Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Gotta wash that snake right out of my head

2008-06-17T00:04:00Z

Why oh why has Whitesnake's "Fool For Your Loving" been running through my head for the last week? It's not that I have any affinity for the lyrics: "A hard-lovin' woman like you just makes a hard-lovin' man." What the hell does that even mean, ...

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AOR addendum: New England

2008-05-19T22:30:22Z

There was one more minor AOR hit I wanted to include in my last post, but there was no audio file to go into the Seeqpod player. "Don't Ever Want To Lose You Ya" by New England was one of many songs I taped off the radio in 1979, but never got th...

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Touch

2008-05-17T22:27:14Z

The pinnacle of my used-record-store-owning career came when a guy from the next county called and said there was a song he'd been looking for for ten years, but nobody knows what it is, and the chorus goes "don't you know what love is," and-- and...

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My first New Wave record

2008-04-07T01:05:41Z

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 d...

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Capital Centre memories

2008-04-02T02:57:48Z

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, Marylan...

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The Mars Volta reminds everyone of King Crimson

2008-02-23T03:21:28Z

I'm not the first one to notice that "Goliath" from the new Mars Volta album sounds like King Crimson's 1969 prog-rock classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man," but I did arrive at that conclusion independently. At just after the 4-minute mark they a...

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Rockin' out with Michael Schenker

2007-11-17T15:37:37Z

There were four of us in the same grade growing up: Kevin at the top of the street, me in the next house down, Mario across the street from me, and Robert two houses down. When we started buying records in junior high we planned for maximum varie...

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Speaking of Night...

2007-10-15T01:36:10Z

Here's the further post on Chris Thompson, guitarist and singer with Night, that I alluded to a few days ago. Some months ago, while reading Russian linguist George Starostin's record reviews on Only Solitaire (warning: do not start reading Only ...

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Night Redux

2007-10-14T15:30:02Z

Maybe the universe really will give you what you want: just the other day I posted a song by Night and mentioned that I really wanted their song "Hot Summer Nights" but couldn't find it. And voilá, my old record-selling partner Platters That Matt...

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Unrelaxing with Stevie Lange

2007-10-11T01:14:48Z

Another of my guilty pleasures is the horror fiction of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, "Britain's Prince of Chill." He put out a huge amount of short horror fiction through the 70s and 80s, and I will qualify "horror fiction" by noting that his stories are j...

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