I’ve Never Had a Dream That Made Sweet Love to Me

I guess because I heard so much of it on the radio when I was growing up, I will always have a lot of affection for ’70s soft rock and MOR. I hear it and it puts a big smile on my face. A smile not entirely untainted by condescension, but not defined by it either.

As a little kid I had no real context for this stuff – it was all just music to me. I’d hear, say, the Hues Corporation’s discofied “Rock the Boat” on the radio, and I would love it, and it would never occur to me that this was anything but rock & roll, that it was in any way qualitatively different from the next thing I heard on the radio, like Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” or something. (Which latter, by the way, I rediscovered a couple years ago and just couldn’t get enough of for months. I love it when that happens.)

Anyway, cue “paradise lost” reference.

Now, of course, this stuff all sounds like kitsch, it’s impossibly dated, it evokes powder-blue jumpsuits. I heard Dr. Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together” on some TV show the other night (a ’70s flashback, of course), and I instantly burst out laughing.

Not entirely sure why that is, but it’s not just because the song is corny. Maybe it’s because in “Sharing the Night Together,” Dr. Hook aren’t just selling the promise of tender-yet-robust sexytimes, they’re selling some kind of lifestyle accessory. There’s something essentially aspirational about so much of the era’s soft rock: the fine “lovemaking” (I know, ugh), just the right wine, the hi-fi at a tasteful volume, the barbarians safely on the other side of the gate. The tag “yacht rock” sprang up a few years ago to reflect exactly this kind of thing, right?

On the other hand, Alice in Chains – or even Nirvana – were clearly selling a lifestyle accessory, too, just as much as, say, Alan O’Day or Rupert Holmes. And Alice in Chains sounded like kitsch to me right from the start.

And I think, however ludicrously, of the very end of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, the idyllic suburban dream blasted to pieces and Zuckerman furious: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

• The Hues Corporation, “Rock the Boat” (buy here)
• Dr. Hook, “Sharing the Night Together” (buy here)
• Alan O’Day, “Undercover Angel” removed by request of artist (buy here)

(Limited time only for these ones, I think.)

More Long Space-Age Highway Songs

I can’t stop.

• Loop, “Mother Sky” (buy nowhere but buy the Can original here)
• Buffalo Daughter, “Autobahn” (buy here and buy the Kraftwerk original here)
• Band of Susans, “Guitar Trio” (buy here, maybe, and buy the Rhys Chatham original here)

Highway Nocturne, Addendum

OK, this too:

• Black Box Recorder, “The English Motorway System” (buy here)

Highway Nocturne

I love driving alone on highways late at night (what that says about me I dunno, but there it is), and these days I don’t get a chance to do it nearly enough.

From Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays:

In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverley Hills), Maria drove the freeway.... Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverley Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fury 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.

From Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections:

Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99c Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

From the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”:

I’m in love with Massachusetts. And the neon when it’s cold outside. And the highway when it’s late at night. Got the radio on. I’m like a roadrunner. Alright. I’m in love with modern moonlight. 128 when it’s dark outside. I’m in love with Massachusetts. I’m in love with the radio on. It helps me from being alone late at night, helps me from being lonely late at night. I don’t feel so bad now in the car, don’t feel so alone with the radio on, like a roadrunner.

From Bruce Springsteen’s “Living on the Edge of the World”:

Early north Jersey industrial skyline, I’m an all-set cobra jet creeping through the nighttime. Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone. This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you’re all alone.... Radio, radio, hear my tale of heartbreak, New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape. Got a counter girl at the exit 24 HoJo, down past the refinery towers where the great black river flows.... Radio’s jammed with gospel stations, lost souls calling long-distance salvation. Hey mister DJ, gotta hear my last prayer – it’s a hey ho, rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere.

And this:

• NEU! “Hallogallo” (buy here)

And this:

• Rhys Chatham, “Guitar Trio” (buy here)

Conny Waves, Bettie Serves

De Artsen (“the Doctors”) was a Dutch band that put out, I think, only one album. You could almost say the circling guitar here prefigures the grunge thing, except it’s much better than that, having a Byrdsy chime & being nimble, not flatfooted. (Just for the record, in case you couldn’t tell, grunge did & does make me groan in bored exasperation.) The drums here have a really nice touch, too, a light surface rattle rather than a bottom-end plod. And the bassline anchors the song while still having lots of fun on its own.

• De Artsen, “Conny Waves with a Shell” (1989, buy Conny Waves with a Shell nowhere)

Joost Visser split off from the group and went all lo-fi. I have one of his records and it’s got a thinner sound, a more hushed mood, but you can still hear its close kinship to the Artsen stuff. FYI, the Paradiso and the Milky Way (“Melkweg”) are nightclubs in Amsterdam.

• Joost Visser, “Up to Paradiso Along the Milky Way” (1995, buy Partners in Hair used here, for now)

The rest of de Artsen kind of morphed into Bettie Serveert. I loved Palomine dearly when it came out, and liked each one of their subsequent records a little less until I finally stopped paying attention altogether. Then three or four years ago Michelle gave me a CDR full of mp3s and it included a recent Bettie Serveert record and thanks to some data glitch track “10” of the record appeared before track “1” and so track 10 was the first thing on the CDR and it was this song –

• Bettie Serveert, “White Dogs” (2003, buy Log 22 here)

– which totally blew me away. It takes you on a trip, man, and then those Velvets chords, and then those guitar solos halfway through, holy moly. And now “White Dogs” might be one of my fave songs of the past four years or so. And I’m still not sure I’ve ever listened carefully to the rest of the album.

Might As Well Go for Soda

Found an old half-filled notebook (got a lot of those) that had a list of sodapap brand names that I wrote down during a visit to the Museum of Beverage Containers outside Nashville. This would have been seven or eight years ago. Loved the place, of course, but apparently it’s no longer open. Too bad.

White Light-nin’
Gayla
Mark III
Lady Lee Lemon Lime
Quirst Grape Soda
Polar Birch Beer
Dis-Go Champagne Cola
Chug-a-Lug
Big K
Snowy Peak
Faygo
Soda Barrel
Jolly Treat
Diet Pop-O Cola

And my fave....

Kick-a-Poo Joy Juice

The Kids Are Alright, or, Catching Up

Saw these local boys opening for Page France the other night. They closed their set with this one, which opens their EP (which, by the way, has a really gorgeous cover, but then I’ve always dug on elephant imagery).

• Great Bloomers, “Catching Up” (info here)

It starts off all country-rock wobble, then veers into guitar & vocal lines right out of midperiod Sonic Youth, complete with feedback squalling away (albeit decorously, over in the corner). Nothing new under this particular sun, maybe, but it’s still confident & charming & startlingly full-on realized. Makes me want to hear more from them.

They also did, the other night, “Happy Talk,” announced as a Daniel Johnston cover, though I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they know about South Pacific and all that. Speaking of which, vintage Broadway cast recordings are apparently where Soulseek’s great mp3-trawling reach breaks down. You know, in case you were wondering. But I do have the good old Captain Sensible version on hand, thanks to a homemade comp JJ made me years ago.

• Captain Sensible, “Happy Talk” (buy here)

Page France was the headliner, there in a travelling two-man version. I enjoyed their set – it peaked with a longish version of “Chariot” that spiralled upward – but the show could have really used the added sonic textures that a full band would bring. Especially since PF suffers from a samey sound at the best of times.

• Page France, “Chariot” (buy Hello, Dear Wind here)

Like many of their songs, this one’s overtly religious. But I like that while the Christian stuff is up front much of the time, it doesn’t come off as exoticized or spooky-for-effect. (Not even the one about Jesus crawling through the ground.) Just the opposite: the singer’s everyman nasal whine somehow assimilates all the trumpets & angels & fire until they seem like prosaic facts of life. Which makes him sound like a real believer, not a tourist. Which is refreshing, at least to this tourist.

Sometimes All It Takes to Ease Your Mind...

I like the moody swirl of this one. It returns the theremin from light textural doodling right back to its horror-movie roots, but also works in a lullabye lilt via the vocal melodies. (And that’s a hell of a nice voice, too.)

• Lost in the Trees, “Walk Around the Lake”

It’s from a companion CD for Esopus #8, which, hey kids, also includes a new Final Fantasy track. (According to the Esopus website, each song riffs on e-mail spam, this one in particular on an ink-cartridge message, which you can kind of see in the first couple lines.)

Just to Find Her

A real classic, from 1977. Starry-eyed longing meets sturdy bar-band workmanship meets punk shamble. (With occasional tambourine & handclaps!) You all probably know this already, but what the hell. Nothing more to say, nothing to do but stand back & get out of the way. Enjoy.

• Wreckless Eric, “Whole Wide World” (buy here)