Welcome to the singles club. At least that’s what I think I’ll be posting all week. This one is a 12 inch of “Stop This Crazy Thing” (1988) by Coldcut. It’s probably the best dance single ever recorded. If you disagree with that I’d love to hear what you think is better.
Junior Reid (Black Uhuru) provides the perfect vocal complement to this jungle music which is replete with all sorts of hoots and hollers, including Tarzan’s signature wail. The sounds and samples are themselves what’s crazy here and I definitely do not want to stop them.
This is one of the most played records in our collection. Long live Coldcut!
(I found this video of “Stop This Crazy Thing.” The record cover appears to be for a 12 inch (different edition than mine), but the record itself looks like a 7 inch, and the music is shorter. The original 12 inch is seven and a half minutes of jumping.)
This is really a still, but I wanted you to hear “Mad Again” by 77klash. It’s a weird mix of hip hop, heaviness and reggae. Check out more of their music at their MySpace page.
Hello, party people! Keith here once again to drop some soft rock knowledge on your Heavy Duty minds. Today’s topic: Mike Doughty (or “Dode” as he was known at Simon’s Rock). He was the frontman for the slacker jazz outfit Soul Coughing. He’s a talented lyricist who turns funny phrases like:
They say you snooze, you lose,
Well I have snost and lost
Since the dissolution of Soul Coughing several years ago, Dode has continued making soulful, quirky “alternative” music without quite as much electronic sampling and such. He’s released a bunch of albums and EPs (see ). I haven’t listened to all of them, but I do rather enjoy Haughty Melodic (a palindrome of “Michael Doughty”), which was probably the best-received, critically and commercially. The standout tracks for me on that album are “Sunken-Eyed Girl,” “Your Misfortune,” and “I Hear The Bells,” but “Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well” is the single, so to speak. It’s been featured on some tv soundtracks lately, so it’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance and you may have heard it on the radio, if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I’m more into this sort of thing:
Now Mike has a new album out entitled Golden Delicious. I haven’t listened to it as much as Haughty Melodic but I’ve been playing it for the past couple weeks and I’m really diggin’ it. My favorite track is “I Wrote a Song About Your Car,” and I also really like “More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle” and the single “27 Jennifers” which was previously released on his 2003 EP “Rockity Roll.” Here’s the video for “27 Jennifers”:
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Mike Doughty’s Band live at The Fillmore in San Francisco. He played a good mix of songs from his solo work and the Soul Coughing catalog. There wasn’t anything resembling a mosh pit, but we did get more bacon than the pan can handle. He actually played that track on a Roland SP-606 Sampling Workstation, like in this video. It was quite similar to the way that Jonathan Coulton plays “Mr. Fancy Pants” on the Zendrum in his live act. But I digress.
The non-musical highlight of last night’s show was when Dode set expectations with us for the end of the show. Four songs before the end, he explained that the next song would be “the song before the fake last song,” to be followed by “the fake last song” with an accompanying big rock ending and the re-introduction (including hometowns) of all the members of the band plus the soundguy. The explanation continued something like this, “Following the fake last song, we will turn around, and you will applaud, or not, and then we’ll turn around and act surprised to see you and then we’ll play two additional songs, including the song that’s been getting a lot of radio airplay, and then we’ll leave and you’ll leave.” I had never before heard a performer set such explicit expectations for the end of the show, and particularly liked that he called the fake last song by name.
My personal rule for all the music I’m posting is that I have to listen to the entire thing and decide whether to keep it. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve consumed the entirety of Metallica’s over-the-top-box-set Live Shit: Binge and Purge (1993), again. It’s almost nine hours of live music! There are three VHS tapes and three CDs. I don’t even have a VCR any more. They released it later with DVDs but I couldn’t wait for that. Actually, this was a birthday present, I believe, and it was stupid spendy. But worth every penny!
That package is the coolest. It even has little metal hinges on the back. In addition to the audio and video stuff there is a small stencil, a moss pit pass from the tour, and a great book. The book has tons of photos and photocopies of set lists, and some serious, but humorous, memos about what the band can and can’t do on stage in various countries, and much more.
I got to see them play at least once on this mega-tour, but I can’t find the ticket stub. This package is an even better memento. Happy birthday to me, and as they say the introduction in the book, “Happy Overdose”!
New music, old records, live shows, stories, memorabilia, garage band demos, anything and everything else related to music. Brothers and sisters... start clicking.
