Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

Interesting that you dont like side 2, the last song is the most "Captain Beyondish" song on it.

I am not Bobby Caldwell.

Re xhuxk's thing in the Voice, excerpted. A bit off topic but this is my territory, the demographics of which have something to do with which he speaks:

The indie domination at the top of the album list is a harder nut to crack, but a few factors seem worth pondering. For one thing, the poll's electorate has changed—freelance dollars aren't flowing like the old days, and with dailies and weeklies chopping arts positions, newsprint dinosaurs have departed the vocation, voluntarily and involuntarily, in droves. Meanwhile, way younger bloggers and Tweeters who make even less money reviewing music have stepped in. Some vote, and plenty see eye-to-eye with Pitchfork ... But when it's mainly the old farts who seem to have minds of their own, I start to wonder.

Actually, saw this coming years ago. Krugman, with reference to the economy, calls it looking for people who aren't part of the Borg collective.

I dropped out of the Poll two or three years ago, no longer keep track. Didn't look at the list this year except for your essay which was noted elsewhere and which caught my eye.

When McD presented his statistical analyses of critic non-congruence, I was always in the bottom five, reliably the total outlier. But there were others, I don't recall them all, but I'd reckon there's been a certain amount of loss for the same reasons -- their are some who are no longer interested in what it has to say. And while it was novel to be a statistical anomaly, the thrill of it's purely transient. I don't actually need a regular statistical proof that I've not been susceptible to groupthink.

It may be partly generational and age-related. But part of it is also not wishing to be part of a large stupid club to which your contribution is less than marginal.

After 2006, the Voice scrubbed itself of all the editors I'd worked with. In the space of over half a decade I'd written, at one time or another, something for every section except astrology and sex, including a cover story.

But it simply became too hard to pitch things to a different group with which I have nothing in common. We might as well be living on different planets and while that's not the case, it is part of the larger phenomenon in which stratification and people walling themselves off in their own areas of mutual interest is now the norm, one which is actually made easy to do through digitial communication/niche community. It's just the way things are so there mut be a certain percentage of people who choose not to participate or become invisible for similar reasons, not necessarily related to the Voice, but certainly related to their experience with music journalism and pop pro-rating.

I don't feel it's a duty to make an effort to break through such things anymore. If one were ostensibly running something like P&J, one would theoretically think such a person would be more interested in doing that. But with the numbers still involved, and there's never a shortage of actual digitally-conveyed input, what's the motivation to do so?

One thing I do know from being in cyberspace full-time for a couple decades is that crowds of the like-minded appreciate themselves more when they're less diverse and if you want lots of eyeballs and comments, you pitch to that if you want the best results. Pandering, but it is the most successful formula.

Anyway, while it's stupid to think that more than a couple people who read and regularly post in this thread contribute to P&J now, it's equally stupid to think that those who post here don't listen to anything new outside of hard rock reissues oldies they've dug out of their closets, f'r instance.

Note: Since this has to do with my own private Idaho, don't cut-n-paste it into the P&J discussion.

this is the first year i submitted a ballot since chuck left. my avant/noise/whatever column in decibel mag enabled me to hear all kinds of strange sounds that i dug a lot and i celebrated the best of them. and there were more where they came from. my column has totally reinvigorated me as far as writing about records goes. so, cuzza what i was listening to this year, i ended up in the bottom ten of voters. happy to be there! but not inordinately happy or anything. i wish more people heard the stuff i heard this year. a lot of it was very exciting.

I wound up down at the bottom by submitting an all-Latin ballot, a few of the albums on which probably sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Just not in America, and not to the online critical community. Not a lot of Los Tigres del Norte fans at Pitchfork, I bet.

Picked up Ten Years After's Roadwork from 2005, a double. It fell on the heels of Now which I thought was a good album sans Alvin Lee and it contains many of the songs from it performed live. They benefit from being played a lot by the time this was put out. Joe Gooch can do all Alvin Lee's parts, so the half of the thing that's classic live TYA is spotless. I'd say "I Can't Keep from Crying Sometimes" which was 14 minutes on the TYA's live one on Epic in the early 70's is still 14 minutes but is souped up by the addition of a medley that goes from the Yardbirds to Deep Purple before sequeing back into the slow jazz blues. "I'm Going Home" is crunching in all the right ways, plus "Hear Me Calling" is included.

Not quite was Foghat Live II was but in the same ballpark. Lots of yobbish soccer cheering from the crowd, so if it's not added on, there's some decent pub fighting audience for 'em in the UK still.

I recall Now, the studio album which came out the same year getting some good notice here. I still have it and crack it out now and then. It was way better than most of Alvin Lee's late stuff with TYA before they laid it to rest.

The Tubes' Mondo Birthmark was studio quality recording -- Wally Heider in SF -- before the debut album. It is, they say, all the stuff producer Al Kooper made a face at with the exceptions of earlier versions of "White Punks on Dope," "Mondo Bondage" and a couple from "Young & Rich". Now it doesn't
seem so outrageous but a spoken word thing about butt fucking set to a Capt. Beefheart disjoint must have seemed so, along with a song about Vietnam vets called "Empy Shoes." Waybill sings his shoes are empty because his legs have been blown off and his baby's left him. Could be ripe for a remake. Send it to Nashville right away.

Nice version of "Telstar" and the first version of "White Punks On Dope" rules just about as much as later versions with the slight diff of having the middle choruses singing "We're white dopes on junk/mom & day live in Hollywood/Hang myself when I get enough rope" rather than the straight title.

Lots of nifty pics and liner notes. This particularly reminds me of how some bands of people who were unreconstructed hippies gravitated to hard rock and elaborate arrangements -- some of this is arranged like the overture from Tommy, only fractured. Coincidentally, I was listening to the Pink Fairies' NeverNeverLand last night and there are similar roots, only the Tubes came from middle class Phoeniz, Arizona and were bigger snobs about being superlative on their instruments, Prairie Prince being one of the original members.

And that was release sometime last year on Fuel. I do recommend it if you're a Tubes fan, at least as far as the live album. Not so much if you like their "Talk to Ya Later" stuff.

So what happened with Wolfmother's Cosmic Egg. In the store yesterday, I noticed a surplus of copies being a bit of evidence of it the band laying a big one.

From four years ago, boiled down from the large enthusiasm from the press:

...The Austin-American Statesman, claims "These Australians play blistering, Afro-rockin' hard rock in the AC/DC tradition" and another, from Associated Press, compares them to the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream.

From the UK News of the World, a gig gets one star and the caption line: Dead Zep

The Aussie rockers have changed their line-up in recent years.

Frontman Andrew Stockdale is the only original member left, having sacked his two bandmates between their debut album and laughably-titled new record Cosmic Egg.

It's had little effect on their search for an original idea. That is, if they're even bothering to look.

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and chest hair of Led Zeppelin and their ilk instead?

As this rapturously received gig proves, as long as greasy men still live with their mothers and denim jackets are seen as a viable style choice, there'll always be a market for derivative Guitar Hero knock-offs such as Woman and Vagabond.

Depressing beyond belief.

Fickle, fickle, fickle.

These were coverage of a gig in Manchester and this notice is more favorable:

... This uncertain demeanour seems completely at odds with Wolfmother’s music. To the uninitiated, Wolfmother are about as subtle as a brick in the face. This is not a criticism; the noughties will most definitely not be remembered as a fruitful period for the guitar solo. Instead, this century has been defined by bands that would rather choke on their skinny jeans than ever dream of turning their amplifiers up to eleven. Wolfmother have defiantly stood against this trend. They have succeeded by playing riff-heavy, hard-rocking songs which grab you by the neck and rattle your boots. By virtue of their willful idiosyncrasy, Wolfmother have become unbelievably popular in the UK. How many other bands that released their debut album in 2005 are still packing out venues of this size? Not many is the answer. By embracing a supposedly moribund genre of music, Wolfmother have struck gold. So with all this success, why does Stockdale seem so tense? It’s probably due to the fact that tonight we are watching one of the first shows undertaken by Wolfmother v2.0.

Following the acrimonious departures of founding members Chris Ross and Myles Heskett last year, Stockdale is now the band’s sole surviving original member. Added to the generally unfavourable reviews that greeted Wolfmother’s most recent album, Cosmic Egg, the reason for Stockdale’s apparent nerves become clear: there's a lot riding on this tour. The Academy crowd obviously don’t care for such petty band politics, remaining buoyant throughout the show, roaring their approval for every song the band play. The band's new members don't seem to share Stockdale’s nerves, delivering a flawless, if mildly clinical performance

Musically, Wolfmother are hardly original. Their influences are not so much predictable as achingly obvious; just name any band that once headlined the old Donington Monsters of Rock festival. Wolfmother are no pastiche however, bringing their own 21st century twist to some well-worn riffs. The hard rock genre may be easy to mock, but it’s a damn hard thing to do well. Wolfmother have the talent not only to do it well, but to thrill their audience at the same time. If they manage to continue playing gigs of this scale, Stockdale will have nothing to worry about.

The same thing could be said of blues or country acts.

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and hats of Muddy Waters and his ilk instead?

Why waste time and effort on creativity, when it's much easier to photocopy the riffs, lyrical themes, haircuts, jewellery, trousers and hats of Hank Williams and his ilk instead?

The second Wolfmother album is decent. But I liked the debut.

The Runaways movie, early reviews. Hollywood Reporter gives it a good review. Salt Lake
pub emits a few haw-worthy although obvious putdowns in a review that's grudgingly positive. You haveta read the whole thing to get the idea he enjoyed it, working under the idea that anything retro or semi-historical is unworhty in some way because teenagers will not like it for multiple sins associated with being quaint.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/the-runaways-film-review-1004061594.story

http://www.saltlakemagazine.com/Blogs/Sundancing/January-2010/Sundance-Film-Review-The-Runaways/

The built-in audience would be: Pervy oldish men who like watching 16-year-olds kick out the jams in their undies. You know, the creepy guy who stares at you a little too long in line for the Port-A-Potties at Coachella. The dudes in the airport 20-years-too-old for that designer T trying to lure bright young things into the Fox Sports bar for a Midori sour. The Generation Which Refuses to Grow Old who collectively careen towards middle age Tweeting and Facebooking their way back to adolescence.

Whereas teens, you know, the ones who buy movie tickets and T-shirts and jewelry from Claire's – can't be bothered with your nostalgia. They don't care. Give 'em sparkly vampires and a gimlet-eyed country-pop star who spits saccharine sweet nothings about boys who go for the cheerleader instead and they'll come charging.

Playing music in a garage? Staying in crappy hotels? Calling from a payphone? Cramming in a sweaty station wagon? Feathering your hair? DIY shirts? Thrift store shopping?

Very quaint mom and dad. But sounds like so much work.

Even as Fanning turns in the most honest portrayal of a teen by a teen since Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy in Fast Times and Stewart's Jett, if for a moment, erases the bile of Bella from the viewer conscious collective — the young ones will stay away from The Runaways for the same reason they look at you funny when you blast The Clash while cleaning the house on a Sunday morning.

The Wrestler suffered from the same -- calling from payphones, staying in crappy places, being in a sweaty van, feathered hair, thrift store shopping.

More reviews, pinched off WSJ, one of the oddest places to find any interest in such a thing:

[i]“Coming-of-age movies are Sundance’s stock in trade, but few announce themselves as boldly, and broadly, as “The Runaways,” whose first shot is a splotch of menstrual blood hitting the pavement. Said splotch emanates from Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), a suburban California teenager with a burgeoning David Bowie obsession and a surly sensuality just beginning to bloom….But in spite of that opening drop, the movie’s evocation of the Runaways’ rise and fall is short on the juices that make for great, trashy, disreputable rock. [Director Floria Sigismondi] crams Fanning into Currie’s famous corset, and stages a passionate kiss between Currie and Jett before compressing their romantic relationship into a single softcore montage, but the movie is too tasteful and glossy to thoroughly embody the Runaways’ quasi-pedophiliac appeal.” [Sam Adams, IFC.com]

“When it gets away from the stage, however, and from the iconography of strutting she-devil-in-lingerie empowerment, The Runaways is just a watchable, rather so-so rock biopic, with the thinly imagined characters and desultory, one-thing-after-another episodic slackness of a TV movie. Granted, there’s a special challenge in bringing this story to life: The Runaways were really just little girls who fed themselves into a giant, buzz-saw machine of image and marketing, all ruled over, of course, by Fowley, the gonzo manager-producer from hell. So they’re really passive vessels in their own story. But The Runaways turns them passive in a different way: They’re made so likable and innocent and quaintly brash that they don’t fully have egos, erotic or otherwise.” [Owen Gleiberman, EW]

“‘The Runaways’ bursts with energy, youth, excess, female empowerment, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an instant hit worldwide with its cast of young stars, but is it any good? Surprisingly, yes. It just must be met on its own terms… Maybe the film falls into the category of Guilty Pleasures. The dark ugliness on display — the amazing drug abuse and pre-AIDS hedonism — looks probably too exciting. While the film makes it clear its personalities suffered tremendously for their addictions, it all looks so glam.” [Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter]

“The movie’s all about the descent into booze and drugs of lead singer Cherie Curry, played as well as she can (given the awful script) by Dakota Fanning as a frail child who’d rather be singing Peggy Lee and Don MacLean. Short on character (Michael Shannon is amusingly ludicrous as the band’s abusive but image-savvy manager) and long on attitude, The Runaways plays like the sloppily entertaining stretched-out music video it is.” [Ella Taylor, NPR]

“All-girl teenage band ‘The Runaways,’ once regarded as a prefab joke but now lionized as trailblazers, are the subject of Floria Sigismondi’s first feature. Despite the helmer’s multidisciplinary background, this proves a conventionally enjoyable making-and-breaking-of-the-band saga… Though sometimes her usual neurotic tics distract, “Twilight’s” Stewart is a good fit for the tough but good-natured Jett, who carried on as frontwoman after Currie left, then launched a far more successful solo career. In line with many previous roles, Fanning emphasizes Currie’s vulnerability — making her a sexy nice-girl victim — though the bratty, dangerously needy character seen in old clips, discussed by bandmates in “Edgeplay,” and even glimpsed in Currie’s own book, seems more interesting.” [Dennis Harvey, Variety]

It's my book the Runaways records still don't sell much. I thought the first one was great when I
bought it in 1978 but it was never set to go far. A little less than half of it is fairly clumsy and one of favorite parts of it is "Dead End Justice" which has limited appeal if you don't like a bare parable about bad girls breaking out of juvie and one of 'em going down on the jailbreak. "Cherry Bomb," "American Nights," "You Drive Me Wild" and "Is It Day or Night" are the other good ones. They work off good riffs and they're so underproduced with big guitar they have a brutality that wasn't on a lot of hard rock records that year, boys vs. girls being irrelevant.

However, the subsequent records were mediocre to turdly except for the live album recorded after they broke up and never released in this country. Done in Japan, where they -- like Cheap Trick -- were
drawing big screaming audiences of children (but everyone did, I think, UFO I was big in Japan), it was substantially stepped on back in the studio. So it sounds really good, the cover is now great dirty old man stuff (it wasn't in -- what '80?) and it fills out to a record of their best material. One can like it as much, maybe more, than the debut.

So why would someone at NPR like anything about The Runaways movie? Any assertions that such a person would like the music or even the Runaways have to be frank lies because the records were never popular and certainly not with the class that pays attention to things like NPR.

And to say the movie bursts with 'female empowerment,' ala the Hollywood Reporter is unusual. The Runaways did not do empowerment on their first album, they did raw rock 'n' roll and their pictures didn't look so hot, even though they were supposed to. And Cherie Curie's biography was not empowering. I had a copy, reviewed it for the newspaper. It was a horror story -- mostly -- with no happy ending and it would have needed, and probably received, something of a face lift for a movie.

I think empowerment came along around the time Joan Jett hit all over the world with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll."

Anyway you slice it, this bit on YouTube from Japan is not empowering. It is a spectacle and the more one watches it the more embarrassing and sweat-inducing it becomes. It was thought to be a good Kim Folwey idea at the time. There certainly had to have been a better way to do things, somewhere much better than Fanny but not quite like this.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Cherie+Currie+Runaways+Cherry+Bomb

they will be immortal if only for cherry bomb alone. as far as npr goes, 70's nostalgia always goes far there. or anywhere. i doubt this movie will be anywhere near as good as the immortal Foxes.

come to think of it, the Foxes soundtrack probably beats most things too. moroder and angel! and bob seger and , um, janis ian! and boston! and donna summer!

glossy to thoroughly embody the Runaways’ quasi-pedophiliac appeal

Their small audience, what there was of it from being in Circus and Crawdaddy, was not obviously afflicted with pedophilia. I'd bet that Dave Marsh's style would have been to tell you the Runaways were for pedophiles, though.

I think pedophiles had their own special mags and the Runaways weren't in them?

I was actually interested in seeing the movie but I may now have to tell everyone I didn't and go in a pulled-down hat and black macintosh.

As for Foxes, yeah Skot, the same thing occured to me. The Runaways without the music and Scott Baio as someone the problem of being to young-looking to get any action.

I've always assumed the Runaways' audience was mostly teenagers, more or less the same age as the Runaways. (Lita Ford born '59; Joan Jett born '60, just like me. Though to be honest my main exposure to them at the time was probably watching the forgotten late '70s TV celebrity fake-sports/obstacle-course competition Almost Anything Goes. I swear I saw them on there once, though when I was hunting around the Internet for evidence of their appearance a couple weeks ago, I found nothing. Could barely find anything about the show itself, actually.)

Did "Cherry Bomb" actually get any rock radio play at the time? Sure don't remember hearing it in Detroit; I'd figure it would have been considered way too punk rock in 1976. Debut album only reached #194 in Billboard; '77 followup, Queens Of Noise, only got to #172.

The Joan Jett wikipedia page says 9-22-58, a month or so after mine. (Madonna anticipates me by 10 days; Michael Jackson trails me by three.) Anyway, I do remember hearing Cherry Bomb on the radio then, but it didn't get heavy play. I guess that would have been WPLJ or more likely WNEW. Saw them as a late teen, in their post-Cherie days, wedged between Suicide & the Ramones. I probably knew about them more from their press than their radio play. Hmm, now I wonder who was in that Joan-led version of the band.

Hmmm.. I didn't check Wiki; Joel Whitburn has 9-22-60 in Philadelphia. But maybe she's older than she used to be!

Did "Cherry Bomb" actually get any rock radio play at the time?

I think Cherry Bomb might have actually had more play a few years later when JJ re-recorded it for Glorious Results of... album.

Late period Runaways was probably Joan Jett, Sandy West, Lita Ford and rotating bass players, either Vickie Blue or Laurie McAllister, not that it mattered much.

There was an old poster that hung in one of the record stores in Pasadena, maybe from the Roxy, advertising a bill of the Runaways and Van Halen. Probably dated from around '78.

Post Runaways no one had an easy time of it. Cherie Currie made two albums, one of which was with her twin sister. There's some awful cheesy video from that time on YouTube. Her backing band for the album was Toto before it was Toto I think. The second one might be more listenable than the first.

Lita Ford's first hard rock solo album had Neal Merryweather in the band, if my memories still good on it. Or maybe he just produced it.

Joan Jett floundered for awhile, no label would take a chance on her. She'd recorded an album with a rolling cast that would become Bad Reputation and she and her producer eventually put it out themselves. And it still wasn't particularly popular although a lot of the songs on it are now so.

It was the second album, I Love Rock 'n' Roll that changed everything.

I"m going to correct that about Bad Reputation being not so popular. Now it occurs to me that it was toured heavy and that it eventually took hold in surprising numbers, setting the stage for the second.

Was actually thinking you were right in the first place, George, but it turns out that Bad Reputation got up to #51 in Billboard -- not near the second LP's #2 (with #1 and #7 singles), but not bad. Thing is, I'm wondering when the debut peaked since, according to Whitburn, its single "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" didn't chart until July '82, after the two I Love Rock N Roll hits had already charted. Supppsedly Bad Reputation debuted on the LP chart in March '81, nine months before the followup, and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks, but I'm wondering whether it may have fallen off, and then re-entered with its single. Wasn't it actually re-released at one point, first out on Blackheart Records and then later on Boardwalk?

Anyway. How come I never noticed before that Eddie And The Hot Rods covered Crack The Sky's "We Want Mine" on Fish 'N' Chips from 1980 before? Real good version, too; maybe the best track on the album. Best (also most Who-like) original is "This Is Today," where they say don't worry about all those young blokes fighting out on the street, they're just having some fun and all, and don't you remember when we used to do that too when we were their age? Which is interesting because it's done from the point of view of somebody older (not to mention possibly apologizing for skinheads beating up Pakistanis, this being 1980 in England and all), but that's the way it goes. Also get the idea that the sort-of-spoken Cockney-accent "Fish N Chips Pts 1 and 2" at LP's beginning and end might be another bid for the oi! boys (unless oi! boys didn't happen until '81 -- don't have a history book handy); wasn't aware fish and chips are a U.K. Friday specialty til now. (Thought that only happened with pre-Vatican II Catholics, and with us it was fish sticks.) "Call It Quits" is another good original rocker, and they cover the Rascals' "You Better Run" (also done by Pat Benatar the same year) and Outsiders' "Time Won't Let Me" well. Al Kooper produces and plays "additional keyboards and guitars."

Also discovered that "Dance Republic" on Joe "King" Carrasco & the Crowns' 1983 Party Weekend LP has basically the same rhythm as Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" (and Bohnannon's "Disco Stomp" - see Stairway disco-metal appendix), which makes me wonder whether the beat might've first come from Mexico. Album also contains enjoyably blatant rips of the Ramones, McCoys, Chuck Berry, ? and the Mysterians, and according to my wife, possibly "Summer Nights" from Grease.

Supppsedly Bad Reputation debuted on the LP chart in March '81, nine months before the followup, and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks, but I'm wondering whether it may have fallen off, and then re-entered with its single. Wasn't it actually re-released at one point, first out on Blackheart Records and then later on Boardwalk?

Yeah, it was re-released. I think this one was a surprising example of word-of-mouth and a buzz combined with touring taking hold. Plus it probably benefited from being the first actually good album from a former member of the Runaways. Lita Ford might have been out of the gate first, I don't recall the years of her first two metal albums, but the first one wasn't any good at all and the second, while an improvement, was a hard rock/HM album with no really catchy tunes.

Btw, not trying to imply that Eddie + Hot Rods actually say anything specific about skinheads or Paki-bashing (or that all skinheads were Paki-bashers, either -- most of them were more likely just drunken football holligans); for all I know, they'd written that song a few years before, and it was just about the original punk rockers, who come to think of it these guys may have felt like big brothers to in the first place. Just imagining what it might have meant amid the turmoil of 1980 U.K. (which I don't know as much about as I might pretend to, actually.) Also don't want to imply that album's as good as their first couple (Teenage Depression, which I still have, and Life On The Line, which I don't anymore for some reason. Have never heard 1979's Thriller (!!??); wasn't even aware of it 'til yesterday.

Also didn't want to imply that that Carrasco album I mentioned was particularly "hard rock"; that band can rock'n'roll, in the '50s Texas border sense obviously, but it's not like their guitars ever get very loud. Just wanted to mention it here because of the "New York Groove" connection. And I'm also pretty sure Carrasco's first two albums were better -- the self-titled Crowns one from 1980 definitely, and the one with El Molino from 1978 inasmuch as a I remember it. Think I'd take Party Weekend over '82's slicker and not-Tex-Mex enough Synapse Gap, which had Michael Jackson on it, though. But this is way off topic by now, so I'll shut up. (Curious whether anybody ever really has worked those kind of Tex-Mexy rhythms into a hard rock context, though. Maybe some Mexican bands I included in Stairway's second edition come close, but Carrasco's band had more bounce than most of those.)

No border rhythms I can detect on Cruzados' After Dark from 1987, their second album, which I bought for 50 cents a few weeks ago. Which seems a little odd to me, given their L.A. Chicano pedigree and the fact that, as the Plugz, they (most of them anyway) had covered "La Bamba" a few years before, which is to say a few years before Los Lobos. (I also call the Plugz' cuts on the Repo Man soundtrack a "hokey barrio move" in Stairway, but I don't have that LP around here anymore to figure out what I meant by that.) Anyway, Cruzados' LP is just straight-down-the-line no-personality post-Springsteen commercial lower-middle-class-struggle medium-hard rock, more or less the same density as what Bryan Adams or Bon Jovi were doing at the time, just without tunes as good. After listening to that Red Rockers LP with "China" on it last year, I'm getting the idea this was a route the industry hoped might work for seasoned hardcore bands; not sure it did work for any, though. Pretty sure I've read that "Bed Of Lies" was the Cruzados' rock radio track at the time, but it didn't chart Hot 100 (they never did -- LPs peaked at #76 and #106), and like "China" I sure never heard it on the radio myself. Album's not too bad, though -- "Last Ride" probably kicks hardest, "Young And On Fire" an okay generic hot child in the city number, "Small Town Love" okay generic fake Mellencamp I guess, "Summer's Come, Summer's Gone" bittersweet and hopeful. Truth is, probably even John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown (who actually had a song called "Tex Mex - Crystal Blue"!) had more captivating songwriting. Song credits here mostly go to band members, but producers are definitely familiar L.A. studio Mafia names (Waddy Wachtel, Billy Steinberg, etc.) Whitburn book says that Marshall Rohner, the guitar player, went on to play in T.S.O.L. in 1989.

Actually hearing more Mexican pop music mixed into Chris Perez Band's Resurrection, a pretty decent Chris Lord-Alge-mixed bilingual commercial 1999 hard rock album on Hollywood Records from a trio led by Selena's widower. But the rhythms are too up-to-date to be "Tex-Mex"; more tejano, I guess, plus corazone ballads. (Phil, who keeps up with Latin music way more than I have for the past decade and a half, could probably talk more coherently about specifics.) Anyway, the guitarist works in Who powerchords sometimes, and they cover Love's "Alone Again Or" in both English and Spanish, and the rock sound in general sounds up-to-date without being at all grunge. 15 songs (high-CD-era length) is too many, but I've let it play through twice this week painlessly. Good melodies and singing throughout. Guessing there might also be late '90s/'00s Christian rock albums this good, but I don't know what.

I remember hearing a single from that Chris Perez disc but I have no memory now of what it sounded like. My best guess, based on his contributions to Selena's work, is that it was probably an ultra-conventional power ballad (his guitar solos on her tracks, when they got in there at all, were always really incongruous, like when one would get pasted into the middle of a Whitney Houston song or something).

Re Joan Jett, after "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" took off, a video for "Do You Wanna Touch Me" (another cover, btw - it's a Gary Glitter song) was shot, featuring Joan in a bikini in an attempt to de-snarling-punk-rock-dyke her image and it kinda worked. I remember seeing it on MTV a bunch in the early to mid 80s.

I've been trying to track down Cruzados stuff on download blogs off and on for a while, but neither of their albums seem to turn up. After reading your description, I'm no longer much interested, despite the fact that I think the Plugz' Electrify Me is the greatest punk album to ever come out of L.A., and that they should be worshipped like gods in the Latin rock community but really aren't - I'd kinda posit Tito Larriva as the Latin equivalent to Scott "Wino" Weinrich: a total lifer with a devoted cult but who's never managed to break through, despite occasional nods from major labels.

On a more current topic, is anybody making more entertaining hard rock/ metal videos than White Wizzard these days? I doubt it. Their new one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfnIBnz2_zw

OK, dredged up the Cruzados' debut, tried to listen, but couldn't make it past the huge '80s drums.

Phil, to what extent did the Plugz draw on Mexican-American music? At all? (Not saying they should or shouldn't have; just curious about it.)

Found the Pontiac Brothers' Johnson for $1 last month -- what passed for a college-radio hard rock band in 1988, on rootsy college-rock label Frontier. Definitely more Stones-boogie to them than to the Replacements (especially in opener and by far best cut "Ain't What I Call Home," which rocks as hard as a lot of good '80s Mellencamp, maybe in "American Dream" and "Real Job" too), but I don't think they ever get to the level of, say, Rock City Angels or Faster Pussycat (much less Guns N Roses, who were already hitting by the time this came out.) Maybe Georgia Satellites now and then, or at least (in "Drop Of The Hat") Jason and the Scorchers. Wimpiest-sounding and most (post-Stink) Replacements-like cut, "Creep," is also the only one sung by the guitarist, Ward Dotson, who oddly enough used to be in the Gun Club. But the main singer, Matt Simon, still doesn't manage character to have cut in sleaze-metal L.A. at the time, and the rhythm section would be too stiff too. Ian McLagan's piano (doesn't say on which cuts) seems to help when it shows up, though. And the words hardly ever stick for more than a line at a time -- mostly girlfriend anxiety stuff, near as I can tell -- not even on a preening Westerberg level. The sound gets more muffled when it gets louder on Side Two, so maybe they were trying to do an Exile thing there, hard to tell. Christgau gave both this album and a previous one B+'s, which seems about right. (Pretty sure I Rock-a-Rama'd one of their LPs in Creem, maybe even this one.)

Uh, guess part of what I'm saying about them vs. the L.A. sleaze-glam stuff is that bands like Rock City Angels and (especially second album) Faster Pussycat, while also clearly Stones-infused, just had way more looseness and open-endedness to their arrangements, and dance groove to their rock; they didn't seem so reined in. Maybe also helped that those bands wanted to come off as rock stars, not just regular guys (though it's interesting that coming off as just regular guys didn't seem to hurt '70s bands like Earth Quake and Brownsville Station near so much.)

Phil, to what extent did the Plugz draw on Mexican-American music? At all?

Yeah, a lot. The original lineup was two Mexicans and a white bassist, and on their first album they noticed/figured out that hardcore and Tejano/norteño music have the exact same up-and-down rhythm, so they've got a great Latin-punk groove. Plus they covered "La Bamba" in like 90 seconds with rewritten punk-rock lyrics. On the second album, they brought in a saxophonist and went a little more Los Lobos-ish, except that it was released in 1981, and Los Lobos' first Slash record didn't come out until 1983. (They did an indie EP in 1978 that nobody outside of L.A. heard until it was reissued after they became critics' darlings.)

hardcore and Tejano/norteño music have the exact same up-and-down rhythm

Ha ha, pretty sure this is actually called "polka" (Poles and Germans having brought their accordions to Texas in the 19th Century, and the rest being the history.) But I get exactly what you're saying; thanks!

I'd kinda posit Tito Larriva as the Latin equivalent to Scott "Wino" Weinrich: a total lifer with a devoted cult but who's never managed to break through, despite occasional nods from major labels.

He's now indelibly in cine history, I think, for being the bandleader in the Tarantino vampire biker bar film, From Dusk Til Dawn.

I suppose the band was Tito & the Tarantulas and I recall them boosting an album to little success out here. But the movie's continued success in replay must be worth some royalties.

When I first got here long here I was initially surprised by how much the Mexican musicians in the restaurants were the same as the polka musicians in Pennsylvania. The Pennsy Germans and their gemutlichkeit thing is totally like Mexicano hospitality in soCal. And for well over a hundred years the big thing the dad would do would be to pass his accordion on to his son. Which sounds funny but these accordions were maximum things and expensive. It lost a lot of steam when Fender's electric guitars moved into the neighborhood.

Guitarist Dave Chandler, bassist Mark Adams, drummer Armando Acosta and
vocalist Scott Reagers crawled out of the industrial wasteland of Lomita,
CA, in 1979, playing dinosaur doom when L.A.¹s squalid underground was ruled
by the hardcore punk aesthetic of Black Flag. Vitus invoked the fuzzed-out,
drugged-out riff hypnosis of Sabbath at a time when their musical mentors in
the Drab Four were at their pre-Dio nadir.

All through the ¹80s, they wrote torpid doom epics while speed metal
exploded across L.A. County in the form of Metallica, Slayer and Dark Angel.
They were bellbottomed longhairs playing bleary-eyed dirge metal on an SST
roster that had built its punk-as-fuck reputation with Black Flag, Minutemen
and weirdo rock bands like Saccharine Trust and the Meat Puppets. Thrust
into a scene they had hardly anything in common with, Vitus spent most of
their career getting spit on while touring with the likes of Flag, the
Mentors and the Brood.

After recording two full-lengths (1984¹s Saint Vitus and 1985¹s Hallow¹s
Victim) and an EP (1985¹s The Walking Dead) with Vitus, Reagers split
mid-tour, within days of finding his own replacement in burgeoning DC
death-glam iconoclast Scott ³Wino² Weinrich. In 1986, the new Vitus lineup
recorded their six-song masterpiece, Born Too Late, with producer Joe
Carducci at Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach, CA. Released the
following year, the album was an unmitigated triumph of autobiographical
heaviness. Chandler¹s lyrics about alcoholism (³Dying Inside²), acid trips
(³Clear Windowpane²) and depression (³The Lost Feeling²) were trumped only
by those of the title track, which perfectly articulated Saint Vitus¹
acrimonious relationship with the rest of the world. And yet 23 years later,
Vitus have been embraced by metalheads everywhere, and Born Too Late is a
stone-cold classic. Here¹s how it went down.

Came in my mailbox today in promo for Born Too Late. I still like the Saint Vitus debut a lot. "Burial at Sea" and "The Psychopath" -- I put it on last week and it has a very faded distant quality, with the guitarist really working the wah. Every guitar line has a cocked wah tone, complimenting the dolorous vocals.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2010/01/gone-home-ten-years-later-really-no-one.html

The White Wizzard video deserves applause. It's totally not fair that it is doomed to only be enjoyed in ghettos like ours. Singer has best teeth and racy metal ready blue ski jacket combo in rock 'n' roll.

And judging by the video posted in last year's thread, they're upping their game too.

Yeah, the video is really excellent. And I totally agree with the band - the soprano sax truly is the most evil sound on earth.

Guessing -- judging from their opening spot on the Lady Gaga tour, and a stupid "night on the town with" piece in this morning's NY Times style section that mentioned they've got a major label coming out -- Semi-Precious Weapons are going to be the next glam-rock band to get some label push. Possible they've improved over the past two years, but here's what I wrote on Rhapsody about an earlier album by them, and they'd have to improve a whole lot for me to wind up giving a shit:

Semi Precious Weapons, We Love You (Razor & Tie): Just because their album cover looks colorfully flamboyant and the record is "produced by the legendary Tony Visconti (T. Rex, David Bowie, Morrissey)" (as the press bio puts it), doesn't mean that these NYC glam phonies don't play Brit-poppish wimp-rock for sad children. Which they sure seem to.

Cosloy-curated Matador Record punk compilation of local Austin mostly punk bands called Casual Victim Pile getting tons of press here; obviously not expecting to like much of it, but I emailed the label asking for a copy, and haven't heard back so maybe I'm persona non grata there. I did kind of like the album by one of the bands, the Golden Boys, that I heard a couple years ago though (Scorpion Stomp #2 on Hook Or Crook, sort of backwoods swamp goth blues thing a la Birthday Party or the Scientists.) Apparently some of the other bands are teen hardcore, and one of the ones with girls gets compared to Joan Jett and the Pretenders, something I would have to hear to believe. If anybody here happens to hear it, though, please say what you think.

Another one of the bands, Strange Boys, have been getting lots of hype in the past couple years as garage rock saviors, but judging from the two albums I've heard (last year's and this year's) they don't rock at all; just sound lazy and hazy and really low energy -- just more indie slackers. I don't get it. Though their new album (due out in late Feb) does have one song, "Da Da," where they seem to steal half the drunken tune, but none of the drunken rock, from "All Night Long" by Joe Walsh.

But truth is (what everybody reading this thread is already thinking), why am I even bothering with all that nerd-rock crap when there's a new Ratt album coming out? (Playing in the background now; sounds okay! -- Pearcy says they wanted to make it sound like it could have been the followup to Out Of The Cellar, and so far it kind of does!)

Best news I've heard all day! The last Dokken album sounded musically in line with Under Lock and Key and Back for the Attack, except Don can't really hit all the notes he used to hit and his voice just generally sounds beat. How does Pearcy's voice sound now?

Not bad! At least so far. I mean, his echo-screeching actually sounded kinda strained to me way back in 1984, but so far I'm impressed by the extent that his high register hasn't deteriorated since then. And the band doesn't seem to be dragging its feet, either! There are at least a couple songs that seem as fast as anything they did in the '80s. (But this is just my first time through; don't quote me. Album is called Infestation, btw, due out on Roadrunner toward the end of April.)

I had some good things to say about Pearcy's last solo album in 2008. I'm kinda looking forward to the new Ratt disc, as long as it sounds more like their earlier stuff than their latter-day stuff.

Earlier stuff, no question. (Wish I still had my copy of their debut EP on Time Coast Records with "Walking The Dog" on it, btw; how much is that worth these days?) Playing the new Airbourne now; maybe okay, maybe not, I'm not sure yet, but definitely nowhere near as good as the new Ratt (which comes out on the same day on the same record label.)

Finally caught up with Zalvation, the new Sensational Alex Harvey Band's record from 2006 without Alex, naturally. It's the originals plus a gamer who can't really pull off Alex's old Bertolt Brechtian/Kurt Weill naughty Euro-theatre and Cliff Richard impersonations. So it's really a Zal
Cleminson solo, or even more accurately, a reformulation of Tear Gas. Tear Gas was the pre-SAHBsters before Alex found 'em, with producer Davey Batchelor on vocals. One album, Piggy Go Better was not good, another s/t was a really good stab at ripping off Jeff Beck/Led Zep, much better than Leafhound, for example.

So Zalvation from 2006 redoes old SAHB numbers in the context of a straight hard rock/metal band which means it's Cleminson's show. First listen has it pretty good.

In Pennsy, all the bands influenced by the Dead End Kids did Alex Harvey and that eventually included Cinderella and Britny Fox and probably Poison when they were in Harrisburg. And Britny Fox finally committed to record the SAHB tune the Dead End Kids had been playing in bars from Reading to the Jersey shore for at least a decade, Midnight Moses. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

Cleminson ups the ante on it a little, supercharging the riff even a little more to make up for the lack of Alex. It doesn't really need an Alex Harvey to make it work though, any yob can carry off the vocal part since it's mostly just a semi-ontune stream of relation punctuated by shouts of "Hey! <pause> Hey! Hey! Hey!"

If you liked SAHB only because they were quaint you wouldn't like this so much because you only like the Alex Harvey part. If you liked them because of the Cleminson stuff, this is a go.

Angus Khan opened their album last year with a pretty deadly version of "Midnight Moses" too, I thought.

Best new Airbourne track so far: "It Ain't Over Til It's Over." Fast! (But seven songs in, and the first one not to make me impatient.)

Okay, liking "Steel Town" too. Aussies going for that blue-collar Pittsburgh AC/DC crowd. (Actually, there might be steel towns Down Under, too; I just don't know what they are.) Anyway, I should probably shut up about this record until I've played it through a couple times.

BTW, rather than post them all into this thread, select YouTubes:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2010/01/sludge-in-70s-that-was-name-of-my.html

If you liked SAHB only because they were quaint you wouldn't like this so much because you only like the Alex Harvey part. If you liked them because of the Cleminson stuff, this is a go.

Never thought of SAHB as "quaint," but I must be in the former camp. Listened to most of the sound samples online and couldn't finish. Alex's yowl is sorely missed.