Friday, November 27, 2009

Bubble Puppy -- "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" (1969)


If you've found your place at last
Then you need not use the looking glass

(I disagree. I don't care whether you've found your place at last or you haven't, a looking glass can sure come in handy.  Sometimes you need to check out how your hair looks – make sure you are looking fine.  How you gonna do that without a looking glass?)

Bubble Puppy was just a one-hit wonder, but it was one hell of a hit. The song made it to number 14 on the Billboard "Hot 100," which I find surprising – it's a very radical song.


'62 Chevy Biscayne station wagon
I remember hearing this song on AM radio while I was driving my family's 1962 Chevy Biscayne station wagon (6-cylinder engine, three on the tree, no a/c, and a vacuum tube radio that took about a minute to warm up) to high school.  

I almost drove into the damn ditch.  This song is hot, hot, hot!  I've never heard anything quite like it since, and I trust I never will.


*     *     *     *     *

Bubble Puppy was formed in San Antonio, but moved to Austin before "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" was released. 

Texas was a psychedelic music hot spot in those days, believe it or not.  The most famous Texas psychedelic band was the 13th Floor Elevators (I'll get around to them eventually) and the astonishingly weird The Red Crayola.  

Bubble Puppy put out one album (it flopped – except for this song), changed labels, changed names (they renamed themselves Demian after the Herman Hesse novel), put out another album (it flopped), and then broke up.

Bubble Puppy's "A Gathering of Promises" album
The first time Bubble Puppy played live before a big audience was as the opening act for The Who in San Antonio. They must have been pretty good – their official website proclaims them to be the "most feared opening act in rock & roll history."  (Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back, Bubble Puppy.)  

The most famous story about an opening act upstaging the main attraction involves Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.  Unfortunately, it's almost certainly apocryphal, which is a real shame.


*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "Hot Smoke and Sassafras."

Click here for an absolutely insane animation video of the song by an art collective named Paper Rad.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Eurythmics -- "Would I Lie to You?" (1985)


Would I lie to you, honey?
Now would I say something that wasn't true?

Oh, please.  
OF COURSE I would lie to you!  And you'd lie to me or anyone else if you had a good reason to do so – and if you thought you could get away with it.

Just about everyone lies.  
Men lie.  Women lie.  Children lie.

I don't think dogs lie, but cats certainly do.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to see a video of a live performance of the song I really like.

Why do I like it so much?  Because it has a really good saxophone solo!  (You believe me, right? Would I lie to you, honey?)  



*     *     *     *     *

Click here to see the official music video for "Would I Lie to You?"

Here's a link you can use to order the song from Amazon:

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Rolling Stones -- "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968)


Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste

When we were in junior high in the mid-1960s, I and many of my friends devoted a lot of attention to top-40 music. 

The Beatles were universally recognized as the numero uno group, but we disagreed over who was the best of the rest. 

My pick – the Rolling Stones – turned out to be a pretty good one. My best friend wasn't so lucky. He hitched his wagon to  . . . Herman's Hermits?  (Later he switched his allegiance to Simon and Garfunkel, which was a little better, I guess.)

By the time we were in high school, we focused less on singles and more on albums. Rubber Soul and Revolver produced some hit singles, but were viewed more as a whole than a collection of individual parts – as was the first Led Zeppelin album and many others. The Rolling Stones had some good albums prior to Beggars Banquet, but that was their first truly great LP.


The original "Beggar's Banquet" album cover
Track one, side one of that album – which issued in a rather plain white jacket with a simple cursive-script title after the original filthy-toilet cover was deemed unsuitable for the American market – was the immortal "Sympathy for the Devil," a song whose lyrics outdid almost anything else that had come along before it in terms of intellectual sophistication. 

It was an apologia pro vita sua of sorts sung by the devil himself ("Just call me Lucifer"), with references to Pontius Pilate, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi blitzkreig, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and various other bits of nasty business for which the Prince of Darkness is often given the credit. The song was over six minutes long, and doesn't sound a bit dated 40-plus years after it's original release.

I remember reading a review of the album in Newsweek, which mentioned the song's use of "politesse," a French word that can be translated simply as "politeness," but is better understood as meaning formal or genteel politeness. 

Remembering to say "please" and "thank you" when you ask someone to pass the taters and gravy doesn't mean you have politesse. We're talking the kind of politeness that is practiced by guys who wear morning coats and striped trousers when they drop by the ambassador's digs for tea or a spot of sherry. 

The point of the article was that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were much more than shaggy-haired teen idols cranking out boy-loves-girl lyrics employing a 6th-grade vocabulary. They were sophisticates and intellectuals.


*     *     *     *     *

We were all concerned in those days with proving to our elders that the bands we listened to (the Doors, the Kinks, the Who, et al.) deserved to be taken seriously. I remember how one friend of mine insisted that parents listen to a song on his brand-new Steppenwolf album that he hadn't listened to yet but understood made a strong anti-drug statement. Imagine his surprise (and that of his parents) when John Kay got to the chorus of that song:

God damn the pusher
God damn, I say, the pusher
I said God damn, GOD DAMN the pusher man!

After I bought Beggar's Banquet and listened to it a few thousand times, I found the sheet music for the album at the local music store. I didn't play the guitar, but I was a pretty good pianist back then, so I attempted to play "Sympathy for the Devil," and "Parachute Woman," and "Stray Cat Blues," and all the rest on the piano, reading the sheet music more or less literally. That didn't work out quite as well as I hoped.

A few years later, when I was in college, I was hanging around with a pretty bad crowd – a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and poseurs. One of my friends was a foreign-film aficionado (is my overuse of French words starting to get annoying, or is it more my affectation of italicizing them that is getting on your nerves?), and he announced to us one day that there was going to be a midnight showing of the 1968 Jean-Luc Godard film titled Sympathy for the Devil at a local theater: 



Godard, one of the founding members of the French New Wave filmmaking movement, was also a Marxist – which gave him beaucoup street cred to early-1970's vintage American college students. Our friend was absolutely breathless with excitement (that's a little joke for you Godard fans out there) when he shared these glad tidings, and we all started counting the days until the big night.

Godard's Sympathy for the Devil combines footage of the Rolling Stones' recording various takes of that song – which started as something quite different than the song that ended up on their album – with tedious and obscure political dreck (e.g., shots of members of the Black Panthers reading from various half-baked revolutionary texts). 

For a big Rolling Stones fan like myself, the documentary footage of Mick, Keith and the boys in the recording studio was somewhat interesting, at least through the first few takes of the song – eventually even the charm of that began to wear a little thin. But the rest of the movie was appallingly boring.

Click here to watch the trailer for the movie, which makes Sympathy for the Devil  seem like it might be almost interesting. But don't be fooled – it's not.

I saw my friend a few days later and asked him what he thought of the movie. He said that it was perhaps the greatest film he had ever seen. I instantly realized that he and I saw the world very differently indeed.


*     *     *     *     *

That midnight showing of "Sympathy for the Devil" was the end of my life as a pseudo-intellectual and the beginning of my life as an anti-intellectual. [NOTE: If that sentence doesn't prove that I'm so full of sh*t that my eyes are brown, I don't know what does.] 

The culmination of my anti-intellectual phase came a year or two later, in a college class of mine titled "Contemporary Culture."

There were no lectures in that class. Instead, we attended various cultural events, and wrote papers on our experiences. We went to a Van Cliburn piano concert, saw Truffaut's The 400 Blows, visited the home of art patrons John and Dominique de Menil (which was later converted to an art museum), and spent an evening in the Rothko Chapel, which featured 14 large and essentially identical and very dark monochromatic paintings. (Anyone who has seen these paintings won't be surprised to learn that the artist who created them, Mark Rothko had a long struggle with from depression. He committed suicide in 1970.) 

I thought I was going to lose my mind at the Rothko Chapel that night. Having to sit and stare at these almost-black canvases for three hours was the worst kind of sensory deprivation. You can get an idea of what the paintings look like from this photo:


The Rothko Chapel
For our final project in this class, a friend of mine and I told the story of a made-up modern composer, complete with brief excerpts from his nonexistent compositions performed by me on a piano – those excerpts consisting of totally random banging on the keys. 

The fictional biography of our fictional composer started out in a reasonably plausible fashion but got more and more absurd as it went along. We had him die by falling out of a malfunctioning Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Transylvania. (I was a great fan of Bela Bartok, a very real modern composer who was a native of Romania.) 

Naturally, the class swallowed our ridiculous story hook, line, and sinker – including the professor. (He later claimed to have been suspicious that we had made the whole thing up, but didn't say anything because he was afraid of offending us – by which he meant he was as clueless as the other students, or didn't have the confidence in his critical abilities to call us out as phonies).

Our point – that (like the Emperor in the Hans Christian Andersen story) contemporary art, music, writing, etc., had no clothes, and the artists and critics and academics who tried to persuade us otherwise were just as naked – was far from original, and I doubt that our presentation was especially clever or creative. We were shooting fish in a barrel – our target (pseudo-intellectualism among college students in the early 1970's) was so fat and slow-moving that we really couldn't have missed.


*     *     *     *     *

To be honest, I'm not totally cured of pseudo-intellectualism. 

I still occasionally read a modern novel that the New Yorker say is to die for, or watch an avant garde film that the avant garde critics all love. But most of the time I manage to resist wasting my time on such nonsense. 

Before my road-to-Damascus experience at that midnight showing of Godard's film, I thought that I was going to have to read Finnegan's Wake someday if I wanted to think of myself as an educated man. Now I've know that life is too short to waste time trying to decipher Joyce. (I feel the same way about Virginia Woolf, but a friend of mine whose opinions I have the utmost respect for has told me otherwise, so I may have to give her another chance. But only one.)


Life is too short
Of course, being an anti-intellectual is just as much a pose as being a pseudo-intellectual. I'm a very smart guy, and I'm highly educated (albeit with a number of large gaps in my education) and a voracious reader. But I'm also a small-town kid who didn't go to Europe until I was 50, doesn't speak a foreign language, and carefully avoids pronouncing a large number of the proper nouns in the classic novels I've read because I've never heard those names pronounced properly and am afraid of sounding foolish in front of the more sophisticated types who know how to say them correctly.

So it's hard for me to know which way to go. I can be the sophisticated Ivy Leaguer who remembers his humble roots, or I can be the unapologetic redneck who knows good writing and good art when he sees it – and good music when he hears it. (As this blog proves.) Or I can alternate between the two depending on the environment – always in doubt as to which is the real me. [NOTE: This post is getting more brown-eyed by the moment. I'm tempted to edit it severely, but I don't believe in rewriting history.]


*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "Sympathy for the Devil."

Click here to watch the infamous performance of that song at Altamont in 1969. 

Use the link below to order "Sympathy for the Devil" from Amazon:

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Mudhoney -- "Into Yer Shtik" (1995)


You're so hounded . . . ungrounded . . . surrounded
By scum-sucking leeches who will shovel your sh*t

(No need to hold back, guys – tell us what you really think!)

Mudhoney is usually described as the first grunge band.  (One of the band's members is credited with first using the term to describe this style of music.)  I'm not sure if this is really a grunge song – for one thing, it wasn't released until about a year after Kurt Cobain's death, after grunge's popularity had peaked.



Mudhoney got its name from a 1965 Russ Meyer movie, the poster for which featured this line: "Passion debased by lust . . . leaves a taste of evil." Here's how one cinephile summarized its plot:

It's 1933, in the midst of the Depression and Prohibition. Calif, a stranger with a past walks into Spooner, Missouri on his way from Michigan to California. He hires on with Lute Wade to earn some travelling money, but gets entangled in a bad family situation: Lute's daughter is married to Sidney, a good-for-nothing drunk that frequents the rural equivalent of a whorehouse and beats his wife and is just waiting for Lute to kick the bucket to get his money. When Sidney and a local wacko preacher begin orchestrating a smear campaign against Calif, he finds it difficult to conceal his past and his growing affection for Sidney's wife.

Click here if you'd like to watch the trailer for this truly appalling movie, which the band's members never saw.


*     *     *     *     *

I had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains CDs back in the early 1990's, but I don't recall ever hearing anything by Mudhoney until recently.  My Brother the Cow – their fourth studio album – is strong, and this is by far my favorite song on it.



For those of you who didn't grow up watching Borscht Belt comedians on The Ed Sullivan Show, "shtik" (more commonly transliterated as "shtick") can be defined as a somewhat contrived and obvious comedy mannerism or routine. Here, it's used to mean the characteristics or activities that sum up what the various people in the song are really like – "into yer shtik" is very close to "into your thing."

"Into Yer Shtik" views the world as being populated largely by fools and (even worse) phonies, and it isn't afraid to tell it like it is.

Here's what the singer has to say about one character in the song:

Susie's just a girl
Who's doing her job
That came to New York
And wanted a car
Working with the management
To the stars
Kissing ass
Is a part of her job . . .
Oh she loves her job
What the hell?

She does it so well

Click here to listen to "Into Yer Shtik."

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Sunday, November 1, 2009

The Last -- "She Don't Know Why I'm Here" (1977)


See that girl with the soft blue eyes
They never seem to close or show surprise

I'm not going to beat around the bush – this is the best rock single in history, and it's really not even close. And I could easily have missed it altogether – which makes me wonder what other great records are out there that I've never heard.

I moved to Washington, DC, in the fall of 1977, and quickly discovered the Georgetown University radio station – like a lot of college radio stations, it played a lot of crazy, random stuff you never heard on commercial radio stations. For some reason (there were different conspiracy theories going around at the time), that station went off the air a year or two later.

One of its DJs was given a Saturday evening show (7 to 10 pm, I think) on the old WHFS – a very quirky commercial (barely) radio station that is often mentioned in George Pelecanos books. I don't know the guy's name, but the show was called "Mystic Eyes," and I taped it on my stereo cassette recorder whenever I could. There's a lot of duplication in the 100 hours or so of tapes I still have, and "She Don't Know Why I'm Here" popped up several times, but somehow I never captured the DJ giving the name of the song or the band.

[NOTE: Months later, I got an e-mail from a fellow fan of the old WHFS, who told me the DJ's name was Steven Lorber and gave me his telephone number.  Steven and I have become friends since then – earlier this year, I was a guest on his WOWD-FM radio show.]


Later, I made a single 90-minute compilation tape featuring my favorite songs from "Mystic Eyes," and this song closed it -- the ne plus ultra of a lot of great, bizarre music. I made a number of copies of that tape for my friends, and I always told them about the last song, and how frustrated I was not to know what it was. Once I even called a local radio station and left a message for a DJ who had worked at 'HFS back in the day, thinking he might know something, but I never heard back.

*     *     *     *     *

Fast forward to the 21st century, and my discovery that you could easily find song lyrics on the Internet. This song was a live recording, and my copies of it were often incomplete and always pretty hissy, and I couldn't begin to decipher all the lyrics. But I did pick up the phrase "plastic naugahyde" near the end. ("Modified hypocrites" probably would have worked just as well as a search term, but I had no idea that's what they were singing.)

This one's for you
You modified hypocrites
God! To raise your children like goldfish
In plastic naugahyde cells

I got exactly one hit when I plugged "plastic naugahyde" into a search engine (probably Alta Vista, not Google – this was quite awhile ago, boys and girls).  That hit took me to The Last's website, where I found everything I wanted to know about "She Don't Know Why I'm Here" and The Last. (You can click here to go to that website.)

My search was over. Eureka!

*     *     *     *     *

The album version of the song is pretty good, but much more top-40 in feel – the live version I heard on "Mystic Eyes" is MUCH better. (Don't miss the 13th Floor Elevators-ish ululation at about 1:40.)

Oddly, I never listened to any other music by The Last (a band that has been described by reviewers as bringing together surf music, British Invasion harmonies, pop-punk, and neo-psychedelia). I really should go back to the "LA Explosion" site or iTunes or Amazon or wherever and give some of The Last's other songs a chance – they might be just as good as this one.

So how do I plan to top this song? I don't. This blog isn't like those lame syndicated "top 40" radio shows that start with #40 and count down to #1. I could drop dead before I find time to post again, or I could simply forget my password. So I want to be sure that if this blog turns out to be a one-post wonder, that this song is the subject of that post.

Speaking of the girl with the soft blue eyes who is described in the two lines from the song that I quoted at the beginning of this post, I think I've been looking for her since I first heard this song in 1978 or 1979. (She doesn't have to have blue eyes, although that would be a nice touch.)

Click here to watch a video of The Last performing "She Don't Know Why I'm Here."

Click below if you want to buy the live version of "She Don't Know Why I'm Here" from Amazon:

What? Who? WHY?



What? My posts to "2 or 3 Lines" will always start with 2 or 3 lines from a song that you should know about but may not -- followed by a lot of miscellaneous stuff (that's the "and so much more" part), which may be related to that song or may not be. The time period will range from the mid-1960's (when I hit puberty) to now. Consecutive posts will usually cover songs that are at least 5 years apart, and preferably 10 years apart, but not always. There's probably going to be more stuff from the late 60's and 70's than from the last few years, but the were will be quite a bit about music from the last decade as well. 

Of course, I reserve the right to break my own rules at any time -- e.g., I may quote not just 2 or 3 lines, but 4 or even 5 -- or a lot more. The posts may be long or short or in-between, depending on the song itself, its historical or cultural significance (if any), and its significance to me. Be prepared to read about what was going on in my life when the song was released, why I like it or think it is worthy of discussion, blah blah blah.

Who? Who I am and how I became what I am today is very relevant to the songs I've chosen to feature on this blog, but I'm not going to give you any kind of biography here. This blog is more about the music than it is about me. Of course, you'll learn things about me from the posts, and I'm happy to respond to e-mails or comments if you want to know more. (Here are a few basic facts: I'm very good-looking, smart, and speak several languages without a trace of an accent. I don't always drink beer -- but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.)

WHY? Good question. I'm not really sure -- if I had a shrink, he or she might know. For one thing, there's a lot of music out there that has been forgotten or was never discovered in the first place -- I'm still stumbling across great songs from the 60's and 70's that I somehow missed -- and you need to know about them! 

For another thing, I like to write and I especially like to write about myself, and as you'll see, there's a lot about me here. (And forget about what I said above under "Who?" -- this blog is more about me than it is about the music.)

A word from our sponsors. At the end of each post, you'll find an Amazon link so you can also buy it if you like. (I'll make some money if you decide to do that.)  Where possible, I've included links to YouTube videos or other links to the entire song, live versions of that song, cover versions of that song, or anything else may I stumble across.