I was quite blessed growing up to have to loving parents that provided for me and my sister in many tangible and intangible ways. I never had to worry about my food or shelter or anything, and Santa Claus was always overly generous. One thing that we received from him one year was the MAC (Mobile Action Command) series of action figures by the Matchbox Car company. These were intrepid adventurers and rescuers that followed me through a wide variety of adventures in at least two states. Their secret mountain headquarters had everything that intrepid rescuers and adventurers might require to aid them (except women and beer, but that is a different action adventurer). I miss playing with them and thank my parents for their largess. I have GOT to find those guys...
If you liked the last stuff with the keyboards, you'll love this! Or, perhaps, not. Long before Devo did their devo thing, there was Kraftwerk. In some ways, I suppose they could be seen as a Teutonic Devo, although, it is more probably that Devo is an American Kraftwerk. With their hypnotic music, lyrical discussions of robots in German, and snappy makeup and outfits, it makes me want to get a really skinny tie, shave my beard, slick back my hair, and move in a jerky manner. Isn't that cool? Seventies Germany rocks - so unemotional and mannequin-esque. Just like me!
Anyone that has not experienced the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis should. Here is their magnum opus from that era, "Supper's Ready," in three parts IT is worth the time investment... Part one:
I'm back on the Stiffs - Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Rockpile. I want to start a new wave band - Ruthless Jonah and the Marble City Rockets. Whose with me?
Girls would talk about us, because we would be so sexy and exciting! Enjoy!
Seriously, will someone tell me why they don't make movies like this anymore? I realize that the 1970s amped up the excess in rock music to the point that punk HAD to happen, but this movie celebrates the theme of excess to such an excessive level that it seems almost comfortingly, orgiastically cathartic. Maybe the GSHA band could perform inside a building that's being imploded!
By the way, I HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE! THE TRAILER ALONE MADE ME CRAZY! WHAT A NAME FOR A MOVIE! Enjoy!
For some reason, I was thinking about traveling recently, especially those travels back in my youth. My sister, who shares my whacked sense of humor for things a bit askew, used to listen with me to tapes on our Realistic tape recorder on many family trips throughout this great land of ours. We would be in the back of the station wagon with the seat down, un-seatbelted of course, drawing on old computer print-out paper from my dad's office and reading comic books and playing Simon and Merlin and card games, all the while listening to Bible stories narrated by Burl Ives and various other tapes my parents had to make us tolerable during the trip. I don't know if she remembers, but we used to giggle and giggle in evil glee at some of the songs on a compilation tape of oldies that my parents had. There was "Que Sera Sera" sung by Doris Day. Mitch Miller did "The Yellow Rose of Texas." But, the one that really got us cackling was "Hey, There (You with the stars in your eyes)," sung by Rosemary Clooney, George's aunt. The way it was recorded, she would sing the chorus (Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes...) in one channel and then speak a reply in the other channel (Are you talking to me?). This was too funny for the both of us, and we would laugh and laugh and laugh and hyperventilate and laugh and laugh and eat some Trix cereal and laugh and laugh and rewind the tape and listen to this again and again and laugh and laugh and laugh until we were at the beach or West Virginia or wherever we were going. This video I have posted is probably from a Karaoke machine, so it has no pictures. However, I think that you will agree, as my sister and I believed and still believe, that this remains either very funny or very disturbing. Maybe even both! My sister has since gone on to be an amazing mother of four (I am her oldest) and I hope that she will one day pass this song on to her other kids as some sort of legacy that will either slightly scar their psyches or make them continue to enjoy drawing pictures of purple dogs and orange trees.
Having recently admitted my love and secret shame of MOR seventies soft rock, I have been, as I often do, hyper-looking at and listening to videos and songs of this genre. I must be OCD when it comes to music, because I get fixated on something like "sunshine pop" and then, for 3 or 4 weeks, can do nothing but download and listen to this type of music. And, as before, my new obsession has become seventies soft rock, and I have been sucking this stuff down like an opium addict. HOWEVER, this video by the band Exile has kinda creeped and freaked me out.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the disembodied lips on the wall and on the floor. Maybe it's the lead singer's rough androgyny that makes him/her look like a man, then a woman, then a man in such a way that makes me wonder if he is a demonic entity - the dance gyrations don't help. Maybe it is the singluar theme of the lyrics, which proclaim that the only focus of the protagonist will be to get his baby and kiss her all over, all over, all over, again and again - not that I am against kissing or kissing all over, for that matter, but the band's singleminded focus on this particular activity make me wonder if there might be tentacles and spinal fluid sucking involved. Maybe it is the fact that the band is, in my opinion, WAY to into their music, as if they are heralding a new age of utopian revolution or that their music rocks in a similar way as, say, the Ramones. Maybe I'm just overanalyzing it, but you have to admit that they don't make bands like this anymore, which might be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Either way, enjoy!
While I can engage in music snobbery with the best of them, dropping Yo La Tengo and Joy Division references while I hold my nose at the regular pablum that constitutes modern radio, I have always had a soft spot (secret shame?) for the lighter end of the rock spectrum. Apparently, I am not alone, as I chanced upon a group of videos by a bunch of guys from California detailing the untold stories of the creation of what they term "yacht rock" - the Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers type of music that dominated the airwaves of the late seventies and early eighties. These videos are brilliant and provide a wonderful take on this hidden history that so clearly needed to be told. This is the first episode, entitled "What a Fool Believes;" hopefully you will tear up and laugh out loud at the same time, like I did. We should have done this kinda stuff with the GSHA...
People like to suggest, sometimes, that I am some sort of acid burnt wacko, a persona that I, sometimes, encourage perhaps. However, if youtube had been around when I was doing chemical alterations to my psyche, THIS kind of video would have made me a prime candidate for a rubber room and arm and leg restraints. Hell, it's freaky enough WITHOUT drugs; I couldn't imagine watching this already out of my mind! Of course, I have watched it repeatedly today!
You know me - I like all sorts music, high brow and low brow. But this video just makes my bowels and nads hurt with an unimaginable horror - no wonder punk music needed to happen and happened when it did! "But, wait," you might say, "I thought you liked bands like the Osmonds!?! Aren't they similar?" I won't quibble on that point - both bands are somewhat of the same ilk. HOWEVER, the Osmonds were musical geniuses, a Mormon Beatles, if you will. They mined the depths and heights of our emotions and imaginations, making this world a better, kinder, and stronger place. They played their instruments AND danced AND sang AND smiled AND all the while searched for ways to end world hunger, fight Communist Aggression, and pursue the race to land a man-made vehicle on Mars. The band in this video, on the other hand, was so obviously only in it for the money - how else do you explain someone voluntarily playing this kind of garbage and doing so in public on television? For the joy of the music and the ability to entertain? HELL NO! Money, pure and simple, is the source of this horse manure! So, go tell "the Man" to honk on bubba for foisting crap like this onto us! Enjoy!
This is one of the greatest videos ever put on the internet. Can you feel it? The hypnotic beats of the band make you fall down in disco-inspired seizures.
In case the first video didn't get your toes a-tappin' and your legs a-twitching, here is a video of the great German Krautrock band Can, performing their hit "Paperhouse." If ever you wished that you could find a German band that had a Japanese singer who sang in English, all the while convulsing on stage with his jazz-rock posse high on mushrooms and schnapps, then this one is for you! Enjoy!
I have realized that everything I have ever needed to know, I learned on Schoolhouse Rock, especially the one about the Preamble of the Constitution (professional historians may balk, but you have to let me think this for me to keep my sanity). Sing it with me!
The Preamble Song
Hey, do you know about the U.S.A.? Do you know about the government? Can you tell me about the Constitution? Hey, learn about the U.S.A.
In 1787 I'm told Our founding fathers did agree To write a list of principles For keepin' people free.
The U.S.A. was just startin' out. A whole brand-new country. And so our people spelled it out The things that we should be.
And they put those principles down on paper and called it the Constitution, and it's been helping us run our country ever since then. The first part of the Constitution is called the preamble and tells what those founding fathers set out to do.
We the people, In order to form a more perfect union, Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, Provide for the common defense, Promote the general welfare and Secure the blessings of liberty To ourselves and our posterity Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In 1787 I'm told Our founding fathers all sat down And wrote a list of principles That's known the world around.
The U.S.A. was just starting out A whole brand-new country. And so our people spelled it out They wanted a land of liberty.
And the Preamble goes like this:
We the people, In order to form a more perfect union, Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, Provide for the common defense, Promote the general welfare and Secure the blessings of liberty To ourselves and our posterity Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
For those of you that know me, you know that I love the Lawrence Welk Show. It started innocently enough, watching it with my grandmother. I reasoned that I could choose to either really hate it or really completely get into it. As I opted for the latter, I became quite a fan of the show, mainly for its overly upbeat American ideal being played out during the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the hippie movement during the 1960s and 1970s. With this in mind, it is amazing to see a song such as this played on the show, especially given the double-meaning of the song lyrics to all the heads who might have tuned in to the show in the Seventies. As a historian, this is an example of how the establishment can take something from the underground and sanitize it for its own purposes, whatever those may be. Unlike other videos of the Welk Show on YouTube, this is real and actually happened:
It begs the question of whether or not the singers actually knew what they were singing. Or, maybe they had just ingested a heapin' helpin' of Thai Stick to help them through their performance! Either way, enjoy!
Gosh, the Grateful Dead in 1970 were so cute! They seemed so alive and into their music, even if they just kinda stood there and gazed off into space. The crowd sure was into their music, even if most of them had no rhythm whatsoever. This is when I like the Dead the best, before all the drugs made them too jazzy and less R&B-y. Indeed, Rhythm and Blues and Blues is my latest obsession du jour. So, expect more of that for a while until I lock onto something else. Enjoy!
One of the little known rock gods, albeit one without the intense political fury of The Clash or the skull-piercingly ear-damaging riffage of The Stooges, is Roger Whittaker, a South African born baritone singer whose beautiful voice has warmed middle class American livingrooms since the early 1970s. Many were the evenings when my family would joy to the sound of his records, eating Jiffy-Pop and washing it down with cola from glass bottles. Oh, how we thrilled at his jaw-droppingly exquisite take on the current MOR hits of other wimpy heavy weights, such as Anne Murray and John Denver. Oh, how we marvelled at his intense sincerity and his hyper-space speed-whistling ability. We knew that Christmas was coming with the emergence of the Roger Whittaker Christmas Album every year.
So, here are two of my favorite hits of Rog. If these don't move you to tears, you must be dead inside, you heartless bastard!
The 1970s was a difficult time to grow up. Sure, the intense racial antagonism in the United States had ebbed considerably. The Vietnam War was in its final days. Women's liberation made for the genesis of "girl power." The flower power movement had been replaced by increasingly plastic and disposable culture. And the creators of youth-targeted products must have been burning through their remaining mountains of mind-altering chemicals, because they produced several things that still can evoke moments of shear terror in me even today.
For example:
I was never, ever, ever tempted to drink drain cleaner because of this tripped out take on poison ingestion. Apparently, the makers of this commercial had experienced a horrible acid trip where the cleaning product bottles spoke to them and urged them to drink their contents. I hated this commercial and as a result I will not, to this day, drink Mr. Clean.
Similarly, this documentary on milk production from Sesame Street drove me f-ing insane then and now:
I guess the sense of urgency that all the people showed getting the little girl her milk struck me as being overly dramatic - looks like they're scrambling for a freaking national civil defense emergency. Not that I would claim that I was an early advocate for the return to breast feeding, but I suppose that I hated this because I knew there were alternate (and more healthy) sources of milk that might have been explored to quiet the little girl's despair. Likewise, the pseudo-prog rock inspired theme music with the annoying female singer seems to be the pinnacle of bloated rock excess that caused the angry reaction of punk music later in the decade. I guess that everything in the 1970s was exacerbated in our national consciousness due to Watergate - blame it on Nixon!
My parents recently gave me some old pictures that I drew as a wee lad. Among the silliness was this one, circa probably 1977:Apparently, my conception of rock and roll at that time included the notion that capes were very important to rock bands, as well as a thunderbolt motif (probably influenced from the Shazam television show I religiously watched on Saturday mornings). I don't know exactly what type of music this band was playing, but I assume it was The Carpenters + Kiss + Queen + Manfred Mann's Earth Band. I would like to think that I was drawing a Roxy Music / MC5 type band with an intense political anarcho-syndicalist message incorporated in their searing lyrics, but they really have an Osmonds vibe going, don't you think? My secret shame...
I have long enjoyed Pere Ubu but have rarely seen anything of them live. Here is a version of their song "Final Solution" by Peter Murphy, better known for his role in Bauhaus.
Here's a Swedish band, Bob Hund, with a Swedish language cover version:
Finally, here are some of the Ubus in their later band The Dead Boys singing another Pere Ubu compositiion, Sonic Reducer:
...especially as all 4 of my readers expect, nay, DEMAND pointed observations, cogent commentary, and biting yet witty satire. How can I keep up? I could open up the recesses of my darkest desires and most apocalyptic visions, but then who would want to read about that? Shall I provide a journal of fever dreams, or would that be more likely to frighten than enlighten? Take from the following video what you will, and journey into the blackest corners of my soul...
I recently was having a conversation with some of the ladies I work with about hair care products. And having been, until recently, a long haired person, I was telling them about waterless or dry shampoo products that could be used in an emergency in the event that you couldn't wash your hair in the normal fashion. I told them, in particular, about the product called Psssssst, which was a dry shampoo spray in a can that could be used to spruce up oily hair, even as it cut a hole the size of a football field into the ozone layer. I discovered that this product is back on the market and have decided that I might buy some of it, for my own nefarious purposes. What this has to do with anything even remotely related to anything that I usually talk about in this blog is hard to fathom, but all will be revealed in good time!
I was quite blessed growing up to have to loving parents that provided for me and my sister in many tangible and intangible ways. I never had to worry about my food or shelter or anything, and Santa Claus was always overly generous. One thing that we received from him one year was the MAC (Mobile Action Command) series of action figures by the Matchbox Car company. These were intrepid adventurers and rescuers that followed me through a wide variety of adventures in at least two states. Their secret mountain headquarters had everything that intrepid rescuers and adventurers might require to aid them (except women and beer, but that is a different action adventurer). I miss playing with them and thank my parents for their largess. I have GOT to find those guys...
