Hop-skipping as usual through the decades and musical styles, I seem to have unconsciously leaned in the direction of “interesting juxtapositions” this time around. There’s Lana Del Rey into “Telstar,” for one, and “Telstar” into Depeche Mode, for another. The opening duo is another sort of juxtaposition, offering power pop from 30 years apart, back to back. Then there’s the offbeat sense made from Carole King leading into Jill Scott, or Veruca Salt into that luscious Lydia Luce song. And what to make of Elvis Costello into Buddy Holly? I didn’t adjoin them on purpose but realized afterwards how much Elvis in his early incarnation was identified with his Buddy Holly glasses and wardrobe. I was instead going here for comparing and contrasting the pre-rock’n’roll vibe of the Elvis song with the early rock’n’roll potency of Buddy Holly’s (posthumous) release.
And there’s more, as you’ll see. As always I encourage listening all the way to the end, even if it takes a few sessions: unlike old vinyl albums, the songs don’t get any worse towards the end of side two. The Roches song that concludes (and lends a title to) the mix is in particular a distinctive, overlooked treasure:
1. “Girl of My Dreams” – Bram Tchaikovsky (Strange Man, Changed Man, 1979)
2. “Carly (Goddess of Death)” – The Capes (Hello, 2006)
3. “Twilight” – Shawn Colvin (Cover Girl, 1994)
4. “Mariners Apartment Complex” – Lana Del Rey (Norman Fucking Rockwell, 2019)
5. “Telstar” – The Tornados (single, 1962)
6. “Everything Counts” – Depeche Mode (Construction Time Again, 1983)
7. “Quiet” – Lucy Bell (Emotion Pending EP, 2023)
8. “Pleasant Valley Sunday” – Carole King (demo, 1966; The Legendary Demos, 2012)
9. “Hate on Me” – Jill Scott (The Real Thing – Words & Music, Vol. 3, 2007)
10. “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” – Elvis Costello (National Ransom, 2010)
11. “Love’s Made a Fool of You” – Buddy Holly (demo, 1958; released 1964)
12. “Got to Get You Back” – Sons of Robin Stone (single, 1974)
13. “No Substitute” – The Shivvers (unreleased single, 1980)
14. “Seether” – Veruca Salt (American Thighs, 1994)
15. “Occasionally” – Lydia Luce (Dark River, 2021)
16. “Sorrow” – The Merseys (single, 1966)
17. “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” – The Clash (single, 1978)
18. “Capacity” – Charly Bliss (Young Enough, 2019)
19. “Hang Down Your Head” – Tom Waits (Rain Dogs, 1985)
20. “So” – The Roches (Can We Go Home Now, 1995)
Random notes:
* “Girl of My Dreams” was one of a handful of late-’70s new wave nuggets to hit the US top 40 (just barely: it peaked at #37), and one of the best of the bunch. Bram Tchaikovsky was the stage name adopted by British guitarist Peter Bramall, first as a member of the great pub rock band The Motors and then as leader of his own band, to which he also lent the name Bram Tchaikovsky. The rest of the band’s debut album, Strange Man, Changed Man, thanks in part to the leader’s appealingly resonant voice, was above average guitar rock, but has long since fallen into obscurity. Even the indelible power pop gem “Girl of My Dreams” has but 75,000 streams on Spotify; I guess it has yet to find its way onto a streaming TV series. By comparison, its 1979 new wave top-40 compatriot, Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to be Kind,” has some 27 million streams. Numbers never tell the whole story.
* Along with her masterly strengths as a singer and acoustic guitar player, Shawn Colvin has long displayed a preternatural gift as a covers artist–perhaps, I’m guessing, because of those previously mentioned strengths. In her early years as a performer, many a concert highlight moment came from how she interpreted songs–songs that often arrived from much more of a rock setting than her “girl with a guitar” milieu. And while her cleverly named 1994 album Cover Girl may be a bit too much of a good thing–one or two well-placed cover songs in a concert may have a bigger impact than 13 in a row–there’s no question that the good stuff is top-notch. I’ve always been partial in particular to her transformative cover of the Robbie Robertson song “Twilight.” How she even heard what she does with it in the Band’s slightly (and oddly) perky, organ-frilled arrangement is something of a miracle. But boy does she nail this one–an all-time great cover.
* Veruca Salt has a long, involved history, with a little bit of everything: buzz band status, critical and popular backlash, intra-band feuding, a long hiatus, and, more recently, the unexpected rapprochement and return to form. “Seether” is the song that introduced the Chicago quartet to the world, but American Thighs, the grunge-influenced debut, is possibly not quite as good as the band’s surprise reunion album, 2015’s Ghost Notes. In any case, check that one out if you enjoy their sound and missed the memo. And now the latest news from Verucaland: in June, front woman Louise Post, after all these years, released her first solo album, Sleepwalker. Sounds intriguing after a quick, abbreviated listen–definitely a broadening and/or mellowing and/or 2020-ing of the Veruca Salt palette, with a couple of characteristically crunchy numbers in the mix. I hope to go back and listen more closely.
* While the Monkees made some noticeable tweaks to “Pleasant Valley Sunday” when they did their big hit version, there’s something in Carole King’s delivery of the song she co-wrote with Gerry Goffin that really hits home. She and Goffin were writing from their own experience of having moved out of New York City to the suburbs and their distaste for the lifestyle encountered there. (There was in fact a Pleasant Valley Way in their New Jersey neighborhood.) As for the Monkees’ version, King was reportedly unhappy with the changes that were made, which included a faster pace and some new and shifted words in the bridge. Admittedly the lyric changes robbed them of a bit of sense but this wasn’t Pulitzer Prize winning poetry in the first place. And the musical changes, which included the electric guitar line that opens the song and later recurs, helped flesh out and solidify a song that was a bit on the short side. King apparently made peace with the alterations over time; on her 2005 live album, she sings the song the Monkees’ way, complete with the introductory guitar lick (done here on an acoustic guitar).
* The Lydia Luce song, featured here in 2020, is just gorgeous. The laid-back verse eases you in but that chorus is thrilling, with its melancholy chord changes, dramatic build, and perfect resolution. If you didn’t hear it the first time here’s another invitation.
* Power-pop-oriented Milwaukee band the Shivvers had a brief, shining moment of regional fame in the early ’80s, which included being named best local band by readers of the Milwaukee Journal in 1982. But they never managed to get a record deal during their lifespan, which involved but one officially (self-) released single and a batch of other songs recorded but tucked away for years on (so I imagine) dusty boxes of tape reels. In 2006, a record label specializing in–hang on, this is a mouthful–“rare, obscure, independent and undiscovered punk, post-punk, D.I.Y., and power-pop groups from the U.S. and the U.K. 1977-1984” released an album called–hang on, another mouthful–Lost Hits from Milwaukee’s First Family of Power Pop: 1979-82, featuring every bit of recorded Shivvers material in existence. “No Substitute,” written by front woman Jill Kossoris, is one of 21 tracks. A song very much rooted in its jangly, new-wave-y time, it also has that timeless quality built into power pop, if only because the genre persists against all odds into the current day. You won’t find any on the charts, you’ll see classics generally ignored (see “Girl of My Dreams,” above), but the genre does not die, perhaps because the human yearning for melody, also against all odds, survives even the harshest, unmelodic pop cultural moments, however long-lasting. I’m waiting for the current one to end but am not holding my breath.
* The Philly-based Sons of Robin Stone were also mostly a local, unrecorded phenomenon, but they did at least briefly have a record deal: “Got to Get You Back” was the B-side of their one single for ATCO Records. The song eventually found its way to Northern Soul aficionados, as many great B-sides eventually did and still do. Note that on Discogs it’s listed as an A-side but according to a relative of one of the original band members, in a note on an internet forum from 2002, this was actually the B-side. (I do my homework here.) Note too that the original label does not have an A or a B on either side, but the item number on the label for this song ends in “1” while the number on the flip side ends in “0,” which suggest this is in fact the B-side. (More homework.) These guys were typically classified as “blue-eyed soul,” which was the emergent euphemism in the ’70s for white groups aligning sonically with music Black artists were making at the time. Whatever: it’s a pretty cool early disco song, complete with a time-signature oddity in the chorus that adds a gratifying twist and yet somehow doesn’t interrupt the groove.
* If the opening lines of “Sorrow” ring some sort of distant bell in your mind, it’s probably because George Harrison launches into them, non-sequiturishly, in the extended coda to the great Beatles song “It’s All Too Much”–check it out at 4:17. Like many hits from the past, “Sorrow” has a backstory. Its recording life began, unassumingly, as a B-side of a single by the American band The McCoys, released in 1965. The Liverpool-based band The Merseys (formerly The Merseybeats) recorded their own version in 1966, and this one became the big hit in the UK that Harrison quoted. Digging deeper: the song was co-written by Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer, the team that had written “My Boyfriend’s Back” and the McCoys’ big hit “Hang On Sloopy,” among other songs. They also briefly recorded as a group called the Strangeloves, where they had a hit with the song “I Want Candy” (later revived indelibly by the band Bow Wow Wow). Gottehrer was arguably the most consequential of the three, going on to found Sire Records in New York with the late Seymour Stein, a formative moment in the American new wave scene. He would go on to produce albums for Blondie, the Go-Go’s, Marshall Crenshaw, and, more recently, two 2010s albums by the Dum Dum Girls.
Fingertips 