Sometimes it’s hard to reach into the dark, dank, spiderweb-glazed swamp of memory and grab something from 20 years ago, but this much I remember: In the 1970s through the early 1990s a few select artists like Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, Madonna, Metallica, and yes, Journey, could inspire such rabid devotion in rock fans that they’d flock to stores holding special midnight openings to sell a new record the first minute it was allowed.
Today, the music-biz is so fragmented, rock radio is so weakened, and leaked MP3s/digital streams make the concept of a “formal record release” a notion antiquated as the corset — or at least Valley Girl talk. People buy CDs not for the tactile experience but as a backup hardcopy. Hard to imagine staying up for a midnight record-release party for that.
While Popdose commenters might have their own recollections of when this particular Event-with-a-capital-E stuff died, my official day is March 31, 1992, the day Bruce Springsteen’s Human Touch and Lucky Town CDs hit stores. As a reporter for an indie record-store trade tab, ’twas my job to call a dozen stores and get the vibe for the turnout. While traffic was fairly steady during the first full day of release, store owners said, the midnight openings were lightly attended, and didn’t pay off for store owners.
Right below that top tier of 1980s “Event” artists was a fistful of all-stars who might not be worth camping out for, but we’d make time to get to a record store the day a new CD came out — or the next day, at the latest — so that we could rip it open, play it, and dig it.
John “Johnny Cougar” Mellencamp was one of those. 1989’s Big Daddy was the last in a string of five albums in which he dominated the charts. His success had come after he shed the pretty-boy rock star image shaped by his early manager Tony DeFries, followed his muse, and morphed into a midwestern poor-man’s Dylan. Once comfortable in his own skin, Mellencamp wrote lyrical themes and stories that hit home, served on a bed of tasty power chords with a side order of Kenny Aronoff’s never-too-intrusive precision drumming.
While some rock-ologists give much (deserved) credit to Uncle Tupelo and the Cowboy Junkies for advancing the alt-country movement in and around 1990, it could be argued that Mellencamp’s 1980s output at least provided some inspiration for it, with its folky leanings, featured fiddles and dobro, and its social conscience that stuck out — in the Reagan era, at least — like a milk bucket under a bull. The guy started Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985, an annual event that’s bagged $33 million for family farmers to date. (more…)
Things should have been going swimmingly for The Cult. Their album Electric had succeeded in becoming the biker-rock record they hoped it would be – raw, straight-ahead and helmed by a fledgling production wunderkind named Rick Rubin. It gained some necessary traction in the sales and recognition departments as well, based in part on the single “Love Removal Machine.” By the time the band went on the road, however, the future for the Cult looked grim. By most accounts, the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of frontman Ian Astbury, his hedonism and earth-child eccentricities becoming far too difficult for the rest of the band to absorb. The Japanese leg of the tour was nixed as Astbury’s proclivity toward destroying the instruments every night was becoming too costly to continue.
That they returned in 1989 with the album Sonic Temple is, then, some sort of miracle. That they were able to wrest some noteworthy rock anthems from the process is even more remarkable. Longtime bassist Jamie Stewart recorded on the album, but quit the band not long after completion. Guitarist Billy Duffy, having been stripped of his guitar pedals and sonic tricks by Rick Rubin, was relieved not only to have Sonic Temple’s producer Bob Rock reinstate the pedals, but add string sections, walls of reverb and Iggy Pop, essentially undoing all the retrofitting Rubin placed on the band previously.
And Ian Astbury? Well, this is the man who would be Jim Morrison’s successor, so certain things remain consistent in his ouevre. The shamanistic posturing, the biker-bar swagger, his ability to pad a short and sweet lyric with nonsensical ad-libs and attaching a “baybeh” to almost any sentiment: they’re all on the album, but don’t knock it, because for the most part, it works. The reason it works is because when added to the hard-rock kick that most of the songs possess, the two halves become a whole that logic can’t divide. For instance, the big single of the album, “Fire Woman,” is not so far removed from AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Astbury doesn’t really need to go into deep, psychological detail about why his junk is on fire. It just is; she’s just turning him on, and that’s all there needs to be said. Does that diminish the song in any way? Not really because, after all, this is prime stripper-approved rock ‘n’ roll, itself only a euphemism for mattress endurance testing. (more…)
It was supposed to be a stopgap, a way to mark time between real records — a soundtrack project released ten months too late to support the movie (in this case, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ), its 22 wordless tracks of largely nonwestern rhythms and scales had zero chance for radio play. As a follow-up to the commercial juggernaut that was So, it was a disappointment. But in the arc of Peter Gabriel’s career, Passion is a high point and a milestone.
Gabriel’s previous soundtrack effort, Birdy, was more of a remix record, consisting mostly of reworkings of previously-released material. Passion, though, was all-new in a number of ways. It marked Gabriel’s first full-on foray into world music. Where African and Brazilian rhythms had underpinned much of his previous solo work, he had previously combined them with classic pop structures. Passion announces its break from this approach with the opening track, “The Feeling Begins.” An Armenian doudouk, playing a traditional lament, is answered by L. Shankar’s Indian violin; the conversation simmers until it explodes in a flurry of North African rhythms, punctuated by roaring rock guitar.
Too much so-called “world music” cops only the exotic surfaces, forcing them into tried-and-true pop contexts: Scottish fiddles with drum machines, Senegalese vocals with drum machines , Gypsy guitars with drum machines … you get the idea. But by building their compositions from the ground up with elements from different traditions, Gabriel and his collaborators create something entirely new — a world music that is truly global, partaking of many musics but ultimately tied to no single source. Passion paved the way for later experiments in the same vein by hybrid artists like Afro Celt Sound System and the late Hector Zazou. (more…)
I was living in Hong Kong when Cosmic Thing was released on these shores, June 27, 1989, to be exact. I bought a lot of CDs there (and laserdiscs, if anyone still remembers those), but lacked guidance. Britpop was the local flavor of the former Crown Colony’s few critics, and reviews weren’t easy to access from abroad back then, as U.S. magazines like Rolling Stone took two months to cross the Pacific and cost a pretty penny to obtain. I had an undisciplined collection. Thanks to my friends I caught the XTC bug, hard; that was the foundation of my taste for my expat years. Left to my own devices, though, I floundered. Did I really buy Aretha Franklin’s Through the Storm? Yes.
So I was untutored in Cosmic Thing. The B-52’s I knew from “Rock Lobster,” which, if you were of a certain age, you drank warm beer to, then maybe broke out with feebly spasmodic, avant-garde-ish “dance” moves at college as it went on. I didn’t hear the rapture that greeted their fifth album’s release, as I sifted through unsold piles of Millie Jackson’s Back to the Shit and Pia Zadora’s Pia Z. at the maze-like CD and knockoff computer emporium near my office. (Nor, for that matter, did I hear the noise surrounding that month’s Hollywood blockbuster, Batman. It didn’t open in Hong Kong till Chinese New Year, eight months later. But of course I bought the Prince songtrack right away—you know, the one the guys in Shaun of the Dead throw at a zombie to pierce its skull, after rejecting other, better Prince albums as projectiles.) (more…)
Let’s get a couple things straight: Terence Trent Howard, a.k.a Terence Trent D’Arby, a.k.a. his latest name–which came to him in a dream–Sananda Francesco Maitreya, is a certifiable nut. He also doesn’t seem to have someone in his entourage who can reel in his nutty musical impulses, which leads to peculiar interludes, asides, giggling, and soliloquies in his recordings. He likes making weird concept albums, rock-opera things that sound like what might happen if Wilson Pickett were fronting Styx.
Yet his voice is beautiful, powerful, and rough. His grasp of soul singing is extraordinary; he can effortlessly flit from gospel to jazz to hard funk to pop to Memphis-style soul shouting, and even pull off late-’60s psychedelic soul, which was pretty weird to begin with but yet he makes it sound cool. He’s kind of like Prince, except more flawed in a Sun Ra kind of loony way (both D’Arby and Ra had issues with U.S. Army service, so they have that in common). (more…)
Manchester boasts arguably the most fertile British rock soil, having birthed a million bands from John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers to 10cc to the Buzzcocks and the Smiths. In my lifetime, the scene was never hotter than in the mid-to-late 1980s, when it was dubbed “Madchester” and gave rise to a bunch of bands that all quickly came and went. One of the first, and the hottest, was the Stone Roses, whose self-titled debut hit American shores in 1989.
Not a lot of Americans hipped themselves to The Stone Roses, which is a shame, because it contained some rockin’, melodic tuneage that provided an antidote to the synth-y tripe, hair-metal power ballads, and teenybopper nymphs like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson polluting the charts at the time. These guys shut up and played their funky guitar lines that took their cues straight from James Brown and Parliament as much as they did their 1960s English pop forebears. (more…)
It’s been forever and a day since I felt like this
I want a fifth of Wild Turkey and one little kiss
And I don’t miss that girl; if I did, I wouldn’t let it show
I might go to the moon, might wind up dead
Wake up in morning in a stranger’s bed
Well, I’m not concerned with any of that no more — “Six Years Gone” (download)
The Georgia Satellites shot to the top of the charts in the fall of 1986 with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” a jokey little play on Southern morality that sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time. Real drums, no keyboard player, and a sound that wasn’t so much produced as it was simply recorded. With their bad hair, crooked teeth, and dirty clothes, they looked more like beer-swilling rednecks than rock stars; in the age when physical imperfections were beginning to be sanded out of the music business by MTV, the Sats were exceptions to just about every commonly accepted rule of fame. Their debut album, the simply titled Georgia Satellites, was a reminder of what rock & roll was supposed to be: loud, rude, and sloppy. They covered Terry Anderson’s “Battleship Chains,” one of those musician’s favorites that was later recorded by Warren Zevon and The Replacements, among others. They tore the shit out of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Overall, they channeled their rock heroes (a group that includes the Stones, the Faces, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis) without simply aping them. What they didn’t do was record another hit single. “Hands to Yourself,” great as it was, pigeonholed the band as something of a novelty act, and they receded from the public eye almost as quickly as they’d entered it. (Thus proving the rock & roll maxim that you can’t yodel in a song and have a long career:unless you have a fabulous rack.) (more…)
By the time Shawn Colvin signed with Columbia Records in 1988, she was a beloved figure at folk-music clubs around the nation – and particularly on the East Coast, from the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., to Club Passim in Cambridge. She had been kicking around the scene for years, first fronting rock bands during the ’70s and then emerging (along with her friend Suzanne Vega) as perhaps the quintessential Girls With Guitars for the ’80s. She usually (though not always) toured without a band, and she got her piercing songs across with nothing more than her emotive alto and the astounding colorations she coaxed from her acoustic instrument.
The cassette Colvin sold at her gigs while she was still an unsigned artist – which she creatively titled Live Tape – had become something of a sensation, as soundboard recordings sold at folk clubs go. It showcased a fully formed artist with a trove of terrific songs, and it got passed around so much that its audience far surpassed the number of people who had actually seen her perform. (I obtained a copy of it from a friend a couple months before attending my first Colvin concert, an opening slot for k.d. lang at the Birchmere during the summer of ’88.) Her ascension to major-label status was clearly just a matter of time, and the folk community was understandably thrilled when reports surfaced that she had signed a contract and headed into the studio with her boyfriend, John Leventhal, producing.
They weren’t quite prepared for the album that would emerge in October ’89. (more…)
I was a pretty confused kid in 1989. Well, not a kid, really — I was 17 going on 18. I had a couple of hundred vinyl records, and David Foster was my guiding light , but when I bought my first CD player that year, I didn’t really know which direction to take my budding CD collection. I had calculated that Lionel Richie would release his fourth solo album in 1989. That didn’t happen. I hated my old favorite band, Chicago, with a passion after they disposed of David Foster and released the Diane Warren-infused trainwreck Chicago 19 in 1988, so I couldn’t care less what they were up to. Level 42 were more or less in shambles after the departure of Boon and Phil and I didn’t expect a new Toto album until the next year. Pet Shop Boys released the glorious single “Left to My Own Devices” but I wasn’t really into singles, and their 1989 remix album (Introspective) wasn’t great. The whole New Romantic/Sophisti-Pop movement was waning, and while I was still listening to Johnny Hates Jazz and trying to make my hair look like Clark Datchler’s with Studio Line, the girls in my class got into Guns ‘n’ Roses and suddenly they dug long-haired dudes on motorbikes.
I had one foot planted on the dancefloor at the time as well, but Italo Disco didn’t sound quite as appealing to me as it had in 1986, and Black Box’s “Ride on Time” wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. I tried to get into house music and bought a volume in the “House Sound of Chicago Megamix” series, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me. I was getting sick and tired of the synth gurus that used to thrill me in the mid-’80s — Jean-Michel Jarre was turning into Napoleon Bonaparte with a Laserharp, Tangerine Dream swapped their Moogs and ARP’s for rhythm presets on a cheap Korg Wavestation, and the Miami Vice/Jan Hammer thing wasn’t really happening anymore. And where was David Foster? Foster was almost invisible on record in 1989. Rock wasn’t really an option yet, and I didn’t get rap at all. So what was I to do?
One day after school I listened to the radio. They presented a batch of new releases, and suddenly I heard these sweet piano tinklings that reminded me of David Foster’s “Winter Games,” only slightly jazzier and with a snappy beat. Oh, yes. Jazzy David Foster with a snappy beat. Groovy. This couldn’t be wrong.
For much of his solo career, it was Paul McCartney’s peculiar fate to seem perpetually in need of a creative comeback. Chafing against the impossibly high standard he set for himself with his Beatles work, Macca required three years of wilderness-wandering and band-building to make his first Important Album, 1973’s Band on the Run. After that, he forced fans to suffer through nine years of steadily diminishing qualitative returns before finally (if only briefly) winning a Tug of Warwith mediocrity in 1982.
And so on, and so on …
By 1989 McCartney faced a new and unexpected challenge: restoring his commercial viability. Even such moribund albums as Wild Life and London Townhad Top-Tenned during the 1970s despite critical drubbings, but the disastrous film and soundtrack Give My Regards to Broad Streetin 1984 seemed to mark a tipping point in the public’s willingness to consume products of patchy quality just because they had the Macca seal of approval. In 1986 McCartney released the Hugh Padgham-produced, thoroughly modern (and not-half-bad) album Press to Play, only to watch it stall at Number 30 on the Billboard album chart and become his first long-player to fall short of gold-record status.
To his credit, McCartney responded with a retrenchment, getting back to his roots and recording the Choba B CCCPalbum of rock ‘n’ roll standards for release only in the Soviet Union in 1988. Even as that record (initially released only on vinyl) became a sought-after item in the West as an import, word began circulating that McCartney was in the studio with Elvis Costello, and the prospect of their collaboration goosed interest in both men’s forthcoming albums.
The first fruits of their combined labor appeared on Costello’s Spikealbum in early 1989, which featured the most delightful Top-20 single ever written about Alzheimer’s, “Veronica,” as well as the rockabilly throwaway “Pads, Paws and Claws.” Meanwhile, McCartney announced that he would embark in the fall on the biggest tour of his solo career – and his first since his 1979 arrest at the Tokyo airport, on marijuana-possession charges, led to the final breakup of Wings. (more…)
Things should have been going swimmingly for The Cult. Their album Electric had succeeded in becoming the biker-rock record they hoped it would be – raw, straight-ahead and helmed by a fledgling production wunderkind named Rick Rubin. It gained some necessary traction in the sales and recognition departments as well, based in part on the single “Love Removal Machine.” By the time the band went on the road, however, the future for the Cult looked grim. By most accounts, the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of frontman Ian Astbury, his hedonism and earth-child eccentricities becoming far too difficult for the rest of the band to absorb. The Japanese leg of the tour was nixed as Astbury’s proclivity toward destroying the instruments every night was becoming too costly to continue.
The Georgia Satellites shot to the top of the charts in the fall of 1986 with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” a jokey little play on Southern morality that sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time. Real drums, no keyboard player, and a sound that wasn’t so much produced as it was simply recorded. With their bad hair, crooked teeth, and dirty clothes, they looked more like beer-swilling rednecks than rock stars; in the age when physical imperfections were beginning to be sanded out of the music business by MTV, the Sats were exceptions to just about every commonly accepted rule of fame. Their debut album, the simply titled Georgia Satellites, was a reminder of what rock & roll was supposed to be: loud, rude, and sloppy. They covered Terry Anderson’s “Battleship Chains,” one of those musician’s favorites that was later recorded by Warren Zevon and The Replacements, among others. They tore the shit out of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Overall, they channeled their rock heroes (a group that includes the Stones, the Faces, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis) without simply aping them. What they didn’t do was record another hit single. “Hands to Yourself,” great as it was, pigeonholed the band as something of a novelty act, and they receded from the public eye almost as quickly as they’d entered it. (Thus proving the rock & roll maxim that you can’t yodel in a song and have a long career:unless you have a 
The cassette Colvin sold at her gigs while she was still an unsigned artist – which she creatively titled Live Tape – had become something of a sensation, as soundboard recordings sold at folk clubs go. It showcased a fully formed artist with a trove of terrific songs, and it got passed around so much that its audience far surpassed the number of people who had actually seen her perform. (I obtained a copy of it from a friend a couple months before attending my first Colvin concert, an opening slot for k.d. lang at the Birchmere during the summer of ’88.) Her ascension to major-label status was clearly just a matter of time, and the folk community was understandably thrilled when reports surfaced that she had signed a contract and headed into the studio with her boyfriend, John Leventhal, producing.
By 1989 McCartney faced a new and unexpected challenge: restoring his commercial viability. Even such moribund albums as Wild Life and 