Monthly Archives: December 2017

575. the ballad of Lucy Jordan

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64M5jzHO9fk

In which Marianne Faithfull takes a then obscure song written by the same guy who gave us Boy Named Sue and Cover of the Rolling Stone and delivers what some have since hailed as a feminist anthem. Philip Random remembers it first really grabbing him via the movie Montenegro “… that I tend to assume everyone’s seen but hardly anyone actually has. It’s the one where Susan Anspach, wealthy housewife, bored to the point of insanity, finally just bails one day, splits suburbia and her husband and kids, and somehow ends up hanging with some savage eastern European types still playing out blood feuds older than recorded history. It’s a strange movie, disorienting, intense. Anyway, the Ballad Of Lucy Jordan is the song that sends her on her weird journey, inspires her. Finally, she will return to her happy family, except (spoiler alert) the fruit was poisoned.”

MarianneFAITHFULL-1979-2

576. bluebird

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Apparently, Buffalo Springfield are the greatest band nobody’s ever properly heard, unless you were lucky enough to catch them live way back when, with the psychedelic 60s ripping a hole through time. Neil Young and Stephen Stills (and the other guys), brash and wild and still mostly unknown, desperate to be heard, to wake people the f*** up. The records just don’t capture that. They’re too restrained, too produced, which isn’t to say they don’t have some moments, just lacking that overall carnivorous bite.

BuffaloSprinfield-1967

577. let x = x [it tango]

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“In which Laurie Anderson reminds us that sometimes you’ve just gotta go with your intuition. If you see a guy and he looks like a hat check clerk, he is a hat check clerk. And everything that suggests. To which I must add, I have no idea what that is. And I doubt Laurie Anderson did either, early 1980s, just rolling with the zeitgeist which she was in the process of turning inside out with her strange gear and her stranger stories. And the pinks of the world are still trying to make sense of it. Stop making sense.” (Philip Random)

LaurieAnderson-1982-2

578. who are the brain police?

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It’s 1966 and it seems only Frank Zappa and his Mothers realize just how freaky and weird things are about to get, and Frank never even did drugs (beyond cigarettes and coffee). Nevertheless he could see them — the Brain Police. Or more to the point, he felt them, because you can’t see the brain police, can you? They’re within you, hiding behind your devices of oracular perception. Recording things. Seriously, they are there, implanted at birth.

Zappa-Mothers-1966

579. when tomorrow hits

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By the time When Tomorrow Hits hit, Spacemen 3 had already broken up for all the regular reasons that drug addled, pioneering psychedelic outfits break up, and then some. A cover of a Mudhoney original, it was supposed to be part of a double-A split single which would also feature Mudhoney’s version of Spacemen 3’s Revolution, but for whatever hazy reason, that didn’t happen. What does happen is Spacemen 3’s equal parts smoother and sharper take on When Tomorrow Hits, particularly that part when it hits!

580. Venus in furs

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In which the Velvet Underground remind us that in NYC, the so-called Summer of Love was more about coolness and shadows and shiny boots of leather than the hippie sh** that was so popular elsewhere. Music so driven, angular, dark that it made you want to grab a whip and get to cracking it in time. Based on a rather pivotal 1870 novella of the same name that explores themes of sadomasochism and dominance, it hits like a wrong door, the kind you open without really thinking about it, but once you have, whatever’s going on in there – it has you, it won’t let you go. Which perhaps begins to explain how it ended up being used to sell tires.

VU-1966