That Bobby Vee song is perfectly pleasant, but I couldn't get past the fact that it was released the same year as "Bringing it All Back Home," "Rubber Soul," and "A Love Supreme."
I love that performance so much, too. There's a moment not long after the trumpet solo where Linnell kind of closes his eyes and has a cryptic smile, like he's willing himself to remember this moment - that if if all falls apart tomorrow, he still got to play on the Tonight Show with Johnny's whole band.
(I also like to think that this performance gave them the idea that, "Yeah, maybe it'd be fun to put together a band for touring and recording. We need some guys named Dan.")
And it's 31 fuckin' years later, and the guys still like to make music together.
This may be the single album I have listened to more than any other in my entire life. So many great, eclectic, lyrically oblique songs. Birdhouse in Your Soul is a song I can listen to on repeat.
From this vantage point, I can't tell if that was filmed by a friend of theirs who borrowed a camera from the local Cable Access channel, or if it was professionally shot to intentionally look like it was filmed by a friend with borrowed equipment.
In one way, he treated the Rolling Stones like a gig- y'know, OK for now, but we'll see if something better comes along.
But in another way, he was the heart and the spine of the group. I hope they just cancel the tour now, maybe put out one more album if they've got some stuff recorded, and then officially call it quits.
I wonder if the over-emphasis of the lyrics helped them come through more clearly on 1930's-'40s radios.
I'm always fascinated by how music changes to sound better on the equipment of the day - some songs were just engineered perfectly for AM radio, and don't sound quite right on CD, for example.
Nothing lower than a 6, and no songs I needed to play to remind myself what they sounded like. "What Have You Done for Me Lately" is the only 10 of the bunch (but Weird Al's "Living With a Hernia" would be one as well.)
MDMA has become completely associated with dance music and electronica, but the Texas scene that Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians was positively awash in it - there was a window in the '80s where it was sort-of not illegal, and (reportedly) bars were giving it away because patrons drank like fish on it.
My own late-80s/early-90s Ecstasy parties tended much more towards the cuddle-puddle end of things than any kind of High-NRG raves.
I was shocked to find out that "Sealed with a Kiss" is from 1962. It sounds so much like it was influenced by early Beatles and Beach Boys, but I guess it was a little ahead of it's time.
At some point in this whole debacle, the Attorney General of Durham, NC decided to rule the album obscene as well. At this time, I was working in a warehouse for a local chain of CD stores (they were the first stores in the area to specialize in CDs. We didn't sell any cassettes or vinyl.) The order was set to go into effect at midnight. So with that day's deliveries, we asked all of the stores to pack up all of their copies of Nasty As They Wanna Be and send them to the warehouse.
After the stores were closed, I bought one of the copies out of the warehouse just before I went home. So I believe I bought the last legal copy of Two Live Crew's album in Durham County, NC.
I remember hearing "Head Like A Hole" at an end-of-the-semester party at my dorm in December of 1989, and thinking "Well, that's it. The '80s are over."
I may make a few extra accounts so that I can upvote this multiple times. Probably the first time anyone has ever connected either NKOTB or the Power Rangers with Sondheim.
I love the song (this should be the Sondheim song everyone knows, not "Send in the Clowns) and I love the PSBs, but the combo comes off as rushed and thin to me.
I think Lambada would be much more remembered and mocked (or re-appraised) today if the Macarena hadn't come along to replace it with a Latin dance craze that drunk people at weddings could actually do.
9, 7, 9
Jewel - The song is a 7, but it gets two bonus points for...reasons.
Jaynetts - Nice, but not much more.
Alan Sherman - A comedy classic of my childhood that still gets referenced today. Hugely influential, even if the humor has worn thin.
I've always imagined at some point around 1977 Paul Mccartney must have uttered the sentence "I don't have to. I'm a Beatle." I just don't know what the circumstances were.
It's weird - a Bobby Brown song, or another song performed by someone odious or known for odious behavior, will almost always lose at least a point or two from me. But despite "Be My Baby" being as much a Phil Spector song as a Ronettes song, I can't give it less than a 10, and the same would be true of any Phil Spector-produced song.
That may be true of the specific choreography for the Fosse video, because it was designed for film, but Fosse, when choreographing for the stage, could absolutely make the audience focus exactly where he wanted, even with amazing things going on to the sides, in the back, etc. You may have the rest of the dancers at the edge of your awareness, but unless you're putting conscious effort into fighting it, you're watching what he wants you to watch.
My younger child has been obsessed with the Jagged Little Pill Original Broadway Cast Album, and I find no reason to listen to any of those versions of the songs over the Alannis originals (which I love.) Kind of drives me crazy. It's almost...ironic.
Oh Mercy was the first new album to come out from Bob after I was introduced to him in college, and it's still one of my favorites.
It is now, chronologically, part of the first half of his recording career.
A (blind item) gossip site I am inexplicably devoted to has strongly implied that a lot of ugly shit went down behind the scenes of Kids Incorporated, and that the producers were far more devoted to making that ugly shit go down than to making a TV show.
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