Tuesday Tuneage
The Shazam - "Megaphone"
1997

Shamelessy catch power pop by a band I've always meant to listen to more of. This is the #1 song in my collection to play on those mornings where I hit the bedtime tea (not a euphemism) hard the night before, am dreamed out or have hit the dreaded dream-within-a-dream scenario (Inception was fiction?), and can't quite get to one hundred percent of waking up. Five Hour Energy? Nah, 2.25 minute pop song!

And some days I change the chorus to:

I've got a telephone
but I'm ignoring the whole world

Tuesday Tuneage
Bob Seger - "Get Out Of Denver"
1974

March 1990. I'm pacing my living room, listening to some grainy AM signal I miraculously picked up on my boombox. North Dakota is playing Wisconsin in hockey, and a win means UND finishes second in the WCHA. This is important as it means if they go on to advance to the WCHA Final Four, they are a home team. Also, it puts hated archrival Minnesota into third. UND coach Gino Gasparini is pulling out all the stops to get a win, his team goes into overtime but he pulls the goalie for an extra attacker because at the time it looks like two points are needed in the race for second instead of one.

... And then at some point I lose the grainy AM signal. This is pre-Internet, so while you think I would wait for the next morning's paper to find out the score, no. I either called the Grand Forks Herald sports desk or the UND student union hotline to get a score.

Ten years or so later, for some reason I can't get audio of a UND at Mankato State hockey game on the Internet. But I find out that the game is on some AM station out of Mankato. I take a beer out to my car (open container, shhhhh) parked on the street and listen to part of that game on a grainy AM signal.

... And then at some point I lost the grainy AM signal. Thankfully, I would be able to get a final score on the Net later that night.

I'm typing this on Sunday, March 11th. Tonight, Wisconsin at the University of Denver in the rubber game of the opening round of the WCHA playoffs. Why should I care? Well, the winner dictates who UND will playing on Thursday in the opening round of the WCHA Final Five, and at what time. I may have to reorganize my work schedule if UND plays Thursday afternoon. Other things: beer and pizza purchases, workout schedule, laundry, etc. will be affected by whether UND plays in the afternoon or evening.

So what have I done tonight?

1) Saw if free audio of the game was available online without any annoying registration steps.

2) Looked up what radio stations in Wisconsin and Denver carry UW and DU hockey and looked to see if these stations were on my IHeartRadio app on my iPod Touch. Couldn't find the game this way.

3) Checked for score updates on the fan forum at USCHO.com. (The score updates are there, but there's a lot of chatter.)

4) Checked score updates on the College Hockey News and USCHO apps on my iPod Touch.

5) Constantly checked Twitter for score updates.

All because I have the need to know who is getting out of Denver tonight and is headed for St. Paul later in the week. Because I have the need to know whether UND plays Wisconsin Thursday afternoon or Saint Cloud State Thursday night. The technology has changed, but I'm still the young man with a can of beer in my hand, chasing down some grainy AM signal.

Tuesday Tuneage
Van Halen - "She's The Woman"
2012

All I have is one lasting memory, of saying something a little too loud at last call during last weekend's imaginary bar bull session, just hours after buying and tracking A Different Kind Of Truth:

"...I don't care, as far as I'm concerned this is PRODUCED BY TED TEMPLEMAN..."

A tip of the hat to my pal Chuck Tomlinson for prompting me to buy the new Roth-reunion Van Halen album. (Chuck did this via Twitter, so take that Franzen!) I just assumed it would be a long sleepwalk through an arena slumber. Instead, it's a noble effort to bring back the Best Band In The Land of thirty-some years ago. It's all here: killer riffs, danceable beats, sweet harmony vocals, Diamond Dave. I shoulda known something was up when Kool & The Gang was booked as the opening act on the latest VH tour. Talk about signs, right?

Rob Sheffield says it best, that the album is closest sonically to Women And Children First. Any complaints on that? Didn't think so.

One more thing: For finding a fountain of youth for a generation of us, Van Halen will be Time magazine's Persons Of The Year. Book it.

Tuesday Tuneage
Albert Washington and the Kings - "Hold Me Baby"
1969

This one never lets up; incessant horns, keyboards, rhythm section, while Cincinatti soul singer Washington lays it all on the line. Oh, and Lonnie Mack on guitar and now I can hear why so many add him to the Hendrix/Beck/Cropper axis of string-and-mind-bending guitarists who got their start in the sixties. I mean .. geez Louise, after taking in Mack's brilliance on this tune it makes me want to take a Yngwie Malmsteen cheap shot.

Speaking of shots, the B-side of "Hold Me Baby" is titled "I'm Gonna Pour Me A Drink." Yessir.

Tuesday Tuneage

The Swinging Machine - "Do You Have To Ask"

1966

American garage band rock 'n' roll of the mid-sixties was, in the words of Dave Marsh: "Somewhat bluesy, somewhat psychedelic, always amateurish, and for the most part, utterly unself-conscious in (its) naivete." Garage rock has lived on all these decades later as an American tradition, both as music and as a social bond. Lester Bangs: "Call up a bunch of your buddies, get some six-packs or some weed, plus a guitar or two, a bass or drum kit, and you've got instant fantasies about instant stardom."

An "instant stardom" gambit that was played by quite a few of the original generation of garage rockers was when they attempted to ape an artist far, far above them on the Rock Ladder. A fun parlor game to play with some mid-sixties garage rockers is to match them up with what sixties music icon they were trying to emulate. To wit:

The Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction": The Yardbirds

The Knickerbockers' "Lies": The Beatles

The Chocolate Watchband's "Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love In)": The Rolling Stones

Mouse's "A Public Execution": Bob Dylan

The other night on Bill Kelly's show on SiriusXM 21, I heard The Swinging Machine doing "Do You Have To Ask" and I realized that sixties garage rock had someone trying to be The Animals. Sure, the keyboard could be a little more prominent in the mix, but the singer bears an uncanny resemblance to Eric Burdon, there's that verge-of-chaos background singing going on, and like with The Animals: No matter the subject matter there is always a hint (or more) of menace. Two minutes of rock 'n' roll genius.

Tuesday Tuneage

The Rolling Stones - "Paint It, Black"

1966

Happy Valentine's Day!

Tuesday Tuneage

Rancid - "Roots Radicals"

1995

In a discussion with a younger friend last week, I told him how the people who are about five-to-ten years older than me didn't care for the likes of Green Day, The Offspring, or Rancid when they emerged in the mid-ninteties because they weren't "real punk." Those Generation Jonesers are pretty funny: Not only was punk around for over a decade before they discovered it (and I'll take the Standells over the Ramones, but that's another meander), they think their falling for punk in the mid-seventies was some sort of equivalent of the civil rights movement ("...I had blue spiked hair and some guys who liked Skynryd and Zeppelin made fun of me every day...") Oh, boo hoo.

The result of this conversation was that it convinced me to load up Rancid's ...And Out Come The Wolves on my iPod for a listen. One of my favorite albums from the mid-nineties, but one that I hadn't listened to in a few years. I fired it up on Saturday night while sitting down to write in my notebook. A few tracks into it, I had to turn it off. Because it was now dated? Because the forty-six-year old me doesn't dig it like the thirty-year old me? No, I had to turn it off because I wasn't getting any writing done due to constantly tampering the urge to grab a beer and dance around the living room.

Later that night I tracked the whole album and revelled in its fist-pumping, anthemic, wanna-singalong power and glory. All they need to do for its upcoming twentieth anniversary edition is instead of adding bonus tracks ... do the opposite ... shave off the last few tracks (they smell of filler), get it down to a slick thirteen tracks, and clock it in at a punchy thirty-four minutes.

Now onto the next subject: Does Green Day have a greatest hits?

Tuesday Tuneage

Bruce Springsteen - "Atlantic City"

1982

This one has my favorite Springsteen opening lines ever or at least this month:

Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night

Now they blew up his house too

The song opens like something from The Sopranos, though the narration quickly moves to the narrator, who exists on a much lower level than the forces at play with The Chicken Man, the DA, the Gambling Commission, and the oncoming rumble. He's a man in fix, he's got debts no honest man can pay, and he's going to do an unnamed favor for an unnamed associate and hopefully hit paydirt and skip town with his girl.

"Atlantic City" was the first single from Nebraska. It was released thirty years ago, but see if these words apply to present times:

Down here there's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line

Thirty years. Wonder if the narrator of "Atlantic City" is still around and wonder if he's still waiting for that money to trickle down.

Tuesday Tuneage
Motorhead - “Bomber”
1979

I was once told that Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister has done so much speed in his life that the doctors told him not to quit taking it, that his metabolism was so accustomed to amphetamine that his body would shut down if he quit. This may be urban legend but I don’t want to google it. Like the tale that Ozzy Osbourne once dropped acid once a day, every day, for a year ... it just seems right.

Back when my allergy drugs were still imported from a former Eastern Block country (or so I liked to believe), they had wicked side effects. The side effect until the mid-nineties was downs. Drowsy, sleepy, heavy heavy eyelids that forced me into a no-win choice: Suffer the constant congestion and burning eyes from the ragweed allergy, or take a pill, get relief and (hopefully) take a long nap. (This is what led me to start drinking coffee, to stay awake at work.) (So that’s whay I can sleep after drinking lots of coffee, my mind looks at coffee as an offset, not a 100% stimulant.)

Then Claritin-D came along about fifteen years ago or so and it was, I declared, legal speed. I could drink a few beers with it and not get that much buzzed. I didn’t get hungry when on it, and had to make myself eat. I stayed up late, later than usual. Much pacing was involved. I wasn’t yet into craft beer, which is unfortunate. These days I have found beers that could have slowed me down to normal when on Claritin-D; hoppy, boozy beers made by small brewers. These things have alcohol contents up in the plus-six-percent range. One recent fave is Lagunitas Hop Stoopid Ale, which I can get at my local liquor store in a 22-oz bomber. Late in December 2011, I set a goal to listen to Motorhead’s “Bomber” while drinking a bomber sometime before the year ended.

The tune seemed appropriate. As Hop Stoopid was a beer that could have slowed down my Claritin-D speed buzz, Motorhead was a band that would have went rather well with said Claritin-D-enhanced mood. As Chuck Eddy once wrote: Their music veers closer to early Black Flag or the Angry Samoans than to any heavy metal band, mainly because they play their 'Paranoid' and 'Stranglehold' riffs so goddamn fast they belie the "heavy" tag completely.

Though I am off the speed, I still have a use for Motorhead ... it's called Valentine's Day. And as it's late January, I gotta make a mental note to stock up on bombers for my Motorhead-on-headphones for that night. Bring you to your knees, it's a bomber ...

Tuesday Tuneage
Mott the Hoople - "Death May Be Your Santa Claus"
1971

This tune is the biting lead-off track to Mott the Hoople's second album Brain Capers. On that LP it was followed by covers of songs by Dion and The Youngbloods. This was similar to how their debut album started off with a bizarre cover of the Kinks "You Really Got Me" (it was an instrumental) and they followed it up with covers of songs by The Sir Douglas Quintet and Sonny & Cher. I am not listing complaints here. Mott the Hoople is up there with the likes of the Replacements in my pantheon of rock 'n' roll also-rans.

Turns out "Death May Be Your Santa Claus" is not a Christmas song, but I kinda wish it was. And Ian Hunter doesn't even sing the title words at all. Crap. But I just like that as Brits, Mott didn't title it "Death May Be Your Father Christmas." That just lacks hooks.

As for the illustration with this blog post ... that's how you get from Mott to Hoople in North Dakota. If you decide to take said trek, wait for the warm weather months, it's not a Christmastime trip.

Tuesday Tuneage
Rod Stewart - “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)”
1972

Greil Marcus in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: “Rarely has a singer had as full and unique a talent as Rod Stewart; rarely has anyone betrayed his talent so completely.”

Yeah, right, you’re thinking. Rod Stewart? I didn’t buy it either, that Rod Stewart was once a great artist. If the first time you heard him was in the era of “Hot Legs” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” like I did, you woudn’t believe that he was capable of the rock 'n' roll brilliance of Every Picture Tells A Story and Never A Dull Moment. Because that’s where I was a kid and into adulthood. People older than me swore by Stewart’s early work, but c’mon ... this was the guy who tortured me in high school with “Passion” and “Young Turks.” Nothing was going to change my mind.

But the conversion took place, sometime around all the press Stewart got over the release of his Storyteller box set. Maybe it when I was on the road to Damascus, or in this case I-394, when I heard his cover of the Temptations’ “I’m Losing You” on the radio. Or maybe it was when I read comparisions between Stewart and Paul Westerberg, both in their self-depracating humor and how the Replacements’ All Shook Down had that bass-drums-acoustic guitar music like in Stewarts’ early work. I know the deal was pretty much sealed when my buddy Turk loaned me his Every Picture Tells A Story LP. And you know how the story ends: I buy Stewarts’ first four albums and absolutely love them, because once the skeptic becomes the true believer there is no shaking his beliefs. And why do I love those albums?

Greil Marcus again: “A writer who offered profound lyricism and fabulous self-deprecating humor, teller of tall tales and honest heartbreaker, he had an unmatched eye for the tiny details around which lives turn, shatter and reform ... (Stewart had) an uncanny combination of the folksinger’s gentle touch, the rockers’s assault on all things holy and the soul man’s affirmation of the truth buried deep in every human heart.”

To further convince you of Rod Stewart’s brilliance in his early years, I give you a song he didn’t even deign to put on an album. While along with Ron Wood he was part of a fine songwriting team, Stewart also had an uncanny knack for finding just the right songs to cover. This one is “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)”, a big country hit for Jerry Lee Lewis in 1968. He put the tune on the B-side to his cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Angel” in a seeming attempt to bind the longhair/hardhat divide of forty years ago, ever the romantic was our guy Rod. Enjoy it with a nightcap.

Tuesday Tuneage
Lou Reed and Metallica - "Iced Honey"
2011

Possible album titles instead of Lulu: Hide The Lightning. New Yakk.

My friend Steve: "Metallica sounds like as tight of a thrash unit as they've sounded since 1989, and Lou Reed just sounds like the dying old man in Magnolia."

Death Geriatic. I Wanna Be Black (Album.)

Canadian hard rocker Danko Jones: "It’s the Ishtar of rock 'n' roll. And if you don't get that, it's the Waterworld of rock 'n' roll. And if you don't get that, it's the Battlefield Earth of rock 'n' roll."

Metal Machine Mess. Kill ‘Em All And Start With These Guys.

Bill Tuomala: "There was a song I liked halfway through, kinda like day drinking with a hangover when there's that four minutes that you actually feel good."

Full Load. I Can't Stand It.

And yet you have to give Lou credit. At least he came up with the idea of recording a crappy album with Metallica before Neil Young did. Dave Mustaine, expect a call.

Tuesday Tuneage
Hanoi Rocks - "Self Destruction Blues"
1982

Hanoi Rocks were a group of Finns influenced by the New York Dolls (bassist Sami Yaffa is in the Dolls' latest incarnation), and never lived up to their sleaze-rock promise. Bob Ezrin - who had worked wonders with Alice Cooper and Kiss - couldn't even get them up and running at full raunch when he produced their Two Steps From The Move album. Though to be fair, they were crucial in the development of Guns n' Roses, at least looks-wise.

I tried to like 'em, I really did. Kinda felt I had to, with them being my fellow suomalainen and all. I bought three of their albums, one of them on vinyl even. But I never listen to them these days. At least I managed to fit a reference to them in a fantasy I wrote about opening a Finnish bar.

As for this tune, why does the narrator make breakfast for two? He had already said that his gal had left him the prior Monday. Is it some leftover instinct - unaffected by heartbreak, he went ahead and made breakfast for the two of them? Maybe he just had a big appetite. Self-destruction can make a guy hungry, that's why I hesitate to keep potato chips on hand in my pantry.

Tuesday Tuneage
ZZ Top - "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide"
1979

A beer project is loosely defined as any project that is mundane enough that you can have a beer or two while doing it to make it a little more enjoyable. “Beer project” was coined by my good friend Bjerk, I believe the first time he used it around me was when we were repairing the windshield on his Glastron speedboat. And by “we,” I mean that I held the windshield in place while he drilled new holes. (I'd write something self-deprecating about how little I did during this project, but come to think of it ... it was a lot more than your typical second on a UND dorm maintenance project.)

It is while up north at the cabin that the beer project takes a special place. You don’t want to take too much time or have to drive into town for supplies because your ultimate goal is to get back on the water, so improvisation becomes key. This is how my brother and I constructed a “Mayor Country” sign (this was during a time of anti-mayor strife and my brother and I are of the mayor’s “vote early, vote often” constituency ... well, we would be if we had elections up there) from an Old Style Draft box, a magic marker, and some garden stakes. During that same era, I fixed the opening latch on my classic Schmidt cooler - one of those big aluminum ones with a padded cover for sitting and a bottle opener attached - with a latch designed for a window. It was while constructing a landing outside the garage that my Dad uttered the classic line: “We’re going to do something. It might be the wrong thing, but we’re going to do something.” (That landing actually wasn’t a beer project and Dad designed it rather well, but that quote sums up the Beer Project Mentality perfectly.)

So with Bjerk’s Glastron and the windshield ... This was in the days before the worldwide web, the iTunes Store, YouTube etc. freed singular songs from their album constraints. And I really had a hankering to hear ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” I never heard it on Twin Cities radio, it wasn’t one of the three songs by them that KQRS played, and we didn’t have a hard rock station in the Twin Cities. So I called Bjerk up during the week and asked if he had the ZZ Top album with “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” on it. The next weekend he brought a cassette of ZZ Top's Deguello, a boombox, and some cans of Stroh's Light down to his dock. And that was our soundtrack as we fixed that windshield. A well-executed beer project on a sunny summer afternoon.

Tuesday Tuneage
James Gang - "The Bomber"
1970

When I was in my mid-teens, I bought a couple of small paperbacks at the B. Dalton store in Grand Forks. They were short rock biographies published by Tempo Books and both were authored by John Swenson. One was about The Who, the other was about The Eagles. The Who went on to become my obsession in high school, ignored through much of my twenties and thirties, and now once again one of my all-time faves. The Eagles? Well I tried selling the Eagles book last time I moved but the bookstore wouldn’t buy it and now I’m glad I kept it because it has a photo of John Belushi wearing a Vikings windbreaker in it. The Eagles book also doubles as a bio of Joe Walsh and his original version of the James Gang. Swenson wrote that the James Gang blew away Pete Towhnshend when they opened for the The Who circa 1970 and this was enough for me to seek out James Gang LPs in high school. Swenson's descriptions of them - as I recall, and it's been thirty years or so - seemed to place the James Gang in a high tier of the great also-rans in American rock history. They were a homer-or-strikeout band to me, but when they went deep it was brilliant hard rock.

For instance, their second album, James Gang Rides Again, featured a tune called “The Bomber.” which was a montage of:
1) A killer proto-heavy metal piece called "Closet Queen" (Closet what??) (Which makes me wonder what these lines exactly mean ... "So I began to notice some things I hadn't seen before/That's what's brought me here knockin' on your back door");
2) Maurice Ravel's "Bolero"; and
3) Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate To The Wind."

The inclusion of “Bolero” was no doubt influenced by “Beck’s Bolero” from a few years earlier. But Ravel’s estate forced the band to delete it from future pressings, so only the first 10,000 copies of Rides Again LPs featured "Bolero." Of course, the only reason I was aware of this "Bolero" controvery was because had I read that Eagles book - which described the Ravel estate's legal action - right around the same time as the movie 10 was popular and "Bolero" was a significant part of that movie. But I'm not sure I ever even saw that movie, it starred that tiny British guy with kinda long hair who I understand some people thought was funny and it also starred Ursula Andress Linda Evans Bo Derek.

I had mentally misplaced all this "The Bomber" stuff until the other night when for some reason I remembered it while listening to “Beck’s Bolero” in the dark on headphones. This lead me to YouTube, which featured The James Gang’s version of “The Bomber,” complete with the controversial "Bolero" excerpt fully intact. This made that YouTube moment A PROTO-METAL HOLY GRAIL! I hadn't been this excited over a proto-metal finding since: 1) Discovering a copy of the Stooges' quasi-bootleg Metallic K.O. in the racks at Let It Be in the mid-nineties. (Note, the album is not titled Punk K.O.); and 2) Hearing some of Rocket From The Tombs' recordings - officially released as the album The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs - at Treehouse Records early last decade. I bought it on CD and came to find out that it was made up of recordings from various RFTT bootleggs. (One of those bootlegs was titled A Night Of Heavy Music - note, not titled A Night Of Punk Music.)

So what, you say, a minute-and-a-half of some Ohio band's interpretation of a tune was missing and now you found it. Big deal. Well here's another story, maybe it'll clear things up as to my state of mind, maybe it won't: As a teen, I bought a Canadian version of The MC5's Kick Out The Jams LP hoping as an import it would have the REAL intro to the title track. But I was bummed that it had the cleaned-up "brothers and sisters" intro to the title track. Imagine my joy when I bought the album on CD in the nineties and got my long-promised, never-heard "motherfuckers" version ... ANOTHER PROTO-METAL HOLY GRAIL ...