Tuesday Tuneage
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - "F*ckin' Up"
1990

Intuit has been pushing hard to get accountants off of Quickbooks Desktop and into Quickbooks Online, switching Desktop to a spendy subscription model over the summer and then ending subscription sales on September 30th. But what are you getting with Quickbooks Online?
 
First of all the pros. With Quickbooks Online (QBO), you can share a Quickbooks data file with your client. But with all Intuit products any improvement over what preceded it comes with downsides*. Your client will have access to the data file in the cloud and we all know what clients love to do when left to their own devices: Download bank transactions and import them into Quickbooks. In my twenty-five years of bookkeeping I’ve never seen the importing of transactions from a bank work smoothly. Usually it imports the vendor name IN ALL CAPS followed by bunch of random transaction/confirmation numbers. Worse, clients tend to click some wrong button (or just as likely, Intuit fucks this up) and the transactions get imported twice. So you spend time deleting all the duplicate transactions, which takes more time on QBO than it does on Quickbooks Desktop (more on this later.) And your client may think they can take a stab at reconciling their own statements (after all the commercials used to say that “if you can balance a checkbook, you can use Quickbooks”) and that invariably won’t go well. Because, well, your clients probably didn’t spend much time balancing a checkbook — that’s why they hired you, right?

So that’s the caveat-laden pro, what are the cons? The data entry feature will have you bogged down in no time. In desktop, you type in the transaction details, then hit “enter” on the keyboard with your thumb, and you’re automatically in the next transaction. You get in a rhythm and you start flying through data entry. In QBO, you have to move your mouse and click on the enter button at the bottom of the screen to record the transaction. So instead of doing everything pronto with the keyboard, you have to involve your eyes and the mouse as well. Deleting transactions is a three-step procedure involving a hidden drop-down menu, rather than a quick shortcut keystroke like in Desktop. Then there’s the general view of the software interface. In Desktop, you have your customer, vendor, and banking sections laid out clearly and you can add icon shortcuts for your frequently-used tasks. In QBO, the transactions menus are assembled haphazardly in some stew of nonsense. Entering checks and credit card expenses are in one section, bank deposits are in another. For some reason, reconciliation and chart of accounts are lumped in another section altogether. The reports section is overly complicated and good luck trying to figure out how to assemble a simple transaction detail. Thankfully, the Find function works quite well (hey another pro!) and has many numerous, easy-to-use filters to help you narrow your search. This will come in handy as working in QBO will probably result in errors, especially if your client starts poking around in it.

So Quickbooks Online: all in all, two stars as a bookkeeping software — and that may be too kind as a client once called it a scam — and one star compared to Desktop, which is solid until it isn’t. You long-timers out there know what I mean.

*In the first draft of this piece, I typed “downfalls.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Motörhead - "Eat the Rich"
1987

As research for my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? I dug into the April/May 2024 issue of Forbes, which has a specific focus on billionaires. My goodness. I wrote down four words: Late Stage Capitalism Porn.

Lessee, it starts out with some Steve Forbes opinion pieces. He fully supports Israel’s invasion of Gaza and claims that they have made extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties. He writes that the US should fully support Israel, which reminds me of a news story I read last winter that read like an Onion piece and said something like “US advises Israel to use smaller bombs to minimize civilian casualties.” His other editorial said the US should stop investing in renewable energies and instead invest in new businesses that create jobs. Uh Steve-O: renewable businesses are new businesses, maybe go back to that flat tax long con.

What else is in there early on? A list of upscale eateries that are all in New York City. (I’ll stick with Monk’s Diner.) We soon learn that billionaires are nicknamed “three commas,” then things lead into the main act as the prose coughs this up: “What a year it’s been for the planet’s billionaires, whose fortunes continue to swell as global stock markets shrug off war, political unrest, and lingering inflation. There are now more billionaires than ever.”

There is the list of the fourteen men (yes, they’re all men) who are worth $100 billion. We learn that “The combined net worth of the planet’s billlionaires has skyrocketed by 545% over the past two decades, to $14.2 trillion — quadruple the 111% rise in world GDP.” (The graph that accompanies this is outstanding. I mean, seriously nice work whether you think that unreal accumulation of wealth is good or bad.) I found out that Warren Buffett (number six) got into a beef last year with Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam over the price of Pilot truck stops. WTF? And oh hey: the blurb on Bill Gates (number seven) references Cheap Trick with a mention of “stiff competition.”

But enough about the established big shots. Billionaire newcomers include Magic Johnson ($1.2 billion), who was Sid Hartman’s guy before he was your guy, and TV’s Dick Wolf, who for some reason hasn’t plugged his $1.2 billion into a 24/7 streaming Law & Order channel (he blew his chance to put Homicide: Life on the Street episodes on the air with Peacock beating him to it.) Then there’s Taylor Swift ($1.1 billion), who “became the first billionaire musician based soley on songs and performances.” In your face, McCartney!*

There’s a page titled “Warbucks” that leads off with “Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has wrought death and destruction upon untold millions of people. Yet it’s been a boon, at least financially, for several members of the World’s Billionaires list.” War, amirite? Here we have eight men, three of who are war-profiteering from shipping Russian oil and sending Russia guns. There’s one Turkish gent who sent Ukraine a model of military drone so popular, troops wrote a folk song about it. If there’s one Ukranian folk song I would actually listen to, that one is likely it.

At the end there’s a quite good article skeptical of crypto currencies and their ilk that has a compelling page-long graphic and ends with the warning: “Buyer beware. The lunatics are running the crypto asylum.” Huh, actual investigative reporting and a takedown of the dudebros behind the various scams that are crypto. Bravo, even if it is buried in the back of the issue.

Finally, here’s why I love printed magazines. There’s an Aristotle quote on the spine. It reads: “Inferiors agitate that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.” I may not make much money, but Forbes gets me.

*A separate small feature shows that Gibson is releasing a version of non-billionaire Jimmy Page’s 1969 double-necked guitar with a mere $50,000 price tag.

Tuesday Tuneage
Krokus - “Long Stick Goes Boom”
1982

Along with Motörhead and Aerosmith, Krokus also had a song titled “Eat the Rich*”, but this one treads a more familiar path. The beat, the riffs, the vocals, the guitar simulating Pete Townshend’s Who’s Next synthesizer riffs ala “For Those About To Rock”: It’s a state of the art AC/DC knockoff. Not to mention the title is a har har phallic metaphor, just like the masters. This anticipates AC/DC-run-through-the-Xerox from the likes of Cinderella and Dirty Looks just a few years later … but I’ve the survived the eighties one time already.

*For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. - Luke 18:25

Tuesday Tuneage
Terry Reid - “Rich Kid Blues”
1969

In my twenties I worked for a general contractor and one of the projects the company worked on was building out a new space in downtown Minneapolis for Smith Barney. They were famous in the early eighties for having TV commercials where spokesman John Houseman would eloquently state: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” When in a meeting, an always-aim-above coworker in an aside said: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They inherit it.”

I always think of that quote when Dean Phillips comes to mind.

Tuesday Tuneage
Houston Oilers Fight Song
late 1970s

During an Eagles vs. 49ers game in December, Fox caught a member of the San Francisco staff obviously stuffing a large plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth. Which made me wonder: where have all the chew fiends gone? There was a time when you couldn’t escape the stuff. Every big league ball player used it: Rod Carew flirted with batting .400 while having a chaw in his mouth the size of a small tangerine. There was usually some dude in your circle of friends who had a worn circle on a back pocket of his jeans signaling that he indulged. Invariably, someone would be encouraging you to try Skoal Bandits if you wanted to get your feet wet. Hell, they used to advertise the stuff on television. Who can forget the classic Copenhagen/Skoal/Happy Days “a pinch is all it takes” commercials where you could choose your own adventure? The best chewing tobacco commercial featured maybe the best running back in football, but I’m getting ahead of myself …

The Houston Oilers were one of the more enjoyable NFL teams of the late seventies. Great uniforms, a character of a coach in ten-gallon-hat-wearing Bum Phillips, a devastating running back in the great Earl Campbell, irrepressible kick returner Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, and a quarterback who was known to wear a flak jacket to protect his injured ribs in Dan Pastorini. But they couldn’t get past great Pittsburgh Steelers teams in two straight AFC Championship Games, leading to the great Phillips quote: “Last year we knocked on the door. This year we beat on it. Next year we're going to kick the son of a bitch in!”

Earl Campbell was one of the all-time great runners, he’d just as soon run over you instead of flashing his breakaway speed. He appeared in a great Skoal commercial that finished with him saying “Skoal, brother” to us as he walked off with a beauty on the beach.

And the Oilers had a fight song! It featured lyrics such as:

We’ve got the offense
We’ve got the defense
We give the other team no hope

We're the Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers number one

It also had an incessantly catchy melody. My brother and I spent too much time one afternoon reciting this fight song after hearing it. Thing is, a week or two later a Miami Dolphins game was on NBC and they were using the exact same song with “Miami Dolphins” being used in the lyrics for the team name. Weird, and somehow further cemented the legend of The Houston Oilers Fight Song in my mind.

So circa 1992, I was helping my cousin and his wife move their belongings out of their apartment and into a moving truck. His friend Steve and I got into a rhythm of putting boxes onto a cart and shuttling it on an elevator and down to the parking lot. Steve is a total goofball, the best. He started talking about the Houston Oilers of the late seventies and asked me if I remembered their fight song. Ummm, yeah! He suggested we sing it, so we started in but after a bit he stopped me. “You’re going down in pitch for the ‘Houston Oilers number one’ but you’re supposed to go up, like this …” So we started over and I got it right. We sang the song for the slow ride down the four floors. The elevator and its shaft didn’t have much for insulation. The doors opened on first floor and there was a dad and his young daughter staring at us in disbelief and probably some suspicion. We said hi and continued on with our work.

Tuesday Tuneage
Tygers of Pan Tang - “Tyger Bay”
1981

Part One: Michael Moorcock As Secret Influence in Seventies and Eighties Metal

“Let’s go to Down in the Valley,” somebody said. Cool, some random weeknight fall of ‘88 with my three roommates. I hit the used racks, found omigod Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in great shape, cover beat up but who cares if the vinyl is nice? I spotted a used Tygers of Pan Tang album while walking to the register, sitting right there in the front of a rack. Tygers of Pan Tang … had never heard them, just knew that my new faves Metallica raved about them in magazines I flipped through at Shinder’s and the library. But I didn’t pull the trigger on buying it, likely I didn’t have much money in my checking account, maybe I didn’t want to risk it, maybe I was too cheap to pay the eight-dollar price. And maybe I wanted to quit while I was ahead — how often do you find an all-time great Dylan LP in the used racks?

Over the years, Spellbound became a white whale, especially when I scored the two-disc New Wave of British Heavy Metal 1979 compilation about fifteen years ago and it featured the Tygers’ “Killers” on it. And I didn’t want the album on CD (yawn), I wanted it on vinyl like that beauty I saw in the store years ago. Occasional trips through the used racks around town didn’t materialize in a find. Then up stepped the great equalizer, eBay. Spellbound was almost always available on their site, but it usually went for twenty bucks or more and then usually another fifteen bucks or so for shipping because the seller tended to be in the UK. But last fall a copy popped up from an American seller, in Very Good (VG) condition for fifteen bucks and nobody had yet bid on it. I contemplated making a lower offer but ending up winning it for that price. And no other bidders, suckers! Were they scared off by the VG grading of the vinyl, that it wasn’t Very Good Plus or Near Mint? I’ve had good luck with VG albums on eBay, they usually have some surface marks but play quite well. This LP also had a sticker on the cover, who cares I just want something that sounded good via my eighties dorm room stereo system of Audio-Technica turntable, Technics receiver, and ancient JBL speakers. VG = Virtual Gold.

So what about the music? As Chuck Eddy wrote on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal: “(The artists) had Learned Lessons From Punk: Gone were the bloated excesses of yesteryear’s dinosaurs; in their place were shorter, faster, hookier, angrier songs.” So it goes with the Tygers. The riffs are played at breakneck speed with fast fast fast solos thrown in. The singer isn’t obnoxious — many times a crucial metal differential. And cooly, titles like “Gangland,” “Minotaur,” “Blackjack,” and “Tyger Bay” all point to some tough Thin Lizzy-like street-smart universe*.

Part Two: I Shun Microeconomics Unless It Favors Me

So Spellbound ended up being $20.63 total after shipping and sales tax. (An eBay vendor charging sales tax? Go figure.) How does this compare to what I would have paid thirty-five years ago? Back in ‘88, the album was $8.00 and I think the sales tax then was about five percent. I took a “how much is a 1988 dollar worth today” calculator I found online — a dollar then is $2.54 now — and I came up with this:

Eight dollars plus sales tax is: $8.00 x 1.05% = $8.40. And then taking that sales price and multiplying it by how much a 1988 dollar is worth in 2023 is: $8.40 x 2.54 = $21.34.

So Spellbound would have cost me $21.34 in 1988 and I “won” by playing the long game and paying $20.63 in 2023. I saved 71 cents hoo-boy but missed out on thirty-five years of Tygers of Pan Tang fandom while also annoying folks with my raves about the band. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “In the long run we’re all dead.”

*Here’s the part where I admit to failing at describing music, which is why I’m moving on to write about accounting, business, and economics in my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? (Not to be confused with a rumored under-the-counter zine allegedly titled Bookkeeper or Bookmaker? It will have features such as “Bill T’s Guide to T-Bills,” “What Your Chart of Accounts Says About Your Love Life,” and “Shutout? NHL Teams May Found the Key to Not Having to 1099 Emergency Backup Goalies.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Kansas - "Everybody's My Friend"
1983

New dictionary entry for 2024: "Socializing creep":

1) I now say “hi” and exchange the smallest of talk with 3-4 people at the gym, I have succumb to socializing creep. 2) If this evolves into full-blown chatting, I will have become a socializing creep. 3) The latest name for my imaginary punk-metal band is Socializing Creep.

Tuesday Tuneage
Izzy Stradlin & the Ju Ju Hounds - "Take a Look at the Guy"
1992

In December 1987 Ron Wood was at Odegaard Books in Minneapolis signing copies of his memoir Ron Wood by Ron Wood: The Works. I had been living with my parents in Minnetonka post-college for a few months, drove into the city, bought Wood’s book, and stood in line. Of course, the wait was long. I mostly people-watched and listened to the college kids behind me gossip and joke around. Being out of school just months myself, I felt an affinity for these guys and their sense of humor. At some point, an older guy (he may have been in his mid-to-late-thirties) approached the people in front of me and asked: What are you all in line for? “Ron Wood is signing autographs.” Who is that? “He’s in the Rolling Stones.” Who are they? “Uh, they’re a rock band.” The guy nodded, then went on his way. I related this interaction to the guys behind me, we all shook our heads and chuckled, I ended up shooting the breeze with them a bit.

Soon one of Wood’s people announced to the crowd that he would only be signing for fifteen more minutes and after that anybody still in line would be out of luck. I was close enough to the signing table where I could tell I would get in under the wire, Ron was signing and signing and not chatting. A guy approached me and said he was at the back of the line and asked if I could get his acoustic guitar signed. Sure, I said. When I approached Wood, I asked if he could sign my book to “Wyman”, explaining it was my nickname. He glanced at me with a wry smile, then said “I’ll sign my nickname as well,” and signed “Woodman” and drew a little cartoon of himself. Then I asked if he’d sign my friend’s guitar as well. Sure, he said.

I handed the guitar back to its grateful owner. I asked him whether he knew if the Uptown Bar across the street charged cover charge on weeknights. “You’re old enough for bars?” he asked. (A common question back then, I looked like I was sixteen for many years.) He explained he played bass in The Widgets, that they would be playing at a club downtown on Friday, and could put me on the guest list and buy me a beer as thanks for the guitar signature. I gave him my name and headed home.

The club was Graffiti’s, it was in a loft space above Schiek’s, which back then was a fine dining establishment and not yet a gentleman’s club. Being an up-north kid used to bars and not rock clubs, this place was a revelation. Tiny, like it was somebody’s garage or basement. Wow, this is cool, I thought. The bouncer had the guest list written down in a spiral-bound notebook and boom there was my name. Wow, this is cool, I thought. I ordered a Special Export and grabbed a stool at a table. The Urban Guerilla* opened, my new friend bought me a beer and chatted a bit. Soon after, The Widgets played. Wow, this is cool, I thought, I should get out like this more often.

Sometime five or six years later at closing time after watching a band at the Uptown Bar, I was leaving my place up by the stage when I spotted the Widgets dude sitting on top of a booth back. I walked up to him and said: “You get any Ron Wood autographs lately?” Figuring there was maybe a fifty percent chance he remembered me, I was ready to keep walking. He recognized me and immediately started chatting away, introducing me to his friend and told our shared story. He gave me a business card, which I’m pretty sure mentioned some aspect of the local music scene. A record label? Another band? Unfortunately that slips me. But I still have that card somewhere, can’t wait to to stumble across it tucked away in a box of nostalgia or in some book I bought thirty years ago. If I were smart, I’d have used it as a bookmark in my Ron Wood memoir.

*There was a Minneapolis band called The Urban Guerillas who I had seen open at a (natch) notorious Replacements show in East Grand For*ks in ‘84. But on this night it was just one of them playing a guitar and singing, hence the singular moniker.

Tuesday Tuneage

Bobby Charles - "Grow Too Old"

1972

 

So one night I was having my Sleepytime Extra tea, half bagel snack, and watching Two and a Half Men  before heading off to bed. And one of my teenage actress crushes was the guest star. And I couldn’t remember her name. Brook? Brooks? A brook? A creek? Fukkit Dawson’s Creek? Katie Holmes?? Poor Katie was dropped from the Christopher Nolan Batman franchise, thanks Tom Cruise … Nicole Kidman on a late night talk show after their divorce saying the best thing was that she no longer had to wear flats ha ha. BUT THIS WASN’T KATIE HOLMES. She’s years younger than me and the teenage crush on TV was my age. And I couldn’t place her name. I recalled Calvin Klein commercials, her strategically placed hair in The Blue Lagoon, her going to Princeton, Suddenly Susan, her as the tough working-poor mom on The Middle … Oh yeah her appearing on Letterman and the girls I knew were mad because he was nice to her. But who was this gal on my TV screen? So I leaned on my crutch — IMDB — and typed in “Blue Lagoon” and oh sh*t yeah: BROOKE SHIELDS.

Did I mention the Calvin Klein ads? They were all the talk for a spell in ninth grade study hall. Which makes the Run-DMC diss a few years later in the mid-eighties all the more significant: “Your Calvin Klein’s no friend of mine, don’t want nobody’s name on my behind.” During this era, a friend of ours from the University of North Dakota dorm carried a 4.0 GPA in chemistry. (He went to the bar with us exactly once, needless to say my grades weren’t as stellar.) He went on to graduate school at Princeton. Back at UND we received a postcard. He said that one night he was leaving the chem lab and a passionate Brooke jumped him. Good thing, he wrote, that he was wearing his tearaway jersey and escaped. (An all-time great …)

And despite remembering so many random things from my youth, I forgot Brooke Shields’ name. Aging is bad enough with chronic pains triggering physical therapy appointments, two different blood pressure meds, forgetting the names of friends from my school days, prescription orthotics, hands not always working when I’m trying to do something as simple as holding a spatula, knees that don’t always do well on stairs, changing the sports app on my phone because the old one started using a smaller font, etc., etc. … but this one trip-up got to me. Future nights will bring more disappointments and maybe some small triumphs, yet I am certain something ominous happened that night.

Tuesday Tuneage
Mike Post - Theme from The Rockford Files
1974

In the first summer of my self-employment, NBC would show an hour of SCTV at midnight, after the 11 p.m. showing of The Rockford Files on WGN. It didn’t get any better in that summer of 2000 when there wasn’t much to do the next day — I’d just sip whiskey in my little apartment on Emerson Avenue and watch those two hours of great TV and smile and that is how these great journeys get started.

This was when I was hepped to the true genius of Harold Ramis (me, looking him up on the Internet: “Holy crap! He was SCTV’s first head writer! He co-wrote Stripes and Ghostbusters! No wonder he was in those movies!”)

The temp agency was still occasionally sniffing around at that time. I would get some phone calls saying: “Can you take this two-week assignment as a favor?” I had been so good at my work 1996-99 that two-to-four week assignments would get extended for months as the clients would like me so much. But I turned these latest offers down, hoping to sustain my income on only self-employed work. 

One hungover afternoon that summer, I came up with the knockoff Black Sabbath Vol. 4 font for Exiled on Main Street #24, using graph paper, a ruler, dime, and pencil. (It was all measuring and math.) And somehow using the Paint program on my PC to put it all together.

There are other memories — reading Nick Tosches, buying a 1997 Chevy Cavalier and being excited about it, adding some Gary Stewart and Jerry Lee Lewis to those whiskey trips, seeing The Godfather on the big screen at the Oak Street Cinema, and scheming to get out of that little apartment as the building had been bought by a (since disgraced) landlord.

I compare that era to now. I start my Sleepy Time Extra tea around 9:30 p.m., toast half a bagel, add light cream cheese, watch an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on DVR, then head for bed. Still smiles all around.

Tuesday Tuneage
Nick Gilder - "Here Comes the Night"
1978

“Hey we’re Nick Gilder and band and we don’t dress like your typical rockers of these late seventies because we are not your typical rockers of these late seventies. No jeans, tee shirts, and regular-guy looks here.”

Left to right: First we have Nick, whose pants sport a high waistband (sans belt) and pinstripes. Extra button undone on the sheer shirt. Then we have the dude who is confident enough to pull off brown shoes with black slacks. The confidence abounds as not only can he pull off wearing a vest (not all can) but he also wears a necktie unconventionally — without a corresponding collared shirt: the breathtaking audacity. Next is the guy whose shirt has a nonconforming design, plus his shoes look damn comfortable. Okay, the band’s fashion approach hits a little bit of a snag as the next gent is obviously the traditional rocker trying to fit in: hair parted in the center, mustache, jeans (d’oh). Put him in a white blazer and sneakers, have him hold  a cigarette in a rad way, and hope he blends in. (Around this same time, The Cars would do a better job of hiding Elliot Easton’s obvious rocker intentions on the sleeves of their first two albums.) The final dude has short hair but also goes with the high waistband look and considers the buttons on his shirt optional. Two of the guys have their hands in their pockets, anticipating Alanis Morissette or maybe just indicating cool casualness. (This could be two-point-five guys, hard to see what Gilder is doing with his left hand.) And hey nobody’s smiling, but neither did the Dwight Twilley Band on their two albums and they were America’s power pop finest!

Tuesday Tuneage
Faces - “Wicked Messenger”
1969

Down in the Valley, Richfield location. Located on Penn south of 66th Street, exact location not quite remembered. What I do remember is returning from a day trip to Rochester for my corporate job and heading there to buy some CDs and (yes!) a much-desired blue surfer hoodie to wear on cool evenings lakeside up north. Along with the MC5’s Back in the USA, the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, I also scored the Faces’ debut album, First Step.

This was a Japanese pressing, so it was credited to The Faces. Huh? Well, American pressings have always had “Small Faces” on the cover apparently because the Small Faces-to-Faces transition happened so quickly nobody informed the folks at American Warners. (With Rod Stewart at 5-10 and Ron Wood at 5-9 taller than the former Small Faces Kenney Jones, Ronnie Lane, and Ian MacLagan, it was part of the impetus for the name change. Being a modest 5-8 myself, I appreciate Stewart and Wood being looked up to as tall.)

The lyrics were in the CD booklet and they must have been translated by some intern in Tokyo with limited English knowledge as on the great Bob Dylan cover “Wicked Messenger”, this happens:

Actual lyrics:

When questioned who had sent for him
He answered with his thumb
For his tongue it could not speak, but only flatter

CD booklet lyrics:

When questioned who
You said the answer will I come
Boys tongue it could not speak but only patter

Then there’s the Faces’ original “Three Button Hand Me Down”:

Actual lyrics:

Now I had my fair share of these women
But they came between me and my suit

CD booklet lyrics:

Now I had a fair sheriff named Wynn
That came between me and my sweetheart

Hoo-boy. Lost in translation indeed.

Tuesday Tuneage
Cheap Trick - "ELO Kiddies"
1977

Punk didn’t make it in America, unless you count the Standells, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Seeds, etc. back in ‘66. Cheap Trick’s “ELO Kiddies” anticipates Reaganomics with a fury equal of the Clash. New wave metal weirdos and from the Midwest to boot. Five stars.

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.