Most people born before 1990 have some familiarity with the rock band KISS. Fans my age (44) remember the glory years in the mid- to late ‘70s, while younger fans remember the reunion tours of the mid-’90s, or bass player Gene Simmons’s A&E reality show, Family Jewels. Hand in hand with familiarity come opinions regarding the efficacy of the group: Were they just a glam band with a great marketing plan? Is their music any good? Or as my friend Debbie said, “They’re okay, but they’re no Scorpions!”
I’d like to help the non-KISS fan here to:
recognize the musical appeal of the group;
know which albums to embrace and avoid;
gain a greater appreciation for what KISS did for live rock ‘n’ roll performance.
By the same token, KISS did (and continues to do) ridiculously stupid things, and pointing out some of those foibles makes for good sport. So let’s begin at the beginning with the first three albums, released in 1974 and ‘75.
Back in the day, I spent part of every summer in the vicinity of the Seaside Heights amusement park on the Jersey Shore. The log flume, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Himalaya ride…magic. The fried and frozen food was to die (and it may kill me yet). If I’d kept all those quarters and dollars spent trying to win tapes, CDs, and stuffed animals I’d be in the chips today. But I wouldn’t trade the fun I had with my family on those vacations for anything, and I look forward to taking my daughter someday (mom will however have to escort her on the rollercoasters; dad’s always been kind of a wuss in that regard).
I always thought it would be cool to run the water balloon races or activate the spinning wheels, all while breathlessly announcing the action. But according to Adventureland, which bows on DVD today, I had it wrong. The rides are where the heat is; the games are for losers, a half-step up from the dunking booth geeks. It’s this ninth circle of hell that James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is stuck in when his parents’ drastically changed financial picture forces him to abandon a pre-grad school trip to Europe and get a job at Adventureland, the local park in his native Pittsburgh.
Writer/director Greg Mottola based the film on his own late-blooming coming-of-age misery, and set it in the summer of 1987. James is a virgin, and awkward around the ladies, but his clumsy honesty makes him a better-than-usual catch for Em (Kristen Stewart), who rescues him from an angry customer. (James has to give up an outsized panda, the sort of trophy I once lusted after, violating the cardinal rule of Bill Hader’s rabidly officious park manager.) James’ other asset is a steady supply of low-grade pot, which he doles out to some of Adventureland’s other staff misfits. These include the chronically sarcastic Joel (Martin Starr), the overgrown adolescent Frigo (Matt Bush), and the sexy Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), who shocks James by asking him out on a date. James is wise to have another possible girlfriend in reserve, as the insecure Em is under the spell of Adventureland heartthrob Connell (Ryan Reynolds), who spins tales of having played with Lou Reed and doesn’t let his marriage get in the way of a good time. (more…)
I’m almost positive I’ve relayed this story at the site before, but since it fits so well with what we’re about to discuss, I’ll tell it again:
In early 1996, I was dating a girl — we’ll call her the Voluptuous Redhead — whose huge, um, tracts of land were dwarfed only by her solid religious convictions. Though I’ve been a fairly unrepentant heathen for most of my life, I was raised among religious people, and can play along when it’s called for (and in my early 20s, the heaving bosom of a young lady still constituted “called for”) — which is how I found myself, despite some rather profound misgivings, at a Jars of Clay/Michael W. Smith concert.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m relatively familiar with the pop/CCM crossover army of the ’80s and early ’90s, have spent my fair share of time listening to Smith and Amy Grant, and I actually enjoyed the first Jars of Clay album. I think Christianity — or at least its various rules and regulations — is pretty silly, but I admire the beliefs at its core, and although a lot of Christian music during that era was bogged down in hokey production, it can be pretty moving if it’s done right. All of which is to say that, in spite of my low expectations for the concert, I went in thinking it would at least be something I could sit through.
It’s rare that I get a chance to talk to the artists whose music I steal each week, so when the opportunity arises, I seize it, no matter the consequences. Recently, word got out that I’d be featuring “Waiting for Lou,” the bootleg of Lou Reed’s performance at Konserthuset, a.k.a. the Stockholm Concert Hall, on May 14, 1974. But soon after I received a call from Reed’s manager, who said his client was interested in a “chat.”
That made me nervous, since the godfather of punk isn’t known for his sunny disposition. He was described by Legs McNeil in his and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) as being “old, and snotty, and like someone’s cranky old drunken father” when McNeil interviewed him in the mid-’70s for the first issue of Punk magazine. And director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho), who wrote for Punk and tagged along for the interview, noted Reed’s “famous nastiness” and said the interview didn’t end well “because of Lou lashing out or getting bored or whatever…. Lou started getting so hostile. I can’t remember why. He got very mad at Legs, he just hated him.”
With that in mind, I gave Lou a call a few Saturdays ago. Here’s what he had to say …
He’s been dismissed as insincere, overrated, pretentious, and unoriginal. He’s also been praised as a visionary, a genius, and one of the single most important musicians in the history of rock music. He’s made an entire career out of defying expectations, changing his style and image on what is sometimes an album-by-album basis. In his “classic period” alone he went from being a brainy, introspective singer-songwriter to a flashy glam-rock idol to a cocaine-fueled funk enthusiast to an aggressively left-field purveyor of experimental rock. All this in little over a decade, each phase spawning virtual legions of imitators. He almost single-handedly revived the careers of Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, and arguably one of his own biggest influences, Lou Reed. He was one of the first rock artists to openly flirt with bisexuality and play with gender roles, giving a lot of insecure and sexually confused teens in the macho ’70s a rock idol they could call their own. His back catalog is dense and divisive, and to pick one album that sums him up is nigh impossible.
The point is, he’s David Bowie, and depending on which variation of David Bowie you encounter, there’s no guarantee that you’ll like what you hear. The best of his material, however, retains a freshness and relevance that counters any dismissal of his talent as mere trend hopping. So here it is, folks — hot on the heels of the most pompously reverent-sounding introduction I’ve ever written, part one of the Popdose Guide to David Bowie.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the rarest of breeds in the music world: the protest remix.
It’s unclear which is more inconceivable today: that a major label would release a stinging protest song aimed at the government of an extremely wealthy country, or that the song would crack the Top 40. But thanks to the overwhelming good will that came from Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in late 1984 and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” a few months later, benefit fatigue had thankfully not yet kicked in, and “Sun City,” shepherded by Steven Van Zandt, became a surprise hit in late 1985. Now consider some other curiosities about the track:
– Two of the verses feature rappers, a full six months before Run-DMC and Aerosmith would drop their game-changing collaboration.
- The production was by New York big beat maestro Arthur Baker, who was adored by musicians but not exactly known as a hitmaker.
- The majority of the artists who sang on the record hadn’t scored a Top 40 hit of their own in years, if ever.
Indeed, “Sun City” is about as hipster a benefit/protest record as you’re likely to find. Daryl Hall and John Oates, Pat Benatar and Bruce Springsteen are easily the biggest commercial names at the time to appear on the record, while socially conscious artists like Peter Gabriel, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett and, of course, Bono would find mainstream success in the coming years. The rest of the contributors are a who’s who of New York cool. Joey Ramone, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, Duke Bootee, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Stiv Bators and Lou Reed all make appearances, as do Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, George Clinton, a pre-comeback Bonnie Raitt, Temptations David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Wolf, and Herbie Hancock. (Jackson Browne contributes as well, though getting him to work on a protest song back then was like shooting fish in a barrel.) Bob Geldof’s name appears on the 12″ single’s back cover, though one wonders if that was the benefit record equivalent to giving Berry Gordy writing credit on a Motown single; whether he contributed to the track or not, you gotta put Bob’s name on it.
The song itself is easily the best of the big benefit singles, with a crazy catchy “I ain’t gonna play Sun City” chorus and a slammin’ rhythm track assembled by Baker. And again, one must give credit to Van Zandt and Baker for leading off the song with rappers, an unprecedented move at the time. Some stations refused to play the song for that very reason – which just seems hilarious in today’s musical climate, where whitey is the odd man out – and that makes its rise into the Top 40 all the more impressive. What, then, would Baker do with the remix?
Go absolutely apeshit, that’s what. The A-side mix is over nine-and-a-half minutes long, and the “Not So Far Away” dub mix is a gargantuan twelve-and-a-half minutes. He samples Daryl Hall’s voice and turns it into a percussion track – something Girl Talk would turn into a copyright supervisor’s nightmare some 20 years later – and allows what I can only assume to be Hancock to noodle for the final five minutes of the dub mix. And, per usual, there are lots and lots of edits, though the credits for those edits go to Albert Cobrera (note the spelling) and Aldo Miran, which has to be the Latin Rascals (Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran) in disguise. Can anyone confirm or deny?
One of my favorite things about the A-side mix was how Baker turned the last lines in the verses sung by Springsteen, Bono and Bobby Womack into a cappella bits, only to bring the track thundering in on that fourth drum beat in the final measure. And man, listen to that Bono vocal. He hasn’t put anything that passionate to tape in ages.
These days, of course, “Sun City” has as much relevance as songs about occupied Germany, since apartheid came to an end in 1994. I am also reminded of a professor of mine who taught a class on the Sociology of Popular Music (help me out, Ohio University grads: he had a wooden leg, and would sometimes turn it around backwards to mess with people): he thought “Sun City” was fascinating because it’s basically musicians singing to other musicians. After all, no one buying this record was about to play Sun City, were they? (You could make a similar argument that Michael Jackson was singing about how he and his fellow pop stars are the world, and the ones who make a brighter day, blah blah blah.) And, adding an extra dose of irony, half of the artists who sing on this record were nowhere near the Sun City concert director’s radar (though if the video below is to be believed, Daryl Hall turned down $2 million to play there), which means that their declaration that they ain’t gonna play Sun City is like me saying that I’m not going to do business in Dubai. It’s good to have principles, but it’s a lot easier to have them when you know that you will never have to exercise them.
Still, you can’t deny that “Sun City” did an incredible job raising the average person’s awareness to an alarming human rights issue, and that was Van Zandt’s primary goal all along. That the song cracked the Top 40 as well was gravy. I will confess that I did not rip either of the tracks below (still need to save up the coin for a USB turntable, right after I plunk down my soul for the upcoming Beatles version of Rock Band), and the dub mix has a skip in it, but hopefully this will make up for it: the video I’ve included for “Sun City” is done “Pop-Up Video” style, woo hoo! Who would have thought that a third of the video’s budget was spent covering Jimmy Cliff’s hotel room?
Post script: I spent a day at Sun City in 1997, and while this may fly in the face of the thousand words before it, I have to say, the place was pretty sweet.
Lou Reed has a way of polarizing lovers of rock and roll, breaking up marriages, sending brothers off to war against one another, etc. Uncle Donnie gets Lou, though, at least enough to be able to write him with some advice. No telling what Lou might make of this, or of Uncle Donnie. Reading this did send me back to Disc 1 of the most excellent Lou Reed box set, which is a pretty cool collection, though apparently out of print. As Kurt Loder would instruct us if he were here, though, do check it out. – RS
TO: Lou Reed
FROM: Don Skwatzenschitz
RE: Career advice
I gotta tell you, Lou, you scared the hell out of me at the Warhol crockery exhibit at MoMA last week. I mean, you certainly deserve to catch a little shut-eye as much as the next guy, but in the coat room? Hanging upside down? How’d you get up there in the first place? Never mind; I don’t want to know.
I’ve been thinking about you since that incident, and I’ve got to say, for a guy just starting to finagle his way back into the spotlight here in the States, you have a funny way of promoting yourself. People, strangely enough, get put off by you a lot of times. And you’re a swell guy, Lou. That joke you told at MoMA about Bob Dole and the vat of Vaseline was a riot. Even better was the point in the evening when you and Antony Hegarty sang “Only You (And You Alone)” over by the stoneware exhibit. I never knew you had such a beautiful falsetto.
There are some things you need to consider as you venture further out in the coming year, namely the following:
Put on Metal Machine Music—the arena tour! Your recent shows at the Redcat in Los Angeles featured your peculiar brand of noise/ambient/industrial instrumental music, with something called the Metal Machine Trio. According to some of the accounts I’ve read, the shows were well received by the people who were able to tolerate an evening of such stuff, and who stuck around once they figured out “Walk on the Wild Side” would definitely not get an airing that night. It got me thinking—next year is the 35th anniversary of Metal Machine Music, right? Wouldn’t it be great to take your noise/ambient/industrial instrumental concept into arenas, where you could play all of MMM (or as close an approximation as possible) to as many fans as are willing to fill, say, a 7,000-seat venue? Imagine the sound of all that feedback, bouncing in that empty cavernous space, and off 6,800 empty seats! (more…)
There’s a scene near the beginning of The Woman in Red, the 1984 film written and directed by and starring Gene Wilder (it’s a remake of a French film whose title translates to “An Elephant Can Be Extremely Deceptive,” though it’s also known as “Pardon My Affair”), in which his character meets his daughter’s new boyfriend, who’s sporting a multicolored Mohawk. The daughter explains that they’re going to a David Bowie concert together. Wilder then mispronounces the singer’s last name as “Boo-ee.”
Implying that teenage “punks” with Mohawks in the mid-’80s were big fans of Let’s Dance-era Bowie doesn’t quite approach the old-white-guy ignorance of Quincy’s “Next Stop, Nowhere” episode, but there is a blip on the radar, so to speak. Glam rock in the ’70s did influence punk rock, of course, just as proto-punks like Lou Reed influenced Bowie, so it’s not inconceivable that you’d find some androgynous fans still dressing like Ziggy Stardust at Bowie’s concerts in ‘84. But the leather-jacket-and-safety-pins kind of punk? Only if he’s misinformed about what’s “punk” and what’s not, or if he’s experiencing a teenage identity crisis.
That may have been Wilder’s aim when he came up with the idea of the boyfriend character having a Mohawk, but he was 50 when he shot The Woman in Red. Therefore I’m going to go with a little from column A (”I want to make a subtle point about insecure teenagers and parents who feel like they’re behind the times in my character-based comedy”) and a little bit more from column B (”Let me tell you, these kids today with their crazy music …”).
Uncle Donnie gets pissed very rarely, but when he does he can certainly lay into you. I wonder what Scott Weiland thought when he got this. —RS
TO: Scott Weiland
FROM: Don Skwatzenschitz
RE: Career advice
I get mad at you, Scott Weiland, and I don’t get mad at many people. There you are, genius songwriter, rock god, wearer of mascara, and the same hair dye my wife, Mitzi, swears by. Yet you constantly, constantly sabotage yourself. Stone Temple Pilots could have been the biggest band in the world, but you wanted to get high instead. So you break up. You clean up. You work with Daniel Lanois. You practically join Guns n’ Roses. Contraband: best hard rock record of the decade. Libertad: not so much. You get yourself fired from Velvet Revolver, you rejoin STP, you put on some really good shows. Then you put on some really bad shows, stumbling around, ranting and raving.
What’s wrong, Scott? I’m worried about you. Remember the cookout we had up in Kennebunkport back in ‘94, when Mitzi took off her housecoat to show you the STP tattoo on her hindquarters? Remember the hootenanny we had that night around the bonfire, when you took the guitar and played “Interstate Love Song” for us? Remember how much you laughed when Mitzi and I played the All in the Family theme right afterward? I wish you’d think about that night next time you get the urge to secure some China White or act abominably in some other way.
Yes, I’m mad at you, Scott, but I also have some ideas that could help you redeem yourself. Want to hear them? Here you go:
Rename your new solo record.“Happy” in Galoshes? You’re kidding me, right? This isn’t a Garanimals ad, it’s a record by a rock star. A genuine rock star. Possibly the last of your breed, man. Rename the thing. It’s not too late — no one has bought it yet. You debuted at #97 with, what, three thousand copies? Six thousand? In any event, it’s basically your mom and your fan club, so you can still change the name without too many people noticing. Only this time, name it something cool — Reanimator, or Defibrillator, or something else with “-or” on the end. Smackinator. Or just call it Scott Weiland II. But “Happy” in Galoshes? It’s almost like you don’t want a career.
Produce the next Limp Bizkit record. Speaking of shitty titles, you couldn’t talk Fred Durst out of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog-Flavored Water? Either way, Durst put his ball cap back on and Wes Borland apparently found a bunch of badger costumes and face paint he likes, so Limp Biz is getting back together again. Get in on it, Scott. Produce the record. Sing on it. Tour with them. It’ll be the biggest thing going in the next year, when all the late-’90s kids realize they can’t get jobs anymore and need something to remember their childhood with.
Stop doing drugs. Jimi Hendrix did Electric Ladyland under all manner of narcotics. Jim Morrison produced Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman while stoned, drunk, or both. Dylan wrote Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde on speed. Lou Reed did Transformer on some combination of cough syrup and bat urine. All great records. Scott, you cannot do the same thing. You don’t have it in you. Drugs make you do stupid things. Stop taking them. Please.
Fake your death. If you really can’t stop dosing yourself for your art, you can still probably pull off a really faux demise. You’ll be lauded in the press. You’ll be missed by your bandmates. You can move somewhere with whomever is close to you and leave the rigors of rock god-dom behind. Do it healthily — don’t take a stash with you. Watch as people come up with all sorts of good things to say about you. Slash might even be moved to do it, too. Heck, people might even buy “Happy” in Galoshes.
We huddled outside the North Olmsted recreation center waiting for the rest of the spirit band to arrive. On this cold December night, we were supposed to be energizing high school hockey fans, but when not enough kids showed up, we were presented with a three-hour window to spend the rest of the night. Our foursome included Dan, a junior, cool, laid back (like most trombone players) and the one with the car. There was Mark, a stocky, sophomore coronet player who was the epitome of band geek (really nice guy, though). Mark often wore a t-shirt that asked the question, “Why be normal?” He liked to smoke pot.  Jay was a fellow freshman drummer, one of those guys who bled talent, and a close friend at the time. He was an emotional firecracker, calm and fun loving most of the time and then- BAM! — an explosion of anger. Finally, I rounded out the group, the dorky son of the band director. I wore big ’80s-style glasses, had poofy hair, and dressed in god-awful sweatpants that covered the knee brace of my injured knee. With nowhere to be and nothing in particular to do, we piled into Dan’s car and drove away.
Cruising through the hometown seems like a time-honored rite of passage for most young men. You get the keys to the car, you don’t want to be stuck at home, so you hit the road and just drive, listening to whatever music’s on the radio and killing time until you have to roll into bed and sleep away the weekend. On that night, navigating the slickened streets of a Saturday night, with the melted snow sloshing around in the tire wells making that sound like water running, we owned those streets. With a swagger you only have as a teenager, we felt like kings, invincible; nothing could hurt us. The neon signs from the fast food joints, the banks and the gas stations beckoned us, but we drove on, searching for what I don’t know. Camaraderie, I suppose. Isn’t that what we all want when we’re trying to figure out who we are?
I was in low mood; my girlfriend had broken up with me the night before. Somehow, even though I’d only spoken to a couple people, everyone knew, my first experience of gossip traveling faster than the tears can hit the pillow. These three guys, boys I hardly hung out with before that night, decided to comfort me in the manner they knew adults handled pain and loss: by trying to scoring some beer. Meanwhile, the radio dial was tuned to the venerable Cleveland station, WMMS, and their new weekend program, “Classic RockSaturday Night.” The deep voice of legendary DJ Len “Boom” Goldberg spoke to us through the speakers in Dan’ car, as he introduced music from the early 70’s by the artists who had shaped rock and roll.  We were a generation raised on new wave and MTV and in 1984 if we’d heard the music of Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Who or Pink Floyd, it was because of our older siblings who had passed the music down. I hadn’t received that passing of the torch, so listening to “Boom” and the songs he played opened up a new world to me. (more…)
It’s rare that I get a chance to talk to the artists whose music I steal each week, so when the opportunity arises, I seize it, no matter the consequences. Recently, word got out that I’d be featuring “Waiting for Lou,” the bootleg of Lou Reed’s performance at Konserthuset, a.k.a. the Stockholm Concert Hall, on May 14, 1974. But soon after I received a call from Reed’s manager, who said his client was interested in a “chat.”
– Two of the verses feature rappers, a full six months before Run-DMC and Aerosmith would drop their game-changing collaboration.
I gotta tell you, Lou, you scared the hell out of me at the Warhol crockery exhibit at MoMA last week. I mean, you certainly deserve to catch a little shut-eye as much as the next guy, but in the coat room? Hanging upside down? How’d you get up there in the first place? Never mind; I don’t want to know.
We huddled outside the North Olmsted recreation center waiting for the rest of the spirit band to arrive. On this cold December night, we were supposed to be energizing 