This is the late River Phoenix. I was going to put his picture up here yesterday, but I figured it'd make the link too easy. I have to be so careful with you guys. Instead, I went with Mr. Bragg because...
Just in case you haven't noticed, Jez quietly brough The Chain back last week... so if you haven't dropped him a suggestion yet, get over to A History of Dubious Taste now and help restore the greatest interactive blog feature on the internet to its prime position.
It's been a while since I ran any guest posts here, and the only reason for that is that nobody has offered any. Fair enough, most of you have your own blogs to worry about. Fortunately, George has got sick of reading my interminable ramblings day after day, or perhaps taken mercy on me after yesterday's bumper post, and offered not one, but two guest posts to give me what Huey Lewis would call a Couple Days Off. So Guest Post Thursday is back!
Here's George...
I was listening to one of the three cds in the Sick, Sorry and Sober set recently and I heard this:
Today I passed you in the street,
And my heart fell at your feet,
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you
And I thought that it was genius: a simple lyric, a simple tune, that Hawaiian-sounding guitar, that reedy, plaintive and painful voice, combining to make an unforgettable song. I can understand why some 70s and 80s country music puts people off, but I will never understand how people could not like and admire this song.
And if you can get hold of that 3 cd set I would urge you to do so.
A while later, whilst sitting around not doing much, just singing those lines, I thought of this, another simple intro, builds up a bit, that “ooo” the drum roll, then Levi Stubbs’ voice...
I’m spoiling you, two utterly brilliant songs, it’s got to be downhill now. There’s a lot of song titles that start “I can’t”, and an amazing number of them are great. And then there’s that abomination by crap prog turned crap pop group with that drummer-singer. So, to cleanse your ears after just polluting them with the thought of that song, here’s some hard-rock blues.
Anita is on heat as I write this, has been for a couple of days, so much bleating round these parts, and it’s difficult to get her in the goat shed. Parsley goes in no problem, a bit of bread, corn, he’s there, but at times like these, not Anita. FORTY minutes it took on Tuesday. She’s bleating for Francisco’s young male goat:
So a Top Ten “I Can’t” songs. Yes, some obvious ones not there, some deliberately excluded on grounds of taste, but not Barry Manilow, oh no, but because the song is Can’t Smile WIthout You, and not I Can’t Smile Without You.
Thanks of course to Rol for allowing this to be posted. Feel free to leave your inane comment.
And I’ve just been informed that I can write a part 2. I bet you can’t wait!
Because tradition dictates I close my posts with a video (I feel naked without them), I found another version of George's top song which is equally worthy of your ears. And I'm glad George didn't diss Barry. Less bothered about him dissing the drummer-singer.
Another Thursday, another Guest Post. And we welcome back George, who's getting all mushy on us...
George's Top Ten Heart Songs
Rol made the huge mistake of saying I would be welcome to do
another piece for his blog.
And I have chosen My Top Ten Heart songs so I could shoehorn
in one of My Favourite Songs Of All Time, brought to me by Andy Kershaw many
many years ago. I was thinking originally of a Top Ten Meal songs but that led
to me that huge pile of old pish Breakfast In America, which would never ever
be included in such a list but I had to banish that song from my mind. And
instead we have this top ten. Spoiler alert: No Supertramp. Actually, that’s hardly
a spoiler, but hopefully you get the point.
That’s a picture of a cow’s heart. Something I have cooked up for the dogs and cats, who could not scoff it quickly enough. When I told Talho Jorge that I was vegetarian it caused great amusement. We used to get a great slab of heart-and-lung (different butcher) which I just could not deal with. Enough of this offal talk. On with the music:
A Top Ten Heart Songs has to have this in it. Peerless. Well, almost.
(George has now redeemed himself for dissing Ms. Tyler & Mr. Steinman. That is one of my all time favourite songs, as featured here many times before. - Rol.)
I was something of a Hendrix obsessive in my youth, amassing 26 albums by the age of 19. This is from the Royal Albert concert of 1969, on the same day as Denis Law’s 29th birthday:
It’s amazing how clean that guitar sounds, and how all you need for a fantastic blues song are three people. No embellishments, just Hendrix playing the blues, bass and drums.
There might be one or two people reading who don’t actually
own Feast Of Wire. You really should catch yourselves on and rectify that right
now. It is frequently considered The Best Album Ever Made In The Entirety of Recorded
Music. That title has also been bestowed upon ABC, Rod Stewart, and The
Turbines. At the momentum it belongs again to Calexico. And this song replaced
a Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters song, THAT is how good it is:, it’s the
slow, sweeping orchestration, the almost tortured painful vocal, it’s a
glorious and dark, dark song...
It’s after this track that the realisation dawns that the entire album is something special.
Now for some, this song might have been rather spoiled by the bloody ghastly ITV programme of a few years ago, but listen to it now, it’s a fantastic, simple love song, beautifully played and sung, 2 minutes and 7 seconds of pure pop perfection. Come on, who amongst you will not sing the “piddle dee pat” bits. And the rest of it???
This song is from the completely over the top and self-indulgent double album Wheels of Fire album (one track involves an especially tedious Ginger Baker drum solo), but this a great psychedelic/rock song, showing what a great vocalist Jack Bruce was, really powerful, there’s no unending guitar noodling from Clapton, just a brief interlude, and those huge thumping drums of Ginger Baker.
I love how that song seems to begin with Jack Bruce launching into the vocal and Clapton and Baker are almost caught unawares.
I was thinking about not including this, because the singer appeared in my previous outing here. I played it again and thought that if this is to be a Top Ten and not just Ten Songs with Heart In The Title, then it would be ridiculous to exclude it.
(Agreed. - Rol.)
It’s a tremendous song, but remarkably not his best! Another song that can move me to tears. If you don’t like this, you’ve got no heart...
And here’s the shoehorn - I jettisoned the Top Ten Meals Songs idea for the rather easier Heart Songs just so I could include this song. Well, it has been one of my (and I suspect Charity Chic’s) Favourite Songs Of All Time since first heard 30 or so years ago. Like the Dwight song above (OK, I know that’s a cover) I can sing along, or “sing” along, to this word-perfectly. Almost word-perfectly. It’s meant to be sad but it always makes me smile, the cheery music just does not go with the sentiment of the song. Now THIS is a peerless song...
Two minutes and 50 seconds of country music genius. You’ll not hear a better song today.
“I opened up my sack, and lord there it was, my baby’s goodbye note, heartaches for lunch”
“Teardrops change the flavour of things I loved once”
Where else but in country music do you get such great lines??
So, no Jayhawks (Two Hearts) which was briefly a contender. No Joy Division (very very briefly a contender, but not as strong as The Jayhawks). No Bruce Springsteen, obviously.
There might, just possibly, be something that I missed, but looking at the list the only tracks that could possibly be replaced are the Neil Young and Cream songs, the others are nailed on surefire bets for being in any Top Ten Heart Songs.
And thanks to Rol for allowing me again to pollute his pages.
No, thank you, George. For anyone who's interested, I did a Top Ten Breakfast Menu Songs back in 2013... and promised I would include Supertramp in a future Top Ten that never materialised. One day, Supertramp fans, one day. Now I never even thought of tackling a Top Ten Heart Songs because there are so many available options. George did nail a couple of my favourites above... but if he missed out any of yours, feel free to contribute a list of your own for a future instalment of Guest Post Thursday.
You'll be pleased to know that we hit our Kickstarter target for the latest issue of Department of the Peculiar, so Rob has come up with an excellent "extra" to give away with the comic if we hit our stretch goal. (Believe me, I don't understand any of this stuff.)
Because the writer is a sadist, the script for the latest issue required Rob to draw a wall full of portraits of dead rock stars. To be honest, when I wrote that, I thought he'd just do thumbnail sketches... but, Rob being Rob, he ended up doing full portraits... of loads and loads of them.
(Believe me, that's not all of them.)
These went down pretty well when he posted them on Facebook, so Rob came up with the idea of publishing them in a CD booklet. And because it wasn't really fair that the lazy writer got away with doing bugger all for this venture, Rob asked me to write the liner notes.
I came up with a couple of ideas, thinking about what else you'd find in a CD booklet, and decided to write up a track-listing for this imaginary record. Just like the kind of nonsense list / mix I've been writing here for years.
So I've started compiling a list of songs by dead rock stars about death / dying / living forever / etc. etc. etc. This kind of thing...
I have a few more, but because I'm scared of missing out some obvious ones, I thought I'd throw it open to you guys and see if you had any further suggestions.
Here are the rules...
1. The singer (preferably songwriter) has to be dead.
2. The song title has to be about life or death, heaven or hell... it can't just be in the lyrics.
I rejected Come As You Are by Nirvana... but I'd probably have included it if Kurt had called the song "I Don't Have A Gun".
Similarly, I couldn't include My Generation by The Who even though it contains the perfect line ("Hope I die before I get old") because the title doesn't allude to life or death, and the songwriters are still with us.
3. I'll also accept songs where the songwriter appears to have eerily predicted their own demise - like the John Denver one above.
Above is the cover to the "Heroes" booklet, featuring Mal (our character) posing as Bowie.
As always, your wisdom will be gratefully received.
And now, because I didn't have time last week to pay proper tribute to Little Richard...
I started the year with some quite easy ones as I'm sure you're all feeling depressed about returning to work / normality after your Christmas excesses. But be warned... there are some stinkers coming up in the next few weeks!
10. Do you remember a Danish boardgame? It's incomprehensible.
In Danish "Hüsker Dü?" (meaning “Do you remember?") is a children's memory board game. Apparently. I will rely on Chris to tell me if this is not the case.
I found an old notebook over the Christmas period that I'd kept at the time of the spooky events detailed thus far in the tale of my haunted radio station. Back then I still entertained the ridiculous pipe-dream that I was going to be a writer, so I kept notebooks on everything.
Here are a few incidents that were relayed to me by colleagues at the time...
One DJ, first to arrive in the building, switched off the alarm and realised he was bursting for a wee. Ran down the corridor to the toilets... when he got there, the hand-dryers were both on.
A "very down-to-earth" and "not at all sensationalistic" (quoting from my youthful notes) journalist was working alone in the newsroom when a telephone directory (Remember them? Remember how big and thick and heavy they were?) "flew" off the shelf behind him and crashed to the floor. "It didn't just fall," he swore, "it leapt!"
Another early morning DJ, pulling his records off the shelves in the library to prepare for his show, heard a "grunt" behind him. He turned to look but there was nobody there. Moments later he heard the same grunt from further down the corridor. He was still the only one in the building.
Switchboard buttons were pressed in empty studios. This was reported by two separate colleagues - simultaneously working in Studio A and Studio B one night... they both realised the buttons must have been pressed in Studio C, which was empty.
The switchboard caused me similar problems some nights. Generally we had it switched off so it didn't ring while we were taking calls, the lights just flashed to indicate callers. A couple of times, the switchboard started ringing midway through the evening. The button was underneath the switchboard: you had to lift it up to turn it off or on.
And finally (for now) there was the whistle. I heard this twice. A loud, clear "whee-oo-wheet!" whistle heard from inside the room where I was working (on both occasions with another colleague who also heard it) when nobody else was present. Others heard the same whistle at different times.
Coming up on week three and this is proving the hardest (albeit most rewarding) thing I've ever done in my life. Fortunately, I'm still taking lessons in fatherhood from my record collection...
While I have a lot of time for a great deal of 70s chart guff... this hasn't aged particularly well. Yes, kids, there was a time when all pop stars dressed like Chicory Tip...
An off-cut from the legendary SMiLE sessions, finally released in 2004, made even more special by the fact that it serves here as an intro to Surf's Up, one of the greatest Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks songs ever.
Can you recall
How you took me to school
We couldn't talk much at all
It's been so many years
And now these tears
Guess I'm still your child
Out on the moors
We take a pause
See how far we have come
You're moving quite slow
How far can we go
Father and son
Maybe a little bit of a cheat but there's both a Father and a Son in the link above and this is just gorgeous. Not that my boy will ever have to worry about his old man being described in these terms...
Couldn't see his used up body at the funeral
By virtue of the flailing of his conquests
They tied down his casket with the garter belt
Each troubled heart was beating in a sequin dress
Someone must console these lonesome daughters
No written word or ballad will appease them
1. Johnny Cash - Father and Son
Written by Cat Stevens, ruined by Boyzone... resurrected and immortalised by JC (with a little help from Fiona Apple). I love the original, but this version just floors me...
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