The Lovemeknots were a hard-working staple on the Indianapolis club scene until 1995 when they called it quits. They put out 3 CDs and a vinyl 3-song EP called Home Tonight, which has that understated college rock feel that almost begs you not to notice it. This is fine, because when you take it for a spin and get charmed you sorta want it to be your own little secret anyway. “Winchester 73” is the EP’s bruiser, complete with righteous cowbell.

The Lovemeknots – “Winchester 73”

It’s 1979 – I’m ten years old and I’m at the drugstore with my mom. We run into my friend and his mom. He shows me what he’s just bought with his allowance money – the new single by the Knack. I end up going home with them and we listen to both sides of his 45 over and over and eat Zingers for the rest of the day.

I’m linking to the clean radio version here, with the line that ends with “chance” instead of the one that ends with “pants” and the line that ends with “place” instead of the one that ends with “face.” I prefer this one to the intolerable Get the Knack album version because the thought of singer Doug Fieger salivating over a minor happens to creep me out. (He’s the guy second to the far right and he’s always reminded me of a leering cop show character who ends up in handcuffs before the closing credits roll.)

The Knack – “Good Girls Don’t” (45 version)

Ever since its publication in 1986 (regrettably reprinted in 1995), Steven Gaines’ “true story” has been the standard, most abundantly available version of the Beach Boys’ history, which is unfortunate for at least four reasons:

1 – The book has done more than a little to surgically attach the freak show features one now tends to associate with the Beach Boys. The tabloid approach makes for some fast and furious page-turning, but you never ever get the impression that Gaines’ motivations go beyond that. In the book’s intro, Gaines talks about first being transfixed by Brian Wilson’s eyes, “those cold, blue eyes” which eventually turned his alleged “fascination” with the Beach Boys into a “passion.” When all’s said and done, we learn that those happen to be the eyes of a “schizophrenic” invalid who is now safe in the hands of Dr. Eugene Landy, who declares himself “practically a member of the band” on the last page. (If you’re not familiar with Landy, he’s the Svengali doctor who misdiagnosed Wilson, it turned out, abused him emotionally, and lost his license in the early ’90s over his unorthodox practices.)

2 – The book’s mistitled. Gaines’ decision to handle his subject from a sensationalistic point of view makes little room for any discernible heroes other than, perhaps, Landy. And while Wilson’s mother Audree and his first wife Marilyn are treated sympathetically, they are done so as pitiable victims.

3 – Gaines can’t write about the Beach Boys’ music. I say “can’t” instead of “is unwilling” because he actually makes occasional, tossed off, critical attempts but stumbles badly when he does. Here’s Gaines’ complete analysis of the group’s cult favorite, Friends: “a boring, emotionless LP.” Here he is on The Beach Boys Love You: “The best promotional campaign in the world couldn’t have helped [it].” But those are acquired-taste cult albums, you say? Here’s Gaines on “Surfin’ “: “The song was no knockout…nasal, whining, and childlike”; and here’s the most irksome – his take on one of the group’s uncontested core albums, The Beach Boys Today: “The album was not one of Brian’s best works, consisting mostly of a melange of uninspired car tunes.” I’m not even sure what album he’s really talking about here, and if he’s just gotten his records mixed up, I can’t figure out which one he might have really meant.

4 – And this leads to the book’s biggest problem, which is that Gaines evidently despises the Beach Boys’ music enough to disregard it as a significant part of the story. And I’d say that if having a tin ear when endeavoring to write about a cultural phenomenon that happens to be of a primarily musical nature is perhaps forgivable, the consistent failure to acknowledge that phenomenon for what it essentially is is much less so.

posted by Stanislav (Just That Junction, Vermont)
The year was 1983. XTC just released one of their most important albums, English Settlement, and Andrew Partridge felt confident about producing other artists. His American friend, Peter Blegvad, who moved to England prepared a new album The Naked Shakespeare for Virgin and asked Partridge to produce it. Blegvad was known as an avant-garde artist, a former member of Slap Happy and Henry Cow. It’s maybe a little surprising, but Blegvad’s songs are only partially avant-garde. They are somewhere on a surprisingly thick borderline between weird and perfectly normal – his songwriting owes a lot to John Lennon and Bob Dylan. A lot of it is also a conscious attempt to be pop – Dave Eurythmic Stewart nearly ruins the opening song, the only one on this album that he, instead of Partridge, produced. But there is plenty for us music lovers here. A careful listener will be rewarded with a lost jewel of authentic beauty which demands careful listening. It’s a deep and layered record. The song “Powers In The Air” is my favorite.

Peter Blegvad – “Powers In The Air”

The Jo Kurzweg ensemble is like a German Living Strings/Andre Kostalanetz Orchestra for the polka party set. Each track is a medley of at least four different tunes sung by booming ghost choirs over electric guitars and alternating rock and polka beats. Here’s the first portion of one of these medleys. It features a Mendelssohn piece which some may recognize as the revamped American church hymn “O God the Eternal Father.” As for the cover, is this really the group? No clue, but I like to think so.

Jo Kurzweg – “O Täler Weit, O Höhen” medley

Q: What do these these three songs have in common?
A: They’re each US Top 40 hits that feature the kazoo.

Del Shannon – “So Long Baby” (1961)
Dion – “Little Diane” (1962)
Ringo Starr – “You’re Sixteen” (1973)

If you’re already familiar with this song either as a U.S. hit by Mac and Katie Sissoon (UK-based Trinidadians) in ’71 or the Euro smash by Middle of the Road that same year, you might especially enjoy this tender treatment by a Finnish now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t outfit called Briard.

Briard – “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”

Just finished this and, as a Brian Wilson cultist, I’m ready to rank it among the best books so far about him or the Beach Boys for at least four reasons:

1) It’s got a happy ending. Carlin hammers home the recurring theme that every stage of Wilson’s life is affected by a dynamic creative/business collaborator for better or (often) worse, then he leaves us with the clear impression that Wilson circa ’06 is in the hands of folks (wife Melinda being at the forefront) who equate his personal creative vision and personal happiness with financial success. And it’s about time, we sigh.

2) It frames the Beach Boys saga, with all of its familiar, sordid aspects, in the context of Wilson’s creative frustration. Carlin emphasizes that the perceived rejection of Wilson’s Smile material by the rest of the group, and eventually by radio and the buying public, played a major role in his late-sixties collapse. This wasn’t the only factor, of course, but it was a huge one, and Carlin doesn’t let us forget it.

3) It plays down the “heroes and villains” model so much Beach Boys writing drifts toward (and I’m not necessarily thinking Steven Gaines’ Heroes and Villains here, in which everyone’s a villain). The Brian vs. Mike concept, for example, is one that Brian fans eat for breakfast, and although Carlin is obviously on the Brian team (is anyone on the Mike team, come to think of it?), he goes out of his way to give us as sympathetic an image of Mike that a book aimed squarely at Brian fans could possibly give.

4) Carlin speaks the language of the true Brian Wilson faithful. This is perfectly OK because this ilk deserves a book that puts the music front and center, and while Carlin can and does talk about the music on its own merits with a critical eye, it’s shaded with the Church of Brian doctrine that while translations of the Truth may go awry (productions, arrangements, lyricists), Brian’s essential musical vision is 100% pure and reliable. Thus, The Beach Boys Love You is rightfully heralded, song-by-song, as a “darkly lovely” masterwork, Friends as “transcendentalist” (Carlin’s audience will know that he’s not just talking about nature and Thoreau here), and the unlikely 2004 miracle of Smile as a catalyst for redemption. You can’t believe everything you read, but because this is what most of us want to believe anyway, it sure feels nice.

This Scottish group became the Marmalade around 1966, at which point they recorded the proto-Hendrix single “I See the Rain.” By 1968, they were a UK hit-making machine with songs like their no big deal cover of “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” (a UK #1) and their biggest US hit, the memorable “Reflections of My Life” (1970). But back to DF and the Gaylords – I think “That Lonely Feeling” is a masterful slice of early Beatle-ish balladry and wow, that guitar solo is a remarkably tasteful little affair.

Dean Ford and the Gaylords – “That Lonely Feeling”

Posted by Stanislav (Planet Earth)
The most recent Werner Herzog movie “The Wide Blue Yonder” is delicious brain candy. It’s about an intergalactic trip from the Milky Way to Andromenda. What’s fascinating about it is the way that Herzog pulls it off by using nothing but documentary reels linked together with several sequences narrated by one single actor (the wild-eyed Andromedian Brad Dourif reminds me of Kinski). Of course, the farthest humans ever reached with their bodies was the Moon, a ‘mere’ 2.9 million light years short of Andromeda and there is no documentary footage of extragalactic landscapes. Everything in this movie was shot either on Earth or in its immediate orbit. Herzog uses his cameraman’s footage of a polar underwater expedition as landscapes of a planet in the distant (although closest to us) Andromeda galaxy. The Earth spaceship on its way to Andromeda is nothing but a spaceshuttle and mathematicians are actual NASA employees. This film works on at least three levels for me:

Enviromental: The fact that we have places on Earth that look and sound so outlandish that they seem like they’re millions of light years away shows just how much we know about our own planet. The underwater scenes accompanied by voices of Sardinian singers do not look convincingly extraterrestrial, but that was not the point anyway. They are amazing and shocking. Most viewers of this movie have probably never seen anything like this before unless they are polar divers and live on Sardinia. In his highly sardonic way, Herzog serves up The Wide Blue Yonder as a requiem for our dying planet. The solution for our planet, which somehow gets squeezed out by linking oceanic footage with NASA footage, is that humankind needs to leave the Earth and move to some other planet. On the other hand, Herzog clearly does not believe that intergalactic travel will ever be possible, although he’s attempting to convince us, even mathematically, that it is. Which brings me to the next level of this movie…

Mathematical: I can only think of several popular science shows where mathematics and mathematicians are represented the way they truly are. In fictional movies, mathematicians are mad scientists, deeply disturbed, egotistical people without any sense for community. Just watch Straw Dogs, Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind or most recently, Proof. Not only do these movies fail to show the way mathematicians’ thinking processes work, but you can’t even learn any mathematics from watching them because there are no mathematics in them. But Herzog has finally found a way to put mathematics in a fictional movie. Three mathematicians “act” as themselves, with one of them giving a mini-lecture on a blackboard on how people utilize planetary pulls to accelerate vehicles inside the solar system. The lecture is fun and contains completely accurate mathematics. While the mathematician talks, the other one is listening. This really is one of the ways mathematicians communicate their results within their community. The third mathematician speculates on how the existing theory could be extended to interstellar trips farther away. The concept of completion and generalization is possibly what defines mathematics as a distinct science, and we see it here for the first time ever in a fictional movie!

Economical: An idea that you can make a movie recycling footage from previously shot reels is not new. B movies utilized this technique many times and even mainstream cinema has done it (Trail of the Pink Panther), but the results (and reasons) for “patching” are usually questionable. In Herzog’s case – the recycling is the starting point that gives birth to everything else in this movie. It’s the whole point, and you especially see this in the context of its enviromental aspects.

http://www.wildblueyonder.wernerherzog.com/