PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

I hadn't heard they made a movie out of the life of Ian Dury but when I saw it at the library I had to take it home. I put it on and a lot of chaos came out of that disc. Andy Serkis plays Ian Dury and the 2010 movie is directed by Mat Whitecross. I hadn't heard of that guy but he did an ok job with a tough movie. It moves across time and space mixing Ian's life as a child with his life as an adult.  If you told me you hadn't heard of Ian Dury I wouldn't be surprised. You might have heard of the song but never heard of the man who wrote and preformed it. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll came out in England the summer of 1977 and made it to the US some short time later. It was only available as a single for a while. I don't remember having one but I think another guy did. We used to buy 45 RPM singles in those days. At one point I had hundreds of them. What a pain in the ass it was to play a song at a time. I certainly had a copy of the song on Ian Dury's 1st album New Boots and Panties. It became a favorite of several of the locals and got played it a lot. It's more New Wave than punk but that still doesn't pin down all the influences in the music. It well worth a listen. About the movie I can say it was entertaining but kind of sad. Ian was one of those driven guys who got married, had kids, then screwed up his marriage. He had polio and that lead to some sad shit in his life. He died in 2000 of cancer. He continued working until his death. I thought the movie was well worth seeing but not one I would want to watch all that often. I think I'll go watch another episode of QI before Friday Night Movie night. Get my learn on.

Ducks Deluxe

 

I've been trying to work out the dimensions of something I want to build and I have YouTube playing some music. It's the way I can dip into bands I used to listen to without having to bother finding their cds, buying them, and then not playing them but that one time, just after they arrived. That shit happens 'round here way too often. I used to listen to music a lot more when the first Ducks Deluxe album came out in 1974 and I listened to that album a lot. I sold it when I moved here, along with most of the records I had. Later I found I still wanted to listen to those sounds so I started looking for a copy of the album. It wasn't as popular around the Twin Cities and I had to settle for a copy on cassette tape from a guy in Winnipeg. I won't mention his name in case the statue of limitations haven't run out on that yet. I might still have the tape but all that stuff is packed in boxes and I haven't opened them for ages. Wasting internet bandwidth seems like the thing to do, you know instead of hunting for a tape and hoping my old boom box still works.

I don't think many will know the band members but you can read about them on the Wikipedia. I liked their debut album right from the start. It was lively and upbeat rock'n'roll, with a bit of rockabilly and a touch of country filtered through the minds of young Brit musicians. There were a whole bunch of these guys that where influenced by the 1950's American rock'n'roll scene. Nick Lowe and Dave Edmonds might be a couple of the better known of that bunch and hardly anyone knows about 'em. Most of the songs on the first Ducks Deluxe album are on YouTube. That's the order they came in. Take a listen, you might like the songs. You can still buy the cd from Amazon so they still have some fans out there.  

Coast To Coast

Nervous Breakdown

Daddy Put The Bomp

I Got You

Please, Please, Please

Fireball

Don't Mind Rockin' Tonight

Hearts On My Sleeve

Falling For That Woman

West Texas Truckin' Board

Too Hot To Handle

It's All Over Now

and as a bunus

I Found The Law

Here's Roy Orbison doing it. Here's The Motors doing Dancing The Night Away. Just for fun.

The Sensational Alex Harvey

   

Back in the 1970's I was a fairly big fan of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. They were a Glasgow band and fairly popular in the UK. Unless you lived in Cleveland you probably haven't heard of them in the US. The Wikipedia tells me the band did well in Cleveland but not so in other towns. UK records were easy to get in Winnipeg record stores and people I knew typically bought a lot of British bands.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was Alex Harvey on vocals, Zal Cleminson on guitar, Chris Glen on bass, Hugh McKenna on keyboards and cousin Ted McKenna on drums. They had several albums but I only bought their first five records, Framed (1972), Next (1073), The Impossible Dream (1974), Tomorrow Belongs To Me (1975) and Live (1975). I used to listen to them a lot. I think Tomorrow Belongs To Me was my favorite. I sure recognized more songs on that album's song list than any of the other albums. I can't remember when I got rid of the albums, maybe when I moved to Minneapolis in 1978, maybe later. I got rid of a lot of albums when I moved, partly to lighten the load and partly to generate a bit of spare cash. Normally I tire of albums quickly and move on to something new. They used to pile up, then get traded or sold to record stores, until I have nearly none left.

Since getting highspeed internet I can take a look back at old music I liked on YouTube without having to spend any money buying cd's or downloads. I was thinking about some of the songs I used to like by Alex Harvey. I liked his voice and I thought the songs weren't quite normal. Alex was born in Glasgow in 1935 and at age 19 he started playing in bands. First skiffle, then blues and soul, then rock and roll. What in that caused the TSAHB to produce what they did I have no idea. I enjoyed the music when it was new, heard it enough, then moved along. I could buy the CD's, but I'd have to spend 60-70 bucks and there's a good posibility that I might not listen to them enough to get value.

Here's a few of my favorites to give a listen to. There aren't a lot of different songs on YouTube but these are pretty much a good sampler of the band's music. . 

 Vambo

Vambo (Live)

Faith Healer

Tomahawk Kid

Sgt Fury

Framed

I Just Wanna Make Love To You

The Man In The Jar

Bernadette

 

You might remember this song by The Four Tops. It was a hit in 1967. I remember hearing it on the radio. I might have even see The Four Tops preform it on The Ed Sullivan Show. We used to watch that variety show every sunday evening. Ed Sullivan was a newspaper showbiz writer and he somehow got to do a tv show. Each week he had several acts preform. Acts of great variety. Not all of them were what I was interested in but I liked the MoTown artists and Ed liked putting them on tv.

I was watching the 1990 movie  Madhouse the other day and the song features in a bonding scene between John Larroquette and John Diehl. The movie was pretty average but it's nothing outstanding. I had forgotten I had actually seen it when it was first in the theater. It's a version of The Man Who Came To Dinner which was a play first. Written by Moss Hart and George S Kaufman, and starring Monty Woolley, it first opened in 1939. Kaufman and Hart also wrote You Can't Take It With You. I read a Moss Hart auto-bio back in the 1980's and enjoyed that. Kaufman was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and I have read a bit about that group. I used to read a lot by and about humor writers and newspaper columnists from the 1920's and 1930's. TMWCTD was turned into a movie in 1942 and it starred Monty Woolley. He's totally annoying and heavily based on Alexander Woolcott. That guy is a mixed up kettle of fish and sadness. Best not to think about it. Look him up if you want. Me I'm going to go finish that Star Trek novel I'm reading.    

Radio Sunnydale - A Musical Break

I find myself playing a lot of the same few songs over and over. Sometimes I just want to hear that one song off an album. I used to play the Buffy Soundtrack Radio Sunnydale at DreamHaven a lot. It got all nicely worn-in in my brain like a pair of comfy shoes. There are a bunch of great songs on it. Here are two of my favs. Since I can't watch Buffy all the time I can at least play the theme song occasionally. I have a copy on my hard drive so I don't have to get up to hear it. Of Course you can always hit up Youtube for a listen.

 

Nerf Herder. I don't need to listen to anything else they have done. Really, I know I won't like it as much as that theme song, so why bother. And the same goes for the Dandy Warhols, after Bohenian Like You, there's no reason to explore their other music. I know I save myself a lot of time with this attitude. If I find out I'm wrong later I can always erase this post. Who says you can't change the past?

Nights On A Tuesday Afternoon

 

You probably know this song. Night In White Satin by The Moody Blues. I liked it when I heard it in the 60's. I'm somehow drawn to a certain type of singer, a certain type of voice, and I liked the sound of Justin Hayward's voice in this song. I had to look up his name. I might have know it when I was trying them out on vinyl. I had a single of the song that I played a lot. I never got into singles, they were too much trouble to play and albums lasted nearly 20 minutes a side. I'm lazy and as soon as I got a cassette recorder I recorded all my singles. Cassettes were 30 to 60 minutes a side and later players played both sides without me having to get out of my chair. Damn, I'm loving that.  

Other than really liking NIWS I never got into The Moody Blues and their first 3 or 4 albums drifted away when I needed some space. Records are bulky and heavy. After a few listens some records are done being heard. Time to trade them in for some new music. I did not like moving my friends record collections. That's some back breaking shit. Moving music from albums to cds to MP3s sort of makes sense. I like that you can put a huge collection in your pocket. I don't care for the degraded sound but the technology was developed before the advent of huge cheap hard drives. Maybe it will get better again. Probably not. Oh well, I'm not buying MP3's anyway. I've made a few of my own. Just to have some songs on my pc when I didn't want to go get the cd. Hey, it's in the other room. If I can't be lazy in my own house, what's the good of being home. I have thought about getting voice recognition software so I can yell at my computer to put some music on. It just seems wrong.

 

A couple of days ago this song, Tuesday Afternoon by The Moody Blues, popped into my head and I went looking for it on YouTube. I've listened to it several times and while I like parts of it quite a bit I don't like it as much as Night In White Satin. I listened to that song a few times too. I find it haunting. Tuesday Afternoon doesn't quite reach that level. Sadly none of their other songs make me want to listen to them. I tried a few on YouTube but never made it through one of them. I'm just not that much of a 60's Progressive rock kind of guy but I do like these two works.

They did a short piece on MPR this morning about collecting music and they interviewed a teen girl who uses YouTube as a music source. Not so much to look at the video but just to listen to the music on her iPod. The teen girl was talking about listening to The Hollies and I haven't thought about them in a long long time. I went looking on YouTube to see what I might like. You should know Bus Stop from 1966. Give it a spin below.

 

Try Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress, or Too Much Monkey Business, Stop Stop Stop, Jennifer Eccles, On A Carousel, The Mighty Queen, and anything else that you might find on YouTube. They had some good songs that I haven't heard in ages.

Doctorin' The Tardis by The Timelords

 

One of my favorite things about Doctor Who is the opening theme. Here's a YouTube video with all the versions here. It was written by Ron Grainer and created by the sound people at the BBC in 1963. In 1988 The Timelords released a single called Doctorin' The Tardis. I had a CD single of it and played it for a while. I traded it to Jeremy for some toys and hadn't played the copy I made in ages. With watching some Doctor Who of late I wanted to hear it again and when I couldn't find the copy I had made I went to YouTube and watched it there. That's the short version of the song on the video above. Here's the really long version I used to like playing over and over again.

  

It's about 8 minutes. They sold a million copies of the single and the critics panned it in the UK. This version is just over three minutes and it was the #1 hit in the UK for a week or so. Here's a version with Gary Glitter on it. Here's another version of the 12" remix with a tribute to all the different Doctors.

Infinite Gangnam Style

I saw Infinite Gangnam Style on Boing Boing a couple of days ago and it was something pretty goofy. You can turn it on and it will play the song forever. It chops the song up and jumps around in the song to create a never ending song. Unfortunately only Chrome and Safari play it. I already had Chrome. I needed it for the LEGO Brick building site and it worked on Pottermore before I got Internet Explorer 9.

On YouTube while playing the regular length Gangnam Style I found this parody . It pretty much made me laugh all the way through.

 

PSY - Gangnam Style

 

Here's my favorite KPOP song. I'm not that hip, it's the only one I know. I did know what KPOP meant and have since reading about Korean Popstar Rain 2-3 years ago. He once beat out Stephen Colbert for some award and he was pretty good in the 2009 movie Ninja Assassin. I like a good pop song and have since I started listening to top 40 radio in the 1960's. I hardly pay attention to what's going on in the music world anymore. Every now and then something passes by and I notice. Gangnam Style is the thing that popped up today. Actually it was last wednesday but I was busy and forgot to mention it.

I heard about Gangnam Style over on Retail Hell Underground. The song came out last July and this video had over 303 million views the day of this post. It had 293 million views 2 days before the post. PSY is a popular Korean pop star who's got several albums out. Gangnam is a district in Seoul that's pretty posh. Like Beverly Hills in LA. People there are flush with cash so they can stay totally on the cutting edge of important things, like fashion and hair. They certainly aren't at the top of my list of important things but I just can't afford to be fashionable when there's LEGO to be had. In a quote from an interview PSY says of the area and song:

People who are actually from Gangnam never proclaim that they are -- it’s only the posers and wannabes that put on these airs and say that they are "Gangnam Style" -- so this song is actually poking fun at those kinds of people who are trying so hard to be something that they’re not.

The song pokes my funny bone something fierce and I like the playful sexy style, the cute girls, and goofy dance moves. I think I like it being written and sung in Korean, all I hear is his voice and the music. I think it creates a whole different perspective on the song, no lyrics to think about, pure sound. Some of my favorite songs are ones with lyrics that litterally disappear into the music. I know there's soemthing being sung but I'm just not focusing on what the lyrics are saying, just the sounds register. Anyway, maybe you'll like it, maybe not.

Stephen Fry In America

I Netflix'd the two disc set of Stephen Fry In America the other day and really enjoyed them. I'd been a fan of Fry's since the late 1980's when PBS ran episodes of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie and The Black Adder. The Laurie is of course the most delightful Hugh. The two starred in the BBC series Jeeves And Wooster. I find them all highly entertaining but I grew up on a steady diet of British programming. I should get those discs out to watch sometimes soon. Back to Stephen Fry In America. It's a six episode series that aired in 2008. Stephen travels around to every state in the Union. I know people who have been to many of the 50 states and I've driven across and stopped at quite a few myself. I don't know that I know anyone who has been to all 50 states. Stephen drives a London Taxi and he stops along the way to visit with people or look at some interesting place. There's an entertaining stream of commentary about where he's going and what he's seeing. There are plenty of interviews with people, famous and not, and lots of great scenery to look at. Stephen even gets a haircut. You can watch it on YouTube. Here's the second episode, which I think is the one with the haircut. That episodes YouTube page should lead you to the rest. I enjoyed them and would watch them again sometime.