A Long Overdue Thank You

I am here today because there’s a post I need to write that’s going to make me sick if I don’t get it out of my head today, it’s been nagging at me so much since yesterday afternoon. If you happen to have arrived here before the next post is posted, then I’ve probably already spoiled it because you probably already have an idea what it’s about. Sorry for that. They probably both belong on the music blog instead, but I really need to post them here instead (don’t ask me why, like a lot of things it really makes no sense, but there ya go).

First, though, before I get to that post, I would probably be really remiss if I didn’t go back to about a month ago and admit to you all that the day the news came out that Doug Fieger, leader of The Knack, had passed away, I cried my fool head off that entire day and night.

This really didn’t make any sense on the surface. As a 13-year-old, I bought Get the Knack in 1979 just like most everyone else did and played it to death, “My Sharona” was a great tune, it was cool. All peachy.

But The Knack were never, like, one of my VERY favorites, you know. That’s a record that’s somewhat surprisingly stood the test of time, but it would have been far, far down the list of my stranded-on-a-desert-island picks. And goodness knows the music world has lost a bunch of my big heroes in the last several years – Joe Strummer, three of the four original Ramones, many many more. All of which made me sad, of course, but none of which left me incapacitated in tears and unable to do anything but drown my sorrows in YouTube for an entire day.

It finally dawned on me at some point during the course of all that misery why it was affecting me so. The more and more frequent occurrence of the heroes and idols of my youth passing away over the last several years had indeed been more and more disturbing and upsetting, and each one another reminder of how much older I myself was getting and that – since most of my musical heroes were far older than me when I was a preteen, teenager, college kid – I knew these depressing moments were going to happen more and more as time went on and as we all got older, sure.

This one hit HARD, though. Almost like losing a family member, because of the sheer importance of it all.

Importance? The Knack????

Scoff if you will. The Knack changed EVERYTHING – for some of us, anyway.

Oh sure, there was great, and greater, music around. The Ramones had been around for years by that time, The Clash, and dozens of other legendary bands springing up in New York City, on the West Coast, in the UK, lots of places, yes.

There was great music around somewhere. But you’ve likely no idea how hard it was to GET to that music in 1979, if you lived in small towns in West Tennessee. Probably would have been a little different had I grown up in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis – but it still took a long time for a lot of that stuff to filter down to even those places. I’ve written numerous times over the years about how hard I had to scratch and scramble to get my hands on anything I read or found out about that wasn’t “mainstream”, and how I’d have been oblivious to most of it were it not for the fact that I was (A) a night owl and (B) rarely missed an airing of things like Saturday Night Live, Fridays, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.

And you must remember as well – people still listened to radio back then. In the car, at home – wherever – radio was still pretty much king of the hill when it came to getting music to the masses. Yeah, I had a lot of records as a kid – but there were lots of times the choice was either radio, or no music at all.

Were it not for the fact that I was a major Cheap Trick fan from nearly the start, and a KISS fan, and the fact that The Cars put out their first two albums (which still didn’t get played on the radio down here all that much back in the day), I’d have been mostly 100% S.O.L. throughout the late 1970s because there was just so very much horrible crap on the radio. For years up to 1979, the radio airwaves were dominated by disco and so much easy-listening-type junk that even though I listened to it anyway – and even though I bought a lot of it at the time – it was really like a vast musical wasteland out there filled with stuff that might have been better than no music at all, but was thoroughly unexciting and barely tolerable.

There was one FM station in the area that wasn’t on around the clock and did play mostly progressive rock – a lot of which I didn’t like and still don’t, but some of which I did – but it was better than what was on the rest of the stations on the dial, so I’d listen to it when I could. But then we moved too far away in the beginning of the summer of 1979 for me to get the signal anymore, so there went that.

And to make matters even worse, bands I did like whose music made it to mainstream radio were releasing stuff I couldn’t stand, to fit in with the times. God knows I love The Rolling Stones and always have, but with the exception of “Shattered”, you can keep the Some Girls album. Then KISS goes all disco and releases the “I Was Made For Loving You” single and adds even more insult to injury. It just kept getting worse and worse.

That summer of 1979, The Knack saved mainstream radio. For those of us stuck out in the sticks (or almost), those of us who didn’t have easy access to all the cool stuff out of the norm that they didn’t play on our local radio stations and had to scramble to get anything like that – The Knack were a godsend. When “My Sharona” hit the top of the charts and stayed there and stayed there – ultimately becoming the top selling rock single of the entire decade of the Seventies – Doug Fieger and The Knack changed everything, for those of us who didn’t live in the cool cities like NYC and L.A., or even Memphis and Nashville and Knoxville.

The Knack opened the door for all those other bands that came after to get played on Small Town USA radio – some great or good, some not so good, some just plain bad – but they weren’t disco, and they weren’t all that soft rock-easy listening stuff that kind of put the entire nation to sleep, I think, for most of 1974 or 1975 to 1979. Finally there was something new and fresh and different to listen to on the radio – ‘cos listen, if you weren’t old enough to drive yet, you were still pretty dependent on whatever was on the radio for the most part back then.

And all those bands The Knack’s big hit opened up the door for made their way to MTV, when it began – but most of us outside of the cities didn’t have MTV, not for years. You’re reading the blog of someone who, for years, one of the big highlights and treats of going to visit friends and family in Memphis was getting to watch MTV while there, after all.

Radio became tolerable again – kind of funny NOW to think of being THAT dependent on what was being played on the radio – but you just didn’t have that much of a choice back then and, again, a lot of the time, it was radio or no music at all. And I started out growing up in one small town, but spent my teenage years in ones even smaller. My little hometown’s FM radio station would have probably still been playing disco and all-Eagles-all-the-time (nothing against the Eagles, but you get what I mean) by the time I was in high school. Instead, thanks to what happened the summer of 1979 and The Knack, that little radio station was the first place I heard things like Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio”, Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”, and any number of other tunes that might have never have had a shot on mainstream radio had they come out a few years before that.

John Cougar-before-he-was-Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, Loverboy, .38 Special – all those probably would have made it out there anyway, but I have doubts that things like Donnie Iris’ “Ah! Leah!” (still to this day one of my fave all time tunes) would have ever made it to Small Town USA airwaves without the overwhelming initial success of The Knack. Maybe so, who knows – but The Knack still started it all, and at the best possible time when it was desperately needed by those of us far from places like NYC and L.A.

So when I found out that Doug had passed away, I mourned, probably for many reasons. Here was another senseless cancer death, for someone who was really far too young to leave the world this early (he was 57). And the fact that, though The Knack were never a “top favorite” of mine, they were a band that was so instrumental and so important in such a very big change in the world of easily available music that was my youth. And then there was having to face the fact that it’d been now over 30 years since “My Sharona” was released, so that was kind of like the final nail in the coffin of my gloriously misspent youth (not that I don’ t know my youth has been gone a LONG time, but something like that just makes it oh-so-final and irreversible).

It’s hard to believe that was so long ago. If I close my eyes, I can remember a certain day that song was playing and see the radio it was playing on, the dresser the radio was sitting on, see the mountain view outside the window the dresser was next to, and almost – almost – hear the voices of the several people that were lounging around the room that day, most of whom were tapping a foot or fingers or bobbing their head along with the music. It’s that clear. It’s just one of those songs that can immediately whip me right back there to that very spot in time… if only for four minutes and 54 seconds.

Anyway, it was that long ago indeed. And it was just all so depressing and I felt so blah that I just cried my fool head off all day because it was really the only thing I felt like doing.

Which, again, was kind of odd, as Doug was someone I hadn’t really even thought about in a long time. I remember way back during the Kevorkian trials, noticing that the doctor’s attorney’s name was Geoffrey Fieger and thinking he sure did look an awful lot like the only other person named Fieger I’d ever heard of (and of course he does, he’s Doug’s older brother, as it turned out). That was probably the last time Doug Fieger’s name had crossed my mind, really, consciously anyway.

And in the course of that day of mourning, I also discovered that he was once married to actress Marin Kanter, who starred in one of my favorite music films of all time that nobody ever saw called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains with Diane Lane, Laura Dern and Ray Winstone (along with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of The Clash, and Fee Waybill of The Tubes) – a film that finally won a DVD release in 2008 after years of clamoring for it by its cult following of fans, most of whom had only seen it back in the early 1980s when it ran on The Movie Channel and the like. Anyway, that was kind of a neat Easter egg to come across, something I didn’t know.

In any case, The Knack just changed everything for kids like me that were stuck out far away from the cities back in 1979, it was really as simple as that. If not for them, some other band might have come along and done it, sure  – but as it were, it was Doug Fieger and The Knack that saved radio for us. I’ll be ever grateful for that.

This was a neat video from 2008 I found that day on YouTube where Doug and a friend gave an impromptu performance of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” at a party (yet another one of those cool things I find from time to time that make me wish I’d had a video camera in the ’80s to capture some similar moments around Nashville back in the day).

On a final note, here’s a hint – the Get The Knack album is still really, really good. It’s a little dated, but it’s stood the test of time pretty well – you’ve got to get past “My Sharona” and listen to the whole thing to really get it (no pun intended), but I think it’s held up a lot better over time than many of the other big albums from that early New Wave era of rock & roll.

I kinda knew this a long time ago back in the mid-’80s when Greg and Joey and I started messing around musically and (in that honeymoon-like period when you are first getting to know people you’re playing music with really well and everything you discover you have in common is such a treat) we frequently found that the songs we all liked best and had spent time learning were usually the songs on various albums that were the “filler” tunes and ones other people often didn’t know or care about (and because of that, we’d often have to correct people who’d think it was one of Greg’s or Joey’s originals, but that’s another story).

Of the probably thousands of albums we pulled out (whether actually by hand or just talking about them) that summer of 1986, one of the tunes Greg started picking out softly on his guitar in my stupid little apartment north of the MTSU campus was this thing I immediately recognized and started singing the first line before he even opened his mouth, and it eventually became a staple and something people often thought Greg wrote, especially since we kinda indie’d and punked it up a little like we did most everything. This happened all the time – name an album, and whatever obscure “filler” track on that album one of us liked best almost always turned out to be the one the others liked best too. This one, too, was just another one of those “back of the album” tunes we all liked best on the album that most people never heard – along with other ones that weren’t “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t”. It was The Knack’s “Your Number or Your Name”, and we just made it our own for a little while.

“My Sharona” was deservedly the hit for The Knack though – and that guitar solo is actually pretty awesome, and lord knows it sold bazillions of copies – but really when you listen to the album, the other single to me was really always the standout, brilliant one and the gem among it all. It was a favorite of KC’s, and when we were about 14 & 16 he once told me that all I really ever needed to know about teenage boys was in this song  (that was, of course, before The Replacements and before Paul W. wrote “Sixteen Blue”) – but this was always (no surprise) his favorite Knack song and really it was pretty brilliant in its straightforwardness and its simplicity. I was going to post the original video and then I found this semi- (or all?) live version of “Good Girls Don’t” from some appearance on VH-1 in the early ’80s. KC’d be happy with this one and he’d say this is the correct version (because it’s the dirty version, which obviously didn’t make the original video). ;)

In any case – even though I’m a month overdue in posting this – RIP Doug. Thanks for the music, the memories, and thanks especially for saving radio and making it tolerable again for us kids stuck out in the sticks and almost-sticks in the summer of 1979. For that, I will be always grateful.

Music Education 101: Open Letter to NBC Universal

(NOTE: Not the usual case, but this post is being posted on both blogs since the series that is the subject of this post resides on both blogs…)

So, based on a glance at my Tweets on Twitter that night, I noted that I spent approximately nine hours replacing YouTube videos that have been removed since the last time I looked at my (so far) four-part Music Education 101 series of posts. If you missed that before (or just want to check them out again), all the video links except maybe one are working now, although I’ve had to replace several with “alternate” versions (some I’m not too thrilled about), but also added some extras that weren’t there before.

The series lives in my Music Education 101 category on both blogs, or here are the links:

• Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts – The Beginning
• Coming Into My Own – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts
• No Turning Back Now – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three (Now Four) Posts
• Postscript – Lynnster’s Musical Education, Now In Four Posts

I can’t even begin to illustrate what a painfully tedious process it was, searching for and updating all those video links – made even worse by the fact this series is on both my blogs, since it was begun before I added the music blog, so that doubled the work. But of all the posts on either of my blogs – spanning back nearly 13 years on the main blog – those four are probably the most important to me, so whatever.

What pains me, really, is the number of them removed because so-and-so company/organization has declared their ownership/copyright. Fine.

Do these people not understand the power of YouTube these days and the potential for financial gain in a YouTube partnership? When there are everyday people uploading their own videos – be it comedy, commentary, their own music, or what amounts to the video version of a traditional blog (i.e., vlogs) – and making better money doing that than they would with the salary of many very good full time jobs – is the potential financial gain of allowing music and video to be heard and seen on YouTube completely beyond the comprehension of the music and visual media companies?

If Joe Blow next door is able to make a living wage off of YouTube these days, just think how much cash these record companies and other media companies could be raking in by putting up their own partnered YouTube channel. Some have, yes (mainly individual artists/bands though) – but not nearly enough.

There’s one case in particular that gripes me the most – some of what are undeniably the most important performances – American debut and otherwise – of many artists’ careers are their first appearances on Saturday Night Live. These are almost impossible to find – if they get uploaded, it doesn’t take long before they get pulled. Replacing some of those (like Elvis Costello’s famous show-stopping appearance from 1977) is what took me so darned long the other night, and it just irritated the crap out of me.

So here’s my open letter to NBC Universal:

Get your heads out of your collective asses and put up your own YouTube partner channel with these fantastic performances so that they’ll be back in public view where they SHOULD be, for people to enjoy these fabulous pieces of music history – instead of repeatedly blocking them and keeping them hidden from public view.

In this day and age when almost anything can be instantly viewed on the Internet in all kinds of different venues, it’s a doggoned shame that some of the finest musical performances in rock & roll history are being withheld like this. You have the potential to make far, far more profit on those clips as a YouTube partner than you likely ever will recoup in DVD or video sales.

I guess there’s a DVD or music video out there on the market already – point being, I don’t care, and they probably don’t contain the clips I want to see most anyway. How many DVDs have I bought in the past three or four years? Less than ten, and virtually all are feature films.

That said, I’m your target audience with those SNL music clips, NBC Universal – listen to me. Do the right thing and get those clips up on YouTube under your own account so those precious pieces of musical performance history are out there for the public to enjoy (and for those young musically-minded kids, like I once was myself, to learn from) – and make money off of me and everyone else who will watch, rate, and favorite those clips time and time again.

You have nothing to lose – except for the profit you’re not making by withholding them for DVD or whatever purposes, in which case you’re never likely going to profit nearly as much as you would have as a YouTube partner – and instead, the whole world is losing out by not being able to easily access and view these like you now can most anything else on YouTube. I know a big music fan – and Elvis Costello fan – in his twenties who has never even seen that priceless infamous clip. It’s a danged shame.

C’mon, NBC Universal. The solution’s so simple, and everybody wins. You line your pockets probably a lot more than you would have counting on DVD sales – and that music’s back out there where it belongs, for folks to dig. Simple.

Tee Hee

My expatriate Australian buddy Jimm in L.A. just sent me this link, check it out.  It’s a hoot!

Attention All Music Peeps: This Band Needs Your Help

So, I need the attention of the music junkies, music geeks, music fans – all you people for just a few minutes. You know who you are. All you Pixies and Replacements and White Stripes and R.E.M. and Elvis Costello and Nirvana and Bowie and Stones and Stooges and Hoodoo Gurus and Cheap Trick and Clash and Ramones and… well, you know. Everybody.

Everyone who has ever said, “Lynnster, you really need to check out (Pavement, the Hold Steady, the Bottle Rockets, The White Stripes, and insert hundreds of other band names here).” All you former record store employees from back when there was still vinyl in the bins. And all the music folks I’ve gladly pushed and promoted over the years, I could use a little return of favor right now – y’all too. So again – you know, everyone.

All of you, I just need you to listen up for a few. This’ll just take maybe ten or fifteen minutes of your time, tops. I have something (or rather, someones) very important to bring to your attention, and they could use your help if you could spare a few minutes.

OK, so now that I’ve got your attention, I want you to think back to that whole six or seven or eight year period in the Nineties when you actually didn’t have to stay up until late Sunday night to watch the videos YOU wanted to see, and didn’t have to go searching the radio dial for a college radio station that actually had enough power to pick it up wherever you were – or one that was even on at that hour (unless you were one of the very fortunate few that had a 24 hour station nearby) – to get your fix. You know what I’m talking about.

If you were like me, you were probably seeing bands and artists that used to crash on your apartment floor, or that of your friend’s or brother’s or sister’s, in the Eighties when they came through town, now suddenly making it so big that they were playing stadium shows to thousands of people instead of little dive bars with 20 people tops most nights. For a while there, it seemed like everyone I ever knew, every band I had ever liked, and every band I had even just remotely heard of was making it big, or at least getting heard and by many.

Now come back with me to specifically around 1994, 1995, 1996 for a minute. I know you’re all hearing it in your head right now, but in case you need reminding (and of course, insert any number of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc., offerings in between to make it really sound right)… Soundgarden, “Spoonman” and “Black Hole Sun”. Oasis, “Wonderwall”. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”. Hole, “Doll Parts” and “Miss World”. Green Day, “Longview”. Live, “I Alone”, “Lightning Crashes”, “Selling the Drama”. R.E.M., “Bang and Blame” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”. The Cranberries, “Zombie”. Better Than Ezra, “Good”. Elastica, “Connection”. Beck, “Loser”. PJ Harvey, “Down By the Water”. Radiohead, “Creep”. Smashing Pumpkins, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, “1979″, “Zero”, and “Muzzle”. Alanis Morissette, “You Oughta Know”. Foo Fighters, “This is a Call”, “I’ll Stick Around”, “Big Me”. Veruca Salt, “Seether”. Social Distortion, “I Was Wrong”. Stone Temple Pilots, “Vasoline” and “Big Bang Baby”. Scarce, “Freakshadow”.

Huh?

Yeah, I know. Only a handful will know the band Scarce. Mainly a few lucky people from the North Atlantic coast and thereabouts, some more in England maybe, and certainly some folks from Knoxville.

My point is that you SHOULD have known who this band was, and you SHOULD have known this song. You should have known them as well as most of the other bands and artists and songs I listed up there.

It’s a heartbreaking story, it really is.

Scarce came together in 1993, formed by Chick Graning, bass player Joyce Raskin, and drummer Jud Ehrbar (who would be the first of numerous drummers in and out of the band). Chick’s from Knoxville – we share a lot of mutual friends and acquaintances – and had had some success earlier in the Nineties with Boston band Anastasia Screamed. I’m a big fan of the solo stuff he’s put out in recent years too – but for now, let’s get back to Scarce.

Soon after Scarce formed, the trio was soon involved in a major label bidding war. They toured America, Europe, England, and Canada to much acclaim for their live shows. Their Red EP was distributed worldwide and landed in the UK charts, with songs like “All Sideways” and “Days Like This”.

In 1995, following a support tour with Hole in Europe and on the verge of seriously making it big with their debut album, Deadsexy, Chick suffered a brain aneurysm and lapsed into a coma for several weeks. The record company pulled the Red EP from the shelves in the UK. Scarce had been scheduled to play Big Day Out in Australia, which is a big deal for non-Australian bands to score a slot down there – that got canceled too.

When she initially put the “Freakshadow” video up on Scarce’s MySpace profile, Joyce said this:

Just wanted to share the video for “Freakshadow”, which was shot about a month before Chick’s brain hemorrhage. I placed it before the “All Sideways” video thinking how poignant it is to see Chick before his hemorrhage and a few months after when the Sideways video was shot. I remember watching this video while Chick was in a coma and crying because it shows so much of his charm and personality, and at the time he wasn’t moving at all.

Here’s the video for “Freakshadow” – the hit that never was:

Chick eventually recovered & astonishingly, Scarce kept going as a band till 1997, playing two major US tours—even though this meant Chick relearning all his guitar parts and vocals from scratch. But the strain of his illness took its toll on the band, and eventually Chick and Joyce went their separate ways.

Let’s pause again a moment for the video for “All Sideways”:

There are a lot of heartbreaking stories in rock & roll, I know, but this is one of the more heartbreaking I’ve ever known. And especially heartbreaking to me that this band’s music just didn’t get heard like it should have, and that most of you didn’t know this band and these songs like all the others I mentioned above from the same time period.

Fortunately, this tale has a happy ending – or coda, as it were.

Writing a book about the band called Aching To Be (available through Amazon) led to Joyce contacting Chick, and then to Scarce’s re-forming, ending nine years of silence. Songwriting is already under way for a new album, and some of the band’s old material, along with previously unreleased material and pre-A&M demos, are now available. With no expectations but to savor being a real band again, and no one to answer to but themselves, Scarce finally have the happy new beginning they deserved all along.

There’s one problem, though, and here’s where I – and Scarce themselves – could use your help.

At present, Universal Music Group has refused to re-release the band’s debut CD, Deadsexy – not the physical CD itself nor making it available for download/purchase. It’s a fine album and it deserves to be out there and to be heard. Especially by those who have never had a chance to really hear it before.

YOU guys – all you music fans and others – YOU deserve to be able to have an opportunity to hear it, download it, buy it, own it, etc. There are a few used copies of the old release floating around, but not that many, and this record just deserves another chance – and the chance it never really had the first time.

Here’s where you can help. If you can spare a couple of minutes to fire off an email to (email and info removed – see update below!) – requesting UMG release the Deadsexy CD for purchase & download purchase – Joyce, Chick, their manager Teresa, everyone involved would really appreciate it.

And I personally would appreciate it too, as I’m dying to get this CD on my MP3 player, you know.

Those of you who know me (online or off) and frequently talk music with me, you know I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Bottom line is it’s a great record, and it needs and deserves to be out there. Anything you can do to help get it out there, and to spread the word – thank you.

In the meantime, here’s what else you can do Scarce-wise:

• You can check out Scarce’s MySpace profile and listen to (and even purchase for download) what music is currently available by clicking HERE. (“Sudden Downtown Polo Club” is a particular favorite of yours truly.)
• You can buy Joyce Raskin’s awesome book about the band, Aching to Be, at Amazon by clicking HERE.
• Also go to Chick’s MySpace profile by clicking HERE and check out some of his solo work. I love his stuff and Scarce has already been incorporating “Dead Bleux” into their sets, that’s awesome.

All right, that’s enough from me for now but again, if you can spare a minute to (email and info removed – see update below!) – and politely request that UMG release the Deadsexy CD from Scarce, again, it is very much appreciated! Thanks for listening and watching and reading (and hope you enjoyed)!

UPDATE 05/29/2008:  Happy to report that I’ve just learned from Joyce that UMG has agreed to let Deadsexy be licensed, so no further correspondence requesting its release is necessary!  It will soon be available on iTunes (and I expect the usual other sources).  Thanks so very much to everyone that assisted with this effort to get Scarce’s old music out to the masses – Joyce & Chick appreciate you all SO much (and me too)! :)

Swooping In

So I’ve been busy on some projects I have been trying to pull together and complete forever now, thanks to my well-known Aussie rock fetish, and I guess you could say Phase 1 & 2 are up to speed now, Phase 3 is about to get done, and then onto Phase 4 one of these days when I have some free time that I never have anymore.

Anyway, I’ve been busy here and here, and finally got the only existing video footage of The Monarchs up on both MySpace and YouTube, and those of you who pop over here occasionally from the Pen and that general sector who haven’t already heard about the videos will certainly want to check those out.

Otherwise, I am so exhausted right now, and have had so little sleep in the past week and a half (not because of this stuff tho), that I have absolutely nothing else to blog about unless you wanna hear me yawn, so ’til later, folks…

Go Ahead & Sigh, It’s One of THOSE Posts

WARNING:  Total Music Geek post ahead.  I mean, this is a realllllly major one, so you know, many of you are welcome to skip it if you really wanna.

It’s a freakin’ holy grail week!  Not only do I have live, never-seen-before Monarchs video IN MY HAND (thank you from the bottom of my little blonde heart, Muzz!) – which hopefully I will find time to convert and pop on the MySpace profile and YouTube within the next couple of days (as well as put a finish on and unveil the new website)…

But I just found a studio-quality MP3 of something I have not had on anything but CASSETTE in over 20 YEARS!!  It can’t even be found on CD anywhere!  I would tell you what it is, but 99.99% of you (even the music geeks) would have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about anyway.  But YAY!

Thus whittles down the long list I have been carrying around since 1986 of nearly impossible to find, out of print stuff to, like… maybe two things now?

Listen, I could have won $40 million in the lottery today and wouldn’t be any happier.

OK, yes, I know I’m whacked.  But who cares, I’m happy!

I Got One Sometimes Too

More Cheese, Please

Lookie what I found… new old Government Cheese videos. I guess I should monitor YouTube a little more closely sometimes since some of these have actually been posted for a few months now. All kinds of chewy extremely Eighties goodness here to be had.

I remember when less than ten bucks (sometimes a lot less) could buy you a pretty good night out in Nashville or Murfreesboro with a Cheese show and a guaranteed hangover the next morning. And if you were lucky, still have enough left over to buy a much-needed 2 liter bottle of Sun-Drop for the hangover cure, too.

“Oh Yeah” (live):

“Mammaw Drives the Bus”:

“Face to Face”:

Postscript – Lynnster’s Musical Education, Now in Four Posts

I realized over the weekend that I forgot a couple of very important moments in the third post of the music series I posted Saturday, and these were big MAJOR omissions.

I saw this one live on broadcast TV as well in late 1977, while spending the night over at my friend Katie’s house. Not only an important event musically for me, but a classic moment that went down in rock & roll history (because of the false start on live TV). Elvis Costello, 1977 (UPDATE, 10/2009 – As with most clips on YouTube that get put up of some of the most magnificent performances in artists’ careers – i.e., their debut or early Saturday Night Live appearances – this one has been removed, for now. If the clip gets put up again or if NBC Universal ever gets their head out of their collective ass and puts up their own YouTube partner channel with these fantastic performances so that they’ll be back in public view where they SHOULD be for people to enjoy these pieces of music history, I’ll pop it back in here. For now, here’s the actual video for the song – unusual in itself for that period of time since video wasn’t widely used in the ’70s for promotion):

And another event that, along the same lines as The B-52s and the Pretenders, was hugely important… unfortunately I can’t find any footage of what was the actual event where I saw them for the first time (which I believe was on Rock Concert in 1978), but this promo video is from the same time. And featuring one of the world’s greatest drummers in Clem Burke – which is not only my opinion, but the opinion of girl drummer extraordinaire Miss Jo Walker, Christopher & Jay W., and every other drummer I have ever knocked around with. Blondie, 1978:

If I get industrious again in the near future, maybe we’ll hit college days and my point-of-no-return assimilation into the indie scene. I’ll probably just skip high school – while I had some cool stuff like the first couple of U2 albums and some other stuff most people didn’t have in West Tennessee at the time (thank goodness for Night Tracks on TBS!), those days included a lot of Loverboy and .38 Special and Night Ranger and etc., and I don’t need to be reminded of that and neither do you. Ciao for now. ;)

No Turning Back Now – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts

A continuation of the previous two posts… i.e., the finale.

And here is where I witness most of the below at the time of original broadcast (or a similar video at the time), and there’s no turning back after that. I guess late night TV is probably not really the same as it used to be back in my preteen and teenage and babysitting days… but if it was like that now, and you had a child who liked music a lot and also was a night owl that never went to sleep early, they’d probably turn out like me. Scary.

Possibly the most monumental evening in Lynnster Musical History. Here, it’s all over now and there’s no turning back. It’s 1977. It was a late night of babysitting over at the home of a friend of the family. An 11-year-old Lynnster flips on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, as seen here, and things just really wouldn’t ever be the same again. R.I.P. Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny. Just as I first saw them, I give you the Ramones, 1977.

This should really be before the Ramones because this is not the broadcast where I saw Cheap Trick for the first time – that would have probably also been in 1977, and was also on Rock Concert. Nevertheless, this is close enough to the same time, and same era of severe and extreme Robin Zander crush which would last for a couple of decades at least. I kinda got too indie-cool for a while there in the late Eighties and early Nineties and didn’t listen to them much for maybe a decade, then in the latter part of the Nineties, got bit by the bug again and also saw them live for the third time in 20 years and it was awesome. Probably the only band besides the Gurus and The Replacements that I could sing every song off the first ten (or however many) albums backwards and in my sleep, easy. Cheap Trick, circa 1978:

So now, it’s 1979. This is not the broadcast I saw, but it’s close, and the same song of two I saw performed at the time. Probably 12 years old when I saw them, and had never seen anything quite like it before. I had a friend sleeping over who was watching with me, who was, like, “What the hell is THAT?”

I said, “I don’t know, but the guitars. Pay attention to the guitars. And the drums.”

And she said, “Who cares?” Well, me, for one.

Yes, they were whacked out, crazy stuff. And brilliant. This 1979 video of “Uncontrollable Urge” is unfortunately rather poor, but it’s the closest I could find to what I originally saw that night. Devo, 1979 (UPDATE 10/2009 – I’ve had to replace this with another video as the one that was here got taken off YouTube. This one’s from their Fridays appearance in 1980, with a little bit of a comedy lead-in. Sadly, once again, the SNL performance I wrote about that I actually saw in 1979 is yet another one being held hostage by NBC Universal and being kept from the YouTube public):

And here’s yet another of the very most monumental evenings ever. This one I did witness the broadcast live as a VERY impressionable 12 or 13 year old girl. I thought I’d never seen anything as wild as Devo, but this – I’d never seen anything quite like it. When, a minute or so into it and out of nowhere, Cindy Wilson screamed, “Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no limburger!” – chills ran down my spine. I was stunned.

And then I got unstunned and bought the cassette tape the very next day. And just wanted to BE Cindy Wilson after that, really. And how cool was it that they were from the Southeast, just like me?

Some people I guess would say oh, no, the important one’s “Rock Lobster” (which I seem to recall was also performed that night). But for me, it’s this one. The almighty B-52s, 1979 (UPDATE 10/2009 – yet another monumental performance that has been removed from YouTube thanks to NBC Universal. I have replaced it for the time being with this live performance of the same song from 1982):

This is out of order chronologically, but there was rarely an opportunity to see the Sex Pistols on TV, at least in this part of the country, when they were still together. I read all the music rags of the time and had read loads about them, but it must have taken two years to actually see them somewhere besides in photos in print, so even though this video is from 1977, it was probably 1979 or 1980 before I saw it, and the band was long gone and Sid was probably dead by the time I did. That lack of exposure for me at the time is probably why I love The Filth & the Fury DVD so much.

Yeah, there were better bands, but the Pistols are still a hugely important chapter in that period of music, and guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook went on to do some really great stuff later on, especially Steve with the Neurotic Outsiders was awesome. The Sex Pistols, 1977:

I think this is from 1980, and I also saw this on live broadcast. It kind of took a little while for The Clash to filter into semi-rural West Tennessee, as with a lot of other bands I eventually grew to love. RIP Joe. The Clash, around 1980:

This is actually not the first time I saw The Boomtown Rats, though I did see this broadcast as well and I think it was that same week or maybe a week later; in any case, it followed soon after. I initially saw them on Bandstand on a Saturday morning. I wouldn’t really call the Rats a major influence “overall”, but this album itself was a HUGE influence on me on its own. That was one of the greatest albums to come out of the New Wave-y early Eighties. They played this on both performances as well as the big hit of the time, which was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, of course. Sir Saint Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats, 1980 (UPDATE 10/2009 – the video I originally had here has been removed from YouTube, but this is even better – this is BOTH the performances from that evening, “Someone’s Looking at You” AND “I Don’t Like Mondays”):

Last but very much not least, Chrissie Hynde – another EXTREMELY important influence for me as a female. It took me a little while to get to the Pretenders because I didn’t like “Brass in Pocket”, but then the second album came out and I loved it. Went back and bought the first one and was, like, OMG, what have I missed?!?! Saw this one on live broadcast too, in 1981:

So there ya go. The formative years, and maybe explains a lot as to why I’m so musically psychotic/schizophrenic or whatever. Maybe it doesn’t. All I know is it’s there and it’s mine and that’s just me.

Toodles ’til after the weekend, I must go buy a car today and have a car payment again for the first time in years. Yikes.