(I’m Gonna) Tap Dance On Your Head
My neighbor lives in apartment 8A
She send me threatening notes nearly everyday
With a cease and desist, she’s still has plenty to say
But I’ll have the last laugh the day I move away
The other day when I went to the store
Shopping for shoes, bur I found something more
Black and shiny, cool to the core
And now I’m ready to settle the score
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD NOW
And when you’re downstairs, listening to me dance
you’ll reconsider your circumstance.
You’re gonna wish you never saw my face
When I finish tying my shoelace
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD, NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD, NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD, NOW
I’m gonna TAP DANCE ON YER HEAD, NOW
The Ventures may not mean much to the average music fan of today, but very little rock music of the last quarter of the 20th century would have sounded quite the same without them. Guitarists Bob Bogle and Don Wilson, drummer Mel Taylor and bass player Nokie Edwards had a sound that was almost two decades ahead of its time. Does this make them the fabled “first-ever punk band”? Probably not, but if you can find a more aggressive, in-your-face guitar sound circa 1960, please let me know.
The vastness of The Ventures’ influence included their choice of guitar, the Mosrite, a guitar that The Ventures had an exclusive on in the early 1960s. Other “proto-punk” Mosrite users include John Entwistle, Fred “Sonic” Smith (of the MC5), Dave Alexander (of The Stooges), Johnny Ramone, Kurt Cobain, and, of course, Glen Campbell.
There’s a legendary story where, in 1979, Dan Ackroyd plays John Belushi a tape of an old instrumental titled “The 2000-Year-Old Bee.” Belushi loves the song and demands to know which current punk band is on the tape. Ackroyd has to explain to him that this song had been recorded in 1961 by a group called The Ventures. Belushi adored the song so much (as it indirectly reflected back to his time on SNL when he was forced to dress up as a bee), he made Ackroyd promise to play the song at his funeral. Acrkroyd not only agreed, but kept that promise. Sure enough, right after the eulogy, Ackroyd whips out a portable cassette player and out comes “The 2000 Year Old Bee.”
Okay, let’s say you’re folksingers Peter, Paul and Mary. You’ve just had a mostly-accidental smash hit in the form of John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” in late 1969. What do you do? Obviously, you’d capitalize on the unexpected success in some way, most likely by making a spectacularly solid album for the ages, right? If you said “Yes, that’s EXACTLY what I’d do,” then you’re obviously NOT Peter, Paul and Mary.
Just how delusional were the actual Peter, Paul and Mary at the dawn of the 1970s? At least delusional enough to take a break from each other (much needed, if you’ve ever had the misfortune to listen to the godawful Peter, Paul and Mommy album) and release a set of solo albums in 1971 and 1972.
Utilizing the famous Milton Glaser font on all three of the albums’ covers, it at least appeared to be a deliberate attempt to market the three albums as a set (something that Kiss would try with varying success almost ten years later).
So which of the three was more successful? Mary’s album Mary only went as high as #71 on the Billboard album charts in 1971 despite having a version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that predated Roberta Flack’s by nearly a year. Noel Stookey’s album Paul and, despite having the unforgivably bad (albeit, astronomically and inexplicably successful) “The Wedding Song (There Is Love)” as a single, only peaked at #42. Peter Yarrow’s Paul fared the worst, only reaching #163.
Who on God’s earth thought this might be a good idea? Were these solo sets the harbinger of more egotistical outings to come? Did it signal the true beginning of the “Me Decade”? Had they been a more significant group, this might have portended the official end of the 1960s.
Despite their disastrous solo outings, Peter, Paul and Mary would not make another album together until 1978′s Reunion, at which point, nobody cared.
A few years ago, I grabbed an original copy of The Fugs’ First Album, originally titled The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction. I got it at a very reasonable price from a Milwaukee record store (who were honest enough to admit the record was barely playable, at best). It was worth it anyway.
I was recently hipped to the fact that the original mono mixes of the album (about the first two or three LP pressings) have a different take of “Swinburne Stomp” on it.
Though I’m far from the biggest Jimmy Fallon fan on the block, I gotta really hand it to him with this one. Not only does he perfectly approximate Jim Morrison’s voice, as well as the inconceivably corny backdrop from The Doors’ 1967 Ed Sullivan appearance, he exposes the total idiocy that apparently passed for lyrics back in the late 1960′s. Kudos to the band as well. I’m sure they’re professional musicians (if it actually is them playing; it’s a little hard to tell), so it must have been extremely difficult for them to play THAT poorly. The drummer does an absolutely perfect impression of a typical John Densmore drum seizure at about 1:56. My only (very minor) complaint is that, as with so many things parodic, “Weird Al” Yankovic was there first with the brilliant “Craigslist.” As far as the impression goes, I have to give Fallon the nod.
Mayor Bloomberg may have finally figured out a way of methodically dismantling the Occupy Wall Street protest.
I was walking along Wall Street this morning. For the past few weeks, the walking area has been partitioned in a way that allows roughly single-file foot traffic in either direction. Today, however, there was an added bit of police work. Work IDs were required in order to gain entrance to Wall Street between Broadway and Pearl.
Mark my words: the protest backlash will begin sometime next week due to the sheer inconvenience of having to take an ID out of a wallet. Here’s the reason: Generally speaking, Americans value convenience more than anything else. They will sacrifice any shard of liberty or privacy for the thrill of owning the iPhone or BlackBerry, let alone protection from terrorists.
Forcing pedestrians to show ID is a genius move on Bloomberg’s part, as much as I hate to admit it. Not only does it prevent an onslaught on new protestors, it makes it so irritating for the people traveling back and forth daily that it will turn those who were once for the protestors against them.
Hello, this is your Eye In The Sky here. Better known this week as “The Prisoner Of South End Avenue.”
As you know, this weekend is filled with memorials concerning the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Since I live a block away from Ground Zero, it’s kinda hard to escape them. Today, from my window, I could see (and hear) the annual NYPD 9/11 Memorial procession. I figured this year I’d try to get at least a little footage of it. I wound up getting very little (all of it shot from my window), due to an uncharged battery and bad timing.
Musically, it’s all drums and bagpipes. It kinda has that Charles Ives feel in that every band is playing simultaneously, and after a while it just becomes one big cacophonous racket (I like the sound, personally). The whole ceremony had a certain magnificence to it. There were even a few Mounted Police lurking about. God knows what they were doing here, but it’s nice to see them anyway. Overall, the whole thing was pretty surreal but beautiful.
Here’s a little tribute to America’s Favorite Redhead, Lucille Ball. This is an SNL sketch written by Michael O’Donoghue that originally aired on March 19th, 1977.
It is with incredible sadness that I report the death of Gil Scott-Heron.
Repeatedly called by many the “Godfather of Rap,” despite his disliking that monicker, he was a self-proclaimed “Bluesologist” and poet more than anything else.
My first memory of Gil Scott-Heron was hearing, in heavy rotation, what would become the closest thing he ever had to a hit, 1975′s “Johannesburg.” I instantly fell in love with the song, even though I had absolutely no idea what any of the words meant (I was five at the time). I vaguely remember my parents being horrified at me singing the song verbatim (mostly phonetically, but accurately) at the top of my lungs when they had guests over to the house. They took away my radio for a couple of years after that.
I finally got to see him live at Joe’s Pub in 1998, and it was truly like seeing light on stage, he was absolutely brilliant in every way. When I saw him backstage, however, he was having more than a little trouble standing up, a sign of rougher days to come for him.
It is one of life’s little ironies that the man who declared Winter In America died on the weekend that is the unofficial start of Summer. A bad omen if there was one.
Despite making his name with pieces like “Whitey’s On The Moon,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Johannesburg,” Gil Scott-Heron did not strike me as an angry man (nor are the aforementioned songs merely “angry”). He work ranged from the empathetic (“Pieces Of a Man,” “Billy Green Is Dead”) to humorously prophetic (“B-Movie”).
The video clip above is taken from his film, Black Wax. It is an abbreviated version of the “B-Movie” section of the film. “B-Movie” was a song he wrote in 1981 after Ronald Reagan (or “Raygun,” as he’s referred to here) was elected by a so-called “mandate.” The song is particularly relevant in today’s Tea Party “Let’s Take Our Nation Back” political climate. Tea Partiers seem to wallow in the same nostalgia as those who voted for Raygun. In fact, quite a bit of their nostalgia is for Raygun himself.
Below are three songs that are absolutely brilliant and essential (as is the majority of his catalog, for that matter). It pains me to only pick three, but I have to have some limits here.
The first is 1974′s “Winter In America,” the second is 1970′s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” and the third is from his last album, 2010′s I’m New Here. It’s a poem titled “On Coming From A Broken Home.”
Here’s another animation I did mostly for fun. It’s another Kinetic Typography thing with a little 3D thrown in for good measure. The song is called “Amber,” and it was one of the tracks from 1980′s The Residents Commercial Album. I’m dedicating this one to an old friend of mine, Neal Bantens, because this is one of his favorite songs of all time (at least it used to be).
Well, here it is at last! This is the last Great Shakes jingle I have at present (I’m hoping to get more. A lot more). This Great Shakes ad features The Yardbirds and was recorded in 1966. The personnel is unknown, but most likely this was recorded while Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were both guitarists in the group. Jeff Beck left soon after to form the Jeff Beck Group, leaving Page as the sole guitarist and the group as a four-piece. [Yeah, you all know what became of that Page guy. Blah, blah]
The Yardbirds based this ad on their most recent (and my personal favorite) hit, “Over Under Sideways Down.” Enjoy!
