There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and there’s a star-studded concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the occasion. In conjunction with the anniversary, Time-Life has released a nine-DVD collection called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live. It includes eight discs of Hall of Fame inductions and a DVD featuring some of the performances from the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that took place in Cleveland. Since the very first induction back in 1986, we’ve seen and heard about the induction ceremonies (usually in New York) that are a gathering of music legends. They get up on stage and perform their biggest hits; give speeches that are sometimes emotional, sometimes raucous, sometimes spiteful, and at the end of the night all of the inductees and presenters come together for one kick assjam session. With this DVD collection, it appeared as if music aficionados — you know, you and I, the people who made these rock stars legends — were finally going to be included in these events, and not just through the chopped-up versions we’ve seen on VH1.
Sometimes criticizing a recording is easy. It’s just like pulling a trigger. You’ve heard the songs, you dislike the songs and you know exactly why. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult, especially if you take an album apart and experience the parts versus the whole. Had Bleu’s new CD, A Watched Pot, been experienced in that manner, I probably would feel warmer toward it.
It’s not actually Bleu’s fault. He’s a solid performer and songwriter, he’s got sterling pop smarts and he’s also a nice guy with a sense of humor about his work. It comes through on the album as there are almost no real clunkers to be found, but taken as a collection, its hard to get through in a single setting. The reason why is because, excepting one solitary song, the entire collection falls under 110 BPM. I’m not looking for Dance Dance Revolution fodder, but we have one ballad after another after another after a waltz here. That one upbeat track, the Motown influenced “Kiss Me” is all the more effervescent in the contrast, but it got me wishing for more energy expenditure that’s sorely missing.
The big flop of the disc is the unfortunately titled “I Won’t Fuck You Over (This Time)” and the reason why it fails is because, at heart, it’s a sturdy piano blues, easily enjoyed were it not for that nagging expletive reducing the tune to almost a novelty. I never got the feeling this was some stab at honest expression, but merely an exercise, wondering what would be the result if Leiber and Stoller wrote a tune for Ray Charles but were allowed to use the word “fuck” in it. For those who don’t have antennae going up every time a dirty word is uttered, the results may vary. It threw me out of the song. (more…)
Rare is the cover version that both compliments and improves upon the original. This is one of them.
I will not pretend to have a vast knowledge of either Quincy Jones or the Brothers Johnson. To me, Jones was the guy that produced Michael Jackson and occasionally mined Mellow Gold (am I the only one for whom Jones’ song “Just Once” and the movie “The Last American Virgin” are inseparably linked?), and, well, I had never heard of the Brothers Johnson until Jones covered them. I finally went back to hear the original version at Lord Jefito’s behest, and couldn’t believe how deliberate it was. It has a fantastic melody, but has no business slumming in the slow jam commuter lane. Jones’ version rectifies this. Recruiting Ray Charles and Chaka Khan to sing lead was gravy.
On paper, the remixes for “I’ll Be Good to You” are the kind of thing I would assemble in my wildest dreams. (more…)
One of the special treasures of living in Los Angeles or San Diego is knowing that the adult amusement park of Las Vegas is only a brief road trip away. While I’m waiting with bated breath for them to build a high-speed train through the desert, the trip up I-15 and over the mountains is still decidedly bearable, considering the array of illusionary delights that waits on the other side.
I don’t make it up there too often these days, but when I do I generally limit my debauchery to the cheapest craps table I can find. I used to play blackjack with a simple high-low counting system, but after I had a magical night and won enough to pay off a good chunk of my student loans, the game lost its appeal. I’ve always been a terrible poker player because I have a tendency to fall in love with any good hands I get and completely discount that it’s possible other players have even better hands. Last year was a great one for sports gambling, so good in fact that this fall my computer (I call him Gamblor) and I will be hosting a weekly column of football picks. Stay tuned!
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…)
One of my favorite pebbles of pop-culture minutiae is that Curtis Armstrong, the actor who played Herbert Viola for three seasons on Moonlighting and “Booger” in four Revenge of the Nerds movies, knows everything there is to know about Harry Nilsson. (He discussed his love of the late singer-songwriter’s music in an interview with the Onion AV Club in 2006.)
Moonlighting enjoyed breaking the fourth wall, but so did The Monkees 20 years earlier. Nilsson’s song “Cuddly Toy” was performed by the made-for-TV band, which had a talented songwriter of its own — singer-guitarist Mike Nesmith penned the pop classic “Different Drum,” which was recorded by the Stone Poneys (featuring Linda Ronstadt) in 1967 and memorably covered by the Lemonheads in 1990.
According to former bassist Nic Dalton in Everett True’s The Lemonheads: The Illustrated Story, Nilsson visited the band at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles in the summer of ‘93 during the recording of their sixth album, Come On Feel the Lemonheads. He “came in, smoked some pot and played us some new demos he’d just done … Mostly, they were songs looking back on his Seventies days, kind of like The Beatles meet Ween. They sounded lo-fi and cool, especially coming from this middle-aged guy with a paunch.”
In 1998, after four albums and one best-of compilation, the Lemonheads parted ways with Atlantic Records, the label cofounded by Ahmet Ertegun, who nurtured the careers of legends like Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for his portrayal of Charles in Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004), while Ertegun was played by none other than Curtis “Center of the Universe” Armstrong.
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
Sometimes criticizing a recording is easy. It’s just like pulling a trigger. You’ve heard the songs, you dislike the songs and you know exactly why. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult, especially if you take an album apart and experience the parts versus the whole. Had Bleu’s new CD, A Watched Pot, been experienced in that manner, I probably would feel warmer toward it.
I will not pretend to have a vast knowledge of either Quincy Jones or the Brothers Johnson. To me, Jones was the guy that produced Michael Jackson and occasionally mined Mellow Gold (am I the only one for whom Jones’ song “Just Once” and the movie “The Last American Virgin” are inseparably linked?), and, well, I had never heard of the Brothers Johnson until Jones covered them. I finally went back to hear the original version at Lord Jefito’s behest, and couldn’t believe how deliberate it was. It has a fantastic melody, but has no business slumming in the slow jam commuter lane. Jones’ version rectifies this. Recruiting Ray Charles and Chaka Khan to sing lead was gravy.
In 
Moonlighting enjoyed breaking the fourth wall, but so did 