Tuesday Tuneage
Led Zeppelin - “Communication Breakdown”
1969

Last month I got an MRI on my bum knee. The knee hurt when I walked on stairs, which was problematic given that I live on the second floor. I had spent six months in and out of various medical appointments, looking for relief. So on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, I ended up in St. Louis Park a stone’s throw from a Half-Price Books (pre-appointment vinyl shopping yessir) at an imaging facility. After stripping down to boxers and socks and putting on a gown and scrubs pants, the technicians tucked my legs into the MRI chamber. They told me to hold still for the next thirty minutes, and gave me earplugs and headphones and played a Spotify classic rock playlist for me to help block out the noise from what they assured would be a quite loud machine. Thirty minutes? I figured I’d get through seven or eight classic rock songs then soon be on way to the bus stop and a good book for the commute home. Turns out it was six songs:

The Hollies - “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”: Best-ever knockoff of Creedence Clearwater Revival. (More on them later.)

Todd Rundgren - “ Hello It’s Me”: Lately a top-five favorite. (This, the O’Jays “Back Stabbers” or “For the Love of Money”, and three others make up the top five.)

Steve Miller Band - “Rock’n Me”: Like most of the Miller Band’s seventies hits, this one surprisingly punches above its weight.

ZZ Top - “La Grange”: Decades ago, I was talking with members of my sister-in-law’s family from Illinois. I asked her brother-in-law where he lived there. He replied “La Grange,” then when he saw the smile creeping across my face threw in: “They got a lotta nice girls there.” Classic.

Pat Benatar - “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”: “There are three girls here at Ridgemont who have cultivated the Pat Benatar Look.”

The Band - “The Weight”: No matter all the raves and write-ups on the greatness that is The Band, their songs never do much for me. You know how The Band is always to referred to by their cult (I’d call ‘em “Band-Aids”, but Penny Lane already took that one) as “keepers of America’s mythic past, stoic traditionalists while society was breaking apart blah blah blah”? Well they sound zzzzz to these ears. Don’t come at with me with “Baby Don’t You Do It”, it doesn’t touch the Marvin Gaye original. As for The Last Waltz, you can count on that being trod out whenever your local PBS station is doing a fundraiser, as that’s the only time it will feature rock music. (Phones are ready.)  Creedence Clearwater Revival was the keepers of America’s mythic past in the sixties-into-seventies era and they were 100% American, with The Band only being 20% USA-bred and the rest Canadian. Throw in that Creedence’s best-known songs were all three minutes long and bingo: They are who you play on the jukebox while you’re working on that pitcher of High Life and contemplating American Mythology. (Better yet, check out the incredible Travelin’ Band documentary-plus-concert on Netflix.) Thankfully a technician cut off The Band mid-song to inform me that my time was up. Being a true old man, I asked her if she could hand me my shoes as I didn’t feel like getting up off the table yet. She also offered to tie them for me. I declined, but like I said: Old man.

The MRI WAS noisy as f**k, just like the technicians promised. But what got me is that the noise the machine made the most frequently was one that replicated the noise Jimmy Page made at the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” but whereas he did it for two seconds, the MRI machine carried on and on and on. It was funny, kinda. It would have been funnier if it wasn’t so annoying. But guess what song I played repeatedly on headphones on the bus ride home?  

Postscript: After a consultation with my physician’s assistant, physical therapy, an X-ray, two consultations with an orthopedist, and this MRI; the diagnosis was that I have a small spot of arthritis behind the kneecap. The treatment? Ice and naproxen. Of course.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Blasters - “Go, Go, Go”
1982

Anybody remember the original Gaviidae Common? A high-end fancy pancy shopping complex on Nicollet Mall? Bound to be as successful as The Conservatory? I worked as an accountant for a general contractor when Gaviidae was constructed, the division I was in built out some of the tenant spaces there. One shop our company built was owned by a British couple and its concept must have been born from the hubris of the United Kingdom defeating mighty Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982: It was a freakin’ tea room. You could go there and sip your tea and eat your crumpets. On little round wooden tables with doilies. A jolly good time. Oh boy.

Then the utterly predictable happened. The place had loyal customers numbering in the single digits and hence didn’t do great business. The Brits didn’t pay the bills owed to my company and our subcontractors didn’t get paid. Inquiring phone calls went up and down the owner-contractor-subcontractor chain over when funds would be made available to the companies that built out the space and things went to hell.

There was a process directed by people above me involving sending notice that our company would file a lien on the space. One day my bosses were conveniently all in the same meeting so I took a call from one of the clients, a lady with a shrill British accent who railed at me, saying my company was acting inappropriately and offered up the usual deadbeat client excuses for why they weren’t paying their bills. After a few minutes of taking this bat’s haranguing, I calmly told her it was out of my hands and that I would ask one of my bosses to call her later. She yelled some more at me in that annoying voice before hanging up. I placed my receiver down and yelled: “THIS ISN’T THE GODDAMNED LEND-LEASE ACT!”

So on the Fourth of July, I will raise a toast to Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, et. al. Imagine if all the gals in the Upper Midwest had an annoying accent and sounded like some version of that lady. I’ll be also be queuing up The Blasters’ Over There EP, a live recording from 1982 where they absolutely smoke in London. Its back cover notes by Claude Kickman Bessy state “forgive me … for once doubting the American supremacy in the bopping field” and its label has an approved use of the Gadsden Flag. 

Tuesday Tuneage

Corrosion of Conformity - "Goodbye Windows"
1996

Ozzy’s Boneyard — the classic hard rock and heavy metal station on SiriusXM — is my go-to listen when it comes to crunch time on the elliptical, for blasting out distractions while writing, or while descending into a living room happy hour on a lazy afternoon. You get a run of Deep Purple, Scorpions, Led Zeppelin, Black Label Society, and Blue Oyster Cult going on a Friday afternoon with a glass of Larceny bourbon and your troubles are behind you. Lately they have Corrosion of Conformity in regular rotation, which is cause for celebration.

COC became a late nineties/early aughts favorite upon stumbling across a copy of Wiseblood in the used CD racks and circa 2000 I saw them on the America’s Volume Dealer tour at First Avenue. This was the show where I was standing on the main floor and two huge linebacker-size metalheads standing behind me (kindly? gently? it seemed that they had more humor in their intentions than bullying) pushed me into the mosh circle. I made moves like Barry Sanders and bid a retreat out of the pit and found a place further back behind two even bigger guys. But there was another reason for this show being written here in my history, my memoirs, my back pages — and it’s that at some point before the show some skinny little metalhead inadvertently bumped me and spilled part of my beer. He stopped and looked and me, shocked and sheepish, and said: “Oh dude! I’m sorry! I’m sorry.” Then he gestured at my beer and stammered: “Can I buy ya? … Can I buy ya?” I assured him that not much had been spilled and eventually he made his way on. I told this story to a couple of my friends a few days later and soon after “Can I buy ya?” became our shorthand for getting together for a beer. … “Can I buy ya?”

Tuesday Tuneage
The Godfathers - "Birth, School, Work, Death"
1988

During 2006-08 upon the invite of a couple of friends who deejayed at a club near downtown,  I joined them in spinning records a handful of times. It was a blast. To this day I’m still amazed I got a small share of the tip money (usually enough to swing cabfare home), free drinks, and a cozy, dark clubhouse in which to toss around inside jokes for a few hours.

We played vinyl — LPs, EPs, and singles — which was old-school fun, more hands-on than pushing buttons, which led me into shopping for and buying more vinyl — a rather enjoyable pastime.

In January of 2009 with a Cheapo gift certificate given as a Christmas gift in my hand, I bought the Godfathers’ Birth, School, Work, Death, the Pretenders’ debut album, and a couple of other picks in expectations that I would deejay them. What I didn’t know was that my tenure had come to an end. My deejay friends soon moved to NYC and I never asked the bar manager about perhaps continuing to spin records. It wouldn’t have been the same without my friends anyway, so I was content to play vinyl alone in my living room in the dark under headphones.

Birth, School, Work, Death had been the first CD I had bought in 1988, along with Metallica’s … And Justice For All. Due to the title, I soon cut out the cover of the CD longbox (remember those?) and put it on the wall of my accounting cubicle. I dug out the LP recently. With a decades later re-listen, it has been a revelation. My favorite track lately is “If I Only Had Time.” Building upon the earlier single “This Damn Nation”, there’s more gripes about the State of Things: “We’re living under a false economy” shoots a dart straight and Thatcherism and Reaganism. The only relief is to live honestly outside the law: “If I only had time, I’d think of the perfect crime.” Unlike other British alternative acts of the era, the Godfathers weren’t fey dorks. This is tough hard rock, smartly produced, with vocals spit out so you get the sense the singer knows everything’s pretty much bullshit.

And I can’t remember where I read it, but I swear these guys had earlier released “Love Is Dead” as a single on February 14, 1987. Absolute heroes.