Medialoper

Certain Songs #1630: Pretenders – “The Wait”

September 11, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Pretenders
Year: 1979

. . .

After the complicated stomp of “Tattooed Love Boys,” side one of Pretenders went in a different direction, a slow instrumental with double entendre title of “Space Invader,” ostensibly named after a very popular arcade game of the time, highlighted by a big, rumbly Pete Farndon bass and out-of-nowhere guitar outbursts from James Honeyman-Scott that I absolutely loved.

At the fade, they brought in some of the actual noises from the Space Invaders arcade game, which segued instantly to what might be my favorite song on Pretenders, the utterly incandescent “The Wait,” one of most exciting rock ‘n’ roll songs that anybody has ever performed.

Certain Songs #1629: Pretenders – “Tattooed Love Boys”

September 10, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Pretenders
Year: 1979

. . .

A Story Which Is True Until It Isn’t.

It’s November, 1987 and both James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon have been dead for a half-decade, as Chrissie Hynde and Martin Chambers have carried on under the Pretenders banner, making one record that was pretty great and one that wasn’t.

Anyways, none of that mattered to a largish swath of our little tribe as we watched the Pretenders open for U2 — the climax of my 25th birthday weekend — at the massive Alameda County Coliseum, long-time home of the Oakland Athletics and off and on home of Oakland Raiders, because Chrissie Hynde had recruited a lead guitarist who was at least the equal and probably the better of Scott, one Johnny Marr, still fresh from the breakup of the mighty Smiths.

Certain Songs #1628: Pretenders – “Up The Neck”

September 9, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Pretenders
Year: 1979

The second track of Pretenders was “The Phone Call,” which wed a pair of insistent guitar riffs, a weird drum pattern and processed vocals to create a wholly off-kilter experience, which, after “Precious,” felt like a bit of a left turn, but also set up a theme for the whole album: each track was going to be different than the previous one.

Certain Songs #1627: Pretenders – “Precious”

September 8, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Pretenders
Year: 1979

. . .

How do you talk about a thing that changed your life? Because, surely, that’s what side one of Pretenders did for me.

Here’s the thing: I came of musical age in the mid-1970s, one of the most sexist and racist moments in rock music history. At the time, it was received wisdom that only white dudes with guitars knew how to make quality rock and roll. There were, of course, exceptions to that cant — most notably Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom died too young to have the world turn on them — but by and large, that’s just how it was.

Certain Songs #1626: Preston School of Industry – “Monkey Heart and the Horses’ Leg”

September 7, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: All This Sounds Gas
Year: 2001

. . .

The problem with writing about 2001 songs is that they’re always wrapped up in 2001, which was a shitty year on a personal level long before it became a shitty year on a global geopolitical level.

And somehow, my favorite song on the Preston School of Industry’s — the post-Pavement band formed by Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kanneberg — All This Sounds Gas album is wrapped up in both.

Certain Songs #1625: Preston School of Industry – “Enclyclopedic Knowledge Of”

September 6, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: All This Sound Gas
Year: 2001

It’s only happened a few times, but occasionally a band I love that features a pair of songwriters breaks up, and they both issue their post-breakup albums, I like the one that was by the secondary songwriter better than the one by the primary songwriter.

The first time this happened was 1989, when I enjoyed Grant Hart’s weirdly experimental Intolerance way more than Bob Mould’s formally experimental Workbook. Next was 1995, when I (barely) loved Wilco’s fun A.M. more than Son Volt’s , uh, less fun, Trace. And finally, back in 2001, when enjoyed Preston School of Industry’s All This Sounds Gas more that Stephen Malkmus self-titled solo debut.

Certain Songs #1624: The Posies – “Conversations”

September 5, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Every Kind of Light
Year: 2005

. . .

But, of course, The Posies didn’t break up in 1998. At least not for good. There was just too much chemistry in the Ken Stringfellow / Jon Auer paring for them to ignore it for the rest of their lives. And while Ken Stringfellow toured with R.E.M. for several years, as well as played on both Reveal and Around the Sun while putting out a couple of solo albums as well, it was clear that the Posies weren’t truly finished.

In fact, they almost instantly they put out a live album culled from the last tour, Alive Before The Iceberg, and in 2000 Stringfellow and Auer reunited acoustically, as captured on the In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Plugging In live album in 2000 and the studio EP Nice Cheekbones an a PHD in 2001.

Certain Songs #1623: The Posies – “Fall Apart With Me”

September 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Success
Year: 1998

. . .

The third time I saw The Posies, it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever witnessed.

It was also their final show.

One of those statements is, of course, now a lie. But not at the time. When Rox and I (and Matt, I think) went to the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on September 19, 1998, it was billed as the Posies “Final Show,” and they certainly treated it was such, and blowing the roof off of the place in a performance that was emotional, celebratory and went an hour past curfew, to boot. I don’t remember if the cops came to shut it down as they were approaching 3:00am on a Sunday morning, but it would have been kinda cool if they did.

Certain Songs #1622: The Posies – “Throwaway”

September 3, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Amazing Disgrace
Year: 1996

. . .

One of the reasons that Amazing Disgrace is my favorite Posies album (though just barely, truth be told) is that it successfully combined the fuzzy noisy guitars from Frosting on the Beater with some of the dynamic mid-tempo songs that worked so well on Dear 23.

So yeah, while there were ravers like “Daily Mutilation,” “Ontario” and the utterly awesome “Grant Hart,” what truly made Amazing Disgrace were the weird, moody mid-tempo songs like “Song #1,” “Will You Ever Ease Your Mind?” and Jon Auer’s “Throwaway,” which starts out with a guitar solo that is falling apart before your eyes before coming to a dead stop in time for Auer’s first verse, the opening which was just sung over an acoustic guitar.

Certain Songs #1621: The Posies – “Ontario”

August 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Amazing Disgrace
Year: 1996

The second time I saw the Posies they weren’t really the Posies, they were Big Star.

Or half of Big Star, anyways.

Instead of immediately jumping back into the studio to leverage the momentum they’d acquired from the (relative) success of Frosting on the Beater, Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer instead filled in for the Chris Bell and Andy Hummel for a series of shows where Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens finally kinda sorta cashed in on a legacy that had been growing for a decade.

The show I saw was at the Fillmore in San Francisco on June 15, 1994, and it was just fine, though — as expected — Alex Chilton still didn’t really understand what the fuss was all about, even as one of the biggest rock bands on the planet at the time, The Counting Crows, opened the show under a pseudonym.