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.
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...
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.
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.
