I say this with only a slight bit of embarrassment; The Cars’ debut album is my most-purchased title ever. I received it on vinyl one Christmas (way back when humans licked scum off the rocks for sustenance… 1978?), wore that out, repurchased it a year later, bought the CD at the dawn of the digital era, rebought the Rhino remaster because that initial release was horrid, and finally it has come to this — the Mobile Fidelity half-speed mastered vinyl edition. Can you imagine?
For those who like to geek out on the technical end of things, in the vinyl world a sound source is fed into the machine that lathe-cuts the groove into the metal master disc. It is this disc that subsequent vinyl imprints will be pressed from. For modern vinyl cutting, that source is a digital file and the cutting is in real time, meaning the lathe cuts at the same rate as the song is normally played. Mobile Fidelity, or Mo-Fi as they’ve branded themselves, goes back to the original analog master tape for source material and plays back the tracks at half the speed, thus being able to grab much more audio material, hence the “Half Speed Mastered” headline so famously pasted across the tops of their sleeves.
Does it make a difference? I begrudgingly have to admit that it does, and I say this because I am famously candid on the point that my love for vinyl is strictly irrational. I believe it is equal parts nostalgia, fetish and perhaps an attraction to the “bigness” of the record presentation, and that most of the time the much mentioned “warmth” and clarity of analog is the listener hearing what they want to hear, but not what really is. Yet those first palm-muted guitar plunks of “Good Times Roll” followed by the keyboard pings from Greg Hawkes definitely have something my remastered CD doesn’t, and the creeping fear that I’m becoming another arrogant audiophile has started to settle in. (more…)
We, at the site, really do strive to bring the coolest stuff possible to the readers and I think you’d agree our commitment pays off. But sometimes things float through our transom that don’t make it to the site for one reason or another. Such was the case when your own, your very own Dirk McQuickly Jason Hare e-mailed some links to the staff. A friend of his transferred old cassettes recorded from radio broadcasts in the ’80s, complete with commercials, DJ banter and other ephemera, to MP3. Nerdlet that I am, I downloaded as many as I could and reveled in a little regressive therapy at maximum volume.
Then I recalled, “Wait a minute. I’m a notorious packrat! I might have a few tapes of my own!” I did, in fact. Recordings of the fabled WPLJ from 1980s New York actually existed in a tape box that had an inch of dust congealed atop it. I thought this would be a very cool addition to our little Internet menagerie, and it would have been – were it not for the fact I only bought the cheapest, crappy blanks back then.
Yes, friends, the tapes had stretched, warped, some even seized up into circular spools of utter uselessness, but all were rendered ruined by time. But that doesn’t stop a man on a mission, now does it? I decided to build the playlist back from the ground up, based on the information on the J-card. Also, this one particular tape was playable but it sounded horrible, warbly, drifting in azimuth alignment so that sound meandered from fuzzy and muddy to irritatingly sharp. (more…)
Like most kids, summer used to be such a great time of the year for me. School was out, you had all day to spend with your friends, and it was just nice not having to get up and be at a place where a bell signals the passage of time. That first month of summer vacation was amazing! Sleeping in, staying up late, swimming, playing sports, BBQs, and that general feeling that you were free. However, as the months wore on, extreme boredom set in, you were broke, and suddenly going back to school didn’t seem so horrible.
Now that I’m an adult, it’s easy to forget how magical a season it could be. But maybe this mix can capture the spirit of the good, the bad, and the stupid of summer.
At first glance, this really isn’t a song about summer, but the fact that “sunshine” is in the lyrics and the Andrea True Connection loop of “More More More” is the hook has summer written all over it. There are allusions to heat, laying on the lawn, and a relationship that’s gone wrong — so yeah, it’s definitely a summer song.
“Summertime,” DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince (Download)
Even though I’m a California native, I did live in Philadelphia for a couple of years, and living in a city where there are actually four seasons instead of just wet and dry, I never really understood why people would say they loved summer since, well, California has many hot days throughout the year. But if there’s a song that reminds me of summer in Philadelphia, this would be it.
How can you tell the difference between a good music critic and a bad music critic with a single question? Well, your mileage may vary on this, but for my money, you need only ask them to tell you their guilty pleasures. If they offer no hesitation whatsoever before launching into their list, then you should consider their opinions to be suspect. On the other hand, if they hem and haw for a moment before offering up a response that’s half an answer and half a clarification that “if you like something, then you shouldn’t feel guilty about it,” then it’s probably worth adding their RSS feed.
If you’re wondering, I don’t have the ego to suggest that I’m a must-add, mostly because I’m prone to answer the question by saying, “I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about liking them, but…” And as you’ve probably guessed, I have on more than one occasion ended that particular sentence by citing The Click Five.
In 2005, the Click Five released their bouncy debut album, Greetings from Imrie House, and picked up two distinct audiences the moment they left the gate: the power pop fans, most of whom discovered the album because Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) had a hand in writing two songs on the record, and the teenaged girls, who just thought the band was cute. It’s sad but true that the former audience is pretty well negligible when it comes to sales figures, but the latter helped Imrie House sprint to #15 on the Billboard album chart, thanks to the powerhouse first single, “Just the Girl.” If you scour the song titles and the credits, you’ll see that one of the two Schlesinger songs is “I’ll Take My Chances,” which was originally recorded by Swirl 360, who’ll score their own “Hooks ‘N’ You” column one of these days. You’ll also discover that Paul Stanley…yes, the one from KISS…co-wrote “Angel To You (Devil To Me),” and that Elliot Easton – late of The Cars – contributes guitar to that song and well as “I’ll Take My Chances.” In other words, it’s not hard to argue that there’s more street cred here than on your average bubblegum pop-rock album.
So how did they decide to follow it up? Why, by replacing their lead singer, of course!
Grab a hold of something, folks, and take a deep breath. Next week is Halloween, the unofficial start of the holiday season. Christmas Club accounts are starting to turn around, desperate retail outlets fearing one of the worst shopping quarters in decades are trying to pump up the good cheer, candy cane colors and “insane year-end prices!” The kids are starting to get in the spirit and while, for some, that means the spirit of getting more than giving, you can’t help but be just a little tweaked when they’re so happy. They don’t know the extremes of bad finance, credit crunch, etc. et. al. I hope that, when they get to my age and position, they’ll never have to.
Another thing that comes with the holidays is holiday music. I won’t go into that too much (we’ll just say there’s a nice lump of something coming in your Popdose stocking soon enough, and leave it at that) but I’ve made no bones about my opinion of such tunes. They’re a hat you can only wear once a year. Even my beloved A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack sounds slightly screwy in the midsummer heat, don’tcha know, so music of lesser stature and quality definitely doesn’t see the light of day until the temperatures flirt with the 40s. And besides, in my messed-up brain, I associate other music with holidays anyhow. Mostly, they’re involved with gifts received during festivities, but often it’s because they’re things I’d rather listen to any day rather than the standard “Holly jolly, nice ‘n rosy, comfy cozy, shove a fistful of mistletoe up your bunghole” repertoire. Feelin’ all jingle-belly now? Outstanding, let’s begin.
A few weeks ago I was at a record show for a few hours flipping through thousands of $1 records. I fully admit that I am a nosy person — I like listening to conversations going on around me, and it’s almost impossible to avoid them in this setting. I pick up some of the worst-looking albums you could possibly imagine, so I usually don’t make fun of people for their purchasing choices, but sometimes it’s inevitable. The best time to do this is when people are flipping through records and loudly talking to their friends or family like they’re experts on every artist, album, and song ever made. They seem to be trying to impress the seller or other seekers to the point where we somehow magically ignore the fact that Debbie Gibson’s debut is in their hands. This brings me to my first character. We’ll call him “The Shrink.”
The Shrink was probably in his mid-20s and was there with a buddy around the same age. The friend picked up Michael Bolton’s The Hunger and held it up for show. The Shrink then went off on a tangent that I’ll attempt to re-create as much as possible here. He said, “Is that a greatest-hits album? If that’s a greatest-hits album you should put it back, because greatest-hits albums don’t truly reflect where an artist’s head is at the time, and that’s why you should be buying a ‘real record.’ Why would you want just pieces of albums thrown together when your purpose should be to listen to the artist’s mind-set in one period of time?”
Of course I had to let out a little chuckle, not just because of the Shrink completely ripping the greatest-hits concept — which I clearly am not against — but because a harmless Michael Bolton record is what set him off. I’m pretty sure there were no signs given off that this was indeed a greatest-hits record, because if it was, wouldn’t there be some sort of indication on the record sleeve?
The Cars were on an extended hiatus in 1986 and its members were off doing their own thing. Ric Ocasek and Elliot Easton had both released solo discs since the group’s last studio album, Heartbeat City, in 1984. Since Lakewood, Ohio’s Benjamin Orr handled the vocals on that album’s biggest hit, “Drive,” it seemed only natural that he would do the solo thing as well.
Due to the astonishing similarity of his and Ocasek’s voices, people tend to forget/not know that Orr sang on many of the Cars’ hits, including “Let’s Go” and “Just What I Needed,” so an Orr solo album seemed like a sure bet. Orr scored right out of the gate with the ballad “Stay the Night,” a very “Drive”-ish adult-contemporary evergreen (you can probably hear it today on your local soft-rock radio station). “Stay the Night” was a fair-sized hit, and things looked good for sales on the accompanying album, The Lace.
“Too Hot to Stop” was chosen for the album’s second single — a sensible selection, thanks to its more upbeat sound. In fact, the song (download) was probably the most Cars-like pop single to come from their many solo projects (with the possible exception of Ocasek’s “True to You”), with the signature harmonies, glossy production, and participation from keyboardist Greg Hawkes and drummer David Robinson. And the video was from the ’80s school of teased hair and tons o’ hot chicks:
It seemed like a slam dunk, but “Too Hot” failed to make a showing on the charts (except for some middling action on the AOR chart). That doesn’t keep it from being a catchy lost Cars curio, though. Orr spent the next few years fiddling with an ultimately aborted follow-up to The Lace that never saw the light of day. Sadly, we lost Orr to pancreatic cancer in 2000, along with the last hopes for a full-fledged Cars reunion.
“Too Hot to Stop” peaked at #25 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart in 1987.
By 1989, The Cars were history and leader Ric Ocasek embarked as a full-time solo artist, flexing his Roxy Music/Iggy Pop/Suicide influences to the hilt with a more commercial pop sheen. Not surprisingly, The Cars and Ocasek had built up so much rock goodwill by the end of the ’80s that a second-generation Ocasek rocker was able to score a major-label deal.
Christopher Otcasek, keeping his surname’s correct spelling, formed Glamour Camp and signed to EMI Records, where they released their self-titled debut album. While there’s nary a trace of dad, Glamour Camp treaded on some similar ground, with Otcasek affecting an Iggy croon on the album’s leadoff single, “She Did It.” Anyone expecting a nepotistic train wreck were disappointed; while it was nothing too remarkable or groundbreaking, “She Did It” was perfectly serviceable, even charting on the Modern Rock charts and garnering some light rotation MTV play.
Unfortunately, “pleasant and serviceable” doesn’t necessarily always translate into “big seller,” so Glamour Camp’s debut served also as its swan song. However, the band did score somewhat the following year, when their remake of “Real Wild Child” — a song that, yes, Otcasek idol Iggy co-wrote — was featured on the Pretty Woman soundtrack, which went on to sell slightly under a gazillion copies.
So in that respect, Glamour Camp lives on in millions of CD collections, quite probably with no one even realizing it.
It’s currently out of print, but you can grab used copies of the Glamour Camp CD on Amazon for a whopping 1¢.
I say this with only a slight bit of embarrassment; The Cars’ debut album is my most-purchased title ever. I received it on vinyl one Christmas (way back when humans licked scum off the rocks for sustenance… 1978?), wore that out, repurchased it a year later, bought the CD at the dawn of the digital era, rebought the Rhino remaster because that initial release was horrid, and finally it has come to this — the Mobile Fidelity half-speed mastered vinyl edition. Can you imagine?
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The Cars were on an extended hiatus in 1986 and its members were off doing their own thing. Ric Ocasek and Elliot Easton had both released solo discs since the group’s last studio album, Heartbeat City, in 1984. Since Lakewood, Ohio’s Benjamin Orr handled the vocals on that album’s biggest hit, “Drive,” it seemed only natural that he would do the solo thing as well.
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Christopher Otcasek, keeping his surname’s correct spelling, formed Glamour Camp and signed to EMI Records, where they released their self-titled debut album. While there’s nary a trace of dad, Glamour Camp treaded on some similar ground, with Otcasek affecting an Iggy croon on the album’s leadoff single, 