La Vie En Robe

"Child, That's MY Song!!!"

My Taurean soul-sister Tracy tagged me on Facebook with a "write down the top 25 songs you cannot live without" meme. Of course, hers went to twice that length, as does this one.

When I started going to "soul oldies" package shows about 20 years ago, I quickly realized that one of the best parts of those revues was watching various older black women suddenly rise from their seats during the first few bars of a particular favorite and testify, "Child, that's MY song!!!" All of these songs below, for whatever reason, bring out the testifying old black woman in me. I've got several thousand "favorite songs," and I'm sure I'm leaving some key ones off here; hell, many of these songs aren't even the "best" ones that the artists in question recorded. But these particular tracks (in stream-of-consciousness order) have always resonated particularly deeply on a head/heart/hips level, with more than a little spiritual and cosmic echo thrown in for good measure. I never get sick of hearing any of these, and none of them ever fail to make me feel like life is worth living... and loving.

Of course, I've since thought of about 50 more that should be on here -- but then again, rock n' roll is supposed to be about spontaneity...

1. Bob Dylan — Visions of Johanna
2. The Beatles — Rain
3. The Who — Substitute
4. The Rolling Stones — Sway
5. The Shocking Blue — Hot Sand
6. AC/DC — Touch Too Much
7. Radio Birdman — Snake
8. The Flirtations — Nothing But A Heartache
9. Bram Tchaikovsky — Girl of My Dreams
10. The Kinks — I'll Remember
11. Curtis Mayfield — We Got To Have Peace
12. James Brown — Bring It Up
13. The Music Machine — Talk Talk
14. Paul Revere & The Raiders — Him Or Me (What's It Gonna Be)
15. The Jam — Life From A Window
16. The Only Ones — Another Girl, Another Planet
17. The Dells — I Can Sing A Rainbow/Love Is Blue
18. The Isley Brothers — Summer Breeze
19. The MC5 — Poison
20. Lee Hazlewood — Train to Stockholm
21. Black Sabbath — Tomorrow's Dream
22. T. Rex — Metal Guru
23. The Open Mind — Magic Potion
24. MOTO — Magic Words
25. Britney Spears — Toxic
26. Bobby Womack — Sweet Caroline
27. Neil Diamond — Two-Bit Manchild
28. New York Dolls — Trash
29. The Flamin' Groovies — Shake Some Action
30. UFO — Love To Love
31. Thin Lizzy — Cowboy Song
32. Dwight Twilley Band — Looking for the Magic
33. Small Faces — Understanding
34. Pretty Things — She Says Good Morning
35. The Move — Do Ya
36. Eric Burdon & The Animals — A Girl Named Sandoz
37. Scott Walker — Duchess
38. Judas Priest — Diamonds & Rust (Unleashed in the East live version)
39. Lou Rawls — You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine
40. Mulatu Astatqe — Yekermo Sew
41. Graham Parker & the Rumour — Fools Gold
42. Gil Scott-Heron — Lady Day & John Coltrane
43. The Bevis Frond — He'd Be A Diamond
44. The Byrds — She Don't Care About Time
45. Neil Young — Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
46. Merle Haggard — Sing Me Back Home
47. The Everly Brothers — Paradise
48. Fred Neil — The Dolphins
49. Blondie — Dreaming
50. Blue Oyster Cult — In Thee

Taco Tuesday: Frogs-a-Poppin'

Jay n' I mosey on down to our local lily pad to spin the new Alkaline Trio. Toad-tally awesome!

The "Big Hair" Blog Is Live!

Now that it's just a little over three months until my book Big Hair and Plastic Grass drops on May 25, I thought it was time to start up a separate blog for all things related to '70s baseball. It's called Big Hair and Plastic Grass, of course; and as we get closer to the publication date, I will be posting various updates over there regarding upcoming readings, signings and other promotional fun stuff. But I'll also be posting (and writing about) all kindsa '70s baseball-related things over there, ranging from baseball cards to magazine ads to whatever wacky shit I can scare up on YouTube. Please check it out and bookmark that sucka when you get the chance...

A Little Less Conversation (And A Little More Chop-Socky)

Many thanks to my former LA Reader colleague Andy Klein for turning me on to this amazing clip, in which Dolph Lundgren ("Ivan the Russian" from Rocky IV, and star of such deathless flicks as Red Scorpion, The Punisher and Showdown In Little Tokyo drops some serious science before an appreciative audience at Melodiefestivalen 2010. Not only does the man make the most of his one-and-a-half note range on a late-'60s Elvis tune while busting some seriously Young Frankenstein-ian moves with the go-go babes, but he also works out on drums AND demonstrates his martial arts skills. Talk about your all-around entertainers — even Sammy Davis, Jr. couldn't hold a candle to this shit.

Taco Tuesday: Winter Olympics

Jay n' I went to Vancouver to go for the gold, and all we brought back was this damn Story of the Year album.

Doug Fieger, R.I.P.

I recently heard on Handsome Dick Manitoba's radio show that Doug Fieger, leader of The Knack, was in a bad way due to a rough combination of brain and lung cancer — a combination which sadly won out yesterday.

I have to admit that I thought The Knack were kind of jive when they first came out. That leering cover of Get The Knack, the annoying AM radio ubiquitousness of "My Sharona," and their blatant use of Beatlesque visual imagery (which no one would bat an eye at today, but which in 1979 was considered nothing short of sacrilege) all pretty much turned me off. I considered "Good Girls Don't" something of a guilty pleasure at the time, but my love for the tune had more to with its horny adolescent lyrics (which I could certainly relate to) than its innate power-pop craftsmanship.

It wasn't until about seven years later that Bob Mackay, my partner in audio crime in Voodoo Sex Party, my first college band, finally convinced me that Get The Knack was actually a really strong album, maybe even a power-pop classic. We regularly covered "Good Girls Don't" and "Your Number Or Your Name" — the latter of which subsequently wound up in the setlist of my mid-90s L.A. band The Fancy Trolls (as well as on a mixtape for at least one girl I courted), and remains my favorite Knack song to this day.

One weekday afternoon back in 1997, I was in the tiny old Guitar Center in Sherman Oaks, trying out the pink '50s Telecaster reissue that would eventually come home with me. The only other customer in the shop was Doug Fieger, who was systematically (and quite happily) pulling down every budget-priced Strat in the place and trying out licks from "Nowhere Man" on each one — trying to find a sweet-playing bargain, I guess. I wanted to say something to him about how much I loved "Your Number Or Your Name"; but since he'd come off like a pompous douchebag in just about every interview I'd read with him at the height of the Knack's fame, I decided against it.

About six months later, I was writing a big feature story on Weird Al Yankovic for the now-defunct ICON magazine, and my editor suggested that I ring up Doug to get a quote or two about "My Bologna," the "My Sharona" parody that effectively launched Weird Al's career. I did so and, much to my pleasant surprise, Doug turned out to be a really lovely, funny and self-effacing chap, who — aside from laughing all the way to the bank due to the success of both "My Sharona" and "My Bologna" — seemed genuinely amused and flattered by Weird Al's version.

I broke out of journalist mode at the end of the interview to tell him how much I loved that first Knack album, and that I'd covered a couple of his songs in bands of my own; he could have easily been dismissive of the compliment, but he was very sweet and gracious about it. The impression I took away was that of a true music fan and scholar whose own hit record dreams had come true, and who gratefully appreciated and delighted in his good fortune on a daily basis. I really regretted not striking up a conversation with him that day at Guitar Center. Maybe we could have even strummed "Your Number Or Your Name" together. But I'll bet he and George Harrison are working out that twin-guitar "Nowhere Man" lead as we speak.

(I wish there was a video of "Your Number" kicking around out there, but this'll have to do...)

Love To Love

I'm taking a "conscientious objector" stance towards Valentine's Day this year, for a variety of reasons — not least of which, as top playa Smoove B so eloquently puts it in the pages of The Onion, is the fact that the Valentine's industry has got the love holiday "so clogged with fools fumbling over their romantic overtures that it's next to impossible for those who can really make it happen to shine." Word, Smoove.

Plus, I'm too enmeshed in my current period of transition to have much time for any "mance" of the "Ro" variety. Still, incurable romantic that I am, my heart is never entirely immune to the charms of a really good love song. And this week, in the midst of yet another semi-annual rediscovery of UFO's '70s catalog, "Love to Love" came on and once again kicked me in the chest, reminding me of what a truly amazing love song it is. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and declare it the greatest "power ballad" ever recorded.

I started actively listening to hard rock in 1978, when I was a 7th grader in Ann Arbor, and my love for it grew during 1979 when I lived in Los Angeles. But for some reason, I never even heard of (much less heard) UFO until I moved to Chicago at the beginning of 1980. No Place To Run, the band's first studio release since the less-than-amicable departure of guitarist Michael Schenker, had just come out that January; but WLUP-FM (aka "The Loop — Where Chicago Rocks") remained fixated on the older material, regularly spinning the band's hard rock anthems like "Too Hot To Handle," "Doctor Doctor," "Rock Bottom," "Only You Can Rock Me," and of course the live version of "Lights Out," wherein Phil Mogg's final chorus shout-out of "Lights Out CHICAGO" causes the crowd at the old Amphitheater to go completely and utterly batshit.

Like I said, I'd never heard of these guys before I moved to Chicago, but I was immediately taken by the power, punch and general balls-out rocktacularness of UFO. The bruising swagger of their riffs, the sweaty immediacy of their choruses, and the street-wise suss of lead singer Phil Mogg weren't a million miles removed from the English punk rock I'd soon fall completely (if belatedly) in love with. And while they would occasionally stretch songs out past the 10-minute mark — usually to showcase Schenker's dramatic soloing — everything was very carefully structured for maximum impact; when it came to making music, at least, these guys clearly did not fuck around. Only much later would I learn that Mogg and bassist Pete Way had been profoundly influenced in their youth by the Who and the Small Faces, true masters of the well-crafted but hard-rocking pop song.

I can't pinpont the exact moment I first heard "Love To Love"; but in my earliest memory of listening to it, I'm sitting in my small and chilly bedroom in our Mies Van Der Rohe apartment on Lake Shore Drive, watching the inch-thick ice on the inside of my window being slowly melted by the heater underneath, and drifting off into a dreamy reverie about a girl in my 8th grade class that I had a crush on, as the song wafts out of my clock radio. (Several months later, the same girl would ask me to "go" with her, making this quite possibly the first moment of creative visualization I ever experienced.)

At seven minutes-plus, "Love To Love" is definitely a song you can get lost in. (For the record, I'm talking about the version from their 1977 classic Lights Out — the first UFO studio album I ever bought, and still my favorite — and not the live version from Strangers In The Night. Love that version, too, but the original studio waxing is the one that got under my skin first.) It opens with a wordless, multi-part vocal section that sounds like it was lifted from the intro of Queen's "Ogre Battle" and then dipped in liquid 'ludes. Keyboardist Paul Raymond comes in with a haunting, "Tubular Bells"-esque intro, and the band lumbers to life behind him, pounding its way slowly but deliberately forward like an army in winter. And then, at the 2:45 mark — a point at which most of my favorite songs are getting ready to end — the band falls back and cedes the spotlight to Phil Mogg.

With the possible exception of Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, there was no hard rock vocalist in the 1970s more soulful — or more capable of conveying heartache without massively wussing out — than Phil Mogg, and "Love To Love" is the proof. The song's lyrics, once you actually look at them on a page, are simple, brief and almost fragmentary, but Mogg's performance imbues them with such a deep and eloquent ache, there's no need to spell it out further. At the age of 13, I had only the vaguest notion of what "Oh it's been too many times and I can't go back/Night bars, guitars, rundown motels like shacks" even meant, and little clue as to the myriad ways that romantic relationships can sour ("Half the time it could seem funny/The other half is just too sad"). But I certainly already knew what it was like to be lonely and wanting to be loved, and this song (and Mogg's voice) hit that deeply ingrained sense of longing and melancholy like a heavy hammer.

Of course, you can't talk about a classic UFO song without mentioning Michael Schenker — and once again, it's his sense of dynamics and drama that holds the song together, and drives it through its many moods and changes. His first solo (which comes in around the 4:12 mark) is a beautifully restrained, sustain-fueled inversion of the verse melody — not unlike the solo David Gilmour would later lay down on Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," another "slow dance" song from my youth. Schenker finally cuts loose at the 6:45 mark (after Mogg pleads, "I've tried and I need you to stay"), kicking the door down with a massive power chord and unleashing a heart-exploding fusillade that says everything about love, joy, beauty and sadness than Mogg's lyrics can't. It's powerful, profound, and perfect. And you can enjoy the whole thing on the YouTube clip below.

Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.

 

Valentine's Day Advice From Steel Panther

Much as I loved being at baseball camp, I'm bummed that my brief sojourn as a Cub caused me to miss out on interviewing the great Steel Panther. Thankfully, the rest of the ShockHound squad did an excellent job in my absence, getting these '80s hair-metal throwbacks to answer some "very pertinent" questions about love and sex from our readers.

Warning: Profoundly NSFW!

Taco Tuesday: Valentine's Day

Because really, what could be more romantic than Jay n' I talking about the new HIM album?

Epstein Takes The Mound

As promised, here is the video clip of my brief visit to the mound during the Cubs fantasy camp coaches vs. campers "Big Game" at Hohokam Field. A big thank you to Spencer Cook for capturing the moment on video, and to Ron Coomer for egging me on in my Mark Fidrych tribute. (He's the one yelling "Come on Fidrych! Attaboy Mark!" from the coaches' dugout.) Man, that was fun...