Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime

Bryan Ferry, Let's Stick Together

2009-05-05T00:05:00.000-04:00

Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug" was tough, stylish treat on the radio when I was growing up. It wasn't a smash hit on Philadelphia radio in my middle school days, but it would come on now and then and fit right in with the '70s soul and downbeat-heavy rock that I sought out as hormones raged. Later in the '70s, I'd dig rare FM radio spins of songs like "Over You" and "Manifesto." As bad as commercial rock radio was becoming by that time, playlists still allowed for some "play," some experimentation. Those chart-scraping Roxy Music singles occupied a similar place in my heart with other slightly dark, soulful not-quite-hits, like J. Geils Band's "One Last Kiss." Some day I need to gather all those last-gasp, blue-eyed rockin' soul numbers of the late-70s on one mix CD.

I never got around to buying an actual Roxy Music album (or a J. Geils Band album, for that matter) while in high school. The little bit of Roxy Music I was familiar with had qualities I liked, but it required more patience than I could muster. Compared with David Bowie's "Young Americans," a TSOP-influenced song that continues to excite me in an immediately gratifying way from beginning to end to this day, the super-cool "Love Is the Drug" was much more...cool. And I wasn't that cool.

It wasn't until freshman year in college that I first heard the mind-blowing early Roxy Music I'd only read about in magazines and books. An older friend and mentor plied me with some of the tools for deeper understanding before throwing the band's first album on his Bang & Olufsen turntable and and CRANKING UP his super-hi-fi system. I must have been grinning and rocking back like Danny DeVito's Martini from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Mr. Mod hears "Re-make/Re-model" for the first time, November 1981.

After hearing that first album, with its strange mix of absurd, effete pretension and cock-rocking abandon, I wanted more! My friend delivered, playing me the darker For Your Pleasure and then what would become my favorite Roxy Music album, the underrated linchpin in the band's catalog, Stranded. These albums would form the core of a new strain of record collecting. I'd report back to my mentor with each new purchase, but truth be told, that more accomplished, mid-70s rocking run of Country Life and Siren contained a few too many songs that seemed like re-made/re-modeled versions of songs from the first three albums - and went on for a minute or two too long. I was ready for a change of pace.

Bryan Ferry, "Let's Stick Together"

One day in a Chicago record store I picked up my first Bryan Ferry solo album, Let's Stick Together, a 1976 collection of mostly solo singles and B-sides from the preceding years that signalled the band's first breakup/hiatus. Although it's a patchwork collection of recordings, over the years I have found this album to be as coherent as any original album involving Ferry.

This was a better purchase than I could have imagined. I was beginning to develop my stance that I preferred Ferry's warbling croon to Bowie's, and I liked the cover shot. I was also curious to hear why Ferry thought it necessary to cover five Roxy Music songs. My friend never played me this album - I don't think he even owned it! Maybe this would be my chance to teach my master a lesson.

I couldn't wait to get back to my dorm room and check out this album. Before I had a chance to ponder Ferry's Roxy Music covers with the originals, however, I was pumping my fist to the fat pinky rock of the title track. With goonish drummer Paul Thompson, Roxy Music was always able to tap into The Power and Glory of Rock, but never before had they so fully tapped into the Meat and Potatoes of Rock. With Phil Manzanera, the funniest guitarist in rock; Andy MacKay on woodwinds; and Eno or Eddie Jobson, Roxy Music could push well past the edges of Thompson's charging beats, but the band's attempts at more soulful, chugging rock, like "Do the Strand," couldn't help but be something gloriously wrong. With Thomspon drumming on Let's Stick Together and Chris Spedding the primary guitarist (King Crimson buddies John Wetton and Mel Collins fill out most of the bass and sax responsibilities, respectively, with contributions by Manzanera, Jobson, early Roxy guitarist David O'List, and a number of non-official Roxy bassists) Ferry is able to live out seemingly every British rocker's dream as an honest-to-goodness soul man.

Bryan Ferry, "Shame, Shame, Shame"
Bryan Ferry, "The Price of Love"
Bryan Ferry, "2HB"

On Let's Stick Together, Ferry's not a soul man in the traditional Stax/Volt sense. As the backing vocalists' reference to Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness" on the cover of Jimmy Reed's "Shame, Shame, Shame" suggests, Ferry's more of a soul stylist. Like Gaye, Ferry doesn't possess the strongest voice. He layers multiple tracks and points of view to create a richer whole. On his cover of The Everly Brothers' "The Price of Love," a recording that would soon mean so much to me and my burgeoning bandmates, his multi-tracked vocals lead a cavalcade of cutting-edge retro-rock that Dave Edmunds would have killed for with his mates in Rockpile. Even the mellower, not-so-chooglin' numbers, like the subtle covers of Roxy's "2HB" and The Beatles' "It's Only Love," rest on a thick, rhythmic bed over which Ferry can croon with more ease and authority than he could have when undercut by the nervous energy Roxy Music's many "wildcard" musicians.

The thrill of it all.

Not all the Roxy Music covers are as enlightening as the steadier takes on "2HB," "Casanova," and "Sea Breezes" - the funky version of "Re-make/Re-model" shows the limitations of a meat and potatoes diet - but those covers are not at the heart of my love for this album. When Roxy Music would re-form for Flesh + Blood and Manifesto, with the wildcards either cut loose or put on a diet of saltpeter, the band would begin to resemble Ferry's concurrent and even more soulful, meat and potatoes solo outing, The Bride Stripped Bare. Until Ferry and Roxy Music once more learned to coexist and create in a unique, seamless way on 1982's Avalon, Let's Stick Together was the first key work in stripping down the grandiose, cool sound that was sucking out the humanity of Ferry's musical vision. I would have still found much to like about Roxy Music had they continued down their path to the ice palace, but I'm glad Ferry did what it took to go out with heart.

The Prisoners, A Taste of Pink

2008-03-11T00:15:00.004-04:00

Pinker and prouder

Some of you may have noticed that Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime has been inactive since - not coincidentally - the launch of the blog version of Rock Town Hall. It's time I put a little work into this blog's concept again - and make sure to celebrate some things I love wholeheartedly, with no intent to confuse and educate readers.

Recently I pulled out my lone album by The Prisoners, A Taste of Pink. It sounded as rockin' and fun as ever, and the vinyl was still pink. It's hard to find the space between songs when placing the needle on a particular song on a pink-vinyl album, but the tracks on this album make the effort worthwhile.

I never bothered to find out much about this '80s garage-mod band from somewhere in England. A friend owned another album by them, but it was not as good as the one I happened to take a chance on. I never bothered hearing another note by these guys. One great album by any '80s garage-mod band is enough. (God, as I type that sentence I sense myself looking in the mirror, holding an unopened box of my band's second record!) Honestly, though, I can only take so much garage and mod rock, especially when the lyrics and fuzz-guitar solos are nothing special. This album, however, is together! Simply put, it works. The guitars are chunky. The organ player cooks up that Deep Purple "Hush"/Steppenwolf stew. The singers pull no punches. I have FUN while listening to it. It's a good time to get my lab coat pressed.

Since this is a rare album I've never spent much time thinking about, I'm going to do nothing more but share some tracks with you. Send your lab coat to the cleaner and check out The Prisoners!

"Better in Black"

"Maybe I Was Wrong"

"Threw My Heart Away"

"Come to the Mushroom"

The Deluded Optimism of Burt Lancaster

2007-01-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

There's a point early in the film Come Back, Little Sheba in which Burt Lancaster's Doc/Daddy character waxes philosophic and spiritual over the changes he's experienced in his first year's sobriety. Lancaster, as he looks off into the distance of some undefined point in his kitchen and as maybe no other actor can do, is earnest, reflective, optimistic, and - in the audience's eyes - desperate and possibly deluded. The strapping, blue-eyed, grinning, wavy-haired Lancaster naturally exuded a certain American optimism, but it was optimism lacking in hope, as someone like Jimmy Stewart could project, and devoid of cockiness, as expressed in the optimistic characters of Tom Cruise. The optimism expressed by Burt Lancaster is painful; it's the optimism only a lifelong loser can muster.

Lancaster specialized in con men and idealistic losers, from The Rainmaker and Elmer Gantry through Birdman of Alcatraz and his own production of John Cheever's short story, The Swimmer, through his career-capping role in Atlantic City. Regarding Lancaster's performance in The Swimmer, Cheever wrote "He's very sexy and commanding in the girl scenes but half the time he looks as if he were going to cry which is just right for the part." Con man and optimist; it's a tragic pairing that Lancaster managed to play out in countless roles. I don't know much about the man's life, but I sense he was aware of our fate as starting out down in the count, no balls, one strike.

Velvet Underground, Live at Max's Kansas City

2006-12-12T16:47:00.000-05:00

This frequently derided live album marks the end of the road for the the Velvet Underground. It's a cassette-recorded, nearly bootleg affair, in which the band plays to what sounds like a dozen Max's regulars who are audibly more interested in scoring than checking out Lou's last show with the band. Although the band's better-known and cherished 1969: Velvet Underground Live is objectively "better," Max's has always gotten more spins on my turntable.

I won't harp on relative negatives, but let me first deal with 1969. Granted, 1969 has a butt shot on the cover; the once all-important a gatefold sleeve; Mo Tucker pounding away on drums; Doug Yule playing organ, when necessary; and songs not available on any of the band's studio albums (before the release of those great outtakes albums in the 1980s), but to me it always sounded like a lesser version of how I wanted the band at that time - both in their career, post-John Cale, and in my record-buying life at the time of purchase, post-having-bought-all-the-studio albums, to sound. On 1969, the Velvets sound like a competent, sometimes great touring band. They lack the intimacy of the third, s/t Velvet Underground album, and they lack the fire of the Cale lineup. Too often, on all those "Lisa Says We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together With Bonnie Brown" songs, they might as well be filling time with limp-wristed Chuck Berry covers, like the Grateful Dead might do to fill out their audiences' collective peak drug cycle. No offense, Deadheads, I'm just trying to make a point.

The Max's album is the sound of failure and resignation. However, this version of the Velvets, with Doug Yule's underskilled, overplaying teenage brother Billy sitting in for the pregnant Mo, is not beyond gentle moments of joy and remembrance of musical accomplishments of more vital days. "Good evening," begins Lou, "we're called Velvet Underground. You're allowed to dance, in case you didn't know. And...ah, that's about it." Then the band launches into a thoroughly decent version of "I'm Waiting for the Man", on which Sterling Morrison riffs away as easily as he might have when he and Lou first played in their dorm rooms. This is the sound of humans doing their best to make something happen when nothing much is left capable of happening.

I was discussing this album with a friend, who felt this is the Velvet Underground as the garage band Lou and Sterling may at one time have intended it to be. Could be, and I would add that this live album and the 1969 live album illustrate a fork in the road that would eventually face future punks and indie rockers who bought the next 1000 copies of the first VU album after the first 1000 copies had been bought by the likes of Brian Eno. 1969 is a side of the band that relies understated ensemble playing; propulsive rhythms; some cool textures, using the limited resources on stage; and frequently Lou's tough-guy, leather-jacket-wearing voice. To my ears, it's the sound that would launch many fine indie bands like The Feelies, Yo La Tengo, and thousands more. Max's, on the other hand, is carried by little more than the songs and singing of Lou Reed and the awkward dynamic of Lou and Sterling's guitars. No rhythmic or stylistic safety net is in place. No leather, no shades. Lou sings with more expression than usual. This is the road less traveled in VU terms. Early Modern Lovers knew this path. Early Talking Heads would venture down it on occasion. Television and Patti Smith would embrace this clumsy, open-hearted side of this Velvet Underground. There are plenty of good reasons why this path is the least traveled. The brush hasn't been cleared and the destination is not certain, but it's a road to somewhere.

Makin' Lemonade with The Easybeats

2006-12-04T10:05:00.000-05:00

There's a wise saying, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Australia's The Easybeats, a '60s beat band extraordinaire that's best-known for its weekend anthem "Friday On My Mind" and, in hipper circles, the pounding, Who-like "Sorry" and the massively Mod-rockin' "Good Times", took this to heart. True, the band was blessed with lead vocalist Stevie Wright, who possessed the balls-out rebel yell of a young Roger Daltry; the tiny, cute-guy, former child actor appeal of Davey Jones; and the enthusiasm of a cheerleader on crystal meth. And true, the band was blessed with the in-house songwriting and production team of Harry Vanda and George Young (the latter the big brother to Angus and Malcolm) who would go on to produce artists including AC/DC, Suzi Quatro, and Grace Jones as well as their 1-hit wonder, "Hey St. Peter", under the name Flash 'n the Pan. But if you've been thinking about checking out the complete works of The Easybeats based on their few best-known songs, prepare yourself for a tall glass of lemonade.

I own a lot of Easybeats recordings, and for fans of supercharged British Invasion pop, I'd highly recommend the 2-CD collection, The Easybeats: The Definitive Anthology (Repertoire). However, if you're looking for any number of special characteristics treasured by fanboys of many of the second-tier '60s bands, such as displays of subtle songwriting and deft vocal delivery (eg, The Zombies); ringing guitars and sweet harmonies (eg, The Hollies); influential, proto-70s guitar pyrotechnics (eg, The Pretty Things, The Creation); or bombastic psychedelia (eg, The Move), you may find yourself disappointed. Frequently, the songs of The Easybeats are pastiches of other British Invasion and Motown hits of the day. Songs are often built around an off-kilter, tinny guitar riff and a rockin' beat. Backing vocals are usually high and nasally, often making great use of nonsense syllables. In many ways, their aspirations were as straightforward and fun-filled as those of the Dave Clark Five and The Rascals, but The Easybeats usually lacked the discipiline and focus of the former band's hit and they lacked the soulful, native groove of The Rascals. Check out this grainy clip of "Made My Bed Gonna Lie in It" for an example of the rickety, awkward pop that I describe. When you're done with that nearly embarrassing (for anyone over the age of 22) delight, check out what they make of one of the most inherently awkward, failed soul songs of the era, Ike & Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High". To me, this is the definitive version of this song that effectively killed the career of writer-producer Phil Spector. The Easybeats bypass the song's pomp and circumstance and bring out the nervy heart of the song, perhaps all that was worth bringing out.

I have a friend who asks me what it is I see in this band beyond a couple of songs. He can't take the patchwork song structure and the frequently inane lyrics. Typically I agree with him on these charges as they relate to countless other second-tier British Invasion bands, but in The Easybeats I hear the sound of a band doing all they can with what little they've got in a concise 3:00 or less per song. I hear a band pushing against its own strange boundaries yet smart enough, for the most part, to stay within them. I hear the sound of lemonade. Across the 8 sides of Easybeats material that I own, there are few desparate attempts at Relevance: little psychedelia for psychedelia's sake; no bearded, back to the country odes; and only a few surprisingly decent attempts at Humble Pie-like maximum heaviosity. They rarely hit the highs of their 3 best-known songs, although "Falling Off the Edge of the World" is not to be missed for fans of melodramatic '60s pop (eg, The Bee Gees)!

Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti

2006-11-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Sometimes even the curator of Overlooked Gems overlooks an obvious one that's been right under his nose for close to 30 years. In times like these, space must be given to gems that I have overlooked, even when you've known about them all along. Please allow me this moment of self-indulgence and public apology. Please allow yourself to feel as content and mildly wise as I sometimes feel when highlighting the subtle virtues of...oh...The Final Scene in the Otherwise Horrendous Staying Alive.

I've spent a good part of the last 3 days listening to Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. For years, since my latent acceptance and admiration of the band, this has been one of their albums I've never listened to all the way through. I'd pick and choose the few "hits" and move on to the earlier albums, if I needed to continue to "get the Led out," or other albums by artists more in my wheelhouse. For the last 3 days, however, I've listened to this double album from start to finish a half dozen times. After all these years I suddenly find myself appreciating the icy, menacing production of songs like "Custard Pie", "The Rover", and "In the Light". I've been thinking about how,in lesser hands, this hard rock take on The Blooz was done with, at best, an unavoidable element of cartoonish evil (eg, Black Sabbath) or unflattering horniness (eg, ZZ Top) or, at worse (eg, ZZ Top), well, a lot worse than "at best." The lab-coat-wearing Kentonite in me is once more impressed with Zep's mix of science, disgust, and hippie-eyed optimism. Bravo, Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti!

In conclusion, I apologize to all the burnouts of my youth for having mostly overlooked this band and its followers at the end of their prime. You were right.

Celery

2006-11-07T12:45:00.000-05:00

Let's clear the palate, if we may. We've had a string of long, engrossing entries to the Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime of late, and sometimes it's important to take stock of the simplest of pleasures, which is what I found myself doing the other night when, in the course of a little get-together with neighbors, I bit into a cool, crisp stick of celery.

"What a great vegetable!" I thought to myself. Firm, easy to handle, great looking, packs a solid crunch, able to hold toppings, and - maybe most importantly - refreshing as all heck! Think about it, you've been gabbing away at a party; drinking; at some point hovering around the appetizer table, where you're wolfing down squares of tomato pie, cheese and crackers, and anything that will hold some kind of sour cream-based dip, and you realize it may be time to freshen up that overworked mouth. You may try to work in a swish of your next sip of wine when no one's looking. You could duck over to the bathroom and rinse your mouth. Or you could pick up a stick of celery and chomp into it, not missing a beat in party time. Oh, that fantastic CHOMP that a stick of celery makes! A stick of celery in the middle of a party conversation and you're good to go. Laugh all you want. Lean into your friend's ear to better make your important party point. Celery was here.

There are those who despire celery, including one public figure whose distaste for the vegetable shouldn't surprise me based on his history of public food faux pas! Some try to stomach it for its health benefits and wonderous negative calories (see here, too), but to no avail. For shame! Towns greater than these foliks have taken pride in their past history a center of the celery industry. I sense that the difficulties some folks have in loving celery is tied into an inability some have to enjoy the bitter fruits of life. It's their loss.

Paul McCartney himself has made celery a part of his musical palette. Think of the cute ways you can serve celery. Oh, celery! I'll leave those of you equipped with Quicktime with this.

Stephen Malkmus, Face the Truth

2006-11-03T15:28:00.000-05:00

Stephen Malkmus' 2005 solo album, Face the Truth, may be the most-contemporarily overlooked gem, to date, of my lifetime. Of course the album's release, by a figurehead of '90s indie rock (see Pavement), was greeted by generally warm response from all the rock media outlets an indie artist could hope to attract, so Why - you might ask - is this guy considering the album an Overlooked Gem? Well, for starters, compared with glowing reviews given to today's happening artists, it seemed to me that the critical response the album got by Pavement-loving critics was indie rock's version of polite praise, along the lines of "...the best Stones album since Exile" or "Dylan's best work since Blood on the Tracks." These compliments don't in any way beg of you, the reader, to run out and buy an album of the magnitude of that artist's last universally accepted great work. Rather, the critic wants to pass along notice that the artist actually has a pulse. Perhaps the artist is "aging gracefully," as many of the positive Malkmus reviews would note, throwing in something about his then-new status as a father. Granted, before you think I'm picking nits, I acknowledge that we should all be so overlooked after we've passed our initial burst of creative energy, but dig...

When Pavement was at its height and I was already halfway to geezerdom, I'd hear their records and think, They're pretty good for one of these sloppy new bands. I appreciated their stoner humor, their album covers, and some of the guitar interplay. For some reason, from way back when, I have fond memories of enjoying hearing Wowee Zowee in two friends' living room, the memory of which now puzzles said friends because they say they never liked that album and couldn't imagine playing it for me as a means to turn me onto the band. But to return to my point, I overlooked Pavement in the band's time, and by the time I got turned onto Face the Truth I was long past being able to collect the easy "cool points" I could have easily cashed in during the early-90s. Consider this akin to parents of my generation suddenly "loving" Willie Nelson after his collaboration with Julio Iglesias. So it goes. To this day I still have not gotten past my initial "pretty good for one of those bands" characterization, but I love this Face the Truth album. I'll tell you why.

If you've ever been a musician who writes songs to any degree of quality and who has friends who write songs to similarly varying degrees of quality, you may know what I'm about to describe. If not, hang on; it still may make sense. I write songs and I have a number of friends who write songs. Every once in a while one of these friends will play me a recording of something he wrote that knocks my socks off. The song itself may or may not be "great" in and of itself, but there's something about the recording that is clearly from the heart and soul of this friend I know and love. Not in a "major statement" way but more in a casual, subtle way that I'd like to think only one who's been blessed by friend's person's presence might readily indentify. It's a sense of insider information, and I get a feeling of pride in any of my friends' ability to so directly channel something I find unique through song. (Shortly thereafter I'm intensely jealous, finding reasons to denigrate this friend's existence, and pulling out my guitar, but that's another matter.) I don't know Stephen Malkmus from Adam, and I know almost nothing about the guy's life, but I get that sense of being blown away by a friend's new recording when I hear this album. I don't think you have to be a musician/songwriter to know this feeling, when an album by an artist you don't know lets you into his or her casually odd, inner world.

Long story short, I heard a couple of songs from that first Malkmus solo album, and I immediately liked the fact that it sounded more disciplined. That first solo album seemed to aspire to some of the '70s-based chops of a Lou Reed solo album. It promised what I consider the "good-bad" effect of late-70s Lou albums, including sometimes ponderous arrangements and both intentional and unintentional black humor. I had it on my "Find cheap used copy" list. Then a friend burned me a CD containing about 25 low-res mp3s of albums he thought I should check out. Face the Truth was one of them, and it grabbed me by track 2, "It Kills". The dual guitar solos that populate this and some other songs were a great icebreaker. Give me some dualing fuzz guitar solos, along the lines of The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow album, and Mikey likes at least that much.

Throughout the album, I also found myself drawn into the lyrics - sometimes mysterious, sometimes whimsical, sometimes wistful, often all of the above; brief musical references to '70s schlock like "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" and "I Was Made for Loving You"; and the sound of the rhythm section - warm, dry drums and chubby (not obese) bass. As with that first solo album, there are some chops on display, but the chops on Face the Truth sound natural, mannnnn, more like what '60s San Francisco psych bands should have sounded like - devoid of that geographical region's and era's abuse of reverb and other overt attempts at mindbending effects. In an 8-minute song called "No More Shoes", the well-recorded, well-arranged music itself does all the necessary mindbending.

For longtime Pavement fans, my love for the grown-up, self-critical (hear "Post-Paint Boy") Malkmus may buy me a permanent plot of land in Squaresville. Or, what do I know, maybe these folks can appreciate this album for being a mellowed-out version of stuff he once did much better and with more vitality. Fair enough. I've gone back and bought Wowee Zowee, and I do find plenty to like about it, but it's no Face the Truth (which I did end up buying at full price - please note this, Music Industry: mp3 trading can help your business). I'll see if there's anything else I end up loving by this guy, but if truth be told, not every song my friends bring me hit me with as much force. This one album, at least, is near and dear to me, and as a result, I feel like I know something about what makes this Malkmus guy tick. That feeling is always appreciated.

Halfball

2006-10-17T08:18:00.000-04:00

As the summer wound down, while I plowed through assorted, absurd administrative duties required for coaching a boys' travel soccer team (eg, acquiring a state license; collecting birth certificates, notarized medical clearance forms, uniform sizes...everything short of DNA samples), I found myself taking brief refuge in memories of playing halfball with friends and assorted kid-passerby in the old Philadelphia neighbhorhood where my grandparents owned a luncheonette. Playing games was much simpler then. Parents did not have to produce birth certificates. Notary Publics had more time to stamp whatever else it is they stamp. Well-intentioned parent-coaches who'd found they'd bitten off more than they could chew did not have the technology to share their anxiety via a flood of overbearing e-mails to the families of the kids on their teams. Kids met on whatever playing surface would suffice, brought the appropriate ball, and made do with as few tools as possible.

Halfball, if you don't know what I'm talking about, is a city form of baseball at its lowest common denominators: a half of a "pimple ball" that already has served its purpose as a full ball in games of stickball is flung underhanded at a batter who tries to whack it over a building with a broomstick. I'll discuss the game in the present tense, because I have read about gray beards who have organized to keep the game alive, start websites in honor of their leagues, and most likely give Notary Publics even more to do. I don't know if the game is actually played by "the kids" anymore, whether games are instigated in the casual way we used to initiate games as bored kids looking for something to do on grimey summer city streets in humid, northeastern neighborhoods, but let's alllow ourselves this possibility.

Games are usually 1-on-1 or 2-on-2. The is game played across narrow city streets lined by rowhouses and/or factory buildings. Ideally, the outfield wall is a couple of stories high. If the ball goes on the roof of the building across the street, it's a home run. If it hits, say, above the second story but not on the roof it's a triple. If it hits the wall on the wall, say, beneath the third story, it's a double. If it drops past the pitcher without being caught on the fly it's a single. Simple. Flinging the halfball just right took some work, and making solid contact with a broom handle on a floppy piece of well-worn rubber never failed to impress a batter. How many times did I have that halfball lined up just right to unfurl my swing and feel the rubber collapse impotently on contact and dribble off a foot or two to the left side of the plate? Ah, but those times the halfball seemed to wrap around the stick just long enough to get hoisted over the roof of the cardboard box factory across the street were magic!

As a kid who grew up on a newer, rowhouse neigbhorhood in Philadelphia, where the streets and tiny front lawns were too wide for the game (Northeast Philly was a stickball/street hockey neighborhood), playing halfball in my grandparents' Port Richmond neighborhood gave me added "city cred" and made me feel tied into a part of baseball history that is now long gone - that time when Willie Mays or some other northeast corridor player would stop by a neighborhood pickup game and take a few mighty swings. Will another professional baseball player ever stop by a neighbhorhood game of "halfies" or stickball and take a rip?

This past summer, after Phils centerfielder Aaron Rowand cemented his local folk hero status by laying it all on the line with a hellbent, face-first catch into the fence in Citizens Bank Park, Rowand talked about his commitment to the game and his respect for the commitment his parents made to him as a boy, spending their summers driving him around to baseball games for 3 teams he played for simultaneously! I wish I could find the story for you to read. It was a touching story, a totally crazed story, and an especially suburban story with which I can now identify. It was a story for our times, but it was far removed from the story of a kid who played halfball in the summer, in the city.

Mandancing

2006-09-19T13:42:00.000-04:00

Some of you guys checking in on the Overlooked Gems blog may acknowledge how hard it is for even the sweet-lovin' of your mate to get you out on the dance floor. Regardless of the likely combination of ineptitude and psychological hang-ups, these barriers have been known to suddenly disappear in the right circumstances, in clubs with pounding drum beats and chunky guitars played by sweaty musicians. Maybe you're seeing a band that guys dig, like Bethlehem, PA's finest, the Original Sins! Guys' heads are bobbing, arms are crossed tight against chests. Then some guy's arms loosen their deathgrip across his chest and a beer-soaked fist starts pumping to the rhythm. It starts with one man in the crowd and then spreads. Before long, a roomful of guys are mandancing. Some even cross over and dance with the handful of women in the crowd.

The art of suave, ballroom dancing is beyond my comprehension. Unless society was vastly different, what did the majority of guys do in the pre-rock era? How did a man with two left feet find opportunities for mandancing? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of dancing that Rory Gallagher and his axe inspire in this crowd of men.

Recently, I've come across some videos of songs that have always held appeal for me, often strangely so. Seeing these songs accompanied by I'm realizing that they feature mandancing. Men being men. Men teaching men. Man dancing, awkwardly―yes, as men.

For starters, check out this clip of Otis Redding and, midway through, special guests. Check out one aspiring black man who takes lead on a verse of "Shake". See this man in awe of his teacher. By the end of the performance the student is laying the groundwork for future endeavors. Enjoy.

To be clear, the following clip is not an example of the mandancing I am looking to celebrate (don't worry―it's OK for viewing in work).

On the other hand, this shockingly bearded clip is.

Finally, I bring you what may be the Holy Grail of mandancing clips. I've been searching for something like this as long as I've had ways of finding videos online. Deal with it!

September 11 (pre-"9/11")

2006-09-11T14:38:00.000-04:00

Remember when September 11 was just another day? I can't say I really do, because I wasn't born on that day, and as far as I knew, I didn't know anyone who was either born or who died on that day.* I've never been a college football fan and I can't stand the Cowboys, but coaching legends Bear Bryant and Tom Landry called the day their very own. D.H. Lawrence and Lola Falana were born on September 11. Boy, can you imagine a time when you could open the paper on September 11 and read that Lola Falana was born on this day? I bet all those people and their loved ones and more remember September 11 for what it was before the day was ruined for the forseeable future as a day of joyful memories and/or private rememberance.

On September 11, 1609, Henry Hudson landed on Manhatten island. On that same date in 1906, Gandhi is credited with founding the nonviolence movement. What do you know, this makes 100 years of nonviolent forms of protest!

Until September 11 became "9/11" there were Red Sox fans whose offspring would have to wait 86 years for another day like the September 11 in 1918, when the Sox won what generations of fans feared would be the last of their World Series.

The Beatles recorded their first single, "Love Me Do" on September 11, 1962, and in 1985, Pete Rose would break Ty Cobb's all-time record for most hits in a career. That September 11 in 1985 is one I'll remember, when "Charlie Hustle" meant something entirely different than it would a few years later.

*You got me - I don't have a preexisting personal connection to this date, so I'm cheating by the guidelines of my own blog, but allow me this brief post.

Paul Quandt

2006-09-07T16:23:00.000-04:00

I recently saw the kids' movie How to Eat Fried Worms. It was a delightful, down-to-earth, and purely kid-centered underdog/boy dynamics movie. Really sweet. Anything the kids laughed at we laughed at, and vice versa. Few if any modern-day pop culture references and obvious traces of cross-marketing campaigns. Beyonce did not promote her new single, and the kids did not open their refridgerator doors to shelves full of Pepsi. Even that annoying little girl from the old Pepsi ads didn't get under my skin. I'm growing up and getting old, sure, but this movie struck me as about as sweet and pure as kids' movies gets these days.

During the movie, which featured a lot of bully-new kid showdowns leading to...well, I won't spoil anything, I started thinking about one of my favorite bully-new kid-underdog-boy dynamics movies, My Bodyguard, the 1980 film that introduced me to Matt Dillon, for whom I've always had an added attachment because he reminds me of my brother (although not his characters' lifestyle in certain movies). If you've somehow never seen this movie or you haven't seen it in 25 years and you now have kids ready to try "old" movies, I heartily recommend you Netflix this baby. While you watch it, see if you're not drawn into the character of Carson, the little squirt friend of Clifford (Chris Makepeace), played by Paul Quandt. This Quandt kid hits just the right, downbeat, downtrodden, all-knowing note. The great Roger Ebert singled out his performance, saying, "there's another kid, the solemn-faced, wide-eyed Paul Quandt, who steals a couple of scenes with his absolute certainty that the worst is yet to come." Now, check out the link to this review, and see if notice the one thing missing from Paul Quandt's name relative to the names of his costars.

OK, did you get it yet? If not, click on that first, imdb.com link I gave you when I introduced Quandt into this discussion. I'll give it to you here, again. Look at that filmography! Talk about your 1-hit wonders. I've searched high and low on the Web for an update on this guy, and I've found NOTHING of substance beside those mad props from Ebert. It's an endless loop of that sole, barren filmography entry. I've discussed it with people in the know, people in the industry, and they have no idea what happened to this kid. Where are the "Where are they now stories" on the guy? Is he living, is he dead? Did the worst indeed come? I hope not, Paul. Take care!

A Certain Ratio, Sextet

2006-09-01T09:18:00.000-04:00

Sextet by A Certain Ratio is an album I discovered in college, when being depressed and confused was a way of life. I don't know how much I can tell you about the band that you may not already know: they were on Factory Records, this album is produced by Martin Hannett (best known for his work with Joy Division), they're named after an Eno song, etc. I think they appear in that 24 Hour Party People movie, but I can't be sure, not having seen the film.

This is not the type of music I typically liked even way back when, but I bought this album based on the Joy Division/Martin Hannett connection. Along with imagined Cool Points, I would learn that side benefits of owning the vinyl release of this album include the cool textured album cover and the really nice plastic sleeve into which the album slides. It may be the finest-quality plastic sleeve of any record in my collection. Sadly, I cannot include the textured album cover and thick plastic sleeve in this entry. Trust me.

If you've never heard this album, I would describe the music as Joy Division gone funk with heavy elements of '70s Satan movie vibes. Think the meeting point between Hannett's production work on Joy Division's Closer and his work on that great first ESG ep...set in a knock-off of Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. I especially like the staggered, slightly off-key horn parts that appear in songs. That sound represents my personal version of the Charlie Brown teacher "wah-wah-wah" sound. although in my case it was the hopeless sound of my parents fighting.

The Carpenter's Pencil

2006-07-24T07:57:00.000-04:00

As a boy, I had a brief yet intense period of time knowing my Dad. Over the years, at first unexpected and then with regularity thereafter, a small set of objects and places has triggered pleasant feelings about this guy. Model airplanes and ships, which he loved building and painting. Wissahocken Park, where he loved taking me hiking. A stack of notepads and pencils from his old place of employment that still hang about a drawer in my grandmother's house.

Shortly after becoming a home owner and, therefore, a regular customer of hardware stores, I was confronted with another treasured object from a lost part of my youth: the carpenter's pencil, that flat, thick, rectangular pencil that is often sitting at the checkout counter, separating the real men from the boys among DIY impulse buyers. You know, they make sharpeners for these pencils now, but every time I see them next to these special pencils I only think about buying, I scoff at the idea of the sharpener and wonder how any real woodworker could cheat him- or herself the satisfaction of sharpening a carpenter's pencil with a penknife or nearby chisel!

Selling lumber was my father's job, and woodworking was his passion. As a young boy, it seemed like he possessed one archetypal carpenter's pencil - and maybe he did. That pencil could be found in his tool box, on his workbench in the garage, in his glove compartment, and sometimes in his tackle box. He could whip out technical drawings for his customers and his home building projects, and he could doodle with the best of them. Thick, bold pencil lines with firm angles. All the pencil-based tricks of gradation. Sometimes I'd sit next to him and doodle along, pressing down with all my might on a thick No. 2 pencil from his office. He was a bit possessive about his carpenter's pencil, and who could blame him? This was the tool of a craftsman, a craft I would show no aptitude for then or now. I'd make a habit, when he wasn't around, of going out to the garage, getting my little fingers around the natural finish of that unnatural writing utencil, and pressing that thick, soft point into his graph-paper note pads. I rarely pulled off a great doodle with that pencil, but it was fun trying. When I was done, my left hand and the paper would be smeared with the almost-greasy graphite. I'd put the pencil back in its rightful place. Heaven!

One of the downsides of maturing to the point where I was first trusted with using a pen is that I would spend less time using a pencil. One of the downsides of the development of the personal computer is that over the last 15 years, I have spent increasingly less time writing by hand. Surely the computer offers its own forms of doodling, but none has developed with the promise of mastering the carpenter's pencil.

David Thomas and the Wooden Birds, Blame the Messenger

2006-07-14T09:52:00.000-04:00

Blame the Messenger, by David Thomas and the Wooden Birds, is the album that preceded the 1988 reunion of Pere Ubu. In fact, it would be a preview of the reunited Ubu to come, featuring all but one of the band members who would play on and tour in support of the strong comeback album, The Tenement Year: Thomas, synth/noisemaker Allen Raventstine, bassist Tony Maimone, guitarist Jim Jones, and elfin drummer Chris Cutler. Only Ubu longtime beatkeeper Scott Krauss was missing.

What I love about this album, following the sometimes sketchy early-80s releases by the band proper (eg, The Art of Walking) and the nutty, impressionistic batch of solo Thomas albums that led up to this one (Monster Walks the Winter Lake is a particular winner among this category), is its feeling of purpose and propulsion and the way it balances the competing, reckless impulses of early Pere Ubu the way no Ubu release had done since the release of their underrated (among Pere Ubu fans, that is, because anyone else doesn't care) New Picnic Time.

Blame the Messenger starts off with the jaunty, concertina-based "My Town", a song that wouldn't have sounded out of place as the opening cut on any of Thomas' previous solo releases. The second song, "A Fact About Trains", introduces more Pere Ubu rock action (a special type of rock action, to be sure) than what hearty fans had been accustomed to hearing from the big man in many moons. Years after being almost taken out of the equation on the band's interesting Song of the Bailing Man album, Allen Ravenstine's analog synth is once more given room to roam, a welcome trend that would continue and then end, at least within a framework of relative song structure, with The Tenement Year. Things really get interesting for me, though, with "King Knut", which picks up where Dub Housing's "Ubu Dance Party" left off. (Hey, if you own no other Ubu-related release and you've got the stomach for what I'm posting here, run out and grab a copy of Dub Housing, one of my essential rock albums.) The rest of side 1, "When Love Is Uneven" and "The Storm Breaks", madly flows together just so, the way only old-fashioned vinyl album sequencing could allow.

OK, I've said too much about an album I don't intellectually grasp. I can't give you any helpful backstory regarding Thomas' biography at the time or literary references. I wish you were with me in 1988 to see the reunited Ubu that night at Philadelphia's old, marble sailor's church turned club Revival. I dragged an Ubu skeptic along, and he was sold. The return of Krauss, laying down his Neanderthal beats under the sort of proggy Cutler fills you'll hear on this album, was magic. This David Thomas and the Wooden Birds album was the shape of things, briefly, to come.

Mike Cosgrove, Basement Guitar God, and Be Bop Deluxe, Part 2

2006-07-10T23:12:00.000-04:00

In Part 1's attempt at describing the 6 weeks of visits that an old friend and I used to make as teens to Mike Cosgrove's basement performances of Live at Leeds, I hope to have helped dust off some of your own memories of teenage devotion, aspirations, and attempts at creating an identity. These qualities have come to mind over the last few years, as I've found myself unable to turn away from the awkward charms of British, 1970s glam/prog/futuristic band Be Bop Deluxe. These qualities are among the core values of Overlooked Gems...

Dig. During my own teen years of devotion and identity formation, Be Bop Deluxe was on the periphery of the Trouser Press-touted bands I'd been gobbling up. From what I could tell, there was a lot about them to turn me off: sci-fi song titles, platform shoes, leader Bill Nelson's then-current move into synth-textured futuristic new wave with his new band, Red Noise... The most promising thing I was aware of was the album cover for Be Bop Deluxe's 1976 release Sunburst Finish, but that would have to get in line behind my quest to find an original copy of Roxy Music's Country Life.

A half dozen years later I worked with a great, older music head who would turn me onto a lot of music that I was then ready to check out. Dennis' mind-blowing mix tapes rank up the with the most influential mix tapes of my early 20s, with Andy's and Greg's. One day he presented me with an entire 60-minute mix tape of his favorite songs by Be Bop Deluxe. I immediately formed an image of Bill Nelson's early '80s haircut 100 and pleated slacks. Dennis never was one to bat in the .320s, but this tape made me think he was headed for an extended 0-fer.

The tape started with a half dozen songs from the band's debut album, Axe Victim. I'll refer to the writings of Teardrop Explodes frontman Julian Cope, who on his awesome Album of the Month column describes hearing Axe Victim thusly: "Sure, his lyrics lag far behind his musical dexterity, but unless William Nelson had reduced his vocals merely to moaning, screeching and belching, there weren't no words the equal of this boy's laughably over-reaching muse on AXE VICTIM. Indeed, the first time I heard this offering I did just that - just laughed and laughed - outraged at Nelson's shamelessness and inspired by his will to power."

Perfect, Julian! This is how I felt when I first played that old 60-minute cassette my friend made me. I grew to like this stuff but suffered pangs of guilt. I'd just been coming into my own persona, and here comes this music made up of musical bits I'd been proudly rejecting. I would wait for times when my bandmates/housemates weren't home to fire up a bong hit and play this mix of Ziggy-era Bowie; the melodic, wizardly side of Yes, of all things; and Peter Frampton. Once, I think, I tried to turn a bandmate onto this tape, and I was met with good-natured disdain. I tucked the tape away sometime after and forgot about it. Then, about 15 years later, I came across this tape in a box of abandoned cassettes. I popped it in my tape deck, and I felt the same way I'd felt when I first heard it, the way Cope describes it in his piece on the band.

In this same piece, Cope also gets to the ties that bind Nelson to what I think about these days when I reflect on the spark Cosgrove now represents in my memory and imagination, when he writes: "AXE VICTIM's striving ernie-ernie-ernie dying seagull guitar overkill and more-than-occasional overly twee self-obsessed lyrical preciousness are its inner strengths because, although it WAS informed by ZIGGY STARDUST, it was just too excited to give a damn about hiding the fact."

This Nelson guy, I thought, must have been playing along to Ziggy Stardust for the 2 years leading up to the release of Axe Victim. Although the makeup and platform shoes suggest a bit of an attempt at capitalization, the musical debts sound sincere. As Nelson wraps himself in a mantle of Ziggyisms, something of himself can't help but peak out. It's exciting; it's the stuff we can only hope our growing pains are made of. Today I think, Was this the process Cosgrove was putting himself through as he bowed and faced his copy of Live at Leeds? Had I kept up my ritual visits to Cosgrove's basement, would I have witnessed his transformation?

Bill Nelson would slowly transform into something approaching himself with subsequent Be Bop Deluxe albums. He scrapped the band's original lineup for the follow-up album, Futurama, yet the music and Nelson's role in it remained in a delightfully awkward transitional state. Check out this video of the Futurama-era band deftly working its way through the power pop formalities of "Maid in Heaven". Check out Nelson's expressions during his private moments of instrumental passages. Better yet, for awkward, overreaching moments, there's the band's Sunburst Finish-era performance of the clunky prog-boogie number "Fair Exchange". The album Sunburst Finish would mark the band's development into its own strange, slick beast, but live, with the guy 2 years and 3 releases into his professional pop star career, Nelson still looks as giddy and nervous and proud as a kid playing a Tuesday night gig in his first garage band.

If you've tried to do anything, you too may relate to this feeling. Is this where Cosgrove was headed? Did he ever get there, or is he one of those guys I'd meet many times over - later in high school, during my early 20s, during my early 30s - who, for all intents and purposes, never get out of their parents' basement, at the foot of their hi-fi systems and tattered favorite album?

On Be Bop Deluxe's 1977 fine live album, Live in the Air Age, Nelson revisits an autobiographical track from the band's debut album, "Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape". Live, with his Mark II band, the song is no longer a slightly rushed, 6/8 acoustic-based set-up for some cool hot licks but a pretentious, deliberate, electric piano-based set-up for some searing and emotionally moving hot licks. On the surface, this is a recipe for what I would consider a song worth shooting myself in the foot to avoid hearing, but it works, and it sounds like Bill Nelson has arrived at some strange place where he had been expected.

Mike Cosgrove, Basement Guitar God, and Be Bop Deluxe, Part 1

2006-07-07T10:28:00.000-04:00

Chops, desire, love, devotion, aspirations, and ultimately identity… Awkward yet endearing… Slightly embarrassing yet moving… Your kid out on the ball field or performing in a school play… Part 1 of a 2-part joint entry on the Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime hopes to touch on these themes.

We’ll start in 1979, the year some of us began preparing for a transfer from a fantasy life in sports to a fantasy life in rock ‘n roll. My neighborhood friend, personal Babe Ruth League catcher (what a calming influence this guy had on me behind the plate!), and original guitar foil, Mike Appice, introduced me to a neighborhood friend of his, Mike Cosgrove, who’d long been registered in the fantasy rock ‘n roll program, leaving sports behind before it was necessary to wear a cup.

Appice and I were in the intense process of forming our first band with my oldest friend from school, Andy. I’d been bused away from my neighborhood my entire school life, and I’d long been a snobbish outsider on what should have been my own turf. Baseball was my only link to neighborhood kids, and the band would become my only link between a neighborhood friend and school friends. I recruited Appice (whose hormones had also readied him for catching the midnight showing of The Kids Are Alright as often as possible) from the neighborhood to join a band with my school friend. I started teaching him guitar and began inundating him with the punk and new wave records that only I among my middle-class, Philadelphia rowhouse neighborhood of Who’s Next-, Dark Side-, and ZoSo-loving dudes seemed to know about. Appice was a good student, and he quickly surpassed my horrible technical skills, threatening to take over the Mick Jones parts from his subordinate Joe Strummer rhythm role on basement attempts at covering “Clash City Rockers” and “Police and Thieves”. His tastes weren’t as refined as I liked to think mine were, which sometimes led him to gravitate toward attempting to play The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” more than, say, a cool album track from This Year’s Model. For a guy from my neighborhood, though, he was a gem, a rare bundle of energy and good humor.

So this guy Cosgrove lived around the corner from Appice. If memory serves, they’d known each other for a while, and the more Appice developed a fondness for actually practicing his guitar chops, the more he started hanging out in Cosgrove’s basement, where Mike Cosgrove, Basement Guitar God, would put on his show.

Cosgrove couldn’t play Appice cool, underground punk records like I could, but he could show Appice licks, honest-to-goodness rock licks, the kind that got played on the radio. His specialty was the bag of licks used by Pete Townshend, and even a budding punk rocker had to respect that. Appice introduced me to Cosgrove, and I’d accompany him on weekly visits to Cosgrove’s basement. Cosgrove had the hard-to-find Who songbook with reproductions of handwritten chord charts, tabs, and notes from Pete himself on the tricks behind his most-stunning riffs! The day we learned Pete’s exact voicings for the intro of “Substitute” is one I’ll never forget.

Cosgrove was one of these tall, thin, slightly nerdy blonde guys, with long bangs and the sort of large, plastic-framed, slightly tinted glasses that today only British politicians wear. He didn’t do a lot of talking, not with his mouth anyway (if you know what I’m saying, Joe Perry fans). I was never much for actually learning how to play guitar, but this insider knowledge was worth sitting through what would follow. Here’s where I’d get a little scared. He’d inevitably close up the Who songbook, strap on his Gibson SG copy, turn on his Univox amp, and switch on his Pioneer stereo system. Then, he remove his well-worn copy of The Who’s Live at Leeds album from its sleeve and gently place the record on his turntable. In our meat-and-potatoes, proto-Classic Rock part of Philadelphia, not only owning Live at Leeds but knowing it inside and out was a tad bit radical. It wasn’t like owning punk rock records, but it was along the lines of owning and actually listening to Ummagumma. Cosgrove not only knew every bit of stage banter between tracks, he could play every stinking lick Townshend played on the album, including whatever noodlings Townshend played during the stage banter bits. It was amazing, and scary. As Appice and I sat at his feet, he’d lay the needle down and begin to play along with Townshend throughout side 1.

Things would always start well as Cosgrove played the dazzling, visceral, and unintentionally hilarious riffs from “Young Man Blues”. Now my idea of The Who was (and still is) centered around the Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy stuff, when they were a supercharged, concise, testosterone-fueled bundle of pimples and engorged members. As much as I also loved the epic anthems of Who’s Next, this Live at Leeds stuff (and their appearance in Woodstock) marked the turning point for me in the band’s ability to consistently deliver. Daltry started shouting beyond his voice’s natural capacity. Townshend’s guitar tone and playing started to get exposed (I never found him to be that interesting for more than a few seconds of single-note soloing; I missed his reliance on inverted chord riffs). The band’s Look was no longer as cool. The fringed suede jacket thing worked for real hippie bands, but not for The Who. Mods don’t wear fringe. (The problem, I’ve since come to realize, is that sometime between Tommy and Woodstock, the band members started to get laid with too much ease. Was it Mickey who said to Rocky, “Women weaken legs!”) So I’d giggle delightedly through “Young Man Blues” and then enjoy the rumbling of the live version of “Substitute”. I never cared for this version as much as the single, but it’s hard to go wrong with this song.

Like I said, while the goofy stage banter played between songs, Cosgrove would play along with any incidental guitar noises that were coming from Pete that night. “Summertime Blues” was, for me, the album’s raison d’être, and “Shakin’ All Over” was pretty cool as well, but it was sometime during this Johnny Kidd & the Pirates cover (as I would learn during my advanced Who studies) that things got hairy. By this point in the performance, the bloated nature of the band as captured during this performance would start to get to me. By this point in the performance, Cosgrove’s complete absorption and lack of humor about the whole affair would get uncomfortable. As much as Appice was eating up the program’s educational content, even he would start to squirm. Cosgrove seemed to have no idea how weird it was to go through this in front of two fellow teens on a weekly basis. And how much practice time had gone into this performance before we walked down the steps to his basement? (And where were his parents during all this?)

Next in the program was, for me, the deal breaker, the 14:27 version of “’My Generation’.” I quote the song title's quotes because this version, if you don’t know it, contains a medley of Townshend’s assorted riffs from Tommy. It was all meant to climax in the instrumental “Sparks”. For Appice, this was heaven. For me, it was torture. “Sparks” is undoubtedly cool in the way that a guy riding a unicycle is cool, but I don’t want to hear it more than once a year, and I sure don’t want to see some future look-alike of a British Prime Minister play along to it. The entire experience of the Cosgrove performance, at this point, crossed the line from trying to pick up some cool guitar licks from the foot of a master student to observing a monk in prayer.

I would eventually decline invitations to Cosgrove’s basement. Appice and I would eventually butt heads and part ways over his desire to incorporate more instrumental passages into our music. I would eventually transfer what sports credits I could over to rock ‘n roll fantasy university and lose both a great catcher and friend.

How this ties into ‘70s, British glam/prog-rock band Be Bop Deluxe is a story for Part 2!

Reality on TV

2006-06-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

The other day, a friend forwarded me some YouTube links to Captain Beefheart performing "Hot Head" and "Ashtray Heart" on Saturday Night Live. This was from way back when, during the release of the fantastic Doc at the Radar Station album. I'd seen this clip when it happened, and I've seen it in .mpg format a few times over the last few years. This time, though, just days after watching a completely wasted and creepy Iggy Pop sitting down with an awkward, chain-smoking Tom Snyder (on that Punk Rock on the Tomorrow Show box set that's now out on DVD) as well as a charming, articulate Elvis Costello discuss with Snyder his misadventures in unscripted live performance during those same glory days of SNL, it's a wonder us older folks who lived through those days - days when reality actually could be televised for a few minutes at a time - don't just collectively shoot ourselves. I'm not saying we should and that life sucks because Saturday Night Live hasn't broadcast more than a moment or two of furiously joyous performances and comedy bits over the last 20 years, but I see stuff like this, and I'm reminded of just how right SCTV's original opening shot of tvs being thrown out high-rise windows was. Think about how the occasional thrill we get on tv these days, like the breakdown in lip-synching technology suffered by Ashlee Simpson, compares. As Larry Brown used to say after tough wins coaching the Philadelphia 76ers, "It's time I go home and kiss my wife and smell my kids."

The Executioners

2006-05-10T07:34:00.000-04:00

Watching professional wrestling on a local UHF tv station in the mid-70s was one of my earliest guilty pleasures. During my middle school and high school years, this pleasure would extend to attending a few wrestling matches at The Spectrum. My friend Andy and I even saw a steel cage match!

Unlike Andy and a couple of other friends, my memories of the particular wrestling division we watched are extremely hazy. I'm pretty sure it was the early WWF. I know do recall that play-by-play announcer/mastermind Vince McMahon was still years away from injecting himself with steroids and jumping into the ring. You may recall some of the featured wrestlers, the likes of "The Living Legend" Bruno Sammartino; Chief Jay Strongbow; Ivan "Polish Power" Putski; Professor Toru Tanaka; "Superstar" Billy Graham; the hardfought, head-butting, frequent loser, BoBo Brazil, and two of my favorites practitioners of unique, "scientific" finishing moves, Stan Hansen (The Lariat) and Baron Von Raschke (The Claw). Yes, this is going back to the days when fresh-faced Bob Backlund was a good (and boring) guy.

I could go on all day - and maybe you, too, are finding you can't get enough of these memories. Take some time and dig around the dusty corners of your mind; call an old friend; keep the flame burning. First, however, let's recall The Executioners, the minimalistic, masked tag team, a powerhouse among tag teams of the 1970s. Although a tag team match was frequently featured on the broadcasts I used to watch, I felt like there were never enough matches featuring The Executioners. I don't recall this team having many special moves, although in one championship match I will never forget, a third Executioner was seen entering the ring. At the time, this was a scandal far outweighing any illegal move that wrestlers were known to attempt, such as the use of a foreign object or the ripping of the padding on the turnbuckles before slamming an opponent's head into said unpadded turnbuckle. Like a personal Zapruder film, the slow-motion replays of the entry of that third Executioner rank up there with replays of Ed Armbrister's alleged interference with Carlton Fisk after bunting a ball in Game 3 of the 1975 World Series (by the way, you can relive this clip on this page).

In researching this piece, as so often happens when I research another Overlooked Gem, a large part of my innocence was quickly lost: the identity of The Executioners, including the third Executioner, was revealed! In fact, the identities of all the masked wrestlers are now readily available with the click of the mouse. This information is a blessing and a curse. There's something to be said for hazy memories of things that really aren't important. There's something to be said for the unexamined life. It's one thing to know, at an early age, that professional wrestling is fake, but it's quite another thing to have the identity of The Executioners revealed so readily. I'm sorry if I've dragged you into this mess.

By the early-80s, when professional wrestlers turned to juice and updated cartoon characters that fed into the Reagan-era Cold War mentality, I'd long signed off from the "sport." Today, I know too much about the era I loved, but this won't extinguish the flame that still burns for The Executioners.

The Dry Look

2006-04-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

In the early 1970s, Gillette introduced The Dry Look, a revolutionary hairspray for men who'd adopted 1960s' fashion preference for longer, natural hairstyles yet who wanted to keep that "natural," blown-dry hair looking unnaturally neat and flowing just so over their early 1970s' wide shirt collars and long sideburns. Remember the old split-screen tv commercial that ran in the early '70s? The "then" version of the man in the ad, with his Brylcreem-gobbed hair, was portrayed as downbeat and most likely impotent. The "now" version of this gentleman was cool and ready for action, ready for more action than any one man should have been able to handle! Who needed Viagra in the '70s? A full head of long, dry, yet tidy hair was all a man needed to get back on the horse. You think Andrew Stevens ever had problems in the sack? Doubtful. Variations on this commercial would ensue.

Remarkably, this ad anticipated the culturally explosive fashion battle that took place during the 1972 World Series, which pitted that the mustachioed, Dry Look-using Oakland A's against the no-facial-hair-mandated, Brylcreem-applying Cincinnati Reds. (Interestingly, Reds star Pete Rose, whose pageboy haircut always threatened the team's rule against hair over the collar, would go on to shill for The Dry Look's main competitor, Vitalis' Dry Control. The cultural implications of "wet" vs "dry" hair would continue through the decade into the early 1980s. Granted, the dry look wasn't for everybody.

Variations on the concept of attaining a "natural" state through artificial means reached new peaks during the bizarre decade that informs many of the overlooked gems of my lifetime. The product, The Dry Look, is still available today, but the instructive image of a man sporting this bold, new look is no longer part of the packaging. Recently, trends in men's hair fashions have moved from a return to the fully wet look to more of a dried wet look, commonly known as "bed head." But who knows? Today's fashion trend is tomorrow's overlooked gem. There are even reports that the dry look is coming back into fashion!

John Cale, Fear

2006-04-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

For too long I've been delaying writing a profound entry on the backseat gem that is John Cale's 1974 album, Fear. I've had the album, in its cover featuring a harsh, black-and-white, scary yet serene closeup of Cale's large-featured face sitting in front of my stereo for the last month. I've cranked up the album a few times since then. One day I even sat at the piano - an instrument I can't really play - and easily plucked out the chords and basic licks in each song. It was a good way to get further into the slightly overlooked sibling of the "classically trained" Cale's influential and universally acknowledged masterpiece and rock snob rite of passage, the sly, elegant Paris 1919. Few album covers better represent the music that's contained within that the cover for Fear.

After the backstory of his founding of the Velvet Underground, which followed time spent receiving "classical training" and later "studying" under avant garde composer LaMonte Young (perhaps the most referenced artist in rock criticism that rock critics have never actually heard [thanks, RTH!]), the leadoff track of Fear, "Fear Is a Man's Best Friend" follows Paris 1919 in intermediate studies in the artist. I won't bore you with further cut-and-pasted details, although some of them, such as Little Feat backing up Cale on his acknowledged masterpiece, are fascinating for folks like myself, folks who can't get enough of this stuff, right down to the participation of rock's forgotten street poet, Garland Jeffreys, on Cale's solo debut, Vintage Violence. I will waste no further words, and get back to the trick that Fear's title track (click and wait out final 25 seconds of the previous song on a WFMU broadcast to listen) pulls off: it far outdoes John Lennon's "Mother" in kicking off an album with rock 'n roll's long-sought primal scream intensity. When the genre of rock 'n roll was created, surely one of its objectives was to allow yon' teens an outlet for letting the world know just how crazy and mixed up their inner lives were. Combine this with existential philosphy, Freudian analysis, and a Neanderthal's sense of reggae rhythms on the chorus, and you've pretty much got the recipe for Cale's very own Scream.

Throughout the album, Cale receives major contributions from Roxy Music-pedigreed guitarist Phil Manzanera and knob- and perspective-twiddler Brian Eno. The sound is dry, stark, and menacing. Even the mellow songs, of which there are a handful, have that sense of menace. When he sings, in the stately "Buffalo Ballet", the refrain of "Sleeping in the midday sun...", a less-than-peaceful sleep is promised. The third track in, "Barracuda", is pushed along by a grotesque walking bassline and is punctuated by an oddly placed, descending synth run that comes and goes at just the right time. It's another song that confidently - and almost gleefully - bodes bad tidings. (This is getting at what's made this album so right for me over the years.) Manzanera, under the meddling fingers of Eno, is allowed to run free for much of the album, and that's always a good thing. Side 2 kicks off with a long, repetitive, swaggering number called "Gun". Over the rollicking barroom piano-led rhythm track, Manzanera's guitar wails through all levels of filtered devices. Cale sounds like he means business. Too often, in albums that would follow Fear, Cale "meaning business" would mean Cale exhorting a lot of overwrought horseshit. Check out the dead-on-arrival Slow Dazzle album if you dare. On Fear, however, you get out of the way and let the man through. Maybe it's that sound, a sound that has much more with Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure than any other Cale album or Cale production.

So, I procrastinated in writing what I had hoped would be a profound and informative piece on John Cale's Fear. I suspect, as I feared I that would, I have missed the mark. However, as I come to terms with the knowledge that the ocean will have us all, as I play this album, as I learn that there's a time to deflate the balloon I work too hard to maintain, I take solace in and celebrate the dark visions that are put across on this album at just the right pitch for my sensibilities.

Willie Montanez

2006-03-16T11:39:00.000-05:00

Baseball first clicked for the 8-year-old me in 1971, and it's been one of life's clicks that won't stop. That year, my uncle and grandfather started taking me to games in the Phillies' brand-spanking-new multipurpose stadium, Veterans Stadium. The future had arrived. Almost. On a terrible team of late-60s washouts and the first hint of the early-70s prospects who would grow into the franchise's lone (1980) championship team, the Phillies featured an animated rookie centerfielder, Willie Montanez, who came to the Phils as part of the compensation package for the groundbreaking Curt Flood. Despite the presence of this flashy rookie and another animated, if not immediately beloved youngster, shortstop Larry Bowa, the Phillies were in the process of extending an almost-uninterrupted 20-year stretch of losing baseball. Since losing to the Yankees in the 1950 World Series (a rare winning season for the franchise at that time, as well), the team hadn't sniffed the pennant with the exception of the legendary 1964 collapse. Of course, I was not conscious of that season's nightmare finish, but I'd been hearing about it from my uncle and grandfather as early as they began passing on their love for the game. I probably suffered psychic scars from overhearing their agony that September, when I was toddling around my grandparents' house.

Willie Montanez was a sweet-swinging, fine-fielding lefthander. My baseball mentors and I were all lefthanded. Both my uncle and grandfather were centerfielders; I was headed for two of a less-fleet lefty's options: first base and pitcher. In their own self-aggrandized image, Uncle Joe and Grandpop long valued sweet-swinging lefties, such as Stan Musial and Ted Williams as well as less-accomplished lefthanded batters from Philadelphia's past, including Johnny Callison and the Athletics' Elmer Valo. Home runs were fine, but doubles driven in the gaps and RBI are what got the men in my family stoked. En route to his 30 HR, 99 RBI, Rookie of the Year runner-up season, Montanez gave us plenty of opportunities to be stoked, but it was his style that made him one of Philadelphia's most beloved if ultimately mediocre sports heroes.

Montanez had style walking toward the plate, in the batter's box, and in the field. He had style in centerfield and at first base, his natural position, where he returned after his first 2 years in the league. Let's review his behavior at bat. Walking from the on-deck circle to the batter's box was the first of Willie's trademark behaviors: The Bat Flip. Without fail, he flipped his bat while walking toward the box. It was about as cool as it got, and like all of Willie's moves, it was done with joy and never to show up the pitcher. An important aspect of the hot-dogging Montanez is that he did it with love. He wasn't the type to stand in the box and admire home runs, he wasn't the type to glare at a pitcher, his quirky behavior was not associated with loafing or lack of concentration. Montanez was a fundamentally sound baseball player who also happened to have a great time on the field. Once through with rolling his neck and getting into his slight squat, Montanez let his swing take over. Any opportunity to react dramatically to an inside pitch or a bad swing, however, was taken. Kids across Philadelphia quickly added the Montanez batting quirks to their pick-up game repertoires alongside the Bobby Tolan high-held bat stance, the Roy White low-held bat stance, Felix Millan's ridiculous choke-up/back-scratch stance, Joe Morgan's elbow pump, and so forth.

The other Montanez trademark move was more daring and difficult to ape, even in the loosest of pickup games: The Wrist Snap. Once Montanez settled under a routine flyball or popup, a hush fell across the Vet as fans awaited the cobra-quick snap of the wrist and glove as the ball fell gently into Willie's web. Later, when Montanez moved to first base, he also did this dramatic snap, accompanied by a grand sweep of the arm, on balls rifled over to first, even balls he had to scoop out of the dirt. Now and then, if memory serves, an error resulted from one of these moves, but fans were forgiving. The Wrist Snap was too cool to deny, and Montanez was one of the league's slickest-fielding first basemen.

Yes, if you look up the sports term "hot dog" in the dictionary, the mustachioed Montanez would appear, possibly next to a shot of the even more brilliantly mustachioed and equally engaging pitcher Luis Tiant. For another view of the good-natured hot dogging of days of yore, specifically these two titans of the aluminum cart, click HERE.

About a third of the way into the 1975 season, my first baseball hero was traded even up to the San Francisco Giants for a promising yet enigmatic centerfielder, Gary Maddox. Phillies fans of what was slowly becoming a thoroughly mediocre and even hopeful team, were outraged. I'm pretty sure I cried. (Do the math - yeah, I know it's embarrassing!) By this point, Montanez had yet to come close to topping his then-recent rookie season, but he was still so cool and fun to watch. I flipped over their baseball cards, and I knew objectively that Maddox had a lot to offer. He even had a great Afro; a soulful, What's Going On-style beard; and a pretty cool stance featuring long legs that practically straddled the width of the batter's box, but he wasn't Willie. Thankfully, Gary Maddox would win over Phillies fans with his tremendous fielding, his own share of line drives in the gaps, his speed, his class, and his paralell personal odyssey through that great Phillies' team's struggle to get to and win the World Series.

Willie would move on to a number of teams, usually maintaining the sort of decent run production, good batting average, and underwhelming power that is the mark of a second-division team's first baseman. He never came close to hitting 30 HR, although he did manage to drive in 100 runs the year he moved from Philly to San Francisco with only 10 home runs (again, COOL!). Like a few other promising, sweet swingers of his era, such as John Milner and Gene Clines, he never turned out to be the second coming of one of my favorite Overlooked, Under-the-Bubble Hall of Famers, Al Oliver. The Flip and The Snap would travel with him from San Francisco to Atlanta to the Mets (god, how that killed me!) to the Pirates... He finished up his career for a few month back here, where he always belonged, where he will never be overlooked.

Checkin' in with Don Covay

2006-02-23T09:21:00.000-05:00

Before I get too deep into this entry, I want it to be clear to music nerds checkin' in on Overlooked Gems that although the the title of this entry is "Checkin' in with Don Covay" and although this entry will refer to memories associated with that Mercury collection of early-70s Covay recordings, this collection itself is not the place to start for sampling the man's music. Rather, the first thing I hope you do after reading this entry is to seek out a copy of the seemingly out of print Razor & Tie collection, Mercy Mercy: The Definitive Don Covay. This covers his early singles as a Little Richard-style shouter through his fertile country-soul peak through his Mercury years. Used copies of this CD run high, but if you start at the right spot, you might end up spending just as much or more buying the few in-print releases just to get the same 23 keepers and who knows how many more essentials?

If you think you know nothing about Don Covay yet are a lover of '60s music, there's a chance you know something about him through the songs he's written. Although he didn't have a great success as a solo artist, his songs were covered successfully by a number of soul and rock artists. Aretha Franklin made his "Chain of Fools" her own, and this song, with its rock-ready, snakey guitar intro typifies a characteristic of Don Covay's songwriting that, I think, made him a natural for British Invasion bands of the mid-60s to cover. Although I'd grown up loving "Chain of Fools", the first time I noticed Covay's name was as songwriter on the Rolling Stones' version of "Mercy Mercy" from their excellent Out of Our Heads album. Then I realized that it was his persistent, chugging pen behind the Small Faces' "Take This Hurt Off Me" and, finally, one of the coolest songs of my (and someone else's) childhood, Steppenwolf's "Sookie Sookie". Next thing I knew, an old friend with close connections to the Razor & Tie crew handed me a copy of the aforementioned Definitive Don Covay.

Covay's mid-60s songs were guitar driven more than most of the soul hits of that era, and his vocal style tended toward a conversational drawl that Mick Jagger must have obsessed over in developing his strongest vocal approach. I have no way of accounting for his lack of greater success as a solo artist and I in no way mean to diminish him among his peers, but something tells me that had he and his peak-era band, The Goodtimers, been able to perform as pasty-faced white kids with messy moptops, they would have been gold. Their recordings straddle the ridiculous soul-rock divide as well as those of any African American artist before Jimi Hendrix, who incidentally did a stint in Covay's band and may or may not have played guitar on "Mercy Mercy". Check it out someday, and whether it's actually Jimi on that track or not, you will hear, along with the guitar playing of Curtis Mayfield on Impressions records and Pops Staples' playing with the Staples Singers, the roots of a distinctive sound that Hendrix would bring to rock audiences.

So, getting back to my copy of that Checkin' in... collection, I pulled it out recently while preparing to burn a friend some songs that weren't on the Razor & Tie collection that he already owned and loved. As I listened to it, I was reminded that the Definitive collection covered just about all the best songs from this early-70s period, most notably the smooth soul ballad "I Was Checkin' In While She Was Checkin' Out" - a must have for those who've worn out their 45 of Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones". One song, however, that slipped through the cracks of the collection was "Hot Blood", a weird, funky, hoedown of a number that Sucking in the Seventies-era Rolling Stones would have killed for (and I mean that in a complimentary way).

As I listened more, however, to the fine ballad "We Can't Make It No More" and even the horrible but well-intentioned "Mind Is a Horrible Thing to Waste", I was brought back to the year of our Bicentennial, when I was getting my hair "styled" at some "unisex" hair salon in Northeast Philadelphia. The sign for this place showed a nude, interlocking, sexually ambiguous couple with blonde pageboy haircuts. The salon was on the first floor of an old house that also housed other "progressive" businesses - a natural foods store and the like. The doorway to the salon was draped in beads, and inside there were all the requisite plastic and vinly "pod" furnishings that came straight out of A Clockwork Orange. The guy who cut my hair, Gary, and his partner, struck me as being as stereotypically gay as imaginable, yet from what I could make out of their veiled conversations over the sound of scissors and hair dryers, these guys were getting all kinds of girlie action while snorting all kinds of coke. Was it actually '70s-era Mick Jagger cutting my hair?

Needless to say, this shop was the kind of place that could get a 13-year-old boy stoked for the coming era of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, or in the case of this shop's music selection, mid-70s progressive soul. A popular soul station of the time, WDAS, was always turned on. The station is still on the air and still serving the African American community, but I'm not sure if it's as cool as it once was. How would I know, no long getting my hair cut at this shop? Circa 1976, this was THE hip soul station of its time, playing album tracks and long versions of songs like Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes' "Wake Up Everybody". I remember ads for Millie Jackson concerts - I think that was her name - her whole thing was about being dirty. I can't remember if they were able to play her songs, but I felt I was getting insider knowledge.

And how does this relate to Don Covay, you may be asking? Well, it got me thinking about how the failed aspirations of a period in time can be as worthwhile as the codified Time/Life versions that have already been reserved for future generations. (I dread the thousand more times I will live to see the same clip of those hippies doing that Grateful Dead dance in Golden Gate Park over a backing track of "Get Together" or "For What It's Worth"). It got me thinking about the bridges between music and subcultures and people and all that jazz. Now crank up your computer speakers and get down with "Hot Blood"!

Quisp

2006-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

The makers of Cap'n Crunch had the big bucks and breakfast cereal powerbrokers behind them to squash this fiesty competitor! Quisp had a cooler shape and more pleasing texture (little flying saucers that each held a few drops of milk and less of that sandpaper effect on the tongue and cheeks, respectively). The Martian guy on the box was cooler than the Cap'n to boot. Also-ran Quake had its merits, but hey...

OK, OK, I'm no longer 8 years old, and I now know that the Quaker Oats Company made all three cereals and trumped up this competition. In researching this brief entry, I've discovered more than I wanted to know about the cereal wars of my youth. You know, I do this blog, in large part, to celebrate the innocent, joyous convergences of my lifetime, but at times like these, I regret what I've found. Serves me right. I apologize if the links you've followed have nullified a piece of the drama that made up your third grade existence.

Tom Verlaine, Dreamtime

2006-01-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

If they're being honest with themselves, fans of Television likely have mixed feelings about the work of the band and its guiding force, Tom Verlaine, past their remarkable debut album, Marquee Moon. I know of only two people who think the band's follow-up album, Adventure, was anything but a tepid letdown. I know a few people who find merit in the band's s/t "comeback" album from the early '90s, but I've never been able to listen to it past a few introductory spins following its release. It was as if Verlaine and guitar sidekick extraordinaire Richard Lloyd put saltpeter in the food of the band's previously distinctive rhythm section, Fred Smith and Billy Ficca, so the recordings would have a more reserved, "contemporary" appeal. Where were those warm bass fills and the off-kilter crashes? But there I go straying from this blog's extremely positive objectives again! Before I return to accentuating the positive and giving credit where credit is due, I must raise the interesting belief that one friend holds, that the entire story had been told - great story that it was - by the end of side one of the orginal vinyl album release (ie, through the title track for those of you who have not experienced the joys of flipping an actual album over).

I raise these doubts because there's one solo Tom Verlaine album, Dreamtime, that both meets the high, visceral bar set by side one of Marquee Moon while satisfying what I will only assume was Verlaine's vision of a more ascetic, crystaline setting for his music, as hinted at on side 2 of Marquee Moon. Despite some high marks from the usual suspects, Dreamtime was fairly overlooked in its time and is all-but-forgotten (and out of print) today.

The album opens with the furious stomp of "There's a Reason", featuring all the unique guitar and rhythmic interplay that sold us from the opening measures of ""See No Evil". Here, however, the lurching, rhythmic riffs do more than update the debut-album rockers' melding of gleefully stoned, mid-60s Rolling Stones singles and the Beatles's "Paperback Writer". Verlaine has taken the fencing feats of even the song "Marquee Moon" to a level previously unheard in in his oeuvre (sorry, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use that word). Despite the snaky singing, the stinging guitar leads, and all the other stuff that screams ROCK 'N ROLL!, it's the sound suggested by the Lou Reed album title Metal Machine Music more than that of a rockin' band. This quality is carried through the rest of the album to great, pre-crappy-'80s-production-techniques effect.

The album's second track, "Penetration", completes the template of thrusting repetitive rocker followed by elegant mid-tempo number, as established by the first two Television albums. Again, however, the jangly elements of this Dreamtime equivalent to "Venus" and "Days" are lacking in the warm and fuzzies that kept Television's experiments with one firm foot in the traditional rock soil of Woodstock, Monterrey, et al. The song moves along in detailed, dispassionate increments, with only the slightest release during a jaunty dual-guitar break. I keep thinking, whenever I play this song, that although I will never form as emotional and personal an attachment to "Penetration" as I do to "Venus", it all makes sense in the artistic direction that Verlaine initially launched. He was headed this way, as the third song, "Always", a bit of a chilled, nasty rocker along the lines of "Friction", also tells me. And so on...

It may seem like I'm selling Verlaine short on this album by identifying these templates and patterns, but I do think there are artists who can spend a lifetime honing a small set of clear ideas. Not every artist can move comfortably from "Love Me Do" to "Help" to "Strawberry Fields" to "Cold Turkey", and not every artist needs to move in a line that shows such clear "progress." I've got a handful of other Verlaine albums, and they all have their moments, but no other one seems as focused on his small set of clear ideas. No other one seems to pick up the thread, and despite efforts every few years to see what the guy might be up to (eg, producing demos for Jeff Buckley, guesting on Patti Smith recordings, composing music for films), I can never tell if he even possesses the thread these days.

Andy Bresnan

2006-01-09T10:15:00.000-05:00

Philadelphia's multi-instrumentalist/conceptualist extraordinaire Andy Bresnan has added color to the music of Butterfly Joe, Baby Flamehead, and his ancient band Junior Mints, for whom I served a year's residence, doing things like laying on stage and fretting chords on my electric guitar while the hulking Bresnan kneeled over me and played the strings with timbale sticks. As the artistic director for the multi-media Big Mess Orchestra, Bresnan allows himself plenty of room for combining the highest and lowest of arts. If the world knew of him it would be awaiting the album I personally aniticipate, the one of familiar if otherworldly instrumental ditties that best reflects giddy nights spent in his presence, listening to a wide assortment of off-kilter tunes and even learning to heartily appreciate Frank Zappa's Uncle Meat album. Meanwhile, the guy hasn't been wasting time. I would suggest you prepare for upcoming Christmas seasons by purchasing the Big Mess Orchestra's holiday-themed Have Yourself as well as the group's first, self-titled album, featuring originals and enlightening covers. Keep an eye on this guy!

Match Game

2006-01-03T11:24:00.000-05:00

A couple of times a week, while flipping channels, I come to a screeching halt whenever I have the good fortune to find a Game Show Network rebroadcast of the greatest game show ever, Match Game.

We will review some of the reasons why I consider this the greatest game show ever, but the primary reason - and the reason why it is featured as one of the Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime - is that it is the one tv show that best captures my state of mind as a young adolescent on a day off from school.

With few goals ahead but the of eating an entire Entenmann's banana crunch cake, I'd plot down in front of the tube and prepare for a half hour of mindless, racy, pseudo-celebrity-panelled, game show entertainment. This was in the days when pseudo-celebrities nobly strutted their stuff on game shows, variety shows, and comedy roasts. These shows required talent. There were no quick cuts to Elaine Joyce canoodling with Nipsey Russell, no staged hissy fits by Joyce Bulifant. Pseudo-celebrities had to stand - or more likely sit - and deliver, often in the company of regular folks, the game-show contestants. When do you see pseudo-celebrities joining forces anymore with regular folks? But I digress.

There was only so much of this good stuff on in the morning before the 6 stations we received (remember getting no more than the 3 network stations, PBS, and 2 or 3 UHF stations, those of you old enough to have lived before the advent of cable?) were inundated with mostly unwatchable stuff like soap operas. The best of this good stuff was Match Game.

I could describe the rules of the game, but why bother when you can simply click here to refresh your memory or learn about them for the first time? What really made this show click were the regular cast of characters and the set itself. The set had all the requite multi-tiered panels, spinning contestant desks, pop-up question cards, and carnival-like lighting. From certain angles, the rows of lights seemed to hint at the Confederate flag. I'm sure this meant nothing, but then what would the Web be with pointless asides like this?

Host Gene Rayburn was lanky, sported a huge overbite, and yet was somehow kind of handsome, in a goofy Count Dracula way. Among his talents and tools, including the use same half dozen lame voices (eg, doddering old man, Bela Lugosi, fat-cat Texan...) he'd use while reading the questions aloud to the contestants and panelists, Rayburn carried the most distinctive wand of a microphone. Did any fan of that show not long to weild that mic wand? I know I did.

The regular panelists were Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Richard Dawson, who would branch out as a successful game show host himself (Family Feud). Frequent participants included the aforementioned Russell and Bulifant, Fannie Flagg, Betty White, Marcia Wallace, and an ace '70s game show host (eg, my second favorite game show, Tattletales) in his own right, the exquisitely coiffed Bert Convy.

It was always fun to see which panelist a contestant would bond with as he or she moved along in the game. It still is! Certain panelists seemed especially good at providing matches with contestants. Brett Somers obviously put a lot of effort into her answers, and the ladies couldn't help but rely on the relatively suave Dawson. Charles Nelson Reilly (notice: you can't just refer to him or Brett Somers by their first or last name alone), on the other hand, seemed like he was crocked and couldn't give a shit about anything but wisecracking with Rayburn and his fellow panelists. But that was cool too. I get the sense that a lot of partying went on during that show. You don't get that sense these days, on pseudo-celebrity vehicles (Taradise excluded), when even the pseudo-celebs have personal trainers.

I'd like to say the show allowed you to see "another side" of its pseudo-celebrities, but so few of them had a "side" outside the game show/variety show/comedy roast circuit. Prime-time panelists like Betty White and Bill Daily had already mastered their comic personae, so you couldn't say they were "letting their hair down." Nevertheless, they gave it all they had. This may be what it's all about here on Overlooked Gems: Giving it all you've got! I ended 2005 in a bit of a funk regarding the power of these Gems to communicate, but the time I've spent thinking about Match Game has revitalized me. If you're not doing so already, do yourself a favor and tune in the Game Show Network for a few episodes of this show. Maybe like me, you'll find yourself sitting in your favorite seat with a feeling of true contentment and simple joy.

Conversation

2005-12-20T00:58:00.000-05:00

Conversation. Communication. I hope this doesn't need explanation.

George Sanders

2005-11-21T22:49:00.000-05:00

Am I cheating by including an actor who had but one role of note that occurred during my lifetime? Nah, film is forever! I'll keep this one brief, because I'm by no means the first person of my generation to have identified this overlooked gem. Please allow me this not-so-overlooked entry for I have worked hard to uncover many other gems that were previously far from our culture's collective radar.

George Sanders was a character actor who specialized in cads and creepy, scheming runners up to the affections of leading ladies. What set Sanders apart was the ounce of sympathy with which he could invest his creeps. There was a lurking sense that, as PiL might have said, he only wanted to be loved. Not quite a Creep with a Heart of Gold, but often a creep with a heart of some sort.

The voice of George Sanders was seared into my brain from childhood as the villain of The Jungle Book movie, Shere Khan. In real life, as I would discover years later, he looked about as lionine as that voice sounded. Not enough people look the way their voice sounds. It turns out, as I read up on him, that he also put that trained voice to use as a singer, releasing albums that were met with better regard than, say, those that would be released by William Shatner's.

Rebecca, All About Eve, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, are the human roles with which I've come to most associate him. You probably know about the first two. Not enough people I talk to know The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a relatively recent discorvery from a previous lifetime that I recommend checking out (especially those of you who are fans of life after death romances of the Heaven Can Wait ilk). Sanders' ability to infuse a little soul in a character you really don't want anything to do with is at its most subtle in this performance. Other movies that display this actor's detatched, sad magic include Foreign Correspondent and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the latter a film in which his decadence was allowed full reign.

The guy's biography alone is interesting. Born to English parents in Russia. Married to both Zsa Zsa Gabor and, for a brief time toward the end of his life, one of her sisters, Magda. At one point, he was reported to have been under the simultaneous care of seven psychiatrists. Truly, Sanders seemed to have a real interest in matters of the psyche. In 1937, he announced to David Niven that he would commit suicide when he grew old, which he carried out in 1972. I've read a few reports of his suicide note, but each variation rings true to the spirit of his characters. Who knows, regarding these warmed-over bios, but you'll find more of this good stuff if you poke around.

Now, if you didn't read that link I provided at the beginning of this entry, please do so now. Let 'em know I sent you.

Thelma Evans from Good Times

2005-11-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

I want to keep this wholesome and respectful, so relax guys! I was flipping channels the other night, and I caught an episode of the fairly gritty Norman Lear sitcom Good Times. It's always a pleasure to revisit the Evans family! Early JJ was a seriously funny character. Father James Evans, Sr., played by the awesome John Amos, was as manly and tough a loving father figure as anyone could desire. Who could forget that great theme song and the final shot of JJ's memorable painting? Neighbor Willona hit just the right mark. Mother Florida and righteous younger brother Michael always delivered. And Thelma...sweet, hip Thelma. The sister who kept it together. The sister who had it all together.

The next to last thing I want to do is open the floodgates to drooling teenage memories, and the last thing I want to do is fire up some cheap jungle fever, but growing up white in a white neighborhood, Thelma was something else. This brief bio of actress BernNadette Stamis, who portrayed Thelma, cheesy as it may be, captures part of her appeal. She was The Girl Next Door in neighborhoods I rarely ventured; specifically, she was the Girld Next Door in the Low-Rent, High-Rise Housing Project. Who can judge the actual worth of a novel character on a better-than-average tv show that, at least, aimed for a degree of realism? I can say that Thelma's appeal posed neither barriers nor qualifiers. It was something fresh in its time, and it's a concept that still needs refreshing today. Hopefully, this makes enough sense.

Big Dipper, Heavens

2005-11-11T10:02:00.001-05:00

NOTE: Since this was posted, almost the entire Big Dipper catalog has been reissued in one box set by Merge. It's highly recommended!

Frequently, the hardest thing to do when detailing the Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime is trying to articulate why I love or appreciate something small so deeply. I can tear apart things big and small that I don't like in my sleep, but the challenge of maintaining this blog is trying to share positive feelings about things that may never have made a blip on your radar. Let's see how this one goes.

Big Dipper's first full-length album, Heavens, hit the spot for me from the first time I spun it. I liked their debut ep just fine, but it didn't resonate in my soul the way my favorite records do. There's a chance you've never heard of this band, and it's probable that if you know anything about Big Dipper you know more about their musical bloodlines: Volcano Suns, Dumptruck, The Embarrassment... The less said about Volcano Suns the better. As I've stated, it's really important that I keep things on the up and up here, but I will give their sound, at its relative best, some credit for the lurching, throbbing quality of many of Big Dipper's finest song. Dumptruck was a fine, if sometimes stiff (on record), brainy pop band. The Embarrassment, who are well-documented in the hipster underground, was a blast, and the fact that their guitarist Bill Goffrier ended up as one of the frontment of Big Dipper is the genesis of this entry.

I stumbled into seeing The Embarrassment open for PiL in Chicago in 1981 or so, and although they were completely inappropriate for the bill, they were tremendous and transcended what could have been a turned off, snot-nosed crowd that had come to see John Lydon and Keith Levine wave their middle fingers at Rock 'n Roll. The Embarrassment were full of enery, smarts, and good humor. These were important qualities that Big Dipper would exploit.

Heavens came out of the gates strong, with an eerie painting on the cover (courtesy of present-day professional artist Goffrier), the easy-to-swallow "She's Fetching", and the skiffle-pop of "Man o' War". As is so often the case with the best songs of Big Dipper, I read reviews and follow recommendations of other bands, check out their music, and come away thinking "No, based on what I was told, Big Dipper's [insert title] is what this band was supposed to sound like!" For instance, I saw Yo La Tengo after hearing great raves about their first album, back in the days when they had a second guitarist/banjo player. They were fine, but this Big Dipper song is what early Yo La Tengo was supposed to have sounded like. My apologies if I've completely lost you on this concept, but my thanks if you stick with me.

The fun, the energy, and the charmingly eery feeling from the album cover do not stop thereafter. Their sound contains elements of jangle-pop, Boston underground post-punk, and more. Goffrier and second singer-guitarist Gary Waleik, the crucial Steve Diggle to Goffrier's Pete Shelly, supplied expressive, melodic voices that few (if any?) of their Boston underground brethern could match. Side 1 (ah, the power of actual album sides - there's a future Overlooked Gem) ends with a relatively long, pulsating song called "Lunar Module". Crank it up when you finish reading this entry, track down a copy of this album, and find it waiting in your mailbox. Imagine if XTC's Andy Partridge, following the release of Black Sea, had the 4 x 4 surgically removed from his butt and took his mates back to the studio for a loose, rocking set of brainy, repressed pop.

Side 2 opens with the band's most-accessible song, "All Going Out Together". Children of the '80s will hum the decent and similarly-themed "I'll Stop the World and Melt with You" for eternity, but I'll take this ditty to the grave. Again, I'm completely satisfied as this album side plays out. And yes, I'm still spinning my old vinyl copy. Seemingly, this album has yet to be reissued on CD. I hope I'm wrong (I often am). Come on, already! If you're reading this and you own the rights to this album, please contact me. I know a label that would be interested in bringing this album to light.

I saw the band as often as I could in their heyday. This was during a period in my life when, like Mikey, I didn't like much of anything. After shows, I'd make sure to go up to as many of the band members as possible and tell them how great I thought they were, etc. Waleik, in particular, was aces! A few years ago, when I realized he was the producer credited at the end of the extremely tasty public radio sports show It's Only a Game, I wrote him a fanboy e-mail in that same appreciative tone, and he at least pretended to remember me. Aces, I tell you.

They shoulda been contenders. I know, they didn't have a pretty boy with pouty lips and a vacant drug-induced gaze up front, but Big Dipper, circa Heavens, had the goods. The band would actually move up to bigger labels, but the nooks and crannies of Heavens were increasingly smoothed over by the production of their final albums.

Last year, Tom Scharpling, host of my favorite radio show, The Best Show on WFMU, spent a number of episodes trying to organize a Big Dipper reunion show. I followed this news religiously, or so I thought (perhaps I wasn't as strong in my faith as I thought I was, which shouldn't surprise me), but then the story seemed to fizzle out. I don't know if the show happened or not, but it was fun thinking about it.

In the Soup

2005-10-25T13:41:00.000-04:00

Sondra and I saw this movie while living in Hungary. Since no one else cool that we knew at that time or now saw it here in the States, we can only assume that this is an overlooked gem. Possessing a style similar to that of Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, and seemingly a predecessor to both DiCillo's Living in Oblivion and Get Shorty, In the Soup follows the adventures of an artistically driven but financially strapped movie director, played by the appropriately regarded Steve Buscemi, and creative funding exploits directed by a two-bit mobster, played by excellent character actor and Cassavettes vet Seymour Cassell. A surprisingly excellent Jennifer Beals - at that time following her post-Flashdance years in the Artistic Witness Protection Program (and who would later resurface demonstrating equally surprising talent a few years later in the overlooked Devil in a Blue Dress) - plays the director's working class muse.

La Femme Nikita (USA television series)

2005-10-10T08:50:00.000-04:00

Dating back to the fabulously cheesy Silk Stalkings, a Miami Vice knockoff that rode the pastel sport coat and hair gel revolution into the ground, the USA network has been a favorite channel in our household. Before we discuss today's Overlooked Gem, the USA's La Femme Nikita series, it's important to put the network itself in perspective. Then we can discuss the underappreciated wonders of the show that made 24 and Alias possible.

The USA network first caught my attention in the late-1980s with quirky late-night programming like Night Flight and Up All Night. In 1991, the network wisely picked up Silk Stalkings, which had debuted on CBS, where it was quickly cancelled along with the rest of the late Friday night Crime Time After Primetime slot. Silk Stalkings, a creation of tv schlockmeister Stephen J. Cannell, set the pace for the network's subsequent original programming: 1) knockoff a previously successful show or adapt a hit movie for the small screen; 2) cast a duo of sexy lead actors and play up the sexual tension for all it's worth; 3) feature plots involving wealthy older men who are murdered by the lesbian lovers of their trophy wives; 4) utilize dimestore versions of the production techniques of Michael Mann and other '80s action movie directors; and 5) populate each episode's "bad guys" with Asians in ponytails and distinguished middle-age men of indiscriminate Eastern European and Middle Eastern descent. For anyone willing to acknowledge that television should entertain and numb rather than educate and inspire, the USA formula was a winner, even when shows like Pacific Blue, a Baywatch-for-bike cops knockoff, failed. To illustrate the powers of communication that a USA production typically possesses, the year we lived in Budapest, Hungary, we used to watch episodes of Silk Stalkings dubbed in German - a language we didn't know - without missing a beat.

If you've seen the original French movie La Femme Nikita (or the US remake starring Briget Fonda), you know the basic plot that the tv show would exploit. I'm certain that a number of you reading this have already shaken your head in disbelief that so much blog space could be given to this television series rather than the groundbreaking movie that inspired it, but the original film got its due for showing French people bravely firing guns and blowing things up upon its release. As an Overlooked Gem, let's review a few of the qualities that mark the sign of a Great Television Series, namely a dynamic, sexually charged lead duo; a cast that is 6-deep in talent; distinctive background music; and as a show that's set in the "workplace," the ability to fulfill one of the two workplace fantasy models.

Let's start with the chemistry of the leads. Pete Wilson's Nikita and Roy DuPuis' Michael were smokin'! Whereas the original Nikita, Anne Parillaud, was feral and sexy more than outright beautiful, Wilson put it all together. Similarly, the Michael character smoldered through scenes with the vacant sensuality Val Kilmer could barely scratch while playing the equally failed vacantly sensual Jim Morrison. We're not talking Shakespeare here, or even Luc Besson films, but small-screen, cable, niche market episodic tv. Peta Wilson and Roy DuPuis kept it simple and looked great doing so. The inevitable lovers had all the cat-and-mouse, love/hate, I-think-we're-alone-now routines down pat.

As strong as the show's leads were, don't discount the power of a cast that is 6-deep in talent. The characters of Operations (harsh, paranoid, manipulative boss), Madeline (overprotective, well-intentioned yet spiritually poisoned stepmother figure to Nikita), Birkoff (science geek manchild), and Walter (pathetic if loveable hippie/shaman/Vietnam vet) provided a supporting cast as integral to the show's success as did the supporting casts of Cheers, Seinfeld, and M.A.S.H.

The distinctive opening theme and the show's background music, including both the original score and snippets of atmospheric, '90s underground artists (eg, Morphine), were part of the fabric of the show. Although the existence of this music was wholly independent of the television series, longtime fans of the show were likely to categorize something like a track from the first Beth Orton album as "Nikita music," much like fans of the James Bond series of movies might classify all subsequent brassy instrumentals with a certain beat as "James Bond music."

Finally, let's review the two models of shows set in the workplace and how USA's La Femme Nikita satisfied this dynamic for viewers. The best workplace shows use the workplace setting not only as a means for pulling together an assortment of unique characters facing challenging situations but to create an underlying mood of either relatively functional family joy and comfort or extremely dysfunctional dread. Cheers and Sports Night were a great examples of the former. Coworkers were there for each other; hell, when push came to shove, the boss was there for the staff. I used to watch those shows and get depressed about going to work the next day. There was no way my real job could live up to that fantasy. The workplace of La Femme Nikita, on the other hand, is one of dread. Despite the care that the Section team of Nikita, Michael, Birkoff, Walter, and whatever side characters came to the fore for a particular story arc had for each other, Operations and Madeline - and their higher ups - inspired nothing but dread. This made for gripping television watching, and it also helped me look foward to the next day's work, because no matter how bad my job might have been overall or for a particular stretch, it was never remotely as bad as life in the Section.

There's so much more I could cover, but frankly, if I said anymore on the subject I'd have to invite you over to watch a few episodes, and that just seems weird. If you're not already a fan, I strongly encourage you to rent Season 1 on DVD and see if you don't get hooked.

Straight to Hell

2005-09-30T14:34:00.000-04:00

I know only two other fans of this movie, my bandmates Mike Frank and Seth Baer, and I've read of a fourth fan somewhere in the UK. That's it. This punk-rock send-up of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns from director Alex Cox (Repo Man) stars Repo Man alums Dick Rude (who also co-wrote) and Sy Richardson; two of our music heroes, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello; members of the Pogues; and Circle Jerks bassist (and later pre-show dressing room meal companion) Zander "Snake" Schloss. A pre-celebrity Courteney Love displays early signs of her burgeoning lack of talent. (After seeing this movie upon its release, I'm pretty sure I was the first person in the world to spot her complete lack of talent, but of course, we've got to keep it on the up and up here at Overlooked Gems of My Lifetime.)

Don't think I'm recommending a film of subtle insight and emotional resonance. Like Cox's acknowledged cult classic Repo Man, the movie exists primarily for a series of absurd and even lame gags: the cowboys ride Yugos rather than horses, coffee addiction runs rampant among the townfolk, and so forth. A sudden death of an irascible geezer is commemorated by a wholly insincere "He was a great man." But don't just take my word. You've got to see this movie for yourself to appreciate its overlooked greatness. Actually, you may have to see it through the eyes of myself, my two friends, and that English bloke I read about who also digs it.

Slovenia

2005-09-20T14:36:00.000-04:00

Business brought Sondra to this little country nestled among Italy, Austria, Croatia, and the Adriatic, and Sondra brought me along to this little country during our glorious year living in Hungary. Always among the pampered pups of the old Soviet Block, Slovenians quickly extracted themselves from the post-communist Balkan conflicts and continued with a culture that combines the sensuality of Italy with the order of Austria.

Moxie

2005-09-15T23:42:00.000-04:00

We've been vacationing in Maine for 15 years, but it wasn't until last year that we were hipped to the New England region's treasured and historic soda, Moxie. That week, I drank a case of Moxie, and we brought another case home with us, cracking open a can now and then through the winter months to mark special occasions.

Moxie is the oldest continuously produced soft drink in the US. What's it taste like? It tastes like the America of our forefathers, or at least our Anglo-Saxon ones. Imagine a stronger and less-immediately enoyable birch beer (oh, what an overlooked gem Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer is, but that's for another day), a Guinness Irish Stout to Pennsylvania Dutch's Bass Ale. Surely, it's an acquired taste. For what it lacks in immediate pleasure, however, it makes up for with its strong and slow-building aftertaste. Sometimes life gets a little too smooth; Moxie goes down like a fine sandpaper.

Moxie is running neck and neck as my signature drink with the Italian soda produced by the excellent San Pellegrino company, Chinotto. That's right, when you think of me living the good life, please think of me as sipping from a tiny bottle of Chinotto or, when I'm in the states, taking manly swigs from a bright orange can of Moxie!

Manny Sanguillen

2005-09-12T16:07:00.000-04:00

Manny Sanguillen was a free-swinging, bad-fielding catcher for the early '70s Pittsburgh Pirates, the Roberto Clemente/Willie Stargell-led squad known as "The Lumber Company," an overlooked gem of a baseball team itself. He was surrounded by Hall of Famers and world-class flakes, but Sanguillen's appetite for any pitch that he could reach, his amazing ability to make quality contact, and his peculiar ticks while awaiting the next pitch added to his luster. I once saw him hit two doubles in one game against the Phils: one on a pitch above his head and another on a pitch that practically bounced up to the plate. Among other unusual distinctions, in 1975, Sanguillen and $100,000 were traded to the Oakland A's for manager Chuck Tanner.

Lost in Music/This Little Ziggy

2005-09-06T10:01:00.000-04:00

In the years following my disappointment with reading the acclaimed Nick Hornby rock novel High Fidelity, a book that I thought worked better in its slightly cheesy Hollywood movie form (despite the horrible segments featuring Lisa Bonet), I was turned onto two lesser-known rock memoirs with little distribution outside the UK that I found much more satisfying, Giles Smith's Lost in Music and Martin Newell's This Little Ziggy.

Like High Fidelity, these books detail the love and beauty fueling rock obsessives' frequently pathetic exploits. The books share some overlapping themes with each other, in large part because Smith and Newell were bandmates in Newell's cult-pop band, The Cleaners from Venus. Lost in Music is most similar to High Fidelity, with tales of a young man's move from record lover to nearly-successful musician to contented, music-loving journalist. The book is loaded with commentaries on favorite records, a fair share of lists, and other devices made popular in High Fidelity, but even when Smith is waxing over what I would consider a cheesy single from his record collection, there's never that sense that Hornby can't seem to avoid, that of the smug zealot of semi-hipness. Midway through the book, Smith meets up with Newell, and during his stint with The Cleaners of Venus, he realizes what separates himself from what he considers a true artist like Newell. Really sweet, humble stuff that's too often brushed under the carpet in rock writing.

Sweet humility and a great deal of self-deprecating humor are on display in Newell's memoir of his teenage years as an aspiring Glam Rock star. This Little Ziggy is dead-on in its tales of teenage rock rites of passage, from early experiences with rock 'n roll through teenage rebellion, school dropout, girlfriends, drugs, local band success, brushes with near greatness, more drugs, parental reconcilliation, and eventual inklings of one's own artistic voice. I laughed; I cried. Numerous times. This book is presently out of print and pretty tough to find. If you ever come across a copy, snatch it up! Before I leave this post, I must recommend the music of Martin Newell as well, especially The Greatest Living Englishman album.

Glenn Branca, The Ascension

2005-08-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across The Ascension, the first full album by New York guitar-army composer/conductor Glenn Branca, at my old college radio station, and I was immediately hooked. You can't judge an album by its cover, but the Robert Longo-drawn cover of this album made me want to judge its contents. Unlike other records emenating from New York's then-happening (for some, that is) "No Wave" scene, this one packed a tight, walloping punch; it didn't sound like closet Jefferson Airplane cover band flunkies masquerading as Ornette Coleman disciples. Four specially tuned guitars, bass, and drums hammered away at five industrial-strength pieces that sounded then - and now - like some combination of minimalist composer Steve Reich, the Velvet Underground's noisier stomps, and the sweeping violins excerted in Apocalypse Now from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Here, former Teardrop Explodes mastermind, Julian Cope, describes the sound of this record better than I do here.*

I would buy one other Branca album, Symphony #1, I believe, which was basically the sound of a dozen guitarists holding a single note at a low volume for 40 minutes. Someday I'll buy another album of his, especially if I can remember which one it was I saw performed at Drexel University in the mid- to late-80s. The show was booked as part of the university's classical music program, and seeing all the middle-aged subcribers holding their ears was a treat. More of a treat, however, was seeing the music performed live. If memory serves, he had eight guitarists and a drummer that night, including the very cool writer Tim Sommer and the guy who would partner with him in Hugo Largo (ugh - the performance I saw of that band is sure to make my forthcoming Overlooked Turds... blog - but let's keep this blog on the up and up!). Combined with Branca's contortions as conductor there was enough visual stimulation to have made the show memorable had I gone completely deaf. Had I been deaf, however, the beautiful vibrations from the stage would have been icing on the cake. You get the idea. The show ROCKED. For an encore, the band, with Branca joining in on guitar and with at least half of the members displaying the grins evident of the recent inhalation of a big joint, came out and played "Sister Ray".

*It should be noted that this Head Heritage site that Cope is behind may be an Overlooked Gem unto itself. For my money, the man's writing on overlooked gems of his lifetime far outweigh his own musical contributions.

Boyer Smoothies

2005-08-17T09:12:00.000-04:00

The alternative to Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, this unattractive (imagine the pasty skin tone of William F. Buckley, Jr. in candy form), chocolate-free peanut butter cup answers the question "What if the guy who was holding the peanut butter ran into another guy holding peanut butter, but in the form of a chocolate bar?" Actually, as a trip to the humble Boyer Candy Web site will explain, the outer coating is a butterscotch-flavored substance. For fans of chunky peanut butter, the filling has ground up bits of peanuts. Why this Altoona, PA-based candy manufacturer, home to the better-known and equally scrumptious Mallow Cup, doesn't rule the roost in American candy making is clear, but when's the last time you found redeemable "coins" inside your Hershey product?

Bobby Douglass

2005-08-08T15:43:00.000-04:00

This lefthanded quarterback for the early '70s Chicago Bears threw the worst-looking ball in NFL history. However, he was lefthanded, he rushed for a then-record-for-a-QB 900-plus yards - often plunging off-tackle like a fullback - and he was completely lacking in grace. The lefty 10-year-old playground QB that I was could identify.

The Final Scene in the Otherwise Horrendous Staying Alive

2005-08-01T10:20:00.000-04:00

If I ever were to document the stinking, heaping turds of my lifetime, Staying Alive, the Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel to Saturday Night Fever, might top the list. With little effort, I managed to avoid seeing this movie until 20-some years following its release. One night, while flipping channels, I had to give it a try. It's a good thing, because the delay in seeing it not only allowed me to better appreciate the majesty of this movie's badness, but it allowed me to uncover the tiniest overlooked gem of the movie's final scene. And this blog is all about appreciating the good.

John Travolta would have made a better career move by starring in a gay porn film. Stallone, who'd long ago used his single bullet in the arts, manages to make a musical romance set on Broadway with no sense of choreography; not the slightest spark of romance; and a poor man's Michael Sambello soundtrack, courtesy of his brother Frank. You would think that, if nothing else, a slimmed down, buff, and oiled Travolta would have an opportunity to display his enthusiastic dancing talents. You would think that the most generous self-absorbed actor of his generation would have the chance for a meaningful look in the mirror. But no. For 92 minutes, Every Italian Mother's Favorite Son is shackled, humiliated, and even ignored. Finally, in the movie's 93rd minute, Tony Manero tells his woman he has to get out and simply "strut." Tony/Travolta is liberated. The music of the Bee Gees is cranked up, and for a few seconds we see our hero strutting down Times Square with that shit-eating grin and the perfectly feathered hair. The camera freezes on the final image, and I'm left with goosebumps. Moments like these, my friends, are just rewards for one's patience and faith.

Brown

2005-07-27T10:35:00.000-04:00

It's no coincidence that the design template chosen for this blog features brown tones. Brown in all its glorious earthtones has been on the verge of being the forgotten color. Born in the '60s and growing up in the '70s, I never anticipated the need to designate an entry on this blog for the color brown. Clothes, furniture, shag rugs, films, and sports uniforms celebrated the color and its cousin, burnt orange. Brown was beautiful, man. Chocolate Thunder! It was natural. It was the color that best matched its own tones. Brown signified a meeting ground for deep and meaningful social interaction. Then the '80s came along and brown, a color not represented on the pastel pallette, was cast aside. Even the Rolling Stones, a band that understood the beauty of brown as well as anyone, went the Miami Vice route.

Brown is making a comeback, and don't overlook it again! UPS has built its ad campaign around the confidence that the color instills. The Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals have held true, and look for the Padres to return to their old '70s uniforms before this decade's up. Recent films like We Don't Live Here Anymore capitalize on the sadness inherent in these tones.

You're still not convinced, are you? Rent The Beatles' Help! There's a scene where they're playing some songs on a hill. John, Paul, George, and Ringo are wearing varying tones of brown suits. Perfect. Brown has all the cool of black without the threatening and exclusionary aspects.

Maestro Parametric Filter

2005-07-25T09:15:00.000-04:00

The Maestro Parametric Filter, more commonly referred to as the "Coltrane Box" in my little world, is an old guitar effect I've used for more than 20 years. I could educate you with a bunch of technical jargon that means nothing to me, or I could tell you about all the times I've stomped on that noisy old beast and let the midrangey wash elevate my rudimentary, fuzzed out pentatonic scales to new heights.

The Undertones, Positive Touch

2005-07-14T11:44:00.000-04:00

Following the giddy punk-pop delights of the band's eponymous debut (which IMNSHO far outshines the entire recorded history of the Ramones by the end of side 1), Ireland's criminally underrated Undertones matured at an alarmingly fast and commercially disastrous rate. The cover art for their second album, Hynotised, and its leadoff track, "More Songs About Chocolate and Girls", solidified the band's clownish image but obscured growing songcraft and an assured sense of production and arrangements. For me, however, the band reached its peak on album #3 with the bubblegum psychedelia of Positive Touch, a peak so high that most pop fans, including Undertones fans, cannot appreciate its majesty to this day. This album's all about the nooks and crannies; apply butter and check it out for yourself! If you can score an original vinyl copy, that's the way to go: the textured cover and inner sleeve fascinate me to this day. The band's swan song, The Sin of Pride, saw the infusion of hair gel, puffy shirts, and slick '80s soul. Although a few songs cut through the sheen, the album failed to make its mark in the dawn of '80s synth-pop and the attrocities to follow.

Tom Arnold

2005-07-12T10:25:00.000-04:00

Don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not a fan of the works of Tom Arnold or the man himself. Rather, over the course of many years, I’ve come to appreciate his position as Hollywood’s modern-day Everypatheticman. When he was first foisted on the public as Roseanne’s Yoko,* I found even a few seconds of him hogging space on the small screen unbearable. All those nervous tics and giggles and desperate glances for approval, the beads of sweat, the self-deprecating attempts at pussywhipped humor, the likely hair plugs… Hell, I could look in the mirror and find my own pathetic condition more amusing.

Then came The Jackie Thomas Show, a short-lived sitcom in which Arnold played a version of what we suspected was himself, a pompous no-talent comic who lucked into starring on his own sitcom. With a strong supporting cast and some more forgiving house mates at the time, I watched a few episodes, and I had to admit it was not half bad. More importantly, for the first time, I started to see the unmistakably human despair and longing behind his less-flattering surface desperation. I would come to appreciate more of this quality as he began his role as co-host of Fox Sports’ in appropriately named The Best Damn Sports Show Period. As a host and interviewer, the guy is incapable of simply giving himself over to his subject, incapable of taking himself out of the equation.

Arnold’s crowning achievement as an overlooked gem of my lifetime came during a Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview that I listened to a few years ago while sitting in my car, waiting for my Mom and my boys to take care of some last-minute impulse Christmas shopping. He discussed his struggles with various addictions, his weight, his troubled upbringing, his time with Roseanne, and just about every other train wreck you could imagine. Arnold was calmer than I’d ever heard him, but that eager-beaver, open-nerve desperation was still lurking. In a time where too many people want to be a star and where “reality”-based attempts at exploiting various interpersonal weaknesses rule the airwaves, there’s something reassuring about Tom Arnold carving out his niche as America’s true no-talent star. David Brent's got nothing on this guy.

*I had already found Roseanne’s act tired long before Tom joined in on it, so maybe the Yoko analogy isn’t quite accurate (and not that I ever faulted John for Yoko, but that’s another story).

Friends (ie, Quakers)

2005-07-11T09:05:00.000-04:00

The Christian religion with little dogma, no ministers, minimal authority figures, and great faith in the ability of humans to connect directly to their spiritual source has failed to catch on in these insecure, consumer-driven, self-help happy times. Somebody get these people a publicist!

Choking Up

2005-07-05T10:20:00.000-04:00

Baseball has provided numerous overlooked gems of my lifetime, but most recently I was reminded of the almost-lost art of choking up. Few players choke up today, even when the situation calls for a little restraint. While watching a DVD of the 1980 Phillies World Series Champs (maybe the first and last Phillies World Series Champs of my lifetime?), I noticed shots of hulking, slugging leftfielder Greg Luzinski choking up an inch and a half on his bat. This was once common practice, even among some sluggers, when down in the count in a key situation. "Kids," any little league coach would say, "you've got to get wood on the bat if you want to make something happen." Bat control should not be underestimated, but maybe bat control and choking up are not an option when you're swinging a thin-handled aluminum bat. Yuck! Just the ping of a ball off those things makes my stomach turn. Raise your hand if you're old enough to remember trying out one of those old Jackie Robinson model bats, with a handle half as thick as the barrel. Choke up on that baby, and you too can hit 'em where they ain't.

When Things Were Rotten

2005-07-01T08:10:00.000-04:00

This mid-1970s Mel Brooks tv show that spoofed the Robin Hood tales is a hazy memory. Maybe it actually sucked and deserved to be canceled after a handful of episodes, but to an early adolescent high off a half dozen viewings Young Frankenstein, it was hot stuff.

James Blood Ulmer, Odyssey

2005-06-30T09:48:00.000-04:00

A disciple of Ornette Coleman, James Blood Ulmer enjoyed a brief spell of critical acclaim for his fusion of the mysterious harmelodic theories of his mentor with Hendrix/Sly Stone-inspired psychedelic funk rock. However, that formula ran out of gas shortly after it ignited, on the amazing Are Your Glad to Be in America?. On Odyssey, Ulmer is backed up by a drummer and a violinist who plays through a wah-wah. That's it. The result is a very relaxed fusion of psychedelia and rural blues that Ulmer ran into the ground shortly thereafter with a series of live albums that repeated 75% of the songs on this studio album. These days Ulmer is punching his meal ticket on the Martin Scorcese's Blues Project. Mostly "Eh..."

Brewster McCloud

2005-06-29T09:54:00.000-04:00

This early '70s Robert Altman flight of fancy stars Bud Cort as a manchild who pursues his dream of flying while living in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome. Mythological and pop culture references abound, often for the hell of it. Shelly Duvall makes her strangely appealing screen debut. The Altman regulars of that era (eg, Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, Burt Remsen, John Schuck) get to strut their ridiculous screen selves. One of probably a dozen highly recommended and underrated, laid back films that Altman has released between his occasional films receiving commercial and mainstream critical acclaim. As an added bonus, there's something about the setting, styles, and cinematography that perfectly capture my childhood memories of the early '70s.

Roy Wood, Boulders

2005-06-28T14:41:00.000-04:00

Move founder Roy Wood let his whimsical side run wild in this one-man band celebration of Phil Spector pop and British eccentricities. If Brian Wilson's artistic crack-up gets you down and Skip Spence's highly touted Oar strikes you as simply the worst load of crap to come out of the overrated San Francisco scene, try this album. I have no idea what was going on with Wood's mental state, but the album strikes me as a last-stand for a grown man's childhood love of pop music. It's no wonder his equally perverse follow-up albums shot mostly blanks.