Archives for June 2021

Certain Songs #2138: Run-D.M.C. – “It’s Tricky”

June 30, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Raising Hell
Year: 1986

. . .

It was probably inevitable that Run-D.M.C. would hook up with Rick Rubin, and even without the massive success of “Walk This Way” to spur it, Raising Hell might have been their biggest album, as songs like “You Be Illin,” “My Adidas,” “Peter Piper” showed yet another leap in both song-making and execution.

My favorite — and probably my favorite Run-D.M.C. song period — was the self-referential “It’s Tricky,” which features a chorus where Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels are practically singing harmonies.

Certain Songs #2137: Run-D.M.C. – “Walk This Way”

June 29, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Raising Hell
Year: 1986

. . .

Here’s a thing you should probably know before we get into this: Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic was one of the very first albums I bought with my own money, and I probably know every single note of it by heart. But I bought Toys in The Attic not because of “Walk This Way,” but despite it.

Then, now and forevermore, it’s “Sweet Emotion” that is the highlight of that album, followed narrowly by the title track. “Walk This Way” is like, my fifth or sixth favorite song on that album.

Certain Songs #2136: Run-D.M.C – “King of Rock”

June 28, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: King of Rock
Year: 1985

. . .

If “Rock Box” was basically an experiment that worked out better than anybody could have imagined, then the follow-up, 1985’s “King of Rock,” was both a refinement of that experiment and an epic troll towards the people for whom merging rock and rap was anathema.

I wasn’t one of those people: I just wished they’d used punk guitar instead of metal guitar, a distinction that seems silly all these years later, I know. And still, if I couldn’t quite initially wrap my head around the first Run-D.M.C. album — though I do have a memory of Jay dancing around the KFSR studio to “Jam-Master Jay,” — “King of Rock” blew me away from the moment Darryl McDaniels screamed:

Certain Songs #2135: Run-D.M.C. – “Rock Box”

June 25, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Run-D.M.C.
Year: 1984

. . .

As revolutionary as “It’s Like That” was, it on their third single where Run-D.M.C. created a new form of music, an unholy hybrid of metal guitar, massive beats, and of course, Run and D.M.C.’s shouted raps.

Even at the time, “Rock Box” felt as inevitable as it felt groundbreaking, and if the riffs and solos played by guitarist Eddie Martinez were maybe just the tiniest bit rote, it didn’t matter because the context was so shocking.

Certain Songs #2134: Run-D.M.C .- “It’s Like That”

June 24, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Run-D.M.C.
Year: 1983

. . .

It’s always good to come out of the box with a debut single that immediately establishes your identity. It’s even better when people are both initially dumbfounded by that identity and yet almost immediately begin to copy it. But in 1983, there was really no precedent for Run-DMC’s debut single, “It’s Like That.”

The beats were huge, and while they weren’t rock beats per se, they hit like rock beats, as did the massive bass and keyboards that occasionally smashed against them. But only occasionally, because there was a lot of space in this music, which made everything hit that much harder, especially the vocals, which was two guys yelling at each other about how fucked up the world was.

Certain Songs #2133: Royal Headache – “Carolina”

June 23, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: High
Year: 2015

. . .

It really is a damn shame that Royal Headache broke up after High, as it was clear that they were already expanding out from their initial punk-soul formula with slow ones like “Wouldn’t You Know,” songs with long intros like “Garbage,” and their greatest song, the utterly heartbreaking “Carolina,” which is one of my very very favorite songs of the 2010s.

Certain Songs #2132: Royal Headache – “Love Her If I Tried”

June 22, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: High
Year: 2015

. . .

Things were always tumultuous in the Royal Headache camp. Despite — or perhaps because of — the unexpected success of their eponymous 2011 debut album, they broke up in 2013, with the follow-up partially recorded. After being broken up for a year, they got back together to finish the record.

That record, High, was a quantum leap from Royal Headache. Not only did it sound bigger and fuller, it varied up the songs — there’s a couple of slower ones, and a couple that break the four-minute mark — and augmented the instrumentation with some occasional acoustic guitar and keyboards. Though you really couldn’t hear the keyboards all that much. Or the acoustic guitar, for that matter.

Certain Songs #2131: Royal Headache – “Psychotic Episode”

June 21, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Royal Headache
Year: 2011

On their debut album, Australia’s Royal Headache sounded to me like what would happen if the early Jam was fronted by the early Rod Stewart and recorded by Robert Pollard.

The result was one of the best punk rock debuts of the last quarter century, a short (26 minutes) sharp shocking blast of speedy riffs, big hooks and hoarse soul shouting by lead singer Shogun. And while it’s one of those record that takes a few listens to in order to sort out which song is which, it’s all so much fun, it’s worth the effort.

Certain Songs #2130: The Royal Guardsmen – “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron”

June 19, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Snoopy and His Friends
Year: 1966

. . .

My three biggest pop culture jams of my 1960s childhood were the Disney Winnie-the-Pooh records, the Batman TV series and, of course, Peanuts. In the late 1960s, Peanuts was perhaps the biggest things in all of pop culture — absent the Beatles, of course, and even that was probably pretty close — and I just devoured everything I could get my hands on, things like reading and re-reading all of the trade paperbacks they would put out, or seeing A Boy Named Charlie Brown in the theater, and listening to side one of The Royal Guardsmen’s third album, entitled Snoopy and His Friends.

Certain Songs #2129: Roy Orbison – “She’s A Mystery To Me”

June 18, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Mystery Girl
Year: 1989

. . .

Man, life is cruel, ain’t it?

After hitting the very top of the charts with the utterly undeniable “Oh, Pretty Woman!” Roy Orbison would never ever break the U.S. top 20 again in his lifetime. That’s just how fast the pop world changed as the British invaded and bands became ascendent.