Old-school power trio: James Gang

You’ll occasionally catch some James Gang songs on the radio, but this live version of Walk Away shows just how ferocious Joe Walsh and company were before Joe joined the Eagles.

 

Testing a new approach

The tools for blogging are just getting better, even as the time I have to blog is greatly diminished. I’m also spending more and more time on Facebook, where I can just make a quick comment and move on.

So the tactic I’m trying now for Mostly Modern Media is to make a quick comment and move on. Not as quick as a Twitter tweet or Facebook update, but something short and easy.

I reserve the right to go on the occasional 2,000-word rant. Maybe even a well-crafted 2,000-word hypertext essay. But in the interest of posting here more frequently, I’m going to try this sort of thing more often, using ScribeFire to help out.

As a test case, I’ve included a good PopUp Video above. Enjoy.

 

Video alert: Joydrop live

Joydrop was a promising band that deserved another couple of chances to do a truly great album.

What’s stunning in this live clip is how good Tara Slone’s vocals sound. Who the heck voted her off RockStar:INXS?

 

Tunes of the weird: Blotto

One more test to see if YouTube is summarily taking down every video I embed.

In this case, that’d be fine, because it hardly seems fair to label this one “Worst 80’s Music Video,” as some YouTuber has declared. It’s campy fun from an upstate New York band that managed to get some MTV play because MTV didn’t mind campy fun in those days.

It’s Blotto, with I Wanna Be a Lifeguard:

Want some band history? Wikipedia sums it up: “They were formed in 1979 out of the remains of the Star Spangled Washboard Band, a post-hippie comedy jugband.”

Now that I’d like to see.

They still play from time to time, as this 2007 video proves, even though they’ve all gone on to different careers. The drummer’s a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property law, so I’m guessing he would have had all this stuff yanked down from YouTube if he wanted to. Where else are you going to see this? MTV?

 

Tunes of the Weird: Devo

Sometime in the late ’70s (full details are classified), a small group of government scientists attempted to create a grand unified theory of culture. Using the largest supercomputer available at the time, they input a diverse collection of items reflecting the day — a self-help book, a prototype synthesizer and, something that was lying around the office for some reason, a book on sadomasochism.

The computer made some hiccuping noises. Smoke started to rise from the reel-to-reel tape inputs. In the midst of the evacuation, the computer abruptly released the output. It was this video:

Fortunately, they had the ideal band to record this. Devo had been operating for a few years. They were involved with a sort-of religious movement. They used synthesizers. They wore flower pots. They didn’t mind making videos in which they could explain the whips but probably couldn’t explain why a woman was making a dinner consisting entirely of meringue.

The religious movement, incidentally, celebrates feast days of Monty Python, Bill Hicks and Weird Al Yankovic.

The latter, coincidentally, did a pretty good Devo parody. (Not a specific song. Just the whole concept.)

There’s really no one else quite like Devo, with the possible exception of the Earons, who were supposedly some sort of extraterrestrial mechanoid race of synth-reggae musicians whose drummer kept pointing at the viewer. They were anonymous except for the lead singer, who seemed to be angling for a solo career once the gimmick wore off.

Not sure if that solo career ever materialized because … well, because I don’t know the guy’s name. But the Earons apparently are still together in some fashion, because they have a Web site urging us to “stand by for further transmissions.” Did they open an auto repair chain?

Devo still tours. The supercomputer recovered to beat Garry Kasparov but was stolen by a group of doctors trying to find another pill for people who forget to take their Viagra.

UPDATE: I get maybe 50 page views a week, and yet every time I embed a video from YouTube, that video disappears. They took down two of three here — apparently, no one is enforcing Earons copyright.

So here’s a link to the same Weird Al video on what appears to be an official Weird Al YouTube space. There, you can also see the epic R. Kelly parody Trapped in the Drive-Thru.

The Devo video is still there, but they’ve disabled embedding. Follow the link.

 

Tunes of the Weird: King Crimson

It’s a pity YouTube doesn’t have the Sesame Street bit with the great Chinese pianist Lang Lang auditioning for the Grouch Symphony Orchestra. He plays a wonderfully sensitive bit from Rachmaninoff, then a dazzling, playful bit of Lizst, only to be told by Oscar that the orchestra hates beautiful music. In frustration, he slams his elbows on the piano. That, of course, gets him in, and he plays a concerto for orchestra and two elbows in E very flat minor.

Bob, who has been watching the whole scene, tells Lang Lang he doesn’t have to do this.

Lang Lang, who has remarkable comic delivery in his non-native language, responds: “But it’s so interesting …”

That leads us to an occasional new series here, Tunes of the Weird. And the first entry is certainly interesting. It’s King Crimson’s Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, as performed on a Belgian or possibly German TV show in 1972 or possibly 1973.

The song itself, a violent collision of prog and jazz that’s inexplicably catchy, is interesting in its own right. But you have to see the video to see the five guys behind it, including the weirdest guy I’ve ever seen in rock. Or classical. Or whatever they’re playing.

I won’t need to tell you which guy it is. Watch, then I’ll fill you in on the other guys.

You guessed it. They’re all weird.

But the one with the bird calls and the whistle is the most wonderfully eccentric person you’re likely to see in music, Jamie Muir.

Sadly, he didn’t stay in music long, as he explains in this interview. He took up Buddhism and went to a monastery in Scotland. Yes, apparently, there are Buddhist monasteries in Scotland. He returned briefly to music but is now painting. I think I’d pay to watch that.

As for the rest of the band, we have …

- Robert Fripp, the stern-faced guitarist and the only guy who has managed to stay in King Crimson for the duration.

- John Wetton, who seems entirely too free-spirited to play bass in this band but would later seem entirely too uptight to sing in Asia.

- Bill Bruford, the jazz-influenced drummer who had already played on Yes’ classic work but dressed as if he were auditioning for Hee-Haw.

- Then there’s David Cross …

Uh, no, he was eight years old at that time. This would be the rock violinist David Cross. I’m guessing that description fits only one person.

As I recall, on the studio version, the violin was in tune. Here, it’s not. I can think of three possible explanations:

1. He screwed up.

2. Fripp was pissed off at the audience and wanted to “challenge” the listener with dissonance.

3. Cross was pissed off at Fripp and did it out of revenge.

And somehow, the song actually sticks in your head a little. Well, mine, anyway. Yours too? No?

But … it’s so Interesting …

UPDATE: Unbelievable. Warner got a 36-year-old clip from a European TV show taken down? Do they even own that copyright? Believe me, I’m sympathetic to the principles of copyright, but are you kidding me?

OK, here’s another one.

 

Videos from China

Since I’ve been slack about sharing my experiences since returning, having Twittered and blogged them in vivid detail while over there, here are a few videos to show what I couldn’t possibly describe.

Here’s the light show all around the main venues at night.
Light show at the Olympics @ Yahoo! Video

Here’s the trip up to the Great Wall, with a view of the trip down:
Riding up to and down from the Wall @ Yahoo! Video

And then there’s the hockey venue, where tons of people in the familiar volunteer shirts apparently rehearsed something with the mascots:
Kung Fu Fighting in Beijing @ Yahoo! Video

 

China beat: Handball, war, sanitation, etc.

In covering Iceland’s handball team today, I got this quote:

What we thought before this game is just to do what our forefathers did. They at most endured, like, two or three days at home in peace, and then they had to destroy something. They had to go and fight war somewhere. They went with their boats and stuff like that, and we were just on our boats, destroying something. That’s how we went to the game, just to enjoy those 60 minutes like our (unintelligible) in life. That’s what you do. That’s what you live for.

I didn’t use it because I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe Monty Python’s Njorl’s Saga sketch?

Someone else suggested Bjork’s Earth Intruders video:

No, that didn’t help. And the goalkeeper isn’t a Bjork fan, anyway.

BBC readers are obsessed with the way the U.S. media order their medals table, insisting countries should be listed according to gold medals rather than totals.

Naturally, the assumption is not that this is simply a discrepancy in long-standing conventions, such as the differences between “cookie” and “biscuit” or the American stubbornness in resisting the metric system. The assumption is that we all used to list the medals sorted by golds, then changed when China surged to a commanding lead in that category.

Imagine my shock when someone dug up the USA TODAY medal count from Athens, from the stat feed whose specs I helped write, and we had it listed by gold medals. My guess is that we once gave readers the chance to sort it as they saw fit, and that functionality disappeared over one of the multitude of server migrations over the years.

Whatever the explanation, I’m sure it has no chance of being accepted by the folks who were hyping the 200 meters as a showdown between Usain Bolt and Christian Malcolm.

I love the BBC, but anyone from the UK who thinks Americans are the most provincial jerks in the world should take a look at the Beeb’s Olympics coverage. Yikes.

I also love Olympic News Service, which sends hordes of fresh-faced young folks to the venues to collect “flash quotes” from athletes.

You’re generally not going to get controversial material from these quotes, though. They have notepads and not tape recorders, and a 21-year-old generally isn’t going to trust his or her scribbled notes if anyone questions the quote’s accuracy. Also, the quote-taker might not be a native speaker of whatever language the athlete’s speaking.

So if you see someone in a mixed zone ranting as follows:

I was robbed. That ref was clearly watching beach volleyball instead of us. Yeah, my opponent played well, but he also took out a small knife and slashed my knee open right in front of the ref! I can’t believe this crap. I’m going back to the Olympic Village to count my blessings that he didn’t end my career, and you’d better believe I’m going to trash some rooms.

You’ll get this quote.

My opponent played well. I’m going back to the Olympic Village to count my blessings.

So I was surprised to see this from fourth-place high jumper Stefan Holm of Sweden:

I had a bit of luck four years ago in Athens, but shit happens.

ONS might be getting a little punchy near the end of the Games, as are many of us.

Speaking of sanitation, here’s a little sign to remind the media that plumbing in Beijing ain’t what they might be used to back home:

Off to catch the bus back to get a good night’s sleep, believe it or not.

 

Song du semaine, or month: Madness, “It Must Be Love”

My boys have great musical taste. The one who can talk requests this one over and over.

 

Song du semaine: The Donnas, "Fall Behind Me"

Just a clinic in rock guitar playing here. Poor video, unfortunately, almost as badly synced in places as the old Joy Division clip for Love Will Tear Us Apart.

And to my great surprise, it almost works acoustically. I say “almost” because it really needs drums and a more emphatic vocal. The guitar, though, is still pretty good.