I turned on the radio the other day for the first time in months and the first thing I heard was “more music, less talk,” so that’s what we’re going with this week. Well, okay, it’s the same amount of music but less talk. But you get my point.

NEW SOUNDS FOR THE COLLECTION:
Garland Jeffreys, Escape Artist
Krokus, Change of Address
Aleese Simmons, I Want It
Art in America, Art in America

We stroll on with our next-to-last week of artists whose names begin with the letter C, looking at songs that missed the first 40 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ‘80s.

Rita Coolidge
“Fool That I Am” — 1980, #46 (download)

Many times it’s just so much more interesting to talk about everything but the music. What can I say about a boring track from some movie I’ve never heard of called Coast to Coast? Coolidge’s personal life is the story here — she dated Stephen Stills and then Graham Nash right after him, leading to the initial breakup of CSNY. But my favorite tidbit about Coolidge is that she starred in some television specials called The Christmas Raccoons and The Raccoons on Ice in the early ‘80s, which apparently led to the Canadian TV series The Raccoons. Here’s a clip from Raccoons on Ice, narrated by Rich Little and also starring … Leo Sayer!

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The music industry is quick to tell you how piracy is killing them, and it surely is. What they’re not as vocal about is their tendency to kill themselves. This week’s example of the industry’s incompetence: Julian Cope’s 1987 album Saint Julian. It’s Cope’s best-selling album and features his biggest hit, “World Shut Your Mouth.” It’s also currently out of print.

In today’s download-o-rama world, there is simply no excuse for an album like Saint Julian to not be available somehow, someway. If the used-CD sites are any indication, there’s a strong market for Saint Julian — the album is fetching between $25 and $100 on Amazon, Half.com, and eBay — so why doesn’t Island Records send digital copies of it to Amazon and iTunes and make that money themselves? It’s as if they don’t know their back catalogs even exist anymore. Ironic, since those catalogs are what propped them up during lean years in the past (and contributed to the record-setting sales peaks of the late ‘90s), but there you go.

Julian Cope is every bit the stereotypical tortured genius. He once posed for an album cover wearing a turtle shell, and there isn’t a single record label he hasn’t fought with. Back in 1987, however, Cope was feeling especially agreeable, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Modern rock finally gained traction as a scene unto itself in 1986 — Popdoser Will Harris has a rather convincing theory that the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink is where it all started — so when Cope released Saint Julian the following year, he had an audience waiting for him. He quickly became a 120 Minutes darling thanks to the Kinks-like “World Shut Your Mouth” (think “Do It Again” Kinks, not “Lola” Kinks) and the turbocharged “Trampolene,” but it’s the album’s third single, “Eve’s Volcano,” that we’ll be discussing today because, well, it has the best remix. Seriously, this post was originally going to be about “Trampolene,” but then I gave it another listen. Great song, flat remix.

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