Day After Day #345: Watching the Detectives

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Watching the Detectives (1977)

Elvis Costello has been one of the most interesting rock artists going since the late 1970s. I've already featured a more obscure song of his from the late '80s, but as this series winds down, I wanted to highlight one of his greatest.

The artist formerly known as Declan McManus first started playing in a folk-rock band called Rusty in 1972 in Liverpool, England. The following year, he moved to London and playing club gigs as Declan Costello; later in 1973, he formed a pub rock act called Flip City that played around town for a few years. 

He signed with Stiff Records in 1976 and was teamed with Clover, an American country-rock band, as his backing band (some of the members went to form Huey Lewis and the News). They recorded his first album, My Aim is True, in January 1977, but it wasn't released until July. Costello then left his job as a computer operator and set about picking a touring band; he already had chosen drummer Pete Thomas and then held auditions for a bassist and keyboardist. Steve Goulding and Andrew Bodnar, rhythm section of the Rumour (Graham Parker's band) helped with the auditions to see how those trying out would sound as part of a band. 

Costello picked Bruce Thomas on bass (no relation to Pete) and Steve Nason (later to go by Steve Nieve) on keyboards and called the band the Attractions. But while he was hanging out with Goulding and Bodnar, Costello had them help him put together a new song he wrote after listening to the Clash's new debut album. "Watching the Detectives" was also inspired by film composer Bernard Herrmann's moody scores for Hitchcock movies. The combination of a reggae beat, eerie keyboards and cynical lyrics, which were spit out by a sneering Costello about a couple who are arguing while the woman is watching a detective show on TV.

"Nice girls, not one with a defect/Cellophane shrink-wrapped, so correct/Red dogs under illegal legs/She looks so good that he gets down and begs/She is watching the detectives/Ooh, he's so cute/She is watching the detectives/When they shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot/They beat him up until the teardrops start/But he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart."

The song was released as a non-album single in October 1977 in the U.K. and it hit #15 on the Singles Chart. It was added to the U.S. release of My Aim is True but only got to #108.

"Long shot at that jumping sign/Invisible shivers running down my spine/Cut to baby taking off her clothes/Close up of the sign that says, 'We never close'/He snatched at you and you match his cigarette/She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet/I don't know how much more of this I can take/She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake."

Goulding's pounding drums are in the forefront as Costello and Bodnar provide the jagged reggae sound and James Bond guitar; Nieve overdubbed the appropriately sinister sounding organ and piano. The third verse is filled with the lyrical viciousness that Costello would become known for.

"You think you're alone until you realize you're in it/Now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit/They call it instant justice when it's past the legal limit/Someone's scratching at the window; I wonder who is it?/The detectives come to check if you belong to the parents/Who are ready to hear the worst/About their daughter's disappearance/Though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/It only took my little fingers to blow you away."

My Aim is True hit #14 in the U.K. and #32 in the U.S., getting critical raves. Costello and the Attractions played Saturday Night Live in December 1977, earning a ban from SNL producer Lorne Michaels after they unexpectedly pivoted during the live broadcast and played the unreleased song "Radio Radio." 

Costello went on to have a long, successful and interesting career with lots of creative twists and turns along the way. He's still at it, but "Watching the Detectives" remains one of his greatest songs.

Day After Day #274: Girls Talk

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Girls Talk (1979)

Many artists have had vanity labels over the years, usually to release their own material. When Led Zeppelin was at the height of its powers in 1974, its contract with Atlantic Records expired and the band decided to start its own label, Swan Song Records. The Rolling Stones and Beatles had done similar moves a few years earlier; the idea was to release future Zeppelin albums as well as music by other artists the band liked. 

The first Swan Song releases weren't Zep-related, but the debut album by Bad Company and a new record from the Pretty Things. The label was active for a decade, ending in 1983 after Zep broke up and manager Peter Grant fell into ill health (although Swan Song is still used for re-releases of its albums). One of the artists who signed to the label in the early days was Welsh guitarist Dave Edmunds, who had been playing in bands since he was a teenager in the late '50s.

Although Edmunds was primarily known as a rockabilly artist, he also was a producer and had a big hit in 1970 with a cover of "I Hear You Knocking." He produced early '70s British pub rock acts like Brinsley Schwarz (featuring a young Nick Lowe) and Flamin' Groovies as well as blues-rockers Foghat. Edmunds released a 1972 album called Rockpile and for the tour, called his band Dave Edmunds and Rockpile; after the tour, the band split up.

In 1976, Edmunds and Lowe formed a new version of Rockpile along with Billy Bremner and Terry Williams (who had played drums in the original Rockpile); by this point, Rockpile's sound had evolved into power pop, although it also got lumped in as new wave by the late '70s. But because Edmunds had his deal with Swan Song and Lowe had his with Stiff Records (where he was in-house producer), things got a little complicated. Essentially, the band would record albums and then release them as either Lowe or Edmunds solo albums. 

One of those albums was 1979's Repeat When Necessary, which was billed to Edmunds. The album featured mostly covers, although Bremner contributed three originals, including Graham Parker's "Crawling from the Wreckage" and Hank DeVito's "Queen of Hearts" (which later became a hit for Juice Newton). The most prominent song on the album was "Girls Talk," which Elvis Costello wrote and gave to Edmunds to cover. 

It's a typically lacerating but extremely tuneful Costello composition about the emotionally damaging world of gossip. 

"There are some things/You can't cover up with lipstick and powder/Thought I heard you mention my name/Can't you talk any louder?/Don't come any closer, don't come any nearer/My vision of you can't come any clearer/Oh, I just wanna hear girls talk."

Costello and the Attractions did their own version and released it in 1980 as the B-side to their cover of "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down."

"Got a loaded imagination being fired by girls talk/It's a more or less situation inspired by girls talk/But I can't say the words you wanna hear/I suppose you're gonna have to play it by ear, right here/And now girls talk/And they wanna know how, girls talk/And they say it's not allowed, girls talk/If they say that it's so/Don't they think that I know by now?"

The Edmunds version is more upbeat than Costello's, driven by Edmunds' acoustic guitar work and vocal delivery, while Costello's take is a little more sinister. Both versions are excellent, but they just hit differently.

"But the word up on everyone's lipstick that you're dedicated/You may not be an old-fashioned girl but you're gonna get dated/Was it really murder? Were you just pretending?/Lately, I have heard you're the living end."

Edmunds' version was released in June 1979 and hit #4 on the U.K. Singles Chart; it also got to #18 in Canada, which is where I was hearing it regularly on the radio. In the U.S., the song reached #65 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Linda Ronstadt also covered the song on her 1980 new wavy album Mad Love; she also covered two other Costello songs ("Party Girl" and "Talking in the Dark"). Aimee Mann has praised the song, saying she used to cover it live, and Tegan and Sara did a version for the soundtrack of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

After the success of "Girls Talk," Edmunds and Rockpile released the first and only album under the name Rockpile with 1980's Seconds of Pleasure; Edmunds' contract with Swan Song was up so he was freed to do so. The album had a minor hit with "Teacher, Teacher" and the band ended up playing the Heatwave festival in Toronto in August 1980 in front of over 100,000 fans. But tensions between Edmunds and Lowe, mainly over Edmunds' dislike of band manager Jake Riviera, led to Rockpile splitting up in 1981.

Edmunds released four more albums in the '80s with limited success and by the '90s was essentially retired, although he joined a couple of Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band tours in 1992 and 2000. He did a tour in 2007 and performed live a few times over the next couple of years. His last release was an instrumental album in 2015. 

Day After Day: Chewing Gum

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Chewing Gum

Elvis Costello has had a legendary career, but when people look back at his catalog, they probably don't spend too much time on the album Spike. It came out in February 1989, was his 12th studio album and his first since his 1977 debut that didn't feature the Attractions as his backing band. Instead, he worked with producer T-Bone Burnett and recruited four different sets of musicians from the four locations he recorded in: Dublin, New Orleans, Hollywood and London. As you can imagine, it's a pretty varied affair, which ranged from the lovely "Veronica" (written with Paul McCartney and Costello's biggest hit in the U.S., #19 on the Billboard Hot 100) to pissed off protest songs like "Let Him Dangle" and "Tramp the Dirt Down" to the perfectly sardonic "This Town" (featuring Roger McGuinn on 12-string and Macca on bass). The album received mixed reviews, but I quite liked it.

It was the spring of my senior year at UNH and I picked the album up on vinyl (didn't get my first CD player until a few months later) and played it constantly. I saw Costello play at UNH that spring; he was solo, doing songs he picked randomly using a huge roulette wheel. He played for three hours and it was amazing.

As for Spike, it's definitely a bit scattered, but I really liked the New Orleans songs, which featured the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and avant garde guitarist Marc Ribot. I started thinking about it today after reading this Aquarium Drunkard piece about the funky song "Chewing Gum," which features a skronky RIbot guitar solo that Les Claypool of Primus called one of the greatest he'd ever heard. The AD piece includes Costello and Ribot talking about the song, so I won't steal any of its thunder since it's new and really good, but it mentions the counterpoint between Ribot's out-there guitar work and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, specifically Kirk Joseph on sousaphone. I wouldn't describe the solo as one of my favorites, but it's definitely cool and interesting. The song ends with a big crescendo from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. It's just a lot of fun and different from just about anything else coming out from a major rock artist in 1989.

Meanwhile, Costello's lyrics focus on a sleazy guy and his mail-order bride, who he basically acquired as a living sex doll. "The nearest she comes to the 'Dynasty' life he promised her/Is a Chinese takeaway." The chorus brings it home: "There must be something that is better than this/It starts with a slap and ends with a kiss/Begins with you bawling and it ends up in tears/Oh my little one, take that chewing gum out of your ears." 

The summer before this album came out, I was working as an intern for The Peabody Times, a local daily in Massachusetts. One of the stories I wrote was interviewing this Danvers man who had married a mail-order bride. Not sure how the story came about; maybe the agency was promoting a success story? Anyway, the guy was a mousy little creep and the bride (who was from Eastern Europe somewhere) clearly looked bored and/or disgusted. It was definitely a strange experience. A year later, another reporter followed up to see how it was going and it turned out the woman had left him. Big shocker there. Guess she took that chewing gum out of her ears.

Completely Conspicuous 546: Watching the Detectives

I'm joined by guest Phil Stacey as we discuss our favorite albums of 1977. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").

Show notes:

- Recorded via Zoom

- A startling number of great releases in '77; a lot of terrific debuts

- Singles chart was topped by disco and pop: Rod Stewart, Andy Gibb, Streisand, KC and the Sunshine Band, Engelbert Humperdinck

- Jay's non-top 5 faves: Ramones had two albums, Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders, the Damned, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, Cheap Trick had two, Bowie had two, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Rush, Neil Young, The Clash, Wire, Max Webster 

- Jay: My dad had disco mixtapes,

- This was recorded before Johnny Lydon said he had flea bites on his dong

- Phil's non-top 5 favorites: Grateful Dead, Television, Jackson Browne, Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, AC/DC, Dead Boys, Queen, Linda Ronstadt, Wire, Clapton

- The cover of Queen's News of the World scared young Phil; Kmart had a cleaned-up alternate cover

- Jay's #5: Peter Gabriel's solo debut went in new directions, combining art rock and new wave

- Phil's #5: A fiery, concise debut from the Clash (UK only)

- Jay's  #4: Guitar rock meets post punk from Television

- Phil's #4: Bob Marley breaks through in the U.S.

- Jay's and Phil's #3: Talking Heads' debut didn't sound like anything else

- Jay's #2: Iggy Pop worked with Bowie in Berlin to produce an electronic-influenced sound

- Phil's #2: The ubiquitous Fleetwood Mac album is getting popular again

- Remains vital despite massive overplaying of certain songs

- Jay's #1: Elvis Costello burst on the scene with biting lyrics, catchy classics

- Phil's #1: The controversial Steely Dan with a jazzy, meticulous opus

- Favorite songs: "Watching the Detectives" (Jay), "Josie" (Phil)

Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!

The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.

Senseless

As Fridays in December go, this was a pretty good day. I took a vacation day, as I have with all the Fridays this month because I have to use that time or lose it. Once the kids were off to school, I went to the gym to work out, ran some errands and then went to play hockey at noon with a buddy in Peabody. It was a blast and even though I had to leave a little early to get home for a work call (yeah, yeah, I know), I had that tired but exhilarated feeling I get when I've exhausted my body in a good way. So I'm in the lobby of the rink and a TV is on CNN with a breaking news alert about a mass shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut that left TWENTY kids dead.

Talk about a mood changer. These types of events tend to happen fairly often these days, but this one is especially horrifying because the shooter allegedly went into the school and killed his mother and her entire kindergarten class. Makes no fucking sense at all. Of course, with the heightened awareness brought on via social media, I'm reading constant references to the need for gun control, the need to hug your kids and just plain sadness.

I understand it all. As a former reporter, I'm pretty desensitized to horrible stories, but having kids really makes this shit hit home. I'm typing this as my kids play with some friends, blissfully unaware of the mind-fuckingly awful situation that took place just a few hours away to kids just a few years younger than them. We don't let them watch the news because of stuff like this, horrendous child abuse arrests and of course, all the idiotic wars going on all over the world. There's plenty of time for them to learn about how shitty the world can be. Let them enjoy their childhoods while they still can.

As for me, I'm going to my buddy Jay's house tonight to do some podcast recording about our favorite music of 2012. The kids have activities planned. Life will go on as planned, but we'll mourn the dead of Newtown and wait for the next senseless atrocity to happen.

Mixology: Vacation Volume '91

Mixology is a recurring feature in which I take a look at one of the many mix tapes I made over the years. Some are better than others, but all of them are fun to revisit.

Vacation Volume '91 (8/10/91)

I actually made this mix to listen to while on vacation up in Maine. My girlfriend's family had a cottage/campground on an island in Greene, so we were heading up there for a week. Unfortunately, it was the week that the first Lollapalooza tour came through the Boston area, so I missed that historic show with Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band, Body Count, Fishbone and Violent Femmes. I was pretty bummed, but what could I do? I caught the next two years of the festival, but I always regretted missing this one.

Still, it was a good vacation, as I recall. I didn't do much swimming because not being able to see to the bottom of the lake kinda freaked me out, so I did a lot of lounging around. I remember I was reading Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix & the Post-War Rock n' Roll Revolution by Charles Shaar Murray during the vacation and listening to my Walkman a lot.

At this point in '91, I had just moved in with my girlfriend, which was the first time I'd ever lived with a woman. I think it was more of an adjustment for her than me, actually. I know my mother wasn't too thrilled with the whole "living in sin" thing, but that was no big deal to me. We found an apartment in the Centerville area of Beverly that was pretty nice, but we ended up moving across town about nine months later.

This was also around the time that my buddy Chris got married. He was the first of my college friends to get hitched. Just hung out with him last weekend; he and Carolyn are coming up on their 20th anniversary next year.

It's safe to say 1991 was a great year for music, but not just because Nevermind and Ten came out then. At this point in the year, I was listening to Elvis Costello's Mighty Like a Rose a lot, but also Lenny Kravitz's Mama Said and Living Colour's EP Biscuits. Metallica would release "The Black Album" this week; I dug it at first, but it was nowhere near as good as their previous albums. The coming months saw the release of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion double-album, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend, the Pixies' Trompe Le Monde, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, U2's Achtung Baby, Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. Just a sick string of albums (not so much the GNR, but certainly everything else).

Pretty much everything on this mix still holds up, with the possible exception of R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People." Hard to listen to that song anymore. Of course, there's also one of the great one-hit wonders of the early '90s, "3 Strange Days" by School of Fish (I would include the video, but stupid EMI won't allow embeds). Just a transcendent summer song. It's amazing that the band was never able to follow it up in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, that song definitely takes me back to the summer of '91. Good times.

Side A
Talkin' Loud and Saying Nothin' - Living Colour
Miss Freelove '69 - Hoodoo Gurus
Always on the Run - Lenny Kravitz
Ramblin' - Royal Crescent Mob
Make Out Alright - Divinyls
Bitter Tears - INXS
Shiny Happy People - R.E.M.
Playboy to a Man - Elvis Costello
Bridegroom Blues - John Wesley Harding
Night and Day - U2
Twist My Arm - Tragically Hip
3 Strange Days - School of Fish

Side B
Stop! - Jane's Addiction
Jet City Woman - Queensryche
Higher Ground (Daddy-O mix) - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Money Talks - Living Colour
Pushin' Forward Back - Temple of the Dog
Pretty Good Life - Royal Crescent Mob
Two Tongues - Blue Rodeo
Fields of Joy - Lenny Kravitz
A Place in the Sun - Hoodoo Gurus
Fifty-Fifty Split - John Wesley Harding
So Like Candy - Elvis Costello






Miss Freelove:


So Like Candy (live on SNL with sweet beard):

Mixology: Pure Rock on Wheels

Mixology is a recurring feature in which I take a look at one of the many mix tapes I made over the years. Some are better than others, but all of them are fun to revisit.

Pure Rock on Wheels (3/6/93)

The name of this mix came from an ad I saw in the Beverly Times for a party for Christian teens being held at the local roller rink. I'm guessing the "pure rock" part meant wholesome God-lovin' rock from the likes of Stryper, Petra, etc. I really should've gone down to check it out, but that would have involved actually having to listen to that crap, and probably getting baptized and/or hypmotized in the middle of the rink against my will.

It wasn't long after I made this tape that I broke up with my girlfriend of nearly four years. We had a pretty good little domestic thing going, but we had been drifting apart for a while. I didn't move out for three more months as I tried to find somewhere to live. It was awkward, but we were working completely opposite shifts at the paper and subsequently rarely saw each other anyway. Had we not broken up, there was a good chance we would have gotten married in the next year or so. As it turned out, I wasn't ready for that. Sure enough, it took me another seven years before I finally settled down.

A week after this mix was made, the "Storm of the Century" hit the entire U.S. East coast, dumping over a foot of snow on this area, but also all the way down to Florida. This was back when we had sustained cold weather and snow all winter long, so it wasn't a total shock to New Englanders. There were a few bigger storms in the years to come, like the 30 inches of snow dropped on the Northeast in January 1996 (I happened to be in Montreal at the time and missed the whole thing) and the April Fool's storm of 1997, which unexpectedly plopped 2 feet of snow on us. All I really remember about this March '93 storm was having to drive around Beverly interviewing people shoveling out their driveways. How many times can you ask people what they think of all this snow? My editor would lose his mind during snowstorms; he literally sent everybody in the newsroom out on similarly stupid assignments.

Musically, I was getting into bands like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Helmet and Buffalo Tom, as well as Cracker and the Jayhawks. As you can tell from this tape, my musical tastes were all over the place, in a good way. I was listening to WFNX and watching a lot of MTV's 120 Minutes, where the mellifluous tones of Dave Kendall was introducing the latest alterna-icons. It was a fertile time for rock.

Alas, I was about to enter a prolonged period of depression, living on my own (sort of) in Middleton and working a shitty early morning shift at the paper. These tapes (and steady doses of Beavis and Butt-head) were pretty much the only thing that kept me going for a while there. Ozzy said it best: You can't kill rock n' roll.

Side A
Start Choppin' - Dinosaur Jr.
Leave It Alone - Living Colour
Give It - Helmet
Take the Power Back - Rage Against the Machine
Youth Against Fascism - Sonic Youth
Rain When I Die - Alice in Chains
Asshole - Denis Leary
Black Gold - Soul Asylum
Courage (for Hugh M.) - The Tragically Hip
Surround - Dada
Beautiful Girl - INXS

Side B
This is Cracker Soul - Cracker
Paint It Black - U2
Long Way Down - Michael Penn
Jacksons, Monk and Rowe - Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet
Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.
One of These Days - Neil Young
Crowded in the Wings - Jayhawks
Just a Loser - Robert Cray
99% - Soul Asylum
Go Away - Living Colour
Out There - Dinosaur Jr.
Drunken Butterfly - Sonic Youth


Start Choppin':


Jacksons, Monk & Rowe: