Holly and the Italians -- "Youth Coup" (1981)

I'm bored with everything that I see

I'm bored with you and you with me

(More bored with you than with me, of course.)

Even though I'm almost 58 years old, rock music is still VERY important to me.  But I wonder about  bands that are still touring when their members are my age or older.

In "My Generation," the Who famously sang "Hope I die before I get old.”  But they didn't.  (Except for Keith Moon, of course, whose drumming on "I Can See For Miles" is without a doubt the greatest performance by a rock drummer ever.)  I could have done without their performance at the 2010 Super Bowl – when Townshend and Daltrey were 64 and 65, respectively. 

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Ideally, rock music performers are not only young but also have a rock-and-roll attitude – that is, pissed off at their parents and teachers and adults in general.  

"Youth Coup" is hardly "My Generation" circa 1981.  But Holly Vincent of Holly and the Italians did have the right attitude.  

This short-lived band is better known for "Tell That Girl to Shut Up," the single that led to their getting an album deal.  But "Youth Coup" is a great little rock anthem.  And like the songs discussed in my last few posts, I discovered it thanks to the "Mystic Eye" radio show.

Click here to listen to "Youth Coup.”

Urban Verbs -- "Next Question" (1980)

I'm faced with the next question

Is this love or just a feeling?

For some reason, I always associate the Urban Verbs – yet another band whose music I first heard on the "Mystic Eyes" radio program in 1980 – with the Talking Heads.  I'm not sure why, except for the fact that the Taking Heads' drummer, Chris Frantz, was the brother of the Urban Verbs' lead singer, Roddy Frantz. 

Both were beloved by the critics, but the bands really couldn't have been more different in attitude.  The Urban Verbs were unhappy, full of angst – some might say they were whiny and their music was depressing – while the Talking Heads were quirky and offbeat and funny, and usually had their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks.

The Urban Verbs didn't last long.  Their eponymous debut album was released in 1980:

It contained a heapin' helpin' of Debbie Downer-ish tracks, including "The Angry Young Men" ("Oh no, the end is at hand"), "Subways" ("Down here I don't have to say anything/I just sit and look out the window"), "Tina Grey" ("Tina's put her fist through the glass" because "she doesn't want a baby"), and "The Good Life" ("I wouldn't take a piss on your good life").

They put out a second LP the next year, and then broke up in 1982.  Sic transit gloria.

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"Next Question" is my favorite Urban Verbs song.  The singer is willing to assume, arguendo, that he’s in love, but he’s not sure how being in love will change things:  

If this is love, how will it change us?

Make us move just a little bit closer?

Or will you call me every evening? 

This song reminds me of something A. J. Byatt wrote about modern young intellectuals in her novel, Possession:  

They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, "in love," romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure.

In Elvis Costello's "Mystery Dance," the singer is the male half of a young and very inexperienced couple:

I remember when the lights went out

And I was tryin' to make it look like

It was never in doubt

She thought that I knew

And I thought that she knew

So both of us were willing

But we didn't know how to do it

Byatt's overeducated post-docs have just the opposite problem.  They know exactly how to do it,  but aren't quite sure if they want to do it.  

Maybe they would prefer to just talk about doing it, or – better yet – write an article for a scholarly journal exploring the biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, or literary implications of doing it.

The narrator of "Next Question" is like Byatt's characters – he talks too much and thinks too much.  He's trying to write a script for his life rather than just letting it happen.  You really want to grab him by the shoulders and give him a good shake – maybe slap him and yell at him to GET HIS SH*T TOGETHER!

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Click here to listen to "Next Question."

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

Squeeze -- "If I Didn't Love You" (1980)

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I didn't love you, I 'd hate you

Squeeze is yet another band I first heard on the "Mystic Eyes" program, although they became popular enough that I also heard their music elsewhere as well.  

This song is from their third LP, Argybargy, which is a new wave masterpiece -- it has a number of very strong and very memorable tracks, and it's essentially impossible not to sing along when you listen to them.  (I was singing along to this one today while on a bike ride, and got a number of admiring looks from the walkers and joggers that I passed while singing at the top of my lungs.)

I have to disagree with Squeeze when it comes to love and hate -- love and hate aren't always mutually exclusive, either-or emotions.  Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel wasn't talking about romantic love when he said "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference," but I think that principle applies to romantic love.  

The French writer, Marcel Jouhandeau expressed a similar sentiment: "To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn."  (Jouhandeau also said "The heart has its prisons that intelligence cannot unlock," which may be as good as any explanation why love and hate can go together.)

Love most often turns to hate when it is not reciprocated, or when the beloved is guilty of deception or betrayal.  Perhaps Squeeze should have said Because you don't love me, I hate you, or Even though I love you, I hate you.

Click here to listen to "If I Didn't Love You."

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

Gruppo Sportivo -- "Hey Girl" (1979)

She said "Your nose is running, honey"

I said "Sorry, but it's not"

(Think about it.)

Gruppo Sportivo is a Dutch group with an Italian name (which the band saw on a poster and liked – it means "sports team") that sang in French and English (sort of).  They are another one of the great bands that I became acquainted with in 1980 thanks to the "Mystic Eye" radio show.

Gruppo Sportivo's song lyrics sound they are the result of a partnership between a literature professor and a really obnoxious, show-offy 6th-grade boy.  (I'm pretty sure the 6th-grader wrote the lines quoted above.)  

I'm a sucker for pop songs with goofy yet clever lyrics – Sparks, 10cc, etc. – especially if the band includes a Farfisa or Vox Continental organ:

Vox Continental organ

Gruppo Sportivo's first album – which was released in Europe in 1977 – was titled Ten Mistakes.  Their first American album – which was released in 1979 – was titled Mistakes, and most of its content came from Ten Mistakes.  

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The first song on Mistakes is "Mission à Paris," which the band's website describes as "a dime-store spy novel of stolen NATO plans and secret rendezvouses at the Eiffel Tower."  (Whoever wrote that line could use an ESOL class or two.)

Mission a Paris

Shoot down immediately

Oh oh so and so

Du Deuxieme Bureau

Who stole a NATO plan

For flying carpet men

A secret formula

Ca va et cetera

(The Deuxieme Bureau was the French military intelligence agency.)

Click here to listen to "Mission à Paris."

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The most outrageous song on the LP (and there was some very stiff competition for that title) was "P.S. 78," an infectious little ditty about a high-school French class:

We are American kids

Rich daddies and big t*ts

Vive la France, les Wallons

Le camembert, et le bonbons

(If you can't remember the difference between camembert and brie, this article will help.)

Click here to listen to "P. S. 78."

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Click here to listen to today's featured song, "Hey Girl."

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Tru Fax and the Insaniacs -- "Washingtron" (1980)

I used to work as a waitron

In the lounge of the Hiltron

Now I work for my Senatron 

And I live in Arlingtron

I've written elsewhere on this blog about "The Mystic Eye," an eccentric Saturday-night radio show on the old WHFS in Washington, DC – I taped about a hundred hours of this program in 1980, and still have those tapes. 

Recently, I discovered my handwritten lists of the songs on those tapes (or at least the songs that were identified on the tapes).  At least half of the music on those tapes – ranging from new wave to punk to power pop to truly bizarre novelty songs – is stuff I never heard anywhere else

For example, there was "My Girlfriend Is a Rock," by the Nervebreakers, a Texas garage band, which discusses the pros and cons of having a rock for a girlfriend:

You oughta see her in the swimming pool

She swims pretty good as a general rule

But she doesn't swim quite as good

As a girl made out of wood

Click here to listen to “My Girlfriend Is a Rock.”

Another record I heard on “The Mystic Eye” is "Fifi Goes Pop," a cautionary tale about a pet owner in a big hurry who puts his poodle in a microwave after bathing her.  (Obviously he had not read his owner's manual very carefully.)

Fifi goes pop

At setting number two

Cooked from the inside out

In a Fifi barbecue

Sucks to be Fifi, huh?

Click here to listen the original "Fifi" 45.  

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That brings us to Tru Fax and the Insaniacs, a Washington pop-punk band that made its first appearance at the legendary 9:30 Club (then located at 930 F St. NW in DC, only two blocks from my current office) in 1980, the year the club opened – and the same year I was sitting at home on Saturday nights, faithfully recording "The Mystic Eye.” 

"Washingtron" was the band's most popular song by far – they didn't record that much.  As someone who worked for the federal government back in those days, I can attest that it captured a certain aspect of the reality of life in Washington: for a lot of people, life in DC was a pretty mundane 9-to-5 kind of existence.

Tru Fax's lead singer, Diana Quinn, has a website with some information on the band's history if you're interested.  (By the way, I don't think "Tru Fax" has anything to do with facsimile machines – which were not widely used when the band got started in 1978.  Think "true facts" instead.)

The final concert at the original 9:30 Club took place on December 31, 1995.  The bands who performed at that show included not only Tru Fax but also several other "Mystic Eye" stalwarts – like the Insect Surfers, Urban Verbs, Slickee Boys, and Tiny Desk Unit.  Some of the performances from the club's last week have been released on two CDs titled 9:30 Live: A Time, A Place, A Scene.

Click here to hear a live performance of “Washington” from the 9:30 Live CD set.  (This recording doesn’t really do justice to Diana Quinn’s remarkably pure voice, but I couldn’t find the original studio recording of the song on YouTube.)

To buy "Washingtron" from Amazon, just click on the link below:

Trouble Funk -- "Hey Fellas" (1982)

Hey fellas

Do you want to take time out

To get close to the ladies?

One reviewer has written that Trouble Funk's best songs "consist of an irresistible beat and an unforgettable phrase" – which sums up "Hey Fellas" very well.

"Hey Fellas" is one of the happiest songs I know – it is very hard to maintain your bad mood when this song is playing. (Believe me, I've tried.)

This is another song I know about only because of my public library – I can't imagine I would have stumbled across it otherwise. (I've now added a "library" label to each post about a song that I discovered that way. I've also added "not about me" and "all about me" labels to distinguish the posts that are mostly about the music from those that are mostly about me. This is an increasingly rare "not about me" post.)

It's on The Sugar Hill Records Story, a five-CD box set that has the essential hits released by Sugar Hill Records, the New York City-based label that brought rap/hip-hop to the masses.

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Trouble Funk was a Washington, DC go-go band, and its first album was released by Sugar Hill in 1982 – it was, in the words of Gyrofrog creator Joe Castleman, "an opportune moment in musical history which straddled the apogee of disco and the burgeoning of rap." 

 Why go-go never really caught on outside of Washington is something of a mystery. Wikipedia has a very good article on the history of go-go and the musical characteristics that defined the genre, and I recommend it as a good starting point for those who know as little about go-go as I do.

From Gyrofrog's review of the Live CD:

Trouble Funk's go-go sound is characterized by call-and-response interplay with the audience, as well as lots and lots of percussion (as critic John Leland has noted, "in no other North American music does the cowbell play such a major role").  Like earlier funk bands, Trouble Funk features several horn players, as well as a scratchy rhythm guitar . . . . Additionally, since the music is made for dancing, the emphasis is on rhythm, rather than melody ; the horn and keyboard riffs re-emphasize the beat more than the tune . . . . Other than the heavy interaction with the audience, the vocal style is essentially identical to early rap.  Therefore, the main difference between go-go and rap music seems to be that go-go employs a full band; why go-go has not caught on as well as hip-hop has is quite puzzling.

Unique to go-go is the use of not only standard conga drums but also "junior congas," which are 8" and 9" in diameter and about half as tall as the standard congas, a size rarely seen outside of go-go:

According to Wikipedia, they were first used by Rare Essence when they were just getting started and couldn't afford enough full-sized congas, and have become ubiquitous in the go-go scene ever since.

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Washington had a very rich and diverse local-music scene in the early 1980's, highlighted by go-go and the "straight edge" hardcore punk movement. Trouble Funk occasionally shared the stage with "harDCore" bands like Minor Threat. I lived in DC during that era, but I pretty much missed all that -- I certainly never ventured into the venues where go-go and hardcore bands played.

I have a feeling that Trouble Funk must be mentioned in one or more books by Washington novelist George Pelecanos. He drops the names of many, many worthy local bands.

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Two brief anecdotes. I have a friend who went to Vassar College (class of '89) and says that Trouble Funk played on campus when he was a student there. Not exactly the band's usual audience. 

 (When my oldest son was looking at colleges, this friend told me he should go to Vassar because the Princeton Review college guide had said Vassar had the happiest students in the country. When I told him that wasn't really one of my primary criteria in choosing a college for Nick, he looked me in the eye and said in a very serious tone of voice: "Don't you want your son to be happy?")

Another friend has a daughter who used to sneak out to local go-go shows when she was 15 or 16 and had to lie about her age to get admitted to the clubs. (Sometimes the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.)  

When she returned home after attending a Trouble Funk show in Langley Park, MD, one night, she somehow neglected to mention that there had been shots fired outside after the show.  

There are some things your parents don't really need to know. 

[NOTE: My friend later told me that her daughter may have been attending a Backyard Band show when she heard the gunshots – not a Trouble Funk show.  But it makes a better story if we say it's Trouble Funk, and 2 or 3 lines is not exactly The New York Times when it comes to journalistic standards.]

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Trouble Funk is still around. Until recently, they played every Friday night at a Holiday Inn in Alexandria, VA.

Here's a link to a July 2009 Washington Post review of a Trouble Funk appearance at the 9:30 Club in DC, which unfortunately attracted only 200 or so fans.

Click here to watch the first 10 minutes or so of that show. (For some reason, the band always seems to start their shows with their horns playing the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show.)

That show paid tribute to one of the band's founders, Robert Reed, who had recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer.  Here's his New York Times obituary.

Click here to listen to “Hey Fellas.”

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

Raconteurs -- "The Switch and the Spur" (2008)

Any poor souls who trespass against us
Whether it be beast or man
Will suffer the bite or be stung dead on sight
By those who inhabit this land

This is a very odd song.

Actually, that's an understatement.  It's an extremely odd song – unless you think a song told from the point of view of a rattlesnake who has just delivered a lethal amount of venom into an escaped outlaw isn't odd. (If you don't, I'd say that you might be a little odd.)

Rattlesnakes ahead!

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a song with an odder subject.  System of a Down's Old School Hollywood – which is about the singer's experience playing in a celebrity baseball game in Los Angeles with Tony Danza and other B-listers – is pretty odd, but I don't think it comes close to a song featuring a rattlesnake gloating about adding another notch to its belt.

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I had never heard this song until earlier today, but I knew almost immediately that I'd be blogging about it. 

What sold me initially was the trumpet hook – think Latin-type fanfare. (Not salsa-dancing Latin, more bullfighter-ish . . . or spaghetti Western-ish.)  Once that little trumpet riff gets into your brain, you might as well introduce yourself and offer it a seat – it's going to be staying around for a while.

The song tells a Western-movie kind of story about a man who breaks out of jail and is making his escape across a burning desert on an Appaloosa horse. (You can almost hear the Sons of the Pioneers crooning, "Cool . . . clear . . . water" in the background.) 

The horse shies when they encounter a rattlesnake, and the man is thrown from the saddle – breaking his hand, but more significantly falling within range of the deadly rattler.  He remounts the horse after he is bitten, but he's a dead man riding:

The poison pumps through his veins
There's no stopping this
And now he's powerless
Still holding the reins

After delivering the lines quoted at the beginning of this entry, the snake throws down a verbal gauntlet on behalf of not only himself but also all of his deadly brethren – scorpions and the like – to any beast or man who is foolish enough to invade their turf: "You shall never return!"

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As you may know, the Raconteurs was formed by Jack White of the White Stripes and his pal, Brendan Benson.  I was completely unaware of the 2008 Raconteurs CD this song is from – Consolers of the Lonely – until I stumbled across it at the public library a couple of weeks ago:

By the time I had heard this song the second time, I was hooked.  I have sort of an addictive personality, and I'll probably listen to it over and over and over on the way to and from my refereeing assignment tonight.  (God help any of my kids who are stuck riding with me somewhere in the next few days.)

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Click here to learn more about the Stylophone, a $19.95 pocket synthesizer invented in 1967 that was sold mostly to kids but was also used by some serious musicians then and now – including the Raconteurs, who sponsored a contest inviting fans to send in videos of themselves playing Stylophones.  

There's a Youtube video of a dual-Stylophone performance of "The Switch and the Spur" by a fan that you've got to see.  Click here to view it.

A Stylophone

Click here to listen to "The Switch and the Spur" in its entirety (sans Stylophone).

Finally, click here for a video of a live performance of the song – it's very good, and the drummer (Patrick Keeler) is an absolute beast . . . but there's no trumpet!

Click on the link below if you'd like to order the song from Amazon: