38 posts tagged “70s”

Several weeks ago I wrote about Iggy Pop and Peter Murphy sounding nearly the same; just yesterday I discovered the live radio performances that Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor gave during the joint Nine Inch Nails/Bauhaus tour of 2006.  Lo and behold, they did an Iggy Pop cover:

And to pile on the coincidences, Trent released a new Nine Inch Nails album today (The Slip), for free!

Of course I remembered even more Moldy 70s songs immediately after I posted my Moldy 70s video collection, but one of them led to an unanticipated discovery.  Looking for Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" on YouTube, I found instead a live performance from 1986 of the same song by Yukihiro Takahashi, the former drummer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members (Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Haruomi Hosono) have a hand in just about every piece of music from Japan that I hear.  It's an impressive arrangement with the synth riffs played by a horn section, and the keyboardist even replicates the what is undoubtedly the best marimba solo ever in a pop song:

And for comparison purposes, here's the original:

Being first is everything.  Bolus gets linked to from everywhere for posting videos of cheesy 70s songs as "Hell's iPod."  I've been enjoying this crap for years, unironically, having made two "Moldy 70s" CDs during the Napster years.  Here is a video sampler of those fine collections of shamefully seductive pop songs.  Let's start out watching some chicks beat the shit out of a cowbell and a tambourine while Gary Wright and crew show you how phallic a keyboard can be:

"Geek the light fantastic!", says Mrs. V.

1964?  Well, I heard it in the 70s.

"She's gonna get you from behind!"  Ow!

You can't beat "Convoy" for the cheeze factor!

There's some kick-ass clavinet in "Rock Me Gently."

"Sweet City Woman" has one of my favorite gag-inducing lines ever: "And she feeds me love and tenderness and macaroons."  Gahhhhhhh!

As an addendum to my previous post, I've found a usable (i.e. under 20 minutes) edit of "Prelude" from Agharta, the electric-era Miles Davis tune that opened up a whole new area of music to me in 1991.

A couple more new-wave-leaning songs that got regular airplay on staunch AOR station WAVA were Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams" (1979) and the Motors' "Love and Loneliness" (1980).  I always think of those two songs together because Tchaikovsky (actually Peter Bramall) was a member of the Motors before going "solo" (in quotes because Bram Tchaikovsky was one of those "yes it's the lead singer's name but it's also the name of the band" deals), and also before the Motors recorded "Love and Loneliness".  So the only link is a shared history, but that's enough for me.  One of Tchaikovsky's early bands, Heroes, recorded a version of Springsteen's "Growing Up," so it's not surprising to hear Bruce's "Born To Run" motif in "Girl of My Dreams"--

For a couple years, roughly 1978-80, "new wave" music could be heard on rock (or AOR, "album-oriented rock") radio stations.  Either new wave had yet to forge a distinct identity, or rock fans had yet to notice anything different and voice their displeasure, but several of my favorite WAVA songs from that era were, in retrospect, definitely of new wave pedigree.  The first such song was "Yachting Type" by the Yachts, from Liverpool.  I remember the first time I heard it, the DJ said "Plug your ears into this!" before playing it:

I was a fan from that very first exposure.  I bought the album and listened to it over and over, and it bore the repetition: there are a lot of good songs on it.  I had no idea that it was New Wave, I just liked the hooks and the organ.  After that first album the Yachts changed bass players, put out a lackluster second album, and broke up.  The core of the group would later resurface as It's Immaterial, whom I also liked, without even knowing about the Yachts connection, which I only learned recently.  But back to the topic at hand, which is new wave music sneaking onto AOR airwaves, another favorite from those days is the anthemic "The Shape of Things To Come" by the Headboys*:

I never did get around to buying that album, but I taped the song off the radio, and that was good enough.  I've now heard the whole album (thanks to the Power Pop Criminals blog), and the rest of it is more pub-rock than new wave, but still fun, and I might have gotten into it back then anyway.  Belatedly, I learned that "power pop" is the category assigned to these under-the-radar new wave bands, and I have several more examples of their infiltration of AOR airwaves, but I'll start with just these two.

After hearing about it for close to twenty years, I finally saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot over the weekend.  It's a low-budget documentary of the parking-lot party activities before a 1986 Judas Priest concert at the Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland.  What a scene.  The Cap Centre was my local arena, and I went to a whole bunch of rock'n'roll shows there when I was in ninth and tenth grade (1979-81).  While I never took part in any parking-lot debauchery (I was either too young, too scared, or too sensible), I sure did rock out.  Seeing the now-demolished* Cap Centre made me try to remember all the shows I saw there, and for posterity I've put together a Seeqpod playlist that contains most of the bands I saw there.  I've tried to select songs that represent the albums they were promoting at the time, but it wasn't always possible: there just aren't any tracks from Foghat's Tight Shoes, Blackfoot's Tomcattin', or Yes's Drama on seeqable sites.  Some of the opening bands I couldn't find at all (Marseilles, FM) and some I've forgotten altogether.  If I could find again my wooden box with all my ticket stubs in it that would help a lot, but I'm afraid it's lost forever.  But now I will always have this playlist to remind me, because the Internet is forever, right?

*

I was in the ninth grade when I discovered the "imports" section at the local record store (Waxie Maxie's), filled with stuff that looked downright weird.  Even better, though, was the discounted imports bin, and one day when I had five dollars to spend I waffled between Chrome's Red Exposure, which looked strange and interesting, and Jack-Knife's I Wish You Would, which had John Wetton, who was a known quantity to me, on bass.  I opted for Jack-Knife; years later I got really into Chrome and eventually found another copy of Red Exposure to buy.  Would having bought it the first time have changed the trajectory of my musical fandom?  Chrome was decidedly different, and I sometimes wished I'd gotten an earlier start in alternative music.  But a few tunes on the Jack-Knife album hold up well; on the title track Wetton plays one of his most kinetic basslines, and Curt Cress opens the song with the funkiest drumming you'll ever hear on a rock record.  Then there's the fantastic guitar solo by Richard Palmer-James which, when it sounds like it's over, picks up again for another several bars of wah-wah ecstasy:

Jack-Knife was a one-off, Wetton getting some old bandmates together to have some fun between U.K. recording sessions in 1979.  As such it's surprisingly good, and groove miners can find a lot of first-rate breaks (some with cowbell!) to sample.

I've been on a low-grade Hawkwind binge since watching the Hawkwind - Do Not Panic BBC 4 documentary last week, and the binge has expanded to include not just Hawkwind and Hawkwind splinter groups, but bands influenced by Hawkwind as well.  Which is how I came to be listening to Electronic Mind Project, the 2001 CD by Australian band Alpha Omega; it could almost be a lost Hawkwind album.  If given a task to create a fake Hawkwind song, I don't think you could do any better than "Space Pilot"--

Ooh, as of right now the whole Hawkwind documentary is on YouTube in nine parts.  Here's the first:

Bill Laswell's Praxis project, originally a turntable-and-sampler affair, changed direction in the 90s to invent the "cyberthrash" genre.  With a core lineup of Laswell, Buckethead, Bernie Worrell, and Brain, they constantly switched gears from funk to metal thrash to hip-hop to ambient to free jazz, often within the same song.  Praxis has always been primarly an instrumental band.  Their latest album, Profanation, includes a series of guest singers and a dose of nu-metal; it's watered down the Praxis concept, but on the other hand they now have some anthemic choruses to shout along with.  On first listen the fourth track, "Furies," grabbed my attention, because it sounded like Peter Murphy singing.  Peter Murphy on a Praxis album?!  Then as I listened and the singing went into a higher register and exhibited some very un-Murphy-like inflections, I decided it must be Iggy Pop, remembering that Bill Laswell had produced his Instinct album.  And it is indeed Iggy Pop, but did you ever notice how similar he and Peter Murphy sound sometimes?

It was not long after that that I happened upon Iggy Pop again, this time on the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was listening to for my spy music roundup.  The Stooges' 1973 classic "Search and Destroy" plays during the scene in which Steve Zissou drives the pirates from his ship, a perfect bit of snarling energy for the onscreen action:

So the other night I was watching the BBC Four Hawkwind documentary Hawkwind - Do Not Panic, and I heard "Urban Guerilla" for the first time.  I've been a fan of Hawkwind for over 25 years, but I was never a Hawkwind completist, and a good thing too because that's a losing proposition for sure.  I wouldn't say there are gaps in my knowledge of Hawkwind; it would be more accurate to say that my Hawkwind albums are gaps in my ignorance of their body of work.  My little collection of pre-Robert Calvert albums (Hawkwind, In Search of Space, Warrior on the Edge of Time), Calvert-era records (Quark, Strangeness, and Charm, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, PXR5), and the post-Calvert Live Chronicles provided plenty of listening enjoyment.  I never have been able to see the "real" (i.e. Dave Brock-led) Hawkwind.  I got as far as actually going to a show at DC's Bayou nightclub, but the band were unable to obtain visas and the show was cancelled.  Some years later I did get to see Nik Turner's Hawkwind at the 9:30 Club, with Helios Creed in the band, and that was good but not quite the full Hawkwind experience, I suspect.  So anyway, I was heretofore oblivious to "Urban Guerilla," but what struck me is how close it is to "Search and Destroy."  Both songs were written in 1973; they both contain first-person lyrics boasting of fighting, bombing, and general dangerousness; and while Hawkwind don't have the visceral punch of the Stooges, Iggy Pop and Robert Calvert deliver uncannily similar vocal performances.  Here's "Urban Guerilla" for comparison:

1973: the Vietnam War, IRA bombings (which caused the "Urban Guerilla" single to be banned by the BBC, and ultimately withdrawn from the market), the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army, revolutionary (and pseudo-revolutionary) terrorism and bloody counterterrorism were in the air worldwide.  Iggy Pop and Robert Calvert both picked up on it, apparently independently, and produced a pair of songs that will now be forever entwined in my mind.