Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

what do y'all think of Argent? I've been digging their S/T, Ring of Hands and In Deep albums. heavier than I remembered, w/swirling keyboards and celestial harmonies.

Russ Ballard was hard to beat as a songwriter. Between the hard pop rock with hooks he wrote and the more progressive material Rod Argent liked, they covered quite a bit of ground. The Ballard material is what everyone remembers, "Hold Your Head Up," "God Gave Rock 'n' Roll to You," "Liar" which became a hit for 3 Dog Night, "It's Only Money." They even redid "Time of the Season." Even heavy longer stuff like "I Am the Dance of Ages" sounded good.

If you don't mind having your old-school hard-glam energy crossed with modern production and some goth lasciviousness, check out the new HIM album, Screamworks. It's not Humble Pie or anything (it's not humble anything), but if you're the kind of person who notices Ratt on a new-release list, HIM might be worth at least a couple :30 samples. Start with track 1...

Not bad.

http://www.mtv.com/videos/dakota-fanning-featuring-kristen-stewart/490989/cherry-bomb.jhtml

wait, i can't remember, did you go see the runaways movie, gorge?

i don't think i need to see it. i'll bet its not as good as light of day. joan jett should have won an oscar for that movie.

listening to george brigman all day. i can just listen to his records over and over in the store and i'm fine.

No, not yet. Hasn't opened nationwide. March 19, maybe in Pasadena. Going to go in the afternoon to see what the pensioners make of it.

So have we ever discussed Y & T here? I actually don't think I've ever heard their late '70s albums as Yesterday & Today, though everything I've ever read about them suggests I'd like them a lot -- thinking of them as somewhere in the neighborhood of late '70s Riot (which I've grown to think was amazing), maybe? Anyway, I got Y & T's In Rock We Trust from '84 for $1, and turns out I like it more than Martin Popoff (who gives it a 4 and basically calls it a scattershot AOR sellout, which is probably true) does. Apparently the semi-hit (which Popoff likes) was "Don't Stop Runnin'," but I hear three tracks more even brutal or anthemic or just plain entertaining than that: The title track, which is just a hilariously over-the-top Spinal Tap retard-metal power protest that's too dorky to resist ("Kings and queens and presidents are tryin' to take the world in hand/Jokers and freaks and Arab shieks are fightin' over chunks of sand...Tin soldiers march around the world no matter what the people say/One man makes the policy while the rest of us get blown away!); "Master and Slaves," likewise OTT in sound and with backup vocals answering "Master!" that I swear may have inspired "Master Of Puppets" from Metallica (who as I recall were fans); and "Lipstick and Leather," more S&M rock (a topic these guys seem obsessed with) but dancier, sounding like a heavier version of '80s Robert Palmer, which is to say pretty much exactly like the Electric Six sound nowadays. Otherwise, yeah, there are ballads and AOR schlock, but not much more than on say the Scorpions' Blackout (a Popoff 10) as far I can tell, plus Dave Meniketti sings more or less like Sammy Hagar and I don't mind it. Still don't doubt their earlier albums were a lot more rocking, and maybe if I'd heard all that stuff first I'd be pissed off by the dumb hackwork here too, but I didn't.

Deborah Frost, in Rolling Stone Review 1985, didn't like it either, fwiw: "Rarely have suggestions of Grand Funk Railroad (the lead vocals), est (lyrics), and It's a Beautiful Day (meandering solos) been combined so painfully." But she also calls the tempos funereal, which is just wrong; they're not exactly thrashing, but give or take the ballads they're not slow, either. So I don't think she listened close.

Jasper and Oliver btw say Yesterday and Today started out as a Top 40 cover band, which makes me curious about whether there are any tapes or bootlegs of evolving metal bands covering '70s Top 40 hits back then -- might be cool. Like, I'd love to hear Van Halen covering KC and the Sunshine Band, which they supposedly used to do before their debut.

Actually, what I called "the title track" is the lead track, called "Rock & Roll's Gonna Save The World." (And it does!)

so i was reading in gene simmons' autobio that HE was the first person to get van halen into a studio? brought them to new york to record and all that. i never knew that. cyrus - who is four - collects kiss books so i've been learning all kinds of fun facts. you know, his autobio isn't half as smarmy as you would think.

i never thought i would ever listen to this much kiss in my life. cuzza cyrus. i pretty much never listened to kiss until this year and last year.

oh and i don't think i've ever actually listened to an entire Y&T album.

The two albums as Yesterday & Today are good. The debut, which was on London, has the live evergreen, "Alcohol" -- alcohol, alcohol, tomorrow morning I'll be climbing the wall" and variations on such for the chorus inviting singalong. "Fast Ladies, Very Slow (sic) Gin," "Come On Over," "Animal Woman," "25 Hours a Day," "Game-Playing Woman," you get the idea. One track mind does what it knows in amiably loutish and leering way. Guaranteed to greatly offend almost all women including Deb Frost.

The second album, Struck Down, is not quite as solid. The two are unpretentious hard rock albums, in tone fairly well ahead of the time. Meniketti and the rhythm section are very heavy and in the pcoket for these records.

Earthshaker is their hardest, fastest and heaviest.

After trying the really hard and heavy rout, wrapped up after Black Tiger, Y&T softened the image, tried to look a bit like pretty boys and started writing for the stripper rock/hair metal audience.

"Lipstick and Leather" was a pretty good stab at that. Always like the tune but their highest successs came off "Summertime Girls" and the accompanying MTV video from Down for the Count, a silly album with a robot girl on the front cover 'going down' for the Count. I liked it but I don't think their hardcore fans did at all, including Popovic.

"Summertime Girls received tremendous airplay worldwide, played frequently in the Baywatch television series ..." sez Wiki. I kinda remember a Pam Anderson connection; now I perhaps know why.

Went to Geffen, did two albums really aping David Lee Roth-Van Halen, the most obvious being Contagious with a "Hot for Teacher"-type steal on it. Forget the name of the song.

I interviewed one of Y&T's ringer drummers after the original guy left many years ago because he was a Pennsy local. Had a little fun at the expense of the guy always changing his name.

It's here:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2009/12/wayback-machine-goes-nightclubbing.html

Surprising how little Sia Michel brings to a feature on The Runaways movie for the New York Times.

Most of it devoted to movie trivia on production and the director who is the wife of someone from
The Living Things, the band taking her and Dakota Fanning on tour as research for the movie.

"Though 'The Runaways' follows the general trajectory of the band, Ms. Sigismondi also considers the movie more of a coming-of-age story than a definitive biopic, focusing on the relationship among Cherie, Joan and Kim Fowley, the band’s insult-spewing male manager (Michael Shannon). In the film Cherie struggles with her twin sister, a sick alcoholic father, addiction and instant notoriety ....

"The Runaways’ classic hit from their four-year career is the 1976 jailbait anthem Cherry Bomb;"

It was never a hit as far as The Runaways LP was concerned.

"The quintet’s combative sexuality — surprising for rock at the time — seemed to both alienate and titillate audiences. Though they were talented musicians who helped write their songs and were
ferocious live, they were often written off as a slutty, manufactured novelty act by the dude-dominated ’70s rock press and heckled by male musicians, even those they appeared with."

It would have been possible to reference YouTube video of the band, of which there is quite a bit.
I've always felt it often looks acutely embarrassing and awkward, mostly because of the corset
thing and limitation of what you actually can do onstage without the benefit of a big production logistical tail/caravan. Plus it was the Seventies.

"Ferocious live ..." Yes and no. The actual live album from Japan was stepped on in the studio. The boot of an Agora performance which was reviewed upstream shows them to be decently acceptable -- it's not a bad listen -- but really mediocre until warmed up, like many bands. And a number of the tunes,
just like many in Seventies hard rock band stage repertory, are just bad.

"(Creem magazine infamously dismissed them with three unprintable words.)"

What's so unprintable about "These bitches suck" ?

It was Rick Johnson. I couldn't scrape it up in Google Books but he also said:

"How do I hate The Runaways, let me count the ways."

And

"Their vocals recapitulate the history of minor mouth pain ..."

"After the actors were signed, rock school began. The women took lessons in their characters’ instruments so they knew how to hold and wield them correctly, and Ms. Fanning and Ms. Stewart trained to sing exactly like the women they were portraying ..."

Meanwhile Ms. Fanning got onstage with the Living Things to learn the ways of a rock goddess, from the force of her voice to Cherie’s microphone twirling strut. “I had never sung with a band before and felt the power of something like that behind me,” Ms. Fanning said.

"Ms. Currie hopes the film will bring a reconsideration of the Runaways’ legacy."

Joan does "Cherry Bomb" on Leno last Tuesday.

I enjoyed Y&T's Down for the Count and Contagious for what they were at the time, and probably like "Summertime Girls" as much as anything that actually has David Lee Roth (and more than anything that he did solo). Never heard anything after that, and had no idea they were still around!

everyone is still around. seemingly.

Xpost re Cherry Bomb do for Leno.

Sure greases the live version that she had on video on the movie website a couple weeks back. The sound on the rhythm guitar ---- owwwww.

Speaking of a thread over, the Macc Lads. I find I have their entire output. If you've heard it, you know. If not, difficult to briefly describe in the relentless delivery of filthy Ogden Nash-isms
on sex with loose ugly women, defecation, Chinese restaurant race baiting, power drinking, perversion and over-eating set to hard pop punk rock. Which would seem to cover everything worth covering that way.

The last album they made even has arena rock in the same vein. Nothing US is quite the same. The Mentors don't compare at all. And the English slang and Macclesfield accent is a bit hard to get through until you've listened to it a lot.

The Pork Dukes were kind a like 'em only not as prolific or hummable.

Now I'm listening to the totally awesome song, "Village Idiot," followed by the bracing "Frogbashing" for the promotion of vacation and soccer hooliganism into which they insert the French anthem into the chorus of "Frogbashing, frog bashing, dirty bastards" as well as ...

The dirty gits eat invertebrates, burn our sheep, they need a good thrashing,
You see, the fact is, we're out of practise, its been too long since we went frogbashing.

The tarts over there, they're covered in hair, it's hard to know just where the gash is,
All French lasses have got moustaches and serve your beer in tiny glasses.

C'mon, you know that took work. These are from Alehouse Rock which, in retrospect, kind of
outdoes The Anti-Nowhere League in a number of areas.

A song about Rottweiler dogs from the point of view of the dog, who insists that "I can tell you
that I love you when your nose is up my bottom."

Good song about premature ejaculation, sung by a girl, "Two Stroke Eddie."

Start: "Hey, is that Eddie's cum you're wearing?"
Girl 2: "Uh-huh."
Girl 1: "Gee, it must be great riding him."
Girl 2: "Uh-uh."

"He had a problem with his timing."

So she dumps him.

Listening to the new Scorpions album, Sting in the Tail, now. Nice use of 70s talk box on the first track, "Raised on Rock" (not a cover of the Elvis song). A few other decent rockers on it, but four ballads out of 11 tracks is at least two too many, and ending what's been rumored to be their final album with an ultra-cheesy power ballad called "The Best is Yet to Come" (you can just picture them exhorting a drunk, bored state fair crowd to sing along) sends the wrong message. Also, they seem overly concerned with rocking - "Raised on Rock," "Rock Zone," "Spirit of Rock." "Slave Me" is a pretty good cross between their early '80s work and recent Ted Nugent, though. At best, this album has five good songs, so I can't really recommend it.

heaven forbid that the scorpions should be overly concerned with rocking!

Well, they didn't used to be so clumsy about it. Like they're trying to convince themselves, not just the audience.

Sounds almost like an album I'd like because of a dumb try-to-hard earnestness they don't need to peddle. Anyway, Phil's line on drunk bored state fair crowd made me laugh. I covered that demographic for half a decade in Allentown. Fun times. You ain't lived until you've heard a band's lead singer (any band, for me it was Krokus) shout, "Hey Cleveland! How ya tonite! Yah!" At the Allentown Fair Ground. Or at your local ag fairground. In retrospect, it was probably an unintentional compliment.

Now I just gotta give a preliminary shout about Myonga's pre-stupendoug-fame Bob Seger anthology.

I'm late to the party on it.

However, as I told Myonga in e-mail, I wonder why he let the major label beat the Wilson Pickett/James Brown out of him. Rhetorical question, obviously.

"Sock it to Me Santa," aside from the seasonal lyrics, is very good and it struck me as almost exactly
the same thing the J Geils Band was doing on its first two albums, only with a better singer. Shows how
much Seger and the latter were influenced by the same urban black r&B style. And "Yellow Berets" had
me laughing as well as scratching my head, since Seger is 11 years older than I am and was far more
vulnerable to the draft. Tonkin was a year after he turned 18 and he was in the Last Heard, if Wiki's
bio is right, when the war really began to escalate.

"East Side Story" is the "Gloria" rip everyone has to play. It's one of the base codons of US rock.

"Persecution Smith" is -- anyway as I hear it -- a dig on Bob Dylan, hippies and protesters one read about in newspapers, given more jab by the Yardbirdsy backing. It also makes me thinks, if you put it ten years forward, as applying to Patti Smith, only for slightly different reason.

He also does ? & the Mysterians really good and a rich man's early Van Morrison.

If rock n roll spawns singers like him any more early on, they all sadly have to go to Nashville.

Who's singing with Seger on "Love the One You're With"?

Man, it just goes into this merciless vamp! If you're in a classic hard rock band, you gotta be able to play a section like that. Or you'll never amount to anything.

Interviewed John Bush of Armored Saint; results here.

Who's singing with Seger on "Love the One You're With"?

That's Crystal Jenkins and/or Pam Todd, who released an R&B record "Pam Todd & Love Exchange" in '77.

From LA Times:

The Runaways, the '70s all-girl rock band, is having a moment. With performances from Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, Floria Sigismondi's cinematic ode to the baby vixens of the Valley is based on Cherie Currie's memoir of the time, "Neon Angel," originally published in 1989 and out now with new material. The lead singer who immortalized "Cherry Bomb" will read and sign copies of her sassy tome

Sassy tome it wasn't. Had a review copy back when originally published. Was dire and fairly dreadfully written. Imagine a script for Foxes only not funny, no good moments and the girl doesn't die in
the end. I'd think it must have a substantial facelift.

Short Billboard Currie interview distributed through Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62C00020100313

I saw a preview screening of this. Pretty standard rock doc. Don't do drugs, don't trust sleazy producers. Some decent performances. Great songs, of course. Probably worse a Netflix.

worth a Netflix

After seeing it on Friday, my thoughts on The Runaways:

http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2010/03/21/twisted-steel-sex-appeal/

Kim Vincent Fowley song:

http://larecord.com/audio/kimfowley-kimvincentfowley.mp3

kim fowley is a freak, but god bless anyone who could produce "alley oop", "papa oom mow mow", AND "they're coming to take me away ha haaa!". he is a legend. (and that's just the tip of his freaky iceberg.)

"I've destroyed my credit." "I like to have sex with them, doubletalk them into it, make them
confused and then they run out of the house before the sun comes up so I can feed my cat and
go to sleep." "Burn victims were my best customers."

I gotta see this movie. But, like J3ff T. (and like I do with everything these days), I'll probably wait for Netflix to get it.

So what do people make of this new Uriah Heep album, Celebration: Forty Years Of Rock? Would sound great if I was a Martian, but it's almost all new versions of their old songs, and at least one of the new ones ("Only Human," the opener) didn't seem so good on first listen. Is there any real justification for its existence that I'm missing here?

And btw, note to Phil: I actually kind of like that Elephant9 Walk The Nile album, ha! Still not sure why you thought I'd have no use for it; guess you never noticed all the jazz fusion records in Stairway. Actually, if I have a complaint after two or three listens, it's that I'm thinking Ståle Storløkken's keyboards (Hammonds, Rhodes and synth) aren't prominent enough in the mix (see: Uriah Heep.) But maybe I just need to buy me some better speakers.

And oh yeah, also checked out Shakin’ Street's 21st Century Love Channel from last year via Rhapsody; didn't take notes (even in my head), but I can still vouch that it is every bit as worthy as George suggests above. (Rhapsody is also carrying a live album by them from three or four years ago, btw, but I haven't listened to that one yet.)

"they're coming to take me away ha haaa!".

Never knew Fowley had a hand in this! I love The Murmaids' "Popsicles and Icicles" too.

Got Forever, a 2DVD set by Free, in the mail last week; it hits stores today. (I think it was originally released in the UK in 2006, but Eagle Vision got the US rights.) It's got three songs from the German show Beat Club, five more recorded by Granada Television in northern England, some video clips, and on the second disc the band's full set from the Isle of Wight Festival (though there's only film of three songs - the rest is audio only with photos of the band scrolling screen-saver-style). Also interviews with the three surviving members circa '06 and some other stuff. Well worth it if you're a fan.

Runaways soundtrack is every bit as good as I thought from the movie. One thing that wasn't clear was that Joan Jett & the Blackhearts re-recorded the songs subbed by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart.

That means redo of Cherry Bomb, California Paradise, Queens of Noise and Dead End Justice. The result is the backng is a lot more slamming than on the originals which is an improvement because no one actually had to be such great shakes as singers on them originally. QoN and Dead End Justice are really a lot better. The first because it was done on the second album and wasn't the do-it-live-in-the-studio
toss of the debut and was lesser for it. Dead End Justice because the riff was always really good and now the band bites down on it extra hard. Plus, the skit's included. In the movie, it's cut
out.

Plus there's Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller" which I wasn't familiar with. Kicks off the album and it another cool tune.

Currie will be on Colorado at Vroman's in Pasadena tomorrow for a book signing. I'm going.

So if it's meant as an intro to the music of The Runaways to complete novices, it's mostly better than the 'essential' anthology which is stocked everywhere. If people listen to it, they'll get their
money's worth.

The new album by Cathedral, The Guessing Game, is extremely psychedelic and retro/vintage - tons of Mellotron. They started out a plodding doom act but got weirder and faster as they went on. This one reminded me a lot of Uriah Heep's 2008 disc Wake the Sleeper so if you liked that (I did) you'll probably like this. Lee Dorrian's vocals are...an acquired taste, but the riffs are solid, the trippy stuff around the edges works well and it's just generally a good heavy psych-prog album. It's on Nuclear Blast but it ain't metal.

A look at Currie's book, Neon Angel:

http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2010/03/25/survived-the-road-to-ruin/

Today's recommended Shadoks reissue is Moses' Changes, a power trio blues-rock disc from Denmark circa '71. Pretty much sounds like very early Led Zeppelin, other UK heavy blues outfits of the time, etc., etc. Clean vocals, acid-fried guitars, cardboard-box drums. Six tracks in 35 minutes, all originals, which is kinda surprising; this is exactly the kind of album that you'd expect to feature an obligatory run through "The Hunter."

i wrote up changes for my decibel column. didn't i talk about it here? maybe not. thought i did. anyway, yeah, i've been playing it pretty regularly in the store.

Maybe I should've asked Forced Exposure for a Moses promo, but I'd been noticing that I've had a recurring problem with most of those obscuro Shaddocks late psych/early sludge reissues over the past few years -- tend to like them a lot at first, but then I file them and never put them on again, and a couple years later I decide they're taking up too much space. Maybe Moses would've been the exception, though, who knows.

Listening instead now to Johnny Winter And's Live At The Fillmore East 10/3/70, due out a few weeks from now on Collector's Choice. The thing really cranks. Rick Derringer ne' Zehringer's on board (apparently with a couple other former McCoys), and they do "Rock And Roll Hootchie Coo." Not To mention "Good Morning Little School Girl," a seven-minute "Highway 61 Revisited", an 18-minute marathon of Winter's "Mean Town Blues," and close with "Rollin' And Tumblin'" by Muddy Waters. Just seven songs in 67 minutes; you do the math. Long Richie Unterberger liner notes I haven't read yet too. Anyway, I don't much Winter on my shelf, much to my shame probably, so this'll do fine.

"I don't have much" etc. etc. etc. Actually, longest song on there is a 22-minute "It's My Own Fault," apparently a B.B. King number.

There was a period of time when the Blue Sky artists owned US hard rock. Johnny Winter And, Johnny Winteor solo records, Rick Derringer solo, Edgar Winter, Edgar Winter's White Trash, Edgar Winter Group, etc.

Shout Factory put out a 2CD Johnny Winter best-of last year. 35 tracks, all raucous guitar shit.