DAY 413.
Talking Heads........................................................More Songs About Buildings And Food   (1978)












Talking Heads might not be everybody's cup of tea, but tonight I'm finding great comfort listening to this album, I must admit I haven't heard any of their albums that didn't give me a bit of a lift, and this one is no exception, whether it's the distinctive Byrne vocals, or the superb musicianship by Frantz, Harrison & Weymouth (sounds like a law firm) that never sounds anything but polished to perfection, that always hypnotises me into  a state of well being, I don't know but whatever it is, it always works for this pair of lugs.


This is the second time I've played this in 24 hours and it's getting even better, if pushed once again for a favourite track, I'd like to say one of their own (all great tunes) but would have to go for their brilliant cover of Al Green's "Take Me To The River" closely followed by "Stay Hungry" and "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls."




This album will be going into my collection, and if I can suggest, switch of your phone, TV, and all other gadgets, pour yourself a large one, crack a bottle or tin open lay back and give yourself 40 minutes of solace by listening to this wonderful album, it worked for me anyways.




Bits & Bobs;


Have written about Talking Heads before in previous post  (if interested)





More Songs About Buildings And Food is a concept album about late capitalism that speaks with disarming directness to the current political moment. Celebrating its 40th birthday this month, the album has always riveted, but if anything the political and social predicaments that inform these songs have only become more dysfunctional over time. The fetishization of work and the increasingly long work week, self-help individualism and the power of positive thinking, the inspirational entrepreneurial success story, the nightmarish system that underlies and exacerbates these horrors — More Songs About Buildings and Food predicted it all. Those who have spent time reading resumes and cover letters will recognize the language of professional aspiration in these songs, the polite catchphrases beloved by administrators for how they detach speaker from utterance, the brightly disingenuous tone of exaggerated sincerity that pervades advertisements, press releases, everything. In 1978, “The Good Thing” presumably scanned as satire. In 2018, the song could pass for a Silicon Valley business email.

Talking Heads belong to the alternative rock canon’s highest echelon, universally beloved as icons of quirk, and will remain so in perpetuity as new generations of aesthetes discover their back catalog and the joys of gawking over the Stop Making Sense video with a group of friends. Ukulele covers of “This Must Be the Place” abound on YouTube, as do Remain in Light T-shirts at music festivals; Heads posters to this day adorn the bedrooms of indie fans across the globe. By the time they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they had made their mark: art-pop bands were free to play with funk and “world” genres from a punkoid base, nerdboys free to present themselves as such.



 Their legacy has persisted, just as their overt presence in the rock world has shrunk. They’re so obviously omnipresent, their model so played out, it’s almost gauchely self-evident when bands namecheck them as an influence. So, the peculiarities of their discography still startle. Compared to other icons of quirk in the same league, like Bowie and Lou Reed, the harshness and tightness of early Talking Heads alarms. Compared to the few other big quasi-new-wave bands filling arenas in the ‘80s, like R.E.M. and U2, their refusal to appreciate things like beauty and emotions seems both convoluted and inhumane. In a sense they’re too weird to engage with directly, given the sincere literalism of the current critical moment. That’s one reason More Songs About Buildings and Food remains a terrifying listen.



 Art school refugees attracted to aesthetic ideals of starkness and extremity, Talking Heads surfaced in the ‘70s New York punk scene, one of the early CBGB bands. From the start, in live performance and on record, they distinguished themselves musically from the punk template with a wired lankiness that suggested nervous, rather than cathartic, energy. Their 1977 debut, the eponymous Talking Heads: 77, is the dinkiest of the classic punk debuts, fusing punk’s economical spareness with strained mock cheer. The songs that resulted are animated less by a dialectic than the surprisingly rich common ground between theoretically distant sensibilities. The band sound rattles, deploying skewed guitar shrieks and melodious ditties in equal measure, anchored by the supple, reliable rhythm section of bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz’s. “Psycho Killer” and “No Compassion” typify their harsh side, as David Byrne and Jerry Harrison’s choked guitars unwind from their coils to slash at each other. The gloriously chirpy “Don’t Worry About the Government” is an advertising jingle by comparison, but it shares with “Psycho Killer” a detachment, an angularity. Always there’s the sense that the song is playing a joke on you.



 Most crucially, the album establishes Byrne’s carefully constructed persona as lead singer. Imagine The Office’s Dwight Schrute as a Don DeLillo protagonist. As introduced to the world on Talking Heads: 77, David Byrne is not a punk, he’s a geek, and hardly a lovable one — the grownup version of the weird kid who sat in the back of the class and mumbled to himself, who stared at his feet and clenched his jaw, so lost in his own thoughts he never talked to anyone else. He’s white collar, having landed in a generic corporate management job through his obsessive work ethic and slavish deference to authority; there he sputters proclamations like “This report’s incomplete” and “I’m gonna give the problem to you.” He believes in science, business, and government, with absolute faith that the system will take care of people and put them in their place. He’s a proponent of enlightened self-interest and considers himself a gifted motivational speaker. He believes in action over talk, hard logic over feeling, decisiveness over introspection. “Decisiveness” is one of his favorite words. He’s always careful to use proper technical language. He writes songs about business with an insider’s ease and writes love songs like he’s trying to analyze a scientific phenomenon foreign to him. He has a purist’s disdain for human weakness and the squishier emotions, like lack of total self-control, or “compassion.” Often his disdain spills over into seething rage. He’s too repressed to do anything about it or even process the emotion, and it confuses him.



 Men like this exist in droves — awkward, frustrated, but dangerous droves — and the Internet has increased their visibility. We’re acutely conscious of them whenever they type out paragraphs of technical minutia; whenever they correct women to make a show of correcting women; whenever they flaunt false notions of rationality and objectivity; whenever we encounter words like “mansplain,” “scientism,” and “incel.” (The Byrne of “I’m Not in Love” would sneer at “incels” for wanting to have sex in the first place.) Byrne invented the character as a nightmarish exaggeration, before the type was so broadly familiar. Dramatizing social ineptitude was his way of fusing punk with art school; it meant he could play around with tropes and themes. Through the eyes of the geek, he could drag cultural tendencies to their logical endpoints and distort the world into a dystopia he claimed to prefer over real life.



 The perverse fantasies enacted by Byrne on early Talking Heads albums are a mutated form of satire — they don’t exactly uphold conventional values, but they’re so cheerful about pretending to that they don’t code as challenges either. The character isn’t himself the object of satire, nor are the opinions he espouses, nor the situations he finds himself in. But a rationalist’s voice is perfect for revealing subliminal feelings usually left unarticulated, because to him they’re not feelings, and he’ll openly admit to them — he’s rationalized them all. What horrifies about Talking Heads is how calmly and reasonably Byrne expresses the awful little unsaid thoughts that cross our minds regularly. All the tiny daily moments of loathing for people ahead of you in line, cutting you off on the highway, walking slower than you on the sidewalk, standing too close to you in the elevator. All the sudden impulses brought upon us by impatience and exasperation that we immediately ignore and discard for our own social survival and humanity’s greater good. All the logical contortions we go through to justify feeling as we do, forgotten once the feeling passes, all presented brightly, neatly, as if they’re totally normal, because they are.





For their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978), they hired Brian Eno, well on his way to establishing himself as a notorious producer-in-demand. Eno, along with Frantz and Weymouth’s rhythm section, deserves some credit for the album’s increased volume and coherence, replacing the debut’s scrappy thinness with scrappy thickness. The opening chords of “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” an exuberantly silly rocket of a song, announce the specificity and eccentricity of their new sound: galloping drums, hyperactive picking, scratchy rhythm guitar, calmly echoey power chords overlaid atop the nervous base.



 The album’s full, blocky sonic template imbues the band’s brittle intensity with Eno’s mystic, romantic delight in physical sound, constructing a spry, lithe, metallic music machine that clatters and jitters over a bedrock of sturdy, flowing rhythm. These are songs composed of textures derived from punk, blown up into something larger and deeper, something that gleams with the brilliance of new wave keyboards and bounces with the assurance of funk bass. “Artists Only,” whose shiny organ whoosh adorns a set of slinky action-movie basslines that eventually take over the song in a turbulent breakdown, typifies More Songs About Buildings and Food’s basic musical strategy: it’s simultaneously abrasive and immersive.



 The lyrics encompass several flavors of jargon, combining business newspeak, self-help platitudes, academic blather, advertising slogans, therapeutic reassurances, mushy equivocations, and who knows what else into grotesque idiomatic hybrids taken to reflect the speech patterns of brave modern man in capitalist utopia. Contemporary equivalents would use words like “incentive,” “deliverables,” “operationalize,” “empower,” and “self-care.” The catchphrases Byrne utters on More Songs About Buildings and Food aren’t so technical, but they’re no less horrific. I’ve got money now. I’ve got to get to work now. I’m cleaning my brain. I don’t have to prove that I am creative. But never fear: with a little practice, you can walk, talk just like me.



 The album’s first side contains six chirpy, crunchy punkoid miniatures. Some have discernible themes, like “The Girls Want to Be With the Girls,” in which the concept of feminism befuddles the benevolent but confused singer. Over arpeggiated guitar jangle and contentedly plinky piano, Byrne scratches his head, chews his pencil, and notes: “Girls are getting into abstract analysis/would like to make that intuitive leap/they’re making plans that have far-reaching effects/and the girls want to be with the girls/and the boys say, what do you mean?”



 Others are language mashups for their own sake, like “The Good Thing,” a series of garbled slogans that purportedly outline Byrne’s work methodology. As the placid, syncopated guitar riff that anchors the song merges with spacey keyboard air, Byrne informs his management team, waiting attentively for each subsequent PowerPoint slide, that “A straight line exists between me and the good thing/I have found the line and its direction is known to me”; “As we economize, efficiency is multiplied”; and so on. After the second chorus, the song’s superficial calm turns sinister, and the guitars start to clatter, their sharp edges just barely contained by the whirlwind drums and piercing bassline. “I have adopted this and made it my own/cut back on weakness reinforce what is strong/watch me work!” screams Byrne. The song ends as he bellows “work,” repeatedly.



 The first side ends with “Found a Job,” whose thumpy bass, percussive rhythm guitar, and exuberant chord progression would sound like funk if the guitars weren’t so harsh, so cutting, so mechanical. Distorting familiar tropes from beginning to end, “Found a Job” is an entrepreneurial success story presented as a self-help parable. To summarize, an ordinary American couple named Bob and Judy are dissatisfied with the meagre offerings on TV, so they decide to go into business as television producers so they can “make up their own shows.” Their creative product proves a phenomenal success, so they keep at it and gradually build careers for themselves. As an added bonus, the psychological benefits of working together on a project they love resolves all the latent problems in their previously ailing relationship. Loving each other and loving their work, they live happily ever after. Finally, Byrne breaks the fourth wall to present the bigger picture: “So think about this little scene/apply it to your life/if your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right.”



 The conflation of work and love; the particular TV theme, as if television were the center of aesthetic and moral life; the portrayal of hard work as a productive force that will solve everything in your life — what an image of suburban capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. After the third chorus, the band plays an extended outro: the guitar shifts into a faster, scratchier progression, and the keyboard plays a circular hook whose artificial cheer seems to wag its finger at you, reminding you to heed the song’s advice.



 The cognitive dissonance of a rock band, however strange they sound, exhorting you to love your work and follow the rules — and not because they’re offering the usual anticonformist social critique, but because they really want you to love your work and follow the rules — disrupts one’s expected sense of who these musicians are and how they want to be perceived. This ridiculous contradiction, the disjunction between content and presentation, animates More Songs About Buildings and Food. As central as they are, Byrne’s fervent proclamations are only ever half the story, because he sings over music whose energy and beauty is unaccounted for in his worldview. The band’s wiry sharpness and skittish enthusiasm musically embody the paranoid anxiety conveyed by Byrne’s persona, certainly, and when he opens his mouth, agitated noises come out that perfectly complement the harsh whoosh all around. It’s the act of making music itself he finds incomprehensible.



 Byrne plays a character who just wants to go about his business unbothered, waking up early every morning to catch trains that always run on time, working as hard as he can with his nose to the grindstone. Regardless of whether he needs to yelp and wail and let off steam, which he does, he certainly doesn’t want to — all he wants is to stay repressed and unnoticed forever. Somehow he’s wound up here in front of a microphone, and he can’t leave. Even worse, the band behind him is playing delightfully twitchy riffs and rhythms, and it’s making him feel things he’s never felt before, sensations in his body and longings in his heart he can’t control and doesn’t know what to do with. To listen to Talking Heads is to witness a performer’s indecisive dance between pleasure and revulsion. When he screams, it offers him release, but he’s also screaming because the very notion of release terrifies him.



 Since the album’s first side establishes Byrne as a shrill workaholic, the five songs on the second side are doubly startling — especially the sex sequence, which may hardly be a sex sequence at all. Between the jaunty tantrum called “Artists Only” (“You can’t see it til it’s finished!”) and the closing “The Big Country” lie three songs that crystallize the album’s skewed balance between repression and desire. Few musical sequences display the many sides of pleasure so totally as the progression from “I’m Not in Love” to “Stay Hungry” to “Take Me to the River.”



 Sturdy, spiky guitar whomp and thundering drums march through “I’m Not in Love,” whose roaring chords envelop the beat so totally they acquire a percussive solidity of their own. During the chorus, the whole band drops out except for two lone power chords, slamming down repeatedly to fill the silence. Byrne shrieks at random intervals during the verses, hissing and inhaling erratically, while throughout the chorus he murmurs more softly and weaves his way around the harsher guitar chords. The song growls and crashes, assuming a massive scale that looms threateningly over the singer. It’s a scary song for a scary world, for the geek, deeply flustered, has found himself caught in what appears to be a romantic situation. What if this woman tries to touch him — what if she tries to kiss him? The geek frowns. He shudders. He regains his composure. He tells her that he can’t, because he’s not in love. He asks what it takes to fall in love, and wonders whether people really fall in love. He wonders if there’s a time for this; it’s irresponsible. She presses him — what are you saying? He sighs; this poor woman doesn’t understand. He decides to educate her. So he explains how natural feelings just get in the way, and why we don’t really need love. He believes, you see, that one day we’ll live in a world without love. Please respect his opinions — they’ll be respected someday.



 A critic trying to be clever might claim that “I’m Not in Love” is the most brilliantly indirect of love songs, that Byrne is in denial because he’s terrified of how strong his feelings are. I see no reason not to take the song at face value. “I’m Not in Love” quavers with the same distilled loathing the geek has always felt in his bones, combined with a juvenile determination to win the argument by going to logical extremes. She’s backed him into a corner, so he’ll renounce the whole principle on which her argument stands. How dare you think of me in that way? I don’t even believe in love. After the third chorus, the guitars go crazy for two minutes, jerking and scraping away at the drums, at the popping bassline, at their own textural surface, but as the song grinds to a halt there’s still a mountain of anger left over, brooding, trembling, glaring you down.



 “Stay Hungry” is the polar opposite — a blissfully snappy mock-disco exercise, with sparkly keyboards painted over the chugging guitars. “I think we can signify our love now,” exclaims Byrne at the beginning, as the guitars drone and tumble and the beat skips with gleeful insouciance. A lustrous synthesizer plays a cheerfully astonished chord progression during the first verse, while Byrne calls out various bodily instructions, almost like a physical trainer doing jumping jacks: “Stay hungry! Move a muscle! Make a motion!” Then, for about a minute, the band settles into a scratchy groove; Harrison’s glassy organ fills and Weymouth’s obtrusive bassline repeats, over and over, while the rhythm guitar clacks and chatters, stuttering in a percussive pattern that seems to change gradually each time. Then, the same synthesizer as before plays a slower and more plaintive melody; derived from disco, its lyrical ache is particularly blatant when juxtaposed against the band’s fidgety harshness. Byrne begins to croon a tender admission of love, and the track fades out. Voila — his erotic breakthrough! It clicks in under three minutes.



 Then, their famous cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” makes their debt to R&B explicit, and finally pushes the Byrne character over the emotional and sensory edge. Green’s original is streamlined, confident, beautiful in how delicately his falsetto merges with the effortless glide of the strings and the propulsive Hi Rhythm beat. Talking Heads turn the song inside out, revealing the seams: Frantz’s drumming is slower, more lumbering, yet somehow larger in the aural space; Weymouth’s bass is slinky and flat simultaneously; only the guitar hook in the chorus contains echoes of the original song’s central chord progression, turned cruder and more industrial. “Whooshing me down,” cries Byrne, and the music complies — the guitar sound really does whoosh, inhaling giant gulps of virtual air, like a mechanical sonic vacuum that only functions in spurts.



 As performed by Al Green, “Take Me to the River” conflates the two great obsessions of the soul singer — “Take me to the river/drop me in the water” portrays a baptism scene as an act of erotic deliverance. For Talking Heads, it’s a moment of catharsis so massive even the singer can hardly resist its pull. After the last chorus, Byrne’s moans and yells become joyfully inarticulate — so this is what pleasure feels like! The vacuum/guitar goes haywire, as the drums have torn a gash in its surface, and it breaks free, an aural tube gasping and shuddering and flailing side to side. Eventually it drowns out Byrne’s own vocal racket; toward the end, at the song’s climax — finally! — it sucks him up into the ether.



 The album’s second side thus portrays a vivid emotional arc: pleasure taking over, repression collapsing into desire, the singer loosening up and allowing himself to feel things. This narrative is hardly exceptional in itself — critics have praised Talking Heads’s later work, like the pleasant but bland Little Creatures (1985) and their totemic ballad “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” on similar grounds, as if alienated geeks were somehow obliged to grow up, become normal, and learn to love.



 They aren’t, they frequently don’t, and anyway, the sequence from “I’m Not in Love” to “Stay Hungry” to “Take Me to the River” is sublimely weird precisely because these songs occupy space on an album dedicated to celebrating work, discipline, and repression. Like the disco keyboards juxtaposed against the scratchy punk guitars in “Stay Hungry,” the Byrne character’s sudden rush of desire is most striking when contextualized by songs on which he makes a show of buttoning his top button. That the character has been thoroughly dislikable up to this point hardly saps his love songs of relish; instead, it renders them painfully felt — not humanizing, for he’s always been human despite himself, but unexpected and almost surreal. These songs suggest that living in the orderly business world portrayed on the rest of the album comes at a price, and they explain why Byrne sounds so tense, so impassioned even when reciting slogans and numbers. They make clear what’s at stake.



 The album’s final song marks a return to order. Like the rest of the second side, “The Big Country” contextualizes the album’s white-collar nightmare — not emotional but geographical context, and the context of class strata. Here, the geek has rebuttoned his top button, and put on a tie and jacket; he’s sitting on a plane, with his briefcase in the overhead, presumably going to some conference or other, having left his home city of New York or somewhere generic. He has a window seat, and he’s looking out at the landscape, feeling bemused at what he sees. Farmlands! Undeveloped areas! A parkway, and a baseball diamond! He furrows his brow, wondering why anyone would ever choose to live there.



 He knows not everybody can live in the big city like him, as he’s “learned how these things work together.” He even supposes some of them might enjoy their lives; “I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends,” he admits. Enthusiastic slide guitar and rhythmically strummed acoustic underline his sudden fascination, gleefully playing a melody that’s both grand and dinky. Nonetheless: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to!”



 These days, the Byrne character wouldn’t giggle at “those people down there” from the airplane window — he’d interview three of them about why they voted for Trump before returning to his office at a major newspaper to write a condescending thinkpiece about why “coastal elites” are “out of touch” with the “real America.” That’s one reason why, played today, More Songs About Buildings and Food cuts deep. These songs have come true in ways the band couldn’t have foreseen or wanted, while remaining indisputably false in other ways, enough to render it a startling listen indeed. The album’s odes to late capitalism shock because late capitalism is upon us now more than ever; it’s the rare social satire whose exaggerated image of the world is so absurd and indirect it remains so. More Songs About Buildings and Food simultaneously plumbs a political realm and the mysteries of the human heart, connecting them through a structure of feeling that isn’t often articulated. It resonates because it’s so plainly skewed and so plainly recognizable. We’re walking and talking just like him.




Punk art photographer Jimmy De Sana was the man behind the cover for Talking Heads' 1978 album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. As a seminal figure in the anti-art movement, he never played by the rules with his photography, and this was no exception.





For More Songs About Buildings and Food, De Sana - along with Talking Heads' David Byrne - created a fantastic photomosaic. He took hundreds of close-up Polaroid shots of the band, then organized them into a 23x23 grid. The 529 shots he ended up using assembled into a bizarre, distorted view of the band.





Unlike modern photomosaicking, which can be done through computers, De Sana's work was a manual process. He used mismatched photos, combining overexposed shots with natural-looking shots. This is why one square appears unusually bright, while an adjacent square appears normal. He slightly misaligned several shots, making faces, arms, shirts and legs look off-kilter.





This process was likely time-consuming and costly, but the result was undeniably effective. More Songs About Buildings and Food is one of Talking Head's essential works; likewise, the cover is one of Jimmy De Sana's essential works.




 
 

DAY 417.
The Cars............................................The Cars   (1978)











The Cars pulled in at the dawn of that often justifiably maligned genre known as new wave with songwriting acumen, superlative musicianship, and a unique visual "appeal" equaled at the the time only by Blondie. With this, their debut album, they created a gold-plated pop masterpiece dressed up in new wave clothes.


A superbly stylised mash of influences (from Velvet Underground to David Bowie) filtered through unabashed radio-ready pop. The Cars debut is an introductory handbook to new wave that sounds just as great as it sounded four decades ago.


This period is costing me a fortune, used to love this album and hope I still do.

DAY 415.
Van Halen...........................................................Van Halen   (1978)












Never really been into Van Halen, and to be honest this is the first time I've actually listened to them, have heard of them but no' went oot my way to hear anything by them, and have to be honest I don't think I've really missed much.


This for me was late 70s power-pop, I couldn't call it rock although, even in quite short tracks yer man tries to get as much guitary stuff in as he can, which in my humbles is just a load of pish, ok he's pretty quick playing his guitar, but let me ask you "if I got a wooden spoon and rattled at pace against a bit of corrugated iron, making sounds of varying pitch, would you consider it music?" I wouldn't, so why when some prick thinks he's erchie, plucking away at his guitar, with no particular goal just randomly bashing the strings , we have to stand back and applaud and admire his work, absolute bollocks in my humbles, this boy Van Halen's tapping technique had Guitar World ranking it the second best guitar solo of all time (the Emperors New Clothes springs to mind), this is a solo that sometimes goes on for over ten minutes, I'm sorry but is there anyone who could just sit there for ten minutes and listen to some freak wanking off with his guitar, if this is you please try an get some help!



The only track I liked, and to be fair I really really liked it, was their cover of John Brim's blues classic "Ice Cream Man, this track will be getting downloaded, but you can keep the rest, this album wont be going into my collection."




Bits & Bobs;




Years of jumping around on stage took it's toll on Eddie. He had hip-replacement surgery in 1999. He also had cancer in his throat and tongue, which caused him to lose part of his tongue.


 
On their 1979 tour, David Lee Roth gave each of the crew members five backstage passes, which they were supposed to give to beautiful women. If Roth shacked up with one of the babes, he gave the roadie that got her in $100 the next day.


 
Eddie and Alex were born and raised in Holland. Their family moved to Pasadena, California in 1967, when Eddie was 10 and Alex was 12.


 
Eddie took piano lessons throughout his youth. He credits his understanding of classical music for his ability to write songs.


 
Eddie and Alex' father, Jan Van Halen, was a professional clarinet player.


 
Their original name was Mammoth. They changed it after finding out another band had it first. It was Roth's idea to use the name Van Halen, Eddie and Alex didn't like it.


 
Roth was in a band called Redball Jet when he met Eddie and Alex. Michael Anthony met Alex at Pasadena City College.


 
Eddie has serious stage fright, and the only way he could perform early on was by having some drinks beforehand, which is something his dad suggested. He quickly became a very high-functioning alcoholic, but his drinking had a profound effect on his health, his personal relationships, and the band. He credits his wife Janie Liszewski, who he met in 2006, with getting him sober, which he finally did around 2009. For most of 2008, Eddie sat around the house watching television and weaning himself off of alcohol.


 
In 1977, Gene Simmons saw them in concert and set up their first recording session. He flew them to New York and bought them new clothes, but the resulting demo still didn't get them a record deal. The record companies were reluctant to sign them because disco was in and rock was out.


 
On most of the songs, the music was written by Eddie and the lyrics by Roth or Hagar. The band shares songwriting credit, however, meaning that royalties are split equally regardless of who contributes.


 
Roth was hyperactive as a child and became a very high-energy adult. His demand for attention helped the band in the sense that it kept Eddie from having to do interviews or stage moves. Roth did all the talking.


 
Eddie married actress Valerie Bertinelli on April 11, 1981. They met the year before when she brought her brother, who was a huge Van Halen fan, backstage at a show in Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1991 they had a son named Wolfgang. Eddie and Valerie separated in 2001 and divorced in 2005.


 
Eddie is constantly working on his guitars. He takes them apart and pieces them together until he gets them just right.


 
They had a provision in their contract demanding M&Ms backstage with the brown ones removed. This was a way of seeing if the promoters read the contract. If they saw brown M&Ms, they knew there would be problems with the show.


 
In 2004, David Lee Roth turned his back on music and trained to be a paramedic. The same year, the band reunited with Hagar.


 
Eddie started out as a drummer. Alex had a guitar, but while Eddie was out on his paper route (that he had to pay for his drums), Alex would play his drums. Eddie said "Fine, play my drums, I'll play your guitar!"


 
Michael Anthony makes hot sauce. It's called Mad Anthony's Hot Sauce.


 
When Van Halen first appeared, there was a rumor that the group were actually members of KISS without their make-up and attire. If you take a close look at early pics of them, David Lee Roth resembled Paul Stanley, Eddie Van Halen resembled Ace Frehley, and Michael Anthony resembled Gene Simmons. This rumor may had been fueled by Gene Simmons' discovery of the group, and the fact that Van Halen had appeared right around the time KISS had taken a break from the recording studio in 1977. The rumor was soon quelled when the individual members of KISS released their "solo" albums in 1978 around the same time Van Halen II was released, and people began to really notice the height differential between Alex Van Halen and Peter Criss.


 
Anthony's real last name is Sobolewski.


 
Van Halen reunited in 2007 with David Lee Roth joining Eddie and Alex, along with Eddie's son Wolfgang on bass. Sammy Hagar and Mike Anthony weren't invited to join them on tour, but they were the band's sole representatives at Van Halen's Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction that year.


 
Van Halen's 2008 tour rider contains a demand for a study room for bassist Wolfgang Van Halen, who was 16 then, and his tutor. David Lee Roth's dressing room was demanded with no floor covering to allow Mr. Roth to practice martial arts in his dressing room.


 
In the early days, Eddie played his solos with his back to the audience so that other guitar players could not steal his moves, and also because of his stage freight.


 
Eddie Van Halen didn't ask for royalties after completing Michael Jackson's "Beat It" guitar solo - he did it as a favour.


 
David Lee Roth aimed a lot of zingers at his detractors, which were often other musicians. One of these was directed at Sammy Hagar back in 1982 when they exchanged words in the press. "Sammy definitely has a social problem," Dave said in Creem. "I think it's based on lack of education."



Article written about VH in their early days, this comes from Sounds magazine, May 13, 1978. They were just about to conquer the world…





 Columbus, Ohio (3/16/1978). Van Halen, just called back for an encore, are basking in the unexpected adulation. The support band takes a bow. “Thank you Cleveland”, yells their frontman. Cleveland? Silence. You could hear a piece of popcorn pop.


 Van Halen’s collective face drops further still, as insults and hard objects are tossed at the stage. The man whose job it is to keep the band informed on such trivia as where exactly they are playing has reportedly been given his marching orders.


 But anyone can put their platformed foot in it once in awhile; and for every one of those, Van Halen has been takings a bigger step forward. Today Hollywood – as they said back in the days of movieland glam – tomorrow the World.


 Kicking off with an extensive tour of America, supporting – and at times upstaging – Montrose and Journey, the band are now in Europe and Britain on the Black Sabbath tour, before heading east to the Orient. They might get some time off in October, but the Puritan work ethic, the cornerstone of the Land of the Free, goes down fine with Van Halen.


 I mean, this is the band that not long ago played five sets a night, 24 nights in a row, for a bit of loose change.

 “Now we’re on the road, everyone’s saying: Van Halen First World Tour. And we’re going out there and doing a 45-minute set or something like that – man, this is like Van Halen World Vacation”.



Spoken in the true spirit of rock and roll by Jim Dandy/Robert Plant hybrid, bumping-and-grinding frontman Dave Lee Roth, who goes on to say: “It’s been going great. Everybody’s been eating it up like crazy. Because it’s good rock music. It’s straight-ahead stuff, really passionate, really intense stuff with none of this dumb blues-rock or anything.


 “We put a lot of effort into it and people are responding real well – because it translates so much more beautifully live than on the record; because you can really feel the bass. You get the tight pants and all that extra.”


 Not to mention lightshows, dry ice, sweat, blood and white-hot physical excitement. Good old rock and roll; wine, women and song. None of this Malibu lie-with-you-in-a-hammock-looking-at-the-highway-laid-back trash. This is the real McCoy. Groupies form a quiet line by the door.


 Van Halen are from California. The land that gave you love and peace and long-legged girls with freckles and braces, and Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles. California seems to do something to its bands. A week in the sun and they turn laid-back and mellow. Look what happened to Fleetwood Mac…


 It’s not as if California hasn’t any heavy metal fans – it’s swarming with them. Just none of them home-grown. Until Van Halen came along – and it took them four years to get out of the bars and into a recording studio. Van Halen are not laid-back, but they like California. They used to judge wet T-shirt contests.


 The band’s line-up is Dave Lee Roth on lead vocals, Michael Anthony on bass, and brothers Dutchmen Alex Van Halen on drums and (excellent) Edward Van Halen on guitar. Formed four years ago, they originally called themselves Mammoth, until a few choice words from another band of the same name led them to choose ‘Van Halen’. Theirs has been called “the most auspicious hard rock debut since Led Zeppelin.”


 “We were all in rival bands in the LA area”, Roth tells the story. “And once you play a circuit of so many square miles, you become familiar with the other musicians who are playing around. People who weren’t terribly, terribly into it, who wanted to drop off and become a lawyer or a junkie or something, would do that, and the four of us were kind of stuck with each other. It’s because we were very intense about wanting to get a band together and make a record and go on the road and all that entails.”


 They started out playing parties and graduated to bars. At Gazarri’s on the Sunset Strip, they were paid to keep the kids dancing – and thirsty; and they had to run a dance contest twice a week.

 “I had to talk to the kids while they all lined up”, recalls Roth. “I’d do a Monty Hall (the American equivalent of Hugie Greene), ask them ‘where do you come from, what do you do for a living’, all that kind of stuff, or make a joke about quaaludes and the audience would crack up. And then they’d get up and dance.


 “We worked everywhere, see, because we just loved to play. We figured what we’d do is play as far and wide as the car would take us in a one-night drive, and eventually enough people would see us and enough of them like us and we’d be discovered.”


 America is the land of commercials. You advertise everything, from deodorant and hamburgers to plastic surgery, voodoo dolls and religion. Van Halen set about advertising itself.


 “After playing the bars for a while we began promoting our own shows. We would make up flyers and rent a hall and start to put on our own shows around the local high schools and junior colleges, wherever young people would be. We were barred from just about everywhere in Pasadena (their locality N.E. of LA) so we started drawing in other Southern Californian areas. The first show we drew maybe 800 people. The last show – about eight months ago, before the record came out – we drew 3,200 people just with posters. We had no money for radio advertising or newspapers or stuff like that. The local newspaper couldn’t stand us anyway. We represented to them the classic rock-and-roll-band bad guy image.”


 Their next venture was to rent a bunch of semis (flat-deck trucks), put them together and make a stage; put on a sow, keep enough to pay their bills, and invest the rest in a PA system, then some lights, the works.


 “You can’t expect to knock on someone’s door with a demo tape and get a lot”, explains Roth. “We just wanted to be discovered. It took about four years but we did it.”


 The first step on their road to discovery came in the form of one Rodney Bingenheimer, LA hanger-outer, who spotted them bashing out top forty hits at one club, and transported them to another – the Starwood (mecca for heavy metal fans), the only club in Hollywood where the walls actually sweat. The second step was an offer by Gene (Kiss) Simmons to pay for a demo tape session. The third was a visit to the Starwood by producer Ted Templeman (of Doobies and Montrose fame) accompanied by a top bod from Warner Records.


 “It was a crummy Monday night, just like any other”, recalls Roth in a scene so dramatic it could have come straight from the movies. “They just showed up, came backstage after the show, and said ‘hey you guys are terrific – wanna sign up?’ And it felt real good. We’d been campaigning for it for so long, and then we got it. So we said: ‘Ah, now stage two. The rest was just eliminations, now you’re in the race’.”


 Their first album, Van Halen produced by Templeman, came out in December. It’s an impressive debut. Each song has a great riff, written, says Roth, for “instant appeal”.


 “The whole Van Halen concept is that we’re very straight ahead. No studio wizardry, no magic of multiple overdubbing or stuff like that. We just wanted to do a real solid, pure product without being too simplistic – that same old boring blues riff. Recording the album actually took two weeks. All of that stuff on the record is live. It’s all first take or second take stuff. I sang while the band played.


 “Maybe three out of ten songs have a – one – guitar overdub on them. That way it translates real well live, and it makes for a very different sound in this day and age when everybody seems to be ‘soaring vocal harmonies over a progressive background overlay’ stuff. It’s great to make that music, but I’m not sure if that’s rock music.


 All but two of the songs on the album are communally-written originals. The exceptions are the Elmore James oldie, ‘Ice Cream Man’, and their hit single, a remake of the Kinks’ classic ‘You Really got Me’; a throwback to their top 40-playing bar days.


 “We had a repertoire of about 300 songs”, says Roth, “So don’t be surprised if there’s any old stuff on the next album, or the one after that, or whatever. Because there are a lot of great old songs we used to do that translate well into the 1980 sound.”


 That, by the way, is the message they’d like passed on to you.


 “This is the 1980s, tell them, and this is the new sound. It’s not the ’60s, and it’s not a reflection of the ’70s any more. It’s hyper, it’s energy, it’s urgent is what it is. Our music is exuberant and strenuous to play – so we’re really in shape.”


 A glance at the supple body on the album cover, and you believe him. By the way, don’t expect them to cancel a tour if they come down with flu, anything less than death.


 Says Roth: “I can’t stand nerks who complain: ‘Oooh, I have the sniffles. I can’t go on’. There are, say, 10,000 fans who are in love with the act and have been waiting months to see him, and He’s Got The Sniffles! Bars really shape you up. So when your monitors screw up or you get flu or something you don’t O.D. on it. We don’t go to pieces.”



"Runnin' With The Devil"

 
This is the first song on the first Van Halen album. It starts with a backwards blare of car horns, which was made by a contraption Eddie Van Halen put together using a bunch of horns, a car battery, and a footswitch. They used to use it when they played at clubs.


 
Van Halen included this song on a demo Gene Simmons produced for them in 1977. After seeing them in concert, Simmons flew the band to New York, bought them clothes, and set up a recording session. They didn't get a record deal out of it, but gained valuable experience.


 
Gene Simmons had the idea for the car horns at the beginning. He had the band do this on the 1977 "House Of Pain" demo he produced for them.


 
At one point, David Lee Roth says, "Goddamn it lady, you know I ain't lyin' too ya, I'm gonna tell you one time." Roth was never eloquent, but he was occasionally introspective (see "Hang 'Em High"), and even poetic (see "Secrets").


 
The song contains many of the things Van Halen became famous for: David Lee Roth's squeal, Eddie's guitar solo, and Michael Anthony's backup vocals.


 
Eddie's guitar is on the cover of the album. He pieced it together using parts of different guitars until he got the sound and feel he wanted. It is striped black and white on the album, but Eddie later painted it red.


 
This was easy for the band to record because they did not use many studio tricks. They pretty much recorded what they had been playing live for years. Later Van Halen albums became much more complicated.


 
Van Halen opened concerts for Journey and Black Sabbath after releasing this album, helping it sell over 5 million copies as more people found out about them.


 
This gets constant play on classic rock radio. It was not played a lot when it first came out because nobody had heard of Van Halen, so it was never burned out.


  This bears a strong resemblance to Pink Floyd's similarly titled song "Run Like Hell," particularly in the intro (one note on the bass played over and over interrupted by a guitar with echo). Both songs were released within a year of each other, so it is probably just a coincidence.




"Eruption"

This is an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo that leads into "You Really Got Me," which was Van Halen's first single. It started as a warm up exercise Eddie used. The band's producer, Ted Templeman, thought it would make a great addition to the album, so they included it.


 
Eddie ran his guitar through a cheap echo unit called a Univox to get the low growl at the end. He put a different motor in the unit to give it a distinctive sound. Eddie often took apart his guitars and processing devices to create new effects.


 
This song is often cited as one of the best guitar solos of all time. A 2001 Guitar World magazine poll had it placing #2, second only to "Stairway To Heaven." In their 2013 poll, readers picked "Eruption" as #1.


 
Rolling Stone magazine Issue 1054 asked Eddie Van Halen how this song came about: "We recorded our first record on Sunset Sound in Hollywood, and we were warming up for a weekend gig at the Whisky. And I was just rehearsing, and [engineer] Donn Landee happened to record it. It was never planned to be on the record. So the take on the record was a total freak thing. It was just an accident. He happened to be rolling tape."


 
Eddie Van Halen insists that there is a mistake in this song near the beginning. "Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could've played it better," he said. This is a great argument against perfectionism.




"Aint Talkin' 'Bout Love"

The song is about casual sex, something David Lee Roth was known for. He had the roadies give out back stage passes to beautiful women at Van Halen's concerts. There was a $100 reward if the roadie sent one back he slept with.


 
Van Halen played this at many of their early shows before they got a record deal. They included it on a demo Gene Simmons produced for them in 1977.



 If you listen carefully, you can hear an electric sitar low in the mix.


 
This song gets at least as much radio play now as when it first came out. Van Halen took a few years to get a big following, so many of their early songs are now Classic Rock staples because they were never overplayed when they first came out.


 
In 1989, Van Halen sued rap group The 2 Live Crew for stealing the riff from this for their song "The F--k Shop" (The Clean Version was called "The Funk Shop."). The 2 Live Crew ended up selling millions of albums with the song when they became involved in a censorship controversy over their lyrics.


 
Velvet Revolver performed this at the 2007 ceremonies when Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The only Van Halen members who attended were Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, and Hagar performed "Why Cant This Be Love?" at the induction. This song represented the David Lee Roth era of the band.



"I'm The One"

A track from Van Halen's first album, a version by 4 Non Blondes appeared in the 1994 movie Airheads in a scene where they take over a radio station.


 
Alex Van Halen used a double-kick drum on this - something he also did on "Hot For Teacher." When 4 Non Blondes recorded it, their drummer, Dawn Richardson, learned how to use a double-kick 3 days before they recorded it.


 
Linda Perry, who has gone on to write songs for Pink and Christina Aguilera, was lead singer of 4 Non Blondes. She is very good at singing like male rock singers, and a lot of people had no idea the version in Airheads wasn't Van Halen. Perry did a convincing Robert Plant when 4 Non Blondes recorded "Misty Mountain Hop" for the Led Zeppelin tribute album Encomium.




"Jamie's Cryin' "


This song is about a girl who has a one-night stand and lives to regret it. She wants a deeper relationship and feels used by the guys who hit it and quit. She considers writing him a letter asking him to call (remember, this is before texting), but she knows it will get her nowhere.



David Lee Roth wrote the lyrics, which is a little ironic considering his many one-and-done conquests. In the early years of Van Halen, he would have a crew member make sure that some lovely ladies in the crowd were ushered backstage for his enjoyment.


 
A track from the first Van Halen album, "Jamie's Cryin'," was never released as a single, but it became a fan favorite and a concert mainstay during their David Lee Roth era.


 
Eddie Van Halen's guitar riff was sampled for Tone Loc's 1988 hit "Wild Thing."




"Ice Cream Man"


This was written and originally recorded by the Chicago blues musician John Brim. Born in 1922, Brim recorded this at Chess Records in 1953. In 1994, he released a compilation album called The Ice Cream Man.


 
This is one of David Lee Roth's favorites. He pushed to get it on Van Halen's first album as a tribute to the blues.


 
The first verse is just Roth singing and playing acoustic guitar. The full band joins in after that.


 
Like many American blues songs, the lyrics are loaded with double entendres, making it a perfect song for David Lee Roth to sing. At the beginning of the song, Roth says, "Dedicate one to the ladies," making it clear that when he brags that his "flavors are guaranteed to satisfy," he's not talking about the frozen treat.


 
This was one of two covers on Van Halen's first album. The other, "You Really Got Me," was their first single.


 
Van Halen included this on a cassette they gave Gene Simmons before they had a record deal. Simmons didn't like this song, but let them record it anyway when he flew them to New York to make a demo. They didn't get a deal out of it, but when Warner Brothers finally signed them, the songs on the demo, including this, made up much of their first two albums.


 
In 1659 the Sicilian chef Francesco Procopia dei Coltelli perfected the making of ice cream. Twenty seven years later dei Coltelli opened Le Procope, the first cafe in Paris. Here after being considered a dessert for royalty alone, ice cream was made available to the general public for the first time.



 
 

Rick Dagless wrote:

Always enjoyed that Van Halen album. Was the precursor to the big hair and spandex rock bands of the 80's. Ain't talking bout love and Running with the Devil are cracking tracks.

Guitar wankery isn't for everyones ears but I admit I'm quite partial to a good guitar solo and Eddie Van Halen pioneered certain styles that even now are staple techniques used by guitarists now.

Good post RD, "one mans meat " and all that
 

PatReilly wrote:

I've been neglecting this a bit lately, due in part to utter dejection at the football side of things. Will get back to pace soon, but not quite 'match-fit' right now.

To be honest, this has been my escape from things lately.
 

DAY 416.
Willie Colon And Ruben Blades..................................Siembra   (1978)











This wont take long, I enjoyed listening to this one even though I haven't got a clue what the lyrics are, Willie Colon is (a new one on me) a Nuyorican (a New York-born Puerto Rican) and Ruben Blades is Panamanian so I'm assuming it's being sung in Spanish, anyways I liked all the tracks but especially "Plastico" I thought it was going to be a bit disco, then the salsa kicked in and saved it.


This album wont be going into my collection, but it will be getting downloaded and put on my "music for getting on wi' things" playlist




Bits & Bobs;



Couldn't find much in English but did find this review




A compositional and poetic masterpiece, Rubén Blades’ and Willie Colón’s Siembra set new artistic and commercial heights, not merely in salsa, but in all types of music. Although not the first “concept” album in the salsa repertory, Siembra ranks along with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On and Eddie Palmieri’s Justicia in its innovative artistry, brilliant musicality and momentous social and political commentary. This album, which was in the majority of Latino’s homes, launched Blades and Colón’s careers internationally.





Musically, it offered salsa, bomba, cumbia and son montuno rhythms to a growing salsa audience, while poetically it directed its message of cultural pride, social justice and
political liberation to Latinos living throughout the Americas during a time of intense political oppression. “Plástico” is Blades’ manifesto to Latinos, warning them of the “plasticity” of American materialist spending, social climbing and urban “progress.” It also speaks of Latinos’ own history of racial discrimination: diciendo a su hijo de cinco años, “no jueges con niños de color extraño” (telling his five-year-old child, “don’t play with children of different skin color”).





Beginning with a not-so-subtle parody of disco, the music hastily launches into the first verse accompanied by salsa and bomba rhythms. Trombonedriven mambos bridge the sequences of Rubén’s soneos and the aphoristic coro (chorus). “Plástico” ends by paying homage to the people, who were proud of their heritage and of being latino. “Buscando Guayaba” is a classic son montuno that Luisito Cruz, Jr. arranged in the style of Arsenio Rodríguez. As Blades indulges in the play of double entendres – buscando guayaba ando yo, que tenga sabor, que tenga mucho mendo (looking for a girl with flavor, a girl with some spice) – we also hear solos on trombone and timbales, which is usually lacking in contemporary commercial salsa.





For “Pedro Navaja,” Blades took Bertolt Brecht’s characters as well as the tune from The Three Penny Opera’s “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” and reset the characters in El Barrio. Blades brilliantly captures Brecht’s use of satire, social criticism and estrangement, making “Pedro Navaja” an excellent study in dramatic, poetic and musical intertextuality. Blades’ main characters “Pedro Navaja,” esa mujer (the woman) and el borracho (the drunk) are anti-heroes as well as victims of an ultimately contradictory and unjust society, satirically reminding us of the violent reality of barrio life. Luís Ortíz’s musical arrangement is an equally valuable study in the intricacies of treating clave. It is true artistry in rhythm!





“María Lionza” is Blades’ passionate tribute to Venezuela’s most popular patron saint. Colón, who arranged the piece, vividly evokes the indigenous origins of María Lionza especially in the introduction when we hear a whole-tone passage played on the piano. The ritual-like vocalizations and the Afro-Brazilian berimbau, which like María Lionza, is an artifact of the cultural and racial miscegenation – the African, Iberian and Native American – that is Latin American music and culture. “Ojos” is an eloquent homage to all humanity as seen through the eyes of elders, the youth, kings, vagabonds, the imprisoned, the hopeful, neighbors, the blind and of el pueblo. The convergence of poetic eloquence and musicality, especially the arrangement’s collective articulation of clave, is perhaps this album’s most consistent artistic feature.





Excelling once again in the use of rhythms from Latin America, Blades and arranger Luisito Cruz, Jr. seamlessly bring together cumbia and salsa rhythms throughout the verses of “Dime.” Once having launched into the montuno, we hear some of the most exciting elements of Blades’ and Willie’s music – a swinging bass line that marks clave for even the most clave-hindered dancer; Willie’s trombone moña, and Rubén’s swinging soneos, which is very rare in salsa. 





“Siembra” is the album’s resounding musical, poetic, and philosophical epilogue. The message is clear, you will reap (de acuerdo a la semilla) what you sow (asi sera las frutas que recogeras)! For the arrangement of what would become the title song of the LP, Colón contacted the Argentine Franzetti who worked with Colón on previous recordings. Franzetti prepared the arrangement for Siembra for four trombones and rhythm section. It wasn’t until a few weeks after the initial recording session, which Franzetti conducted, that Colón called Franzetti asking for strings to be added. Having only the morning to complete the job, Franzetti rushed the parts over to La Tierra Sound Studios for the string overdub, thereby completing what would become the signature opus of the album. 





Besides being a musical and poetic masterpiece, this album stands as a historical document of the political and social upheaval facing Latin Americans in the late 1970s. As for its significance to contemporary Latino music and identity, Siembra stands as a testament to the consonance of artistic principles, cultural pride, and commercial success. Olvidate de lo plástico que eso nunca deja na’. Siembra y
confía en la mañana nunca te repentirás. (Forget about materialism it’s worth nothing. Plant seeds today and a better tomorrow will come; you won’t regret it.)








 

PatReilly wrote:

I climbed into the loft earlier to see if I could find that first Devo album, for I knew the one I had had a different cover. But I didn't realise I had so many albums!

There are lps by folk I don't really like, like Paul McCartney and various country stars, plus compilations and so many others. I'm wondering why they are in the loft........ I must have stolen them.

Lots of Kinks albums, all the Dr Feelgood stuff 'til Lee Brilleaux's death, The Stranglers 'til Hugh Cornwell left, various Mowtown, many Reggae, all of which I remember buying.

Anyway, wilnae say much about the Devo album until after a/c, but here's mine, on red plastic too.

I woulda loved to have been able to flick through my old record collection Pat, must've brought back some memories,
I also had the cover like yours but if my memory serves, my vinyl was yellow, that was also part of my old mums donation to charity, god rest her soul.

Will try and do the double ( Cars & Devo) tonight.
 

Last edited by arabchanter (02/10/2018 10:43 am)

Not wanting to jump in before you, a/c, but having used to despise Dire Straits, I now quite like them.

Wouldn't buy any of their stuff right enough, but I've maybe stolen one, will have to look in the loft.

As an aside, I found a Nirvana lp up there, not the US band but  UK 'seventies combo. Think it's worth a wee bit nowadays.

Sorry about not posting my ramblings yesterday, I forgot to mention I've had to go oot the toon for a few days as I have a funeral to attend on Thursday, I won't be back until Friday night so hope to catch up then.

Will still put up the album of the day, I can just about manage that on my phone.

Tek wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

DAY 149.
Dire Straits..................................Dire Straits   (1978)











Dire Straits, and in particular lead vocalist, lead guitarist, and songwriter Mark Knopfler,, an ex journalist and schoolteacher, were not punks, and the release of this album in 1978, when punk and new wave (and disco for that matter) were dominating the British media and charts, was brave to say the least.

Brilliant album.

They are often a band that music snobs turn their noses up at, but I, for one, really like them.
 

Ok Tek - Im one of the "snobs".  This band supported by Chris Rea would be my hell.  Tell you what though I will listen to this album - coz thats what this wonderful thread is about.  I hate everything Dire straits have done though -lol 

DAY 421.
Marvin Gaye.............................................Here, My Dear   (1978)












In contempt of court for failing to pay alimony, Gaye, agreed to sign over the advance for an album, and part of it's earnings, to Anna Gordy, his ex wife and inconveniently the sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy.


Grimly fascinated by his own misfortune Gaye conceived a cycle that documented the disintegration of his marriage. The albums gatefold sleeve opened to reveal love as a monopoly-esque board game called "judgment," packed with daggers above hearts and similar ill omens.
 

DAY 417.
The Cars............................................The Cars   (1978)











I love this album, it definitely brings back some great memories, if I had to have a wee go, it would be about the first track, now normally, like the first chapter of a book it gives you a wee clue of what to expect, and on albums it's normally one, of if not the, most upbeat track on the album. The Cars gave us  "Good Times Roll" which fir me is an alright song, but when you have the absolutely stompin' gem that is "Just What I Needed" you couldn't ask for a better opener, all you would need to do was to play the opening track, and most people would be sold, and offski down to Cathy McCabe's to buy a copy.



This album hasn't got a weak track on it,in my humbles, it's also superbly produced and to these lugs at least, doesn't sound in the least dated.My favourite tracks would have to be, to be  honest I haven't really got one, they all have their own merits, so summing up this is a crackin' album, one that will be going into my collection, and if I can just leave you with the immortal words of an old mate of mine "imagine getting a gobble fae the bird on the cover, and she sneezed" ooooooh!!





Bits & Bobs;



Ocasek met the supermodel Paulina Porizkova on the set for their 1984 video for "Drive." They got married in 1989 and had two boys. Ocasek has four other children from two previous marriages.


 
Orr died October 3, 2000 of pancreatic cancer. He vowed to continue playing music until he was dead. Honoring that vow practically to the day cancer took his life, Ben was on stage performing with his band Big People on September 27. He passed away at his Atlanta home 6 days later.


 
Orr had been in the Cleveland Sixties band The Grasshoppers. They opened for the Beach Boys and had their own fan club. They were even the house band for the TV show, Upbeat.


 
Ocasek dropped out of both Antioch College and Bowling Green University.


 
Ocasek and Orr recorded an album together before the Cars under the name Milkwood. Hawkes played keyboards on it.


 
Robinson had been a member of Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers and DMZ.


 
Ocasek has made a name for himself as a producer. Early on, he produced bands like Romeo Void and Suicide, and he later worked with Weezer and Guided By Voices.


 
In 1978, the Cars were named the Best New Artist by Rolling Stone and Creem, among others.


 
They lost the Best New Artist Grammy to one-hit wonder, A Taste of Honey.



 
The first Cars show was performed at an air force base in New Hampshire on New Year's Eve 1977.


 
Before the death of Orr, Ocasek ruled out any possibility of a Cars reunion, saying that he would rather have "hot diarrhea for six months than tour with the Cars for six months."


 
In 2003, Ocasek was named senior vice president of A&R (Artists and Repertoire) at Elektra Records. According to The Boston Globe: "Technically his job is to scout and sign new bands. But Elektra is investing in more than a fresh pair of ears."


 
Ric Ocasek was booted off producing Hanson's second album after 3 weeks. Ocasek's has a strict rule of no corporate presence during recording sessions, which was a problem for Hanson's record company.


 
Ocasek's father worked for NASA on Top secret projects. Ric recalls one time when government agents visited his house and questioned his mother about the dreams his father had at night.


 
In 2005, Easton and Hawkes joined Todd Rundgren to form "The New Cars," performing many of The Cars hits. They toured in 2006, but the project disbanded when Easton broke his clavicle - he fell out of the bunk when their tour bus swerved to avoid another vehicle.


 
The group reunited in 2010, releasing the album Move Like This.




The first of two slightly differing reviews;




Quite simply one of the best produced albums of the era, the 1978 self-titled debut album from The Cars was a unique sounding breakthrough which brought the group instant worldwide attention. This is due to the brilliant production by Roy Thomas Baker and the approachable compositions of group leader Ric Ocasek. Combined, these elements made for a potent mix of new wave cool and radio-friendly pop, which positioned The Cars as an unavoidable jewel to carry the day in the late seventies. The band would later jokingly refer to this as their “true greatest-hits album”, as just about all of the nine tracks have receive significant rotation on rock radio through the years.

Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr began performing as a duo in Columbus, Ohio before migrating to Boston in the early 1970s. There they joined with keyboardist Greg Hawkes, formed the folk band Milkwood, and released a 1973 album which failed to chart. After a few more Ocasek/Orr incarnations, including a jazz band, the group decided to go in a rock-oriented direction. Guitarist Elliot Easton and drummer David Robinson rounded out the quintet with Robinson coming up with the band’s simple name.



 After a demo of the song “Just What I Needed” began getting heavy airplay on a Boston radio station, Elektra Records sent Baker across the ocean to scout the band. After seeing The Cars perform in a Boston school gymnasium, Baker instantly signed the group to a four album deal, all of which he would personally produce.



 The albums first three tracks each reached the Top 40 on the pop charts. “Good Times Roll” commences the album aptly with a slow-rocking guitar riff to draw in traditional rock fans while a full-fledged new wave band arrangement and production is attractive to fans on late 70s pop. Like many of the popular songs on the album, “Good Times Roll” is masterfully segmented with repeated choruses each containing different sonic elements – a guitar riff, a synth lead, chorus vocals, and creative counter-melodies. The song methodically sequences through musical passages on the journey to the song’s end. Ocasek’s lyrics and title are meant more as irony than a true pronouncement of celebration.



 “My Best Friend’s Girl” follows with much of the same formula as “Good Times Roll”, building from a simple guitar riff to a full band arrangement. However, this song has more roots rock and blues elements than the opener, especially the cleanly picked guitar overdub and lead by Easton and the bouncy electric piano by Hawkes. While this recording pushes the song into new wave territory, it remains firmly a pop song with simple elements like handclaps and call-and-response vocal interplay. “Just What I Needed” may be the most purely new wave song on the album with spazzy guitars and square-wave synth lead. The only song on the first side which Orr sings instead of Ocasek, the song was the group’s first big hit regionally and internationally.



 Aside from the cool but repetitive guitar riffing, “I’m in Touch with Your World” is really just a sound-effect-laden collage which tends to sound undercooked and a bit confused. Although not a terrible listen, the song is almost like an experimental piece which samples many synth-driven sound effects and uses other concise methods such as a saxophone solo that lasts all of five seconds. “Don’t Cha Stop” starts with a good guitar led verse which unfortunately gives way to the stale caricature of a chorus. Aside from drummer Robinson getting a chance to really wail on the drums, this side one closer one of the few tracks on the album which doesn’t hold up sonically three and a half decades later.



 The flange-driven drum march of “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight”, which later contains a few really good guitar jams. Beyond that, the song tends to lose steam as it gets repetitive during the body. Perhaps, the formula from side one goes a bit too far on this side two opener and by this point on the album Ocasek’s dry vocals seem to wear a little thin on the ears of the passive listener. Perhaps Baker had this in mind when sequencing the final three tracks which each feature Orr on lead vocals.



 These final three also segue into each other, in an exhilarating mini-suite which may constitute the finest part of The Cars. “Bye Bye Love” is simply the best song on the album. A composition which dates back to the mid seventies, this tune has a driving rock energy and Orr not only handles lead vocals but also plays his best bass on the album. Aside from Orr, the song is a real showcase for Hawkes, who artfully uses the repetitive riffs between the verse lines with layered and building keyboard font which change with each iteration. A less in-your-face and more unassuming track than some of the more popular songs, “Bye Bye Love” starts and concludes with great energy with Easton’s brilliant guitar a head-banging, rudimentary rock riff.



 Hawkes co-wrote “Moving in Stereo”, making it the only song on the album not composed solely by Ocasek. A darker, theatrical, and more intense sonic experience which nearly lasts five minutes (a very long song for this album), the song carries a theme for audiophiles and stereo enthusiasts. Orr has a much smoother singer style which works well for this moody song and his bass is treated with an effects unit that doubles the bass line one octave higher. The closer “All Mixed Up” is the closest thing to a ballad on this album, with Orr singing in an almost folk-like method and with a higher range than anywhere else. While the song maintains some of the album’s new wave elements, it contains many other features such as some good faux synth orchestral horns, an actual saxophone, and a short, country-influenced guitar lead.



 The Cars sold one million copies by the end of 1978 and remained on the charts for nearly three years. Although it only peaked at number 18, Billboard ranked it number 4 on their “Top Albums of the Year” countdown. Critically, the album has been labeled “a genuine rock masterpiece”. It launched a ten year charting career for the group which included several more hit albums and songs.




No.2




 The Cars remind me of the guy who begins a fuck with lots of promise but then pulls back at exactly the wrong moment, forcing you to resort to your fingers to finish the job.



 The pullback may be a move that falls flat, or a dumb-ass technique he read about somewhere guaranteed to make a woman squirt like a high-pressure garden hose. Sometimes it’s because he’s afraid of shooting too early, so he starts to putz around while trying to regain the upper hand over his wayward member. Whatever the cause, it breaks the connection because now he’s thinking about himself and only himself. There’s nothing worse than a self-conscious lover.



 I used to be nice about it, coming up with sneaky ways to get my rocks off manually so the guy wouldn’t feel embarrassed. It was easier when I was on top because then I could slide off and distract him by putting a tit in his mouth while I reached down and took care of business. It was harder when I was on my back or taking it doggy-style, but eventually I learned to wait him out patiently and use the few precious seconds between position changes to relieve the tension.



 Once my dominant side took over, being nice became the least of my concerns. If a guy took a wrong turn, I’d push him off or pull away, stand up and jack off while he watched. That was a far more effective technique because men love watching women masturbate and it usually gets them focused. Sometimes I could even get a decent fuck out of the effort.



 Unfortunately, I can’t do that with The Cars’ first album, since it has been about four decades since they committed the effort to disc. It’s not a bad record; there are some songs I really like and Elliot Easton is an outstanding lead guitarist. The songs are basic rock songs disguised by cheeky but often nonsensical lyrics and heavy use of a decorative synthesizer. I say “decorative” because like so many bands in the late 70’s and 80’s, the synthesizer was used to make songs sound more important and cool than they really were. Unlike Devo, who managed to use a synth in a way that kept the music edgy, the other bands of the era went for the cheap dramatic flourish instead. The reason I chose The Cars’ first album instead of a greatest hits collection is because their synthesizer-dependence only increased over time, and listening to those songs would cause my sensitive ears to recoil in horror.



 I don’t know who chose the track order, but opening with the weakest song on the album isn’t the best way to make new friends. “Good Times Roll” is hardly an original title, and the music hardly evokes good times. The chord structure is simple enough but the choice to use a declining pattern tends to make the song a downer, especially in contrast to the promise of the title. I suppose the dour chord pattern could be a statement of New Wave ironic chic (Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True is full of that sort of stuff), but if irony was the goal, one would think there would be some confirmation in the lyrics. But no, they’re just silly:




Let the good times roll
Let them knock you around
Let the good times roll
Let them make you a clown
Let them leave you up in the air
Let them brush your rock and roll hair
Let the good times roll



 Ric Ocasek employs his soon-to-be-overused pouty vocal style to the point of irritation, and the harmonies used on the last line of the chorus are a pale imitation of Queen (the producer was a Queen alumnus). The intrusion of synth-produced strings causes even more damage. When you have as natural an opening song as “Just What I Needed” in your possession, failing to place it in the lead spot is tantamount to criminal negligence.



 While the opening is so Tommy James, “My Best Friend’s Girl” is at least a more coherent composition. We get to hear Elliot Easton’s lead guitar more clearly, and he gives a pretty impressive all-around performance on the fills and in the solo. Ocasek’s lead vocal isn’t much better, and his occasional Bolan-esque grunts lack sincerity and seem out of context. The harmonies here are stronger, and the rhythm section of Benjamin Orr and David Robinson keeps things moving at a nice pace. The song definitely encourages you to sing along, so overall I think “My Best Friend’s Girl” is a plus.



 Then there’s “Just What I Needed,” a song on a much higher plane. The opening passage is fantastic, with its strong forward movement dramatized by single then double power chords that vanish in the seamless transition to the bass-and-drum drive of the first verse. Though I definitely would have whacked the synth and replaced it with more Elliot Easton, this sucker rocks so hard even the synth can’t kill it, and when Elliot gets his shot in the spotlight, he nails it with a perfectly-arranged solo that ends on an exciting upward run. Benjamin Orr’s lead vocal is outstanding, expressing the contradictory emotions of self-loathing and desire with just the right amount of tension:




I don’t mind you comin’ here
And wastin’ all my time
‘Cause when you’re standin’, oh so near
I kinda lose my mind
It’s not the perfume that you wear
It’s not the ribbons in your hair
And I don’t mind you comin’ here
And wastin’ all my time



 The way to read the lyrics is as follows: the guy is lying in six of the eight lines. The only directly-spoken truth is “‘Cause when you’re standin’ oh so near/I kinda lose my mind.” All the other lines reflect the exact opposite of what he’s feeling. It is the perfume, it is the ribbons, and fuck yeah, he wants her to be there. The spot harmonies on “ribbons in your hair” are inspired and always give me the chills. As an exposition of male paralysis when overwhelmed by desire, there is no better song than “Just What I Needed,” and the fact that it kicks fucking ass is a super-duper-sized bonus!


 “I’m in Touch with Your World” is the most quirky song on the album, and I rather like quirky. Interestingly, the guitar duet establishes the beat, while the percussion instruments (drums, cymbals, bells and ratchet) make the whole thing sound like a mechanical fun house. Ric Ocasek’s vocal is shoved into deep background by the heavy reverb, adding to the mystery of the sound. Both the narrator and object of his one-sided conversation are virtual shut-ins who have created alternative realities through either psilocybin, science fiction or both, and so the message “I’m in touch with your world” is an attempt by Party A to encourage Party B to air his weird thoughts in a safe space. The closing lines, “It’s such a lovely way to go” could imply suicide but the music doesn’t communicate darkness—it’s “music for those whose inner compasses are out of calibration” or more conventionally, those whose cranial containers are “a few bricks shy of a load.”



 We leave the introverts in their artificial cocoon and return to the equally complex world of sexual interaction with “Don’t Cha Stop.” Given my perpetually horny nature, one might think that I would love a song that opened with these lines:




Right here I’d like to melt inside of you
Right here you kiss is totally new
Right here your hands are soft and creamy
Right here your mouth is wet and dreamy



 Wrong! Of all the songs on the album, “Don’t Cha Stop” is by far the most irritating, a song that turns sex into the aural equivalent of a Disney tune. Imagine trying to fuck during the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland—anyone who can pull that off is in serious need of long-term psychotherapy. The sickeningly sweet chorus sounds like it was written for pre-teens who have no idea what those funny feelings in the nether regions are all about and are still dumb enough to think people kiss with their mouths closed. I’m also irritated that the opening guitar pattern and flanged tone sounds eerily similar to the opening passage of The Move’s “The Minister,” and it wouldn’t be the first time that an American band ripped off The Move. Their unique combination of musical excellence and complete obscurity in the American market made them an easy target.



 Let’s MOVE on to the emotionally honest twin of “Just What I Needed,” a song that exposes the moments of desperation experienced usually by those held in the thrall of mating season (ages 16-30) and gives them legitimacy as a natural step in the rite of passage. The narrator of “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” is in a real bad way—so horny he has no problem being used, abused and lied to, and he’ll do it anywhere you like—a convenient sidewalk, on a launching pad at Cape Canaveral, the grassy knoll—hell, maybe even Disneyland! Ric Ocasek finally finds some discipline and delivers a performance true to the character, and there’s more than enough excellent work from Elliott Easton throughout the song to make you forget the synthesizer had ever been invented. This album would have been a thousand times better had The Cars realized what a great lead guitar player they had and let him the fuck loose.



 “Bye Bye Love” features another unoriginal title, another round of flanged guitar and really annoying synth fills that detract from a comparatively strong vocal from Ocasek. What I notice most in this piece is the outstanding drum work from David Robinson, but underneath all the college-level lyrics, this is really just another song that blames it all on the woman. It’s followed by the darker tones of “Moving in Stereo,” a song about failing to face reality that goes absolutely nowhere. We end our journey with “All Mixed Up,” an odd combination of medieval English folk and off-day Queen.



 In the interest of supporting your right to hear both sides of the story, you can head over to AllMusic and read a glowing review of The Cars, where you will see the album described as “a genuine rock masterpiece” and that “all nine tracks are New Wave/rock classics.” What I hear is the sound of a band addicted to the latest toys to the point that they forgot about the real talent they possessed in their quest for trendiness.


 Thank fuck for my fingers.



Take your choice





"Just What I Needed"


 
This established The Cars as one of New Wave's leading hitmakers and helped get them a deal with Elektra Records.



 
Lead vocals were by bass player Ben Orr, but it was written by lead singer/guitarist Ric Ocasek. Orr died of Pancreatic cancer in 2000.



 
Ocasek wrote this in a basement at a commune in Newton, Massachusetts where he lived.



 
The 2-track demo recorded by the band became the most-requested song by a local band in the history of WBCN, a popular rock station in Boston.




This was the group's first single. The Cars evolved from a trio called Milkwood.



 
The group's manager took the Cars' demo tape to two Boston radio stations and got it regular airplay before the group re-recorded it and released this as a single.



 
Seven years after it was first released, this made its second appearance on a single - this time as the B-side of the Cars' last Top 10 hit, "Tonight She Comes."



 
This song was used in the opening credits of the Oscar winning film Boys Don't Cry starring Hillary Swank.





"Bye Bye Love"


"Bye Bye Love," written by Rick Ocasek, is the seventh track from their debut album The Cars. Benjamin Orr does the lead vocals here - he and Ocasek alternated lead vocal duties, which is interesting because they sound quite a bit alike.


 
This song has been used in the HBO TV series Big Love, where it was chosen for having an '80s sound. Since the song was written and released in 1978, that tells you how far The Cars were looking ahead.



 
In Frank Moriarty's Seventies Rock - The Decade of Creative Chaos, it is noted that "The clever melding of disparate elements that characterized 1978's The Cars led to an astonishing success for the band, chiefly because the stodgy album-oriented radio stations - which had in large part attempted to ignore punk and New Wave - finally were confronted with new music that they couldn't help but play."
Note also that in April of 1978, four of the top five singles currently parked on the charts were by the Bee Gees. America had Saturday Night Fever and there seemed to be no cure, so getting something not-disco on the charts at all was a spectacular achievement.




"Moving In Stereo"




With lead vocals by Cars bass player Benjamin Orr, this song uses various studio production techniques to explore the stereo spectrum as the sound goes back and forth between the speakers. While it was never released as a single, the song was popular on rock radio stations and known as a great one to listen to through headphones.



 
The song draws parallels between manipulating a stereo recording and moving through life. It's a rare song where the word "tremolo" appears, which means manipulating a single note.



 
This was written by Cars singer/guitarist Ric Ocasek and keyboard player Greg Hawkes. It's one of the few songs Hawkes received songwriter credit on.



 
This was featured in the movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High. The intro to this song is played during the unforgettable erotic scene where actress Phoebe Cates gets out the swimming pool, while actor Judge Rienhold "fulfills" his fantasy. Incidentally, this song is not included on the music soundtrack available for the film.



 

DAY 418.
Devo.............................Q:Are We Not Men? A:We Are Devo   (1978)











I remember having this album in the late 70s, then it sounded mental, no' as much these days but still has that quirkiness about it that makes it sound just as unique today, all the tracks have that catchy rhythm flowing through them, but never so much alike to make it begin to sound stale.


Although the vocals sometimes sound cold and pragmatic, this in my humbles adds to the geeky, hypnotic and almost robotic performance that "Devo" and "Brian Eno" deliver on this album.My favourite tracks on the album would be "Come Back Jonee," "Mongoloid," and a toss up between "Jocko Homo" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" for the top tune, these two change places quite a lot, but today "Satisfaction" wins top track.



Listening to this album helped me forget about watching that heap of shite today, at least temporarily, this album will be going into my collection, and I'd thoroughly recommend you give it a listen




Bits & Bobs;










Devo formed in 1972 by Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale when they were art students at Kent State University. They were both there when the National Guard killed 4 student protesters in 1970.

 
The band is based on the concept of "De-evolution." The theory is that man has regressed, rather than evolved over the years.



 
Devo considers themselves more artists than musicians. Much of their concept is portrayed in their videos, which show them all dressed alike, going through robotic motions to indicate that people have lost their individuality.


 
Brian Eno produced their first album.


 
David Bowie and Iggy Pop got them a record deal after watching a movie they scored called The Truth About DeEvolution.


 
"Whip It" is their only hit, but many of their other songs were covered in the '90 by groups that discovered them. Nirvana, The Foo Fighters, and Soundgarden have all covered Devo songs.



  
Mark Mothersbaugh writes music for TV shows and commercials. He has worked on Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Rugrats.



 
Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale had a small printing business in the '70s which inspired the title of a Neil Young album. Mothersbaugh was wearing a T-shirt he printed for a rust-removal company when Young saw it and used the slogan, "Rust Never Sleeps."


 
When their songs are used in commercials, the band re-records them so they can keep all the performance rights to the song. Says Casale: "We only half control our songs because of a terrible publishing deal we made in 1978 with Richard Branson, who basically tricked Devo. Our lawyers, who were supposed to be looking out for us, encouraged us to sign this deal, which turned out to be more than an administration deal, it turned out to be a publishing deal when it came to ancillary use, which has to do with TV and film. Every time these things come up, we only control the song for song use, like on a record or compilation. When it comes to synching it to movies and TV, we are now in bed with EMI, who bought the publishing from Richard Branson long ago. They have as much say as us and make the lion's share of the money. We can say no, but we shoot ourselves in the foot by doing so. Better to make a little money for the wrong reasons 20 years later than to never make any money at all."


 
Casale: "We stupidly believed that laser discs were about to happen because we read all the scientific magazines and audiophile mags and they were saying this was on the verge of happening, and certainly the technology existed. We didn't realize that what American business would do, which is typical of American business and human nature in general, was create 3 competing systems to confuse the consumer and make it impossible to buy a unit that would play laser discs except for that person's catalog. You could have 10 titles that you couldn't play on yours but somebody else could play on theirs and vice versa. Obviously, they killed it, but what we were going to do was put out laser discs. Devo would be like The 3 Stooges, you'd watch these film shorts that were music-driven with stories. We were going to put out one a year, we didn't even want a record deal. It all just became a fantasy, there was no such medium and there was no such market and there was no way to get them out there that we knew of. We started investigating putting out VHS cassettes at the time, but even then, it was a fledgling industry with VHS and Beta competing, 2 incompatible formats that people were waiting on to see who won. Nobody understood what we were tying to do, so they weren't offering any distribution deals for us. So we just gave up and signed a record deal."





Devo. If you went up to a random person on the street, and told them to name a Devo song, everyone knows they'd say "Whip It," the smash 1980 hit that put Devo in the forefront of popular new wave music. The band was not always a 90% dance / 10% rock band, however. As with all new wave at the time, their roots were firmly centered in punk -- and though that influence might not be as obvious as it is in other new wave bands of that era (Blondie or the Clash, for example), it's definitely there, and this release shows it.




Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, released in 1978, was the band's first full-length album. You can tell mainly by the lack of the electronic sound that made the band famous. It's a strange but catchy, fun but intense album to listen to. A lot of the dissonant harmonies will make you uncomfortable, and to great effect. Brian Eno's excellent production keeps it clean but raw, which suits the music just right.





As the album blasts off with the fantastic "Uncontrollable Urge," you realize that this Devo is still the lovable, quirky weirdoes who recorded their more well-known later releases, but you can also feel a more down-to-earth quality to their sound right away. The almost-standard punk-sounding guitar lines in many songs provide perfect backing to Mark Mothersbaugh's strange and chaotic voice. You'll be singing "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAH!" within seconds for sure. The infamous "Satisfaction" cover sounds like it was recorded with factory equipment. Rather robotic in nature, it removes all sensuality and, well, musicality from the original song. Somehow though, it's good. This is the nature of Devo in a nutshell. They strip down these songs to their basic, mechanical core, but manage to keep it catchy.





"Praying Hands" and "Space Junk" are both catchy, medium tempo songs that can be stuck in your head all day. "Space Junk" has pretty funny lyrics as well, as with most of the songs on the album. "Mongoloid" is an even worse perpetrator of this, however! The chanting chorus of "Mongoloid he was a mongoloid / Happier than you and me" and all its variations will get burrowed in your mind, and refuse to leave. "Jocko Homo," the album's main single, is seminal Devo. Fun to listen to and sing along with, it's just a great song all around, showcasing Devo's amusing lyrics, with verses like "They tell us that / We lost our tails / Evolving up / From little snails / I say it's all / Just wind in sails." "Too Much Paranoias" shows more of the intense, dissonant side of the band's nature. With an echoing, uncomfortable chorus, it's a strange song to listen to. It leads perfectly into the brilliant "Gut Feeling."





"Gut Feeling" demonstrates a more mature, well-executed two-minute instrumental buildup that doesn't feel like it's going to stop. Giving you another uncomfortable, but more satisfying feeling than the previous track, the song feels like a train that's speeding up faster and faster, heading towards a crash at the end of a track. But just when this train nears the end of the tracks, complete with intensely distorted guitar noise and an extreme feeling of claustrophobia, the song cuts into the speedy "Slap Your Mammy." Probably the only song on this album that could truly be classified as punk in any way, "Slap Your Mammy" is very short, with classic distorted power chords pushing the track to its end. "Come Back Jonee" is a great track with some nice guitar work and fitting drumming, with more catchy vocals. "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')" is probably the funniest song on the album, in my opinion. It's also very catchy! But honestly, how can you go wrong with lyrics like "I saw my baby yesterday / She spent her money on a car / I didn't get her very far / So my baby said to me / You know my baby she / Said sloppy / I think I missed the hole?" After that humorous endeavor, the album finishes up with the fantastic "Shrivel Up." Another tense, strange song, it's mostly very subdued in nature, poignantly ending the album on a quiet note after the madness that took place beforehand.





All in all, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is an excellent introduction to a band often labeled as a one-hit pop wonder. Between this and "Freedom of Choice," Devo put forth some very intelligent, catchy, new wave music. In an era filled with so much awful crap on the airwaves, Devo was a breath of fresh air, with their subtle satirical messages well hidden within their songs.


"Jocko Homo"




 Mothersbaugh said: "'Jocko Homo' was one of the first songs I wrote for the band. The whole song was meant to be a theme song for the theory of de-evolution and for Devo, what we were about. It was meant to lay out the story right there. It was a collection of discussions we had where we sat around in Kent after students had been shot, and decided that what we were seeing happening on the planet, when we looked at the news and read the paper, was not evolution but was more appropriately described as de-evolution."



 
Jocko Homo means "Monkey Man." Mothersbaugh was a student at Kent State University when a friend gave him a pamphlet called "Jocko Homo, Heaven Bound King of the Apes." It was a religious pamphlet debunking evolution, explaining how absurd the idea was that a man would descend from a monkey. The pamphlet was printed in the '30s by a religious zealot from Rogers, Ohio. One of the pictures showed a devil pointing up a staircase that said "2 million years along the stairway to heaven." The devil had 'De-Evolution' written on his chest and was laughing and pointing up the stairs. The stairs had names like slavery, world war, drunkenness, adultery - it kept going with horrible attributes of man.



 
 Devo co-founder Jerry Casale, said: "That was kind of our position statement. It was our mission statement saying, 'Hey look, humans are making up stories about why we're here and how we got here and who we are and what our importance is and it's all basically rubbish, it's absurd. You don't know what's going on, and that's OK. In fact, if you admit you don't know what's going on and you admit there are alternative explanations for things, then you're already better off, and there's a lot of things you won't do because you'd quit believing in ridiculous things that drive you to actions that cause more pain and suffering in the world.' It was kind of a Dada, self-effacing kind of statement, like, 'Look, we're all pinheads here on this planet together.'"



 
Mothersbaugh said: "The chorus that keeps repeating the 'Are we not men' is directly from the very first Island Of Lost Souls (1932). There were two remakes that were both tepid and not nearly as compelling as the original. The original had a mad scientist on a deserted Pacific Island where he operated on animals - beasts from the jungle, in a room called the House Of Pain. He operates on these beasts to try to raise them up on the evolutionary chart. It's a very painful operation and when he does this, you can hear them screaming in the middle of the night in the House Of Pain.




His biggest success was a female named Lota who used to be a panther, but these animals keep devolving backwards. Lota gets cat claws, and she knows she's devolving. He has to do a painful operation to bring her back again, but in the meantime you see all these characters that are like sub-human, half-animal, half-man creatures that stumble around the jungle. Some of them could hold menial jobs at the House Of Pain. At one point, they were walking in a line around a fire in the woods at night while the doctor's working in the House Of Pain, and they were casting shadows on the side of the House Of Pain, and I saw these shadows of these sub-human creatures just slouching past the wall, and I was like, 'Holy crap, I know all those people, they live here in Akron with me.' That's where the inspiration came from.




The mad scientist would crack a whip standing on a rock and all the animals would come to attention, and he'd go, 'What is the law?' Usually it meant one of them had broken the law, like bad dogs that aren't house trained yet. They would all go in kind of a humble fashion, 'Not to spill blood.' Then he would go 'Are we not men?' and he'd crack the whip again and then he goes, 'What is the law?' and they'd have another law they'd have to repeat like 'Not to eat flesh' or 'Not to walk on all fours.' Then he'd crack the whip again and go 'Are we not men?' So that's where the line came from. There were like, watered down, wussy versions of it in the later Islands Of Dr. Moreau stuff, but that was a really intense movie. If you were sitting in a living room in Akron, Ohio in 1972 with some quack religious pamphlet sitting on your lap, the next thing was easy."


 
Casale said : "We moved the debate sideways - you believe what you want, but we like this guy that said we're all descendants of cannibalistic apes that ate the brains of other apes and went crazy and lost their tails. That explained what we were looking at in the world better than Darwinism or Creationism."


 
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was Devo's first album. It was produced by Brian Eno, who was in the band Roxy Music and also produced Talking Heads. He was an innovator of electronic, synthesizer-based music.



 
Jerry Casale: "We were kind of poetically explaining what it meant to be Devo, and what de-evolution was. We didn't see any evidence that man was the result of some never ending linear progress and everything was getting better. When we were growing up, the magazines would show the world in 1999, and it'd be this beautiful, futuristic, domed city with everybody going around in jets and space-cars. Everybody was fed and everybody was groomed and everybody seemed to have tons of money. It's such a joke, what really happened was: the planet got more and more overrun by population, greater gaps between the rich and the poor, more new diseases, decimation of the environment. It seemed like even though people were getting more 'free' information from television and newspapers, they were actually less informed, less thoughtful, and acting dumber. So we saw de-evolution. The fact that a bad actor could be elected president was more proof to us. Things have just gone downhill from there. We didn't really want it to all be true, instead it looks like de-evolution was clearly real. In retrospect, compared to what's going on today, Reagan looks like a serious guy."



 
With the exception of "Whip It," Devo didn't have any big hits, but their music was very influential and continues to be in demand for movies and commercials. Mothersbaugh runs a production company called Mutato Muzika, and has worked on the music for many movies, including Happy Gilmore, Rugrats, and Rushmore. Casale directed all of Devo's videos, and continues to work on music videos and commercials. He has directed music videos by The Cars, The Foo Fighters, Soundgarden and Rush.




"Praying Hands"

“Praying Hands” is something of a piss-take that envisions a dance craze like the twist, but for fundamentalist Christians.It is likely that when writing the song Devo had in mind televangelists Rex Humbard and Ernest Angley, both based in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, not far from the band’s hometown of Akron.



"Mongoloid"


 Devo’s debut single, and one of their most controversial. “Mongoloid” tells the tale of an individual with Down syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that often causes mental retardation, along with facial structure changes that cause almond shaped eyes, similar to those of Asian descent.“Mongoloid” is often misunderstood as either a racist song, or as insulting to those with Down syndrome. However, the song points to its subject as a hero, functioning normally in a de-evolved society.




"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"


 Devo released their rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” as a single in 1977.


 Steve Huey of Allmusic stated that the cover version “reworks the original’s alienation into a spastic freak-out that’s nearly unrecognizable”.


 The song was profusely played on MTV and had a star know as “Spazz Attack” who would commonly dance on the show for the song.


 What was for the Rolling Stones an anthem of teenage angst Devo have repackaged as a diatribe against commercialism, a theme that crops up again and again on their debut LP.




If there is a better cover of this number I've yet to hear it.