If you’re buying into my obnoxious stereotype so far – and if you’re part of the distaff sector of the species, I sincerely apologize for it — then you know where this is going. Because if you’re old like me, you sat around with your buddies and called that girl “Janis Ian.” But by the time I got to graduate school in 1990, her name was “Indigo Girl.”
This album is why. And at this point I’ll pull out of the Neanderthal mentality of my opening and state, simply, that Indigo Girls was one of the finest major-label debuts of the ’80s. Its long-term impact is undeniable, not only upon the duo’s career but upon an entire generation of female singer-songwriters who gained a path to popularity on the radio and the concert stage in part because of its success. (more…)
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…)
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…)
While on a routine errand to buy a baseball mitt, Tom Petty pulled up to a stoplight and glanced over at the car waiting next to him. The other driver was uber producer Jeff Lynne. It was 1987 and Petty had been listening to George Harrison’s triumphant Cloud Nine, which Lynne had produced. So impressed was he by the sound and the songwriting of Harrison’s record that Petty had the former ELO frontman pull over in order to compliment him. Then he uttered the words that would change Petty’s life and kickstart the second phase of his career: “How’d you like to work on some songs together?”
At the time, Petty was in rebuilding mode. He and his storied band, the Heartbreakers, had just completed a world tour behind their album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough).The Florida native was worn out from the constant battles with MCA, his record company, the tension within the band (in particular between Petty and drummer Stan Lynch), and just the grind of being on the road for most of the ’80s. Making matters worse, just before the tour an arsonist had burned Petty’s home to the ground. Literally, he was at a crossroads. The chance meeting with Lynne led to Petty co-writing Roy Orbison’s comeback single, “You Got It,” as well as the formation of the Traveling Wilburys, a laid back supergroup that included Petty, Harrison, Orbison, Lynne, and Petty’s old touring mate, Bob Dylan. Soon thereafter Petty and Lynne commenced on the landmark record, Full Moon Fever, Petty’s first solo recording without the Heartbreakers. (more…)
On the morning of November 21, 1980, the Los Angeles fire department responded to Don Henley’s call to help someone at his house who apparently was having a seizure. The person turned out to be a naked 16-year-old prostitute who had been taking large amounts of cocaine and Quaaludes. While Henley pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and admitted the girl arrived after he called a madam to find girls to party with, he still claims that he didn’t have sex with her, didn’t know how old the prostitute was, and didn’t know how many drugs she was doing–he seems to place the blame for her mass ingestion on roadies who were at his house. In the end, Henley got a fine and two year’s probation, and avoided any harsher drug or sex-related charges. [1]
If this was merely an isolated speed bump along the road of life…well, I wouldn’t be writing this article. Fact is, Henley has had a long history of debauchery in his past. The book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again — a tell-all from four high-priced call girls with celebrity clientele — goes into Henley’s love of coke orgies. I once saw a comic in Los Angeles that “acted out” a supposed event from the book, where multiple prostitutes visited Henley in his hotel room. I won’t go into detail, except one of the call girls mentioned that she had never in her life been around anyone who reeked more of alcohol than Henley. (more…)
In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis chides Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) for his laziness and lack of focus on the game of baseball. “You got a gift,” he says. “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re pissing it away.”
Likewise, when Michael Bolotin (later, Bolton) was born, the gods reached down and gave him lungs of reech Coreenthian leather—a multi-octave range, filtered through a gruff, almost sandpaper-like delivery. But saying Bolton can sing is like saying George Bush can speak English: big deal, what’s he done with it? The issue is context. His early solo work in the 70s was crap—miscast as a Joe Cocker wannabe, he tried his hand crooning stuff like “These Eyes” and “Time is on My Side,” with no particular distinction. His two-album stint as the lead singer of Blackjack was similarly underwhelming—muddy production and faceless instrumentation (by Bruce Kulick, Sandy Gennaro, and Jimmy Haslip, all of whom would go on to more distinctive work elsewhere) left the listener feeling damaged in some significant way.
No, it was shortly after Blackjack, 1983 and ‘84 to be exact, when Bolton found a niche that worked—that of the arena rock god. On both his self-titled ‘83 album and Everybody’s Crazy, which followed the next year, he was backed by flashy, hairsprayed sidemen, who provided the echoed drums and WEE-diddly-diddly gee-tar that helped put Bolton on the road, opening for Ozzy, Loverboy, and their corporate rawk brethren. In arena rock, he found a musical backdrop where his tendency toward histrionics fit, where it was even encouraged. Had he stayed with that style, who knows what might have become of him? He could be co-headlining with Poison this summer, or releasing a Journey-like comeback record through Wal-Mart. (more…)
It still seems strange that Tears for Fears, two Janov-loving introverts from Bath, were one of the biggest bands of the ’80s. In a decade defined by excess (Motley Crue, Guns ‘n Roses), sex (Madonna), outrageous fashion (Cyndi Lauper), blue-collar values (Springsteen, Mellencamp) and, conversely, fundamentalism (U2), Tears for Fears were the textbook definition of ‘one of these things is not like the others.’ That mantra applied to their albums as well; with the possible exception of Talk Talk, you’d be hard pressed to find a band that evolved over the course of its first three albums at the rate that Tears for Fears did. It stands to reason that they wouldn’t play gloomy synth pop forever, but no one could have predicted that they would trade it in for Beatle-esque grandeur.
The transition would not come easy, though. It would take three years, four producers (Clive Langer, Alan Whitstanley and Chris Hughes would all come and go before the band decided to produce it themselves, with the help of engineer Dave Bacsombe), and wheelbarrows full of cash. And it would all start with a piano player at a Kansas City hotel bar, of all places.
Touring behind their monster hit Songs from the Big Chair (1985) was taking a toll on Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. They loved their new songs, of course, but the manner in which they were constructed — barring “I Believe,” the album was programmed and sequenced within an inch of its life — was starting to get to them. They felt paralyzed by their music’s lack of flexibility. One night, after a gig, Orzabal and Smith showered and headed down to the hotel bar to unwind, and promptly had their minds blown by a no-nonsense piano/bass/drums trio fronted by one Oleta Adams. Orzabal and Smith knew what they needed to do next: kick out the style, bring back the jam. (It would be almost 20 years before I realized that Orzabal may have been asking Paul Weller to quit his then-current band in favor of his former one with that line.) Their next album would be more organic, the work of men and not machines. And its lead single would be one of those unforgettable, ‘Holy shit I can’t believe what I’m hearing’ moments that simply doesn’t happen anymore.
I still remember the first time I heard “Sowing the Seeds of Love” on the radio. The big hits during the summer of 1989 were, well, there’s just no other way to say it: they were shit (Michael Damien, Martika, Bette Midler, New Kids, Milli Vanilli, “Batdance”). When “Sowing the Seeds” dropped in late August, it positively exploded out of the speakers, and exposed everything the DJ played before and after it for the pap that it was. From Chris Hughes’ spot-on Ringo impression to the mile-wide and sky-high chorus, “Seeds” wasn’t just Tears for Fears attempting to fix themselves; they were out to change the world. Unfortunately, the latter goal didn’t pan out — 1990 still stands as one of the worst years for pop music, in my mind — but with The Seeds of Love, they more than achieved the former. (more…)
This album is why. And at this point I’ll pull out of the Neanderthal mentality of my opening and state, simply, that Indigo Girls was one of the finest major-label debuts of the ’80s. Its long-term impact is undeniable, not only upon the duo’s career but upon an entire generation of female singer-songwriters who gained a path to popularity on the radio and the concert stage in part because of its success. (more…)
While on a routine errand to buy a baseball mitt, Tom Petty pulled up to a stoplight and glanced over at the car waiting next to him. The other driver was uber producer Jeff Lynne. It was 1987 and Petty had been listening to George Harrison’s triumphant 
In 
The transition would not come easy, though. It would take three years, four producers (Clive Langer, Alan Whitstanley and Chris Hughes would all come and go before the band decided to produce it themselves, with the help of engineer Dave Bacsombe), and wheelbarrows full of cash. And it would all start with a piano player at a Kansas City hotel bar, of all places.