Daniel Nester is the type of author anyone who frequents Popdose should be reading. His essays and prose contain much of the same humorous, sometimes smartass attitude that you readers have come to love. At the same time, he is an accomplished journalist whose ability to immerse himself in his articles makes reading his informative pieces that much more enjoyable. His new book of essays and articles is entitled How to Be Inappropriate; it is available in paperback from Soft Skull Press.
Throughout the book, Nester has a self-deprecating charm that makes his writing seem like he’s just hanging out with you, telling you a good story. Whether it’s recounting the time he moved in next door to an ex-girlfriend while living in New York (“The Puerto Rican Lockhorns Reunion”) or detailing his adventures in self-tanning (“Yes I Tan”) Nester is funny, but never mean. Indeed, even when he could go for the jugular in two of the finest pieces in the book, he instead remains an observer, allowing the laughs to emerge from his subject’s behavior rather than any snarky remark he could have come up with. (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”)
A couple months ago I was browsing around the vinyl section at my local Half-Price Books when I came across a near-mint copy of the soundtrack to Two of a Kind (1983), the film that reteamed John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John after Grease, the highest-grossing movie of 1978. Now, I know that when I wrote about Staying Alive(1983) last fall I was giving myself some shit for writing about a Travolta movie, and I promised myself it would be the only Travolta movie I’d write about. But when I found this soundtrack, I knew I’d have to break that promise. I mean, a movie like Two of a Kind is made for this column, don’t you think? And yes, I know it’s been brought up on Popdose before, along with its soundtrack, but it hasn’t been covered yet by me!
As with many of my favorite bad movies from the ’80s, Two of a Kind is one of those films I used to watch on cable all the time as a kid. I imagine it drew me in because of my love for Grease and Newton-John (”Physical” was my jam for much of 1982). I still have a soft spot for it, even though it is pretty terrible, but I prefer to think of it as one of those terrible-in-an-amazing-way movies.
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…)
Before there was an Arnel Pineda (Steve Perry soundalike, currently fronting Journey), or a Benoit David (Jon Anderson soundalike, currently fronting Yes), or even a Chris Chan (Barry Manilow impersonator, currently playing casinos and corporate gigs), there was John Elefante, whose uncanny vocal resemblance to Steve Walsh landed him the lead singer gig in Kansas after Walsh flew the coop for a “solo career” (like when McLean Stevenson left M*A*S*H for “other roles”). Elefante’s run with the group was modest enough—one mediocre album each in ‘82 and ‘83—but yielded two awesome singles in “Play the Game Tonight” and “Fight Fire with Fire,” both of which remain in Kansas’ setlist to this day.
Somewhere between leaving Kansas in ‘84 and beginning an extensive producing and performing career as a Contemporary Christian artist, John and his brother Dino contributed a track, “Young and Innocent,” to the David Foster-helmed soundtrack of the Brat Pack movie St. Elmo’s Fire. It’s a shame, really, that a song that so majestically exemplifies the best of the power ballad arts was wasted on such a whiny, execrable piece of celluloid mush. That’s how it goes sometimes, though. Booga-booga-booga-ah-ah-ah!
For a moment, let’s accept “Young and Innocent” as a separate entity from the movie. A simple yet stately piano figure opens the song as Elefante glances around the ether:
There’s an echo in the wind.
Makes me wonder where I’ve been
All the years I’ve left behind
Faded pictures in my mind(more…)
I’ve started a new collection! For those who haven’t followed the series from the beginning, the original “collection” that I was aiming to complete was to get every Hot 100 song from the ’80s on either record or CD; I’ve accomplished that save for Shamus M’Cool’s “American Memories,” which I’m resigned to never owning, so that part of my collection is as complete as it’s going to get. Then I moved to all the other charts: mainly Adult, Rock, Dance/Disco, and R&B. But a promise to my wife and myself to stop spending all my money and the fact that I’m out of room in my house to store the thousands of records I own have slowed down the new projects considerably. But since music is so dismal these days, I was getting bored and had to try collecting something new — ’80s metal!
I’ve always been a metal fan — my iPod will shuffle from an ’80s tune to something from Slayer, Carcass, Annihilator, Electric Wizard, Sunn O))), you name it. I have this calm side that can listen to Air Supply tunes and this aggressive side that thinks God Hates Us All by Slayer is the best record ever made (I’m not kidding). My new collection, however, began a few weeks ago after I picked up Martin Popoff’s Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal, Volume 2: The Eighties. It’s a menacing book with over 2,500 reviews of metal records from that decade. It’s the only thing I’ve ever read from Popoff, but he knows his metal, even if he isn’t the best writer (which he admits), often putting a string of words together that make absolutely no sense. He has a passion for power metal and a definite man-crush on Ian Gillan, but for this purpose, who fucking cares? The guy has introduced me to bands I’ve never heard of before and great albums like God, Guns & Guts by Agony Column and Bound to Break by Anthem. I’m still working my way through the letter A in the book; I clearly have a long, headbanging journey ahead of me. But I’m finally feeling good about music again, so it’s all worth it.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be Cheap Trick’s Robin “The Voice” Zander? I mean, the guy’s, like, 85 years old and looks the same as he did on the cover of Heaven Tonight; he can probably still woo any chick he wants from his nightly audience; and, even though he’s probably tired of singing “I Want You to Want Me” every night, he gets to sing “I Want You to Want Me” every night and hear the wildly appreciative applause of the dozens of people (or thousands, if he’s opening for Journey) who’ve come to hear him sing “I Want You to Want Me.”
But Robin Zander has a sensitive side, too. Exhibit A: “The Flame.” I absolutely love “The Flame.” There is nobody else—and I mean nobody else—who could take a line as bad as “Whenever you need someone to lay your heart and head upon” and make it sound like a bolt from Zeus himself. Cheap Trick take a lot of shit for recording it, but if there is shit to be taken, it should be Bob Mitchell and Nick Graham, who wrote the thing, partaking of said excrement. Cheap Trick turned their slow dance-by-numbers ditty into a towering achievement in the power ballad arts.
In 1993, Zander released a guest-heavy solo album, which did about as well as Cheap Trick’s studio output of the era (Woke Up with a Montster, anyone?). Amid the poppy hooks and all star cameos (Maria McKee, Dr. John, Stevie Nicks, and most of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers), Zander placed “Time Will Let You Know,” a Big Statement treatise on taking the great leap of faith and allowing oneself to fall in love. Composed by Zander and someone named Billy O. Who (gotta be a pseudonym, like Prince on those Apollonia 6 and Martika albums—put your guesses in the Comments section), “Time” bundles hope, longing, and resignation to the fates in one massive lighter-worthy package.
The track starts quietly—just Zander and a piano, addressing the object of his affection in hushed exasperation:
Look at you and look at me
Now what are we supposed to be
We’re so afraid of something new
You know it’s true
You turn around and then it’s gone
You can’t be sure if it’s the same old song
We’re so afraid of everyone
Afraid of the sun (more…)
In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis chides Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) for his laziness and lack of focus on the game of baseball. “You got a gift,” he says. “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re pissing it away.”
Likewise, when Michael Bolotin (later, Bolton) was born, the gods reached down and gave him lungs of reech Coreenthian leather—a multi-octave range, filtered through a gruff, almost sandpaper-like delivery. But saying Bolton can sing is like saying George Bush can speak English: big deal, what’s he done with it? The issue is context. His early solo work in the 70s was crap—miscast as a Joe Cocker wannabe, he tried his hand crooning stuff like “These Eyes” and “Time is on My Side,” with no particular distinction. His two-album stint as the lead singer of Blackjack was similarly underwhelming—muddy production and faceless instrumentation (by Bruce Kulick, Sandy Gennaro, and Jimmy Haslip, all of whom would go on to more distinctive work elsewhere) left the listener feeling damaged in some significant way.
No, it was shortly after Blackjack, 1983 and ‘84 to be exact, when Bolton found a niche that worked—that of the arena rock god. On both his self-titled ‘83 album and Everybody’s Crazy, which followed the next year, he was backed by flashy, hairsprayed sidemen, who provided the echoed drums and WEE-diddly-diddly gee-tar that helped put Bolton on the road, opening for Ozzy, Loverboy, and their corporate rawk brethren. In arena rock, he found a musical backdrop where his tendency toward histrionics fit, where it was even encouraged. Had he stayed with that style, who knows what might have become of him? He could be co-headlining with Poison this summer, or releasing a Journey-like comeback record through Wal-Mart. (more…)
My brother’s black five-piece Rogers drum set stood in our basement like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey: Mysterious, imposing and full of wonder. As a prepubescent boy, I would study those drums when he wasn’t looking, much like the cavemen inspected that black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, mouth gaping, curious and hesitant to touch them for fear of what might happen to me. The drums called to me, so much so that the summer before fifth grade I made the ballsy choice of telling my dad, my clarinet teacher, that I didn’t want to play a woodwind instrument and instead wanted to be a drummer. That was one of the best decisions I made early in life.
Throughout fifth and sixth grade, while I was required to play the bells in school band, at home I began learning how to play Budd’s drums. Coordinating the hi-hat with the bass drum and snare came natural to me; drumming was in my blood. By seventh grade, enough of my classmates knew I could keep the beat and play along on the radio to the popular songs of the day that I was asked to join my first rock band. With Budd’s permission (and my parents’ reluctant consent) I was allowed to use his drums for band rehearsals held in the Malchus basement. I recall four of us — Kevin on lead vocals, Craig on guitar, Ross on bass, and myself. Ross was a good drummer; better than me, in fact. But his brother owned a bass guitar so he volunteered play the instrument for us. Being seventh graders, we only learned, like, six songs, all of them pretty basic rock and roll, plus we wrote an original instrumental.
Our best number was Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” from their 1980 album, Departure. The basic rock song written by the mainstream rock band’s lead singer, Steve Perry, and guitar virtuoso, Neal Schon, was the “Smoke on the Water,” the “Rocky Mountain Way” of our day. There are only a couple chords; the verses and chorus are easy to sing; and the most difficult part of the number is the guitar solo. Any seventh-grade band can make its way through “Any Way you Want It.”I’m not sure what that says about the musicality of Journey, but they were one of the most popular bands in the world in the early ’80s, so they were doing something right.
For months we jammed in the basement until word got around that we were actually pretty good and our school principal asked us to play in front of the entire student body of Chestnut School. This would be our one and only gig as a band, coming at the tail end of the school year, spring 1983. The school gathered in the cafeteria like any normal assembly. But this was no ordinary assembly, because the sole reason they were there was to hear their peers jam on stage. From the start, I took it too seriously. I wanted to rock everyone’s socks off! The years spent watching my brother, Budd, play in the local Battle of the Bands, and seeing how professional the band members all took getting up there and playing taught me the professionalism of being a musician. In my mind, our little rock band was doing the same thing; I expected our audience to listen to us as if they were in the Richfield Coliseum raising their lighters to Journey.At that time, Steve Smith, the long-haired drummer from Journey, was my idol. Thinking that all pros dressed like he did, I donned a tank top and a ridiculous pair of running shorts (think Richard Simmons), just as I’d seen him wear in the many photographs I tore out of Hit Parader and Circus Magazine. Unfortunately, I failed to realize that the pros can dress however they like when they’re spending two hours under spotlights. For a beanpole kid like myself, the outfit was a ticket to Dorksville. (more…)
Kevin DuBrow’s cocaine-assisted demise in 2007 denied the world additional work from one of the great philosophical minds in hard rock. Not really, but has there ever been another frontman in the genre who could implore a crowd to “get crazy” (spelled crayzee, if you use the metric system) so convincingly? It was as if he had made the trip from sanity to his current state, and knew the most rockin’ way of getting there, if you wanted to come along too. Ozzy tries to pull it off every time he gets onstage, but no one has truly doubted his sanity since maybe ‘86. Blackie Lawless from WASP is vulgar (in a cool way) and dresses like a Troll doll in a leather bar, but he’s perfectly sane. When DuBrow sang, “Metal health will drive you mad,” you knew he knew firsthand just what metal health could and would do to you, and it wasn’t pretty.
But even crayzee front men have their moments of reflection, and 1984’s “Winners Take All” is just such a moment. The climb to chart-topping heights had given Quiet Riot plenty of fodder for whacked-out tour photography (as evidenced by the plethora of crayzee pics that graced the inner sleeve of Condition Critical, the album from which “Winners” hails), but it apparently came at a price. DuBrow sounds positively bone-weary, like he just sent the evening’s groupie on her way, it’s four in the morning, and he’s staring into his Jack Daniels bottle, wondering if he’s seeing things, or whether that’s really a little man in a tugboat floating around down there.
He contemplates life and all its many disappointments. “Life’s been good / Life’s been bad,” he muses, in a true best-of-times, worst-of-times moment of deep thought. Stunned at the depth of his thought, he looks further inward: “Now I know what I had / Has taken its toll on me.” The listener longs for him to enumerate the things he’s had — women, booze, tinnitus, crabs, a metric ton of coke, hairpieces — but he tries to dig deeper into his thought. “Yes, we give,” he declaims, “and we take / What we get is what we make.”  What we get is what we make. Apparently, DuBrow has exhausted himself — hey, that is a little man in a tugboat — and, reeling, he declares we must all “Believe that dreams come true.”
“The price is high,” he continues in the bridge, “when you keep the score / Take your souls and your goals / To the top.” What that means, I have no idea—my soul will occasionally hit the top of something (usually during a bout of acid reflux), but I’ve always aimed low in life, so my goals typically never even hit medium height. Kevin has lost me there.
Oh, but the chorus redeems even the most muddled musing. If there’s a template or prototype for anthem writing, this might be it. A chorus of multitracked DuBrows make a declaration of unity (”Together we stand”), note the consequences of disunity (”we won’t take no fall”), and finally, make another, longer declaration of unity (”Cuz we’re winners and winners take all”). This is delivered with such strength, such grandeur, such over the top power ballad goodness, I reach for a lighter every time I hear it. Frankie Banali’s drums sound like an anvil dropping down the stairs in an echo chamber; Carlos Cavazo’s power chordage is tinny but true; Rudy Sarzo’s bass—well, I think there’s a bass in there, but Banali’s bass drum provides the bulk of the low end. (more…)
Daniel Nester is the type of author anyone who frequents Popdose should be reading. His essays and prose contain much of the same humorous, sometimes smartass attitude that you readers have come to love. At the same time, he is an accomplished journalist whose ability to immerse himself in his articles makes reading his informative pieces that much more enjoyable. His new book of essays and articles is entitled How to Be Inappropriate; it is available in paperback from Soft Skull Press.
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 
Before there was an 
I’ve always been a metal fan — my iPod will shuffle from an ’80s tune to something from Slayer, Carcass, Annihilator, Electric Wizard, Sunn O))), you name it. I have this calm side that can listen to Air Supply tunes and this aggressive side that thinks God Hates Us All by Slayer is the best record ever made (I’m not kidding). My new collection, however, began a few weeks ago after I picked up Martin Popoff’s 
Wouldn’t it be cool to be Cheap Trick’s Robin “The Voice” Zander? I mean, the guy’s, like, 85 years old and looks the same as he did on the cover of 
In 
My brother’s black five-piece Rogers drum set stood in our basement like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey: Mysterious, imposing and full of wonder. As a prepubescent boy, I would study those drums when he wasn’t looking, much like the cavemen inspected that black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, mouth gaping, curious and hesitant to touch them for fear of what might happen to me. The drums called to me, so much so that the summer before fifth grade I made the ballsy choice of telling my dad, my clarinet teacher, that I didn’t want to play a woodwind instrument and instead wanted to be a drummer. That was one of the best decisions I made early in life.
Kevin DuBrow