Tuesday Tuneage
April Is National Poetry Month
The Guess Who - "Bus Rider"
1970


Beer On The Bus (Smokes In The Car)

Beer on the bus
December after Christmas
Twenty-four cans of Premium
Tightly contained
Cardboard box
Red diamond
The Friendly Beer

Beer on the bus
Eighteen Large
The bus, not the beer count
Step on board
Driver smiles, nods
You'd love to offer
him one
You guys blasting
Van Halen
While the bus cruises
south towards
Forty-sixth street

Or maybe Dennis Hopper
took the 18 Large over
You're passing out Premos
to keep the passengers cool
Hopper gets pissed
He's hiding, sober
Sandra Bullock
falls for you
hard

Tuesday Tuneage
The Gap Band - "Oops Upside Your Head"
1979

(EDITOR'S NOTE: In this blog post I discuss an episode of The White Shadow. If interested, you can watch this episode in its entirety on YouTube.)

The other night, in honor of Minnesota playing UCLA in the opening round of the NCAA basketball tournament, I kicked back and watched "Wanna Bet?", a first-season episode of The White Shadow. Why this episode? Michael Warren, who played hoops at UCLA under John Wooden, is the actor who has a major guest role as Bobby Magnum, a streetwise baskeball hustler who coach Ken Reeves hopes to bring to Carver and hence compete for the city championship.

Although I've seen it prior (including when it originally aired in 1979) "Wanna Bet?" has been stuck in my mind the past few days for a variety of reasons. To wit:

- Bobby Magnum carries a can of spray-on deodorant in his gym page. After he works up a sweat taking the local hoops-playing rubes out of their dough at a local playground, he proceeds to towel off and apply the Right Guard. Classy.

- As my brother loves to point out, the Magnum character is seventeen years old, while Warren was thirty-two at the time. This tops Nathan Cook, who portrayed Carver regular Milton Reese, who was twenty-eight during season one.

- Warren is compelling as Magnum, you can see why he went on to be part of the Hill Street Blues ensemble. His role helps make up for the total lack of lines from cast faves Morris Thorpe, Warren Coolidge, and Salami.

- This was the first "Kid transfers to Carver, plays on basketball team, but is only on show once" episode. This streetwise hustler kid was later followed by gay kid, autistic kid, illiterate kid, deaf kid, etc.

- I love that Reeves beats Magnum one-on-one after sporting him three easy baskets. And while wearing jeans.

- Hey Reeves: Telling your date that her looking better with makeup on is a "miracle" isn't too smooth.

- Reeves does better in his bantering with Sybil Buchanan. In my mind, there is an episode of The White Shadow where Reeves campaigns for a practice facility and the sexual tension between him and Buchanan reaches an all-time high.

- Although Reeves' talk (SPOILER ALERT) with a local bookmaker big shot gets Magnum out of trouble with another bookmaker's goons, there is never a scene where Reeves relates to Magnum that he did this. Yet Magnum thanks Reeves profusely in the closing scene. Odd.

- But the oddest thing of all in this episode, the thing that keeps me up at night in bafflement is this: There is a scene where the team is running laps and they chant "Bop upside the head, we're gonna bop upside the head!" (Check out the chant starting at 27:33 into the episode.) This sounds a lot like The Gap Band's chant from their hit "Oops Upside Your Head". But my Internet research indicates that The White Shadow episode aired in January of 1979, but The Gap Band single didn't come out until later that year … meaning that the Carver team's use of the chant predated The Gap Band's use of it by months!

I googled the heck out of this mystery and got nowhere. I suppose it's possible that members of The Gap Band were watching Shadow, and said: "That chant is genius, let's get to the studio and put it on wax!" My working theory is that the "upside your head" chant must have been a popular thing for urban youth in the late seventies. Ken Reeves would have referred to it as being "ghetto", but we'll let that slide.

Tuesday Tuneage
Wilco - "Box Full Of Letters"
1995

One day shortly after New Year's, I took the 18 Large to the post office, opened the PO box with the key, and there was no mail. The mail apparently had been forwarded by this point. I stopped at Office Max for some supplies, I went to Subway for my customary sandwich. And the walk home just wasn't the same. It was cold, it was windy, it was the last time I'd be taking that walk for that purpose. The liquor cabinet called, it was two in the afternoon.

It didn't start out as something I looked forward to. It was just a job. A client was travelling the country and they asked me check their mail in their absence. It was being forwarded to this PO box at the post office near my neighborhood. When I had a car it was a pit stop. Once I was without a car, it became a little more involved. In late summer and early fall I'd bike there. A nice little jaunt, something to break up the day, an excuse to stop by the nearby Subway.

It was later in the fall that these runs actually got to be fun. Being someone who is adverse to biking when it gets below fifty degrees, I found I could take the 18 Large from my front door to the front door of the post office. iPod blasting, the music tended to be Golden Smog who just seemed like an autumn band to me for some reason ("the leaves listen to what I say"). I also blasted Big Star, Semisonic, Wilco - all music I found/adored/obsessed over in the mid-nineties when I went through my first phase of bus commuting, when I doing temp jobs downtown, when I first set out to become a writer.

I wouldn't catch a return bus home. The 18 Large would have been a long wait and the 18 Normal wouldn’t save that that much walking and was always crowded. Instead, I kept the iPod blasting and trekked it home. Past the old folks high rises (Where I'll live someday??), past the community garden that reminded me that My Hell would involve some sort of gardening, past the Liberal Catholic church (I'm not sure exactly what this denomination believes in, but this parish's website promotes somebody named "Swami Ken"), past the convenience store with way overpriced 3.2 beer, and milk a week past its expiration date, and a decent frozen pizza selection for those no-plan weekend nights.

Later that day I would email the client with what I had found, a day or two after that I would take any checks to their bank up on Hennepin for deposit. That was a bus ride full of UM girls who had ponytails and wore what seemed to be fitted sweats. The bank always had a line but the black security guard was always there for a friendly hello and help with the door. At the joint next door I could get French toast and read the sports page. Soon after I would contemplate tanking the day away down 26th street at a fave local bar. I would see myself ordering a Scotch and soda and reading the sports page while keeping an eye on the cable news on TV. Sadly, I always ended up walking by the bar to catch the 4 home, where I poured myself some coffee and got back to work.

Tuesday Tuneage

Babes In Toyland - "We Are Family"

1995

1914 - The Great War (renamed "World War I" after the sequel came about) starts. Three of the combatants - England, Russia (Allies) and Germany (Central Powers) have monarchs who are first cousins. Yep, England's King George V, Russia's Czar Nicholas II, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II are grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

Almost 2014 - Three of the most prominent submarine sandwich chains - Jimmy John's, Milio's, and Erbert & Gerbert's are owned by first cousins. I bring this up because the centennial of the start of The Great War will soon be upon us. This causes me to worry about the state of our sandwiches, as some of these competing shops are too damn close to each other. Case in point: Jimmy John's opens on/near Augsburg College (genius move, near UM also!) and Milio's ups the ante by setting up shop in the same neighborhood pretty much in Zipp's Liquors (big ol' sandwich to go with that 9:45 pm beer run? Sure!) Will the sandwich chains continue to exist in peace? Or will some crazy Serb set off a chain of events that results in an extended war (also involving submarines!?) With whom will Subway and Quiznos align? More importantly: What about Cousins? 

Tuesday Tuneage
The Original Caste - "One Tin Soldier"
1969

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from my kinda-started, never-completed, now-abandoned novel Heaven Is In Your Mind:

"When I was little, quiet little," she says, "I think maybe first grade or even before elementary school, there was a popular song they played a lot on the radio. It was called 'One Tin Soldier' and was done by a band called Coven who had a weirdo black mass satanist past, though the version I first heard may have been done by some Canadian one-hit wonders called The Original Caste. This confused me for a few days as an adult as when I heard The Original Caste's version on the AM oldies station, I thought they said 'the original cast' and I thought they meant the original cast of the Billy Jack movie, when I knew that Coven were the ones who were credited for the Billy Jack version. Then it dawned on me that Billy Jack wasn't a musical - I have never seen it but I know it is some low-budget revenge fantasy that does not involve singing - so the original soundtrack wouldn't feature any original cast. I think what helped cause this confusion was that in those days there was a spate of hippie musicals: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair that spawned songs that ended up in Top 40 radio and invariably these songs were creepy and sometimes the version you heard was the cast of the movie or the Broadway musical but sometimes what you heard was a pop singer or group doing a cover of the musical's songs.

"So this tune, 'One Tin Soldier,' which I first heard as a young girl, creeped me out for decades. In fact, I would turn it off whenever it came on the oldies station. It probably didn't matter that I turned it off though, once I heard those opening notes I could recite the song word-for-word. As a girl I couldn't avoid it as I would hear it while riding with my mom in the car on errands or while playing with my older sister, who would constantly play the forty-five on a portable record player in her room. Anyway, this song, I'm sure you heard it, is a simple morality tale: The valley people want the mountain people's treasure chest, the mountain people offer to share it, the valley people get angry and kill the mountain people. They open the treasure chest - and I think a Ray Bradbury story once ended on a similar note - only to find a note that says 'peace on earth.' And this sound freaked me out, scared me silly, I mean an entire people - genocide - being killed over a simple treasure chest. I knew the song taught a lesson but I thought it did it in a cruel, cruel way. The older I got, the more pissed off I got about it. The song didn't quantify how many mountain people there were - ten? a hundred? ten thousand? - not that a lower number justified their murders in any way. I hated The Original Caste and Coven for singing this song. Like I said, hearing those opening notes, so hopeful and pleasant on their own, filled me with dread and I would immediately change the station.

"What I never told anybody, was that this song filled an hour of my Sunday mornings with dread also. Given that the lyrics of 'One Tin Soldier' feature words like 'peace,' 'Judgment Day,' and 'kingdom,' and that the first line of the song addresses children, for some reason I thought it was a Bible story put in song form for children. Year after year in Sunday School, I figured at some point the teacher would tell the Bible story of the mountain people and the valley people. And then because invariably - as my elementary-age education seemed to involve large amounts of singing, along with art projects - we would have to sing 'One Tin Soldier.' And that was my big fear, to have to sing that song with all my Sunday School classmates. You know how creepy little children sound when they sing in groups, and then throw genocide lyrics on top of that? Have you ever heard that Canadian elementary school choir album from the seventies where they sing pop songs? Creepy. But the story never came up. Of course, it turned out that while the Old Testament has bloodbaths galore, the story is not in the Bible at all, I found this out when I brought the mountain and valley peoples up at a dinner party during a discussion over Israel and the Palestinians, imagine the looks I got with that one ... By sixth grade my parents had stopped going to church, by seventh grade they had split up and neither of them would drop me off at Sunday School at all."

Tuesday Tuneage
"Hello Hardee's"
Mid-To-Late 1970s

So that Triumph/Hardee's blog post from a couple of weeks ago sent me on a trip down Hardee's Memory Lane. Weird, as I'm not even that big a fan of the chain. I worked at one for a couple of summers in college and those summers I bet I ate the employee-discounted food two or three times total. (Though to be fair, in the second summer they dropped their signature char-broiled burgers in favor of fried ones in a misguided attempt to save bucks.) But still … I can probably name all the towns that I have ordered Hardee's in: Crookston, Detroit Lakes, Elk River, Grand Forks, Long Prairie, Milaca, Minneapolis (remember the West Bank location off of 35W??), Moorhead, Sauk Centre, St. Cloud, St. Paul, Staples, Wadena. Like I said: Weird memory trip.

This Hardee's thing I have going is likely caused by this commercial, a favorite thirty seconds of TV of mine as a kid, one that has always stuck firmly in my memory. Ten years ago or so while driving to Minneapolis from St. Paul, I stopped at the Hardee's off of I-94 to get lunch and brought it to my afternoon client. Queries were made by the folks there as to where I had scored the Hardee's. As by this time they had brought back their signature char-broiled burgers, I proceeded to riff on this old commercial, pumping my fist and yelling: "CHAR-BROILED BURGERS! CHAR-BROILED BURGERS!" As everyone in the room was quite younger than me and had no recollection of this commercial, things went quiet after my outburst. And the commercial wasn't on the web to show, so I was left looking like a raving madman.

Now it is on YouTube and of course it has brought me much joy in this new year. And this Hardee's nostalgia has me craving Hardee's char-broiled burgers and some fries, we're talking Taco John's-like craving here (blasphemy, I know.) If I had a car, I'd make the trip to St. Paul for that Hardee's right now. But don't be surprised if you're on a Metro Transit commute sometime and you hear a middle-aged man yell: "I WISH THIS BUS WAS GOING TO HARDEE'S!"

Tuesday Tuneage
Link Wray &His Ray Men - "Rumble"
1958

MEMO
February 1, 2013
To: Evan Ruud, CEO Tuomala Worldwide
From: Bill Tuomala, Jack Of Some Trades
Re: LinkedIn Account

Evan -

I appreciate the company's move towards social networking, but can I close my LinkedIn account? It's useless! Words fail me on how crappy the LinkedIn experience has been in my six years or so of dealing with it.

"LinkedIn is a wasteland of the hopeless, overeducated, unemployed. It's a hope-free zone." - Def Jeff Johnson

LinkedIn has gotten me zero new accounting clients. I suspect folks just Google my name and after they read my assorted irreverent essays and my inane tweets, they take a pass. Obviously, my twenty-five years of experience and self-proclaimed title of "Best Bookkeeper in Minneapolis" does not help me online.

"I suspect that my antisocial minority will soon be a majority, and we'll have an antisociety! Imagine that! Will Rogers the ultimate outlaw!" - Lester Bangs

You can probably guess how I feel when I get those requests to "Join my network on LinkedIn." Do you think my heart skips a beat or do I think "Ah, crap"? Yep, you know it. They've replaced the forwarded "this is funny" emails from the days of yore. Why deal with this type of nonsense in my inbox? I've got lists to make, inspiration to ponder, and work to contemplate.

"He's on LinkedIn, Lemon. He might as well be dead!" - Jack Donaghy

Let me know how I should move on this issue.
thanks
BT


MEMO
February 2, 2013
To: Bill Tuomala
From: Evan Ruud
Re: LinkedIn Account

Tuomala -

For a figurehead, you have a lot to say. My advice: Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Evan

Tuesday Tuneage
Triumph - "Fight The Good Fight"
1981

First heard this one in my car in a Hardee's parking lot in Crookston in the mid-eighies. I was immediately blown away by the anthemic power and glory of it, especially the crunching chorus. It still amazes me, but this past week when I would listen to it all I would think of was: Why was I in Crookston? Must have one of those trips between Grand Forks and my parents' cabin a couple of hours southeast where I avoided the interstates and took the back highways. Why a stop in Crookston (only thirty minutes from Grand Forks) and why Hardee's? I can't say. I did a lot of mysterious, baffling things in my youth but eating lunch in my car with Q98 blasting on the radio was one of them that worked out for the good.

Tuesday Tuneage
Badlands - "Winter's Call"
1989

Badlands' Wikipedia page reads like a combination of Behind The Music and This Is Spinal Tap. To wit:

- Their unreleased third album finally found light of day … in a 1998 release, in Japan.

- The guitarist and vocalist traded barbs in separate issues of Kerrang! magazine, and at one show the vocalist interrupted the show to pull out the Kerrang! issue with the guitarist's shots and shouted: "There's two sides to every story!" While he did this, the guitarist mouthed: "It's all true."

- Also, a reference to Desmond Child (of course); "working on one of his muscle cars"; and the fact that the band was made up of various former members of Ozzy Osbourne's band, Dio-era Black Sabbath, and a future member of Kiss. (And some of these were the same person.)

A Badlands fanboy (there was one?) obviously pirated part of this page, with such gushing sentiments as:

With melodic sensibilities and solid chops, each member of the band proved a cornerstone creatively, while presenting energetic live shows with flawless musicality.

Despite all the tensions in the band, they proved ever a 'Musician's Favourite' (*Tuesday Tuneage Editor's note: Brit spelling of "Musician"? Hmmmm.*) group, prompting all with musical talent to attend as many of their shows as possible, due to their 'jam it out' live shows, never offering the same show twice.

The truly impressive thing about Badlands' Wikipedia page is that if you look at the "years active", there are NO GAPS. Hardly any band formed ten years ago or more contains no such gaps in its Wikipedia page, because rock bands always reunite, and always to score nostalgia bucks. See, NO GAPS = NO REUNIONS. Good for you, Badlands, way to stick to your principles. (Then again, there's the very real probability that nobody is clamoring for a Badlands reunion, aside from the British fan who gushed about them on Wikipedia.)

After hearing Badlands, I can tell why on listens to Z-Rock I gravitated towards the like of Sabbath-heads/proto-stoner-rockers Trouble. I would have written about them instead, but their Wikipedia page just isn't funny.

Tuesday Tuneage
Shooting Star - "Hang On For Your Life"
1981

I recently went on a late seventies/early eighties AOR detour, caused by viewing the video of April Wine's "Enough Is Enough", which entirely took place on a semi and featured: 1) Myles Goodwyn singing into a CB radio handset as the rest of the band was crammed into the cab, and 2) Canadian girls dressed oh-so-early-eighties. Soon enough, I was ears-deep into 707, Axe, Duke Jupiter, Billy Thorpe etc. etc. etc. Maybe this is some sort of decades-later overreaction to not having an AOR station in Grand Forks throughout most of high school and college. KKDQ-FM was AOR until 1981, when it became Top 40 XL93. Q98 out of Fargo was just out of range and my sister made fun of me for listening to its static when it came in on cloudy days. My response was that the static was better than all of Grand Forks radio. (I make a lot of Q98 references here during Tuesday Tuneage, my folks have a cabin an hour east of Fargo, so I got the station out there during summers and through most of the commutes to and from there.)

With nobody to toss me a rope, this recent downward spiral through decades-old AOR continued. And so I ended up at Shooting Star, a Kansas City group that had some success thirty years ago or so. "Hang On For Your Life" is faster than the norm, meaning that punk had allowed the speed limit to be raised in AOR Land. Then again, maybe they were going back to Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" for speed clues. There are working-class nods in the lyrics: "Working hard to make a living", "union scale", and mention of some sort of muscle car. (Also something about needing a strong drink, this song probably wasn't big with the MADD crowd, but hey at least they advised seat belt use, pretty forward thinking in 1981!)

The tune is chock-full of obvious Zep and BadCo influences and is close to being typical faceless early eighties AOR, but there is a certain appeal as you blast in on headphones: 1) Its speed, 2) The vocalist's kinda-raspy voice, 3) The production. Typically with a band like this and a chance at a hit with a hook-filled song, you would expect some studio gloss. Thankfully none of that nonsense shows up here. Maybe being on the Virgin label helped, maybe producer Dennis McKay knew the right touch with which to handle the sound. Whatever the theory, the bare-bones sound completes the charm. Not to mention that Hang On For Your Life is one of my fave album covers, maybe even the favorite of any album I don't actually own. Any child of the seventies who had the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle would absolutely be drawn in by it.

Special Bonus Addendum: A Google image search of Shooting Star indicates some sort of "get haircuts in order to look relevant" transformation for the band. (Remember Metallica before and after Load?) Check out Shooting Star's "before" look and "after" look. Alas, I didn't find what years these photos are from and apparently the haircuts also shed a band member, perhaps going to the Kansas Music Hall of Fame on a fact-finding mission is in order to clear this matter up.

Tuesday Tuneage
Scandal Featuring Patty Smyth - "The Warrior"
1984

When it was announced last summer that the Twins' radio broadcasts would be moving to 96.3 FM K-Twin for the upcoming season, I checked out the station to see what kind of music it played. Then I found myself loving it. I'm not being ironic here, turns out I'm a big fan of the "Hot AC" radio format! In fact, I fear burning myself out on it and then I'll be back on Local Current and SiriusXM Underground Garage, where I won't hear "Hey Jealousy" by the Gin Blossoms, "What Do All The People Know" by the Monroes, "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant, or "Locked Out Of Heaven" by Bruno Mars.

Recently while driving a rental car, I heard "The Warrior" by Scandal on K-Twin and found myself cranking up the volume. When I got home, I had to fire up the song again on YouTube. The video is dumb and features weirdo dancing/performance art. But when Patty Smyth does the "shoot the pistols" gesture at the end? Always gets me. More importantly, this tune was a big hit during that magical radio summer of 1984. I was one of those guys up north smug in my knowing the difference between Patty Smyth and Patti Smith. These days, I don't think about it much and have reduced it to this shorthand:

Patti Smith was married to Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, meaning he was a protopunk. Patty Smyth is married to John McEnroe, who in the seventies was a punk.

I've never heard Patti Smith on K-Twin. Maybe she should hire Nick Gilder and Mike Chapman?

Tuesday Tuneage
Husker Du - "New Day Rising"
1985

In which Saint Paul's own Huskers play fast fast fast and Bob Mould repeats three words over and over:

New day rising
New day rising
New day rising

It's the most audacious album opener since Mott the Hoople's debut, when they started off with a cover of "You Really Got Me" (done as an instrumental.)

"New Day Rising" is a fun one to make up your own words to. For instance, I generally have every other Friday off, so on the Thursday night I find myself singing:

Three-day weekend
Three-day weekend

There's all kinds of variatons of four or five syllable phrases that you can use:

Taco Tuesday
Surly Bender
Heggies Pizza
TV Girlfriend
Obama Mandate
Golden Chokers
Summit Saga
Scotch And Soda
Grain Belt Premium
Huskers Vinyl

Just remember: You're not insanely talking to yourself if you are instead singing!

Tuesday Tuneage
Ray Conniff and The Ray Conniff Singers - "Ring Christmas Bells"
1962

Mom used to play Ray Conniff and The Ray Conniff Singers' We Wish You A Merry Christmas around the house during December. As a little kid, I was a big fan of it. Then I got older and thought it cornball. I dug it out of my stash of inherited parents' vinyl (my folks are still with us, but gave me their LPs years ago) one recent Saturday evening fully prepared to make fun of it as preparation for listening/scribing to Marah's excellent A Christmas Kind Of Town album.

I knew my plan was in trouble as I glanced at the album cover. I had forgotten that the gal on it always gave me a certain glad/uneasy feeling throughout my youth. She sports a miniskirted Santa outfit with strategically-placed belt, Santa hat, black boots, plus no ring! (After sorting through my Mom's LPs, I see that Conniff regularly put yeah-baby gals on his album covers. A sly one, that Mr. Conniff. Sell the albums to America's housewives and once the husbands spot that eye candy they won't complain or insist Johnny Cash be played instead.)

Then all my snideness was blown away a few seconds into side one. Turns out this Conniff album is pretty good. I quickly reached a decision to add this one to my Christmas music rotation, it'll be a mandatory listen along with Bob Dylan's Christmas In The Heart, A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, Marah's aforementioned album (which I will tell you about, someday), and Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You. The Conniff album holds up because: 1) It's traditional songs which they do quite well, and 2) I'm a sucker for this type of Christmas music.

Also We Wish You A Merry Christmas brings up memories of winter and Christmas in West Fargo, North Dakota, where my family lived until 1972. Santa at the Nodak store, lots of snow, huge holiday dinners with my Mom's sister and her family, my brother and I being on a toboggan tied to a snowmobile as our neighbor Punchy pulled us, his looking back at us, grinning.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Refreshments - “Banditos”
1996

To be clear: This music-listening phase I’m now going through is not “nineties nostalgia.” As Michael Ventura wrote: Nostalgia cheapens, corrupts, and, finally, destroys memory, leaving in its place a bright plastic artifact that pretends to be one’s past.

See, lately my mind has been running through a lot of nineties memories. And with me, memories heavily go hand-in-hand with music. But I’m not being nostlagic for the nineties. I mean, why would I be?  For the first half of the nineties I worked for a cheapo outfit of a corporation, where I got to hear nonsense about “team” and “teamwork” on a daily basis, got lied to and stabbed in the back, and (among other cultural insults) had a coworker ask if The Black Crowes were “a new wave band.” It was horrible, kept getting worse, yet somehow I got it through my thick skull that it didn’t have to be permanent. The last half of the nineties were some of the best times of my life as I worked on being a writer (instead of merely thinking I could be one someday) and started a zine. But still, I was doing temp jobs for low wages. The days weren’t all that great, reading the newspaper with my brown-bag lunch was easily the highlight. If it wasn’t for MPR/KFAN/Radio K on that little radio I kept in my cubicle, I would have been one miserable little accountant.

But that mid-point of the nineties, when REV-105 was going strong and breaking ground and The Edge was trying to play catch-up here in Minneapolis was some joyous fun while spinning around the FM dial. I keep meaning to assemble a playlist of faves from those few short years. Most of them would be one-hits, and that's fine with me, I hear that era as single-servings, not Bold Statements By Major Artists. (Not that bold statements weren't being made, just my radio-listening experience was typical one of hearing a bunch of fun songs by various artists.) I should assemble this playlist soon, before I totally forget all the songs I loved. Case in point, a few weeks ago I heard The Refreshments' "Banditos" on SiriusXM Lithium and realized I had completely forgotten it. It's a beauty of a one-hit wonder, hooky garage rock with a certain contagious exuberance over its slacker tale. In the Jukebox of My Mind, this tune is the much-heralded B-side to Beck’s “Mexico.”

This is the only song I know by The Refreshments. Maybe they recorded other such gems, but this one is the only one I care to hear. Because I have a very specific memory of hearing this in on my car radio on Emerson Avenue South in 1996. I was in a very good mood that day, I don’t remember why. Maybe it was just hearing this song. Some days, something like that is enough.

Tuesday Tuneage
Lorence Hud - “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”
1972

A Tuesday Tuneage sorta sequel to last week’s April Wine piece. It turns out that the Wine’s “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” is a cover, orginally done by a Canadian rocker named Lorence Hud. If someone said the name “Lorence Hud” wouldn’t you immediately think “must be a Canadian rocker” without knowing his occupation?

Hud’s lumberjack looks remind me of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Not a good thing, as I’ve never seen any of the X-Men movies, and have only liked Jackman in one thing: The Prestige. I don’t have a Dr. Cox-like disdain for Jackman, I just don’t have much use for the guy. Same goes for Liam Neeson (notable only Christopher Nolan has done anything good with these guys lately.)

And now when I hear “Hud” I’m going to think of a pretty good Canadian rock song and Hugh Jackman and not necessarily Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. Not sure that was fair to my mind, but I brought it upon myself.