Retro Music Thursday: Grant Lee Buffalo

Glorious.

Retro Music Thursdays: Ride

I've been totally remiss on my Retro Music Thursdays! I might just start posting music with no comment at all, just songs I want to listen to, despite the stories I could connect to all of them. But this week is Ride. And I have to brag on this one; it's because of Ride I can officially say I was hit on by a famous person. ;)

Ride were the leaders of the shoegazer movement in the UK at the time: loud guitars, long hair that hung into their faces, staring at the ground as they played (hence the name of the movement) and they were loud. FREAKIN' loud. They were headed up by two young guys, Andy Bell (the one on the far right in the pic) and Mark Gardner, the Mick Jaggeresque guy on the left. They were the songwriters, guitarists, and singers. Their harmonies and the wall of sound they produced on album were extraordinary.

The first time they played Toronto I was too young to go see them, and my boyfriend at the time (now husband) went anyway. Bastard. They were playing with Lush, Ride's female equivalent (I'm sure I'll play them on here one of these days), and Rob came home with a t-shirt for me that I wore until it was just a bunch of loose threads. He also came home with what we thought at the time was serious hearing damage. You know that ringing in your ears you have after a loud show? It lasts a day or two... but after five days it was STILL happening and we thought oh crap, he's done it now. To this day I worry that his Pete Townshendesque hearing is a result of that show, and not all the gigs he played himself at the time.

But anyway, a couple of years later I was FINALLY 19, and I was off to see them. Andy and Mark had an obsession with the book, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and the themes of that book permeated their first full-length album. Like on this song, "Seagull."



Rob and I were working at the student newspaper at the university (well, OK, HE was, and I always tagged along as the photographer because I was still in high school... back then you had grade 13 so you were much older by the time you went to university). I'd gotten backstage at a lot of shows as "the photographer" and no one ever seemed to notice that I didn't take a single shot (I had no idea how to use the fancy camera the paper had given me). So instead, I went into this glaringly bright back room and sat in the very soft couch, sinking almost all the way to the floor, and Rob set up at a table with Andy and the two began talking. Mark Gardner was in the far corner tuning a guitar, and I just listened to the interview. At one point Andy began asking Rob if he'd read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Rob said no. I had actually just written a long paper on JLS for a World Religions course I was taking, and I retold the story as a metaphor of Zen buddhism and achieving nirvana. So I piped up and said something, and Andy turned and began talking to me. Mark jumped up from the corner and rushed over to the couch, where he sat down next to me and we sank even further into the ground. He began asking me what I thought of it, and the three of us were talking about the book and poor Rob was sitting there wondering how the heck he was going to get his interview back on track. Finally I said something like, "But anyway, I don't think we have much more time here, so..." and looked at Rob as the cue for him to keep going, and he did (he was actually really good at steering people back over). Andy continued talking to him, and Mark lowered his voice and kept talking to me. And then he asked me what I was doing after the show and could he meet me for a coffee or something.

Now, I was 19 and he was supercute but I loved Ride for their music, and not them. Oh, and not to mention my BOYFRIEND was sitting right there, now engrossed in a conversation about guitars with Andy Bell and not hearing this. I smiled and shyly said I lived two hours away and we'd have to get going after the show, and he said oh come on, we could find a way to get you home, and I said no, no that was OK.

During the show we were up near the stage and Mark blew a kiss at me. Melt. But just for the record, I have zero regrets about that. It makes a great story this way, and if it had happened any other way, I could have NEVER MENTIONED IT. ;) (Side note: when the Manchester dance scene band The Inspiral Carpets played Toronto, two of my friends went and the same thing happened with them, but they said yes, and became the band's in-town "groupies" for over a year. Weird. I heard things about those guys I really didn't want to know.)

While Nowhere is a fantastic album, I think this song is probably my favourite. Unfortunately you actually need the album and headphones (or a super-loud stereo and understanding neighbours) to truly appreciate the awesome sound these guys created.

Retro Music Thursdays: The Pixies

After my first post here, I immediately started getting requests to talk about The Pixies (mostly because y'all know my immense love for them already). I was trying to remember the first time I heard them, but I think it was when my then-boyfriend, now-husband got a tape of Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa from a friend of his and came over to play "I've Been Tired" for me. "I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed," "I LIKE Lou Reed," she said...

Great stuff. But it was when I heard Doolittle that I immediately fell in love with them, and then I think I liked Bossanova even more. I think the first time I saw the Pixies was in late 1991 in the same week I saw Tin Machine and someone else... we lived in London Ontario and had to drive two hours to Toronto every time we wanted to see a gig all through high school, and there were some weeks where we were traveling there two and three times a week (it still boggles my mind that my parents were OK with that...) Black Francis, as he was then known before he became Frank Black (though his real name is Charles), is notoriously quiet on stage. He does his thing, he sings his songs, but it's Kim Deal who does all the talking.

Oh Kim Deal. The other "Kim" love of my life after Kim Gordon. Again, the one I watch through every set every time I see them. I remember going to see them at the Concert Hall in Toronto (now the home of CTV, I believe) and during their set one of their amps blew. And I don't mean it stopped working, I mean it BLEW UP, loudly. You've never seen Charles move as quickly as he did then. He just turned and RAN, and I don't think I've ever seen the man do more than a slow saunter before or after that. Things were dealt with and they returned to the stage fairly quickly and continued their set, but I still remember my husband and I in stitches watching it (after our own hearts started beating again... it was LOUD). But to his credit, I think he caught a shock off his mike, so that couldn't have been fun for him. Let's just say he wasn't in the best mood for the rest of the show (and that's saying something about this usually sullen frontman).

Live, The Pixies can't be beat. Frank's vocals are spot-on (even when screaming... I've always been in awe of the fact that he still has such a powerful voice after all these years of stripping it raw through screaming). Kim Deal is the audience favourite. Joey Santiago rarely looks up, but he's always brilliant, and David Lovering stays in the background playing drums, only coming to the fore to sing "La La Love You" (a song I hate). The audiences who have been going to see them for years all know the signs for "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" -- you hold up one hand with five fingers for "If man is five," then both hands with one fully extended, and one finger on the other hand extended for "Then the devil is six," and hands way up in the air, two fingers extended on the other hand, screaming and jumping up and down for "Then GOD is SEVEN!"

Doolittle remains the best album to watch them perform live, though most of the best stuff is packed at the front end of the record. I remember one time seeing them open for U2 on the first leg of the Achtung Baby tour, and the band looked absolutely miserable on stage and it was the worst time I'd seen them. Later they said U2 barely acknowledged their existence, but the real problem was within. A few months later, the Pixies had broken up.

But in 2004, they reformed, and they've probably made more money on the reunion tours than they ever did before. Seeing them in November 2004 was my first concert after my first baby had been born. She was three months old at the time, and I remember clutching a cellphone throughout the show, while being in euphoria that I was finally seeing the Pixies again. I've seen them a few times since then, and they never, ever let me down. A documentary came out a few years ago called Loud Quiet Loud (a description that sums up pretty much every Pixies song) and it showed what was really happening behind the scenes, and was fascinating.

It's tough picking just one song, because usually whatever Pixies song I happen to be listening to at the time is my favourite. But if someone said to me, "Quick, name your favourite Pixies song," I think I'd always answer the same way: Debaser. Inspired by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's surrealist film, "Un Chien Andalou," it's Frank at his screaming best, Kim with her perfect girlie voice, a great opening bass line, out-of-tune guitars, and a hook that you just can't get out of your head.

Retro Music Thursdays: Sonic Youth

My husband's family are what you would call in the tech community "early adopters." They were the first people on their street to have a VHS player, so for years, when everyone else waited until VHS players were a little smaller and far cheaper, his parents had this giant silver thing with the top-loading thing where you'd stick the tape and it would get jammed half the time. When the rest of the world was standing up and changing channels, they had an enormous box that connected to the TV via a cord with these push-buttons on it: a remote control via Fred Flintstone. They paid 10 times what we now pay for a DVD player and CD player, but they had it before anyone.

So it should have come as no surprise when I was a teenager and beginning to date their son that they would get a satellite dish. And I don't mean the ones you have now that are the size of dinner plates that attach to your house. No... have you seen the movie Contact? Where they have those multi-storey satellite dishes at the VLA sites listening for alien life forms? They had one like that put in... only it was black. But it was about the same size as their house and took up most of the backyard.

So, my husband got this wicked program called 120 Minutes on a little channel called MTV that was from down in the U S of A. We became addicted to that show, where they'd play the best music from the alternative/underground/college/indie/whatever you want to call it scene. It was the place where I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and Creep. It was also the first time I heard Kool Thing by Sonic Youth.

Now, other people got into Sonic Youth way earlier than I did, and see Daydream Nation as THE album the hipster Sonic Youth fans should be listening to. But for me, it's Goo. It was my first Sonic Youth experience and it will always be my favourite.

Here was this super-cool blonde chick with a smoky off-key voice, wearing silver pants and dancing around with a cat while these other manic guys jumped around in the background. She didn't smile, and you wouldn't want to mess with her. I wanted to BE her. I quickly found out the lady was Kim Gordon, her husband was Thurston Moore (the guitarist) and she was 39 years old. That seemed really old at the time, but she was super hot. I'm still not as old as she was in this video, but god, what I'd give for that body. She plays a giant bass guitar that practically dwarfs her on stage, but in the million-plus times I've seen Sonic Youth since then, I can't take my eyes off her. (This will be an onrunning trope throughout these Thursdays, by the way... I generally want to be with someone in the band, or I just want to be someone in the band. Or both.)

Years later, I had all the Sonic Youth albums and we went to see them open for Neil Young. (As I once opened a review I wrote in a college newspaper, "If Neil Young is the godfather of grunge, Sonic Youth is its communal family.") The audience was filled with aging hippies in fringed suede jackets, long hair and headbands. And then there was the group of us. I think it was four of us at the time, sitting way in the back of the arena, and when SY hit the stage, we hit the floor, dancing and singing and shouting, "TOM VIOLENCE!!" between every song. When Thurston finally said, "This next song is called Tom Violence," we went out of our minds, and the hippies around us continued to stare at the weirdo group of kids dancing and screaming behind them, as they politely clapped for the band with out-of-tune guitars and wished their set was over.

After that, I was at one of those shows EVERYONE says they were at now. It was at a place called the Music Hall in Toronto, which held about 500 people but there was this promoter who shall remain nameless who infamously oversold the place, doubling its capacity. Rumour had it members of Catherine Wheel and some other Britpop band who were in town at the time were turned away. Red Kross was opening, and I remember sitting way up in the top balcony, dripping with sweat because there were SO many people in there, not enough air, as the people beside us smoked so much grass I was completely high by the end of the set. Sonic Youth hit the stage, and after four songs they walked off. We sat there, perplexed. Then Thurston ran back on, grabbed the mike and said, "The pigs are shutting us down! Hide your drugs!" and the people beside us tossed the bag of weed under the seat and ran out of there as fast as they could (to this day the memory makes me giggle). We left, completely pissed that we'd driven two hours and couldn't get our money back because some money-grubbing promoter (who is now one of the most successful concert promoters in the world -- he organizes Coachella) double-booked the place and now I couldn't see the band I'd come to see. We walked outside and the place was crawling with cops. As my boyfriend (now husband) and I walked back to our car, we had this strange feeling of being followed and turned around, and a cruiser was following us down the sidewalk. I kid you not (and that's not the pot talking). It's become one of the most infamous concerts in 1990s Toronto concert history, and so while I missed the show, I was glad to have been there.

But back to my original reason for loving Sonic Youth: Kool Thing. I listened to this song for months on my Walkman on the way to school, and it also contributed to my hearing loss.

Retro Music Thursdays: The Mission

So, I've decided to introduce a new element to my blog as we head into the fall and a whole whack of new TV: retro music Thursdays.

Remember when retro was the music your parents listened to? When it was poodle skirts and 60s surf music on the radio. "And now, on today's best retro hits, it's Jan and Dean!"

And do you remember that first time when you walked into a "Retro Mondays" night at your favourite club... and it was the music that was playing when you were in university? Wait... Blur? The Smiths? U2? Sonic Youth??? THIS is RETRO?!

Just a couple of nights ago, I was standing in a hotel elevator in Niagara Falls and these three girls got on the elevator, all in skanky clothes and heavily perfumed, going out clubbin'. They looked like they had maybe just come of drinking age (or would be carrying really good IDs that night) and they were reading aloud the acts that were coming to the casino from a poster inside the door. And then they said, "Dana Carvey? Who's Dana Carvey? Should it be Dana Harvey? I think it's Harvey. Wait... is that a man? Why is he called Dana?" And I felt my heart sink. Most every North American who is my age knows who Dana Carvey is... but I'm that other generation now. Now there's a generation of kids going to clubs that hasn't got a clue who he is. Was he terribly important to me? Of course not. The Church Lady was funny once and then it was stupid, and he tended to be too over the top and never made it outside of SNL, really. (But man, his Garth was inspired, wasn't it?) It was just a little sad to me that I now have references that are lost on other adults.

Whatever. I'm embracing the fact that my music is now retro, and I'm gonna damn well celebrate it. So every Thursday we're going to listen to the songs that, well, didn't make the whole world sing, but they made me sing and shaped who I am. And I"ll include a little anecdote as to why.

Let's start big: The Mission. Just a couple of weeks ago I was doing the final editorial flip through a book that will soon be out from my publisher, called Encyclopedia Gothica, the A-Z of all things Goth. And I marvelled that so much of my life has been shaped by Goth. The music I listen to has been inspired by it, the movies and TV and books I love the most are closer to Goth than really anything else, and even the colours of my clothes lean to black, although I never went for the all-out Goth uniform. I wanted to, but never jumped in. Instead i just hung out with a bunch of other Goths who did and lived vicariously through their black fingernails, red lips and very white skin.

The Mission were one of my favourite bands. Wayne Hussey and his hat and sunglasses, their giant orchestral songs. I wanted to have Hussey's children. I loved Sisters of Mercy, too (Hey now, hey now now... sing this corrosion to me...) but they simply weren't The Mission. I finally saw The Mission at Massey Hall in 1990 and had seats way up in the nosebleeds, but it was still an awe-inspiring show. The opening act? The Wonder Stuff. I didn't know them before then, but they became gods to me. Don't worry, they'll show up in a couple of weeks. But first, "Tower of Strength," horse and all. (I always thought this video was a bit bonkers.) Oh, the hearing loss I've endured because of this song on terribly high volume in headphones. (Don't be fooled by the shortened single version; the extended one is the only one that matters...)