Blip, Again

Andrew W.K., The Mclaughlin Group and Carl Sandburg.

Chapter Twenty Five: Music Retail Ruins

Ah music retail a concept growing quainter by the day and soon to be as smitten into redundancy as elevator operation. Every generation feels the sting of becoming anachronistic and we all respond with our own particular band of bitterness. We lament, we protest and finally we either become a cranky holdout or we acquiesce.
“You guys wanna hear a great song?” asked a music retail lifer who works for one of the surviving stores in my hometown. We (my fellow throw-back with whom I do a weekly Saturday Rock Walk to seek musical treasure) did. He played us “Your Love Alone is Not Enough by the Manic Street Preachers and we each had to buy the album. A High Fidelity moment perhaps but a communal one, which is something transferring bits per second can never quite replicate.
The Tone were a communal experience. I walked down into The Cellar (another retail casualty of downloading) the subterranean home of deliberately ugly sub-genres and an employee we’ll call…Hedberg said, “You gotta hear this!” Damn! Exploding guitars, trade-off vocals and those supple ska-inflected beats – this is a high. It’s Jam-Clash-SLF again, I know, but they still found their own tiny patch of space in the musical universe. The Tone actually were English and were led by Thatcher on Acid’s Ben Corrigan as well as Dan Bernstein and featured the minimally credited Bob and Paul on bass and drums respectively. Everybody sings, which promises something great in a band plus the fully credited Dave “Fingers” Eve adds some rippling organ. Twelve songs (almost of which were singles) and not one that should’ve been thrown into a weighted bag and dropped into the river. “Pauline”, which enumerates all of their influence including Pauline Murray of the Selecter and the less-than-celebrated Jilted John (which explains the cockney-novelty cover song “Bloody”) is the album’s raison d’etre and high water mark. Anachronistic but not tainted by bitterness.
Take the Tone - you’ll have no more regrets than you already do.


Download

Chapter Twenty Four: Blondie was a Band

Every generation gets the sex symbol(s) it deserves; for those of us creeping towards puberty in the late 70’s Debbie Harry was our It Girl.
I remember seeing Blondie perform “Hanging on the Telephone” on TV at a tender age. Debbie Harry was doing her standing-still-at-the-mike pose and was decked out in a glowing-red dress. I didn’t fully understand my reaction but when she got to that part about “I'd like to talk when I can show you my affection” but it may have influenced my decision to buy a cassette tape of Parallel Lines.
Of course, a dream of Kristy McNicol may have convinced me to watch the execrable show Family but that phase passed. However, these years later it seems that of all the class of CBGB’s graduates, Blondie get the least respect (well other than the Shirts or the Tuff Darts). The Ramones were lionized for milking every last drop from their distillation of rock history. Blondie accomplished the same thing but since they insisted on moving “forward” (in a manner –disco, rap, old reggae – not so different than the Clash) and had hits they grew critically marginalized.
As a songwriter, bandleader and sex symbol Debbie Harry joins a list of women (Maybelle Carter, Billie Holliday, Janis Joplin) who re-defined the role of women within their genre. Plus Harry and her band's hits livened up the radio and jump started a thousand underground bands.

Two bands here attest to the influence of Blondie on the music of the late 70’s/early 80’s.




The Expressos (Rozzi vocals - Mick Toldi guitars - Nicholas Pyall guitars, keyboards - Milan Lekavica drums - Johnny Christo bass) used the Girl Group meets the New Wave shtick but never sounded derivative. In fact the song-writing here (see “Tango in Mono” and “My Yesterday”) equals a lot of Blondie’s late 70’s peak. The Byrds influence on “There She Goes” and “Promises and Ties” is beautiful but the album (B-sides both commercial and literal have been appended to enhance your listening pleasure) lacks any weak spots. I cannot fathom how this album (along with the contemporaneous Keys album) does not have a cult following and lavish re-issue. Soon…

Download



The Passengers (Angie Pepper, vocals, Jim Dickson on bass with Jeff Sullivan on guitar and Steve Harris on keyboards) never had the backing of a major label (though Denis Tek of Radio Birdman was a supporter/romantic interest) but this demo (issued on a French CD shows that Australia had better bands than Icehouse available for export in ’79. The striking Angie Pepper, who from the look of the booklet often performed in a bra, might have made a few Australians boys and girls sit up and take notice for both physical and musical reasons and, as with the best pop music, those two reasons are inextricably linked.

Download

A Blip

Chapter Twenty-Two: Are You Ready for the Cow-Punk?

“There’s no such thing as cow-punk.” Did I say that? Yes, though in my defense I was sixteen, standing in the basement of Wellington’s (a sleazeball bar) after having just witnessed a spectacular set by Soul Asylum and it was 1985. Now Soul Asylum had just finished refusing to play anything from their first e.p. (Say What You Will) and had focussed exclusively on the less thrashy (and perhaps a touch more country) material from the stunning Made to be Broken album. Some earnest fellow-traveler claimed that Soul Asylum and this “this band from Edmonton called Jr. Gone Wild are cow-punk”. I begged to differ since back in the 80’s I, as narrow-minded music fans always have, disavowed all country music.

By this time the roots-rock sound (one of the more flagrantly critic-created genres) was in full swing. When faced with an enemy as ugly as the soulless and gutless synth-pop a million bands (often older punks) went back in time. Eighties bands exhumed garage rock, folk-rock and psychedelia with glee. Then of course there was country-rock, which almost every single recording artists of the 60’s is credited with having invented (by the way it’s all about Buck Owens, the death-deifying Mr. Parsons aside). The less commercial bands (Jason and the Scorchers etc.) got called cow-punk and the ones who made beer commercials (Del Fuegos etc.) got labeled roots-rock. But they all loved Gram, Bolo ties and that twang and they all got wiped out as the 80‘s bled into the 90’s. However by then Uncle Tupelo managed to steal every ounce of credit leaving Jason and the Scorchers et al cruelly empty-handed.

And there in the midst of the action was Mike McDonald, criminally neglected also-ran and linchpin of Jr. Gone Wild. “They've been called "the Sex Pistols meet Hank Williams." Lead singer and songwriter Mike McDonald once joked that the band had progressed: they were now a cross between the Clash and George Jones” says an article on their excellent (and ten-year old!) web site. The first album Less Art, More Pop has an R.E.M. angle (though they claimed in old interviews that BYO Records made them wear the twee-hippy gear) then they added some Neil Young, maybe a bit of Bob and (if Mike is to be believed) gallons of alcohol. They moved to Canadian indie (and “rootsy”) label Stony Plain for their excellent second album Too Dumb To Quit (nice Ramones reference). Mike sobered up for what may be their strongest album Simple Little Wish (which like it’s predecessor Pull the Goalie is still available from Stony Plain Records). Mike and JGW wrote empathetic, intelligent and ringing songs, such as “Slept all Afternoon" and “In Contempt of Me" which must be heard. Enjoy it, even if cow-punk was just a dumb label.

P.S. C-60 Low Noise has lots of what passed for cow-punk (and especially the thundering Jason and the Scorchers! Maybe more on them later.)

Less Art, More Pop

Too Dumb to Quit

In Canada, almost like some sorta Watchmen parallel universe, roots-rock flourished and became mainstream. In the late 80’s Steve Earle filled stadium in north and bands like The Tragically Hip and Blue Rodeo became staples of Canadian rock and even, to a degree, country radio. Of course under the radar flew the breathtakingly beautiful Lost Durangos and the achingly melodic Skydiggers.

I first heard the Skydiggers (Andy Maize, Josh Finlayson, Peter Cash, Wayne Stokes and Ron Macey) on the floor at a Vancouver record store named A + B Sound. In the early 1990’s mainstream record store employees were not yet anachronisms-waiting-to-happen but we suffered a strict dress and sound code, no loud hair or loud guitars. So before Nirvana gave the hammer blow to those regulations folkish-rock was a Great Escape from the enforced blandness. In that context the second Skydiggers album, Restless, pealed like a great bell: with those sad harmonies and chiming guitars meshing just so. True you can hear that Byrds via R.E.M. sound in songs like Accusation but the aching lyrics of This Old Town has the lope of gut-bucket country plus a perfect accapella break-it down part. Just Listen; there's much to hear.

As per usual, research has revealed that only the current Skydiggers album to be in print. So we will try to salve that injustice with these mp3’s, which will only be available temporarily in the hopes that soon the real thing will come along.

Skydiggers - Debut


Skydiggers - Restless