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Bootleg City: 3 in New York City, April ‘88

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! As the mayor of Bootleg City, it’s my responsibility to give you the best aural fireworks display money can buy, but therein lies the problem — Bootleg City has run out of money.

You see, Fiscal Year 2008 was kind of a bust in Bootleg City, just as it was for many other cities around the world. Did you hear Gotham City is liquidating its entire police department and putting all further law enforcement in Batman’s hands? And in Erotic City, the Fruit on the Bottom Edible Underwear factory closed earlier this year, putting thousands of citizens out of work and forcing them to wear real underwear for the first time. Mayor P.R. Nelson responded to the crisis by saying, “If we cannot make babies, maybe we can make some time. Thoughts of pretty you and me, Erotic City come alive,” which seems to indicate City Hall is heavily courting the cuckoo-clock industry to set up shop there sometime soon.

Here in Bootleg City I was hoping to present you with a great Jackson 5 bootleg on the Fourth, but instead you’ll have to settle for 3. You remember 3, don’t you? Yeah, neither do I, but here’s a little bit of background …

Six years after prog-rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer broke up in 1979, keyboardist Keith Emerson and bassist Greg Lake got back together without drummer Carl Palmer, who was in Asia at the time — the ’80s supergroup, not the continent, but then again, I don’t have the man’s itinerary for that decade, so anything’s possible — and formed Emerson, Lake & Powell with drummer Cozy Powell, thus turning ELP into a slightly different ELP with a drummer whose initials were the same as the first guy’s. Totally uncool, guys. But Steve Augeri, the Steve Perry look- and soundalike who replaced Steve Perry in Journey in the late ’90s, can’t say there wasn’t precedent.

But then ELP2 broke up, Emerson got back together with Palmer, and they added a new guy, Robert Berry. Somewhere along the way they must have decided EBP wasn’t catchy enough, so they went with 3, making their record label’s marketing department reach for the nearest noose.

Like ELP2, they only recorded one album — 1988’s To the Power of Three — and on April 14 of that year they performed a show at the Ritz in New York City. The concert was then broadcast on WNEW-FM, and is brought to you today by our own Dw. Dunphy. Thanks for the bootleg, Dw.!

Next week the budget cuts continue, with a bootleg of Three Dog Night performing one song — Nilsson’s “One,” of course — that’ll only be available for download for half a minute. We all have to make sacrifices, people.

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Sugar Water: Black and/or White

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Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”

Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.

It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.

The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”

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Bootleg City: Evan Dando and the Lemonheads

To celebrate/exploit the release of Varshons, the new covers album by Evan Dando’s Lemonheads, Bootleg City is covering its own covers-filled edition from July 27, 2007. Of course, back in those days there was no Popdose.

“But Mayor Cass,” the children always ask, “where did people go when they wanted to download music for free and write comments underneath the accompanying text that was only tangentially related to said text?”

“My my!” I answer. “What big words you have in your … um … don’t tell me … starts with a V …”

That’s when their smiles usually vanish. “Fine, we’ll dumb it down for you, old man. What was it called before it was called Popdose?

Kids. They really do say the darnedest, most f**ked-up bulls**t.

For those who don’t know, before there was Popdose there was Jefitoblog, and whenever its creator, Popdose’s Jeff Giles, was foolish enough to allow guest writers to contribute, he’d often have to upload all their MP3s for them along with all their text. Uploading MP3s is a time-consuming, hand-cramping, soul-fisting process. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun being mayor of Bootleg City, but if there was a way to charge you people a nonreading tax so I could buy some child labor that would upload the MP3s for me, I’d do it in a heartbeat. (Of course I wouldn’t underpay them. I love those little octothorp ampersand percent sign exclamation points.)

However, I’m glad Jeff no longer has to upload songs for me, because (1) he does more for Popdose than you’ll ever know and deserves our eternal gratitude, and (2) I don’t trust him one bit with my stuff. Never have, never will. The real Jeff Giles writes for Newsweek — who does this “Jeff DeWester” impostor think he is?

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CD Review: The Lemonheads, “Varshons”

The Lemonheads’ new album, Varshons (The End Records), kicks off with Gram Parsons’s “I Just Can’t Take It Anymore,” in which the resigned, lovelorn protagonist declares, “Well, we could’ve done a lot / We certainly did not / So I’ll try to do the things I did before.” In his own way, Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando — who is the ‘Heads, for all intents and purposes — is declaring the same: He’s only released two studio albums of original material in the past decade. And though the Lemonheads have recorded a bunch of covers over the years, starting in 1986 with Proud Scum’s “I Am a Rabbit” and including “Luka” and “Mrs. Robinson” along the way, Varshons is the revolving-door band’s first all-covers LP (unless you count his solo 2001 country-covers EP, Griffith Sunset). As Dando told Australia’s Time Off magazine recently, “I refuse to [write songs] on purpose. I’m always playing a guitar, but I refuse to go ‘OK, I’m going to write a fucking song today even if it sucks.’”

Fair enough. So until the next album of Lemonheads or solo Dando originals sees the light of day, we have this collection of 11 songs that Varshons producer Gibby Haynes, otherwise known as the leader of the Butthole Surfers, has put on mix tapes for Dando over the years.

Dando’s goal was for Varshons to have the grab-bag variety of a mix tape, which it achieves in fits and starts, but most of his interpretations here are filtered through his admiration for Parsons and the late musician’s country-rock sensibilities. (The word “versions,” if said with an English accent, will apparently get you “varshons,” but you can also reach that destination by way of a southern twang.)

Hearing Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die” (”His name is codeine / And he’s the nicest thing I’ve seen / Together we’re gonna wait around to die”) in this context isn’t a surprise, but Wire’s “Fragile” and GG Allin’s “Layin’ Up With Linda” aren’t the most likely candidates for steel-guitar revisionism. Punk-rock outlaw Allin was known for his deeply misogynistic lyrics, but Dando makes the black comedy of “Linda” palatable, providing just the right amount of sociopathic pouting to lines like “One day I just got bored and killed her / She used to be fun.” It’s also the third murder ballad by the Lemonheads in as many albums, following Car Button Cloth’s “Knoxville Girl” (1996) and The Lemonheads‘ “Baby’s Home” (2006).

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Bootleg City: “Vin Scelsa’s Live at Lunch,” 6/28/00 (Pt. 3)

Here are some fun facts about singer-songwriter Jules Shear:

1. He’s from Pittsburgh. So is actor Jeff Goldblum, who stars in a 2006 pseudo-documentary called Pittsburgh that chronicles his homecoming performance in a production of The Music Man five years ago. It also stars Illeana Douglas, a friend of Goldblum’s, who was dating Moby in ‘04 and learning more than she wanted to know about the musician’s appetite for pornography.

2. Illeana Douglas and Moby never dated, hence Pittsburgh’s status as a “pseudo-documentary.” But Moby did research his role by borrowing Jules Shear’s extensive collection of amateur porn.

(Okay, so that “fact” about Shear’s porn collection is a lie. And it’s possible he wouldn’t consider it to be “fun,” either. But why should Jeff Goldblum be the only person who’s allowed to blur the line between fact and fiction? On that note …)

3. For a brief period in the early ’90s, Shear cut his own hair. When he was finished with a trim he’d yell, “Shear genius!” Sadly, no one was around to hear it.

4. Jules & the Polar Bears was originally going to consist of Shear and three actual polar bears, but due to his unwillingness to relocate to the North Pole — and polar bears’ general inability to play instruments — he eventually settled for human musicians David Beebe, Richard Bredice, and Stephen Hague. However, he insisted on treating them like real polar bears, going so far as to contractually limit them to an all-fish diet.

5. Jeff Goldblum starred in the 1988 movie Vibes with Cyndi Lauper, whose hit song “All Through the Night” was written and first recorded by Shear. The soundtrack of 1985’s The Goonies includes two songs performed by Lauper as well as one by the Bangles, “I Got Nothing,” which was cowritten by Shear. The Bangles then recorded Shear’s “If She Knew What She Wants,” another song he recorded first on one of his own LPs, for their album Different Light. Goldblum sings in Pittsburgh for his role as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, but songs like “Seventy-six Trombones” probably would’ve sounded better coming out of Lauper’s mouth.

6. “Jules Shear” is a stage name. His real name is Julianne Shear.

7. Did you know that legendary author Jules Verne used rival sci-fi scribe H.G. Wells’s time machine to travel forward in time to 1984, where he declared Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” to be “not as good as that one Shear wrote”? And that after watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension he declared costar Jeff Goldblum to be “quirky as hell but fun to watch”?

8. Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Goldblum!!!

9. The Pittsburgh Penguins recently won the Stanley Cup, but don’t talk about the reigning hockey champions around Shear or he’ll go into a loud, profane tirade about how there aren’t any penguins in Pittsburgh. There aren’t any polar bears either, but you’ll only make things worse if you bring that up. Just change the subject to Happy Feet and you’ll see that he loves penguins — it’s lapses in geographical logic he can’t stand.

10. Though it hasn’t been confirmed that either Jules Shear or Jeff Goldblum has read Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, it’s nice to imagine them being members of the same book club. Especially if one’s a big fan of Jules Verne and the other’s a big fan of H.G. Wells and they’re willing to wrestle over who’s better.

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Bootleg City: “Vin Scelsa’s Live at Lunch,” 6/28/00 (Pt. 2)

In part two of this flashback edition of Vin Scelsa’s Live at Lunch, singer-songwriter Jules Shear talks about the R&B inspiration for “If She Knew What She Wants,” how he feels about artists licensing their songs for commercials, his romantic relationships with singer-songwriters Pal Shazar and Aimee Mann, and his role in the creation of MTV Unplugged in the late ’80s. In between the bursts of candid conversation, Scelsa spins songs by Cyndi Lauper and Johnny Cash, a foot-stomping cover of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” courtesy of B.B. King and Eric Clapton, and a cut from Shear’s first band, the Funky Kings.

However, the biggest surprise of the entire June 28, 2000, Live at Lunch broadcast is Shear’s speaking voice. Suffice to say it’s not what you’d expect if you’ve ever heard “Steady,” his sole entry on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (though Lauper’s cover of Shear’s “All Through the Night” reached #5 in ‘84). My own personal reaction is best summed up by the following verse from “Stereo,” the opening track on Pavement’s 1997 album Brighten the Corners:

What about the voice of Geddy Lee?
How did it get so high?
I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy.
(I know him, and he does.)
Then you’re my fact-checkin’ cuz.

[interview: Jules and the Isleys]
[interview: "Twist and Shout"]
If She Knew What She Wants (Jules Shear)
[interview: songs in commercials]
The More That I’m Around You (Jules Shear)
[interview: love and songwriting]
All Through the Night (Cyndi Lauper)
[interview: Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual]
All Through the Night (Jules Shear)
I Walk the Line (Johnny Cash)
[interview: questions from Vin's listeners]
Nothing Was Exchanged (The Funky Kings)
[interview: MTV Unplugged]
Hold On, I’m Comin’ (B.B. King and Eric Clapton)

Bootleg City: “Vin Scelsa’s Live at Lunch,” 6/28/00 (Pt. 1)

As the mayor of Bootleg City, it’s good to be king — or just mayor, I guess. Or how about “king-mayor”? But certainly not Sonia Sotomayor, who dared to suggest eight years ago that her experiences as a Latina have been different than mine as a white guy. Your Honor, I’ll have you know that I own both the Mambo Kings soundtrack and a Tito Puente greatest-hits compilation. I’m not allowed to play them at the country club, but my golfing buddies did use them as coasters without my permission last week. I’m just glad they didn’t take those CDs out onto the skeet-shooting range. It took forever to glue my vinyl collection back together.

What I’m trying to say is that I like having power and influence in the music world. For example, last fall I was benevolent enough to give all of you demos and outtakes from Big Star’s classic albums #1 Record and Radio City. Once again, you’re welcome, and yes, it is my world you’re not paying property taxes in.

Rhino Records must have visited Bootleg City last fall — rather than all those other blogs and websites that featured the tracks first, though there’s no competition when it comes to my selfless, humble charity — because come September they’re releasing a Big Star box set featuring the Memphis band’s first three albums and the bootleg tracks that were featured here. My pleasure, Rhino, and of course I’ll accept a free copy as a sign of your gratitude. Send it to: The Mayor, 1 Way St., Bootleg City, USA. ‘Preciate it!

I forgot to mention on May 29 that the Genesis Live at Wembley Stadium bootleg was made possible by Jason Hare, whose name isn’t as fun to say as “the Chubb Group,” but it’ll have to do. Thanks, Jason! (By the way, if any of you ever refer to me as “Mayor Casshole,” you’ll be banished from the kingdom. Unless you’re Rupert Murdoch — he has power over my influence, and he knows how to abuse it. I can now say that all the Aussie-bashing on Flight of the Conchords and in the trailer for Funny People is totally justified. There must be something in their backwards-draining water that makes them so aggressive. Or maybe it’s because their entire civilization started with a conjugal visit.)

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CD Review: Vanessa Williams, “The Real Thing”

It’s been more than 25 years since Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America. But once nude pictures of the former photographer’s assistant were published without her consent in Penthouse magazine in the summer of ‘84, she was forced to relinquish the title. After all this time, the question remains: whatever happened to Bob Guccione?

Williams, of course, bounced back quickly from the scandal, scoring first as a singer with pop-R&B albums like The Right Stuff (1988) and The Comfort Zone (1991), and the hit ballads “Save the Best for Last” and “Colors of the Wind.” She then transitioned into acting, starring on the big screen in Eraser (1996) and Soul Food (1997) and earning a Tony nomination for Into the Woods. Since 2006 she’s played over-the-top villain Wilhelmina Slater on TV’s Ugly Betty, but if the Ritalin-deficient rhythms of that sitcom have you reaching for the remote, you may appreciate the subtler approach of her latest record, The Real Thing (Concord).

It’s Williams’s first album of (mostly) original, non-holiday material since 1997’s Next, and as she says in the liner notes, “My initial musical direction for this Concord CD kept morphing from Brazilian … to torch songs, big band and R&B.”  All four styles show up on The Real Thing, along with four different producers, but Williams has the confidence and soft touch necessary to pull it off, not to mention that the album’s overall adult-contemporary sheen smooths out any and all bumps in the road connecting the various genres.

The track that best sums up the LP is a cover of Barbra Streisand’s “Lazy Afternoon” (1975) — The Real Thing is “grown folks’ music” for a do-nothing summer afternoon, something to put on in the background as the clouds drift past and you relax before hosting a dinner party. And guess what? The Real Thing is perfect background music for that occasion too! Ask for it by name at your local Starbucks, hotel bar, and/or smooth-jazz station, but ask gently — Vanessa’s trying to set a mood here, after all.

That’s meant as a compliment. At this point in her career, Williams has nothing left to prove; she can handle being the last thing on your mind as you coordinate table settings or order a latte. So even if the tempo rarely rises above mid- and the temperature remains a safe 98 degrees throughout, she made the album she wanted to make. The restraint pays off with the breezy charm of songs like “Loving You,” a jazzy slow-burner written by Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and Carole Bayer Sager; the soft-rock track “Just Friends,” another ‘Face composition that also features his backing vocals; and “The Real Thing,” a Latin-flavored Stevie Wonder tune first recorded by Sergio Mendes in 1977. Wonder’s presence is also felt on “October Sky,” a duet with Javier Colon, who invokes the Motown legend’s effortless charisma.

Confidence and charm can’t rescue “I Fell In,” which sounds like it was discovered in a pile of rejected soundtrack ballads from the ’80s, and there’s nothing here that comes close to Williams’s smokin’ 1991 cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Work to Do” — which turned the original’s sexism on its ear — but her creamy vocals elevate even the weakest tracks on The Real Thing. A quarter-century after it looked like she’d become a footnote to pop-culture history, Vanessa Williams has proven she’s the real thing too.

Just Friends
Lazy Afternoon

The Real Thing is available at Amazon.com.

Sugar Water: “24” and the Enhanced Techniques of Viewer Torture

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In February 2007 The New Yorker published “Whatever It Takes,” an article by Jane Mayer about the Fox series 24, and how the politically conservative views of the show’s creators, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, have influenced its use of torture scenes. “The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue. It’s getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over,” said Howard Gordon, the show’s head writer, or “showrunner,” who described himself as a “moderate Democrat.”

In that same month, Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, announced he was running for president, while on 24 there was already a black president in the White House: Wayne Palmer, the brother of ex-president David Palmer, who was assassinated in season five. That’s right — two black presidents in a span of three fictional terms of office. Pretty liberal, huh? (Author and NPR favorite Sarah Vowell is a fan, and former Air America radio host Janeane Garofalo was a regular cast member this past season.) And how about all those scenes of indestructible government agent Jack Bauer using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” forcing terrorist suspects to talk so he can find whatever ticking time bomb is set to go off before the end of each season? Pretty right-wing, huh? (Rush Limbaugh’s a fan — and a good friend of Surnow’s — and Senator John McCain made a cameo in season five.)

24 is a bleeding-heart-liberal show soaked in the blood of our freedom-hating enemies. Everybody wins! Everybody except the show’s fans, who, regardless of their personal politics, know the once riveting show’s best days are behind it, and not just because the post-9/11 cultural zeitgeist can no longer lend 24 the kind of collective-unconscious off-screen urgency it used to. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury summed it up nicely in a strip earlier this month, in which a CIA applicant who asks about “ticking time-bomb exemptions” is told, “Everyone’s over ‘24.’” The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue on both sides of the screen when it comes to the long-running series.

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Bootleg City: Genesis in London, July ‘87

Noah Lennox, otherwise known as Panda Bear in the band Animal Collective — and as a solo artist — plays art rock and experimental pop music. But it’s still pop, and when the Onion A.V. Club asked him to set his iPod to “shuffle” in October 2007 as part of its Random Rules feature, one of the songs that came up was Phil Collins’s 1985 hit “Sussudio.”

Lennox said, “I feel like the way people react to music is the same way they react to people; you either respond to the person and trust them, or you don’t. I can’t put my finger on it, but I get into guys like S.E. Rogie or Phil Collins — even somebody like George Michael — whereas there’s a lot of similar music that I won’t get into for whatever reason. It’s really difficult to for me to say why. The fact that [Collins] is really into what he’s doing comes through somehow, and that resonates with me very well.”

Collins, of course, was a hugely successful solo artist in the ’80s as well as the lead singer and drummer for Genesis, which made its name with progressive rock in the ’70s but shifted its focus to radio-friendly pop the following decade, scoring five top-ten hits alone with its 1986 album Invisible Touch. Collins has taken his fair share of abuse over the years for the earworms he’s created, with “Sussudio” showing up on many “worst songs of the ’80s” lists.

Why all the hate? Because rock stars aren’t supposed to be short and losing their hair, that’s why! It makes them too much like normal people, and we all know normal people suck. And rock stars apparently aren’t supposed to use a nonsense word like “Sussudio” for the title of a hit song that you’ll be singing for the rest of the day whether you like it or not. But for artists and fans like Panda Bear, Collins is king because he knows who he is, and the world is a better place for it. Don’t blame him for the fact that no matter where you are in the world at any given moment, one of his songs will be on the radio.

The following bootleg is a bit of a cheat: it’s an audio rip of Genesis’s Live at Wembley Stadium DVD, recorded in London in July 1987. But “Sussudio” is nowhere in sight, so those of you with a preexisting earworm infection can rest easy.

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