Made-to-Order Playlists - 11/23/2008

(Here's another playlist from my project to gain good karma so I can continue to mentally slay the bus cretins. More to follow - I need all the help I can get; there's sooo many bus cretins.)

"5 David Bowie songs that Lou Reed should do covers of", submitted by Chad Nevett

"This is Not America"
"Fashion" (and Lou, please phrase 'the' better than "thuh-uh")
"Blue Jean"
"Breaking Glass"
"Dancing in the Street" (duet with wife Laurie Anderson)

Made-to-Order Playlists - 11/18/2008

(Here's the first playlist of my project to gain good karma so I can continue to mentally slay the bus cretins. More to follow - I need all the help I can get; there's sooo many bus cretins.)

"Top 10 songs sung by a female that you would want to cover at a Karaoke session with a real band behind you." submitted by Paul Caputo

"You Only Live Twice", Nancy Sinatra
"Love Song for a Vampire", Annie Lennox
"Come Away With Me", Norah Jones
"The World Spins", Julee Cruise
"Tired Eyes", Containe
"Love is Here Where I Live", Everything But the Girl
"Saints", The Breeders
"Time the Avenger", The Pretenders
"Shame", Low
"Up the Neck", The Pretenders
"Protection", Massive Attack (sung by Tracey Thorn)
"Tom's Diner", DNA (sung by Suzanne Vega)
"Misguided Angel", The Cowboy Junkies
"Bad Connection", Yaz

O.K., that's 14. Sue me.

How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Lads from Manchester

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first singles by The Smiths, who I've come to declare the greatest English band of the 1980s (R.E.M. and Talking Heads would tie for the American award) and with Steely Dan, my 2 favorite acts of all time.

It also marks the 20th year of my discovery of the band. Now, do the math here: the band only existed for 5 years, at the outside. That's right, I never listened to them while they were current, a mistake I've made up for by listening to them exclusively for weeks at a time over the last 15 years. Which causes the wife grief to no end.

It's not that I didn't try to like them while they were "alive". OK, I spent the first two years hating on them, calling them and their ilk the "aaaahhh" bands - buncha morose mother(crockers) if I'd ever heard any.

But, in 1986, I came across "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" on WLIR, or WDRE (it was both, more than once, I think) and liked it. Now, there were two girls that worked at the same Dunkin' Donuts that I did and I'm gonna etch them into history right here: Anne Marie Tynan and Alicia Montero. They loved, or should I say, lived, what was in the 1980s called "college rock": Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure, U2 (yes, Virginia, there was a time when Pope Bono wasn't in every issue of Time and Newsweek), Psychedelic Furs, the Jesus and Mary Chain and our lads from Manchester, the Smiths. At this point, the Smiths had eclipsed U2 in their minds because, to them, U2 had gotten away from them - they weren't theirs and theirs alone anymore.

In Almost Famous, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, playing rock critic Lester Bangs, nails the love for music with one line: "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." And that was these two, who I think fondly of from time to time. They are the older sistrrs to the girl in that Pixies doc.

Knowing that, I asked them, "Hey, what's that song about the double-decker bus and the 10-ton truck?" As God is my witness, they looked at me with the straightest face and said they had no idea.

But, they had to know. How couldn't they know? Of course they knew. But they weren't going to let Joe Springsteen Fan with his cracked, faded Asia shirt in to their little world. No way is this guy, who's a little older, with a little more money going to get our ticket to the show. Not when we've put our lunch money together for two weeks to buy an import 12" of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", with its four live tracks from the Oxford Apollo, 3/18/85. Fuck him; let him work harder.

And I let it slide.

Until 1988, when I went over to my friend Joey's house. His younger sister had had a party the night before, and when I came downstairs, he says to me, almost incredulously, "You gotta hear this; someone left this in the cassette player last night." And out of the speakers came the chiming opening chords to "Ask".

Who is this, I asked. Cassette cover in my hand - "Louder than Bombs", a stateside singles/B-side compilation designed to catch us stupid Americans up on what we could have been listening to instead of Baltimora, Corey Hart and the Power Station for the last 3 years.

And we listened. And we got it. And we realized that maybe, just maybe there was a little too much Journey, a few Kenny Loggins songs too many in our lives.

So Anne Marie and Alicia, if you're out there, I figured it out for myself. If all worked out well, your kids are listening to A Place to Bury Strangers and looking crosseyed at the squares who think the Strokes are still cutting edge.

Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ, indeed.

A Quick One While I'm Here

As I was on the bus, feeling very...uncharitable towards my fellow man, I took solace, as I always do, in my beloved iPod. And to combat the feelings of misanthropy toward the cretins, um, people, I decided to give back to you, dear reader, in the following way.

You make the playlist. That's right, you title a list - themed, of course (we're literary here!) - and I'll create it from my library.

It could be - "10 Great Guitar Rave-Ups from the 1980s", "12 Songs the Beatles Couldn't Do on Their Best Day" or "15 Terrible Songs from Otherwise Great Albums".

Tell your friends. List early and list often.

Have fun!!

loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies

loudQUIETloud (2006, Cantor and Galkin) is a documentary chronicling the 2004 reunion tour of the Pixies. It's nicely paced, with some great character arcs like bassist Kim Deal's dependency on her sister Kelley's presence, as they support each other through sobriety and guitarist Joey Santiago's anchoring himself to the world outside the band by working on a documentary score and webcamming with his family. Actually, all four members rely on something outside the band to get them through this period of time; there's little to no interaction with each other. It's as if they see this as a job, something to get through. That's not to say that they don't do their job well; the performances start off wobbly, but become inspired as the tour moves on.

There's a great sequence in the film, though, that truly makes it worth watching. The filmmakers find a pair of girls, no more than 15 or 16 years old, making them born just as the Pixies were hitting their peak. One of them happened upon a book called Brave New Girl which has a character who's heavily into the Pixies. From this, she got all the Pixies' music and is now in a Pixies cover band. The scene when she gets to meet the band is such an intimate moment for her, I actually felt like a voyeur watching it.

If they left it at that, it would stand as a great film moment. But we get two more beats that play out beautifully. After she meets the band, she slips Kim Deal her highlighted, read-to-death copy of the book. Cut to: back on the bus, Deal flips through it ever so gently, totally aware of the talisman-like power it had on this young girl.

Finally, as the credits start to roll, the filmmakers give us a glimpse of the girl's cover band, reverently playing "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and then splice it seamlessly into the actual band's version. I can't count how many people I've heard say were influenced by the Beatles but I do know I've gagged nearly every time, barely able to get out, "Yeah, who the fuck wasn't?". (Sometimes it's, "I find I stay alive by breathing." but that doesn't get the desired response.) Here, we see how a band takes hold of one's imagination, passion, thoughts - hell, every damned waking moment - without a single cliche. When kids (mostly girls) are 8, 9, 10 they eat, sleep, drink and breathe acts like the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana. I've got zero problem with that; quite the contrary, it's a shame how far fewer people develop that kind of passion for bands as they get older. Maybe it's just nature weeding out the true believers.

I hope for two things after watching this doc: that girl never loses the passion and that I get to hear her play someday.