Archives for April 2019

Certain Songs #1524: Pete Townshend – “Drowned (Secret Policeman’s Ball, 1979)”

April 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Secret Policeman’s Ball – The Music
Year: 1979

The Secret Policeman’s Ball was the name given to a series of concerts for Amnesty International in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1979, the show was directed by John Cleese, who not only recruited Peter Cook, but fellow Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

On the musical side that year were John Williams — yes, that John Williams — Tom Robinson and Pete Townshend, who was still in his post-Keith Moon’s death spiral, and in the middle of recording his first solo album, to boot.

Certain Songs #1523: Pete Townshend & Ronnie Lane – “My Baby Gives it Away”

April 29, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rough Mix
Year: 1977

In late 1976, after what turned out to be The Who’s final full tour with Keith Moon (big fucking sigh), Pete Townshend was asked by fellow mod-turned-Meher Baba acolyte Ronnie Lane to produce Lane’s next album.

Ronnie Lane was a founding member and bassist for both incarnations of the Faces: the Small with Steve Marriott and the drunk with Rod Stewart, and he was also responsible for of one of the greatest songs anybody will ever write about growing older, “Ooh La La“.

Certain Songs #1522: Pete Townshend ft. Roger Daltrey – “Sally Simpson”

April 28, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tommy Soundtrack
Year: 1975

I’ll always find it ironic that my first extended exposure to the music of The Who was via the Tommy film and soundtrack, which, as I’ve written previously, was primarily because of my love for Elton John.

And because the film was so-over-the-top and there’d already been an alternate version of Tommy — with the London Symphony Orchestra — I think that not a lot has been written about how Pete Townshend tricked up many of songs on the movie soundtrack with the musical sophistication he’d gained doing who’s next and Quadrophenia.

Certain Songs #1521: Pete Townshend – “Let’s See Action”

April 27, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Who Came First
Year: 1972

Pete Townshend’s first official solo album, Who Came First, is kind of a mongrel mess. As a devotee of Meher Baba, he’d already participated in a pair of privately-distributed records as tributes to Baba, which were — duh! — heavily.

Because there was clearly a demand for Townshend’s music outside of the context of The Who, the decision was made to take a couple of tracks from those records and combine them with three demos from Pete’s aborted Lifehouse project, from which had sprung the monumental who’s next.

Certain Songs #1520: Pete Townshend – “Politician”

April 26, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Scoop
Year: 1967

So let’s just start with this: except for Prince, I think that Pete Townshend is the most overall talented person of the rock music era. There were better guitar players, better songwriters, better singers, better producers, better lyricists. But for nearly two decades, nobody combined it all in quite the way he did.

We’ll get to The Who when we get to The Who, but even outside of the context of a band that I’m still not sure isn’t my favorite (along w/ R.E.M., The Replacements, The Clash & The Rolling Stones), he did tremendous tremendous work.

Certain Songs #1519: Pete Shelley – “I Generate a Feeling”

April 25, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Homosapien
Year: 1981

My favorite song on the Homosapien album, and one of my favorite Pete Shelley songs period, the introvert’s anthem “I Generate a Feeling” was to me the perfect marriage of his manic voice and the synth-pop soundscapes he was generating.

Leading off with a synth whistling “hey check me out,” and featuring a drum machine seemingly set to “meander,” it seemed to me like “I Generate a Feeling” just kinda wandered around itself, never completely figuring where it wanted to end up. Which was kinda ironic for a song about getting in touch with yourself.

Certain Songs #1518: Pete Shelley – “Homosapien”

April 24, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Homosapien
Year: 1981

Pete Shelley had a long, interesting and pretty great career.

When he died at the end of last year, most of the focus was on his long career with the Buzzcocks, who were, if not the first British punk band to successfully yoke pure pop with loud fuzzy guitars, were most certainly the greatest, their initial run lionized forever, but their second act st

But after he died, I was reminded that the Buzzcocks were way more than Singles Going Steady — their albums were often weird and experimental, contrasting the pure pop songs with more formal sonic experiments, culminating with A Different Kind of Tension, and the wildly disparate singles that followed it.

Certain Songs #1517: Pet Shop Boys – “West End Girls”

April 23, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Single, 1984

Here’s how little I know about this song: there are apparently a whole bunch of different versions of it, and the one I have on my iTunes doesn’t fit any of the lengths of the song that are listed on its Wikipedia page. And in fact, the version of “West End Girls” soundtracking the video is substantially different from the one I listened to while writing this post.

Which, I guess, is why “West End Girls” was so inescapable in the mid-1980s: they just kept re-releasing it until it wore down all resistance. Including my reflexive resistance to songs that sounded like “West End Girls.”

Certain Songs #1516: Perfect – “Better Days”

April 22, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Once, Twice, Three Times a Maybe
Year: 2004

I think it says something about Tommy Stinson that after The Replacements splintered in the early 1990s, out the four solo careers, his was the only one under the aegis of a band, Bash & Pop. Thinking about it now, it makes sense: while Tommy probably would have been better branded under his own name, he’d spent all of his adolescence and early 20s as part of a gang; he really didn’t know anything else.

So he became the frontman of Bash & Pop, whose debut Friday Night is Killing Me turned out to be the best of all of the early post-‘mats projects, filled with exactly what you’d expect: lean rockers and barroom tearjerkers. He’d clearly been paying attention.

Certain Songs #1515: Pearl Jam – “The Fixer”

April 18, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Backspacer
Year: 2009

Like most bands, Pearl Jam’s output slowed up in their second decade: 2002 brought Riot Act, another album I never really connected with, and 2006 brought the much better Pearl Jam album, though it still didn’t come anywhere close to the heights they’d previously reached.

However, 2009’s Backspacer nearly did. From the cover art by the great Tom Tomorrow to the very strong lineup of songs, Backspacer was the best Pearl Jam album in over a decade, and I even got to see them on the subsequent tour.