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Def Leppard - “Rocket”

Herbie Hancock - “Rockit”

Mojo: “The exception that proves the rule” is a cliche whose meaning completely eludes me. It’s like saying just once, we can trust Rush Limbaugh to walk into an NFL pregame show and…well, you know what I mean. But if there was ever a band that fit the cliche, it’s Def Leppard. They fit a lot of cliches, but let’s focus on Mojo’s main rule: If it’s got a good hook, it’s gotta be good pop, period, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Miley Cyrus or Miles Davis is doing it. Def Leppard had dumptruck loads of good hooks, but no one would ever confuse them with good pop. “Rocket” is personally offensive to me, because they co-opt the very fabric of rock-n-roll and claim to be a part of the lineage that begat Major Tom, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, and even Lou Reed and his Satellite of Love–even though I think the gents in the last song-off did a good job of communicating the collective Popdose attitude toward Lou Reed. But even he’s a dozen steps up from this garbage.

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I am a reformed audiophile. A hybrid type of sound geek, with one foot in the strange world of excellent sound and the whackos who populate it, and the other among the great unwashed normal people who get along just fine with, you know, anything you can buy at Target and factory stereos in their cars.

That’s not saying much apropos to vinyl, yet, except that I do have an ear — and appreciation — for geeky “audio-synchrocies” between the formats. For the record, my ears cannot take any normal, mass-produced computer audio system; I rolled my own rig with a 250-watts-per-channel 1980s Adcom power amp hooked up to my Mac, which serves as a preamplifier through which I pump my MP3s out to Cambridge Soundworks Newton M80s. In the man-cave — our house’s half-finished basement has a stone foundation, which isn’t magic, acoustically, but it’s not bouncy like the usual rec room — I have a vintage ’80s EV club PA I bought from a DJ off Craigslist suitable for a 300-capacity. Plug my iPod right into a tiny mixer that an ex-wedding DJ gave me. Crown amp, 600 watts a side. Freakin’ loud for weightlifting time, I tell you.

I settled on this gear after years of experimenting, thousands of dollars down the tubes, and hundreds of hours squandered at hi-end audio shops sampling different systems and musics to figure out that most of the audiophile products are a lot of hot air to part you from your hard-earned income. No doubt this stuff sounds better, but incrementally so: To get what I would consider a couple hundred bucks’ worth of incremental improvement, you gotta spend thousands more. And nod in appreciation when the salesperson asks how great it sounds. (more…)

I think I speak for all of Popdose, going through a painful migration to the latest version of Wordpress, that we have had the freeeeeeekin’ blues this week. To my compadres at the site, I offer this phenomenal cut, “A Man of Many Words,” from one of the tastiest blues records of the 20th century, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play the Blues.

The album finds both artists are at their absolute, positive critical and popular peak. In fact, you just can’t go wrong buying any of their legendary collaborative albums from this period, most of which have been re-released on Rhino.

The sad thing for us writers is that, in the end, this song isn’t about writing. Buddy really isn’t sympathizing with us and our tribulations. The writing in this song — itself a transparent rewriting of the Stax/Otis Redding joint “Hard to Handle,” later remade by the Black Crowes — has nothing to do with pens, quills, keyboards or Black-freakin-berries. In fact, it’s just another song about the protagonist’s stamina in the sack.

Anyway, it’s a blues song. It’s about writing. It fits our week here at Popdose. If you don’t have this record, go get the sumbitch. Here’s a video of Buddy Guy performing the song live sans Wells, which if you had any doubt about how blues evolved into rock (and how Hendrix learned his entire fucking act at the altar of Buddy Guy) you got it all in one sweet little clip. It also is proof that the most Wordpress-ig’nant writer of the staff can embed YouTubes in the new era…if it indeed shows up in this post:

The Popdose staff was sitting around the other day, doing what we do best — namely, talking about records that most people wish they didn’t remember — when a discussion about the Moody Blues’ “Your Wildest Dreams” somehow led into some heavy-duty reminiscing about the records we all listened to when we were kids — and how those records were more or less culled from the Top 40 hits of the day, hits that our parents, as often as not, listened to along with us.

So, we wondered, who’s making music these days that impressionable preteens and their parents enjoy? Top 40 radio is pretty much dead, and the lines between Radio Disney, MTV, and whatever the hell it is that the over-30 crowd is listening to these days have been drawn depressingly deep. Look, it isn’t just that we think the Jonas Brothers and Lil Wayne aren’t all that great; it’s that some of us can remember enjoying the latest hits from the Spinners, the Bangles, or Cheap Trick right alongside our parents.

Current music is still a multigenerational thing, but not the way it used to be — so here, without further ado, is a list (with downloads, natch) of some of the stuff your faithful Popdosers were listening to in their formative preteen years. Pull up a chair and a set of headphones, and give in to Tweener Mixtape Madness! (more…)

I am an unabashed fan of Cephas & Wiggins, who bring a modern take on traditional folk blues. In interviews, they’re gentlemen, who love telling their stories and giving thoughtful takes on where blues has come from, where it’s going, and what they’re doing.

Guitarist John Cephas is 78, while harmonica player Phil Wiggins is nearly a quarter-century his junior. They met at a D.C. festival in 1977, and record for Alligator Records. In the three decades they’ve recorded their brand of Piedmont folk blues, they’ve slowly, quietly built a fan following who might not know of all the traditions from which they draw–but they know talented musicians playing good music when they hear it. For the record, they go wa-a-a-y back in the blues canon, styling their tuneage after ancient greats like Blind Boy Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, and Blind Willie McTell.

You gotta decide whether their sound’s up your alley, but a great sample with which to start is “Sounds of the Blues,” which elegantly uses onomatopoeia to describe the last chapter of what seems to be a long relationship. But we’ll never know, because these guys do what the best songwriters do: Leave enough to the imagination to make the listening a very personal experience.

This feature’s been a little too Detroit Rock City-heavy. While ’tis true that the Motor City and the surrounding region was so incredibly loaded with fiercely competitive bands that collectors today gravitate toward that scene more than, say, the crummy garage-rock put out near Schenectady, Des Moines, and of course, Eau Claire…

…OK, OK, y’all’s convinced me to keep the Lo-Fi spotlight on Detroit. Here’s the Soul Benders’ cover of “Seven and Seven Is.”

What in the bleeping name of Pete Best are we doing with this cut, you may ask. Here’s the original “Seven,” below, done by Love, which might not be the most familiar name in rock. In fact it was the only top 40 hit for the band, a record left to the bonepile of obscurity for musicologists to rhapsodize about and lord their superior knowledge over people who would give them credibility.

In the world of cool no-hit-wonder garage bands, The Soul Benders are actually pretty cool, because they sound great, but more importantly, they were on Fenton Records of Sparta, Michigan. The big thing about garage and psychedelic music listening/fandom/collecting is that a lot of these bands sucked. They didn’t make it anywhere for good reason. (more…)

Here’s the deal: Every once in a while one stumbles upon a group or whatever that just knocks you on your butt and you gotta broadcast your discovery to the world. Last night I accidentally clicked on some hairdresser’s site on MySpace — friend of a friend thing — and this groove emanated out of my speakers and enveloped the room in electro-retro-funky stuff that made me think “Prince, James Brown, and Fatboy Slim all at once! Oh my gosh! Who is this?” It’s not just beats and noise, this is stuff crafted by someone who has an appreciation for what made funk tick!

Aside: I really dig dance music. Well, actually, not much of it. In fact it’s gotta be big beat or otherwise derivative of 1970s funk for me to appreciate it. The ambients leave me cold most of the time, and one more repetitive washing-machine techno beat might indeed split my skull right open or possibly send me on a monitor-smashing binge through the house. But show me a good Norman Cook, Paul Oakenfold, or Adam Freeland production—especially if it features or samples Bootsy or one of his pals—and you’ll get me in the mood.

A few emails later — and they responded immediately — I learned that the group who kicked my ears was Artist of the Year, a Montreal outfit, and the song was Big Night, which they graciously gave us permission to upload for your listening enjoyment. To go with their golden ear for ultimate funk beats distilled to 8-bit digital using vintage instrumental sounds like a pastry chef expertly uses marzipan, they have a sometimes, uh, sophomoric sense of humor. (more…)

Bob Dylan - “Like a Rolling Stone”

Robert: Rolling Stone magazine named Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) the greatest song of all time in 2004. It certainly contains the best Rolling Stone product placement of all time — it predates the magazine’s existence, making it a truly impressive example of forward-thinking marketing — but is it really the best song ever? For the purposes of this edition of Song-Off, you bet your ass it is! Some say this immaculate kiss-off to a privileged bohemian girl who wants to be a starving artist (but without all that icky starvation) was blown in the direction of Edie Sedgwick or Joan Baez. But others say it’s Dylan turning his poison pen on himself, that he’s the one “with no direction home” after embracing electric guitars and alienating his folk-music fans. But as he says in the song, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Dylan goes for broke in “Like a Rolling Stone” and comes up with a song for the ages.

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Doooood, if you’ve been following this psychotic lo-fi series of posts all year, you’ve heard some hidden gems, some peculiar covers, some underground legends, and wacky side projects of people in more famous bands like the MC5. What you haven’t heard so far is some insanely obscure crazy psychedelic stuff from the 1960s, out-and-out relics that should have been left marooned on the Island of Bad Trips.

Well, today, I’m here to make up for that deficiency. Meet The Driving Stupid, whose couple smash hits (”smash” is relative to their other totally non-hits) included this gem, “Horror Asparagus Stories.” This is from Volume 3 of the Pebbles compilation series, which garage-psych addicts all know is one step obscurer than Nuggets.

Clearly the product of a k-hole (thanks, Hughes, for introducing me to that concept last week) or ingestion of some peculiar substance cut with rat poison or perhaps the same junk they make patchouli out of, this cut shows why so many thousands of obscure garage-psych songs never impacted the charts.

Of course, their total lack of chart success and our obsession with anthropological matters–and, let’s not forget, the record collector’s compulsive psyche–make them perfect for exploration here in 2008. Plus, even if it’s crap that never charted from the 1960s, I’m convinced (and I came of age in the 1980s, I’m no hippie relic myself) is about 20 times better than the crap on the pop charts today. At least they knew how to sing and play instruments, mostly.

My garage-rock/psychedelic collector-dweeb friends (and I am fairly dweebish in this regard, so don’t take that as some kind of slight) will accuse me of taking the week off, because this one’s a low-hanging plum to pick. But I’ll hazard a guess that few people outside the clique know the E! True Hollywood Story behind “The Magic Bus.”

The Who, it turns out, wasn’t the original recording artist. Tis true, Pete Townshend wrote the song somewhere around 1966. He cast it aside, completely consumed with this rock opera thing he was writing about some goofy Helen-Keller-as-pinball-messiah dude.

Some months later, while he was still engrossed in writing this damfool Rube Goldberg musical contraption, the label got a tad antsy about the fact there wasn’t much Who musical output. Oh bloody hell, Townshend said, and cranked out a series of singles to satisfy his band’s obligations, “Magic Bus” being one of them, and the rest is history.

In the meantime, a no-hit wonder band called The Pudding had recorded the first version, which came and went without much fanfare. Clearly, Townshend had published the song with a pretty clear and detailed arrangement, because it’s amazing how it’s not so far from The Who versions–and The Pudding had no single to mimic.

The Pudding and a blue million other unknown–but totally great–English garage-psych bands of the 1960s are memorialized on the Rubble Collection, a 20-CD set guaranteed to sate the appetite of even the most hardcore geek of the genre…at least for a few days. The set’s chopped into two halves; “Magic Bus” is on Rubble Collection, Vol. 1-10. The rest of the set, Rubble Collection, Vol. 11-20, is equally awesome.