Your Weekly Funny
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
Bob Dylan got busted trespassing at the home where the Boss wrote Born to Run. Apparently, he’s visiting the childhood homes of all his imitations. This article is so frickin’ hilarious and bizarre, you may not stop smiling this weekend. 
Fleet Foxes On SNL
The Fleet Foxes, last year’s it indie band, played SNL this past Saturday night. I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live since Tina Fey became head writer, but I do dig good music. Here the boys do ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’. Very good song, even if they do sound a lot like CSN. Why not sound like CSN? They’re awesome, right? I especially love to watch grown men soft-rock out. Ouarter-horns, Fleet Foxes. Quarter-horns.
‘Children of the Revolution’-T Rex, Elton, Ringo ‘72
This rocks a whole hell of a lot. Three drummers, T-Rex, and Elton bang out this classic T-Rex hit. On the flip, you also see the wasted self-love which made the ’70s suck. Bolan starts off by serenading EJ from within his piano. Ringo, who directed a T-Rex feature from which this is taken, walks around in a clown suit filming T-Rex in a mirrored cube. Ick!
Amount of degradation before and after this was shot- Epic!
Found- MBV.
‘Salvage Mission’
How I Became the Bomb – Salvage Mission from How I Became the Bomb on Vimeo.
Great video for a very cool, bombastic slice of pop by the group How I Became the Bomb. I’m not sure what video game they used for the special effects, but it looks like it might be a Star Wars game.
Yes, music videos are back as meaningful art. MTV be damned, rockers still want to be actors. And thank God for that.
Ups to MBV for this.
MBV: Your One-Stop Music Blog
Shambollocks always wants you to be the coolest person on your scene, so we want to make sure you’re aware of MBV- the new music site which combines the works of Said the Gramophone, Largehearted Boy, Fluxblog, The Catbird Seat, and Chromewaves in one place. Don’t waste your time at Pitchfork or trawling the web. If you want new sounds, stop at MBV first.
Just as a reminder, they are the new addition to our blog list at the bottom of our page.
‘Sinkership’
Iceland may be suffering through a winter of discontent, but they are still churning out great music. Today we spotlight the band Sin Fang Bous, a side project for a guy who is in another band called Seabear of which I am unaware. Their song ‘Sinkership’ has everything going on-horns, strings, and what sounds almost like the theme song to ‘Kid Icarus’. Shambollocks‘ never faults pop which tries too hard, and we will definitely keep our eyes and ears open for this band’s future work. You can find the song at bunnynico.
‘Punk Rock Is A Joke’
That was the instant opinion of a Dallas youth after walking out early from a Sex Pistols show there in January, 1978 (a very special month indeed). The Pistols played the Longhorn Ballroom, a Dallas institution which at one point was owned by Bob Wills and, later, Jack Ruby.
The video is great for all you rock historians, if just for the marquee outside the Longhorn, which advertises a Merle Haggard show beneath the Sex Pistols. There is also an intellectually stimulating interview with one Sid Vicious. Sid couldn’t score heroin as easily in Texas and, suffering from withdrawal, would spit blood at a woman who climbed the stage and punched him.
The Pistols’ 1978 US tour was one of rock’s great debacles. By the time they reached the final date in San Francisco, every band member wanted to call it quits. We at Shambollocks feel we owe the Pistols quite a bit. Literally.
Thanks to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog for the vid.
- In other rock news, my instant verdict on No Age, after a second time seeing them last night- best new band to come out of the States in a couple of years. If you pine for ’80s punk, or are a big Husker Du or Mudhoney fan you should definitely check them out.
The Sound of Young America
A few songs into the dance portion of my wedding reception, my Aunt Margaret, a proper woman of leisure, told me, “Play some Motown.” We did immediately. The music Barry Gordy’s little-record-company-that-could made in the ’60s is already timeless. I remember hearing Motown music growing up from my sisters and brother, and it sounded like it came out the day before. Like their chart peers the Beatles, the Motown artists never age. The Temptations always sounds as fresh as they look in the picture above.
On a broader level, Motown paved the way for Barack Obama. The popular black artists who preceded Motown were not young. Motown brought young, black America into whites’ car radios and The Ed Sullivan Show. They were the non-threatening vanguard of the civil rights movement. I truly love and admire the artistry of the Motown musicians. This year is the 50th anniversary of the label, and I’m sure you will see much publicity about that fact. Vanity Fair provides an oral history on the label that made it all happen.
The ‘Story’ Behind Welcome To The Jungle
New York Magazine has an excerpt from Stephen Davis’ Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses. The excerpt relates how Axl Rose (then Bill Bailey) came to find the refrain for his band’s first big hit. I put the word story in quotes because Davis wrote Hammer of the Gods, a wildly entertaining if oft-refuted biography of Led Zeppelin. Davis gave our culture the story of Led’s stay at a hotel in Seattle, which led to the bumper sticker on Troy McClure’s DeLorean ‘I [Heart] Sea World’. Yes, this is how my brain works. You don’t want to be there. But I digress.
To Bill and his friend, it was bedlam, a Caribbean neighborhood in Washington Heights with a funky street scene of bodegas and shouting kids playing under open hydrants, crones yelling out of windows in Spanish, idlers under shop awnings, hustlers working the corners of 177th and Broadway. Bill and Paul, from Tippecanoe County in Indiana, were the only white faces in a sea of black people, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Muslim women in veils, Haitians, Hindus, Chinese shopkeepers, and lots of kids immediately picking up on two white boys who’d just climbed out of the hellish Cross Bronx like hayseed mountaineers in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and very long straight hair. The boys just stood and gaped, checking out this scene. “Rapper’s Delight,” bass-heavy hip-hop, blasted out of a bodega speaker. Lurid graffiti covered every flat surface. Kids were busting moves — break dancing — on the sidewalk. Bill Bailey had never seen this before. Basically, there weren’t any black people in his part of Indiana, so they might as well have been in Senegal.
Now an old man limped over to them. He gave them the once-over, seeming to linger over Bill’s cowboy boots. Bill was becoming uneasy now, his friend noticed, which was never a good thing, because, when agitated or upset, Bill’s behavior could get a little out there. Finally, the old man spoke, or rather squawked, in a high-pitched shriek.
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?”
The boys, taken aback, just looked at him.
“I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?“
Bill Bailey said, “Uh, we’re just trying to get to…”
“YOU’RE IN THE JUNGLE, BABY!“
Bill Bailey — the future W. Axl Rose — just stared at him in wonderment. And then the little old man wound himself up to his full fury and told these white boys what they could expect from New York City at the tail end of the seventies: years of bankruptcy, endemic crime, corruption, decadence — the gateway to the eighties and the scourge of AIDS. He told it to them straight from the gut:
“YOU’RE GONNA DIE!”
Either way, great ’story’.
Sphere: Related ContentAhmet Ertegun and the Music We Love
Ahmet Ertegun died last year. You may have heard it in the news, and seen a picture of someone who looked like a ’70s retread. Well, that man had as much to do with inventing rock n’ roll as any performer. Ahmet co-founded and ran Atlantic Records, the most successful independent record label of all time. He recorded Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin. Later his label released records by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.
The New Yorker’s George W. S. Trow wrote a marvelous profile of Ahmet in 1978. If you love rock music like Shambollocks does, you need to read this piece. It carries a bit of the publication’s snootiness, but gives a crystalline vision of what it meant to be in rock in the ’70s, when the coolness faded and money became paramount.
The record business is not, in its essence, picturesque. The processes of the work are straightforward, and while it is true that behind the scenes there are several coherent styles in operation, these styles (the style of engineers of twenty-seven or thirty-four with long hair and a nose for drugs; the style of press agents of twenty-seven or thirty-four with one small item of Vuitton and a nose for drugs; the style implied by stencilled T-shirts and access to rented limousines) lack the air of ingenious contrivance that was formerly found in the movie industry, for instance. There was about the old movie industry a feeling that adolescents—adolescent actors and adolescent moguls—were dressing up to play-act as adults. The superior candor of the record business has resulted in a formal recognition of adolescent styles. Styles that must be a little jittery, however, since they are juxtaposed with the real work of a cutthroat business.
If you wanted to know why the Ramones saved rock n’ roll, read this article.
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O'Hare Arpt., IL
