popplers

The 80s will find you naked.

Wow. This morning I tuned in to VH1 Classic's video show, Totally 80's. These are only a small subset of the retro-horror that I experienced. Words can not describe how old these videos made me feel.

Duran Duran - The Wild Boys

When I was in high school, I had no idea why so many gay men liked Duran Duran.

El DeBarge - Who's Johnny?

Yes, this is from Short Circuit. Yes, that's Ally Sheedy.

Force MDs - Tender Love

I could not stop staring at the Cosby sweaters.

Bobby Brown - Every Little Step

Bicycle shorts with suspenders— just one of many wardrobe malfunctions taking place in this video.

(To be fair, they also showed Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey and Billy Joel - Pressure. But those only made me feel old because of how young and thin Peter Gabriel and Billy Joel looked back then.)

Pledge week

Everybody's calling for donations this week. WBUR is doing its annual pre-Valentine's Day flower flogging, and WXPN was touting a chance to win free tickets to Bonnaroo or Ithaca, NY. Wait, what? Yes, it's true— you can win a trip for two to Ithaca. (It reminds me of the old joke: 1st Prize - 1 week in Ithaca. 2nd Prize - 2 weeks in Ithaca…) At least they threw in dinner at the Moosewood Restaurant and tix to Los Lobos.

In between all the calls for donations, XPN managed to play some darned good music, including several songs I hadn't heard in ages. I particularly enjoyed hearing Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' (theme from Midnight Cowboy) and Wilco's Heavy Metal Drummer. The latter reminded me of one of my favorite videos (from over 4 years ago!): Instant Messaging.

Joy, joy, joy...

Last night, Cambridge's own Club Passim hosted a rockin', rollin', preachin', folky, gospel show from the inimitable Michelle Shocked. (Actually, Passim hosted two shows, but we only went to the early one. We're old folks, and it was a school night.) I was really psyched because it's been so long (5 years) since we last saw her, and because Erin McKeown was backing her up on guitar. I'm happy to say that the show did not disappoint. Also picked up a copy of Michelle's newest live album (link to follow later-- this is just a quick, Blackberry-driven post, so my link fu is impaired.). Great show, excellent company, and yummy pizza from Veggie Planet— what's not to like?

Her new album is called To Heaven U Ride, a live performance recorded at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. She played almost all of these tracks during her Passim set.

Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding

JDL points us to the Best. Music Video. Evah. I can't believe that they were able to do this in a single take.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

It only hurts when I laugh

Just got back from seeing the brilliantly blasphemous Eric Schwartz at Fox Run. My sides still hurt from laughing. The show was recorded and will be released as a CD in a few weeks. Eric sang lots of new material, plus some old favorites, including:

• Hattie and Mattie
• Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis
• Who Da Bitch Now
• I Don't Know You
• Houston, We Have A Problem
• Telltale Kitchen (How many folk singers can pull off rhyming drosophila with falafel?!)
• Martini

You can listen to and/or view these songs at ericschwartz.com. If you are not easily offended, please consider buying some of his fine CDs. We own Pleading the First: Songs my Mother Hates and That's How It's Gonna Be. I think that the newest CD should be titled simply, I Have No Son.

New tunes

Went to see the Falcon Ridge Preview Tour at Fox Run over the weekend, and picked up four great new CDs. I've had Jim's Big Ego (Lucky) stuck in my head for days. And we won two free tix to FRFF for answering trivia questions!

Jim's Big Ego They're Everywhere!	Kym Tuvim On the Mend	Chris Pureka Driving North	Jason Spooner Lost Houses

For the record, these were the 2 questions. (Links go to answers.)

1. Name a monotreme.
   
2. Which fictional character became unstuck in time?

What I've been listening to lately

They Might Be Architectural Critics

I have really been enjoying the They Might Be Giants podcasts and other nifty stuff on tmbg.com. The Venue Songs are extremely funny, especially my favorite: Albany.

The Egg, when was it new?
The Egg, there's nothing to do
The Egg, the Egg, no corners for you

Poured concrete flowing into organic shapes
Carpet, wood trim, and some velvet drapes
Combine to make one perfect place

The podcasts are also lots of fun. Get 'em here, while they last.

They are making plans that have far-reaching effects

Music quickies!

• There was a great need for beer. And Buffalo wings. It was one of those weeks. Went to the Sit'n Bull and saw The Band That Time Forgot. Celebrated Tito's birthday. Fulfilled the aforementioned need for beer and wings: Mission accomplished.
  
• I like Beth Orton. The video for her new song, Conceived, is sweet (but would be ever so much better with real Muppets). Most of the animals look a little wrong, like taxidermied Muppets (especially the deer!). I think it's because the eyes aren't quite right. The mole rocks, though.
  
• Empirical proof: even if you've had a really bad week, you will feel better if you put The Name of This Band is Talking Heads in your car's CD player, especially if you crank up the volume during Pulled Up and/or The Girls Want To Be With The Girls. That is all.

Music review and road trip

Last weekend, Chris and I took the S2000 and headed into New Hampshire. It was sunny and in the 50s (although it grew steadily colder as we drove north). We went to a concert at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH. The theatre opened in the 1920s as a vaudeville theatre, and later became a movie house and concert hall. It fell on hard times, but was beautifully restored in the mid-90s.

The opening act was The Mammals, a folk/ bluegrass/ newgrass band. They started off with a spirited rendition of Hangman's Reel, then shifted gears hard with their surreal cover of Richard Thompson's 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Picture, if you will, the song being performed by the Kingston Trio with Margot Timmins (of Cowboy Junkies) on vocals. Or listen to this snippet. The rest of their performance was quite good, with lots of spirited jamming and folk-rock goodness.

Arlo Guthrie was touring with his son Abe and friend Gordon Titcomb. The show was a fun mix of storytelling, songs, and lengthy digressions. Arlo told an amusing story about Bob Dylan coming to visit his father, and followed it up with Mr. Tambourine Man. They played all the hits that you'd expect: Coming Into Los Angeles, Darkest Hour, City of New Orleans, and of course, Alice's Restaurant. The Mammals came back on stage for several of the songs, including a singalong version of This Land is Your Land.

After the show, we (and about 50 other concert-goers) headed over to Hermanos Cocina Mexicana for dinner. Chris and I started off with Melissa's Chipotle Dip (served with veggies and blue corn chips), which was quite yummy (and somewhat healthier than the usual nachos and salsa appetizer). I ordered the veggie Enchilito. I should have ordered the veggie & bean one instead— it was a little too much like a salad rolled up in a tortilla. Chris ordered Bruce's Chimichanga, which rocked. The desserts were fantastic, but we should have split one. After eating the Mexican chocolate pecan pie and a banana chimichanga, we needed to call the paramedics. We rolled to our car and headed for home.

27 8x10 colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one

While driving home from work (late) last night, I won tickets to Arlo Guthrie at the Capitol Center for the Arts! It's kind of frightening that this is the Alice's Restaurant 40th Anniversary Massacree Tour 2005.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

Nobody gets out of here without singin' the blues.

I was listening to NPR on my way to work this morning, and caught the tail end of their interview with B.B. King (80 years old today— God bless 'im!) They played a great snippet of "I Gotta Move Out of This Neighborhood" (from the Blues Summit album):

Nobody loves me but my mother
Sometimes I think
She could be jiving, too

J-pop extravaganza

The adorable and energetic Puffy Ami Yumi were at the Somerville Theatre last night, and so were we. They're cute, they have their own cartoon, and they totally rock! Teen Titans! Go!

Look how they shine for you

Picked up Cheryl and drove the S2000 to Great Woods for a long-overdue grrls' night out. Our free Coldplay tickets had arrived in the mail a few days earlier, and the radio station had called about the limo ride. (Alas, the limo ride was logistically inconvenient, so we gave it a pass— in order to partake, we would have had to drive an hour north to Haverhill to ride an hour and a half south to Mansfield.) But it was a lovely night to be driving around with the top down, and traffic wasn't bad at all.

Since we made excellent time on 495, we were already in our seats when the opening act, Black Mountain hit the stage. I think that Sarah Rodman over at the Herald pretty much nailed it with the somewhat harsh closing sentence of her review: Openers Black Mountain played a resoundingly loud set of psychedelic noodle rock whose merits were aptly summed up in the title of their final song, ''No Satisfaction.'' The seats were decent— they weren't under the pavilion, but they were on-center in the second row of the "open air seating". (And apparently they would have cost $50 each + fees if we'd actually had to buy them from TicketBa$tard— yikes!)

Coldplay was just as loud, but far more enjoyable. The sound during their set was still excessively muddy; I was definitely underwhelmed by the Tweeter Center's sound overall (both in volume levels and in fidelity). I thought that the lighting/ stage show was whizzy and high-tech, but often uninspiring. There were more than a few Blue Man Group Rock Concert Movement Number X moments that made me smile (Rock Concert Movement #78: The Fake Ending). But it was a great night to be outside under the stars, listening to a solid, unpretentious performance. I just wish that I'd remembered to bring earplugs.

Rhythm method

I was driving to work on Friday morning, listening to The River (92.5 WXRV). They've been doing a call-in contest all week where the caller has to spell a tricky word to win the prize. As a former winner of the 4th grade diocesan spelling bee, I felt qualified to compete. I grabbed my cell phone and looked up the number. Busy. Redial. Busy. Repeat ad nauseum.

Amazingly, the phone started to ring and I actually got through! I spelled "rhythm" correctly and won tickets to see Coldplay at the Tweeter Center (Great Woods) in Mansfield next Saturday. Apparently a limo ride is also part of the deal, but it leaves from the radio station in Haverhill, so that's suboptimal for me.

The first contestant misspelled "affidavit" (I think he tried "affadavit") and the second misspelled "liaison" (left out the first "i"). Finally, those countless games of Scrabble have paid off! (Particularly those where I have a rack full of consonants and no vowels.)

Does it get any better than this?

Went to see Garbage at Avalon this evening. They put on quite a show— I actually enjoyed them even more than I was expecting to. Afterward, walked over the bridge and had a bite at the Middle East (mmm… falafel). Finished up with a microsundae at Tosci's and rode home with the top down.

This is not Casey Kasem's Top 40.

Via Daypop, good, hard-rockin' fun with retroCRUSH's 50 Coolest Song Parts. Yes, there's a lot of Queen, The Who, and Rolling Stones (and more than a few bands in the "guilty pleasure" category). There were also a lot of picks that made me think to myself "No way-- who are they kidding?!" But almost every entry has an MP3 to accompany it, and when I listen to the snippet, I am forced to admit that, yes, that is an exceptionally cool bit of music. (Except for #22.) Robert Berry was dead-on with #27, though:

Sometimes the coolest song parts are just about the lyrics. Stan Ridgeway, the front man of the original version of Wall of Voodoo lent an inimitable nerdy twang to the lead vocals that was something special, and on a song like "Mexican Radio" it was just magical. Full of instruments and sound effects that I can't even begin to identify, this fuzzy sounding fast paced hit is full of great laughs (and has a great video, if you're ever lucky enough to see it), but only once every so often, do the stars align to produce a lyric as golden as:

I wish I was in Tiajuana,
eating barbecued iguana!

The video accompanies the line perfectly with a juicy giant lizard being rotated on a spit above a fire. And Stan delivers the line with gusto, with special tremble as he says, "bar-be-cuuuuuuuued" that ensures instant immortality.

So, go on. Start at #50, and work your way up to the top. You may be surprised.

DVN

Da Vinci's Notebook is playing at Capo's on Friday, November 11th! I love these guys. Check out their video "Title of the Song" on Comedy Central. You know it's geek-rock when a single album covers Bill Gates, Internet porn, and Heather Graham.