V02-T11 England Rocks

.....Yes, you've probably heard it before and no, you probably haven't. This is going to take a bit of explaining.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 11

• 02:51 "ENGLAND ROCKS" (Ian Hunter)
• performed by Ian Hunter
• original source: A-side, 7" CBS 5497 (UK) July, 1977
• and my source: 2LP SHADES OF IAN HUNTER Columbia C2 36251 (US) 1979

.....After I put this compilation tape together in 1993, this track was released as a bonus track for the CD of the album OVERNIGHT ANGELS Columbia/Sony Rewind 506063 2 (E) January 28th, 2002. There was an earlier CD pressing of the album (without the bonus track) for the European market in 1994 and a later one in Japan in 2006. We finally got a sort-of domestic release when it was combined with ALL-AMERICAN ALIEN BOY for American Beat Records, including "ENGLAND ROCKS" as a bonus track.

.....According to Ian Hunter's own liner notes from the 2CD compilation ONCE BITTEN TWICE SHY, this song was first written as "CLEVELAND ROCKS". I'm not sure when it was written exactly, but Hunter rarely wrote about America or American music for Mott The Hoople, but frequently did as a solo artist. And while there's been a handful of outtakes from each of his first two solo LP's (IAN HUNTER and ALL-AMERICAN ALIEN BOY) surfacing as bonus tracks and compilation tracks in the past two decades, "CLEVELAND ROCKS" hasn't been one of them. What he did bring with him from those sessions to the third album was a long-standing connection to the band Queen. Early in their career Queen opened for Mott and were shocked at how good their live shows were, given the commercial underperformance of their Island albums. While Ian was recording ALL-AMERICAN ALIEN BOY in New York, his wife Trudi bumped into Queen on a trans-Atlantic flight, mentioned his sessions at Electric Lady and after landing, the band waited around for an hour at the studio hoping to contribute something. While their own "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY" single and A NIGHT AT THE OPERA album were both number one in England and top ten in the US, all they wanted at that moment was to be on Hunter's record. They provided the overwhelming backing vocals to "YOU NEARLY DID ME IN", bumping it up to A-side status (it was still buried in the charts by their own "YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND", ironically). The Queen connection continued after they completed their next album, A DAY AT THE RACES, and their producer Roy Thomas Baker signed on to produce Hunter's next, OVERNIGHT ANGELS, and help him get a harder rock sound than he had producing himself.

.....To this day, Hunter reportedly does not perform songs from this album live. His memories of the project, aside from the actual recording, are pretty bad. During the production period, Hunter had secured a house for the band and crew to crash in (for comfort, camaraderie and minimizing lost time). While they were sleeping, the house caught fire and it was only through sheer dumb luck that nobody died. When the jackets for the album were printed, the photo of studio drummer Dennis Elliott (properly credited in small print) was replaced with a photo of touring drummer Curly Smith. Elliott had been on Hunter's first solo album and then joined Foreigner, whose first album and single had only just come out in the US and was due out imminently in England when the jacket proofs appeared. Hunter had been hoping to persuade Elliott to come back full time, but the jacket switch hurt his case long enough for Foreigner's 7" and LP to go top 5 in the US, killing it completely. This and a number of other things led Hunter to fire his manager, and... well, I should just let Ian explain this one:

"OVERNIGHT ANGELS was not released in the US because I fired my manager, Fred Heller, during the English promotional tour-- just before it was to be released in America. Columbia said they didn't want to release it until I had new management and that dragged on until it became too late." [from Ian Hunter's website, maintained by his wife, Trudi; under the heading 'The Horse's Mouth #6 August 7th, 2000']

.....The label CBS also reportedly nixed using the song "CLEVELAND ROCKS", claiming it was too regional in scope to be widely popular. That didn't seem to hurt "NUTBUSH CITY LIMITS", "BRISTOL STOMP", "MEMPHIS", "JACKSON" or dozens of songs about Chicago and New York. We could probably put this down to executives feeling pressured to appear to have some kind of magical insight into the idiosyncrasies of their business but zero incentive or reward for being right and zero punishment for being wrong. (Sidebar: 1977 was the same year that the comic book character The Incredible Hulk-- then 15 years old-- was turned into a television series. The executives at CBS-TV insisted the character's name, Bruce Banner, be changed to David because they were certain that the public would find the name Bruce too effeminate. Keep in mind that Bruce Jenner took home a chestful of gold medals for being the world's greatest athlete the previous summer and was still on boxes of Wheaties. I'm just saying...) Producing a new session himself, Hunter finally recorded the song as "ENGLAND ROCKS" and it was released with "WILD 'N' FREE" from the OA album on the back.

.....After waiting out Mick Ronson's contractual obligations, Hunter and Ronson were working together again in 1978 on a succession of low-profile and mostly fruitless studio sessions with Corky Laing and Felix Pappalardi (of Mountain) and John Cale, but it was an offer to produce an album for punk group Generation X (with Billy Idol) that led to him signing with their label, Chrysalis. He and Ronson produced his next album, YOU'RE NEVER ALONE WITH A SCHIZOPHRENIC in 1979 and included "SHIPS", covered mere months later by Barry Manilow(?) and becoming Manilow's only top ten single from the ONE VOICE album. In England Hunter had released singles for "WHEN THE DAYLIGHT COMES" and his own "SHIPS" when he got his first US chart action for a single with "JUST ANOTHER NIGHT", backed with the new "CLEVELAND ROCKS". That led to "CLEVELAND ROCKS" getting an A-side release in England and Columbia rethinking matters. Early in 1980, about two months before Chrysalis would release a live double-LP of Hunter and Ronson, Columbia released a double-LP compilation: SHADES OF IAN HUNTER-- THE BALLAD OF IAN HUNTER AND MOTT THE HOOPLE. US copies are actually marked '1979' for copyright purposes. It included one LP of Mott (but only 1972-1974) and one LP of Hunter solo. The first three sides were good mixtures of hits and rarities (given the limited space and the fact that Columbia/CBS already had a hits compilation for Mott in print), but side four was made of "ENGLAND ROCKS", "WILD'N'FREE" and three other songs from OVERNIGHT ANGELS.

.....I wanted to see that compilation make it to CD, but in 1988 Chrysalis used the name SHADES OF IAN HUNTER for a CD-only compilation of 1979-1982 material. Believing that the two labels would dispute claim to the title endlessly, I gave up waiting and added this to my tape as a legitimate rarity. By the end of 1993, too late for me, the Columbia compilation came out on CD in Germany. Then, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, OA got a European CD in 1994, etc. In 1997, The Drew Carey Show (on US television) changed it's opening theme song to a cover of "CLEVELAND ROCKS" by American band Presidents Of The United States. Since then it's been kicking around more broadly than before in the general pop-consciousness, but for many out there the "ENGLAND ROCKS" recording is still an unusual twist on things.

.....Tomorrow, more England, more rock.

V02-T10 Sweet Jane

.....We lost Jim Carroll last year. The fact that he died on September 11th in Manhattan means that he may have been overshadowed in the electronic media, where lazy and sensationalist editors no doubt had video retrospectives of the 2001 attacks prepared weeks in advance, if not left over from the year before. It was in all the papers, though.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?" track 10

• 4:11 "SWEET JANE" (Lou Reed)
• performed by Jim Carroll
• original source: LP I WRITE YOUR NAME Atlantic 80123-1 (US) Jan. 16th, 1984
• and my source: CD I WRITE YOUR NAME Atlantic 80123-2 (US) [no date; 1991?]

.....I promise, this will be the last cover tune for this volume of the series.

.....Jim Carroll knew Lou Reed personally when the Velvet Underground first recorded this song (notice how the name 'Lou' is used in this version where the name 'Jim' is used in the original). Carroll was a teenaged junkie poetry prodigy at the time, often in or around performance spaces in New York. About that time, in 1968, Valerie Solanas tried to murder Velvets patron Andy Warhol, prompting him to reverse his earlier relatively-open-door policy at The Factory. Warhol's prior willingness to host a large number and broad range of eccentrics resulted in these people playing off of and energizing each other. When he closed the doors, that flow of creativity he had cultivated couldn't just stop. It came out of the basements and occupied the clubs. Carroll and Reed were both productive creatively before meeting Warhol, but in the 1970's they had an audience beyond the Factory that they didn't have before.

.....The album that this comes from is the last one entirely of music from Carroll. He continued playing with bands but those recordings were released on various artists collections and hybrids of music and spoken-word performance such as POOLS OF MERCURY.

V02-T09 Simultaneous Simultude

.....Having just read Jon Savage's book "England's Dreaming" the year before making this tape, I had a new appreciation for the punk movement that sprung up in Ohio in the early 1970's just after the earliest days of the New York scene and before Malcolm McLaren decided to make a copy of the New York Dolls (and take credit for the idea). As it turned out, I had examples of many of the pieces of the Ohio scene in my music collection without knowing that they could be put together to form a larger picture.

Volume 2:"WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 9

• 03:04 "MY THEORY OF SIMULTANEOUS SIMULTUDE/RED TIN BUS" (The Wooden Birds)
• performed by David Thomas and The Wooden Birds
• original source: LP MONSTER WALKS THE WINTER LAKE TwinTone TTR8661 (US) 1986
• and my source: CD MONSTER WALKS THE WINTER LAKE TwinTone TTRCD8661 (Japan) 1986

.....David Thomas is better known as the lead singer of Pere Ubu, an innovative band well known in the Cleveland area in the mid 1970's. Before 1980 they had already crossed paths with Rocket From The Tombs (the inspiration for the band Rocket From The Crypt), The Dead Boys and Electric Eels. When Pere Ubu lapsed into inactivity in the early 1980's, Thomas reacted by pursuing solo work. In this selection he warms up his assembled studio band with a mental exercise and when one member remains silent Thomas explains in an aside to the listeners that the band member is "from New York", as though no further explanation were necessary.

.....The mental exercise in question is like a cross between a psychologist's word association test and the S.A.T.'s. His conjecture that "Everything is like... something" really asks if everything can be described in terms of other things. For instance: if you look up a word in the dictionary, isn't the definition just made of other words? And if you look up those words, the pattern repeats itself until you reach a definition that hinges on the word you started with. Simultaneous Simultude bypasses all of that by presuming that the natures of things are as cyclical as our language. Anything that has a name or can be described must be defined using words, which in turn are defined using other words which in turn are used to describe some other object. Why not simply compare the original item to that 'other object' and cut out the middle man?

.....Next I'll look at not one, but two New York Legends.

V02-T08 The Day The World Turned Day-Glo

.....For any readers who have not lived in England and who are not certain what a "Wimpy Bar" is, the photo on the right is an example of one. It's a fast food restaurant chain, probably the first in England and inspired by the character Wimpy ("I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today...") from the Popeye cartoons/comic strip. Now, before I inadvertently contribute to the mountain of online misinformation out there, I should point out two things: (1) the owners of the Wimpy restaurants don't license or use the cartoon character and (2) they're not affiliated with the Popeye's Fried Chicken restaurants.

.....Oh, and if anybody asks, the photo (assuming it reproduces properly) was uploaded to Flickr by somebody named 'Sumit'. They either are meticulous at cropping digital photos or have a wonderful sense of composition when snapping shots of discount diners.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 8

• 02:50 "THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED DAY-GLO" (Poly Styrene)
• performed by X-Ray Specs
• original source: A-side, 7" EMI INT553 (UK) April, 1978
• and my source: CD GERM-FREE ADOLESCENTS Caroline CAROL 1813-2 (US) 1991

.....Poly Styrene was actually Marion Elliott, whose half-English, half-Somali heritage made her stand out when punk swept London in 1977. She definitely belonged in a key spot in punk as a cultural movement; this song was not her only one that showed a keen eye for society's acquiescence and capitulation to the artificial. But in punk as a scene that became increasingly filled with Northern skins and pale, disaffected Mancunians, being afro'd, Arabic, teenage and female was a combination that made her a demographic of one. At the beginning of the year merely being in a punk band gave you an extended family of sorts, but by the end of 1977 there were so many people identifying as punks that the scene was factionalizing under its own weight.

.....This song really dates from at least as far back as the summer of 1977. A studio demo from that time nearly reproduces the live set they performed at the Roxy in April, adding "OBSESSED WITH YOU" and "THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED DAY-GLO". It's worth seeking out that version because it includes original saxophonist Lora Logic, who only appeared on the first of their studio singles, "OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!" for Virgin that October, before quitting the band to complete high school. (Let me repeat that: she didn't quit high school to join a band in the hopes of becoming famous; she was in a band that was already famous and quit to go to high school. She later formed the band Essential Logic.) Poly Styrene and the rest carried on with Rudi Thomas (Steve Thompson) on sax. They signed to EMI right after New Year's and demo'd all new material plus new takes of "OBSESSED..." and "THE DAY...", which became their label debut in April.

.....Marion dissolved X-ray Specs (who all went on to other bands) and experienced a deeply felt religious conversion. She didn't give up music categorically but only performed or recorded when she could write or find material consistent with her faith. She had one solo album and reconvened X-Ray Specs in the 1990's for the album "CONSCIOUS CONSUMER".

.....I probably picked this song to follow "BATMAN" because there had been an issue of the comic book Doom Patrol named after "THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED DAY-GLO". The writer Grant Morrison was like many other Brits writing American comics in that he incorporated song titles into character names and story titles. Anyway, I'm getting tired and I'm going to need to rest. Tomorrow I exchange social commentary for something more philosophical.

V02-T07b Batman

.....I expected people to recognize the tune but not necessarily the band.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7b

• 01:27 BATMAN (Neal Hefti)
• performed by The Who
• original source: EP READY, STEADY, WHO! Reaction 592001 (UK) Nov. 11, 1966
• and my source: CD RARITIES 1966-1972 Vols. 1 and 2 Polydor 847670-2 (UK) 1991

.....Like most bands appearing on the BBC's "Ready, Steady, Go!" television series, The Who recorded their music at the network's studios a few days in advance and then lip-synched to themselves on the show. That was mid-October, 1966. Their management intended to release an EP of the studio recordings to coincide with the airing but ran into legal hassles. It would take less time and mean fewer headaches to actually rerecord everything from scratch and rush release it, which is what they did. It's not surprising that some fans came to assume that the Reaction EP was taken from the show anyway, despite switching out some of the songs for others.

.....On the show they appeared to be playing "BATMAN", "BUCKET T", "I'M A BOY" and "DISGUISES". They also goofed around to Cliff Richard's song "SUMMER HOLIDAY". There are incomplete bits of the instrumental "COBWEBS AND STRANGE". The finale was intended to be a medley of their own "MY GENERATION" in a medley with Elgar's "LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY", but for some reason the Elgar was replaced with "RULE BRITTANIA". The medley was too much of a pain to reproduce and "I'M A BOY" had just been an A-side and was likely still in stores, so those two were dropped and replaced with "BARBARA ANN" (to indulge Keith Moon's surf music fixation) and yet another version of "CIRCLES", probably to undercut the sales of earlier versions being released under different names by an ex-producer they were fighting in court.

.....In 1977 The Jam used "BATMAN" to close side one of their first album IN THE CITY. Considering their retro Mod image in the midst of height-of-punk London, this was clearly a nod to The Who and not to the Batman TV show. When The Jam broke up (really so that Paul Weller could form the even more retro Style Council) in 1982, The Who released what would be their last studio album for the foreseeable future and gave the first of many 'farewell' tours. In 1983 their old label in England released a matching pair of 'rarities' LP's to cash in on the tour. They were actually the non-album singles prior to the ODDS & SODS album, which may all have lapsed out of print at the time but were circulated in large numbers when originally released. The CD I own that combines the two albums was manufactured in 1991 and then imported to this country, which means I probably bought it shortly before making this mix tape. That would explain it being on my mind and at hand. (NOTE: The title of the previous volume of this tape series, "The Pitchfork Approach", was only half joking.) A quick trip to Amazon suggests that finding a copy might get expensive. In 1995 most of the EP (minus "CIRCLES") showed up as bonus tracks on the mono mix CD of the album A QUICK ONE. On the plus side, it includes an unused outtake of the "MY GENERATION"/"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" medley. That CD was supposedly rereleased a few years later in stereo but with identical packaging. Caveat Emptor.

.....Did I mention something about "height-of-punk London" just now? Hold that thought until tomorrow.

V02-T07a "And where...is the Batman?"

.....This interstitial is well known as a sample.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7a

• 00:10 [excerpt from "BATDANCE" (Prince)]
• performed by Jack Nicholson (via Prince)
• original source: CD BATMAN Warner Bros. 9 25936-2 (US)
• and my source: the same

.....As a long time comics fan, I had serious misgivings about the casting in that first Tim Burton Batman movie. After seeing the movie I surprised myself by remarking that Michael Keaton was so promising as the lead that they should never have hamstrung him with that idiotic costume, a solid piece of vulcanized rubber with less flexibility than a truck tire. He couldn't even turn his head without turning his entire body, he couldn't raise his arms above his head without being switched into a different version of the costume. Keaton, whose earlier career was built on bottom of the barrel comedy film roles clearly written with Bill Murray in mind but which Murray wisely turned down, wasn't someone the casual filmgoer would chose first as Batman, certainly not over actors who simply look more the way Bruce Wayne is typically drawn. (Pierce Brosnan comes to mind.) But shortly before being cast Keaton was seen in a movie about a man struggling with alcoholism. Finding that movie on cable some time later made casting him seem more reasonable.

.....What I couldn't get past, not when it was announced, not while I sat in the theater watching the movie and not in the years since, was casting Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Somebody apparently couldn't absorb the fact that more than a decade had passed since "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I know that Nicholson is sort of a sacred cow in Hollywood, largely on the strength of superlative films like "Five Easy Pieces", which were already pretty dusty when Burton's "Batman" was being filmed. I know that he's a baby boomer, meaning that when he looks in a mirror, he still sees himself as he was at 23 years of age. And at 23, he would have been magnificent as the Joker. But in 1989 he was WAAAAY TOOOO FAAAAT. I was prepared for a live action movie to gloss over or ignore many elements that ask for a suspension of disbelief in a comic book. For instance, the cape could never actually move the way it is often drawn for dramatic effect. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that a character who, at the time, had been skinny for half a century to be played by a skinny actor. The Joker had been skinny in the comics, in the newspaper strip, in cartoons, on television, in coloring books, board games, paperbacks, trading cards, posters, month after month, year after year since 1940. And after Jack Nicholson played him in the movie he continued to be skinny in every iteration and permutation conceivable. It may not be as bad as casting blond English characters with Tom Cruise ("Interview With A Vampire") and Keanu Reeves ("Constantine"), but it still bothers me twenty years later that almost everyone pretended to not notice.

.....I decided that Jack could make himself useful introducing the next track.

V02-T06 Dad, I'm In Jail

.....Before the introduction of YouTube, short experimental pieces of animation were gathered together into feature-length festivals and tournees and shown in repertory movie theaters. Before they ever appeared on television, I saw the original version of Ren & Stimpy and Beavis & Butthead shorts in a movie theater. That's also the way I first heard the following recording:

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 6

• 01:25 "DAD, I'M IN JAIL" (David Was, Don Was)
• performed by Was (Not Was)
• original source: B-side, 7" Mercury WAS2 (UK) 1987
• and my source: CD WHAT UP, DOG? Chrysalis VK41664 (US) 1988

.....I'm not going to argue with the villainous CheckSpelling feature Blogger uses over what the appropriate plural of "Was" is, so let's just say they're each producers, not brothers. (Two days ago it wouldn't accept the word 'ambience'; I held the American Heritage Dictionary open and looked from the page to the screen and back again, half relieved that I wasn't prematurely senile and half angry that I had wasted time looking up a word I had spelled correctly the first time.)

.....The animation was shown in my area of the country at least as far back as 1991, but could have been made in conjunction with the album's release. In 1984 their work on what would have been their third album, tentatively titled "Lost In Prehistoric Detroit" according to the site WorldWideWas.com, led to chronic fights with the Geffen label and the band's contract changed hands a few times. By the time the final version of the album emerged as WHAT UP, DOG? they had released several singles it would then include, giving it the feel of a hits compilation. This 'song' was the B-side of SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE.

.....The next track goes from cartoon to comic books.