When the 2007 live action-animation hybrid movie of Alvin and the Chipmunks made $60 million in its opening weekend, it took people by surprise. Hadn’t the besweatered musical trio outstayed its welcome by just a few decades? Who on earth still thought there was life in this quaint Baby Boom-era novelty act? Whoever it was, I bet he or she got a huge bonus and a promotion. They also have my undying gratitude for creating yet another Chipmunks-related cultural product. I’m not quite a completist – that would be quite an ambition, considering that the “group” has released nearly forty studio albums! (Yes, you read that right.) But I have maintained a fierce affection for the ’Munks over a period of many years, in defiance of the ever-increasing cynicism of kids’ entertainment.
Some folks like the Chipmunks – yes, besides me – because they think the little guys (that’s Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, for those of you living under a rock) are cute. Others find their animated shenanigans amusing. I confess that the corny humor of their kiddie-fied, punny songs (for example, in a Rick Springfield cover, they sing, “Jesse’s got himself a squirrel and I wanna make her mine”) makes me cackle. However, I became a CFL (Chipmunks Fan for Life – I just made that up) for the same reason one becomes attached to any other musical act: I like their music. For whatever reason, I actually like how pop, rock and country-western tunes sound when performed by adult humans and sped up to sound like what someone imagined oversized singing rodents would sound like. In a possibly related note, I also consider Fran Drescher’s nasal, accented voice charming. I was originally drawn in by the premise – the image of Alvin dressed à la John Travolta on the cover of the Urban Chipmunk album struck me as hilarious at age nine – but I stayed for the love of the music itself. Trust me, once you’ve heard those smooth, high-pitched harmonies on numbers like “Bette Davis Eyes,” “My Sharona” and “Arthur’s Theme,” your perspective on the recording arts is forever altered. (more…)
For me, 1981 was a real musical watershed. I was a sophomore in high school, and through a series of events, it was also a year where I attended three high schools. “School One” was a rocker school where FM AOR radio ruled. “School Two” was a rocker school as well, but it also trended toward the more soulful sounds of the S.o.S Band, Prince, the Time, and Rick James. “School Three” was more interesting. In addition to rock and soul, new wave was surfacing in a way that made the rockers uneasy, and the soul lovers shrug with indifference — except when that ’80s dance started to dominate the dance floor. You know the one. It’s that aerobic workout/ kicking dance thing Molly Ringwald was rockin’ in The Breakfast Club a few years later. That dance gave rise to many o’ chuckles from the soul crowd at the dances I went to. Me? I was a rocker first, and then switched sides and became a big fan of new wavy sounds that will be featured next week.
But first, let’s go back to a time when, yes, the bands represented below were really popular with the stoners. However, not all who loved this music wore army jackets and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot next to the school before class. (more…)
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”)
I didn’t think anyone could be a more perfect candidate for this series than Dan Fogelberg, but I was wrong. This, folks, is a band that shouldn’t have new music. Hell, even the last Foreigner album was a record out of time and space, and that came out in 1995. By now, these guys should be collecting buffet passes for America’s finer casinos and playing “Hot Blooded” twice a night for politely appreciative crowds of Camaro owners and shut-ins. Maybe a stray new track or two on the compilations that dribble out once or twice a decade, sure…but an entire album of new Foreigner songs? They’re kidding, right?
But wait. Back up a minute, because that ‘95 Foreigner record — it was called Mr. Moonlight, stop laughing — was actually really good. And so, God help me, is Can’t Slow Down, the two-CD, one-DVD recession-busting value package that the current version of the band is peddling through a Walmart exclusive.
Let me be clear. I listened to, and loved, more than my fair share of ’80s AOR; if there was a rocker attempting a desperate late-career comeback during the decade, I was there, plunking my money down on the counter at the record store to own the undignified flailings of everyone from Chicago to Heart to Bad Company. I’ve never had any special affection for Foreigner, though; by the time I started collecting music, they were polluting the airwaves with “I Want to Know What Love Is,” which was followed by the even shittier “I Don’t Want to Live Without You” — and the less said about 1991’s Lou Gramm-less Unusual Heat, the better. Many a rock band has crumbled under the weight of platinum records, but Foreigner was unique — no sooner did they achieve mainstream success than Gramm and Jones were at each other’s throats, splitting and reuniting twice after 1990, destroying in the process not only Gramm’s burgeoning solo career, but Foreigner’s too. Of course, they would have been wiped off the map when grunge slouched onto the scene in the early ’90s, but they should have at least been intact, instead of dissolving from one of Atlantic’s crown jewels into a motley crew of hired hands tagging along with Jones on a series of progressively sadder tours. (more…)
“It’s always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.” — Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape)
I dislike Rob Sheffield for many reasons—his writing comes off as pompous, hipper-than-thou snark (and that’s just for the stuff he likes); his greasy, perpetual grad student look smacks so obviously of affectation; his voice on those VH1 shows sounds like he’s gargling bathwater with a tampon shoved up each nostril; and he made music writing safe for a whole army of people just like him (read Spin lately?). I also dislike him out of insane jealousy; in spite of all the above, he wrote one of the most moving books about music and music fans I’ve ever read. The bastard done really good. Go to Amazon now and purchase a copy, or borrow one from your local library, that most wonderful of socialist institutions.
A song I’d relegated to the leaky, cobwebby space in the back of my mind recently came to find me. I’d been in the mood to listen to some vinyl, and one of the hundred or so LPs I had standing at attention on a shelf in my living was Foreigner’s 1987 album Inside Information. Immediately, I knew which song I would drop the needle on first; I flipped the thing over to Side Two, and let my trusty old turntable do its thing. (more…)
This week, I’m taking a cue from Popdose’s own Uncle Donnie (and not from my cousin Donnie, thank you very much) to offer up a little pre-emptive career advice. It was made known recently that Kiss would be releasing a three-disc, brand new album soon, it would be an exclusive to WalMart, and it should have the Lazarus-like qualities found in Journey’s last album, Revelations. Oh, I had something to say about it, but only after its release, as one of the curious benefits of being a WalMart exclusive is that you don’t have to market your band to the critics – meaning you critics are probably not getting promotional copies with which to skewer the provider. You’ll buy your review copy like everybody else.
What does all this have to do with Mick Jones? Well, aside from the fact that the Clash’s Mick Jones gets all the love while Foreigner’s Mick Jones has to keep reminding folks he’s not the Clash’s Mick Jones, Kiss just pooped on his band’s parade ground, for only a week or so prior to Kiss’ announcement for the upcoming Sonic Boom, Jones was lightly basking in the pale, lukewarm glow of his band’s own impending WalMart release, Can’t Slow Down. He has a few handicaps already doing the exact opposite of his CD’s title. First of all, Lou Gramm is not the vocalist on the album. Since his conversion to Christianity, his bouts with cancer and the plain old truth that he doesn’t sound much like Lou Gramm anymore, Foreigner has necessarily had to employ the services of former Hurricane vocalist Kelly Hansen. I refuse to take shots at this situation because, for all I know, Hansen might be a great addition. I’ve never heard him sing, so he’s getting a pass. However, he’s not the only addition to the group. Mick Jones is the sole original member of Foreigner now. But these things happen to bands after 30 or so years. At any rate, this new album was getting a fair amount of write-up on the rock blogs and such until, whap, Gene Simmons went and barfed Karo syrup and red dye #5 all over Can’t Slow Down. Those same blogs are now inundated with Kiss blurbs on a daily basis. (more…)
We, at the site, really do strive to bring the coolest stuff possible to the readers and I think you’d agree our commitment pays off. But sometimes things float through our transom that don’t make it to the site for one reason or another. Such was the case when your own, your very own Dirk McQuickly Jason Hare e-mailed some links to the staff. A friend of his transferred old cassettes recorded from radio broadcasts in the ’80s, complete with commercials, DJ banter and other ephemera, to MP3. Nerdlet that I am, I downloaded as many as I could and reveled in a little regressive therapy at maximum volume.
Then I recalled, “Wait a minute. I’m a notorious packrat! I might have a few tapes of my own!” I did, in fact. Recordings of the fabled WPLJ from 1980s New York actually existed in a tape box that had an inch of dust congealed atop it. I thought this would be a very cool addition to our little Internet menagerie, and it would have been – were it not for the fact I only bought the cheapest, crappy blanks back then.
Yes, friends, the tapes had stretched, warped, some even seized up into circular spools of utter uselessness, but all were rendered ruined by time. But that doesn’t stop a man on a mission, now does it? I decided to build the playlist back from the ground up, based on the information on the J-card. Also, this one particular tape was playable but it sounded horrible, warbly, drifting in azimuth alignment so that sound meandered from fuzzy and muddy to irritatingly sharp. (more…)
It’s amazing, the things a guy can learn even at my advanced age. The real treat for me, in slapping together this (too)-long-running series – which already has examined hits from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s that ran out of gas just one block short of the Texaco – has been the opportunity to put into context some of the music-geek trivia that’s been crowding out more important information in my head for the last 30 years.
I’m embarrassed to say I was able to sit down at my laptop and reel off the names of about three dozen #2 hits from the grand and glorious ’80s without even cracking open my ever-present Joel Whitburn or Fred Bronson singles bibles. (The fact that I could do that, but can’t tie a Windsor knot, may explain why my career on Wall Street never took off. It also made narrowing down to 10 songs for this list a painful experience.) But it’s one thing to keep song titles and chart placements in your memory; it’s another to marvel at the tricks of fate, poor taste, or record-biz manipulation that launch one single over another on the way to Top 40 glory. Take this first juxtaposition, for example:
11. “Hazy Shade of Winter,” the Bangles. Here’s the hit that slaps some sense into those who mistake the Bangles for a novelty act, or stubbornly cling to the notion that Susanna, Vicki, Debbi and Michael didn’t really rock. They took a 20-year-old, twee-as-all-get-out Simon & Garfunkel tune and turned it into a fuzz-guitar anthem of ’80s excess, the perfect theme for what should have been a much better movie based on Bret Easton Ellis’ Hollywood-druggies novel Less than Zero. (Funny how the movie biz managed to mangle both Ellis’ book and Jay McInerney’s New York equivalent, Bright Lights, Big City. Of course, casting pretty boys Andrew McCarthy and Michael J. Fox as jaded protagonists didn’t help.) Anyway, how were the Bangles rewarded for their maturity and brilliance in transforming “Hazy Shade of Winter”? They were left in the dust by the god-awful ballad “Could’ve Been,” which might have been less terrible had it not been butchered by that caterwauling, flavor-of-the-month, shopping-mall princess Tiffany. A slightly interesting fact about “Could’ve Been”: Its composer, Lois Blaisch, was “discovered” while singing for her supper at a recently-shuttered restaurant a few miles from my house, called the Hungry Hunter. I knew there had to be a reason why I never considered going into that place … besides, of course, the goofiness of its name, particularly considering that it sat in the middle of a SoCal strip mall… (more…)
So I had a great idea. An entire post about fake rock bands — groups made up for your cinematic pleasure that, in spite of not actually being real bands, managed to put out a couple decent tunes for the soundtrack. The definitions of real and fake in this super-sub-category are wishy-washy. Some of these actors actually play their music, others don’t and are lip-synching to studio performers. Some of the groups represented are meant as serious depictions, while others are strictly satirical. Some aren’t getting represented at all here (inferring that if the key member of the band is named something like Mark or Marky, your crappy movie didn’t make the cut.) Yes, a great idea, and an original idea! No one on the Internet has dared to do anything like this, not even my colleague Jon Cummings on this very site!
Nuts. Ah, ta’ hell with it — let’s keep going.
If we’re starting with the obvious, then we’re obviously starting with Spinal Tap, the metal band consisting of David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean,) Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer.) In the now ubiquitous mockumentary, the actors actually recorded their own tunes, which is a rarity. Then again, the songs weren’t meant to be taken all that seriously, but to be the foil for generational musical satire. Ranging from hippy-dippy psyche-folk with “Listen to the Flower People,” to Yardbirdsian skiffle rock with “Gimme Some Money” all the way to the heavy-handed metal misogyny of “Big Bottom,” the point was part comedy, part tribute, and all listenable. Still,This Is Spinal Tap was meant to be a joke. (A point of irony — “Gimme Some Money” was actually used in an American Express commercial, before the credit market was revealed to be as bogus as some of these bands…)
That was until, in the 1990s, the band returned with a ‘for real’ album in Break Like the Wind. Sure, there was plenty of help from special guest musicians like Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriani and Slash, but it was still Tap at its core, and still satirical. It would be hard to hear “The Sun Never Sweats” in any other context. Now, in good old 2009, news of a proposed third Tap CD is making the rounds. Harry Shearer told BBC News it is a probability, naming a proposed track: “Gimme Some More Money.” I can’t wait. (more…)
If you’ve been dreading the return of this column ever since Popdose ended its holiday hiatus, then allow me to tell you who you have to blame for my decision to come out of hiding: the one and only Dw. Dunphy. There had been precious little in the way of concern about the absence of “Hooks ‘N’ You” from the Popdose landscape, and fair enough to that, given how much fantastic stuff is already filling the site on a daily basis, but Mr. Dunphy called me out on Facebook for the column’s absence, and I felt obliged to rise to the challenge and prove that, yes, I’m still around. And what better way to prove this than by spotlighting the soundtrack to a film with a title that handily describes my ongoing level of sanity?
There are plenty of great rock-themed flicks out there, and, indeed, many of them have some phenomenal soundtracks to accompany them. I have found, however, that not nearly enough fans of this genre are aware of “Still Crazy.” The film chronicles a ’70s stadium rock band called Strange Fruit, which ended its existence rather badly after first suffering through the unexpected death of their original lead singer and then replacing him, only to have their stage set-up struck by lightning during the 1977 Wisbech Rock Festival, an event which led to the break-up of the group. In 1998, the Fruits – as they are prone to call themselves – attempt to perform a resurrection of sorts and not only bring the band back together but rewrite history and be remembered for their music rather than their misfortunes.
It’s a blending of bits and pieces from several real-life tales, but “Still Crazy” is also a film that achieves a remarkable degree of realism in the way it portrays the majority of the former band members not as a bunch of guys living posh off their royalties but, rather, real people who have spent the interim years since their original success having to struggle to make ends meet. Plus, it has a great cast, including Bill Nighy, Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall, Hans Matheson, Stephen Rea, and Juliet Aubrey, currently best known as the villainous Helen Cutter on BBC America’s “Primeval.” Most importantly, though, it’s full of more musical references than you can shake a stick at. My personal favorite has always been when Connolly’s character, Strange Fruit’s longtime roadie, drives up in the band’s new tour bus and boasts that it offers “tinted windows, air conditioning, and twin portaloos, not to mention an extensive library of pornography, courtesy of the Psychedelic Furs!”
Given this information, it will likely not surprise you that is a film very much beloved by quite a few musicians, including the members of the Fratellis, who not only named their first album after Stephen Rea’s character, Tony Costello, but, indeed, made time during the acceptance of their award for British Breakthrough Act at the 2007 BRIT Awards to thank the members of Strange Fruit. Furthermore, those who have seen and fallen in love with “Still Crazy” are almost certain to run out and purchase its soundtrack…and this is where we transition from talking about an unheralded film to discussing an unheralded album.
![alvinandthechipmunks2_m[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/alvinandthechipmunks2_m1.jpg "alvinandthechipmunks2_m[1]")
When the 2007 live action-animation hybrid movie of Alvin and the Chipmunks made $60 million in its opening weekend, it took people by surprise. Hadn’t the besweatered musical trio outstayed its welcome by just a few decades? Who on earth still thought there was life in this quaint Baby Boom-era novelty act? Whoever it was, I bet he or she got a huge bonus and a promotion. They also have my undying gratitude for creating yet another Chipmunks-related cultural product. I’m not quite a completist – that would be quite an ambition, considering that the “group” has released nearly forty studio albums! (Yes, you read that right.) But I have maintained a fierce affection for the ’Munks over a period of many years, in defiance of the ever-increasing cynicism of kids’ entertainment.
“It’s always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.”
It’s amazing, the things a guy can learn even at my advanced age. The real treat for me, in slapping together this (too)-long-running series – which already has examined hits from the 
So I had a great idea. An entire post about fake rock bands — groups made up for your cinematic pleasure that, in spite of not actually being real bands, managed to put out a couple decent tunes for the soundtrack. The definitions of real and fake in this super-sub-category are wishy-washy. Some of these actors actually play their music, others don’t and are lip-synching to studio performers. Some of the groups represented are meant as serious depictions, while others are strictly satirical. Some aren’t getting represented at all here (inferring that if the key member of the band is named something like 
, your crappy movie didn’t make the cut.) Yes, a great idea, and an original idea! No one on the Internet has dared to do anything like this, not even my colleague 
If we’re starting with the obvious, then we’re obviously starting with Spinal Tap, the metal band consisting of David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean,) Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer.) In the now ubiquitous mockumentary, the actors actually recorded their own tunes, which is a rarity. Then again, the songs weren’t meant to be taken all that seriously, but to be the foil for generational musical satire. Ranging from hippy-dippy psyche-folk with “Listen to the Flower People,” to Yardbirdsian skiffle rock with “
was meant to be a joke. (A point of irony — “Gimme Some Money” was actually used in an American Express commercial, before the credit market was revealed to be as bogus as some of these bands…)
. Sure, there was plenty of help from special guest musicians like Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriani and Slash, but it was still Tap at its core, and still satirical. It would be hard to hear “
