Chasing the long tail of new media
Album: Bring the Family
Year: 1987
John Hiatt was a hoary veteran by the time he broke into the charts for the first time with Bring The Family, his eighth album.
And part of the reason he broke into the charts was that the advance word was that he’d been able to recruit a crack band featuring Jim Keltner on drums, Ry Cooder on guitar and Nick Lowe on bass to play a tough but sparse set of rootsy songs.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #804: John Hiatt – “Have a Little Faith in Me”
Album: John Fogerty
Year: 1975
Maybe because it had been five years since the last great Creedence album — Cosmo’s Factory for those of you keeping score at home — and maybe because the last two Creedence albums had been sub-par and his first solo album all covers, John Fogerty’s self-titled 1975 album has kind of been lost to history.
And that’s a shame, because it’s a far better record than the John Fogerty comeback albums that you remember from the mid-1980s.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #803: John Fogerty – “Almost Saturday Night”
Album: Who The Hell is John Eddie?
Year: 2003
Luckily, John Eddie knew the question you were going to ask when you saw this post, and named his album after it.
As it turns out, Who The Hell is John Eddie? is still the only music I’ve ever heard from Eddie, who is basically a straightforward heartland rocker based out of New Jersey. And I’m not going to lie: I had just turned 40 when I got this album, and the opening verse of “Forty” was completely relatable.
Album: A Love Supreme
Year: 1965
A Love Supreme, of course, is probably one of the two or three best-loved jazz albums of all time.
Recorded in a single blast in December of 1964 and released a scant month later, it’s one of the very few not just records, but works of art that pretty much everybody agrees is completely and utterly transcendent.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #801: John Coltrane – “Acknowlegement”
Album: My Favorite Things
Year: 1961
As the patron saint of rock ‘n’ rollers who dabble in jazz, John Coltrane carries a lot of spiritual weight on his long-dead shoulders.
I’d always been intrigued by Roger McGuinn invoking him as an influence on the almighty “Eight Miles High,” but it wasn’t until KFSR that I truly discovered his music.
As some of you might remember, in the early days KFSR started its broadcasting weekdays 6:00AM (or so, because college students) with six hours of J-A-Z-Z jazz, followed by afternoons and evenings of alt-rock. The practical upshot of this was that it was my first firehose exposure to jazz of all shapes and sizes.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #800: John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”
Album: Fear
Year: 1974
There might have been a Pete Frame family tree for all of this, but in the early to mid-1970s there was a cabal of mostly U.K. art rockers who played on each others albums in ever-changing configurations.
Some of the collaborations are famous: Brian Eno & David Bowie grabbing Robert Fripp to play on “Heroes,” or Bowie producing Lou Reed’s Transformer (and bringing Mick Ronson along for the ride).
Album: Eddie & The Cruisers Soundtrack
Year: 1983
SOMETIME IN 1982
:: Phone rings ::
“Hello?”
“Bruce? Bruce Springsteen?”
“Um, yeah. How did you ge–”
“Hi, Mr. Springsteen, I’m an agent representing Joseph Brooks, a producer for Embassy Pictures.”
“Uh-huh…”
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #798: John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band – “On The Dark Side”
Album: But Seriously, Folks …
Year: 1978
The single most likable thing — perhaps the only truly likable thing as “Boys of Summer” gets by on art not charm — anybody associated with The Eagles has ever done, Joe Walsh’s unapologetic ode to the rock star life remains as fun and catchy and weird as it seemed when it was first released in the summer of 1978.
One of those songs that straddled the AM/FM divide with perfect precision, the 4:35 single version went to #12 on the Billboard charts, while the 8:04 album version blasted its way from car stereos for months.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #797: Joe Walsh – “Life’s Been Good”
Album: Streetcore
Year: 2003
This is making me sad. Writing about St. Joe Strummer, and the last songs that he ever wrote and recorded.
I mean, it’s a sad time all around, I guess, so maybe it’s more that, but I keep thinking about what he would have done in the past fifteen years, and how such fucking wrong it is that a man that always felt so full of life was felled at such a young age. I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, I’m four years older as I write these words than Joe was when he died.
If only his heart had been as strong as his soul.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #796: Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – “Burning Streets”
Album: Streetcore
Year: 2003
Given the fact that a couple of years ago, I wrote about The Clash for an entire month, Joe Strummer already had a lifetime pass by the time he gave Mick Jones the boot, so in a way it didn’t even matter that Cut The Crap sucked, he’d already done enough.
Nor did it matter that his songs for the those great and insane mid-1980s Alex Cox films were underwhelming, he’d already done enough.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #795: Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – “Arms Aloft”