We did it! More specifically and much less modestly, I did it — I won Tuesday’s election!
My victory even got some coverage from Associated Press national political writer Liz Sidoti, who wrote, “A slew of cities selected mayors …”
A win-win all around!
Wow! People are really fired up about this Tuesday’s election in Bootleg City! As mayor, it warms my heart to see such civic pride and faith in democracy. Don’t forget to vote, everyone. Remember, we’re all in this together.
Everyone except the mayoral candidates whose asses I’m totally going to kick on November 3, that is. On that note, here’s my final attack ad of the campaign season:
Last summer Matt Wardlaw was quoted as saying, “Taco Bell and I have a relationship that dates back to an infamous church youth group trip in the late ’80s.”
So what else is Matt Wardlaw not telling us that he already did tell us but not without it being taken out of context?
For starters, just last week Mr. Wardlaw told Mayor Robert Cass, “Not if you were the last immigrant grocer on Earth!” But why does Mr. Wardlaw hate immigrant grocers? And does he plan to molest them the way he molested 14 innocent Mexican-American tacos in 20 minutes back when Republicans were still in the White House?
On November 3, don’t vote for a molester of tacos or any other foods made by hardworking, minimum wage-earning, American Dream-having immigrants. Vote for Robert Cass. Vote for him for Mayor.
Paid for by the Committee to Re-elect a Mayor Who Isn’t Addicted to Vinyl or Any Other Mind-Altering Substance.
Editor’s note: This week’s mixtape has an inordinate amount of song edits. While the prog purists who prefer the full-length epics might take offense, we simply cannot post 12-or-so tunes at 13-plus minutes apiece (and two songs clocking in at a half hour each). We hope you’ll understand why we’ve done as we’ve done and then show your support to the bands below by buying their albums.
10cc – Une Nuit a Paris from The Original Soundtrack
Transatlantic – Duel With the Devil from Bridge Across Forever
Frost* – Milliontown (Ballad Edit) from Milliontown
Dream Theater – Finally Free from Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory
Kerry Livgren featuring David Pack – Ground Zero from Seeds of Change
GTR – When the Heart Rules the Mind from GTR
Fates Warning – A Pleasant Shade of Gray Part Six from A Pleasant Shade of Gray (1997)
Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Take a Pebble from Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Fish – A Gentleman’s Excuse Me from Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors
Genesis – Fading Lights from We Can’t Dance
King Crimson – Model Man from Three of a Perfect Pair: 30th Anniversary
Marillion – Whatever Is Wrong With You from Vol. 2—Happiness Is the Road: The Hard Shoulder
Wetton Downes – Let Me Go from Icon
Yes – Soon (from The Gates Of Delirium) from Relayer
“When you think cogs, think Cogswell Cogs!”
Damn, why won’t this car start?
The most amusing thing in retrospect about “Close (to the Edit),” and Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984), the album that spawned it, is that the first kids in my hometown that gravitated to the Art of Noise were the breakdancers. Their music didn’t quite gel with Mantronix, or Newcleus, or the other electro-funk stuff they were blasting out of their boom boxes – even funnier is the fact that many people just assumed that the Art of Noise were black, solely because of their affiliation with the electro scene – but a big beat is a big beat, and “Close (to the Edit)” has some seriously big beats. The problem, though, was that once the breakdancers gravitated to the album, it was instantly uncool to like the Art of Noise.
Luckily for me, I was already uncool.
For the life of me, I could not imagine how someone could watch Zbigniew Rybczynski’s eye-popping video for “Close (to the Edit)” and not think that was the coolest song or video ever made. Three guys in business suits bashing the shit out of various instruments to one colossal drum beat (Alan White of Yes, as sampled by Art of Noise founder and producer extraordinaire Trevor Horn), and the main instrumentation consisted of the sound of a car starting at various speeds? (A VW Golf, if Wikipedia is correct) It was a veritable cornucopia of awesomeness! And yet, whenever I sang the song or video’s praises to any of my cooler, macho friends, the response was always the same: “Fag.”
Fuck those guys. (more…)
Okay, I fully admit that as a guy who loves progressive rock, I’m setting myself up for ridicule and taunts from the peanut gallery. I hear you derisively yelling, “Math rock geek,” or “Lover of unicorns, ferries, and 7/8 time.”
Whatever.
Progressive rock is a genre of music that has an odd cross-section appeal. On the one hand, there are geeks who are lured by the complexity of the music. On the other, there are stoners who just love a good trip — and need an appropriate soundtrack. Sometimes you get a combination of stoner/geek in one person — and they end up creating things like Second Life or Boohbah. Me? I love melody more than complexity, so my tastes in progressive rock lean more toward what’s presented here.
“Total Mass Retain,” Yes (download)
The first time I heard Yes was in my junior year of high school. I had just moved to a new school, and I met a guy who turned out to be a huge lover of what we now call classic rock. Led Zep, the Doors, Hendrix, and Yes. One day, he lent me an old 8 track tape he had of Close to the Edge. I had an old stereo that had an 8 track player, and I must have listened to that tape for three days straight. I wasn’t too taken by the songs at first, but by day two, something clicked and I was hooked. (more…)
May is the unofficial start of the summer concert season, so to unofficially celebrate the shows of 2009, Popdose.com and Internet radio station The Penguin have teamed up for Penguimania 2009. Tune in each Wednesday at 9:00 EST for Radioshow With Dw. Dunphy to hear the live performance mega mix in full. Then each week, starting today, we’ll present a downloadable MP3 of a set from the “concert.”
To start things off, we have a few classic rock staples and a great, under appreciated prog band. In the early ’90s, the band Yes fragmented for the umpteenth time and the classic lineup of Jon Anderson, Bill Bruford, Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe temporarily struck out on their own. They started their concerts with a medley of “Time and a Word,” “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and an ABWH original, “Teakbois.”
Paul Rodgers is famously known as the voice of Free and Bad Company’s early years. He’s known later on as the heir to Freddy Mercury’s throne in Queen. Here, Rodgers presents one of his best-known songs, “Bad Company.”
Once strictly a studio group, Alan Parsons struck out for the road in the mid-’90s, bringing several mainstays of The Project with him. Featured on this rendition of “Don’t Answer Me” is Chris Thompson, formerly of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
Enchant is a San Francisco bay-area prog rock band with more than one foot in the hard rock sound. Here is their ballad, “Follow The Sun.”
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We’ll see you here next week for set two and, don’t forget: you can enjoy the entire mix over at The Penguin, Wednesday nights starting at 9:00 PM EST: find it at www.thepenguinrocks.com.
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Before there was an Arnel Pineda (Steve Perry soundalike, currently fronting Journey), or a Benoit David (Jon Anderson soundalike, currently fronting Yes), or even a Chris Chan (Barry Manilow impersonator, currently playing casinos and corporate gigs), there was John Elefante, whose uncanny vocal resemblance to Steve Walsh landed him the lead singer gig in Kansas after Walsh flew the coop for a “solo career” (like when McLean Stevenson left M*A*S*H for “other roles”). Elefante’s run with the group was modest enough—one mediocre album each in ‘82 and ‘83—but yielded two awesome singles in “Play the Game Tonight” and “Fight Fire with Fire,” both of which remain in Kansas’ setlist to this day.
Somewhere between leaving Kansas in ‘84 and beginning an extensive producing and performing career as a Contemporary Christian artist, John and his brother Dino contributed a track, “Young and Innocent,” to the David Foster-helmed soundtrack of the Brat Pack movie St. Elmo’s Fire. It’s a shame, really, that a song that so majestically exemplifies the best of the power ballad arts was wasted on such a whiny, execrable piece of celluloid mush. That’s how it goes sometimes, though. Booga-booga-booga-ah-ah-ah!
For a moment, let’s accept “Young and Innocent” as a separate entity from the movie. A simple yet stately piano figure opens the song as Elefante glances around the ether:
There’s an echo in the wind.
Makes me wonder where I’ve been
All the years I’ve left behind
Faded pictures in my mind (more…)
Introducing an occasional series wherein we take a look at some of the most massive-sounding songs in pop history. A funny thing happened around 1971, or maybe 1972 — it depends on who you talk to. Progressive rock had been a part of the 1960s music scene, but was most commonly lumped in with psychedelic music and drug rock and was seldom considered an entity unto itself. Then, at the dawn of the Watergate decade, prog escaped into the wide open fields of seven-minute solos, half-hour compositions and mountains coming out of the sky and standing there. The aim was clear — to make a popular form of rock that was as ambitious, orchestral and big as classical music.
Of course, pop music had already been doing that to an extent, and achieving it in under five minutes a clip. Say what you want about Phil Spector and his utterly reprehensible behavior, the guy produced monoliths that also doubled as three-minute pop songs. He wasn’t the only one at it, either, and Big Songs is devoted to taking a look at the microcosmic grandeur of some of these hits (suggestions are, as always, welcomed.)
Let us begin with the Brothers, Righteous and Walker. The similarities are immediate, starting with the fact that none of the five among the bands were actually brothers. The Righteous Brothers were, famously, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, and their sound was built on a foundation of boomy, wall-of-reverb ambiance, slowly building orchestration from just simple strings to full, rich sections and backup singers that oooh-ed and aaaah-ed like a choir. It would not be strange to call the Righteous Brothers a blue-eyed gospel group under these conditions, especially in Medley and Hatfield’s emphatically roaring delivery. Key examples come in the ripping bridge of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” where their singing is closer to testifyin’ than harmonizing, and on “Unchained Melody,” where Hatfield moves from understated arrangement to nothing less than heaven appearing from the parting clouds. (more…)
Yes – Symphonic Live (2009, Eagle Records)
purchase this album (Amazon)
It’s hard for me to judge the music of Yes in any rational way — and even harder when it comes to this two-disc soundtrack from Eagle Records’ previous DVD release. This would have been a much different case had you caught me in the 1990s, as I frequently went back to those albums when I wanted to zone out on long blocks of prog rock goodness, but the band’s particular brand of lush, epic composition is now lodged in that “gotta be in a mood” category for me, perhaps permanently. While Symphonic Live is a novel way of representing some of those classics for the umpteenth time, it fails to really catch fire.
That alone caused me to think it over. What’s the matter? You have Messrs. Anderson, Howe, Squire and White playing their hearts out in front of an orchestra! This should be a home run, no debate, and yet there is a by-rote feel to the proceedings that relegates the performances to the “eh, whatever” pile. After a brief moment of detective work, I hit upon what it was and have come to the conclusion Rick Wakeman was the most important member of the band. Jon Anderson emoted about strange mysticism and phantasmagoria, Chris Squire plunked out that dirty low end, and Steve Howe played the guitar with possessed perfection, but they all stood still. They stayed in their cubicle and performed. Meanwhile, madman Wakeman, in his ridiculous spangled capes, flipped and fiddled about on multiple keyboards, pianos and what-not, providing the musical and visual acrobatics for the show. 
You can surmise then that Wakeman had no part in this recording and his circus atmosphere is sorely missing. You’re still listening to these stellar musicians doing their best in front of a solid ensemble, but so what? Where’s the excitement? Perhaps this live outing truly needed the DVD’s visual aspect to put it across, but there’s zero danger in the audio edition. Bad enough that almost every track, from “Roundabout” and “Long Distance Runaround” to “And You And I” and “Close To The Edge” has been done, and done, and done before (excepting the three songs from the Magnification album, which this 1997 tour promoted,) it’s more egregious that this neat gimmick of orchestral backing lends nothing to the songs. Actually, a well-versed Mellotron player could have done a lot more with a lot less (again, paging Dr. Wakeman) and kept the energy up. What we wind up with is nothing less than a PBS pledge drive special where the former act goes out there and tries to dredge former glories for the benefit of the millionth airing of Ken Burns’ Civil War and a box full of tote bags.
The biggest error of Yes’ Symphonic Live is that these long-form songs sound just that: long. In the original recordings and a few live CDs, if you actually had a tolerance for prog pomposity (I do) those songs didn’t feel so lengthy, but man, oh man, do they feel labored here. On paper, their run-through of “The Gates Of Delerium” from the Relayer album sounds like a good idea. Here, you’re counting down the minutes until the “Soon” coda and wondering if you just aren’t the marathon runner you used to be. Never fear; it’s not you or a lack of iron in your diet. Symphonic Live is pretty, but it’s also a drag.
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A funny thing happened in the middle of the 1990s: Record labels looked into their vaults and found that most of their best selling titles had been in circulation for awhile on CD and, as one would expect, weren’t as exciting to the buying public anymore. Remember that in the initial run of the compact disc labels were suddenly flush with cash, old assets were getting new sales life and all was right with the world. Once they had reached the tipping point where most consumers had CDs of Rumours, Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt. Pepper’s, etc., they had a crucial decision to make. Shall we now go out into the great, wide world of new music acts and fill our rosters with exciting, up and coming talent?
Nah, too much work. Let’s reissue those old CDs again, only this time, we’ll stuff the back nine with B-sides, unreleased tracks and live cuts. It sounds crass, but don’t knock it. It works. The labels did get a kick-up of interest through this process of “double-dipping,” and sometimes it was for the best. Labels like Rykodisc and Rhino took a lot of care in representing classic albums, often bringing them back with better, remastered sound to make the package more palatable to those who had tinny, digitally fraught originals. Other labels took notice and, as you’d expect, the business of the deluxe reissue started booming. CDs wound up with extra tracks best left on the cutting room floor, songs pared with awful guide vocals, blooper reels, inclusions of little to no interest to the average music fan. The Elvis Costello fan has felt the impact the hardest, as Mr. MacManus’ output has rotated from the original Sony Music auspices to the Ryko reissues, then to the Rhino reissues, then to his current home at Universal Music. You could own four separate versions of My Aim Is True, each with its own plusses and minuses, none rising above the rest to definitive status.
Look, I’m a fan and a collector. I’ve been skunked more than once by the “special edition” label. I know what it’s like to buy something only to have it supplanted only a year later by the bigger, better, badder version. To prove my point, I have dedicated this week’s post to some of my favorite special edition extras. These are things the labels would rather we left alone. After all, some of these tracks are the only reason why you ought to repurchase these things, and I’m going all renegade by just plopping them here for your perusal. I’m a rebel and I’ll never, ever be any good. Ready to receive your bonuses? Oh la Saleema! (more…)
