With their heads in the cloud...

Toto for All It Deserves

If you’ve had enough of this once favorite of lite-FM – does anyone even know what that is anymore? – then you’ll agree that Africa, the song, finally gets its due.

Everybody Knows #$%&’s @*$#ed

Succinct, to the point, no fluff or puffery and in all of 16 seconds:



Everything that needed to be said was said above. If you want more context, see below but you already got to the muscle; the rest is just cellulite.

The End Is Nearer Than It Was Yesterday

And we’re doing it to ourselves.

This song is completely A.I., from composition to recording. The voice is virtual. In fact, they’re blithely calling these generated bytes of doom “virtual musicians,” but that’s not what it is; this is the moment we open the gate to allow our machine overlords to take over. This is like Tea Party dupes voting away their own healthcare and social programs — the moment this becomes acceptable, human creativity is irrelevant. What jobs are going to be left?

The evil minds behind this are Auxuman, an artificial intelligence startup based in London.

Plead for mercy!

Music That Matters, Pt 26

With my previous 25 installments of Music That Matters, I’ve tried to make the case for the way music acts on us like a stream of emotional triggers —through my own well-chosen examples—while it arouses the pineal gland. (More on that in a moment.) A song, or more often, a piece of a piece, offers the listener some seductive lingerie to draw you into the boudoir, backseat, against a tree, etc. of a song. Sex first, then love: as you’re increasingly smitten, you learn to love everything else about it along the way. And often the reasons why don’t even make rational sense: It’s something that happens beyond both consciousness and free will. It’s not unlike the way we find ourselves attracted to other humans—it’s not something we choose. What it does is excite a whole suite of things that may trigger you – experience, chemistry, proclivities, memories, colors – but in the end it doesn’t even matter: It’s magic.

Like Crazy, quite possibly one of the best pop songs composed in the last 20 years: When CeeLo was on Live from Daryl’s House, Daryl Hall said something similar.



Why is that song so good? Is it the skipping vocal melody, the hooky choruses, the atmosphere, the church backgrounders, the traditional ballad strings, that major and minor chord sound shift? Maybe, but whatever it does, it binds you in a multitude of ways like Lilliputians capturing Gulliver. And yet, the song is a slight confection. It’s no Bohemian Rhapsody or A Day in the Life. Crazy’s whole is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts: That’s the magic that pop music does like nothing else on Earth.

(A shame CeeLo poisoned the song by revealing himself as a rapey asshole. Ah, well...)

All of which many believe excites the pineal gland, the contact point between mind and body according to Descartes. It's said that when excited, the gland channels health, longevity, harmony, and spirituality. Search pineal gland and music and find all kinds magical thinking about how it may be activated with music — or a tuning fork and crystals: kits are for sale! Actual research tells us its primary function is the nightly release of melatonin which affects sleep-wake cycles and not much else.

Music can, however, create a bevy of intense emotional effects and, for some of us, it can transform us with a religious-like passion. But let’s forget the pineal gland — listen up (below) and go to church (or temple, ashram, synagogue, mosque, or whatever) and worship. Like the slogan of old Stiff Records, “F*ck art. Let's dance.”

263) Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters, (1973) Chameleon: While electronic keyboards in various forms had begun in the late 40’s with Fender pianos, Wurlitzers coming in the mid 50’s, and Moog synthesizers and Clavinets in 1964, it wouldn’t be until the early 70’s that they’d storm pop music. And this had much to do with who was playing them: I’m going to guess a young Herbie Hancock’s hearing Ray Charles’ banging What’d I Say (1959) was probably a turning point. Though, probably no record did more for electronica in pop music than Headhunters. The sounds were otherworldly, ethereal, and transcendent and Hancock was just the captain to take us there. By the time of the 80’s and digital sounds came along, electronics would become trendier and more ephemeral. But even now, it’s the analog sounds of the vintage ’boards that still drive deep into our dreams. Some manufacturers even regained their licenses and started making those analog ’boards again more recently, but there probably won’t be anyone creating such a worthy spaceship for going into the heart of the sun as Headhunters again.




264) XTC, All Along the Watchtower, Are You Receiving Me?, The Rhythm (1978): This first album by the band was also while the first wave of Thatcher era punk was still raging. By the time the album White Music was in the stores, there was already a growing legion of players out there that appreciated punk’s energy but found the crude structures too limiting. By then, XTC and many others were being tagged with the post-punk label which suited them less as time went on. In the case of early XTC, their chords were Chuck Berry, if chunkier, but the keyboards lent them a more sophisticated Music Hall cum sci-fi bent. Keyboardist Barry Andrews’ work remains some of the most innovative in rock history, in my mind. A journey he’d quickly abandon for his dancier and immediately more successful enterprise Shriekback. XTC’s leader Andy Partridge gives a vocal workout that may make this cover of Watchtower even harder than Hendrix’s.



Crappy audio on the next two but images are worth it:





265) The Birthday Party, Cry (1981): Why this was left off of their Hits collection is a mystery. If there’s any truth to that pineal gland business, this ditty would be would kick the wind out of it. The more formalistic version of psychedelia on the lyric sheet may’ve been entered into a word spinner app and set to abstract-o-vize. And then all was propelled into hyperspace on the afterburners of that scream: Cry! F--kin’ bingo! The words are kooky and obtuse – and the drums are right there with them – and among them are a few profoundly nestled sugar cubes to blow up your face: “...I’ll dig myself a hole and fill up that space with I’ll fill it up with flesh and I’ll fill it up with no flesh...and I’ll fill it with tears...” Truer words have never been written.



266) Bob Dylan, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) (1974): Another installment in Dylan’s gallery of voices. This one as heated and insolent as any in his career and could’ve easily served as the model for Johnny Rotten who’d start his own band a year after this album’s release. The Band’s playing is ferocious and Garth Hudson’s purgatory string-like organ sound is an ominous counterpunch to the Hammond sound the many Highway 61 Revisited imitators used to pollute the air in the world after. Whatever Dylan’s original intentions of Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way, this rendition adds far more lemon juice and jalapeño.


Bob Dylan & The Band - Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) from Not Dark Yet on Vimeo.

267) The Sound, The Fire (1981): More post-punk: This would be their most brilliant moment. Sadly, history tells us their commercial prospects were only brief and dim as proven here, From the Lion’s Mouth, that’d ultimately cash out at 100K units. By the late 80’s, leader, singer, guitarist, and songwriter Adrian Borland would be displaying symptoms of clinical depression. By 1999, he’d take his own life. I bring this up because this ultimate expression of existential pain does offer the work much more poignancy, as the singer laments his youthful emotions jacked of their free will for desire, as is often the case with the young and, if you’re very lucky, old. The Fire is a banging’ little number the dashes right out of the gate with simplistic brilliance and a relentless punctuation of bass and guitar that pump turbo into every cylinder. A powerhouse to decorate your time.



268) Billie Holiday, I'm a Fool to Want You (1958); Your Mother’s Son-in-Law (1933): Billie also had her vocal transformations. Hers may’ve been less a choice than hard and desperate living. (And as we now know, she was targeted for destruction by the government.) The sweet exuberance of her early sides were overrun by a freight train of livin’ by the time of her Lady in Satin album era – it’d be like the difference between Greta Thunberg pigtails and a pre-surgical shaved head. Every terror and soul-freezing moment of her adult life is rendered in her singular take on I’m a Fool to Want You. Frank Sinatra took a ponce’s swing at this too but his was a Disney remake next to her Hitchcock-like original. This is adult music that throws a full spotlight on the scar tissue. It’s not for the squeamish.





269) Prince, Loose! (1994): For my money, Prince got better in the 90’s. The songs were less programmed, the sounds more analog, and nothing in his very deep catalog matches this track for sheer power. According to Wiki, Prince had little love for the album at the time. He called it “old material.” The songs were dirtier even than the adolescent porn of Dirty Mind (check Come), which is saying something, and the sheer muscle of them kicks the shit out of any of his 80’s output by far.



270) Procol Harum, Simple Sister (1971): Unless you’re some kind of Anglophiliac, you probably didn’t care much about Procol Harum beyond Whiter Shade of Pale, which swam in a larder of accolade excess, and maybe the orchestral balloon of the live Conquistador. While stars in Britain, their sound didn’t seem to translate well to American tastes. You probably also don’t care that this was Robin Trower’s last pitch on guitar for the band. Like Whiter Shade of Pale, Sister paired a great melody with a sneering and uniquely Keith Reid lyric, one that bends toward the surreal:

Simple sister 
Got whooping cough 
Lock her in a cell 
Throw the key 
Into the sea 
Hope she never gets well

I’m not sure why this vid is a paen to groupies. But, there it is:



271) The League of Gentlemen, Inductive Resonance, Dislocated (1981): On this record Robert Fripp would begin developing the style he’d utilize for the rest of his musical life including future versions of King Crimson. (A style I’ve written about before.) It’s mathy and meticulous and influenced by avantists like Steven Reich but Fripp takes it somewhere more melodic and kinetic than anything the avantists would’ve imagined. And yet, it’s a sound completely controlled and restrained in a way to give it a kind of white knuckle tension.

Also: Barry Andrews (post XTC) is the one beating out tantrums on the organ.





272) The Isley Brothers, Livin’ in the Life (1977): The era may’ve been disco but the Isleys decided to return to some of the sweaty vein-thumping rage of Fight the Power. The sound is vintage, the tempos and grooves more subdued, and the subject matter more mature and toned down—still cynical and mystified but changed: Go for Your Guns was the long contemplative email after the angry drunk texts of The Heat Is On. I wish they had of worked this angle more.

“How Dare You?”: Greta does Swedish metal

Dylan Goes Hard

Evolution is an act of defiance. A defiance of order that’s necessary to create change and progress—this is true whether art or biology. (Whether the change is good is another matter; it’s also completely inevitable.) The birthing of evolutions, like biological birth, can produce profound labor pains.

Regarding the particular evolution of Bob Dylan, he was evolution squared: He evolved “folk music” while blithely battering it as it had been known—yet always doing it with a kind of ham-fisted love. Clearly, he was a fanboy of folk and traditional American musicks—even calling himself an acolyte of Woody Guthrie. But he could never bring himself to simply pay it homage. His evolution of the art he loved, birthed something far more radiant and radioactive. Especially when he took it electric. As we know, the loyalists were vociferously appalled. In recent interviews, Robbie Robertson addresses this issue explaining how the initial audiences were beyond disappointed—expressing shock and sometimes rage. But booing wasn't enough—people charged the stage and threw objects. One audience member famously screamed “Judas!” Dylan responds by calling them a liar.

According to Robertson, Dylan was never discouraged. The resistance only made him more defiant and utterly resolved that he was on the right path. Eventually, the audiences relented.

His songs became the gold standards of generations. The only evolution he couldn't surmount was age. So when the time came, the aged troubadour was bestowed with the Nobel Prize and the career at last set in marble and parchment for evermore: Dylan canonized as an institution.

And the traveling companion to this difficult evolution was his voice: a chameleonic instrument he’d change like a mask. With his very first album, as heard on Gospel Plow, he offers himself in a conventional gospel growl and sounds uncharacteristically tuneful. By 1966 that was all gone as evident in Like a Rolling Stone (below). At this stage, he replaces the tuneful with atonal insolence, aggressive in ways even Johnny Rotten wouldn’t match. Its defiance rendered in agonized beauty. And the songs: bouquets that often offer surprising melodic secrets when you hear other people sing them.

Dylan was more punk than Elvis ever was.

The Rolling Thunder Revue of Maggie’s Farm is Olympic and yet again, his voice is more conventionally dynamic. It’s some of the hardest music of his career. It also sounds as if he’s aware of the punk that was happening at the time. Even Dylan™ seems to realize how significant the cultural moment of punk would be—though not nearly as commercially significant as his own moment beginning 15 years before.









On A Hard Rain Is A-Gonna Fall, Dylan paints the moment as “Where black is the color/where none is the number...” And then in Like a Rolling Stone and much of the rest of Blonde on Blonde, he locks that moment into his voice:

Hey! Ho! They Let Themselves Go!

The Oswald Conspiracy Covering "Point Blank"

Jack Ruby on lead guitar; Jim Leavelle on 'boards.

“Because You're Never Too Old to Rock”

Yes. Yes, you are.

You're never to old not to love to rock – a whole different thing.

The story goes, two German grayhead men, their ages listed only as "elderly," snuck out of their nursing home to attend a sold-out metal festival.

They got back at 3 a.m.

Imagine If Leaders Could Imagine...

If you’re among the projectile bleeding heart Liberal class, prepare to piss bitch tears. Oh gawd, if only! I’ve friends and family who stop listening after the line Imagine there’s no heaven... But if only the religious fundie frontin’ leaders like Bibi and his costumed swaddled head adversaries (and allies, strange bedfellows sometimes) could say ...and no religion too... think of the many of the circles of despair that ring the world that just might disappear.

Imagine.

A Wandering Grayhead in the Millennials’ Swamp, Vol 2

T: Sharon Van Etten; L: Noa Niles (Gateway Drugs);
C: Ellie Rowsell (Wolf Alice); R: Tricky

How old am I? I lost my virginity while The Cars played, that’s how old. Just What I Needed and I pounded together. For us oldsters, it’s just too easy to stay in an endless loop of music from our virginity-losing youth.

I’m not going to do that. And I hate seeing other Boomers bullet-training their way to the Great Sunset doing it also. But as I venture into the Millennial Swamp, you won’t be surprised to find that much of what attracts me has the timeless sound. As you’ll find in the below, the blood rushing in the veins of these tracks is old skool, if refreshed.

11) The Foals, What Went Down (2015): To get the kind of intensity being transmitted here takes a band, not just someone alone in their room with beats, loops, and samples. Here, when the band leans in, it catches fire. No matter what the torturous rage of the maker behind the keys in the best EDM joints, they'll never get anywhere near the intensity found here. For that, you need a band of people bangin’ analog. That’ll never change. Never.



12) Gateway Drugs, Black Wine of the Owl (2014): There’s a through-line here from the jangly folk rock of the 60’s – think of the bands Tom Petty stole from – and some of the 80’s bands that may’ve stolen from the same sources that Tom Petty did but with harder results – Echo and the Bunnymen, early Cure and Talking Heads, etc. This ditty features some nice noise hollandaise – and that processed scream is golden – atop this otherwise straight up omelet. Plus, enough guitar retro included to thrill a grayhead like me. Bonus points for the name choices of both band and song.



13) Caribou, Odessa (2010): You may know this song from the snippets that keep popping up on television, a commercial, games, and whatnot. I just heard it on Idris Elba’s Turn Up Charlie. Caribou is Canadian mathematician and composer Dan Snaith, and judging from the fact that he created 700 songs for the album that didn’t make it on, he has an Asperger’s level of focus. The bass sound and tuned percussive sounds were manipulated samples. That laughing inter-dimensional animal sound sample was thieved right from a RD Burman record, an Indian composer best known for his extensive film work. It appears to be some horn misused brilliantly and it’s a sound that’ll crawl tapeworm deep into your music lobes. That sound is what makes this whole exercise pop.



And the source of that sample:



14) Radio Tehran, Gelaye (2010): From Tehran, transplanted to London, with a sound that’s (Middle) East meets West in the best ways possible – well, skewed more toward the West: A platform of Western rhythms and beats under a slathering of, what?, Iranian Kabob? If it weren’t for the Persian vocals, and the odd touches – like the violin – it’d be hard to distinguish them musically from other Western “indie-alt” bands. Other than the fact that they’re very good. And that they’re not feigning assimilation by pandering to English-speaking ears was another good choice on their part.



15) Sharon Van Etten, Hands, No One’s Easy to Love (2019): I’ve always been a fan of the slow build. Whether it be with my career, or my songs, or life. 

Jersey girl and mom Van Etten currently resides in Brooklyn. Her first full-length was released in 2009. Since, she’s been absorbed by the star-maker machinery with an appearance on Ellen as well as acting turns on OA and Twin Peaks.

As for No One’s Easy to Love, she had me at the title. The media categorialists (like Pitchfork) say her sound has echoes of the folk tradition. Meh. I don’t hear it. Her restrained use of electronics and emotive use of subject matter give her stuff more gravitas than the general Brooklyn coffee house folky spawn. Her voice is strong in the Grace Slick tradition and similarly without soul pretensions or appropriation. There’s also a slight undercurrent of dystopia beneath it all which, to me, makes it all the more irresistible.





16) Natasha Atlas, Kidda (1997):

Natasha is a true mixed nut, musically and otherwise. Born of an ancestrally Egyptian father (by way of Belgium) and a British mum, she too was sprung in Belgium but would grow up with her mother in England. By her own description Atlas is Jewish by birth, technically Muslim, and Sufi by choice. Musically she’s a purveyor of cha'abi moderne (popular music) but will also cover James Brown. Her voice is a synthesizer of Western and Middle-Eastern traditions. Her use of melisma, or Mezdeke, as the Turk/Arab locals call it, with dance beats is something we’ve been waiting too long for.



17) Wolf Alice, Formidable Cool (2017): According to the Guardian’s head rock and pop critic, Alexis Petridis, Wolf Alice is a shapeshifting blend of shoegaze, grunge and folk. No, no, no: It’s for this that artists hate the press so – such pigeon-holing descriptions limit the band’s sound and effect and they deserve better.

North Londoners Wolf Alice display their fusty roots like heraldry. On their own behalf the band says they were opting for a retro sound, particularly in their use of bass and drums, aiming for a kind of modern Motown groove. Unaltered, it’s a sound that would’ve been compatible with like-minded bands of the 80’s and 90’s. They’re not looking to shapeshift the continuum as much as ride it. In that vein, don’t look for this capable band to carve out any striking new territory either. But what does drive them above the fray of alternative pretenders is the power and range of singer of Ellie Rowsell. Her range isn’t just one of vocal technique but of color and versatility. Hers is the right balance of authenticity, snarl, and yonic authority – she may wear the mask of the cute chick singer but she transcends that constraint by atmospheres. Formidable Cool is from their second album. No further proof needed: They’ve arrived.



18) Super Furry Animals, The Very Best of Neil Diamond (2009): From the land of Badfinger – Wales – formed in 1993 and floated with critical praise enough to fill case loads of drool cups. Such as these gushes from their Wiki page: Billboard that said they were “one of the most imaginative bands of our time” and the NME claimed that “There's a case to be argued that [Super Furry Animals] are the most important band of the past 15 years.”

F**k Radiohead, then!

Their ears have a bent toward 70’s pop tunes not unlike Scottish band Belle and Sebastian. The choice of including Neil Diamond in the title was no accident. The groove is solid enough to block gamma rays, the melody’s infectiousness is nearly virulent, and the layers of noodled guitar noise adds just the right amount of aural carbs. And there’s more than a hint of irreverence behind everything they do: Altogether, a very nice piece of sonic rarebit.



19) Tricky, Parenthesis (2013): A collab with Brooklyn-based indie band The Antlers, this version offers a much improved remixed version of the original. Tricky has been saddled with the Trip-Hop label from the beginning and this stopped suiting him long ago. His 1997 debut Maxinquaye was considered his untoppable high water mark. Tricky thinks False Idols, the album whence Parenthesis came, is better. I agree.



20) Thundercat, Them Changes (2015): If that burbling synth sound on the bottom, a tribute to this Isley Brothers monster, doesn't barb you from the get-go, forget you. Smarter (and possibly aged) ears will tell you that Thundercat AKA Stephen Bruner has done some serious crate digging. Them Changes packs a Soul sausage with peak Isley Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, and Graham Central Station – sausages that were mass-produced back in the day when Rock and Soul could run together and get creolized into the gumbo in the best ways possible. I miss those days.

When Rockers are for Napping...

Also:
• The Rolling Kidney Stones
• Almost Deaf Leppard
• Peaked Floyd
• Metallica Hips
• Graysnake
• Iron Deficiency Maiden
• REO Tourist Bus
• Nine Inch Fingernails
• ZZ Stopped
• Mr. Big Prostate
• Men No Longer Able to Work
• Survivor Benefits
• The Hip Replacements
• The Early Byrds
• Scooterhead
• No Rush
• Talking Meds
• Uriah Asleep
• Vertical (on the) Horizon

Paul Gets Mickrolled

The end of the Road:

“My Way”: The Baby Daddy of “Mars” and more

Did you know that Bowie wrote English lyrics for a song that’d later become My Way? The tune was from the French song Comme d'habitude. It was composed by Jacques Revaux and released in 1967 by French singer Claude François.

Legend goes that Paul Anka heard the song on the radio during a French holiday and decided to secure the song’s rights. Anka would write English lyrics, based loosely on the original and a conversation Anka had with Frank Sinatra over dinner. During dinner Sinatra would claim that he was planning to leave show business. That night, Anka wrote the lyrics with Sinatra in mind and made subtle changes to the original’s melody. Anka brought it to Sinatra who released the song in 1969. It was an international smash.

Bowie heard the Sinatra song, recognizing it as the tune he worked on. He’d composed Life on Mars as revenge, borrowing some of the song’s structure.

Hear the story here:

Boys Playin’ Hard

How to play with force and spunk:

The Fifth Beatle

Hairy Georgeson

Tadpole Sia Before the Total Pop Music Frog

When Australian pop wonder Sia first stepped away from the local South Australian music scene, she'd move to London and find work as a backup singer for Jamiroquai. Next, was work with Zero 7 for three albums. Destiny is probably the best known work of the period (2002). This being back in a time when Sia was still hanging actual face out there. I’d never realized that it was her voice I was hearing:



(Not the original vid I posted. For some reason that was taken down. This is not quite as good but close enough.)

If you want to go into pop and you don’t look like you’re ready to be pimped as sexy covermeat for an entertainment magazine, forget it. Pop music may not be for you.

It's That “BIlly Corgan Rides a Roller Coaster” Meme

If you haven’t seen this, it’s a thing:



Created by Nikki Emery: https://twitter.com/stellamelos

Head-Banging in Russia

Call it Flirting-with-Death Metal: One fast stop and it’s borscht everywhere.

The Shaggs: The Complete Story Told in 5 Minutes that You Need to Hear

“Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst... Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album Philosophy of the World will further confound.”

Susan Orlean, The New Yorker

They may be the ultimate expression of outsider art. Their story has been subject to some embroidery but the vid below seems credibly straightforward. Plus, most of them are still alive for verification. As far as the font of all this legend, their canon consists of but one album released in 1969, Philosophy of the World. A mere one thousand copies were pressed and of those 900 may’ve been lost or stolen. In the end, their considerable legend was built on a platform of 100 albums.

Red Rooster/Rounder reissued the album in 1980; RCA Victor re-re-released the album in 1999; a short-lived, off-Broadway musical about their life was produced in 2011.

The Shaggs were sisters Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin (vocals/lead guitar), Betty Wiggin (vocals/rhythm guitar), Helen Wiggin (drums) and, later, Rachel Wiggin (bass) – and most of all, fascist Osmond Family-wannabe patriarch Austin Wiggin.

Frank Zappa would claim they were better than The Beatles (this may be apocryphal though it doesn’t seem beyond Zappa’s tongue-in-cheekiness); Kurt Cobain said their album was his fifth all-time favorite. No less than Lester Bangs wrote:

“They recorded an album up in New England that can stand, I think, easily with Beatles ’65, Life with the Lions, Blonde on Blonde, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as one of the landmarks of roll’n’roll history... They can't play a lick! But mainly they got the right attitude, which is all roll’n’roll’s ever been about from day one.”

Rolling Stone described The Shaggs as “sounding like lobotomized Trapp Family singers.” Terry Adams of NRBQ – a big fan – compared the group's melodic lines and structures to the free jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman.

The fact that their obsessively controlling father insisted they not listen to music will be immediately apparent. It may also be their greatest font of treasure. They likely didn’t read much poetry either. Their “tunings,” or lack thereof, are inspired. The rhythms can only be described as in a state of constant of phasing and retardment. They are to music they are Tommy Wiseau was to film, if Tommy shot on Pixelvision. Music described to extraterrestrials based on writing from a restroom wall. On the bright side, it’s very organic.

Here’s a nice encapsulation of their story.



And the legendary album:



Dot Wiggin released the solo album Ready! Set! Go! in 2013. A fan describes Dot as “...being forced to play rock and roll music like your dad... would force you to take piano lessons. And the difference is we have it on tape.”

An official promo vid for Dot’s album:

Creep Serving a Higher Purpose, Truly

Netherlands television includes a kids version of the very popular television franchise The Voice. No doubt that much of what they present is middling at best – not unlike our stateside version. All of that only makes what happened on this night all the more spectacular.

Teen sisters Mimi (15) and Josefin (13) bring something telepathic between them in their rendition of Radiohead’s Creep as maybe only two gifted people who share 50% of their DNA can. And as good as their performance is – and it’s flawless – the stunned, gaped-mouth reactions of the judges, and the audience, only push it further into the stratosphere.

Rewatch it and note how the sisters look to one another nervously before they begin. What you’re watching is them each seeing the other in that way for the last time. Because in less than two minutes they’ll be forever changed as they step out of what may prove to be the greatest moment of their lives.

Mimi starts strong but it’s Josefin that gets the judges to slam the button. As it is with great talent, it only takes a fraction of a moment to realize what she’s bringing. Then, when those two voices come together and climb up into the first creep, everyone in the room feels the magic including the last holdout judges who slam in. Also, that lengthening of the creeps from the original was a touch of genius. It was their sucker punch and secret weapon. The judges agreed. Mimi comes in soon after with a screech that overdrives the drama. Their trick bag is loaded.

I’ve watched this many times now. Clearly, there are moments here that are untamable, unfakeable, and certainly unrepeatable. Their fresh-eyed joy as teenagers is completely infectious. There’s no denying that they’ve created something brilliantly incandescent here. I hope the hype that follows doesn’t crush them. The expectations will be brutal.

Happy Death Men?

According to an Australian study, death metal fans aren’t desensitized to violent imagery, even by listening to songs saturated with it. In fact, they’re made happier than most if you can believe that. However ironic, this happens “through feelings of joy and empowerment” delivered through those brutal, screaming, thundering bursts AKA songs by way of the music they love – somehow.

Or better yet:

If fans of violent music were desensitized to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music.

For enthusiasts of Devil Music, this has got to be a disappointment of sinister proportions. Otherwise, here’s a dose. Get happy:

Arctic Remix: Brit Rock w/ a Cuban Override & Cold Blooded Results

Remember The Buena Vista Social Club? When Ry Cooder went to Cuba in the late 90’s, recorded some local music legends and many of us lost our collective minds? Well, in 2004 Rhythm del Mundo took some songs from various happening groups of the time, and remixed them with Cuban musicians including some Buena Vista Social Club alumni. Some of the results were damned ingenious, like this one:

Serge Gainsbourg & his Lollipop:

Entendre, please! And make it a double!

That waggish trickster Serge Gainsbourg: When he wrote Les Succettes (“Lollipops”) for the 18 year old France Gall in 1966, the girlish gal probably hadn’t much experience with succettes of the skin variety. She bought the lollipop concept, entendre-free.

I’m guessing her parents weren’t paying much attention to what she was doing either. Gall is said to have been very upset when she learned the truth about what those models meant by pulling the long succettes in and out of their mouths as well as the forest of dancing phalli she was made to cavort with. Oh. And singing verses like:

When the barley sugar 
Flavored with anise 
Sinks in Annie’s throat, 
She is in heaven.

Here’s the story according to website Dangerous Minds:

It wasn’t until she was on tour in Tokyo that someone let the cat out of the bag [about the entendre of the song]. Gall was infuriated and greatly embarrassed by what she’d unwittingly taken part in. She felt betrayed by the adults around her and mocked like a naive fool. She refused to leave her home for weeks afterwards and ultimately stopped singing Gainsbourg’s songs that had made her so famous. For years afterwards her career suffered from her association with this scandal, even if “Les Sucettes” had been a big hit.



Despite his legendary love affair with Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg made something of a career out of being a cad. In 1986 he would encounter a 22 year old Whitney Houston and just couldn’t help himself. Gainsbourg, a three pack-a-day smoker, was 58 at the time. He’d be dead four years later.

NY3 & Fripp: The Most Metal Song You’ll Ever Hear & It’s Not Metal

That riff drops with more atomic weight than the entire history of Nordic Death Metal and Slayer’s complete canon put together. The meter is probably pi and the violent drumming, by Narada Michael Walden, out Keith Moons Keith Moon. And the “lyrics?” What’s edgier and more metal and punk than a life-changing domestic squabble where the mother scales the depths of imagination for every pissy, bigoted, and heart-shatteringly poison-tipped arrow she can spew? (See the lyrics here.)

F--k all that devil worship crap – it’s kid’s stuff. For trauma, Satan can’t compete with an alcoholic step-mother.

This from a guy who claims guitar-based music bored him.

In 1974 he told Guitar Player that “virtually nothing interests me about the guitar.” He said most guitar music is boring. He also thought the guitar bored Jimi Hendrix and for both the guitar is only a medium used for transmitting into the universe, those metal strings being a medium that gives them a language for speaking. (Hear Fripp’s story of Hendrix going fanboy on him in 1969.)

Okay, back to that riff. He’s essentially walking down some scale based on extraterrestrial angularities and battered intervals the ear doesn’t often get exposed to. Part of his secret is the alternative tuning: Fripp invented his own tuning called the New Standard Tuning (NST). Strings are tuned to fifths, except for the top – G-C-G-D-A-E-G – and even if you know nothing and care even less about guitar technique, your ears will detect the differences instantly. It drops your lobes into another universe.

Add to this a picking style he calls perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion) which takes short melody figures and chains them together in brutally fast lines, a mashup of minimalist repeated figures, avant jazz runs, and atonal composers like Milton Babbitt and Anton Webern.

Fripp has played versions of this run over the years, going back. (See the Lark’s Tongue in Aspic III version below.) What he does on NY3 is give that sound its highest purpose. For me, it’s the culmination of what all those avant garde academy types were aiming at. Fripp gives us something we can use – utter agitated pleasure.



And more fripperies:

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog vs Bon Jovi: It's Not Even Close

Our mission here at Jelly Roll is uplift by raising the levels of moral, psychological, and aesthetic consciousness. We do this here by supporting music we believe deserves more of your attention. We’re not here to besmirch by launching snarky salvos at easy targets. And to that end we are (mostly) faithful. It’s a line we don’t cross.

However, it is one that Triumph has made a career of crossing and here he poops on Bon Jovi with ingenious deftness. And it is our mission is to support ingeniousness.

Life as a Dating Profile: A Brief History of Deee-Lite

I still believe the best accessory is a smile, the best attitude is no attitude, and the only permanent thing about me is change. Lady Miss Kier [on style]

Oldsters will remember Deee-Lite’s Groove Is in the Heart from 1991. If so, they’ll remember the image of Lady Miss Kier (née Kierin Magenta Kirby) and her stunning visual charisma and style as indelible brain graffiti. She presented herself as exotic, aided in part by her retro fashion sense and loud print obsessions. Her opening spoken riff from Groove added well to the myth – not bad from a girl whose origins were anything but; I’ve no idea of her ethnic background but as she was Ohio-born and raised and I’m going to guess she’s a Midwestern white girl through and through. Though, credit her for getting out as soon as she could – she moved to NYC right out of high school. Also, props for her elegant and completely transformative reinvention.

That’s the context: But this isn’t for just simply touting the brilliant sparkle of Lady Miss Kier. Instead, I’m here to drag corporatism and the muthaf**kas that create the culture we live in. She’d prove to be yet another one of its multitudinous victims.

Kier’s style and presentation were considered fire back in the day – if not still. I’d hesitate to give too much credit to the other two members for Deee-Lite’s sound since it was mostly standard-issue sample sausage dance groove. What is interesting is that corporate beastmasters thought so highly of Lady Miss Kier and her outfit that after a label bidding war, Deee-Lite was offered a seven album deal with Elektra Records. (Note: This is according to Wikipedia so we may need to take the claim with some salt. The only other mention of this “deal” I could find was on a Deee-Lite fan page.) That’s right: Seven. Who gets that? No one and, as it turned out, neither did they.

So, after all the dating profile-like effrontery and foreplay, like some creepy nerd who tries to slip in the tongue with his New Year’s Eve kiss, their record company went totally Capitalist dickhead:

After global success, tours, dance club fame, and a single peaking #4 on Billboard, Warner Brothers refused to pay for the recording of a second album. Deee-Lite managed to pull together the cash and financed the follow-up themselves. Of course, their second offering didn’t come close to the smash of the first which I suspect was a problem WB was expecting. They did manage two Top 40 hits, however – which would be respect enough for anyone. Their third album fared a little better.

But after five years together, and the dissolution of the marriage between Lady Miss Kier and husband and band partner Supa DJ Dimitry, Deee-Lite would de-commissioned. And the will of Capitalism would take another.

Before Car CD Players Were Only Used to Hold Mobile Phones

Al Jaffe is an illustrator and writer for Mad Magazine. His work first appeared in the magazine in 1955 and still does to this day. Jaffee is 98 years old.

Jaffe did a recurring series in the magazine as well as books called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. This is one.

The Kind of Love that Never Dies Is Often the Very Kind that Does

You can’t front feeling like this.

On his 1974 album So What, Joe Walsh attempted to make sense of the loss of his daughter and the debilitating grief that went with it (rarely possible). She was not quite three years old when her seat would take the direct impact of a car running a stop sign. His response would be A Song for Emma.

The song’s emotional atomic weight is a like that of a Rare Earth element: Its density of heartbreak is both stunning and subtle. It leaves a burning chill like dry ice. If you want to write something that’ll nail people to the floor, then take a lesson here – don’t write about s--t that never happened. When it’s real or not, the reader/listener knows. You can’t front. It’s a part of existence we’re just too familiar with to accept facsimile or artifice. And this song is real AF.

Walsh’s marriage to Emma’s mother would end not long after, as often happens with such a loss. Ten years later Walsh was in a relationship with Stevie Nicks and still in mourning. Nicks would be so moved by his sharing of the experience she wrote the song Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You about it. Of the song she said it was “…the most committed song I ever wrote…Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore since [the day he shared the his story with me].”

You don’t need to have kids of your own to understand the heartbreak rattling around inside Song for Emma, though it’ll help. If you do, expect your eyes to piss bitch tears. Though, I promise they’ll be cleansing ones.

Sometimes, the heart just needs to sit in its feels. This song’ll drop you into subterranean depths quick. You may think you won’t want to go there, but on a wintry day, it may be just the thing.

An Old Joke Still Killing: Killing Joke

I love it when old guys deliver. And here Killing Jokes ships like a meth-smoking Flying Dutchmen on 11.

A brief history: British, formed in 1978, often credited with being the instigators of what’d become known as industrial. Their early albums featured tribal drumming, guitar slabs on repeat, simple grooves, and singer Jaz Coleman’s distinctive roar which often seemed to operate beyond the redline. He seemed capable of massive vocal bursts that could’ve been sculpted on a cheese grater. They were, and are as you’ll note below, if nothing else, intense.

Fifty-eight year old, New Zealand-born Coleman (his mother is half Bengali) has been known to have some, er, interesting worldly notions. He left music behind in 1982 to go to Iceland and wait out the impending asteroid apocalypse. During the time away he’d also study serious classical composing. Later, he’d work with “some of the world’s leading orchestras.” He’d also become an ordained priest and a father of three daughters. After touring the U.S. many times, he has come to see Americans as the obese, food doped, crippled with short attention spans, dumbed-down, and unfocused passive zombies that we are. He also says computers are killing the future’s potential great minds.

Fair enough.

The 2015 version of Killing Joke flexes a sound of brutal guitar hammering and insistent ruthless drumming. It’s a groove fit for slamming on the dance floor. And that voice: When he says “I am the virus,” you will believe. So clamp on the headphones and prepare for five minutes of an aural apocalypse you won’t regret.

A Wandering Grayhead in the Millennials’ Swamp, Vol 1: Jams You Need Today

That the music industry is in full disruption mode should surprise no one. More likely, it’s in full dissolution mode. And as per usual, the suits didn’t see this monster coming. They rarely do, probably blinded and deafened by their golden parachutes and bonuses. (Like Sears department stores closing 100 locations while its CEO gets a $25M bonus. Failure rewarded: It’s almost as if these bosses write their own rules.) We’ve being seeing these corpses of entertainment empires piling up for a while now: Blockbuster, Rhapsody, Beats Music, Tower Records, Grooveshark, on and on. Streaming is only the latest disruptive blow of a long swinging hammer. Forbes says music industry death is only a matter of time.

Shed no tears for the giants though: They’ve been quietly buying shares of the digital service startups and offering access to their large music catalogs. And guess who’s (still) getting screwed on the deal? See below.

And, as per usual in Capitalism, it’s the artists – erm, content developers, who’re getting pimped out of existence. The corporate predators, in this case the streaming services, are doing well. In fact, Spotify’s first earnings report for 2018 claimed revenue of $1.36 billion. The artists are now little more than buskers on a seasonal, corporate entry-level salary. (To prove the point, check this mid-level metal band’s income for a 30-day tour.)

We’ll have to wait and see if the parasites actually kill their hosts this time.

The Era of Streaming: Forget the Era of the Album – that’s long gone. Who even listens to anything but self-curated playlists anymore? No cult of fanatics will ever be enough to sustain an albums industry.

Just an FYI: It takes 1,500 streams for an artist to recoup an equivalent of the royalties afforded by of the sale of one album. Even royalties from digital downloads from songs via iTunes – not streamed, but bought – are pathetically scant. The only real wage available to artists is touring – great if you’re Smashing Pumpkins (who came from a pre-Napster era), not so if you’re the average garage band starting out. So, this is what music is being reduced to: An amateur’s enterprise.

As per tradition, even today the heavyweights are feeling the burn: It’s reported that Drake has brought in $100 million in revenue for Apple and Spotify. At a royalty rate of $0.005 per stream, that makes his take $500,000. Even by old record royalty standards, a legendarily chiseling system, that’s an egregiously pathetic rate.

For those who’d flip back through the earlier posts of this blog, they’ll note the slavish attention I’ve give to the hoary old nuggets from long bygone eras. Well, No more! I vow to concentrate only on (mostly) Millennial Era music from here on in.

With that in mind, enjoy the selections below before the talented tenth bail and the whole music industry becomes overrun with hobbyists and amateurs: These I submit for your playlist delectation. Think of it as your savory Swamp Sausage for the day:

1) Mr. Jukes (AKA mr jukes), Angels/Your Love (2017):



A solo/collaborative project from Bombay Bicycle Club's Jack Steadman. Speaking of sausage, this is very much a sound file Pro Tools sausage in a sweet skin brass. This track could fit in nicely with those old Verve Remixed collections. Nice horns, nice vocal, an incessant, driving and hypnotic groove – as George Clinton would say, it’s all good for your earhole.

2) M83, Wait: From an album released in 2010 by “French electronic musician” Anthony Gonzalez who’s currently holed up in Los Angeles, DBA M83. Originally a duo but it seems to be down to him now. M83 has enjoyed some mainstream success and institutional props – they’d a Grammy nom – but don’t hold it against them. As you’ll note, the joint starts chill, meandering a bit and patient build before ascending into the swirling cauldron of ethereal drama it becomes by the fade. Grunge tried to do this far more impatiently and abruptly (think Smells Like Teen Spirit); this is the grownup version: Measured, mature, and more heartfelt. Like the difference of screaming triggered at a loved one versus the long and carefully-crafted drag you can give someone when you really put some thought into it, loading it with all those targets that only a loved one with history can know. I know I just went dark there, and I’m not sure that’s what M83 intended for themselves, but those bird-like squawks near the end come from somewhere considerably south of heartwarming. You know what I mean.



3) Superfood, Raindance (2017): Music of the 60’s was often brash in its mixing of sources and genres – think Sly and the Family Stone, Ellen McIlwaine, Santana, on and on. Rock was still relatively infantile at the time. In that sense, Superfood is refreshing and doing that thing that Brits have a history of doing so well, colonizing music as if they were lands and people. On Raindance the Birmingham duo has mixes up American styles in way we haven't heard in a while, since, I don't know, rap metal? This is Brit-pop does best – attempting an imitation and ending up leaving their fingerprints all over it, in a very good way.



4) Bloc Party, Banquet (2005): Crafty, spunky, spirited, with hooks to grab your loins – nice production too. And they’ve got a portfolio loaded with such songs. If ours was a universe that didn't laugh at human injustice, these guys would be big as Radiohead, or at least as big as those twee bands twenty øne piløts, The Postal Service, The National, Snow Patrol, Imagine Dragons, yecch al. They may not quite have the range or ambition of Radiohead but they do make a stunning noise.



Bonus! Two More Years (MSTRKRFT Remix): One of the few remixes I've heard that far exceeds the original.



5) Sufrajett, Love Me More: From 2003 – a band so old they still have a MySpace page. The song may not offer anything new to canon of beleaguered-girlfriend-with-loser-boyfriend trope, but it does add some fire. The chorus is an ear worm of anaconda proportions. It’ll dig straight to your brain’s center without mercy if you’re not bothered by its its retro 70’s punk vernacular. As for the video, it’ll be hard to miss the central message: Check out those shorts!

The band is long gone today but singer Simi Stone is still with us and has work to imbibe, including on Spotify. Sufrajett also has three songs available (still) for download, including this one here.



6) The Knife, Pass This On (2003): An electronic music brother and sister duo (Karin and Olof Dreijer) from Sweden – and, no, that’s not them in the video: Sister Karin also fronted a project called Fever Ray. First time I heard this, I completely fell for the whole I’m in love with your brother schtick. I fell so hard I got past the whole new agey steel drum sound which usually puts me off. I love the breathy, conspiratorial vocal conceit and the layers of squeaky background vocals that sound like a squadron of haunted dolls. Also, the spam-email syntax and the generally opaque lyrics together make for a juicy ambiguous cocktail that only adds to the mystique: A seriously danceable Swedish confection bomb.



7) Deerhoof, Spiral Golden Town (2005): Another relic from the early naughties – 2005. To start, the opening horn fanfare is pure and irresistible steroid for your music nodes. Once past that, the fanfare embroiders itself into song’s circusy middle and by then you should’ve fallen deep into the juicy tiger pit. I’m going to guess the word quirky is the go-to scribes will resort to label their sound, but usually quirky isn’t propped onto a foundation as powered up and, at times, funky as they are. A lot of the debt must go to the thunder of drummer Greg Saunier, though his pounds here are chill. (Check out their live in-studio performances on YouTube.) Deerhoof hails from San Francisco and there are deep traces of local quirk are in their mix – The Residents, Mr. Bungle, Primus, Jonathan Richman, some folkrock, some horn bands, etc. Bassist and singer Satomi Matsuzaki, who’d joined the band within a week of arriving stateside from Japan, shares her native countrymen’s affinity for cutesy lyrics and precious themes and they’re mostly delivered in a kind of legato bark that befits her serviceable but unsingerly vocal stylings. What she does deliver, is well-engineered into the songs. The two guitarists intertwine well together, though they’re low-keyed here. On a hotter mix, the guitars can delve into a kind of sonic hot oil wrestling.

We need more bands like this.




8) Eels, Souljacker Part 1 (2002): I grew up a big fan of the blues but, generally speaking, I’ve moved on.  Souljacker takes the form and reworks into something fresh and surprising, even. I discovered Souljacker from the soundtrack of The United States of Tara. I knew of Eels (essentially the work of Mark Oliver Everett) from the 90’s when Novocaine for the Soul was hitting. Hadn’t paid much attention much after. For most anyone born after GenX, Eels catalog is probably going to sound like something you would’ve heard on your grandpa’s iPod. Their music tends toward the slow and ponderous though the emotions are often a little rawer and naked. Obviously, Souljacker is something else entirely – a bit out of character. Souljacker is hot, direct, succinct, and a li’l off it’s meds in the best way possible.



9) Headshy, Coma (2014): Once, long ago, I did a job at Johnny Depp’s house. On that day I’d meet Johnny and his sister who worked as his assistant/coordinator/major-domo. A fine person but, clearly, there wasn’t enough of Johnny’s ice-sculptured jaw and cheekbones to decorate the entire family tree. Music too can be like a family of siblings. Some are just prettier than others. Somehow those minute genetic adjustments can make for profound differences.

Songs can be much the same. The sources, the influences, the construction, and even DNA can be much the same but the differences can vary wildly. For Coma, the DNA of Headshy had all of the chromosomes lining up just right – Headshy is their Alex of the Baldwins or the Kim of the Kardashians. Digging through their catalog, the music seems to favor the slow and subdued. What I might call bong loaded music – too many bowls to muster up the energy to bang out a rocker. The rest of their catalog is a bit diaphanous if dark.



10) Molice, Android Said (2010): I’d guess Tokyo-based Molice hired some (American?) PR hack to craft their musical description: “... [their] East/West hybrid sound has a wide appeal by being both catchy and edgy, incorporating rock n’ roll, classical, dance, shoegaze, alternative, and post-hardcore elements.” That’s pure sales fluff and mostly fictional: I’m not hearing that. Except for the Japanese lyrics, their sound – at least on Android Said – is pure Western retro seasoned with a spoonfuls of surf punk twang. This may be why it attaches to my (very Western) receptors so hard. I’ve poked around a bit on Spotify and I can say, sadly, Android Said isn’t typical – that aside, this track kills like a ninja.

And, gawds, that riff! Taut, concise, caffeinated, sounding just incomplete enough to leave you hanging before coming around again. If that doesn’t seize your senses like the waft of McDonald’s french fries as you drive past then whatever other pleasure nuggets are to be found here, they won’t be for you.

Life Is a Rock Opera You Can't Dance to

Once, I was young and in a band: Three boys and two girls – one boy was the drummer so he doesn’t count. (He had a girlfriend.) One girl was going between the other of us two boys (and I was falling in love with her – a bad, bad idea). Both of us also had a tension with the blond singer. We boys were also the band’s songwriters so it was competition on stilts.

And 25 years later the drummer died.

Our stories are the almost exactly the same.

Banging and Scraping for the Groove

I’m going to guess that The Esbjörn Svensson Trio from Sweden are jazzers that grew up on rock. I’d throw this outfit in a bag with cool cat Matthew Shipp which I’ve posted here before. Both musicks display footnotes from hip hop, rock, trance, and here – when that double bass (Dan Berglund) drops in with the bowed fuzz tone – metal. I think the band has moments when it wants to traipse off into New Agey Fairyland, or rural folk as they’ve called George Winston, but that bass player and muted piano hammering brings it all back.

I’ve long argued that bebop, like abstract painting, are movements that want to take the art away from the people and lock in the tiny rooms for an academy audience. If bebop had rich benefactors like fine art does with collectors, there might be a bigger audience for jazz. (People do worship the rich. Even the things they collect.)

Maybe this is what it’ll take to save jazz and make it relevant again.

When the Tragically Cool (& Others) Get Popped: Pt 1

First, The Tragically Cool:

Presenting a tribute to those whose mug shots were worthy of a Ralph Lauren ad and a shout out to the style and elegance that never abandoned them – even in what might be, for most, one of life’s most dire humiliations.

The First Place All-Time Hall of Fame Award: Who could top David Bowie in his Station to Station, Man Who Fell to Earth period? Never will you see a ice-colder, more I’m Rick James, bitch! look coming from a mug shot on anyone – certainly not from Rick James. 

The arrest was in a downtown Rochester, NY hotel following a performance. Along with Iggy Pop and another person, all were charged with marijuana possession. Two months later the charges were dismissed and Bowie and Rochester would never meet again.

The always fine Jane Fonda in her wife-of-Congressman-Tom Hayden activist days. Also from the same period she won the academy award for Klute: She worked the Shag (the name of her hair style) like no one else.

Beiber just knowing that he’s The Beeb – with rock-hard abs, a porn star’s package (noted in those poolside paparazzi pics), all while crashing Lambos for fun – and has an Armani army of attorneys at his disposal who’ll get him released long before he reaches the hold, shows himself to be completely unperturbed – jolly even. 

In 2014 at 20, the Beebs admitted to police that he was blazed with a prescription drug chaser. Justin was able to avoid jail time but only after a plea agreement to take an anger management course and make a $50,000 charitable donation, in addition to paying court-ordered fines. Three years later, a contrite Beiber walked back from his sparkly pimp mugshot and admitted a desire to never go through that ordeal again. He also posted a couple of decidedly less pimp pics to his Instagram. (See below.)

Steve McQueen, the star of such films as The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape takes the bravado one step further: Flashing peace and figuring as long as he’s buzzed, the party ain’t over. In 1972 McQueen was brought in for drunk driving while in Anchorage, AK. Once released, he left town and charges were filed in absentia. 

If you’ve ever seen Bullit, you’ll know that if they caught him, it’s only because he let them. 

Frank Sinatra: Ol’ Blue Eyes showing the piercing stare and a wig of hair thick enough stay put during a Jersey squall. Also, he reveals why the flaps of the bobbysoxers’ may’ve gotten moist back in the day: The pic was taken while Frankie was still toiling in the obscure clubs of New Jersey mob land. He had just begun singing on New York radio that year but was still unknown nationwide.

Even at this early stage, the 1938 charges against him were worthy of an idol: Sinatra was arrested twice that year for “Seduction” and “Adultery.” Apparently the crooner had banged a broad “of good repute” by letting her think he might marry her: Such a devil.

In the cad department though, a few years later Blue Eyes would pay a doctor $40,000 (a good sum in those days) to “bribe to doctors in New Jersey in order to escape the draft.” It worked. He was declared 4-F “because of a perforated eardrum and chronic mastoiditis and that his mental condition was one of mental instability.” Also:

During the psychiatric interview, the patient stated that he was “neurotic, afraid to be in crowds, afraid to go in the elevator, makes him feel that he would want to run when surrounded by people. He had comatic ideas and headaches and has been very nervous for four or five years. Wakens tired in the A.M., is run down and undernourished. The examining psychiatrist concluded that this selectee suffered from psychoneurosis and was not acceptable material from the psychiatric viewpoint.”

Apparently, the above had been secret until 1980 when it was released under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Phil Spector, legendary music producer, impresario, shitty husband, and gun enthusiast is currently serving 19-year term for the murder of his live-in girlfriend. At 74 in 2013, he looked rather unintimidated considering his likelihood of ever seeing the outside again.

Nicki Minaj, another weapons enthusiast, was arrested in 2003 for criminal possession of a strap (with intent to use). At the time she was 20, known as Onika Maraj, and working as a Red Lobster waitress in Queens. You’ll find no sweat on her concealer-free brow.

John Belushi, brows totally on fleek: 

And, The Others:

I was once detained and issued a two tickets for trespassing and an open container. I’d to sit on the curb with my hands on my head until the police arrived (all of this in front of my girlfriend at the time). I wasn’t yet 21 so it all could’ve been much worse. Still, I’ve never actually been sent to jail. Gawd no: I’ll straight up admit, I’d wet myself like a poodle pup in pen with pitbulls and cry bitch tears. I would. So, the look of fear and humiliation on the faces below, I totally get. Just note that the fear on the faces below only serves to make the faces above appear all the more heroic.

Not moving like Jagger: Sir Mick Jagger, as seen in his famous arrest of 1967. According to the band, a party at Keith Richards’ country estate had been tipped off to the police by The News of the World for possible drug activity. Jagger was suing the paper for slander at the time. Among the guests were Marianne Faithfull and George and Patti Boyd Harrison. 

Waiting until the Harrisons had left, the police would enter the house and arrest both Richards and Jagger. The two would be issued harsh sentences but the charges would later be overturned.

Here, apparent repeat offender and future Axl Rose was 18 in the top photo, and probably not much older – but a li’l harder – below. At top, his face looks like it may’ve serious doubts about turning 19. Welcome to the Jungle, Rosebud.

Dale Bozzio from Missing Persons: Just for some context, this is what Dale used to look like;

Earlier in her career she did some, er, modeling if you’re interested. In any event, despite her early promise she appears to have ended up somewhere else entirely. Most recently, Ms Bozzio was still touring with some version of a “Missing Persons,” so it seems as if she’s mostly functional. However, her recent run-in with the law might seem to indicate otherwise. Not knowing her full story, I don’t want to play the possibility of any substance or mental health issues for yucks.Still, she appears to have gone full cat lady: Bozzio tried to rescue sick and feral cats from the woods of New Hampshire, but she evidently didn't take very good care of them. Two of the cats were found dead and 12 were put down after being neglected while Bozzio toured with the band last fall. Later, a judge found her guilty of one count of cruelty to animals and sentenced her to 90 days in jail and 250 hours of community service. She was also ordered to pay a $2700 euthanization bill.

Another repeat offender, Jim Morrison, and arguably one of the history’s great faces: • Top: Morrison looking as cold-blooded as a Lizard King in 1963 – this would’ve made him 20 and two years away the formation of The Doors. The charges against the rambunctious lad, made in his hometown of Tallahasee, FL were petty larceny, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and public drunkenness at a football game. After making fun of the footballers, Jimbo stole an umbrella and helmet from a squad car’s open window. The charges were later dropped for a small fine. I’m sure his Rear Admiral father was not amused. • Middle: Morrison’s infamous New Haven arrest for an expletive-laced tirade issued from the stage against the police who’d just maced him in the face while waiting backstage. The claim was he was trying to incite a riot.• Bottom: On the occasion of his even more infamous Miami arrest in which it was thought he’d exposed himself, in a Dionysian frenzy, to the audience. (According to what I’ve read, the general consensus is that he probably didn’t. Iggy Pop, OTOH, brings his glory all out in this video, probably around 1979-80, and while the result is impressive, the law – and YouTube, so far – was uninterested.) After the Miami arrest, the now bearded, paunchy, and dazed Morrison would find himself dead within a year.

Aerosmith’s and American Idol’s Steven Tyler at 19 looking like Shit’s gonna get serious when my dad finds out. The lips appearing not to have reached their full efflorescence as of yet. 

In high school Tyler played drums in various bands before composing Dream On in 1969. He’d meet Joe Perry and with Brad Whitford they’d form Aerosmith a year later. Tyler would be 22.

Here, Kurt Cobain at 19, but the troubled pubescent Kurt would’ve previously been popped for spray painting God is gay and ain't got no how watchamacallit on various cars in Aberdeen, WA. This shot below was for the occasion of a trespassing charge – police found him climbing on the roof of an abandoned warehouse. (Who hasn’t done that?) In 1986 he would’ve been 16 and already living on his own.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) used to live around the corner from me. My wife and our two kids were crossing at the corner of his street when he, possibly channeling his huffing psycho character from Blue Velvet, wasn’t about to slow his Jaguar down for no punk ass, non-celebrity family. I felt the wind of his Michelins on my heels. We all of us stared him down. He didn’t look back.

Hopper’s brush with the law came in 1975 and the story goes that after winning some LSD in a poker game, he walked outside and shot a .357 magnum into a tree because he thought it was a grizzly bear. In a turn of Hollywood kismet, Hopper ended up in the same jail where Jack Nicholson’s introductory scene was filmed for Easy Rider.