Some of my fellow Still in Rotation contributors have started up a new site called Raised on the Radio and they invited me to put together a playlist for the Twisted Mix-tape Tuesday feature. Just to make it more fun, every week there’s a new theme. This week the theme is anything goes so I got to choose my own theme.
I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating a playlist (or a CD or tape, back in the day), so half a dozen ideas that popped into my head were rejected after I was unable to settle on five songs. I decided on songs in foreign languages partly because that limited the number of songs I knew and made it easier to keep it to five.
The name of the site and the idea behind it reminded me of this Velvet Underground song. Such a classic, and so true.
Then one fine morning she puts on a New York station
You know she don’t believe what she heard at all
She started shaking to that fine, fine music
You know her life was saved by rock & roll.
I grew up outside of New York City and the station we listened to was WLIR. I didn’t realize how lucky we were to have that station until we moved up to Maine half-way through my high school years. There were some pretty glaring gaps in our classmates’ musical knowledge, at least to our way of thinking, though they seemed happy enough.
Raise your hand if you remember the old 9:30 Club at 930 F St. N.W. in Washington, D.C. I lived in DC from 1991-1994 and I spent many, many nights there. I loved that dark, smelly hole in the wall. I’ve been to the new 9:30 Club at least once, maybe twice, and in many respects it’s a better club, but it will never take the place of the old club in my heart. The list of bands I saw play there is long and varied but when I tried to find a video from any of those shows to use here, I struck out. I contemplated using any one of the videos from inside the club I did find just to illustrate a point but I went with this version of 9-9 instead since today is 9-9 and it was recorded there, just audio only.
The point I wanted to make was about the ubiquity of cell phone cameras at shows these days. Back in June I went to see the Joy Formidable at a club and there were more people filming the show than there were dancing. When the person most likely to try and get a pit going is the 45-year-old mother of two kids (that’s me) and not the dozens of 20-something-year-old guys, you’re doing it wrong. I suppose to each their own and maybe they’ll enjoy their crappy cell phone videos with people singing along loudly and off key, but I’d rather dance.
Now, I’m not a Luddite and I have been known to grab a quick picture at most of the shows I’ve been to since getting a smart phone. Usually in between songs and just a still, not video, and mostly because I don’t want to be trying to get some great video when I could be dancing or paying attention and just being in the moment. But of all the annoying concert behaviors out there, I find the constant filming to be far less intrusive* than the drunken bros hollering stupid comments or the amount of talking taking place when the band, that we’ve all paid money to come see, is playing. Those drive me much more crazy than someone watching the show through a 4″ screen instead of the real life thing in front of them. I just feel like those people are missing out.
At first the filming really bothered me. But how many shows have I been to since this trend took off where I went online the next day to try and find videos of the show? Quite a few. And didn’t I just download the whole mp3 set from the Replacements first reunion show in Toronto and watch the videos people posted from there? You bet I did. I don’t want to be taking those videos myself, and lots of the ones you find are just awful and not worth watching because your own view was better, or the person holding the camera is shouting and singing and ugh. But I do so love having some live footage to be able to go back to if it’s done well.
Which is where the old 9:30 Club comes in. If you want to see some footage from inside the old 9:30 Club, just look up any live video of the mid-80s DC hardcore bands like Minor Threat, and you’ll find some. Most of the old footage you find will be taken from the video camera that someone used to operate up on top of this pole in the middle of the floor. There were these pillars placed in really inconvenient spots, architecturally holding up the building no doubt but when you were in the mosh pit, you had to be mindful of where they were. Some employee would get hoisted up into the crow’s nest spot on the top of that pole with a video camera and shoot the whole show. I’ve heard conflicting reports of what became of those tapes. One was that they just had it on closed circuit as it played what was happening on stage to small tv sets in the back bar and downstairs and there weren’t tapes of every show. The other was that they all burned in a fire at a house where they’d been stored after the club moved up to V St. Either way, the ones that made it to YouTube are rare, rare videos, and a real treasure. I always thought that would have been a cool second job but in reality the poor person up there was probably close to passing out every night as smoking was still allowed and it was easily 100 degrees or more at that height on some nights.
Here’s what I would love to see become the norm at clubs and concert halls. People could take a couple of pictures here and there, sure. But if the club could film it, from some unobstructed spot like they did at the old 9:30 Club, then make that available somehow, maybe people would go back to enjoying the show in person. I don’t know how you could work it out so no one is short changing the bands**, and I’d like for it to still be something special, that you were really there and not just watching the video of it. I have a fair number of old bootleg audio tapes from shows back in the day. Some I acquired just because they were offered to me but the ones I really loved were the ones of shows I’d been to. And if there were video from a couple of those shows? I would give a lot of things for video clips from a handful of those shows. A whole lot.
* I’m on the short side and I like to get as close to the front in a GA setting as possible so I can see the band and not just some big guy’s back. For the most part, I haven’t had my view obstructed by hundreds of cameras held aloft just because I’ve put myself where that’s not much of a problem. If I ran a club, I’d want a sloped floor so that the short girls can still see farther back (the TLA in Philadelphia is like this as it was a movie theater before – I saw movies there in college – and when they ripped out the seats to turn it into a club, they kept the sloped floor). Ideally I’d relegate people who insist on filming to the sides, maybe up on a slightly raised floor, out of the way of the people who really want to dance/watch/listen. And people who take pictures of themselves with their friends and the stage in the background? They are just losers.
** One thought was maybe it could be made available after the tour ended so as to not give the whole thing away or give people a reason to not pay to see the show in person. For me any video is never going to be as good as being there and even when I’ve seen a stream of a concert while it’s taking place (like Coachella, 12-12-12, etc.), it’s not even close to the experience of seeing it live. That said, this exists and it’s so freaking incredible.
One of the things I think of when I hear this song is how much Bobby Hackney’s sons would have been freaking out the first time they heard it. Can you imagine being a college-aged kid and suddenly finding out your father and uncles had played in a punk band in the early 70s? That the men in your family that you knew had a reggae band in their free time had once been rocking out this hard? I’m telling you, my mind would be blown.
I finally got a chance to watch the documentary A Band Called Death last week. I highly recommend checking it out, it’s a pretty amazing story. Here’s my review of it. And if you happen to be in the greater NYC area, Death are playing at the Afropunk festival in Brooklyn this weekend.
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.]
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.
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!
Today was the last day of school for my daughter. Pretty late this year because of all the days school was cancelled due to the blizzard and hurricane Sandy. It’s the power outages that do us in.
Summer is, hands down, my favorite season. The only thing I don’t like about it is the increase in the size and number of insects. Every other thing I adore. Hazy, hot, and humid? Love it. Thunderstorms? Sure! The smells, sounds, tastes, and sights of summer are what I live for all winter long.
Think about all the summer fruits and vegetables. There’s just no comparison. I like root vegetables probably more than the next person (as a vegetarian, they’re kind of staples for much of the year) but I’d trade them all for a ripe garden tomato. I’m not much of a gardener myself, I don’t have the time, space, or inclination really, but I usually manage to have a couple of large containers with tomato plants and I hit up the farmer’s markets pretty regularly. Farm fresh corn on the cob, does it get any better?
When I was a kid we used to go up to Maine from suburban New York City for the entire month of July. We went to a little beach town where there were only a handful of year-round residents but dozens of returning summer families. Some owned houses and stayed the whole summer, others, like us, came for two weeks or longer and stayed in the same rental houses year after year. We had electricity but no tv (or any kind of electronic distractions), just lots of other kids, books, games, cards, the beaches, rocky coastline, boats, swimming holes, blueberry patches: heaven. It was truly idyllic. My mother would let us roam free, more or less, and we ran all over the place in our bare feet. I know that all of my siblings feel the same way I do and wish we could give our kids the same lazy, free, unplugged and fueled by your imagination kind of summers we had there. I’m sure we complained about being bored now and then but our memories are overwhelmingly positive.
I’m taking some time off from work and going to try to recreate some of that summer magic for my kids on a greatly reduced scale. We only have a week and a half before the summer camps kick in and there’s not much chance I”ll get them to give up their DS and iPod, but if the weather cooperates we’ll hit the beach, look for seaglass, skip rocks, ride bikes, and bask in the warm summer sun right up until their bedtime.
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.
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.
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!
Noisy Cats 