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  • The Top 100 Songs of the ’00s, #99: “If You’re Gone”

    matchbox

    I’m not entirely into sharing anecdotes about my personal life on this site, but this song has very special significance for me. It was late spring 2000 when I fell in love, really for the first time. It was also late spring 2000 when “Mad Season by matchbox twenty” came out. I can remember sitting on MetroNorth together the night I bought “Mad Season” (on cassette!). We listened to it together going home that night, on my Walkman, one headphone in each of our ears. I can remember the lyrics of “If You’re Gone” resonating deeply with me, as I found myself marvelling at this new relationship but also frightened half to death that I’d screw it up. As things turned out, the relationship was over by mid-autumn. I did indeed screw it up, and everything about that song reminded me of my gargantuan fuck-up, to the point where I was at a convention where a label rep was premiering the video, and I had to leave the room while the video played. The rawness is gone all these years later-I can actually listen to the song now without tearing up, and my memories of the relationship are focused more on the positive aspects, especially now that we’re friends again. Sometimes the most random songs speak to you-I’d never in a million years think that a matchbox twenty song would remind me of the greatest lost love of my life, but here we are, and here it is…

    Thanks Rob Thomas for writing a beautiful song. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. Confession time’s over.

  • First Look: Asher Roth “Be By Myself”

    OK, I’ll admit it. I don’t hate Asher Roth. At the very least, I give him props for not trying to be something he isn’t (hear that, 2009-era Eminem?). Maybe it’s because I hang out with a bunch of college kids, but “I Love College” touched my guilty-pleasure nerve and led “Asleep in the Bread Aisle” into my record collection. The album’s not great (although I wouldn’t call it my most regrettable music purchase of 2009), but Asher makes a pretty decent bid to avoid one-hit-wonderdom with his new single “Be By Myself”, which features the Round Mound of Rap, Cee-Lo Green. Man, despite the fact that this is nominally Asher’s video, don’t you wanna hear Cee-Lo rap again? (yeah, we know he can sing, but he can rhyme better…seriously…he might be the most underrated emcee *ever*).

    Anyhow, check out the video and let us know what you think…

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #36: Shag Motor Pony

    Sad Cafe's "Run Home Girl" single

    SAD CAFE  “Run Home Girl”  b/w  “Feel Like Dying”  (A&M Records #2111, 1978)

    What do the words “Manchester, England” mean to me?  (Football hooligans and songs from Hair aside.)  Probably the same things you’re thinking:  Factory Records, Joy Division, Crispy Ambulance, New Order, The Smiths, The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Happy Mondays, John Cooper Clarke, Tony Wilson, 24-Hour Party People, that damn “Blue Monday” 12-inch, The Stone Roses, The Verve, The Hacienda, the whole “MADchester” proto-rave scene that seemed to dominate MTV before the grunge (and the E) took hold.  Oh, OK…and that band with the two snotty brothers who verbally gob all over each other constantly…what was their name?  I forget.  Anyway…

    Radio-friendly adult-contemporary soft-rock wasn’t exactly pouring out of Manchester in the late ’70’s, but a shiny little slice of it can be found in Sad Cafe’s woefully underrated catalog, exemplified here by this single taken from their 1978 LP, Misplaced Ideals.  I probably would’ve never heard of this record had it not been for a late-night radio call-in show that invited listeners to win prizes by answering trivia questions.  I can’t recall what question I answered, but I remember being invited to show up the next day at a local record shop to claim my prize, which was a fresh (and very sweet-smelling, if I remember correctly) copy of Ideals, plus this single (for some unknown reason).  And claim it I did.

    Sad Cafe's "Misplaced Ideals" LP (US artwork)

    Side A, “Run Home Girl,” is glossy, sexy, sax-driven, and chock-full-o’-hooks like all good ’70’s AM-radio classics should be.  It reached the lower echelons of Billboard, and, several weeks after my victorious contest win, briefly became a pop radio staple, keeping its momentum throughout 1979.  Back then, the glistening guitars of “Girl” sounded ace blasting from a dashboard on a hot summer day (while sucking on a lime Slurpee, of course) alongside tracks like “Rich Girl” and “Smoke From A Distant Fire.”  Today, I hear elements of this track in young groups like Phoenix, who are mining the lesser-exploited aspects of ’70’s pop for a new generation.

    The real payoff here, however, is the flipside, “Feel Like Dying,” a deeper cut also taken from the Ideals LP.  With its lugubrious, Mick Karn-style bassline and all-night-jazz-club piano, “Dying” starts off in that sorta bluesy, cigarettes ‘n’ whiskey after-hours-bar mode that Frank Sinatra made fashionable, then suddenly builds up and explodes into a splashy wet-wash of blistering guitar and sax, then drops you back down and lets you drift out to sea, breathless.  Slap this on your next late-night-spliffs-&-cocktails mix between some Daryl Hall and some Boz Scaggs and you’ll see what I mean.  Purely great.

    (Unfortunately, there’s no clips of either of these tracks anywhere on the ‘net, but you can take in some of the Cafe’s other classics here.)

    Sad Cafe’s singer/songwriter/frontman/mastermind Paul Young (not to be confused with “Every Time You Go Away” Paul Young) moonlighted in Genesis’ Mike Rutherford’s successful side-project Mike + The Mechanics while simultaneously recording and performing with Sad Cafe throughout the ’80’s and ’90’s.  Though they scored several more hits in the UK, stateside success eluded them, and Young died of a heart attack in July of 2000.  Sadly, the Sad Cafe is now closed.

    NEXT WEEK:  It was the ugliest slab of puke-like purple vinyl I’d ever seen.  And I had to have it.