Practice makes perfect. The All-Star Jam is a place to practice your thing! Tell us what’s on your mind.
May 232014
Mr. Moderator
May 222014
Was Fear‘s 1981 performance on Saturday Night Live the first example of the Made for TV Pit Audience phenomenon, which has become de rigueur for VH1 spectacles, the Super Bowl halftime show, and the like? You know what I mean by Made for TV Pit Audience, right? It’s the elite group of “insiders” of an artist’s fanbase who are strategically encouraged to rush the otherwise guarded pit area so they can show the rest of us how the featured artist truly deserves to be admired and adored.
I suspect something’s missing in the story of this “anarchic” Fear performance on SNL. The hardcore kids slam dancing and stage diving didn’t just happen to get tickets to that night’s performance, did they? They didn’t just happen to be standing at a cleared-out spot at the foot of the stage. They were audience props. They were actually the reason for booking Fear, despite whatever story has long been told about Belushi wanting them on, which may in itself have been true. Fear’s appearance on SNL would have added up to nothing without those hardcore kids placed in the pit to show the rest of America how it was done.
May 222014
I will forever associate this song with a few days I spent sick as a dog in a little house in the mountain town of my Italian relatives. On my cousins’ boom box I was able to pick up some station that played a loop of a the same dozen songs, including this, PiL’s “Poptones,” and the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis.” Not a bad soundtrack to my fever dreams. I even taped those dozen songs to bring home with me. That loop inspired what I feel was one of the first really good songs I ever wrote. I wrote the lyrics in that little bedroom and actually remembered enough of the tune to figure out the chords when I got back home.
Have you ever experienced an especially memorable loop of songs?
May 202014
Are you kidding me, the estate for Spirit guitarist Randy California is considering bringing suit against Led Zeppelin for allegedly ripping off 2 measures of the interminable instrumental album filler “Taurus” for the intro to Led Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven”? It takes 45 boring seconds to even get to the allegedly ripped off 2 measure. I doubt Jimmy Page could have lasted that long. For all the blatant heists Page has masterminded, this is like charging Willie Sutton for taking a magazine home with him from a doctor’s office. Dismissed!
In related news, the state of California is considering bringing suit against the estate of Randy Craig Wolfe for ripping off its name.
May 092014
This week’s All-Star Jam is a Battle of the Bands! Spread the news! Tell me if you don’t think the band at the 3:26 mark is about 10 years ahead of its time! Tell us what’s really on your mind!
May 092014
For entertainment value alone, which era of rock ‘n roll do you feel is most likely to deliver the goods? For instance, if I’m blindfolded and reach my hand into a bag of unmarked rock ‘n roll performances from a given era, the bag of early 1970s rock is likely to turn up a gem—strictly from an overall entertainment value, not necessarily a musical one—such as this 1971 performance by Atomic Rooster.
I get no musical satisfaction out of this clip, yet I’m happy as a clam to watch these prog-blooz hippies hunker down in their suede, fringe, and headbands and manufacture what are, to my ears, exciting tones, regardless of the music that emanates from those tones.
Musically, like so many geeks around here, I’m more easily satisfied by records from 1966 and 1967, but perhaps because some of the music I most love is from that period I get thrown for a loop when confronted with a random selection that offends my aesthetic sensibilities, like this:
May 072014
In the recent, bizarre Twins thread, MrHuman mentioned that Bruce Springsteen has an original song called “Tomorrow Never Knows” that is NOT a cover of the Beatles’ song by that name. What really stuck in my mind, however, was MrHuman’s belief that The Boss has never done a Beatles cover. That’s hard to believe (didn’t he sing “Imagine” the night Lennon was killed?), but I’ll take him at his word, especially because it got me thinking about what Beatles song I could imagine Springsteen covering, and how much I would be likely be irked by that cover.
