In Which Doctor Casino Listens to Classic Rock Classics for the First Time

i love about half of myonga's early-seger comp, and find the other half a little cheesy. absolutely worth hearing.

really disappointed this Christmas song isn't a blatant "Santa Claus Never Forgets" a la "Run Run Rudolph" - but it is totally rockin'! And funny.

Thanks for the links and recommendations everyone. Realizing Seger actually had a totally legit career as a relatively old-time rock-and-roller makes all his pleas for the genre feel much more justifiable. Cracking open the MVB comp and holy shit, this is wild.

this rules

So's Bob Seger, ya dum dum!

(in which you case you are objectively wrong)

First of all, calm yourself down.

Second, Seger's career up to around 1982 is transcendent, and the "he never topped this early single" thing is hipster garbage talk

if the second half of that comp is cheesy then i would wager you are yet to experience real cheese

Been loving this thread (and want Sandy to start her own!) and it's an honour to be invoked herein :D

You are a national hero for assembling/distributing that comp.

otm

and want Sandy to start her own!

also otm

You are a national hero for assembling/distributing that comp.

SOMEBODY HAD TO (since Seger never will)

sorry y'all i'll be back in a bit, two plus two is on my mind and i got some thinkin to do

p.s. THANK YOU mvb! I never would have had the slightest idea about this stuff.

And I in turn thank tyler, scott, xhuxk etc. - basically everybody who had a hand in the thing. Everyone on that "reissue news" thread really.

You are a national hero for assembling/distributing that comp.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Tuesday, July 8, 2014 9:50 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

International hero. I seem to remember the return address on the disc he sent me was in Canada. I lost the disc, unfortunatley, after listening to it about 100 times.

B-b-but I spent a third of my life living on the Michigan border! (Three different towns, both peninsulas)

Multiple x-posts: careful who you're calling hipster, son.

am i about to be challenged to a duel?

Hang your Seger regressivism on any tree, geek.

Okay, before this explodes into a rockin' barroom brawl: Fire Down Below!

Yeah, this is all right. Maybe I'm predisposed to like it based on this other quality Seger, but it's sounding really good on headphones, nice solid recording of some nice solid playing. Not so into this 'list of people' kinda songwriting, adds up to a kind of bland scenario: they're different people, but they're alike! Seems like you could get to the same point with a little more interrelationships in the story, the banker could be casting shade at the poor man before he's taken over by the fire down below. What's this about again? Strippers? Or they're not all at the same place, I guess, some are in Berkeley and some are in Queens? Somewhere there's somebody ain't treatin' somebody right... wait, what's going on? I thought the fire was going to be about sex but is it actually wrath? What these guys have in common is not treating somebody right?

Wow, that was baffling. The one! two! three! into the solo has renewed my interest though. Another kinda sudden ending - my one lasting beef with Rock & Roll Never Forgets (now that I've listened to it like seven times in the last twelve hours) is how it just wanders away from the last chorus and ends without fanfare - surely if rock and roll never forgets, it'd show the 31-year-old sweet sixteen a better time than that. In this one it just seems like they ran out of energy, time or ideas - gimme a little more solo, a little more 'fire' at least.

Second listen, hoping I can follow the story a little better. The rock-n-rolling is probably strong enough to carry it just as an instrumental, with Seger's rasping as just another instrument, so in any case this isn't killing my interest in picking up the album. So, okay, there are street lights, here come these girls... what is this all about? Are they going to see a band? Why would all these lawyers and bankers be there? I feel like I'm lost in a pronoun here, the "it" that's never gonna stop. I do like that it happens in Moline, and I guess at this point I'm pretty sure this is about prostitution, an "oldest profession" kinda things... which makes the implications of bad treatment kinda grosser. At best I'd guess it's that the johns' wives aren't "treating them right" sexually but that's not very appealing as a narrative. Yeah, blame Mrs. Lockhorn... yeesh.

Thumbs up for the band, thumbs down for the lame lyric. "Fire down below" is too strong a phrase to get wasted on a lame cliche. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it really would have done well as another paean to the eternal appeal of rock: get all these horny men and women to the Bob Seger concert and let the music stoke the fires. Last verse could wrap up how the night ends up: Steve and Sally on the pinball table / Jack and Jill are in the john, etc. With a little rewrite here and there it could also have made a good Tums commercial.

chlamidya, iirc

:)

Another kinda sudden ending - my one lasting beef with Rock & Roll Never Forgets ... is how it just wanders away from the last chorus and ends without fanfare

this seems to have been a common feature of '60s and '70s rock, either through fades or other means, that doesn't seem to happen so much anymore, as if they realized they were about to run out of vinyl space and they better do something quick.

What these guys have in common is not treating somebody right?

yeah that's a weird, possibly creepy, possibly not, line, which makes things suddenly darker without offering much of a clue as to who, what or why. maybe a throwaway line. maybe not.

first time i ever heard "the fire down below" was at the boston garden, with 15,000 people screaming the title every time it came around. it was my first real rock concert, and it seemed unbelievably loud. it was the big singalong moment of the night. i had no idea what they were saying, but i wanted to join in. i asked my friend what everyone was saying and i couldn't hear him at all, so i started singing something like "she's got zfgfh gwyrwer unghf mirwoowgh!," and it felt good, and it seemed about right, so i kept singing it. i didn't find out the real words till the next morning.

Hahaha - "and it felt good, and it seemed about right, so i kept singing it" - have done this so many times and it's usually permanently affected my understanding of the song. A cover of "Boris the Spider" rendered it the haunting question: Who is the Spider?, "Gold Star For Robot Boy" was Can't stop the robot, boy!, etc.

The running-out-of-vinyl thing is pretty plausible tbh - I mean when it's a fade-out, presumably that suppresses a longer jam and makes the track the "right" length. (Or it just hides the moment when everybody screwed up or started arguing with each other, etc...)

I think the "not treating right" thing is creepy no matter what the plot is, but it's certainly way more creepy if we're to assume that the bankers, et al., are out there mistreating the prostitutes.

Possibly inspired Don or Glenn to write "Heartache Tonight"

HEARTACHE TONIGHT
GLENN: …and then they sold 12 million records, and everything changed! As Bob Dylan said, “They deceived me into thinking I had something to protect.” And that’s what happened with us. We made it, and it ate us. The Long Run became, indeed, the long run. It was a difficult record to make overall, but I loved “Heartache Tonight.” Whenever Bob Seger was in L.A., he always used to come over and visit me, and he’d visit Don, too, and play us stuff he was working on — and we would do the same. I seem to remember that I had the verse thing going on for “Heartache Tonight,” and I was showing it to Seger, and we were jammin’ — I think we were jammin’ on electric guitars at LaFontaine — and then he blurted out the chorus. That’s how “Heartache” started. Then Bob disappeared, and J.D., Don, and I finished that song up. No heavy lyrics — the song is more of a romp — and that’s what it was intended to be.

"Fire Down Below" definitely about prostitution, FWIW.

Listen how Seger kicks out the "COME" in the chorus - a pretty unambigous double-entendre if ever there was one.

having parked in detroit for our last two entries, let's step over the border and take a look around canada. this next song is considered by wikipedia (and, therefore, by most of the internet) to be the unofficial first song of the '80s, since it was side 1, track 1 of an album, permanent waves, released on jan. 1, 1980. the song was named for the slogan of toronto's cfny-fm, one of the few stations that played rush early in their career. at the time, cfny-fm was an alternative/modern-rock station. now they're "the edge" and they play new rock.

SONG #15: RUSH "THE SPIRIT OF RADIO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juv5Ifs2fFY

(dr. casino spoiler alert: this is one of those songs that, because of its title, you might have heard but not known what it was. so i guess we'll see.)

Slightly off-track but fuck the Rush song about the trees that are pissed off at each other, that is a huge Pittsburgh CR staple and OMG I hate it so much.

I think the fire down below is what Derek and Clive referred to as "the horn".

(spoiler alert 2: rush's "the trees" will not be featured on this thread.)

Yeah, that one's a stinker alright.

"The Trees" is some anti-union/anti-organizing bullshit.

"Spirit of Radio," though, is pretty great. Probably their best song (or at least neck-and-neck with "Tom Sawyer").

ILXor askance johnson and I were talking about what a lyrical turd "The Trees" is this past weekend. I had never listened to the lyrics closely enough to recognize it as a Randian paean to the superiority of oak trees. I just thought it was a dumb as hell song about trees, but askance set me straight. (lol)

I voted for Red Barchetta in the poll, even though that too is blatantly Randian. I think what makes The Trees so bad is that it's a dumb as hell song about trees.

I dont read the Trees as Randian. I think the lyrics are criticizing both the oaks and the maples. Red Barchetta is about a car and drinking by the fireside.

Red barchetta is more plain libertarian to me. And unlike the trees, it super slays.

So happy that my hatred for the pissed off trees is shared, I have found my people.

Peart has said that "The Trees" was just meant as a humorous song that was inspired by a cartoon about trees acting like people, not as a political statement. The break in 5 is awesome iirc but I'm surprised that this is a classic rock staple anywhere.

CI: The tune "Trees" from your Hemispheres album comes to my mind as you speak.

NP: Lyrically, that's a piece of doggerel. I certainly wouldn't be proud of the writing skill of that. What I would be proud of in that is taking a pure idea and creating an image for it. I was very proud of what I achieved in that sense. Although on the skill side of it, it's zero. I wrote "Trees" in about five minutes. It's simple rhyming and phrasing, but it illustrates a point so clearly. I wish I could do that all of the time.

CI: Did that particular song's lyrics cover a deeper social message?

NP: No, it was just a flash. I was working on an entirely different thing when I saw a cartoon picture of these trees carrying on like fools. I thought. "What if trees acted like people?" So, I saw it as a cartoon really, and wrote it that way. I think that's the image that it conjures up to a listener or a reader. A very simple statement.

I mean, I've read that too, but death of the author and all...

The Spirit of Radio: The spoilers are right - hard to get more than a quarter-second into this and not go "Oh, that!" Yes, I have heard this, many times. I have never paid any attention to it, though, so in the spirit of things I'll do that now.

The intro has this really unfortunate stop-start thing where they keep promising an awesome riff or a groove and then insist on doing a little half-stop and switching it up (this happens again periodically, especially towards the end, and I guess is them showing off their technical chops or something). Once we get to the verse, it's fine and all, but as with most of their stuff that I've heard there's a sort of thin quality - not just owing to Lee's shrill vocals, but just generally this band seems to have turned the bass/treble dial turned way over to the right. It's thus quite welcome when the bigger, more in-your-face guitars come back, there's a bedrock for the vocals to play off. Their guitar attack still has more tin and crackle in it than I might like, but maybe that's meant to make it feel "radio"-ish?

I wish I liked Rush more. I'd want to supporting eager, earnest, nerdy English-class bands bands who want to compose mini-epics about how cool it is that radio airwaves carry music on them. And yet somehow when it just gets down to the band doing their version of rocking out, I kinda just wanna hear "Dream Police" instead. Wow, I don't remember ever hearing this "words of the prophets" bit before, that's a little better though it doesn't actually benefit in any way from the Simon & Garfunkel allusion.

Well, so now I know what that's called.

Man, I already can't remember anything at all about that song except the opening guitar thing. As far as I know Rush are actually one long, hookless, picaresque performance of vaguely rock-oriented music, from which a record company periodically publishes excerpts, mislabeled as hit singles. Presumably, "The Spirit of Radio" addresses the soullessness of this system in some way. Hoping that some of the other ones they have coming up in this countdown strike me better.

i wish u liked rush more too, doc

*sigh*

I gave up trying to like Rush a long time ago. And I *like* nerdy semi-literate proggy shit. They're just so stiff.

;_;

i am, despite my username, agnostic about rush. never quite got their whole thing, but every so often i hear something that makes me want to know more. this made me laugh: one long, hookless, picaresque performance of vaguely rock-oriented music, from which a record company periodically publishes excerpts, mislabeled as hit singles.

we're going to stay proggy for another eight minutes or so. this is from the FOT (fairly obvious title) school of prog. no spoiler alert needed, i don't think.

SONG #16: YES "ROUNDABOUT"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGzjIq4aZI

Doctor Casino so very OTM about everything that is wrong with Rush. I like that new wavey song they did with Aimee Mann, though. Geddy's voice is a whole lot more tolerable in the lower registers.

Oh, duh, I just found out why I like that Rush song. Peter Collins produced that album, and he also produced my favorite nerdy semi-literate proggy album of all time, Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime. So thank you Peter Collins for allowing me to like one Rush song.

sandy nooooooo

Man you Rush haters. I'm so mad I could pick up a bass and play the shit out of it.