Recently I heard Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise” on Classic Rock radio 2 days in a row. It’s not close to the worst song ever, but it has no business ever being broadcast on the public airwaves again. It doesn’t add anything to our lives that Money’s first single, “Baby Hold On,” didn’t deliver. It’s not even a song we can take pleasure in disliking. It’s just there, like a piece of dried gum on a crowded city sidewalk. If some station’s got to play Eddie Money, isn’t “Baby Hold On” a slightly less relevant song? I hereby move that the record industry melt the master tapes of “Two Tickets to Paradise” and recall all vinyl and digital copies in circulation. There’s no point in anyone needing to hear that song again.
What do you say? What completely irrelevant song would you move to have deleted from public airplay – and recalled from private collections?
It’s not completely irrelevant, but I personally never need to hear “Born to be Wild” ever again, and wouldn’t be sad if no one else could hear it either!
I can actually remember what Two Tickets to Paradise sounds like, at least the chorus, but I can’t retrieve Baby Hold On from the memory banks. I’m not sure if that supports your redundancy theory or not.
I’d like to withdraw Blondie’s Tide Is High from circulation. I happened to hear the Paragons’ original the other day, and it’s as brilliant as you’d expect Treasure Isle rocksteady from that period to be. It’s obviously not going to get played on the radio — in fact it was the b-side of the even more groovy Only A Smile — but the Blondie version is total bland-out. I actually liked Blondie and Debbie’s voice is a winner, but they were just out of gas by that point, and the ubiquity of that record is inexplicable to me.
I’m on BigSteve’s team here — great choice.
Eddie Money had terrible posture. Very Nixonian.
I motion to withdraw Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight”. I don’t ever need to hear that again. Also, while we’re at it, Jeffrey Gaines’ cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”. My throat gets clogged with hacky sacks and Izod logos every time I hear it.
It’s so easy to pick stuff that just sucks, and I’m not sure that’s the challenge here. I mean, I’d just as soon never hear “I Wanna Know What Love Is” by Foreigner, but then again, I don’t that song should have ever been made.
You know, in the mediocrities-I’m-surprised-we-don’t-hear-more-often category: I heard “Can’t Get Enough” by Bad Company the other day, and marvelled at how long it had been. Still has one of the shittiest solos in rock guitar history, but not a bad tune, as far as basically idiotic rock goes.
Right, Hrrundi, I’m not looking for songs that we think suck or whatever, but rather songs that truly serve no purpose ever being heard again…by anybody. Some songs are so bad, for instance, that future generations may learn from hearing them again, occasionally. Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” – as bad as we may argue it is – may have some educational merit for its BIG DRUM FILL and the production technique used to capture it. I believe my Eddie Money selection, however, holds no merit for future airings. It would surprise me Bad Co. has a worthwhile entry in this melting project.
To clarify, I don’t think those songs by Collins or Gaines suck in terms of playing, production, or even arrangement. I think I may have even found something to appreciate in them when I first heard them. But I think they totally fit the chewed-gum-on-the-sidewalk criteria. “I Wanna Know What Love Is” does indeed suck on a number of levels and is thus disqualified from the list. “Hot Blooded”, however, still has usefulness in certain situations.
I like the conceptual idea of Eddie Money, some cop who decided that rock star thing seemed like a pretty easy gig, sort of like the narrator in “Money For Nothing.”
I don’t ever need to hear any of his songs again, though, so he is a very good example of completely inessential music. And I’ll agree with rating “Baby Hold On” over “Two Tickets To Paradise”, relatively speaking. Baby Hold On at least has that brief part where it’s just the drums for a few seconds, right? That’s something, sort of. Despite probably having heard it a few hundred times, all I can bring to mind in Two Tickets To Paradise is the chorus. I mean, I think I know how the verses go, but they sound pretty much just like the chorus, don’t they?
The Eddie Money wikipedia page seems like maybe Eddie Money wrote it, especially that “Money In The Media” section that documents Money’s career in being referenced in sitcom episodes. This kind of made me wonder who would be the rock musician most likely to edit his/her own wiki entries.
But that photo at the top of it, that’s a strangely revealing glimpse of what it must be like to be Eddie Money in 2008. Even the caption, “After Concert In College Station, TX” seems sadly poetic. I might buy a watercolor of that.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with In The Air Tonight. It was kind of cool as a deep track, but it ended up getting over-played on the radio and way over-licensed for film and TV use, completely dulling its effect and turning the famous drum fill into a cliche.
The deal though is that Mr. Mod is going after something more than over-played. Isn’t part of the original concept that Money’s songs are pretty much interchangeable? Briefly checking the wikipedia entry, my eye was caught by Take Me Home Tonight. That’s another iteration of the same basic template, and I’m not sure if the exploitation of Ronnie Spector’s voice makes it any less inessential.
I would remove the whole goddamned classic rock radio playlist. I’m sick of all of it…INCLUDING the *good* stuff (like, for example, “Gimme Shelter,” which I haven’t pulled out and listen to on my own in over a decade)
China Grove, have a cigar, blah blah blah……
blughhghgh…….blahfnggndkl;d….
Yeah, the problem is that mass-market radio only every plays 150 songs. That said, I did receive Eddie Money’s first album (the “Two Tickets…” one) from a friend in order to check out what talent he might have had, and I was left wanting. A Freshman Slump is a tough row to hoe, causing Mr. Money to be a nonstarter.
An aside: due to Eddie Money’s affliction with Randy Newman’s Disease, we had a rumor in the old country that Eddie Money did not have any top teeth. I spent years looking for them, but the guy just does not reveal.
I think Bad Co. is a great example (though I wouldn’t disagree with the entire classic rock genre). Can’t Get Enough is enough. It’s not all that bad. But who needs to hear Feel Like Makin’ Love again? They may as well have named it Feel Like I Can’t Get Enough of Makin’ Love…Duh uh UHH Duh uh UHH.
I liked Free, but I just never could warm up to Bad Co. Can’t Get Enough has some nice 70’s beer can held high moments, but they just kept doing the same song over and over.
Back in July, we had a thread about whether Bad Company or Foreigner were the ultimate product of boiling rock down to its distilled cliche essence.
I was then and still am of the opinion that Foreigner fit that bill, but I can absolutely see a case that Bad Co. may have contributed the ultimate inessential rock song. Again, not worst song, just the least necessary. The question is, which Bad Co. song is the least essential rock song? Feel Like Makin’ Love? Shooting Star? Bad Company? Can’t Get Enough? Ready For Love?
It must be one of those, if only because there can’t be a reason for all of them to exist, and I believe that we can somehow determine which it is.
I’m with saturnismine: get rid of all of them and re-think the whole thing.
My idea of a great radio show is any one that plays a bunch of songs I’ve never heard before. I don’t care if I even like them. I just want to hear something different.
Re: Eddie Money: “Two Tickets to Paradise” is his best song: tons of great lead guitar on that one. “Baby Hold On” and “Cool Cool Water” are nice radio songs too…I can live with all of those. His albums, however, are dire: he’s a perfect example of someone whose hits are ALL he has. And some of those are pretty lousy too.
Re: Bad Company. “Shooting Star” wins that contest easily. The last thing any of us ever need to hear is another song about the rise and fall of a rock and roll star. In fact, the last thing I ever need to hear is any other song abotu rock n’ roll, period.
Shooting Star is certainly the pits and has a lot going for pure uselessness. Ready For Love fits the bill, too. That song doesn’t seem ready for anything but a nap.
I’ve been thinking about this most of the day. I’m now certain that “Ready for Love” is the least relevant Bad Co song. Melt the master! At least the other Bad Co songs cited are either a little manly, unintenionally funny, or both. “Ready for Love” is like their Led Zeppelin’s Presence wrapped up in one song. It’s got a whiff of 3-day-old death.
pudman, you’re a mensch.
what i am about to say next has little to do with this thread’s true objective (much like my recording technique tussle with hvb, which i refuse to engage any further for fear of saying more mean things at him…but man did he disappointment with that “no attention to detail” nonsense):
I worked an eddie money show here in philly, and had the pleasure of meeting him, and his lovely lady of the moment: “miss december, 1982” he said to me, proudly, as he introduced her. she was quite the bimbo, but a lovely woman, full of cheer.
she stood right off stage and danced to the whole set. i mean, she was shakin’.
the number of times eddie looked off stage to her, winked, and gave her the thumb and index finger like he was shooting a gun as she danced, was priceless. and she *loved* it…basked in it. it was very sweet.
i also worked an Eddie Money show at the troc (i did lights)
the experience made me like him a lot more than i had. he has a lot of hits:
take me home tonite
shakin
baby hold on
walk on water
2 tickets to paradise
that’s 5 hits.
i like eddie money’s album filler more than anything by pavement or wilco.
cher stole her song,turn back time, from eddie’s walk on water.
Argent’s Hold Your Head Up need never be heard by humans again. Way too long and less than worthless by now.
Shawnkilroy, “Hold Your Head Up” is EXACTLY the type of song that we’re looking to delete from the public (and private) record. Tremendous call!
oh…yeah… I also like EASY Money, the movie with Rodney Dangerfield, and Taylor Negron, and the dad from Beatlejuice.
If Rod had let my man Russ Ballard give Hold Your Head Up a once over, I bet it would hold itself up much better today.
I’m enjoying the Eddie Money stories. They fit into my vision of him as just some dude who figured “I could do that!” and accidentally became famous.
Back to Bad Company and the valley of irrelevancy, Mod, I’m glad to see that you threw unintentional humor in there as a qualifier to make some of their songs slightly less irrelevant than others. This is what saves Shooting Star for me. I do think there’s something incredibly irrelevant about a song called “Bad Company” on an album called Bad Company by a band called Bad Company. That’s not just redundant. That’s like, threedundant.
Still the irrelevancy showdown for me is between Can’t Get Enough and Ready For Love. Was there anything to get off Can’t Get Enough that people couldn’t get from the Grand Funk cover of Some Kind Of Wonderful that same year, if that’s what they wanted?
On that note, was there anything that Bad Company could have accomplished that Free couldn’t have accomplished? “All Right Now” pretty much does everything that Bad Company was ever going to do by itself, just better, doesn’t it? Now I’m kind of curious what exactly led to the break-up of Free and formation of Bad Company. Were Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke unable to sell the rest of the band on their “We should keep making songs like this, but slightly shittier!” philosophy?
Let’s not forget that Bad Company also afforded Mick Ralphs the opportunity to do what he did in Mott the Hoople, but this time in a much less interesting band.
I have no particular fondness for Bad Company or Eddie Money (although I will confess that I love “Take Me Home Tonight”) but aren’t you setting the bar awfully high here?
The way I read it, an artist can’t repeat themselves. That seems to be the Rock Crime here that is being treated with disdain. People don’t seem to be saying that “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love” is such a terrible song, ditto for “Ready For Love”, just that you don’t need both. And that’s the way I read the original proposition.
Fine as far as it goes but why the disdain? Does any artist not have repetitive songs? Why don’t we slam The Four Tops for “It’s The Same Old Song” which announces that it is repetitive by it’s title? “Heat Wave” / “Quick Sand” anyone? Or James Brown for countless examples?
Does an artist’s every song have to break some new ground?
I’ll go with Styx, “Lady,” a pointless jumble of a song that somehow found favor with AOR. I’m surmising there may have been something else included with the records sent to the DJs.
I don’t think everything has to break new ground. In fact, I think people would call me a hypocrite if I said I did. I think songs should at least try to add something to what’s been done, though. Motorhead makes the same album all the time but there still seems to be a reason for them to get out and do it.
I’ll say one thing, though. I never knew so many felt so apathetic towards Bad Co as me. I can’t work up a good hate towards them, like I can with the Eagles, but Bad Co doesn’t seem to care about their own songs any more than I do.
I may want to take some backstory cred for this thread, as I believe that some time back I suggested that Eddie Money was an example of a guy whose music, if it did not exist, would not really make the history of rock and roll the slightest bit (significantly) different.
Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman To Me” seems to me a bad, soul-less version of a song that many R & B artists have done much better. Strike it from the record forever, please.
We don’t need anything by Air Supply, those guys should have been suffocated.
Al, I don’t think any of us really mean it as outright disdain. I don’t dislike any of the songs I’ve mentioned in this thread. There’s nothing really wrong with Bad Company, but there’s also nothing particularly right about them, and in that way, they occupy a peculiar space in the rock world. The ultimate “just there” rock band.
I guess in their case, it’s not so much that they wrote songs that sounded like their other songs as it is that they wrote songs that sounded like their other songs, which sounded like other songs they’d written in other bands, which probably nobody ever would have missed had they themselves not been written.
They were a majorly successful, very well known rock band who, like mwall says about Eddie Money, you could remove from rock history and nothing would change. I think that’s kind of fascinating, in a most unfascinating way.
Please don’t anyone start a thread on bands you could remove from rock history and nothing would change. The thread would go on for a year and we’d eliminate 90% of every rock & roller that ever existed.
That would be a scary thread, Al.
I think the band or the band members have to at least done something worthwhile to be metnioned. Would the world have ever noticed if The Stones never made A Bigger Bang? You can step back in their career and agree with Lester Bangs that Black and Blue is their first meaningless album, but it’s really not, at least because of Hot Stuff and their first real shot at trying to play a real reggae song with Cherry Oh Baby. I thought Free was pretty great, but Bad Co just seemed like a minor league all star roster. They looked good at the time, but no one remembers who they really were.
Eddie Money does get points for getting a major thanks on the back cover of THE BEAT, which is fab power pop, better than any Eddie Money greatest hits album could be.
as to BLACK & BLUE, it most certainly is meaningless: an audition album with nothing but jams and ballads and rewrites. The real question is whether the two albums that preceded it are meaningless too.
Billy Joel, at least for a time, seemed to have an obsession with proving how “tough” and “street” he was in his songs. You can practically hear how he feels threatened by middle age in certain songs and I think those songs for him became extremely repetitive.
I don’t think think that if Billy Joel fell off the face of the earth in 1968 it wouldn’t have mattered, but he became obsessed with this theme in his music and for everyone else except him it needed to be done only once. “You May be Right” is an example. So is “It’s Still Rock n’ Roll to Me”
Ironically, Billy became both very “tough” and, literally, “street” in his 50’s when he began crashing his car into parked cars and houses.
Billy Joel discussion belongs in the “Melt the Artists!” topic, not the “Melt the Masters!” topic.
Is this wrong? Am I crazy? I have an amazing soft spot for “Captain Jack” and think it justifies Billy Joel’s existence.
I also have, for reasons unexplainable, kept my copy of ATTILA even as I purged my collection of just about every rare and valuable album I own.
I hate almost all Billy Joel until he reaches what fans probably consider his downturn. I can live with “Still Rock ‘n Roll to Me” and some other song from his New Wave album. I actually like “Uptown Girl” and some of his other Four Seasons/Brill Building pastiches. I can even live with some song called “River of Life,” or something like that, on which he attempts to become South African-influenced Paul Simon. All that folky stuff and the bad McCartney-cum-Bar Mitzvah music? No thank you!
I LOVE what Northvancoveman points out about BJ’s tough guy schtick. I may have to work up an analysis comparing his schtick to Lou Reed’s and other middle class New York kids of Jewish and Italian descent (maybe starting with Dion). Who’s really tough? What are the shared values of toughness being expressed? Are any New York rockers, for that matter, REALLY tough, or is it a whole musical city of put-ons?