Preach. Teach (as the recently deceased Tony Allen does here). The All-Star Jam is the place to do your thing.
May 052020
Mr. Moderator
May 052020
Oh, to be 17 again and see this for the first time in the forgotten, underrated 1981 punk rock documentary DOA! I don’t know if I could turn on an adult to this performance the way my friends and I were turned on while seeing this film at a midnight showing at either Philadelphia’s TLA or Tower Theater.
I’m not one to look back too fondly on my teenage years, but this captures a great moment. Is there a musical performance captured on film or video that makes you long to be 17 again?
May 042020
I just learned that a longtime Philadelphia music scene legend, Tom Sheehy, who actually was known around town as “The Colonel” (as in Elvis Presley’s Colonel), has passed. I didn’t know The Colonel well, but he was a fixture at almost any national or local show of note from the start of my club-going days, in the early 1980s, through whenever it was in the last 5 or 10 years, when I first noticed I didn’t see his gaunt face and gray, thinning shag-pompadour in the crowd. His standing as a local scene legend far preceded the time I first got to know him. I’m sure Townsman geo, who goes back further and played in one of Kenn Kweder‘s lineups, which The Colonel managed and/or did publicity for, can fill us in on details.
I was never sure exactly what The Colonel did, how he paid his bills, how he was tied to all local music-related media (ie, clubs, radio stations, record stores), etc, but as I mentioned him being at “almost any…show of note,” he seemed to help define what constituted “of note.” When we’d see him in the crowd at one of my band’s shows, for instance, my bandmates and I would note his presence and get a little jolt of pride at the “scene blessing” we’d been given. Who knew why this felt good? Tom seemed like a nice enough guy, in the few, brief words we exchanged, but why the hell did we care that he was in the crowd?
May 012020
Is Cat Stevens worthy of a critical upgrade? I’m not suggesting that he get upgraded to the level of an early-1970s folk-rock legend, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell, but would you rather listen to 5 Cat Stevens songs or 5 by Jackson Browne?
I can’t be the only person who would rather hear “Wild World” or “Peace Train” over possibly any James Taylor song excluding “Fire and Rain,” can I? Did our judgmental views over Cat’s conversion to Islam take him out of the running for the solid respect we allow for Sweet Baby James?
I’ll take it one step further, that step that inevitably leads me into a pile of cow manure: How great is the distance between Cat Stevens’ peak period and the three albums Nick Drake released? What makes T. Rex‘s bubblegum glam-folk peak that much better than Cat’s bubblegum-singer-songwriter records? How many smash hits away from a Greatest Hits, vol. 2 was Stevens, which could have placed him in the realm of Elton John?
Ignore the preceding paragraph, but know that I put it out there as a straw dog, a sign of the confidence of have in my initial question. I sense music lovers have backed off from holding Yusef Islam‘s religious beliefs against him. Is it time we acknowledge that the guy was pretty good, even Rock Town Hall Foyer of Fame worthy?
Where’s Townsman hrrundivbakshi when we need him?
Apr 282020
Is this topics like shooting fish in a barrel? Yes, unless we restrict ourselves to artists who released no more than TWO (2) releases before some hotshot producer polished them up and helped them become wildly successful. This limit, mind you, will rule out the likes of Soul Asylum, comeback-era Aerosmith, and lord knows how many other fish in a barrel you’re dying to shoot.
A second limitation in this discussion is that some artist’s underground “cool” phase under a different name or in a different band does not count. If the debut by The Cars, for instance, strikes you as overproduced slop relative to earlier music some of the band members put out under a different name, that earlier band you thought was cooler without all the glossy production doesn’t count. The Cars started out with a heavily produced first album…as The Cars. (For the record, if you feel like arguing, I have no problem with the incredibly polished production of that album.)
My first thought on this topic goes to The Bangles, originally The Bangs before another band claimed ownership of that name. Although their music wasn’t that much different on their debut EP, I enjoy it so much more before some producer gussied them up and helped them get wildly popular. Bless that producer, mind you, for helping them enjoy the sweet life of Top 40 success, but I wish they could have received a government grant to continue making music like “The Real World,” their initial single.
Apr 272020
Stick with me for a minute: I’m going to ask us to determine whether some musical phenomena were full-on early arrivals from the future or merely a musical equivalent of Secretariat‘s 1973 Belmont Stakes capper to his Triple Crown run. But first, a little background on what the hell I am talking about…
Apr 252020
Here’s the place to do your own thing.
