Category: Music

Friday-Night Rock Out: “Any Way You Want It”

E.L. Doctorow once said that Edgar Allen Poe was the best bad writer in American history. I would suggest that Journey was the best bad band in rock history. Blessed with a classic rock pairing of a great singer and a great lead guitarist—Steve Perry and Neil Schon, respectively—Journey was a hit-machine all through the 1980s. In a sea of turgid, flat corporate rock, Journey’s unusual combination of Perry’s crooning lyrics and Schon’s clean-yet-virtuosic guitar licks was a winner. It stood out a mile on F.M. radio. Also, the band had a great work ethic. They played out-of-the-way venues in the midwest and the deep south that many other bands shunned, which won the band the eternal devotion of countless rural and working-class kids, to whom Journey’s sentimental and often maudlin songs appealed.

It was this sentimental and overblown quality that made Journey a bit of a drag. There was something cloying and yet self-aggrandizing about much of their work. Every other song sounded like an “anthem.” One was always tempted to flick a lighter and wave it in the air whenever one of them came on the radio.

Still, when Journey was on its game and at its most pure, they could create a really great, down-and-dirty rock song. My favorite of theirs—the only one that truly feels like a rock song, to me—is their unapologetic ode to sex, “Any Way You Want It”.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Vertigo”

Like all great rock bands, U2 has always has always had the ability to reinvent itself. Just when you think it’s completely washed out and finished, the members come up with another great album. They did it in 1991 with Achtung Baby and again in 1994 with How to Assemble an Atomic Bomb. The best song off that latter album is “Vertigo,” which also has one of the cooler music videos the band has ever appeared in.

Rock on…

What I’m Listening To: “Sorcerer”

One of my favorite films of all time is Michael Mann’s first feature, 1981’s Thief. That movie was not only the beginning of my life-long love of Mann’s movies, but also with the soundscapes of the German band Tangerine Dream, who composed the score. 

When I saw the movie, I had never heard of Tangerine Dream, and thus had no idea that they were one of the iconic avant-guarde bands of the 1970s, producing legendary albums like Phaedra and Zeit. All I knew was their music was hypnotic and unbelievably powerful.

In fact, Tangerine Dream was sort of the Hans Zimmer of their day, creating some of truly great soundtracks. One of their other great scores was for William Friedkin’s 1977 suspense film Sorcerer. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Nominally a thriller, it’s about four guys from totally different backgrounds, all hiding in out from the law in South America. When a local oil platform catches fire, the guys are offered a big payday if they will drive two trucks full of leaky nitroglycerin through the mountains to put the fire out. That’s the stated plot of the film. I have a theory, however, that its really about four guys who are in hell and just don’t realize it yet. They all have much to atone for, and each suffers and grows (or fails to grow) in his own way.

The score brilliantly evokes that sense of menace and evil that lies just around the corner. It’s a great piece to listen to when you’re in a dark and somewhat demented state of mind (or if you want to be in one, for whatever reason).

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Kiss them for Me”

Was there ever a band more influential than Siouxie and the Banshees? Bands as diverse as Depeche Mode and Jane’s Addiction have expressed their admiration. And no less an iconic figure than Billy Idol has written about how awestruck he was the first time he saw the Banshees play live.

Not only were they one of the most important bands of the 1980s, they were one of the hardest to pigeonhole. Post-punk. Alt-rock. Alt-pop. Glam-rock. Goth-rock. All these labels have been applied to them.

All I know is that I always loved them, and still do.

Oh, and they’re really good to dance to.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Cuts You Up”

Not surprisingly, my first exposure to Peter Murphy was from a movie. It was his face and music that are used in the first frames of Tony Scott’s great and underrated horror masterpiece, The Hunger. At the time, Murphy was of course the lead singer for the archetypal goth band Bauhaus, and it is their archetypal song “Bella Legosi’s Dead” that is featured in the opening. Ever since I saw that movie and heard that music, that voice, I was hooked on Peter Murphy.

This was in the early 1980s and, needless to say, goth music wasn’t getting much air-play on the pop-rock radio stations that I and my high school friends all listened to. Still, there was something afoot. Some of my cooler, English-nerd friends started wearing T-shirts with the Bauhaus logo on them.

As I soon learned, goth was, almost literally, an underground movement. Goth clubs starting appearing in basement-bars and old, converted warehouses. The one in Gainesville was called The Vatican, and it’s still of a legend with people my age.

I am by no means an expert on goth music, but one thing I do know is that it is not depressing. Rather, goth’s appeal comes from a paradoxical combination of melancholy realism and romantic defiance. Both of these impulses are wonderfully evoked in Murphy’s most successful solo work, “Cuts You Up”. It’s still my favorite of Murphy’s songs.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Never Let You Go”

The 1990s had so many great, iconic bands–Nirvana, SoundGarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and on and on–that it’s easy to forget that there were lot of other, damn good bands around that were scrambling for attention. Third Eye Blind was such a band. They broke through a few years after the grunge wave had subsided, and their pop-inflected, rap-inflected brand of rock almost seems like a response to grunge. A reaction. A means of cleansing the sonic palatte.

I didn’t really listen to much Third Eye Blind at the time (the late 1990s and early 2000s), but thanks to the magic of Pandora and its sublime algorithms, I’ve been getting them in my play list quite a bit. And that’s a good thing. I was shocked to realize how much I liked them, then and now.

Unfortunately, they only had two big records–Third Eye Blind and Blue–before fissures between lead vocalist Stephan Jenkins and lead guitarist Kevin Cadogan caused them to partially split up. Even so, the band has a great legacy. This is my favorite of their songs.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Firestarter”

Back in the late 1990s, every guy I knew under the age of thirty had a copy of The Prodigy‘s Fat of the Land album. This was the case even though there was nothing particularly new about the record itself; Big Beat had been around for years, and some of the songs on the album itself had come out on previous albums. Nevertheless, each song is more than the sum of its parts. Each one comes together into a delierously wicked electro-dance mash-up that remains unrivaled.

Back in the day, my favorite song off the album was the problematically entitled “Smack My Bitch Up”. (As far as I’m concerned, the title is camp, if not actual satire in the Spinal Tap mode.) But these days, my favorite The Prodigy song is probably this little gem, “Firestarter”.

Rock on…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Where the River Flows”

I have written about the band Collective Soul before. They were one of my favorite bands of the 1990s, and not just because they hailed from my part of the country (Atlanta isn’t too far from Gainesville, after all).

I remember when their first big singles hit the radio back in the day, and how their sound struck me as both rooted in a deep tradition of Southern Rock but also entirely new and current (grungy, even). Band mastermind Ed Roland’s great voice and edgy lyrics were complimented by Jesse Triplet’s brilliant guitar work. On FM radio (yeah, there was still radio then), they stuck out a mile from all the other hard-rock knockoffs of the age.

This is one of their best songs.

Rock on…!

BONUS: Here is a great inteview of Ed Roland by Rick Beato…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “The Last Stop”

Ah, how the tide turns. Back in the 1990s, The Dave Matthews Band bestrode the music world like a colossus. With their incredibly inventive and fresh jazz-rock stylings and bewitching lyrics by frontman Mathews, they were one of the most popular bands in the world, and deservedly.

Now, for reasons I can’t quite understand, they are considered passé, even ridiculous. The Nickelback of the soft-rock world. Oh, well. I have a feeling that DMB’s popularity will enjoy a resurgence soon. Here’s my attempt to get the ball rolling with “The Last Stop,” one of the darkest and most menacing songs I’ve ever heard.