This week’s Hot Gear Friday – done with a nod, as always, toward Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday” – focuses on the “Speed Racer” of guitar gear, the Supro Thunderbolt.

When you were a kid, did you ever dream about finding a bunch of parts in a second-hand-parts store, tossing them together, and – via an improbable series of empricial vicissitudes – accidentally build a go-cart that could go 200 mph? Or do the neighborhood show or skit that would get seen, randomly, by some Hollywood agent?

The Supro amp was sorta like that.

Supro was a budget-model line of guitars and amps, just a couple of steps above the makes you’d find in Penneys and Sears catalogs of the day, but nowhere near the A-list amps of the day, the Fenders and Ampegs and Marshalls and Hiwatts. They were priced accordingly, when they were new – outside the catalog range, but toward the lower end of the music-store brand range.

But what you got…

…was a value priced piece of equipment with a tone that’d strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. With a good, high-output guitar, the Supro would get the perfect overdrive. It was like that mythical, fictional, fantasy go-kart built out of odds and sods that just happened to work better than the sum of their parts.
Jimmy Page reportedly used a Thud on Led Zeppelin I, II, III and/or IV, depending on the legend you choose to believe. This introduces a chicken/egg question; would people have noticed this humble, budget amp without the Jimmy Page history/legend, or would that legend/history have ever existed had the Supro not been a diamond in the rought?

Who cares?

All I know is, I got to play one in college; when my Fender Deluxe Reverb was in the shop (a long, gruelling process in rural North Dakota at the time), I borrowed a Thud from a friend of mine.

And until the dawn of amps with “modeling” processors (subject of an upcoming HGF) I’ve never played an amp that just felt so perfect, before or since (short, perhaps, of the occasional Mesa/Boogie that, at that time of my life, would have cost a couple months’ salary). And apparently others think so, too – once humble Thuds seem to go for princely ransoms on EBay these days.

If you get the impression that I could burn through a Powerball purse on guitar gear, you’re probably not all wrong…

Matt “Republicans Kill Babies” Snyders over at the City Pages covers a format shakeup at “89.3 The Current“, Bill Kling’s 401K Minnesota Public Radio’s attempt to lock in the 25-35 set.

It seems their ratings are off a quarter, and they’ve done what every flailing radio station does when the numbers head south; they’ve hired a consultant.

And The Consultant has put an end to free-form programming, and set the station up with The Playlist.

Well, whatever.  I mainly cite the piece to quote this line, about The Current’s token Brit, Mark Wheat.

[Wheat] turns his attention to a wide computer screen, finds his rhythm, and grabs the mic at precisely the right beat.

No, he probably does not.

Mark Wheat is just about the sloppiest , most dead-air-prone on-air presence this side of the Macalester college station; a verbal diarrheac who’d seem to be addicted to the percolating flow of his pointillistic knowledge of alt music, he rambles uncontrollably on the air.  Hearing his voice itself doesn’t make me turn away from The Current; that happens when his chattering about Tegan and Sara’s last gig at the Fine Line (or whatever) passes the two minute mark, and/or his name-dropping comes too fast to make out individual names.

Just saying.

Today’s Hot Gear Friday (with a nod to Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday”) is the Hamer Standard.

They say that, when it comes to people of the opposite (or, for some of us I guess, same) sex, we’re attracted to people we find “exotic” – different than those we grew up around.

I saw this first-hand a few years back. I grew up in North Dakota, where tall, blond, Northern-European-descended women are as common as wheat – like Minnesota, only more so. I worked with a guy on a project, an Italian from Newark named Vito. He’d fly in to the Twin Cities to work on a project – and as we’d walk about downtown from one meeting to another, he’d be in a constant froth; “Gawd, Mitch, I should move out here. How do you get any work done with all these tall gorgeous blondes around here?”

“Enh”, I said, remembering when I’d been flown out to the east coast, and spent a couple of days wandering about all bobbleheaded over all of the non-blond, non-tall, non-north-European women.

So if you’ve noticed that I’ve been focusing a lot on big, dense-bodied guitars – the Les Paul, the Yamaha SG2000, and today’s special, the Hamer Sunburst – then you catch the drift of the anecdote above. I’ve been playing light guitars for thirty years now. Fenders, like my old Jazzmaster, tend to be relatively lightly-built (although as Pete Townsend found to his chagrin, lightness can be deceiving – the Strat is nearly un-smashable; it can serve as an axe, as long as all you want to chop up is amplifiers), with fairly high actions. My other electric – a mid-seventies Ibanez SG – is a fairly light little thing. Sweet tone, sure (having a Seymore Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickup down by the bridge forgives a lot of sins), but that light build doesn’t retain vibrations…

…like an armored beast like the Hamer. Playing a Sunburst is to playing my Jazz like driving an M1 Abrams is to driving a dune buggy; both serve their purposes; one feels very different than the other.

And the Sunburst is right up there on my “things I wanna buy when I get an unexpected windfall” list…

In their 1982 classic “This Beat Goes On”, the lead singer of the Canadian band “the Kings” tells some unnamed strumpet “You said to call me up when I was in Tirana”. Now, this being 1982, Albania was run by a paranoid Maoist clacque (sort of like Minneapolis) and among the most closed societies on earth. Was this a toss-off espionage reference? Or was the singer of Albanian descent?

Tracy and the Anti-Strib gang have the market cornered on “Hot Chick Friday” – where they take a moment to post pictures of gorgeous women that I’ve nailed – so it’d be unseemly to horn in on their act.

And I love being unseemly.

It’s a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Standard, one of perhaps the three most sought-after electric guitars in the business. I recall reading that they went for $279, brand new out of the Gibson catalog, during Ike’s second term. When I first started playing guitar during the Carter administration – before the guitar collectors market went insane – they were already going for a stellar $3,000; thirty years later, some of them fetch mid-to-high five figures.

The tiger-stripe lacquer finish and the brick-heavy body create an afternoon’s worth of sustain. The action, like most Gibsons, is nice and low; your fingers just race, which is disconcerting to a Fender player like me. Even thirty years ago, the whole assembly – aged nicely even then – yielded a sweet, round, weathered tone that was the tonal equivalent of James Earl Jones’ voice; it had credibility just because of how it sounded.

I played a ’57 once – not a tiger-stripe, but a Gold-Top, its first cousin – that a friend of the bass player in my very first band had picked up ten years earlier for maybe $100, before the collectors value became established. I’d been playing guitar for maybe two years; I had a long way to go. And yet strapping that bad boy on was like sitting in an F1 Lotus after learning how to drive a combine; it’s hard not to feel like a guitar hero playing a ’57.

Go here, and vote for anything but Black Sabbath.  Because I totally hate Black Sabbath.

Yes – for the first and only time in my life, I’m running a campaign based purely on hatred.

Do it for the children.

 Thanks.

But I will occasionally publish things like…

…the last ten songs on my IPod:

10. Talk of the Town, Pretenders
9. Gone Away, Offspring (by far the best thing they ever did)
8. New Girl Now, Honeymoon Suite (by far the only thing they ever did)
7. The Punk And The Godfather, the Who
6. She’s Happy, the Gear Daddies
5. I Believe, Stevie Wonder
4. Little Mascara, the Replacements
3. Rockaway The Days, Springsteen
2. Jelly Roll, Charles Mingus
1. Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed, Richard and Linda Thompson

That feels much better than cat pictues, dinnit?

Kool Aid Report is running a poll – “Best Metal Song”.

I nominated “Running WIth The Devil” by Van Halen.  If you have a minute or two, run by and give it a vote, if you please.  Kid Leo of WMMS in Cleveland – the greatest rock and roll disk jockey of all time – calls it the best metal song of all time, and if Kid Leo and I agree about anything, well, go with Kid Leo anyway.  Thanks.

Now, metalheads might ask “is that really metal?”

To which I respond with a thwack upside their fool heads; who cares?  The definition of “Metal” has bounced around like a ferret on Jaegermeister over the past 25 years, and all you metalheads better shut up or I’ll sic Wilson Pickett on you.

And you don’t want that.

Kouba writes about yet another mutual favorite of ours, John Hiatt:

John Hiatt is a true musician, and an accomplished songwriter whose songs have been covered by many of the biggest names in the business. Like John Mellencamp, who is about the same age, Hiatt is from Indiana, and has had his share of hard knocks.

 Hiatt is indeed an amazing singer and writer.  I first discovered him with “Slow Turning”, his big comeback after kicking booze in the late eighties.  It’s a paradox of rock and roll – or maybe a metaphor for it – that some of the best artists’ best, most creative years come when they’re the most bent; Pete Townsend, Warren Zevon and a long list of others top the list of artists whose best material happened when they were partying like it was 1999. 

Hiatt went against that grain, and thankfully so; his best years were still ahead of him when he put down the bottle.

He stayed dedicated to his craft, and I think it’s one of the Laws of the Universe that if you shower something with love for long enough, something beautiful is guaranteed to grow.

Which, like “the best way to become wealthy/in love/happy is to appear as if  you already are”, is some of the best advice in life.

Whether it’s this story – about a Polish couple that is divorce after meeting in a “client-to-provider” capacity in a brothel:

A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

 …or that Ed was able to seamlessly correlate it with Rupert Holmes’ “Pina Colada Song” (AKA “the day Satan conquered the Seventies”).

I’ll get back to y’all on that.

Just on basic principle, I submit this 1985 classic for your approval.

Not that I need anyone’s approval.

Every time Youtube bugs me – for example, when stalkers use it to play out their pathetic little dreams of acting like a “journalist” – I just kick back and think that without Youtube, things like this would never resurface.

I also see this, or especially this, and wonder if I can’t possibly find a copy of my old band’s “Erotic County” – the country version of the Prince classic “Erotic City”.

Maybe someday.

For years, I wondered if Stacy Jones – the drummer for Letter for Cleo – was the same guy who was the a-friggin-mazing drummer on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill tour.

No, I find out – ten years later – it was Taylor Hawkins.

Apopos not much.

That is all.

I’m pretty up front about music I love, and music I can’t stand.

But really, any music that’s got something that grabs me in the liver can rock my musical world – hence, there’s a third category; music done by artists that I should detest, but I just can’t help it, I love it anyway. It’s usually got a hook to it that makes me feel all minty, but whatever, its’ all good.

Just…guilty.

• Rocky Mountain High, John Denver – Not to say I’m a huge John Denver fan, but…oh, who am I kidding? I taught myself to play guitar from John Denver records. And while most of his stuff has fallen out of my conscience over the years, I still love this song; partly because it’s not a bad tune, and partly because the album for which it was the title cut featured one really good acoustic band, including Mike Taylor on the guitar – and Mike Taylor could play that thing.
• Cry, Mandy Moore – The worst thing about being in my mid-forties is the realization that I’ll probably never get a shot at nailing Mandy Moore (motto: “80% less embarassing than Britney, more PG-rated than Christina Aguilera“). But “Cry” has a really, really cool hook (especially the roll out of the bridge), it’s from a very underrated movie (that would have been less underrated, perhaps, if they’d hacked out the stupid “terminal illness” stuff), and I just like it, and I don’t care what you think.
• Kids in America, Kim Wilde/Lem/New Radicals – Oh, shut up. You know you love it. It’s that moment just before English synth-pop tipped over the edge from desperately un-funky to desperately un-fun. (And I love both the covers, including the New Radicals‘ thrashy cover, if only because it helps answer the question “whatever happened to Danielle Brisebois“)
• Do You Sleep, Lisa Loeb – Lisa Loeb, during her razor-thin heyday maybe ten years ago, was the Sarah Vowell of pop music. No, that’s not a good thing. But I always liked this song; I chalk it up to the background vocal part. It doesn’t take much, sometimes, for me to rationalize my way into liking something. (And since we’re talking hooks…). But I still want to break horn-rimmed glasses worn for ironic purposes on basic principle, so I’m still OK.
• If She Knew What She Wants, Bangles – Let’s get one thing straight; there was nothing guilty about the pleasure of the Bangles’ debut album, 1984’s All Over The Place. It was chock full of really great stuff,and I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who wants to argue it. But Different Light was a little different; loaded with covers and beating us over the head with Susanna Hoffs (not that there’s anything wrong with that), it was an obvious play for Top40 wuv (not that there’s anything wrong with that, either). But this song had the most gorgeous hook of the 1980’s, so all is totally forgiven.
• This Woman’s Work, Kate Bush – Kate Bush is usually just…too…weird for me. She’s an acquired taste that I’ve tried, oh lord I’ve tried, to acquire, over and over again. And I enjoy her stuff, in the same way that I enjoy Rachmaninoff piano concertos; “how the hell do they do that?” Oh, she’s musically interesting, and, um, interesting otherwise as well, but most of her music I can take or leave. And yet this one absolutely shreds me. Every damn time. Even when it was in that stupid Kevin Bacon movie.
• She Said, She Said, The Beatles – Time for a shameful declaration; I’ve never been a huge Beatles fan. I don’t care for anything after Sergeant Pepper, to be perfectly honest.
• But I Do Love You, LeAnn Rimes – Do I even have to say it?
• A Long December, Counting Crows – Adam Duritz has always bugged the bejeebers out of me. But this song has always ripped me up from the inside out – never more than this past year.
• She Said, She Said, The Beatles – Here’s a surprising revelation; I’ve never been a yuuuge Beatles fan. Oh, I like lots of their stuff, don’t worry – although most of their stuff after Sergeant Pepper honestly bores me stiff. Really. It just doesn’t grab me. ‘Strooth. But this song just totally hypnotizes me. And that’s a good thing.
• Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Hanoi Rocks – Ok, nothing remotely guilty about it. No, wait; they’re from Finland.Hm.Nope. Still not guilty.
• You Really Had Me Going, Holly Dunn – Holly Dunn, the queen of twangy honky-tonk country back before twang was cool again, was saving country-western from the “Crossover-Pop” nightmare of the seventies and early eighties when Garth Brooks was still greasing palms in Nashville. Her disappearance is proof positive that the country music business is just plain stupid.

…I was working at a couple of contracting jobs, which meant at various points working a number of allnighters; starting work at 5PM (after finishing up the day’s contracting!) and working until like 11AM the next morning.

And I owned exactly two CDs. And one of them was The Ghost of Tom Joad, which, with the Lord as my witness, includes no hummable songs whatsoever.

And the other one was the one this song is off of – and so this song for me is forever associated with being exhausted, and up and working in the wee hours, and freezing my ass off from either the chilly room or the fatigue.
UPDATE: Well, TGOTJ includes almost no hummable songs. Now that I mention it, I do have “Sinaloa Cowboys” stuck in my head.

Shane MacGowan turns 50 today, believe it or not. And ten years ago, I’d have never believed it.

And no, he’s not slacked off the booze one bit:

It’s a milestone most people thought Shane MacGowan would never live to see. But on Christmas Day the legendary Pogues hellraiser will celebrate his 50th birthday.And as the booze-loving Irishman raises (presumably several) glasses to toast his half-century tomorrow, he is determined that the party will carry on right into the New Year.

Why break the habit of a lifetime?

Read the whole thing. Learn about MacGowan’s teeth.

Ugh.

I’ll say this – it’s not the weirdest Christmas video of all time. Half of the Sex Pistols and 3/4 of Thin Lizzie doing a rum-sodden Christmas carol.

Or at least a lyp-sync of one.

Of course, no Top40 Christmas would be complete without this, or for that matter this.

And of course, Christmas isn’t Christmas without this. And yes, I do miss Kirsty MacColl more every year.

Well, no lip-synching this idea: Merry Christmas, all!

Via pianomomsicle; a meme:

1. What’s your favorite song about growing up? “The River” by Springsteen.
2. What’s your favorite song about cars or driving? “Racing In The Streets” by – yep – Springsteen. Although it’s more about…well, growing up. Or more like “being ambushed by the realization that you’re an adult now”. But I’m going to list it here, because the first two verses are about drag-racing. The song always kills me.
3. What’s your favorite song whose title is a person’s name? Um, “Rosalita” by…yeah, Springsteen.
4. What’s your favorite get-up-and-dance song? All right, a non-Springsteen entry. That’d be “Shotgun” by Junior Walker and the All-Stars (although Springsteen has covered it). Or “It’s A Long Way To The Top” by AC/DC.
5. What’s your favorite novelty song? “Raspberry Beret” by the Hindu Love Gods. Honorable mention – a thrash-punk version of Prince’s “Kiss” that is lost to history. That, and/or Killdozer’s version of “I Am, I Said”.

That is all.

Trying for months and months.

Still can’t find “Caroline” by Kirsty MacColl, anywhere.  At all.

For that matter, her classic Electric Landlady is nowhere in evidence online.

Note to whomever makes these decisions; there’s a lot more to the late MacColl than “They Don’t Know About Us” and “Fairytale of New York”.

That is all.

Heh.

JB Doubtless over at Fraters is sounding off about punk rock with his characteristic subtlety:

People like to pretend that punk is about rebellion and challenging authority. It reality, it’s just a nihilistic ethos premised on self-destruction, emptiness, and most of all failure. The worst thing you can do in the world of punk is succeed. In that way it shares an affinity with gangsta rap culture which derides success in school as “acting white,” while punk derides success in anything as “selling out.” How dare you do well!

To be fair, “Against Me!” is, by all indications, your typical post-Henry-Rollins American punk band (yaaawwwwwn). Still, when JB quotes the Strib reviewer Chris Riemenschneider…:

Gabel became the Angry Young Man of future Against Me! fame around age 12, when he moved to Naples, Fla. A coastal town where many wealthy retirees go to soak up the sun and tax breaks (including many Minnesotans), Naples “is absolutely oppressive to youth,” he said.

…and replies…:

It also tells me a lot about Gabel that he would describe spending his formative years in an “oppressive” environment. Part of being punk (and a big part of its appeal) means never having to grow up.

I can see JB standing with a shotgun on his porch, telling those damn kids to get off his lawn.

UPDATE: My bad – I see the piece was written by Chad the Elder. The tone and approach seemed so…JBish. My bad.

On the one hand, I’ll chalk it up to Chad having had, perhaps, one of his brother’s patented hangover-bomb holiday cocktails.

On the other – Chris Riemenschneider is not a good music critic. I see lines like this:

At once bleeding-hearted but mostly apolitical, and apathetic but hopeful…

…and I’m drawn back to this bit of work:

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Which one is parody? Does it matter anymore?

On Against Me!, I must remain apathetically, albeit not angrily, ignorant.

…yes, I have been humming “Wasted Years” by Iron Maiden nonstop for the last couple of days…

Since 1984, I have heard that in fact Big Country did do a video for my favorite song of theirs, “Where the Rose Is Sown”, from Steeltown (one of my ten favorite albums ever).

Well, thanks to the miracle of Youtube, I not only see that it did in fact exist, but was accompanied by a cool live vid of the title cut (and an atrociously-edited version of this classic homage to the Jacobites).

So the remaining question, really, is where on earth can a guy find a Yamaha SG2000?

Simon,

For the past quarter-century, I’ve been pointing out to people that you are, in fact, Pete Townsend’s little brother. Of course, it’d make not the faintest shred of difference, and nobody would care…

…but for your great shining moment, Sweet Sound – the album that put you on the map, back in 1983.  And the cornerstone of that album was “I Am The Answer”, one of the most perfect pop songs ever written.

Cut with your old band (bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Bzrzecki, who joined Big Country around this time), centered around a spare, chiming guitar part and the gorgeous interplay between you and Butler’s vocals, the song was an exhilarating wonder. I’ve been wanting to find it for years.

So now I have an IPod, and ITumes.  And I went looking.  And found it.

Sort of.

No, the version available on ITunes is not the Sweet Sound take.  It’s a newer version.

And Simon?  Bubbie?  We gotta talk.

Where the old version was low-key and gorgeous, the new one is shrill and constipated-sounding.  Where Tony Butler’s harmonies on the original defied vocal gravity, the new version sounds like you’re backed by a bunch of Scottish football hooligans.

See to this, can we?

That is all.

Vinnie “Mad Dog” Lopez may have been the worst drummer to ever record a major-label album.

The New Jersey drummer, most famous known only for having played on Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the Street Shuffle – albums famous for swooping changes in rhythm for no good musical reason – was whacked from the E Street Band in 1974, replaced first with Ernie “Boom” Carter (who played on “Born to Run”) and finally Max Weinberg, both of whom could…well, keep a beat for starters.

It’s interesting, then, to look at this video of the tribute band “Tramps Like Us”, featuring Lopez on drums, doing a ’73-era Springsteen classic , “Thundercrack”.

So – not only is he no better a drummer than ever, but he’s backing a bunch of singers that sound like a bunch of Italian soccer fans trying to sing harmony.