Tuesday Tuneage
The Shins - "Sphagnum Esplanade"
2002

What to make of this song ... fuzztone bass line, a guitar and piano picking out single notes, the vocals are mostly in falsetto, no drums, a synthesizer solo (I think), and a solo by another instrument that I can’t quite identify. If had never heard it and read that description, I would have scoffed. Plus I can’t decipher the words. But I realize googling those lyrics would take most of the fun out of the listen anyway.

Reminds me of early last decade when I first heard tracks from Pink Floyd’s first two albums and said: “Now I see where the Shins got that sound from.”

Conclusion? This song haunts, oh how it haunts.

Bourbon And Water

Until recently, my choice of mixed drink was rye and ginger. The way the ginger ale brought out the peppery taste of Old Overcoat was brilliant. Those went down sooooo good. Problem is with ginger ale though, it’s got about 50 calories per dose as a mixer. When you’re a middle-aged drinker who needs to focus on not putting the pounds on (for good health, for lower blood pressure, because I have flat feet which don’t need the extra poundage and pounding, because cardio workouts go so much easier when I’m lighter), it’s preferable to imbibe a whiskey drink neat or with a no-calorie mixer. Why not drink light beer instead of regular beer to reduce your drinking calories, you say. Please, I say. You’re not talking about eliminating Surly Bender or Summit India Pale Ale from my diet instead of ginger ale? You must be kidding.

So with rye and ginger out of the mix, what did I go with as preferred cocktail this summer? Well, I started with scotch (White Horse) and soda and then moved on to Glen Moray on the rocks. (It’s been on sale at my favorite neighborhood liquor store.) But buying a bottle of Evan Williams on a trip up north last month became a tipping point. At my parents, I started drinking it neat in a Dixie cup (an odd ritual, Old Fashioned glasses were available) while writing nightly on my laptop. I was turned on to Evan Williams by David Wondrich in Esquire a couple of years ago when he reviewed “best cheap booze” and immediately fell in severe like with it. It’s just as good as Jim Beam in my book and a lot lighter on the checkbook. Not to mention I saw John Munch pour from a bottle of it in an episode of Homicide. Sold!

Eventually what happened mid-summer was that I found myself in the mood for Evan Williams here at home. And since I didn’t have any Dixie cups, I started to pour myself some bourbon and waters on the rocks in an Old Fashioned glass, thereby reviving a fave drink of mine from the early part of the last decade. Sipping this drink is a favorite ritual while I write my eight hundred words a day (typically written at night), a task I set myself to do the rest of this summer for some unknown but noble reason back in early July. I'm generally not a good summer writer and most of what I end up writing is crap or at best middling writing practice. But it keeps the writing mind active and my fingers love it when I actually do tune into something that I genuinely want to write about. In such good times, I thank Evan Williams and whatever music is playing as I type. In bad times? I only have myself to blame. And I’m sure I’ll pour another drink in order to try to get over it.

Tuesday Tuneage
Steam - "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"
1969

Dedicated to the now-dead presidential ambitions of Tim Pawenty, who had been running for the White House for oh-so-many years. May he run for dogcatcher somewhere, sometime. Maybe then he might move above fourteen percent in the polls (which he recently couldn't do with Iowa Republicans) and perhaps even win a majority of the votes (which he never did statewide in Minnesota.) I've even got a catchy nickname for him if he does win that job of catching dogs: "TPaw."

Tuesday Tuneage
The Fatback Band - "(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop"
1976

I recently got rid of my car as I realized: 1) I barely drive while in town, 2) Half my miles were driving up north to see my folks, 3) Most things I need in my day-to-day life are within six blocks of my apartment, 4) The two clients I still travel to (the rest are all handled via telecommuting) are on easy, thirty-minute bus commutes. So now I bike to the close things and bus to the further things. No big hassles so far, and the one time I decided I needed a car, I went with my HourCar option to fill the void. Biking around the neighborhood is relatively easy, I avoid major traffic areas and tend to favor coasting, to nobody's surprise. Bussing has been the revelation, the drivers have been ever-friendly and helpful, it's where I get a ton of reading done and it's where I start to think, and think a lot (too much?) I'm sure it has something to do with the bus stop waiting and the passivity of the bus riding experience. My notes:

At the bus stop:
- If there is time between transfers, look for a coffee shop - this is Minneapolis, one should be within a stone's throw - and caffeine up.
- If there is bar near your transfer stop (this is on the ride home), ponder what exactly is important that you have to do today/tonight or tomorrow for that matter.
- Check Twitter on your mobile phone, you know you want/have to.
- Mentally citizen arrest all the drivers who drive by and are texting.
- Nod at the cyclists when they pass you.
- Drink from your flask (optional).

On the bus:
- Read a newspaper.
- Read a book.
- Find any songs on your iPod that relate to busses: “Kiss Me On The Bus”, “Bus Rider”, “The Load-Out”, “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street”, and of course “(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop.”
- Check Twitter on your mobile phone, you know you want/have to.
- Always say “thank you” to the driver. Because as governor, Tim Pawlenty treated the drivers like some sort of bogeymen and boasts about it during his presidential campaign, means they have earned our courtesy and respect. Power to the unions, power to the workers. Speaking of our former (yet currently) pandering, whiteboy governor, I can’t wait for TFraud to drop out of the GOP race due to the extreme boredom he has inflicted on Republicans nationwide ... and/or due to his topping off at five percent in the polls ... and/or due to his coming off like a conservative version of Michael Dukakis: a wimp and a bore. Because if Dukakis had never done that tank photo-op, you just know that TClown’s people would have been calling around the country, looking for a friendly tank factory in an effort to shore up his foreign policy creds. The morning after “TPaw” (this is why I call him “whiteboy” only a true dork would allow himself to be called “TPaw”) drops out of the Republican race, I will have a hangover the size of Iowa and New Hampshire combined. Don't worry Timmy, you still have a future: I hear Sears is looking for a middle-aged man to model the men's version of Mom jeans ad in their weekly circular.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Surfaris - “Surfer Joe”
1963

The things you find out while surfing (pun not intended) the Internet. Like that “Surfer Joe”, an okay song most notable for its protagonist showing up in others’ songs - we’ll get to that later, was an A-side and its B-side was The Surfaris’ biggest hit “Wipe-Out.” The B-side went to number two on the charts, and the A-side went only to number sixty-two. This makes sense as “Wipe-Out” is eternal rock ‘n’ roll genius, all noise and laughter and rhythm and further proof that it was more often than not that it was the little one-hit-wonder instrumental bands that made the best surf music.

“Surfer Joe” on the other hand, is tenative and features an awkward white guy singing, it's kind of proto-indie rock. Surfer Joe gets drafted and with this being 1963 it means the Gulf of Tonkin incident was about a year away and Joe likely got shipped off to Vietnam war with LBJ’s escalation. Poor Joe, indeed. Though this does lead me to believe that Surfer Joe was in part the inspiration for the Lance Johnson surfer character in Apocalypse Now. (And I gotta point out that Lance’s middle initial was “B”, which made him an “LBJ” ha ha Coppola that’s a good one, as good as naming Harrison Ford’s character “Lucas.”)

So “Surfer Joe” is middling music, a kinda-interesting story, and a grade-A musical history footnote as nobody would guess it was an A-side to golden oldies smash. But it gets interesting when Joe starting popping up in other people’s songs. The first I know of was when Neil Young featured him in “Surfer Joe and Moe The Sleaze” from his underrated 1981 Re-ac-tor album. It’s my favorite Young album ever, it features killer hard rock and keeps me interested at least seventy-five percent of the time during a listen, a win in my book for Young. But I’m not part of the Neil Young cult and can't be trusted, as when I delve into his albums I find them - aside from Tonight's The Night and Time Fades Away - not living up to the acclaims.

In 1990, Paul Westerberg referenced Surfer Joe in the Replacements’ “I’ll Be You”: Well, I laughed half the way to Tokyo / I dreamt I was Surfer Joe /And what that means, I don't know. “Half the way to Tokyo” has Pacific Rim written all over it, which indicates Westerberg definitely had Joe’s Vietnam fate on his mind while he slept. Neil Young, on the other hand, hints that we might able to see Joe surf again in the early eighties. It'll never get hailed as a Major Achievement, but I find it somewhat comforting to see such highly-regarded songwriters attempting to make a cult figure out of someone who otherwise would have ended up an obscure folk hero. Next stop, Cooperstown.

Tuesday Tuneage
Funkadelic - “Funky Dollar Bill”
1970

A certain circle of friends of mine sometimes call me “Dolla Bill.” (Because I’m an accountant, get it? Ha ha.) This is as whiteboy a nickname as “TPaw”, but in my own defense I am not a bore like Tim Pawlenty is, plus I support and genuinely like the Metro Transit bus drivers, while TPaw’s constituency is middle-aged white guys who are pissed that a Metro Transit bus is in HIS way on HIS road and HIS car can’t pass it! TPaw also Tpanders to evangelical voters (also always white, but not always middle-aged or male) who live in far-flung suburbs and exburbs where they don’t always have great bus service, or don’t have busses altogether, and in many cases don’t even have sidewalks. So that’s TFraud’s base: metro road-ragers and suburban holy rollers. Don’t bike near these people, even if you’re wearing a helmet.

Anyway - in my case, “Dollar Bill” would work better than "Dolla Bill", it doesn’t have that faux hip-hop flavor (I like hip-hop just fine, but I’m a middle-aged white guy and can’t pull off hip-hop) and is the name featured in Chank Diesel’s portrait of me that hangs in my living room (thanks Steve.) Also don’t forget that Dollar Bill was a minor character in Watchmen.

But to this week’s song ... “Funky Dollar Bill” is Exhibit A of what Jimi Hendrix, an artist every bit as inventive and daring as the Beatles, The Roling Stones, and Bob Dylan were in the sixties, wrought. Brilliant guitar in both the rhythm and effects area, a beat that’s just off-and-on enough to kinda reflect America’s War With Itself in that era, plus grade-A vocals (lead and harmony), and an odd keyboard that seems to prophesize Sly’s breakdown a few short year hence. Funkadelic at its prime was hard-hitting, chilling, and weird weird weird.

Oh, and the album that’s it’s on? The song before it references my birthday in the song title. As the Russian kid said to Curtis Jackson in the Russians-are-coming episode of The White Shadow: "Funk-a-what?"

Tuesday Tuneage
The Shys - "Never Gonna Die"
2006

A glorious ode to debauchery. This isn’t Merle Haggard’s “Swinging Doors” or the Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular,” this is akin to Ray Charles “Let’s Go Get Stoned” or Van Halen’s “Bottoms Up!” ... a tribute to ending up face first on the futon after a night of drinking.

Something in the lyrics makes me think it’s about a small-town kids who have realized they’re never getting out of that place, but what the hell it’s Friday night so pass the bottle around and get another twelver, don’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning at seven. Years down the road, they’ll be the ones listening to “Swinging Doors” on the jukebox after work and won’t use words like “wasted” or “never gonna die,” instead it will be words like “a taste” and “decent buzz” and “these heaters are gonna kill me.” And they will laugh with each other at the bar about when they were young and indestructible and stole drinks and cruised around the county like they owned it.

Index Cards

A couple of years ago I bought a laptop and it changed the way I go about the process of writing. I used to do all my writing - the jotting of notes, rough drafts, ramblings - in a Mead Five Star notebook. But once I got the laptop, I switched to doing most of my writing - practice, ramblings, drafts - on it. Around this same time, I took to the habit of always keeping a small stack of index cards with me, next to my writing desk, in my Mead notebook, in my bookbag. The intent with these cards was to have a handy place to write down the short notes that zapped into my brain from time-to-time. I used to write these in the Mead notebook, but now with laptop writing that is usually out of reach. Another inspiration for the use of index cards was reading the late Rick Johnson a few years back. He was hilarious, and I remembered in Jim DeRogatis's Lester Bang biography, Let It Blurt, he wrote that Johnson: "walked around with a stack of index cards, jotting down weird phrases and quips whenever he heard them, then shuffling through the deck while writing his reviews until he found the appropriate one-liners." (Johnson wrote this blog post's featured photo above.)

Last week I went through the stacks of used index cards that were on my writing desk in order to sort them and help me figure out where my writing mind is (and was.) Some of them were notes on a novel I'm writing, some were ideas for my Tuesday Tuneage series, and some were just weird, random things I had written down. For instance:

"How many mainland Americans live above Grand Forks latitude-wise?"

"And then I'll get out of what's left of your hair." - I think Dark Star said this on Channel 23's Sunday night Sports Show, probably to Sid Hartman, though Sid still has lots of hair up top so maybe Dark targeted somebody else.

"Fake Bud Grant" - a never-created Twitter account whose intent was to make fun of the Vikings and their choking-dog ways. Would have been fun in last years 6-10 season.

"The manageable, pleasant winters are the reward for the humid, brutal months of summer with oppressive sunlight for hours on end" - Written in response to the get-outside dorks who think Minneapolis winters are tough and that summer is paradise. I hate the heat of summer, don't think Minneapolis winters are that tough, and love the gray skies, cool temps, and early darkness of fall and winter here.

"He'll be right back after a word from his sponsor."
"Shakes for breakfast."
- Alcoholism is a disease, Tuomala! Geez! (I am not proud.)

"Family is permanent, friends I hang with, former coworkers are meant to fade." - I was invited to join former coworkers last month, I stayed home and paid my estimated taxes.

"Henry Paulson" - This led to writing a prose poem where I imagined Paulson heeding his true calling as a college basketball coach.

"Make him a hero because he's the best failure we've got." - Paul Nelson on Rod Stewart. Pretty confident this is from the Stewart biography Nelson wrote with Lester Bangs.

"There aren't many Special Export drinkers left." - Overheard a bartender say this.

So if you're a writer who is plagued/blessed with random mind intrusions and don't know how to quite handle them, consider the Index Card Gambit. I even put up a bulletin board in my writing office to tack some of my used index cards to. Almost makes the so-called system official in some way.

Tuesday Tuneage
Run Westy Run - "David's Drum"
1995

In which Minneapolis heroes combine funk rhythm, wah-wah guitar, vocals spoken more than sung, and a righteously anthemic chorus into a heady mix of rock 'n' roll. When scrappy little hometown heroes pull off something this glorious, release it on a three-song EP, and get a little local airplay to boot ... it's just another reason so many of us rave about the Minneapolis music scene.

And needless to say, but I'll say it anyway: Their live show was great also.

Tuesday Tuneage
Kings Of The Sun - "Drop The Gun"
1990

Don't fall in like with Kings Of The Sun, this song is a hard rock gem, but the rest of the album it comes from is sub-that-era-Aerosmith and I seem to recall a lot of creepy lyrics about stalking women on it. First heard this one on Q98 late summer 1991 while my buddy talked to an apartment building caretaker about a potenial lease in Fergus Falls, the other memory from that sweaty afternoon (no AC in the car) was a six pack of Special Export Light on ice in a little cooler to enjoy on that Highway 59 roadtrip through Otter Tail County. Don't know how the hell I ever tracked down this band in my pre-Internet days, but I was known as a resourceful lad even before I was the Silver Surfer.

So enjoy this, Australian guitar rock served up fine: Kinda interesting outlaw story, biting guitars, singalong chorus ... what more could you ask for? Drop the gun, boy.

Tuesday Tuneage
Iggy Pop - "Cold Metal"
1988

1) Conversation with a friend in my car in the late eighties while Iggy Pop's "Cold Metal" was playing on the radio:

BT: Hey, Iggy's singing about metal!
Friend: Isn't this Billy Idol?
BT: Nope, it's Iggy. He's singing about metal.
F: No, he's not.
BT: Uh, yeah. Listen to him: "Cold metal ..."
F: He's not singing "metal."
BT: Yeah he is. Listen. "Cold metal ...:
F: He's singing something else.

2) "Cold Metal" is from the album Instinct, which features Steve Jones of Sex Pistols fame on guitar. Iggy's next album, Home, would feature Slash and Duff from Guns N' Roses. Confusion reigns!

3) Cut to circa ten years ago, sitting with friends in bar. I declare Stooges Fun House album one of the greatest metal albums ever. I am told that the Stooges weren't metal, they were punk. I say that Fun House was their "metal" album and Raw Power was their "punk" album, kinda like how Kick Out The Jams was the MC5's "metal" album and Back in the USA was their "punk" album. This was like trying to convince a friend that Iggy was actually singing the word "metal" in a chorus of a song ...

The GOP Rogues Gallery

The goofballs who attend Tea Party rallies favor a certain sign in which President Obama is sporting war paint ala Heath Ledger/The Joker in The Dark Knight. But one look at Michele Bachmann in HD last spring prompted me to tweet that she looks much more like The Joker than Barack Obama does. This led me to wonder: Which classic Batman villains do the other Republican presidential candidates match up with?

Sure he's out of the race, but no other GOP figure says "cartoonish villain" like Donald Trump. And Trump = The Penguin. Wikipedia says that in the past twenty years, animated Batman series have depicted The Penguin alternately as "deformed outcast and high-profile aristocrat." Both of those descriptors match up with Trump.

Michele Bachmann = The Joker. Not only does she have the maniacal eyes and grin of The Clown Prince of Crime, she shows up on TV to taunt her opponents, which is Jokerish behavior indeed.

Mitt Romney = Mr. Freeze. Because he does seem to live at a below-zero temperature and he moves slowly, mechanically, like he's wearing a cryogenic suit.

Newt Gingrich = The Riddler. Gingrich is smart, but wants to show it off so bad that he trips up on his own smartiness, much as The Riddler gives Batman just enough clues to get caught. Wikipedia describes The Riddler as "a malignant narcissist with an enormous ego." Sound familiar, Newt?

Sarah Palin = Catwoman. Both Palin and Catwoman favor leather, and there is a dominatrix aura to both of them. According to Wikipedia, in the fifties Batman comics revealed that Catwoman is an amnesiac flight attendant. This of course matches David Letterman's description of Palin's "slutty flight attendant" look.

Tim Pawlenty = Harvey "Two-Face" Dent. I have a relative who has met Pawlenty and although she doesn't agree with his politics, insists that he is the nicest guy. But what nice guy leaves his governorship with his state facing a six billion dollar defecit? Pawlenty recently showed more two-faced behavior. On a Sunday morning show he slammed Mitt Romney, then the next night at a debate he backed off from his attacks. Unfortunately for Pawlenty, America will not believe in Harvey Dent.

Ron Paul = The Scarecrow. Wikipedia says that The Scarecrow is addicted to fear and some would claim that a politician obsessed with the usual conspiracy, uh, scarecrows such as the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, and the North American Union is also addicted to fear.

Rick Santorum = This specimen is such a shrill scold that he doesn't match up to any villians. But remember in that great scene from The Dark Knight where The Joker says that he can spot the squealers? You just know that a pud like Santorum would rat out anybody and everybody if it means he would escape unharmed.

Jon Huntsman = ? Huntsman hasn't yet shown which masked threat to society he mirrors. But have no illusions, once he starts kissing up to the GOP base, Huntsman will reveal his creepy, belongs-in-Arkham alter-ego. And as others have pointed out, he - like Romney - already looks like the stuffed shirt who would hand you a pink slip to the applause of the shareholders.

And now you're waiting for me to annoit Barack Obama as Batman, right? Nope, consider Obama's cool demeanor, his ace handling of his commander-in-chief duties (offing pirates was just a prelude to the taking out Osama bin Laden, the what-Pakistani-sovreignty? mission reminds one of Batman's "he has no jurisdiction" taking of Lau in Hong Kong), and his background in Chicago - where Christopher Nolan has set his Batman films - and the resemblance is obvious. Our president is Commissioner Jim Gordon.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Party - "In My Dreams"
1992

In my mind, there are two battling theories as to how I first heard a group of Mickey Mouse Clubbers do a cover of a Dokken tune:

1) It was played on a local radio show like Cosmic Slop or Crap From The Past and I was immediately drawn to it, as I considered the original an eerie minor classic from my college years.

or:

2) I heard it in my car while scanning the likes of Radio AAHS or Radio Disney, the only stations I ever listened to in the nineties that would have had this tune in rotation.

My gut tells me that option #1 is the more logical choice and normally I would write it as such, but the "heard weird cover version of pop metal song in my car" storyline is also compelling. This brings up an ongoing debate in nonfiction personal writing. One school of thought says that you should always try your best to write the truth, another says you should write things how you remember them. I go with the latter as I generally write on trivial matters and being lazy I don't want to spend time verifying accounts of trivial matters. Though I have been scolded a few times as I have gotten the cast of characters wrong in one or two of my old-days memories I have written down. This hasn't convinced me to do any fact-checking on my memoirs though, I keep writing 'em down in the way I remember 'em.

Anyway ... Dokken was eighties pop metal and The Party was nineties bubblegum dance pop and OF COURSE they do the song justice, so what if their preteen/tween fans are not haunted by The One That Got Away? Which leaves it to us adults to listen to "In My Dreams" (which artist? pick 'em) and do a shot with a beer chaser. Damn you, haunting pop music.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Replacements - "Can't Get Enough"
1984

In Jim Walsh's oral history of the Replacements, All Over But The Shouting, Roscoe Shoemaker explains that he had taped a Replacements set at a small show in Oklahoma City in 1984. Shoemaker says there were twenty to thirty people at the show at that they yelled out requests that the Replacements honored. Somebody seized/stole the tape and it went on to become a released by Twin/Tone Records in 1984. (Full disclosure: In this book, I relate two anecdotes about seeing the band in 1984 and 1987.)

Available at first only on cassette titled The Shit Hits The Fans, and then later something of an urban legend - unavailable in the pre-Internet ages, rumored to be a bootleg, this Oklahoma City set went on to become known among Replacements faithful as the "'Mats get drunk and play cover" live album. I scored a copy off of eBay ten years ago or so, the seller claimed it was a CD, by which he meant that it was a CD-R with the album title written in a kinda-fancy font on the disc. No cover art, no liner notes. I think I paid ten bucks.

A close listen reveals that The Shit Hits The Fans isn't quite the "they play drunk covers" of legend. While undoubtably drunk, the Replacements first half of the recorded songs is a mixture of originals and straightforward covers of Lloyd Price, Robyn Hitchcock, and The Jackson 5. The songs of legend happen after they wind up their original song "Hear You Been To College" - a slow blues - and people in the crowd yell "play white music!", "Lynyrd Skynyrd!", and "play some rock you fucking pumpkins!" Or maybe it's "bumpkins", which might make more sense, sounds like "pumpkins" to me though. I'm convinced it's the ignorant demand to "play white music!" that pissed off Westerberg a little or maybe more and which prompted him to unleash the band through a string of classic rock covers like "Saturday Night Special", "Breakdown", "Misty Mountain Hop", and "Takin' Care Of Business." Most of these they fail to finish, and "Iron Man" actually starts out as "War Pigs" until Westerberg starts singing "Iron Man." Funny stuff, and damn fun to listen to, also, though probably only to diehard Replacements fans. It's not exactly the stuff you'd play to someone unfamiliar with the band to win them over.

The best of the covers is that of Bad Company's "Can't Get Enough", in which they blister through it straight-on and even convince themselves to pull off the guitar solo. That beats being able to stand up straight most nights.

Tuesday Tuneage
Def Leppard - "Rock of Ages"
1983

How much do I love vintage Def Leppard? Too many reasons to go into here, so let me go with this: I regularly compare them to another fave - Mott the Hoople.

"Rock of Ages" is from Pyromania and like the rest of that album, it's hook-tastic and helped Def Lep get on the radio for those oh-so-long months before the deluge of radio greatness that was the year 1984 started. You have to remember: This was 1983 when crappy fop fellow Brits like Culture Club and all those New Romantic bands had Newsweek wondering about a New British Invasion. Def Lep were leftovers from the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) who after their debut album were picked by Mutt Lange for him to work his wonders, and work his wonders he did. High 'N Dry was a hard rock classic, and Pyromania topped it. With radio (and not the office building on its album cover) the target in mind, Lange and Def Leppard unleashed song after song that landed on Top 40 and AOR radio. One of these was the chorus-heavy, Mott-reminding, anthem that was "Rock of Ages."

The great thing about the video for this tune is that it's a parody of so many insipid heavy metal/Dungeons & Dragons videos (see Dio, Ronnie Fucking James.) Though it is strange to see drummer Rick Allen with both his arms, his losing an arm in a car accident in 1984 would provide the opening for Mutt Lange to completely take over the recordings of Hysteria, create a dozen or so more Top 40 and AOR hits, and leave Def Leppard as the faces to tour behind his studio effort. (So goes the theory, just don't ask a Shania Twain fan about it.) Regarding Rick Allen ... sixties garage rockers The Barbarians also had a drummer with one arm and their most famous song is "Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl", which sounds a lot like Def Leppard AND ... Mott the Hoople!