Who's Baddest and Who Is Best

Album: The Rainmakers, The Good News and the Bad News, 1989

Best Track: "Reckoning Day"

Lasting Memory: Several times each week, I find myself quoting anywhere from a line from to the complete lyrics of a song off of the Rainmakers' The Good News and the Bad News. Lead vocalist and songwriter Bob Walkenhorst did some genius work on the album, and I was pleased to discover today that he hasn't lost his fastball over the past two decades.

He certainly wasted no time in giving Good News listeners the good stuff, kicking off the record with "Reckoning Day":

Well I was thinking about Abraham Lincoln
And the enemies of the truth
But I could not tell a Kennedy
From a John Wilkes Booth

Now outta my way
Outta my way
Outta my way
Hot rocking on reckoning day

And I feel like picking a fight
With anybody who claims they’re right
All the preacher men the politicians
The critics and the things they write

Outta my way
Outta my way
Outta my way
Hot rocking on reckoning day

And this is a call to arms
This is a call to hands
This is a call to the voices and the minds
Of the people in every land

Outta my way
Outta my way
Outta my way
Hot rocking on reckoning day

We’re taking the history test
Who’s baddest and who is best
(a) Lennon the brother
(b) Lennon the sisters
(c) Lenin the communist

Outta my way
Outta my way
Outta my way
Hot rocking on reckoning day

Reckoning day put the money in the mattress
Reckoning day put your pennies where they count
Reckoning day nothing left to believe in
Nothing to doubt nothing left to wait for

And getting him to tell the truth
Was like pulling a wisdom tooth
And though he never would admit it
Everybody knew he did it
When he burned down the voting booth

Outta my way
Outta my way

And we are the immigrant flock
Shipwrecked on Plymouth Rock
From the Monitor the Merrimack
From the Thresher and the Pueblo and the Titanic

Reckoning day put the money in the mattress
Reckoning day put your pennies where they count
Reckoning day nothing left to believe in
Nothing to doubt nothing left to wait for

How could that cavalcade of historical revisionism, rhetorical riddles, and aphorisms fail to recur to me during the past month?

I experienced the same pleasant haunting from "Shiny Shiny" whenever I've had reason to think about my father's rusting but redoubtable 1965 Mustang. The lines "She's the one he never sold/ Some things are classic, some are just old" whispered in my mind's ear nearly every day until my old man finally did sell the car in the winter of 2007.

No doubt the many lyrics' staying power was enhanced by the fact that they were played and sung in a manner that suggested Steve Forbert was fronting a supergroup made up of members of the dB's and the Hooters. [ED: If you do nothing else today, click on the Steve Forbert link. It will make your day. I always feel good for hours after hearing "Romeo's Tune." You will, too.]

The effect is strong and welcome. "We Walk the Levee" is the soundtrack to my thoughts about Hurricane Katrina. "Spend It on Love," which opens with

Hear tell of a man who took a hundred dollars
Spent it on lottery tickets and beer
Won a couple million, left his wife and children
Lived himself for dead in a couple of years

Should have spent it on love
Spent it on the children
Spent it on the ones who need it the most

runs through my head every time I'm down at the Breez Inn buying lottery tickets and beer. Duh.

Then there's "Thirty Days." As Walkenhorst helpfully reminds listeners and rememberers, "Thirty days has September/ April June and county jails." That's a lesson best not forgotten, as is the song's later description of a God who, rather than resting after six hard days of creating "got drunk and lonely/ Created trouble and time alone" -- a God who "Each thirty days he shoots out the full moon/ Just to remind us we're on our own."

Try not to keep that in mind the next time you're enjoying an eye-opener on Sunday morning instead of sitting in a church pew.

Up Next: Ramones, Ramones, 1976 (cassette reissue)

Destroy the Village to Destroy It

Thor played Loki yesterday, blowing up NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite before it could get into orbit and begin transmitting observations on the gaseous composition of Earth's atmosphere.

For this ultimate act of hilariously ironic meddling in the affairs of mortals, I will dedicate my next bull slaughter to the Norse god of thunder.

Few single events -- if any -- create more so-called greenhouse gas emissions than a NASA missile launch. If the global warming theorists are correct in asserting that human- and livestock-generated carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone are the principal cause of global warming, then how can they justify sending objects such as the OCO into space?

Along the same line of inquiry, what does flying dozens of political functionaries to and from Antarctica to personally hear information they could as easily and more effectively receive in an e-mail do other than generate several metric tons of supposedly ice-killing carbon dioxide?

Until every member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can recite Matthew 7:5 by heart, I refuse to take them seriously as individuals committed to solving a purported problem.

Whores Woody Allen Has Known

While I have not seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I was never more sure of anything in my entire life than I was that Penelope Cruz would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the movie.

The whore in the Woody Allen film always wins the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Well maybe the woman does not always win, and maybe the woman is not technically a whore, but peep this:

• Mariel Hemmingway, 1979, nominated for playing the 17-year-old lover of Allen's 41-year-old teacher in Manhattan


• Judy Davis, 1992, nominated for playing an unfaithful wife in Husbands & Wives


• Mira Sorvino, 1995, won for playing a call girl in Mighty Aphrodite


• Penelope Cruz, 2008, won for playing the slutty ex-wife of a painter in Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I will never know whether any of these actresses deserved their awards from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences because I am observing a one-man boycott of Woody Allen. I find the Allen morally repugnant, physically off-putting, psychologically alien, and generally unfunny. As for Sra. Cruz, I find her neither attractive nor interesting.

That's just me, but, hey, you gotta know what you don't want.

What Academy voters want, it seems, is whores. Just scroll through the list of Supporting Actress nominees since 1936. Starting right off the bat with Beulah Bondi in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) through Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity (1953), Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (1976), and Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), being shown putting your virtue up for sale seems to be a sure way to earn Oscar buzz.

There's an Aesop-level metaphorical moral about the nature of Hollywood success in there somewhere.

Keep a Lamp Trimmed and Burning

Album: The Radiators, Zig-Zaggin' Through Ghostland, 1989

Best Track: "Fall of Dark"

Lasting Memory: The name of this album, as I recall from hearing an interview with some Radiators band members on FM99 in 1990 when the station had "7 Album Sides at 7" show on Sunday nights, came from a Vietnam vet the band knew who described his time sneaking through the rainforest during night maneuvers as "zig-zaggin' through ghostland."

I am too lazy to do an Internet search to either confirm any part of my memory or determine whether the term was standard slang. I hope both are true, though, because the image is so evocative, perfectly conjuring what it would look like to run from covering tree and to obscuring fern as the sky overhead was intermittently made day-bright by flares, tracers, and phosphorous shells. The blur of motion, play of shadows, and constant fear would definitely make a man feel as if he were moving randomly through a haunted world.

Great use of the language, there, that restores some of my faith in native English speakers, which has been taking some pretty serious hits lately.

The Radiators conjure many nice musical and lyrical moments on Zig-Zaggin' Through Ghostland, especially in "Fall of Dark":



The line from the chorus that runs "Keep a lamp trimmed and burning" is particularly effective as a metaphor for the band's continuing to perform and record into their fourth decade and for encouraging the cyclically wounded American economy and workforce to keep the faith and keep an eye out because the light chases and follows the dark.

And not to get too heavy, but the second-best song on Zig-Zaggin' is the cover of "But It's Alright," which makes hope nonmetaphorically personal by assuring a lover that everything will be OK.

There's a lot to like on Zig-Zaggin'. Not enough to win over millions of people in the record-buying public, but that's a regret probably best not dwelt on when rueful reminiscences can be as easily spent on "Memories of Venus," for instance.

The other reason to follow the Radiators' admonition to keep a lamp burning is because the songs on Zig-Zaggin' are chock-a-block with phrases and references that may soon be as arcane as Chaucerian Middle English.

The best example of this is "Confidential," the first track on the album. The lyrics include mentions of local newspaper classified ads, payphones, and four-party lines. I'm old enough to remember when every household subscribed to a newspaper, payphones were ubiquitous, and home phones were mandatory. Any kid first hearing "Confidential" today might not be able to make heads or tails of the song's tale of the underbelly of society simply because the modes of communication being described have no meaning for the kid.

In that sense, then, we need to keep the lamp burning just to ensure that there will be lamps in the future. Anymore, technologies aren't becoming obsolete, they're being abandoned and almost willfully erased from society's consciousness.

Here's hoping that that trend stops.

Up Next: The Rainmakers, The Good News and the Bad News, 1989

Even More History of Words Meaning Stuff

Bloviation and delusion. I'm increasingly convinced that anything I hear on news radio is all no more than bloviation and delusion.

Two things I heard this morning convinced me of this.

The first thing has been malleating at my incus for a while now, and I'm most likely as much as two decades too late to the angry mob on this one, but I want to literally puncture my timpanic membrane every time I hear Rush Limbaugh say "drive-by media" during one of the recap/teaser bits that get played each morning on "Macrini's Morning News Team," which is a show I actually enjoy very much.

Limbaugh obviously intends the term be insulting, but it infuriates me not because it offends but because it is inherently and extrinsically meaningless and because its appropriate replacement would be even more effectively insulting.

"Drive by" can mean one of two things, those being "passing by without noticing or engaging" or "attempted assassination from a moving vehicle." Limbaugh employs neither of these meanings in his coinage, nor can he because the news media undeniably notices and engages and does not assassinate anyone's character without sticking around for the days, weeks, or even years it requires to go methodically through the stages of annoying, wounding, killing, and dancing on the grave of its chosen targets.

What does Limbaugh intend to accuse news reporters of, then? Probably that reporters tend to focus only on the surface of a news event and then move on too quickly to cover another event. This would properly be characterized as "hit-and-run media," which is more damning and equally as euphonious.

I have no hope that Limbaugh will ever begin using the English language correctly. He is, after all, a big, fat idiot.

I used to have faint hope, however, that some people somewhere would sometimes use words in ways that indicated that those people knew what those words meant. That hope died a Studs Terkelian death this morning when I heard a fortuneteller tell an NPR interviewer that she believes the tarot readings she performs empower her clients to take control of their future.

Read that again.

Yes, a woman with a job title that explicitly states that "fortune" exists and can be "told" -- whose entire self-identity is predicated on her alleged mystical ability to descry the immutable future -- believes that people can determine their own fates.

I wonder if the fortuneteller foresaw me banging my forehead repeatedly into my desktop?

Yours malapropitiously,
Ed

The Problem With Perfection

Album: The Radiators, Law of the Fish, 1987

Best Track: "Like Dreamers Do"

Lasting Memory: Two very specific, completely unrelated, and head-shakingly insignificant memories are cued like grainy 16-mm home movies in my mind's eye every time I spin The Radiators' Law of the Fish.

The first shows me sitting on the top step of the staircase leading from the living room of my family's first house in Virginia Beach to the second floor, listening to "Boomerang" on my knockoff Walkman tape player and thumbing through a Boy Scouts uniform catalog. The details of that pointless moment remain perfect 22 years later, but to what purpose?

The second memory reel has me waiting at a table in the Lafayette Branch library repeatedly singing "Doctor Doctor" to myself while waiting for my group project partner from 12th-grade religion class to show up and complete our "wedding" budget. The first verse and chorus to "Doctor Doctor" run

Talk about the heartache,
Talk about the pain
Ti Jean said the only real thing,
Was to live and love in vain
Talk about the silence, and the
Pre-dawn firing squad
Lost cigarette, never will forget
That look on the face of God

Doctor doctor, you know I feel so bad
Doctor doctor, she was the best
Thing I never had

I guess I didn't have high hopes for my and Vicky's(?) ersatz couple actually making to the imaginary altar. But, again, why that particular memory would be formed and recur makes little sense.

I'll leave the mysteries of memory unsolved for now and instead take intellectual refuge in the certainty of the statement that "Like Dreamers Do" is one of the most perfect rock/pop/New Orleans blues/blue-eyed soul/toy piano/bad junior high poetry songs ever recorded.

Doubt me? Watch this video (can't get the thing embedded).

Still not convinced? Read these lyrics:

I've been waiting for you
'fore I call your name
I've been longing for you
In sunshine and rain

Oh oh black diamond,
Oh how she shine
Oh black diamond,
Let's close our eyes

I've been pulling for ya
In everything you try
I've been weeping with ya
Every time you cry

Now the sun Is sinking,
Can't wait to get to sleep
See the black diamond
Shining in the deep

I'll meet you on the vast plains
Behind the gates of dream
Laughing dancing in the sand
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do

Won't you look at you now
Oh you crazy fool
Won't you look at you now
You mad molecule

I'll meet you on the vast plains
Behind the gates of dream
Laughing dancing in the sand
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do

Perfection, thy name is "Like Dreamers Do." The problem is, the song is so good in every way that even the strongest other tracks on Law of the Fish, like "This Wagon's Gonna Roll," wind up sounding like filler. The very good pales alongside the perfect. Pity about that.

Up Next: The Radiators, Zig-Zaggin' Through Ghostland, 1989

Don't Rock the Yacht

Album: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering, 1989

Best Track: "Circle Around the Sun"

Lasting Memory: Poi Dog Pondering has a lot of goodwill attached to it for me because it was a go-to album for dinner parties hosted by my graduate school classmates. I wouldn't characterize my class as a community of scholars, but we did fully embrace the aspects of Renaissance and salon culture that involved eating well and drinking a little too much a little too often while heatedly debating questions such as "Is oxygen really any different from phlogiston?"

Excellent times, those.

Without the overwhelmingly positive associations, the PDP would hold little appeal on its own because it is essentially gimmicky background music. The gimmick is Hawaiian-meets-70s soft rock, and the atmosphericness is exemplified by the track "Wood Guitar."

PDP does have a couple of standout songs, and readers may even remember hearing "Living With the Dreaming Body" back in the day. The best song is "Circle Around the Sun," which would not be at all out place on a 12o Minutes-based version of VH-1's 40 Most Softsational Soft Rock Hits.

Like all yacht rock, the music on PDP is best enjoyed through inattention -- Muzak for the less-than-mundane.

Up Next: The Radiators, Law of the Fish, 1987

Love Conquers Some

Album: The Plimsouls, Everywhere at Once, 1983

Best Track: "Play the Breaks"

Lasting Memory: The Plimsouls were the bar band in the classic 1983 teen romantic comedy Valley Girl. The band's "Everywhere at Once" plays as Romeo stand-in Nick (what happened?) Cage escorts Juliet surrogate Deborah (still a major crush) Foreman past the bouncer and to the night club table right after the "save the radio" scene."

Then, the band fires up with "A Million Miles Away." You won't find a more on-the-nose musical number this side of "76 Trombones." Still, it works. And it's what led me to fish Everywhere at Once out of a $2.99 bargain tape bin 20 years ago and enjoy the album's "Magic Touch" ever since.

I love Valley Girl. I love The Music Man. Hell, truth be told, I'm a sucker for any well-done rom-com. Give me The Truth About Cats and Dogs over Star Wars any day, and give me Say Anything, The Philadelphia Story, and Some Like It Hot twice on Sunday. This makes me a sap -- a 6-foot, 300-pound, goateed, wrestling-refereeing sap. But for all that, a well-entertained sap.

And if I had a single word to describe The Plimsouls' Everywhere at Once, that word would be "entertaining." The album is the acme of early-80s power pop. The guitars chime and lope (especially on "Play the Breaks"), the lyrics are just deep enough to stick with you, and lead Plimsoul Peter Case's voice is just rough enough around the edges to be engaging and endearing without being distracting. Plus, having produced no actual radio hits, the Plimsouls are just under-the-radar enough to gain me back some much needed street cred.

The way I see it, it's okay to have Bringing Up Baby on my DVR "Do Not Delete" list as long as I have Everywhere at Once in my music collection. Right?

Right?*

Up Next: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering, 1989

* Thank goodness Facebook doesn't have an e-wedgie app.

Tell Me Some Tales

Regular posts resume tomorrow. Ain't that ...




the oldest story in the world.

And Now, We're Communists

I promise to get back to the music posts eventually. Until at least some time next week, though, I'll be too busy to do anything with this Web forum but clear my political throat.

Here is an e-mail that I sent into my local NPR current-events call-in show, Hearsay. It was read over the air and everything. This is my second Hearsay appearance in the past 70 days. I may be becoming a crank, but I still have a long way to go down that slippery slope before I can be found typing my manifesto in a one-room cabin.

Anyway, Obama's talk about pay-plan limits for bank executives makes my palms itch. What do you think?

=======

Kathy,

I have two questions about President Obama's announcement that annual salaries for some financial institutions' executives will be capped at $500,000. I have no answers, but I'd be interested in hearing thoughts other than my own, which come down to, "While I'm as upset with the likes of John Thain as anyone, I also think setting hard limits on executive pay is a bad and probably illegal idea."

Here are my questions:

-- Without fully nationalizing the banks and making bank executives federal employees, how can the government set salaries?

-- If pay is limited to $500,000 per year, what will happen to the rest of the, say, $25,500,000 that had been paid out to bank executives in the last few years? It seems likely that the money will just disappear. How can actively taking money out of circulation during a financial crisis help anyone? I suppose the cap satisfies some desire for vengeance, but isn't that kind of cutting up our credit cards to spite our wallets?

=======