Music – Spectre Collie

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Bring Your Eh Game

Two tunes in honor of a weekend trip to Alberta

We just got back from an extended weekend trip to Edmonton, Alberta. We were there for Game Con Canada, where I was tagging along with my husband as he helped out at the Logomancy Media booth. They’re a group of content streamers who do a lot of TTRPGs and related videos and podcasts, fundraising for charities like Make-a-Wish and the Trans Lifeline.

It was my first time ever in Canada, and two things I really appreciated about a nerd convention there: the opening ceremony included a land acknowledgment by a performer named Dallas Arcand Jr, and the tag-line for the show was “Bring Your Eh-Game.”

The first night in Edmonton, we went to a bar where every screen was playing the game in the Stanley Cup final between the Oilers and the Florida Panthers. At least 2/3 of the people in the bar (and throughout the city) were wearing Oilers jerseys, and asking me what I thought of that 2nd period, eh? (I had to admit that I know even less about hockey than I do about most sports).

When the Oilers won that game, it was the best thing, possibly the highlight of the trip for me. The entire bar seemed to erupt, and previously mild-mannered guys were now screaming and hugging each other. The bar sound system started blasting “La Bamba” — along with “Informer” by Snow, which didn’t make sense to me until I found out Snow was Canadian — which became the Oilers’ victory song to pay tribute to locker room attendant and fan Joey Moss, who loved the song, after his death.

I realize that forming an opinion about Canada based on a single weekend in Edmonton would be kind of like forming an opinion about the whole of the United States after a few days in Des Moines, but overall my impression was that Canada was like the US if everything were about 10-15% better. It’s not a magical, perfect, paradise, but there’s just a baseline level of kindness and sanity that hasn’t been rotted away by the last couple of decades of fringe groups in the US throwing absolute tantrums whenever anyone proposes making things better.

And I admit I already had a positive impression of Canada, at least as far back as working on the Kim Possible project at Epcot. We were working out of the Canada pavilion with a bunch of cast members from Vancouver and Alberta, and there was just a relentlessly good vibe through the whole project. I admit I still like to linger around the Canada pavilion to listen to the background music loop, which contains a flute-heavy instrumental version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s corny, yes, but it never fails to bring back great memories of good people working on a very special project.

Tuesday Tune-Two Fer: I’ve Seen You on the Beach, and I’ve Seen You on TV

Two tunes related by the 80s and people going nuts on a keyboard

Hey now, wooo! Look at that! It’s a full-on ass crack from one of the Duran Duran guys¹, right there smack in the middle of the screen in the video to “Rio.” All these years I guess I’ve been too distracted by the model winking at me to notice how deliberately that shot was composed, and now I feel foolish.

Other things I didn’t really remember or fully appreciate: how much of the video is the guys doing slapstick, and how much of the song is Nick Rhodes² going nuts on the keyboard. I hope he was using an arpeggiator, or the poor guy must’ve been exhausted by the end of it!

The keyboards are such a big part of the sound of “Rio” (and also “Hungry Like the Wolf,” where they’re a little bit more prominent) that it seems odd that I’m only really noticing them now. But in my defense: 1) I can’t overstate how ubiquitous this album was at the time, and it gradually just became like background noise; and 2) I was more distracted by how much the video was stressing how heterosexual these guys were by having them cavort with supermodels, vs how not-heterosexual the video made me feel overall.³

It was also reminding me of another song that I couldn’t quite place. Eventually, after several fruitless Google searches for “pop songs with arpeggiators” I suddenly remembered it was “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” by Eurythmics. I’ve always been conflicted by that song, because there’s so much of it I 1000% genuinely, unreservedly love, like how Annie Lennox manages to stretch the word “bliss” across like a dozen syllables, and how the video says “what the hell, it’s the 80s, let’s just put everybody in drag,” and how it somehow still feels timeless despite the cheesy drum pads.

But I hate the harmonica solo, and I always hate harmonica solos, even when they’re by Stevie Wonder. I do genuinely wonder whether it has the same connotation for other people that it does for me, where it immediately makes me think of lower-budget live action family movies and Hanna Barbera cartoons from the late 1970s, where everything felt brown and cheap and dirty, and was just begging for the 1980s to come in and make everything clean and modern and brightly-colored again. Largely by artists like Duran Duran and the Eurythmics, now that I think of it.

Sorry I can’t be more specific, since I never bothered to learn who’s who. I thought the drummer was the cute one, even before I understood what it implied for me that I’d picked a cute one. ↩︎
I looked it up. ↩︎
And yet I never noticed the butt. It was still mostly vibes at that point. ↩︎

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Mrs Peel, We’re Needed

Two tunes for drinking Mai Tais and thinking about Diana Rigg

A couple of weeks ago, we visited Broken Compass, a tiki bar in Burbank that we’d never been to. Verdict: pretty good! Neither too small nor large, good separation of the waiting area and the reveal of the interior, a food menu that had a lot of variety, tiki drinks that were even better than the food, and overall a strong vehicle for everything you want from a tiki bar. I spent too much money on a pair of earrings shaped like Moai heads.

What makes this relevant to Tuesday Tune Two-Fer, though, is that in addition to the exotica you expect to hear inside a tiki bar, they were also occasionally playing Bond music. I heard one track that was extremely familiar, but I couldn’t place it exactly: was it from Thunderball? You Only Live Twice? Shazam wasn’t able to pick it up, so I had to wait until I got home and listen to every John Barry Bond score on YouTube until I reached it: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. One of the only Bond movies that I’ve never seen, something I should correct soon if only for Diana Rigg.

It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but Bond music works very well in a tiki bar environment. Maybe because they all suggest the 1960s, adventure, and the tropics. (Even when they’re mostly about skiing, I think?)

Speaking of Diana Rigg: Laurie Johnson’s music from The Avengers would also be an excellent addition to your tiki bar soundtrack. Yes, I know that it mostly conjures up images of extremely un-tropical England. But it’s so cool. (Incidentally, I don’t like the version of the theme included below, but it’s the only one available on Apple Music. Find the version actually included in the show, or in other compilations of Johnson’s music and/or 60s TV themes).

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Horny for Fan Fest

Two tunes from the extremely nostalgic background music loop at Universal’s Fan Fest nights

At the beginning of the month, we went to the Fan Fest Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood. This was the first year of the event, which was structured like Horror Nights, but for non-horror licensed IP. On the whole, it was better than I’d expected, and we enjoyed it a lot.

Two of the properties were anime, one of which (One Piece) we were aware of and the other one neither of us had even heard of. We don’t go to anything in the Harry Potter section of the park anymore, because of the asshole author who still profits from it. So it was just Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, Back to the Future, and lower crowds in Super Nintendo World.

The D&D walkthrough was definitely the highlight, with an extremely impressive Beholder animatronic. We went through twice, and as far as I’m concerned, that alone made the night worth it. I appreciated what they were trying to do with Back to the Future — give fans a chance to walk around the actual backstage set, combining photo ops with a mini-LARP and live music on the prom stage — but neither of us are big enough fans to get the full effect. And the Star Trek walkthrough was let down a bit by its scale and scope; I just felt like I’d been spoiled by the permanent Las Vegas attraction years ago. But all the cast and team members were super friendly and seemed to be having fun, so the whole night just felt like a good time.

One thing that I especially appreciated was the loop of 1980s background music that was playing over the escalators to the lower lot and around the tram tour. If the point was nostalgia, they nailed it, because I spent the whole time having vivid sense memories of middle and high school. I felt especially at home when they started playing “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band, which I was a little bit obsessed with back in 1981 or 82.

And I can’t say with 100% certainty that they also played “She’s a Beauty” by The Tubes,¹ because the tram ride down to the Back to the Future section played “The Power of Love” on a constant loop, which (along with “Take on Me” by a-ha) drove every other song out of my mind. But even if they didn’t, this was 100% the vibe they seemed to be going for. And I was eating it up. I was tempted to just stay on the escalators all night.

It genuinely never occurred to me just how many of the favorite songs of my adolescence were all about guys being horny for unattainable women.² I guess it should be obvious in retrospect, since that’s what adolescence is for most guys. I was just in it for the vicious guitar solos.

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Mad props for the titty drums, guys!
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These two and also “Photograph” by Def Leppard and “I’ll Wait” and “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Ask For It By Name

In honor of Poker Face, two tunes tangentially related by the fact that I can never remember their titles

Episode 2 of season 2 of Poker Face is called “Last Looks,” and it prominently features the song “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny. I’d recognize that steel guitar anywhere, and I feel like I would even if I didn’t spend so much time in tiki bars. But I never knew the title until this episode.¹

There must be dozens of songs like that, instrumentals that I’ve heard dozens if not hundreds of times, but have no idea of their titles, artists, or the stories behind them. Shazam can rarely hear well enough over the background noise of a bar or restaurant, and with all the talk about “AI” there’s still nothing that will answer the question “what’s that song that goes doot doot doot doot doot?” I’ve made the point of learning a few over the years, which are so ubiquitous that you hear all the time, but everybody just assumes you already know the title: “Caravan,” “Baby Elephant Walk,” and “A Taste of Honey.”

A recent victory, after years of hearing the tune but never being able to associate a title, was when I finally learned that this song is called “Afrikaan Beat” and is by Bert Kaempfert. My hope is that as I’m lying on my death bed, a familiar song comes on in the background, but nobody in the room can place it, and my last words will be “That’s ‘Girl in a Sportscar‘ by Alan Hawkshaw,” and my journey will be complete.

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The episode also features the song “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, but if you don’t know the title to that one, you just aren’t listening.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Everyone Knows The Water Is Warm Enough

Two barely tangentially-related tunes in honor of Wendy Melvoin

One of my (many) cultural blind spots is that I never really got into Prince. I know all the hits, of course, and I’ve been trying to get caught up in my adult years. But back in the 80s, I categorized Prince and the Revolution as being decidedly not for me.

I remember opening the LP of 1999 and being immediately scandalized at the huge centerfold of nude Prince lying there. Oh no, I am not supposed to be seeing this! I closed it and from then on tried to ensure that my parents never witnessed what I’d bought with their money.

So I didn’t fully appreciate the video for “Kiss” until several years ago, when I finally clued into how it’s so simultaneously corny and drily funny. I never thought of Prince as having much of a sense of humor — especially since Purple Rain never struck me as anything but painfully earnest — but here he’s clearly making fun of himself and his image.

Key to all of that is stripping it down to just him and Wendy Melvoin on guitar. For those of us who only knew of Prince as being on stages surrounded by meticulously art-directed and choreographed musicians and supermodels, it was a huge change to see such a relatively spare video. If the point of the video had been simply “I write music and play a ton of instruments and am super sexy,” then it could’ve just been Prince and the veiled dancer. But since the point was to have fun and poke fun at his own image, he needed to play off one of the most talented members of his band.

And she’s always come across as so cool in that video. Absolutely part of the whole showmanship and schtick of being in The Revolution, but also grimacing when he gets uncomfortably close. “Prince is gonna Prince! Gotta love ‘im!”¹

Melvoin has done a lot outside of her work with Prince, as part of Wendy and Lisa and other collaborations both with and without Lisa Coleman, so I don’t want to diminish that. But I’m fascinated by this specific moment, when a superstar chose to be goofy and take the piss out of himself, so instead of “Waterfall” or “Computer Blue,” I’ll be corny and pair it with my favorite song by The Association. Who makes “Kiss” work? Everyone knows it’s Wendy.

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I am vaguely aware that Wendy and Lisa were seriously on the outs with Prince for some time, but I thought it was heartwarming to hear Melvoin talk after his death about her experiences working with him.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: He’s Been There The Whole Time

Prompted by Game Changers, two tunes by Seal

If you’re not watching Game Changers on Dropout, you should start. I admit I was skeptical when the clips from that series and its spin-off Make Some Noise kept popping up on YouTube and Instagram: I didn’t think the material was all that funny, but I did love how the cast all so enthusiastically supported each other. That seems to be an overriding ethos of the channel and all of its series. Everybody’s just kind to each other, and it’s so refreshing to see. But Game Changers has come into its own the past couple of seasons, with some genuinely brilliant concepts.

Anyway, the most recent episode featured “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, for reasons I won’t spoil. It was the first time I’d heard the song in a long time, and it got immediately stuck in my head. I’d never thought much about it in the early 90s when it was released, beyond “hella corny” and “Batman” and “that hot dude singing with his shirt open.” Very rarely, I’ll launch into “my power, my pleasure, my pain!” if I hear it playing in a grocery store or something. But I’ve just thought of it as maudlin, forgettable, early 90’s pop.

But here’s the thing: it’s actually a good song! It’s a perfect showcase for Seal’s vocal range, and whether or not the lyrics actually mean anything, the phrasing is pretty interesting. “The more I get of you, the stranger it feels” doesn’t scan with the rest of the chorus, so it feels like a period at the end of a sentence instead of a melody repeating. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for a song I’d always dismissed.

Another ubiquitous Seal song from the early 1990s that I haven’t thought much about: “Crazy.” I admit I haven’t been as won over by this as much as I was “Kiss from a Rose.” But only hearing it on the radio and public PA systems without ever buying the album, I never knew that it was produced by Trevor Horn.

Listening to it now, it’s kind of obvious — I can’t tell if the sound is so closely associated with the late 80s/early 90s because “Crazy” played all of the time, or because Horn defined so much of what I think of as the sound of that time. I know of his music mainly through Art of Noise and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, but he seemed to have a hand in absolutely everything. I should go through and compile a Trevor Horn-produced playlist at some point.

(Incidentally: on the deluxe version of Seal II, which contains “Kiss from a Rose,” Seal does a cover of “Manic Depression” with Jeff Beck, and it’s pretty solid).

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Songs For and/or About The Earth

Prompted by a new release from Dirty Projectors (kind of), presenting the extents of my awareness of modern symphonic music

A year ago, we went to see the LA Philharmonic perform Song of the Earth, a song cycle largely about climate change from David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. I enjoyed it a lot, considering that it’s more experimental than my tastes tend to run, and the subject matter is pretty heavy.

At the time, I said I hoped that one day there would be an album release, since even though I can’t say with much confidence that I understood it or even felt it to its fullest effect, there were still several themes from it that kept bouncing around in my head. Today is that day, and you can get a recording of it from bandcamp and streaming services.

For a “serious” work, it’s got an awful lot of hooks. Or I guess they’re more accurately called motifs or something. In any case, the best example of that is “Gimme Bread,” which has a repeated “Yeah yeah” and xylophone flourish that is carried on throughout the rest of the work. (And the drive home, and the months afterwards).

Another thing I said at the time was that because of my very limited frame of reference for modern symphonic music, I kept being reminded of Orion by Philip Glass. Not just for the sense of repetition, but because it’s surprisingly accessible for those of us who don’t typically like orchestral or classical music. My favorite is “Brazil,” which I first heard as part of the excellent soundtrack for the PSP game Lumines.

All Hold Up

Recap of last night’s show seeing Kim Deal in Los Angeles

Kim Deal is currently on tour promoting her solo album Nobody Loves You More (or is the album promoting the tour? I don’t know how the music industry works anymore), and last night we saw the show here in Los Angeles.

I don’t know if spoiler etiquette applies to concerts, but the show had Kim and her touring lineup — including trumpet, trombone, violin, and cello players — play the entirety of the new album, and then two encores with selected songs from the history of the Breeders and her solo singles.

Morgan Nagler is the opening act for the LA-area shows, and I enjoyed her set a good bit. She came back on stage to sing on the tracks she’d co-written with Deal, and I was especially happy that they did my favorite, “The Root.”

It was interesting, because I’d been wondering what distinguishes a Kim Deal solo album from a Breeders album, and the show highlighted the difference. It felt more like the results of Deal collaborating with a bunch of different people over a long career, instead of a specific lineup. Kelley Deal was there singing backup, but she kept to the back mostly, because this was Kim’s project. The exception was when Kim left the stage to do “Bats in the Afternoon Sky,” an instrumental track that was performed by Kelley and another singer, a keyboardist, and (if I remember correctly?) a guitarist. It was difficult to make out what was said in the introduction, but I think they mentioned that the musicians were from the Kelley Deal 6000.

In any case, it was a really great show. I was skeptical how the tracks from the new album would do live, since to me they feel more produced than any of Kim Deal’s music I was familiar with, but the end result was flawless. Highlights for me were “Crystal Breath,” “Big Ben Beat,” “Safari,” “Coast,” and “Off You.”

Morgan Nagler performing as the opening act

Something I realized during the Soul Coughing concert last year was that it’s actually a good thing that my music tastes mostly calcified sometime in the late 1990s. It means I’m not only aging along with the band, but with the band’s audience. It’s always nice to see creaky graybeards both on stage and in the crowd, to see equal representation of My People. (Even if it is a reminder that no matter how much I like to think of myself as unique, I’m very much a Type of Guy).

That was in effect for the Kim Deal show, but I guess her audience is more cross-generational, since there were a lot of youths there. And by youths, I mean Los Angelenos probably in their early- to mid-30s, likely going through their own premature life crises. As they violated my clearly-defined personal space boundary, pushing in front of us to stand directly blocking view of the stage and with their backs and asses within inches of rubbing against me, I felt myself going into White Middle-Aged Man Hulk mode. (“You wouldn’t like me when I’m cranky.”) Plus I was getting really hot and my back hurt, so I was happy when the midwesterners-in-their-early-60s on stage decided to end the show after around two hours.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: We Are Belonging

Two tunes from 1984 that felt like anthems

I don’t always understand why my brain makes certain connections, but two of my favorite “one-off” songs from the mid-80s were “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” by Icicle Works, and “We Belong” by Pat Benatar.

“One-off” meaning they’re not one-hit wonders (I am intimately familiar with “Love Is a Battlefield” and its video, thank you very much), but that I’m not that crazy about the rest of the artists’ songs but would still rank these among my favorites.

There are lot of other jangly guitar and/or percussion-heavy songs that might pair better with “Whisper to a Scream,” but my mind keeps going back to Pat Benatar’s anthem. Which is part of the connection; they both feel like anthems. They’re also both from 1984, and their videos were both filmed on white sound stages where the directors insisted the band play despite hostile if not outright dangerous working conditions.

How in THE HELL are we supposed to make music to inspire the youth of today when we’re BURIED under FLYING LEAVES or GAUZY WHITE FABRIC?

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Dance Like Globey’s Watching

Two tunes to have yourself a queery little Christmas

This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.

I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.

But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”

How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.

Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).

The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).

Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.

Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.

In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.

So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Six or Eight Thousand Years Ago

Two tunes with misunderstood lyrics about the cradle of civilization

I ain’t no student of ancient culture, but there’s one thing that I do know: The B-52’s didn’t do a ton of research when writing the song “Mesopotamia.”

But that’s kind of what the song is all about, and kind of why I love the band. They made songs about whatever weird shit they felt like: counterfeiting, driving in the south at night, odd beach encounters, how there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.

Because we’re living in the future, Apple Music automatically showed me the lyrics as I was listening, and I realized I’ve had it wrong for 30 years. When Kate sings, “I know a neat excavation!” I had always heard it as “I know I need excavation,” which I’d always thought was some kind of weird horny double entendre. The real version is much more charming and in the spirit of the B-52s, of course.¹

Another lyric I always misheard was from “River Euphrates” by the Pixies. I thought they were just saying “ri-ri-ri-ri” over and over again for River Euphrates, much like Shaggy would say “gh-gh-gh-gh” for Ghosts. Apparently the real lyric is “Ride a tire down the River Euphrates.” Which is also much more charming than I’d thought. It generates a calming image of the Black Francis and Kim Deal tubing through the cradle of civilization while Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson call from the shore to come check out some neat pyramids.

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I don’t think they ever had any racy lyrics at all, did they? Apart from “Strobe Light” and “I’m gonna kiss your pineapple!!!”