14 July 2023 - PJ Harvey - 50 Ft Queenie

I've mentioned the worst show I ever saw - September 10, 1995, Hartford, CT.  Live, with special guests PJ Harvey and Veruca Salt.  I didn't have high expectations of the headliner - I was there for the two openers.  Veruca Salt were truly disappointing.

I had high expectations of PJ Harvey, and Polly Jean let me down.  I'm sure it was an off night, because she had already released three great albums of material and has consistently done so since.  

And the show wasn't all bad.  She did perform this song and it was the highlight of the show.  

This song, her third single ever, came from her second album Rid of Me. It was a huge hit in the UK, but she never got the commercial success stateside that she had enjoyed in Europe.  Is it her best song?  No.  It is a rockabilly punk masterpiece, but she's got better songs lyrically and musically.  But it's a FUN song.  It's an in-your-face, dick-measuring masterpiece by a woman who previously wrote a song about her childbreaing hips.  

I KNOW I caught her on an off night, because this performance, and other songs from this performance, rocks.  From 2003, you can see the song isn't hard to play on guitar, but it is simplicity that makes it a masterpiece.

Someday, I am going to stop being surprised at musicians who are still touring 30 years into their careers.  This is from 2016, and it STILL rocks.  Polly Jean has given up the guitar, but that makes for a more dynamic performance.

13 July 2023 - The Pandoras - Run-Down Love Battery

The Pandoras were an all-girl garage band that got their start in LA in 1982 and had a great run until 1991, when front woman Paula Pierce passed away.  The band didn't break up (they're STILL together, despite also losing bassist and background vocalist Kim Shattuck in 1991 to The Muffs (Melanie Vammen also went to The Muffs) and again in 2018 to ALS), but their glory days were behind them.

This performance, from 1990, was probably their pinnacle.  They were a garage band and a good one at that, with a bunch of great musicians who all happened to be women making great music.  

Oh, they also made a video for the song. I just wanted to feature something that WASN'T such obvious 1980s record label objectification right up front.  

12 July 2023 - Pixies - Debaser

The second you saw the name "Luis Buñuel" in yesterday's post, you should have known this was coming.

"I am un chien andalusia" is literally a line in this song.

"Slicing up eyeballs" is literally a different line in the song.

Can we look at the title of the film, though?  Un chien andalou is a mishmash of French and Spanish already.  The film is really about nothing.  It's a surrealist collaboration between Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It was, at points, stomach-turning, debasing the standards of art and morality.

Ahhhh, there it is.  The title.  That last sentence paraphrases Black Francis a.k.a. Charles Thompson IV, the writer of this song and leader of the Pixies, the Boston-based post-punk band that broke through the US consciousness with their 2nd full length album, Doolittle, which opened with this bombastic song. 

Never released as a single in the US, this song hit #23 on the UK charts.  More personally, it's possibly my favorite song by a band that I count among my favorites.   

The Pixies did break up in the mid 90s but reformed about a decade later, and are still together and still making music.  Kim Deal did leave the band in 2013 to devote herself to The Breeders full-time, and was replaced on their 2013 tour by Muffs frontwoman Kim Shattuck - who was amazing as a fill-in.

Shattuck was replaced the next year - by most accounts, because her personality (which had been very frontwoman-y and outgoing) didn't mesh with what was a mostly introverted band, which is a shame because she was incredible.  She was replaced by Paz Lenchantin, who, to be fair, is also incredible.

11 July 2023 - White Town - Your Woman

Jyoti Prakash Mishra, White Town's sole member, famous music producer, and a guy, wrote this song as kind of a methaphor for all sorts of relations, that could be adaptable to all sorts of points of view.   He recorded the song using a sample from an old Lew Stone song (the muted trumpet), free MIDI software and a cheap tape recorder, releasing it in 1997.

He created a worldwide sensation.  

This song was a worldwide hit - top 30 in the US, top 10 elsewhere.  What's more, it carried Mishra's self-described mediocre voice and pretty good keyboard work to one hit wonder status.

No, seriously, he said this.

“I feel so privileged [because] to be 100 percent honest with you — I’m a mediocre singer, I’m a terrible guitarist, I’m a pretty good keyboardist, I’m a good producer, not amazing, but good.”

The video was partially inspired by Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou - thankfully without slicing up any eyeballs - and other surrealist artists, and has the same 20's feel that the Lew Stone sample gives to the song.

10 July 2023 - The Cult - She Sells Sanctuary

In 1985, British band - from Bradford, West Yorkshire, if we're being precise - The Cult would release what would ultimately be their best known and most widely recognized single.  It wasn't their biggest hit - although close to it in the UK - and didn't even chart in the US, although its success and endurance paved the way for their future worldwide success.  

Written by Ian Astbury - the lead vocalist - and Billy Duffy - the guitarist..... I didn't need to tell you that.  The song shows that. Astbury's haunting vocals lend an air of enigmatic charisma to the lyrics that are tuned for his voice. His raw, soulful delivery infuses the lyrics with passion and depth, drawing the listener into a realm of introspection and introspective longing. Add that to Duffy's distinctive guitar work, which merges elements of psychedelic rock with a touch of new wave, and you've got a Cult classic.

No, not that kind of cult classic.

Weirdly, the song was also a club hit - so much so that in 1993, it got some remixes and a rerelease, which ended up being a hit in its own right.

It's weird, though.

The Cult, believe it or not, are still together. There have absolutely been some lineup changes, but it has always been, unceasingly, the Billy and Ian show throughout.  This performance from 2022 shows that the song has changed a little to accomodate for the changes age brings to vocalists, but not much - and the energy is still there.  

7 July 2023 - David Bowie – Space Oddity

In 1969, feeling feelings of alientation - his career was taking a nose dive - and having seen Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowie wrote and recorded this classic song.

It was an initial bomb but enventually because a UK hit, his only until 1973.  

It remained a bomb in the US for three years, until it was released in 1972.  THEN it hit #15 on the pop charts and became a big deal.  

In July, 1990, I was getting ready to go to college.  I was 18, and visiting family in Niagara Falls and Buffalo. Coincidentally, and not visiting my family, David Bowie was playing at the Niagara Falls Convention Center in what he said would be his last tour playing his classic songs, such as "Space Oddity".

Naturally, I wanted to go, but I was only allowed to go if I went with my Aunt Martha, who, to be fair, wasn't terribly old herself and so was cool enough to actually enjoy the show.  We had a great time and it was a great show.

My younger sister was pissed because she wanted to go.  Sorry, Dawn.

This is from Santiago, Chile, on the same tour.  I can tell you that this is exactly how it sounded.

  

By the way, David Bowie lied, because here he is, performing the song in 1997.  David Bowie taught me not to believe that farewell tours are real.  

But that 1990 show was still great.  

6 July 2023 - Peter Schilling - Major Tom (Coming Home) (Völlig losgelöst)

This top 20 hit was released in 1983 by German artist Peter Schilling.  The titular Major Tom is, at least officially, not the same Major Tom who happens to be an astronaut in the David Bowie classic "Space Oddity:.   

But c'mon.

Yes it is.  

The synth-heavy song is right in place in 1983 - and it remains a really cool song to this day.  It was Schilling's first English language single, and it ended up being a worldwide hit.

Ready for the other shoe?  Well, the title of this post should have given it away.  

This was a rerecorded version of a German song - and a hit song at that - by Schilling in 1982. Titled "Major Tom (Völlig losgelöst)", it was hit in Europe and the German-speaking world.  Specifically, it was a #1 hit in Germany.  

The video is not NEARLY as good.