How about you? Have you ever had a bad trip while listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service — or has the intersection of Rock and drugs ever resulted in a total BUMMER?
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
Oct 272013
hrrundivbakshi
Sep 272013
I was out at the once lively and exciting — now sad and slightly weird — XTC fan site, chalkhills.org, where I found a reference to the ongoing XTC-like work of a guy named Robert Wegmann. Being in possession of a fairly open mind, I headed out to the Internet to see what I could see.
What I saw made me feel deeply conflicted. Here’s what I saw:
And here’s how it made me feel:
I am now officially a middle-aged man. Though I never really strove for any kind of significant success in the field of music, I did keep trying, for the fun of it — and I still write music, of a style not totally dissimilar to Mr. Wegmann’s. My music is better than some, and worse than others — like Mr. Wegmann’s. I sort of feel like I could be Robert Wegmann. I feel for the guy. Hell, I may even feel like the guy.
But I’m not Robert Wegmann, and that, believe me, is a choice I have made very deliberately. I think I am too old for a bowl hair-do. I am too old to mug and wink in a “music video.” I am too old to play rock star on camera — especially while playing a kind of prock that was never really in fashion, not even 30 years ago. And I am too old, for crying out loud, to be pretending to play a Chapman stick. I am too old for this, and so is Robert Wegmann. He and I should just stop.
HVB
Aug 022013
Greetings, seekers of the rare, the unusual, the putatively worthless! I come before you once again with a pair of fine, obscure tunes — both from the same, excellent single — collected at a garage sale I chanced upon a few weeks ago.
I make no claims about the catalog depth of the Shangri-Las, a girl group most famous for their mega-smash hit, “Leader Of the Pack.” But I can say that all the Sharngri-Las material I have found in my thrifty peregrinations has provided excellent entertainment, and Mrs. Bakshi concurs. This single is no different. The A-side, “Love You More Than Yesterday,” is catchy and hook-laden, and features just enough — how shall I say it? — girlish naivete to amuse.
01 Love You More Than Yesterday
The B-side, however, was a real WTF moment for me. And I mean that in a good way! As you’ll hear, “Past, Present & Future” isn’t really a “song” at all. It’s a spoken word piece, about… uh… about the emotional impact of being raped, as far as I can tell. Seriously.
The first time I heard it, I had a hard time getting past the melodrama, and I suspect you’ll have the same reaction. But if you have it pop up on CD mixes in the car for a month as I did, you may find yourself appreciating its subtler charms. I cannot tell a lie; I love the extreme girly drama of it. As I get older, I find myself losing patience with the supposed drama of the gang-banger, the beer-drinker, the hell-raiser, and I enjoy the simple charm (if you can call it that) of a girl’s lament, ca. 1965. And as far as girl’s laments go, this one is a corker. See what you think.
As always, I look forward to your responses.
HVB
Jul 232013
Okay, it ain’t Walter Becker’s beard, but still.
Jul 182013
As most of you know, I recently became the proud father of a beautiful baby girl. Miss M turned four months old a few days ago, so her ability to understand human language is basically nonexistent… but I still found myself censoring a piece of music that came on iTunes shuffle this morning, as the Bakshi family was wolfing down our breakfast cereal. It was a strange feeling to have done so, almost instinctual. Certainly illogical, given her tender age. But I did it anyway.
A shiny RTH No-Prize to the Townsman or Townswoman who can identify which song I found too grown-up for my baby’s tender ears!
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
Jul 122013
Please note: they were also Rockin’.
Greetings, seekers of good, cheap music! I come before you with a couple of songs gathered from local thrift stores that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Both are good examples of the kind of music I pick up just because the title appeals to me. And who could pass up the opportunity to give a spin to a tune called “Don’t Fool With Fu Manchu”? Here it is, as performed by Boston garage crossover artistes The Rockin’ Ramrods.
I swear, I have the best luck when I buy stuff just because the title sounds interesting. Money isn’t the only — not even the main — reason I do this, but a year or so ago I found a busted-down single in a thrift store. It was on the Dixie label (never heard of it), and it featured “Hangover Blues” on one side, and “Satan’s Wife” on the other. I had to buy it, despite the fact that it looked like it had been run over by a lawnmower. Turned out the damn thing was worth hundreds of dollars (well, maybe not in the beat-up condition my copy was in) — and with good reason; “Satan’s Wife” is a great song. Here’s Jesse Floyd performing the number for you. Please join me in imagining that Jesse and his gang of drunken hillbillies recorded this huddled around a Sears & Roebuck tape deck in the lantern-lit living room of a Tennessee mountain shack; the Internet tells me that the Dixie label was an offshoot of a larger concern that devoted itself to small-run vanity pressings for country folk who had home-grown tapes they wanted the world to hear.
As always, I look forward to your responses.
HVB
Jul 032013
Eugene Church and the Fellows
Greetings once again, fellow seekers of the rare, the rockin’, and the rubbish-y! I come before you bearing two more dusty discs for your amusement, scrounged from the flea markets, thrift stores and garage sales in and around our nation’s capitol.
Over the years I’ve been buying my music this way, I’ve come across a number of tunes that were originally introduced to me through “cover versions” by artists I grew up with. Old, scratchy blues 45s and 78s show me what the Fabulous Thunderbirds were listening to back in the 70s, and there are any number of uptempo party/soul records that clearly had a treasured spot in the record collections of members of the J. Geils Band.
Every now and then, I run into singles that sound like they should have been covered by this or that band from my youth. I’m presenting two of them to you today.
The first is entitled “Good News,” by Eugene Church, and I think it coulda, shoulda, oughtta have been one of those foot-stomping party tunes cranked out by the J. Geils Band during their mid-70s heyday. I can hear Magic Dick and J. doubling down on the faux morse code intro, and Stephen Jo Bladd joining in on the “hoo… hoo”s during the verses. Of course, the thing would have been sped up and rockified like all their covers, but that’s okay.
Next up: a song called “We Need Love,” which I would have loved to hear by NRBQ, and sung by Big Al Anderson — who, quite frankly, already sounds like he stole a trick or two from the vocal playbook of Ray Scott, the artist you’ll hear here. I just love the enthusiasm Scott shows for the lyric, which he manages to transform into quite a lusty affair.
I hope you enjoy, and, as always, I look forward to your responses.
HVB
