August 2009 – Wrekehavoc.com

Month: August 2009

guilty pleasure monday: ana ng (they might be giants)

Posted on August 31, 2009February 9, 2010 by wrekehavoc

i don’t want the world; i just want your half.

wish i had a better version of this classic to share, but those of you unfamiliar with this classic will just have to take my word that this song is noteworthy. ana ng, one of the gazillion songs the zany brooklyn group they might be giants cranked out as a dial a song, is a simple, loopy song about a girl the singer has never met. the singer ponders whether his soulmate is somewhere on the other side of the planet:

Ana Ng and I are getting old
And we still haven’t walked in the glow of each other’s majestic presence
Listen Ana hear my words
They’re the ones you would think I would say if there was a me for you

deep.

anyway, it was wonderful to see that i’m not the only person in the world who wonders about whether someone i’m meant to know lives somewhere in peru or china or maybe even zaire. (not my soulmate, of course. already found that guy.) lucky for me, now, that there’s this here internet thing that has already helped me find people (or vice versa) who share my sensibilities. or who at least seem to tolerate me. some. (::waving at folks::)

when i think of they might be giants, i also think about their output for kids and families. my kids have spent many happy hours dancing to the songs from their book and CD entitled no!, especially happy doesn’t have to have an ending. (i can still hear them sing-shouting i’m just a hippie kitten.) and i squealed with joy when they came out with here come the ABCs, even though by that point, they had teamed up with the Mouse. still, i hope as time goes on, john and john maintain their independence, their sense of humor, and their steady creative output!

i also started thinking about the sort of artists who are going into kids music these days. you’ve got the mothersbaughs (from devo) who seem to score a zillion different kids shows and movies. you’ve got they might be giants who are hooked into the disney music train. and i cannot forget dan zanes (formerly of the del fu-e-gos, as juliana hatfield once sang), who is also a disney kids music god at this stage. (permit me a little shoutout to my homeboy yosi, who is also producing some fun music for kids, including our perennial fave, beach. maybe he hasn’t been signed by disney yet, but he has been on XM and puts on a fantastic, energetic show. be sure to catch him when he comes to your town — your kids will love it!) i must confess, i’m glad there are artists who are digging deep and trying to write more intelligent stuff for kids. but it seems like only the quirkiest ones are willing to go there. i’d love to see more mainstream folks enter that world and see how they fare. (some dip their toes in via sesame street or a compilation LP, but that’s where it ends.)

they, too, might become childrens music giants.

guilty pleasure monday: all for leyna (billy joel)

Posted on August 24, 2009June 13, 2013 by wrekehavoc

apparently not inspired by her.

whenever i think of billy joel’s song all for leyna, i think of two things. the first and foremost memory is of the summer of JAP Camp. one summer, my mom and dad thought i would enjoy a sleepaway camp experience. my mom’s friend would work at camp as the art teacher while her son went to camp; as misery loves company, my mom’s friend suggested that my mom work at camp so that i might have fun in the jewish alps, too.

so in the summer of 1980, off we triapsed to camp lokanda. i was situated in a large bunkhouse (with carpet!) with a gaggle of some of the Jappiest girls LawnGuyland could offer. we had electronics (well, what passed for them in 1980; now i suspect the place is riddled with DSs, iphones, ipods, and so on.). we had neon pink fingernail polish. we had bloomies on tushes. we had girls who did not want to do anything remotely athletic for fear of breaking a nail.

in short, we had some of the nastiest bitches i have encountered before or since.

these girls were horrible. they were catty; they were demeaning; they were demanding. and i, of course, was the child of hired help, so i was the lowest of the low (strike one). i was also from new jersey. (strike two.) in an effort to stay the hell away from them, i decided to take advantage of what the camp had to offer. because i wasn’t afraid of boys seeing me without full makeup (which i didn’t wear at the time) or perfect hair (which i never would achieve in my lifetime), i was willing to wake up at the veryvery early hour of 6 am in order to learn to waterski. i hung with the boys when i could to play softball or soccer or anything remotely athletic. some of the boys were ridiculous princes as well, but there were a few who were worthwhile.

and hell, all the foreign counselors liked me. they invited me to hang out with them after lights out.

anyway, the fact that i had made friends with the boys (strike three) (HELLO? i have two older brothers and a lot of my friends, especially at that point in my life, were boys) combined with the fact that my mommy and daddy were not wealthy scions of the Five Towns pretty much sealed my fate.

however, peace would come whenever this one girl in my room would break out her tape recorder and play the billy joel glass houses album. they would all shut up or sing. they wouldn’t pick on me. it was nirvana.

i will love billy joel forever, if only for that.

deus ex machina came when my mother and i had to leave camp early because she had this pesky lump. the next month, we would realize it was cancerous, and a whole different part of my life would start. but at the time, before i know what really was happening, i was just happy beyond belief to get the hell out of there.

the second memory is a bit shorter and slightly bittersweet. an old boyfriend (who shall remain nameless) told me once about this girl named stephanie. she was apparently just the very coolest girl on the planet. or maybe she put out. i don’t remember. anyway, i had to endure him and his desperate talk about this girl: she gave him a night, that’s all it was. what would it take for him to stop kidding himself, wasting his — and my– time?

obviously, that one didn’t work out.

but to this day, whenever i hear this song, i always sing it as all for stephanie.

p.s. he didn’t end up with her, either.

guilty pleasure monday: frank and ava (suzanne vega)

Posted on August 17, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

frank and ava. embedding is borked, so you have to click here to hear it. bork bork bork.

you know those toys you loved as a child and then tired of? those toys are like the artists you enjoyed in your youth. you still love listening to their hits (or classic albums, if they weren’t exactly a top 40 act) — but have you given them a listen lately? sure, some of them will not be producing great stuff, but you might be surprised at the ones who are.

i feel this way about suzanne vega.

suzanne vega has produced consistently engaging works. she’s so much more than luka (or tom’s diner, which i can’t stand in the smashed-up DNA version) and thank Dog for that. her voice is so clear, so evocative, kind of like a female lou reed but one who actually can sing (with some apologies to reed, who probably could care less.) i cannot understand why she is not more celebrated in the world when she creates the kind of music in league with heavies like aimee mann (at whose altar i worship daily.) some of the imagery in selections from songs in red and grey, an album that is a morose yet wistful product of her divorce, is riveting: she explains to her child:

Daddy’s a dark riddle; Mama’s head’s full of bees. You are my little kite, carried away in the wayward breeze.

i was glad that her next release, beauty & crime, moved away from that topic. frank and ava, she once noted, is the story of a couple who can’t live together and who can’t live apart. in the end, like the real frank and ava, they end their relationship and never see each other again, though they never forget each other. it is a song with an incredible hook; i’m surprised it wasn’t snapped up for use in a movie or starbucks or SOMEWHERE.

we love this song. my little cherubs sing knowingly it’s not enough to be in love. i wonder whether they will really understand that later on in life. i guess i’ll have to content myself with a different image for now: the image of BC, who, in the proud tradition of her grandmother, mangles the lyrics to the song. unintentionally. for girlfriend, the song starts out this way:

on the way to the bidet is where the trouble used to start.

(well, for people of a certain age, this could be a problem, right?)

anyway, maybe suzanne vega doesn’t light your lucky as she does mine (musically speaking), but perhaps you should check out someone you liked years ago. their latest stuff may not put them in heavy rotation on the radio (especially if you live in radio wasteland as i do), but it might merit heavy rotation on an mp3 player near you.

guilty pleasure monday: sneakin' sally through the alley (robert palmer)

Posted on August 10, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

anyone else notice a leitmotif here in the guilty pleasure monday world?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsLz2pvO5N0

yes, those of you observant enough (or even breathing, perhaps) might notice i’m picking GPMs featuring a lady’s name. although the lady in this song is clearly no lady.

and she sure as hell ain’t the singer’s wife.

you can’t talk about this song, a cover of new orleans legend allen toussaint’s, without mentioning the late, great lowell george of little feat. i remember the first time i heard the sailin’ shoes / hey julia / sneakin’ sally through the alley montage and thinking — wait a minute — is palmer covering a little feat tune? i had heard the little feat version of sailin’ shoes, but not palmer’s. george backs palmer on this album, and i think it shows.

so many people think of robert palmer as the slicked out, tricked out guy of the 80s with that annoying all-girl band.

(yeah. i’ll wait while the guys out there finish with the video…)

anyway, long before the creepy whiteface models (TM), a predecessor to the blue man group (sans tobias fünke), palmer was a purveyor of blue-eyed soul, as those crazy, cliche-ridden music writers like to call it. teamed up with george, he made a classic album filled with slide guitars and funky beats. my kids have been listening to this since they were, well, even littler, as it is never too early to experience the greats. sure, the lyrics aren’t exactly kid-friendly (there’s a lady in a turban in a cocaine tree and she does a dance so rhythmically. hello, division of youth and family services?) but hell, like me, they’re paying most of their attention to the groove.

the only problem occurred when BC, age 3 or 4, started singing hey julia to her little friend, named, not surprisingly, julia.

Hey, hey Julia, you’re acting so peculiar
I know I’d never fool you in a million years
A horn section you resemble and your figure makes me tremble
And I sure would like to handle whats between your ears

yes, i remember the day when girlfriend asked me about that last line. i think i told her the singer was talking about the woman’s brains, like in a horror movie. she accepted that, and we moved on. (i expect a bill from her therapist in about 20 years.)

so this threesome of songs (and don’t think that term won’t get me saddled with all sorts of perverted page hits now) goes from drugs to sex to getting caught. we don’t really get to know much about sally, beyond her generosity and her clandestine trips through the alley. but what we do learn? the sheer stupidity of the man telling the tale of woe. why, there’s nothing wrong with being friends, he tells his wife — sometimes, this chick lets me use her car!

i’ll say.

guilty pleasure monday: jane (jefferson starship)

Posted on August 3, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

yeah yeah. i had a guilty pleasure post about jefferson airplane a little while back. but the airplane and the starship are two different modes of transport, if you know what i mean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIsiR43Zw5M

when jane was released in 1979, i think the only person left standing from the original jefferson airplane lineup was paul kantner. (someone chime in if i’m mistaken.) my beloved grace slick (and her rockin’ haircut that i’ve copied for the past 30 years)had been kicked out, thanks to her infamous drunken tirades against basically the entire nation of germany. marty balin bailed the group just before this album (but not before contributing some mid-1970s hits which i can hardly stand.) luckily, they somehow pulled in journey’s drummer aynsley dunbar and discovered teenaged guitarist craig chaquico who has since gone on to play smooth jazz and new age successfully. voila! instant band.

to my young ears, the song had a fantastic hook — and a killer keyboard part for me to bang along with on that poor, beleagured piano (the one that still graces my family room, despite the times when hellboy pounds on it.) i didn’t care that the singer was obviously being played by his girlfriend, jane. (when i was 14, those sorts of things didn’t loom large in my mind. the song could have been about flying monkeys and i would have been fine with it, as long as the hook was working.) i hear it, and i’m instantly transported to summer camp — the second year i was working at one, that is. (for $50 a week. yes, you read that right. by my calculations, i would have to work one hour to afford the big gulp coffee i required prior to each work day.)

ah, leonard baer day camp, 1979:

i would be the dork on the far right channeling my inner chris evert in the white shirt and green tennis shorts.

my hair had not improved one iota from the year prior, when i was a mere CIT:

lmbdc 1978 — white shirt, top left, dork with whistle. cos that's how i rolled.

what a difference some years make:

lmbdc 1983 — far left, girl with bouncin' and behavin' hair. just prior to my infamous run-in with Sun In.

i think i was still pulling in that $50/week by 1983. probably kept me in hair supplies, i think. but it kept me from working on the sleazeside heights boardwalk, a scary and dangerous thing for a girl of a certain age to be doing, my parents insisted…

where was i? r i g h t…

jefferson starship. 1979 was probably their last year of interest for me. (and apparently billy corgan, too.) they’d go on in various incarnations, building up to the atrocity known as we built this city, one of the worst popular songs of the 1980s. (a decade that had a lot of awful musical opportunities, so no mean feat.) by then, they had dropped the jefferson part of their name and were simply starship. perhaps they should have put whatever dirigible they were flying in in park in 1979, cut their losses, and followed solo careers.

sigh. nothing lasts.

thankfully, i still have jane. and, come to think of it, my grace slick hair.