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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: 45 Revolutions Per Minute

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #19: Stand By Your Manboobs

    ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS  “You Little Fool” b/w “Big Sister” & “The Stamping Ground” (F-Beat Records UK #XX26, 1982)

    “A pretty prime cut,” it says, etched in some unknown stranger’s messy handwriting on the inner groove of this imported 7-inch.  I’d have to wholeheartedly agree, given the 3 great tracks to which we’re being treated on this week’s edition of 45 RPM.  International raconteur and talk-show host Declan MacManus needs no introduction, so let’s just dive right in, shall we?

    See the video for Elvis Costello\’s \”You Little Fool\” on YouTube

    Early MTVophiles will recall this video, starring The Impostor himself as the dismissive, scowling headmaster.  I nabbed this imported copy of “…Fool” a few weeks before the release of Imperial Bedroom, up to this point the most ambitious of EC & The A’s full-lengths.  Initially, I was stunned and a bit taken aback by the track’s rich, lush production, atypical of Costello’s previous Nick Lowe-helmed output.  Though the 45 artwork was misleading, it proved to be Geoff Emerick, the former Abbey Road engineer made famous by his legendary work with The Beatles, who was responsible for EC’s new and vibrant sound.  A big step in a great new direction, or at least it seemed at the time.  I’d have to wait ’til street date for the hotly-anticipated Bedroom to bring the fruits of this laborious collaboration full-circle.  Meanwhile…

    Side B features two tracks, first of which is “Big Sister,” an outtake from the sessions that became 1981’s Trust LP.  Those familiar with that album know its finale, the spooky and lyrically similar “Big Sister’s Clothes.”  Well, this is apparently an earlier version, produced by Nick Lowe and showcasing that hard-rocking Stax/Volt bar-band side of The Attractions so well-explored on albums like Trust and Get Happy!!  EC himself later referred to the track’s lyrics as an “unsubtle commentary on (Margaret Thatcher)’s enthusiasm for Cold War posturing.”  In-dubitably!

    Play “Big Sister” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions

    Our Liverpudlian friend is no stranger to aliases.  (Hell, he even recorded under the name Napoleon Dynamite nearly 20 years before the famous Jared Hess flick.)  Blithely credited to The Emotional Toothpaste, “The Stamping Ground” gives us 3-plus minutes of tremolo guitars and Everly Brothers-style harmonies in 3/4 time.  In other words, it’s an EC solo demo.  A sad elegy to the tired old singles-bar scene, this warbling, bleary-eyed and beer-soaked track would not have sounded out of place being growled by Shane MacGowan on a mid-period Pogues album.  Some seriously emotional toothpaste, indeed.

    Play “The Stamping Ground” by The Emotional Toothpaste

    To this day, you can always count on Elvis Costello to be up to something.  His most recent full-length, Momofuku (Lost Highway Records), was one of the few albums that blew me away in 2008.  You can keep up with his crafty doings at http://www.elviscostello.com.

    NEXT WEEK: You’ve been told what I’m after.  On see-thru red plastic, no less.

  • 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!

  • Wax On!!!: The Poetics Go Digital

    Some of you know David Middleton as the author of our Forty-Five Revolutions per Minute series. Each week, David  picks out a (usually reasonably obscure) 45RPM record from his collection and talks about it. What some of you might not know is that David is a musician himself, and spent a chunk of the late Eighties and early Nineties fronting the band Waxing Poetics. The Virginia based-group got some face time on MTV, toured the country, and their first album, 1987’s Hermitage, was co-produced by R.E.M.’s Mike Mills.

    I’m proud to inform you guys that the Waxing Poetics’ complete three-album discography is now available on iTunes and Amazon mp3! These albums have been unavailable for some time, so those of you who were fans back in the day -or want to check the band out for the first time- can do so!

    At the risk of embarrassing one of my best friends (sorry, buddy), here’s some live footage of the Poetics from 1990. Thanks, YouTube! The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but you get the idea of how rockin’ these guys were. Ah, I just realized embedding has been disabled, so I’ve included the link here.