Here’s a quick set up on a busy morning after a long night’s work that I’m sure you will take the distance.
Imagine a world in which our nerdy rock banter and insights are banned by the State as being harmful and counterproductive to the social order of the music industry. Mainstream entertainment publishing titans, like Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, don’t want our lot challenging the received marketing messages handed down with review copies of the day’s most heavily promoted sounds. Rock Town Hall, as a publicly available music discussion venue, is broken up. Our URL is blocked! Townspeople are tracked down in their mothers’ basements. Top 10 lists—and even the collected Billboard state-of-the-industry article links of RTH Chess holdout Links Linkerson—are wiped clean from hard drives! Townsman berlyant heads to the hills to organize a secret community for fugitive Townspeople and other rock nerds.
This secret community is organized along the lines of the one in Farenheit 451. To preserve our collective wealth of deeply held and off-the-beaten-path opinions for future generations, Townspeople pledge to memorize one musical opinion. It can be a personal view, a succinct record review (eg, J.D. Considine’s GTR review, that read something like “SHT”), a key quote from a landmark artist interview, or so forth.
Should this day come, what one musical opinion would you pledge to take with you for the sake of future generations?
I will memorize Jann Wenner’s 5-star review of Jagger’s Goddess in the Doorway.
My contribution:
I’m torn between two Keith quotes:
(paraphrasing)
– Any band on a given night can be the best band in the world
– all you need to play it is five strings, two notes, two fingers and one asshole
I will embark on the task of memorizing as many David Lee Roth quotations as possible, including, but not limited to, the following:
“Rock critics all like Elvis Costello because all rock critics look like Elvis Costello.”
“You’ve got to constantly reinvest your enthusiasm for livin’ large, Marge — so large you need a barge!”
“I think people want the balance more than ever. You know, plant an Ethiopian, feed the rain forest, save the ozone layer–you gotta have that! “Oh woe is me,” as a form of self-dramatization, is always fun. It shouldn’t be replaced, but there should be a balance. Sooner or later, it’s Miller time! Sooner or later, there is some hallelujah, watusi-tailgate, light-up-the-goddamn-sky-it’s-finally-the-weekend, okay? And I don’t care whether you wear a cowboy hat or your hair is purple, I don’t care if you have a wedding ring or a clit ring, sooner or later, there’s Miller time! That doesn’t mean simple belly laughs, and it doesn’t mean high-brow. It just means, “Wanna go have a drink?”
“I always wanted to be an outrage to public decency and a threat to women. And this is one of the few occupations where you’re not only allowed that, buy you’re encouraged.”
“Ozzy is the Prince of Darkness and I’m the Patron Saint of Larceny. Who would you rather be?”
“I don’t discriminate. I’ve slept with Black women. I’ve slept with Chinese women. In fact, I’ve slept with a Black Chinese woman!”
“The hood ornament on your car is for telling you where you’re going. The rear-view-mirror is for showing you how good you look while you’re getting there.”
“An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance”
“If you can’t do it in a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans under one white light bulb, you can’t do it!”
“You bet your ass this is real Jack Daniel’s.. I don’t see fuckin’ Quiet Riot up here!”
“The perfect woman has an IQ of 150, wants to make love until 4 in the morning, then turns into a pizza!”
“The violence and everything and Eddie Van Halen constantly calling me out, screaming into a camera lens from three thousand, two hundred and twenty six miles away, ‘I’m gonna kick you in your nuts! You better wear a cup. You better watch your balls.’ This causes me to ask, because we’re talking to a very articulate magazine here, with an articulate audience readership, and an entirely articulate interviewer here. What kind of balls is he imagining? What kind of testicles are haunting Eddie Van Halen’s sleep? Are these giant turbo-prop monster truck nards that smash Chevies and Buicks and are now rolling over his front gate right now up there at 5150 and crushing his designer sports car and the family pet as it squeals a short, brief, glorious warning? Or are these highly trained, super-mobile, small, but highly maneuverable Belgian assault nards that even now are swarming under the gates and are about to sail into the nerve center of the gangland stronghold! The mind fairly reels, sire.”
Elvis responded to that DLR quote in an “auto-interview” that he did with himself in 1989:
Interviewer Elvis: The well know comedian David Lee Roth has said, “Rock critics only like Elvis Costello because he’s devastatingly handsome, just like them”. Can you comment on that?
Elvis: No I think he says that because he looks like a female impersonator.
http://www.ina.fr/ardisson/lunettes-noires-pour-nuits-blanches/video/I07331454/auto-interview-elvis-costello.fr.html
The day Oats and I first read the interview where Diamond Dave dropped this quote was – I think I can speak for him here as well – one of the finest days in our histories of musical appreciation.
I also think DLR’s beloved “Sam throws a party, I am the party” review of the brief Hagar/Roth team-up deserves codification in your Bald Sea Scrolls.
It’s true. There was life before I read that quote, and the life afterward. Like night and day, really.
This reminds me. I hope, in the coming months, to compose a VH-related post that I hope to be the first volley in what will be a multi-tiered social networking campaign. Stay tuned!
I’d have to get the wording exact before I memorized it, but isn’t there a koan by andyr about improvisation? Something like “There’s nothing wrong with improvisation as long as it’s carefully planned out”?
That’s an important one, BigSteve. As an eyewitness to the first uttering of this koan, I believe it went:
The review for GTR was “Ttl sht.” Funny enough, THAT really was the first quote/review that came to my mind before you quoted it. Too late to the party. In the same book, someone made the the comparison that “not liking The Beatles was almost as perverse as not liking the sun.” It sure is bloated, but I’ll take it with me.
TB
PS–Your album Shark Sandwich only garnered a two-word review: “Shit sandwich.”
The rhythm section is the key.
Sorry to pince nez you, TB, but the review was “SHT” in capital letters, to mimic the name of the band. You can google it. I’m not sure how the myth of adding the “ttl” got started.
Take it from Willie Dixon / Jim Morrison / Doug Fieger. Plus it sums up everything David Lee Roth stands for:
“What you don’t know / but the little girls understand”
I’m gonna remember that Lester Bangs loved Metal Machine Music, so I can laugh at the future generations that track that turd down, put it on their turntable and then wonder just what the fuck was the matter with Lester.
I’ll probably preserve my bitch the VU box set, specifically the fact that the middle eighth was reinstated in the studio version of “Sweet Jane” and those added two measures of rhythm guitar (recorded off a room mic track, no less) was cut into the section right before the coda of “Rock ‘n Roll.” Future generations must know this.
Lester Bangs’ review of “Chicago At Carnegie Hall”: “At 3.23 pounds…anybody that tells me it’s not the heaviest album of the year just doesn’t know his math.”
Awesome!
I’ve got a hard copy of the Album Guide. That’s where I swear I got the “ttl” from. I’ll check it when I get home tonight. Could we possibly have another ZZ Top/live cattle thing? I know I saw it somewhere, but…Stay tuned…
TB
I agree with Big Steve. It was written by JD Constadine (I think) and it originally appeared in Musician Magazine’s “Short Cuts” section. Another classic from that section: “Over the past 15 years, Rush has gone from mindlessly imitating Led Zeppelin to carefully copying the Police. That’s progress for ya.”
A friend of mine’s cousin is a huuge ZZ Top fan, and like he was literally at a show and the guy sitting next to him, or it mighta been in front of him, was talking about this awwwesome show he was at in the 70s when they like had a whole herd of cattle and a buncha snakes and vultures and scorpions and shit on the stage, and in the middle of the show one of the bulls gets spooked by someone with a flash camera, even though they totally said no flashbulbs, please, and so the cattle like start a stampede and stuff and ZZ never even stopped playing, and the coolest part is this guy, the one my friend’s cousin was sitting next to, got the whole thing on tape. I mean, I didn’t hear it, but he said you can hear the mooing and stomping and people screaming and stuff and the whole time you can hear them pounding on “Thunderbird” or something. The guy took pictures, too, but the camera got stepped on by one of the bulls, which is a bummer, ’cause that’d be so cool to see.
Turns out we are all correct. The original review was “SHT” written by Considine. It appeared in Musician magazine and is now one of the most famous reviews he’s ever done. I never read that review.
I’ve had a copy of the 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide since about 1995. Here is the complete GTR review written by Considine taken from that edition (where he rates the album 1/2 a star):
“Pointless, pompous guitar wank-a-rama, featuring Steve Hackett (formerly of Genesis) and Steve Howe (periodically of Yes). Ttl sht.”
I don’t know if the review was expanded for the guide due to copyrights with Musician or if RS just wanted to be little different. I guess the short answer would be that it is the expanded/remastered edition of the original review.
TB
Thank you for clearing this up, TB. Can we now put aside our collective Pince Nez – or redirect it to the ZZ Top issue?:)