Category: music
guilty pleasure monday: put on your sunday clothes (from the musical “hello dolly”)
oh, don’t be a hater.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVA3jgpgIY8this past week, BC, jools, and i spent our time visiting my parents, my mother in law, and various and assorted uncles, aunts, and cousins (plus my beloved old friend jen, who handed me a tea bag to throw into the potomac when i returned home.) we had a great time — eating, playing, shopping, painting pottery, eating, visiting a used book store, eating some more. i ran my annual speed seder, bringing the old girl in about an hour and a half (including the eating part.) hellboy even read the four questions — in english, but he read them just the same. a very big moment for me, as i have historically been the youngest at the table all my life. BC always refused to read the questions.
and now, the torch has been passed to a new generation.
anyway, speaking of passing torches, my dad taped a few musicals in case the kids wanted to watch something on TV. and while the boy seemed to be more excited about the offerings on discovery kids, BC was enthralled by the musicals. first, she watched gigi, a terrific lerner and loewe time piece featuring a gorgeous leslie caron. and, of course, this unforgettable guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGM3ZTP2nw(okay, okay. so there is something a little creepy about the leering old fella, but i like the song nonetheless.)
and then, one of my favorites: hello, dolly!
now, you may be disgusted surprised to know that i grew up on musicals. yes, i learned to love punk, metal, and all sorts of other musical enterprises as well; but i also experienced a steady diet of rogers and hammerstein, lerner and loewe, andrew lloyd webber, and so many others in my formative years.
and love or hate her politics, barbra sings like buttah.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqPiJ0L7YmYhello, dolly! is so much fun. barbra and walter matthau are well-suited; a young tommy tune towers over his ladyfriend; and a young michael crawford nearly steals the show as cornelius hackl. i especially love put on your sunday clothes. i actually think about it some days when i feel like crap and adopt it as a sort of mini philosophy. (in fact, years ago, i shared my office with a young lady who told me that she could always tell when i was feeling extra awful — i would actually put on makeup.)
so to see BC falling in love with the movie and the music?
it’s like buttah.
guilty pleasure monday: cool as kim deal (the dandy warhols)
Hey.
There’s nothing in my heart.
I’d rather be cool than be smart.
while i would have been pleased to have hair like jeannie shrimpton back in 1965 and stand just like bill wyman, the guys from dandy warhol had something a little more modern in mind: kim deal.
and kim deal is a big deal. the bassist and backup singer for the pixies, mrs. john murphy (as she had herself credited in a wacky little feminist moment) struggled to be heard, occasionally grabbing her moments. frankly, i’m glad she left the pixies so that she could focus on her other band, the breeders.
the breeders, which also included throwing muses guitarist tanya donelly (who would later form another well-loved band, belly), kim’s identical twin sister kelley; and ultimately a revolving lineup, let deal flex her songwriting wings. she wrote some great stuff:
and a song i often quote:
i’m pretty sure i saw both the breeders and belly at various HFStivals in the ’90s. but those concerts are a blur of heat and sweat and rain and wildly varying artists, so i can’t be exactly sure unless i check one of BS’s ancient HFStival t-shirts (some of which still exist, remarkably.)
kim ended up creating a side project, the amps, when her sister had some drug problems, but then ended up ultimately back together, and i’m pretty sure they still play today.
(of course, some of you are probably pissed at me for not addressing the actual guilty pleasure song of the day, cool as kim deal. you know i am prone to tangents. forgive me. just enjoy the song and it’ll all be cool.
and hey — it’s my beloved cousin stephanie‘s birthday today — she’s as cool as kim deal, too.
happy just to be nominated
thanks so much for nominating two of my posts for the just posts of 2009 award!
and
guilty pleasure monday: millworker (james taylor)
voting is over now, and winners have not yet been announced. but check out the page — there are some really amazing thought-provoking posts up there.
it truly is an honor just to be nominated.
guilty pleasure monday: girl don’t tell me (beach boys)
i’m still riding high on the T.A.M.I. show from last week, i guess.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ztc_lAb5Wswhen i was about 9 or so, my oldest brother, BTD, bought the compilation album endless summer, a move which effectively made me a fan of the beach boys lock, stock, and surfboard. i probably played that LP more than he ever did, as i loved the warm sounds the band evoked on countless songs. my dad, with his ever-discerning ear for melody, eventually pointed me toward some of the more challenging songs not present on that compilation, like god only knows, a product of the famous pet sounds album. it is well-known how super genius brian wilson was attempting to keep up with the beatles in the mid-1960s; he tired of writing about surf and girls and cars and moved on to significantly complex musical ideas. (and i’m pretty sure that the beatles adored him as well.)
but before brian veered down the road of creative genius/man who laid in bed for years, he composed things that were a little weightier but not as heavy as what would come. one of these songs, girl don’t tell me (a song which wilson claimed in his autobiography that he wrote alone, which resulted in mike love successfully suing him for songwriting credits), i believe, was actually written in 1965 for the beatles to record. the beatles, of course, never recorded the song (who knows if they ever even saw it), though it sounds like a perfect fit for stuff they were doing during that year (i can see it fitting in nicely on the help! soundtrack.)
why do i love this song? well, besides the interesting and moving direction in which the chords take you, i love this song because carl wilson sings it.
can you imagine being carl wilson? living in the shadow of the immense talent that is brian wilson? yet carl was no slouch in the talent department, and i wish more people realized that fact. his lovely alto graces so many classic beach boys songs following this one (yeah, he sang on a few before, but to me, girl don’t tell me is the first song of any significance that his voice graces.) not knocking mike love, of course, but his voice would not fit the bill on songs like this and god only knows and even good vibrations.
sadly, carl wilson lost his cancer battle over 10 years ago; but his stellar guitar work and his evocative singing are still with us. it’s hard to come out from the shadow of a sibling who looms so large; but carl definitely did his best to do so, in a quiet but consistently solid way.
guilty pleasure monday: out of sight/night train (james brown)
warning: you will get exhausted watching his legs move.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVnGTLtUNgothe other night, i had the great pleasure of watching the famous T.A.M.I. Show courtesy of my local PBS station’s beg-a-thon. for those of you unfamiliar, the T.A.M.I. show is an amazing time capsule of a movie, filmed at a show in Santa Monica, CA in 1964. it was released in theaters, then promptly disappeared for a life in bootleg-dom. it was shown once on cable in 1984, but it remained out of sight (and not in the groovy sense of the phrase) until this year, when dick clark and his merry band of lawyers made things possible for the film’s release onto DVD.
the film is absolutely glorious, and not just because of the amazing hullabaloo-like dancers (including a young toni basil and teri garr) who frug their fannies off. the lineup is incredible: you have a still-innocent marvin gaye, the supremes (riding high at the time on the back of three back-to-back number one hits); you have the miracles; the beach boys; jan and dean; gerry and the pacemakers; the rolling stones (before satisfaction hit the world like a firestorm); and several others.
and of course, you have the godfather of soul: james brown and the flames.
there’s a reason the police call out this performance (which also included prisoner of love/please please please. complete with the king refusing his robe) in their 1980 song when the world is running down [james brown the t.a.m.i. show.] there’s a reason why keith richards is widely quoted as saying that following james brown’s performance in this show was the biggest mistake of [their] lives.
do you see the young lady who is shaking it in the audience during night train? she is losing the curlers in her hair, and yet, she doesn’t care. brown is screaming; he’s grunting; and something primal is just hitting people in the audience and driving them wild. i’m sure that this has got to be the part that eddie murphy stole for his famous james brown hot tub sketch. of course, eddie’ take on james (NSFW):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-FcNSDGKwthere are only two artists i think i would never, ever want to follow if i were a performer. i could never follow jimi hendrix after he set his guitar ablaze. and wild horses could not make me follow james brown. his energy; his superfantastical movements; his theatrics… unbelievable. for those kiddies out there who think michael jackson invented moonwalking, think again. michael surely studied at the feet of james brown. (in fact, it appears after this performance that a young mick jagger is attempting some of james brown’s moves.)
anyway, the film is delightful. there are a few separated-at-birth moments in it, of course:
and
not to mention the flames member who sports a ‘do much like the three stooges’ beloved moe howard.
but i digress.
james brown is da bomb. if there’s a rock and roll heaven, then i bet james is teaching some of those slackers how to dance.
pablo picasso
pablo picasso was never called an asshole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dQ4owtKH3Mi have two children: one, BC, who will tell me anything and everything about her day from a minute-by-minute perspective; and jools, who may occasionally share a nugget or two beyond my day went okay if the sky is a certain shade of blue, the moon is in the seventh house, and jupiter might be somehow aligning with mars. i usually get my best info from jools while walking home from the school bus in the afternoon if he hasn’t decided to run ahead with other children or hang back, picking up sticks or plodding along with our neighbor’s mellow, slow-trudging lab.
it was one of those wonderful days when i just had to pick the boy up from the bus and he held my hand the whole way home. (well, almost. sometimes, the snow on the side of the road is too hard to resist.) as usual, i asked him about his day; whether classes went well, whether this one bully continued to torture him by telling him he had a small head, that sort of thing. he had had art that day; and i asked how that went.
well, he mused, i have decided that i am not going to get upset anymore whenever art teacher tells me that my work is scribble-scrabble. i’m going to like my work anyway.
hold the phone?
did art teacher actually tell you your work was ‘scribble scrabble’? in those words?
yes, the boy replied. he doesn’t like when people color outside the lines.
i have almost had enough of this art teacher. BC, who is creative and imaginative as the next kid, who normally LOVES art, especially when she has had art teacher #2, used to come home in tears last year because of this teacher. he would berate her for not drawing the way he wanted people to draw. he would criticize her every work. mom, she once told me, he only likes you and your work if you are an actual talented artist. i’m not.
i still remember his one line comment on her report card. and i quote: BC seems to like art.
yeah, well she did before she had you as a teacher.
so now, while BC has the nice art teacher, jools is stuck with the less-than-supportive art teacher. and he has been taking it on the chin for a few months now, trying his best.
i think this art teacher might be laboring under the impression that he is preparing these children for the sorbonne or something. maybe my thinking is a little too basic, but i like to think that an art teacher’s job is to try to get kids excited about art — to see art all around them, to provide them another way to communicate to the world their vision of what they see and how they feel. absolutely, there are technical ideas that they need to convey about colors and perspective and such.
but not every kid will be pablo picasso.
it doesn’t mean you have to make that child feel like an asshole.
egregious 80’s music: we built this city (starship)
my nominee for worst song of the 1980s. quite possibly one of the worst ever.
by the time the classic rock group jefferson airplane / jefferson starship had morphed into starship, times indeed had changed. for one thing, no one in the band was legally permitted to use the terms jefferson or airplane when they performed. that left them as simply starship: a band consisting of a bunch of guys around founding member grace slick (she with the haircut i’ve worn on and off for the past 30 years.)
anyway, everything about we built this city screamed of the bad, commercialistic state of the music industry in the mid-1980s. sure, the music industry is always commercial — but this song is like an emblem of that crass, homogenized, pre-digested pap that was served up to people… and sadly, they loved it. (at least, they did at the time.) the song speaks of los angeles, but the band allowed different radio stations to dub traffic reports over part of the song as it played to make it seem much more local. to ensure airplay, an MTV executive had a voice-over part in the song.
you might be interested in knowing that bernie taupin, sir elton john’s longtime musical collaborator, is partially responsible for this one. (bad, bernie!)
in 2004, blender magazine decided this to be the worst song of the 1980s, and i quite agree. one of the magazine’s contributors locked himself up and listened only to this song for a 24-hour marathon. one wonders whether the powers that be ought to have considered this prior to interrogations at gitmo.
as an aside, i was always troubled by a particular part of the song:
Marconi plays the Mamba,
Listen to the radio
Don’t you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll!
thanks to the magic that is google, i now know the correct lyrics. but for years, i thought they were singing about a high school friend of mine. i couldn’t figure out for the life of me why they would have the nerve to sing marc cote (pronounced ko-tee) plays the mamba. listen to the radio. as an artist, he would never, EVER, allow himself to be attached to such a collosal trainwreck of a song. i am much relieved to know this to be true.
knee deep in the hoopla? i think they were knee deep in a completely different substance.
egregious 80’s music: do they know it’s christmas (band-aid)
’cause there won’t be snow in africa this christmas…
i suspect there isn’t snow in much of africa, this christmas or any other. but in 1984, there also wasn’t a lot of food for people in ethiopia, which led to sir bob geldof and midge ure (of ultravox) to pen a song to raise money for their relief. a great idea, a generous idea, and yet a naive idea in hindsight, as no one knows whether the money ever for to the places it needed to go. not to mention the song just basically sucked.
no one said it better than morrissey:
The main reason I’m dangerous is because I’m not afraid to say how I feel. I’m not afraid to say that I think Band Aid was diabolical. Or to say that I think Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Many people find that very unsettling, but I’ll say it as loud as anyone wants me to.
In the first instance the record itself was absolutely tuneless. One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England. It was an awful record considering the mass of talent involved. And it wasn’t done shyly — it was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.
ah, st. moz…
anyway, it’s hard to talk about this one without including the video. you watch the video, and even someone heavily entrenched in ’80’s music ends up scratching her head: hmm… who the hell is THAT? there are plenty of gimmies: righteous bono and his mullet; sting with his sir lancelot hair; phil collins with a tiny vestige of his natural hair remaining; george michael with more makeup than a tranny; and of course, boy george, who looks like, er, well, boy george. after that, it begins to get a little murky. i know bananarama are the three girls in the front with very unwashed hairt… hmmm. who the hell ARE these people?
anyway, it’s christmas season now, so get ready to hear this one repeatedly. somehow, i think it will never go away. pity that.
egregious '80's music: total eclipse of the heart (bonnie tyler)
turn around, bright eyes…
am i the only one who watches this video and gets creeped out by the voice that keeps repeating turn around? i keep waiting for the serial killer to pop out of somewhere. it’s bad enough tyler seems to be dreaming about the boys in her school. but the serial killer? eek. fortunately, there are people who took the video on and made it a bit less scary for people like me.
a must-see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-x9ygQEGAwe have jim steinman, man behind meatloaf, to blame for this song. somehow, it wasn’t enough to spread the schmaltz just with the ‘loaf. or maybe the ‘loaf rejected this one… i don’t see anyone calling him bright eyes.
fun trivia factoid for you brooooce fans out there — mighty max weinberg plays drums on this one. yeah, i feel proud now, too.