“We learned more from a three-minute record baby than we ever learned in school.”
It’s amazing to me that, Springsteen circa 1984 set the basis for some of my favorite music ever, even though I didn’t really give Born In The USA props until I was in my early twenties. He’s directly influenced most of the artists in this Rock N’ Roll Means Well series, and his was one of my favorite shows ever. Shortly after returning from Vietnam in 2007 I sneaked in to see him play at the Oracle Arena in Oakland during the Magic tour, and it was, AH-HEM, amazing.
The biggest surprise by far was him busting into “No Surrender” early into the set. This 1984 song about busting out, hitting the road, and seeing what was outside your small town (and was also about Steven Van Zandt leaving the E-Street Band) continues to inspire artists around the world.
Needless to say, I lost my shit when he played that song. It was, simply, goosebump-inducing incredible. Here’s an acoustic version done in France 15 years after the song came out for an Amnesty International concert:
Still the same effect. Born In the USA may have been the greatest album of the 1980’s.
Note: This is the second installment in a weekly series entitled Rock & Roll Means Well, which was also the name of a 2008 tour embarked upon by The Hold Steady and Drive-By Truckers. I’m going to try and focus on current American music done that, I dunno, belongs together.
If you were walking down the street and saw these dudes, you would know that they were in a band. A rock band. Maybe a rock band for the kids. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
The Gaslight Anthem are a band, and really all I know about them is that they’re from New Jersey. I admit, “The Gaslight Anthem” is a stupid band name, and I would have never even bothered listening to them if it weren’t for the insistence of a friend of mine that I would like them. This comes after a night last November where I rocked my ass off (for the second night in a row, mind you) to Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady over in San Francisco, and she was there to know what I really might like.
Still, I put it off and it wasn’t until an evening in December, a week before Christmas, stuck in traffic on Interstate 80 heading west over Donner Pass in the snow and waiting to put the chains on the car that I read an article in The Onion exalting their most recent record The ‘59 Sound in their year end best-of list. Simply, it said they fell somewhere between Against Me! and some dude named Bruce Springsteen. I guess I had to give this a listen.
Simply put, at first I was torn as to if I should like this band or not. They have a shitty-ass emo band name, borrow liberally from the Boss, using his characters and referencing his songs, and sometimes comes off more as The Killers without the keyboards. I was so torn, but I could not deny that these songs are catchy as shit, but also catchy in the sense that 2001-era Jimmy Eat World songs were catchy. Is this a guilty pleasure or am I just guilty?
Fuck it. I am a fan. At least, I like The ‘59 Sound, and if you’re on the fence and you believe in critical acclaim (especially haters like Pitchfork who gave this record a 8.6/10.0), redemption, The Boss, a “high and lonesome sound,” punk bands who grow up and listen to older records, and rock and roll music that is catchy and good and makes you want to go to shows, push your way up front, jump up and down, and singalong, that’s what The Gaslight Anthem do.
I haven’t seen Sandy and Johnny, or Mary
I heard they got married, might of had a couple babies
And traded their memories, for Fairview and Makers
And never play no pinball, or get up pass the breakers.
But not me, pretty baby
We still love Tom Petty songs
And driving old men crazy
“Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” may be a bit of a bait and switch with this band, but this is the song I think of the most. The way Brian Fallon belts out the line “Can I get a witness pretty baby?” shows the urgency, immediacy, and sincerity that the Gaslight Anthem bring to their kind of music.
It may be for the kids, but that doesn’t mean it has to suck.
Note: This is the first in a weekly series entitled Rock & Roll Means Well, which was also the name of a 2008 tour embarked upon by The Hold Steady and Drive-By Truckers. I’m going to try and focus on current American music done that, I dunno, belongs together.
This is also the first in an attempt to post an MP3 a week. I hope this works.
First, I should get something out of the way:
MIKE COOLEY IS A FUCKING GENIUS.
There, I’ve said it. I’ve thought about that line a million times, anytime one of his songs comes on my iPod shuffle as I’m riding up Broadway in Oakland, anytime he took the microphone on the two shows I saw last November at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and anytime I put on his playlist I’ve made of all the Cooley Drive-By Truckers songs…it just, fucking, works.
I’ve always kind of liked the Drive-By Truckers. I first heard them sometime around 2001 when a guy I’d met through his blog put a song of theirs, the ultra-fine “One Of These Days” (from DBT’s 1999 album Pizza Deliverance) on a mix CD that I ended up with as part of some weblog community thing. I honestly forget how we met, but me and Armando hung out a couple time around North Carolina as a I traveled around.
Anyways. I ended up putting the song on a mix CD I made called The Russian River: Songs For Rural Driving around the same time. I used to have a delivery route that I took up to Sonoma County in California every Wednesday, and the music matched the backroads landscape that I saw every week.
I had started to get into country music, American rock & roll, and, well, stuff that was old. Before that I had been rooted in current indie pop and indie rock releases, and before that I liked the punkier offerings the 1990’s had to offer. This was different, and “One Of These Days” fit right in.
I kept after Drive-By Truckers, putting each additional release on my iPod, loving some songs, being ho-hum about others, and then they booked a tour with my new favorite band, The Hold Steady, and they called that tour Rock & Roll Means Well.
I went to both shows in San Francisco, but the first one had DBT headlining, and then I realized why I LOVED some songs and thought others were OK: Mike Cooley. I guess I knew there were different singers and songwriters in the band, but it wasn’t until I saw the live show that I knew who sang all, and I mean all, of my very favorite songs. “Carl Perkin’s Caddilac,” (a favorite of mine on my monthly Honky-Tonk DJ set), “Lisa’s Birthday,” the kind of funny but super real “Bob,” “Gravity’s Gone, “Zip City,” “Women Without Whiskey,” “72 (This Highway’s Mean),” and “Shut Up And Get On The Plane” from Southern Rock Opera, “Marry Me,” “Three Dimes Down,” and “Self-Destructive Zones” all from Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. It was all Cooley. All his storytelling songwriting genius and I instantly realized that I liked, loved, Drive-By Truckers even more than I thought.
So, how to pick a song, one song to feature. Last night, riding up Broadway on my 1976 Schwinn, coming back from a good air hockey tournament and even better Belgian ales, “A Ghost To Most” from 2008’s excellent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark came on my little green iPod shuffle and I started singing along. It felt good. It felt GREAT, I slowed up a bit to let the song finish before I got home, riding past Kaye’s, the Kragen, the Burger King, singing aloud:
Baby every bone in my body’s gone to jumping
like they’re gonna come through my skin.
If they could get along without the rest of me, it wouldn’t matter if they did
But skeletons ain’t got nowhere to stick their money
nobody makes britches that size
and besides you’re a ghost to most before they notice
that you ever had a hair or a hide
Fucking tops. It’s a powerful song, it’s a song that I get, and it’s a song, like most of Cooley’ songs, that tells a story. I encourage you to seek out all of the songs mention above, and hopefully you’ll get some of the magic that I do.
This post was longer than I’d wanted it to be, but fuck it. Check in next Monday for another MP3.
For me, the beauty of MP3 blogs is always the chance of discovery. Sure, you hear music in restaurants, at bars, on TV, in the cars and apartments of friends, but there’s something about stumbling onto a song, or better yet, a band, that you have nobody to thank for but dumb luck and the author of the blog.
That’s how I found The War On Drugs. I don’t even remember where or when it happened, but sometime a few months ago while looking for something, anything, new and interesting to listen to I was lucky enough to click on “Taking The Farm.”
It was instant love. The chugga chugga of the snare drum, sounding like a ghost train traversing the deserts of the Southwest, the spooky chiming guitars that sound as if they were sampled from scratchy old 78 RPM records, and especially Adam Granducie’s Nebraska era Springsteen “woo woo wooing.” There’s a little bit of Dylan style vocals to go along with the layers of fuzzy affected organs, guitars and drums that were run through a modular moog filter giving them a mysterious, instantly recognizable overblown quality.
“Arms Like Boulders,” which leads off their excellent new Wagonwheel Blues album on Secretly Canadian, is a bit more straightforward with lots of wailing harmonica and sounds, by far, the most like Dylan. Granducie’s voice is so amazingly sincere when delivering the vocals, throwing in the occasional “Hey!” that makes it easy to imagine them playing this song live as he steps off the microphone from singing and switches to harmonica for the chorus.
This is the new Americana, and The War On drugs succeed song after song in evoking memories of the Southwest and big cities of the Fifties and Sixties. It’s new but it’s old. They’re an indie rock band that somehow brings to mind, cowboys, cattle drives, glistening jetliners, American Indians, adobe structures, skyscrapers, the newness of airports, driving through New Mexico, all filtered through a Super 8 camera and a mirror.
“I was riding on the new jet planes just to see if I’d come back, and I was riding on the wagon wheel with a monkey on my back.”
This imagery all comes together in the video for “A Needle In Your Eye #16.” The organs bellow, breathing in and breathing out, then another organ comes in before the backbeat kicks in hard. It’s like an altered version of Springsteen’s “No Surrender,” just as triumphant, catchy, and inspirational. It makes me to want to kick it up, dance in the front row, belt out “So come on tell me that you feel the way that I…you won’t be a needle in your eye anymore.”
Turn the stereo up or put on your headphones. Dim the lights a bit, if you can, and let the video and the music do you like it’s done me. The War On Drugs may tinker with found instruments and throw together songs in their Philadelphia living rooms, but the music is huge, layered, and addicting. Wagonwheel Blues is the rare record that greatly impresses me and offers an escape, an instant escape, from the ho-hum world around you. Alright.
I got in a fight with a girl on the Fourth of July. I don’t really know what happened, but after drinking some great wine in the cemetery, hitting up a boss picnic in an Oakland estate overlooking 580, and ending up back in the Rock Block drinking cheap beer and watching my friends light shit on fire I felt like dancing. Good thing we had a kitchen and an iPod dock. The cops came but we didn’t notice. We turned the music up. I rode my bike home to grab my iPod. We danced some more. Next thing I know my friend and I start swinging. Neither of us know how it started. It was total dance punching, no face shots, pauses to pick new songs, and really in the end she kicked my ass as I went flying on the ground into a bag of recycling. After that Miss Rodeo America and I rode home and I had to take a shower from the fight club.
The next day my opponent posted some photos on Facebook. The bruises were brutal and at first I felt bad until I realized that we had a good time. A couple days later, I found a small bruise on my left arm. I *never* bruise, so I felt proud that my ass got slightly kicked as well.
Some of these songs we listened to that night, some other ones I didn’t hear until this week (the new CSS album is great, and I like this Black Kids song quite a bit). These are my 13 favorite songs as of like…right now.
02. CSS: Left Behind (“So I’m Gonna Fly Back To Helsinki, even stay there for awhile. Gonna get my things back, gonna get some fun, gonna drink till I pass out. I’m gonna get on to the table and dance my ass off till I die.”)
Swervedriver are playing a show in San Francisco at the Fillmore on May 29th. I will probably be there. Actually, I *should* be there as I have been a fan for a decade or so, long after they stopped being a touring band and playing arenas with The Smashing Pumpkins, and touring with Hum, Soundgarden, and Shudder To Think, and long, *long* after they were hanging out with Ride in Oxford.
We were watching the new 120 Minutes last night on VH1 classic with JACT and a Catherine Wheel video came on and I mentioned that we should go see Swervedriver. J said “I never got into Swervedriver” and I took that to mean that she had heard them but wasn’t a fan, but it turns out she has just never heard them (which made me think I should write about them on PIZZA of course). T again said “I always get them confused with Skrewdriver.” A was totally game.
I still remember exactly when and how I got into Swervedriver. I was still living on 63rd street in Rockridge and was having a late night IM conversation, windows open and vinyl on the stereo, and I told a friend in Sacramento that I would buy whatever CD she told me I should get the next day when I visited the Amoeba Records on Telegraph avenue. She told me to get Mezcal Head, Swervedriver’s second record that came out in 1993 (my memory is hazy, but I think I was late-night chatting and record shopping sometime in 1999).
I think I listened to Mezcal Head for the first time driving to the East Oakland practice space of my first band. I remember pulling into the parking lot and waiting for “Last Train To Satansville” end. I was totally hooked on the huge guitars, awesome drumming, and the way they allowed a pop/rock song to get huge, get long, and just keep going.
Another single, “Duel,” also featured huge guitars (perfect for the nineties) and was a favorite at NME. Sure, Adam Franklin had unfortunate dreads but I was listening to them years later and didn’t bother to look up what they looked like. I can see how I missed the dull video for “Duel” on 120 Minutes.
Sadly, the band was always overshadowed by bigger acts (rumor has it they got dropped from Creation Records in 1995 so they could focus on Oasis). The cool thing with Swervedriver was that their records continued to be awesome despite sagging sales and changing tastes. After Mezcal Head they recorded two more records, Ejector Seat Reservation and 99th Dream, both of which were either not initially released or released and then quickly went out of print. Luckily, I found both on CD so I got to enjoy some more of the Swervdriver magic before MP3s for long out of print records were widely available.
But now they’re back and they’re touring and I think I’m going to go see them play an oversized rock show at a much overrated venue. I will drink some beers and hopefully they will be loud. Good times, good times.
I should have written this entry years ago. I’ve had a bad habit of secretly loving BMSR for long periods of time and not really telling anyone about it, preferring instead to turn them up really loud on my iPod when the songs came on at random. They are the rare band that you find while reviewing records for an online publication that you actually really enjoy. I received their record Start A People shortly after it was released in 2004 but didn’t get around reviewing it until October 2005 because I had been enjoying it for so long. I even commented on my own review as an apology for taking my sweet time writing about it. I loved the analog sound, and the head bouncing rhythm and how I could tell these songs were painstakingly assembled rather than programmed into a computer.
I had not quite forgotten about the band, but last year an ex-coworker gave me Dandelion Gum after he had seen the band BLOW MINDS at SXSW and my love was reborn. BMSR have a completely unique sound and image, something that is hard to come by in an overcrowded music scene. Their use of non-computerized analog sounds, live drums and bass (at least during their performances), and super cool vocodored vocals make their songs unique and irresistible. I loved Dandelion Gum but I never even though the band would play live.
To my surprise I found out they would be playing a show at The Bottom Of The Hill, one of my long time favorite venues in San Francisco. It’s a good sounding, cozy spot with cheap PBR and a great soundsystem. I loved hearing the songs loud and raw and with live drums and liked the silly visuals they had going on behind them (this is a good thing, as 2 of the 5 members spend the entire time on the floor playing keyboards and singing away from the audience’s view). For the first time in a long while making the trek across the bridge and staying out late on a school night felt enjoyable and worth being sleepy at work the next day. I was still excited about the show, so I checked out some videos:
I figured that sense we now had our very own MP3 blog (even though, really, the now defunct BLCKYLLWBLCK’S MP3 of the week goes back 8 years are so) I ought to check out what else is out there.
Whoah. There are a lot of music blogs out there. A ton. Ok, OK! I get it!
But, this is a good thing because you can find cool nuggets like Of Montreal covering M.I.A. Yeah, I know you can find this track *other places* but I wanted to the high vocals, simple, deep basslines, and irresistible yumminess of this track here :
In 2005 I was asked if I wanted to get tickets to BSP’s upcoming performance in San Francisco. Having listened to the first few tracks off their first record (and quickly turning them off), I told my friends that I didn’t like British Sea Power. “Are you sure? Have you heard Open Season?” No, why, no I had not.
So, I got their sophomore release and put it on in the kitchen of our old place on 41st street in Oakland while I started cooking up some Indian food from scratch (it was a phase). By the time “Please Stand Up” came on I was hooked, floored, and impressed.
We went to see the band and I thought they were good, but, you know, not GREAT. Then I left on a US tour in August 2005. Every night after a show I found myself, a little tipsy, crawling into my bench seat in our white Ford Econoline and putting on Open Season. Upstate New York to Columbus? BSP. An overnight drive from Norfolk to Philly? BSP. Twice.
So, I waited patiently for their new record to be released in 2008 and now that Do You Like Rock Music? is here life is good again. I mean, what can really be better than an album recorded in a converted water tower in a 200 year-old fort and the forests of the Krivoklatsko Biosphere Reserve in the Czech Republic? Even the album release party was at the Czech embassy in London!
British Sea Power are eccentric, odd, whimsical, and damn good with a rock song. The first single from DYLRM? thunders with (yes, many have said it) Arcade Fire style anthemics. It’s a call to their people to join them in their kooky adventures.
Lead singles are supposed to be good, catchy, and powerful (duh), but it’s the rest of the album that really draws me in. While driving home in the cold rain the other night the different layers of a song like “A Trip Out” killed me. There’s the rocking guitar intro with huge kick drum beats and the a call to arms. “Pick up your sickle, get on board. We’re all going on a trip out.” Are they English seafarers heading over to the Isle of Wight for a take down?
The song changes pace with the line “One fine day before the apocalpyse…” and I laughed out loud in the car at just how GOOD it was and how GOOD music can be.
So, yes. I might have a favorite band again. It’s been a long time coming and it makes all music sound good again.
(photo by 
