(Big thanks to Bristol Boy from My Life's a Jigsaw for the scans!)
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MRML has long raged against the dominance of overly-delicate monotony in what's called indie-rock but the deceptively-named Sleigh Bells (Adam Graham says " If Andrew WK's little sister started a band, it might sound like Sleigh Bells" though 'Venetian Snares meets the Vivian Girls' works as well) may be a sign that the genre's finally gonna get a little fucked-up.
Sure, why not?
For me the biggest disappointment of the evening was Dylan. He sang three of his classics, including "Blowin' in the Wind", which ought to have been one of the greatest moments of the concert. Unfortunately, the performance was catastrophic. He had met Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in a night club in New York the night before and they had offered to back him. So, there they were - pop music's seminal songwriter and the world's greatest rhythm guitarist and his partner. But they were out of time, they couldn't stay in tune and they seemed to treat the song with disdain. (I later heard that the curtain had dropped between them and their monitors, so that they couldn't hear themselves perform.) Then he displayed a a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid by saying, unforgivably, 'It would be nice if some of this money went to the American farmers." Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief. Live Aid was about people losing their lives. There is a radical difference between losing your livelihood and losing your life. It did instigate Farm Aid, which was a good thing in itself but it was a crass, stupid, nationalistic thing to say. It was to have been the finale but thank God Ken Kragen had persuaded Lionel Richie to come and sing "We Are the World". Dylan left the stage and as he walked by his manager, he just looked up and said, "Sorry."Author Michael Gray called it, "the most disheveled, debilitatingly drunk performance of his career" and refers to his remarks as "breath-takingly insensitive" but adds, "...there was nothing dishonourable in Dylan's being, as he visibly was, desperately embarrassed by the whole spectacle of these superstars patting themselves on the back while advancing their global profiles in the name of charity - so that one might not rush to judgment on Dylan's failure to "behave himself".
"Bob Dylan told me to look at Woody Guthrie, and I did. I took the name Boomtown Rats from his book, Bound For Glory."Bob Geldof
The comps started back in 1998 with #1 and ended 2003 with #10. There was another one planned called "Best of Powerpearls", but was not realized due to less interest of the customers.
You might know the Killed by Death and Bloodstains compilations, which were focused on punk rock in the 90's. We thought it's a good idea to give people an idea of the more poppy part of punk. The idea was to release just one track of every band. There was much interest in punk and power pop record collection end of the 90's. Extremely high prices were paid for the original records. For example the Fingers on PP #4 reached $3000-4000.
It's good to know that there are still a lot people around who love the music. Nowadays it's so easy with mp3, no vinyl to need...
Cheers
i.
"Rat Trap" is our only song to get played on the radio here because American DJ's think it sounds like Bruce Springsteen. But I want you to know (laughs, adopts American DJ accent) that Bruce Springsteen couldn't write a song half as good as this if he tried.
Bob Geldof, to an audience in New York who booed in response.
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(Photo property of Kevin Mazur)
(We had merch!)
All those Og records helped inspire Jane Fonda and the Honda, who performed just one earth-shattering show. For that so-called show we played a butchery of Billy Bragg's "Strange Things Happen' and an original called, "Socialized Hairdressing" before serving some cheap n' doughy pizza. Our audience consisted of fourteen close personal friends, thirteen of whom were still as such at show's end.
So JFH (our initialism!), never did get to fulfill our dream of opening for The Dik Van Dykes. The Diks were a band that cleaved to the Og doctrine of primitivism (see Steve Hoy's three-string guitar and Stu Smith's kick pedal-less kit) but who added a chirpy but choppy pop sensibility to it all. Some said they sounded like the Ramones battling The B-52's. Perhaps more precisely, The Diks high-speed junk-pop, with back-up singers the Pop-Tarts bringing the la-la's, bore a strong resemblance to late seventies Scottish fashion-plates, The Rezillos (whose album title the Diks paid homage to). Easy comparisons aside, this album still stands on its own, like some demented inukshuk. The songs are hummable and funny - these lyrics will return a thousand joys even if, and perhaps because, you'll never understand them all.
Nobody Likes link is in the comments.
Speaking of comments, please leave us one about the Dik's music or that time you were involved with a not-so-good band.
A big thanks goes out to Nicola who not only bought me this L.P. for my birthday on almost exactly this date twenty-fuckin-two years ago but also had every Jane Fonda and the Hondas "demo" tape.
