There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and there’s a star-studded concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the occasion. In conjunction with the anniversary, Time-Life has released a nine-DVD collection called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live. It includes eight discs of Hall of Fame inductions and a DVD featuring some of the performances from the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that took place in Cleveland. Since the very first induction back in 1986, we’ve seen and heard about the induction ceremonies (usually in New York) that are a gathering of music legends. They get up on stage and perform their biggest hits; give speeches that are sometimes emotional, sometimes raucous, sometimes spiteful, and at the end of the night all of the inductees and presenters come together for one kick assjam session. With this DVD collection, it appeared as if music aficionados — you know, you and I, the people who made these rock stars legends — were finally going to be included in these events, and not just through the chopped-up versions we’ve seen on VH1.
This is something we’ve been talking about doing for a long time — in fact, we really thought we’d be debuting the Popdose Podcast over a year ago. It wasn’t until we were finally able to trick our friend Dave Lifton into shuttering his long-running and wildly popular Wings for Wheels series that our plans came together — with the technical savvy necessary to edit our nonsensical jabbering into pure audio entertainment, and a strong enough personality to keep the entire podcast from dissolving into a giggling fit of mom jokes, Dave was the crucial final ingredient we were waiting for all along.
So open up your pod, baby, and let us in — and remember, this is only our debut. Even television classics like According to Jim didn’t enjoy their finest moments until they’d had a little time to hit their stride, and you have no idea what we have in store for you during the coming months. (Note: neither do we.) Like what you hear? Hate it? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know. And now, without further ado…
The Popdose Podcast, Episode 1: Donkey Eatin’ a Pony (1:09:49, 64.9 MB), featuring Jeff Giles, Jason Hare, and Dave Lifton. You can also subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.
38:20 Jason Hare credits Terje Fjelde’s awesome Popdose podcast contributions, then discusses Mariah Carey appearing on Oprah and covering Foreigner. Digressions continue into Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Journey, The Saw Lady, and Wing.
54:31 Popdose Endorsements (official title yet to be determined; offer your suggestions in the comments!): Jeff endorses fun. (song clip: “Benson Hedges”)
57:06 Popdose Endorsements: Dave endorses Robbie Fulks (song clip: “Papa Was A Steel-Headed Man”)
Call this mix the postscript of Beatles Week at Popdose … a postscript that’s a couple of weeks late! But better late than never, right? There’s been a lot of talk about the marketing savvy of Beatles merchandise, and it’s pretty damn impressive. I mean, getting people to buy remastered recordings they’ve probably had in their collections for years (and I’m talking about vinyl, cassette, 8 track, CD, and mp3s) is no easy feat – unless the product really is superior to what came before. And yes, the remasters did live up to the hype. But if I may start a second sentence with a conjunction, what also lives up to the hype is the long shadow of the Beatles’ style of music on popular recording artists. Billy Joel, Andy Partridge, Roland Orzabal, Jeff Lynne, Neil Finn, and the Gallagher boys must have all, at one point or another, fantasized about being “The 5th Beatle” while singing along to one of the Fab Four’s songs. So much so, that they all wrote songs that were unabashedly Beatlesque.
Billy is certainly a singer/songwriter who doesn’t need to copy the style of musical giants since, well, he’s in that pantheon. I’m not a big fan of his music, but The Nylon Curtain was, for me, the most impressive of his catalog. The sappy love songs were absent and the themes tackled were certainly a step up from what came before and after this album — and having several nods to the Beatles only added to the depth of this album. (more…)
May is the unofficial start of the summer concert season, so to unofficially celebrate the shows of 2009, Popdose.com and internet radio station The Penguin have teamed up for Penguimania 2009. Tune in each Wednesday at 9:00 EST for Radioshow With Dw. Dunphy to hear the live performance megamix in full. Then each week we’ll present a downloadable MP3 of a set from the “concert.”
Starting off this, the final set of Penguimania 2009, is King’s X with a breakout track from the Ear Candy album. “Mississippi Moon” features guitarist Ty Tabor on vocals.
From their eponymous “Island Album,” known as such as it was their sole release on the Island label, The 77’s tear through their original “Pearls Before Swine.” The live version was the first recording of the tune, and subsequent studio recordings were put to tape with the command, “Play it like you did live.”
Technically the last Pink Floyd song being it was the final track of The Division Bell, the last studio Floyd album (we can dispense with the Roger Waters/not Roger Waters argument on another day,) “High Hopes” represents the band at its most ornate and orchestral.
Recorded during the tour of his hugely popular album The Stranger, Billy Joel closes it all out with “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” in part a tribute to the Phil Spector/Ronettes pop sound.
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That’s it! Thanks for enjoying Penguimania 2009 and don’t forget: you can enjoy the entire mix over at The Penguin, Wednesday nights starting at 9:00 PM EST: find it at www.thepenguinrocks.com. Popdose and The Penguin wish you your best concert experiences this summer. I’ll be back next week when we return to Dw. Dunphy On…
Let me get this out in the open: I work in a dangerous place. No, I don’t work with nuclear materials, nor do I work at a restaurant where I train as a competitive eater on the side. Rather, I work in a place where earworm attacks happen, and, as of late, are happening more frequently. You see, I work at an Adult Contemporary radio station where some of the songs have an effect that I can’t seem to shake. Yes, some songs get trapped in my head and the lyrics, melody, and various hooks weave themselves into my cerebral cortex like those creatures did to Chekov and Captain Terrell in Star Trek II. Or as Khan so eloquently said about the worms of Ceti Alpha Five (but could easily been talking about the songs featured here): “You see, their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex. This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later, as they grow, follows madness — and death.”
Oh, little earworm, how you have tortured me! And now, dear readers, I pass along the love. (more…)
Let’s hop right into the music this week and stray all over the map within the borders of the letter J, looking at songs that charted no higher than #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the 1980s.
Garland Jeffreys had been putting out music since 1969 with little success, though he had a non-charting yet popular song in 1973 called “Wild in the Streets.” His 1980 album Escape Artist yielded “96 Tears”, his only charting song.
John “Jellybean” Benitez had three songs on the Hot 100, the most well known being ’85s “Sidewalk Talk” written by and featuring Madonna on the chorus. Jellybean’s solo career consisted of using other artists as vocalists and apparently on quite a few occasions, “using” should be in quotes. On the cover of the “Sidewalk Talk” single he made prominent mention of Madonna writing it though didn’t bother to credit the main female singer, Catherine Buchannan. He’s also sold the rights to some of his songs without the knowledge of the singer on the track, most famously with his track “Love’s Gonna Get You” which featured Jocelyn Brown singing “It’s getting kind of heavy” which would be the prominent line in Snap’s song, “The Power” in 1990. “The Real Thing” is the most generic of his three solo hits, this one featuring singer Steven Dante.
Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson
“Just to Satisfy You” — 1982, #52 (download)
Billed as Waylon & Willie on the single, this is a nice modern remake of a track Waylon released back in 1969 on his album of the same name. I’m no Willie Nelson fan, but I think this is one of his best in the decade.
Maybe it’s the fall, or the fact that I’m missing the fall, but every September my heart starts to feel the season change as if it were turning from blood red to golden orange and yellow, like the trees I recall from my youth.
During these months I can’t help but think of my close friend Bob. Ours is a friendship that’s grown into one of the tightest relationships I have. I was the best man in his first wedding, an honor I still hold close to my heart even though that relationship didn’t last. That wedding took place in late summer, 1991, just after I returned from my first California adventure. While I’m not an ardent Billy Joel fan, “And So It Goes” is a reminder of that time in his life, and it conjures images of Bob’s strength against the punches life threw at him when things fell apart.
Bob and I met during my freshman year at Bowling Green; he was the pledge trainer in my fraternity. Since it was the band fraternity, I didn’t take the organization too seriously; I was a cocky freshman who thought he was much better than those other band geeks. Thankfully, I learned what a fool I was, as the men in that fraternity became my best friends. Bob and I wound up living next to each other during my sophomore year; that was the point when things changed, and we began to turn to each other for advice, encouragement, and beer. Throughout the remainder of my college years, whenever Bob came to Bowling Green for a visit, he was sure to stop by our house and hang out, maybe even crash for the night.
In New York, baseball is akin to religion. To many New Yorkers, Billy Joel is, too. So it was no surprise when it was announced that Joel would play the last concert at the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium.
And so, the themes of the night were, of course, New York and baseball, and Joel delivered a surprisingly long stream of hits that referenced those very things – “New York State of Mind,” “Zanzibar,” “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” “Miami 2017″ and “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Many of the songs he played also seemed to contain indirect references, those to tradition, the past, or change, like “Allentown,” with its opening line, “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories down.” To really drive the whole baseball theme home, he opened with the National Anthem, and played “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” during his encore.
Joel’s facial expressions were somewhere between distraction, awe and stoicism, but in big screen close-ups, his eyes looked occasionally watery. He didn’t choose to slather the audience in overwhelming sentiment, however, only mentioning how strange it was that he saw the stadium being built only to watch it come down soon, and apologizing to those who bought tickets for the evening assuming that it would be the very last show (the Mets could only offer up Friday as the additional date, he said).
The “Last Play at Shea” — or “Last Double-Play at Shea,” as he jokingly referred to it — makes Joel the first artist to have headlined all three major New York stadiums: Giants’, Yankees’ & Mets. He also brings to a close a trend started by the Beatles, when they opened their ‘65 North American tour at Shea on August 15th; which he nodded to with covers of “It’s A Hard Day’s Night” and “She Loves Me.” That show was the first concert at a major stadium and broke records for attendance and profit, proving that rock ‘n’ roll was a major force. (more…)
These days baby boomers, especially women, are in something of a panic. Demographically, professionally, financially and sociologically, they’ve been dominating American culture for nearly half a century now, while succeeding generations have waited, often impatiently, for them to get the hell out of the way. This summer, however, boomers confront the reality that whether they look to the left or the right, neither candidate for the highest office in our land represents their generation. One guy is old enough to be their dad’s little brother; the other guy wasn’t even out of kindergarten when Martin and Bobby were killed. Should Obama win the presidency and hold it until Generation X is fully ascendant in the political realm, the boomers’ entire presidential legacy will likely rest on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
I note this fact not (merely) to rub the boomers’ presidential mediocrity in their faces, but because I’m so sick to death of celebrating political and entertainment milestones that perpetuate the boomers’ vision of themselves as the most culturally significant batch of malcontents ever to walk the planet. The most recent of these is among the most egregious: last week’s release of a “30th-Anniversary Edition” of Billy Joel’s breakthrough album The Stranger. The release is timed, no doubt, to coincide with Joel’s pair of sold-out shows this week at the soon-to-be-torn-down Shea Stadium, a facility that (like Joel himself) has been sitting fat and happy on Long Island for far too long. This coalescence of events resulted in a lengthy, at-times humorous profile of Joel in the New York Times yesterday – an article whose accompanying photograph by Damon Winter revealed the full measure of Joel’s advancing age, in a manner similar to Richard Avedon’s iconic image of a dying Humphrey Bogart.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have anything against The Stranger, or Joel in general, and a fresh digital remastering is almost always nice. But if The Stranger is going to be offered up as the latest boomer nostalgia trip, then let’s really think about its significance.
Jason Hare will be the first to tell you that “Just the Way You Are,” the album’s leadoff and biggest hit, is one of the touchstones of ’70s Mellow Gold; in retrospect, it stands in the memory with certain other artifacts of middle-class pop culture in 1978 – The Goodbye Girl, say, or perhaps Barry Manilow’s Even Now album – as anecdotal evidence of a generation starting to go soft. Meanwhile, “Vienna” reflects the boomers’ ’70s-era shift from changing the world to an “I’m OK, You’re OK” self-help mentality, and “The Stranger” (apart from sounding like a perfect theme song for Eyes of Laura Mars or Looking for Mr. Goodbar) seems to warn against the very emotional openness engendered by boomer trends from Flower Power to disco. (more…)
Have you ever felt like a song has the answer you’re looking for? That if you could just figure out what the person is really, truly singing about and saying, then you’d know what to do?
For the past couple crossroads in my life, “Vienna” has been that song.
Judging by Billy Joel’s personal life, it’s probably not the safest bet to assume that he’s got the answers to much of anything, but “Vienna” has a certain timelessness. It was released in the ’70s, but sounds like it could have come out yesterday. It tackles the questions that never really go away: questions about what we want and what we need, about getting older, about how we live our lives. But while it may be straight-forward, it’s also somewhat vague.
Slow down you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart tell me why
You are still so afraid?
But couldn’t slowing down be seen as being afraid, too? It all depends on what we’re talking about here.
But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
In a song about the values of slowing down, this seems to contradict his point. It sounds like he’s saying that you can work hard to get what you want or relax and just get old. If he’s advocating the latter, this is hardly convincing. Or, is this a criticism of the former, pointing out that even if you work hard to get what you want, you’ll still get old, just like everyone else? But we’re all going to get old, anyway, so isn’t it better to get what you want in the process? Then there’s that “you know” to contend with. Is this the way the subject of the song thinks, and he’s criticizing this way of thinking? (more…)
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
John “Jellybean” Benitez had three songs on the Hot 100, the most well known being ’85s “Sidewalk Talk” written by and featuring Madonna on the chorus. Jellybean’s solo career consisted of using other artists as vocalists and apparently on quite a few occasions, “using” should be in quotes. On the cover of the “Sidewalk Talk” single he made prominent mention of Madonna writing it though didn’t bother to credit the main female singer, Catherine Buchannan. He’s also sold the rights to some of his songs without the knowledge of the singer on the track, most famously with his track “Love’s Gonna Get You” which featured Jocelyn Brown singing “It’s getting kind of heavy” which would be the prominent line in Snap’s song, “The Power” in 1990. “The Real Thing” is the most generic of his three solo hits, this one featuring singer Steven Dante.
Maybe it’s the fall, or the fact that I’m missing the fall, but every September my heart starts to feel the season change as if it were turning from blood red to golden orange and yellow, like the trees I recall from my youth.
These days baby boomers, especially women, are in something of a panic. Demographically, professionally, financially and sociologically, they’ve been dominating American culture for nearly half a century now, while succeeding generations have waited, often impatiently, for them to get the hell out of the way. This summer, however, boomers confront the reality that whether they look to the left or the right, neither candidate for the highest office in our land represents their generation. One guy is old enough to be their dad’s little brother; the other guy wasn’t even out of kindergarten when Martin and Bobby were killed. Should Obama win the presidency and hold it until Generation X is fully ascendant in the political realm, the boomers’ entire presidential legacy will likely rest on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have anything against The Stranger, or Joel in general, and a fresh digital remastering is almost always nice. But if The Stranger is going to be offered up as the latest boomer nostalgia trip, then let’s really think about its significance.
