Apr 092020
Apr 072020
Recent mentions of magical finds of Bob Dylan and Beatles outtakes via vinyl’s bootleg golden age and legitimate releases of previously unreleased outtakes that became a staple in the all-but-dead CD age got me wondering what your Top 3 cutting-room floor classics might be.
As a kid, I never had enough money to justify the low ROI from buying bootlegs, so I got out of that game early. My close personal friend Townsman Andyr sunk more money into Beatles bootlegs than I was willing to sink, and whenever I’d check them out, I was amazed at how little worthwhile material they left on the cutting-room floor. Those cats were efficient!
Apr 072020
Remember when we used to have a little morbid fun over rock ‘n roll deaths with celebrations featuring the “He was a great…man” tag and clip from Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell? Those were the days.
Now, a COVID-19 tag has come into existence. I don’t like this tag. It’s not funny at all. Today, producer Hal Willner, who I first knew of as a musical director for Saturday Night Live and then the brains behind a series of underground star-studded tribute albums in the early 1980s, died from coronovirus. He was 64, right about the age for someone to feel more fondly over a Delaney & Bonnie trifle than anyone from another generation might feel. Terrible.
Apr 072020
In a comment on another thread this week, Townsman al said he had some shots he took from an AC/DC Lane in Melbourne, Australia. These are too good to embed in the comments from a post that hasn’t caught fire. I’m posting them on the Main Stage, instead, and asking you to share your experiences walking any of the Streets of Rock ‘n Roll (or related 20th century and beyond music genres).
Apr 062020
Remember Cabbage Patch Kids, those creepy (or so I thought, in my early 30s, or whenever those things were popular) stuffed dolls that were all the rage for a couple of years? I thought about them this weekend, while listening to The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn, a favorite syndicated radio show hosted by the longtime music-scene friend and all-around great guy whose moods make up the flow of each episode.
This week, Ben did a second edition of his highly appreciated “Comfort Zone” theme from a few weeks back. It was as enjoyable and comfortable an episode as Ben is known to deliver regularly, pushed along gently by his dry wit. The appearance of the Beach Boys‘ “Sail on Sailor” was no surprise. His love for later period Beach Boys far exceeds my own. I won’t get into a whole Please Explain discuss on that song right now, but feel free to explain, as a side topic, why that song is any more loved by hipsters than Pablo Cruise‘s “Love Will Find a Way.”
Apr 012020
O-to-the-M-to-the-G. I’ve been so excited about this trial balloon of an RTH second coming (at Easter time no less!) that I couldn’t pick one from the pile of posts that I was considering to use to say “Hi Again Townsmen!”. Sad that it turns out to be one that just came to light:
Adam Schlesinger, Fountains of Wayne singer, dead at 52 from Covid-19
Mr. Moderator turned me onto Fountains of Wayne years ago and I was hooked from the first song he played me- Radiation Vibe which is also the first song from their first self-titled release.
My now 21yo son started learning to play guitar about 8 years ago and I turned him on to FOW. He sang Stacy’s Mom at his 5th grade karaoke graduation celebration. He had to ask the DJ to play it as it wasn’t on the “kids approved” list that his elementary school requested. (The apple doesn’t fall far.)
A few years later I took him to his first concert- Fountains of Wayne at The Roxy. He loved it. I bought him a t-shirt that he wore years after it fit.
not actual size
He felt that that single experience with his dad effected his life in such a profoundly positive way that, because the shirt no longer fit, he did this-
Apr 012020
Ever have one of those moments when you reflect and say to yourself, “It’s time I try being a better person; it’s time I give [insert thing you’ve never liked] a chance”? I had one of those moment last week, when I decided to give ZZ Top a chance.
Social distancing has opened my mind and heart to all sorts of things I’d normally not watch on Netflix, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Lab series. How much more annoying could a ZZ Top documentary, That Little Ol’ Band From Texas, be than a 6-part series featuring Paltrow and her fellow vocal fry lackeys self-obsessing over touchy-feely subjects that first came into being to make us better people spiritually, not worse?
To my surprise and delight, to my edification as an evolved, better person, the ZZ Top documentary was not bad at all. I realized at least 5 things from watching this program:
- The members of ZZ Top are way more articulate and engaging than I was expecting.
- Billy Gibbons is and always has been much thinner than I realized. (What is with the insertion of the middle initial F, though?)
- The band spend most of its career looking like regular, cowboy dudes, which was a much less annoying Look than their bearded, sharp-dressed man shtick of the MTV age. I barely paid any attention to ZZ Top in their first 10 years, but had I, I would have been much less put off by simply looking at them. Hearing those old songs again, I still don’t get much pleasure out of them, but their instrument tones are sweet. Their surge in popularity thanks to the MTV hits explains so much of what I don’t like about that band. Had it not been for that evolution in their career, I could have happily ignored them through the glory years of RTH and saved Townsman hrrundivbakshi much heartache.
- I still don’t care for Prince.
- Beside some footage of vultures sitting back by drummer Frank Beard, which we’d uncovered years ago in our Bullshit On series regarding the alleged tour featuring livestock, there’s nothing more to prove that bison and bucking broncos and whatnot actually shared the stage with the band. Come on, an entire segment of the doc highlights this part of the band’s mythology, including an interview with a rodeo clown who was supposedly hired to wrangle the animals, and we don’t even get a still image of a bison sharing a mic with Dusty Hill? I smell a page taken from the playbook of that Scorsese doc on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review.
