Tuesday Tuneage

The Jackson 5 - "Doctor My Eyes"

1972

When they were in their hit-making glory, The Jackson 5 were my band. I've written the story before, I'm certain: Circa 1970, my Mom cut out a J5 single from the back of an Alpha-Bits cereal box. That song, "ABC" (natch), was my favorite song for all the obvious reasons: Fuzztone guitar, call-and-response vocals, catchy-beyond-belief chorus, Michael's exuberance. Certain elements of the Tuomala household derided my early seventies affection for the J5, called them "kid stuff."  I didn't care. I loved them. They were uniquely mine, nobody else in the house listened to them and none of my friends did either.

Sure they were kid stuff, but in the best way possible. Because the J5 were sloppy joes, fruit cocktail, Lay's potato chips, and a big glass of milk; they were playing wiffle ball in the back yard during that brief time after supper and before bedtime is called. Kid stuff? So what! They had their own cartoon show! That was straight-up street cred in my book.

The joy I experience when listening to the J5 has never abated after all these decades. Earlier this month, I thought "then why in the world don't I have more of their music?" So on a recently mildly depressing Saturday, I fought the mind doom and bought a thirty-six song J5 anthology. It was the correct move on my part - the songs almost all great in the ways I remembered and that one can expect from the Motown machine. But what grabbed my attention as I tracked the songs were their covers. I had been unaware of these. They did Sly and the Family Stone and the Delfonics (medley of "Sing A Simple Song" and "Can You Remember"), Funkadelic ("I'll Bet You") and oddest of all: Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes."

They absolutely kill it on this one, cutting Browne on one of his best songs (even if Jermaine does pull a Kingsmen/"Louie Louie" move and starts singing a verse too early.) Michael is simply a superior singer to Browne, while the rest of the J5 up the ante with their harmony stylizings. On the original, Browne used Graham Nash and David Crosby, no slouches with harmonies, but the J5 wipe the floor with them. Better guitar solo too. I'll take kid stuff over a Sacred Songwriter pretty much every time. Alpha-Bits taste so much better than granola, right?

Tuesday Tuneage
The Standells - "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White"
1966

Excerpts from That '70s Show: The Complete Guide, by Bill Tuomala. Written on spec. Unpublished.

----------

Hyde: Punk is the nihilistic outcry against the corporate rock 'n' roll takeover. It's the soundtrack of the revolution, man.

Forman: I thought you said Blue Oyster Cult was the soundtrack of the revolution.

But Hyde instinctively knew that both punk and the metal of Blue Oyster Cult had the potential to be such soundtracks: punk had the anger and the outcry, but metal spoke to the proletariat in America, where punk was for college kids. Hyde would also utter populist slogans like "The three true branches of the government are: military, corporate, and Hollywood."

----------

That '70s Show exhibited a class consciousness not seen in prime time much in that era (or any.) Blessed with being a sitcom, it could get away with it. Freaks and Geeks, which debuted a year later, also showed such honesty but was a dramedy and didn't make it through a full showing of its first season.

Hyde spent his early years in a broken home until his mother abandoned him when he was a teen. He was taken in by the Formans, where Red Forman - a straight-talking, no b.s. Old Mil man - would come to admire hime more than his own son Eric, the kid with a perpetual smirk who laughs at his own jokes

In the first season Halloween episode, it is revealed that Hyde was meant for academic brilliance until he was blamed for ruining a classmate's project, a wrong actually committed by Forman, who never 'fessed up. Meaning Forman learned early that the kid lower than him on the economic scale could be a handy scapegoat. In season two, he would blame Hyde for stealing his stash of cash that he had hid in his Candy Land game box, it would turn out Red had borrowed it in order to have money to get the water heater fixed.

----------

In the second season episode "Burning Down The House", Hyde claims to have been making out with the popular and fetching Kat Peterson (Amy Adams, yessir), Forman and Donna don't believe him, but she is soon seen leaving his bedroom.

Hyde: "She's slummin' it, I'm lovin' it."

Jackie, a spoiled pretty rich girl, plans a small dinner party where she imagines her friends as aristocratic, intellectual elites. (Dark-skinned foreign exhange student Fez is, of course, the servant. With an English accent.) Kelso invites everybody, the dinner party turns into a regular messy teen party, and chaos ensues. At the party Kat ignores Hyde, but once her friends leave, she approaches Hyde. He says: "You know, for a rich girl you're kinda skanky. C'mon let me show you the garage." They leave to go make out. Hyde being a teen male and preferring to have a hot makeout buddy that he doesn't have to spend any other time with, is fine with this arrangement. The downfall of his future relationship with Jackie was that he ended up a boyfriend and was expected to act as such once Jackie escaped her greasy fantasies like that one where she replicated Olivia Newton-John in her Grease-y tight black pants.

Tuesday Tuneage
Jason And The Scorchers - "Absolutely Sweet Marie"
1983

When in 1985 after returning from spring break in the Chicago area where my parents were then living, I took a trip to the record store at the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks to buy albums by two groups I had heard in Chicago on the radio and MTV: Run-DMC and Jason and the Scorchers. The Scorchers' Lost and Found LP quickly caught on with a few of us in the dorm. My pal Gary then went out and bought a prior release, the Fervor EP, taped it, then (bless him) handed the EP over to me to keep.

The Scorchers' combination of country and rock 'n' roll - cowpunk, some called it - provided a map to other cowpunk and roots rock artists I gained an affinity for in the mid-eighties: Del Fuegos, Steve Earle, Georgia Satellites, Social Distortion, True Believers. This in turn made the late eighties-into-nineties music of the Geardaddies, Jayhawks, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, and Wilco all the more welcome. And gave me the insight to look back and get into the Flying Burrito Brothers, maybe my favorite band ever to sing along with.

Upon digging the Scorchers' Fervor EP out of the archives, it is apparent to me now, in 2013, that the Scorchers were playing a game at age 19 that I was not aware of. The production team includes Jim Dickinson, the late Memphis legend who among many many other accomplishments produced Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers album. The credits on the back of the EP include a "Thank You Friends" (a song from said Big Star LP) and it was recorded in part at Sam Phillips Recording Studio and mixed in part at Ardent Studio, both of these are Memphis recording institutions.

And so, on the first song of this EP, they go about and cover Bob Dylan off of Blonde On Blonde (recorded in Nashville, and the Scorchers were orginally known as "Jason and the Nashville Scorchers", looks like the Scorchers beat Steve Earle to the punch by years in deciding to record in Memphis rather than Nashville to avoid the tinniness of the sound.) For this one they dropped the usual production team of the rest of the EP, it was instead guided by Terry Manning of Stax Records and Ardent Studio fame, who they also wisely had produce their first full-length. Their version of "Absolutely Sweet Marie" is, um, scorching. Driving rhythm section, inventive guitar work, soulful harmonica (!), and distinctive bleep-you-if-you-don't-like-my-accent vocals.  Over before you want it to be, on "Absolutely Sweet Marie" Jason and the Scorchers proceed to own the song, which is a very Hendrix thing to do. I cannot think of a higher compliment.

Tuesday Tuneage
Traffic - "Heaven Is In Your Mind"
1967


4/30/12: Tuomala Remembers It's National Poetry Month

waiting for the bus
listening to Traffic

Tuesday Tuneage
Black Sabbath - "Children Of The Grave"
1971

The only advantage I can see to this winter that won't end is that winter is metal weather and spring's weather is meant for cheerful clever pop or the Beach Boys or something bright and nasally I don't want to deal with. If you're listening to the likes of Black Sabbath's gloom 'n doom and it helps make sense of the gloom 'n doom of the gray skies, threatening snow, and whipping wind, then you are in a better place. Not to mention we got North Korea threatening to start a war and while sixties peace-and-lovers don't like to admit it, seventies greats Sabbath could match up with anybody in the Woodstock lineup when it came to anti-war and don't-blow-up-the-world songs, plus had a sound that stood up to repeated listenings. Unlike say, Country Joe and the Fish.

"Children Of The Grave" has a Love Conquers All message that sixties snobs should appreciate, the "problem" for the hippies was that Sabbath riffed away in headbanging glee, with the bass taking the lead early alongside drums that sound like an incoming thunderstorm, soon to be joined by guitar effects that mimic missile strikes, and Ozzy's raucous vocals. So yeah, it's not Dylan, the Airplane, the Beatles, or (thank the Lord) Joan Baez. It's murky metal telling kids they have the power to make the world a better place.

Sixties sellouts would hear this tune in some form years down the line anyways when Blondie used the exact same beat from "Children of the Grave" in their hit "Call Me." So have some fun and close your eyes and imagine your favorite sixties casualty in a disco in 1980, having giving up protests and changing the world, having ditched weed for coke, in white blazer, shirt unbuttoned, showing swank necklaces. He ponders Reagan's chances in November, dancing to that Black Sabbath beat.

Tuesday Tuneage
April Is National Poetry Month
The Guess Who - "Bus Rider"
1970


Beer On The Bus (Smokes In The Car)

Beer on the bus
December after Christmas
Twenty-four cans of Premium
Tightly contained
Cardboard box
Red diamond
The Friendly Beer

Beer on the bus
Eighteen Large
The bus, not the beer count
Step on board
Driver smiles, nods
You'd love to offer
him one
You guys blasting
Van Halen
While the bus cruises
south towards
Forty-sixth street

Or maybe Dennis Hopper
took the 18 Large over
You're passing out Premos
to keep the passengers cool
Hopper gets pissed
He's hiding, sober
Sandra Bullock
falls for you
hard

Tuesday Tuneage
The Gap Band - "Oops Upside Your Head"
1979

(EDITOR'S NOTE: In this blog post I discuss an episode of The White Shadow. If interested, you can watch this episode in its entirety on YouTube.)

The other night, in honor of Minnesota playing UCLA in the opening round of the NCAA basketball tournament, I kicked back and watched "Wanna Bet?", a first-season episode of The White Shadow. Why this episode? Michael Warren, who played hoops at UCLA under John Wooden, is the actor who has a major guest role as Bobby Magnum, a streetwise baskeball hustler who coach Ken Reeves hopes to bring to Carver and hence compete for the city championship.

Although I've seen it prior (including when it originally aired in 1979) "Wanna Bet?" has been stuck in my mind the past few days for a variety of reasons. To wit:

- Bobby Magnum carries a can of spray-on deodorant in his gym page. After he works up a sweat taking the local hoops-playing rubes out of their dough at a local playground, he proceeds to towel off and apply the Right Guard. Classy.

- As my brother loves to point out, the Magnum character is seventeen years old, while Warren was thirty-two at the time. This tops Nathan Cook, who portrayed Carver regular Milton Reese, who was twenty-eight during season one.

- Warren is compelling as Magnum, you can see why he went on to be part of the Hill Street Blues ensemble. His role helps make up for the total lack of lines from cast faves Morris Thorpe, Warren Coolidge, and Salami.

- This was the first "Kid transfers to Carver, plays on basketball team, but is only on show once" episode. This streetwise hustler kid was later followed by gay kid, autistic kid, illiterate kid, deaf kid, etc.

- I love that Reeves beats Magnum one-on-one after sporting him three easy baskets. And while wearing jeans.

- Hey Reeves: Telling your date that her looking better with makeup on is a "miracle" isn't too smooth.

- Reeves does better in his bantering with Sybil Buchanan. In my mind, there is an episode of The White Shadow where Reeves campaigns for a practice facility and the sexual tension between him and Buchanan reaches an all-time high.

- Although Reeves' talk (SPOILER ALERT) with a local bookmaker big shot gets Magnum out of trouble with another bookmaker's goons, there is never a scene where Reeves relates to Magnum that he did this. Yet Magnum thanks Reeves profusely in the closing scene. Odd.

- But the oddest thing of all in this episode, the thing that keeps me up at night in bafflement is this: There is a scene where the team is running laps and they chant "Bop upside the head, we're gonna bop upside the head!" (Check out the chant starting at 27:33 into the episode.) This sounds a lot like The Gap Band's chant from their hit "Oops Upside Your Head". But my Internet research indicates that The White Shadow episode aired in January of 1979, but The Gap Band single didn't come out until later that year … meaning that the Carver team's use of the chant predated The Gap Band's use of it by months!

I googled the heck out of this mystery and got nowhere. I suppose it's possible that members of The Gap Band were watching Shadow, and said: "That chant is genius, let's get to the studio and put it on wax!" My working theory is that the "upside your head" chant must have been a popular thing for urban youth in the late seventies. Ken Reeves would have referred to it as being "ghetto", but we'll let that slide.

Tuesday Tuneage
Wilco - "Box Full Of Letters"
1995

One day shortly after New Year's, I took the 18 Large to the post office, opened the PO box with the key, and there was no mail. The mail apparently had been forwarded by this point. I stopped at Office Max for some supplies, I went to Subway for my customary sandwich. And the walk home just wasn't the same. It was cold, it was windy, it was the last time I'd be taking that walk for that purpose. The liquor cabinet called, it was two in the afternoon.

It didn't start out as something I looked forward to. It was just a job. A client was travelling the country and they asked me check their mail in their absence. It was being forwarded to this PO box at the post office near my neighborhood. When I had a car it was a pit stop. Once I was without a car, it became a little more involved. In late summer and early fall I'd bike there. A nice little jaunt, something to break up the day, an excuse to stop by the nearby Subway.

It was later in the fall that these runs actually got to be fun. Being someone who is adverse to biking when it gets below fifty degrees, I found I could take the 18 Large from my front door to the front door of the post office. iPod blasting, the music tended to be Golden Smog who just seemed like an autumn band to me for some reason ("the leaves listen to what I say"). I also blasted Big Star, Semisonic, Wilco - all music I found/adored/obsessed over in the mid-nineties when I went through my first phase of bus commuting, when I doing temp jobs downtown, when I first set out to become a writer.

I wouldn't catch a return bus home. The 18 Large would have been a long wait and the 18 Normal wouldn’t save that that much walking and was always crowded. Instead, I kept the iPod blasting and trekked it home. Past the old folks high rises (Where I'll live someday??), past the community garden that reminded me that My Hell would involve some sort of gardening, past the Liberal Catholic church (I'm not sure exactly what this denomination believes in, but this parish's website promotes somebody named "Swami Ken"), past the convenience store with way overpriced 3.2 beer, and milk a week past its expiration date, and a decent frozen pizza selection for those no-plan weekend nights.

Later that day I would email the client with what I had found, a day or two after that I would take any checks to their bank up on Hennepin for deposit. That was a bus ride full of UM girls who had ponytails and wore what seemed to be fitted sweats. The bank always had a line but the black security guard was always there for a friendly hello and help with the door. At the joint next door I could get French toast and read the sports page. Soon after I would contemplate tanking the day away down 26th street at a fave local bar. I would see myself ordering a Scotch and soda and reading the sports page while keeping an eye on the cable news on TV. Sadly, I always ended up walking by the bar to catch the 4 home, where I poured myself some coffee and got back to work.

Tuesday Tuneage

Babes In Toyland - "We Are Family"

1995

1914 - The Great War (renamed "World War I" after the sequel came about) starts. Three of the combatants - England, Russia (Allies) and Germany (Central Powers) have monarchs who are first cousins. Yep, England's King George V, Russia's Czar Nicholas II, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II are grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

Almost 2014 - Three of the most prominent submarine sandwich chains - Jimmy John's, Milio's, and Erbert & Gerbert's are owned by first cousins. I bring this up because the centennial of the start of The Great War will soon be upon us. This causes me to worry about the state of our sandwiches, as some of these competing shops are too damn close to each other. Case in point: Jimmy John's opens on/near Augsburg College (genius move, near UM also!) and Milio's ups the ante by setting up shop in the same neighborhood pretty much in Zipp's Liquors (big ol' sandwich to go with that 9:45 pm beer run? Sure!) Will the sandwich chains continue to exist in peace? Or will some crazy Serb set off a chain of events that results in an extended war (also involving submarines!?) With whom will Subway and Quiznos align? More importantly: What about Cousins? 

Tuesday Tuneage
The Original Caste - "One Tin Soldier"
1969

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from my kinda-started, never-completed, now-abandoned novel Heaven Is In Your Mind:

"When I was little, quiet little," she says, "I think maybe first grade or even before elementary school, there was a popular song they played a lot on the radio. It was called 'One Tin Soldier' and was done by a band called Coven who had a weirdo black mass satanist past, though the version I first heard may have been done by some Canadian one-hit wonders called The Original Caste. This confused me for a few days as an adult as when I heard The Original Caste's version on the AM oldies station, I thought they said 'the original cast' and I thought they meant the original cast of the Billy Jack movie, when I knew that Coven were the ones who were credited for the Billy Jack version. Then it dawned on me that Billy Jack wasn't a musical - I have never seen it but I know it is some low-budget revenge fantasy that does not involve singing - so the original soundtrack wouldn't feature any original cast. I think what helped cause this confusion was that in those days there was a spate of hippie musicals: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair that spawned songs that ended up in Top 40 radio and invariably these songs were creepy and sometimes the version you heard was the cast of the movie or the Broadway musical but sometimes what you heard was a pop singer or group doing a cover of the musical's songs.

"So this tune, 'One Tin Soldier,' which I first heard as a young girl, creeped me out for decades. In fact, I would turn it off whenever it came on the oldies station. It probably didn't matter that I turned it off though, once I heard those opening notes I could recite the song word-for-word. As a girl I couldn't avoid it as I would hear it while riding with my mom in the car on errands or while playing with my older sister, who would constantly play the forty-five on a portable record player in her room. Anyway, this song, I'm sure you heard it, is a simple morality tale: The valley people want the mountain people's treasure chest, the mountain people offer to share it, the valley people get angry and kill the mountain people. They open the treasure chest - and I think a Ray Bradbury story once ended on a similar note - only to find a note that says 'peace on earth.' And this sound freaked me out, scared me silly, I mean an entire people - genocide - being killed over a simple treasure chest. I knew the song taught a lesson but I thought it did it in a cruel, cruel way. The older I got, the more pissed off I got about it. The song didn't quantify how many mountain people there were - ten? a hundred? ten thousand? - not that a lower number justified their murders in any way. I hated The Original Caste and Coven for singing this song. Like I said, hearing those opening notes, so hopeful and pleasant on their own, filled me with dread and I would immediately change the station.

"What I never told anybody, was that this song filled an hour of my Sunday mornings with dread also. Given that the lyrics of 'One Tin Soldier' feature words like 'peace,' 'Judgment Day,' and 'kingdom,' and that the first line of the song addresses children, for some reason I thought it was a Bible story put in song form for children. Year after year in Sunday School, I figured at some point the teacher would tell the Bible story of the mountain people and the valley people. And then because invariably - as my elementary-age education seemed to involve large amounts of singing, along with art projects - we would have to sing 'One Tin Soldier.' And that was my big fear, to have to sing that song with all my Sunday School classmates. You know how creepy little children sound when they sing in groups, and then throw genocide lyrics on top of that? Have you ever heard that Canadian elementary school choir album from the seventies where they sing pop songs? Creepy. But the story never came up. Of course, it turned out that while the Old Testament has bloodbaths galore, the story is not in the Bible at all, I found this out when I brought the mountain and valley peoples up at a dinner party during a discussion over Israel and the Palestinians, imagine the looks I got with that one ... By sixth grade my parents had stopped going to church, by seventh grade they had split up and neither of them would drop me off at Sunday School at all."

Tuesday Tuneage
"Hello Hardee's"
Mid-To-Late 1970s

So that Triumph/Hardee's blog post from a couple of weeks ago sent me on a trip down Hardee's Memory Lane. Weird, as I'm not even that big a fan of the chain. I worked at one for a couple of summers in college and those summers I bet I ate the employee-discounted food two or three times total. (Though to be fair, in the second summer they dropped their signature char-broiled burgers in favor of fried ones in a misguided attempt to save bucks.) But still … I can probably name all the towns that I have ordered Hardee's in: Crookston, Detroit Lakes, Elk River, Grand Forks, Long Prairie, Milaca, Minneapolis (remember the West Bank location off of 35W??), Moorhead, Sauk Centre, St. Cloud, St. Paul, Staples, Wadena. Like I said: Weird memory trip.

This Hardee's thing I have going is likely caused by this commercial, a favorite thirty seconds of TV of mine as a kid, one that has always stuck firmly in my memory. Ten years ago or so while driving to Minneapolis from St. Paul, I stopped at the Hardee's off of I-94 to get lunch and brought it to my afternoon client. Queries were made by the folks there as to where I had scored the Hardee's. As by this time they had brought back their signature char-broiled burgers, I proceeded to riff on this old commercial, pumping my fist and yelling: "CHAR-BROILED BURGERS! CHAR-BROILED BURGERS!" As everyone in the room was quite younger than me and had no recollection of this commercial, things went quiet after my outburst. And the commercial wasn't on the web to show, so I was left looking like a raving madman.

Now it is on YouTube and of course it has brought me much joy in this new year. And this Hardee's nostalgia has me craving Hardee's char-broiled burgers and some fries, we're talking Taco John's-like craving here (blasphemy, I know.) If I had a car, I'd make the trip to St. Paul for that Hardee's right now. But don't be surprised if you're on a Metro Transit commute sometime and you hear a middle-aged man yell: "I WISH THIS BUS WAS GOING TO HARDEE'S!"

Tuesday Tuneage
Link Wray &His Ray Men - "Rumble"
1958

MEMO
February 1, 2013
To: Evan Ruud, CEO Tuomala Worldwide
From: Bill Tuomala, Jack Of Some Trades
Re: LinkedIn Account

Evan -

I appreciate the company's move towards social networking, but can I close my LinkedIn account? It's useless! Words fail me on how crappy the LinkedIn experience has been in my six years or so of dealing with it.

"LinkedIn is a wasteland of the hopeless, overeducated, unemployed. It's a hope-free zone." - Def Jeff Johnson

LinkedIn has gotten me zero new accounting clients. I suspect folks just Google my name and after they read my assorted irreverent essays and my inane tweets, they take a pass. Obviously, my twenty-five years of experience and self-proclaimed title of "Best Bookkeeper in Minneapolis" does not help me online.

"I suspect that my antisocial minority will soon be a majority, and we'll have an antisociety! Imagine that! Will Rogers the ultimate outlaw!" - Lester Bangs

You can probably guess how I feel when I get those requests to "Join my network on LinkedIn." Do you think my heart skips a beat or do I think "Ah, crap"? Yep, you know it. They've replaced the forwarded "this is funny" emails from the days of yore. Why deal with this type of nonsense in my inbox? I've got lists to make, inspiration to ponder, and work to contemplate.

"He's on LinkedIn, Lemon. He might as well be dead!" - Jack Donaghy

Let me know how I should move on this issue.
thanks
BT


MEMO
February 2, 2013
To: Bill Tuomala
From: Evan Ruud
Re: LinkedIn Account

Tuomala -

For a figurehead, you have a lot to say. My advice: Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Evan

Tuesday Tuneage
Triumph - "Fight The Good Fight"
1981

First heard this one in my car in a Hardee's parking lot in Crookston in the mid-eighies. I was immediately blown away by the anthemic power and glory of it, especially the crunching chorus. It still amazes me, but this past week when I would listen to it all I would think of was: Why was I in Crookston? Must have one of those trips between Grand Forks and my parents' cabin a couple of hours southeast where I avoided the interstates and took the back highways. Why a stop in Crookston (only thirty minutes from Grand Forks) and why Hardee's? I can't say. I did a lot of mysterious, baffling things in my youth but eating lunch in my car with Q98 blasting on the radio was one of them that worked out for the good.

Tuesday Tuneage
Badlands - "Winter's Call"
1989

Badlands' Wikipedia page reads like a combination of Behind The Music and This Is Spinal Tap. To wit:

- Their unreleased third album finally found light of day … in a 1998 release, in Japan.

- The guitarist and vocalist traded barbs in separate issues of Kerrang! magazine, and at one show the vocalist interrupted the show to pull out the Kerrang! issue with the guitarist's shots and shouted: "There's two sides to every story!" While he did this, the guitarist mouthed: "It's all true."

- Also, a reference to Desmond Child (of course); "working on one of his muscle cars"; and the fact that the band was made up of various former members of Ozzy Osbourne's band, Dio-era Black Sabbath, and a future member of Kiss. (And some of these were the same person.)

A Badlands fanboy (there was one?) obviously pirated part of this page, with such gushing sentiments as:

With melodic sensibilities and solid chops, each member of the band proved a cornerstone creatively, while presenting energetic live shows with flawless musicality.

Despite all the tensions in the band, they proved ever a 'Musician's Favourite' (*Tuesday Tuneage Editor's note: Brit spelling of "Musician"? Hmmmm.*) group, prompting all with musical talent to attend as many of their shows as possible, due to their 'jam it out' live shows, never offering the same show twice.

The truly impressive thing about Badlands' Wikipedia page is that if you look at the "years active", there are NO GAPS. Hardly any band formed ten years ago or more contains no such gaps in its Wikipedia page, because rock bands always reunite, and always to score nostalgia bucks. See, NO GAPS = NO REUNIONS. Good for you, Badlands, way to stick to your principles. (Then again, there's the very real probability that nobody is clamoring for a Badlands reunion, aside from the British fan who gushed about them on Wikipedia.)

After hearing Badlands, I can tell why on listens to Z-Rock I gravitated towards the like of Sabbath-heads/proto-stoner-rockers Trouble. I would have written about them instead, but their Wikipedia page just isn't funny.

Tuesday Tuneage
Shooting Star - "Hang On For Your Life"
1981

I recently went on a late seventies/early eighties AOR detour, caused by viewing the video of April Wine's "Enough Is Enough", which entirely took place on a semi and featured: 1) Myles Goodwyn singing into a CB radio handset as the rest of the band was crammed into the cab, and 2) Canadian girls dressed oh-so-early-eighties. Soon enough, I was ears-deep into 707, Axe, Duke Jupiter, Billy Thorpe etc. etc. etc. Maybe this is some sort of decades-later overreaction to not having an AOR station in Grand Forks throughout most of high school and college. KKDQ-FM was AOR until 1981, when it became Top 40 XL93. Q98 out of Fargo was just out of range and my sister made fun of me for listening to its static when it came in on cloudy days. My response was that the static was better than all of Grand Forks radio. (I make a lot of Q98 references here during Tuesday Tuneage, my folks have a cabin an hour east of Fargo, so I got the station out there during summers and through most of the commutes to and from there.)

With nobody to toss me a rope, this recent downward spiral through decades-old AOR continued. And so I ended up at Shooting Star, a Kansas City group that had some success thirty years ago or so. "Hang On For Your Life" is faster than the norm, meaning that punk had allowed the speed limit to be raised in AOR Land. Then again, maybe they were going back to Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" for speed clues. There are working-class nods in the lyrics: "Working hard to make a living", "union scale", and mention of some sort of muscle car. (Also something about needing a strong drink, this song probably wasn't big with the MADD crowd, but hey at least they advised seat belt use, pretty forward thinking in 1981!)

The tune is chock-full of obvious Zep and BadCo influences and is close to being typical faceless early eighties AOR, but there is a certain appeal as you blast in on headphones: 1) Its speed, 2) The vocalist's kinda-raspy voice, 3) The production. Typically with a band like this and a chance at a hit with a hook-filled song, you would expect some studio gloss. Thankfully none of that nonsense shows up here. Maybe being on the Virgin label helped, maybe producer Dennis McKay knew the right touch with which to handle the sound. Whatever the theory, the bare-bones sound completes the charm. Not to mention that Hang On For Your Life is one of my fave album covers, maybe even the favorite of any album I don't actually own. Any child of the seventies who had the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle would absolutely be drawn in by it.

Special Bonus Addendum: A Google image search of Shooting Star indicates some sort of "get haircuts in order to look relevant" transformation for the band. (Remember Metallica before and after Load?) Check out Shooting Star's "before" look and "after" look. Alas, I didn't find what years these photos are from and apparently the haircuts also shed a band member, perhaps going to the Kansas Music Hall of Fame on a fact-finding mission is in order to clear this matter up.