Tuesday, June 29, 2021


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, June 15, 2021

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.