As the surge of hormones ran through my teenage loins, Pat Benetar appeared on the scene in a a French sailor-style striped shirt and leather pants. I knew that god put her on the scene to turn me on, but I found her to be a complete turnoff. Her music sure didn’t help.
One of her hits from her unavoidable debut album was a song called “You Better Run.” The main guitar hook was easy enough that even I could play it, as I fumbled with my newly acquired electric guitar. It was as if god put that song on the FM airwaves to turn me on, but I found her singing and the twists and turns the song would take as it hit the chorus to be a complete turnoff. Her objectively cute, petite body in that outfit didn’t help.
No biggie. There was plenty of FM rock music I couldn’t stand in the late ’70s. I learned to ignore the music of Pat Benetar and not stress out over the fact that I didn’t find her appealing, even though I knew she was constructed to appeal to my burgeoning tastes in women.
Two years later, when I finally started to figure out how to be remotely cool, I bought a used copy of the classic Rascals’ greatest hits album and realized that “You Better Run” was actually one of their songs. I had no idea. The Rascals were cool, man. Their version must have been the definitive one that Benetar and her guitar-wielding mate Neil Giraldo butchered.
Rock & roll is littered with lots of bands featuring brothers.
How many are there? Let’s find out with a Last Man Standing. Let’s not be exclusionary though. Sisters, brother & sister, parent and child are all allowed. That’s as far as we stretch though. No cousins twice removed or anything.
Oh, and they don’t have to have a love-hate relationship.
Bonus points for twins. I can only think of one of those [Ed – Oh, I think you’ll be sorry for your obvious oversight!] so I’ll put that out there to start the show and since they are twins I’ll show two videos (because I couldn’t decide on a favorite).
Thanks to Craig & Charlie Reid, I am the last man standing!
As always, don’t Bogart this thread. Please limit yourself to ONE ENTRY PER POST.
I read the news the other day, oh boy, and found out it was 50 years ago that Jim Morrison checked out, either of a heart attack in a nice warm bath at home or overdosed on the throne at some local bar, depending on who you ask. Did anyone ever make a quicker descent from rock God to fat Elvis to dead Elvis? Man, he went for it.
In our household, my parents regularly discussed the news, but the death of a drugged-up hippy primarily known for getting arrested after waving his privates around on stage would have been low on their list of things to discuss with their 8-year-old son. That’s if they knew who he was, which seems as unlikely as me taking note of news about a rapper or singer in a boy band.
Without access to their music, other than “Light My Fire” on the Stardust soundtrack album, I read about them in books and magazines and was keen to find out more. About 4 years later, I was more than ready to pull out and demand to hear their albums when visiting friends whose parents were more liberal than my own. Which was almost everyone.
Before the world got poorly, I went to Paris with Mrs H, where I insisted on visiting Pere Lachaise cemetery. We arrived about an hour before closing time. She was tired and decided to help the sunset along with her knitting while I bounced around in search of what’s left of famous dead people, clutching the little map they handed me on the way in.
I said goodnight to Georges Melies and Edith Piaf, then found Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, who had the good sense to make things easier for death tourists by getting buried together. A brisk dash up the hill and I was soon channeling my inner Morrissey while having out with Oscar Wilde. The custodians grew so weary of cleaning his monument they stuck a huge glass box over it about twenty years ago. Nowadays, visitors chuck roses and whatnot over the walls before heading east to where the hardcore dudes hang out. For there rests Jim Morrison, under a mountain of tributes that photos suggest looks like a week’s worth of trash dumped on the unassuming marker beneath.
If you’ve seen The Prisoner, you might remember the buggies going out to retrieve Patrick McGoohan during his periodic escape attempts. About 20 minutes before closing time, the cemetery fills with similar vehicles, driving around exhorting anyone not 6 feet underground to make their way to the exit, barking at laggards through cracked loud hailers like some deranged Gallic Mark E Smith tribute act.
After losing a lot of weight, I discovered I can now run, better than I could as a teenager, or ever wanted to. I considered dodging the dune buggies and dashing over to see brother Jim, but quickly decided I couldn’t be bothered.
And that was when I realised The Doors, whose music meant so much to me as an angry/miserable, and usually both, teenager meant no longer held that magic for me. In addition, I wonder whether they ever did, or if I was merely dazzled by the legend.
There are about half a dozen songs I like well enough if I hear them on the radio. Two or three are so good that straight after hearing them I want to listen to them again. Mostly, they feel like something I used to do a long time ago and now can’t remember why. I’ve heard rereading Catcher in the Rye as an adult has the same effect on many.
If I heard “The End” coming from one of our children’s rooms, I’d probably walk on down the hall and ask them nicely to shut the door. Father, I want to… That’s very nice son, would you mind doing it more quietly?
So, am I maligning the Lizard King, or was he really wandering around most of the time stark naked, as opposed to simply waving his bits around at those who may or may not have wanted to see them?
And who in your musical life either appeared, or was heralded, as the second coming but turned out just to be a naughty boy?
Couldn’t you take the sentence “Honestly, the T. Rex catalog can be arguably defined as ‘Get it On (Bang a Gong)’ and 60 or so other tracks that are more or less ‘Son of Get It On (Bang a Gong)'” and substitute “Chuck Berry” for “T. Rex” and “Johnny B. Goode” for “Get It On (Bang A Gong)”? The only flaw in that is that Marc Bolan had more variety in his songs than Chuck Berry did.
I won’t argue that Bolan did mostly one thing. One overall thing to keep in mind is that he died at age 30. It’s an incomplete career that was actually over 4 years before his death when the cocaine and champagne stagnated him; he was only rounding back into shape months before the car crash.
Another overall thing to keep in mind is that the statement isn’t really true. He started out as Dylan folkie, then switched to the Incredible String Band-ish Tyrannosaurus Rex, then to T. Rex. With T. Rex, he had hit on the sound that made him a superstar (at least outside the US), and that’s what he wanted to be and he rode it.
Rode it like Eddie Arcaro! But, wait, that Eddie Arcaro, he was a one-trick pony (yes, I confess, I used Arcaro just so I could use that line), he really wasn’t that good, all he ever did was ride horses, never won the home run crown, never was NBA MVP.
Silly, huh? Arcaro was the greatest ever at what he did; you don’t criticize him for what he didn’t do. Likewise with Bolan. While he wasn’t the greatest at what he did, he was great. He wasn’t Chuck Berry (although he nicked a whole lot from Berry), and we don’t criticize Berry for writing the same song over and over.
Bolan realized before the punks, at a time when rock & roll was splintering into prog and metal and Laurel Canyon and all the rest, that rock & roll at its birth was about boys & girls & love & sex married to a great riff and that’s what he did. Yep, over and over, but it sure is a good formula, isn’t it?
He has never gotten the credit he deserves. Not for returning to the roots before The Ramones or the New York Dolls or punk ever did, not for paving the way for Bowie with glam (and later, Marc shifted into soul-influenced music due to his relationship with Gloria Jones of “Tainted Love” fame before Bowie as well), not for embracing “stardom” before Elton John. [Side note apropos of nothing: Marc, David, and Elton were all born in 1947.]
Here is a playlist, if not exactly a UK 14 track best of. No “Get It On,” no “Telegram Sam,” no “Jeepster.” You all know those anyway and that’s probably all you know. Be honest EPG, you couldn’t name 10 T. Rex songs, never mind 60.
From the great “Billy Powell on piano” to the humble screaming the word “guitar”, solo introductions have always been a part of rock and roll. A great introduction can boost a good solo to great and really add some kick to the song.
Some of my personal favorites have to be Justin Hawkins of The Darkness yelling “GUITAR” to kick off the lead in “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” featured below
This normally wouldn’t be special, but it came out in 2003. I feel like this a preserving the magic of a bygone age, and therefore it earns a spot on my list. It’s short, sweet, and gets the job done.
I’m also going to throw in Jimi Hendrix’s “I gave her the gun, I shot her”, and the subsequent “shoot her for me one more time” in “Hey Joe”
Now that I’ve given my examples, I’d like to hear some more from you guys. What introduction really boosted a lead to the next level? Alternatively, what was a time when someone really just needed to shut up and play? I look forward to listening.
When I was younger and more idealistic, I might have crafted a 10,000-word essay this question. I don’t think I have that much idealism left, but I’ve got to ask anyway.
I got turned onto Steppenwolf as a little kid, thanks to the faux-live album with the snarling wolf on the cover. Their half dozen or so nasty rock classics were staples of AM radio, also bridging over to FM, when I finally got around to listening to FM radio. Their music was featured in Easy Rider, another key learning opportunity that my parents somehow turned me onto when I was about 7 years old. Steppenwolf was biker cool, man.
I still love listening to a Steppenwolf hit when it comes on the radio. Years ago, I tried listening to something other than the live album or their greatest hits. If you’ve been wondering if the deep cuts are worth the effort, trust me: they are not. That said, the band’s 5 or 6 killer singles retain their staying power.
OK, “Magic Carpet Ride” isn’t as mind-blowing as it was when I was 7, and “Born to Be Wild” has lost something thanks to overexposure, but “Hey, Lawdy Mama” came up on a playlist the other day, and I was as ready to pick a fight with a stranger as ever. That is possibly the most badass song ever. Some of those little guitar hooks could take down the best guitar hooks by the mighty Lynyrd Skynyrd.
And don’t get me started on “The Pusher.” It’s as ominous and unintentionally funny as ever.
We could be talking more often about the 5 or 6 great singles by Steppenwolf, but instead, we go on for days over T. Rex or lazy-ass Alex Chilton. Why?
It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong — but it takes a much, much smaller man to take nearly 40 years to ‘fess up to his mistakes. And that’s just the kind of man I am. So here I am, stripped naked of shame and regret, chained to the Orockle doors, megaphone in hand, ready to scream into the howling wind: I WAS WRONG ABOUT ALEX CHILTON’S 1980s OUTPUT!
Like everybody else who came into rock maturity in the 1980s (other than E. Pluribus Gergeley), I fell deeply in love with Big Star upon hearing them as a pimply-faced college puke. Big Star had everything I needed as a budding music nerd, in overwhelming abundance: Impeccable song craft! Soaring harmonies! Clanging guitars! Doomed-to-fail braininess! I-know-more-than-you-do exclusivity!
I rhapsodized over the pop perfection of their first two albums, and made excuses for the shambolic weirdness of the third. I agonized over the band’s collapse, and cursed the world for not appreciating their greatness, even as I enjoyed being one of the select few who actually owned a copy of “Radio City” on the original Ardent label. I decided Alex Chilton was a genius.
Of course, I wasn’t the only music nerd in the 1980s to discover Chilton and Big Star, so a few indie labels decided it would make good business sense to green-light various Chilton “comeback” projects, which were targeted fairly specifically at people like me. And here is where I started to go very, very wrong — because, like almost everybody else at the time, I thought these albums and EPs sucked.
The critical take on Chilton’s first “comeback” album, “High Priest,” was basically: “huh?” Everybody, including (probably especially) me, just could not understand why the man we perceived as the creative genius behind the dense, powerful, proto-power pop of Big Star would debase himself with such a lazy throwaway album of obscure ’60s AM/soul radio material. The arrangements were sloppy — not insane, or non-existent, as on “Like Flies On Sherbert,” but stripped down, basic, elemental… yeah, “lazy.” Basically, if Alex had wanted to piss off all the people looking for a return to Big Star’s style and substance, he couldn’t have done a better job.
But — even as some critics twisted themselves into pretzels trying to convince us this was all part of a Chilton master plan to fool the world by deliberately making music that was beneath him — the truth is that this album, and most of the other stuff he released as an indie elder statesman, was great. Not Great with a capital “G,” but impeccably curated, played with honesty, clarity, and nuance, and generally pleasing to the earbulbs. I’ve grown into a place where I absolutely adore these records, and I listen to them far more often than the Big Star material (which I still marvel at, but find to be very much “of an era.”)
I should point out that I also love the original artists’ versions of the covers within this catalog. But Chilton’s soulful interpretations are unique, and meaningful. Like a bop jazz trio doing a set of Broadway show tunes, they’re measurably different from the originals, but respectful of the source material.
All this to say: go check out “High Priest,” or “Set,” and listen with an open mind. I think you’ll like what you hear.
