From the cover of "Supremes A' Go Go" (1966)

The list of great Motown albums doesn’t start to fill in until 1971 or so, when Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder used their new creative freedom to make fully realized wholes. For Motown’s first decade, the focus was on singles, mixed on a rickety three-track machine in that little house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit for maximum sonic punch on the radio (car radios, especially) and on 45s.

In the mid 60s, the most popular sonic punch out of Motown came from the Supremes, whose hot streak rivaled that of the Beatles for a while. Their second studio album, Where Did Our Love Go, had reached #2 in 1964. In customary Motown fashion, it included a lot of filler—in this case, old tracks recorded before they were famous—plus three #1 singles: the title song, “Baby Love,” and “Come See About Me.”

Berry Gordy was a master marketer, so in the next two years the Supremes followed Where Did Our Love Go with A Bit of Liverpool, featuring familiar British Invasion hits (mostly Lennon/McCartney songs), and The Supremes Sing Country, Western and Pop, which includes a version of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” that’s pretty much indescribable. Other albums in this period included a live album, a tribute to Sam Cooke, a Christmas album, and a couple of other albums assembled on the hits/filler plan.

The master marketer’s master plan reached its apex in 1966 with Supremes A’ Go Go. It includes only one big single, “You Can’t Hurry Love,” but also includes eight Motown songs made famous by other acts and versions of “These Boots Are Made for Walking” and “Hang on Sloopy.” It hit #1 on the Billboard 200 on October 22, 1966, and stayed two weeks, the first Motown album ever to make #1. It undoubtedly propelled many a party in late 1966 and 1967—with nary a ballad on it, it’s a straight-up jam with the Sound of Young America.

Eight of the songs were written by the Motown production team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, so the album could just as easily have been called The Supremes Sing Holland Dozier Holland. It wasn’t. The master marketer gave that title to their next album, with 12 more HDH songs.

Here are the Supremes performing the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” on TV.

In our next installment: a final week in the sun for a genre that had ruled the album charts for a decade.

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Brilliant?

Questionably.

One of the foremost procrastinators of his or any other generation?

Without a doubt.

Last year, we put together the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mixtape, available in three volumes with an additional bonus volume of B-sides that didn’t make the cut.  What we didn’t tell you (but you were probably expecting if you were at all familiar with the books) is that there was a fourth volume to the trilogy.  And in keeping with Douglas Adams’ tradition of arbitrarily adding material in unexpected ways, we added an extra two weeks in front of its publication date.  At least…let’s say that’s why we did it that way.  As always, special thanks to DwDunphy for the stellar artwork.  Enjoy!

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mixtape – Book 4

BOOK 4:  SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

1.  ”So Long & Thanks for All The Fish” – Keyboard Cathy
2.  ”Big Yellow Taxi” – Joni Mitchell
3.  ”Home” – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
4.  ”Dry the Rain” – The Beta Band
5.  ”I Can’t Explain” – Eric Thompson
6.  ”Tunnel of Love” – Dire Straits
7.  ”The Great Gig in the Sky” – Rick Wakeman,  C.C. White, Steve Howe
8.  ”Aladdin Sane” – David Bowie
9.  ”In the Dolphin Tank” – Port Blue
10.  ”High Hopes” – Pink Floyd
11.  ”We Apologize for the Inconvenience” – Sufjan Stevens

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Your date tonight. It’s like snapping in that last piece of the puzzle that holds the whole picture together. Everything that’s supposed to rock is rockin’ with an extra helping of more. There are no substitutions. No stunt doubles, no pretenders. Tapped straight from the source. A gushing geyser of “grab the front of the shirt, pull ‘em close, kiss with your hands on his face kinda deal.” Drink it up, honey. This magic don’t fall off trees.

Song for the Soundtrack of Your No Date Tonight

You’ve got a temporary kind of love. So many temps it’s like a damn staffing agency. A shuffle of the deck and your face card comes up with your part-time lovah’s nickname: “Single Serving Southwest Guy,” “New York,” “Fun Guy,” “Twitter BF,” “Good Times,” “___ Right This Minute,” and so it goes. Tonight you got the joker in your hand. That means you skip your turn. Go with the hand you’re dealt, dollface. And think about rent-to-own. (S)he with the most miles on the frequent renter card eventually has to fold to stay in the game.

[Diamond Rugs, "Call Girl Blues" Diamond Rugs, 2012]

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Contrary to popular belief, the beginning of the Eighties didn’t signify the death of disco or most of the artists that personified the genre to the general public. Some (like the late Donna Summer) experimented with different sounds, refusing to be pigeonholed. Some (like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic) moved behind the boards to produce, and some just went slightly underground, playing to their core faithful.

One such artist was Sylvester, who many have classified as the King AND Queen of the genre. In an age when being openly gay still carried a major social stigma, Sylvester was out and proud. Consider the fact that in 2012, there are still no openly gay performers of African descent within sniffing distance of the Top 40. Well, Sylvester marched onto pop radio several times in the late Seventies with sizzling hits like “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real.” His music was frankly sexual and his image was over the top. Half a decade before Boy George, Sylvester and his zaftig backup singers Two Tons o’ Fun (later to become The Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame) invaded Middle America via the Merv Griffin Show and “American Bandstand.”

Sylvester struggled with musical changes in the Eighties, not to mention attempts to tone down his image that were made by label execs. However, he was still a fixture on the dance charts with songs like “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” which received memorable placement in the 1982 Eddie Murphy vehicle “Trading Places.” However, a major label contract wouldn’t come his way until the middle of the decade. Signing with Warner Brothers in 1986, he immediately hit paydirt with the single “Someone Like You.”

The energetic dance tune (with single artwork by Keith Haring) climbed the R&B charts at the beginning of 1987, and topped the dance charts, thanks to a fantastic mix by legendary deejay/producer Larry Levan. The video (one of only a small handful that Sylvester made) is relatively restrained, considering the high levels of camp that Sylvester was capable of. Make sure you take a look at his performance of the song on “The Late Show with Joan Rivers.” And you young’uns thought Adam Lambert was the gayest thing to swish across a TV screen?

The album that contained “Someone Like You” was called Mutual Attraction, and contained faithful covers of Stevie Wonder’s “Living For the City” as well as the Gershwin standard “Summertime,” however, it didn’t achieve the level of success that Sylvester and Warner Brothers were hoping for. Sadly, there was never a follow up, as Sylvester passed away in December 1988. While he isn’t often cited as an influence, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to believe that artists ranging from Prince and Madonna to Beyonce and Lady GaGa took cues from his gospel-trained voice and theatrical sense of showmanship. Way more than a relic of the disco era, Sylvester was a musical and cultural trailblazer.

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Arista Nashville

After Carrie Underwood won American Idol in 2005, she wanted to be marketed as a country singer, and she has been fabulously successful: 11 #1 country singles and three more that peaked at #2, plus three multi-platinum albums, with the new Blown Away released earlier this month. Her two best singles, “Before He Cheats” and “Wasted,” show two different sides of her—the sassy girl who won’t be mistreated and the powerful singer who can open up on a song like a firehose. Her latest single, “Good Girl,” tries to combine the two, but creates a vortex of suck that can only end up one of the World’s Worst Songs.

You know you’re in trouble within the first 15 seconds when you notice that “Good Girl” is slathered in Auto-Tune. I can’t tell if this is a production gimmick to give it a particular sheen or if it’s to keep Carrie in the right key. (Suggested motto for Auto-Tune: “Because professionals do it in one take, no matter what.”) About two-and-a-half minutes in, Carrie decides add extra sass by singing louder, blasting through the rest of the song like she was trying to demolish it. The first time I heard it I wondered, “Why is this person screaming at me?”

That “Good Girl” is considered a country song is a marketing decision, not a musical one. It’s country because the record label says it is, not because it has the remotest thing in common with country music. It’s not just Underwood who benefits from this, it’s much of Nashville these days—but it comes at the cost of un-mooring country from its history, and turning it from an organic art form into a plastic commodity. (We took a glance at this phenomenon in a Popdose post last month.)

But the thing that’s most annoying about “Good Girl” is the song’s emotional payoff line: “You better get to gettin’ on your goodbye shoes.” What are goodbye shoes?  Are they athletic shoes, so you can get away faster? Galoshes, so you can get away in the rain? Stilettos, for a sexy strut out the door? The amount of brainpower it took me to think up three examples of what goodbye shoes might be is vastly more than the concept deserves. “Goodbye shoes” is a hacky songwriter construction that sounds like imagery but paints no meaningful picture.

So for a lot of reasons both technical and aesthetic, one will rarely come across a record more objectionable than “Good Girl”—but it doesn’t matter. The record is poised to cross over from country to pop, and will likely become one of the biggest, broadest hits of Underwood’s career.

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The hangout. Today’s sexy term for a little making out, a little testing of the water, s’more smooching. Throw in tequila and things start to spill. Clothes, secrets, hang ups. The make or break stuff. The things you need to know before you commit to a whole night. You’re hanging. Unshackled from the date word, you’re free to come and go at your leisure, but you don’t. Because beneath your façade of cool, you’ve got a beating heart and two eyes. Two eyes that see there’s more to that pretty little thang. Slip out of your slacker suit and give a little bit of your love to her.

[Fink, "Pretty Little Thing," Biscuits for Breakfast, 2006]

Song for the Soundtrack of Your No Date Tonight

Temptation is an evil force that wipes out reason and logic. A land mine made of lust and love and sharp edges that’ll kill ya. Keep your wings level tonight. Tip too far to one side and next thing you know you’re tail spinning into a giant field of all your bad decisions. And there’s no magic ball in this Field of Screams, friend. Just a bunch of strike outs and loaded, baseless love. Stay off the grass. This too shall pass.

[Suzanne Vega, "Caramel" Nine Objects of Desire, 1996]

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Music fans across the globe were stunned last week with the passing of The Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch a week ago. For a lot of folks in my generation, The Beasties were iconic. Not only were they (along with Run-DMC and LL Cool J) instrumental in bringing hip-hop to middle America, but they were also true musical chameleons. In today’s industry, where playing it safe and following trends is the name of the game, it’s worth noting that Adam, Mike, and Adam changed (or modified, at least) their sound constantly, and their audience stayed with them for the whole ride.

1989′s Paul’s Boutique remains a watershed album–not just for the Beasties, or for hip-hop, but for my own evolution as a music fan. Having been fairly ambivalent about Licensed To Ill, this was the album that put me firmly on Team Beastie Boys. Legal issues have removed much of the creativity from the art of sampling, but the Dust Brothers’ production on Paul’s Boutique is amazing–on par with The Bomb Squad’s work on It Takes a Nation of Millions or Prince Paul’s on 3 Feet High & Rising. In an interview years ago, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. described listening to a particular album (I believe it was Patti Smith’s Horses) as so revelatory, it felt like someone had dropped a piano on his head. Paul’s Boutique was one of those albums for me–this crazy collage of sound that left me slackjawed after my first several encounters with it.  For their part, the Beasties began to hone their silly/sincere schtick with this album, balancing lines referencing just about every pop-culture icon on the planet with more sober thoughts like “racism is schism on the serious tip.”

Creative maturation aside, Paul’s Boutique is just a fun-ass album. I’ve found myself listening to it to the exclusion of any other Beasties album (or any other album period, just about) for the past week, and it always makes me smile. The “Hey Ladies” video is delightfully silly, a throwback to the disco era at a time when nostalgia for the Seventies was just beginning to rear it’s head. If you have a case of the Mondays-which would make no sense, because it’s Friday-there’s no better cure.

Adam, thanks for bringing light and joy-not to mention consciousness-to the world through your music. You’ll be missed.

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In 1994, I could boot up my family’s PC, wait around ten minutes for it to warm up and then delve into, of all things, a real estate development simulator that engrossed me for hours as I transformed a humble office building into a mixed-use spire that would put Hancock Center to shame. In 2012, I can boot up my much, much faster PC and play a game that simulates what it’s like to ramp off a cliff on a motorcycle, freefall onto the nose of a fighter jet, ride it into the clouds, hijack it, send it careening into the statue of a dictator and then land unscathed. Video games sure have changed, but in a very strange way the two games I’m referencing resonate with me by connecting with the same set of emotions.

The first game is SimTower, the deceptively simple “computer toy” from 1994 by Maxis, makers of pretty much everything with the term “sim” in the title. The second is Just Cause 2 by Avalanche Studios, released 16 years later. On the surface (and quite far below it), these two games have nothing in common. One puts players in the role of some kind of benevolent Donald Trump figure and the other smashes every action movie cliche into a single experience for a generation raised on cable TV and Mountain Dew. And yet, they both tap into moments of simple pleasure stemming from a bit of elusive realism.

As much time as I’ve spent blowing up whole military installations solo in Just Cause 2, I might have spent a comparably sizable chunk of time tearing down its in-game freeway at high speeds, never once shooting a gun or running down an enemy soldier. In those times, doing anything outlandish or violent would have broken the mood. It was beautiful to hop into a sports car and reach top speed just as the sun slid behind the mountains. In the best moments, it was like I could feel the wind from the back windows, naturally cracked. I could connect with that simulation because, while I’ve never piloted an attack helicopter on a suicide mission against a missile-crazy despot, I have been on a freeway late at night going an inadvisable speed just for the thrill of it.

Likewise, I have never actually been in a massive skyscraper that has offices, a hotel, condos, a movie theater, a luxury restaurant and a freakin’ chapel at the top, but I’ve been in all of those places separately. SimTower is an inherently peaceful game and though it isn’t realistic in its scale or configuration, it taps into true memories with its simulations. It asks players to imagine every office they’ve ever been in by playing a very realistic sound clip of office noise every time an office block is clicked. It asks players to remember the strangeness and excitement of staying in a hotel. Most of all, it asks players to see the wonder of modernity writ large by throwing it all into one place and positing that, money and zoning being no object, doing so in real life might just be plausible.

There aren’t as many “peace” games out there today as there were back in the ’90s. These days, players more often than not have to invent their own peace games within inherently violent games like I did with Just Cause 2. There are a lot of reasons most gaming today is loud and explosion-centric, but mostly I think it’s just that the culture of gaming has merged with the mainstream so weird, little toys like SimTower don’t have room to thrive anymore. There’s some hope in browser, mobile and social games that have players tending a farm or something equally sleepy, but the quiet, even contemplative nature of old games is absent in today’s frantic designs.

Really, this particular nostalgia trip isn’t just about how video games have changed in the past 20 years. It goes deeper than that. Today, technology is loud, social and ubiquitous. In the ’90s, tech was on the margins most of the time. Computers were cold and quiet, their pacing necessarily deliberate for their slow processing speeds. Video games are signs and symbols of information technology as a whole. Games in the 1990s were weird, detached and surreal. Even the ones with guns and bombs were oddly quiet. My nostalgia isn’t for those games themselves. Rather, it’s for the unique experience of technology first learning to attach itself to our lives, our memories of hotels and night time freeway driving, but still being strange to us. It was nothing less than our society’s first contact with alien beings.

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Chris says: Below you’ll find my piece on Desert Island Discs. But first I wanted to give you a bit of info on myself and my album. I’ve completed an album called Homesick recently that was recorded entirely on an iPhone using nothing but the mic of the phone and a 4 Track app. I was inspired by great music from the 60′s that used limitations in creative ways and tended to favor full, unedited takes in order to capture the honesty of the moment. Because it was all done on the phone, I wasn’t limited to staying in the same studio to record everything. So I went all over Los Angeles, from The Greek Theater to Little Tokyo. We filmed everything also on the phone and made videos for each song. Many of my friends and family pitched in. It was an absolute blast to make. It will be released on May 22 exclusively on iTunes and on June 26 in all other digital outlets. Limited quantities of CDs and Vinyl are also forthcoming. Ok, enough plugging, off to the island we go!

*****

If you were stuck on a desert island, what five albums would you take with you?

There’s three ways I’d like to answer this question. The first way will be to just simply list my five favorite albums of all time. Easy. Here they are:

The Beatles, Abbey Road

Nick Drake, Pink Moon

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds

Van Morrison,Astral Weeks

Joni Mitchell, Blue

Each of those albums has shaped who I am as a person and a musician. I decided to write my own songs and start a band the first time I heard Abbey Road. I decided to learn guitar after hearing Pink Moon (I was strictly a piano player before then). Pet Sounds and Astral Weeks taught me the virtues of meticulous attention to detail AND putting a bunch of random people in a room together and seeing what happens. And Blue taught me about honesty and opening yourself up. Without these albums and about 50 others, I wouldn’t be here now writing this piece and I probably wouldn’t be writing and singing songs. Well, maybe I would, but how are we to know? Multiverse, I’m sure.

*****

The second way I’d like to answer the question is to think what albums would serve as a proper soundtrack to solitary island life. To do this, I figure that you’d need music for all your different moods. This makes it hard to boil it down to 5 albums. But let’s say you’d need one album to convey the loneliness you feel at night, one album for those times where you’re in a lighter mood and perhaps even laughing at your own situation, one album for when you need to let out some aggression, one album that reminds you specifically of home, and one album that defines your new home and identity as an islander. Here’s what I came up with:

LONELINESS: Nick Drake, Pink Moon

This is the only holdover from my favorite albums list. It is perhaps THE album for working through loneliness and depression. Sitting by myself out in the middle of nowhere, I would find comfort in the fact that there’s someone who can empathize with my plight and maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone.

LAUGHTER AS COPING MECHANISM: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society

Ray Davies and company would serve well as the soundtrack to those days when I’m able to shrug off the blues and try and enjoy my life on the island. This is some bittersweet stuff all about nostalgia and the absurdity of living in the past. It would allow me to laugh at all the chumps out there taking pictures of each other to prove they really existed, and be happy living in the now.

LETTING OUT AGGRESSION: James Brown, Star Time

The obvious choice for this would be a punk record, like Static Age by The Misfits. But I decided to go with the hardest working man in show business to get me dancing all over the place. Not only would this collection serve as a great outlet for my own aggression, but the sheer amount of material (71 tracks) means it would take a long time to get tired of it, and that is definitely something you’d want to consider if you were out on your own for all of eternity.

REMINDER OF HOME: Chris Price, Homesick

What better way to recall my previous life as a city dweller and non-island person than this? This may be cheating, but honestly it’s not like I’m saying its my favorite album or anything. I’m just saying it would be nice to hear this album and think of all the places we went to make it and all the friends and family who got involved in it. It would be my way of keeping those people and places fresh in my memory.

ISLAND IDENTITY SOUNDTRACK: The Congos,  Heart Of The Congos

This one’s easy. There is nothing that says “cast away” to me like The Congos singing “Fisherman”. I’d sit there in the sand, drunk on coconuts, tossing a line into the sea to try and find dinner, soaking up the sun. This album and particularly that song would become a mantra of mine. Island life would be sweet.

*****

The third and final way to approach this is to realize that I probably won’t have any electricity on this island, so even if I had a boombox the batteries would eventually run out and I’d just be stuck with album covers. So which 5 album covers would I want to stare at forever? These are the 5 I thought of:

Nick Drake, Pink Moon (hat trick!)

The Beatles, Revolver

Antonio Carlos Jobim, Wave

Jane Brikin/Serge Gainsbourg

Miles Davis, Bitches Brew

*****

Cast Away is a good movie. The End.

Chris Price

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Song for the Soundtrack of Your Date Tonight

Ah, the date that delivers the shivers. Holy electrical force field, Batman. Your chemistry burned down the lab and nearly melted your face. An eye lock that stops your heart. The unexplained spelled out before you. You’re hooked on a feeling and high on believing there’s a greater reason for this cosmic connection. It’s like you’ve lost all control of your head…and your hands. Bathe in it. Soak it up. Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby.

[Wanda Jackson, "Shakin' All Over" The Party Ain't Over, 2011]

Song for the Soundtrack of Your No Date Tonight

Hey fellas. Lookin’ at a bleak landscape? Maybe it’s time to manscape. Clean up your act. Ladies love cool dudes, but five day stubble gets you in trouble. Seattle grunge, Brooklyn hipster, San Francisco skinny jeans…time to put that wool cap in the fire. Hair that’s sweaty don’t get the Bettys. Get ready, Freddy. Power’s in the shower. And a shave. And a haircut. Even the beastiest of boys eventually learned if you let go of that funky monkey, you’re gonna get Girls, Girls, Girls.

[Beastie Boys, "She's On It" Krush Groove Soundtrack, 1985]

Nerd Soundtrack Bonus

And, tonight, for the first time ever, a brief bonus clip in honor of Star Wars day. In the spirit of the day, release your inner alien and let your freak flag fly. Go get that girl at the bar with one eye. Don’t worry about your bulbous head and reptilian skin tonight, friend. It’s your night. May the 4th be with you.

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