When Detroit proto-punk rockers the MC5 broke up in 1972, the five original band members went their separate ways. Bassist Michael Davis left first – he went on to form Destroy All Monsters with ex-Stooge Ron Asheton. Drummer Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson attempted a handful of unsuccessful solo ventures. Singer Rob Tyner made some post-MC5 progress, as a producer, songwriter, bandleader and photographer, before his untimely death in 1991.
Guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith formed the excellent Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, a Detroit rawk supergroup of sorts, featuring Scott Morgan of the Rationals, Gary Rasmussen of the Up! and Scott Asheton of the Stooges. Unfortunately, SRB only released one “official” single in the late ’70s, though UK label Easy Action released an excellent six-disc box set of live and studio material that fans of high-energy ’70s rock will love. “Sonic” Smith met and married singer Patti Smith (coincidentally they had the same last name), retired from music to raise a family, and died tragically in 1994.
MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer went to prison, after getting caught selling coke to an undercover federal agent. Upon release after a couple years in the joint, Kramer formed a short partnership with ex-New York Doll and ex-Heartbreaker Johnny Thunders called Gang War.
Two ’70s rock and drug casualties do not a lasting group make, and Gang War was no exception. They had about a year in ‘em, they didn’t release any official recordings, they barely cut some demo material in the studio. But over the years, some documentation of several live sets have been unearthed, one of the best being the Gang War! import on the UK Jungle-Freud label (why is it the Brits who are always unearthing this stuff?), taken from a couple of shows recorded live in Toronto and Boston in 1980. (more…)
DOWNLOAD THE FULL MIX HERE
First off, let me say that “Y.M.C.A.” didn’t make the cut on this mix. Yeah, it’s a fun song, but chances are you’ve heard it a million times, and it’s such an earworm that it really belonged on last week’s mix — but I didn’t have the heart to do that to you. Clearly, I did have the heart to foist Billy Joel and Neil Diamond on you, but that’s because I have so much love in my heart.
This week, we’re spelling it! Yep, for some reason songwriters will often spell words in their songs, and sometimes it works, and other times, well … no so much. Oh, and for those of you who actually listen to the full mix you’ll get some humorous drops culled from the wilds of You Tube that just helps me state the obvious in this mix.
“C.I.T.Y.,” John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band (download)
This is the tune that started me thinking about songs where spelling seems to count for something. (more…)
“When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it’s not, mmmmmmmm, boy.” – Jack Handey
Last week a late surge by Fats Domino pushed him out in front of a crowded field, as “Blueberry Hill” proved to be the most popular pie filling, followed by cherries and peaches. Join us again next week, as we keep up with current events by posting a pair of Songs About Someone Named Mary By Bands That Are Named After Medieval Torture Devices.
Who knows how Uncle Donnie gets to know someone like Michael Stipe well enough to receive the gift of dishware from him? Granted, these are strange times in which we live, so finding something like this in the memo stack was not entirely a surprise, though Mike Mills and Peter Buck might not be too happy with U.D.’s nicknames for them. —RS
TO: Michael Stipe
FROM: Don Skwatzenschitz
RE: Career Advice
Mike, thanks so much for the Basquiat dinner plates. Nothing like getting to the bottom of one of Mitzi’s casseroles and seeing a neo-Expressionist skull staring back at me. We’d have you over for dinner, but I know you’re a vegetarian, and she puts beef broth in everything (makes for an interesting apple pie, let me tell you).
Mike, I know you and the boys got a bit of a bump in popularity last year, with the Accelerate album and the return to rocking out and such and so forth. You’re at your best when you and the nerdy one let the schlubby one turn up his amps and blow a hole through whatever wall happens to be nearby. Don’t get me wrong—I actually liked Around the Sun (leaving New York is never easy, but there’s so much more of the country to see) and Up. To my ears, Reveal is the only truly crap record you guys have made. Man, did that stink. I mean, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, aside from maybe—maybe—“Imitation of Life,” but that got old pretty quickly. You guys dropped a turd on that one. Most bands don’t recover from something that rank.
Which is why you should look out for yourself more, for your own career, your own life apart from the nerdy one and the schlubby one. I’ve got some ideas you might want to consider:
Go nuts. You’re a dignified, middle aged man with intellectual, political, and artistic pursuits beyond the music you are best known for. You appreciate privacy and go to some lengths to protect it. You support worthy people and worthier causes. Mike, it’s a wonder anyone knows who the hell you are. You need to pull a Britney. Or an Amy Winehouse. Go out for a night on the town without any underwear … or pants. Or put on the underwear, smoke five or six pounds of crack, and go wandering down the street on a crying jag. Better yet, get fat, take steroids, get plastic surgery to the point where you’re barely recognizable, take in a bunch of stray dogs, and do a lot of interviews about how you’ve hit rock bottom and are now bouncing back. It worked for Mickey Rourke—he even got an Oscar nomination. Speaking of which …
Become an actor. They’re actually making a remake of The Three Stooges, with Jim-friggin’-Carey as Curly. Michael, you were born for that role. It’s totally playing against type (unless Curly was really a shy, mumbling alternative type and we just didn’t know it), which is why you’ll blow everyone away with your “Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuks” and your “Whoop-whoop-whoops” and you “Oh, wiseguys.” Forget that whole movie producer thing, Mike. You were born to be in front of the camera. Acting like Curly Stooge.
Two words: Food Network.You and Mario Batali were so awesome together on that Sundance show. The two of you need to do a cooking show together—Mike and Mario’s Vegetarian Kitchen or some such thing. It’ll knock that conniving bitch Paula Deen right off the network.
Fake your death. There’d be a state funeral in Georgia. Flags at half-staff at the next Lollapalooza show. Courtney Love might write a song for you (or get Billy Corgan to do it and say she wrote it). Rolling Stone would put you on the cover and give every album five stars in the next Record Guide (including Reveal, which really was a turd, Mike). Warners might actually earn back some of your advance from the last REM contract. And you—you get to disappear, find a little place on the beach somewhere and live out your days listening to Patti Smith bootlegs and reading Rene Ricard collections to your heart’s content. Sound good? I knew it would.
Let us now praise famous do-rag-wearing guitarist/songwriter/deejay/record execs. Now, unless Clive Davis has a couple side gigs or fashion proclivities I’m unaware of, I can think of only one person who fits the bill—Steven Van Zandt. Call him Miami Steve, Little Steven, Silvio Dante, or Steven Lento, his main nom de rock should be “Almighty Savior of Garage Rock”—that soul-stirring mongrel amalgam of rock, soul, surf, folk, blues, punk, and the kitchen sink. Progenitors and practitioners of the three-chord stomp owe the recent interest in their work to Van Zandt’s radio program Little Steven’s Underground Garage and its various offshoots, including festival concerts, the show’s Web site, its satellite radio channel, and the wonderful Wicked Cool Records, the label through which Van Zandt has released a stack of loud and proud albums by the likes of the Chesterfield Kings, the Cocktail Slippers, and the Grip Weeds.
Wicked Cool is also responsible for a series of bitchin’ compilations named after Underground Garage’s weekly “Coolest Song in the World” feature. The eighth volume of the series has just seen wide release (after a four-month exclusive period with f.y.e., which sponsors the show), and it is a keeper. With its focus on new and young bands, the album shows garage as a living, thriving endeavor.
Palmyra Delran of the girl group the Friggs kicks off the comp with “Baby Should Have Known Better,” locking into a punky groove and spiking her cautionary tale with the kind of repetitive chorus that lodges itself in the listener’s head for years. It’s a fitting start to the record—the song was selected by Underground Garage listeners as the “Coolest Song of 2008″ and, well, it rocks.
“Terminal Boredom” finds the awesomely named Cute Lepers rocking a tune that could have been a Clash outtake. The Lepers are currently signed to Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records—a fitting connection, as Jett’s influence can be felt on a number of tracks led by female singers, like the Downbeat 5’s “Dum Dum Ditty,” which channels the Crystals through a Bad Reputation filter. That track would have made a an equally great Phil Spector single or deep cut on the Ramones’ first record, as would a number of old and recent Joan Jett tracks. (more…)
Erika Wennerstrom is a genuine force of nature. If you’re hearing her voice for the first time, you quickly realize that it qualifies as a revelation. If you’ve heard her before, you’ve been waiting for an encore. That encore has arrived in the form of the third Heartless Bastards album, The Mountain (Fat Possum Records).
These aren’t your momma’s Heartless Bastards. Things have changed. First, Wennerstrom split up with her boyfriend of 11 years, Mike Lamping, who played bass in the band, and was very much present on its first two albums. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever dealt with,” she told the New York Times. Next she headed to Austin for a fresh start, where she holed up in an apartment for six months until she had written the 11 songs that make up The Mountain. Every song, every syllable on the album is haunted by the ghost of love lost:
Lately I’m feeling so alone
I packed up my bags and I left my home
And now everything’s changed and I’m feeling alone
I got no one to blame cause I had to go
As if all of that wasn’t enough, Wennerstrom and producer Mike McCarthy (Spoon, Trail of Dead, Patty Griffin) have expanded the band’s sonic palette beyond bass, drums, and Wennerstrom’s electric guitar bashing. Crucial new elements include violin, banjo, and pedal steel. If you’re thinking this is a turn toward country music, forget it, unless you consider a certain Appalachian longing to be a part of the genre. Heartless Bastards remain a powerful indie-rock band at their core. If you’re curious as to what that means these days, listen to “Witchypoo.”(more…)
If I ever run for office, and someone asks the drug-use question, I can honestly say I didn’t inhale. While pop-music critics are a Dionysian lot, snorting coke off groupies’ breasts, film critics are prim, fussbudget types. There were a lot of people laughing at the stoner humor in Pineapple Express. Me, I rolled my own. My bliss started with the opening credits: The film is a Columbia release, and to get the ’70s vibe under way, the opening credits are in the same exact font the studio used for its comedies in the shag-carpet days. “Man, this is gonna be some good shit,” I thought.
And I was right. There is some good shit in Pineapple Express. But there’s some bad shit too. Plus some bat shit toward the end, though the best shit comes after the bad shit, when three of its characters are just sort of chewing the fat the morning after some heavy shit has gone down.
The film comes to us from producer Judd Apatow, whose modest mom-and-pop comedy outfit became a factory after last summer’s Knocked Up and Superbad, both of which were $100 million hits, now churning out new yuks every quarter. Pineapple Express’s star, Seth Rogen, cowrote the script, which I suspect was merely a list of suggestions as he and James Franco, tending to his long-dormant funny bone, headed to the set and started making shit up. The best scenes in the movie, which pit Rogen’s maturity-challenged process server and Franco’s puppyish pot dealer against a bunch of heavies looking for some really great shit cultivated by the government, have the smell of improvisation to them.
From a place apart
Morpheus, God of dreams, awakes
The artist Robert Mapplethorpe died from complications of AIDS in 1989. According to his great friend, Patti Smith, “His mortal suffering was so profound that I wept through much of his illness. After his death, I wanted to give him something other than tears, so I wrote The Coral Sea.” Her epic poem was published in book form in 1996.
Smith attempted public readings of the piece, but found that she was unable to sustain a reading of the entire thing. It wasn’t until she teamed up with Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) for a pair of concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in 2005 and 2006 that the true nature of her amazing achievement revealed itself.
The Coral Sea, a two-disc set released on the artists’ own PASK label, is a record of those two monumental performances. The concerts featured Smith reading her work, accompanied by Shields on guitars and effects. It is unlike anything that I have ever heard.
Art, not nature moved him
Nature, he had boasted, was meant to be redesigned
Opened and folded like a fan
The poem tells the story of Mapplethorpe, referred to variously as the sleeper, the traveller, or simply, ‘M’, as he makes his heroic journey to the next world. In this case the voyage will take him to the Solomon Islands so that he might see the Southern Cross, which his beloved uncle had described to him, before he dies. He journeys aboard a ship through uncharted waters, experiencing the stages of death, from pain and defiance, to revelation and acceptance. (more…)
Mike, thanks so much for the 
If I ever run for office, and someone asks the drug-use question, I can honestly say I didn’t inhale. While pop-music critics are a Dionysian lot, snorting coke off groupies’ breasts, film critics are prim, fussbudget types. There were a lot of people laughing at the stoner humor in Pineapple Express. Me, I rolled my own. My bliss started with the opening credits: The film is a Columbia release, and to get the ’70s vibe under way, the opening credits are in the same exact font the studio used for its comedies in the shag-carpet days. “Man, this is gonna be some good shit,” I thought.
