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

Ha, I almost brought up Billy Joel too but figured I'd already brought him up too often in this thread!

would be impossible.

I love Joel, but in his live demeanor, particularly on the ballads, he sometimes loses me - but the crowd is loving it. There's this whole dreary, doughy maudlin side of classic rock that clearly struck huge chords. Got that vibe from "The Load Out." Is it a distinct CR phenomenon? I mean ballads are big any old time, but I feel like the Sensitive Rocker, the Tough Road Guy who does have Something to Say From the Heart, letting his guard down, etc., kind of gets solidified around this point. Dunno if it's just the inevitable distillation of various 60s trends and expectations, generational weariness, the emotive affect of the arena setting, or what.

I think it works great on songs I like better - see my effusive praise for "Running on Empty" (notably a more uptempo and energetic performance), but on songs that fall flat it just feels like they're made for aliens.

I'd never heard this Jackson Browne song. Nothing he's done has ever stuck in my head, 'cept Running On Empty and Doctor My Eyes. And Somebody's Baby.

I did not know that was Lindley!

As soon as DC mentioned those opening chords, I felt these gray memories of sitting alone in the DJ studio, looking at the clock and sighing.

I love Joel, but in his live demeanor, particularly on the ballads, he sometimes loses me - but the crowd is loving it.

"Blame it all on yourself, but she's always ~a woman~ ~to me~" *throws piano over the stage; crowd chants Отечество наше свободное.*

Well, that moment I've always been able to get behind.

(lol at the gray DJ booth memory, well-phrased)

while we're on the subject of rock stars chronicling and complaining about life on the road...

SONG #30: AC/DC "IT'S A LONG WAY TO THE TOP (IF YOU WANNA ROCK 'N' ROLL")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDCs7ijNUVM

"i tell you folks/it's harder than it looks!"

This'll be interesting. I know this band is a Big Deal and that freshmen get issued copies of Back in Black free with their subscription to Rolling Stone, but I really only know the very biggest hits, and most of them I don't like. Actually I think "Dirty Deeds" is the only one I'm ever happy to hear on the radio. I know they have a big deal where the lead singer died and they changed singers early on; I'm assuming this will be the second guy because it has a music video.

It's A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll): Starting strong. Big loud riff. Kinda "generic rock riff," I know this kinda thing more through Buckcherry or Black Crowes or whoever trying to channel it, whatever generation of Rock is Back! bands. Na na na na highway, goin' to a show. Got it.

Cool that they have bagpipes in the band, they should mix those higher though. Hey, there they are. That sounds okay. Cool drone quality mixed in with the guitars, lets them cut through the mix without having a choir or synthesizers or w/e. The call-and-response between lead and bagpipe is totally cool. I don't mind this long instrumental section cause the vocal part was sorta generic trite rock on the road stuff. Plus they really sound like they're jamming with the bagpipe people, not like it's just some goof added by the producer, feels like they're really in the same room giving each other winks. Man, if this guy is the replacement guy he sure sounds a lot like the guy on the other hits. Maybe this is one of those old proto-videos? It sounds really punchy and clean though, no 70s haze holding these guys up.

It's bugging me what city they're in, trying to recognize it by its modernist landmarks. Glasgow maybe? Boston? Get it known, get it paid, get it ripped off on the plane! That's how it goes, playing in a band! Man, they're really struggling to think of other things they can do on this parade truck. Should have brought in Bjork.

I dunno man, I wanna hold the five minutes' running time against this riff but these guys are rockin' pretty hard. The rhythm section is just giving it 100%, not letting up, secret might really be the liveliness of the drummer, all this little rackety-tackety stuff in the background makes this a lively neck-swinging toe-tapper rather than a sluggish riff-pounder - "Ba bramp dang donk, ba dunh dump dump" could get reeeeeal tedious otherwise. That's really helpful to the theme honestly, you feel like these guys deserve being at the top - there's no feeling of coasting on their successes here.

Overall, another surprise thumbs up! I still don't think it needs five minutes but it was totally lively and fun... and the bagpipe thing, which could have been gimmicky, just sounded awesome coming out of the speakers.

I know they have a big deal where the lead singer died and they changed singers early on; I'm assuming this will be the second guy because it has a music video.

Nope, this is the original guy, Bon Scott.

It's bugging me what city they're in, trying to recognize it by its modernist landmarks. Glasgow maybe? Boston?

Probably Sydney; this was still early in their career (1975), and I don't think they'd made it off the island yet.

secret might really be the liveliness of the drummer,

otm. Phil Rudd is what makes AC/DC great. I'll take a whole album of isolated Rudd drum tracks over a non-Rudd AC/DC record.

haha reading up on wikipedia it appears i may be wrong about every detail of this song. The bagpipes are synthesized?!

Doc Casino and Tarfumes so very very OTM about Phil Rudd. He was the PERFECT drummer for AC/DC.

Possibly interesting sociological comment: in the mid-to-late 70s, there was a lot of dissent within the ranks of music fans. There were camps and you were supposed to pick one and stick with it. You were either a hard rock/metal kid, an "regular rock" kid (you liked the big selling stuff like Foreigner/Boston/Styx/etc.), a punk kid, or a new wave/glam kid. It was okay to overlap between hard rock/metal and "regular rock" and it was okay to overlap between punk and new wave/glam, but you weren't supposed to cross species, even though all of us secretly loved stuff the other camps did, too. But the one band that EVERYBODY loved openly was AC/DC. The hard rock kids loved them for obvious reasons, the "regular" kids loved them because they were catchy and commercial, the punk kids loved them because they had attitude, and the new wave/glam kids liked them because they were fun and Angus wore a costume. AC/DC brought us together.

I just recently ranked every AC/DC album from worst to best for Stereogum. As I said there, "AC/DC emerged in the early ’70s, when hard rock was at its commercial peak, but rather than head in the jamming, crowd-pleasing direction of, say, Grand Funk Railroad, they stripped their music to engine and chassis and went racing down Australia’s back roads like the musical equivalent of the bikers from Mad Max. And by keeping their heads down and preserving their core sound with zero capitulation to trends, they managed to build a solid career, particularly live, and eventually become legends." They really did have it all from about 1975 to 1979; Bon Scott was a fantastic, sneering frontman, and Angus was a great lead guitarist (he claims he only has one solo, but it's a really good one), but their strongest weapons were Malcolm Young's rhythm guitar, which is dead-on and devastating, and Phil Rudd's utterly no-frills drumming. Once Bon Scott died and Brian Johnson took over on vocals, they became bluesier but less of a boogie band, mostly to their detriment.

There were camps and you were supposed to pick one and stick with it. You were either a hard rock/metal kid, an "regular rock" kid (you liked the big selling stuff like Foreigner/Boston/Styx/etc.), a punk kid, or a new wave/glam kid

I would have been one of the backwards kids who still had Three Dog Night posters in their bedrooms, but this is super interesting! Watching that AC/DC video, and particularly with an eye on the guitarist, I was also funnily reminded of Cheap Trick, who I expect did not cross these lines so much. But there's a real miscellaneous quality to their different styles/presentations, and the one real goofy guy with funny hats and stuff rings this "they were fun and Angus wore a costume" bell for me.

horse, that's good stuff. Y'all are making me like this band more in a few posts than I've done in a lifetime of hearing "TNT," "Back in Black" and "Highway to Hell" ad nauseum (though the latter, I'll concede, has an amazing chorus).

If you do decide to dig into the catalog, pay close attention to Bon Scott's lyrics (he's on High Voltage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Let There Be Rock, Powerage and Highway to Hell) - he's actually a pretty sharp writer, though there's a genuinely creepy sexual aggression to a lot of his songs that really wouldn't fly today. I mean, "Squealer" is describing straight-up rape, and gleeful about it.

Yeah, "Squealer" is pretty fucked up.

Great piece, 誤訳侮辱, only I'd put Ballbreaker way higher...maybe even just below Highway. Even though it's not as loud and in-yer-face as earlier AC/DC, it's more direct and sinister. It's the weird guy muttering menacingly behind you rather than the obnoxious drunk shouting in front of you.

I just recently ranked every AC/DC album from worst to best for Stereogum.
I really enjoyed this, thanks.

Watching that AC/DC video, and particularly with an eye on the guitarist, I was also funnily reminded of Cheap Trick, who I expect did not cross these lines so much.

Actually, Cheap Trick DID cross those lines as well, and largely for the same reasons. So did, interestingly enough, Tom Petty and Van Halen. Those were the bands that it was okay for everybody to love (punk kids loved Van Halen because it was well known that DLR hung out at all the punk clubs in LA and supported a lot of the LA punk scene).

Oh, rad! Always thought of AC/DC as just having fundamentally more street cred, or maybe their high just lasted longer.

I love how much thought AC/DC has put into being so thoughtless. Mal's illness has made me respect it even more, the more I read about their process. Because obviously Angus can play, and supposedly Malcolm is even better, but they put their energy into being as dumb and simple as possible. It's a hard rock salve. Also, never forget:

http://www.chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=article&IssueID=6&ID=96

I moved to Minneapolis in 1994, a cheap apartment on the wrong side of I-94. Coming home from the record store one afternoon, I got into a three-car accident a few blocks away from my place. I managed to "limp" it back to my street, but by the time I got there, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to drive it anywhere else.

I called a tow truck and waited outside. It wasn't a good moment standing out front of my shitty apartment looking at my busted car on the street. Some dude came up to me and tried to sell me some tapes out of a Case Logic carrier that he just so happened to have on him at that moment. I told him I wasn't interested just as the tow truck pulled up.

Guy loaded up the husk of my car on to the trailer, I signed the paperwork and handed the tow guy a check. As he was firming up the straps and everything, same neighborhood dude from before comes up and this time, gets a buy from the driver.

Which all leads up to this final moment of me standing on the sidewalk, watching the tow truck with its yellow siren lights turning and my car on its back, motoring south as the intro of "Thunderstruck" begins playing at full volume.

I love how the backing vocals on that and all AC/DC sounds like a bunch of massed trolls.

Great article, horse, and I love that you gave a shout-out to Carducci in the first line. Joe's a stellar guy. He wrote a book, Enter Naomi, about one of my best friends, Naomi Petersen. Joe, Naomi's brother Chris, Kara Roessler, Guy Pinhas, Scott Reeder, and I were trying to collaborate on putting together an online site that would serve as a personal tribute to her and an archive of her work, but it's been hard to coordinate with so many people involved.

Yeah, Rock and the Pop Narcotic is easily the single book of music criticism that's had the most influence on me as a writer, and Enter Naomi is fantastic, too.

naomi petersen was a fantastic photographer! her art was a huge part of how i absorbed a lot of my favorite records.

another band that strikes me as having crossed all those rock/metal/punk/glam lines is motorhead, though they were never quite as big as any of the other bands mentioned above. "ace of spades" was a huge influence, personally, in helping me find my way across some of those borders as a fan.

yeah the punks I was hanging out with in the mid-80's totally dug Motorhead

Oh, yeah, everybody loved Motorhead as well. Especially the hard rock/metal and punk kids. Nobody knew what category to put them in.

I miss Naomi terribly. I love that she is remembered so fondly. I wish she were still here.

Mainstream AOR fans and new wave fans loved Motorhead? Wouldn't have pegged that.

Obviously most of the Motorhead fans were metal kids or punk kids, but Motorhead was one of those bands that it was "acceptable" to like no matter what your chosen genre was. I did know a lot of new wavers who liked Motorhead. Not too many AOR fans that I was acquainted with knew about them, but the ones that did, liked them.

Also, to be clear, the AOR fans were by far the least interested in what was acceptable and what was not, because they weren't the most vocal fans or the ones who really had a clear subculture.

Because obviously Angus can play, and supposedly Malcolm is even better, but they put their energy into being as dumb and simple as possible.

Eh, simple maybe, but I wouldn't say dumb. For me, AC/DC is essentially the electric Count Basie Orchestra in that they do one thing: they swing in a way that no other entity can imitate, much less emulate. Malcolm is AC/DC's Freddie Green.

When I was 13, maybe 14, and getting into metal, a slightly older friend who was deep into punk gave me Motörhead's No Remorse, which he described as "the only metal record worth listening to."

Years later, I interviewed Lemmy live onstage at South by Southwest (this was in 2010 - I was picked because a friend of mine co-directed Lemmy: The Movie), and he talked about meeting John Lydon at an early-ish Motörhead gig, in full punk regalia, and remember him as a kid with long hair and a trench coat he'd spotted at Hawkwind gigs a couple of years earlier.

In high school in 84-85 Iron Maiden was the band the punk rockers and metal dudes all agreed on.

There's one band that came close in imitating/emulating the AC/DC swing: Accept.

Krokus too for awhile

Krokus went back to it. The last Krokus record is a great AC/DC record.

The Cult circa-Electric was a good fake-AC/DC.

yeah, "wildflower" is about as close to "rock'n'roll singer" as it gets without a lawsuit

In high school in 84-85 Iron Maiden was the band the punk rockers and metal dudes all agreed on.

― Gar Tooth (Jon Lewis)

Yeah, I was gonna say earlier that Maiden was another metal band that the punks I knew all liked. Especially early Maiden when Paul Dianno was the singer. They sort of drifted away a bit when Bruce Dickinson took over.

hmm by 84-85 Iron Maiden was way too associated with hessians at my school. the punks did like Metallica though.

this is clearly this thread's NWOBHM moment. and so:

SONG #31: JUDAS PRIEST "YOU'VE GOT ANOTHER THING COMIN'"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtuoFv4dcwM

(i'm reasonably sure this is one that the punk/new wave kids and the metal kids did not agree on.)

PRIEST!!!

I was both a punk/new waver and a metal head (to be fair, I was in my 20s in the 80s and I knew how to maneuver the social boundaries a little bit better) and I loved it all as long as it RAWKED.

Priest: better singles.
Maiden: better live act. Like, amazing live act.

You've Got Another Thing Comin': Is it really not "Think"? Oh well. I like "Breakin' the Law" but don't really know anything else and for some reason have always gotten them mixed up with Motorhead, another harder rock band where I only know the one most famous song about being a badass.

But we're off to a good start here, chugga-chugga. The lead coming in sounds a lot more processed and studio-y than I'd have expected. Vocals are good and energetic Kinda at the party-rock borderline here, though the kinda unclear vocals work against that pleasantly. "Caving like a Buddha's cakes, we're do or die." Actually it's distracting me trying to work out a damn thing he's saying so I should save that for my second listen. I wonder if they realized they fucked up the idiom in the title and tried to add some filter to mush it out so you couldn't tell, and in the process kinda screwed everything else up. Makes me really appreciate producers (Mutt Lange) that can get a bunch of reverby dudes shouting on top of each other and have it sound crystal-clear and punchy as shit. Judas Priest sound like they're playing inside a dumpster, or like they dragged their smoke machines and colored lights into the basement of a spaceship on a period sci-fi movie set.

I dunno, this is like, okay. I wish it weren't quite so arena-ready. It's one of those rock songs where the verses, musically, mark time and give the vocalist space for his hopefully really cool lyrics, and then the chorus is just kinda repeating the title phrase and hoping the riff is strong enough to stand in for a hook.

Second listen, just trying with the lyrics now. I'm really struggling here - I should say that I do kinda have an earache today so there could be some kinda problem on my end, or maybe it's Youtube or something. But I really am having trouble working out anything this guy is saying! I don't normally do this thing for risk of seeming like I'm trying to be wacky or whatever, but this is seriously the best I can do after several listens, though I think I did successfully correct a few of my worst guesses, like "You think I'm in the pool? Yo man, you got another thing comin'!"

Born to life, I'm gonna live it up / I'm takin' flight, I said I, I never get it up
Stay tall, I'm'a gonna caterwaul / I'm on the top as long as the music's loud
Bet you think I sit around, answering the fire / You're thinking like a fool cause it's casin', gooey guy
I'm the bees of fortune, we're easy to be had / You think I let it go, you're mad, you got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
Lettuce ride, here is Will, the Talking Heads / well listen miss, tonight there will be some action spent
They're live! Harder, Conan Moe Jackson / I got an Ace card, comin' down the ruuuuts
Think you'll feel, sit around, with a shovel in your brain / Got some gyno pool, well you better think again
I'm the haze of fortune, waiting to be had / You think I let it go, you mad, you got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
Endless birth calamity, we've had our share of faro / Answer now, it's gonna give in, aim for a new tomorrow!!!
(break)
Ohhhhh so hot, no time to take a rest, yeah! / Aaaaadd up, uh profane, second best
Real slow, gut in sun security / Hey I'm a big smash, I'm goin' for infinity, yeah
If you think I'm sit around, ass now rope in the fire / You're thinking like a fool cause it's a case of do or die
I'm the ace of fortune, waiting to be had / You think I let it go you're mad, you got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
You got another thing comin'
You got another thing.... COMIN' OH YOWH!
You got another thing comin', hey yeah iff....
Come and help me, ho yyeah, oh yeah, it's'a tall down.... (Hold me down)

I have to say that repeat listening to try and work out the words didn't really give me any greater enjoyment of the song. It just kinda stomps along with this kinda metallic weird sound to it. The main riff is fine as an engine but it's missing a personality - real contrast with "Breakin' the Law," my one point of reference, or our last song here in fact. Thumbs sideways, tilting down - if it was just in the background somewhere I don't think I'd notice it enough to be annoyed by it, but how it got into the running as a classic rock classic, I can't fathom.

I wonder if they realized they fucked up the idiom in the title

? what are you talking about