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Post by scoOter on Aug 4, 2004 13:23:44 GMT -5
if you're here, you probably would be interested in picking up this issue. and YES, it is paul related!
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Post by troublkepnyerhedup on Aug 4, 2004 13:55:03 GMT -5
I'm like 50 feet from a stack of em, but thought i'd sit my butt down and find it online instead so I could share the link with our MPLS-deprived brethren.
Surprise: it is not in Jim Walsh's column, which is about what he did last week, day by day.
The closest thing I can find in the online City Pages is this:
[Pat Travers] deserves to be remembered for more than simply "Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)." (Night & Day, 3/29/1995)
If it takes a big man to admit he's wrong, then I'm a wee music critic staring into the kneecaps of Jiminy Cricket. I've written a boatload of opinions that remain more dubious than ever in the face of subsequent conventional wisdom--and I continue to believe almost every one. I'll still take Ice-T over Ice Cube (as rapper, lyricist, or actor); think Sonny Rollins is a more enthralling saxophonist than Bird or Coltrane; regard Beck as an emperor with no clothes; claim Amy Grant has more sex appeal than Foxy Brown or Lil' Kim; and maintain that among hip-hop releases from 1993, Salt-n-Pepa's Very Necessary is a superior disc to both Dre's Chronic and De La Soul's Buhloone Mindstate.
But in the A-List section of this particular City Pages issue (then known as Night & Day), obviously coping with some severe life crisis or monster hangover, I scribbled something that not even I can pretend to defend. Though it shames me to repeat it, I did indeed write that Pat Travers, now perhaps most charitably described as a Bob Seger wannabe during the late '70s, "deserves to be remembered for more than simply 'Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights).'" There's not enough space to explain the 73 ways these words are stupid, so let me just say that "Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)" is by any measure--rational or irrational--an indelible blotch on anyone's résumé, and case-closed reason enough for its creator to be permanently forgotten. If championing "Boom" wasn't bad enough, I also thought that the likes of "Rock N Roll Susie," "Heat in the Street," and "Snortin' Whiskey" offered further cause for Travers to lay claim on a few of your brain cells. Obviously, I was in error. If Pat Travers ever resurrects his sorry career to the point where he's third on the bill at one of the local casinos, he owes me a beer. --Britt Robson
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Post by scoOter on Aug 4, 2004 14:09:15 GMT -5
that ain't it! in the 8/4 ("1984") issue jim walsh namechecks paul, but THAT isn't even what i am talking about. There is a whole article on let it be.
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Post by A Regular on Aug 4, 2004 14:13:52 GMT -5
that ain't it! in the 8/4 ("1984") issue jim walsh namechecks paul, but THAT isn't even what i am talking about. There is a whole article on let it be. Does your city pages paper carry the stripwax comic strip record review? This week it's Tommy S's turn. |
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Post by scoOter on Aug 4, 2004 14:24:03 GMT -5
Does your city pages paper carry the stripwax comic strip record review? This week it's Tommy S's turn. i don't think so.... do post! is there a link? i would definitely give you a link to the lib article, but i really can't find one... |
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Post by A Regular on Aug 4, 2004 15:15:19 GMT -5
I checked the site for it, stripwax.com, but it isn't up yet. The paper's site didn't have it posted either. Sorry, but it might pop up soon.
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Post by troublkepnyerhedup on Aug 4, 2004 15:17:40 GMT -5
that ain't it! in the 8/4 ("1984") issue jim walsh namechecks paul, but THAT isn't even what i am talking about. There is a whole article on let it be. scooter, that's last week's City Pages (see the "Gratuitous" thread). Oddly enough, that LIB essay had been floating around online for a few months. I read it a few weeks ago following a link posted on the AMR board. Maybe it was the starting point for City Pages' look-back-to-1984 issue. |
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Post by scoOter on Aug 4, 2004 15:25:14 GMT -5
scooter, that's last week's City Pages (see the "Gratuitous" thread). Oddly enough, that LIB essay had been floating around online for a few months. I read it a few weeks ago following a link posted on the AMR board. Maybe it was the starting point for City Pages' look-back-to-1984 issue. son of a....! |
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Post by Kathy on Aug 4, 2004 16:30:00 GMT -5
I think you should type it up for all us to read. |
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Post by scoOter on Aug 4, 2004 16:45:34 GMT -5
I think you should type it up for all us to read. whatever it takes to restore my good name! |
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Post by landshark on Aug 4, 2004 20:12:12 GMT -5
So can anyone find the link to the lib story?
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Post by troublkepnyerhedup on Aug 4, 2004 20:59:14 GMT -5
So can anyone find the link to the lib story? The link and the first few sentences is in the "Gratuitous" thread. But hey, I'll go copy it and paste it. I'll spare you the Jim Walsh column. Here's the pertinent snippet: Paul Westerberg, after returning last winter from a family trip to an indoor water park, confessed to me, "I never thought I'd find myself doing that." citypages.com/databank/25/1234/article12335.aspSame issue of City Pages has a little essay on the Mats that I think was already available online: www.citypages.com/databank/25/1234/article12331.asp#5(Starts out, "For all the legends of ramshackle shows fueled by booze and snot, the lip service paid to Paul Westerberg's clever, poignant lyrics, and the bawdy pathos that informs the mythology of the Replacements, one petty detail is almost always overlooked: The 'Mats were a tight little unit.") and the rest goes like this: I mean that these guys could play, that they were--and still are--underrated in that regard. But then again, this is how it is with most great bands: Folks are aware of, say, Dave Grohl's ferocious drumming, or McCartney's lock-groove melodic bass playing, or even Malcolm Young's bump 'n' grind rhythm guitar work, but it's hardly the first thing they think about when listing the attributes of the bands those fellows happen to have played in. (And as for those who did get credit for their technical skill--well, nobody talks much about how a Steve Vai record saved lives. And if you do, get the f*ck away from me, you wank.) But trust me, the Replacements--Stinson, Stinson, Mars, Westerberg--could play. Any other talk is simply a disingenuous DIY ruse. This was never more evident than on Let It Be, a record that carries so much affirmation and emotional heft for me that I can barely write about it in anything other than technical terms. It's hard to imagine drunken punk heroes sitting in a concrete room, plunking away at tunes, hammering away on mundane music-class things like tempo, harmony, and arrangement. But, sports fans, I'm afraid that's exactly what the band did before entering Blackberry Way Studios to record the best record to ever emerge from the indie underground. Case in point: "Seen Your Video." A quasi-surf instrumental, the tune seems tossed off. The song is anything but, however, and Bob and Paul's two-guitar give-and-play not only constitutes a deft piece of writing, but offers something as great as anything Mick Taylor brought to Sticky Fingers. Back-cover liner notes hint at the seriousness of it all, for anyone keeping score at home: "Paul on 12-string electric, piano." Actually, on the sleeve it says "acoustic" rather than "electric," which may be an attempt to dismiss the so-uncool notion of musicianship. But I'm not fooled: It's a masterpiece. The rest of the album rumbles and soars with the kind of intensity and confidence that results from men at work. I've been playing in bands playing Replacements songs for damn near 20 years, and I can honestly say that in all the times I've been a part of covering "I Will Dare"--probably no less than 300, but who's counting--all the various combos I've played with have really nailed the song maybe five times. That song is a bitch. The rest of Let It Be, wisely, I've rarely ever tried. None of this was apparent to me when I first heard it 19 years ago. My friend Jean, who, alas, was decidedly not my girlfriend at the time ("Fifteen Blue," anyone?), was in the throes of a mad crush on Tommy in early 1985, which I found pretty damn annoying, frankly. For this, I dismissed the record every time I hung out in her bedroom and she put it on. It sounded tinny and grating, and what the hell was with the half-assed ending of "Androgynous," anyway? Tommy this, Tommy that, Jean would say, blah, blah blah. So in a fit of jealousy, I swiped the cassette out of her boom box one day, hoping never to hear--or never let her hear--the record again. At least that's how I remember it. But a funny thing happened on the way to my adolescent envy: With Jean being frustratingly unavailable, I fell in love with the 'Mats. And for good reason. For starters, Let It Be was full of adolescent humor. "Gary's Got a Boner" is funny enough for the Beavis and Butt-head set, and it rips off the Nuge's "Cat Scratch Fever" to boot. (A songwriting credit was given to the Motor City Madman in later pressings of the record.) But the line, "Gary's got a soft-on/But not for long, long, long" will likely crack me up well into middle age, when I'll sadly be popping Levitra and relating all too well. So the record's f*ckin' funny. But it's no joke; it's also really heavy, man. The pedal steel alone on "Sixteen Blue" is enough to make a dead man weep, and any machismo underpinnings found elsewhere on Let It Be (see "Favorite Thing," for example) are undercut by the most honest confession of sexual confusion ever plied to wax: "Brag about things/You don't understand/A girl and a woman/A boy and a man." Yeah, meathead, he's talking to you. And when Paul intones that "Your age is the hardest age/Everything drags and drags/It ain't funny/You ain't laughin' are you?" he's hardly speaking to only those among us waiting for our driver's licenses. And there's no resolution by the end of the record, no absolutes or blacks and whites to jibe succinctly with the era of Just Say No. Westerberg has accrued a nice stable of tearjerkers--"Within Your Reach," "Here Comes a Regular," and "If Only You Were Lonely" come to mind--but the not-at-all concealed anger in "Answering Machine," the album's final scene, makes it the most resonant of all of Paul's lonely-hearts-club songs. Westerberg's alone again, and he's pissed that you're not around. He even hints that he misses you, and that's somehow not enough to get you to pick up the f*cking phone. The song ends with a loop of that friendly phone lady offering, "If you need help, if you'd like to make a call ..." that's slowed down and distorted. It's chilling. And it's also comforting, beyond any rationale. To this day, it rings true. |
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Post by scoOter on Aug 5, 2004 8:57:34 GMT -5
oh god! what have i done here?
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Post by troublkepnyerhedup on Aug 8, 2004 3:09:40 GMT -5
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