The History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast has reached "Kick Out the Jams." The unedited version is up now for Patreon followers of the show. The free version will be up later this week after it's had all the "motherfuckers" edited out in order to maintain the podcast's Clean rating across all the different streaming services.by breno
Ha! That one was actually on the bubble, but I included it because its countryish arrangement made it different enough to stand out amongst all the mid-tempo tracks that made these three albums a bit of a trudge. There were other songs from Reveal that I considered - "I've Been High," "Disappear" and "Summer Turns To High" specifically, but they blended in withby breno
Or Dokken, Poison and Whitesnake?by breno
Just watched Savages on YouTube. Pretty good, though it takes its foot off the throttle at the end. Andy is pretty terrifying in it - not as over the top crazy as Pray for the Wildcats, but more relentless and calculating. The phony smile he always has plastered on his face when he's pretending the things he's saying to Sam Bottoms are perfectly reasonable is a nice touch. It put meby breno
The Pat McCarthy-era R.E.M. albums don't get much love here, or anywhere, really. It's actually pretty hard to track where most people on this board disembarked the R.E.M. bus - some people seem to have lost interest as soon as they moved on from Mitch Easter, others once they signed with WB, others when Bill Berry left, etc. But I stuck with them to the very end, and I actually like thby breno
Yep, I also thought of Savages, but it's been so.long since I've seen it that I don't remember much about it, except that Andy was indeed an evil bastard in it. I need to track it down and give it a re-watch.by breno
A Face In the Crowd - the movie that for 60 years was considered the gold standard for harsh & cynical political movies, then reality exposed it as actually way too naive and trusting in the ultimate common sense of the rabble. The other Andy Griffith movie that I would say is just as relevant today is, I kid you not, the early-70s made-for-TV motorcycling through Baja flick Pray For the Wby breno
As mentioned by me countless times, all credit goes to my older brothers, who for some reason were just wired differently than 99.99% of the rest of the gomers lurking in the soybean fields of Macoupin County, IL and were able to read about bands they'd never heard a single note by in Creem or Circus and be intrigued enough to take a flyer on Blue Oyster Cult & 10cc in 1973, and were ablby breno
Just got home from seeing EC's stop in the St. Louis region, and it was objectively a good show, but a frustrating one. He's always been afflicted with the "I wrote a great vocal melody for this song, but when I perform it live I'm going to intentionally butcher it for some fucking reason" disease, but jumpin' jeepers, has that disease ever metastasized. He looooooooby breno
Not a musician, but there's enough comic book nerds lurking here to make it news worth sharing. He started writing comics professionally at the age of 13 when he took over writing Legion of Super Heroes. Given that it was DC Comics in the 1960s, a 13-year-old was likely writing more sophisticated stories than the adults were. He moved over to Marvel in the 70s, where he was editor-in-chieby breno
I knew that "Mexican Radio" was never a top 40 hit across the U.S., but I have no doubt it probably seemed like one in LA. Surprised that "I Got You" never made the top 40, as that one was in pretty heavy rotation on the main St. Louis top 40 station at the time. Of course, that's the same station that played the hell out of "Starry Eyes" and "Teenarama&by breno
It does reflect the shift in focus of that volume away from the 80s to the 90s, though. Blur and desaturate a photo, mix & match fonts of varying degrees of legibility on top of it and voila! You've got Raygun magazine, the closing credits for Se7en and Vaughan Oliver's less expensive step-grandchildren. It's an appropriate reflection of its decade's design aesthetic, forby breno
I mentioned seeing Wreckless Eric playing a pizza joint in St. Louis in the Devo/B-52s/Lene Lovich thread. 12 or 13 years ago, Graham Parker did a show in a photography studio in Bethalto, Illinois - one of the sleepier burbs on the east side of the river from StL. I once went to see the Tubes at the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield. The location was not so weird, but the fact thatby breno
The teen dream heartthrob of all the girls in my grade school class. The King Ghidorah to David Cassidy's Godzilla. Had some pop hits that were perfectly listenable for the era. Starred in Here Come the Brides, which, iirc, was a tv show about packing young women off to the wilderness to mate with lumberjacks, and that's how we got Seattle. Was the lifeblood of Tiger Beat magazine and eby breno
"I've always got the impression they were very popular in the U.S. Is that true or am I mistaken." Ah, wouldn't that be a better world. But sadly, no. The average yahoo in the U.S. has never heard of Gang of Four. "I Love a Man In Uniform" was moderately popular on college radio in the early 80s, but most college stations weren't even listened to by a very bby breno
Damn. I wasn't a big fan of Bad Company, either, but Ralphs was in my personal pantheon for being in Mott. They didn't survive too long after his departure. Rest in peace, Mick. And thanks.by breno
I'm guessing this Sister Ray is unfamiliar with the Sister Ray from the 90s, and that's fair enough - that garage-punk combo was so obscure that this doesn't even trigger any ire over my personal bugbear of younger combos blithely recycling band names that a 30 second web search would show were taken. (There was a particularly egregious one of those I saw a couple of weeks ago, butby breno
One of my chums has a 16-year-old son that he's completely baffled by, because "He doesn't like any BANDS!!!" (He's one of those delightful people who speaks entirely in italics.) He generally follows that observation with "Of course, there aren't any bands anymore anyway!" This friend's definition of "band" is "Alice In Chains, Alice Inby breno
I saw it. Don't remember a whole lot about it, except for how bleak mid-70s London looked. For what it's worth, I have it ranked 2,336 out of 6,884 on my list of movies on Flickchart. So I guess I thought it was respectable enough to make my middle third.by breno
Well, as long as we're dredging up old threads, here's footage of the River City Tanlines opening for Wreckless Eric in that aforementioned pizza joint: <; As Ira points out, it might as well be in someone's basement. Not sure why someone posted footage of the RC Tanlines that night but not of Eric the headliner. Unless they had a crush on Tanlines vocalist Alicja Trout, wby breno
It actually looks like a step up from where Wreckless Eric played the only show he ever played in St. Louis, around 20 years ago, which was a tiny little stage in the corner of a pizza joint. He didn't get a bad reaction, I think probably because all the patrons were so used to ignoring the locals that usually played that stage that they paid no attention to the weird British guy banging awaby breno
Devo and the B-52s are heading out for yet another farewell tour for both, but this time together. And they're bringing Lene Lovich along! Of course, no stops on the tour are anywhere feasible for me to attend. Lene has announced a couple of standalone dates, but so far I can't find any list of a full tour for her outside the Devo/B-52s. The dates she's announced, though, are maybeby breno
My brother got a Danny O'Day ventriloquist dummy for Christmas at some point in the late 60s/early 70s. It came with the instructional album, Jimmy Nelson's Instant Ventriloquism, which purported to teach one all the skills they needed to know to become a ventriloquist. I don't recall my brother ever putting any effort at all into trying to learn it, but we did listen the hell outby breno
According to the setlists published online, Sparks are performing "Whippings and Apologies" from Woofer on their current tour, which I would imagine is pretty damn epic live. So of course, the only date on this tour that is at all accessible to me is in Chicago, which would be fine except it's at fucking Riotfest, and there's no way I'm going to waste time going to some dby breno
Unsurprisingly, the best and most informative appreciation of McCarthy I've seen online so far is courtesy of the Monk.by breno
"Real Wild Child" got to #27 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, but "Candy" got to #28 on the Hot 100, so "Candy" is Iggy's only top 40 song in the sense that Casey Kasem would've counted it down. "Candy" only got to #30 on the Mainstream Rock chart, so "Real Wild Child" did beat it there. But in terms of the top 40 that mattersby breno
Looking online, I see that Nitzer Ebb were actually considered EBM - Electronic Body Music - a subgenre I was heretofore unfamiliar with, because God forbid electronic music leave any subdivisions on the table. I'm convinced technoheads won't be satisfied until every song by every band that ever used a synthesizer is declared a shining example of its own micro-micro-micro-micro-genre.by breno
The best way to view the general public's perception of the Beach Boys is to ask what if everyone just stopped listening to the Beatles after Rubber Soul? "Sure, they wrote a few more complicated songs, but mostly they were just yeah yeah yeah music." So they get to the point of yeah, "Good Vibrations" is more complex than "Surfin' Safari," but mostly thby breno
I was a relative latecomer to Wilson fandom, given that in my childhood, the Beach Boys were pretty much only known as an oldies act that sang about surfing, which was not something that loomed large in my life. Once I hit my 20s and began reading appreciation of Pet Sounds, I saw the genius in his work and sought out the less well-known at the time stuff. Hopefully his troubled mind is finallby breno
One of the true greats. It's been 50+ years since he was a direct factor in music, but it's hard to imagine Prince and his musical family existing without Sly. A legend.by breno
