guest for his second New York City area show a few days later.  That big night was close to twenty years ago....

But that was just the most recent of memories.  A lot of them are about the people I got to see in a much more intimate venue, like being literally two feet away from Lloyd Cole as he did an acoustic set one absolutely frigid Thursday night in December.  There was going on a first date with a woman to see the Boston band Orangutan one Sunday night and ending up with what pretty much was a private show, as we were the only two people who showed up (the band, who knew me, played anyway).  There was the time Jersey natives The Melting Hopefuls were celebrating the release of their one and only album, Space Flyer, by handing out toy rayguns.

And there were the memories I made at Maxwell’s due to my musical journalism. There was the time my friend Vaughn gleefully tore apart the hipster doofus veneer of a certain 4 AD band spokesman by quizzing him on the comic books he claimed to love.  There was the time I was invited to interview Pat Fish of the The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy over a dinner, a dinner that resulted in us bonding over our love of Hammer horror movies (it turned out Hammer stalwart director Terence Fisher was related to Mr. Fish).  And then there was the strange and wonderful not-quite friendship that grew up between me and one of my musical crushes Tanya Donnelly, which I chronicled here.

I’m sure you can gather from some of my war stories that Maxwell’s hey day was in the early 90‘s, during that time when the success of Nirvana (who played Maxwell’s) briefly saw an overwhelming interest in independent music.  It’s a credit to the owner Todd Abramson that he kept it open as long as he did, but the changing face of the neighborhood, with the gentrification wave hitting it hard in the last decade, has made running this legendary venue to difficult.

So now one of the most legendary, intimate venues in the tri-state area is about to disappear into the mists of history.  And that is why we are living in the End Times.

This Is Your Song For....May 1st, 2013: Dandy by Los Helldandys

Viva Le Rockabilly!

Happy May Day, Communists!  Here’s some instrumental Mexican rockabilly to celebrate with!

Utilizing my limited Spanish, I can determine that Los Helldandys was founded in 2006 in Tijuana and try to mix their rockabilly with touches of punk, blues and surf.  And in the tradition of surf rock, this is an instrumental, but it’s unmistakable in its fusion of rockabilly twang with the beefier, more heavily countrified twang of some of the traditional Mexican pop.  In particular, there’s a time change that to me seems alien to other forms of rockabilly, as if our musicians decided to shift their attentions.  I’ve always appreciated and been fascinated by how American pop music gets filtered through foreign eyes; looking through the playlist on my Sansa Fuze right now, you’ll see Swedish, French, German and Japanese versions of rockabilly and garage rock.  There is something about how something that was designed to be so uniquely Amurrican becomes warped and altered by a pair of eyes from Somewhere Else that frequently results in something delightful.  Hell, it might be why I became such a devote of second and third wave ska, since the bulk of that is a mutation of the Jamaican original through English and American eyes.

I obtained this song through an episode of the rather cool Portuguese radio show Revolution Rock Radio, although further samples of Los Helldandys’ work can be found at a number of places.

Here's a live video of the band so you can figure out if they're for you.

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...

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.