This week's edition of 10 Songs draws exclusively from the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 1017.
THE BAY CITY ROLLERS: Wouldn't You Like It
When I was in college in the late '70s, I had a friend named Jane, who was a DJ on the Brockport campus radio station. We hung out together a few times, including one night when I kibbitzed with her in the studio while she did her radio show. And I requested one specific song....
By the end of the Me Decade, former teen idols The Bay City Rollers were persona non grata to the buying public, an embarrassing relic of adolescence for those (mostly female) fans who'd outgrown their puppy-eyed crushes on this Tartan-clad combo. And most music lovers who identified as older, male, hipper, and/or more mature just despised the Rollers all along.
But not me. Once I learned to ignore the ludicrous notion of the Rollers as the next Beatles, I found that I liked some of the Rollers' records just fine, thanks. I was especially taken with "Rock And Roll Love Letter" and "Yesterday's Hero." When I became aware of the notion of power pop, I was delighted to learn that the writers of Bomp! magazine included The Bay City Rollers as at least a tangent to that discussion.
I saw the Rollers lip-sync an album track called "Wouldn't You Like It" on the Midnight Special TV show, and I was instantly captivated by its power-chord riffs, chugging rhythm, and sheer overall oomph. My interest in the Rollers wasn't then sufficient to prompt me to buy many of their records--I had the "Rock And Roll Love Letter" and "Saturday Night" 45s, and the Dedication and It's A Game LPs--but my girlfriend's pal Debi was an unrepentant Rollers fan; she had the Rock And Roll Love Letter album, and played "Wouldn't You Like It" for me. Man, what a great track.
So some time later, when I was chilling with mi amiga pequeña Jane as she did her radio show, I bugged Jane to play "Wouldn't You Like It." Bugged. Begged. Pestered. Pleaded. No, Carl!, she insisted, I'm not playing the freakin' Bay City Rollers on my show! She finally relented just to shut me up. The song played...and, to her surprise, she liked it, and said so on the radio. Gotta give her credit for that. She went so far as to say that if the Rollers had just come along a couple of years later than they did, they would have been considered part of the new wave.
It's been nearly forty years. We were pals, and we parted as pals. I still think of Jane whenever I play that song, a Bay City Rollers album track that illustrated the transcendent value of ignoring prejudices, and embodied the enduring strength of friendship. And I dedicate the song once again, as I did on the radio just the other night, to an old comrade. This one goes out to my friend Jane, wherever she is. Thanks again, my friend.
BLONDIE: X Offender
Well, speaking of puppy-eyed crushes....
Blondie's lead singer Debbie Harry was sexy without any appearance of trying to be sexy. She didn't even seem to be conscious of her everyday allure, her natural beauty and glamour, her God-given possession of It. She just was.
My first awareness of Blondie came via Phonograph Record Magazine in 1977, when I was in the spring semester of my senior year in high school. I've never forgotten writer Mark Shipper's description of the band's look as "like Marilyn Monroe backed by The Dave Clark Five," a blurb which sold me on Blondie well before I ever heard a note of their music. When I got to college that fall, I immediately started carpet-bombing the school radio station with requests for all of the acts I'd read about in PRM, from Television to The Dictators, and certainly including constant (and urgent) petitions to hear Blondie's "X Offender." I loved the track on first spin, and I have never stopped loving it since. And they called it puppy love!
MARY-CHAPIN CARPENTER: Never Had It So Good
I developed a slight interest in country music in the early '90s. As much as I detest current country, and as much as I probably hated the most popular country stuff back then, there was undeniably some fantastic stuff going on within the genre. CMT had a weekly rockin' country showcase called Crossroads, and I paid as much attention to that as I did MTV's left-of-the-dial shindig 120 Minutes. Before that, I was already following a superb Syracuse group called The Delta Rays, fronted by Craig Marshall and Maura Boudreau (the latter now known as Maura Kennedy, and now playing with her husband Pete Kennedy as the world-renowned coffeehouse-pop duo The Kennedys).
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| Delta Rays 45 cover photo by some guy named Dana Bonn |
THE FLASHCUBES: It's You Tonight
If you know of my prevailing and pervasive allegiance to Syracuse's own power pop powerhouse The Flashcubes, you might be surprised to discover that I have absolutely no contemporaneous memory of one of their signature tunes, bassist Gary Frenay's absolutely fabulous "It's You Tonight." Timing. I don't think the 'Cubes were playing the song yet in the summer of 1979, which was when I abruptly stopped going to their shows in the wake of guitarist Paul Armstrong's dismissal from the group. They were probably performing the song by the time I decided to start seeing them again, but living away from Syracuse at the time, I didn't have enough opportunity to immerse myself in Flashcubes Mark II; I remember they were still a pretty damned good group, but the specific recollections are forgotten wisps, surrendered to the march of years (and the consumption of beers). I came to know and love the song much, much later, on cassettes of Flashcubes material provided to me by Gary.
THE GIN BLOSSOMS: Allison Road
A listener on Sunday night described this as a guilty pleasure, a concept I reject. The idea of guilty pleasures in pop music relies on the fiction that one should be self-conscious about the perceived hipness of one's own taste; I spurn that lie outright. And this song? Man, this is such an exhilarating, entrancing little number, buoyed by its own bounce 'n' verve, that even the suggestion of someone feeling a tinge of guilt for diggin' it is unworthy of consideration. Case dismissed.
THE KINKS: You Really Got Me
Ahem. THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!!
KISS: Calling Dr. Love
My first favorite KISS song, though it was eventually supplanted by "Shout It Out Loud." My sister Denise gave me the Rock And Roll Over album as a high school graduation gift in 1977, about six months after I saw KISS in concert.
THE RAMONES: I Don't Want To Walk Around With You
Our tribute to social distancing. I don't know if I heard this song prior to acquiring The Ramones' eponymous debut album in the spring of '78, my cherished prize when I won the LP of my choice in a trivia contest sponsored by the Brockport campus newspaper. I had heard the album's Side One in its entirety by then, courtesy of a campus radio DJ named Joel. Joel was closing his show one afternoon, and offered to finish his shift by playing whatever album side his first caller requested. I was that first caller! My request of Ramones Side One was met with Joel's anguished cry of Oh, you BASTARD! But he played it.
"I Don't Want To Walk Around With You" was on Side Two. Couldn't convince Joel to throw in a spin of that side, too. Can't blame him. He honored his end of the deal.
LINDA RONSTADT: How Do I Make You?
Punk rock kinda trashed my love of Linda Ronstadt. I'd been a fan for a few years, coming to her delectable renditions of "Long, Long Time" and Michael Nesmith's "Different Drum" after the fact, and to gems like "You're No Good," "When Will I Be Loved," and "Love Is A Rose" roughly contemporary to their deserved radio heyday.
But my embrace of punk made her seem, I dunno...suddenly uncool. Schisms were forming, turfs were declared, and the fact that none of that nonsense of picking sides in pop music made a damned bit of rational sense couldn't stop zealots like me from planting our flags and screeching.
Linda aligned herself with the other side, with the likes of The Eagles. She told Rolling Stone about seeing The Ramones play live, and hating it, describing the sound as so constricted it could only be called hemorrhoid music; The Ramones later commented that she had left the show holding her ears. Flag planted.
Sure, this all seems stupid now. But it was dead serious at the time. Even Linda's decision to cover a few songs written by angry young man Elvis Costello was viewed with suspicion and loathing (and that's just from Costello himself). Her 1980 album Mad Love wasn't really her new wave album, but that's how a few people perceived it. I lumped it in with Billy Joel's Glass Houses as examples of boring old farts trying to catch a new wave to be sittin' on top of a trend. I like both albums a lot more now than I did then.
"How Do I Make You?" was the first single off Mad Love, its inherent pop energy channeling neither Ramones nor Eagles, but sounding swell on the radio. That should have been enough. I realize that now.
SQUEEZE: Tempted
I may as well make this confession straight up: I did not care for "Tempted" at all when I first heard it. I saw the video a couple of times on MTV, didn't even realize it was Squeeze, and dismissed it as the sort of dull and dreary wallpaper pop I associated with acts like Hall & Oates. I did not like Hall & Oates, and my only pleasant association with any of their music was the memory of seeing my first stripper, disrobing to the tune of "Rich Girl."
It's difficult to reconstruct my own Squeeze timeline. It's likely that "Cool For Cats" was the only Squeeze song I heard while I was still in college, and that wasn't sufficient to interest me in the group. A little bit later, I simply adored Squeeze's "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)," and loved seeing Squeeze play that and "Annie Get Your Gun" in what was supposed to be their farewell performance on Saturday Night Live in 1982. I came to retroactively recognize the pop brilliance of Squeeze as the '80s trudged on. "Tempted" was part of that brilliance, even if I was slow to comprehend that truth. I can't explain why I was initially so dismissive of such an engaging temptation.
Squeeze is touring this year as an opening act for Hall & Oates. The personal symmetry of that happenstance borders on the WTF. I did eventually develop a tolerance for Hall & Oates, but I doubt I'll ever be a fan, and the tour therefore isn't for me, even with Squeeze.
No, not even if there were strippers. But Squeeze? I admit: I'm tempted.
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| The clothes are stayin' on, bud! |
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