A great, underrated song by the Monkees that one rarely hears on oldies stations. This is accompanied by the original clip from the Monkees’ TV show, which, while cheesy, is nice to look at if you like looking at pretty women. Forgive my knuckle-dragging on this one, but this was filmed during an era when women actually had curves and bodies that weren’t enhanced by chemicals or surgery. And I must say, it’s rather nice.
http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=77934241&ac=now
From the 2009 album “House of a Thousand Guitars,” is a lovely ballad by Willie Nile. Nile is an immensely talented singer-songwriter who always seemed on the verge of breaking big, but never did due to various circumstances. He recorded some albums in the early 1980s for Arista with members of the Patti Smith Group as backup musicians. Pete Townsend was such a fan, he hired Nile to open some dates for the Who back in the 1980s. Among his fans and backing musicians over the years: Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson, Loudon Wainwright III, Roger McGuinn, and many others. A vastly terrific and underrated talent.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/how-bad-can-it-be-case-file-23-saturday-night-live,84591/
Bad comedy has always intrigued me, which is why I found this article about SNL’s infamous 1980-81 season so fascinating. Part of Nathan Rabin’s endlessly terrific “My World of Flops” series, Rabin analyzes the SNL season most people believe was the series’ worst. This was the season produced by Jean Doumanian, right after Lorne Michaels (and the rest of the original cast) left, and she had to start over with a new cast and new writers. After reading the detailed account of this season’s failure in Doug Hill’s and Jeff Weingrad’s 1985 book “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live” many years ago, I had been trying to see these episodes for a long time. Some of the episodes appeared on Comedy Central when repeats of the show were run, but many of them were severely edited. It wasn’t until some DVD-Rs of this season mysteriously fell off a truck in a town I don’t remember that I finally got a chance to watch the season.
Yes, this season is pretty bad. However, when you look at the show over its nearly 40-year history, there are other seasons that are arguably as bad. What’s easier to see now (as opposed to back in 1980) is that the show goes through severe ups and downs, the downs usually being the years when the show has to start over with a new cast and writers. It’s not that the performers/writers are bad during the down seasons, it just takes time for a new talent pool to gel, but watching that process can be incredibly painful (and interesting). The 1980-81 season was one of those seasons, and Doumanian had an incredibly thankless job. Because no one had ever seen this process before and because the first 5 seasons were so beloved, anything less than being better than the first 5 seasons would have been seen as a failure.
Despite these qualifications, the season is pretty terrible, though the obvious highlight is watching the introduction of Eddie Murphy. Watching Murphy and how fresh and funny he was back in the day, it’s astonishing to think where his career has ended up over 30 years later. Don’t get me wrong, the man still has enormous talent (“Dreamgirls”), but when you see the hacky comedies he’s become affiliated with in recent years (“Pluto Nash,” “Daddy Day Care”), it’s a sad reminder of how far he’s sunk.
The other fascinating person to watch that season is Charles Rocket. Billed as a cross between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and groomed to be the season’s breakout star by producer Doumanian, Rocket is a better talent than historians of the show would lead you to believe. However, the pressure cooker environment of the show, coupled with the sky-high expectations put on his shoulders by Doumanian, likely contributed to him being immensely difficult to work with, as Hill and Weingrad allege in their book. After being fired soon after dropping the “f-bomb” on live television, Rocket periodically popped up in character roles in movies and TV, usually very good and playing the kind of caddish roles that Wil Arnett specialized in before starring in “Up All Night” (ironically, produced by Lorne Michaels). His 2005 suicide by slitting his own throat was especially sad, considering that before SNL, Rocket was considered an important figure in the Providence, Rhode Island arts scene during the early-mid 1970s, a scene that also produced Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and the Talking Heads. (Rocket played accordion on the David Byrne-produced B-52s album “Whammy”). Below is a link to an article from the Providence Phoenix that discusses this part of Rocket’s career.
http://www.providencephoenix.com/features/p_and_j/documents/05030762.asp
Doumanian later went on to become producer of then-best friend Woody Allen’s films during the 1990s and early 2000s, until an infamous falling out occurred, detailed in the Vanity Fair article listed below:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2005/12/woodyallen200512
Alan Price’s splendid opening song to Lindsay Anderson’s equally splendid 1973 film “O Lucky Man!” While the film is more than a little cynical, the song is one of the best, genuinely optimistic songs of all time. One hell of a lot more meaningful than “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
The splendid and infamous mash-up of “Push It” by Salt n’ Pepa with “No Fun” by The Stooges, put together by 2 Many DJs. This was one of Nick Hornby’s favorites in his collection of essays about desert island songs, “Songbook.” If you like what you hear, be sure to check out the 2 Many DJs album “As Heard on Radio Vol. 2″ , which is nothing but multiple mashups of everything from the Velvet Underground to Dolly Parton to Peaches to Emerson Lake & Palmer. Trust me, it’s WAAAAY better than it sounds.
Two Velvets covers for the price of one. From one of Ferry’s better solo albums (1978’s “The Bride Stripped Bare”). Ferry ingeniously mixes “Beginning to See the Light” with “What Goes On.” The late-70s production and guitar work by Waddy Wachtel (Warren Zevon’s right-hand man) lends the perfect touch.
Terrific old-school hip-hop from Roxanne Shante on vocals and Biz Markie on human beat box and cat sounds. The part about 2:34 in where Biz Markie does the Meow Mix theme always makes me fall out of my chair in hysterics.
Michael Nesmith is a true Renaissance man who has never completely gotten his due. In addition to being one of the original Monkees, Nesmith is a superlative singer-songwriter (he wrote Linda Ronstadt’s hit “Different Drum”), music video pioneer, film producer (he financed “Repo Man”), and media mogul.
This song was composed by David Allan Coe, but made famous by a teenage country singer named Tanya Tucker back in the early 1970s. At the time, it was considered salacious to have a teenager sing this due to certain lyrics, but sadly, the controversy diminishes the real beauty of this song. Coe was in and out of prison for most of his early life and if you listen to the lyrics, they are written from the perspective of a man who has seen and done of lot of things that would scare most people away. The person singing the song wants to make sure that whoever is going to share their life with him understand what it will entail, and to make sure that they’re strong enough. Through Cash’s world-weary voice, the song is heartbreaking.
Lou Reed’s semi-comeback, at least with critics, circa 1982. Sober for approximately 2 years, Reed takes the opportunity to look at his years as an alcoholic and drug addict with graphic intensity. “Waves of Fear” makes the Velvet’s “Heroin” look like a romantic ballad (which in many ways, it kind of always was). The supremely sick dissonant, metallic guitar solos by Robert Quine are almost as disturbing as the lyrics.
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