Tuesday Tuneage
Cheap Trick - "ELO Kiddies"
1977

Punk didn’t make it in America, unless you count the Standells, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Seeds, etc. back in ‘66. Cheap Trick’s “ELO Kiddies” anticipates Reaganomics with a fury equal of the Clash. New wave metal weirdos and from the Midwest to boot. Five stars.

Tuesday Tuneage
Led Zeppelin - “Communication Breakdown”
1969

Last month I got an MRI on my bum knee. The knee hurt when I walked on stairs, which was problematic given that I live on the second floor. I had spent six months in and out of various medical appointments, looking for relief. So on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, I ended up in St. Louis Park a stone’s throw from a Half-Price Books (pre-appointment vinyl shopping yessir) at an imaging facility. After stripping down to boxers and socks and putting on a gown and scrubs pants, the technicians tucked my legs into the MRI chamber. They told me to hold still for the next thirty minutes, and gave me earplugs and headphones and played a Spotify classic rock playlist for me to help block out the noise from what they assured would be a quite loud machine. Thirty minutes? I figured I’d get through seven or eight classic rock songs then soon be on way to the bus stop and a good book for the commute home. Turns out it was six songs:

The Hollies - “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”: Best-ever knockoff of Creedence Clearwater Revival. (More on them later.)

Todd Rundgren - “ Hello It’s Me”: Lately a top-five favorite. (This, the O’Jays “Back Stabbers” or “For the Love of Money”, and three others make up the top five.)

Steve Miller Band - “Rock’n Me”: Like most of the Miller Band’s seventies hits, this one surprisingly punches above its weight.

ZZ Top - “La Grange”: Decades ago, I was talking with members of my sister-in-law’s family from Illinois. I asked her brother-in-law where he lived there. He replied “La Grange,” then when he saw the smile creeping across my face threw in: “They got a lotta nice girls there.” Classic.

Pat Benatar - “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”: “There are three girls here at Ridgemont who have cultivated the Pat Benatar Look.”

The Band - “The Weight”: No matter all the raves and write-ups on the greatness that is The Band, their songs never do much for me. You know how The Band is always to referred to by their cult (I’d call ‘em “Band-Aids”, but Penny Lane already took that one) as “keepers of America’s mythic past, stoic traditionalists while society was breaking apart blah blah blah”? Well they sound zzzzz to these ears. Don’t come at with me with “Baby Don’t You Do It”, it doesn’t touch the Marvin Gaye original. As for The Last Waltz, you can count on that being trod out whenever your local PBS station is doing a fundraiser, as that’s the only time it will feature rock music. (Phones are ready.)  Creedence Clearwater Revival was the keepers of America’s mythic past in the sixties-into-seventies era and they were 100% American, with The Band only being 20% USA-bred and the rest Canadian. Throw in that Creedence’s best-known songs were all three minutes long and bingo: They are who you play on the jukebox while you’re working on that pitcher of High Life and contemplating American Mythology. (Better yet, check out the incredible Travelin’ Band documentary-plus-concert on Netflix.) Thankfully a technician cut off The Band mid-song to inform me that my time was up. Being a true old man, I asked her if she could hand me my shoes as I didn’t feel like getting up off the table yet. She also offered to tie them for me. I declined, but like I said: Old man.

The MRI WAS noisy as f**k, just like the technicians promised. But what got me is that the noise the machine made the most frequently was one that replicated the noise Jimmy Page made at the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” but whereas he did it for two seconds, the MRI machine carried on and on and on. It was funny, kinda. It would have been funnier if it wasn’t so annoying. But guess what song I played repeatedly on headphones on the bus ride home?  

Postscript: After a consultation with my physician’s assistant, physical therapy, an X-ray, two consultations with an orthopedist, and this MRI; the diagnosis was that I have a small spot of arthritis behind the kneecap. The treatment? Ice and naproxen. Of course.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Blasters - “Go, Go, Go”
1982

Anybody remember the original Gaviidae Common? A high-end fancy pancy shopping complex on Nicollet Mall? Bound to be as successful as The Conservatory? I worked as an accountant for a general contractor when Gaviidae was constructed, the division I was in built out some of the tenant spaces there. One shop our company built was owned by a British couple and its concept must have been born from the hubris of the United Kingdom defeating mighty Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982: It was a freakin’ tea room. You could go there and sip your tea and eat your crumpets. On little round wooden tables with doilies. A jolly good time. Oh boy.

Then the utterly predictable happened. The place had loyal customers numbering in the single digits and hence didn’t do great business. The Brits didn’t pay the bills owed to my company and our subcontractors didn’t get paid. Inquiring phone calls went up and down the owner-contractor-subcontractor chain over when funds would be made available to the companies that built out the space and things went to hell.

There was a process directed by people above me involving sending notice that our company would file a lien on the space. One day my bosses were conveniently all in the same meeting so I took a call from one of the clients, a lady with a shrill British accent who railed at me, saying my company was acting inappropriately and offered up the usual deadbeat client excuses for why they weren’t paying their bills. After a few minutes of taking this bat’s haranguing, I calmly told her it was out of my hands and that I would ask one of my bosses to call her later. She yelled some more at me in that annoying voice before hanging up. I placed my receiver down and yelled: “THIS ISN’T THE GODDAMNED LEND-LEASE ACT!”

So on the Fourth of July, I will raise a toast to Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, et. al. Imagine if all the gals in the Upper Midwest had an annoying accent and sounded like some version of that lady. I’ll be also be queuing up The Blasters’ Over There EP, a live recording from 1982 where they absolutely smoke in London. Its back cover notes by Claude Kickman Bessy state “forgive me … for once doubting the American supremacy in the bopping field” and its label has an approved use of the Gadsden Flag. 

Tuesday Tuneage

Corrosion of Conformity - "Goodbye Windows"
1996

Ozzy’s Boneyard — the classic hard rock and heavy metal station on SiriusXM — is my go-to listen when it comes to crunch time on the elliptical, for blasting out distractions while writing, or while descending into a living room happy hour on a lazy afternoon. You get a run of Deep Purple, Scorpions, Led Zeppelin, Black Label Society, and Blue Oyster Cult going on a Friday afternoon with a glass of Larceny bourbon and your troubles are behind you. Lately they have Corrosion of Conformity in regular rotation, which is cause for celebration.

COC became a late nineties/early aughts favorite upon stumbling across a copy of Wiseblood in the used CD racks and circa 2000 I saw them on the America’s Volume Dealer tour at First Avenue. This was the show where I was standing on the main floor and two huge linebacker-size metalheads standing behind me (kindly? gently? it seemed that they had more humor in their intentions than bullying) pushed me into the mosh circle. I made moves like Barry Sanders and bid a retreat out of the pit and found a place further back behind two even bigger guys. But there was another reason for this show being written here in my history, my memoirs, my back pages — and it’s that at some point before the show some skinny little metalhead inadvertently bumped me and spilled part of my beer. He stopped and looked and me, shocked and sheepish, and said: “Oh dude! I’m sorry! I’m sorry.” Then he gestured at my beer and stammered: “Can I buy ya? … Can I buy ya?” I assured him that not much had been spilled and eventually he made his way on. I told this story to a couple of my friends a few days later and soon after “Can I buy ya?” became our shorthand for getting together for a beer. … “Can I buy ya?”

Tuesday Tuneage
The Godfathers - "Birth, School, Work, Death"
1988

During 2006-08 upon the invite of a couple of friends who deejayed at a club near downtown,  I joined them in spinning records a handful of times. It was a blast. To this day I’m still amazed I got a small share of the tip money (usually enough to swing cabfare home), free drinks, and a cozy, dark clubhouse in which to toss around inside jokes for a few hours.

We played vinyl — LPs, EPs, and singles — which was old-school fun, more hands-on than pushing buttons, which led me into shopping for and buying more vinyl — a rather enjoyable pastime.

In January of 2009 with a Cheapo gift certificate given as a Christmas gift in my hand, I bought the Godfathers’ Birth, School, Work, Death, the Pretenders’ debut album, and a couple of other picks in expectations that I would deejay them. What I didn’t know was that my tenure had come to an end. My deejay friends soon moved to NYC and I never asked the bar manager about perhaps continuing to spin records. It wouldn’t have been the same without my friends anyway, so I was content to play vinyl alone in my living room in the dark under headphones.

Birth, School, Work, Death had been the first CD I had bought in 1988, along with Metallica’s … And Justice For All. Due to the title, I soon cut out the cover of the CD longbox (remember those?) and put it on the wall of my accounting cubicle. I dug out the LP recently. With a decades later re-listen, it has been a revelation. My favorite track lately is “If I Only Had Time.” Building upon the earlier single “This Damn Nation”, there’s more gripes about the State of Things: “We’re living under a false economy” shoots a dart straight and Thatcherism and Reaganism. The only relief is to live honestly outside the law: “If I only had time, I’d think of the perfect crime.” Unlike other British alternative acts of the era, the Godfathers weren’t fey dorks. This is tough hard rock, smartly produced, with vocals spit out so you get the sense the singer knows everything’s pretty much bullshit.

And I can’t remember where I read it, but I swear these guys had earlier released “Love Is Dead” as a single on February 14, 1987. Absolute heroes.

Tuesday Tuneage
Bo Diddley - “Pills”
1961

It’s probably high school apocryphon, but it has stuck with me over the decades. We would sit in our nook of the commons before classes started in the morning, a crumpled-up-little-milk-carton’s toss from this couple, not being able to hear them but fascinated nonetheless. The guy was a wrestler. The gal was a cheerleader. What fascinated us was that he would totally fawn over her and she kinda held him in disdain. Like doing her nails or makeup while he talked to her. And he was nuts about her. And not crazy like in a puppy-dog-teenage love kind of way. Like in the way they were sitting there one morning, and he was talking to her and she was obviously ignoring him. Finally he groaned and ripped his teeshirt to make some sort of psycho point. (Over in our group, a fellow wrestler said: “Hey I loaned him that shirt!”) A week or so later we heard that she had broken up with him. Then a few days after that we heard that he showed up at Happy Joe’s Pizza Parlor where she worked one night and approached her at the counter and showed her a handful of pills. “If you don’t get back together with me,” he said, “I’ll take these.” And as the story went, she poured him a glass of water.

Tuesday Tuneage
INXS - “This Time”
1985

I recently finished reading Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson and wow his life story got boring. Drug addict, alcoholic, abuser of women, a constant litany of “if he wouldn’t have fallen to his vices and lived up to his talent” quotes. Though when excerpts of his work were printed you could see that glimmer, that spark that proved he could at times live up to his hype. But the dude skipped out on reporting on both the Fall of Saigon and the Rumble in the Jungle, which is not gonzo. Not at all.

There was an interesting tidbit that grabbed me. In the early eighties some kid from the University of North Dakota called one of Thompson’s agents, wondering if he’d come to UND to give a lecture. And it turned out that Hunter S. Thompson’s first college “lecture” was in Grand Forks circa 1983-84. I was a student there then, but have no recollection of this event. Then again, I didn’t become familiar with his writing until a few years later when a roommate subscribed to Rolling Stone. I remember Thompson wrote a review of ecstasy, which was likely when I found out that it’s a drug. A few weeks earlier I had run into a guy from high school in a loud bar and he was raving about ecstasy. I bluffed and nodded my head in approval. I thought “Ecstasy” was a band. (I was probably thinking of INXS, both having that “ex” sound it them.) So yet again not actively participating in a conversation paid off. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool …”

Tuesday Tuneage
Inside Experience - "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
1969

In the continuing effort to drown out the window AC unit, the Brown Acid compilations of proto-stoner metal from the late sixties and early seventies have been employed. The music is more amateurish and stumbling than the likes of Frijid Pink and Blue Cheer, as the Nuggets-era bands started embracing harsher drugs, became slower and heavier, headed for burnout, and brought about the comedown referenced in the series’ title.

This cover of the Cream song by Eric Clapton and Martin Sharp starts out as a bummer, then stumbles into a higher gear. There’s no sign of Clapton’s wah-wah guitar, kinda like how when The Litter covered The Yardbirds’ version of “I’m a Man” they neglected to attempt the Jeff-Beck-treats-his-guitar-as-a-percussion-instrument thing. But the cool (yes, cool) touch these slouches pulled off was the sudden laughing and cackling kicking in at the end. The Sirens, of course. The tune sounds like it was recorded in the dankest of basements (hence the band name) and we the listeners are up on the porch drinking lukewarm Miller High Lifes. (If this had been recorded in the nineties, some joker would have told you that you were listening to “lo-fi.”)

And after buying Cream’s Disraeli Gears forty years ago in the used racks at Mother’s Records, a kicking-myself realization: While this tune is about Ulysses from Roman mythology, a later verse doesn’t namecheck Venus and instead uses Aphrodite from Greek mythology. Hey Clapton: Shoulda brushed up on your Edith Hamilton!

Tuesday Tuneage
Coverdale-Page - “Pride and Joy”
1993

I was working my first post-college temp job at the Richfield Lunds grocery store in the summer of 1987. My task was to sit at a table with another temp and some senior volunteers and help people sign up to obtain at-home colon cancer screening tests. It was a campaign promoted by channel 5’s Dr. Michael Breen, who once stopped by to say hi and thank us for helping out. (Imagine my disappointment decades later while watching the NBA Finals and finding out ABC’s Mike Breen is a completely different guy, coulda done the Jeff Spicoli “ah, I know that dude” bit.) Later in the summer the reachout effort tamped down and the table was down to one-person shifts and there weren’t many interested patrons. (Though I was referred to as “sir” for the first time ever by a high school kid looking for the deli section ... I was twenty-one, sigh.) The manager of the store took a liking to me and said it would be fine if I flipped through magazines at my station during the slow stretches. So it was in a magazine there — I forget which — that I read Whitesnake’s name described as “seemingly both racist *and* sexist.” That line sounds like a Spinal Tap outtake, bravo.

Tawny Kitaen (RIP) aside, I never cared for Whitesnake. Glossy corporate metal that became increasingly laughable once Guns n’ Roses appeared and dumb without enough fun to make up for it. (No, I didn’t care about the hire-Steve-Vai move.) While I could go back to David Coverdale’s solo album White Snake (two words, not one, a complicated fellow this Dave) and try to find a song, instead I’m using a Coverdale-Page song here because Jimmy Page’s efforts in the nineties to resuscitate Led Zeppelin were pretty damn funny.

Tuesday Tuneage
Deep Purple - "Flight of the Rat"
1970

Deep Purple in Rock was the debut of the fabled Mark II edition of the band. As Billy Altman wrote in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red edition, 1979): “(Ritchie) Blackmore began to pull feverish and original solos out of nowhere, as he and (keyboardist Jon) Lord began to serve as counterpoints to each other.” The best case of this on In Rock is “The Flight of the Rat.” The album also has one of the great seventies album covers. In Chuck Eddy’s excellent tome Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, he writes that Deep Purple disguising themselves as Mount Rushmore on the cover of In Rock was “a very Spinal Tap thing to do.” Thinking of this made me note other Spinal Tap-ish things that have occurred in real life. Soon I will be listing others here and maybe I’ll actually write something instead of quoting others. To get the writing juices flowing, I can look to the lyrics that came with Deep Purple’s Machine Head (Mark II's masterpiece), they’re hanging in my office.

Tuesday Tuneage
Mick Jagger with Dave Grohl - “Eazy Sleazy”
2021

“Deep dive” is one of those phrases thrown around a lot the past few years, and I can safely say that such excursions aren’t working for me when it comes to certain current events, even though these days I have all kinds of time. Even counting time washing masks, streaming shows, applying for PPP loans, coming up with excuses not to attend the inevitable post-pandemic parties, cataloging my grievances against my newly-adopted cat (who is doing the same), and avoiding neighbors in the hallway ... I have time. In fact, I have too much time on my hands but yet I don’t want deep dives. I only want shallow dives. Wait, with such a dive you could injure your head and neck in shallow water. No, I only want shallow swims these days. Subjects that aren’t deep, like: Figuring out which University of North Dakota football players have scored points in Super Bowls, Cheap Trick’s eighties output, Everybody Loves Raymond reruns, those three great songs from Badfinger, digging up the rules of board games I played as a kid, and this Jagger/Grohl song. It’s garage-dance rock, dumb as hell, and a lot of fun.

And after a couple of spins and an afternoon dance party is contemplated, soon some time has been killed and it’s time for more coffee. A caffeine-plus-jitters diet is keeping the weight off, saves me from taking a deep dive into how to stay healthy when shut inside month after month. Coffee, water, and then daydream about beer. Friends are taking deep dives into craft beers, having all kinds of sixers and twelvers and growlers delivered to their homes. I shallowly swim in cheap macro lagers — Pabst, LaBatt, Grain Belt. Saves money and I can drink more of ‘em because they’re not hoppy. It’s fun tossing the cans into the recycling container, the kind of shallow activity that might take up my evening. Shallow swims, I’m in.

Tuesday Tuneage
Wilson Picket - “Fire and Water”
1971

In my efforts to listen to more Wilson Pickett, I assembled a playlist of him covering others’ hits. What a fun, exhilarating experience. Pickett would take on anything. There was hard rock: “Born to Be Wild*,” “Fire and Water,” and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (taking on the Vanilla Fudge version of the Supremes’ classic.) There was bubblegum: “Sugar Sugar” and “Run Joey Run.” There was the greatest British band with “Hey Jude,” the greatest American band with “Proud Mary,” and a criminally underrated American band with “Groovin’.” There was an ancient folk song in “Stagger Lee,” and a folk song of relatively recent invention in “Hey Joe.” Plus Roger Miller’s “Engine Engine Number 9” and another pretty good songwriter thrown in with Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”

Perhaps my favorite is his take on Free’s “Fire and Water.” Where Free’s version was all tension until Paul Kossoff’s brilliant guitar solo freed (ahem) things up, Pickett’s soars with horns and his irrepressible vocal. The weather is warming up and it’s time to maybe smile. Me, I’m going to listen to sunny music with the windows open. Wilson Picket demands a listen. What else are you going to do: Listen to The Kinks sleepwalk their way through “Long Tall Sally”?

*Better than Steve Martin’s version even.

Tuesday Tuneage
Creedence Clearwater Revival - “Lodi”
1969

Been at this same writing desk in my apartment for almost a year now, putting down words. But it’s not the same without being at the coffee shop, grabbing a table and setting up my office there with notebook, iPad, magazines, and folders. The words I type these days mostly go into unfinished pieces that feel inspired or at least solid upon first spark, but after typing up the notes and rewriting, revising, and editing, they lose their shine. There’s no variety while I sit here, no random sighting of folks across the shop, no snippets of conversation drifting across my table. No sense that as I’m away from home, I’m getting away with something. I like to use that feeling of mischief in creating, that sense of pulling a fast one, of getting away with the perfect score. But here I am sitting at home again, like the narrator in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lodi”, on a treadmill with seemingly no way of getting off. “If I only had a dollar ...”

Tuesday Tuneage
Brenton Wood - “Psychotic Reaction”
1967

How I made it until 2021 without hearing this one is baffling. Sampling Count Five’s garage rock masterpiece of the same name while adding ? and the Mysterians-like keyboard results in a soul nugget that anticipates Funkadelic, Prince (especially), and a long list of funk weirdos. Both Woods and the Five were on the same Double Shot label, must of made clearing the rights to the song easier. Interesting that the original “Psychotic Reaction” was a clumsy/genius rehash of the Yardbirds “I’m a Man”, which in turn was a cover of the Bo Diddley classic. Though when things get weirdly fun we tend to end up at Bo, don’t we?

(And again, the singer is Brenton Wood, not Bretton Woods.)

Tuesday Tuneage
Alice Cooper - “Reflected”
1969

Some rock ‘n’ roll urban legends are salacious, like the Rod Stewart/emergency room/stomach pump story. Others are curious: Bruce Springsteen supposedly wrote “Billie Jean”, this is backed up by a photo of Bruce mimicking that song’s video on the back cover of the “Dancing in the Dark” twelve-inch. Some are hilarious: In the late eighties a story swirled that Depeche Mode played concerts with backing tapes instead of real instruments, one time the tape machine malfunctioned, and the band had to start the concert over with the tape rolling from the beginning. My favorite of these legends is the “evil rock act has origins in something harmless from your youth” genre. I first heard one of these during my childhood in the early seventies. Alice Cooper was taking the nation by storm (documented in “Elected”) with a double-punch of their horror-movie-influenced live shows and a concurrent takeover of the radio airwaves with hook-filled teen anthems like “School’s Out” and “No More Mister Nice Guy.” A rumor circulated that lead singer Alice was none other than Ken Osmond, the actor who had portrayed Eddie Haskell in the sixties sitcom Leave It to Beaver. Turns out in reality Ken Osmond went on to become a cop in Los Angeles, was shot in the line of duty and survived, which may have been the genesis of the other rumor involving the cast of the show: That show star Jerry “Beaver” Mathis had been killed in action in Vietnam.

The next variation I heard on this legend was in the mid-eighties. My brother said that our cousin had told him that he had heard that the members of Motley Crue used to be the band Bread. To be honest, I love this one more than the Osmond/Cooper rumor. Purporting that Bread, known for a run of saccharine AM radio hits in the seventies, went on to become PMRC bad boys Motley Crue is rich. In The Wonder Years, Winnie Cooper gave Kevin Arnold a Bread album. Kevin feigned enthusiasm (because Winnie, woo woo) but in voiceover admitted his disdain for the band. Which would explain why a fading David Gates knew that the typical teen male wouldn’t go for his songs. So he turned to Tom Werman to punch up some tapes he had sitting around ("they’re like ‘Mother Freedom’, only more rockin"), convinced his bandmates to wear makeup and change their names, and start paying attention to this thing called “MTV” ...

Speaking of The Wonder Years, in the nineties a rumor circulated that Josh Saviano, the actor who was Kevin’s best friend Paul Pfeiffer, grew up to become Marilyn Manson. I didn’t hear of this one in typical urban legend third-hand such as “my sister’s neighbor’s friend told me ...”, instead I read it while surfing the Net via AOL. By this time I was in my thirties, had an interest in urban legends, and spotted the motif instantly. At a family reunion, a teenage cousin was into Marilyn Manson and tried to present his whole shtick as shocking. Her mom, a fellow child of the seventies, simply chuckled and said: “Oh yeah, Alice Cooper.”