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.
Welcome back, everyone, to yet another latest edition of CHART ATTACK! As you know, we take the good charts with the bad charts ’round here. Two weeks ago, we covered a pretty stellar week from 1980. This week? Well, while we have some strong tunes this week, there are also some clunkers, too. Check ‘em out as we attack October 19, 1991!
10. Love…Thy Will Be Done — Martika 9. Can’t Stop This Thing We Started — Bryan Adams 8. Everybody Plays the Fool — Aaron Neville 7. I Adore Mi Amor — Color Me Badd 6. Good Vibrations — Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch Featuring Loleatta Holloway 5. Something to Talk About — Bonnie Raitt 4. Hole Hearted — Extreme 3. Romantic — Karyn White 2. Do Anything — Natural Selection Featuring Niki Haris 1. Emotions — Mariah Carey
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t remember this song — I know I don’t have no recollection of ever hearing it on the radio. “Toy Soldiers” might be the only song you remember of Martika’s (perhaps helped by Eminem’s sample of it in his 2005 song “Like Toy Soliders”), but she also reached #18 with “More Than You Know” and #25 with her cover of “I Feel the Earth Move,” in addition to peaking here at #10 with this song. You’ll also be forgiven if you knew this song but had no clue it was actually sung by Martika, since she sounds nothing like she did on “Toy Soldiers.” No, she sounds like she’s been taken hostage and forced to sing this song exactly the way someone else wants her to sing it…wait a minute, this song was written by Prince! Story checks out!
So yes, it’s true — for a brief, shining moment, Martika was a Prince Girl, which I think is something like being a Bond Girl but with a lot more patchouli. And she does a fine job with this song, although anybody really could’ve sung it; in fact,parts of her vocal are reminiscent of the Prince/Madonna “Love Song” duet from Like a Prayer. Musically, the song itself is a bore — the bass and drums are static throughout — but somehow ends up being oddly compelling. Prince created his own mix of the song (available on Martika’s greatest hits collection, which I double-dog dare you to buy), and he’s performed it live himself, too — our buddy (and diehard Prince fan) Pete from Ickmusic has gifted us with this version from 3/8/95, live from The Astoria in London. It’s just drums and bass until the three-and-a-half minute mark, but after that, we get a pretty good vocal from Prince. I’d say I prefer Martika’s original, but still, it’s pretty cool to have. Thanks, Pete!
Curious what Tika’s up to these days? Well, she hasn’t released an album as “Martika” since this one, 1991’s Martika’s Kitchen, but she’s released two albums with her husband, Michael Mozart (I don’t know if that’s his real name, and I don’t care) as part if the group Oppera. And more recently, she’s going by the stage name Vita Edit and starring as “Lolly Pop” in a web series entitled j8ded. Mozart is in it too, billed as Michael Daemon. Martika, how the hell did you wind up being stranger than Prince?
By the way, don’t be surprised if this song is in your head all day. I keep singing it to myself, but I replace the word “love” with random one-syllable words, like “scones” and “balls.” (more…)
At first, on paper, this week didn’t seem like much. But as I was writing it up, I found myself groovin’ pretty hard to the tracks — it sneaks up on you just a bit, but is thoroughly enjoyable. See if you agree as we take a look at another set of songs that charted below #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the 1980s.
Eddie Rabbitt
“Gone Too Far” — 1980, #82 (download)
“You Can’t Run From Love” — 1983, #55 (download)
“You Put the Beat in My Heart” — 1983, #81 (download)
I know many of you have had your memory jogged by something in this series and I’m happy that same thing happens for me every now and then as well. I’ve often said how my mother had some 45s, but I only remember a few of them, and then I hit another artist in the series that completely takes me back to the ‘80s and my mom’s 45 crate. Eddie Rabbitt is one of those artists. My God, how could I forget the constant spinning of “I Love a Rainy Night” — almost a perfect pop song? I remember the red Elektra label spinning on that record player with the bright yellow adapter you had to put in the hole of the record just perfectly so it would fit snugly on the player. There’s a nice vivid picture of me sitting on my grandparents’ floor listening to this over and over in my head right now and I usually don’t remember anything. See, this is what music does to me. So thank you, Eddie Rabbitt. Unfortunately, none of these three songs even come close to “Rainy Night.”
Gerry Rafferty
“The Royal Mile (Sweet Darlin’)” — 1980, #54 (download)
This is a strange week for me, as I also have vivid memories associated with Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 hit “Right Down the Line” is another brilliant pop record that my mother spun with me. In fact, I’d almost bet many times it was directly before or after “I Love a Rainy Night.” And I don’t know if it’s because it’s in every dollar bin or from my mom, but the cover to his album City to City sticks in my mind as well. I don’t however ever remember hearing “The Royal Mile”; I think my mom was pretty broke raising me, so she didn’t have the money for too much music, so maybe this never made its way into my house. Shame too, because I’m diggin’ it a lot right now.
Two years ago, when I was working on this column’s debut, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s “Book of Dreams” and what the song means to Julie and me. During the first month of our courtship I created my first mixtape for her, entitled HEY, HEY, JULIE! On that tape was the Springsteen song, one that’s grown to have profound meaning in our relationship.
We began dating in August of 1992, and soon thereafter, I threw this tape together in a flurry of inspiration, wanting to give Julie something that came from my heart. I don’t recall the actual minutes spent in my parents’ basement picking the songs or laying them down on a Maxell cassette (my brand of choice), but looking back on the list of songs, I’m happy to see they still add up to 90 quailty minutes of music.
Before Nick Hornby wonderfully wrote about what makes a good mixtape in High Fidelity, I assembled exactly the right combination of hip, well known and somewhat obscure songs from my small music collection. Combining big hits like “Learning to Fly,” “What I Am,” and “All This Time” with lesser-known songs by popular artists such as “Until the End of the World,” “Shining Star,” and “Getting to Know You,” while tossing in some hard to find (at the time) songs like “Baby Mine” and “Wild Night” made this tape eclectic, but still enjoyable to listen to and quite accessible. (more…)
I distinctly recall the first time I heard Maia Sharp sing. It was the summer of 1997, and I was driving down a steep hill in Steelton, PA, on the way to the regular Tuesday night acoustic gig my buddy Jim and I did at the late, great Flight Deck in Middletown. I was thinking about the night’s set when a voice came through my radio (tuned to WXPN), telling a fugitive tale:
I left the town that was my future
To ride along with you
You said, “I’m going to California”
So I was going to California, too
You get a thrill from causing trouble
Life has offered nothing more
So we kept it to the back roads
Looking for an easy score
I need this to be love
The lyrics, as I could make them out then, were immediately compelling, but even more compelling was the voice—definitely female, but with a character that I, to this day, have trouble describing to people. I wind up explaining it away as a thickness, a sense of density, something with weight and sexiness and beauty. The song, “I Need This to be Love,” kicked off her self-titled debut album, one of my favorite records of that year, and one I return to regularly. (more…)
“I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.” —Walt Whitman
With the All-Star Game right around the corner, I suggested to Kelly Stitzel that she feature Bull Durham for this week’s Soundtrack Saturday. I was shocked — shocked, I tell ya! — to find out she’s never seen writer-director Ron Shelton’s 1988 summer hit, one of the best sports movies of all time, if not the best movie about baseball. It’s also one of the finest romantic comedies of the past 25 years.
First-time director Shelton drew from his own experiences as a minor-league ball player for Bull Durham’s screenplay, and he was blessed with a stellar cast that brought his richly drawn characters to life. It’s a movie full of smart dialogue and character-based comedy that celebrates the lunacy, hijinks, and joy of America’s two favorite pastimes — baseball and sex.
Susan Sarandon, radiant as ever, flew on her own dime from Italy to audition and win the role of Annie Savoy, a part-time teacher in Durham, North Carolina. Annie dedicates each summer of her life to tutoring a player on the Durham Bulls, the local minor-league team, that she believes has the best potential to get a call up to the majors. However, Annie isn’t interested in improving the players’ reading and writing. And she isn’t a coach, although she knows as much about baseball as any manager. No, she’s more of a spiritual and sexual adviser: “You know how to make love, then you’ll know how to pitch.” She reads Walt Whitman to her lover-players and puts on Edith Piaf records in the hopes of making them well-rounded human beings and therefore better ball players. At the top of the film she chooses as her new student Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, the Bulls’ latest gifted pitcher, who has a million-dollar arm but a five-cent head on his shoulders.
The role of Nuke went to Tim Robbins in a career-breakthrough performance. Shelton had to fight to get Robbins cast in the part; up to that point he’d been in Howard the Duck, an infamous flop, and mostly blink-and-you-missed-him bit parts (raise your hand if you recall him in Top Gun). In addition to his lack of experience onscreen, executives at Orion Pictures felt that a woman as classy as Sarandon would never fall for a guy like Robbins. Luckily, Shelton prevailed, and the two actors not only worked wonderfully on the set but fell in love and remain a devoted couple to this day. Shows you how smart those movie execs can be.
If you’ve ever ventured into that thicket of sweetness and stress known as Planning A Wedding, you’ve probably at least considered buying one (or five) of those awful compilations of “wedding music.” They come in all sorts of flavors – classical, country, Contemporary Christian, pop standards, classic R&B – and they’ve got icky titles like A Day to Remember, or Songs That Say “I Love You.” They tend to feature a lot of the same songs, like “Always and Forever,” and “Three Times a Lady,” and “Wonderful Tonight,” and Pachelbel’s Canon, and “The Way You Look Tonight,” and that horrible Boyz II Men song “On Bended Knee.” And, just like the Book of Common Prayer, they’re all diabolically designed to make your nuptials sound just like everybody else’s.
My wife Gwen and I wed 15 years ago today, and to celebrate that occasion – along with the onset of the June wedding season – I thought I’d give Popdose’s loyal readers an anniversary present: a mixtape of wedding songs and stories from some of our columnists, and an opportunity to share your own remembrances and ideas in the comments. These songs aren’t your garden-variety bridal standards; in fact, a few of them are downright bizarre. But even if you don’t find them suitable for your own purposes the next time you get hitched, hopefully they’ll inspire you and your betrothed to follow your own muse, and not some music conglomerate’s. Click here for a compressed file of all the tracks featured here, and read on! (more…)
I’m not much of a believer in band reunions — they seldom result in any output that actually improves the band’s legacy, and often have just the opposite effect. Still, I was thrilled recently when rumors of a Faces reunion were all over the Internet. First of all, the Faces were always one of my favorite bands; second, despite the presence of future superstars Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, they never really got the shot that they deserved. Of course, a lot of that was of their own mischievous making. In many ways the world has come to see the Faces as the perennial scrappy underdogs.
Most of the Faces have gone on to solo careers, to one degree of success or another. Beloved bassist and songwriter Ronnie Lane died in 1997. None of them have been able to recreate the special vibe that a Faces album had, though; it was some sort of magic blend of carefree rock and roll, and cry in your beer pathos.
Faces (and Small Faces) keyboard player Ian McLagan became something of a journeyman, making brilliant contributions to records and tours by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, and many, many others. He is one of the most respected and revered musicians in the world by his colleagues and his fans. He moved to Austin in 1994, where he formed the Bump Band, which includes bassist Mark Andes (Spirit, Jo Jo Gunne, Canned Heat, Heart), drummer Don Harvey (Martha Davis, Joe Ely, Charlie Sexton), and Joe Newcomb (Ray Wylie Hubbard, the Resentments, Beaver Nelson). The band released “Extra Live” in 2006.
On August 2, 2006, McLagan suffered a loss that would change his life substantially. His wife Kim was killed in a car accident near Austin. She was 57 years-old, and they had been married for 28 years. Kim had previously been married to Who drummer Keith Moon. McLagan hasn’t stopped playing though, far from it, and now he’s back with Never Say Never (00:02:59), a solo album by a former Faces member that finally captures the magic of the legendary band. (more…)
My father was admitted into the hospital this week complaining of chest pains; because he’d had bypass surgery in 1992, the doctors were very concerned about the condition of his heart.Let me tell you that as a 71-year-old man, he’s a strong and stubborn as he was when I was growing up.My updates came from my mother, who called me from her cell phone, and in her voice was the same tension and impatience she’s always had with doctors; years of nursing experience will do that to you.My parents have been married for 46 years and as they get older I’ve come to appreciate the tough times they endured, and how strong their love is. I didn’t always think that way.It wasn’t until my father’s heart surgery in ’92 that I really saw how much they do care for each other.
Looking at their relationship, I can’t help but think about my own marriage to Julie.I hope that when Sophie and Jacob reflect on their childhood, they’ll have good recollections of how much their dad loved their mom.Julie and I laugh and kid each other, we’re always hugging and kissing, and we are always there to comfort one another during the troubling times.At times I shake my head when I pause to think about the 15 years we’ve been married.That number seems like a long time, and yet it’s flitted by as a feather in the wind.Like a feather, there have been moments when we’re very high and the joy of life carries us along — and then there are those days when the wind has calmed and the feather lays on the ground, waiting for something to come along and carry us onward.
Music has always been a way in which we’ve bonded.We share our musical tastes and turn one another on to artists and sounds that we might not have otherwise listened to.I forced Springsteen upon her (she’s a big fan now, just ask her) and she brought into my world many beautiful female singers such as Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin and Bonnie Raitt.More recently, she has fallen in love with the music of Brandi Carlile.Okay, maybe not all of her music, but one song, “Tragedy,” which was featured in a heartbreaking episode of Grey’s Anatomy a couple of seasons ago.On this song Carlile sings like an open wound, so sad and passionate; it’s chilling.I sought out more of Carlile’s music and came across her 2007 album, The Story.It’s a CD of bluesy, polished rock that bears the rootsy trademark of its producer, T-Bone Burnett.Among the songs, the title track immediately spoke to me on musical and emotional levels. (more…)
October 30, 2002 – It was close to the end when Warren Zevon made what everyone knew would be his final appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. The cancer had already taken a tremendous toll on him, and every small movement was an effort. Letterman loved Warren’s music, and had supported his career for years. I like to think that it was because Dave recognized that Warren was willing to cross a line that Dave could only approach before retreating. During the Q & A that night, Dave asked Warren what the one thing was that he wanted people to know. The dying songwriter famously replied, “enjoy every sandwich.” Less than a year later, he was gone.
Warren left us with a beautiful farewell album that he called The Wind, and he laid out his final wishes on the emotional closing track:
Shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath
Keep me in your heart for awhile
If I leave you that doesn’t mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile
And so we have kept him in our hearts over these last five years. For many of us, hardly a day goes by that Warren doesn’t remain a presence. When his sandwich metaphor is applied to his music, Warren made sure that we would enjoy every sandwich. It’s not just about his music though, any more than our memories of Hunter S. Thompson, surely a kindred spirit to Warren, are just about his writing. In their too-short lives, both men managed to find a freedom that few of us will ever know. (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.
Eddie Rabbitt
Two years ago, when I was working on this column’s debut, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s 
Maia Sharp, Echo (2009, Crooked Crown Records)
My father was admitted into the hospital this week complaining of chest pains; because he’d had bypass surgery in 1992, the doctors were very concerned about the condition of his heart.
