Dad Rock Primary, No. 4: Boston, A Prolific, Constipated One-Man Act

You see success, I see excess, so....

The Biggest Surprise: The story behind the “Mary Ann” on “More Than a Feeling,” or the fact that every person in that video is playing a lie....
The Most Famous Line-Up: Tom Scholz on everything (and all production), but also Brad Delp (vox/guitar), Barry Goudreau (guitar), and, later, Sib Hashian (drums), and Fran Sheehan (bass).

What You Need to Know
“I was just writing the kind of music I wanted to hear.”

Tom Scholz developed the material that became Boston’s first album in his basement, with him playing, recording, and crucially manipulating the production to get the sound he was after. He financed the whole thing through a day-job with Polaroid and, no matter how many record executives tried to flush Scholz out of the various basements he created, he never produced a Boston album anywhere outside the basement studios he built for himself wherever he settled down. And that’s the real point of interest in all this: Scholz has as many technical achievements as he has musical ones. When he couldn’t figure out how to get a sound out of the equipment he had, he made new equipment – all of them analog, notably, a point of pride he advertised on some Boston albums. And he really did some incredible stuff with this – specifically, the guitar sound, which, one person interviewed in that “Behind the Music” described as “crunchy guitar that sounded almost three-dimensional.” By my (untrained) ear, he did the same thing with Delp’s vocals – i.e., adding layers to them to make his voice sound like a chorus. When Scholz needed a physical band to record final demos or for the “showcase” he arranged to secure a recording contract to put out six albums in 10 years, he called in connections he made playing in bands during college (e.g., Freehold and Mother’s Milk). Scholz creative process/perfectionism made that rate of production laughably unrealistic - he never got over the b-side of Boston’s rushed (for him) second album, Don’t Look Back (1978) - and a major lawsuit inevitably followed when he insisted on taking his own damn time for a third album. That album, Third Stage, finally came out in 1986 and produced one monster hit (“Amanda”), but Boston’s history basically dries up there (and gets a little weird; see the final minutes of that “Behind the Music” linked to below).

Because Boston is based on Scholz’s singular vision, it’s probably worth taking a little time on Scholz’ influences. He grew up listening to and (I think) playing classic music. According to the “BtM” documentary, The Kinks were the first rock band he really liked – and he did branch out from there – but, if two things stand out about Boston musically, it’s the intricate structure of the songs and, most of all the production. The success of the band’s first, best-known album (1976, “Foreplay/Long Time,” “Peace of Mind,” and “More Than a Feeling*”) still feels like the creative peak. Full disclosure: I barely looked into either Third Stage, never mind 1994’s Walk On, and on the grounds that Boston’s time had passed.

My Favorite Anecdote
As Scholz bravely confessed, the inspiration for “Mary Ann” came from an older cousin Scholz had a crush on when he was 8 or 9 years old. Given the timing, I’m willing to give him a pass.

Why They Didn’t Make the Island
I struggle with Boston because too much of Scholz’ music sounds the same - something that could come from my own shitty ear just as much as repetition. I chose the one track I did from Third Stage – “We’re Ready” – precisely for its slight tonal differences with Boston’s earlier music, whether reining in the trebles or leaving a little more dead-air in the production. That gets at another fun detail: the song “Let Me Take You Home Tonight,” is a rare example of song that didn’t come from Scholz; that more roots-based tune came from Delp, and it’s enough to make you wonder what a different balance would have sounded like

Other Featured Songs: I also added "Don't Look Back" (LIVE!) but only as an act of hostility; that sounds so, so very Boston; the same goes for another successful single from the same album, "A Man I'll Never Be." It's the same gimmicks, the same vague uplift that defines some part of arena rock. That’s not the kind of thing one takes to a desert island, because until the end of your life? Seriously?
Most Boston Song: “More Than a Feeling,” and sorry for being boring.

Sources
Wikipedia

Behind the Music (actually a Japanese/reverential documentary on Boston).

The Dad Rock Primary, No. 5: Foreigner, aka, Mick Jones' Control Issues

He's not wrong....

[Ed. Links to all sources besides the songs are at the bottom of the post.]

The Biggest Surprise: The extent to which the band operated like Leninist Russia.
The Most Famous Line-Up: Jones (guitar) Lou Gramm (vocals), Al Greenwood (keys), Ed Gagliardi (bass), Dennis Elliott (drums), and Ian McDonald (not clear, but I think guitar with them).

What You Need to Know
Foreigner’s chose their name deliberately, or at least after rejecting “Trigger.” Because the original membership split evenly at the time between Yanks and Brits, at least half the band would be foreign no matter where they played, or that was the joke. In his defense, Jones did start the band: “stranded” in New York and with his current band imploded, he assembled a new band one man/instrument at a time with encouragement from a friend named Bud Prager. The search for a lead singer became the final, fateful piece. Auditioning 40-50 singers finally knocked loose a memory of Gramm, an American from upstate New York he saw perform earlier with a band called Black Sheep. Gramm was “cleaning a public safety building from seven at night till about 11:30” when Jones came calling, but they hired him almost as soon as he stepped out of the booth. Once they launched – which would take some time and something like Prager’s life savings – they could neither stop churning out hits – e.g., “It Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold As Ice” from their 1977 eponymous debut and the title track and “Hot Blooded” from 1978’s Double Vision - nor hold the band together. Most of the band’s musical direction came from Gramm and Jones (though McDonald insists he got his hands in there as well), but Jones seized ownership of creative control early by way of a succession of purges – e.g., Gagliardi before Double Vision, then teaming up with Gramm to oust founding members (Greenwood and McDonald) on the way to making the band a four-piece and recording 4 (a name with multiple, fairly dull connotations), the band’s biggest album, in 1981 (ft. “Juke Box Hero,” “Urgent,” and  “Waiting for a Girl Like You”).

Even Gramm eventually strained against the short leash Jones kept on the band. Feeling stifled (paraphrase, “I was tired of singing someone else’s songs”), he recorded a solo album (with the single, “Midnight Blue”), which, no shock, Jones resented for sounding too much like Foreigner. According to Behind the Music’s account, the lead single for 1984’s Agent Provocateur, “I Want to Know What Love Is,” caused the final break…but it takes a strained narrative to hold that together – specifically, that the “hard-rocking” Foreigner recoiled at the idea of attaching their name to a ballad. I’m trying to square that against the many ballads in Foreigner’s oeuvre going back to their debut fucking album with “Woman Oh Woman” and “Fool for You Anyway” (also, what was “Waiting for a Girl Like You” on 4?). After a couple decades, some profound health scares for both Jones and Gramm (and Gramm’s was/is rough, though not as rough as Gagliardi’s actual death), the band still plays, and Jones finally achieved his dream of absolute creative control.

My Favorite Anecdote:
Gramm on the controversial album cover for Head Games (third album, and the least successful from their hey-day; picture above):

“Part of that was because of the cover. The song Head Games was banned by a lot of radio stations after the cover of the album came out. Today, that would not have even been a problem. But in the Bible Belt, the cover of the cute little girl in the boys' bathroom erasing her number off the wall...They didn't see the humor in that. It wasn't supposed to even be sexy. She was sexy....she was cute… She was erasing her phone number off the wall of the boys' bathroom and that's all it was. A big deal was made out of that and it really hurt our sales."

Why They Didn’t Make the Island
With as little disrespect as possible, Foreigner always struck me as the cheesiest band of this bunch - yes, that’s with Styx in the mix. Too many of lyrics are laughable (or cringey AF; see “Love Has Taken Its Toll”), and listening to Gramm stretch bad writing to fit the music doesn’t help. The predictability of the guitar combined with rhythm structures that don’t have any bounce in them probably turn me off more than anything else.
Other Featured Songs: “You’re All I Am” (another ballad; nice one, too) and “Blue Morning, Blue Day,” another song I almost like. I like them best when they play off type. "Break It Up," more or may not have achieved that feat, but it got some props somewhere I read...
Most Foreigner Song: “Hot Blooded,” where they don’t fuck around and nail the hard-rock energy.

Sources
Wikipedia

Behind the Music

One Hit No More, No. 16: The Blues Magoos, "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet"; Call It Bluesedelic

Shit happened, man...

[Ed. Note – In order to avoid warping the narrative to get in links where I want them, all the sources for this post are listed and linked to at the end. Hope it works for you…and me.]

The Hit
A proto-psychedelic rock tune called “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” The Blues Magoos dropped into the Greenwich Village scene in 1966 – the very cusp of what counts as the psychedelic rock era (or enjoy this crappy live version). It opens with a shimmer of electric organ before clearing space for a grooving bass riff that holds the song together. It blew up worldwide – No. 5 on Billboard, and I read loose talk of No. 5 worldwide, but who knows? It’s a fun little tune that just about screams “mid-60s!”

That said, I’m excited about this band/post because, for the first time since I started this project, I finally found a band that might have gotten screwed into being a one hit wonder.

The (Original) Band
Emil “Peppy” Thielheim, aka, Peppy Castro (vox/guitar), Dennis LePore (lead guitar), Ralph Scala (organ/vox), Ron Gilbert (bass), Jon Finnegan (drums).

The Rest of the Story
The Blues Magoos started in Greenwich Village, playing wherever they could, trying to live on $8-10 a night, and crashing at home when they couldn’t earn enough playing shows. They started young too - right out of high school – which made home a live option. According to both Castro and Scala, a band that didn’t write its own songs would die in the Village, something that had the band writing songs at the same time they learned their instruments. All the members had their influences ("it was all Country-Western, Rhythm and Blues and Delta Blues"), but Scala notes that they wrote songs “as the commercial end.” And that will come up later…

From what I gather, “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” was one of The Blues Magoos’ first polished tunes, so they hit the ground running. With Greenwich Village crawling with industry people, all it took was a series of one introduction leads to another moments to land the band to a deal with Mercury Records. They recorded two albums in quick succession – Psychedelic Lollipop in 1966 and Electric Comic Book in 1967 – and that’s where all the stories take off.

One Hit No More, No. 15: The Gentrys, "Keep on Dancing," and One Brilliant Second Act

He wrote songs for the talent on top of this...

The Hit
“Keep on Dancing,” a garage-inspired tune with a “recorded-in-a-box” sound with a notable structure: “The second half of the song, after the false fade, beginning with Wall's drum fill, is the same as the first.” There’s more than one way to get to two minutes fifty…

Inspired by what they’d heard from the UK, The Gentrys wanted to record more songs with that sound. They recorded “Keep on Dancing” for a local label – Youngstown Records, I think – but, sadly, when MGM signed them to sell that hit and whatever came after it, they connected them to the wrong producer. At least that’s how guitarist/lead singer, Larry Strawberry, saw it and that name…a blessing, I tell you.

The Rest of the Story
The Gentrys formed as a group of friends at Memphis, Tennessee’s Treadwell High. To go through the rest of the members, they were: Pat Neal on bass guitar, Larry Butler on keyboards, the drummer Larry Wall (and later Rob Straube), Bobby Fisher on sax and keyboards, Jimmy Johnson on trumpet and, finally, Bruce Bowles and Jimmy Hart as back-up vocals…and hold onto the last name in that list.

They started the band as juniors and, to put some meat on what Strawberry called “our little rise to fame,” they went from playing dances and killing every Battle of the Bands they came across, to getting Youngstown to put out the single “Sometimes,” to steadily touring the mid-South (with chaperones! rock 'n' roll, MFs!), to doing a (possible dodgy) triple on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, to recording “Keep on Dancing,” to playing on shows like Hullabaloo Shindig! and Where the Action Is (i.e., shows featuring rockers for the teenyboppers). MGM called somewhere in there and, next thing you know they’re touring on Dick Clark caravan tours and playing with The Beach Boys (damn!) and Sonny and Cher (huh).

To skip to the end, after doing the math on what Dick Clark paid and seeing the solid support from family members and girlfriends get a little more complicated, the band’s members played out their careers on, as Strawberry named it, “the red-dirt circuit.” They made, like, 1.5 to four times per show doing that than what Dick Clark paid them, but they also lost the national exposure.

Crash Course, No. 14: Parquet Courts, Regular Dudes, Killing It Every Day

Not bad for inspiration....

Personal
Parquet Courts first piqued my interest with “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience” a lively punk number kissed with ska/dub rhythms. That grew into a fixation when the jaunty “Tenderness” rolled around (sorry about the "fan-cam" quality on that video). Both came from the band’s 2018 release Wide Awake!, which didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but does now.

A Little History
“The songs are told from a first-person perspective about experiences we’ve had, what someone feels like when fighting a square job from 9-5, and finding beauty and meaning in the world. It’s really important to all of us, and a lot of people can relate to that.”

I’m about to struggle to write much of interest about the (mostly) New-York-by-way-of Texas Parquet Courts. That has less to do with them not being thoughtful and/or intelligent, than it does with the reality that I’d need another month or so to learn their music well enough to properly comment on what they’re trying to tell the world. They definitely come from the “punk” tradition – a genre labeling almost as useful as “rock” at this point - their lyrics are political, they talk collective action, but, from what I gather, more from a “state of the world/existential” point of view than specific advocacy. They’re not given to grand declarations, at least not in interviews, so that aspect is contained entirely in their music, which’ll take more time to tease out than I’ve given myself for this, and I hate getting over my damn skis, so I’ll leave it there. In some fundamental way, they seem like any other four guys going to a job one day after the other, only they go to a much better job.

Parquet Courts is a four-piece, arranged like so:

“Led by two Texas transplants — Austin Brown, 27, and Andrew Savage, 26 — Parquet Courts’ is rounded out by bassist Sean Yeaton and Savage’s younger brother, Max.”

To fill in the blanks, Max Savage hits the drums (and looks distractingly like Andrew), while both Brown and Andrew Savage manage guitar and vocals and, near as I can tell, do all the songwriting. Based on what I’ve seen A. Savage “leads” the band – i.e., who does all the talking in this 2018 Face Culture interview (Part 1) – but don’t lead singers always do that(?), but I also didn’t catch too many instances of Brown taking a full musical lead outside of “Mardi Gras Beads” (the post-chorus guitar is fantastic; also, about the strike-through, it turns out Brown sings on several of my favorite tracks on Wide Awake!). Still, no one in the band looked or sounded sad or thwarted in any interview I’ve seen, and they’ve been at it as Parquet Courts since 2011, so, till further notice, they look like band who knows what works and feels comfortable doing it. Boring as hell, basically. (In other words, what’s my hook, dammit!)

One Hit No More, No. 14: Jonathan King, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and He Should Have

NOTE: King does not usually look like Mitch McConnell, but...

“I have been studying the music industry for the last three years and it is one big joke. Anyone can make it if they're clever and can fool a few people.”

Back in 1965, a Englishman named Jonathan King wanted to be a pop star very, very badly, so he wrote a song called, “Everyone's Gone to the Moon.” It’s not a great song, one of those popular music hold-outs in the early(ish) age of rock ‘n’ roll that borrowed from it while still sounding like something your local radio station would play after a Petula Clark hit. Whatever I think of that song, Jonathan King understood how pop stardom worked. Maybe not in the most traditional way – and, as it happened, not without prison time(!) – but King gave one hell of a lot more to popular culture than that one cheesy song…

…if nothing else, you can thank him for the “ooga chaka ooga ooga” in his remake of “Hooked on Feeling.” (Even if his version wasn’t the most popular; paging Blue Swede.)

Born to privilege in 1944, King became obsessed with pop stardom around the time he was working on his A levels. He was already performing with a band, The Bumbles, as well as writing and producing for them. That accounted for King’s first crack at fame, a single titled “Gotta Tell” (which I can't find). That flopped, but it only took his third/fourth attempt to write the hit that made him famous. "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" hit No. 4 on the UK charts behind The Beatles’ “Help!” at No. 1 and, to deepen the foreshadowing introduced above (e.g., “prison time(!)”), King played on Jimmy Savile’s Top of the Pops. Wait for it…

The decision to flag “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as either King’s third or fourth attempt touches on a curious aspect of King’s career. King had persuaded Decca Records to release a 45 based on another song titled “Green Is the Grass”; when they’d asked him for a B-side, he delivered “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which immediately became the A-side. “Green Is the Grass” flopped in the end, but the way King released his next hit – e.g., without his name attached to it; he didn’t even perform it – established a template that he’d return to throughout his career. That single was titled “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous. King continued to release hits under his own name – e.g., “Lazy Bones,” Flirt,” and “Hooked on a Feeling” – but he’d also put out songs under names like The Weathermen (“It’s the Same Old Song” (yes, it's a (bad) cover)), Nemo (“The Sun Has Got His Hat On”), Sakkarin (“Sugar, Sugar”), and St. Cecelia (“Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)”). There was a certain logic to it all:

Crash Course, No. 13: Ezra Furman, You've Already Missed Too Much

Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus?

Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.

As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):

“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”

The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.

OK, on with the rest of it.

Personal

As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.