How 2B Confused is Randophonic’s longest, most random and least concise countdown yet, tracking as it does the 1499 Records We All Really Need To Hear Before The Eschaton Immenatizes.
Whatever that means.
What it means is we’ll be at it until either the end of time, or we hit #1, whichever happens first (assuming both don’t happen in simultaneous singularity).
In which The Gun Club kick out the sort of murky, raw LOUD-quiet-LOUD that would have shifted bucketloads of units to the grunge crowd … if they’d only released Fire of Love (the album) ten years later than they did. Because in 1981, the world just wasn’t ready for the likes of For the Love of Ivey or any number of other dangerous gems. Not the mobbed up geniuses who programmed radio anyway, ran the major record labels, shifted the units. Which in the end has got to be a good thing – The Gun Club still sounding fresh, still beautiful in their ugliness, like Elvis from hell.
“When Elvis (aka The King) died in 1977, John Lennon was smugly heard to observe that he’d already been been dead for almost twenty years — ever since he joined the army back in 1958. But I give him another ten years, to 1968 and the big deal comeback TV special on NBC. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had just been shot, the Vietnam war had officially gone to hell, the Beatles hadn’t played live for years. But Elvis wasn’t worried. He had a secret weapon for the show’s finale, a brand new song written by a guy named Earl Brown called If I Can Dream. ‘I’m never going to sing another song I don’t believe in,’ said Elvis when he first heard it, ‘I’m never going to make another movie I don’t believe in.’ And yeah, Elvis did deliver on NBC, a performance that reached deep through the strange vacuum of the cathode ray tube and touched the hopeful soul of all humanity, maybe even saved the world. But then he proceeded to eat doughnuts, sing awful songs, make worse movies, and finally died nine years later, alone, sitting on a toilet. Poor guy. The King of Need, the Residents called him.” (Philip Random)
Mott the Hoople at peak glam let it rip with one of those ain’t-life-on-the-road-a-drag raveups that makes it sound so damned fun you want to quit everything and join the first half-assed band that crosses your path, and never return, just go-go-go … at least as far as Memphis.
Mr. Neil Young and his horse friends at the very peak of their shambolic grandeur. We credit and/or blame the Bolivian marching power that was all the rage at the time if you were a certain class of rock star or movie director (or the kind of person that hung with them) way back when in that cultural depression between the death of the Elvis and the Sex Pistols and whatever the hell happened next. Some have argued nothing — the world ended and it’s all been a feedback loop every since.
Randophonic 