Here's "Only Women Bleed," featuring Wagner's guitar work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plpF8b-Ax3I
Here's Wagner himself performing "I Never Cry":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixRlqcCB1Tk
Guitarist Dick Wagner died yesterday at 71 from respiratory failure from a lung infection that was a complication from recent heart surgery. Wagner was best known for his work with Alice Cooper, writing the beautiful melody to "Only Women Bleed" to which Cooper contributed lyrics decrying spousal abuse. The two also collaborated on other classic songs including "I Never Cry," "You and Me," and "How You Gonna See Me Now." Wagner's work also included playing on Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin and Peter Gabriel's 1977 debut solo album, along with co-writing Air Supply's 1985 Top 40 hit "Just As I Am."
Here's "Only Women Bleed," featuring Wagner's guitar work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plpF8b-Ax3I Here's Wagner himself performing "I Never Cry": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixRlqcCB1Tk
0 Comments
The band 3 (not Free, 3) was basically Emerson and Palmer without Lake, who was replaced by Robert Berry for this, their only album, 1988's To The Power of Three. The first half is ruined by Keith Emerson's overkeyboarding with the leadoff track and first single "Talkin' Bout" sounding like an even lamer Mr. Mister with the keybs ascending at irregular intervals in the background like the vomit that rises in your throat before you puke. The three-part (there's 3 again, 'cause it's a magic number) suite (and of course there had to be a suite with two ELP members involved) "Desde La Vida" employs every synth cliche known to mankind circa 1988 and resembles several Starship songs colliding.
The second half is much better, though. "Runaway" shows that this Berry guy is a pretty good writer, and Emerson's "On My Way Home" is serious without being pompous. What is more, "Eight Miles High" is a reimagination of the Byrds classic as a dance-pop song, complete with Emerson providing the background synth swooshes so popular in hit singles at the time. I can only wonder what the Byrds thought of it, considering how much Belinda Carlisle's pop remake of Cream's "I Feel Free" irked Jack Bruce on its single release that same year. The album charted at a respectable #97 and "Talkin' Bout" made the AOR song listing, but the band never recorded again. ELP reformed in 1992, and judging from Berry's website, he seems to have had the most lasting success with a band called Alliance that includes former Night Ranger keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald in its lineup. Grade: B Here's the best tracks: "Runaway": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoISJf7MTfE "On My Way Home" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lMLGl_j0bg "Eight Miles High": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79aUpeOuBks Discovered Cozy Powell's "Dance With The Devil" while playing a '70s hits compilation yesterday and thought it was worth sharing. This made #49 in April 1974:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTmDXr2kydQ The CD also included Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together" later on. This song has never been a favorite of mine because the annoyingly idealistic lyrics (trust me, dude, not everybody wants to live together - ever heard of the KKK?) detract from the instrumental, but with Cozy's track fresh in my mind, I found myself focused on that insanely hypnotic rhythm machine in the background. That thing could be used for brainwashing in a cult. Listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFU-FJzPE80 Further research uncovered that the week in February 1973 that Thomas' track peaked at #3, Steely Dan's classic "Do It Again" peaked at #6 right below it. If you're not familiar with it, "Do It Again" contains another of the most riveting shuffling rhythms in rock. It must've been pretty cool hearing these side-by-side on the radio back in the day. Here's the track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYtN1TuzEL8 Finally, I'll leave you with my favorite "epic" - and as much as I hate the overuse of that word, it certainly applies here - use of percussion on a rock song: Bow Wow Wow's "Love, Peace & Harmony," released in 1983. I can't help but think they were at least partially inspired by Cozy's track with the chanting and all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQXz_S7zrc Now, I'd like to see somebody wipe the vocals off the Thomas and Steely Dan tracks and then do the same for Bow Wow Wow's song, and splice it with Cozy Powell's. Then put all of it together in an endless loop. Would either be endlessy relaxing or send you straight to a straitjacket. Or both, intermittently. This little piece of prose popped into my head while I was waiting in line at the supermarket yesterday. It's based on what was going on at the time, and while I will probably never find a use for it, I thought it was too good to forget: As I wait for the cashier to pop over to an adjoining register to grab four packs of suicide sticks, aka cigarettes, for the customer ahead of me, my attention shifts to the store's background music, where Mariah Carey is singing about feeling emotions. Judging from her screeching, I'm guessing that she's either experiencing great pain or birthing offspring. The picture says it all. She even has to plug her own ears when she sings.
There's a Garbage Pail Kid they missed out on: Caterwauling Carey. And where do all those happy people in Retromercial Land (see previous entry) do their shopping?
At K-Mart, of course! And here's proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYxXuY6_Png When did K-Mart ever sell refrigerators? Come with me now to that magical, ebullient world, where everyone is happy, and every word is sung instead of spoken, yes, that world that exists only in retro TV commercials, musicals and children's programming...just click on this link, and it will take you there and set you freeee.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72B99WCQTwc I have no idea where this comes from, but it doesn't look American. As far as I know, the United States Postal Service employees have never worn pea-soup-vomit-colored uniforms. I do know that the guy at :45 bears a frightening resemblance to Mark Hamill, and the guy at :55 gives off a creepy Norman Bates serial killer vibe. I also know I'm not gonna get this song outta my head for the rest of the night. If there are any faithful followers out there who have been reading this blog since it started last October, you may recall that I had just begun a book titled 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die back then and I promised a review when I completed it. Well, I finally finished the 960-page work, and as I am a man of my word, here's the review. And anyway... ...so here goes.
The book's major fault is that there are simply not 1000 video games interesting enough to celebrate. "Not enough credit is given to the diversity that now exisits within video games," writes the book's editor Tony Mott in the introduction, but you'd never know it from reading this Sears catalog of a book. I'd estimate (and I didn't give enough of a whoop to actually do a numerical count) that only one-third of the titles in the chronological listing are anything unique, and it's hard to separate them from the chaff of multiple franchise sequels and duplicated sports simulations. Three Grand Theft Auto titles in a row? Really? Are all those martial arts and auto racing games that are highlighted actually that much of evolutionary stepping stones from their predecessors that you had to feature every one of them? True visionary titles like Maniac Mansion, Facade, and Spider: the Secret of Bryce Manor get lost in the shuffle, which defeats the book's purpose stated in the introduction. Secondly, the book's contributors simply aren't that good. They spend the beginning sections of the games of the 1970s - '90s actually APOLOGIZING for what they see as the games' supposed low-tech shortcomings when these titles, for me, are the best that were ever developed. If you can't work up the enthusiasm for what you're covering, why include in a book like this that supposedly documents the best of what the medium has to offer? In the cases of GoldenEye 007 and Shining Force III, the writers can't even be bothered to tell you the games' objectives, and the review of NHL Hockey sidetracks into a pointless digression about a favorite scene from the film Swingers. Even worse, the writers get so bogged down in techno-babble that I got the feeling that they didn't really care if anyone outside their little club found any of it accessible or not. I own five other titles in the "1001 Before You Die" series (Songs, Albums, Comics, Books and Paintings) that are much better, and with the exception of the Paintings volume, none of them are as jargon-heavy as this one. For example: "This game is known for an interface that traded a verbal parser for system for a contextual cursor and for its early use of vector technology. The climax, meanwhile, is one of the best early displays of polygon-based game graphics." If you can get any meaning out of that, or the use of "ludonarrative dissonance" documented in another entry, this is a book for you. Perhaps a glossary would be in order. I just completed Kate Torgovnick's book Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, and while it wasn't anything I'd recommend, the author at least had the foresight to include a list of terms describing the cheerleaders' moves in the back, so I could picture what a "scorpion" or a "rewind" looked like as I read the text. I was hoping 1001 Video Games would add something worthwhile to my library of books chronicling video game history by pointing out unique titles and updating my knowledge of current trends. Unfortunately, it is too cluttered to do that and is a disappointing decline from the high quality of the other 1001 books that I own. My final thought as I finished this behemoth of a book? Game over, finally. Grade: C "This was a shopping mall Now it's all covered with flowers." "This was a discount store Now it's turned into a corn field" "And as things fell apart Nobody paid much attention" Lyrics from "(Nothing But) Flowers" by Talking Heads. Photos taken by Seph Lawless, from his book Black Friday: The Collapse of the American Shopping Mall. The work documents two abandoned malls in Ohio: the Rolling Acres Mall near Akron, and the Randall Park Mall near Cleveland. Lawless worked at a mall in his first job, and here's a fascinating interview covering how he got the photos:
http://petapixel.com/2014/04/28/black-friday-haunting-documentary-photo-series-captures-abandoned-malls-us/ |
Walburgh's BlogMostly retro, mainly music, but generally whatever's on my mind. Archives
June 2017
Categories
All
|