Somebody’s Mom.

For no reason whatsoever, here’s The Pointed Sticks - guest starring Linda Manz - in one of my favourite movies, “Out of the Blue” (1980).



A belated RIP to Dennis Hopper, for this incredible film if not much else.

More Pointed Sticks:



Whata group!

Labels: Pointed Sticks, power pop, punk, videos

Chiltonism III:
In Touch With All The Chicks.


>> Alex Chilton – Shakin’ the World <<

Writing about Alex Chilton’s early solo work, it is easy – TOO easy – to end up portraying it as a punkoid rejection of the flawless power-pop he helped create on the first two Big Star records.

That’s the version that’ll go down in legend, but just like any other generalisation you might try to nail to this man’s supremely weird career, it ain’t quite so.

Chilton didn’t abandon the power-pop calling after the SisterLovers holocaust – indeed, recordings like “Shakin' The World” (also found on “Dusted in Memphis”) make me think he understood it better than anyone.

Y’see, what killed power-pop as a viable creative force stone-dead almost immediately after it’s ’79-’80 christening at the font of Greg Shaw & Bomp! Magazine wasn’t its inherent conservatism (just look at the parallel garage revival – thirty years young and still a ton o’ fun), but rather the curse of effort.

All those fucking skinny tie Rickenbacker guys – they’re workin’ too hard, as Paul Collins conveniently put it in one of The Nerves best tunes. Sweating blood over their perfect three minute ditty, mortgaging their house for studio time til they’ve produced the fucking thing to within an inch of its life, until we feel their exhaustion, their dedication to the cause seeping through each note; until it becomes a bloody chore to listen to, in short.

I ask you, is that what the magic of pop songs and loud guitars boil down to? Did The Who spend 36 straight hours thrashing out the best possible arrangement for “The Kids Are Alright” before they laid it down?

God love ‘em, but it’s a lost cause.

Chilton knew this, years before such try-hards became an active hazard. That’s why he took “Shakin’ The World”, an anthemic pop killer to rival anything from #1 Record, fitted it out with an obtuse set of lyrics gently parodying Madison Avenue advertising men and knocked it off in one take, then apparently chucked it in the vault and forgot about it before going off to hang out with Tav Falco or whatever, knowing instinctively that we’d all hear it and love it sooner or later.

And lord, was he ever right to keep it quiet. Just IMAGINE what the sub-Tom Petty brigade would have done to this one, in ‘praise’ of their imagined Big Star mentor. They’d have bludgeoned the life out of it. All those uncertain pauses ands sneaky almost-collapses – bulldozed. All those hilarious, deadpan lines (“we’re practicin’ bending spoons..”) – gurned up with comedy signposts til they wouldn’t raise a grin from a chimp.

As it is, Chilton’s “Shakin' The World” is a lithe, creeping, wonderful star-gazing thing, and I’d contest there’s more pure power-pop essence to be found in the bit where he slurs “we’re in touch with all the chicks, all the chicks on Lex..” than in the whole back catalogue of, say, The Plimsouls or whoever.

(I shouldn't say that - I quite like The Plimsouls...)

Labels: Alex Chilton, power pop

Rock N' Roll Girl.

It's 1980, and The (Paul Collins) Beat are chasin' the dream:



2008 and they're still hot on the trail:



Glorious failures..?

LIFERS. : D

Labels: awesomeness, Paul Collins Beat, power pop, videos

This Post is Brought to you by the Gods of Awesomeness.

I'm moving house in a couple of days, and as such, haven't had time to write anything.

That means another lame video post, but thankfully we have three of the flat-out AWESOMEST pop videos I've seen in all my days, all of them of a power-pop/bubblegum/punk persuasion, and all of them hailing from that golden year for such things, 1981.

First, The Modernettes (not to be confused with UK post-punk band The Mo-dettes, who are also ace), doing 'Barbra'. What can I possibly say.... I think about half the youtube playcount on this one is me.



The B-Girls - 'High School Dance'. Again, just The Greatest. Great tune, fantastic lyrics, big guitar riff, killer backbeat - I so want to cover this song. Sadly, I don't think the B-Girls ever actually recorded it in this form - or at least, the only version of it on the retrospective CD of theirs I ordered immediately after watching this video is an acoustic muck-around, retitled "Boys Are Drinking". Even sadder, most of their other material isn't half as rocking as this clip, with most of their studio recordings serving to reinforce the worst women-in-rock cliches by just sounding really weedy and... 'candy-assed', I believe is the term, whilst the sleevenotes seem to imply that they were more notable at their day for the amount of time they spent hanging out with Johnny Thunders, Stiv Baters, The Clash etc. than for their own achievements. It's particularly galling to discover that their version of "Who Says Girls Can't Rock?" (as memorably covered by The Riff Randells) just plain... doesn't. Oh well. Such is life. For these three minutes on Canadian TV at least, they RULED SUPREME. Dennis The Menace jerseys, white cowboy boots, Rickenbacker - now there's a look you can't fuck with.



A dead cert for "best ever power-pop band from Milwaukee", here's the oddly-named SHIVVERS, with "Please Stand By"! (I can only assume there must have been another local group called Shivers or something.) I know I'm only restating what I said at the top of the post, but man this video is awesome. What a singer! It's like if Lydia Lunch had packed it in and joined Blondie instead! Look at her eyes in the close-ups! Amazing! And what a song! Number one w/ a bullet! And say what you like about the guy with the hangglider collar and the red stratocaster, he can't hear you, he's too busy livin' the dream.



CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE: I first saw the Modernettes video over at Last Days Of Man On Earth, as part of a fucking fantastic Canadian punk video post. (There's a similarly great round-up of Japanese punk on the front page at the moment too - check out Friction and The SS - wowza.) Also, my friend Pete sent me links to the B Girls and Shivvers videos, thus meaning nothing in this post is actually the result of my own scholarly pop-culture type investigations.

Labels: 1980s, awesomeness, lameness, power pop, punk, Shivvers, the B Girls, the Modernettes, videos

Guitar Romantics: The Exploding Hearts

Ok, so they’re a pretty ubiquitous presence in certain strands of US punk culture. Ok, so I’ve had their sole LP ‘Guitar Romantic’ stuffed into my Mp3 player for a good while now, and have been aware of their work for far longer.

But I’d be lying if I tried to claim I haven’t been listening to The Exploding Hearts just about every damn day on the journey to or from work for the past month or so.

Every day it’s the same: struggle toward or away from the front door, rub my tired eyes, and contemplate sticking on some of the less familiar records I’ve stuck on the portable music box in order to give them more of a listen. And everyday, it’s another quick blast of “Sleeping Aides...” or “Modern Kicks” that wins out. Just a couple of tunes, I tell myself, just to get me going, then I’ll put something else on. Then I’ll proceed to listen to the whole album twice through over the course of the day. I think I could probably recite all of the lyrics by now, and whistle the solos. If I could whistle, which I can’t, thank christ. But I could probably do my best to imitate the bits of lingering feedback and ‘phew - we just finished the song’ noise at the end of each track instead. (Despite being as tight a band as you could hope to encounter whilst their songs were actually in progress, these guys sure knew the value of ploughing toward a clattering, collapsible, ad-libbed rock n’ roll ending, and I bless them for it daily.)

Anyway. ‘Guitar Romantic’. First issued by Dirtnap records in January 2003. I swear to god, it’s fucking perfect. It sounds EXACTLY like a record called “Guitar Romantic” by a band called “The Exploding Hearts” should sound. I guess the last song goes on maybe about a minute too long, but aside from that, I love every single thing about it.

The Exploding Hearts may have relied on a simple formula, one that SOMEONE was bound to make their own at some point, but man, what a formula it is, and never before or since has a band launched into it with the energy and guts and 100% hit rate that these guys did.

So, for the uninitiated, what are the ingredients we’re looking at here?

Well:

1. Classic, perfectly formed power-pop songs, tunes that could stand up to – and indeed beat the hell out of – just about anything on those Rhino Poptopia comps, topped with howled, heartfelt lyrics about girl trouble, and drugs, and schoolyard riots, and other such travails of being a punk kid, but, well, mostly girl trouble to be honest, and why not? Every one’s a winner.

Now, If there’s one problem with ‘power-pop’ as a genre, it’s that it’s often played by embittered old dudes going through the motions, but not so here, as we add;

2. Gallons of snotty, hormonal punk rock energy, coming straight from that exact same place as The Undertones, Circlejerks, Ramones, the first few Replacements records and early Green Day, where the puerile crashes headfirst into the sublime, where mad desperation hitches a ride on top of stoned suburban ennui, where every sound this band makes simultaneously cries out “FUCK YOU!” and “I LOVE YOU!” and *nothing* in-between.

3. A wild, musically accomplished band with energy levels through the roof who could, and did, absolutely play their asses off in pursuit of melodic rocking perfection.

4. A truly ridiculous ‘everything in the red’ production aesthetic, executed in the same spirit as Iggy’s remix of ‘Raw Power’. The first time I played ‘Guitar Romantic’ through my earphones, I thought there was something wrong with it – vocals all distorted and guitars clipping all over the place. Then I realised that it was simply more AWESOME than my poor equipment was accustomed to. Like, finally, someone made an album where the guitars are mixed at right level! Adam Cox’s humbucker powerchords get full spectrum dominance whilst Terry Six’s freaking *beautiful* overdriven Rickenbacker leads cleave in over the top even louder, like sickly candy from pop heaven. The vocals are cranked and compressed to shit in order to remain comprehensible over the racket, and sound all the better for it. And, miraculously, the rhythm section still comes through loud and clear too, sounding like they’re just thumping away harder than ever to stay on-message above all the distortion. THIS, I put it to you musicians and audiophile dudes, is the way a great rock n’ roll record should sound in the 21st century.

And that’s that I guess. I may be getting more reactionary in my musical tastes as I get older, but fuck it. Life as expressed through sound doesn’t get much better than this. To have been involved in the making of this music – even just making the tea (or handing out the airplane glue) – would I think justify a deeper sense of achievement than any foolhardy artistic ambitions the likes of you or I may strive day and night to fulfil.

There’s now another Exploding Hearts CD on the market too, thanks again to the folks at Dirtnap (also home to other fine power/pop/punk/garage outfits such as The Riff Randells and The Carbonas, so why not give ‘em a look), and I went out and bought it from Rough Trade the other week to help make up for my wanton freeloading of ‘Guitar Romantic’. Called ‘Shattered’, it collects the rest of the band’s recordings in a pleasantly no nonsense fashion, comprising eight non-LP songs taken from singles, session outtakes etc., and a few alternate (and on the whole less satisfactory) mixes of the album material.

Perhaps inevitably, the stuff on ‘Shattered’ isn’t quite so good as the motherlode of ‘Guitar Romantic’. The tunes occasionally veer a bit too far toward a polite power-pop-by-numbers blueprint, and lack the raucous feeling and overloaded production, but by anyone else’s standards it’s still absolutely top stuff, featuring some of the band’s best pure punk moments in the form of ‘(Making) Teenage Faces’ (“Someone shot the principal / straight through his head / school is out forever / and we’re glad that he’s dead!”), and a supremely snotty take on F.U.2’s uber-generic punk classic ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ (“it’s better than kissin’!”), whilst the self-explanatory ‘Walking Out On Love’ is a two minute blast of straight to tape perfection and ‘We Don’t Have To Worry Anymore’ is one of the group’s best compositions.

Those unfamiliar with The Exploding Hearts may have picked up on the fact that I’ve used the past tense pretty definitively a few times when discussing them in this post. That’s because on July 20th 2003, between some place and some other place on the way to a show, their tour van crashed. Pretty badly. The details don’t really matter, the point is: three quarters of the band – Adam Cox (guitar/vocals), Jeremy Gage (drums) and Matt Fitzgerald (bass) - never regained consciousness.

Pretty devastating and upsetting stuff, even five years later on the other side of the world.

But, crass though it may be to draw a conclusion like this from such an obvious tragedy, it must be said: for the world at large, a better legacy for a rock n’ roll band is hard to imagine. As one of rock’s greatest survivors ironically reminds us from time to time, rust never sleeps, and, barely out of high school, these guys had the look, the sound, the energy DOWN. About seventeen original songs immortalised on tape, every one a lightning bolt of emotion, confusion, noise and triumph, then a handful of now-legendary live shows, followed by a sudden, fiery demise. Beat that, punks.

You might be *slightly* cheered to know that surviving band member Terry Six has stayed true to the power-pop cause, and now fronts the thoroughly ‘70s-tastic Nice Boys. (And I kinda dig ‘em actually - they’ve got real great stuff going down on a pure retro bubblegum tip, but it’s all a bit too determinedly UN-PUNK for me to really love, y’know..?)

Anyway, It’s no wonder the 'Hearts have gained a hefty cult following in the states, with bands like The Busy Signals and Sleeping Aides & Razorblades taking their names from their songs (the latter have since renamed themselves The Nica-Teens – fairly sensibly, I’d venture to suggest) and certain sections of the internet are nigh-on overflowing with tribute videos, cover versions and the like. But, in the UK at least, The Exploding Hearts still none too well known, so hopefully I’m not just wasting time going over old ground with this post.

When trying to decide which two tunes from ‘Guitar Romantic’ to post for you, I might as well have pinned the song titles to the wall and thrown darts at them, such is the overall quality of the songs therein. In fact I might do that anyway, it sounds fun, but, if pushed, I think these are my two faves.

Download and play loud.

I’m A Pretender

Throwaway Style

And, thanks to the wonders of Youtube, you can also spend some quality time with one of the best rock n’ roll bands of the 21st century thus far, thanks to these two videos from one of their last shows, at the Bottom Of The Hill club in San Francisco. Fantastic stuff. I believe I achieved some sort of state of oneness with the universe somewhere between ‘I’m A Pretender’ and ‘Boulevard Trash’ in the first video.

Put ‘em on full-screen and play loud.

Part one (Modern Kicks / I’m A Pretender / Boulevard Trash):



Part Two (Busy Signals / Sleeping Aides & Razorblades):

Labels: power pop, punk rock, The Exploding Hearts, videos