The Jam at Pinkpop 05.26.1980 in 320 mp3

Paul Weller is my favorite British rock star. True. Not only am I head over heels with his music with the Jam and solo (eh, not so much Style Council), but I also love his taste in music. The compilation he made for Mojo last year provided K and I with our first dance song. I love the fact that his dad still manages him, even after all these years. His politics are dead-on working-class and sensible. Whenever you hear him interviewed he flashes the kind of sense of humor which would only get better after a few pints (even though Paul himself abstains). And last, but certainly not least, there is his sense of style. Sure, everyone wants to be a rock star, but Paul is the only one I want to dress like. I have to admit it. I have a man crush on Paul Weller. I’m OK with that.

We all know about the Sex Pistols and the Clash over here in the states, but the Jam were the better pop band. Yes, they never recorded a ‘God Save The Queen’ or released an album as transcendent as London Calling. But for sheer amount of great tracks, the Jam blows away the work of those two combined. Never achieving hit single status here in the States, the Jam and Paul Weller are pop deities in their native England.

The Jam were a trio from Woking, Surrey and also included bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler. Weller and his mates were in love with the mid-60’s Who and Small Faces, and they aimed to copy the mod lifestyle of that time. Weller played a Rickenbacker guitar and purchased a Lambretta scooter. While the punks dyed their hair and wore safety pins through their noses, the Jam showed up to their gigs in stylish suits and haircuts. They then tore the roof of whatever hall they were booked at with music which embraced ’60s r&b and pop, oblivious to the middle finger most punks extended toward that time. In the five years the band existed, it strung together eighteen consecutive UK Top 40 singles.

After the Jam’s initial success, they began to be dogged by certain press and peers as nothing more than mod revivalists. Nothing could be further from the truth. While most of the punks were slumming art-school drop-outs or upper-class twits, the Jam acted more like the striking laborers of the time in England. During the tour for their second album, This Is The Modern World, the band got into a fight with some rugby players in a Leeds hotel and Weller broke several bones and was charged with assault. The charges were dropped, but try to imagine any other British band ever taking on a bunch of rugby players. The rest of the tour was canceled and your to be sure the band lost a great deal of income.

I heard ‘Beat Surrender’ on XRT sometime in my ‘tweens and couldn’t get the song out of my head. I soon purchased Snap on cassette from Wind Records in Oak Lawn. How was this music not on American classic rock? I couldn’t understand. It fit right into the new wave sound of the early ’80s while swinging harder and having killer lyrics. Why didn’t the Jam catch on here in the States? Who knows, but I’m sure opening for Blue Oyster Cult, as they did in ‘78, didn’t help matters.

Our  show comes from the 1980 Pinkpop festival. Pinkpop is Holland’s answer to Glastonbury. That year the headliners along with the Jam were Joe Jackson, the Specials, and, ahem, Van Halen and the J Geils Band. A fairly mixed crowd of Dutch rockers, I imagine.. This show just makes me mad. The Jam were such a tight band with such an amazing collection of songs. Why did I have to be born too late? Listening to this set, you know why the Jam were such a great live draw. While the punks stole their riffs and slamming bass drums from the hard rock of bands like Thin Lizzy, the Jam wanted to sound like a Motown rhythm section. And although they don’t sound that good, they definitely sound like a unit. Live the songs which make up the three straight masterpieces the Jam released (All Mod Cons, Setting Sons, and Sound Affects) sound much more like their ’60s soul influences than they do on record. Foxton especially takes advantage of this opportunity to brandish his lead bass lines on almost each song. He even gets a lead vocal. On drums, Buckler was no Keith Moon, but no one was asking him to be. He keep Foxton on schedule with a steady, propulsive hand which would earn kudos from Charlie Watts. Highlight for me is the encore of ‘All Mod Cons’ into ‘David Watts’. I doubt the Van Halen Kinks cover was as impressive that day as the Jam’s.

This is nothing less than a prime document of one of the best pop bands of all time at the top of their game.

I don't know Sven- Dylan or Golden Earring?

Bob Dylan Sweden 05.27.1989 in 320 mp3

Bob Dylan Sweden 05.27.1989 in FLAC

You can’t ignore Bob Dylan if you follow pop music. His work makes up a primary genetic strand in pop, recombining with other music to create entirely new pop genres. I fell in love with Bob at an early age, stopping whatever I was doing when ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ came on the radio. His music didn’t court you, like his peers the Beatles. No, it stood its own ground, aware that it sounded completely different than anything else of its time. Dylan’s music waits for everyone, and when you finally embrace it your world becomes all the richer. He is our modern Shakespeare- a poet of popular art whose work reveals universal truths which enlighten humanity. Like Shakespeare, he will always be out of time, sure to be heard and studied anew long after his last performance. His influence here can be seen at the top of every page. Bob Dylan will be with us forever.

Of course, Bob Dylan is human, and he does exist. He is of finite time. And for most of his adult life, he has had to grapple with the burden of being Bob Dylan. For that, there are no universal truths to reveal. Only he knows how it feels. Forty years of “What next?” Bob handled that question quite well at the start, always finding a way to reinvent himself after a misstep. This impressive agility gradually left him. Bob was blind-sided by punk music, new wave, and post-punk as the ’70s ended. For the first time, his music was not of the zeitgeist. Instead, he appeared old, out-of-touch, even decrepit to this new music scene. The right move would have been to strip his sound back to the mid-60s, replug in to the youth culture as it were. Bob chose to go the Elvis path instead, starting a tour in ‘78 which resembled a Vegas-style, those-were-the-days revue. The critical response to his ‘78 tour was near unanimously negative. In response, Bob went to the reinvention du jour of any broke showman. He found God.

God and Bob toured and recorded together for the next four years. When the real Bob finally reappeared for Infidels in 1983, he seemed destined for the oldies circuit for sure. For the rest of the ’80s, Dylan embarked on a journey to find commercial success. This poet wanted relevance, he needed to be heard. He could not outrun his own long shadow, though. As proteges like Bruce and Mellencamp climbed the charts, Bob was stuck in a rut of playing rote ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’s to dwindling audiences. When album after album was ignored popular attention, Dylan turned to the road. Maybe the future was anonymity. He sought to burrow himself into working bands, first with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and then with the Dead. The Dead tour is where Bob hit rock bottom. The shows made neither Deadheads or Dylanists happy. After the Dead declined Bob’s offer to continue the tour in ‘88, Bob found himself at home in New Orleans, alone and nearly forgotten. In his excellent Chronicles, Bob explains to us what went wrong:

The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. My audience or future audience now would never be able to experience the newly plowed fields that I was about to enter. There were many reasons for this, reasons for the whiskey to have gone out of the bottle. Always a prolific but never exact, too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I’d been following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know.

Besides finding himself out of creative juice, Bob’s voice had done gone left the building. Years of posing as a broken down troubador had turned him into the real thing. Whereas before he kept a base level pitch he could find to bury the dagger in ‘Rollin Stone’ and many of his anthems, now he could only muster the breathy gasps of the middle-aged man he was. What to do? Bob wrote new songs which he cared about. He met with Daniel Lanois, the producer of the moment. Lanois’ work on U2’s Joshua Tree and Peter Gabriel’s So were still on the album charts. Lanois offered to produce Dylan’s next album. The album they crafted, Oh Mercy, received the best critical press of any Dylan release since the mid-’70s.

Dylan wasn’t done yet. The manager of the Dead tour got him a band- G.E. Smith (from SNL) on guitar, Kenny Aaronson on bass, and Christopher Parker on drums. The band worked together on seventeen dates in ‘88. Dylan booked one hundred dates for the band in ‘89. In October of ‘89, Dylan referred to his current tour as “the Never Ending Tour.” The name stuck. Over the next nineteen years, with a rotating cast of musicians, Dylan never played less than a hundred shows. Over that time, he rediscovered who Bob Dylan was. Bob Dylan was not the au courant cover boy of the pop world. No, he was the old master of American pop, always on the road honing his craft. Bob finally found a role he could embrace.

And Bob found a new voice. Yes, Bob barely sings anymore. What he has left is a world-weary sing-speak heavily influenced by Johny Cash. He went back to a folk tradition of concentrating on the words. He might not be able to deliver ‘Maggie’s Farm’ with the bite of a young man, but he replaces it with the knowledge of what the words mean. I saw Dylan three times on the N.E.T. (as it is called by Dylanists). One show was fierce. The other two contained many revelatory moments. I walked away from all three shaking my head at this man’s devotion to music.

Bob in full druid habit.

The show we have today was the first of Bob’s ‘89 shows. He recently completed the Oh Mercy sessions. His career reinvention was in still in its early moments. This concert is not the best live Dylan show you’ll ever hear. Bob played the whole show in an hooded anorak which entirely covered his head and upper-body. His voice sounds terrible in spots, and his harmonica mucks up a few tracks. But it is a wonderful portrait of an artist in transition. Bob plays ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, a song he never played in concert before 1988. He follows that up with his first performance of ‘You Don’t Know Me’, the Eddy Arnold song which Ray Charles standardized. Next comes ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’. This is the highlight of the set. You can hear the new Dylan in this song. No longer is there the smug dismissal of the young man. No, this is now the story of a man far too aware of the fickle nature of love, be it public or private.

Bob will return to that high-level for ‘Silvio’ and strum some fine guitar for the encore. The rest of the show is a man finding out how to be a middle-aged rocker before a live audience. The band cooks the whole set. They are tight, providing the appropriate space for Bob’s performance. The encore hints at what is ahead for this tour. Bob’s voice will repossess these songs eventually. At the time, though, he was hot in search for the right bait. This is the sound of someone working his art. It is the sound of struggle.

It is a sound we all can admire.

The set list:

Intro (swedish Language)
01. Subterranean Homesick Blues
02. You Don’t Know Me
03. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
04. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
05. You’re A Big Girl Now
06. Just Like A Woman
07. Blowin’ in the Wind
08. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
09. Gates of Eden
10. Silvio
11. I Shall Be Released
12. Like A Rolling Stone
13. Girl From The North Country
14. Give My Love To Rose
15. Maggie’s Farm

This is how a real rocker plays with himself.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions Live ‘79 At The Sophia Gardens in 320 mp3

Elvis Costello was the first rock n roller to which I felt a personal connection. From his first album in 1977, Elvis was on heavy rotation in the Brett household. Elvis, Bruce, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, and Michael Jackson made up the musical Mt. Rushmore of my childhood. I enjoy all of them immensely to this day, but to a five- or six-year old the the rest of them were glitzy and alien. Elvis wore big, thick glasses, like I did. He stared back from his album covers uncomfortably, like a caged animal. His songs combined smart lyrics with a burning restlessness. His music was frustration. I ate it all up. To this day, I believe if I were to run into Elvis in a pub, we’d share a couple of pints and be the best of friends. Elvis is one of those top echelon pop artists who mastered the album form. From his debut, My Aim Is True, through ’82’s Imperial Bedroom, he released six perfect albums (and one very good one). Today, these albums have not aged one bit. When you hear me turn old fogey on you, and say, “They don’t make music like the old days” it is to Elvis Costello’s early work I’m referring.

On January 27, 1979, promoting his second album This Year’s Model, Elvis and his band the Attractions played Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, Wales with John Cooper Clarke and opening act Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Now that’s a triple bill that screams 1979. The attendees were mostly hard-core punks there to see Hell. Hence, Costello’s “And we think anyone who throws glasses or spits is a tosser” before the final song. Costello was often clumped with the punks, but this is more a case of timing than anything else. Elvis’s music bore little resemblance to the “1-2-3-4!” bludgeon of punk music. It also bore little resemblance to the new wave or post-punk music which followed punk. Elvis had more in common with the Beatles or Kinks than any of his peers.

What strikes you about this show at first is early versions of songs from the soon-to-be-released Armed Forces and even a track from Get Happy!!. Already, ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ‘Green Shirts’ possess that pop magic that Elvis could conjure nearly at will.

The highlights are the tracks from Model. ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Lipstick Vogue’ snap with Steve Nieve’s keyboard vamps and Bruce Thomas’ powerful drums. Elvis once said on-stage at one of the innumerable times I’ve seen him that Nieve is ‘the most dangerous man alive’. He certainly sounds that way on many of the songs here, both adding size to the band’s sound and guiding them. His work here is as integral as Garth Hudson’s to The Band. Look no further than ‘Pump It Up’. Elvis and he battle it out during the song’s first few bars, but than Elvis just steps aside and let’s this behemoth loose. Impressive. For the last track, former Stiff labelmate Dave Edmunds gets onstage for ‘Mystery Dance’. Great, great show.

Even if the poor Welshmen couldn’t understand a thing. It’s all sl;hwe;oirhjas;lkc to them.

The Boss takes the stage in Tampa tonight at halftime of the Super Bowl. He will have twelve minutes and will do a medley of hits. I expect it to be pretty strong, pretty tight. Will it be as good as Prince a couple years ago? No. But he won’t embarrass himself, either. Bruce is not getting any younger, and it’s just not in him to perform at the same high intensity with which he earned his following. But we at Shambollocks! want to remind you of how high energy Bruce can be when he is on his game. Herewith, a few fantastic samples of the man and his mastery.

First, ‘Thunder Road’ from the mid-’70s. If this song was a philosophy, it would be one by which I’ve lived my life.

Now my personal fave, ‘Rosalita’. On album this is a great song, but live it is a living, breathing entity all its own, sucking up everything in its wake. At this performance, that means it brings up a series of young ladies to the stage. Oh, to be the Boss.

And finally ‘Dancing In The Dark’, which might be his biggest hit here in the States. The single version is probably my least favorite song on Born In The U.S.A.. I don’t begrudge Bruce attempts at pop hits, but the layer of cheesy synth crud on the single has no place in his catalog. Live, though, he can still make even this song swing. Here, from a performance a couple years ago is a charging ‘Dancing In The Dark’. Does anyone love their job more than him?

Thanks to IGN for the legwork on this. Check the link if you want a Boss Super Bowl party playlist. Also, the Times Sunday Magazine has a Bruce interview which is pretty darn good.

Those charming men.

Last of the English Roses by the Smiths in 320 mp3

Today we feature a fantastic show from the Smiths’ first major tour in 1984. There is no way they can sound this amazingly good this early in their career?! Um, yeah way, it appears. There is no band in America right now that sounds this good three albums into their career. Highlights abound- for starters,  check out ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’, or ‘Back To The Old House’. There are many who talk of R.E.M as the rock band of the ’80s, but the Smiths’ were the gun in that knife fight.

I came very late to the Smiths. My sisters gave me plenty of great ’80s Britpop, but somehow the Smiths flew under their radar. I was twelve or thirteen when I first became aware of them.  The right age for the Smiths. Or the wrong age. Depends on how you look at it. Put it this way, the Smiths got me into Bowie. Not the right order. I was two steps from eyeliner. Pretty scary.

After I passed off those cassettes to my sister for anti-coolness, I pretty much turned my back on the Smiths. An early ’90s meh. But the man is right. The more you ignore Morrissey the closer he gets. By senior year, they had worked their way back into my ear. And they’ve never left. This band defines almost everything I think is bad-ass cool about a guitar band, with a complete resistance toward any kind of return embrace. The Smiths are unique because they never wanted to hang out with us. They never needed our adulation. They knew they were good. Maybe it’s why their music always speaks so fervently to misfits all over the world. If the Island of Misfit Toys is real, Morrissey is Moonraker, the Lion King.

And I’m the polka-dotted pig.

Highlight for me in this show- Morrissey, already having patented his sardonic rock star, saying, “This next one’s called ‘There’s Always Something There To Remind Me’.”

NPR has an old appreciation of ‘Born To Run’ up. ‘Born To Run’ is not my favorite Boss song, but it is undoubtedly the song and sound which defines him. He needs to play it every show. How do you not get sick of something that’s become as big as you are? Here’s how the Boss has done it:

The first is the Boss in London, 1975. My favorite performance of the song because if there is any song that reflects youth, this is the one.

Now here he is, biggest rock star in the world.

Born To Run 1982 by Bruce Springsteen

This time, slowed down and acoustic in 1987. Even stripped down, this song wants to bust out.

Without the E Street Band in 1993. And it shows. Who IS that chick playing sax?

Finally, with REM in 2004. This is pretty much the sound and set you get when you see him right now. No word if Michael Mills asked Little Stephen afterwards how to get away from your frontman.

A 1 2 3 4!

- Yesterday’s Guardian contains an interview with the Boss and an exclusive download of a track, ‘Life Itself’, from his upcoming album Working On A Dream, out January 26th.

Snap Lead Single Judgement- Umm, Bruce. Pick a new first single. That one is lame. And not getting played at the Super Bowl, I imagine.