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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: David Middleton

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #38: Sanitized By Swisher

    R.E.M.'s "Driver 8" 45 sleeve

    R.E.M.  “Driver 8″  b/w  “Crazy” (I.R.S. Records #52678, 1985)

    Alternative rock became a saleable commodity in the 1990’s, but back in ’85 it was mostly confined to non-commercial college radio stations, dorm-room record-players, frat-house keggers and a string of musky all-ages clubs that stretched from Jacksonville to San Diego.  Acting as a genuine “alternative” to all the Poison, Warrant and Cinderella gumming up the airwaves, down-to-earth acts like The Minutemen, Husker Du and The Replacements provided a much-needed sanctuary for those of us whose favorite Saturday night records were Marquee Moon and Pink Flag, and whose favorite Sunday morning record was The Velvet Underground & Nico.  By simply being themselves, Athens, GA’s R.E.M. rose to become the intelligent, headstrong, always forward-looking and never-reluctant centerpiece of this phenomenon, and their championing of other great bands who influenced them was second to none.  Along with being an R.E.M. fan came the bonus of others’ great music too.  At the time of release, I saw this week’s featured single as a mature talisman from wizened elder-statesmen.  Looking back, I see that it was only just the beginning.

    The back of R.E.M.'s "Driver 8" 45 sleeve

    If you say it fast enough, the title “Driver 8″ could be mistaken for “Gyrate,” which was the name of a popular LP by Athens art-dance-rock pioneers Pylon some five years prior (around the same time as Gang Of Four’s Entertainment! and The B-52’s’ Wild Planet, to put it in context).  And our boys hold very true to that influence in the song itself, which intercuts Michael Stipe’s oblique Southern storytelling with the same kind of terse, jerky, stark rhythms and wiry guitars patented by their new wave Georgian forebears.  And the train conductor says, “Take a break…”

    Watch the video for \”Driver 8\” by R.E.M. on YouTube

    “Driver 8” was the 2nd of two singles pulled from R.E.M.’s third LP, the Joe Boyd-produced Fables Of The Reconstruction (or Reconstruction Of The Fables, depending on which way you hold the record), an album which focused less on the reverberating, ringing jangle of their previous efforts (which nearly ignored the caffeinated agit-prop of their early live shows) and more on the solid, dense rock foundation that was about to bring them worldwide success.  More Tom Verlaine and less Roger McGuinn, one could say.  The house wasn’t fully built yet, but the cornerstones were well in place.

    R.E.M.'s 1985 LP "Fables Of The Reconstruction"

    Side B serves up more Pylon in the form of a straight-up cover of their 1981 single, “Crazy.”  It sounds so good that I wish they’d done a whole album of Pylon covers.  This recording later appeared on R.E.M.’s Dead Letter Office CD (a great collections of B-sides, and also for the longest time the only way you could get their brilliant Chronic Town EP). You can check out a live concert recording from ’89 here, but even cooler is this more recent footage of Pylon themselves performing the song at KFJC Los Altos last November, keeping very true to their original vision.

    Pylon's classic "Gyrate" LP

    I don’t need to tell you what became of Rock & Roll Hall-Of-Famers R.E.M., but Pylon broke up and reunited several times over, releasing three albums-worth of heavenly, danceable, overlooked genius, plus one best-of collection (appropriately titled, “Hits”).  Guitarist/songwriter Randy Bewley died this past February, after suffering a heart attack while driving, sadly putting an end to all things Pylon.

    NEXT WEEK: The farther one travels, the less one knows.

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #37: Midnight At The Blurasis

    Desmond Child & Rouge "Our Love Is Insane"

    DESMOND CHILD & ROUGE  “Our Love Is Insane”  b/w  “City In Heat” (Capitol Records #4669, 1978)

    I was never one of those “Disco Sucks” guys.  In fact, disco pretty much freaked me out and blew me away from the beginning, before the genre even had a name.  George McRae’s super-sexy and shimmering “Rock Your Baby”…was it soul?  Funk?  Pop?  Or was it such a smash that it didn’t even matter?  On a daily basis, Merv Griffin brought the most inventive and outlandish disco acts of the ’70’s into suburban American living rooms via his afternoon syndicated chat show.  Among them were The Village People, Chic, Grace Jones, Sylvester and the unforgettable Donna Summer, whose operatic moans coupled with Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating European synthesizers propelled popular music into the techno-sexual stratosphere, never to fully recover.  By this time, disco was (and still is), like it or not, an indelible part of the American landscape.

    Trolling for obscure new wave imports in a little restroom-sized headshop called Grooves, I stumbled upon this pug-fugly slab of vomit-swirled purple vinyl by Desmond Child & Rouge.  I had never heard of them, but this record looked so disgusting (like a baby had puked up a messy mix of grape sherbet, blood and charcoal) that I just couldn’t resist.  I had seen colored vinyl before, even owned a few pieces of see-thru plastic, and picture-discs were popular then amongst collectors, but Lord Almighty.  I’d never encountered anything this revolting that didn’t require a mop and lots of Pine-Sol.  Sold!

    Our Swirled Purple Vinyl Is Insane

    From the opening bass-&-kick-drum punch on the first listen, it was very clear that “Our Love Is Insane” was not going to be the slick, glossy, overproduced kind of disco then cluttering up the post-Saturday Night Fever airwaves.  This was grittier, more underground and more urban in nature.  This was a foreshadowing of the dance-rock about to come.  This was the future.

    Play \”Our Love Is Insane\” by Desmond Child & Rouge

    The hot, pounding rhythm section and hard-rock guitars lay a nice rough bed for the intertwining, cascading vocals of the Rouge girls, who ooze a very natural, classy, liberated New York sexiness that I just don’t see anywhere anymore.  “Insane” never significantly charted, but became a considerable club smash.  Within weeks, more rock acts were allowing disco rhythms to creep into their repertoires, and more disco acts were beefing up the guitars and sneaking in a little more rock.  Soon Donna Summer herself would score big with the one-two punch of “Bad Girls” and “Hot Stuff,” which both sound eerily close to this track. On the streets of New York, rock drum patterns and disco basslines were being rapped over in the Bronx, and a young Madonna was planning her attack down on the LES.  Let the ’80’s begin.

    On the flipside, “City In Heat” provides a heavy swirl of hard guitars, piano, bongos and jazzy vocal scatting that ebbs downward and builds back up to staccato crescendos.  Perfect soundtrack music for an episode of Starsky & Hutch or S.W.A.T., but not the unique barn-burner the A-side proved to be.  That’s OK, though;  they can’t all be winners.

    “Winner” is, however, a word that can easily be applied to Desmond Child.  After a 2nd Capitol LP with Rouge, Child embarked on a songwriting career that singlehandedly leaves most others in the dust.  You can find a stunning (and ever-growing) list of his hit credits here, and you can see, hear and learn more at his website, but chances are you probably have a Child-penned song running through your head at any given moment.

    NEXT WEEK: Your head is shaking and your arms are shaking and your feet are shaking because the Earth is shaking.

  • 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.