There have been some bumps in the air lately, but people still fly all the time. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about flying in hour 2; in hour 1, I paid tribute to Clem Burke and Dave Allen and played a bunch of hot new rock jams. Even the snakes on a plane dig it!
This playlist watches out for snakes:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Blondie - Dreaming/Eat to the Beat
Blondie - Hanging on the Telephone/Parallel Lines
Gang of Four - Not Great Men/Entertainment!
Gang of Four - Natural's Not In It/Entertainment!
Savak - No Man's Island/SQUAWK!
Scowl - Special/Are We All Angels
Rough Francis - Great to Be Alive/Fall EP
Ty Segall - Fantastic Tomb/Possession
Hallelujah the Hills - Fake Flowers at Sunset (3 of Diamonds)/DECK: Diamonds
Mekons - War Economy/Horror
Billy Nomates - The Test/Metalhorse
Bria Salmena - Closer to You/Big Dog
Destroyer - The Same Thing as Nothing at All/Dan's Boogie
Cameron Keiber - Habsburg Jaw/Nurser
Hour 2: Flying
Plastic Bertrand - Ca Plane Pour Moi/An 1
Pavement - Hit the Plane Down/Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Husker Du - Private Plane/Flip Your Wig
Silkworm - Pilot/In the West reissue
Drive-By Truckers - Shut Up and Get On the Plane/Southern Rock Opera
Guided By Voices - Test Pilot/Earth Man Blues
The Tragically Hip - Fifty Mission Cap/Fully Completely
Kristin Hersh - From the Plane/Wyatt at the Coyote Palace
Kurt Vile - Goin' On a Plane Today/(watch my moves)
Tigers Jaw - Plane vs. Tank vs. Submarine/Live at Studio 4
Max Webster - Night Flights/A Million Vacations
David Bowie - African Night Flight/Lodger
Mark Lanegan - Night Flight to Kabul/Somebody's Knocking
Bad History Month - The Flight from Hell/Death Takes a Holiday
Part 1 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey as we talk our way through a March Madness-style tournament of our favorite rock artists. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
We left out artists that we both didn't like: Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, Phish, Iron Maiden
Also had to leave off a number of artists just for space considerations: Ramones, AC/DC, Feelies, Breeders, Camper Van Beethoven, etc.
Some tough matchups in round 1 with randomized seeding
The Smiths vs. PJ Harvey
Spoon vs. Courtney Barnett
Led Zeppelin vs. Bob Dylan
The Cure vs. Prince
Elton John vs. James Brown
Pavement vs. Queens of the Stone Age
Buffalo Tom vs. Rush
Allman Brothers Band vs. Soundgarden
The Kinks vs. The Rolling Stones
Alice in Chains vs. Beastie Boys
Bob Marley vs. The Cure
Joe Jackson vs. The Afghan Whigs
The Tragically Hip vs. Velvet Underground
The Clash vs. Iggy Pop
Stevie Ray Vaughan vs. The Police
Sloan vs. Mark Lanegan
To be continued with the rest of Round 1
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.
Hey, I get it. The world kinda sucks right now. Which is why radio is more important than ever; you need something to get your mind off the constant stream of bad news. Unfortunately, commercial radio blows, but that's where the innernet comes in. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played hot new stuff from the Taxpayers, Bria Salmena and Destroyer in hour 1 and rock blocks in hour 2. It's just like the old days with Dr. Johnny Fever, only...not.
This playlist rocks the block:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
The Taxpayers - Evil Everywhere/Circle Breaker
Bria Salmena - Rags/Big Dog
The Drowns - View from the Bottom/View from the Bottom (2025 Jack Endino Remaster)
Destroyer - Sun Meet Snow/Dan's Boogie
Daniel Kleederman - Answers/Another Life
Spun Out - Pale Green Sky/Dream Noise
Escape-ism - Beneath the Underground/Charge of the Love Brigade
Throwing Muses - Libretto/Moonlight Concessions
Cameron Keiber - Beach Party Iran 1970/Nurser
Bob Mould - Sharp Little Pieces/Here We Go Crazy
The Murder Capital - Can't Pretend to Know/Blindness
Rough Francis - Moving Backwards/Fall EP
Kestrels - Total Bummer/Better Wonder
Pigeon Pit - Keys to the City/Crazy Arms
The Laughing Chimes - A Promise to Keep/Whispers in the Speech Machine
FACS - Talking Haunted/Wish Defense
Hour 2: Rock blocks
The New Pornographers - Letter from an Occupant/Mass Romantic
A.C. Newman - Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns/Shut Down the Streets
Neko Case - Star Witness/Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Destroyer - Your Blood/Destroyer's Rubies
Boss Hog - Walk In/Boss Hog
Boss Hog - I'm Not Like Everybody Else/Suburbia soundtrack
Boss Hog - Billy/Brood X
Public Enemy - Prophets of Rage/It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Public Enemy - Brothers Gonna Work It Out/Fear of a Black Planet
Public Enemy - Gotta Give the Peeps What They Need/Revolverlution
The longer things go, the weirder things get. Life in 2025 is so insane it makes 1990 look like a quaint, archaic fever dream. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from 1990 in hour 2, and it was a blast. But don't tell the guy it was funny.
This playlist is funny how?
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
The Drowns - Take Me Back/View from the Bottom (2025 Jack Endino remaster)
Rough Francis - Summer Sun/Fall EP
The Men - Get My Soul/Buyer Beware
Daniel Kleederman - Compromised Positions/Another Life
Cameron Keiber - Forever 25/Nurser
Bob Mould - When Your Heart is Broken/Here We Go Crazy
Escape-ism - Black Gold/Charge of the Love Brigade
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at Altered Beast, Matthew Sweet's 1993 follow-up to his breakthrough album.
The music business is a mysterious and unpredictable thing. Many artists have recorded brilliant albums that go underappreciated while the dumbest shit imaginable totally blows up. This is about one of those underappreciated albums.
Matthew Sweet got his start in Nebraska, playing in the bands the Specs and the Dialtones while still in high school. He went to college in Athens, Georgia, as that city's music scene was hitting its stride. Sweet had met R.E.M. when they played in Lincoln, Nebraska, the previous year; he teamed up with Michael Stipe in a duo called Community Trolls and played guitar in Oh-OK, a band fronted by Stipe's sister Linda. He also formed The Buzz of Delight with Oh-OK drummer David Pierce and released an EP in 1984, which led to Sweet scoring a solo deal with Columbia Records.
His first two albums, 1986's Inside and 1989's Earth, received positive reviews but didn't sell well. By the end of the '90s, his label was done with him and his marriage ended. Sweet signed with Zoo Entertainment in 1990 and he put together a powerhouse band featuring indie guitar gods Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine. The resulting album was 1991's Girlfriend, a power pop masterpiece that broke through on FM radio and MTV with the title track (which hit #10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart). While the album only hit #100 on the Billboard 200 chart, Sweet got a lot of attention in the indie rock world and was poised for bigger things.
But by July 1993, when Sweet's fourth album Altered Beast was released, a lot had changed in the rock world. Grunge was king and music fans were chasing after the latest big thing, which was guitar-dominated heavy rock from the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Sweet's super-melodic power pop wasn't in demand, but Altered Beast also had a darker edge to it that turned some fans of Girlfriend off. It was still catchy as hell, but there was a lot more anger and intensity to songs like "Devil with the Green Eyes," "Someone to Pull the Trigger," "Knowing People" and "The Ugly Truth." The grunge acts had plenty of that darkness as well, but for whatever reason, Altered Beast didn't catch on with the public as much.
It's too bad, because it's an impressive record. Sweet brought back Lloyd and Quine to provide hot lead guitar on several songs but also recruited a who's who of killer musicians: guitarists Ivan Julian and Greg Leisz, Nicky Hopkins on piano and drummers Rick Menck, Pete Thomas, Jody Stephens, Fred Maher and Mick Fleetwood (producer Richard Dashut worked on several huge Fleetwood Mac albums).
The album's title came from the videogame Altered Beast, and Sweet told Spin magazine that it referred to "whatever is inside you that someday might explode, and maybe you don't know it's there."
I became a Matthew Sweet fan after hearing "Divine Intervention" from the Girlfriend album, so I was looking forward to Altered Beast. And while I was at first disappointed that it wasn't Girlfriend 2, it only took a few listens to realize this was something different and excellent. It didn't hurt that the album's release coincided with the similarly dark turn my life had taken; I was 25, recently out of a long-term relationship, renting a room in a house in a town I didn't know and working crazy hours (5 a.m. to 1 p.m.). I was depressed and this depressing album really spoke to me.
You know Sweet was dealing with some serious shit when he put not one, but two clips from the X-rated movie Caligula on the album. The musical scope of the album was all over the place, from stinging rockers like "Dinosaur Act," "Ugly Truth Rock" and "Knowing People" to hooky pop-rock like "Time Capsule," "Life Without You" and "Do It Again" to country-rock gems like "What Do You Know?" and "The Ugly Truth" to searing guitar rippers like "Falling" and "In Too Deep." It's a rewarding collection that it took some folks decades to appreciate.
Strangely enough, Altered Beast charted higher than Girlfriend, hitting #75 on the Billboard 200, but it didn't have near the cultural impact of its predecessor. In 1994, Sweet released Son of Altered Beast, an EP featuring live and alternate versions of Sweet songs, plus a live cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears."
In 1995, Sweet returned with the more upbeat album 100% Fun (although the title came from Kurt Cobain's suicide note), which featured the hit "Sick of Myself." In the subsequent 30 years, he's released nine more studio albums as well as covers albums with Susanna Hoffs and an acoustic album as part of The Thorns with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. His latest album was 2021's Catspaw. Sweet was touring in Canada with the band Hanson last fall when he suffered a serious stroke; a GoFundMe helped raise enough money to fly him home with a medical crew and to a rehabilitation hospital. To date, nearly $570,000 has been crowdfunded to help Sweet as he relearns how to perform basic tasks again. It's unclear whether he'll ever be able to play music again, but here's hoping. He's one of the underrated greats.
Obsession can take many forms: Love, lust, hobbies or something even darker. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about obsession in hour 2. Break out the cattle gun, friendo.
Call it, playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Cameron Keiber - Sons and Daughters/Nurser
Throwing Muses - Albatross/Moonlight Concessions
Miynt - Blu-Ray Land/Rain Money Dogs
Rough Francis - Fall/Fall EP
Real Sickies - Should Have Seen It Coming/Under a Plastic Bag
Bob Mould - Fur Mink Augurs/Here We Go Crazy
Ovlov - Land of Steve-O (Demo)/Buds Demos
Cardinals - Unreal/Live at Scholz Garten, KUTX
Swervedriver - The World's Fair/The World's Fair EP
The Men - Buyer Beware/Buyer Beware
The Flamingos Pink - Burn/GROWF
Peel Dream Magazine - Interiors/Modern Meta Physic
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - 103/Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010
Sloan - Median Strip (Andrew Vocal)/Smeared box set
Escape-ism - If You Feel Like Rockin'/Charge of the Love Brigade
Dax Riggs - Blues for You Know Who/7 Songs for Spiders
King Hannah - The Mattress/Big Swimmer
Hour 2: Obsession
PJ Harvey - Down By the Water/To Bring You My Love
The Police - Murder By Numbers/Synchronicity
Peter Gabriel - Intruder/Live in Athens 1987
Gang of Four - Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time/Solid Gold
Hatchie - Obsessed/Keepsake
The Godfathers - Obsession/Birth, School, Work, Death
Queens of the Stone Age - You Can't Quit Me Baby/Queens of the Stone Age
Living Colour - Postman/Stain
Soundgarden - Mailman/Superunknown
Sonic Youth - Self-Obsessed and Sexxee/Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
The Afghan Whigs - I Keep Coming Back/Gentlemen
Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Possess Your Heart/Narrow Stairs
I've never understood the fascination with the British royal family here in the U.S. Wasn't this country founded to get away from the monarchy? But whenever there's a royal wedding or some other event going on over there, all the networks (and a lot of the public in general) fall all over themselves in wonder over the pointless pageantry. Nevertheless, I've got songs about queens this week in hour 2 of Stuck In Thee Garage.
Must...crank...the...playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Bob Mould - Neanderthal/Here We Go Crazy
The Men - Tombstone/Buyer Beware
Hunger Anthem - Bloodsucker/Lift
Swervedriver - Pack Yr Vision/The World's Fair EP
Art D'Ecco - Cooler Than This/Serene Demon
Kinski - Staircase Wit/Stumbledown Terrace
The Murder Capital - A Distant Life/Blindness
Ovlov - Eat More (Demo)/Buds Demos
Dax Riggs - Ain't That Darkness/7 Songs for Spiders
Squid - Crispy Skin/Cowards
Guided By Voices - I Couldn't See the Light/Universe Room
The Laughing Chimes - Mudhouse Mansion/Whispers in the Speech Machine
Pigeon Pit - Bronco/Crazy Arms
Kestrels - Interstellar/Better Wonder
Charm School - Youthquaker/Debt Forever
Amyl and the Sniffers - Pigs/Cartoon Darkness
Hour 2: Queens
PJ Harvey - 50 Ft. Queenie/Rid of Me
David Bowie - Queen Bitch/Hunky Dory
Ty Segall - Orange Color Queen/Ty Segall
Shellac and David Yow - God Save the Queen/Halloween 1998 at Lounge Ax
Japandroids - No Allegiance to the Queen/No Singles
Fucked Up - Queen of Hearts/David Comes to Life
The B-52s - Queen of Vegas/Whammy!
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory/So Divided
Guided By Voices - Queen Parking Lot/Surrender Your Poppy Field
Quasi - Queen of Ears/Breaking the Balls of History
Nirvana - Hairspray Queen/Incesticide
The Subways - Rock & Roll Queen/Young for Eternity
Johnny Foreigner - The Last Queens of Scotland/You Can Do Better
Thee Oh Sees - Poor Queen/Mutilator Defeated at Last
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at the TV sensation that was Battle of the Network Stars.
Growing up in the 1970s was very different than it is for kids today. We spent a LOT of time unsupervised, especially those of us who were latchkey kids; in other words, both parents worked and we were left to our own designs while they weren't home.
For me, that really came into play in 1975 when we moved from the high-rise apartment buildings of Scarborough, Ontario (at the time, a suburb of Toronto; now it's actually part of the city) to the eastern suburban town of Pickering. I was in second grade at the time and would walk home from school, let myself into the house and find ways to occupy my time until my parents got home around dinnertime. I didn't really have homework until 5th or 6th grade, so I would either play hockey in my driveway (this WAS Canada, after all) or make myself a snack and watch TV. Typically, it was syndicated reruns of Happy Days, which aired in the afternoon (called Happy Days Again to differentiate from the newer episodes), Barney Miller and M.A.S.H. or older shows like Gilligan's Island.
Like many kids of my generation, I watched a LOT of TV growing. Of course, my biggest role model, my dad, would come home from work, eat dinner and then plop himself down on the couch to watch TV until it was time to go to bed. He loved reruns of shows like Bewitched, the Bob Newhart Show and Hogan's Heroes, but would also watch newer shows like Dallas, the Love Boat or Fantasy Island. And we followed the Toronto Maple Leafs, who at that time typically played on Wednesday and Saturday nights.
These were the days of the Big 3 TV networks: ABC, CBS and NBC. There were UHF (aka cable) stations that showed old movies and reruns, but all new, non-syndicated programming was on the Big 3. Non-scripted shows back then were still all about stars; if you were an ordinary person, you could get on game shows, but the networks were big on star power. A lot more people watched network shows back then, so there was serious competition for eyeballs.
In 1973, ABC began airing the show Superstars as part of its weekend Wide World of Sports programming, with top athletes competing in different sports. One of the first winners was O.J. Simpson in 1975. After seeing its popularity, ABC got the idea to hold a similar competition featuring TV stars competing in different sporting events. Dubbed Battle of the Network Stars, the first episode aired in November 1976 with the competitors participating in swimming, kayaking, volleyball, golf, tennis, bowling, cycling, 3-on-3 football, a baseball dunk tank, running and an obstacle course, as well as game of "Simon Says." After the regular events, the team with the lowest score was eliminated and the remaining two teams determined the winner in a game of tug of war. Legendary sports announcer Howard Cosell was the host, providing overly dramatic commentary for events featuring the likes of Gabe Kaplan, Telly Savalas and Robert Conrad, the three team captains in the first two years.
The great Will Harris put together an entertaining oral history of the Battle of the Network Stars for the A.V. Club several years back, featuring interviews with many of the competitors. The games were entertaining, especially considering the fact that in the mid-1970s, there was much less of a premium on working out than in later years. A lot of the participants were terrible at sports, but that was all part of the fun. There was a combination of big names (the aforementioned captains, Hal Linden, Tom Selleck), young talent (Ron Howard, Jimmie Walker, Scott Baio, Kristy McNichol, Valerie Bertinelli, Todd Bridges), up-and-comers (Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Kurt Russell) and starlets (Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Cheryl Tiegs, Lynda Carter, Erin Gray, Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Adrienne Barbeau). With the last group, the networks were also all about T&A, so getting your hottest stars in bathing suits was definitely good for business.
ABC ran episodes every six months until May 1985, with one final edition in 1988. It also inspired Circus of the Stars, a CBS show that featured TV and movie stars performing circus acts; the show ran from 1977-1994.
There was a lot of good-natured fun, but the actors started to take it seriously because there was money on the line. They received $10,000 each for just showing up, the second-place team won $15,000 each and the winning team got $20,000 each. Sometimes this led to heated confrontations; one year, there was a controversy over the relay race finish. Robert Conrad, the tough guy star of the NBC World War II show Baa Baa Black Sheep, was so incensed by his team getting penalized for a violation that he challenged ABC captain Gabe Kaplan, the standup comic star of Welcome Back, Kotter, to a footrace. Kaplan smoked him in the race, creating great TV in the process.
It was dumb fun and very much of its time, just like the insane network promos that would feature hundreds of stars doing song-and-dance disco numbers to hype the new season. In 2017, ABC revived Battle of the Network Stars as a weekly series, with teams featuring celebrities based on their roles: TV sitcoms, variety, White House, prime time soaps, cops, doctors, etc. It ran for nine episodes and I have zero memory of it even happening.
Of course, the concept of TV celebrity has changed since the '80s with the advent of reality TV. There are plenty of celebrity competition shows, whether it's on Jeopardy, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, MTV's endless series of Real World/Road Rules Challenges, The Surreal Life. As the definition of a celebrity has changed to include YouTube streamers and TikTokers, so has the impact of these competitions.
I don't recall paying a whole lot of attention to Battle of the Network Stars as a kid, other than to know that it was on every so often. But much like the entertainment options of today, they were created to distract us from the scarier stuff going on the world like wars, economic troubles and assassinations. It worked. Almost 50 years later, they're still a lot of fun to look back on through grainy YouTube clips.
Monarchy seems like such an outdated notion, but there are still kings out there and there are certainly world leaders who want to be kings. Regardless, there are many songs about kings and I played some of them in hour 2 of this week's installment of Stuck In Thee Garage. I also paid tribute to the late great David Johansen and played some hot new rippers from Model/Actriz, Fontaines D.C., Preoccupations and The Men in hour 1.
It's good to be the playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
New York Dolls - Personality Crisis/New York Dolls
New York Dolls - Jet Boy/New York Dolls
David Johansen - Funky But Chic/Live It Up
David Johansen - We Gotta Get Out of This Place/Don't Bring Me Down/It's My Life /Live It Up
Model/Actriz - Cinderella/Pirouette
Fontaines D.C. - It's Amazing to Be Young/Single
Preoccupations - Focus/Ill at Ease
The Men - Pony/Buyer Beware
PUP - Hallways/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
The Murder Capital - Death of a Giant/Blindness
Chemtrails - Detritus Andronicus/The Joy of Sects
Patterson Hood - Airplane Screams/Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
Dax Riggs - Deceiver/7 Songs for Spiders
Kinski - Stumbledown Terrace/Stumbledown Terrace
Hour 2: Kings
The I Don't Cares - King of America/Wild Stab
R.E.M. - King of Birds/Document
The Mountain Goats - Clemency for the Wizard King/In League with Dragons
PJ Harvey - The Desperate Kingdom of Love/Uh Huh Her
Rush - A Farewell to Kings/A Farewell to Kings
Rainbow - Kill the King/Long Live Rock 'N Roll
Masters of Reality - Kill the King/Masters of Reality
Kam Fong - King of Prussia/From the Bottom of the Sea
El-P - No Kings/I'll Sleep When You're Dead
Run-DMC - King of Rock/King of Rock
Fu Manchu - Separate Kingdom/California Crossing
Frank Black & the Catholics - King & Queen of Siam/Frank Black & the Catholics
Okkervil River - A King and a Queen/Black Sheep Boy
XTC - King for a Day (acoustic)/K-Rocking in Pasadena 5/29/89
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at the classic 1986 documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
Heavy metal in the 1980s was fairly ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous. I say that with love, because I was a teenage metalhead. I was more of a fan of the heavier bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, but I liked some of the poodle-haired stuff as well like Ratt and Dokken for a while. It didn't take long for the genre to lose its luster, so by 1991 when bands like Nirvana effectively took them off the board, it wasn't a big loss.
But in 1986, that wasn't even a possibility. Metal was riding high and the ridiculousness was in full force. On May 31, Judas Priest was playing at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland. Jeff Krulik and John Heyn borrowed some cameras from the local PBS station and went to interview fans in the parking lot. Thus was born Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a 17-minute documentary that perfectly captured that moment in time, all the mullets, spandex and youthful exuberance.
The amateur filmmakers walked around the lot, telling fans they were from MTV and getting some incredible interviews with the fans, some of whom were feeling no pain. The most notable (and hilarious) was a guy in a zebra-print jumpsuit who went on a rant about Madonna and punk. The documentary managed to be both endearing and illuminating. It resisted the urge to poke fun at the fans while also showing how funny their fandom was. Deadspin did a great piece a while back catching up with a lot of the participants.
Krulik and Heyn showed the doc at some film festivals. They tried to show the doc to the members of Judas Priest, but couldn't get backstage the next time the band came through the DC area in 1988. After a few years, it was consigned as a VHS tape to the shelves of video stores. Obviously, these were the days before the World Wide Web, but the tape went viral in a different way, by word of mouth. Ironically enough, one copy reportedly ended up on Nirvana's tour bus in the early '90s.
I never saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot back when it came out; not many people did. Eventually, when the internet and YouTube became a thing, I and many others saw the documentary and it became a sensation.
Krulik and Heyn made other documentaries: Monster Truck Parking Lot in 1988, Neil Diamond Parking Lot in 1996 and Harry Potter Parking Lot (filmed outside a J.K. Rowling appearance) in 1999. They made a series called Parking Lot in 2004, which aired on Trio. And in 2006, a DVD of Heavy Metal Parking Lot was released.
I turned my back on metal for a while after the early '90s, but I've come to accept that there are no guilty pleasures. Every so often I'll crank up an Iron Maiden or Judas Priest album and feel no shame about it. Life's too short to not enjoy yourself. And if that means putting on a zebra-print jumpsuit and yelling out that Madonna's a dick, then hey, go nuts, man.
Music choices in movies can be crucial to setting the mood, capturing a moment or moving the plot along. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs for an imaginary movie soundtrack in hour 2. It's an eclectic collection of awesome tuneage. Great for driving through Hollywood, for example.
This playlist doesn't pick up hitchhikers:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Kinski - Experimental Hugs/Stumbledown Terrace
The Murder Capital - Moonshot/Blindness
Art d'Ecco - Survival of the Fittest/Serene Demon
Patterson Hood - The Van Pelt Parties (feat. Wednesday)/Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
Dax Riggs - Graveyard Soul/7 Songs for Spiders
Guided By Voices - Aluminum Stingray Girl/Universe Room
Emerald Comets - Dreamnight/Single
Cutouts - Narc/Snakeskin
Horsegirl - Well I Know You're Shy/Phonetics On and On
Kestrels - Total Bummer/Better Wonder
FACS - You Future/Wish Defense
Charm School - Je T'aime (A Quoi Bon)/Debt Forever
Lambrini Girls - Nothing Tastes as Good as It Feels/Who Let the Dogs Out
Sharon Van Etten - Trouble/Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory
English Teacher - I'm Not Crying You're Crying/This Could Be Texas
Twin Foxes - Crossed/Green, It's All Around You
Squid - Building 650/Cowards
Hour 2: Soundtrack to an imaginary movie
Gang of Four - To Hell with Poverty!/ Another Day/Another Dollar EP
Peter Gabriel - Modern Love/Peter Gabriel (1977)
Stiv Bators - Make Up Your Mind/Disconnected
Ween - It's Gonna Be a Long Night/Quebec
Fu Manchu - Boogie Van/King of the Road
Neil Young - Cocaine Eyes/Eldorado EP
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Mistakes and Regrets/Madonna
Orbit - Medicine/Libido Speedway
Jawbreaker - I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both/Dear You
Parliament - Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)/Mothership Connection
Speedy Ortiz - Puffer feat. Lizzo (Lazerbeak remix)/Foiled Again EP
Yves Tumor - Echolalia/Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
XTC - Helicopter/Drums and Wires
Robert Palmer - Looking for Clues/Clues
The Police - Truth Hits Everybody/Outlandos d'Amour
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the soundtrack for the 1970 film Performance.
Movies and music have gone together well since the earliest days of film. There's the score, which is typically instrumental music written for the film that sets the tone for the individual scenes. And then there's the soundtrack, which can consist of specific songs chosen for inclusion in the movie. These can be originals, previously recorded songs or big hits that reflect the time period portrayed in the film.
Some songs have become indelibly tied to certain films. One of those is "Memo from Turner," which Mick Jagger recorded for the soundtrack of the 1970 movie Performance, in which he co-starred as a reclusive rock star.
The movie had a crazy back story. Co-director Donald Cammell originally planned it as a lighthearted '60s romp, with Marlon Brando in the role of the gangster Chas. Later, British actor James Fox took over the gangster role and the story turned into a darker tale filled with graphic violence, sex and drug use. Fox's character is an ambitious London gangster who goes into hiding at the home of Turner (Jagger).
Warner Bros., which was bankrolling the film, assumed it was going to be the Rolling Stones' version of A Hard Day's Night; they were in for a big surprise. Although it was filmed in 1968, the movie wasn't released until 1970 because of the studio's concerns over the sex and violence. Reportedly the wife of a Warners exec vomited in shock at a test screening. When the movie was released in the U.S., the voices of several key actors were dubbed because the studio thought Americans wouldn't be able to understand their Cockney accents. Critics gave the film mixed reviews upon its release; noted critic Richard Schickel of Life called it "the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing." Tell us how you really feel, Dick.
The Stones were originally supposed to write the soundtrack, but there were issues that arose. Jagger's character was involved with one played by Anita Pallenberg, an actress and model who just happened to be the real-life girlfriend of Keith Richards (who stole her away from fellow Stone Brian Jones). Richards was concerned that about rumors that Jagger and Pallenberg had real sex during filming, which was apparently confirmed by Stones pianist Ian Stewart, who was on set during the sex scene. After that, Richards did not want to be involved in the soundtrack, so other musicians were recruited.
The soundtrack was produced by Jack Nitzsche, who was well known for his work with the Stones and Neil Young, among many others. Other major contributors were a young Randy Newman, who sang a rocking version of the song "Gone Dead Train" and slide guitarist extraordinaire Ry Cooder, who contributed some instrumentals as well as the ripping slide on "Memo from Turner."
The song itself has an interesting history. Jagger and Richards wrote the song and the Stones recorded a version in September 1968, featuring Brian Jones on guitar; it was eventually released on the 1975 odds and sods compilation Metamorphosis. After their falling out over Pallenberg, Richards stopped working on the soundtrack and Jagger brought in Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi of Traffic to help out with "Memo." Winwood played bass and Capaldi drums, and then Winwood added guitar, piano and organ. That slower version is below. A few months later, Nitzsche replaced Winwood's guitar with Cooder on slide and Russ Titelman on additional guitar; the organ was removed and the piano parts redone by Randy Newman. This was the version that ended up on the soundtrack and is the best, in my opinion, thanks to Cooder's wicked slide work.
The song was released as a solo single by Jagger in 1970, hitting #32 on the U.K. singles chart. It's a dark, gritty song that fit in well with the "Sympathy for the Devil" era of the Stones.
"Didn't I see you down in San Antone/On a hot and dusty night?/You were eating eggs in Sammy's/When the black man there drew his knife/Oh, you drowned that Jew in Rampton/As he washed his sleeveless shirt/You know, that Spanish-speaking gentleman/The one we all called Kurt?/Come now, gentlemen/I know there's some mistake/How forgetful I'm becoming/Now you've fixed your business straight."
Two decades later, the song re-emerged after Martin Scorsese used it in 1990's Goodfellas in the scene where a coked-out Ray Liotta thinks helicopters are following him. Although it was miscredited as the Stones' version, it's actually the solo Jagger one. A year later, it was covered by the alt-rock band Dramarama, who did a nice version with Mick Taylor on lead guitar, and then in 1993, Debbie Harry of Blondie covered the song on her Debravation tour.
I was in DC over the weekend and picked up a used copy of the Performance soundtrack from a cool little record shop called Art Sound Language. It had been a long time since I'd heard "Memo from Turner," but it's still great.
As for the movie, I haven't actually seen it, other than a few clips, but it developed a cult following in the '70s and '80s and is now considered a classic British gangster film. Quentin Tarantino called Performance "one of the best rock movies of all time." It's available to rent online at a number of different streaming outlets including Amazon Prime and Apple+.
So much is happening right now that 40 years ago might as well be 400, but here we are. As one of the elders who was actually around then, I played songs from 1985 in hour 2 of Stuck In Thee Garage this week. It was a heady time, full of emerging powerhouses, poppy confections and pure genius.
All MacGyver needs is a paper clip to turn this playlist into a pipe bomb:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Mclusky - Way of the Exploding Dickhead/The World is Still Here and So Are We
Hunger Anthem - Ways/Lift
FACS - A Room/Wish Defense
Dax Riggs - Sunshine Felt the Darkness Smile/7 Smiles for Spiders
Horsegirl - Rock City/Phonetics On and On
Squid - Cro-Magnon Man/Cowards
Black Country, New Road - Besties/Forever Howlong
Bully - Atom Bomb (Electric Version)/Single
Guided By Voices - The Great Man/Universe Room
Kestrels - Dream of You in Black/Better Wonder
Ex-Void - Swansea/In Love Again
The Laughing Chimes - High Beams/Whispers in the Speech Machine
Charm School - Cherry Red/Debt Forever
Robyn Hitchcock - The Man in My Head/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
Ben Lee - Like This or Like That (Demo version)/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
Charles Moothart - The Truth (Will Do That)/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
Hour 2: 1985
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey/Psychocandy
R.E.M. - Life and How to Live It/Fables of the Reconstruction
The Replacements - Swingin' Party (Ed Stasium mix)/Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)
Black Flag - Out of This World/In My Head
Husker Du - I Apologize/New Day Rising
Husker Du - Hate Paper Doll/Flip Your Wig
The Cure - In Between Days/The Head on the Door
The Cult - Rain/Love
Sonic Youth - Brave Men Run (In My Family)/Bad Moon Rising
Prince and the Revolution - Tamborine/Around the World in a Day
The Power Station - Get It On (Bang a Gong)/The Power Station
Y&T - Summertime Girls/Down for the Count
Ratt - Lay It Down/Invasion of Your Privacy
David Lee Roth - Easy Street/Crazy from the Heat EP
Jason and the Scorchers - White Lies/Lost & Found
Pete Townshend - Secondhand Love/White City: A Novel
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the Columbia House Record Club, which mass-produced records, tapes and CDs for generations with bait-and-switch offers.
If you're of a certain age (40+), you've likely heard of the Columbia House Record Club. In the early '80s, when I joined, it advertised in magazines like Parade with offers of 12 records for a penny. Of course, the catch was you had to buy several more at a marked-up price.
I signed up at age 14 in 1982 after we had moved to Washington state. You would receive a monthly mailing with a catalog and card featuring a record of the month, which the club would mail you if you didn't return the card within 10 days saying you didn't want it (or you wanted something else). Many kids would sign up under fake names, pocketing the records (or cassettes or later, CDs) and then signing up under a different name. I wasn't savvy enough to think of these tactics, so I just kept sending the card back.
There was a competing club run by RCA (which later became BMG) that I also joined. I used the clubs to build my music collection with older releases by bands like Led Zeppelin, the Who and Van Halen. Later, I got some decent deals on box sets by the Velvet Underground, the Clash and Robert Johnson. But basically the whole thing was a scam that lasted for decades.
The club used negative option billing, a practice in which services are automatically supplied to consumers until a specific cancellation order is issued. The practice was outlawed in Canada in 2005 and is still legal in 35 states (as of a few years ago).
Also, as it turned out, underage customers weren't legally bound to the agreement; sadly, I didn't realize this until much later.
Columbia House got its start in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club, formed by CBS/Columbia Records as a foray into mail-order sales. It grew so fast that the company moved its operations from New York City to Terre Haute, Indiana, where the company had opened a record pressing facility. Soon RCA Victor and Capitol Records also launched record clubs; each club sold only their label's releases at first.
In the 1960s, Columbia began clubs for reel-to-reel, 8-track and cassette tapes, with Columbia House becoming the overarching brand for the mail-order divisions. By 1975, there were more than 3 million members. In 1982, the CBS Video Club became part of Columbia House. In 1988, Sony acquired the CBS Records Group, which included Columbia House, which had 6 million members at the time. The corporate shuffling continued in 1991, when the CBS Records Group was renamed Sony Music Entertainment and half of Columbia House was sold to Time Warner, which added Time Life's video and music clubs, pushing the membership of Columbia House to 10 million.
After college, I started buying CDs like everybody else and realized they were a lot cheaper to buy used from record stores. I fulfilled my record club agreements and ditched them both in the early '90s, but Columbia House grew even bigger in the CD era. In 1994, Columbia House and other clubs accounted for 15% of all CD sales; two years later, Columbia House hit its peak at 16 million members. The clubs targeted customers in rural areas who didn't have access to record stores.
In 1999, Columbia House announced a merger with online retailer CDNow, which was struggling and had partnerships with Columbia House and its owners Sony and Time Warner. The merger was abandoned the following year as Columbia House's finances were having trouble and there was increased competition from a new retailer called Amazon.com. CDNow was then bought by Bertelsmann, which partially merged it with BMG Direct in a new venture called BeMusic. Amazon then took over CDNow in 2001; that year, music clubs accounted for less than 8% of all CD sales, which was attributed to competition from online outlets and big box retailers like Wal-Mart.
In 2001, a security breach in the Columbia House website exposed thousands of customer names, addresses and portions of credit card numbers. The following year, Sony and AOL Time Warner sold 85% of Columbia House to an investment firm called The Blackstone Group. There were rumors of a merger of Columbia House and Blockbuster, but that never happened. In 2005, longtime rival BMG bought Columbia House and merged it with the BMG Music Service, calling the new venture BMG Columbia House.
Of course, by this time, CD sales were plummeting thanks to the proliferation of digital music and file-sharing sites like Napster that allowed people to download terabytes of free music. Nobody was buying physical media anymore, let alone from a scammy record club.
Another investment firm, JMCK Corp. (the 2000s were the era of the investment firm; the company I worked was bought and sold by a few of them during that time) bought BMG Columbia House and changed its name to the uber-catchy Direct Brands. The music mail-order part of the club was shut down on June 30, 2009. Direct Brands continued to run a DVD and Blu-Ray Disc club under the name Columbia House; the club's owners filed for bankruptcy in 2015. There's a still a Columbia House website up, although it doesn't seem like it has been updated in a while.
Since the decline of the big mail-order music clubs, vinyl (and cassettes to a lesser degree) have made a slight return to popularity courtesy of hipsters. Artists like Taylor Swift and Adele have created a huge demand for their vinyl releases, so much so that pressing plants are overwhelmed by them and lower-profile artists have to wait to get their albums pressed. Rabid young fans often buy the records without having anything to play them on.
And there are even newer clubs springing up like Vinyl Me, Please that send a record of the month to members. Another popular option for many indie artists is to reissue albums on vinyl, especially 20th or 30th anniversary editions with bonus tracks.
In a music world dominated by streaming, it's nice to have physical media to turn to on occasion. I still have most of the records I bought from Columbia House and RCA/BMG (and even the cassette of Eddie Murphy's Comedian album; I only listened to that on my Walkman so my mom wouldn't freak out at all the swearing), so I guess I got my money's worth. Sort of.
Oh hey, it's Valentine's Day. A big deal for some, not so much for others. Whatever the case, this week on Stuck In Thee Garage I played anti-Valentine's songs in hour 2 because why the hell not? There are many occasions when love does indeed stink.
This playlist says whoop de doo:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
FACS - Desire Path/Wish Defense
Rocket - Take Aim/Versions of You
Charm School - Crime Time/Debt Forever
Algernon Cadwallader - Springing Leaks (live)/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
The War on Drugs - Arms Like Boulders (live)/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
Ty Segall - The Hallway/Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
Destroyer - Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World/Dan's Boogie
Pigeon Pit - Apple/Crazy Arms
Chemtrails - Sycophant's Paradise/The Joy of Sects
Shawn Smith - Turn On the Water/Single
Wilco - Spiders (Kidsmoke) 9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago version/A Ghost is Born expanded edition
Hallelujah the Hills - I Wanna Destroy You/Puritan Garage Howlers Vol. II
Lambrini Girls - Filthy Rich Nepo Baby/Who Let the Dogs Out
Twin Foxes - Pinnacle/Green, It's All Around You
Wild Pink - Eating the Egg Whole/Dulling the Horns
Hour 2: Anti-Valentine's
Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)/Singles Going Steady
Grinderman - No Pussy Blues/Grinderman
The Godfathers - Love is Dead/Birth, School, Work, Death
PJ Harvey - Dry/Rid of Me
The Raveonettes - Expelled from Love/Lust Lust Lust
The Pretenders - Stop Your Sobbing/Pretenders
Betty Davis - Anti Love Song/Betty Davis
PUP - Robot Writes a Love Song/The Unraveling of PUPtheBand
Matthew Sweet - Love is Gone/Kimi Ga Suki Raifu
Band of Horses - No One is Gonna Love You/Cease to Begin
The Pursuit of Happiness - Killed by Love/Love Junk
Van Halen - You're No Good/II
Judas Priest - (Take These) Chains/Screaming for Vengeance
Sasami - Not a Love Song/Squeeze
Crystal Castles - Not in Love (feat. Robert Smith)/Single
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at V66, the short-lived Boston-based music video channel from the mid-1980s.
In this age of on-demand streaming of pretty much anything you want, it's interesting to look back on how different things were for entertainment options when I was a kid. You were pretty much at the whim of radio and TV programmers in terms of when and what you could see; if you missed the episode of Happy Days that featured Robin Williams as Mork from Ork (which originally aired in February 1978), you had to wait for summer reruns to see it again. There were no DVRs or on-demand options, or even VCRs (at least nobody I knew had one then) to record the episode.
Artists had been making music videos since the 1960s, but I didn't really become aware of them until 1979, when a Toronto station called CITY-TV began airing a show called The New Music. In addition to running interviews with the hottest musicians of the day and concert footage, the show would air music videos. I remember seeing "Ashes to Ashes" by David Bowie, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police, "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads and "One Step Beyond" by Madness, among many others. This coincided with the beginning of my lifelong obsession with music, so seeing videos was a cool new way to enjoy it.
I remember hearing about the launch of MTV in the U.S. in August 1981; a few months later, we would move to Richland, Washington, where my dad had taken a job. The cable system there, like many in the country, hadn't picked up MTV yet, so it was just a concept at that point. But there were other ways to see videos: USA Network's Night Flight was a four-hour show that featured full-length and short films, concerts and rock videos, and HBO had a show called Video Jukebox.
A few years later, we moved to Kingston, New Hampshire, where the cable system again didn't have MTV available. NBC launched Friday Night Videos at 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning (right after Late Night with David Letterman); I would try and stay up and watch it up but would often fall asleep part way through because it was so late. One time, I was fading in and out while watching Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance," which led to some really strange dreams. And the Boston CBS affiliate had a show called Hot Hit Video that would air in the afternoons after school. Sometimes I would go with my friend Jeremy to his girlfriend's house in a neighboring town where they got MTV and watch videos for hours.
During my senior year of high school (1984-85), I discovered a new video channel called V66. It wasn't on our cable system, but you could pick it up with an antenna on the UHF band (if you cut the cord from cable now, you can still pick up UHF stations with a digital antenna). We had one TV that wasn't on cable and one day I was watching and flipping stations and came across channel 66, which was playing "How Soon is Now?" by the Smiths; I was blown away by the song, but also the fact that this station existed.
WVJV-TV (aka V66) went on the air almost exactly 40 years ago, on February 12. Launched by Boston-area radio veterans John Garabedian and Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg, V66 followed the same format as MTV, with video jockeys introducing music videos and concerts and hosting events in the Boston area. The station played a wide variety of music, from rock to pop to hip hop, mixing in local unknown acts with major artists. Local artists featured included Til Tuesday, Del Fuegos, Extreme and the Fools. With the New England Patriots getting ready to take on the Chicago Bears in the 1986 Super Bowl, V66 even produced an answer video to the Bears' popular "Super Bowl Shuffle" called "New England, the Patriots and We." It's as hilariously cringy as it sounds (see below), and the Pats ended up getting demolished by the Bears.
In July 1985, V66 aired the big Live Aid benefit concerts (in addition to ABC). Eventually in an attempt to increase ratings, the station added news shows, sports highlights, comedies and syndicated programs. Ratings were measured by 30- and 60-minute blocks; it was difficult to maintain steady ratings when a viewer might change the channel if they didn't like a particular song that was airing. (Interestingly enough, MTV came to the same realization a few years later and began airing non-music-based programming like the game show Remote Control and later reality shows like The Real World and Road Rules. MTV still exists, but you won't find music videos anymore, just endless viewings of tedious "reality" shows.)
I didn't watch V66 a whole lot because the signal was so fuzzy; I lived in the boonies so V66 would kind of come and go. I would check in every so often and watch it for a while before it got too staticky. When I went to college in the fall of 1985, I didn't have a TV in my room anymore (we just had a bit TV in the dorm lounge; it was a different time, kids), so I wasn't able to watch V66 anymore. And then when I came home for the holidays that December, the local cable system had finally added MTV, so I watched that whenever I could.
V66 didn't stick around for very long. Garabedian was hoping it would become a national network, but by the summer of 1986, the station was sold to the Home Shopping Network; it went off the air on my 19th birthday, September 21, 1986. The station now broadcasts the Spanish-language network Univision to the Boston area.
Although it wasn't around very long, V66 made a strong impression on music fans in the Boston area. Local filmmaker Eric Green watched the channel as a young child and in 2008, began working on a documentary about V66, interviewing former staff and viewers. The documentary, Life on the V: The Story of V66, came out in 2014. It's been out on DVD since 2015 and is screening at the Somerville Theatre on February 27 as part of the theatre's February offerings. It's a fun look at an interesting blip in the Boston media landscape. I interviewed Green about Life on the V for my podcast in 2012 while he was making the film (listen to parts 1 and 2) and again in 2015 after it was released (listen here).
Fast forward 40 years and music videos are still made, but they're nowhere near as influential as they were in the '80s and '90s. You can find them on YouTube whenever you want, but you're hard-pressed to find then on TV anymore. Certainly not on MTV. But for a short time in the mid-80s in Boston, you could get your video fix on V66. And that wasn't a bad thing at all.
War is never a good solution to a problem, but mankind sure gets into a lot of them. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about war in hour 2. It's enough to get your drill sergeant all fired up.
This playlist will make you drop and give it 20:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
PUP - Paranoid/Single
Lambrini Girls - Bad Apple/Who Let the Dogs Out
Charm School - Boycott Everything Everywhere/Debt Forever
Swervedriver - Volume Control/The World's Fair EP
Momma - I Want You (Fever)/Welcome to My Blue Sky
Chemtrails - Join Our Death Cult/The Joy of Sects
Snapped Ankles - Raoul/Hard Times Furious Dancing
J Mascis - Breathe/Single
Runnner - Coinstar/Single
Benjamin Booker - Slow Dance in a Gay Bar/Lower
Tunde Adebimpe - Drop/Thee Black Boltz
Peel Dream Magazine - Callers/Modern Meta Physic reissue
The Gits - Kings and Queens/Frenching the Bully 2024 remaster
Hallelujah the Hills - That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate/Puritan Garage Howlers Vol. II
Ex-Void - Pinhead/In Love Again
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Kurt Cobain's Cardigan/Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010
The Laughing Chimes - Fluorescent Minds/Whispers in the Speech Machine
Hour 2: War
IDLES - War/Ultra Mono
The Police - Bombs Away/Zenyatta Mondatta
XTC - Generals and Majors/Black Sea
Frank Black - Dance War/The Cult of Ray
The Dils - Class War/Dils Dils Dils
Oxford Collapse - The Birthday Wars/Bits
Waxahatchee - War/Saint Cloud
Sufjan Stevens - "The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"/Come On Feel the Illinoise
The Besnard Lakes - Cedric's War/The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse
Ladyhawk - War/Fight for Anarchy
The New Pornographers - Centre for Holy Wars/Mass Romantic
Cat Power - He War/You Are Free
Tiny Magnetic Pets - Cold War Neon/Deluxe Debris
Golden Gurls - End of the War/Typo Magic
Iron Maiden - Die With Your Boots On/Piece of Mind
Part 2 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey about bad songs from good artists. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
Songs we hate by artists we love
Phil's #6: U2 makes a misstep
Bono's talking tough
Jay's #6: A #1 hit from Cheap Trick featuring outside songwriters
The power ballad became huge for hard rock bands
Phil's #5: AC/DC hits it big after losing their singer
Jay's #5: When the biggest band tries to get weird
Phil's #4: When GNR decided to cover Dylan
They had lots of bad covers
Jay's #4: When Aerosmith hit #1 with a soundtrack ballad
Late-period Aerosmith is tough to take
Phil's #3: The Smiths get preachy about animal rights
Let's hear it for Bovine University
Morrissey with ham-fisted lyrics about vegetarianism
Jay's #3: R.E.M. had a couple of stinkers
A version of the song ended up on Sesame Street
Phil's #2: Punk rock upstarts go acoustic
Green Day ended up becoming very mainstream
Jay's #2: Bowie and Jagger with a very '80s abomination of a cover
Video premiered during Live Aid
Phil's #1: A definitive low for the Police at their most successful time
Andy Summers wrote some bad songs every so often
Jay's #1: Genesis with an all-timer of an offensive song
The video alone is brutal
Blame it on Mike Rutherford
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.
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at Pump Up the Volume, the 1990 Christian Slater movie about a pirate radio DJ.
As the 1980s were ending, there was a definite shift happening in the music world and pop culture in general. Alternative or college rock was starting to gain some traction in the mainstream music world, with bands like U2 and R.E.M. emerging as superstars by the decade's end. There was still plenty of lame stuff on the charts, but the fact that a band like Love and Rockets could have the #3 song on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1989 was a sign that things were indeed changing.
On the silver screen, John Hughes made a big impression in the '80s for his bittersweet comedies, there was also a glut of dumb teen party movies. But things were changing there as well, with Cameron Crowe's great 1989 dramedy Say Anything being a leading example. Canadian director Allan Moyle, who had made the iconic 1980 new wave comedy Times Square, wrote a script about a teenager who runs his own pirate radio station, based on a high school classmate of his who would distribute anonymous pamphlets with commentaries on life and school issues. The classmate later killed himself; his struggles informed the script, which a producer convinced him to direct.
Originally called Lean On Me, the film was picked up by New Line Cinema, which was notable for making independent movies at the time, including the Nightmare on Elm Street series but also John Waters' controversial films and Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy. While the studio supported Moyle's vision, there were still some moves to make it more mainstream, like changing the title to Pump Up the Volume, the name of a dance song that was a big hit for M/A/R/R/S in 1987.
Moyle initially wanted John Cusack to star as Mark Hunter, the meek high school student who revealed another side of his personality as DJ Hard Harry, but Cusack refused because he was finished playing high school kids. They ended up going with Christian Slater, who was a hot commodity after starring in 1989's Heathers as a fairly twisted character that was sort of a high school version of Jack Nicholson. He was also having some issues offscreen, with two drunk driving arrests in 1988 and 1989, the second of which saw him crash his car into some telephone poles after leading police on a car chase; he spent 10 days in jail. Samantha Mathis played Nora, who becomes obsessed with figuring out the identity of the mysterious DJ.
Set in a suburb of Phoenix, the movie finds Slater playing a shy loner in school during the day who then unleashes his angst at night when he broadcasts a radio show from his parents' basement. He plays punk rock and hip hop, goes on animated rants about corruption and how corporations and adults suck, and adds to the shock factor by pretending to masturbate. Eventually, he builds a following among his classmates, who don't know his identity but are picking up what he's putting down. Harry struggles with the fact that a student who called into his show later killed himself and he encourages his listeners to deal with their problems. As students start circulating bootleg tapes of Harry's show, parents and faculty become convinced it's causing the school's problems and call the police. The movie's third act gets a little ridiculous, with seemingly every student in the school gathering to follow Harry's every word and the FCC sending a small army of vehicles out to trace the show's location.
While pirate radio never became a huge thing in the U.S., eventually podcasts, YouTube and social media became similar ways for people to create their own content and get their thoughts out to a wider audience. The movie was also ahead of its time with its eclectic soundtrack, which featured Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" as the station's theme song but also provided a pre-Lollapalooza vibe with songs from Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Pixies, Bad Brains and Henry Rollins, Peter Murphy, Above the Law, Cowboy Junkies, Ivan Neville and Concrete Blonde (covering "Everybody Knows"). Included in the film are Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Stan Ridgway, Was (Not Was), Descendents, Richard Hell and Urban Dance Squad.
The film was a dud at the box office when it was released in August 1990, grossing only $1.6 million on its opening weekend and a total of $11.5 million in North America. Part of the problem may have been its R rating, which kept its target audience from seeing it in the theater. The studio also didn't a good job distributing and marketing the movie.
It garnered a cult following when it was released to home video. Thanks to rights issues primarily to do with the music licensing, Pump Up the Volume's soundtrack isn't available for streaming. The movie is currently not available for streaming, either, although it has popped up on Max from time to time (I watched it a few years ago). It's available on Blu-ray, though. It's also up on YouTube in a series of clips if you want to watch it that way.
Indie movies also began to have more success in the years that followed Pump Up the Volume's release, with auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson making their mark, among many others.
After Pump Up the Volume, Moyle went on to direct The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag and Empire Records in the '90s, but nothing since. A musical theater adaptation of Pump Up the Volume was supposed to premiere in April 2020, but didn't happen because of the COVID pandemic. Slater had box office success in the '90s, including appearances in True Romance, Interview with the Vampire and Broken Arrow, but since 2000, he has had more work on TV, most notably in Mr. Robot. Mathis similarly became a popular '90s movie actress and continues to work on TV and in movies.
I remember when Pump Up the Volume came out but never saw it in the theater. My interest in it was piqued a few years later when my brother made me a cassette of the soundtrack album. Eventually, I saw it on cable. It's not perfect, but I appreciate the spirit and the effort.
It has been 45 years or so since Neil Young sang that it's better to burn out than to fade away, but is it really? Fading away has its benefits. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about fading away in hour 2. It's enough to make you want to drift off...
Here's the playlist in a snap:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Lambrini Girls - Company Culture/Who Let the Dogs Out
Charm School - Debt Forever/Debt Forever
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Come Saturday (Searching for the Now version)/Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010
Pigeon Pit - Bad Advice/Crazy Arms
The Waterboys - Hopper's On Top (Genius)/Life, Death and Dennis Hopper
Art d'Ecco - True Believer/Serene Demon
The Laughing Chimes - Atrophy/Whispers in the Speech Machine
