Tuesday Tuneage
Bo Diddley - “Pills”
1961

It’s probably high school apocryphon, but it has stuck with me over the decades. We would sit in our nook of the commons before classes started in the morning, a crumpled-up-little-milk-carton’s toss from this couple, not being able to hear them but fascinated nonetheless. The guy was a wrestler. The gal was a cheerleader. What fascinated us was that he would totally fawn over her and she kinda held him in disdain. Like doing her nails or makeup while he talked to her. And he was nuts about her. And not crazy like in a puppy-dog-teenage love kind of way. Like in the way they were sitting there one morning, and he was talking to her and she was obviously ignoring him. Finally he groaned and ripped his teeshirt to make some sort of psycho point. (Over in our group, a fellow wrestler said: “Hey I loaned him that shirt!”) A week or so later we heard that she had broken up with him. Then a few days after that we heard that he showed up at Happy Joe’s Pizza Parlor where she worked one night and approached her at the counter and showed her a handful of pills. “If you don’t get back together with me,” he said, “I’ll take these.” And as the story went, she poured him a glass of water.

Tuesday Tuneage
INXS - “This Time”
1985

I recently finished reading Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson and wow his life story got boring. Drug addict, alcoholic, abuser of women, a constant litany of “if he wouldn’t have fallen to his vices and lived up to his talent” quotes. Though when excerpts of his work were printed you could see that glimmer, that spark that proved he could at times live up to his hype. But the dude skipped out on reporting on both the Fall of Saigon and the Rumble in the Jungle, which is not gonzo. Not at all.

There was an interesting tidbit that grabbed me. In the early eighties some kid from the University of North Dakota called one of Thompson’s agents, wondering if he’d come to UND to give a lecture. And it turned out that Hunter S. Thompson’s first college “lecture” was in Grand Forks circa 1983-84. I was a student there then, but have no recollection of this event. Then again, I didn’t become familiar with his writing until a few years later when a roommate subscribed to Rolling Stone. I remember Thompson wrote a review of ecstasy, which was likely when I found out that it’s a drug. A few weeks earlier I had run into a guy from high school in a loud bar and he was raving about ecstasy. I bluffed and nodded my head in approval. I thought “Ecstasy” was a band. (I was probably thinking of INXS, both having that “ex” sound it them.) So yet again not actively participating in a conversation paid off. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool …”

Tuesday Tuneage
Inside Experience - "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
1969

In the continuing effort to drown out the window AC unit, the Brown Acid compilations of proto-stoner metal from the late sixties and early seventies have been employed. The music is more amateurish and stumbling than the likes of Frijid Pink and Blue Cheer, as the Nuggets-era bands started embracing harsher drugs, became slower and heavier, headed for burnout, and brought about the comedown referenced in the series’ title.

This cover of the Cream song by Eric Clapton and Martin Sharp starts out as a bummer, then stumbles into a higher gear. There’s no sign of Clapton’s wah-wah guitar, kinda like how when The Litter covered The Yardbirds’ version of “I’m a Man” they neglected to attempt the Jeff-Beck-treats-his-guitar-as-a-percussion-instrument thing. But the cool (yes, cool) touch these slouches pulled off was the sudden laughing and cackling kicking in at the end. The Sirens, of course. The tune sounds like it was recorded in the dankest of basements (hence the band name) and we the listeners are up on the porch drinking lukewarm Miller High Lifes. (If this had been recorded in the nineties, some joker would have told you that you were listening to “lo-fi.”)

And after buying Cream’s Disraeli Gears forty years ago in the used racks at Mother’s Records, a kicking-myself realization: While this tune is about Ulysses from Roman mythology, a later verse doesn’t namecheck Venus and instead uses Aphrodite from Greek mythology. Hey Clapton: Shoulda brushed up on your Edith Hamilton!

Tuesday Tuneage
Coverdale-Page - “Pride and Joy”
1993

I was working my first post-college temp job at the Richfield Lunds grocery store in the summer of 1987. My task was to sit at a table with another temp and some senior volunteers and help people sign up to obtain at-home colon cancer screening tests. It was a campaign promoted by channel 5’s Dr. Michael Breen, who once stopped by to say hi and thank us for helping out. (Imagine my disappointment decades later while watching the NBA Finals and finding out ABC’s Mike Breen is a completely different guy, coulda done the Jeff Spicoli “ah, I know that dude” bit.) Later in the summer the reachout effort tamped down and the table was down to one-person shifts and there weren’t many interested patrons. (Though I was referred to as “sir” for the first time ever by a high school kid looking for the deli section ... I was twenty-one, sigh.) The manager of the store took a liking to me and said it would be fine if I flipped through magazines at my station during the slow stretches. So it was in a magazine there — I forget which — that I read Whitesnake’s name described as “seemingly both racist *and* sexist.” That line sounds like a Spinal Tap outtake, bravo.

Tawny Kitaen (RIP) aside, I never cared for Whitesnake. Glossy corporate metal that became increasingly laughable once Guns n’ Roses appeared and dumb without enough fun to make up for it. (No, I didn’t care about the hire-Steve-Vai move.) While I could go back to David Coverdale’s solo album White Snake (two words, not one, a complicated fellow this Dave) and try to find a song, instead I’m using a Coverdale-Page song here because Jimmy Page’s efforts in the nineties to resuscitate Led Zeppelin were pretty damn funny.

Tuesday Tuneage
Deep Purple - "Flight of the Rat"
1970

Deep Purple in Rock was the debut of the fabled Mark II edition of the band. As Billy Altman wrote in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red edition, 1979): “(Ritchie) Blackmore began to pull feverish and original solos out of nowhere, as he and (keyboardist Jon) Lord began to serve as counterpoints to each other.” The best case of this on In Rock is “The Flight of the Rat.” The album also has one of the great seventies album covers. In Chuck Eddy’s excellent tome Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, he writes that Deep Purple disguising themselves as Mount Rushmore on the cover of In Rock was “a very Spinal Tap thing to do.” Thinking of this made me note other Spinal Tap-ish things that have occurred in real life. Soon I will be listing others here and maybe I’ll actually write something instead of quoting others. To get the writing juices flowing, I can look to the lyrics that came with Deep Purple’s Machine Head (Mark II's masterpiece), they’re hanging in my office.

Tuesday Tuneage
Mick Jagger with Dave Grohl - “Eazy Sleazy”
2021

“Deep dive” is one of those phrases thrown around a lot the past few years, and I can safely say that such excursions aren’t working for me when it comes to certain current events, even though these days I have all kinds of time. Even counting time washing masks, streaming shows, applying for PPP loans, coming up with excuses not to attend the inevitable post-pandemic parties, cataloging my grievances against my newly-adopted cat (who is doing the same), and avoiding neighbors in the hallway ... I have time. In fact, I have too much time on my hands but yet I don’t want deep dives. I only want shallow dives. Wait, with such a dive you could injure your head and neck in shallow water. No, I only want shallow swims these days. Subjects that aren’t deep, like: Figuring out which University of North Dakota football players have scored points in Super Bowls, Cheap Trick’s eighties output, Everybody Loves Raymond reruns, those three great songs from Badfinger, digging up the rules of board games I played as a kid, and this Jagger/Grohl song. It’s garage-dance rock, dumb as hell, and a lot of fun.

And after a couple of spins and an afternoon dance party is contemplated, soon some time has been killed and it’s time for more coffee. A caffeine-plus-jitters diet is keeping the weight off, saves me from taking a deep dive into how to stay healthy when shut inside month after month. Coffee, water, and then daydream about beer. Friends are taking deep dives into craft beers, having all kinds of sixers and twelvers and growlers delivered to their homes. I shallowly swim in cheap macro lagers — Pabst, LaBatt, Grain Belt. Saves money and I can drink more of ‘em because they’re not hoppy. It’s fun tossing the cans into the recycling container, the kind of shallow activity that might take up my evening. Shallow swims, I’m in.

Tuesday Tuneage
Wilson Picket - “Fire and Water”
1971

In my efforts to listen to more Wilson Pickett, I assembled a playlist of him covering others’ hits. What a fun, exhilarating experience. Pickett would take on anything. There was hard rock: “Born to Be Wild*,” “Fire and Water,” and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (taking on the Vanilla Fudge version of the Supremes’ classic.) There was bubblegum: “Sugar Sugar” and “Run Joey Run.” There was the greatest British band with “Hey Jude,” the greatest American band with “Proud Mary,” and a criminally underrated American band with “Groovin’.” There was an ancient folk song in “Stagger Lee,” and a folk song of relatively recent invention in “Hey Joe.” Plus Roger Miller’s “Engine Engine Number 9” and another pretty good songwriter thrown in with Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”

Perhaps my favorite is his take on Free’s “Fire and Water.” Where Free’s version was all tension until Paul Kossoff’s brilliant guitar solo freed (ahem) things up, Pickett’s soars with horns and his irrepressible vocal. The weather is warming up and it’s time to maybe smile. Me, I’m going to listen to sunny music with the windows open. Wilson Picket demands a listen. What else are you going to do: Listen to The Kinks sleepwalk their way through “Long Tall Sally”?

*Better than Steve Martin’s version even.

Tuesday Tuneage
Creedence Clearwater Revival - “Lodi”
1969

Been at this same writing desk in my apartment for almost a year now, putting down words. But it’s not the same without being at the coffee shop, grabbing a table and setting up my office there with notebook, iPad, magazines, and folders. The words I type these days mostly go into unfinished pieces that feel inspired or at least solid upon first spark, but after typing up the notes and rewriting, revising, and editing, they lose their shine. There’s no variety while I sit here, no random sighting of folks across the shop, no snippets of conversation drifting across my table. No sense that as I’m away from home, I’m getting away with something. I like to use that feeling of mischief in creating, that sense of pulling a fast one, of getting away with the perfect score. But here I am sitting at home again, like the narrator in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lodi”, on a treadmill with seemingly no way of getting off. “If I only had a dollar ...”

Tuesday Tuneage
Brenton Wood - “Psychotic Reaction”
1967

How I made it until 2021 without hearing this one is baffling. Sampling Count Five’s garage rock masterpiece of the same name while adding ? and the Mysterians-like keyboard results in a soul nugget that anticipates Funkadelic, Prince (especially), and a long list of funk weirdos. Both Woods and the Five were on the same Double Shot label, must of made clearing the rights to the song easier. Interesting that the original “Psychotic Reaction” was a clumsy/genius rehash of the Yardbirds “I’m a Man”, which in turn was a cover of the Bo Diddley classic. Though when things get weirdly fun we tend to end up at Bo, don’t we?

(And again, the singer is Brenton Wood, not Bretton Woods.)