for some reason their songs have been going through my head lately – interesting article. I was really into this band back in the day….this concert clip is kinda weird – they rarely played much live and despite their sound being heavy on keys, there aren’t any on stage? Must be playing to recordings – certainly have enough percussion guys though!
The Power Of Propaganda: A Secret Wish 25 Years On…
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Never knew about this – I can see the similarity although the Zeppelin tune is arguably much more complex…songs can be played at the link…
Led Zeppelin Loses First Round in ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Lawsuit
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and sadly, still far, far too true…! Mose Allison said it first, The Who said it best.
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Cream vocalist and bassist Jack Bruce dies at 71
Sad – my favorite member of Cream has passed away. I generally respect Clapton but excepting Cream and a bit of his early solo stuff, can’t generally stand his career since. Ginger Baker has already been discussed in these pages – apparently he has a new solo record out too – but what a freak.
But Jack Bruce, arguably the brains and certainly the key songwriter in Cream, has sadly passed. My favorite quote from him was when he said “People ask me – do you care that Eric Clapton gets all the fame from Cream? I say no, because I get all the money!” 🙂
R.I.P……May you have reached your White Room in harmony and rest…..
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So some of my zany friends from college days pinged me last night around 930pm on their way to a Mike Watt (originally of Minutemen and fIREHOSE fame) show at The Tractor with tickets – I was lucky enough to be able to go – very cool!
He’s touring with a pair of Italian guys in a band called il sogno del marinaio (it was part of this 2014 tour). The opener was a Japanese band called Lite who were also very good.
The show was interesting – The Tractor of course is such a great venue, being small and not overwhelming with NOISE like some can be (e.g. The Showbox when it’s cranked up a wee bit too loud). While Lite was fairly straight-ahead ‘math rock’ (not sure what that means) the il sogno del marinaio set was much more experimental. Then they all joined on stage at the end for an extended jam, which was pretty cool, if a bit crowded up there.
We then slid down the street to The People’s Pub for a couple more beers before running out of steam around 1250am – man, we are getting old.
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Scarecrow Video raising $100K on Kickstarter to preserve world’s largest archive of movies
for those of you who don’t know who/what Scarecrow Video is, you need to get INFORMED. 🙂
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As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.
In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.
While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.
The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…
As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.
Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB
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I honestly don’t remember the original of this song, but heard the cover on KEXP this am while driving to work – very cool! The band is Tame Impala, but this cover isn’t on any of their current records, apparently, it’s more recent.
here’s the original (from 1996, which is probably why I never heard it the first time, wasn’t paying any attention) – actually pretty good…even if he’s doing his best Diana Ross look in this video:
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Just finished reading Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am, which I got from Kerewin on my recent birthday.
Being a huge Who fan for at least a couple decades now and having read (or own) most of the Who bio-type books out there (Maximum R&B by Richard Barnes; Before I Get Old by Dave Marsh; Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher; Full Moon by Peter “Dougal” Butler; countless other Mojo and similar articles) I’ve read a lot about them besides enjoying their music, and am familiar with much of their history, successes and demons over time.
But this book is quite different, no doubt intended that way by Townshend – it’s much more personal and revealing, and to me, not always in a good way – but again, as implied or outright stated by Townshend in the book in several places, that’s exactly the way he wanted it.
On the plus side, you get to see a fairly different view of The Who and its principal songwriter. The Keith Moon books (Butler, Fletcher) paint a varied picture of a semi-fulltime lunatic who played drums brilliantly at his peak, but sunk pretty low or perpetually lived in a fantasy land when not, often to the sometimes extreme detriment of those around him. There is no real book directly dealing with John Entwistle or Roger Daltrey that I know of, and as the former is sadly dead, besides possibly a book on his massively powerful and influential bass-playing, I suspect there won’t be – Roger of course can still write his and may be in fact doing so, not sure. Both Dave Marsh and Richard Barnes give a pretty good look at Roger in their books, however.
And so we come to Pete, who ended up being the creative driving force behind the band over time and arguably the real engine behind its success. In this book Pete tries to come to grips with many personal demons in explaining his life story and role in The Who’s peaks and valleys, and confesses to being a potential cause of several of the latter. And it was nice to see – say by comparison to the recent Ginger Baker movie I watched – that he usually takes responsibility for his failures, even if he doesn’t always learn from them (womanizing, drugs, booze). He even calls himself a self-obsessed prat at intervals depending on the story he’s telling.
For me a bit of downside came in all the womanizing – sure, he had a tough childhood – much tougher than I knew of, and fraught with loneliness and alienation from his flaky/lame parents – And surely being married at 25 with two kids amid crazy sudden fame and pressure to keep delivering hits might drive anyone mad. But, I still don’t see why he got married if he was going to carry on with groupies while on the road with the band? Surely any/all rock star womanizing isn’t ‘good’ anyway generally – but at least those who aren’t married aren’t kidding themselves (and those they fool around with), either? Just seems extremely lame to me.
The alcohol and drug abuse – pretty par for the court in the rock world of that time (and since), and most of Pete’s contemporaries went through much of the same, including most of The Who and its surrounding posse. But despite knowing a lot about and being a fan of Pete and The Who, this whole ‘user/abuser’ scenario is simply so outside my experience, I really can’t relate to it. I’m just glad he survived it, even if a lot of it was his own doing.
I guess I would have liked knowing more about his inner thinking when writing songs – I felt I got glimpses of it here and there but the book is more a story about experiences and consequence (to me, anyway) than about methods. And perhaps that stuff is too hard to put on paper, or simply too hard/too private to put in even a memoir. I would have also liked to know more about his usage and experimentation with sounds, synthesizers and the like – he mentions them all the time in passing, but doesn’t provide much detail.
I think the final conclusion for me is/was that Pete is very human, with all the positives and negatives that can come from same – I’m thankful for the great music he’s created with The Who, and still remain a huge fan – even at his worst – he still kicks a**!
Other thoughts on the book:
Wikipedia
American Songwriter
LA Times
Rolling Stone
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although it is now a month old (doh!) this has to be Anna Minard’s funniest column yet – well DONE, sir!
Never Heard of ‘Em (by Anna Minard) – Nico
including classic words like “I used to hear 30 seconds of a punk song and feel like my ears were going to throw up.” and “This is just all bells and talk-singing and waggling noises and some lady who sounds like she lives in a tree.”
too funny.
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