The Eagles dogpiling continues.

First off, if you haven’t had a chance, read Scott Malchus’ great review of Don Felder’s “Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001).” Good stuff. But this writer is fond of anything that makes Glen Frey look like a hack and a douchebag, so there you go.

It’s a safe bet that Don Henley had no idea how dated his work would become. Even his best songs are sealed off from the rest of the world in an aerosol can hair spray-coated bubble. This owes less to his music’s production value – though that was certainly a factor with “Dirty Laundry” – than the fiery anti-Reagan rhetoric that punctuated every song that wasn’t aimed at some fork in the road or other. (Fans of the Eagles’ “Good Day in Hell” just chuckled, hopefully.) In the case of “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” though, both its production and subject matter tie the song to the ground “General’s Daughter”-style, and leave it to die. Yahtzee!

Written by longtime collaborator and ‘70s session guitarist extraordinaire Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar, “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” the second single from Henley’s triple-platinum Building the Perfect Beast, certainly has the spirit of a Henley song, wagging a finger at Americans for having little regard for the atrocities that go on outside its borders. And with a title like that, you may as well go whole hog and make the track as danceable as possible, right? Who knows, maybe Henley and Kooch deliberately went overboard with the keytars and fake horns in order to make a point – a soulless, plastic dance track about soulless, plastic people – and then laughed all the way to the bank when the song went Top Ten. Today, however, it’s the turd in Henley’s punch bowl. (more…)

Meet the rarest of beasts: the heavy metal dance mix.

After the “disappointing” sales figures for Judas Priest’s 1984 album Defenders of the Faith (it merely went platinum), CBS Records gave the band the kind of visionary direction that has made the major labels the shining beacon of business savvy they are today: sell more records. In 1986, that meant ‘add keyboards,’ and Priest, good lads that they were, obliged for their 1986 album Turbo, though whether that was willingly so is not known. Ah, but such concessions are a slippery slope, and one wonders, when the band turned “Turbo Lover” in to the label, if they had any idea that the label would turn around and commission a remix of the track for play in dance clubs.

The move was “too little, too late” on a number of levels. By 1986, rock radio was phasing out the extended mixes that were all the rage two years before – we’re guessing it was those god-awful mixes from ZZ Top’s Afterburner that did the trick – and there wasn’t a club on the planet that was about to give any mix of “Turbo Lover” heavy rotation. The remix was only half the problem, though; Judas Priest was permanently linked to a scene that had simply run out of time. English metal was dead, and not even the bands that were still putting out interesting work (Iron Maiden) could escape it. Casual metal fans were moving on to the Replacements, and the hardcore metal fans hated those goddamn synthesizers. Priest’s goose was cooked before the “Turbo Lover” 12” single left the pressing plant.

In all fairness, the idea of a Judas Priest remix is more offensive than the remix itself. The song is more or less an update of “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’,” the band’s sole foray into the Billboard Hot 100 (it peaked at #67, which means it will surely be in the ‘J’ episode of Bottom Feeders), with a little “Rebel Yell” mixed in for good measure. In other words, it was not the naked ploy to appeal to clubgoers that, say, “Sleeping Bag” was. It was just a rock song with keyboards, and the 12” mix is just a rock song with keyboards and a longer outro. It also had a hilariously bad video, contained below for your amusement. (more…)

For many rock acts that made their mark in the ‘70s, 1985 was the year they faced off against what could be called the New Wave Borg. The rules were simple: assimilate or die. And man, oh man, did they do some crazy things in order to adapt. ZZ Top put artificial record scratching sounds in one of their songs. Dire Straits wrote a song about the very thing that was killing them (MTV), and wound up with the biggest hit of their career. Heart’s hard rockin’ Wilson sisters transformed themselves into porcelain popsters. Bands from the ‘60s (the Monkees, the Moody Blues) would reboot their careers in similar fashion the following year. There is no other way to say it: it was downright terrifying to watch, never mind listen to.

And yet, for as ugly as some of those rock makeovers were (see Dave Steed’s breakdown of the Animals’ New Wave record, if you dare), the musicians that buttered their bread on the opposite end of the musical spectrum suffered even worse. That’s right, I’m speaking of the men who mined the vaults of Mellow Gold.

Dan Fogelberg (R.I.P.) tried reinventing himself as a rocker with “Language of Love,” then abandoned pop for country (by way of bluegrass) after the public didn’t take to his “new style.” Paul Davis (R.I.P.) signed with pop-minded Arista and scored some of his biggest hits, but hated the direction his music was headed and also abandoned pop for country, his first love. In the musician’s equivalent of the last act of the scoundrel, Air Supply was singing Jim Steinman songs. Tick, tick, boom. Wuss rock was dying a gruesome death, and nobody cared.

Gino Vannelli was not going out like that. (more…)

You don’t get much more ‘right place, right time’ than Bryan Ferry and his sole Top 40 entry, “Kiss and Tell.” Despite his superstar status in his native England – 16 Top 40 singles as a member of Roxy Music, 16 Top 40 singles as a solo artist – Ferry couldn’t buy a hit in America. He did have one thing working in his favor, though: MTV. They loved Ferry, putting several of his songs into much higher rotation than his chart success would suggest they deserved. In return, he gave the network the perception of good taste and hipster cool, something that came in handy between the videos for “Tarzan Boy” and “Kyrie.”

In 1987, Ferry went for the brass ring on Bête Noire, using Madonna’s producer (Patrick Leonard), a discarded Smiths song (Johnny Marr gave “Love Changes Everything” to Ferry, who christened it “The Right Stuff”), and, as always, David Gilmour. The album featured Ferry’s trademark sultry lounge cool, but was a decidedly more upbeat affair in comparison to his 1985 solo album Boys & Girls and Roxy Music’s swan song Avalon. That newfound enthusiasm was apparently contagious: Reprise placed the album’s second single, “Kiss and Tell” (download), on the soundtrack for Bright Lights, Big City, where it rubbed shoulders with Depeche Mode, New Order, Prince and M/A/R/R/S. The movie was a crashing bore, but the soundtrack, home to two recent Top 40 hits (New Order’s “True Faith” and M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume”), was a modest hit out of the box. That modest success lent itself to Ferry, propelling the song to #31 on the US charts, which is ten spots better than it did on the UK charts, strangely enough.

Now for the tough love: the lyrics to “Kiss and Tell” are pretty damn bad, even for a Ferry song. (Hey, I love Ferry as much as anyone, but he was prone to some purple-ass prose.) Ten cents a dance, love for sale, Adam and Eve, faded magazine, flash photograph. Wowzers. Those are not deep thoughts, though feel free to insert your own ‘vapid late-‘80s radio’ joke here. What the song lacked in lyrical prowess, though, it made up for with a catchy chorus and, once mixer Alan Meyerson was finished with it, a monster rhythm section, featuring a typewriter percussion track that predates the score for Atonement by 20 years. Meyerson’s mix is pure muscle, putting a huge flange over the guitar solo and fleshing the rhythm section out with about a dozen percussion tracks. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Meyerson’s 12” mix is that the edit work by the splice-happy Latin Rascals – making their third but by no means last WLW appearance – is more low-key than usual, only flashing their wares after the first chorus. They are, however, given carte blanche on the dub mix (download), and the Rascals waste no time hacking Ferry to bits.

MTV’s love affair with Ferry would end soon after the success of “Kiss and Tell.” The third single from Bête Noire, “Limbo,” received only mild interest, and by the time the ‘90s hit, Ferry was out of the picture completely. And one suspects that Ferry was perfectly fine with that, knowing that the success of “Kiss and Tell” owed more to good fortune than anything. Like most artists’ biggest hits, it is by no means Ferry’s best song, but it’s not an embarrassment, either.

The music industry is quick to tell you how piracy is killing them, and it surely is. What they’re not as vocal about is their tendency to kill themselves. This week’s example of the industry’s incompetence: Julian Cope’s 1987 album Saint Julian. It’s Cope’s best-selling album and features his biggest hit, “World Shut Your Mouth.” It’s also currently out of print.

In today’s download-o-rama world, there is simply no excuse for an album like Saint Julian to not be available somehow, someway. If the used-CD sites are any indication, there’s a strong market for Saint Julian — the album is fetching between $25 and $100 on Amazon, Half.com, and eBay — so why doesn’t Island Records send digital copies of it to Amazon and iTunes and make that money themselves? It’s as if they don’t know their back catalogs even exist anymore. Ironic, since those catalogs are what propped them up during lean years in the past (and contributed to the record-setting sales peaks of the late ‘90s), but there you go.

Julian Cope is every bit the stereotypical tortured genius. He once posed for an album cover wearing a turtle shell, and there isn’t a single record label he hasn’t fought with. Back in 1987, however, Cope was feeling especially agreeable, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Modern rock finally gained traction as a scene unto itself in 1986 — Popdoser Will Harris has a rather convincing theory that the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink is where it all started — so when Cope released Saint Julian the following year, he had an audience waiting for him. He quickly became a 120 Minutes darling thanks to the Kinks-like “World Shut Your Mouth” (think “Do It Again” Kinks, not “Lola” Kinks) and the turbocharged “Trampolene,” but it’s the album’s third single, “Eve’s Volcano,” that we’ll be discussing today because, well, it has the best remix. Seriously, this post was originally going to be about “Trampolene,” but then I gave it another listen. Great song, flat remix.

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Simply put, those “U1” jokes about Simple Minds that Py Korry referred to in his most recent Mix Six installment began here.

“Produced by Steve Lillywhite.” For most bands, those four words are akin to being touched by the hand of God. For Simple Minds, it ultimately caused more problems than it solved. The band was riding a steady wave of buzz after the release of their 1982 album New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) in 1982, so it was easy to see why Lillywhite was interested in applying his sonic bombast to the band’s atmospheric art pop. The end result, 1984’s Sparkle in the Rain, is arguably Simple Minds’ finest record, and fewer songs displayed that bombast better than the album’s second single, “Speed Your Love to Me.” Along with its crash-boom-bang drum track, Mel Gaynor positively rocks that cowbell, and Lillywhite’s 12” mix, which highlights Charlie Burchill’s scratch guitar technique, inspired U2 comparisons by the pound. Bono didn’t mind, though; he loved Sparkle in the Rain, saying it was what U2 aspired to do with War. You know, if Bono had any idea back then how to lighten the fuck up.

This is the part where the writer is supposed to talk at length about the difficulties Simple Minds had living in the shadow of U2, their decision to record a silly pop song that Billy Idol and Bryan Ferry had already turned down, etc. But not here, not today. We choose to remember Simple Minds as they were before the music machine crushed their spirit. Consider this: when Sparkle in the Rain was released, it was still anyone’s guess whether U2 or Simple Minds would prove to be more popular. Isn’t that just adorable? Not as adorable as Kerr’s jacket in the song’s promo video, of course, but you get the idea.

Simple Minds - Speed Your Love to Me (Extended Version)

People are making a big deal out of Fatboy Slim and Soulwax doing remixes of tracks from the Rolling Stones’ back catalog, but this is truly much ado about nothing. The band, after all, was one of the first rock acts to play the remix game with “Miss You,” and beginning with their 1983 album Undercover, they would commission remixes of nearly every song they released as a single. Few bands understand crossover potential like the Stones. Whether you were at the concert hall or in the club, the Stones loved you. And your money.

The remix genre didn’t have much of a personality when “Miss You” was made, but it definitely had one by the time Undercover arrived. The band went the ‘extend the album version’ route with the album’s first single, “Undercover of the Night,” but when it came time to issuing remixes of the third single “Too Much Blood,” the band chose New York freestyler Arthur Baker to man the boards. The difference between the remixes for “Undercover” and “Too Much Blood,” to borrow an expression from comedian Larry Miller, is like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.

While the modus operandi of remixers today is to strip a song of all of its definable characteristics, Baker did the opposite; he would keep the track more or less intact, and would add a couple elements to punch things up. In this case, punching up the track meant two new keyboard lines – one of which, a Funkadelic-style synth bass, doesn’t appear until after the third chorus – and a whole mess of percussion. What was once a song is now a party, and now that everyone is feeling festive, Baker decides to have a little fun.

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Or, the very first 12” mix I ever heard and saw with my own eyes.

My sister brought it home with her from college one Christmas. I was 14, so the idea of stretching a song out for clubs so DJs could seamlessly mix them together was a rather alien concept. Even more alien was the notion that normal proles like myself could purchase these mixes for our home collection, no DJ credentials required. Fascinating.

Robert Palmer gets maligned in certain circles for the whole ‘whiteface girls in black spandex’ thing, but let’s make something abundantly clear: his work for Island, while not the model of consistency, was rarely dull. He would experiment with any style under the sun – witness the island riddims of “Every Kinda People” and the cock rock of “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)” – and would sing any song he thought was cool, once covering Gary Numan and the Beatles on the same album. Simply put, the man followed his muse, with little regard for where it took him. Until, of course, he got a taste of success with the Power Station, at which point the muse was bound, gagged, and thrown into the trunk for a few years.

In 1983, however, the muse was still in charge, and when Palmer heard a song from the New York R&B duo the System called, fittingly enough, “You Are in My System,” he knew what to do. Armed with a voice significantly stronger than System singer Mic Murphy and an actual human behind an actual drum kit (the drummer did get some help from some synthetic toms), Palmer’s version takes the perky keyboard riff and Kraftwerk-ish percussion and gives it a soul. The 12” mix does not deviate much from the original, simply adding a couple mix-in and mix-out points and a bit involving a bouncing kick drum. But this was 1983; Arthur Baker had not yet turned the 12” mix on its ear by spinning vocal tapes backwards and cutting the rhythm tracks to shreds. Simple was good, and this was very, very good. And dig that brief scat in the instrumental break.

Funny story: I interviewed Babydaddy of the Scissor Sisters, and when I commented on how their song “Paul McCartney” reminded me of Palmer’s “Looking for Clues,” he admitted that that was exactly what they were aiming for, then made a throwaway comment about that song’s groove, saying, “Who knew that Robert Palmer had it in him?”

I sent him “You Are in My System.” I got a one-word reply: “Awesome!”

Robert Palmer – You Are in My System (Extended Version)

Los Angeles, September 1987. The director of A&R at Virgin Records rolls out of bed at three in the afternoon, his mind a fog after a three-day bender of booze, hookers and blow. He stumbles out into the kitchen to mix himself a screwdriver (“Hair of the dog’ll do it. Fuck you, I do not have a problem.”), putting on sunglasses after the glare of the light from the refrigerator proves to be more than his brain can process. Only then does he realize that his underwear is on backwards and his robe is inside out.

Nameless A&R Guy gets the mail – still in backward undies and inside-out robe – and sees a small brown envelope with no postage on it. He brings the mail to the kitchen table, opens the envelope, and pulls out a blank cassette that says, in block letters, “Warren Zevon Dance Mix.”

Sweet Jesus, what have I done?

He calls his assistant Claire (who bailed on the festivities two days earlier, shortly after her boss asked if he could snort the next line off of her ass), and asks her what the hell a Warren Zevon dance mix is doing in his mailbox. “You don’t remember?” she asks as neutrally as possible, secretly stung that her boss only wanted to snort coke off her ass. “You thought it would be hilarious to give Warren’s song to this pair of New York Latinos, just to see the look on Warren’s face when he heard it. You were so excited about it that I had them get started on it right away. They worked all night and overnighted the mixes to me this morning. Also, you dropped Scarlett and Black from the label, and signed Janet Jackson’s choreographer, for God’s sake. Good luck explaining that one at the next meeting.”

I am so dead, Nameless A&R Guy thought to himself.

In fairness to Nameless A&R Guy, his logic was not as twisted as you might think. Zevon had recruited George Clinton to do the arrangement for “Leave My Monkey Alone” (Clinton also shows up the video for the song), which makes a dance mix of the song a given. No, the twisted part would be the decision to get the Latin Rascals (Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran) involved. The Rascals, you see, were all about the edits, where kick drums are turned into machine gun fire. Perhaps their involvement was in response to the A-side mix, a ten-and-a-half-minute, rather unremarkable marathon version of the song. (We’ll assume that Claire commissioned that one.) Nameless A&R Guy, meanwhile, was very smart in assuming that if a Warren Zevon track is going to get any club play, it better have some pop, and the Latin Rascals mix, which will inspire a flurry of descriptors ranging from “awesome” to “blasphemous” and all points in between, has undeniable pop. And stutter. And pause. And pop again. Listen if you dare, Zevonphiles.

Warren Zevon - Leave My Monkey Alone (Latin Rascals Edit) (download)

No band wants their video legacy to trump their musical legacy, but in the case of Go West, chances are that when one of their songs comes on the radio (figuratively speaking of course, since radio stopped playing them years ago), the first thought the listener entertains will be one of bouncing numbers and wooden figurines. The Godley and Creme-directed clip was an eye-popper — though one wonders what possessed them to feature singer Peter Cox in a wife beater while carrying a giant wrench — and helped propel the song to within spitting distance of the Top 40, peaking at #41.

For 1985, the video holds up remarkably well, using some nifty split-screen panning. (The Russell Mulcahy-directed clip for the follow-up single, “Call Me,” is not so fortunate.) Likewise, this mix of the song (download), the B-side of “Call Me’s” U.S. 12″ single, has also held up well, perhaps because it seems aimed more at the home listener than the clubber. Is that a drum-free keyboard intro? And heavens, what is that thing in the middle? Is that … a guitar solo? Yesirree, and a mighty fine one at that. And to think, we thought that Richard Drummie carried that thing around with him in the videos just to give him something to do.

The band would go on to greater success years later thanks to a certain song from the Pretty Woman soundtrack (and, of all things, a rerecording of a song from their first album that wasn’t deemed worthy of a Stateside release the first time around), but for my money “We Close Our Eyes” is still the only Go West song that matters, and this is the only mix of that song that matters. What does it mean, though, to say that imagination never lets us take the blame? That sounds like one of those David Byrne, fill-the-space-with-words lyrics. God, did I just compare Go West to the Talking Heads? I think that’s my queue to walk away before I say anything really stupid. See you next week, kids.