One of my favorite Popdose experiences to date came in the wake of Part 9 in our colleague Dave Steed’s wonderful “Bottom Feeders” series. He had identified his first CD purchase, and dozens of his readers spontaneously took the opportunity to share their firsts — CDs, LPs, singles, MP3s, etc. In a shameless attempt to replicate the Kumbaya togetherness of that key moment in Popdose history, I’m launching an occasional series inviting readers to share your experiences as fans, haters, critics and/or ignorers of some of the greatest acts in rock history.

The rules will be simple. Every few weeks I’ll choose an act, offer up a story about a particular song that has affected me, and then open up the request lines for you to talk about a song by the same act that has affected you, positively or negatively. (If you’d like to suggest an act for a future column and offer your own story – in essence, to take over the column for a week – please write me at jon.) I’m counting on you all; if you don’t play along, I’ll kill the column and I’ll be very, very disappointed in you.

Starting things off with an easy one, this week’s artist is U2, the song (for me) is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and here’s my story:

On March 9, 1987, I was a senior at Northwestern relaxing through the “study period” preceding winter-quarter exam week. I’d slept in that morning, and was walking into town (that’s Evanston, IL, for the uninitiated) just before lunchtime for my Tuesday ritual of checking out the new album releases at Vintage Vinyl. I had just descended the steps in front of Northwestern’s somewhat-famed clock tower when a black, late-model sports car pulled up in front of me and the driver yelled, “Cumshot!”

Now, only one guy had the Bush-ian temerity to nickname me “Cumshot,” or “Cumquat,” or “Cummilingous,” or choose your favorite: my friend/rival John Heilemann. John usually, but not always, got the better of me in our continual attempts to one-up each other as budding journalists, but he and I shared a giddy devotion to riding the crest of the pop-culture zeitgeist. So I walked up to the passenger window and Heilemann simply said, “Get in. I got it.”

“It,” of course, was The Joshua Tree, and Heilemann had gotten to the store first (bastard!). (more…)

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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…)

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sit•com n. Informal
A situation comedy; a television comedy series involving a group of regular characters in everyday situations, often set in the home and/or workplace

For three seasons, Weeds was the very model of a modern pay-cable sitcom. Set in the fictional, cookie-cutter L.A. suburb Agrestic, it centered on widowed housewife-turned-pot dealer Nancy Botwin (played by goddess of stage and screen Mary Louise Parker) and her expansive circle of friends, family and…um…business associates, from her best customer Doug (Kevin Nealon) to her ambitious supplier/grower Conrad (Romany Malco). Neatly balancing Nancy’s dual roles as suburban soccer mom and dabbler in the seedy (no pun intended) world of illicit substances, Weeds was hilarious, sexy, sometimes even moving, and always good for a contact high. It also was (seemingly) confident in the one element that must, by definition, ground any situation comedy: its situation.

Beginning with last fall’s Season-Three closer, however, Weeds has audaciously – and, so far at least, disastrously – loosed itself from its sitcom moorings. Creator Jenji Kohan didn’t just shift the show’s setting; she burned the motherfucker down, destroying all of Agrestic’s “Little Boxes” in an inferno neatly tied to last year’s horrific California wildfires. Unfortunately, while most of the major characters survived the blaze, Kohan and the show’s writers seem to have left the funny behind along with the “MILFweed” in Nancy’s growhouse; as a result, Weeds has gone sadly (and with all apologies to Cheech & Chong) up in smoke. (more…)

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Can you feel it? I feel it. You know what I’m talking about – that sudden jolt, that shock that has surged through the American consciousness over the past three weeks? It’s not the Democrats nominating a black guy for president…who didn’t see that one coming? It’s not gays getting married in California…though I do distinctly sense my own marriage being undermined.

No, I’m talking about the recent revelation that, back in the ’70s, there were people with loose morals! Don’t take my word for it; the (vaguely titillating) evidence is right there on CBS (CBS?!?) every Thursday night at 10 on Swingtown, a show that’s a veritable smorgasbord of bell bottoms, Playboy Club parties, soft rock, and archetypal placeholders that so far occupy the space where real characters should be.

There’s Grant Show, who already made the ’90s safe for promiscuity on Melrose Place, as an airline pilot intent on bringing the Mile High Club down to earth. There’s Jack Davenport, the onetime backbone of the awesome British sex-romp Coupling who wasn’t much of a swordsman (ahem) in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, as a family man struggling with the sexual revolution and his American accent.

There’s Molly Parker, who first gained notice playing a necrophile (necrophiliac?) in the Candian indie film Kissed, as a homemaker straddling ’50s suburban mores and the swingin’ ’70s. (It seems clear she’ll be straddling other things in the coming weeks, but that’s another story.) And then there’s the gorgeous Lana Parrilla, late of 24 and the short-lived Windfall, as Show’s absurdly hot-to-trot wife who takes a practically evangelical approach to the recruitment and seduction of swinger wannabes.

It’s the bicentennial summer of ’76, and Davenport and Parker, thanks to some financial good fortune, have moved “only five minutes away” from their conservative Chicago neighborhood and their dowdy friends into a den of iniquity filled with wife-swappers, slutty divorcees, and perhaps even some nascent teen homosexuality. (Only on TV could changing neighborhoods seem like time travel – but then, Swingtown producers Mike Kelley and Alan Poul told the New York Times that they envisioned the show as the bastard child of Boogie Nights and The Wonder Years, and if that’s possible then I guess anything is.) Here’s a humorous sneak peek: (more…)

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Last week in this space, I described a single by the Canadian rock band Prism as “sounding like an early-’80s Cliff Richard single (not that there’s anything wrong with that).” I’d like to say I spent hours deciding whether or not to make such a seemingly insulting comparison, but I’d be lying – I tossed it off. It wasn’t until I was editing the piece that I began weighing the significance of what I’d written; suddenly (ahem), the wheels were in motion, and that phrase triggered a flood of memories and bits of knowledge that I’m pretty sure I’ve been suppressing since about 1983 – when I finished high school and headed off for college determined to invent a cooler version of my previous self (just like everyone else does, right? Right?).

Anyway, thanks to the magic researching powers of the Internet, I quickly discovered that not only had I been a fan of Cliff’s turn-of-the-’80s singles like “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” “Dreaming,” and especially “A Little In Love” – I had actually owned a Cliff Richard album. Legit MP3 files are difficult to come by for some of these tunes (how can it be impossible to buy a copy of a top-10 hit like “We Don’t Talk Anymore”?), but as I searched iTunes and Amazon I found the title of his 1980 collection I’m No Hero vaguely familiar, and as I sampled track after track I recognized each one, until…

Cripes! I know it was 28 years ago, but I’ve owned at least 10,000 records/tapes/CDs/digital albums in my life, and until now, I thought I had a pretty good handle on which ones I’ve had and which ones I haven’t. Is Cliff really that forgettable?

Apparently so, at least in the U.S.

Of course, in the U.K. no homegrown solo artist has ever been bigger. Beginning with “Move It” in 1958 – a song that no less an authority than John Lennon identified as the “first British rock record” – Cliff has sold more singles than any other act in British history. (more…)

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Actually, it’s only Volume 2, but who’s counting?

This is an all-Canadian edition of my occasional series sorting through the wreckage of a vinyl collection that focused heavily on minor hits and gone-but-not-always-forgotten acts. The bands featured here shared not only a home country, but also a home city (Vancouver), a bass player (Ab Bryant), and a rockin’ (but not too hard-rockin’) sound that scored them a series of minor U.S. hits before their brief early-’80s journeys to Kasemopolis. Oh, and one other thing: Both these songs skimmed the bottom of the Top 40 during the same weeks in March 1982.

Chilliwack – “I Believe”

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any more voices in my head than the average person, but during the fall of 1981 one of those voices was running a particular phrase on a perpetual loop: “Gone gone gone, she been gone so long, she been gone gone gone so long/Gone gone gone, she been gone so long, g-gone gone gone gone so long.”

Chilliwack formed around 1970 and named themselves after a city east of Vancouver, in the Fraser Valley region of southern British Columbia; the name means “going back up” in one of the nearly dead Salishan languages once spoken by the region’s Native Americans. And now that you know that, know this: “My Girl (Gone Gone Gone)” not only wasn’t Chilliwack’s sole American hit, it wasn’t even their first. Four other songs, all major Canadian hits, had charted here during the ’70s – the biggest being the #67 smash “Arms of Mary” from 1978.

None of those songs, however, had inspired anything like this: (more…)

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The difference between journalism and history is, of course, time and perspective – as I’ve been reminded over the last few months, as I’ve presumptuously taken it upon myself to identify the Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era. I’ve had to attack songs from the ’50s and ’60s that I wasn’t around to hear in heavy rotation on Top 40 radio, and therefore can only judge through a historical prism. I’ve been forced to balance my childhood/teenage perspective on the music of the ’70s and ’80s with my current, more jaundiced view – a view that dominated my thoughts on ’90s music.

But now that’s all out the window, as I wade into the (at times kinda filthy) waters of Noughties pop with a firm realization that I am definitively Out Of The Demographic. Though it fluctuates around the edges, the traditional target demo of Top 40 radio is ages 12 to 35; well, I hit my 35th birthday in December 2000 – the Number One song that week appears on this list – and right around that time my (practically) lifelong obsession with pop radio and the Hot 100 was confronted by a simple, yet overpowering question: “What is this crap?”

And just like that, I found myself perilously close to this:

Oh, I’ve done my best to fight it – that whole “Why do kids listen to this type of music?” thing. I’ve tried to keep up, and in fact, in researching this column I was pleasantly surprised to find relatively few songs that I had never heard even once. (Of course, in many cases I had only heard them because I had seen a fresh issue of Billboard, thought “What the heck is that?” and made a quick visit to iTunes or YouTube.) Of course, music fans of all ages, races and tastes are likely to find similar gaps in their knowledge of this decade’s chart-topping songs. As I detailed last week in this space, huge changes at radio and in the marketplace have turned the Hot 100 into something of a warehouse for the biggest hits in various (and often mutually exclusive) radio sub-formats, rather than a distillation of the once-hegemonic Top 40 beast.

Simply put, the Hot 100 no longer reflects the listening experiences of many pop-radio-listening Americans. It leans a bit too heavily on R&B tracks, because the “Rhythmic Top 40” stations on the Hot 100 radio panel tend to give more daily spins to their top tracks than do “Top 40 Mainstream” stations. It leans way too heavily on rap singles, even though many of those singles receive scant airplay on the majority of pop stations, because rap accounts for a disproportionate percentage of the CD singles still being sold. In fact, the Hot 100 has changed so much, and generated so many complaints in recent years, that Billboard saw fit three years ago to create a “Pop 100” chart (and a complementary “Pop 100 Airplay” list) to track activity on what’s left of “mainstream” Top 40.

But you know what? Screw it. If the Hot 100 is still good enough for Fred Bronson and his Billboard Book of Number One Hits, it’s good enough for me – even if it means I had to give multiple spins to a batch of derivative, middling rap hits that likely wouldn’t have come anywhere near the Number One slot if not for their utter prurience. So let’s get on with it, and I’ll try to get through without too many Quincy moments. (more…)

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Over the past several months I’ve been engaged in a Vision Quest on this tiny slice of the Internet, attempting to locate and suitably disparage the worst Number One songs of the Rock Era. That quest will reach some sort of fruition next week with a rundown of the worst-bests of our current decade; however, the process of reviewing the top songs of the last two decades has compelled me to focus on the myriad changes that have rocked the music industry – and the pop singles charts – since my brief tenure as a copy editor and writer at Billboard in the early 1990s. In order to understand those changes more clearly, I decided to enlist the guru himself – Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s Director of Charts and Senior Analyst.

If you’re a chart obsessive like I am – and if you’re still reading this, you probably are – you likely are aware that, beginning around the time I worked at the magazine (really, I swear it’s not my fault), dramatic changes rocked the seemingly well-oiled machine known as Billboard’s Hot 100. The magazine began using computerized analyses of both airplay and sales at that time, in an effort to make the Hot 100 and its other charts more accurate than ever; paradoxically, though, changes in the practices of those who spun, manufactured and sold music conspired at that time to make the magazine’s flagship chart a less-accurate reflection of the public’s musical tastes.

By the end of the ’90s, the chart which had defined American popular music for four decades would be, arguably, a shadow of its former self – victimized by advancing technologies, fragmenting radio formats, declining sales and panicking record companies. These changes manifested themselves in ways that were clear to anyone who followed the charts closely. For one thing, singles began achieving longer stretches at Number One than had previously been the norm; whereas exactly one song (Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”) had spent as many as 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 between 1958 and 1991, no fewer than 15 have done so since then. Similarly, since 1995 a dozen singles have debuted at Number One; no single had done that in the first 40 years of the rock era.

On the other hand, since the ’90s it has been common for singles to advance all the way to the top of the Hot 100 without receiving airplay on hundreds of the stations that participate in the chart’s radio panel. And, in the development that was perhaps most disturbing to chart-watchers, during the ’90s many of the biggest radio hits – particularly songs by rock-oriented acts – failed to chart at all. (more…)

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Man, I’ve got a headache. Maybe it’s a hangover from the most recent installment in this series, when so many readers joined me in sifting through the effluvial of the ’80s that I briefly thought they were clicking over to Popdose to revel in my rapier wit, rather than to hear “Kokomo” one more time. Having been disavowed of this notion by the Pulitzer committee, which dropped me in round one of their deliberations over the coveted “Best Performance by a Wise-Ass Pop Listmaker” medal, I drank through my pain and decided to soldier on to the 1990s.

It was an era when…hmmm… What happened in the ’90s, anyway? I mean, apart from Bill and Hill and Newt and Monica and all that? Isn’t there a VH1 show somewhere that can remind me why this decade is worth discussing? Oh, of course – and the I Love the ’90s web page lists the decade’s pop-culture “highlights” primarily as a series of rivalries: Tonya and Nancy… Amy Fisher and the Buttafuocos… Pee-Wee and his wee-wee… Sharon Stone and her cooter…

Bleah. Of course, the recording industry in the ’90s had its own share of rivalries – Mariah vs. Whitney, Hammer vs. Vanilla Ice, Garth vs. Billy Ray, Biggie vs. 2Pac, Puff Daddy vs. P. Diddy, Britney vs. Xtina, Backstreet vs. N’Sync, Kurt vs. the shotg… sorry. Too soon? (Speaking of “too soon,” it’s worthwhile to note that while ’80s nostalgia was already rampant by the mid-’90s, no such yearning for the halcyon days of Showgirls and 90210 has yet emerged nearly a decade post-millennium.)

For the purposes of this column, at least, the biggest music-biz rivalries of the decade featured Top-40 radio formats diverging and competing for listeners, and major record companies declaring war on… their customers. I’ll go into more detail on these phenomena next week in this space; for now, here’s a brief rundown. On the radio side, a trend toward narrowcasting divided Top 40 radio into multiple mini-formats, with the result that by the late 1990s songs could reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 while receiving airplay on only a fraction of the format’s stations. Meanwhile, radio playlists shrank through the early ’90s at the same time that Billboard began tracking airplay electronically rather than relying on radio stations’ own reports; as a result, the biggest hits sat atop the chart for months at a time.

At retail, panicky record labels responded to a sales slowdown by ending the production of singles for many of their biggest rock-oriented acts. Because Billboard was slow to change its Hot 100 eligibility policies to include radio hits that hadn’t been released as commercial singles, the charts of the 1990s failed to properly recognize some of the era’s biggest hits – including the two biggest pop-radio hits of the rock era, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.” Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, in their most recent vintages, list those and other radio-only chart-toppers of the ’90s as Number Ones; Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number One Hits, on the other hand, continues to focus solely on the Hot 100. Contradicting my own policy, established in my column on the ’50s, I’ve chosen this time to favor Bronson and remain Hot 100-centric. So sue me.

On that note… as Casey Kasem used to say after one of those wretched Long Distance Dedications: On with the countdown! (more…)

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A few weeks ago in this space, I located the origin of my personal anglophilia in the syndicated radio show Rock Over London, which introduced Americans to ‘80s-era British acts both major (Tears for Fears) and minor (that Boy George imitator, Marilyn). For me, the visual equivalent of Rock Over London was the Rock Yearbook series, which was published (in the U.S. at least) by St. Martin’s Press each autumn between 1980 and 1988. Many were the early-December days during college when I would blow off studying for finals to stalk the local bookstores for the latest edition, then immerse myself in the intimate details of Prefab Sprout or the Blow Monkeys’ chart positions instead of re-reading Dostoevsky or sifting through histories of the Boer War.

My grades tended to reflect these priorities, but no matter: The education found in the Yearbooks’ glossy pages eventually proved at least as valuable as the one for which my parents staved off retirement and depleted their bank accounts. For the Rock Yearbooks were a trove of both information and attitude, generously ladled by critics from the British rock rags Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Smash Hits. These Brits were uniformly snarky, self-indulgent and pleased with themselves, in contrast with an American crit-corps who (for the most part) took themselves and the music way too seriously to revel in the trinket-like gaudiness of ’80s pop.

The thrills of the Rock Yearbooks were manyfold: the Acts of the Year and Quotes of the Year reviews, the Best and Worst Album Covers, the “Thanks…but No Thanks” section (from 1985: “thanks” to the Who “for finally calling it a day,” and “no thanks” to Everything But the Girl – “Why did they always have to look so miserable?”).

But for me, the mother’s milk were the year’s worth of top-20 singles and albums charts – from Billboard in the U.S. and Music Week in the U.K. – and the collected snippets of album reviews culled from the aforementioned British music mags. With the charts, the fun was in the cross-cultural comparisons – how much time passed between a song’s appearance in one country and its debut in the other, for example, or how the U.S. and U.K. charts could be at times quite similar (“I Want to Know What Love Is” dominated both countries simultaneously), at others wildly divergent. Take, for example, these Top 5’s from June 1984: (more…)

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