Fits and Starts

$1000 Wedding

Comrade Paul over at STWOF has a very nice tribute to Gram Parsons' $1000 Wedding today. I share his love for the song, and concur that it is one of the finest things that Parsons bestowed upon us.

My introduction to the song, however - and indeed to Parsons himself - came not through his version, but from the Mekons version on their 1985 album, Original Sin, one of the high-water marks of a career that has too many to possibly count. On Original Sin, the Mekons first dipped their toes into the waters of American Country & Western, which would later lead to their alt-country classic, The Mekons Honky Tonkin'.

The Mekons Honky Tonkin'  included a glorious cover of another Parsons tune, the oft-covered Sin City. This version also served as my introduction to the song, and to me stands up as the standard bearer of Parsons covers. In fact, I must admit that it was several years before I learned that Sin City was not a Mekons original.

Here are both Mekons covers for you, along with Evan Dando's quite respectable take on $1000 Wedding.

The Mekons - $1000 Wedding.mp3

The Mekons - Sin City.mp3

Evan Dando - $1000 Wedding.mp3

 

Terry & Julie Revisited

    I saw John Wesley Harding back in 1995 or so, and he performed an unrecorded song that he introduced as a sequel to The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset. He joked that he cowrote it with Ray Davies, when actually he had simply lifted the chorus from Waterloo Sunset and inserted it into a new song. It was a song of memorable beauty, even to this day.
   A much reworked version of the song, called In Paradise, showed up on his next disc, John Wesley Harding's New Deal (fantastic!), absent of the Waterloo Sunset chorus. Presumably copyright issues forced Harding to remove that which was lifted outright from the original.

  Thanks to my dear friend Andy for emailing me last week with some questions about The Kinks, inspiring me to spend much of the weekend digging deep into my Kinks collection for the first time in awhile. Every time I listen to them, I always wonder why I don't listen to them more.

Both tunes are below, in all their splendor.

Download 12_in_paradise.mp3 - John Wesley Harding

Download 11_waterloo_sunset.mp3 - The Kinks

Your Generation Don't Mean A Thing to Me

I've been getting a fair amount of supportive email about the blog lately, and I am truly grateful that people are paying attention, and occasionally motivated enough to send an email or drop a comment. The post that I continue to get the most mail about is this one from February, where I incorrectly claim that Gimme Some Truth was a Generation X original. Hippie types from far and wide have chimed in to inform me that the song was in fact penned by John Lennon, and some choice insults have been directed my way as a result of the inaccuracy. This was a careless error on my part, and I certainly should have checked my facts better. Quite honestly, however, the song simply seems too good to have been written by Lennon. I just assumed that it must be an Idol/James original. Koo koo ka choo. Peace, hippies. Now please leave me be.

Here, then, is a cover of an actual GenX original- Your Generation, given the full mod treatment by The Times from their 1985 disc Go! With the Times. This is a charming, lo-fi affair - a side project of Television Personality Dan Treacy and Teenage Filmstar Ed Ball- and well worth seeking out. You can pick it up on emusic here.

Download 09_your_generation.mp3 - The Times

Download 02_your_generation.mp3 - Generation X

It Matters Not What I Do Next

 

THE ROADSIDE IS LITTERED with thousands rock and roll bands that nobody's heard, and for most of us, that's probably a good thing. The fact is a lot of bands don't deserve to be heard in the first place. But every once in a while you find in the assorted debris a special band that works so tirelessly, creates works of such enormous and lasting value, and yet is so routinely ignored that you can only shake your head at the fickle vagaries of the music world.

-David Fischer Filler Magazine 1999

In what is the most uplifting bit of music news I've heard in some time, Fire Escape Talking reports that a new Verlaines disc is in the works, after a hiatus that goes back to 1999. I have been a passionate fan of the Verlaines since I first heard them in the late '80s, and I suspect I will go to my grave crying "Foul!" at the shamefully inadequate success they have achieved, both critically and commercially.  Hope, however, springs eternal and maybe a new release will bring them some of the credit (and record sales) that is rightfully theirs. Maybe....

Download 03_joed_out.mp3

Download 05_crisis_after_crisis.mp3

Download 06_war_in_my_head.mp3