A few weeks ago, I was listening to Raphael Saadiq’s album Stone Rollin' and since then, the song “Heart Attack” has been stuck in my head. It’s a propulsive number, opening with a drum roll and steadily building throughout as Saadiq wails/shouts his agony as the bass line thumps. It’s also a supremely retro song (Sly and the Family Stone, anyone?), and hearing it also takes me back to my 8-9-10-year-old self. My friends and I obsessively listened to WABC radio back then and spent our TV viewing time watching Hullabaloo, Shindig, and American Bandstand, dreaming of the day we would be cool teenagers.
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The Prefab Sprout got me thinking about other records I was playing around the same time in my freshman year dorm room, and I landed on Lloyd Cole pretty quickly. I’d be happy to hear anything from the hat trick of ‘80s Commotions’ releases more often than I do, but one would be hard pressed to find a better “here I am” career announcer than “Rattlesnakes,” the title track of the first record. The jangly guitars across the album were right where I lived at the time (it was kind of where we all lived at the time; Peter Buck, call your office), but it was probably the strings and the name-checking of Simone de Beauvoir and the French pronunciation of Eve Marie Saint on “Rattlesnakes” that appealed to my budding late-teen pretension.
Cole went on to make several other good post-Commotions records, but I don’t play any of them as often as is probably warranted. (The record he made with Jill Sobule in a band called The Negatives especially hit home for me as kind of a grown-up version of the earlier work.)
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Hi Chris! Some readers may want to be aware that Seattle’s KEXP [mentioned by our reader yesterday] has an excellent podcast, Music That Matters, which is available on all the major podcasting apps. I’d also like to nominate a Track of the Day from Seattle’s neighbor, Portland: A Million Shards by Pseudosix. A mesmerizing song that never got any attention that I have really liked for years. The band is no more but has has sort of morphed into Ages and Ages. I hope all is well with you.
It will be this coming weekend, when I’m out in Portland visiting family for two weeks and hoping to catch some live music. Bummer I just missed Kinski, an old favorite, but maybe I’ll take my mother to see Snoop Dogg, as one does. If any Portlanders have some good suggestions, drop me an email.
A reader mentions my favorite radio station, in Seattle:
KEXP was playing these guys the other day, and the lyric “the sunset makes a fence out of the forest” made me sit up and listen, and find out who they were: Prefab Sprout. Intentionally terrible name for a really stupendous band. The album this song comes from, Steve McQueen, is one of the all-time under-appreciated greats.
Prefab Sprout are an English rock band from Witton Gilbert, County Durham, England who rose to fame during the 1980s. Nine of their albums have reached the Top 40 in the UK Albums Chart, and one of their singles, “The King of Rock 'n' Roll,” peaked at number seven in the UK Singles Chart. The band had minimal chart success in the United States. Their 1985 album Steve McQueen was released in the US with the title Two Wheels Good and peaked at number 180 in the Billboard 200. Frontman Paddy McAloon has been hailed as one of the great songwriters of his era.
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Frank Sinatra was born one hundred years ago today. NPR’s Scott Simon recalls a “truly magnificent” moment in Sinatra’s complicated life, when a citizens’ group in Gary, Indiana, invited him to perform at a high school that had recently integrated, spurring a bunch of white students to stage a walkout:
November 5, 1945, Richard Durham of the Chicago Daily Defender described Frank Sinatra’s appearance at Froebel High in Gary this way: “Sinatra, blue-suit and red bow-tie, five feet ten inches tall and 138 pounds, the heavyweight in the hearts of the teenagers, stepped to the stage amid weeping, some fainting, much crying, and said, ‘You should be proud of Gary, but you can't stay proud by pulling this sort of strike...’
“When he described his own racial background and told how he was called a ‘dirty little Guinea,’ the students yelled in horror, ‘No, no, no,’ and listened quietly when he told them to stop using the words...” Well, Sinatra used words we don’t say on the air these days.
“The eyes of the nation are watching Gary,” Frank Sinatra told the students. “You have a wonderful war production record. Don’t spoil it by pulling a strike. Go on back to school, kids.”
“When he sang ‘The House I Live In,’” wrote The Defender, “a strange silence fell upon his normally noisy worshippers and for once they screamed only when the songs ended.”
Heads up that The American Life’s next episode is on the life of Frank Sinatra and it airs tomorrow night at 7pm CST. From the promo link: “That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of life’s great mysteries.”
Yesterday I mentioned how the song “Sister Christian” was stuck in my head after rewatching Boogie Nights, so a reader today emailed her own earworm—“Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart,” sung by the recently deceased Scott Weiland, who named his autobiography after one of its main lyrics, Not Dead & Not For Sale. (Watch the song with visual lyrics here.)
Anything good stuck in your head right now? Have a particularly strong memory attached it? Drop me an email. Our reader today recalls:
I was pregnant at the time, and I was in love with Tiny Music. I was stuck on Nirvana’s In Utero, too. That was a coincidence!
Last weekend I rewatched Boogie Nights for maybe the fifth time and have since been unable to get this song out of my head (it provides the backdrop to the intense scene with the coked-up, Russian-roulette playing Alfred Molina):
The band, Night Ranger, revealed just this August the story behind the title of the 1983 song:
Lead singer and bassist Jack Blades revealed who inspired his bandmate Kelly Keagy’s lyrics. “Kelly’s sister’s name is Christy and so he was writing a song about his little sister growing up in a small town in Oregon and cruising up and down the street on a Friday, Saturday night, you know, motoring, everything like that, but it was sister Christy. He’s singing ‘sister Christy oh the,’ and we all thought it was Christian.” Keagy cleared up the confusion, but it was too late—Christian just sounded better to the band. ...
Fans have also debated the meaning behind the song. The band dished a woman from Minnesota once approached them and asked, “’Is that about a nun who sells dope to school kids?’ We were like, ‘yes ma’am’… never destroy the dream.”
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A reader agrees with Spencer that Kendrick Lamar should win Album of the Year at the Grammys:
To Pimp A Butterfly really is a great album. It works so much better as a cohesive whole than as a collection of tracks that I almost can’t even listen to it without starting right at the beginning. And I always feel like I pick up some new insight or angle on it every time I come back to it. Granted, it’s not easy to just put on and have in the background, but when I find the time and space for it I’m never disappointed.
You can listen to the full album here. Spencer characterized the above song as a “brag track like no other, sounding like Parliament Funkadelic covering ‘Smooth Criminal’ (which is, in fact, sampled) as Lamar imagines the Roots slave Kunta Kinte turned into a rap boss.”
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In response to Sophie’s review of TheWiz Live!, “NBC’s best musical yet,” a reader writes:
I loved it, far better than I was expecting. The thing I disliked was being overwhelmed by commercials; it seemed that there were 5-6 minutes of them after every musical number. The ads really were intrusive, breaking up the play too much. [CB note: At least the actors themselves weren’t ads.]
I loved seeing Stephanie Mills in the production, like passing the torch to a new generation. Mary J. Bling as the Wicked Witch of the West was great, the show-stopper being her performance of “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” The actors playing Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion were excellent casting decisions.
For me the weakest member, and the one I was most looking forward to, was Queen Latifah. I guess I was expecting a lot more, and in my opinion, her performance was one of the flattest—not a lot of emotional difference between her first scenes and the final scenes.
Overall though, a fine performance and I’m glad to hear it’s Broadway bound. With good casting and some tweaks, it’ll be a show to see when in NYC.
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There was a lot of debate in the comments section of Spencer’s piece covering the death of Scott Weiland, a debate that mostly centered on whether Weiland’s Stone Temple Pilots were more poseurs or pathfinders:
I’m sorry the dude died, especially if he had kids or whatever, but let’s not pretend he was any sort of legit artist. The guy was the the most successful poseur of the 1990s. Whatever sound and style was the thing at the time is what he and his bands were. He was Jared Leto without the acting.
A less harsh critic of Stone Temple Pearl Jam is a reader who goes by GillianAndersonCooper, using the avatar below:
Well, for the band’s first big single, “Plush,” Weiland was doing an Eddie Vedder impression. There is no other way to describe it. Sure, he wasn’t the only one, but his was the most egregious. He even appropriated all of the tics and mannerisms for the video.
The band did subsequently evolve in another direction though.
Another agrees:
Being a Seattle native, I was not a fan when STP first broke. I considered them to be just another Seattle Sound wannabe band. But they quickly crafted their own sound. Fast forward two years to 1994: The STP show on July 30th at the Gorge Amphitheater is still one of my favorite concerts of all time.
Another reader contends that “STP was never grunge. I remember Weiland criticizing grunge artists as a bunch of shoe gazers.” Another responds with a question:
But what is grunge?
I would characterize it as a period of early ‘90s alternative rock that took inspiration from ‘70s hard rock and usually featured sludgy guitar sounds and riffs and raspy vocals. Stone Temple Pilots definitely fit the description, at the very least with Core and Purple.
I’ve pretty much heard the case for how every band referred to as grunge wasn't really grunge. “Alice in Chains weren’t grunge; they were just heavy metal.” “Hole weren’t grunge; they were punk.” And so on. Bands like STP, Pearl Jam, and Silverchair did move away from that sound to varying degrees, but I would say early STP were pretty definitive of grunge, even a little generic.
Here’s one more reader defending the band’s evolution:
I’m genuinely curious as to what “thing at the time” they were mimicking on the Tiny Music album. Something Britpop-ish, perhaps? I can’t think of an applicable American trend at the time, offhand. And regarding Velvet Revolver [which Weiland was a part of], they seemed like a classic rock throwback than a group jumping on a current bandwagon.
I’m not suggesting that Weiland was some sort of avant-garde visionary, but aside from very early STP, I think that he and his bandmates deserve just a bit more credit for finding their own sound.
Lastly, a throwback appreciation from a pair of early ‘90s music critics:
St. Lucia frontman Jean-Philip Grobler grew up in South Africa, but he and his band’s global ties take the idea of an “international band” to utter extremes. Jean’s wife/bandmate Patti Beranek was born in Germany, her parents are Taiwanese and Czech, she and Jean met at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (founded by Paul McCartney), where all of their best friends were Norwegian. The couple summers in Greece every year, and they had representatives from over 22 countries at their wedding. They’ve performed everywhere from Mexico to Australia to Belgium and Anguilla. This is their first new song in two years.
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