I stumbled on to this guided by some lines of code on the internet -- it's quite mesmerizing. Of course, the piano playing by Nicky Hopkins is pretty, but really it's the chords sequence too -- shifting from plateau to plateau in the verses until the choruses drop you into the valley. Gorgeous stuff.
Lennon's original 1968 solo demo (when it was titled 'Child of Nature') here.
This is not widely circulated (at least, as of now) but what amazing footage of rehearsal of the best song off of Hole's Live Through This. To see the band, especially the late Kristen Pfaff, in such an intimate setting is wild.
What a loss. Not so well-known in the U.S., Steve Harley was a modest
sized rock star in the UK in the early to mid-1970s, principally
through a number 1 hit song, "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" which I
fondly remember from my childhood. A lovely acoustic ditty tinged with a
hint of his snarly cockney affectation,with bits of Dylanese sprinkled
in, it was everywhere in the 1975 and covered a million times by more
contemporary people, including Duran Duran and Erasure. The song was
billed under Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.
But if you dug deeper, you might have stumbled upon a pair of his early '70s albums, billed under Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie (1973) and Psychomodo (1974) which were the bastard child of Johnny Rotten (still to burst into the world of pop) and David Bowie. I think Steve Harley had aspirations to make a grand statement of an album like Sgt. Pepper but the ones he did release still stand up as full-on attempts to produce a truly 1970s album, one denuded of any hints that the '60s happened at all. There's the obvious androgyny and glamness of it all, a hat tipoff to decadence and self-gratification, the full-on unapologetic cadence of his working class English accent, and of course, that sneer, half Dylan and half Bowie and half still-to-be-created Johnny Rotten. Yes, three halves is what makes Cockney Rebel slightly off-kilter, not really fitting into anything, a bit off the rails, a true anomaly in the history of '70s pop. Oh, one more thing, at least on his early albums, Harley sought to disavow the guitar completely (too '60s), and so the sound becomes something both baroque pop and almost proggy.
My favorite track off The Human Menagerie is this, "Mirror Freak," a tour de force of sexy imagery and decadent descent into debauchery, the drums cracking like broken elbow bones. I guarantee there was nothing like this in 1973, no, not even Bowie.
The sweet spot of my nostalgia is really the '90s, or more to the
point, something like 1988 to about 1999. In that period, I aged from 23
to 33, and that sounds about right in terms of how nostalgia fixes
itself onto one's twenties. My failing, if I can call it that, was that
even as I was experiencing it, I felt a sense of nostalgia about what I
was experiencing, something described once by Fredric Jameson as 'nostalgia for the present.' Ever since I was a young boy, I've had an acute sense
of the passing of time, that its inexorable,
unstoppable, and irreversible qualities gave it a particular bittersweet taste; a kind of big tragedy, perhaps even a farce in the grand
vista of life. I'm not sure I had the words to describe this feeling
at the time but I remember feeling aware of 'The Past' as an
object of lament and loss, even when I was about ten or eleven. I
have a memory of reading Neil Young's quote in Decade's liner notes (supposedly from
Bob Dylan): "Now that the past is gone," which seemed to distill all those tensions into a pithy quote.
I don't have any particular memory of the Sundays' "Here's Where the Story Ends" but I do definitely remember listening to it in 1990. The music gently evoked the Smiths but not in any kind of gratuitous way but rather more as homage and affectation. That year, especially, was a year of confusion for me. I wouldn't say turmoil (which was 1991) but still not stable. My academic future was in doubt, my girlfriend was interested in others, and I did a lot of drugs. But I did have a very active social life with people whose names I've mostly forgotten. And I absorbed a galaxy worth of new music from every corner of the universe. But even then, the Sundays' track seemed to perfectly soundtrack the feeling that something was ending (as it was) and that "a terrible year" was either just gone, or happening, or around the corner.
I'm sure the fact that the voice was a woman's was an important factor - a waif-like English woman who seemed to inhabit a landscape produced by a Cure-damaged sensibility. In other words, someone, if she was real, I might have had a crush on, or at least been interested to talk to at a party.Don't know why but am enjoying this. Distinctly remember walking somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004 or so, listening to this blasting on my headphones. Sort of a motley combination of Led Zeppelin's version of "Travelin' Riverside Blues" and the Stooges "Down on the Street" or something.
Music like this seems particularly cringe these days. And honestly, I never listen to this kind of shit at all. But sometimes, just sometimes, you want to hear the knockoff, the pastiche, rather than the original. There must be a German word for when you prefer the imitation of the imitation to the original. Also, let no one say that Jack White cannot play guitar. One a good day, he's probably as good as Jack Black. He may not be as good as Meg White is a drummer but he can indeed hold his own.
This song was a deep cut from the album Make the World Go Away from Donny and Marie Osmond, released some time in 1975 and written by Donny and his older brother Merrill Osmond, who was the lead vocalist (and bassist!) for the Osmonds. The song itself is an example of classic '70s pop craft, somewhere between Burt Bacharach and the theme from M.A.S.H. There's very little about the album that I can find online, especially who played what. The guitar is quite expertly played and suggests some slick session player, perhaps on his off-day from a Steely Dan session for Katy Lied.
For a very brief period in 1975, my older sister was a fan of the Osmonds, and by osmosis, I absorbed some of their music, including this track.
Interesting story about the producer of this track (and the album as a whole), one Mike Curb who (gulp) later on served as the Republican Party's Lieutenant Governor of the state of California in the early '80s. I guess he would be known as more of a Democrat these days, given how rightward the Republican Party has moved in the past three or four decades, given his early advocacy for gay rights, but in many other respects he was definitely a kind of fiscal conservative.
Curb scored music for A LOT of movies in the sixties and also was a lucrative songwriter of some repute too. More important, he started his own label which merged with MGM Records and Verve Records, and he, Mr. Mike Curb, became President of the new company in 1969. Yes, the company that released records by the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.
In the 1970s, his subsidiary label (Curb Records, obviously) put out music by Eric Burdon, War, Ritchie Havens, Gloria Gaynor, etc. Apparently, Curb records is still a thing now (in 2024!), and Mike Curb still heads it at the age of 79. Good for him.
Other facts about Mike Curb:
- he headed the country and western subsidiary of Motown Records (yes, Motown Records) in the 1970s
- Curb organized the Inaugural Youth Concert to start the second term of Richard Nixon (!) in January 1973. Among the artists who played for Nixon were Jimmy Osmond (kid brother to Donny who sings here), Ray Stevens, and a bunch of other people I've never heard of. I wonder how they felt when in the subsequent months, the Watergate scandal broke.
- Curb, as President of MGM, fired 18 artists from their roster for their supposed promotion of "hard drugs" in their songs. Well, "Heroin" by VU will do that.
Anyway, so Donny & Mary Osmond -- yeah, the vapid duo at the center of probably the worst music made in the seventies, recorded this here song. I like it. What can I say. It captures so perfectly the ennui of a mid-70s TV movie's middle interlude when the two lovers have split up and their independent lives are soundtracked by the mourning sound of Donny and Marie.
"She shows no emotion at all / Stares into space like a dead china doll"
Lovely new song from the new Crowded House album. A bit of a surprise because I honestly have not paid attention to Crowded House in 30 years. A beautiful bit of jangle pop, circa the Sundays who might have driven past Real Estate. But you know, he's an old dude (like me), so it hits harder.
