Tuesday Tuneage
David Essex - "Rock On"
1973

I'm guessing this is the only David Essex song you'll ever need. Certainly, it's the only one most of us have ever heard, though I wonder if its flipside "On and On" is some sort of continuation of the single. Horribly covered by some soap opera actor in the eighties, in the nineties REM was smart enough to reclaim the song by quoting it on their eerie single "Drive."

It sounded out of place on the radio in the early seventies, and likely would in any era. Bass-driven and echo-heavy, it's first verse is an homage to old rock 'n' roll without sounding like any sort of rock 'n' roll at all. (John Fogerty had to be nonplussed upon hearing it.) "And where do we go from here?" anticipates Guns n' Roses "Where do we go now?" in "Sweet Child O' Mine." More significantly, the funhouse look at rock 'n' roll of "Rock On" anticipates the brilliantly haunting book Rock Dreams, which was released just a year later.

This tune leaves more questions than it answers. The question bugging me this week: Is "Jimmy Dean" a confidence that he knows the late James Dean on the familiar basis or does it to harken to singer Jimmy Dean, he of "Big Bad John" note, who is also known for his microwavable breakfast fare?

Tuesday Tuneage
Axe - "Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets"
1982

PART ONE: US-81 OFF-RAMP TO MINNEAPOLIS WEST BANK

"Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets" is the rare song on Tuesday Tuneage which is not only a Q-98 Classic, but also has status as a favorite of the Cosmic Slop show on Radio K back in the day. I'd try to describe it, but you just have to track it. Soon you'll be pining for a summer night of having a keg cup in your hand, bumming a heater off of a friend, checking out the hot burnout girls in their Levi's, and nodding your head to the killer song blasting on the boombox.

And you gotta love the audacity of the song's premise. Most of us, when we have parties, we have them in our houses or backyards. Maybe in the garage. Not these guys and not this party. It's going to be IN THE STREETS BABY AND IT'S GOING TO BE A ROCK 'N' ROLL PARTY. How many kegs of High Life got drained out on the pavement that night? And did Axe invent National Night Out??

PART TWO: CONSUMER REPORTS SEZ

"Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets" is on the album Offering. A sophomore year dorm suitemate had Axe's Offering on cassette and played it frequently, I remember asking him if he could maybe play his copy of Hot Rocks for a change instead. I don't remember what the rest of Offering sounded like, but am pretty sure it didn't equal "Rock 'N' Roll Party in the Streets." Sure, I could go look up the take Rolling Stone had back in '82 or pull up the AllMusic review. But instead, I'm going to offer (sorry) up what genuine Amazon customers think of this album. Because if you are going to spend $15 on an Offering CD (or around $5 for the cassette on ebay, and I get the feeling cassettes outsold vinyl on the original release of this album like 10-1), you should know what the people truly think! (All spelling is left as-is.) Take it away, folks:

"The entire first side is terrific, and the second side is, too, until the last song or two. I own this album on cassette."

"I had 3 cassettes of Offering, one for my car, one for my boyfriend's and one for the portable player I took on my morning run."

"This album had a certain sofistication in it that, I, as a teenager, had to listen to a few times to grasp … Axe's sound, to me, is like Bob Seger electrified!!"

"I bought this on a cassette when it first came out. It's not a great album but definitely worth buying."

"Axe were your typical hard rock bar band type that had just enough licks to find them tapping on the shoulders of 80's A.O.R. radio stations. In order to get there, however, they put on a lot of polish to keep the airwaves sweet, which means that "Rock And Roll Party In The Streets" could have easily used some Everclear in the punch."

"It should also be on your current playlist if you are a true rock and roller."

"Way back in the early 80's my cousin and I walked into this independent record store in Missouri to pick up a Blue Oyster Cult album. At the recommendation of the owner we also picked up this GEM. I wore the vinyl out and switched to cassette."

"FYI - AOR stands for Album Oriented Rock, a very successful FM radio format in the late 70s and early 80s that evolved from the underground/freeform radio formats of the late 60s. ...Post disco, but pre Madonna. Quite a lot of these stations eventually morphed again into Classic Rock stations during the late 80s and early 90s. Axe is one of the many bands that had their moment in the AOR era, but have been excluded from most classic rock programming."

"I dont know if this is a good enough review or not. Need some feedback on it asap. This is my first time doing this."

Tuesday Tuneage
New Radicals - "You Get What You Give"
1998

With "You Get What You Give", New Radicals marked themselves as one of the great one-hit wonders of the past twenty years. I bought their only album, Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too, back in the day when I read somewhere it was a refreshing alternative to Beck's minstrel act on Midnite Vultures. It had always been a fun, pick-me-up album to listen to, but after recently loading it on my iPhone and having it grab me in some way it hadn't before on a bus ride home one afternoon, I began to get more intrigued the overall seventies blue-eyed sould vibe, the humor, the Prince homage in "Technicolor Lover", and daring to a leftist (if not ummm, radical) lyrical vibe into a mainstream album. Not to mention the essential appeal of the hooks a'plenty all over the album. My only complaint is that the scorching indictment of Corporate America is largely buried on the title track via mumbling.

And now it's Groundhog Day here for me, as New Radicals only released the one album. Frontman/mastermind Gregg Alexander broke up the band to focus on songwriting and producing. Great for him, you gotta do what makes you happy. Still, I feel depraved and depressed there have been no more New Radicals LPs, EPs, 45s, or iTunes Exclusives that have come down the line since 1998. All we have is this: Hall and Oates, with the help of Todd Rundgren, covered "Someday We'll Know" in 2003. As expected.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Victims - "Television Addict"
1977

The dream where I was a rookie homicide detective and Lieutenant Giardello took a shine to me and my work effort. The only time ever I enjoyed wearing a suit.

Spending an an hour of two of research and seventeen bucks at Amazon figuring out how to hook up my MacBook to my HDTV, just so I could watch my college hockey team on a bigger screen.

Years ago when a couple told me they didn't have a television, stealing Joey Tribiani's material and asking: "What's all your furniture pointed at?"

My Mom saying that TV was the best babysitter. She'd just plop me or my siblings in front of it, we'd stare at it, and she could get the housework done in peace.

The dream where I was part of the Carver basketball team (despite being in waking life short and horrible at hoops), hanging out with Cool, New York, and Thorpe, joining Salami as we walked out to the Motel California.

Those times in the nineties when I would go out of my way during Screen-Free Week - when such a silly concept actually got attention, had to Google it to even see what it's called and if it's still a thing - to watch more TV. Take that, snobby dorks!

The dream where a friend and I were involved with a meth dealer, contemplated turning state's evidence, decided to do one more favor for the dealer, then the cops pulled us over, I lied my socks off, my friend got hauled downtown on a trumped-up bunco charge, and I destroyed damaging evidence and decided to leave town permanently.

Tuesday Tuneage
Run-DMC - "Rock Box"
1984

F*ck it, cards on the table, this off my chest: "Rock Box" is the greatest heavy metal song ever recorded.

First heard these guys on Chicago radio during the two years in the mid-eighties when my folks lived in Illinois and I'd visit them on college breaks. Mom was in the store grabbing a couple of things, I was out in the car and started channel surfing. I came across two guys rapping-near-yelling while metal guitar wailed on. I had read in a recent issue of  Rock & Roll Confidential that there was a rap-metal group called Run-DMC and figured "how many rap-metal outfits can there be?" Back in Grand Forks, I found myself in the Columbia Mall record store buying Run-DMC's King of Rock and Jason and the Scorchers Lost and Found, what with the purchase of Purple Rain the summer before having led to my permanent removal from the "I prefer music by long-established acts, many are likely British, and some may be dead" ranks.

Soon I would backtrack and get Run-DMC's debut, where they first came up with their groundbreaking (and there is no way of overstating this) sound. Drum machine, synthed chimes, heavy metal riffs, and Hendrix-like leads on guitar. It's like they took the controlled chaos of the early Funkadelic albums or those few seconds of "Beat It" where Eddie Van Halen totally shreds and constructed a whole universe around it.

In two years they would follow the natural progression that "Rock Box", then "King of Rock" suggested, brilliantly cover "Walk This Way," and rehabilitate Aerosmith completely. Their formula was so unique it has never been topped. Rap. Metal. Rap-metal. Boom. I'll listen to Run-DMC on a loop to my death before I get into old fogey songwriter music by the likes of John Hiatt or Elvis Costello.

Tuesday Tuneage
Edgar Winter Group - "Frankenstein"
1973

The Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" was instrumental (ha ha) in trying to rehabilitate the image of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster among the Watergate Youth of the mid-seventies. Soon to follow in '73 was the made-for-TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, which was an odd title with Frankenstein originally being a novel and all. Despite having a young Jane Seymour in it, my friends and I didn't dig it, it was pretty boring due to: 1) Being in color (not only was the original Frankenstein movie in black-and-white, we later learned from the back cover of Cheap Trick's In Color that many times B&W is more interesting), and 2) No lumbering monster with bolts in his neck. 1974's Young Frankenstein was an obvious improvement. It featured a rather fetching Teri Garr. And oh yeah, Mel Brooks at the height of his goofy talents.

The Winter Group's tune is important, because it says (ha ha) everything in under five minutes. It's an instrumental from when instrumentals still mattered, a masterpiece of funk-metal wowee that rocketed to the top of the charts and let us all imagine what it was "about." Childhood friend Brett claimed this song was a telling of the Frankenstein story and the "weird noises" part that starts about 2:49 in was when the monster was being elevated skyward to receive electricity from lightning.

Forty years later, "Frankenstein" continues to amaze. And one wonders would could have been. The Winter Group had Rick Derringer on guitar, meaning the Winter/Derringer axis was responsible for AM/FM hits "Frankenstein", "Free Ride", and "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo." They were set to completely dominate rock 'n' roll by 1975, but here's a bonus Halloween tale for you: Derringer was too haunted by Beck Bogert & Appice to concentrate on making hits.

Tuesday Tuneage
ZZ Top - "Got Me Under Pressure"
1983

How can it be that at age 48, I gave in, surrendered any remaining class/Northern/intellectual biases against ZZ Top? Sure, before I would say: "Well, yeah they have a one bonafide great song: 'I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide', and a handful of other ones that make for good beer-guzzling fun on a summer afternoon, but c'mon: They're just for fun." Bleep that, I am embracing ZZ Top now after going all-in (kinda) and buying their Rancho Texicano collection. All those songs there were just "fun"? YEAH THAT'S THE POINT.

"Cheap Sunglasses" is a blast and just weird enough to stand out on Fargo's Q98 back in the day. "Tube Snake Boogie" is sophomoric, but brings back fond memories of me trying to change the channel when it came on the radio and my Mom was driving. "No, leave that on," she said. "Sounds like a good bluesy tune." "Uh, it's kind of raunchy," I said, understating things totally. Later in the song, she said: "Oh, I see." But thankfully she was commenting on the "she won't do it but her sister will" part and NOT the song's subject matter. "La Grange" brings to mind a great story involving my brother's brother-in-law. I asked once where in Illinois he lived. "La Grange," he replied. Seeing the smirk forming on my face, he quickly threw in: "They gotta lotta nice girls." Classic!

I find "Got Me Under Pressure" as my #2 fave ZZ Top song, after "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" It's got an art museum, lipstick, drugs, S&M (not Steve Martin's "Spaniards and Mexicans"), and a harried guy who doesn't like himself that much. And all credit to ZZ Top: They did the supposed hard rock no-no of using synths, but even those they turned into a fuzzy and distorted whiskey-soaked pulse. How this tune flopped on the charts in 1983 is beyond me, but Q98 in all its AOR glory played it proudly. 1984 would prove to be ZZ Top's year all over the radio. And the band's "sellout" moves on Eliminator sound refreshing all these years later. Go figure.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Kings - "This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide"
1980

How to do justice to one of the all-time greats? There's no way to overhype or overheat this one. Bigger concern: How to sit down and type up these notes up without cuing up the song and starting an instant party in the living room?

Canada's own The Kings' "This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide" is a garage rock twofer with vocals and keyboards that hold hands with new wave, riffing guitar for the hard rockers, and a great beat so the girls can dance. Throw in an ECHO-y mix by clutch producer Bob Ezrin (a fellow Canadian, whose production credits include party classics "School's Out" and "Shout It Out Loud") and you've got a classic one-hit wonder that will bring a smile to Gen Xers all over North America.

This is one of the few songs that I bother obsessing with the lyrics:

- Lunatics and crazies are mentioned frequently, matching the no-holds-barred zaniness of the music.

- The lines: "Hey ladies / You crazies / Well me and Zero / Request you in the Mercedes" anticipate the appearance of the Beastie Boys a half-decade later.

- I don't trust the infinite lyrics websites. Is it: "I'm laughing as I'm analyzed" or "I'm laughing as I'm outta lies."?

- "Nothing matters but the weekend / From a Tuesday point of view" is another in a long line of lyrics and songs that point to Tuesday (this blog being biased) being the great non-weekend rock 'n' roll day. To wit, a sampling:

"Ruby Tuesday" by The Rolling Stones
"Tuesday's Gone" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
"Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday
"Friday on My Mind" by The Easybeats ("Coming Tuesday I feel better")
"Girlfriend" by Matthew Sweet (title track of an album that has Tuesday Weld - yessir - on its cover)

- The "nothing matters but the weekend" line comes into the song just as the drums go to a military march-sounding beat. It's a call to arms! Arm yourself with some Molsons and bring on Friday!

This song never quits. It's the "A Day In The Life", "Stairway To Heaven", AND "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" of garage rock. Play it now and I guarantee: Instant party in your living room.

Tuesday Tuneage
Petra Haden - "I Can't Reach You"
2005

When Petra Haden released her a cappella version of The Who Sell Out back in 2005, it went through a few stages of perception in my mind:

- WTF?
- Okay, I gotta buy this one just out of the curiousity factor. Maybe it'll give me some good material to mock.
- WTF?
- Hey this is dangerously catchy!
- Genius!
- Brilliant!
- This will cure any foul mood I ever have in my life FOREVER.

So last week involved barely making rent and other assorted minor/major hassles involved with being my own boss (and not always being very good at it.) Needless to say: Come Saturday night I fired up Petra Haden's gloriously charming album, poured a cold one, and gave in once again.

Tuesday Tuneage
Green River - "Swallow My Pride"
1988

I recently finished reading Steve Waksman's This Ain't The Summer of Love: Conflict And Crossover In Heavy Metal and Punk. A few thoughts:

1) This was an absorbing and informative read, recommended for fans of either genre.

2) He states the case that punk was basically as a concept invented by writers. True, but how not "punk rock" is that?

3) Chuck Eddy wrote the synopsis for this book back in 1991 in the intro to his book Stairway To Hell: "Punk and metal had been swapping genes approximately forever. Graph their time lines, you'll end up with a double helix."

4) The Stooges' Fun House album is a great metal album. I mention this only because certain punk rock fans I know have hissy fits when I bring this matter up.

The title of This Ain't The Summer of Love was inspired by a bit of a song by Green River. They are one of those bands that looks better on paper than they actually sound. With two guys who went on to form Mudhoney and two guys who went on to form Pearl Jam, they were kind of a reverse-chronological supergroup. The excitement I felt in finding their Dry As A Bone/Rehab Doll collection in the used CD stacks at Roadrunner Records was tops I ever felt about them; actually listening to them is another matter. Mark Arms's sub-Iggy voice generally wears me down before I make it through a complete tracking.

"Swallow My Pride" is where in 1988 they cover their own song from 1985, and end up also covering the chorus of Blue Oyster Cult's "This Ain't The Summer of Love", tying in sonically to the metallic garage sound of the early BOC albums. As eighties punk/alt bands covering classic hard rock bands goes, it's about up there with The Minutemen's take on Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" but not up there with The Replacements covering Kiss and nicking a Ted Nugent riff on Let It Be. Green River scored extra points in advance for not covering the "cowbell" song though. Thank the Lord for that.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Novas - "The Crusher"
1964

So it's a Monday evening in July and I'm bored senseless. The volume of accounting work is slow slow slow, the mental numbness has creeped all over my brain. I don't feel like writing, reading, or watching Netflix. The newspaper has been read and the sun will be out for a while. I surf the channels on Comcast and come across WWE Raw. I stop to watch. The wrestling moves are the same as always, but I'm disturbed by the matchups. The people of color are either heels or getting beat up by multiple white guys. But then "The Real Americans" make their entrance and their manager runs down host city Brooklyn for being a melting pot. He also doesn't like foreigners who are sneaking their way into the country. His team faces the Usos, these high-flying Samoan dudes who wear war paint. The Usos win the match and immediately become my favorite babyfaces with their warpaint, chants, and high-flying moves. I'm hooked.

Next up is the smug Damien Sandow, who instantly becomes a favorite heel. He bills himself as "The Intellectual Savior of the Masses" (his entrance music is Handel's "Messiah") and repeatedly commands the crowd to "Silence!" His opponent is some nondescript guy named Christian, who I eventually deduce is a wily long-time veteran. This proves to be true as he outsmarts Sandow, gains a pin, and then runs out of the ring pointing to his forehead to indicate he also has the smarts that Sandow claims are his exclusively!

Also appearing that night were colorful characters like Alberto Del Rio, a heel who looks like a Hispanic Mitt Romney; weird backwoods cult the Wyatt Family (one guy wore a sheep's head mask); the fascist-looking Shield (three guys dressed in all black, boots and protective vests); and of course ANOTHER heel manager, Paul Heyman, insufferably smug in the best Bobby "The Weasel" Heenan manner. The WWE wasn't the AWA of my youth, but it flipped the AWA formula around. Classic AWA had boring matches - always a star beating up a jobber like Kenny "Sodbuster" Jay (he owned a landscaping business) and interspersed with brilliant over-the-top interviews where a star would interact with classic straight man Gene Okerlund. In WWE, the interviews are rare but the matches always feature name stars. The plan is to keep you interested in the ongoing storylines, hoping you will buy into their pay-per-view events.

And this all takes be back to being a child, when The Crusher was my wrestling hero along with many youth and adults across the Upper Midwest. Leave it to a Minneapolis garage band to pay homage to him on a 45. Listen up you turkeynecks!

Tuesday Tuneage
Golden Smog - "V"
1996

Bulldog Jan 14th

Oh yeah that's her
the one's who's gonna break
your heart tonight
She brings you beers
you give her money
She leaves
Gary once said
that's the perfect woman.

Tuesday Tuneage

R.E.M. - "Orange Crush"

1988

My first sustained exposure to R.E.M. came from two sources: 1) Summer singles on Q-98 out of Fargo when I was spending college years June through August in Otter Tail County. "So. Central Rain" and "Can't Get There From Here" were so weirdly great to hear amidst the hard and classic rock on gravel roads while driving on the way to greasy summer jobs. 2) College pal Gary, who had the albums on cassette. The specific memory here is that we were at a party hosted by close friends but nothing much was going on, so Gary grabbed me and our friend Chris and we drove around Grand Forks with beers and listened to R.E.M. and The Replacements. In fact, that was Gary's reasoning to get out of the party: "Hey I got some R.E.M. and Replacements tapes in the car, let's go for a drive."

But I found Murmur through Document to be non-great outside of the singles. I was at a post-college bash at a friend's apartment in Grand Forks (UND was hosting hated NDSU in football, but it was chilly out so we watched the beer in his flat with multiple flats of beer) when a debate about R.E.M. broke out. The divisions broke down predictably in 1988 ways: The hep declared them arguably the greatest band in the world and the classic rockers deemed them wussy and non-rock. I uttered something I deemed significant from my Schmidt-fueled haze: "They should release a collection of singles, I'd buy that." That fell on flat ears. (Deservedly, I added nothing to the debate, I was just being an entitled consumer.) Amazingly, I was in Northern Lights down on Hennepin and 7th just a few days later and stumbled across Eponymous, the very singles collection I had recently called for.

I fell in love with Eponymous and grew to think of R.E.M. was an outstanding band. Should have went with my first "they're a singles band" instinct though, as Green and Out of Time were both duds outside of their singles (and not always then, "Radio Song" is pretty bad.) I learned my lesson by the time Automatic for the People came out, ducked buying it despite the brilliance of its lead singles "Drive." and "Man on the Moon." Friends would get miffed with my singles band theory and my disdain for Automatic for the People's "Everybody Hurts" but we've reached a detente in middle age as R.E.M. has disbanded and I spend more time delving into my music collection and less time concocting contrarian theories.

I had been silently campaigning for an Eponymous II - a collection of R.E.M. singles from 1988 forward - for years and then finally realized in this day of the mp3, I could make my own R.E.M. playlist. The first song on this R.E.M. Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (That Excludes "Everbody Hurts" And Other Songs) playlist is "Orange Crush". It's from an album titled Green (Chicago rockers Green soon released an EP titled R.E.M.) and is one of those songs that (temporarily) roped me into the sizable R.E.M. cult. It's not about soda pop or the 1977 Denver Broncos 3-4 defense but is intriguingly catchy.

Tuesday Tuneage
Soul Asylum - "Barstool Blues"
1989

to head through that door, take a right and find a barstool. To order and to drink and to glance at the baseball game on the TV. To watch the lovelies as they walk in, to check out the punks as they maintain the code. To order a shot, and then do it well. To contemplate a bus ride home but have one more. To stay later than you meant and to see the record store is closed. To decide to walk home. To stop at another bar. To daydream at night.

Tuesday Tuneage
Smashing Pumpkins - "Cherub Rock"
1993

In those heady days of my Z-Rock obsession they played grunge, which was sweet because grunge was a great subgenre of metal: bottom-heavy, Sabbath-influenced, and played by guys who guzzled beer and wore flannel shirts. Hell, the Pearl Jam guys even loved sports - thereby reinforcing grunge's populist appeal.

On 1992's Singles soundtrack, the one that you swore up and down was "going to be a mainstay of everybody’s album collection in twenty years”, Smashing Pumpkins' “Drown” dropped into all the grunge so beautifully. The following year, I debated buying the Pumpkins' second album, Siamese Dream. The first single, "Cherub Rock" was exhuberant, anthemic. The second single, "Today", had an annoying chorus that was childlike and not in a good way. The sinker was that the third single, "Disarm", it had the “I used to be a little boy” line sung so whinily by frontman Billy Corgan. Along with this was the increasing realization that this Corgan character was something of a dork.

This realization was vindicated after reading an article in the April 1994 issue of Spin on Soundgarden that had major moments of levity, all inadvertently provided by Corgan. To wit:

- Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil drink beers, while Corgan orders a strawberry margarita.

- Corgan riffs on Jungian therapy, then actually asks Thayil what astrological sign he is.

- "Ooh," Thayil says a little too loudly as Corgan walks away, "I'll bet he's going to call his therapist in Chicago, wake her up at four in the morning, and tell her about that big, mean bear who made fun of him."

- Corgan walks past wearing a long-sleeved Superman T-shirt like the one your four-year-old nephew probably owns."You hurt me deeply," Corgan says, touching the giant S on his chest and pouting. "You hurt me deeply in my heart."

(At this point I must say I imagine that Jim Parsons - Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory - of course plays Corgan in the Smashing Pumpins biopic.)

As a music fan, it seemed you had to take the Corgan drama queen nonsense with the anthemic, surging guitars. I couldn’t get my head around that, especially at that age when I had an idealized view of rockers. I spent the rest of the nineties chuckling at Billy Corgan. The next Smashing Pumpkins album was titled - get this: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and had lyrics like "The world is a vampire" and "God is empty … just like me." Whoah, deep stuff there William! After that, there was the inevitable dabbling with electronica and when they put out an album titled MACHINA/The Machines of God I figured laughing at Corgan wasn't even worth the effort any more. Ryan Adams - an equally annoying whiner had appeared and The White Stripes were on the horizon to provide hope and optimism in rock 'n' roll as I entered my late thirties.

These days, I play some Smashing Pumpkins and have fun with nineties nostalgia. I remember the odd moment of seeing Billy Corgan as a panel member on Midwest Sports Channel on the Chicago-based cult favorite The Sports Writers on TV, which meant he wasn't one hundred percent dork. I can hit "skip" any time "Disarm" is played on a device and it's not like I have to hang out with Corgan. And every once in a while, I dwell on that time when “Cherub Rock” was an indicator that Smashing Pumpkins could be the next fave band - I remember what street I was driving on and what the weather was like when I first heard its opening chords - and the oncoming unraveling of the knowledge that their brand of alt rock wasn't exactly the Little Richard funhouse rock 'n' roll that I revel in.