Pop That Goes Crunch!

Seven Decades Of Melodic Rock & Roll

Archive for the month “July, 2012”

05 Jul 2012
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Big Star’s “Breathtakingly Beautiful Music”

Today I am reblogging a piece from last month on Big Star. As Brian Westbye notes, they indeed put out “breathtakingly beautiful music.” My earlier post on the band, and “September Gurls” in particular, can be found here: https://popthatgoescrunch.com/2011/12/19/the-greatest-song-you-probably-never-heard/

Brian Westbye's avatarbrian westbye

This is the third installment of a series. Due to the subjective nature of what quantifies a One Hit Wonder, how much of the band must be dead to be a One Hit Wonder With Dead Guys, etc., etc., etc., there will be some shifting of the goal posts across these essays. Such is life and rock ‘n roll.

Goal Post Shift 1: Big Star never got anywhere near a hit. Big Star’s singer/guitarist Alex Chilton did have a #1 – “The Letter” – with his previous band, The Box Tops, for four weeks in the summer of 1967, when he was sixteen (with a much older voice). But the closest Big Star got to the charts during their existence from 1971 – 1974 was nowhere, and the closest they got to public acclaim was in 1998, when the song “In the Street” was appropriated as the theme song of…

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03 Jul 2012

Jack Of All Trades

Yes, I know, cover versions of songs can suck eggs. Sometimes they are slavish imitations of the originals, hoping to cash in on familiarity. Sometimes they try so hard to be wildly different than the original that they succeed only in being wildly different than the original. No matter what, though, the original usually is better than the cover.

The song “I’m Shakin'” has been around the block a couple of times.

Little Willie John, whose 1956 waxing of “Fever” went to the top of the R&B charts, did the first version of the song, way back in 1961.

The Blasters never failed to get the crowd moving with their jazzier version, first recorded in 1981. I remember almost being knocked over a couple of times when they played it at one of their shows.

The new edition of the song by John Anthony Gillis, known better as Jack White — formerly of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and many other bands and one-offs — is a rollicking, no-holds-barred workout with a couple of slicing guitars, some hand claps and female back-up singers added to the mix.

The AllMusic guide White’s version of “I’m Shakin'” “clumsy” and “cabaret.” If it is “clumsy,” its perfectly “clumsy,” consistent with White’s analog, tape and razor blade approach to record-making. He makes “I’m Shakin'” entirely his own. It is indeed a record, in the best mid-70s meaning of the word. It’s over-the-top in a good way.

So, here it is. I dare you to remain still while listening. The thing just moves. And enjoy the wacky home-made video mash-up featuring the Soul Train dancers:

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01 Jul 2012

The Revenge Against Bloat Rock

The last post on this blog displayed a decided preference for the easy, the breezy and the casual in rock music over the making of Big Statements. Rock musicians just ain’t philosophers.

That got me thinking about the most simple, catchy two-chord pop punk issued over the last year. And it was put out by a guy — along with his family — with a natural penchant for navel-gazing and the issuance of important proclamations about life.

That would be “I Want Revenge” by The Boo, a side-project of the occasionally self-important Billie Joe Armstrong. While Green Day certainly has put out a lot of catchy two minute pieces of pop punk goodness, it occasionally shows bloat rock tendencies. However, the band’s earlier side project, The Foxboro Hot Tubs, put out a terrific — and quite fun — record a couple of years ago steeped in the British Invasion and Garage Rock. It made no Big Statements.

The Boo, though, is even more simple, consisting of Armstrong, his wife and their two sons. It sounds positively 1979. Its fast. Its kind of repetitive. Its kind of obnoxious. It conveys a single theme over three buzz-saw minutes — “you broke my heart, I’m gonna get you back.” It thus has all of the elements to have been featured prominently on Rodney on the Roq way back in the day. Here it is:

Heck, the packaging even looks like a 45 sold at Rhino Records back in 1979:

Channeling 1979

You can call “I Want Revenge” nostalgia. You can call it backward-looking. Or you can just call it fun. It makes no Big Statements. It doesn’t even try. And that’s a really good thing.

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