March 11 – Does Lisa Find Time To Sleep?

Happy birthday to one of the ’90s great musical ladies, “one hit wonder” Lisa Loeb. Loeb is 56 today and has done quite well and quite a lot for someone saddled with that tag! A gold, #1 single before even being signed to a record company, TV actress, writer, childrens’ entertainer, friend of Ethan Hawke… and Hello Kitty… you might want to “stay” on her page a bit longer.

Loeb was born in Maryland but raised in Dallas, where she learned to play piano and guitar when young. By her late teens, she was in a band there with Duncan Sheik, a classmate. By the beginning of the ’90s, she’d got her degree in literature, moved to New York City where she was a regular in the cafe scene, singing her own songs, had formed another folk pop band, Nine Stories, and lived next door to up-and-coming actor Ethan Hawke for some time.

That was a lucky break for her. Ethan heard her play one of her songs – “Stay” – and liked it so much he convinced the makers of the movie he was working on, Reality Bites, to use it in the soundtrack. At the time, she’d put out just one self-made cassette, (The Purple Tape, which she sold off the stage in a surprising close parallel to the Barenaked Ladies at the start of their career) and had no contract with any label, big or small.

The song took off even more than the Gen X movie and quickly went to #1 in the U.S. and Canada and top 10 in the UK. As such, she became the first un-signed artist ever to have a Billboard chart-topping single. It ended up going gold and being the sixth-top seller of 1994. That caught the attention of some in the business; soon she was signed on with Geffen, who got to include “Stay” on her debut album, Tails. That one hit the top 30 in the States, Canada and Britain and got her a gold record at home (and platinum one in Canada.)

While she’s generally regarded as a “one hit wonder”, she actually hit the top 20 with a couple more singles in the ’90s, “Do You Sleep” and “I Do” and has put out 14 more studio albums since Tails. Among those were 2014’s Lullaby Girl, in which she covered artists ranging from Fleetwood Mac and Bacharach & David to Kermit the Frog. But that’s hardly been the limits of her ambition. Lisa’s put out children’s records, written a couple of kids’ books, acted in a number of TV shows including a recurring role in Gossip Girl, did a food & travel show with her then boyfriend Dweezil Zappa (Frank’s son) and then a reality show about her dating life after breaking up with him but before marrying her husband who worked on the Food Network show! And while not doing that, she’s got her own Sirius satellite radio interview show. Not to mention designed her own line of eyeglasses, a sort of trademark of hers. Oh, and she has a non-profit coffee company, Wake Up Brew, with the funds going to her own childrens’ charity. All of which leads one to think her answer to her own song “Do You Sleep?” might be “not much”! You’ll be able to find out for yourself what she’s been upto lately if you’re in the Northeast; she has a number of shows booked for May in New Jersey and New England.

February 7 – A Generous Serving Of Cake

Is thirty year old Cake still tasty? Well, opinions might vary but certainly the California band has weathered decades a bit better than a slice of red velvet would. Cake, the band, put out their first album, Motorcade of Generosity, three decades back on this day in 1994. If you were one of their early fans and saw them driving around that day, you might have picked up a copy…since at that time their van was the primary retail outlet for the self-produced and then self-printed release. After a few months, it had garnered enough attention for them to be signed to Capricorn Records, who put it out nationally months later. Curiously, Capricorn were from the other end of the country, Macon, Georgia and had been best known for having the Allman Bros. in the ’70s.

Cake was, and perhaps still is (whether or not they still exist is rather up in the air) the musical vehicle for eclectic guitarist/singer John McCrea. He’d formed the band three years earlier in Sacramento, and it reflected his variety of tastes – everything from country to rap to mariachi – and dry sense of humor. They have a full-time trumpet player, Vince DiFiore and have done things like put out an album with the cover printed in five different color choices, with each being a “scratch and sniff” with a unique scent. Cake and “quirky” seem indelibly linked in music.

Motorcade… was a 13 song, 43 minute affair with all the titles written largely by McCrea, including “Jolene” a famous title but not the one we know by Dolly Parton. Other titles give a hint of their mindset or sense of humor, including “Commanche”, “I Bombed Korea” and “Rock’n’Roll Lifestyle.” The latter was eventually put out as a single and dares to potentially bite the hand that feeds it, mocking obsessive rock fans (‘excess ain’t rebellion, you’re drinking what they’re selling now, your self-destruction doesn’t hurt them…”) .

Initially it wasn’t noticed by many critics but later… well, it still wasn’t that much. When it came out the Wisconsin State Journal suggested it had “great lyrics, creative instrumentation and production that’s about as simple as production can be” and soon Pulse noted it, calling it “one of the best” indie releases of the year. Later, Pitchfork suggested the “warm and close” songs sound like “a subterranean tavern where a cantina band plays over clinking glasses.” Allmusic graded it just 2-stars but did suggest it was “a keeper” because of “ a few entertaining songs” especially “Rock’n’roll Lifestyle” (“a thoroughly laudable send up of the excesses of rock fans”) but thought overall it sounded like Phish and “its triviality can easily become tiresome.”

Few heard it enough to allow it to be tiresome; even when released by Capricorn it failed to chart nationally although the single did reach #31 on Billboard‘s Alternative Rock charts. What it did though was open the door for them, and the next album, Fashion Nugget, with the hit “The Distance” was found much tastier by the public. It went double platinum.

December 5 – Fool’s Gold Turned Into Platinum

In their land, it was considered one of the best debuts of all-time; in North America all but a few alternative rock stations blinked as it came and went. Stone Roses hit #1 on the British Indie chart this day in 1989, and top 10 overall, with the hypnotic “Fool’s Gold”. It was a hit in Australia (#13) and Ireland (#9) as well, and over here did hit the alternative chart top 5 while missing mainstream radio airplay.  In the UK though, so popular were they that the song recharted and went back to #1 on the Indie chart in September 1990, then  made it back up to #25 in 1995, as their Manchester-contemporaries, Oasis were getting hot.

Stone Roses were at the forefront of the “Madchester” movement with the likes of Inspiral Carpets and were for awhile managed by Howard Jones. The Brit press loved their music and their quotes – Ian Brown from the band told NME around this time that they “were the most important group in the world.” It was an exaggeration and display of an Oasis-size ego, but for a brief time they might have been the top dogs in the British Isles. The album spawned seven singles and four of them made it to the top of the Indie chart, including the platinum-selling “I Wanna Be Adored”.  Their self-titled debut  went 4X platinum there and in 1997 was voted as the second greatest album of all-time in a poll run by the Guardian newspaper and Channel 4 TV.

After leaving their then-indie Silvertone label in 1991 (which was later bought by BMG), they signed on with Geffen Records but still only managed to put out one new album , which went platinum in the UK as well. There is no shortage of compilation albums drawn from the two though- at least six. Heavy drug use and big egos may have prevented them from becoming U2 or R.E.M.-big but this song has aged well and made the band known to North America as well. KROQ in L.A. ranked it as the 5th best song of 1990. “Fool’s God” is not a bad introduction to their sound which touches on jingle-jangle alternative rock and trance music. This tune, according to Brown, was built around a beat inspired by James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” with a nod to “Shaft” by Isaac Hayes while his lyrics came to him while watching the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

July 17 – Bonus Bit : Our Readers Play

A few days back we looked at Phillippe Wynne of the Spinners and noted he had the misfortune of spending much of his childhood in an orphanage. Today we take a quick look at a different type of “orphan.”

It’s probably safe to assume all you readers have an appreciation of, and likely a passion for music. You listen to it, collect LPs, CDs, compile Spotify lists and go see live shows. But a few of our regular readers are pretty good musicians in their own right. For example Texas’ Phil Strawn.

Phil was thoroughly involved in the Dallas music scene of the late-’60s and ’70s and rubbed shoulders with a lot of well-known greats. He was in several bands and a couple of weeks back, he challenged me to find one of his songs online. Well, I have to admit I thought I had one… but was seemingly wrong. However, Phil posted it on his own site so I’ll share it here.

Strawn was, and remains to this day a guitarist, and seems he sang too. He was in a band called The Dolphins who became The Orphans. They cut a single, “Leader of My Mind” which apparently did OK in the Texas market. However, it seems totally absent online… if you have a copy, put it up for us! This is where my confusion came in. There have been several bands using the name The Orphans through the years (seemingly this was why they didn’t keep the name themselves) and a few obscure tunes are on Youtube by Orphans … but none seem to be Strawn & Co.

In 1968, they changed their name to ATNT – for Alice Talks N’ Talks (we bet there’s a story behind that!) – and recorded a single called “Cobblestone Street.” Phil – then going by “John” – played lead guitar, “purposely untuned” and sang. The band’s original was apparently more rocky, garage-style but the producer decided to bring in some horns to sound a wee bit reminiscent of then new and hot Chicago. Sounded like a good call to us. As you can hear, it was a likable, very-’60s single with a bit of the Chicago horns and bit of psychedelic organ behind a melodic little tune.

The ATNT debuted at a festival in Dallas called the Flower Fair, where they played with the likes of Spencer Davis (without Steve Winwood though), Mitch Ryder and Neil Diamond.

They didn’t quite breakthrough nationally and seemed to call it quits before the ’70s got into high gear but… they put out a record. A good one too. And that’s more than most of us can even hope to do, so well done, Phil !. And it left him with some great stories to tell all these years later. 

So there you have it – a band that’s probably new to you, and a little you might not know about one of your fellow readers!

June 23 – Dalle Took A New Group Out For A Spinnerette

What were you to do in the waning days of the first decade of the 2000s and were a huge Hole fan…and were tired of waiting for the Widow Cobain to deliver some new tunes? Well perhaps you’d take Spinnerette out for a spin. That California-based, female-fronted band put out their only full album, a self-titled one on this day in 2009 in North America. It had come out a few days earlier in Britain and, in an ahead-of-its-time manner, been available on their MySpace page before that.

Although calling Spinnerette a “band” is actually not what they considered themselves. It was really singer/songwriter Brody Dalle and others. She said it wasn’t “a band – it’s me and whichever musicians I want to work with at the time.” At the time that included former Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons as well as Alain Johannes of Queens of the Stone Age and guitarist Tony Bevilacqua, who like Dalle had been in accalaimed (but small-selling) punk act The Distillers.

The comparison to Hole seemed obvious. There was a female singer not afraid to flaunt her sexuality turning out driving hard rock songs (fittingly, one of the highlights is called “Driving Song”) that occasionally headed into pleasantly-pop territories.

After putting out a four song EP in 2008, they released their 13 song album (which included a couple of the EP tunes, notably “Ghetto Love”, the “single”) on small labels – Canadian Anthem Records in North America, and Hassle in the UK. Although American, it seemed more Brits paid attention to Spinnerette than North Americans, perhaps helped by playing the large Reading Festival that year.

Critics didn’t know what to make of Dalle and her not-a-band-band. Or at least couldn’t agree on it. The Guardian in the UK gave it 3-stars, allmusic 3.5 while the NME limited it to 2-stars and Pitchfork 3/10. The Alternative Press meanwhile gave it a 9 out of 10 rave. It came down to if you liked angry-sounding, hard alternative with a woman out front, it seems. The BBC gave it a lengthy review, saying “the Brody Dalle Show is back in town…a menagerie of personalities”, the “ultimate all-encapsulating mood swing of its matriarch.” They figured it veered from “undeniable moments of the expected dark intensity” like “Cupid” to “a nod towards Weezer” on songs like “Sex Bomb”, “a girly teasing yelp-along for knowing young ladies.” Cross town, the NME simply noted “different is good, right ? Err, not always” and labeled it “quasi-medicianl placebo bollocks!” Allmusic fell somewhere in between, calling it “state of the art California trash-pop” that showed “life after punk rock can actually be fun.”

Spinnerette attracted some attention on alt rock radio stations, but wasn’t a big seller, hitting only #41 on the Indie list in the U.S. (and not coming close to the regular album charts) and just missed the British top 100. They stopped spinning the nest year and Dalle has embarked on a solo career since.

June 15 – Turntable Talk 15 : Star Was A Star To Those Who Knew Him. Or Music.

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! Thanks once again to all the regular readers and welcome to any new ones. If you’re keeping count, this is our 15^th instalment…if you’re wondering about past topics, I have the previous topics indexed here. For any new readers, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is My Hometown. Not about Bruce Springsteen’s downbeat 1984 tune… although if our writers are from Asbury Park, it could be! We’ve asked them to simply write about either an artist they like from their hometown or a song about it. Of course, since not everyone comes from New York or London, not everyone’s hometown is necessarily a hotbed of past musical talent. So I leave it to our guests to interpet what their “hometown” is.

Today we finish off the topic with a few notes from yours truly here at A Sound Day:

Thanks again to our guest contributors this time around. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, finding out a little more about our writers as well as the music scenes from where they grew up…from the outskirts of Nashville and Detroit to the great Blues town of Chicago; the “other” London ( maybe the least known city of half a million or so people on our continent?) to the exotic Glasgow and even Cologne, Germany. Seems no matter where you grow up, there’s bound to be some great music being made there.

As some of you know, my roots are in Ontario, Canada like fellow bloggers Randy and Deke. I typically say I come from Toronto. It’s easy for most people to grasp, being a city of three million people in its own right and the home to baseball and basketball teams most Americans are well-familiar with. Toronto is, and long has been a musical mecca. In the ’60s it had a folk scene to rival New York’s and was home to the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the great Gordon Lightfoot who lived most of his life there. From Toronto have come Rush, the Barenaked Ladies, more recently Drake, showing how multi-cultural the city is. Add in acts who’ve done great at home, with occasional flashes of glory elsewhere like Glass Tiger, Alannah Myles, Saga and the excellent – but not widely-known outside of Canada – Blue Rodeo.

Any of them would be good subjects and many of them I have looked at here before. But, to be accurate I’m not from Toronto, specifically. Now, most of the TV I watched growing up was on Toronto stations, same with the radio I listened to and the daily newspapers I read – all Toronto. On a clear day, most places I lived allowed me to see the 1815-foot tall CN Tower in that city somewhere in the distance. But, I grew up in the eastern suburbs actually – the Durham Region and more specifically the twin cities of Oshawa-Whitby.

Durham Region is a large “county” just east of Toronto. It’s really like two in one. A line of hills runs east-west through it, the Oak Ridges. North of it the countryside is actually, well, country. Farms, forests, a few small towns. South of them however, it’s all urban. You’d not know you’d left Toronto and crossed into Durham on the 401 (the interstate of Canada if you will) or take the commuter Go Train. Oshawa is the largest of those eastern suburbs, at one time the country’s leading automotive city. The headquarters of GM Canada. When I was growing up, it seemed like everyone I knew in school had dads that worked at GM. At one time, the city had a listed population of 91 000 and GM employed 24 000. Of course, some of those people lived outside Oshawa and worked there, but you get an idea of how much it dominated the city’s economy and landscape. Over the years, GM’s sold off factories, downsized, mechanized more and had less and less of a presence. Currently I think only one car line operates and fewer than 3000 people work for them in the city of 160 000. Thankfully high-tech companies, a college and university and other ventures came in to keep the city from the fate of some of its American “Rust Belt” counterparts.

Anyhow, for all that, I had a bit of trouble figuring out who to write about for my hometown music. I thought of Blue Rodeo, since they are from Toronto (mainly) and one of their two lead singers and guitarists, Greg Keelor actually lives on a farm in Durham. For a brief time, I actually lived on a buddy’s farm which was “around the corner” from Greg’s place, which is where the band recorded the Five Days in July album that went 6X platinum domestically. So a local connection, but I’ve written about them quite a few times before.

Then the obvious one for me was a band you might know if you were, say, “Born to Be Wild”. Yep, Steppenwolf came from Oshawa. But at the time they were known as the Sparrows. They moved to La-la Land and changed their name and became international superstars. The Sparrows had a little success around Ontario before that; “If You Don’t Want My Love” was a top 5 single in Canada in ’64. Did that make them rich? Not so much. Among the 24 000 people that worked at GM in that era was John Kay, the voice of Steppenwolf. My dad worked alongside him on the assembly line!

Also living most of their life in Oshawa was a singer who is in the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and helped a legend win a Grammy. Shirley Eikhard, who sadly passed away last year, had a Canadian country chart-topper with “Smiling Wine” as well as an overall top 40 hit with her take on Fleetwood Mac’s “Say You Love Me”. But she really hit the bigtime when Bonnie Raitt recorded Shirley’s “Something To Talk About”, which won Bonnie a Grammy and launched her into the top 10 across North America.

Early 21^st Century skate-punk heroes Sum 41 were from Whitby; I’d driven behind a car that had a personalized license plate of “Sum41Mum”. Presumably a lady’s version of an “ask me about my honor student graduate child” bumper sticker! They had four platinum albums in Canada and their All Killer No Filler one managed to do that in the U.S. as well, hitting #13 there. It really wasn’t music I loved but it was nice to see local lads make it big. Even their protegees, Protest the Hero, had a Canadian #1 album, Fortress, despite being on an indie label. About 20 years ago I went out with a lady whose son went to school with some of them and went to all their shows. I assume at times when I was at her house, some of the kids in the kitchen joking around were guys who about four years later would be on top of the national album chart. And I shouldn’t forget Chalk Circle, a great little alt rock band that might have come as close as any Canadian band in the ’80s to sounding a bit like U2 or The Alarm. They had a couple of big hit singles in Canada in “April Fool” and “This Mourning.”

Not a bad little musical heritage, but it occurred to me that music is more than just the performers and that made me think of one of the hometown heroes for music fans between about 15 and 70 in Durham – Mike Shulga.

Never heard of Shulga? Don’t feel bad, few people in Oshawa would have either. A few more might know him by his alias, Mike Star. But if you were into music from the ’70s until recently there, you knew Star Records, his operation.

Star Records was a record shop…and more. Shulga was the son of immigrant parents who farmed. He loved music, and from what I know, tried to play a little but wasn’t really good. So he opened up his own little record shop instead, in 1974.

When I was in my prime music-obsession, buying lots and lots of music age, mostly the ’80s, we were fortunate to have over half a dozen record stores in the city. Our main mall itself at one time had four! They were clean, brightly lit, had great displays of the current hits and generally good selections of most music genres. Star Records though was something different. A small standalone store in a rundown part of downtown. If you’ve seen the film High Fidelity, you pretty much have seen Star Records, only it was dingier and more crowded. And if you can remember “Barry” (Jack Black) in the movie, imagine him twenty years on and you might come up with Mike. He could be surly at times and this wasn’t the place to go to look for the latest mass-market Whitney Houston album. But…

If you wanted music that wasn’t going to readily appear in the mall stores, Star Records was the place. And like a few of the great British shops such as Rough Trade, Mike realized that there was local talent that he liked that the Warners and CBS’s weren’t going to touch… so he started his own label. Star Records sold artists like punkers Purple Toads and Forgotten Rebels , rockabilly’s Paladins and others who signed to Star Records, the label. No wonder Chalk Circle called his store “a major musical influence” and Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene (a band with local members too) said “Mike’s shop was an oasis for me and my friends growing up in the ’80s. This was the only record shop to hit.” Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo I mentioned – yep, he loved the store and the band mentioned the shop in a documentary about them. At times, I’ve mentioned the truly great CFNY radio in Toronto, the only major commercial alt rock/new wave station in the country back then. One of their DJs was Dave Bookman. “Bookie”. His own band had a record out on Star Records and when he was in charge of new music at the radio station, he was driving 30 miles to Star to pick up copies and info from its ear-to-the-ground owner. If you can picture it, the radio station was on the street within two blocks of Canada’s three biggest flagship record stores. But he would go to a store close to an hour away that was probably under 1000 square feet. A fellow blogger, Rob Faucher, visited it and called Mike “a true luddite” and noted the store had “that musty record store smell” and people were constantly saying “excuse me” as they tried to work their way through the very narrow aisles. When he came to buy some records, he was told they only take cash. And he loved it. Some of the music he bought he might have seen live two decades earlier via Mike’s Star Club too. Noticing there were almost no venues in the city where new acts or underground ones could perform (there were lots of bars with live music but if the band didn’t play all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young and Led Zep covers, forget it. They weren’t going to be booked) he would at times rent spaces and present concerts of his own acts, and even “biggies” like the Smithereens.

When I was in my college years and shortly thereafter, I lived with CFNY on the radio much of the time. I grew to love acts they played up like Depeche Mode, the Stranglers, Echo & the Bunnymen, Mighty Lemon Drops. I liked mainstream people like John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen and Don Henley a lot as well, and I could get their new releases easily enough and comparatively cheaply at the mall. Maybe even get a Depeche Mode album. But if I want to explore those alt rock discographies there was nowhere to go but Star. I doubt there was a 12” single or import LP in my collection by the ’90s that didn’t come from Star. If back then I’d been as into the Beatles as I am now, well, I could have found the out of print old vinyl LPs of theirs there too. I say vinyl, because Star never felt much inclined to stock CDs, or cassettes either. You might see a box of a few at the counter, but he was a staunch vinyl fanatic … back long before hipsters made that cool again. I asked him about it once, he basically told me he didn’t like CD sound and figured it was a fad. That was when I actually interviewed him for a Toronto publication. It was one of my first paid writing gigs. Unfortunately, old school Mike refused to have his picture taken nor allow any photos be taken inside . “If you want to walk out on the street and take a picture, I can’t stop you. But none in here.” The videographer who got the above shot got lucky or must have had an extra dose of charisma to capture Mike at his cash register!

For a fad, CDs lasted decades and racked up billions of sales, but all that’s old is new again and vinyl is going strong once again. Sadly Mike’s not around to see it. He passed away on a Cuban vacation in 2015.

I’ve since relocated and don’t visit the street or shop; my understanding of it is it did carry on for awhile but is now closed and relegated to the memories of many Canadian music stars, and fans of those stars. There is however, a record shop around the corner from it now though, Kops, which hopefully will be an oasis for a new generation of music lovers.

April 25 – Bridwell’s Band Galloped To Winning Reviews

Happy birthday to one of the best “young” American musicians around these days, Ben Bridwell. Ben turns 45, which gives you an idea of how these days rock & roll is more a middle-aged man’s game than a young ones! Bridwell is the voice and driving force behind the great Band of Horses, a band nicely summed up by allmusic as “indie rockers who separated themselves with rootsy twang, gorgeous slow burn songs and lush reverb-drenched production.”

Bridwell was born and had his childhood in the Columbia, SC area but was relocated with his mom to Tucson as a teen. There he made friends with a couple of people at a pizza shop and they chased the dream of music stardom to the northwest, settling in Olympia right around the tail end of the Seattle grunge movement. There they formed a band, Carissa’s Weird, in which he played drums (briefly) and bass before the guitarist, Mat Brooke, taught him to play guitar. Simultaneously, Ben started his own record company, Brown Records to put out their records and hopefully get other indies just enough notice to be signed to bigger labels. “That’s always been my calling, spreading the bands I liked that people hadn’t heard,” he said years later.

While Carissa’s Weird didn’t do much outside of attract a modest following around the Puget Sound, it helped Bridwell develop his playing and writing skills and it folded before long, leaving him to start a new band – Band of Horses.

“At a time when we were all down, he picked himself up, higher than anyone thought he could,” Brooke said about him, adding he was “extremely proud.” Brooke joined Band of Horses for their first album (2006’s Everything All the Time, on the iconic Seattle label, SubPop) but left soon after citing a desire to try other musical styles without clashing with Bridwell.

Other members have come and gone, but Bridwell’s been the guiding light for Band of Horses, being the vocalist, primary writer and guitarist through the years and their six studio albums to date. The most successful was 2010’s Infinite Arms which hit the top 10 at home and in Canada. Arguably the best one though was 2007’s Cease to Begin, their first to chart and a dreamy southern-fried rock album that Rolling Stone suggested for “those who prefer their indie rock with a big dose of beauty”. It produced the alternative radio hit “Is there a Ghost?” (which in true 2007 style was issued first on Ben’s MySpace page) and their only top 10 single to date, “No One’s Gonna Love You (LIke I Will)”. After that album they signed to Columbia Records, and their most recent release, last year’s Things Are Great  was on BMG , but meanwhile, Bridwell’s restarted Brown records to promote under-appreciated indie acts.

He recently celebrated his 14th wedding anniversary , likely back in South Carolina, as he moved Band of Horses back to his homestate after their debut album saying with all the time they spend on the road, he needed a home to go to and “it would be nice to be around my family” which now includes four children. Band of Horses will hit the road this summer however, with a tour schedule spread across the country.

April 13 – Forty Years, Three Million Sales… Add It Up

Rock has had its share of “rags-to-riches” stories and improbable successes but it might be that none match the one that arrived 40 years ago today. If you’re in a band and seem to be going nowhere, keep in mind there are the Violent Femmes, whose self-titled album came out this day in 1983. To approximately zero notice.

The Violent Femmes were a trio of teenagers in Milwaukee who started their band around 1981 – even the exact time they began playing together seems murky. It was largely the vehicle of guitarist and vocalist Gordon Gano, joined by his buddies bassist Brian Ritchie (who used a stand-up acoustic bass in the early days) and drummer Victor DeLorenzo. They often practiced and made pocket money busking on the streets of their city. Which led to their amazing luck’s first moment – James Honeyman-Scott saw them on the street one day in August ’81. He of course was with The Pretenders, who happened to be playing a concert there that night. Somehow he got Chrissie Hynde to give them a listen, and she invited them to open for her band that night. This is about where if it was a movie, viewers would be slapping their foreheads and saying “Oh please! As if…”

They kept playing and writing songs and soon signed to Slash Records, for as journalist Seth Jacobsen put it “the princely sum of $0”. Slash was a small L.A. indie label, which eventually like the Femmes do OK for themselves. In the company’s case, that was being bought out by Warner Bros. But for the Femmes first album, it was all small-budget, indie music and indie label promotion.

The odd-sounding ten song record – it wouldn’t come out as a CD until 1987 – was almost entirely written and sung by Gano. The one “exception” was the official single from it, “Gone Daddy Gone” which credits Willie Dixon as a co-writer. Obviously, the Milwaukee lads didn’t ever know the old Blues man, but they did lift a verse from his song “I Just Want To Make Love to You” (first sung by Muddy Waters) for the song, hence the co-credit.

“Gone Daddy Gone” with its xylophone, was one of three tunes on the record one might think of as “singles”, and surprisingly, probably the least successful. Even though not 7” singles nor touched by mainstream radio in the day, “Add it Up” and “Blister in the Sun” were the songs that made the Violent Femmes career. “Add It Up” with its R-rated lyrics about sexual frustration quickly became a college radio sing-along favorite. “What we’re saying is ‘here’s romanticism thrown back in your face…here’s raw emotion. Can you deal with this?” said Gano of it. Even more popular, eventually, was “Blister in the Sun” a song hand-picked by John Cusack for use in his Gross Pointe Blank film of the ’90s. After that it somehow got picked to be the first-ever English song played on Ireland’s (typically Irish-language only) RTE Radio Na Gaeltachta.

It might now seem surprising that as familiar as that song is, it didn’t hit the charts and in fact, neither did the album at the time. Curiously Violent Femmes did scratch its way into the Australian and New Zealand top 40, barely, but not only did it miss that at home, it didn’t even finish in the year-end best of charts on alt stations that later would play them extensively like CFNY and KROQ. Word of mouth, use in equally obscure film and TV and college radio exposure helped the album keep going and by 1987, it was gold. In 1991, it was certified platinum without hitting the top 100 albums chart. Currently it’s estimated to have sold better than three million copies.

Given its obscurity, it’s no surprise few publications noticed it when it came out. The Village Voice did, but didn’t give it much thought other than to compare them to Jonathan Richman & the New Lovers, a comparison so common Gano is apparently sick of it. But retroactively it’s been scrutinized and generally lauded. Q, Uncut and Rolling Stone have all graded it 4-stars, allmusic, 5. Pitchfork graded it 9 out of 10 and had it as their 36^th best album of the 1980s… in a 2002 article. They described it as “brash, devil-eyed songs that hummed with sex, violence and perverted religiosity” and noted the band itself was “perhaps the greatest mixtape band of its era”, a reference to how it seemed lots of people who never bought their records had a song or two of theirs on a homemade tape. Allmusic describe them as “Milwaukee rockers whose geeky, nervous songwriting and blend of folk-pop with new wave produced several cult classics” and noted of the album, its “tense, jittery, hyperactive feel” and Gano being “naive and childish one minute, bitterly frustrated and rebellious the next… captured the contradictions of adolescence.”

The Femmes have put out nine more albums since, some with moderate success on alt rock and college stations, but none matching the first one in sales nor reviews. But they left us with a legacy of a few alt rock standards and the lesson to never give up, and give it your best… you just don’t know who might be watching!

March 23 – Good Thing Travis Didn’t Stay Home To Watch Coronation Street That Night

The Smiths hit it big this day in 1983, although they likely didn’t quite yet realize it. They played their first show outside of their hometown of Manchester, at the Rock Garden in London, 40 years ago tonight. The Rock Garden at Covent Garden was by then “the” place to be seen for an up-and-coming act; U2 played their first London show there and Dire Straits had a “residency” there before becoming famous. The show did the trick for Morrissey and Johnny Marr, the competing driving forces of the band. By that time, they’d become popular in Manchester, having played there for much of the past winter, but weren’t widely known outside of town. In the audience in London though, was Geoff Travis, the boss at Rough Trade Records. He’d started the label in his own record shop and had become the first “indie” label to have a 100 000 selling album in the UK, Inflammable Material by Stiff Little Fingers. By the time he got to see The Smiths, he was quite a force in British music despite running the label in a tiny record store. He liked what he saw and signed them right away.

Travis got them to record “Hand in Glove” and had it on the shelves as a 7″ single two months later. Although it didn’t make it onto the overall British charts, it did OK and made it all the way to #3 on the official Indie chart. After that, the rest is history as they say with them launching an incredible string of 14-straight singles that topped the Indie chart, starting with “This Charming Man” and finally wrapping up with “Girlfriend in a Coma” four years later. When all was said and done, they’d logged three platinum singles at home and 18 Top 30s overall on the regular (not just “indie”) charts there. In their five short years, they’d become one of the most influential bands of the decade with their jingly guitars, catchy riffs and gloomy lyrics.

By the way, Morrissey has said that there is only one “truly great British album” … Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, which coincidentally came out 10 years to the day prior.​

October 21 – Shins Legged Their Way To Popularity

Say “Sub Pop” and one usually thinks right away of Nirvana. But there’s a whole lot more to the respected Seattle indie label than the origins of the Mythology of Kurt, and while not many of their other acts went on to become mega-selling stars, they’ve had a good run of promoting highly-respected (and less self-destructive) bands through the decades, including Band of Horses, Flaming Lips and the Shins. Speaking of whom, they put out their second, critically-acclaimed album, Chute’s Too Narrow this day in 2003.

The Shins are a Portland-based project that is essentially James Mercer and whatever friends happen to be around at the time. An introspective singer/songwriter and guitarist he says he went into music because “it got me out of my shell and gave me a social life.” He formed them while he was in a band called Flake, in Alburquerque, but relocated to be closer to the “scene” when he got a chance to tour with Modest Mouse, which in turn got them signed to Subpop.

Their debut, Oh Inverted World, won them good reviews which continued to grow, with their reputation for this one. This time around The Shins were a quartet, with Mercer helped out by drummer James Sandoval, bassist Dave Hernandez and keyboardist Marty Crandall, who’s role was slightly lessened as they shifted towards a slightly more jangly guitar-based sound which at its best sounded vaguely like a less morose Smiths.

He wrote and recorded the ten snappy songs (only two run past four minutes) in his basement in a run-down neighborhood of Portland. Still, a young band with moderate sales had to economize and he said since the equipment was there, why bother renting a studio? “It only cost $60 to buy deadbolts for the doors,” he noted. They did get it finished up and mixed in a Seattle studio mind you.

Critics sat up and took notice with the release, despite them lacking a real “hit” thus far. Rolling Stone gave it 4-stars, noting it was “more substantial than what is sold in the mainstream” and was a record of “old-school pop songwriting, full of ’60s-style psych-folk music.” Entertainment Weekly gave it an “A-”, comparing them to “conservatory dropouts raised on Beach Boys.” Blender thought it “equally charming and more consistent” than the first one. Later, allmusic graded it 4-stars, suggesting “they excel at sounding happy, sad, frustrated and vulnerable at the same time… bursting with nervous energy.” they singled out the “under-stated…winding ‘Young Pilgrims‘ “ and the first single, “the bouncy but brooding ‘So Says I’” as highlights.

If mainstream radio largely ignored The Shins, their fans in the entertainment world didn’t. The album got boosts from TV and movies – “Those to Come” appeared in both the Scarlett Johannson romcom In Good Company and the Will Ferrell flick Winter Passing, they got to perform “So Says I” live in an episode of Gilmore Girls and proving that there are certain “perks” to being an indie rock star, Crandall’s girlfriend wore The Shins t-shirts three times on the show she was on – America’s Next Top Model.

For all that, the record was only a modest success. Singles “So Says I” and “Fighting in a Sack” did OK on college radio but barely made the regular charts and the album stalled in the 80s on both American and British charts. However, eventually it would go gold at home and pave the way for their follow-up, Wincing the Night Away to be a top 10 hit in the U.S. and Canada.