web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Author: David Middleton

  • Special Edition Live: Mark Lawrence

     

    MARK LAWRENCE live at Googie’s Lounge, NYC, October 1st 2008

    On an almost daily basis, I wonder how up-and-coming singer-songwriters manage to do it these days.  You can release your own CD, upload your tracks to the internet, then get in a car with as few people as possible and hit the road, I suppose.  Can you be a one-man business in this modern world, selling your own T-shirts and booking your own gigs and driving yourself from town to town?  I guess.  I’ve often dreamed of getting a CDL and becoming a self-contained trucking & entertainment industry myself, performing my favorite Marty Robbins tunes at truck stops ’round the country after dispatching giant cords of lumber, a pot-bellied pig named Porky my only traveling companion.  Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms nationwide could band together and order my 8-Track hits comps from K-Tel!  Well, a former beauty queen from The Last Frontier can dream, can’t she?  Oh, nevermind…

    The thing is, all these thoughts just wash right out of my mind when I witness an actual performance by a great singer-songwriter, if only because the magic of a great performance tends to sweep me up into a world where the technical aspect of being a performer no longer matters.  Who cares how the magician does the trick, if the illusion is breathtaking enough, right?  Well this is how I felt last Wednesday night when I caught a set by Mark Lawrence at Googie’s Lounge, a small cabaret perched above The Living Room on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan.

    (more…)

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #5: Sex Duplex

    SNAKEFINGER  “The Spot” b/w “Smelly Tongues” (Ralph Records RR7805, 1978)

    “BUY OR DIE!!” screamed the 16th-of-a-page, black & white ad from the back pages of my beloved new issue of Crawdaddy.  Or was it Creem?  Circus?  Trouser Press!  Well who knows…time wipes that stuff out of your memory.  I do remember, after devouring a 3-page Burroughs interview, clipping the little coupon and sending a crisp dollar bill to Ralph Records in San Francisco.  For what exactly, I didn’t know.  But it arrived a few weeks later in a thick cardboard sleeve:  Buy Or Die #1 was Ralph’s first 4-song sampler, and it was pants-shittingly good.  But that’s a story for another time, when I grab it randomly from the big red cabinet.  In the meantime…

    (more…)

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #4: The Immaterial Ocean

     

    Squeeze's "Packet of Three" EP.
    Squeeze

    SQUEEZE  Packet Of Three EP:  “Cat On A Wall” b/w “Night Ride” & “Backtrack”(Deptford Fun City Records DFC 01, November 1979)

    Squeeze needs no introduction, so I’ll just dig right into the meat of this platter.  This is the 1979 reissue of their 1977 debut EP on the Deptford Fun City label from the UK.  Exactly how I ended up with this I’m unsure, but suffice to say it’s one of my favorite little time-capsules from the late-’70’s English punk/pub/power-pop explosion.  Not that I was there to witness it mind you, but some scenes you just have to experience vicariously, right?  Right.  So let’s move onward.

    Besides the obvious sexual implications, the EP’s title refers to the fact that it features 3 tracks:  “Cat On A Wall” adorns side A on its own, while “Night Ride” and “Backtrack” share the flip.  For some reason, the label fails to mention “Night Ride,” but it’s listed on the sleeve, so nevermind.  The disc is pressed on a red vinyl so dark it looks black;  when held up to light it gives off a dark cherry glow.  Nothing could be finer.

    Side A’s “Cat On A Wall” is pure hard-driving power-pop, the kind I wish Squeeze still made.  Granted, there’s lots of bands aping this sound today, but these cats are the MASTERS, let’s face it.  The blistering guitar solos, the octave harmony vocals, the drum solo bordering on Peartgasm, descending into pure acid-fried dissonance and back again, the run-off groove that lasts forever if you let it…who the hell else could get away with this and live to tell about it?  No one besides Squeeze, that’s who.  And the only bad thing I can say about this track is it’s way too short.  Ya gotta play it twice.  (I found a video someone else made, playing the original pressing.  It looks & sounds better than any vid I can make, so here it is.)

    SQUEEZE \”Cat On A Wall\” on YouTube

    “Night Ride” opens the flip-side with a tinny, distorted guitar playing eighth-notes on the open strings from low to high, leading into a raucous hard-rocker.  Then “Backtrack,” which basically sounds like Professor Longhair on steroids and speed, zips in and out of your ears before you can even realize what has hit them.  Former Velvet Underground violist John Cale produced all 3 of these tracks, as well as their entire debut album.  He’s even pictured with the band on the back of this EP’s sleeve.  Now, from what I’ve read, Cale and the band absolutely hated each other and never worked together again, but who the fuck knows or cares?  All I know is that Cale coaxed an amazing sound from these guys in this session, putting the levels up into the red, developing a thick, hard rock for Squeeze to build on.  And build they did.  But they never sounded quite like this again.

    NEXT WEEK:  What happens when a strangely-named English guitar virtuoso meets four mysterious masked-men from Shreveport in swinging 1970’s San Francisco?