Tuesday Tuneage
Focus - "Hocus Pocus"
1971

You think I'm going to try describing this tune with words??

But how great is this song? Its title rhymes, meaning it goes up there with standards like "Tutti Frutti," "Wooly Bully," "True Blue," "Double Trouble" "Bang-Shang-A-Lang," "Wango Tango," "A.C.D.C.," "Someday, Someway," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," etc. etc.

Tuesday Tuneage
Steel Wool - "No Sugar Tonight"
1969

I told the story of this song (or my theory on it) last year on an Exiled Radio podcast. Since I haven't done a podcast in over a year - got sick of hearing myself talk - and I think only four people listened to those podcasts anyway, I feel safe writing the same old thing about the song here.

A couple of years ago, I read the book Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth by Kim Cooper and David Smay. There was a short chapter on White Whale Records, a Los Angeles label in the sixties that was most famous for having The Turtles on its roster. The book mentioned that one of the singles released by White Whale was a song titled "No Sugar Tonight" by the band Steel Wool and that the song was written by one Randy Bachman. There was no mention of Bachman's Guess Who pedigree or that his band actually recorded this song also. So I downloaded the song - a terrific, fast-paced, garage-y take on a song you've heard a million times on classic rock radio and are likely sick of.

But Steel Wool's take lacks the "New Mother Nature" second half that the Guess Who had. A look at Wikipedia's entry on the song shows that Bachman wrote "No Sugar" while in Los Angeles and that while the Guess Who recorded it in 1969, they didn't release it until 1970 so there is a solid chance that Steel Wool released it first. My theory on this is further backed up by Wikipedia's claim that Bachman played "No Sugar Tonight" for his band and the record label, they said it was too short, and Burton Cummings then wrote "New Mother Nature" to fill out a longer piece. (Which makes "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" Canada's "A Day In The Life.") See, I think Randy Bachman wrote "No Sugar Tonight" in Los Angeles and shopped it around in order to get some songwriter money. But the best he could do was pawn it off on Steel Wool - which in order further the mystery was maybe fronted by Bobby Randell, who used to be a key member of The Knickerbockers of the garage-rock Beatles-sounding "Lies" fame.

A song that's two minutes and five seconds long and yes, it stuck with me so that I thought through all of the above. Damn that was a fun few days.

Tuesday Tuneage
Alice Cooper - "Generation Landslide"
1973

A brief rock 'n' roll history lesson, because few I have talked to over the years seem to know this: The name "Alice Cooper" originally applied to the whole band - Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce on guitars, Neil Smith on drums, Dennis Dunaway on bass, and Vincent Furnier on lead vocals. After seven albums -five on Warner Bros. and four of those produced by the masterful Bob Ezrin - the band split up (likely due to artistic differences, right?) and Furnier went on to a solo career as "Alice Cooper." It is important to understand this, it's why the original band's (best captured on 1974's Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits) music is better than Alice's later solo stuff. Plus it makes the "she asked me why the singer's name was Alice" line in "Be My Lover" all the better in the By The Way Which One's Pink Sweepstakes.

I first heard "Generation Landslide" in the movie Dogtown and Z-Boys (the movie so nice Stacy Peralta wrote it twice) and not owning any Alice Cooper aside from Greatest Hits was intrigued. I acquired the song and it's brilliant. Acoustic guitar opening, hooks galore, Dylan-like lyrics, a damn fine harmonica solo, and a hard rock ending that's worthy of The Who. The song is about the generation gap - I think, though the first time I heard "landslide" used colloquially was after the 1972 presidential election - but nobody has anaylzed these lyrics like those of "American Pie" though the song is just as good and over and done with much quicker.

Thinking Too Much About The Ghost Writer

I watched The Ghost Writer the other night. It looked great - it was always cloudy and/or rainy, adding to the foreboding - and the actors were all in fine form, plus you got your blonde or brunette mature hottie choice between Kim Cattrall and Olivia Williams (much younger than her character in real life, somehow they made her look older and hotter.) It deals with a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) assigned to help former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) with his memoirs. The previous ghost writer died under mysterious circumstances, and this new ghost writer begins to find out things are not what they seem with Lang and his past. I ended up giving it three stars (out of five) on my Netflix, but there were certain elements of the plot I couldn't get my head around in any type of logical way.

**NOTE**: Plot spoilers ahead. If you haven't seen The Ghost Writer and don't want it ruined, please stop reading.

1) Lang makes a speech on the road outside of his compound and security seemed pretty lax. I was waiting for somebody to pelt him with an egg or two. Geez, with security like this he could end up getting shot ...

2) Towards the end of the movie, at a book publication party a note is passed from person to person to person to person (etc.) to Lang's wife. These are a bunch of hoity-toity folks drinking champagne, not a seventh-grade study hall. No way the note gets passed like this.

3) One of the mysteries that unfolds is the assertion that Lang has been a CIA operative since the mid-seventies and in his ten years as prime minister, did the USA's bidding. Since when has the United States government ever needed the CIA to get the UK to do what it wants? No malfeasance needed: All the Americans gotta do is ask.

Tuesday Tuneage
D.A.D - "Sleeping My Day Away"
1989

This one was a staple on Z-Rock back when I was enthralled with that blissfully awesome station. It opens with a Folsom Prison guitar, throws in a hook-tastic riff, melody, and chorus and containst this immortal line:

"'Cause I hit the sack when the sun's coming back!"

Which lyrically resembles Merle Haggard's "Honky Tonk Night Time Man." Combined with the Johnny Cash reference above, I'd love to argue that this makes D.A.D. some hidden gem of an alt-country band but I haven't had enough coffee yet today to pull that off.

(Option #2 after more coffee: Anti-corporate down-with-The-Man rant on how D.A.D. used to stand for "Disneyland After Dark" but the band dropped that name under legal pressure from Disney, the same corporation that owned ABC Radio Networks ... who pulled the plug on Z-Rock!)

All these years later I still love this tune, and it describes one of my great achievements as a younger man. Because during this era, I once came home from work on a Friday, fell asleep around 6:30 pm and woke up Saturday afternoon about 4:30 pm. Twenty-two hours straight!

Tuesday Tuneage
Paul Westerberg - "Man Without Ties"
1993 (I think)


I'm not here to convince you of the greatness of Paul Westerberg's songwriting. Those of you who are familiar with the 'Mats and Westerberg's solo work know this already. If you've stumbled upon this and are not familiar with Westerberg's work, well you'll just have to trust me: The man has a golden pen.

Years ago I turned my good friend onto Turk onto the Replacements. It was part of a musical reciprocity agreement - I loaned him some of my new music LPs from the likes of the 'Mats and Husker Du, he loaned me classics from the likes of Black Sabbath and Van Morrison. After listening to a few Replacements albums, Turk declared that Westerberg a modern-day Woody Guthrie who "could write a song about anything, including that hot girl who works at the convenience store in Midwest Plaza." It was my duty to inform him that Westerberg had already done that, "Customer" from the Replacements' first album.

So last week I stumbled upon a Westerberg tune titled "Man Without Ties." I thought it might be about guys like me, as I don't have to wear a tie to work. Before buying it from iTunes, I scanned the lyrics. I instead found out that it's about an unattached man who eats frozen pizza every Friday night. Holy crap, the song isn't just about a guy like me, Westerberg has nailed my life to a "T"! The feeling I got was eerie, but it subsided as I sang along with the song six or seven times in a row. The tune is a fun one, it starts out almost as a whisper and is a full-blown singalong by the end.

Rituals For Agnostics

After thirty years, I recently switched from using an electric razor to shaving with a manual razor and shaving cream. What happened was that one morning I put my bifocals on after shaving and with my readers part of the lenses saw I wasn't getting the clean, close shave I thought I had been getting. I hated shaving anyway - a few years back I moved to shaving only every other day as appearances aren't important with my employment situation. To see that I wasn't getting the job done properly drove me nuts. I've never had the desire to grow a beard (though a Nick Blackburn/Matt Guerrier-like moustache is under consideration), so shaving suddently became a major concern.

After doing some research online, I went with a Gillette razor. My other option was something from the Schick line. In fact, I like saying "Schick" more than I like saying "Gillette", so at times I pretend I bought the other brand. And after shaving once the old-fashioned way, I was hooked. Now instead of hating shaving, I love it. I love filling the sink up halfway with hot water, I love covering my face with shaving cream, I love rinsing the razor after a few strokes. And once I don those bifocals ... ahhhhh, sure "Schick" is fun to say - but so is "Gillette Mach 3 Turbo." So now I have a new favorite ritual.

And "ritual" is the key word here. As I get older and find ways to manage the various anxieties, worries, and day-to-day hassles that ultimately don't add up to anything major but a confused mind ... I find that it's the little rituals that calm me down, make me feel in control, and ready to face the day or long night.

Grinding whole bean coffee, pouring water into the coffee maker and hitting the "on" button. Reading the newspaper during commercial breaks during the Twins game. Mixing a martini, Rob Roy, or simple scotch and soda - my move last year to add cocktails to my liquid diet was no doubt influenced by the non-ritual of opening a beer. Cleaning the vinyl LP, cleaning the needle (all vinyl junkies know the importance of using clean needles), dropping the stylus on the outer rim of the album or single.

Rituals. The simple little things that keep me from saying "the way of the future" over and over again.

Tuesday Tuneage
Black Sabbath - "Snowblind"
1972

I pretty much hate summer. I was trying to decide if I "hate" summer or if I merely "dislike" it. But words like "detest" and "loathe" kept popping up in my mental thesaurus, so "hate" it is. I hear my fellow Twin Cities residents tell us that summer is our reward for our brutal winters, but I look at it the other way: Our winters are relatively mild (spend a winter a couple of hundred miles or more further north and you'll know what I mean) and I look at our falls and winters as being a reward for days where draining heat and humidity drown out any attempt I have at enjoying a day. Plus summer features lots of sunshine, which I find boring. Nighttime? Darkness? Much more fun, much more to dream about and write about in the dark hours.

Today the heat index in Minneapolis hit over 100 degrees. I spent most of the day in my apartment with my window air conditioning unit going, along with ceiling fans and a fan blowing here in my writing office. It wasn't cool enough to chill beer, but it was comfortable. I have recently been reading some nonsense about how we need to put our home air conditioning units aside. Something about how if we don't chill ourselves at home, we'll go outside and socialize with our neighbors. Then because folks are outside a lot after work, our streets will be safer. I assume that the anti-air conditioner lobby thinks that once this "Open Windows, Use Fans" strategy eliminates crime, it will soon bring us world peace.

Which brings me to Black Sabbath's "Snowblind." As I prefer winter to summer, when the heat index is around or over 100 degrees, I love to blast this tune on headphones and pretend it's January (even though the song isn't really about snow.) I crank up the air conditioning and celebrate that via its blasting loud technology it trumps all of that hippie commune "let's live together as one" bullshit. Just like Black Sabbath did.

Tuesday Tuneage
Point Blank - "Nicole"
1981

My one memory of this song when it was popular (it hit #39 on the Billboard Hot 100 when I was in high school) is hearing it while driving down Washington Avenue/Highway 81 South in Grand Forks on my way home from school. In fact, that is my only Point Blank memory. Curious, I checked my Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red one) to see what they had to say about the band. John Swenson: Pointless late-Seventies formula hard rock. Nice pun, Swenson. Allmusic.com doesn't give the band any kind of overview or bio, but their always-friendly album reviews tend to back up Swenson's "formula" claim, tending to refer only diehard fans of the group or Southern rock afficiandos to certain albums.

"Nicole" is from an LP titled American Exce$$. If you're someone who admires their use of dollar signs there, well they previously had an album pointedly - pun intended, Swenson got me going - aimed at getting some attention titled Airplay. Allmusic.com describes American Exce$$ as: "more Toto than ZZ Top." That hurts. More interesting in this review is the fact that prior to this album, Point Blank fired their original lead vocalist and brought in a guy named Bubba (yes!) Keith.

Rather than calling "Nicole" something as harsh as "formula", I'll call it "competent hard rock" and a helluva lot better than most stuff playing on Grand Forks' Top 40 station back in '81. It's about a guy who returns to his hometown to find the sweet little thing he had a fling or romance with has turned into a bad girl.

She's "hanging around with strangers" and "looking like a burnout."

But in the end, he admits he kinda likes his girl gone wrong, and not just because burnout girls wear the tightest jeans:

You started looking kind of spaced-out
You drive a man stark raving wild

Of course she drives you wild, she's a hot girl and your name is Bubba. Nicole will never settle down with you but she'll let you buy a box of Miller High Life for her and her friends Friday night.

Tuesday Tuneage
Blue Oyster Cult - "Black Blade"
1980

The lyrics for this song were written in collaboration with science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, and it's all about his hero Elric - the protagonist of a bunch of sword and sorcery books. I admit I had the misfortune of reading some of them as a teen. Not only were they not "hard sci-fi" but they were fantasy, which is bullshit. (Tip of the pen to Roman from Party Down Catering.) (Moorcock did write Behold The Man, which as far as I can remember is some great sci-fi. To keep all of this in perspective though, none of this stuff is exactly Play It As It Lays.)

But Blue Oyster Cult's sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal/S&M/kitchen-sink shtick holds up so well over time because their tongues were always planted firmly in cheek. And BOC's music also holds up because it is up there with the very finest of seventies metal: Riffing guitars, rock-solid rhythm section, and hooks hooks hooks. At the end of this tune you get some some sort of robotic voice talking sinister-like at the end. He's the voice of the Black Blade sword and he's asserting his control over his would-be owner. It's as scary as the kids who show up on your doorstep on Halloween in monster costumes. And "Black Blade" is as much fun as handing out treats to those kids and chuckling while you sip on a beer. Help yourself to some candy.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Del Fuegos - "Don't Run Wild"
1985
A big deal to some in the mid-eighties was the so-called "roots rock" movement. The logic, I think, went like this: Rock in the first half of the eighties got too overproduced and glossy. Roots rock was part of the counterattack, with band emphasizing "roots" such a country and old-time (think fifties) rock 'n' roll. Hence the likes of The Blasters, The True Believers, Rank and File, Jason and the Scorchers, The BoDeans, The Beat Farmers, Lone Justice, The Long Ryders, and The Del Fuegos. And just like pretty much every rock 'n' roll genre ... Some of it was great while much of it forgettable. (This description sums up The Long Ryders' State Of Our Union LP: Opening song "Looking For Lewis and Clark" is a classic while the rest of the album is unbelievably mediocre.)

Anyway, The Del Fuegos put out "Don't Run Wild" in '85. I had never seen the linked video until tonight, but now I know what Patrick Dempsey was up to before Can't Buy Me Love. I first heard the tune on Q98 out of Fargo and loved it. Still do, with its mysterious sound and catchy chorus it's a late-night-under-headphones fave. Problem is, the album they put it on is called Boston, Mass. When rock 'n' roll fans think of Boston, they think of the awesome J. Geils Band, who did their own version of roots rock (soul, R&B, Stonesy swagger) in the seventies and easily beat all the above-listed bands. "We are gonna ... blow ... your ... face ... out!"

Tuesday Tuneage
The Faces - "Too Bad"
1971

This tune is an underdog story where our boys are sent to a gig at some posh place but are deemed to scruffy to take the stage. It all has to do with the English class system, which is typically a yawner as a subject (or else confusing: You have to hit rewind on the DVD remote, and then scroll around to get the subtitles working), but this is The Faces and we trust them to tell a story in under three minutes thirty seconds and then let us go. And through the song Rod Stewart lets us know why the club wouldn't let them play, and accents and class has a lot to do with it:

"We just don't have the right accent."

"I didn't have the old school tie."

"My regional tongue gave us away again."

Oh, and they had to take the bus home. Too bad. Musically, it's one of their finest rockers with the band blazing through it and Stewart whooping along. Not only do we get to hear the legendary Glynn Johns at the beginning, the tune also contains one of the all-time great rock 'n' roll pauses in the song too. I'm guessing this is a cinch as the greatest song ever about regional accents.

And if you're wondering why I'm intrigued by regional accents ... a not-so-small part of it is being at a party in the mid-nineties and having somebody wonder aloud if I started talking like I do after seeing the movie Fargo. And then being at later parties and telling people I was an accent consultant for that movie and sometimes getting away with it. Or the most fun: Having my accented-but-less Minneapolis friends relish/laugh at how I say: "I'm goin' home."

Tuesday Tuneage
Pat Benatar - "You Better Run"
1980

In a lunch room scene in 1982's Fast Times At Ridgemont High, the greatest teen comedy ever made, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) says to Linda (Phoebe Cates): "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!" To which Linda responds that Ridgemont High in fact has three girls who have cultivated the Pat Benatar look. Eighteen years later I was in the Entry with my friend Jim, we were checking out The Phones, a Fargo-Moorhead band who had a Minneapolis scene heyday back in the eighties. The crowd was largely (all?) people our age, folks in their mid-thirties and up. You had the sense that there were a few married couples who had hired a Friday night babysitter so that they could go out and relive a slice of their twenties. Nothing wrong with that, The Phones were blasting dance-y music and the crowd was eating it up. At one point Jim pointed to a gal wearing tights and a headband dancing on the floor and said: "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!"

So anyway ... in case you had forgotten ... Here is the classic Pat Benatar look: Short hair with bangs and ears exposed, high cheekbones, a top with horizontal stripes that shows a lot of shoulder and the upper back, a totally unneccessary belt (how did she get those pants on?), and boots. The Rascals did this tune first and best, but once again: How did she get those pants on??

Tuesday Tuneage
Soul Asylum - "James At 16 Medley"
1988

This is a medley of the type that Soul Asylum was known to pull off in the late eighties in their club shows. (According to the Enter The Soul Asylum website, it was recorded in June of 1988 at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. (Thanks also to this website for identifying the Bootsy Collins tune in the medley ... I had no clue on that one.) Why Soul Asylum gave such a title to this live track, I don't know. James At 16 was a TV show that my sister liked in the late seventies. I didn't like it. I don't remember why, I probably decided not to like it just to annoy my sister.

Here are the songs that Soul Aslyum triumphantly run through (if only in portions):

"The Cross" - Prince
"For What It's Worth" - Buffalo Springfield
"I'm Waiting For The Man" - The Velvet Underground
"Birth, School, Work, Death" - The Godfathers
"Damaged Goods" - Gang of Four
"Play That Funky Music" - Wild Cherry
"Free-For-All" - Ted Nugent
"I Don't Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance (Oops!)" - The Gap Band
"Body Slam" - Bootsy Collins
"Stayin' Alive" - Bee Gees
"Wishing Well" - Terence Trent D'Arby
"Get Down Tonight" - KC and the Sunshine Band
"Peaceful Easy Feeling" - Eagles

Except it's not a bunch of ironic slackers shrugging and smirking their way through these songs. This was something they would do after yet another mind-blowing show. As I've written before, Soul Asylum were the best live band of my generation. C'mon, the medley list has you intrigued. Give it a listen. If the medley isn't pitch-perfect, well ... it's four garage rockers serving up a nightcap after a solid set of brilliance.

TV Dramas Are Becoming My New Reality

Last weekend I watched Street Fight, a documentary about the 2002 mayoral campaign in Newark, New Jersey. I loved it and gave it five stars in my Netflix rating, but found myself thinking strange thoughts during it. These thoughts were all about television series.

In recent years, I have watched The Wire and The Sopranos in their entirety on DVD. These HBO series are easily among contenders for The Greatest Television Drama of all time. I hold The Wire among my favorite TV show ever, and can't stop thinking about The Sopranos months after watching the final episode. So while watching Street Fight, early on I was thinking: "This reminds me of Season Four of The Wire", which also dealt with a mayoral race in a crime-ridden, majority-black city. Then I had to remind myself that Street Fight is real, and The Wire wasn't. (Another brilliant TV drama I have watched in recent years, Homicide: Life On The Street, came from the same real-life Baltimore source material as The Wire. Though in my mind at times I think of Homicide as fiction and The Wire as "real", even though both shows are fictional. I think it has to do with The Wire being more documentary-like.)

Later, during my viewing of Street Fight, I started to wonder what Newark-area resident Tony Soprano thought of this mayoral race. Here I was cleary in tongue-in-cheek territory, though I admit I thought it through and figured out that Tony would favor the sixteen-year incumbent - obviously if the mayor had been in power that long, Tony would have "his guys" within the administration. And when the documentary mentioned controversies that arose because of visits to a Newark strip club, I thought: Geez, they should of went to the Bada Bing! For the right price, Silvio would have made sure that things were kept hush-hush.

When I was about to scold myself for thinking about televison dramas all through the viewing of a political documentary, I remembered that The Wire and The Sopranos are great, engaging, entertaining art. And they're far superior to the crap that is shown on so-called reality TV. Of course, my great taste in television doesn't mean that I shouldn't maybe still go out there and get a reality of my own. Oh well.