In My Family

Not enough individual Sparks songs on the net. Nevermind, here’s a whole album. Which you probably already own on the original vinyl, but if you don’t, you’re welcome. As you can easily guess from the image, Sparks have never been about pleasing the lowest common denominator. They’re kind of an acquired taste, most appealing to fans of camp, satire and musical parody. They’re simply too sophisticated and weird for common audiences.

Iki Maska

The more you learn about Nina Hagen, the more you realize that she really is as insane as her music suggests. For example, she married a seventeen-year-old when she was 32. Wouldn’t we all like to do that? Or, on a less inspiring note, she believes that UFOs are a real thing and AIDS isn’t. All in all, she’s probably an extremely interesting and fun person, but you wouldn’t trust her to operate heavy machinery or coach Little League.

If There Is Something

All I can say is, if you haven’t been educated about Roxy Music, I feel sorry for you and if you don’t get it, you probably don’t deserve to. I used to feel a need to make people understand, not just this but everything, me in general. Then I realized that either they do or they don’t and if they don’t there’s nothing I can do for it. I’ve also learned that loving something – whatever thing it is – is terribly lonely because nobody hears or sees things the same way and the way that thing makes me feel can’t be communicated. Even the people who share my tastes with amazing 95% overlap still hear and see and understand things their own way. Which is why you just have to accept that your relationship with your music is essentially a private matter for you to enjoy and not bore other people with. I’ve spoken before about my conviction that the act of listening to music is a communication between yourself and the artist, in which they feed their vision directly into your soul, making for a one directional and lopsided but no less real for it relationship. That’s not a way of looking at it that I’ve heard from anyone but myself, but I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that way, or who’s found that their relations with, say, Bryan Ferry are more enriching than with most of the people who actually exist in real life and we interact with outside of our heads. Bryan Ferry has been a better friend than pretty much most of the people I’ve met, and certainly more important to me than nine out of ten of the men I’ve slept with. And I don’t think that’s in any way abnormal or unhealthy. I think everyone has that place in their heart for role models and imaginary friends, although a lot of people don’t talk about it in quite this way. I also suspect that for many people that special spot is filled with Jesus. If you think about it, who is Jesus but your imaginary rock star idol, and what are rock stars but re-made and re-modeled substitute Christ figures?

If I Was a Blackbird

How about a Scottish love ballad? I’m sure you must be tired of all these posts on people you already know about.  So therefore, Silly Wizard, a band I myself don’t know much about except that they were part of the British folk music revival of the seventies. While bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention gave their arrangements of old folk songs a modern rock sound with the addition of electric guitar, Silly Wizard played in a more traditional style with more emphasis on banjos and fiddles. Consequently, they were less popular and today remain less well known. I understand that traditional folk music can be hard to get into, even when leavened with guitar solos, and the purity of Silly Wizard’s music may even be alienating to listeners weaned on drum machines. People tend to associate folk music (and especially the Irish variety) with all sorts of cheesy things from Riverdance to Ren Faires to movies starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Also, most of us here in America have trouble distinguishing the particulars of Irish, Scottish and English traditions. Still, it’s very much worth taking the time to explore, for the musicianship, storytelling and culture.

ICUROK

You may not instantly recognize the name of Klaus Nomi, but be assured that on a subconscious level, you do know him. Nomi died in 1983, alone and forgotten, like many of the first wave of AIDS victims, in a quarantined hospital bed. (Partly because of the stigma of  the “Gay Men’s Plague” and partly because his personality was such that he’d alienated practically everyone he’d ever known.) He died a failure, he never made it big is an opera singer, pop star, television chef or performance artist, all things he’d tried his hand at. His one brush with fame was a single gig singing backup for David Bowie. He was no more than a tiny, weird bleep on a music scene already teeming with outrageous characters. And yet, since his death, his influence has stealthily invaded pop culture, to the point where his singature silhouette has achieved genuine iconhood. If you’ve seen the parade of triangle-suited Nomis walking the runway at this season’s Balmain show, you can see how the ghost of him lingers. And it’s not just the fashion flock that, finished digesting 80′s Claude Montana and Madonna’s pointy bra, now hungers for more esoteric reference points. Klaus Nomi’s music – an icy cocktail of operatic vocals, machine made disco beats and irony – has cycled from bleeding-edge avant-garde down to piddling novelty and straight back. What was once unpalatable weirdness now, finally, hits the bullseye. Listen to this song and tell me you couldn’t mistake it for something from Daft Punk. Nomi’s style, his sense of camp and his taste for mixing the highest elements with the lowest are suddenly, just like that proverbial stopped clock, right on time.

I’m Waiting for the Man

I guess I don’t have to tell you what man Lou is waiting for and why. I can only comment that $26 went a much longer way ’67. You couldn’t buy very much heroin for $26 today, and also I’m afraid that all the shady characters have been swept away from Lexington Avenue long ago. Nevertheless, the general intent hasn’t changed much over the years. I’m sure what Lou Reed put to paper in 1967 remains a universal experience, amirite? I mean, who hasn’t trekked to the bad side of town to buy drugs before? Whaddya mean not all of you have bought heroin!? In any case, if the jangle and feedback of the Velvets isn’t alienating and culty enough for ya, check out the cover Nico cut. She, more than anyone else, understood the true meaning of the song – most likely a lot better than Lou Reed himself ever did. Nico was neck deep in heroin by the time she recorded her 1981 album Drama of Exile, and her attitude was very much in keeping with the material:

[Aura label head Aaron] Sixx admitted that Nico “didn’t give a shit what happened to the LP, she just wanted the money for drugs.” Yet despite these unconventional circumstances, Drama of Exile would see Nico receive some of the best reviews of her career.

— Dave Thompson, Better to Burn Out: The Cult of Death in Rock ‘N’ Roll

Waiting for the Man was certainly a brilliant choice for her. She didn’t have very much contribution in the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico, having been roped in by Andy Warhol for glamour purposes, but she lived that album for the rest of her life. Lou Reed never did as many degenarate things as his songs lead us to imagine and in no time at all he was living the high life with David Bowie. Speaking of whom, there he is with Lou, still having a real good time together. It’s great to see those two jamming together on a particularly rockin’ mid-90s David Bowie song – oh wait, that’s a cover of Waiting for the Man that mysteriously just sounds exactly like a mid-90′s David Bowie song.

I’m Sticking With You

I bet a lot of you didn’t even realize that The Velvet Underground had a girl drummer. At least not at first. Once you started learning a little bit you found out that Maureen Tucker was really a trailblazer, one of the very first women to play an instrument in a band without becoming a hyper-sexualized focal point. She went by the name Moe, kept her hair short, dressed plainly and studiously avoided whatever small amount of spotlight was afforded by being a Velvet Underground member. She looked like one of the guys and was accepted as one. Her approach to drumming was one of radical simplicity. She used a stripped down kit and eschewed cymbals as too show-offy. The minimalism of her style was an integral part of the Velvets’ sound, which took them absolutely nowhere at the time, but has since been celebrated as one of rock’s biggest influences. Tucker didn’t gain much glory from her pivotal years with the Velvet Underground, nor did she do anything glamorous with the rest of her life. She made a couple of low-key solo albums and played sporadically with old friends like John Cale, but mostly she just lived an anonymous life. She married, had five children, settled down in Georgia and spent years working at Walmart. All par for the course for someone who had no interest in being a superstar. Her handful of vocal contributions with the Velvets will never be radio hits, but they have gained an increased following, thanks to being featured prominently in the film Juno. That movie besides being, like, the cutest, made a hit of its eccentric soundtrack of quirky and twee music by the likes of Kimya Dawson, Cat Power and this long-forgotten gem of a Moe Tucker vocal.

I’m Not Sayin’

Somewhat of a rarity, a video of Nico’s first single, 1965. She had already made some recordings with Serge Gainsbourg, but that collaboration never went anywhere and she was still primarily working as a model. Her singing career didn’t really start until she was picked up by Andrew Loog Oldham, who besides managing The Rolling Stones, had recently transformed a 17 year old “angel with big tits” named Marianne Faithfull into a dreamy pop star. He was probably trying to repeat the trick with Nico, but she proved to be less pliable than the naive and sheltered Faithfull had been. Despite her stunning looks and modeling success, having a pretty image always rubbed Nico the wrong way. She never enjoyed modeling or acting, because she hated discipline and being groomed, posed and told what to do. What she did enjoy was the creative freedom of being a musician, although at first she faced the same problem of having powerful men trying to mold her to fit some image. Although she was signed to Oldham’s label and had the support of her friend Brian Jones and Jimmy Page in the studio with her, her single never took off. I can imagine the pushy impresario Andrew telling her to look wistful and sing pretty, and Nico, always as stubborn as an iceberg, just continuing to do things her own way. She just wasn’t a pop angel. She could sing in a lovely high register if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She had a naturally deep voice and she didn’t like being told to sing high. Other things she didn’t like were self-promotion, interviews, photo shoots and sucking up to people – all the things that make a pop star. Eventually she stomped out on every scene that wanted to embrace her, so she could make her defiantly uncommercial music on her own terms. I can’t say if she ever really found happiness, but she must have found some creative satisfaction at least.

I Love Paul

Hello and welcome to the new year! Let’s start it off with some hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare courtesy of Nina Hagen. Who is Paul? I don’t know. Let’s imagine it’s Paul McCartney. Does that make sense? No, but this is Nina Hagen, a crazy moon bat who thinks she’s deep. Take it from me, anyone who doesn’t have the attention span to decide on a hair color can’t be trusted to deliver a deep spiritual message. At least, not intentionally. Sometimes Nina says some pretty dumb shit, and sometimes she gets in way over her head with misbegotten political causes, and sometimes it seems like she’s not even in on her own joke. But since most of the time her music is so high spirited and fun, everything else can be forgiven. Yeah, she’s loony, but she’s not the fist loony pop star and she wears it so well.

Home

If I can clear up one misconception about Lene Lovich – she is not German. I always assumed she was, because of her name, and because she’s weird, and because she appears to dress out of the same dustbin as Nina Hagen. But no, she’s from Detroit, Michigan, home of Iggy Pop and The White Stripes. You can’t really blame me for making the misassociation though. Lovich is a breed of weird that rarely springs up in America. Not coincidentally, she has had her best success in Europe and has long made England her home. The association with Nina Hagen isn’t off-base either; the two are friends and have often played together and covered each other’s songs. I don’t know what Lovich has been up to since she made her breakthrough album Stateless in 1978. I know she had a moment of cultish popularity during the 80′s and her song Lucky Number was a small hit. It doesn’t matter too terribly much; Stateless is a bizarre, brilliant little gem bright enough to earn her all the posterity she needs. The most recent I’ve heard of her she made a cameo appearance on a Dresden Dolls concert video, looking exactly as she did in ’78. A very appropriate team-up, I should say. I can see how Amanda Fucking Palmer owes a debt to Lovich and her uncompromising eccentricity. It’s perhaps inevitable that Lovich should be just a small footnote in the teeming history of rock music, oddball that she is, but it is encouraging to see at least a few young people taking lessons from her. We need more balls-out crazy women taking the stage.