Thursday, November 14, 2013

Tom Petty Videos Were Creepy

I just found out that Tom Petty had a music video for the song Make It Better from the album Southern Accents, which surprised me, since I thought the only hit from that album was Don't Come Around Here No More. The other thing that surprised me was that the music video for Make It Better is that it's almost as shit your pants scary with a side of tripping balls as Don't Come Around Here No More's video. Thankfully in this one, The Heartbreakers don't turn a woman into a cake and eat her. They just climb into a woman's brain and play a song. Then the woman attacks the tiny ear booger Tom Petty with a Q-Tip.


I've been trying to understand why people consider Southern Accents to be one of his weakest albums. I really like it. It's one of my favorites to be honest. But I think I found a reason: those god damn music videos probably gave a bunch of people nightmares.

I'm sort of glad that Rebels didn't have a video now. That's one of my favorite Petty songs ever, but the live performance works just fine. The other option probably would've been a bunch of giant Land of Confusion puppets wearing trucker hats and overalls driving in a truck with Tom Petty in the back in a silly hat with stupid sunglasses.

Maybe there can be a sequel video for Mary's New Car where they have a female puppet like that driving around inside an acid trip hellscape. Or for Spike, they can have a half dog, half man in a spiked collar chasing Tom Petty around an apartment building like it's Scooby Doo or something. For The Best of Everything, they can have Mike Campbell dressed up as Satan showing up and taking a shit inside of a human brain, and at the end, they can play American Girl backwards while Satan slow dances with Tom Petty in the Mad Hatter outfit..

But it still wouldn't be as terrifying as the video for Mary Jane's Last Dance, because that video had strongly implied necrophilia. Or Yer So Bad, because that had a guy hanging out with a blow up doll and pregnant men. That's not as terrifying as necrophilia, but it's somehow almost as creepy.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Song Showcase - Walk Away by Del Shannon

To say Del Shannon was underrated is like saying The Beatles had a few good songs. It doesn't even begin to cover it. Shannon had one of the greatest voices in popular music, right up there with Freddie Mercury and Roy Orbison. But he had a bigger range than either of them. Although he was strongest in a falsetto, he could go quite a bit deeper as well, and fairly effectively, which is rare for a singer.

It's also worth noting that Shannon was apparently a big deal in Liverpool during the early days of the Merseybeat movement that gave us The Beatles, who he was a fairly big influence on. He was also the first American to cover a Beatles song - From Me to You, making it the first time a Lennon/McCartney song charted in the US, although it only went to #77.

And yet, to most people, he's just the guy that sang Little Runaway. His career went in the toilet during the mid sixties, and it never really recovered. His recordings after that were fairly few and far between, but they were generally of a very high quality. He tagged for replacing Roy Orbison in the Travelling Willburies before he committed suicide in 1990. His posthumous album, Rock On, had all the elements of Orbison's Mystery Girl, which introduced him to a new generation. It was produced by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty's Heartbreakers were more or less his backing band on the album, and it had some of the strongest material of his career, and then of course, there's the fact that he died around the time of it's release. And yet, it went nowhere.

Anyway, here's one of the better songs off of that album, Walk Away, which was also one of the album's hits. It went to #99 in Australia and nowhere else. It's like the last depressing footnote of the sad life and career of a great, underappreciated talent.

Monday, October 21, 2013

The Eighties Music Video Formula

The eighties music video formula - There's a ridiculously hot woman (or multiple ridiculously hot women) just doing something somewhere. Often, they aren't wearing much. Elsewhere, typically in a factory or warehouse, a bunch of guys approaching middle age are lip synching and pretending to play electric instruments that might not even be plugged in. Often, there's a bunch of guys in the warehouse who seem to just be making sparks.

An example of this is Eddie Money's Walk on Water. It hits every one of these notes. Brunette model going around being ridiculously hot, Eddie Money and a bunch of session musicians nowhere near her, and a few guys around them are just making sparks. It's one of the the quintessential eighties videos.





If it's a metal video, replace the sports jackets and jeans the guys in the band are wearing with leather jackets with no shirts on underneath, make the hair more awful and make the women dress less like models and more like strippers. Make sure there's at least one shot of the singer and one of the guitarists or the bassist going back to back while the singer lets out a high pitched wail.

Song Showcase - The Break by Urge Overkill

Urge Overkill is one of my favorite bands, and their 1995 album Exit The Dragon is a strong contender for my favorite album. It was a claustrophobic, frantic and desperate piece of music. This is post Cobain alternative rock done right. It might not be the best introduction for the band. That would go to their previous album, Saturation which was a much more accessible, and honestly, a considerably more fun album that depicted the band's persona better than anything else ever did with the exception of their brilliant cover of Neil Diamond's Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon off of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, which is what most people know them for. Before you listen to The Break, I'd recommend clicking on that link and maybe this next one, which goes to Sister Havana, which I think defines them better than The Break does. It's about going down to Cuba and having a fling with a girl who turns out to be Fidel Castro's girlfriend.

But The Break, which was the lead single off of Exit The Dragon was the second Urge Overkill song I ever heard, after Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon. It's not really what the band was about. They were cocky, over the top, a bit pretentious and had this smug self awareness to them that is either charming or infuriating, depending on whether you like them or not. The Break however, is them at the height of their powers creatively when it was all falling apart due to addiction, excess and continued mainstream disinterest. If Saturation was their equivalent of Big Star's #1 Record, then Exit The Dragon is a combination of Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers. It's bleak, raw and at the same time, a fantastic pop/rock album. And The Break is the defining track off of it.

It's very minimal. The only instruments I can make out are guitars (and very nineties rock sounding guitars), drums and percussion. If I listen very closely, I can faintly make out bass. King Roeser, the band's bassist sings lead here as he did on most of the album, like he did before guitarist (and vocal powerhouse) Nash Kato took over most of the vocal work on Saturation.

The guitars crash like a wrecking ball and cut like a jagged, rusty knife at the same time. I don't know which band members are laying which instruments, since in the video, Kato and Roeser are both shown playing guitar and bass at different points, so I can't really assign credit with certainty for it, but the guitar work here is just amazing. This is one of my favorite guitar tracks ever. Roeser's voice matches the sound of the guitars. His voice was always ragged and ghostly, like he's been screaming, smoking and drinking whiskey all night, but here, it's even moreso than usual, and it's very appealing, because he knows how to make that vocal style work. Right before the first chorus, he belts out "I can't get a break," which is to me, the moment that sums up the album perfectly.

Which brings us to the drummer, Blackie Onassis. The guy is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music. He goes back and forth between forceful and yet subdued to frantic and yet precise brilliantly here. One of the things that nobody talks about about these guys is how good of a drummer that Onassis was. The drumming here is just as good as the guitar work and vocals.

Also, fans of the cartoon series Daria might recognize this song, as it was featured on an episode of the series, which is pretty cool. Daria's great, Urge Overkill's great... why not get some chocolate in that peanut butter? Of course, there's a part of me that thinks that the guys who breathed new life into Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon probably shouldn't have anything to do with a TV show about a girl Daria's age...

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Song Showcase - Walls by Tom Petty

A bit of a quick update before I go on. I think I've decided to not do a 'favorite song of the week' thing. That limits me to updating that once a week. Sure, it's a more regular updating schedule, but I have like, three or four songs I want to write about right now. So we're changing this to a Song Showcase. I'll try to get at least weekly updates going with it. No guarantees, since my schedule is filled up with school, but I'll try to keep this up.

Tom Petty's written a bunch of songs that I consider absolutely brilliant. American Girl, Even the Losers, The Wild One Forever, Southern Accents, Rebels, The Best of Everything, It'll All Work Out, most of Full Moon Fever, Wildflowers and Echoes and a few songs he wrote for other artists such as Lone Justice's Ways to be Wicked and Rod Stewart's Leave Virginia Alone.

One of those that gets about as much attention as those last two is Walls. It's obscure mostly because it was only on the soundtrack to She's The One, a movie that as far as I'm aware, nobody even watched, and having seen it myself, I can say right now that even if you do watch it, you'll forget about it half an hour later. I've heard some people say it's one of the best romantic comedies ever, but honestly, if it isn't As Good as it Gets or Chasing Amy, then it's probably not anything more than mediocre and forgettable.

The one memorable thing about She's The One is that Tom Petty's soundtrack for it is great. There aren't any moments of brilliance on it, but it's still a very solid album well worth picking up if you can find it, and Walls is the best song there, but it's full of great music that most people haven't heard, or aren't even aware that it exists. There are two versions of Walls, and I'll include both here. They're both great renditions of the song and I'm not sure which I prefer.


Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Favorite Song of the Week - 10/16/2013 - In a Station by Karen Dalton

I've decided to do something new with this blog that might make updates a bit more frequent and routine. A weekly entry that I'm calling "Favorite Song of the Week." It's just a song that I've picked out to showcase here with no rhyme or reason except that I really like it. I'm not sure if this will remain a Wednesday thing, but it probably won't due to my college schedule. Something on the weekend is more likely. But for now, here's this week's entry, folk singer Karen Dalton's cover of The Band's In a Station.



Karen Dalton was an obscure folk singer who put out two albums in the lte sixties and early seventies. Bob Dylan himself said that Dalton was his favorite singer, comparing her voice to Billie Holiday's, which is a comparison that has been made about her by many people who have heard her. Dalton was different from most other folk musicians of the era due to the fact that she didn't write her own material, but after hearing her singing The Band's In a Station, it's really not that big of a problem. It's rare for someone to cover the band and actually improve on their material, especially with a song as good as Richard Manuel's brilliant In a Station, but she did it. Manuel's vocal performance on the original was one of his best, and considering that Manuel is one of the greatest vocalists in the history of popular music, somebody outshining his performance is no easy feat. But Dalton did it.

Her version is a lot jazzier than The Band's original, which fits the Billie Holliday comparison that people make of her. Her voice is a ragged, world weary croak, but in this context, it's absolutely gorgeous.

As for Dalton herself, the album this was on, In My Own Time was the last one she ever recorded. Some unreleased recordings have been put out in recent years, but she apparently never recorded again after 1971. From what I've read, she wasn't a psychologically well woman. She was more than likely psychotic and more than likely a life long drug addict. There are two semi-conflicting stories about her death. It's been confirmed that she died of AIDS in 1993, and it was initially believed that she died in the streets of New York City. It was later confirmed that she died in Upstate New York under the care of her friend, guitarist Peter Walker.

Monday, September 16, 2013

See You In Hell by Grim Reaper

 

I think I've found it - the worst garbage metal band to come out of the eighties. That's not a statement to be made lightly. The surprising part is that they aren't hair metal. Their music is more indebted to Dio than REO Speedwagon, but they give the worst eighties arena rock bands a run for their money. They're also completely without the charm of bands like Night Ranger and Poison that makes them a guilty pleasure.

And that band, the bastion of dreadfully bad trash metal is Grim Reaper. These guys probably watched This is Spinal Tap, thought that songs like Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight and Stonehenge were really good, and decided to emulate that without realizing that it was intended to be terrible.

The lead singer is a fat faced, thirty-something goofball with the worst mullet I've ever seen in my life and not in that hilariously bad way, either. He's belting out awful lyrics about youthful rebellion or some other nonsense while doing his best Ronnie James Dio impression. To be fair to the guy, he'd do a good job singing lead in a Dio cover band. I'd say that the closest comparison to this as far as quality goes is Elf, the band that Ronnie James Dio got his start in. There was obvious talent involved, and the singer sounded like Dio (because he was), but they had no idea what they were doing.

As for the talent, I have to say that instrumentally, this band is good. The guitar work especially. But talent doesn't guarantee good music, especially if your songwriting is complete shit and your singer is trying way too hard.

The only reason most people remember this band is because on several occasions (three that I've found) Beavis and Butt-Head made fun of their music videos. If you want to hear Grim Reaper, just watch those. You'll get the basic idea of how bad their music was and you won't have to sit through three plus minutes of the worst metal this side of John Mikl Thor.

Because at least John Mikl Thor was a funny sort of bad. This is just completely without entertainment value.

In conclusion, I don't particularly like this band.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Monster by Fred Schneider

Every once in a while, I stumble across a song or music video on Youtube and I know I have to sit down and write about it for this blog. It rarely happens due to my free time being occupied with other endeavors, but this time, I had to force myself to write this. I just found this a couple minutes before I sat down to write about it.

This music video is a solo project from Fred Schneider of the B-52's. The video was banned on MTV. Watch it and find out why.


By the way, the blonde in the video is Tina Weymouth the bassist for The Talking Heads, and apparently her husband, Chris Franz, the drummer for The Talking Heads is in the video as well. There's no point to that.

In conclusion, Fred Schneider is one strange little man. And that's why I love him. But I wasn't expecting this. I don't know if I like this or not, all I know is that the world needs to know about Fred Schneider's Monster.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Song Showcase - Still Sane by Carolyn Mas

Here's a pretty recent discovery I made. Carolyn Mas, a singer who had a minor hit in 1979 with this great little number, Still Sane. It's all I've ever heard from her, but I just picked up an album of hers from a thrift store for a buck in spectacular condition, and I really need to get to listening to that given how much this song impressed me. Then again, anything with a saxophone in it is guaranteed to at least grab my attention. Throw in a great chorus, a damn good vocal performance and a tight performance from the rest of the band and you get a solid song.

The song is insanely catchy as well, which works to it's favor. I first heard this song about a week ago late at night right before bed. When I woke up in the morning, I had it in my head for a while afterwards. I'm sort of surprised that this was such a minor hit when it came out, but then again, being a minor hit isn't any statement about it's quality. It's a killer song, even if it was barely noticed.

Also, I'd like to point out that this video is from the singer's Youtube channel, which is really cool.


Song Review - Torture by The Jacksons




You know what the best part of The Jacksons was? Michael, obviously. You know they continued on without him after he made it on his own, right? No, you didn't know that? Of course not. Because you do better things with your time than listen to shitty music by middling talents such as Tito and Jermaine... I don't know any other Jackson Brothers. The only reason most of us remember Tito is because of that scene in Rush Hour where Chris Tucker tells Jackie Chan "I'm Michael Jackson, you Tito."

The joke is that Tito is irrelevant. Jermaine had a few awful hit songs in the early eighties that people vaguely remember. But the only reason he had those hits is because he came out of the same vagina as the biggest star in the world. Also, he's the greasiest person on the planet. He looks like he's always wet. He's also a punchline for being irrelevant.

But this song was a hit. You know why? Michael sings on it. That's the same reason Rockwell had fifteen minutes of fame. That, and being Berry Gordy's kid. (See LMFAO for more of this nepotism in action with untalented musicians in the Gordy family.)

But here's the kicker. The part that I really don't get. This song is pretty good. It's catchy, it has a great chorus, and Tito has some pretty solid guitar work here. As far as R&B guitarists go, he's not Steve Cropper or Ernie Isley by any stretch of the imagination, but he's a pretty good guitarist in his own right. Jermaine and... the other two... were both mediocre singers, let's not try to paint them as anything more. But Tito was a fine guitarist. I don't know if he's the only guitarist here, and I'm not 100% that it's him playing the guitar here, but I know Tito's a bit of a bigger guy and the guitarist here is... let's be honest here, he's fat. So I'm assuming that it's Tito. If it's another Jackson brother, then I apologize for making that mistake and comparing them to Tito.

The video itself is stupid and cheesy (oh god, is it ever those two things), but it's grown on me. I like this kind of nonsense in my eighties videos. My favorite part is in the end, where you see the Jackson brothers standing with Michael. Except it's not Michael. It's a wax scuplture of Michael. I don't know if that's hilarious, or depressing that he couldn't make time for his own family.

Also, breakdancing skeletons and a really crappy spider suit. That's pretty awesome.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Song Review - All The Way From Memphis by Contraband


I wish there was a way for me to show exactly how disgusted I was when I first heard this dreck. There was another really crappy cover of an Ian Hunter song from around this period of time - Great White's Once Bitten Twice Shy, which was admittedly a lot worse, because nobody in that awful band had anything more than middling talent.

But Contraband? This should have been a kick-ass supergroup. Their lineup was a pretty solid one. Bobby Blotzer from Ratt on drums, Vixen's Share Pedersen on bass (say what you will about Vixen, they were talented), and the dual guitar attack of Tracii Guns from L.A. Guns and guitar legend, Michael Schenker. Also, Richard Black from Shark Island on vocals. I've never heard of him either. Unfortunately, in reality, we get a band lamer than Damn Yankees, but at least I don't have to see Ted Nugent lowering himself to playing sappy power ballads with Tommy Shaw and the guy from Night Ranger trading off lead vocals.

As a side note, I have no idea why I've never touched High Enough yet on this blog. It seems right up my alley of making fun of bad music. That's now on my to do list.

What I love is that in the opening of the video, we see the logos for the bands these members were a part of and their signiture next to them. It just comes across as desperate. It feels like they're saying "Remember us? We were relevant five years ago."

But this is by the numbers, uninspired, generic hard rock without anything special setting it apart from other crap on the rock charts in 1991, aside from the fact that it's a blasphemous cover. And as I said, there's already a much more noteworthy blasphemous Ian Hunter cover.

This is shit, but even worse than that, it's boring shit. It's shit that isn't even worth the twenty minutes it took me to write about how shitty it is. So, why did I even bother?

Hell if I know. I'm gonna go listen to some Ian Hunter.

UPDATE! - 11/22/2013

During a bit of research for another blog entry I'm sort of working on (not sure if anything will come from it) on a cover of Fleetwood Mac's The Chain by a largely forgotten band called Shark Island, I remembered this entry due to the similar concept of taking a great seventies song and turning it into shitty, generic late eighties/early nineties butt rock. Both bands also have a lead vocalist in common. The guy's butchered great songs in this style before. I figured that I might as well put a link to that cover of The Chain in here just in case I never do anything with it. I'll be fair and say that the outro to the song is actually pretty damn good when it's unrecognizable as a butchered version of The Chain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY1xs3B8BU4 

Also, the video I linked to for this entry was pulled from Youtube, so I put another copy up. I'd make some snotty remark like "no need to thank me," but a better comment would be "I'm sorry for noticing that and making it easier to find this garbage," and "Seriously, Michael Schenker's better than this."

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Song Showcase - You're Breakin' My Heart by Harry Nilsson

In 1972, Harry Nilsson put out one of his numerous classics. You're Breakin' My Heart wasn't in the same league as his stunning cover of Badfinger's Without You, but it had one thing that certainly set it apart from any other song out there.

The opening line of the song is "You're breaking my heart, you're tearing it apart, so fuck you."

This is a full 38 years before Cee Lo Green put out his song, Fuck You, and two years before Cee Lo was even born. Harry Nilsson was a trail blazer. It's also worth noting that Nilsson drops the F-bomb ten words into the song while Cee Lo waited thirteen to do the same in his.

This song isn't in the same league as Nilsson Sings Newman, Without You or Everybody's Talkin, but it has one thing that none of those songs had. It was an original Nilsson composition. The guy was a great songwriter, but was known mostly for his covers. He had a wonderfully off beat sense of humor to his songs, and this was a great example of that.


Saturday, August 24, 2013

Song Showcase - Citizen Jane by Bernie Taupin

Again with the lack of updates... I apologize for that. I've been focusing more on my Youtube channel lately. If you're interested in the music writing I've done, there's none of that on the channel at the moment. It's all video game related stuff, but if you're interested, check that out.

Of course, at this point, I'm pretty sure a good amount of my readers are bots from Russian spam sites trying to get me to click the link in their referral so they can send me porn and try to get money out of me or something, but there's probably some real people reading this, right?

Anyway, enough of my complaining about that. I'm going to change the format of this a bit so I can get back in the swing of it. Showcasing songs I like - most of which are obscure.

Today's entry is Citizen Jane by Bernie Taupin, Elton John's lyricist. Bernie's only ever put out a few of his own albums, which isn't surprising. The guy's been focused on providing lyrics for one of the biggest musical performers in the world for over forty years. It's made him very wealthy, and fulfilled him as an artist. He isn't required to put his own voice on record, as long as his words make it there.

Besides, Bernie's not much of a singer. He does fine here, but his voice is quite weak and thin. It suits this particular song, though, and Elton John's background vocals help out a lot. But I think Taupin's voice is what makes this song work. It's a very mellow and restrained voice. He doesn't have much of a voice, but he knows how to use it well.


Sunday, July 7, 2013

Song Reviews - No Time to Lose by The Tarney Spencer Band


I figured I'd try a new direction for this blog since I was losing interest in making fun of cheesy music videos. I'll definitely do more of that in the future, but for now, I want to focus on more serious music reviews, specifically obscure and forgotten songs that I love.

The first entry is an obscure minor hit on radio and MTV from the late seventies and early eighties called No Time to Lose by the Tarney Spencer Band.

There's nothing I can say about this song that sums up my feelings about it than the following statement... It's my favorite song ever. I remember hearing it on the classic rock radio station in St. Louis every so often when I was growing up there, and it always mesmerized me. Whenever they played it, I stopped in my tracks, dropped whatever I was doing and gave it my full attention.

If I had to describe it's sound, it's like if Bob Welch had stayed with Fleetwood Mac during the Buckingham/Nicks years. It's the kind of glossy, commercial pop/rock coming out of southern California during the last year or two of the 1970's. But it has an immediacy and power to it. It still gives me the chills when I hear it, and I've listened to it countless times.

The guitars sound like an update to the surf rock of the 1960's, only without the breakneck speed of guys like Dick Dale. The interplay between the rhythm section is fantastic. I'm not a musician, so it's difficult for me to explain. It just has to be heard. It's not surprising that the duo of Tarney and Spencer are a bassist and drummer respectively.

The Tarney Spencer Band was a duo made up of bassist/singer Alan Tarney and drummer Trevor Spencer, a pair of Australians who were members of Cliff Richard's backing band during the seventies. Richard was one of the biggest pop stars in the history of English music, and their most long lived, although he never caught on in the States aside from a few hits, including Devil Woman. I personally think he did his best work in the seventies when these two were in his band. Tarney was also one of his regular songwriters.

Tarney went on to produce a handful of eighties artists, including a-ha and their international smash hit, Take on Me.

As for the song, I can't find any indication that it was a big hit anywhere. It charted in the lower reaches of the Billboard pop charts twice, in 1978 (at #86) and 1981 (at #74) respectively. I believe that charting in 1981 was because of MTV airplay. I've seen a video for it, and it's a different version of the song than the one I'm used to. It's about a minute shorter, and quite a bit slower. I sort of prefer the faster, longer version, but the shorter version has the better opening. I'd say that the opening to this version is one of the best I've ever heard in any song.

I'm not sure if the version in the video was the one on the LP or the single, or just a version edited for airplay, but both versions are worth listening to. Here's the longer, faster version (the video used is apparently from another video they did, so it just looks like horrible lip synching.)


 And here's the shorter, slower version.


Sunday, June 30, 2013

The Holy Grail of Eighties Garbage Rock - Friends by Dragon Sound

Friday night was the first time I saw the greatest b-movie ever made, Miami Connection. Saturday, I wrote a review for it on my other blog - read it here - and today, I've decided to post something in this blog about the movie's soundtrack.

In that film review, I called Miami Connection "the holy grail of low budget eighties action," and it sort of occurred to me just now that one of the songs from the soundtrack is the holy grail of eighties garbage rock. This song is on par with Stan Bush's The Touch. The songs have a very similar feel to them, and I think that they're equals. Granted, the singer on Friends doesn't have a voice nearly as powerful and awesome as Stan Bush's golden pipes of awesomeness, but the song is just as memorable and just as deserving of being considered a masterpiece of eighties garbage rock.

The funniest part here is that it's from about the same time as The Touch, and yet, it's far more dated. The Touch sounded like 1986 because it came out in 1986. Friends sounds like 1982 at the very latest, and yet it came out in 1987. I think that makes it even more awesome.

You could even argue that song actually sounds very recent, because a song like this could only be recorded by someone after the year 2010 as a parody of eighties music for something like an Adult Swim cartoon that combines eighties cartoons like GI Joe and Transformers into a self aware parody of the era. This is so of the era that it can't actually be from the era. But it is, and that's why it's the holy grail of eighties garbage rock.

The song can also be heard on the soundtrack to the video game love letter to eighties cheese, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Song Review - I Do The Rock by Tim Curry

Apparently, Tim Curry had a stroke recently, and my heart goes out to the guy and I hope he makes a full recovery and that he can soon get back to being the most kitschy and flamboyant human being this side of John Waters.

I've always loved the guy. He's made a career out of making bad movies a little more awesome with his presence. His iconic performance in Rocky Horror Picture Show defined the concept of a performance that's so bad that it's good. The guy is a b-movie legend, and his performances in film, stage, TV and cartoon voice work are always fantastic and very memorable.

But one of my favorite things he's ever done is I Do The Rock, a largely forgotten song he made in 1979. I have no idea how it's been forgotten, because it's everything glorious about Tim Curry. He's making a horrible attempt at an accent - I don't even know what accent. Russian? Jamaican? I'll just call the accent 'Tim Curry Attempting an Accent.' It's the same one he did in Congo. He's also prancing around like the gayest man on the planet, and just being all around awesome. Also, the song is absolutely horrendous. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard, but I can look past that because it's Tim Curry, dammit. Hell, I don't look past it. The awfulness is the main attraction. I'm watching this flamboyant, creepy British guy prance around and sing the most idiotic lyrics I've ever heard. This is Tim Curry at his finest.

Get well, Tim. You friggin' rule.


Song Review - Who Says by Device

It's been a while since I've done this, and I figure the best way to make a comeback to this blog is with a throwback to my first entry - Device. I've done a bit more research about these guys and their keyboardist/songwriter Holly Knight since my first entry, because of the same kind of curiosity that lead me to discover countless bands and artists. To quote the guy Harry Callahan threatened with that famous 'did I shoot six shots or only five' line, "I gots to know."

That's how I found their other video for a song called Who Says. It's quintessential eighties trash rock, and it is glorious.


This video might be obscure as hell, but it's a defining one of the era. It had everything.

It was shot in a warehouse. There are random spotlights all over. For some reason, there's some hot girl wearing a sweatshirt wandering through a parking garage. Every guy here has a magnificently awful blonde mullet. Holly Knight is playing a keytar. A friggin' keytar, for God's sake. And the fashion is horrendous.

The guitarist is wearing denim with a scarf around his neck. The lead singer is wearing leather chaps over his denim - LEATHER CHAPS. Holly Knight is wearing a tight one piece spandex thing with a jacket that doesn't look like it has any way of closing, and it doesn't even go any lower than her stomach. The drummer is wearing a sleeveless black button up shirt. The kicker there? Holly Knight was credited for providing 'programming,' which I assume means drum machine programming. There was no drummer credited on the album. They just found a guy with a mullet and sat him down at the skins for this video because... I have no idea why.

The best part of this? The singer. Initially, I thought his voice sounded familiar. I brushed this off because it's sort of the generic eighties singer voice. Then I looked up the album's credits on the All Music Guide and found out that the singer is Paul Engemann. It's certainly not a household name, but he does have one very well known song.


Holy shit, it's the Push it to the Limit guy. I'm kicking myself for not finding this out for the first entry on this blog.

This is a great one of the best pieces of eighties rock I've come across. It's cheesy and stupid, sure, but it was written by Holly Knight and sung by the same voice that did Push it to the Limit. The album was produced by Mike Chapman, who was pretty much the Holly Knight of the seventies. You shouldn't expect smart music from these people. You'll get catchy, listenable and very memorable music from them, though.

Unfortunately, Device split up after one album, and this and Hanging on a Heart Attack are the only videos they put out. It's a shame because these videos are great fodder for me and this blog. But I can take solace in the fact that Holly Knight was a very prolific songwriter. There will be more songs with her songwriting credits on here, you can count on that. It would be unavoidable even if I was trying not to - she's that prolific. But I won't avoid her work. Not just because it's perfect for this blog, but because I really like her work. I'm a fan.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Winner of Eurovision This Year Wasn't Bad

This is an update to my last entry from a few weeks ago about Eurovision where I railed against the contest for producing a lot of shitty music. I still stand by that statement. But to be fair, I didn't pay any more attention to Eurovision after writing that and I just now figured that I might as well see who won.

Eurovision has declared a winner. Only Teardrops by Emmilie De Forest, Denmark's entry. I'm not blown away by it, but it's a pretty decent song.


So yeah, something decent won this year. It's better than that Norwegian guy's awful Fairytale song that won a few years back. That song was the worst piece of music to ever come out of Scandanavia. And that's the region of the world that crapped out ABBA. I'd take Dancing Queen over that garbage any day of the week.

I like how this went from sort of praising Eurovision for this year's winner being decent, into ripping into some fiddle playing jerk's awful song. But seriously, Fairytale can go fuck itself.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Eurovision - The Good and the Bad

Eurovision is this month! What is Eurovision, you may ask? Let me explain this to my American readership.

It's a yearly contest where a bunch of European countries (and a few in northern Africa and the western parts of the middle east, which as any fourth grader taking a geography class could tell you, are not parts of Europe) pick singers from their country to record a song, and then a panel of judges picks which one is the best. It's a pretty huge deal in that corner of the world.

Some of the artists who took part in the contest have gone on to be big names in the music world. Such as ABBA and Celine Dion, who most of know for being completely and indefensibly horrible.

However, in the interest of fairness, I want to talk about one of the good entries in the contest, because there were some good ones over the years. By the law of averages, there would have to be. If Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap, 10% has to be at the very least not crap, and a small percentage of that 10% has to be good or even great, right?

The best song I could find from the contest is by music legend, Julio Iglesias with his first big hit song, Gwendolyne, which was Spain's entry in the 1970 contest. It's an absolutely beautiful song.


On the other end of the quality spectrum is this mess, the UK's 2000 entry, Don't Play That Song Again by Nicki French.

 

UGH. Don't play that song again.

This woman has all the talent of a third place runner up on a bad season of American Idol. She's probably better known for this awful cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart that was an actual hit in America in 1995 going to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. I have no idea why. It's painfully bland.

It's not always pop music, though. Sometimes, it's as far from pop as you can get. And it still manages to suck. Like Spain's 2010 entry, Algo Pequenito by Daniel Diges.

 

It's like Tim Burton and Cirque Du Soleil teamed up to show me absolute horror, and to add insult to injury, they had some guy with Art Garfunkel's hair sing a horrible song at the same time.

Norway's 1978 entry, Mi Etter Mil by Jahn Teigen, is considered one of the worst ever, apparently. The kicker is that they brought this guy back twice afterwards to represent Norway.

 

I don't know why people hated this. If you're going to make awful music, you might as well be hilariously bad about it. I dig this guy. The suspenders, the tie, the collar, the pants, the sunglasses, that little jump he does at the end... This is a man failing spectacularly, and apparently he used that failure to propel himself into a successful music career. Jahn Teigen rules.

Here's another one from Norway, 2009's entry by Aleksander Rybak. The song is called Fairytale. This guy has one of the worst singing voices I've ever heard. And he rocks the fiddle like a Scandinavian Charlie Daniels.

                                    

Here's the worst part. That won. A panel of judges from across Europe determined that this was the best song to come out of Europe and a handful of countries outside of Europe that year. Now, I'm not really up on European popular music from 2009, but I'm betting that that's not true.

As I mentioned before, not all entries are from Europe. The funny thing is that Israel has won the contest three times. That's not a statement of quality, but it's something.

Anyway, here's Israel's 2000 entry. It's by a band called Ping Pong, and the song is entitled Sa' me 'akh. Just press play and brace yourself, because you're in for a bumpy ride.

                                    

You probably turned the video off as soon as the singing starts, and that's understandable because blondie there is one of the worst singers I've ever heard, but trust me - it gets worse with each passing second. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard. I hate this song and I hate everyone involved with it.

Apparently, they got into a bit of trouble with their country's government when they all pulled out flags, some of them Syrian, and waved them around because a song this horrible needs a political message thrown in because otherwise, I wouldn't take it seriously.

That's not all the horrible songs I could find (and the Julio Iglesias song isn't the only good one I could find either), but that's all I really want to say. I think I showcased plenty of horrible stuff and one really good song, and that's really the only thing I'm trying to do here.

I honestly wish I had more time to research this contest because I'm sure I'm missing some great music, as well as some horrendous garbage. I just hope that Ping Pong was the worst entry in Eurovision's history. I don't know if I could stomach anything that's worse than that.

There's also the possibility that I'm being far too kind to Eurovision. I won't rule that out either.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Song Review - Fantasy by Aldo Nova



Everything that is awesome about generic eighties rock is on this album.
If someone asked me to defend shitty eighties rock, specifically the early eighties kind of garbage rock, I'd have one name for them... Aldo Nova. Not the artist, because nobody cares about him. I'm referring to his 1982 self titled debut album, which was everything horribly awesome about commercial eighties rock. Specifically the album's first track, the big hit from the album (and really, Aldo Nova's entire recording career) - Fantasy.


Note - the song itself starts about 1:30 into the video. Before that, it's just complete nonsense

I know that Fantasy is about as far from an actual defense of this kind of stuff as you can get - if you hate early eighties commercial rock music, you will despise this song. But if you like it, then you probably can't bring yourself to not love this song.

Puke green Dodge St. Regis - the official car of Sledge Hammer.
This is the kind of song that would be played in an low budget hard-R eighties cop movie as the hard boiled cop on the edge cruises the Sunset Strip in a lime green Dodge St. Regis to pick up a hooker and some coke.

So, part of the reason I like this song is because it reminds me of a type of movie I like, even if it was never used in one of those movies. But I also like it because it's a defining song of this type of music and it exemplifies everything I love about it. It's a cheesy song with just as much synthesizer as guitar, the lyrics are generic 'life on the streets' fare written by a French Canadian rock musician who would later go on to do session work for Michael Bolton and Celine Dion - yeah, man, Aldo Nova's from the streets. Come on, he's like the Canadian version of Tommy Shaw from Styx. That's not a compliment.

Nobody ever accused this kind of music of being sincere or intelligent. If they did, they're either kidding or they're stupid.

The part of this video that people remember is the opening. Some dorky looking guy in a bowtie is standing around holding a guitar with some guys holding guns standing around him in what is probably meant to look like a shipping yard at night, but is more than likely a warehouse indoors, because every eighties music video was shot inside of a warehouse. Then, they lower a cheap helicopter prop from the ceiling. And then, this steps out of the chopper.

Nice pajamas, dork.
The guy in the bowtie is no longer the dorkiest guy there, because while bowties are dorky, they're not nearly as dorky as tight leopard print pajamas. They go over to a door, Aldo Nova shoots it with his guitar lazer and they go inside so Aldo Nova can lip synch his song to a group of central casting hires in a warehouse made to look like a night club.


To my original point about this being a defense of this kind of music. It only is if you like the stuff. If you're like me, then this was awesome. If you're not, then you think I'm a moron. And you're probably right.

But at least I'm not wearing leopard print pajamas.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Song Reviews - Edge of a Broken Heart by Vixen



Warning - I'm about to admit to liking something that I should probably hate.



Long before I even attempted this blog, I was making fun of bad music videos and bad music, and one of my favorite punching bags was the mid-eighties all-girl pop/metal band, Vixen. It's sort of hard to see why, considering that nobody remembers them, but I can explain it, I think.
I recently got to thinking about why I chose to make fun of this briefly moderately successful and largely forgotten band. Is it because they’re all women? Absolutely not. I happen to like The Runaways and Girlschool, and they were both all-girl rock bands. Is it because they were a pop band? Hardly. I’m a huge fan of power pop, and this isn’t far off from mid and late eighties power pop bands like Enuff Z’Nuff and the latter day Cheap Trick, both bands that I like.

Is it because Edge of a Broken Heart sucks? No, actually. I’ve recently been able to admit to myself that I kind of like this song, to my eternal shame. It’s a guilty pleasure. And that's the reason - I couldn't admit to myself that I actually liked this, so I listened to it and made mean jokes about it.

I can also admit that these girls aren’t bad musicians. The singer has a good voice and if she let herself go a little more, she’d be very enjoyable to listen to. The instrumentalists aren’t bad, either. They aren’t extraordinary, at least as far as I can hear, but they’re a tight, professional unit. I love the guitar riff and the guitar solo here is quite good, and the bassline is noticeable, which is a plus – there aren’t enough good bass parts in rock music, and I always appreciate being able to say anything about the way a bass is played in a song.

The only problem I have with Vixen is that they’re bland. There’s no personality to this. I’m wondering if their handlers at the record label had them tone it down so as not to threaten their potential, largely male audience. It’s a possibility, and it’s unfortunate. Apparently, they were veterans on the Sunset Strip club scene for a long time before they got a record deal.

Admittedly, there’s also the possibility that they would have just been another lame hair metal band if given the chance to do what they wanted to. In fact, it’s probably pretty likely. But it’s a shame that they weren’t given the same chances as their male counterparts to make crappy music. At the very least, they would have stood out amongst the crowd of mediocrity. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s something, I guess.

And yes, I know that this song was co-written by Richard Marx. I can't stand that guy. The other writer? Fee Waybill from The Tubes. If you know anything about The Tubes, that's kind of shocking and not surprising at all both at once. Do yourself a favor and click that link. That's The Tubes. You're welcome.

Music Video Review - You're a Friend of Mine by Clarence Clemmons and Jackson Browne

Mick Jagger and David Bowie's horrific cover version of Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas gets a lot of flak for supposedly being one of the worst songs of the 1980's with one of the most uncomfortably homoerotic music videos ever. Don't take my word for it - click that link and see for yourself. That probably won't be the last you'll see of that video on this blog - I almost have to take a shot at it at some point.

Oh God, where's the Mars Bar? I apologize if you got that joke.

It is a horrible video for an equally horrible song, but the weird sexual chemistry between Bowie and Jagger at least has the potential to make the video amusing, I guess. But there's another eighties duet that's much, much worse. Clarence Clemmons and Jackson Browne's You're a Friend of Mine.


Now, I love Clarence Clemmons. He was just a big, goofy guy with a saxophone and he seemed like one of the most genuinely nice guys in music. He was also one hell of a sax player. But there's a reason that he isn't known as a singer. It's because he's not good at it.  I'm a fan of Jackson Browne as well. Running on Empty is one of my favorite albums ever and The Pretender is one of my favorite songs. He also produced another one of my favorite albums, Warren Zevon's self titled 1976 release. I have to clarify all this because I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SONG.

The video concerns Clarence Clemmons in an ugly blue shirt failing to dance. Understandable, I guess. I know that he's a sax player and a black guy, so going by stereotypes surrounding sax playing African American men, he should be able to dance. But he was like, 6'6", so I can understand how he wouldn't be the most graceful guy. But it's still funny seeing him try to dance in most cases. This is not one of them.

There's also Jackson Browne going around the apartment they're in playing his guitar and singing directly The Big Man's face. That's awkward. Then there's the Dave Coulier looking guy on piano and the Al Jurreau looking guy on drums. To the Dave Coulier lookalike's credit, he doesn't look like he's having much fun.

The part that I think is the closest to being amusing is Darryl Hannah who was apparently an item with Jackson Browne at the time or something. She's painting them at first and later videotaping them. Because apparently they wanted this to be recorded for people to see. Why would they think that? Because in the eighties, people did a lot of cocaine, and if Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories taught me anything, it's that...


Things to listen for - towards the end, Jackson Browne's voice cracks. They didn't go back to re-record that line, because... why would they? It's Jackson Browne and he had better things to do in the eighties, like trying to convince people that Lawyers in Love wasn't a horrible album.

Overall, this song is probably the worst thing either of these guys ever did. But you want to know something depressing? Look up Clarence Clemmons's name on Google.


With everything this guy ever did with Springsteen and the E-Street Band, this is what people care most about.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Video Game Review - Battle Hunter (Playstation)



  
Genre: Turn Based Strategy/Board Game
Release: 2001 
Developer: Success
Publisher: Agetec Inc.


Battle Hunter was marketed as an RPG, but it’s really not. It utilizes stats for the characters, but that’s really the only RPG element it has. It’s more similar to a board game. Your character has statistics for a handful of abilities – attack, defense, movement and HP, and the battles in the game are decided by cards and dice rolls.

The game puts you and three other characters (either controlled by the AI or other players) on a randomized board and tasks you to find a specific item in a random crate and then make your way to the exit. If another player gets the item, you have to stop them and take it from them before they can escape with it. There are AI monsters in the game as well, and they can be annoying, but the goal isn’t to fight them. They’re just obstacles.

The one thing that truly stands out in this game is the soundtrack. It’s very good, particularly the track Eyes in Minds (lThat's a link to the song on Youtube - give it a listen.). The character designs are quite good as well. They pack a lot of personality into each of the designs. So, hats off to the art and music teams for the game.

So, is Battle Hunter a great game? No. But it’s a good game, especially for the price you’ll pay for it. I got my copy for $10 at a used game store. You can probably get yours for about the same give or take a few bucks on eBay. It’s a bargain bin game, so don’t expect it to rock your world because it won’t. But it will likely entertain you for a little while. You’ll probably play it briefly every once in a while as well. And that’s worth $10, I think.

Score: 7/10 – Good

In conclusion, here's a picture of one of the game's characters. He looks like Michael Ironside raided Bruce Campbell's Burn Notice wardrobe.
Much like Chuck Finley, Sam Fisher is forever.