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Pop Rock Nation

Author: David Middleton

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #18: Born Sippy

     

    STEALERS WHEEL “Star” b/w “What More Could You Want” (A&M Records #AM-1483-S, 1973)

    Everybody knows Scottish folk/pop/rock duo Stealers Wheel’s Dylanesque 1973 Top-10 smash, “Stuck In The Middle With You,” a classic oldies-station staple even before that director included it in that movie. (Sense a theme here?  Backtrack to 45 RPM #15.  I assure ya, boys, it’s purely coincidental.)  Fewer people, however, know about “Star,” the Wheel’s follow-up single, much less their brilliant 3-LP output.  I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, a little ancient history.

    Like that famous postage stamp with the upside-down airplane (though worth considerably less money), my copy of  “Star” is misprinted.  The B-side label is pressed onto both sides of the disc, giving the illusion that both sides feature the same track, “What More Could You Want.”  Double-A-side 45s were common in the early ’70’s, usually pressed in limited quantity for in-store or radio play.  If one side became worn out or scratched, you could simply flip the disc and play the clean side without having to pony up the bread for a fresh copy.  Sucker that I was, I bought this fake-double-A-side platter at my neighborhood drug store thinking it was the Stealers’ new single.  For months, I played “What More Could You Want” over and over, thinking, “This song is great!  How come it’s not on the radio?  How come it’s not a smash hit?”  Then one day I accidentally flipped it over, and the opening strums of “Star” emerged from my little stereo.  Oops.

     

    A catchy shuffle of the Lennonesque variety, “Star” is 3 minutes of pure shimmering acoustic-guitar pop loveliness and honey-throated vocal harmonies, punctuated with spikes of harmonica, kazoo, woodblock, and bawdy barrelhouse piano.  It spent 3 weeks on the US singles charts, peaking at #29 in March of ’74.  The duo of Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan went on to produce one more brilliant (but underrated and underperforming) album for A&M before sadly parting ways in ’75.

     

    And as for that B-side I played to death after mistaking it for an A-side?  Well suffice to say it rocks.  “What More Could You Want” is a ballsy, two-chord stomper, with tricky time-signature changes and stop-start verses, that could fit right between The Sweet and Badfinger on your next Roots Of Brit-Pop mixtape.  Hell, remove the squiggly synths and beef up the guitars a tad and it wouldn’t be out of place on an early KISS album.  And listen up all you overpaid computer geeks at Activision — break that slide rule out of your pocket-protector and put on your horn-rimmed glasses with tape in the middle now!  With lyrics like, “You got a brand new Telecaster / What more could you want,” this track is a must-have for the next edition of Guitar Hero. So get on it, you slack-ass fucks.

    Both Rafferty and Egan pursued solo careers.  Stateside, Rafferty ended up back in the Top 20 in 1978 with “Right Down The Line” and the sax-fueled classic, “Baker Street” from his multi-platinum United Artists LP, City To City.  The 3-LP Stealers Wheel catalog [Stealers Wheel, Ferguslie Park and Right Or Wrong] has been reissued in the UK by Cherry Red Records, and is well worth seeking out.

    NEXT WEEK: It Came (Crawling To The U.S.A.) From Liverpool!

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #17: Elephant’s Gerald

    KILKENNY CATS  “Attractive Figure” b/w “Of Talk”  (Coyote Records COY111, 1984)

    Back in 45 RPM #6, I wrote about the magical impact of the 7-inch on ’80’s indie rock.  Well here’s another great artifact from that time period.  Even though I was lucky enough to witness their live set a few times, Athens, GA’s Kilkenny Cats have always held great mystery for me.  Even to this day not much is widely known about them, which makes this single all the more fun and entertaining.  So I won’t bore you with silly details about my underage beer-soaked nights at the 40-Watt Club, I’ll just let these Cats’ sexy vibe speak for itself.

    A VU-influenced ode to the joys of taking speed, side-A’s “Attractive Figure” introduces us early to the KC’s ratatat drumming and steel-rake guitars, then propels us head-first into its stop-start verse and soaring chorus.  Great music for shaking off a hard day’s work, or more likely a long week’s finals.  And when the band stops and singer Tom Cheek does that little thing where he breathes in?  Pure sex.

    The disc’s longer B-side, “Of Talk,” sounds like it could be an outtake from the Steve Wynn/Dream Syndicate 1982 classic Days Of Wine & Roses LP.  Walls of distorted guitars bury Cheek’s low Lou Reed-like mumble, creating a dreamy atmosphere perfect to smoke pot (or shoot heroin) to.  Or just kick back & let the music be your drug, which I think is the idea here.

    Unfortunately my little lo-fi YouTube uploads failed this week.  Probably too many grandmas at once trying to upload shots of cats chasing string.  Anyway, there’s virtually no extensive footage of Kilkenny Cats anywhere on the internet.  A travesty if you ask me, but you can catch a quick blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of the band in this trailer for the film ATHENS, GA INSIDE-OUT from 1986.  A great film if you can find a copy, AGIO serves not only as a stellar indie-rock time-capsule, but also as a snapshot of how and why so much unusual and influential music could emerge from such a quiet little Southern college town.

    NEXT WEEK:  A double A-side from what I imagine would be Marvin Nash’s least favorite band.

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #16: Viva Lost Vegans

    STEVE MARTIN  “Grandmother’s Song”  b/w  “Let’s Get Small” (Warner Bros. Records WBS 8503, 1977)

    Novelty songs and comedy records were of no short supply in my house as a kid growing up.  In my Dad’s collection alone, amongst the guitar virtuosos and big western-swing bands, there were scads of 78 RPM platters by the likes of Spike Jones and Kay Kyser’s Kampus Kowboys.  My older brother had the motherlode, of course:  pristine full-length stereophonic LPs of Lenny Bruce, The Smothers Brothers, Woody Allen and Bob Newhart (whose Button-Down Mind we practically memorized;  I can still do the whole “hair-piece” bit), as well as the adult (read: drug-fueled) comedy of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Cheech & Chong and the incomparable Redd Foxx, who’s still cussing a “blue” streak somewhere, I’m sure.

    My personal favorite was the yellow gatefold double-album from Kermit Schaefer’s Pardon My

    Blooper! series.  What’s more funny to a pre-teen boy than professional broadcasters royally blowing it on-air?  Nothing, that’s what.  (And obviously little has changed, as trillions of YouTubers will testify.)  Hell, I can still crack myself up at any time simply by saying, “Wonder For The Best Bread And Rolls” real fast.  Now that’s entertainment!

    Millions of late-night television viewers fell madly in love with Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin in the mid-’70’s, and I was no exception.  In the years pre-VCR, I would place a cassette recorder in front of the single monaural speaker on my little black & white portable and capture the audio portion of their genius performances on The Tonight Show, NBC’s Saturday Night, Fridays and The Midnight Special for review the next day.  And the next.  And for permanent memorization thereafter.  Kaufman’s bits, being less jokey and more visual, ultimately didn’t translate well to audio.  Martin, however, had by this point crafted the surreal audio joke into an art form.  So if Steve Martin was on Saturday Night Live, I was out in the garage after church Sunday morning, with my brother’s banjo slung around my neck and a prop arrow stuck through my head, doing all the bits.  Most notably this one, where a lovely little “life lesson” ditty quickly descends into a clusterfuck of bestial proportions.

    STEVE MARTIN \”Grandmother\’s Song\” on YouTube

    Learn to play this song, and play it for your kids, nephews, cousins or whatever children you have in your family, and they will adore you forever.  Kids absolutely LOVE this song, especially when they get to sing, “Put a live chicken in your underwear.”  Kids will call it “The Chicken Underwear Song.”  “Play ‘Chicken Underwear’!  Play ‘Chicken Underwear’!” they will scream, and you must oblige, as they have now been exposed to the great surreal masterpiece that is Steve Martin’s “Grandmother’s Song,” and their lives will never be the same.  They will never be sad again, as they can always sing these words and laugh hysterically anytime life gets them down.  I know that’s what I do.

    Side B of this short-but-sweet single provides the title cut from Martin’s 1977 debut LP, Let’s Get Small, from which both these tracks are taken.  Clocking in at a scant 1:24, “…Small” stands as Martin’s classic piss-take on America’s ever-popular drug humor;  simply by changing the word “high” to “small,” Martin becomes a comedian playing a comedian doing a bit about drugs.  Not until Mitch Hedberg slipped in then slipped away did we get a wider bird’s-eye view of the comic brain on drugs.  Since I don’t have a clip of this bit handy, I’ll leave you with this somewhat related, yet significantly more chaotic sketch from the same year, pairing Martin with a different kind of wild-and-crazy guy, The Who’s Keith Moon.

    STEVE MARTIN & KEITH MOON on YouTube

    Steve Martin’s career, which extended beyond standup and into acting, writing and music, is chronicled thoroughly in his best-selling 2007 autobiography, Born Standing Up.

    NEXT WEEK: Four attractive young men from Athens, GA release a single.  And the rest is history.