40s

New Town Velocity

Johnny Marr – New Town Velocity

Every once in a while the “recommended for you” videos that show up on YouTube if I’m logged in are actually very welcome suggestions. This was the one I was presented with yesterday and I’ve listened to it a lot already.

I’m sure I heard it earlier this year when Johnny Marr’s album The Messenger came out but I didn’t have the time then to really listen to it. There’s something about this track, more so than the previous singles, that has a very distinct Johnny Marr sound to it. And I am a sucker for that Johnny Marr signature guitar.

I think sometimes it may be too easy to hang the influence the Smiths had on me, and many other people, on Morrissey’s contribution to the band. It’s true, I can speak or write entirely in Smiths quotes* off the top of my head and I know I’m not the only one of my friends who can do that. Rob Sheffield wrote nearly a whole chapter of his book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran in Smiths quotes and paraphrases. We may all be spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg but it’s Johnny’s guitar that instantly hooks us with those first four notes on “Ask.” “Oscillate Wildly” had as much yearning to it as the other songs without any lyrics at all. The Smiths were as great as they were because it was both the music and lyrics coming together at the perfect time.

I listened to Morrissey’s first couple of solo albums and went to see him on I guess it was the Kill Uncle tour (since I never got the chance to see the Smiths live), but it wasn’t the same. It was missing Johnny Marr. And let’s be honest, Morrissey is nearly a caricature of himself at this point. While Morrissey spent the past year cancelling show after show, Johnny Marr’s been showing up at festivals and elsewhere and just rocking without any of the drama. Morrissey may be the last of the famous international playboys, but he’d probably be completely unknown to most people if Johnny Marr hadn’t knocked on his door.

* By now you’ve all seen this, and it may seem to belie the point I’m trying to make here but it’s just so great. http://thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com/   [edited 9/18/13 to say, I knew it wouldn’t be allowed to stand. They’ve been ordered to take it down.]

Shut Up

Savages – Shut Up

There have been a lot of shows I have wanted to catch this year that I just couldn’t pull off but this is one I’m really regretting not making. They played their east coast dates right on the heels of the Feelies show and I had just been on vacation prior to that so I was short on time and money. They’re coming back in September but playing larger places, like the widely disparaged Terminal 5 in New York. I might have to do it as a birthday present to myself though because this kicks some serious ass.

A friend was trying to coax me into going down to Philadelphia the other night to see New Order with her. It was pretty tempting. I went so far as to investigate the cheap bus lines and the train but the whole package was going to run into more money than I felt a responsible mother of two ought to be blowing. Back when I was in my 20s and had no one but myself to worry about I would have made the trip and lived on ramen noodles for a week if that’s what it took. I perfected the art of cheap travel in college when someone clued me into the fact that you could hop the local commuter trains from our campus outside of Philadelphia all the way up to New Haven. All that was missing was a local option between Wilmington, DE and Baltimore, and from New Haven to Providence, and you could have (inconveniently and slowly) made your whole way from Boston to DC on the local trains.

I miss that, believe it or not. It wasn’t comfortable, it sometimes involved sprinting up and down stairs to get from one track to another and unless it was an express, you made a lot of stops. But it was a fraction of the cost and you could decide to do it very last minute. There isn’t much spontaneity in my life these days and every now and then I get a little nostalgic for a less complicated time when the biggest consideration was which train I was going to catch.

Away

The Feelies – Away

A week and a half ago I went to the last-ever Feelies show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. It was a show that was a long time coming but so, so worth it. I wrote it up for Caught in the Carousel so please hop over there to read it. In that article I mention this video, which was filmed at Maxwell’s many years ago. Enjoy!

Alex Chilton

The Replacements – Alex Chilton

Late last night the news broke that The Replacements (well, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson at least) are doing three reunion shows at Riot Fest in Toronto, Chicago, and Denver. Earlier this past spring they released Songs for Slim, a benefit album to raise money for former Replacements guitarist Slim Dunlap, who had suffered a stroke. Both of these news items were cause for a lot of excitement amongst ‘Mats fans since the band broke up 22 years ago.

I am a big Replacements fan. I even like All Shook Down, their last album which is basically a Paul Westerberg solo affair. It’s not my favorite (Let it Be is, which I wrote about for Still in Rotation on Midlife Mixtape), but I’ll pop it in the CD player now and then. But it’s the mid-80s albums I like best, when they had enough experience under their belts to write some of the greatest songs ever, yet still had enough piss and vinegar to write songs like Gary’s Got a Boner and make a video like the one above.

I saw the Replacements twice back when I was in college and I have always been pretty happy to have those shows in my concert catalog. I didn’t give a lot of thought to the idea of a reunion since they constantly seemed on the verge of self-destruction anyway. I counted myself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to have been able to witness the sloppy glory that one of their live shows could be. So would I go now to a reunion show? Hell yes, I would. I can’t imagine they’d get up to the same antics but I’d be there for the songs, and to see Paul and Tommy play together again.

The three appearances announced yesterday are nowhere near me so I’m still imagining that I won’t get to see them play live again and those shows in 1987 and 89 are going to be it for me. I’m good with that. Maybe if I’d never had the chance to see them earlier I’d be scoping out plane tickets about now. Instead I’ll watch from a distance and no doubt there will be articles posted and videos to watch.

Speaking of Alex Chilton, there’s a new movie coming out that I’ll try to catch when I’m down in New York at the beginning of July called Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. The trailer looks great.

Kiss Off

Violent Femmes – Kiss Off

If the sight of this album cover doesn’t immediately take you back to high school, well, maybe you’re older than I am because if you’re my age or younger, it should*. Even if you weren’t in high school when it came out, like I was, there’s something so quintessentially high school about it. Probably because many of the songs were written by Gordon Gano when he was that age. It was just voted #5 in the top 10 albums of 1983 poll by the readers of Slicing Up Eyeballs. This reader definitely included it in the ten I voted for.

I thought of this song this morning as I sat in traffic, already late for work before hitting the wall of cars. There had been a substitute bus driver this morning who showed up eight minutes early and, with no one standing out waiting in the rain, blew right past the house. My seven-year old was in tears at the thought of missing the bus, probably because it meant no Pokemon trading card opportunities, but still, tears first thing on a Monday morning is a very inauspicious beginning to a week. So I told him we could catch up to the bus, grabbed my car keys and we hurried on alternate streets to beat the bus to a stop a few after ours.

Normally I should already be on my way to work when his bus arrives but I could barely get out of bed this morning since I some noisy neighbors woke me up at 2:15am. They were just hanging out on their front porch, talking loudly, at 2:15am on a Sunday night. Clearly these people don’t work 9-5 jobs or have school-aged children.

I sent my boss and a co-worker a text explaining I was running late because of a school bus mishap and hoped I’d be there before a 9:30 meeting I had scheduled. I didn’t have to attend the meeting but ideally I would have been around to make sure it got underway without any problems. Therefore I should not have been surprised to come upon a sea of red tail lights just as I thought I might make it in by that time. And of course I would get an email from one of the participants saying can we please reschedule, I just left you a voice mail.

I’m not really annoyed with any of the people that caused me to be so late this morning (ok, yes, the noisy neighbors) but I was listening to the new album by the National since the show’s tomorrow night. On the last track, Hard to Find, which came on while I sat in the stop and go traffic, Matt Berninger sings “You can all just kiss off into the air…” an obvious tip of the hat to the boys from Milwaukee. With everything feeling like it was out of my control, the frustrations that are so prevalent throughout the Violent Femmes first album were mounting and I found myself thinking, “10, 10, 10, 10 for everything! Everything! Everything! Everything!”

*Maybe because I so strongly associate this album with my youth, it was jarring to see them perform basically the whole album at Coachella this past April. Some things are better left in your memory.

Sea of Love

The National – Sea of Love

It’s Tuesday. That means it’s new release day in the US. Depending on where you get your music news, you might not have known that there was anything other than the new Daft Punk album out today (in theory, but it was streaming on iTunes last week and was in my local record shop on Friday so…). But the album that arrived on my porch today was Trouble Will Find Me by The National.

Here’s where I admit that this is the first physical copy of one of their albums that I own. I’ve bought all the others as digital downloads then burned them on to discs to have in the car. My car is old. I have a smart phone and a bluetooth FM transmitter and I can actually rig that all up to stream music off the phone through the radio but I travel such distances that the frequency needs to be changed a few times during the drive and it’s kind of a pain. As long as the CD player still works, I’m going to keep using it. Now I finally have the booklet with all the liner notes and the lyrics and art work. I miss that when all I have is a file on the computer.

I’m going to be seeing them live in two weeks so I wanted to make sure I had enough time with the new album before the show. I’m really looking forward to it because it’s a relatively small place. The last time I saw them was at the Beacon Theatre in New York on the last night of their week-long run there, wrapping up their world tour for High Violet. The Beacon is a beautiful theater, not that big, and I had excellent seats so it was a great show. Still, I really love small shows and I’m excited to see how the dynamic is when they’re in a place that’s about half that size, general admission, at the start of the tour and on the road. The beginning of summer instead of the beginning of winter. It’s all different.

They’ve been quite busy promoting the album with appearances on Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, a six hour performance at MoMA PS1, and even a documentary. Then today there were three pop-up shows announced on Twitter and pictures and video trickling out all day long. Given that their previously announced New York show is at the Barclays Center, I think these small shows today were highly sought after and for once I didn’t envy all those people scrambling to get into them. See you in a couple weeks, guys!

I Samma Bil

Bo Kaspers Orkester – I Samma Bil

Today was the Eurovision Song Contest, held in my husband’s hometown, Malmö, Sweden. If you’re not from Europe or happened to spend a year abroad there during school or something, you probably have no idea that this extravaganza exists. It’s quite the big deal there though and they have regional competitions to pick the one song/performer that will represent the country. Back in 1974 ABBA won with Waterloo. Were it not for Eurovision, they might have remained world famous in Sweden, as we like to say.

I have a number of friends who live in Sweden, most of them Americans who have Swedish spouses like me, and they have embraced the over-the-top campy nature of the event. I’ll see their posts about the preliminary competitions, Melodifestivalen, and who they’re going to vote for, who had the worst song or outfits, but come the grand finale of Eurovision, my Twitter feed is non-stop snarky comments about the schmaltziest acts Europe can dish out.

To my knowledge, Bo Kaspers Orkester has never taken part in any of that, but I wanted to have a little taste of Sweden to represent them tonight since Denmark took home the big prize. I like a number of bands from Sweden but most of them sing in English and I thought it would be nice to have something maybe a bit more Swedish. This video comes from another Swedish singing festival, Allsång på Skansen, which is held every summer in Stockholm. The whole idea is that everyone is supposed to sing along, it’s mostly songs everyone knows, people bring the kids, it’s kind of an institution. I think what might be the best thing about it is that it’s so beautiful there. And look, it’s like 9pm and it’s still broad daylight.

The first time I went to Sweden with my then boyfriend, I lobbied hard to go up to Dalarna in central Sweden because I’d grown up loving all of Carl Larsson’s paintings and Astrid Lindgren’s stories and I wanted to see places that looked like those. We had a friend from graduate school (where we’d met) who lived near there so we stayed with him for a couple of days and saw the sights. The first night we sat up talking and the Swedes all kept glancing at their watches and finally had to tell me that it was 1am and we probably ought to go to bed. It looked like it was maybe 8:30 outside to me and I was so buzzed from all the extra sunlight. One of my American friends now lives way up in the north of Sweden where it never actually gets dark in the peak summer time. Of course the flip side is that they have very little daylight in the winter. Which is why I always try to have our visits as close to Midsommar as possible.

We Live As We Dream Alone

Gang of Four – We Live As We Dream Alone

I don’t know about you but it feels like the music press has spent the last two years reminding us of what albums are now 20 or 25 years old. Sometimes it seems impossible that so much time could have passed, other times it feels like, yeah, 20 years is probably about right. When I watch old clips on YouTube, it often looks like it was even longer ago (this one is *gulp* 30 years old). Poke around there for a while and if you’re looking for it, you’ll find some extraordinary things.

I bought myself a CD player as a college graduation present but I didn’t have any CDs yet so I also bought a receiver, turntable, and speakers. The CD player bit the dust a number of years ago but the turntable was just given a clean bill of health at a turntable clinic put on by my local record store. I sold off some of my records when I left college but I kept most of them and simply replicated my collection on CD as well. It’s funny because CDs were supposed to be indestructible but many of those now skip and one of them, the data just vanished from it completely. Luckily, I still have the records and they still play. Songs of the Free by Gang of Four is one of those treasured vinyl albums.

I remember reading that they were a big influence on bands I loved and they were in that movie, Urgh! A Music War which we got a copy of somehow. I loved digging around connecting the dots. In the pre-internet days, it took time and dedication and those were two things I had in abundance. The pay-off would probably seem small to most people—getting to see live footage of a band that had broken up—but to me it was like a secret code. Pay attention. It’s all there. Hey! Kids.

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth – Kool Thing

Kool Thing indeed. Really, can you out cool Kim Gordon? I don’t think so.

I missed that yesterday was Kim Gordon’s 60th birthday. I think it’s easy to forget how long she’s been out there paving the way for women in music because she’s still doing it. I have always loved that she was part of a band that was loud, experimental, noisy. There aren’t a lot of women in bands like that, and even fewer back in the early days. That she not only held her own but was often out front, like in this song, just made her that much more cool in my book. Like she didn’t take shit from anyone.

When she and Thurston Moore announced they were splitting up, I was more sad about the break up of Sonic Youth than of some super couple of alt rock. I didn’t know why and it didn’t really matter to me. Now that Kim has said why, I just think Thurston was a fool. Because Kim Gordon is the hottest fucking thing on the planet in my book. Happy birthday and rock on, Kim!

This is Not a Photograph

Mission of Burma – This is Not a Photograph

It seems only fitting to finish off this week with another Boston band, and an iconic one at that.

What an unbelievable week. There’s really nothing I can say that someone else hasn’t already said more eloquently. Let’s just hope the rest of the year doesn’t continue at that pace.

Book-ending the week on the positive side, I filed the taxes on Sunday (getting a small refund from both state and feds) and the state refund was deposited in my bank account today, just in time for Record Store Day. I walked down to my local record shop which is remarkably still there, and still a record store. Not records plus CDs, DVDs, posters, t-shirts, books, and all kinds of other stuff. It’s small and it’s for the vinyl lovers. Most of the newly issued records are usually too expensive for me so I tend to go digging in the bins for stuff I should have bought back in the day. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are still some real finds.

Today I found Signals, Calls, and Marches by Mission of Burma. It was in such beautiful shape I was sure it must be a reissue but I took it out and it only had the 1981 copyright on it. When I bought it the owner said, “Wow, Mission of Burma, you’re a real deep catalog gal.” I came home and looked it up on eBay, there was a reissue on Matador Records back in 2008, but the one I just bought is an original 1981 Ace of Hearts pressing, it even still has the funky lyrics sheet on some kind of textured paper where the words to all the songs are written in alphabetical order. It’s so cool. $12.95 well spent in my book.