Fourth of July is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. Firstly, because it’s not religiously affiliated. Secondly, because it generally involves some combination of the following three items: fire, grilling meat and alcohol. All in the name of patriotism. I’m not sure how our fourth of July traditions evolved to include these potentially disastrous things together, but I’m thankful they did.

However, there are few songs that connect with the holiday for me. Sure, there are all the patriotic anthems if you want to get stereotypical. There’s really only one song that reminds me of a particular fourth of July.

While I was still summering at home on the West Coast, it was something of tradition to go out to the cabin of some family friends on Harstine Island, which is in Puget Sound. It’s right on the water, so it cools off at night, and it’s far from any big cities, so it gets really dark. Because it’s so quiet and woodsy, everyone is shooing off fireworks. You can stand on the shore and be surrounded by bright, colorful lights in every direction — including an Indian reservation. They always delivered. Big time.

I was more or less left to my own thoughts at these holidays, and often I’d clear my mind of everything associated with my life in the cities, my life in New York, my life in Seattle, and just spend hours using as many senses as possible.  Watching the water roll in waves, skimming my hand on top of soft, pointed blades of grass, listening to the sounds of voices from far away, smelling the musk of the forest and the smoke of barbecues in the air… the taste of alcohol. (more…)

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Vrabel: I have a buddy who’s a big Asia fan. And every single time my buddy who’s an Asia fan tells me he’s an Asia fan, I bring up “Heat of the Moment,” and he calls me a dirty name, and we stare at each other in strained silence for 15 minutes. “Heat of the Moment” is like Kryptonite to prog fans. I call it the “57 Channels and Nothin’ On” Theory.

Ken: I don’t like prog. I don’t like ’80s music (what on earth am I doing at Popdose?). From a brief look at the video, no one in the band has a mullet. I’m willing to give them points for that, and only that.

Beau: Funny, I just covered this one. Basically, it’s terrific prog-rock playing distilled into a palatable pop-rock song. But oy, those lyrics. John, when her looks have gone and she’s alone, she’s still going to be blocking your calls.

Zack: It seems like something of a guilty pleasure, but I actually can’t resist the epic quality of this song’s opening. The video, on the other hand, sucks. Aside from using the same damn effect for the entire video, couldn’t they at least have changed the direction of the screen transitions? Once we get away from the intro, I find the song fair to middling. Nothing special, and it looks like we’re in for some much worse “music” this week. (more…)

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Bruce Springsteen - Independence Day (live) from Live 1975-1985 (1986)
Taj Mahal - Freedom Ride from Largo (1998)
The Damnwells - God Bless America from Air Stereo (2006)
The Beach Boys - Spirit Of America from Good Vibrations (1993)
James Taylor - On The 4th Of July from October Road (2002)
Crosby Stills Nash and Young - American Dream from American Dream (1988)
Michael McDonald - Sweet Freedom (remix) from Sweet Freedom (1986)
Chicago - Free Country from Chicago III (1971)
Kansas - Song For America from Ultimate Kansas (2002)
Matthew Ryan - American Dirt from Matthew Ryan vs. the Silver State (2008)
American Music Club - Patriot’s Heart from Love Songs for Patriots (2004)
Bill Janovitz and Crown Victoria - Fireworks on TV from Fireworks on TV! (2004)
Randy Newman - A Few Words in Defense of Our Country from A Few Words in Defense of My Country (2007)
Richard Julian - Fourth of July from Richard Julian (1997)
Will Hoge - America from The America EP (2004)
Bob Dylan - Chimes Of Freedom (live) from No Direction Home (2005)
Neil Young - Rockin’ In The Free World from Freedom (1989)
Paul Simon - American Tune from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973)
Ray Charles - America The Beautiful from Genius & Soul (1997)
Mark O’Connor - The Star-Spangled Banner from Midnight on the Water (1998)

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Okay, who hasn’t thought America’s favorite family has jumped the shark by now? Even with the success of last year’s movie (which I found quite funny) still fresh in the audience’s mind, the actual show has become something not so much unfunny as it is unfriendly.

Allow me to back up here. This assertion has been going on for a decade now, ever since a particularly harsh mean streak started to creep up on good old dullard Homer Simpson. His callous nature and general ignorance to all but his own personal needs cataloged deaths, a desire to get a friend back off the wagon ’cause he needed a drinking buddy, framing his wife for a DUI to save his own ass, and many a faux pas resulting in the viewing public crowning the character “Jerk-Ass Homer.” If there was an upside, it was that the rest of the characters seemed to be coping, uh, in character. The other saving grace was that, often, the show was still funny and still, dare I say it, human. As if to acknowledge that the audience’s statement was heard loud and clear, the term “Jerk-Ass Homer” started working itself into the scripts.

But now, in its millionth season on the air, all the characters are becoming jerk-ass. Homer dreams of suffocating his father, abandoning his kids, and shacking up with a rack of meat in a motel room. Marge also dreams of escape while attempting to live vicariously through her kids. Those kids, Bart and Lisa, are exhibiting less of a sibling rivalry and more of an ingrained hate for each other, and where the show once balanced the absurdities of real, mundane life with the occasional flashes of cartoonishness, now it is, inside and out, a cartoon.

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Hey everybody and environs. Welcome to the twenty-second claw-clicking week of Name That Tune at Popdose. What if there were no rules? Then we’d have to delete the boilerplate:

The Rules:

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Here’s one I’ve been saving because … well, I’ve been too lazy to break out the USB turntable.

1994 was a great year for the Breeders. Last Splash had just turned platinum and “Cannonball” was crossing over from Alternative Nation to Top 40 radio, something completely unthinkable today. Sadly, it would also be the final year of the group in its most popular form, as success screwed with the band’s heads. But for a time, the Breeders could do no wrong. So if the band wanted to release a single available only on 7″ vinyl, then heck, sure! And make sure the vinyl is lime green! Okey dokey, Deals! Oh, and we only want to put one new song on it and not one, but two covers. Genius! And we’ll make a video to promote the B-side, not the A-side. Um, sure!

“Shocker in Gloomtown” (download) was one of the two covers on the Head to Toe single, a song originally by fellow Daytonians Guided By Voices, who also appear in the video, peering through the garage windows. It’s also the shortest and best track on the single, an under two-minute blast of punk hooks, raw production by Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis, and almost remedial guitar as Kelley Deal learns to play in front of all of us. (more…)

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Doooood, if you’ve been following this psychotic lo-fi series of posts all year, you’ve heard some hidden gems, some peculiar covers, some underground legends, and wacky side projects of people in more famous bands like the MC5. What you haven’t heard so far is some insanely obscure crazy psychedelic stuff from the 1960s, out-and-out relics that should have been left marooned on the Island of Bad Trips.

Well, today, I’m here to make up for that deficiency. Meet The Driving Stupid, whose couple smash hits (”smash” is relative to their other totally non-hits) included this gem, “Horror Asparagus Stories.” This is from Volume 3 of the Pebbles compilation series, which garage-psych addicts all know is one step obscurer than Nuggets.

Clearly the product of a k-hole (thanks, Hughes, for introducing me to that concept last week) or ingestion of some peculiar substance cut with rat poison or perhaps the same junk they make patchouli out of, this cut shows why so many thousands of obscure garage-psych songs never impacted the charts.

Of course, their total lack of chart success and our obsession with anthropological matters–and, let’s not forget, the record collector’s compulsive psyche–make them perfect for exploration here in 2008. Plus, even if it’s crap that never charted from the 1960s, I’m convinced (and I came of age in the 1980s, I’m no hippie relic myself) is about 20 times better than the crap on the pop charts today. At least they knew how to sing and play instruments, mostly.

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If you should find yourself in North Olmsted, Ohio with a few extra minutes, you can drive past the North Olmsted high school. There, if you know where to look, you’ll find a brown brick, perfectly centered between two windows on the way to the soccer practice field at the back of the school. Because it is brown, this brick blends in nicely with the rest of the orange and tan skin of the school. That layer of burnt umber, oil-based paint was applied to the wall on a humid, scorching afternoon in August 1990. At the tail end of my time working on the North Olmsted Board of Education summer maintenance crew, I decided to leave my mark on the school in which I grew up and started the path to adulthood.

For three years, I worked alongside a group of college guys my age and a group of men in their 40s and 50s (“lifers” as we called them) who were the full-time maintenance men for the school system. Each year, our summers were spent sweating our asses off in the Ohio heat, primarily painting classrooms and the exterior trim of the schools. My friend, Jeff, landed me the job and I convinced him to persuade Mike Clancy, the head of the maintenance department, to hire Steve, too. Like I said, I matured during that period. I learned how to be a better friend, an okay boyfriend (which would provide me with the lessons to be a good husband someday) and a halfway decent painter. Those laborious days were full of Diner-esque conversations; lazy, introspective moments; and a lot of good music playing from my Emerson dual cassette boom box. Although there were many songs I grew to love during that time, many of those tunes hold only nostalgic value to me these days. However, one song remains a favorite basement song and it is one I would include in my personal top ten: They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”. (more…)

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Over the next year Terje Fjelde has agreed to listen to nothing but David Foster on his iPod. He’s loaded the thing with over 1,200 songs produced, arranged, composed, and/or played by David Foster. A deal with the devil? He keeps wondering.

When I started writing for this series I asked my wife to read the first draft, just to get an idea of how people would react to the concept.

MY WIFE (sighing, after being asked the same question five times in an hour): OK, OK, Terje, I’ll read it soon. What’s it about anyway?

ME: It’s about David Foster, my childhood hero!

(She rolls her eyes.)

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A selection of “Findings” from the back page of Harper’s Magazine, June 2008.

A genetic variation affecting two thirds of East Asian men might allow them to take performance-enhancing testosterone undetected, a study found. As yet there exists only anecdotal evidence that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean athletes are more successful at cheating. (Randy Newman, “Yellow Man” [download])

Biologists warned that woody plants were poised to invade China, and phytologists in Europe confirmed that invasive Chinese black truffles threaten Perigord black truffles with extinction through interbreeding. (Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land” [download])

Scientists found that the DNA of platypuses comprises bird, mammal, and reptile genes, and that the Amazon molly fish has been reproducing asexually for 70,000 years but has avoided the rapid genetic deterioration associated with asexual vertebrates by stealing the DNA of its sister species. (Tears for Fears, “God’s Mistake” [download])

Australian biologists discovered that subordinate gobie fish restrict their eating so as not to grow large enough to threaten dominant fish, and primatologists found that subordinate female macaques, stressed from constant harassment by dominant females, tend to eat too much calorie-rich food. An overweight English hedgehog was reported to have lost weight on the Atkins diet. (The Staple Singers, “The Weight” [download])

Women who consume bananas before conception are more likely to bear boys. (Sparks, “Dick Around” [download])

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