Archives for May 2020

Certain Songs #1829: Rare Earth – “I Just Want to Celebrate”

May 29, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: One World
Year: 1971

. . .

The late 1960s and early 1970s was filled with manly bands filled with manly men singing funky rock songs with their manly voices. While the biggest of these bands was Grand Funk Railroad, there were others, starting off with The Doors, MC5, Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf and, of course, Rare Earth, who started in 1960, and — according to their Wikipedia page — are still going 60 years later. With an original member! Saxist Gil Bridges was there from the start, and is still there, so good job, Gil!!

Certain Songs #1828: Rank and File – “The Sound of The Rain”

May 28, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Long Gone Dead
Year: 1984

. . .

While only two years separated Sundown and the follow-up, 1984’s Long Gone Dead, they were a pretty tumultuous two years, to say the least. First off, Alejandro Escovedo left the band, to start a career that is still a bit of a blind spot to me, though I’ve checked in here and there over the decades, and at some point, drummer Slim Evans left.

And so while Sundown was just the original four members, Long Gone Dead was basically Chip and Tony Kinman backed by a bunch of session musicians. And while one of those session musicians with the great Stan Lynch, the lusher, fuller sound of the record also made it seem more anonymous, even if the Kinmans still sang amazingly.

Certain Songs #1827: Rank and File – “Coyote”

May 27, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Sundown
Year: 1982

. . .

I got to see Rank and File in concert. Hell, I think I even got to meet Chip and/or Tony Kinman. I know for sure I saw them March of 1983, and they were playing down the Ikeway at the Old Town Saloon and Dining Emporium. What I think happened that Brad picked them up in his 1951 Studebaker to bring them back to the radio station for me to interview them.

Unless it didn’t. It was nearly 40 years ago, and the only I know for sure is that I got to see the show (thank the gods for my fake ID) (actually, thank Jim M, who changed my birth month from “11” to “01” and added 10 crucial months to my age) and they got to see Brad’s Studebaker. However, I didn’t write down that I actually go to interview them, so I probably didn’t, given that I’d noted just a couple of weeks earlier that I’d interviewed Tom Gray of the Brains, and holy cow, did this post go off the rails in record time.

Certain Songs #1826: Rank and File – “The Conductor Wore Black”

May 26, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Sundown
Year: 1982

. . .

Sure, ya gotta have a train song, right? That’s just the rules.

And Sundown had one helluva train song ending the first side, Tony Kinman’s “The Conductor Wore Black,” perhaps the most joyful song about its specific type of train since “Hot Rails To Hell,” which I guess was only a decade prior. (And not by a country band, either.)

Certain Songs #1825: Rank and File – “Amanda Ruth”

May 22, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Sundown
Year: 1982

. . .

“I started this damn country band,” Ryan Adams (yes, I know) sang on the first Whiskeytown album, “because punk rock was too hard to sing.” And while Adams was being somewhat facetious, even while validating my life-long truism that some of our best musicians play hardcore, he was positing himself as heir to a grand tradition that arguably started with Rank and File.

Prior to teaming up with drummer Slim Evans and ringer Alejandro Escovedo, Chip and Tony Kinman (RIP) were in the legendary San Francisco punk band The Dils, where they wrote songs like “Class War” and “I Hate The Rich,” as the kids did back then. But the Kinman brothers were always musically restless, and so as the rules for hardcore got ever more stringent, the Dils broke up, probably because punk rock was too easy to sing. Cos Chip and Tony Kinman could sing anything: their harmonies were otherworldly.

Certain Songs #1824: Randy Newman – “Mama Told Me Not To Come”

May 21, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: 12 Songs
Year: 1970

I’m going to admit this up front: Randy Newman is both an American treasure and a huge blind spot for me. And I don’t know why: but his sad songs don’t make my cry, his funny songs don’t make me laugh and his serious songs haven’t ever connected. That’s on me.

And so, I know that you know that I came to this song via the Three Dog Night cover, my favorite of their wonderfully oversung run of early 1970s singles, which in a weird way, makes me sad: 12 Songs has always been described as his absolute pinnacle, and I can only nod my head and agree because I really can’t argue with any point anybody makes about Newman.

Certain Songs #1823: Rancid – “GGF”

May 20, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rancid
Year: 2000

. . .

I don’t know if you know this, because it so rarely comes up in his songs, but Tim Armstrong is from the East Bay, having grown up in the shadow of Golden Gate Fields, the horse-racing track that sits right on the edge of the San Francisco Bay.

And he pays thrilling tribute that upbringing on “GGF,” the final track from Rancid, which opens with a declaration of pride, as well as a peek inside of his soul, as over crashing power chords, Armstrong declares:

Certain Songs #1822: Rancid – “Rigged on a Fix”

May 19, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rancid
Year: 2000

. . .

As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam, while punk rock changed my life, I never considered myself a punk, especially the American hardcore kind, and so I didn’t go to as many punk shows as I might have.

That said, I went to quite a few, and pretty early on I came to a conclusion: all of the best musicians gravitated to hardcore, where they could test their musical limits without seeming to show off. Especially drummers. With the exception of Carlton Barrett — I mean, c’mon — a lot of the best drummers I saw were in hardcore bands, stopping and starting at will and cranking out lightspeed backbeats.

Certain Songs #1821: Rancid – “Black Derby Jacket”

May 18, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rancid
Year: 2000

. . .

After widening their sound with 1998’s Life Won’t Wait, Rancid narrowed it down to a full hardcore road just two years later with 2000’s Rancid, the second self-titled record in their career.

Cramming 22 songs into a little over 40 minutes, Rancid plays a bit like a hardcore version of Alien Lanes, though — as hardcore does — far more consistent, with most of the songs clocking in under two minutes and some of them practically over before they begin. So when you got a longer one — the epic “Radio Havana” at 3:42, they kinda stood out. As did the songs sung by bassist Matt Freeman, who hadn’t sung any leads at all on the previous two.

Certain Songs #1820: Rancid – “Coppers”

May 16, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Life Won’t Wait
Year: 1998

. . .

But Life Won’t Wait saved its best shot for the very end.

Which, sometimes Rancid’s generosity could be exhausting: wading through 20 tracks of pummeling punk rock mixed with speedy ska probably wasn’t everybody’s idea of the best way to spend an hour of their life, not to mention the time it took to sort out the individual songs from each other. So I do wonder if some people even made it to the end of Life Won’t Wait and got to this utter stunner of a track.