Tuesday Tuneage
Rush - "Limelight"
1981

(I make a lot of Q98 references here during Tuesday Tuneage…

(CLICK TO EXPAND)

Tuesday Tuneage
The New York Dolls - "Don't Start Me Talkin'"
1974

As I have written before:

The YMCA is not my social club. The goal of going there is simple: Get an elliptical workout for thirty minutes with my iPhone blasting some metal; walk on the treadmill for forty minutes while listening to more music; stretch; and then get the hell out of there.

But my fellow middle-aged folks who work out at my Y? Way too social for my tastes. Worse, the men are always looking for new members to recruit into their coffee klatch. Last year, I was carrying my bike helmet and one of them nodded at me and asked about my bike ride. I made some dry comment about it not being bad because "it was all downhill", and now we give each other the nod of recognition. Perfectly fine, because he is content to chat away with his other workout friends and leaves me alone to go sweat it out. But early this year, I made the mistake of talking to another klatch member. He was leaning on an elliptical machine that I wanted to use, talking with his buddy on the next machine. I should have just went and grabbed a treadmill and watched Sports Shouting on ESPN. Instead, I asked him if he would be using the machine, he said no, gave me room to get on it, and then started joking around on how I would have to keep his buddy company. Except I think he was only half-joking. I smiled, put on my earbuds, cranked Motorhead, and put any potential conversations out of my mind.

Look, if you want to be pals with your fellow sweat-soaked companions at the gym, feel free. Just leave me out of it. I don't care about your mortgages, kids, lawn care duties, retirement dreams, grandkids, careers, travel plans, or what you're grilling on your decks. Like I stated above, my focus is to get my exercise and get the hell out of there after stretching. But now that I had spoken to the coffee klatch, in future visits they made eye contact with me, nodded at me, tried to draw me into their conversations. I could see as the year went on that some sort of stratagem was needed to back the coffee klatch away from me. Get a shirt that says LEAVE ME ALONE on it in big block letters? No, not passive-aggressive enough. Quit the Y? No, it's only four blocks away. Work out at a different time? No, the late afternoon time is perfect, allows me to blow my accounting number-crunching brain away and then glide into the evening with a fresh mind. Besides, I'm sure other times of the day have their own coffee klatches.

A few weeks ago on a Tuesday, a few of the klatch were standing around chatting over the NFL Network's replay of the Vikings game from the prior Sunday, which was airing on one of the big screen TVs in the cardio room. The Vikings, sheesh. The joke franchise which has choked/quit/clowned its way through over a half-century of existence, yet is still vastly beloved by the vast majority of sports fans in my part of the world. I actively cheer for the Purple to lose, sad but true which is great fun. So I'm not fascinated with the destined-to-fail folks like Zim, Teddy, and Norv that Vikings fans fawn over. I hopped on my usual elliptical machine that was located in front of the group, began my workout, then after a while glanced at the TV to my left. It was late in the fourth quarter … manna from heaven … and my scheming, conniving, avoiding brain, ramped up on endorphins came up with a plan …

Vikings are driving late for a tying or go-ahead score. Teddy Bridgewater drops back to pass … and Broncos blitzers come through unchecked, strip-sack Bridgewater, and pounce on the fumble. Broncos win, remain undefeated, Vikings lose, remain team that can't beat a good team on the road.

And just like I did on Sunday when this game aired live, I pumped my fist and grinned broadly. I didn't overdo it and shout like I had two days prior, but I didn't have any scotch or beef jerky on me this time either. The coffee klatch hasn't tried to lure me into a conversation since.

Tuesday Tuneage
U2 - "Gloria"
1981

Summer is overrated. All those folks with their exhortations to get outside and enjoy the weather are bores: As if the act of being outside is some sort of magical event or that it will solve anything except to keep Coppertone in business. What about those books to read*, TV shows to stream, and LPs to spin? Now that summer is gladly in the rearview mirror, it has dawned on me that October is my favorite month, hands-down. Let me list the reasons:

- Any lingering oppressive heat and humidity goes away. You can shut the windows and not be woken up by your busybody home-owning neighbors who are mowing, blowing leaves, and making general homeowner noise. I like hunkering down inside while it's chilly outside. The landlord (or more likely, my building's thermostat) turns the heat on at some point in October and then my apartment will be 79 degrees until April. I sit inside wearing shorts, a teeshirt, and keep a living room window partially open so that it doesn't creep above 80. Bud Light Lime-A-Rita anyone?

- While the weather is nice enough to still go for long walks, the street fairs and festivals that tend to populate summer have mostly gone away. What this means is that street vendors who invent their own little currency of paper tickets (X amount of tickets for Y dollars, a beer costs Z amount of tickets) aren’t lurking, screwing up the value of straight cash. October: When the good ol’ U.S. dollar stands less of a chance of being dissed and diminished.

 - Hockey starts up. UND and the other NCHC teams generally play Friday and Saturday night series so I can have plans for the weekend. Plus I can double my pleasure: I automatically have an excuse to not meet people for social activities on Friday and Saturday. "Sorry, gotta support my team." Not that I get invited out much these days, but it's nice to have a ready-made alibi. But it's not only the weekends where I can indulge in hockey. The NHL starts and it's a fast-paced, highly-skilled wonder. And it's not just hockey. October is a rich smorgasbord of sports on TV. There's college football, NFL, and THAT PLAYOFF BASEBALL GAME YOU FORGOT ABOUT ON IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON!

- Nostalgia. It was in an October that I started my self-employment. At the end of September of 1999, I finished a temp job assignment. During my time off in October I worked a few hours a week doing books for the sole client I had who I worked directly for and waited for the agency to line up my next steady assignment with an outside client. One night during this time, I met my friend Jeff for beers at the CC Club. Jeff was someone I had known for ten years, the brother of one of my college friends. We had never hung out, but having the same interests we would run into each other once or twice a year at shows or movies. During a pitcher of Summit, he mentioned that he was dreading going to his design studio the next day as he had to do client invoicing. I said hey that is what I do for work! Barely-blinking, hops-infused lightbulbs went off over our heads and this led to my securing Jeff's company as that valued second client that I needed to kick temp work to the curb and head into self-employment. Another pitcher of Summit was summoned and we spent the rest of our evening talking about movies, music, TV, etc. Guns n’ Roses was mentioned during the conversation. I got home fired up, abuzz in excitement and pop culture and possibilities. I made a pot of coffee and stayed up until four a.m. writing into my notebook everything I could think of that I wanted to say about Guns n’ Roses. Over the next couple of weeks, this became Exiled on Main Street #21, which was listed in Best of November 1999 in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and also led some fans of alternative rock my age to (gasp) say that they sometimes too liked metal. Me, I was on a path where I no longer had to wear khakis and a collared shirt to some downtown office and could stay out late at shows any night of the week. A captain of industry? No, more like a lieutenant of leisure.

*Don't yap at me about summer reading. I do my book reading on my phone and the sun's glare makes this difficult.

Tuesday Tuneage
David Lee Roth - "Yankee Rose"
1986

PART ONE: DESPERATION ON A RED LINE

I'm sure I wasn't alone in thinking when David Lee Roth split from Van Halen in the mid-eighties that things were never going to be the same with that band. The goofy theatrics of Roth vs. the rock 'n' roll chops of the other guys was too valuable a dynamic too be recreated or equalled. Even as a teen I knew this.

Buzz started among many hard rock fans when Sammy Hagar was rumored to be the new VH lead singer. I was skeptical, but nobody seemed to agree with me. Sammy Hagar? He was a journeyman, a servicable dude who churned out some decent hard rock earlier in the decade with the likes of "There's Only One Way To Rock" and "Three Lock Box" before veering into meathead territory with "I Can't Drive 55". Seriously, c'mon: The Red Rocker? (I had a college friend who would never call him "Sammy Hagar", it was always "The Red Rocker." Like he knew Hagar well and felt comfortable with the familiar.) Being the only remotely interesting guy in something called HSAS does not lead's one resume in an interview to front the greatest band in mid-eighties America. But the rumor became reality and Hagar was in.

The first Van Hagar album, 5150, had Atlas on the cover, signifying its hope to be a slick mythic product. Rolling Stone (by now the house organ of The Rock Establishment, its publisher Jann Wenner would soon lend a huge hand in codifying all that rock 'n' roll rebellion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) praised it to the heavens because of its tunefulness and slick sound and that Eddie Van Halen's musical abilities obviously outweighed that showy punk Roth's lack of solemnness and how instead Hagar was a nice fit as collaborator. (Rolling Stone's Tim Holmes: On 5150, you taste the clean air of the ozone, see the radiant sunbeams shooting through storm clouds, while the fire burns down below.) (Not mentioned: This album's leadoff single had these lyrics: Only time will tell if we stand the test of time.) Those of us destined to become back-in-my-day VH curmudgeons were already grumbling: "it's just not the same …" while a whole generation of Van Hagar fans was born.

I remember running into a friend on the UND campus in the first half of 1986 and he was telling me how fresh 5150 sounded and how much Hagar added to the band and I was smiling and he thought I was looking forward to hearing the album, but over his shoulder I saw this girl Trish who was petite, hot, and flirty and once made it a point to say stop and say hi to me when she was wearing only a towel wrapped around her as she left her shower … she picked that exact moment to say hi, such are the dangers of stopping by a girls dorm to get some class notes, and somehow my brain stayed engaged on this nonsensical Van Hagar stuff JUST enough to pass on getting a taped copy of 5150. Sure, I could have been a nice guy and taken it, but what if it fell into the wrong hands? What if I then loaned it to somebody in the dorm and it became a soundtrack to our intense post-dinner backgammon games? The horrors.

PART TWO: DAVE TV AVAILABLE IN SPANISH VIA SAP

David Lee Roth's "Yankee Rose" single emerged a few months later in the summer of '86. Roth declared "a REAL STATE of INDEPENDENCE" in case you were wondering what was up behind all the harmless double entendres. The rolling bass into riffing guitars and the ending cries of "bright lights, city lights" toward the end signified that somebody left from the still-remembered, already-long-lamented good ol' Van Halen of two summers prior still gave a damn about rock 'n' roll and making interesting noises and style being character. Rumors that it was a tribute to the Statue of Liberty made the whole thing noble somehow. Roth put together an ace band and recorded a solid album where he appeared on the cover in not-blackface, a native, not a mythic character. Weirder, he also went and cut the full Eat 'Em and Smile album in Spanish. But in the end it all made sense, of course: Because both gringo and amigo editions were PRODUCED BY TED TEMPLEMAN.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Eagles - "Those Shoes"
1979

"I hate the fuckin' Eagles man."

 - The Dude, The Big Lebowski

"Go Eagles! E-A-G-L-E-S! (chuckles loudly)"

 - Mike Tice, December 2005

On a Friday last July, KEXP out of Seattle set about to play every song that was sampled on The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. It was a ridiculously fun project, lasting 12 hours. I heard a few hours while it was on at an accounting client and certain songs would bring interjections from us of "no way!" and "they sampled THIS?" One of the songs played was "Those Shoes" by The Eagles and ever since that afternoon I have tended to go through a phase once a week where I play "Those Shoes" three times in a row and then force myself to do something else in fear that I will keep listening  to it on a loop until bedtime. Strangely, I listen to no other Eagles songs. And this has led me to grab off my bookshelf Headliners: Eagles, a paperback by John Swenson I bought and read back in high school in the early eighties. I'm in a sudden and thankful backlogs of books to read, so I only occasionally peek and page through the book, but I recall it being pretty good as fan bios go. Swenson is a fine writer, and much of the book sneakily doubles as a biography of Joe Walsh and his James Gang*. Walsh is the man who turned The Eagles from a pleasant country-rock outfit into a kinda-hard rock band, and his weirdo persona gave the band a glint of a personality.

So while Walsh didn't have a hand in writing "Those Shoes", his fingerprints/fretboard is all over it. It's got that Midwestern funk thing down like he did in The James Gang  ("Funk #50"?) and more importantly he does croaky guitar like on "Rocky Mountain Way". And let's be honest, Joe should put out an EP of his just playing guitar with that sound. I'd buy three. (One on vinyl, on in mp3, and one for the car I don't have.) But it was a longer-term Eagle who came up with the lyrics, and some of them are doozies.

"You're so smooth and the world's so rough" is lyrical gold, it's like a PG-rated Gene Simmons line. "They give you tablets of love" - is this a pill? And I think "handy with a shovel" means cocaine? I'm drug naive unless it involves antihistamines, caffeine, or pour-your-own depressants. "Jerkoffs in their fancy cars" is a universal lyric … HELL YEAH! "You can't believe your reviews" is probably an aside about the Eagles and rock critics. ("With nary a hint of responsibility in their voices, they sing of Los Angeles' decadent culture, and in the end personify the smugly detached professionalism of much of that city's music." - John Milward, The Rolling Stone Record Guide, first red edition.) Put Cameron Crowe on retainer!

That "Those Shoes" was used heavily in The Beastie Boys' "High Plains Drifter" on Paul's Boutique is huge, but that Beasties ditty pales in comparison to Van Halen's earlier Eastwood-lifting "Hang 'Em High" so I say HAIL CALIFORNIA HARD ROCK/KINDA-HARD-ROCK-WHEN-IT-INCLUDES-JOE-WALSH. DO NOT LOOK BACK. THE EIGHTIES AND BEYOND ARE YOURS. SEE YOU AT US FESTIVAL 3.

*I gotta read this book again cover-to-cover and maybe I'll report back on it here. (Or in typical fashion, I'll instead go crack open Swenson's Headliners: The Who and forget to write about the Eagles book.) A couple of things I do need to bring up though: 1) Swenson signs off with a fan-friendly: "Altogether it seems like the 80s will hear quite a lot from the Eagles", but the book instead appropriately reads as a nice short biography of The Eagles if you don't care about any of their comebacks. 2) In classic fan bio form, the book contains uncaptioned photos. Here's one of Glenn Frey and John Belushi, who is wearing a Minnesota Vikings windbreaker. Why is Chicago guy Belushi wearing a Vikings jacket? Was it the drugs? Did he steal it from Al Franken?

Tuesday Tuneage
Fastway - "Say What You Will"
1983

Zeppish riff predicts The White Stripes, kinda
vocalist lays up short of Stephen Pearcy, surely
not as mysterious as Zebra
not as stone-cold cool as PJ Harvey
not hooks like Billy Squier
not unintentionally funny like Kingdom Come
(or Coverdale/Page for that matter)
maybe shoulda been produced by
recorded by Steve Albini
like Page and Plant?

Tuesday Tuneage
Burton Cummings - "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"
1976

A couple of years ago I received this email:

Hello, a few of my friends and I are huge Blackhawks fans and we stumbled upon this article you wrote back in 2006 on Jonathan Toews: There's been some debate as to whether it's a parody or not. Any clarification you can give would be great! Thanks!

I would have loved to have responded in deadpan with: "Oh yes, it's true." But I was on vacation and only had my phone to type on and didn't have the energy to mess around with these folks. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Wheatfield Soul Line …") So I revealed the truth: I am a huge University of North Dakota hockey fan who at the time was frequently spinning The Best Of The Guess Who on my turntable and wrote the mashup that took place in my writing mind. While I've written lesser essays with better source material, I would never be quick to dismiss The Guess Who. In 2008, I was deejaying at an art gallery and while spinning "Share The Land", a rather attractive fifty-something wanted to hire me to deejay a party of hers. "Um," I said, "I just do this is a hobby." She looked puzzled. Me, I was probably in a hurry to play Brownsville Station's "Smokin' In The Boys Room". It was a political event, after all.

Tuesday Tuneage
UFO - "Lights Out"
1977

THERE ARE FIVE STAGES TO A PROJECT:
A) Excitement and Euphoria
B) Disenchantment
C) The Search for the Guilty
D) Punishment of the Innocent
E) Distinction for the Uninvolved
 - Aubrey Powell

As a young lover of vinyl albums and their packaging, I was incredibly naive about how album artwork was conceived. If I had a working theory, it was probably thought that each record company had an arts department, and a person or people in that department would deliver artwork after conferring with the recording band or artist. But as a big teenage Pink Floyd fan and a compulsive reader of liner notes, I would always see "Sleeve Design By Hipgnosis" noted on the Floyd LPs. I conjectured that there must be some cool company in the UK somewhere that specialized in trippy Floyd LP art. Later, I would see the Hipgnosis acknowledgement on other bands albums and figured Hipgnosis was some big design company that specialized in album art. I was only half right in my guess.

Last winter, I bought For The Love Of Vinyl: The Album Art Of Hipgnosis by Hipgnosis founders/main collaborators Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell. Every Wednesday morning for a stretch of weeks this past spring, I would drink coffee and flip through the book for thirty minutes or so and enjoy the ride. This coffee table book is crammed with album art - front covers, back covers, liner sleeves, posters, outtakes, rough takes - and Storm and Aubrey each provide a few paragraphs telling the story of how they came up with the design. You are in the hands of a couple of highly entertaining guys, they yukk it up through the narratives and sometimes draw a blank with a "that's all I remember, hopefully (the other guy) can provide more detail" confession, and then The Other Guy always does deliver the goods.

I can't do their storytelling justice, but a certain singer is referred to as "Olivia Neutron Bomb" and the tale where Storm jokingly pre-caller-ID answers the phone as Groucho Marx to a quick-to-anger Peter Grant - Led Zeppelin’s notoriously feared and violent manager - has to be in any Hipgnosis biopic. (I may write its script on spec!)

Paging through this book, I fell in love with their approach to their craft. While the Hipgnois album covers are hip, winking, cool; the way they put together album art was the DIY ethic at its best:  Two (later three) guys working in a small London studio. Stock photography stills for background. Get a car, round up some friends to be the models, head to the countryside or an old house for a shoot. And this was all done pre-Photoshop; one of the guys refers to Hipgnosis as "masters of scissors and glue", using montages to great effect.

While Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon is their best-known work, it isn’t “typical” Hipgnosis. Floyd's Wish You Were Here is more representative of their aesthetic. A few more examples:

- The effect for Peter Gabriel’s “melt” album cover was obtained by taking a Polaroid and then applying a blunt pencil to it while it developed. The book is full with anecdotes like this: A make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach unleashed for maximum effect.

- The Strawbs' Deadlines album. Yes they actually filled a phone booth with water and put a (non-stunt man, yikes) guy in a suit in it upside down. (Then there's the inside sleeve, ha!)

- Compare AC/DC’s original Australian cover for Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap to what Hipgnosis came up with for the international version. Storm came up with the design in London, Aubrey was reached by phone in Los Angeles on a different assignment and shot a still of a no-tell motel in LA for a background, then shot models back in London to be the characters in the photo. And I just noticed - there's a dog on the cover! (Aubrey deadpans: "We didn't meet the band and never heard from them again.")

- The UFO Lights Out album. Some guy wearing a jumpsuit, he’s down by where the power works are. But wait: The jumpsuit is zippered down uncomfortably low. And in the background is another person - whether it’s guy or gal isn’t easily identifiable - slipping on his/her jumpsuit. Did they trip out London’s power supply just to have a rendezvous? Or did the hanky panky occur after they fixed a power outage? During? These are the types of stories that form in your mind while gazing upon Hipgnois album covers.

I felt genuinely a bit down when I got to the end of this book, that there were no more pages to flip through and study. Like Rock Dreams and Stairway To Hell, it will likely become one that I occasionally grab to page through, to reference, to allow me to daydream/write/give a damn. As Adrian Shaughnessy writes in the opening commentary, Hipgnosis's work "speaks to people who normally don't care too much about visual expression, in other words ordinary people."

Tuesday Tuneage
Funkadelic - "Friday Night, August 14th"
1970

I turned fifty last week and it was the best sort of birthday. Not only did I not work AT ALL (though working wouldn't have been completely horrible - I'm self-employed and mostly work from home - but I am still in the mindset from having an office job many many years ago where working on your birthday meant spending it with the annoyances/semblances of human beings that are coworkers …), my day consisted of: 1) Biking over to Our Kitchen for a Denver sandwich (their Denver = solid) and hash browns, 2) Biking to Lake Street Spirits for some Summit Saga, 3) Coffee at home with the Common Man Progrum and backgammon on my iPhone, 4) BIGGEST DEAL: Took the bus to Target Field to watch the Twins. Awesome seat (ticket provided by my Dad, still taking care of me when I'm a senior!), Premium stand close by, and fireworks after the game. Twins lost, but I was emotionally prepared for that with Corey Kluber on the opposing nine's mound.

With fifty being a Landmark Birthday, I keep thinking I'm supposed to write something profound, something poignant, something BIG about being around a half-century. I don't have much to say, but I can proudly offer this on Me Being Fifty:

No wife, no kids, no house, no car, no boss, no Facebook account. To quote some of the best lines in Watchmen: "What's happened to The American Dream?" "It came true, you're lookin' at it."

Tuesday Tuneage
Little Anthony & The Imperials - "Hurt So Bad"
1965

Towards the end of many a calendar year over the past twenty, I have said to myself: "Next year is the one I start listening to a lot of soul music" and every time I'd chump out and end up listening to BTO, ELO, BOC, etc. with a vague promise to "get into soul when the next calendar year starts." (Why it has to be a January 1st start I think is because soul artists have recorded so many classic Christmas songs that the pump would be primed in December, unless Greg Lake's "I Believe In Father Christmas" got me sidetracked …) But signing up for Apple Music last month has allowed me to listen to a whole slew of classic soul artists that in the past I was too cheap/white/lazy to delve into before. So hell yeah, 2015: A Second Half of a Year of Soul.

"Hurt So Bad" isn't the tough type of soul that I generally prefer, but it's haunted me since I was a tyke and Mom would take me with her when she ran errands in her Ford. She would play Fargo's WDAY-AM and "Hurt So Bad" was in regular rotation along with the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden" and "Love The One You're With" (the lyrical content of that one confused the six-year old me … free love wha?) and "Those Were The Days". Tracking this song over and over and over again on Apple Music has been a blast. Now I see why little-kid me had such a weird fascination and jitters over this song: The "like needles and pins" line is incisive, masterful (don't play with sharp objects, Billy) while the production of Teddy Randazzo - the sharp sound, the almost-subversive "Hurt! Hurt so bad!" of the background singers -  elevates the tune out of pathos.

And how bad did Linda "The Butcher" Ronstadt carve up this one? After listening to Little Anthony & The Imperials, her version is schmaltz, a mailed-in affair, an afterthought. Be careful which oldies station you listen to, folks.

Tuesday Tuneage
Marah - "Pizzeria"
2004

Glenwood Springs (CO) Post Independent - June 23rd, 2015:

Anson Lemmer had no way of knowing that on his last delivery order of the night of June 15 for Uncle Pizza in Glenwood, he would perform CPR and help with a potentially life-saving rescue. Lemmer, 19, of Denver is staying in Glenwood with his parents to work over the summer. Only two days after starting with Uncle Pizza, this incident occurred.

“This was my very last order of the night. I expected to just run right out there and back,” Lemmer said. Instead, when he arrived at the address on Valley View Road with a hot pizza, he saw a man turning blue outside of the house. Two other people were with the man — one attempting CPR and one on the phone calling it in. “When I pulled up there, I knew something was wrong, and I had to act. They asked me right away if I knew CPR,” Lemmer said. “I jumped in right away to do those chest compressions.” 

Trained in CPR a year ago, Lemmer didn’t think twice about acting. He said it was like a fight-or-flight choice, and he had to fight. A situation like that is tense with a lot of variables, he said. “It’s important to not get caught up in the bystander effect,” Lemmer said. “I felt a couple of ribs break. He’s going to wake up with sore ribs.”

It all happened in 10 to 15 minutes, he said, when EMTs from the Glenwood Fire Department showed up to take over. Lemmer said they shook his hand and thanked him. “He started to breathe ... very wheezy. Not coherent yet,” Lemmer said. “I backed off.”

Fire Chief Gary Tillotson confirmed that his EMTs responded to an incident on the 15th of a CPR in progress. The man was taken to Valley View Hospital, but the man’s name and further details were not available.

His manager thought he had gotten lost, wondering what had taken so long. Soon after, he called his parents. “I called my parents and said this has been the craziest pizza delivery ever. I left a pizza boy and came back a pizza man,” Lemmer said. “They were proud of me. Totally unexpected thing.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Chris Norman and Suzi Quatro - "Stumblin' In"
1979

You knew Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, bored with writing all those rah-rah teenybopper songs for Suzi Quatro, The Sweet, and assorted never-broke-in-the-US glam rockers like Mud and Smokie of course had a crossover country shuffle up their sleeves, just waiting for that moment when it could make a major dent on the charts. Pair Quatro - known mostly to America from post-shark Happy Days episodes but with no US hits to her name - with the vaguely Rod Stewartish-sounding (with Rod's brand near its all-time post-sellout high) Chris Norman and BOOM! The charming "Stumblin' In" went to Number Four on the US Top 40 in 1979. Not that you'll hear it on the condensed oldies playlist that KOOL 108 now uses, but that's what SiriusXM's Seventies on 7 channel is for.

So we can spend the rest of the day gazing at Quatro in her leather and contemplating that she had an album titled Rock Hard, but one nagging question: Who the hell is this Chris Norman? A few stabs at his identity:

- He's Greg Norman's brother.
- He's AWA wrestler Norman Christopher.
- He's a Chapman/Chinn creation, who they later renamed "Nick Gilder." (Not "Bryan Adams" as the urban legend claims.)
- He was one of those guys in Mott the Hoople that wasn't Ian Hunter and that didn't later join Bad Company.
- He's the guy who played Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver.
- He's the cousin of Paul Norman, who once yelled "jump!" at a guy leaning out of a fourth-floor window on the University of North Dakota campus in the fall of 1983. I cracked up, so any time we saw each on campus we would yell "jump!" at each other. A few months later, Van Halen released "Jump" as their leadoff single from 1984. Back in school for the second semester, first time I saw Norman, he grabbed me, grinned, and asked: "Heard that Van Halen song??"
- He's that guy who turned down "Because The Night" so Bruce Springsteen turned and offered it to Patti Smith.
- "Chris Norman" is a nickname for Suzi Quatro's bangs.

And more important question regarding Chris Norman: Should we ever trust a man with two first names?

Tuesday Tuneage
Public Enemy - "Don't Believe The Hype"
1988

Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back came out in 1988 and during my first listens to it in 1989, I knew it was unique and great and a landmark. Sonically and lyrically revolutionary, and funny, the album contains unforgettable mottos that I've appropriated over the years, trying to slip them into conversations, tweets, and asides: Bring the noise, How low can you go?, Don't believe the hype, Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?, No more music by the suckers.

Once at work back in the late eighties, my pal and fellow writer Janell - she's the one who bought me the first notebook that I seriously scribbled through in the nineties - had bought a mini tape recorder to assist her in her writing and pulled it on me in the break room, asking me to say something. I immediately said: "No more music by the suckers" and of course was overly gleeful when she played it back to quizzical looks all around. Nobody in that room knew what I was talking about, of course. Then again, I barely did.

My fave one lately is when I saw the headline of the Star Tribune on June 27, 2015 - RIGHT TO MARRY FOR ALL - and unleashed a "Yeahhhhh boy!!!" that my neighbors likely heard.

As for "Don't Believe The Hype": How many times have I brought that slogan out in the past quarter-century-plus? For any number of overrated movies (Forrest Gump), TV shows (Six Feet Under), bands (where do I start? I'll use Ben Folds Five as a placeholder …), sports teams (so many Gophers hockey teams), boozes (Johnnie Walker Black), food (Krispy Kreme, Popeye's chicken - at least the location four blocks north of my place), the Aeron chair (good way to further mess up an already-messed up back), any big-name designer promoted hard by Target, literary novels (Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue) … etc. etc.

All those cheap shots, good thing I live alone. Plus all those cheap shots divert from the basic core of this wacky little post: In 2015 as in any other year since I bought it, when I track It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back it still feels like I'm listening to some mind-blowing music from the future. For reasons too lengthy to get into here, I lost track of hip-hop in the early nineties. Time to play some catch up, starting with Public Enemy.

And does Hot 102.5 FM have a request line?

Tuesday Tuneage
Kevn Kinney - "Heard The Laughter Ending"
1990

7th Street Entry, fall 1990. Went to check out Drivin' N' Cryin', a blast - both ears-wise and mood-wise - of a night that ended with them doing the Ramones with Bob Stinson guesting on guitar, it starts with a polite-as-heck guy my age wearing a nice sweater asking me if I had heard the band before. I said no, I showed up on a recommendation of a friend. He tells me to check out the lead singer Kevn Kinney's solo album. That it's mostly acoustic, produced by Peter Buck, outstanding. That he's called Cities FM to request that they add Kinney to their playlist.

I soon bought Drivin' N' Cryin's Mystery Road, a solid and at times spectacular album. Around the same time I also got the Kinney album, MacDougal Blues and was stunned. This was the type of folk music I could rally around. I hyped it incessantly to friends, nobody seemed to care though my pal the receptionist at the office I work at was intrigued when I played a bit of a song over the phone to her.

It's no secret that I'm not a lyrics guy, but Kinney's "Heard The Laughter Ending" is brilliant words-wise. A snapshot of an also-ran of a comedian working away on the road because it's all he knows to do, dreaming of getting home to an imaginary plush mansion far, far away from where he grew up. He plays small rooms, isn't asked to do a residency or come back any time soon. He somehow plays a bigger room, he bombs, he's quickly forgotten. One thinks of the episode of Louie that features Doug Stanhope. A mirror is mentioned twice, and that imagery takes you to the final scene of Raging Bull. The comedian in this tune does finally get to go home, we're not sure if it's a victory or a loss.

Tuesday Tuneage
Los Pets - "Hello I Love You"
circa mid-sixties

The Doors were for the most part dorks, let's admit. Their shorter songs were inevitably their better ones, that way the bands' hackneyed sound and Jim Morrison's pretensions were left fewer chances to be exposed. Francis Ford Coppola found great use of "The End" in Apocalypse Now and while the likes of "People Are Strange" do strike a certain chord in the I'm-weird/I'm-unwanted/I'm-so-alone category, it was soon outclassed by the likes of "Do You Know How It Feels" by The Flying Burrito Brothers. You don't hear many great covers of Doors songs either. What do you think of when you hear "Doors cover"? That you've wandered into what looks to be a cool dive bar for an Old Style and a shot of bar whiskey, but there's some lame hippie band meandering through a lounge-music-with-bad-poetry bore. (Maybe Blood, Sweat & Tears should have covered "Touch Me"? That mighta worked.)

So. We are left with this tune by Los Pets and it's the one great cover of a Doors song, and it's amazing. This run through "Hello I Love You" is more punk than most anything to come down the pipe from the UK or US the following decade(s), better trash than any number of overhyped tracks you've heard over the years. Fuzz-guitar greatness replaces the chintzy Manzarek keyboards, and it's vocals in left ear, that guitar in right. It stands as a certain singular madness of garage rock genius. The liner notes to Mexican Rock and Roll Rumble and Psych-Out South Of The Border succinctly/correctly state: "The Pets were actually from Venezuela and the Doors should've sounded like this in Hell!"