soon you'll all be singing along

(with the deepest of apologies to 1967's Fantastic Four Annual #5)
Pulp - The Fear (This Is Hardcore, 1998) - Of the unknown? Hardly. I know all too well what I'm afraid of happening on the fourth of November. Not even crash infusions of sublime Britpop can ease my anxieties.

Count Five - Psychotic Reaction (from Psychotic Revelation, 2003) - Superlative garage rock doesn't help, either, though not from lack of trying.

like someone shit under a pine tree

"Yes, I detect the distinct aroma of a chemical engineer's approximation of wildflowers...or a burning whitewall tire."
Celebrate the natural while embracing the artificial -- just one of the litany of paradoxes collectively known as "the 1970s." From the simulated wood-grain paneling used to convey an informal "rustic" touch in a split-level ranch home, to the earth-toned (or Mardras and other "old-timey" and nativesque print) polyester fashions, to the plethora of dubiously "natural" aromas hatched in labs and unleashed by a host of household vectors -- there is no shortage of examples illustrating that era's conflicting impulses.

Without discounting how much of this phenomenon was driven from the top down ("Ladies Home Journal says avacado and floral prints are in this year!"), underlying the co-optive marketing trend was a certain degree of ecological awareness filtered through the era's omnipresent accent of self-actualization. Both were holdovers from sixties counterculture ideology that managed to embed themselves in the public consciousness where radical politics and other militant alternatives to the satus quo had failed.

Though the naturalist impulse survived and thrived well into the Me Decade, it mutated into a less virulent strain, as an itch upon the conscience, rather than a pain. As such, it was something that could be easily be salved without resorting to solar powered bunkers made from soda bottles or drastically changing one's habits. Satisfaction of conscience without sacrifices in consumption or comfort was attainable, and even if the means contradicted the ends or the net impact ran into the loss column, it was good enough for most folks. (For a modern example, look at how liberally the terms "green" and "organic" are tossed around by marketers...or just take a quick stroll through any Whole Foods store.)

If I had to choose one aroma that symbolizes the 1970s for me, I'd have to go with the strawberry-scented tree-shaped air fresheners. "Strawberry" is a bit misleading, actually, as the actual scent and flavor of fresh strawberries, like cold fusion, is something that science has yet to sucessfully create under laboratory conditions. They can create a reasonable facsimile of lemon, a passable banana, but when it comes to strawberry, the best they've been able to accomplish is a random guess based on incomplete third-hand accounts.

(Disturbingly enough, when someone describes something as smelling or tasting of strawberries, in nearly every case they mean the artificial version and not the real thing....which applies to a lot of other aromas and flavors as well. Over time, the baseline has been shifted so that the imperfect facsimile has become the definitive standard.)

Cloying, sickly sweet, and as obnoxious as what it proposes to mask, those ubiquitous dashboard fixtures perfectly symbolize the era for me, right down to the iconic evergreen shape that, like the scented oils embedded within, evokes a sense of naturalism fundamentally at odds with its actual origins.

Young Fresh Fellows - Fruitbasket Blues (from Beans and Tolerance, 1989) - No artificial colors, no artificial flavors -- just some hard-to-find, 100% organic Seattle-grown indie rock.

The Buggles - Living in the Plastic Age (from Age of Plastic, 1980) - Everything fake is real again.

Friday Night Fights: Rush 'N' Attack

It's friday night, cats and kittens, which means it's time for a little realpolitik action with Black Canary, Master of International Diplomacy!

(from Justice League #3, July 1987; by Giffen, DeMatteis, Maguire & Gordon)
Now that's what I call détente....

The Dents - Not Through with You (from Time for Biting, 2006) - Up for some kickass parochial punk rawk? Maura caught them performing at a Boston Derby Dames a couple years back and their album has been on heavy houshold rotation ever since.

children of the counter-revolution

Buried somewhere in my attic archives is a copy of the January (February?) 1978 issue of Creem, which features a cover story on the Sex Pistols' disastrous American tour and subsequent break-up (wedged in at the end of the piece as a "breaking news item"). The issue also features a list of recommended punk records, with a mention of The Clash's debut LP being considered "too rough-sounding" for an American release by CBS and a review for The Jam's The Modern World.

The punky buzz was in the air at the time, with nuggets of punk news and rumors liberally sprinkled amidst the premature optimism for the Frampton/Bee Gees Sgt. Pepper movie's prospects and record labels playing both sides of the street with full page ads for The Vibrators' Pure Mania ("You've been conned! This is real rock and roll!") run back-to-back with ones for the various corporate rock gods punk was supposed to displace.

All in all, it offers an amazing glimpse at the rock'n'roll zeitgeist at a watershed time, the crossroads of millennarian rhetoric and sobering realizations. Which is why it pains me that I can't locate the damn thing after four years of searching through my boxes from the move to our house on the hillside. I suspect that I packed it, along with my Psychotronic film and video guides (which doubled as scrapbooks for the better part of a decade), into a "special" box for easy retrieval, providing yet another example of my being tripped up by my own clever thinking.

Oh, well, I guess we'll just have to settle for this unexpected find from the August 1978 issue of Pizzazz:

That's right, Mighty Marvel's mag for swingin' teens paid a visit to a Bowery dive bar in order to rake the cooling embers of the New York punk scene.

It starts off with some speculative junk food for thought...

...or will the "punk" tag be so freely and nonsensically applied that it becomes reduced to meaningless marketing jargon?

The writer then spends a while discussing club's overall ambience (i.e. dive bar chic) while unsurprisingly omitting any and all references to dirty needles and hepatitis infections. (Remember, kids: A 2% bleach solution is your friend.) As for CBGB's clientele...

Oh, so it's a downmarket version of Studio 54, then? Anyone care to wager if the dog collar and leather jacket kids mentioned in the article ever attended the venue before the media buzz began? Here's the accompanying photo of the tragically hip crowd...

One of these people is not a music critic for the Village Voice! Can you tell which one?
Tell me, Mr. Pizzazz Staff writer, how loud was it?

Loud enough to evoke a baffling Peanuts reference, apparently. Here's something I never understood about outsiders' descriptions of punk music -- music played in club venues is always too goddamn loud, unless the artist is playing an acoustic set. That's not something limited to just punk acts. If the music requires any sort of amplification, it's a given that the person in charge of the PA system will crank the volume up to "head inside a jet turbine" levels.

No vintage mass media depiction of punk rock would be complete without a taste of some representatively "punky" lyrics, and the article does not disappoint:

The members of Flip City were apparently alumni of the University of New Hampshire.
There is no entry for either Flip City in the International Discography of American New Wave. (Shrapnel, the other band cited in the article, has an entry in the listing of New Jersey acts.) By the time the article was written, most of the founding members of the Bowery scene had moved onto bigger venues, broken up, or slid into the "no wave" or "mutant disco" scenes, leaving an assortment of wannabes and bandwagon jumpers to occupy the field.

I'm kind of curious about Flip City, though, with its pair of female vocalists and the somewhat new wavey description of the band. Shrapnel, whose act centered around dressing up like Vietnam vets and engaging in mock firefights, sounds like yet another example of the novelty shock punk buffoonery that has glommed onto the scene since its inception and rarely lives up to its over-the-top promise. It's a lot easier to be loud and obnoxious than it is to be loud, obnoxious, and clever...

...which brings us to this mindboggling inset featuring one of the "really big American punk groups" of the era:

What the fuck, Pizzazz?
There's no Flip City, no Shrapnel, and definitely no goddamn Kiss in today's musical selections, just a swell pair of cuts from the golden era of the NYC punk -- off-kilter rock romanticism by Television and Suicide's sweetly sinister brand of synthpunk. I'm quite fond of a lot of the music that came out of the 1970's NYC punk scene, but I'm less charitable regarding the scene itself, which spent decades trying to distance itself from "punk" before rushing back to assert its primacy once the label had come back in vogue.

Television - See No Evil (from Marquee Moon, 1977)

Suicide - Cheree (from Suicide, 1977)

multiversal bandstand

The Batusi may be the most (in)famous of novelty dances inspired by comic book characters, but there were scores of others that never managed to register on the masscult consciousness. Here's a brief rundown of some of the more notable ones:

The Element Man - A visually exciting set of moves set this dance apart from the rest of the pack, but the fact that only those who had been exposed to the Orb of Ra could properly perform the steps kept it from achieving widespread appeal.

The Funky Robot - Easy to perform, with low rhythmic requirements, the Funky Robot's strengths turned out to be its greatest weakness. So easy that even one's super-dad could do it, the dance quickly became associated with polyester-addicted squares and new age family therapy sessions.

The Tula-Hula - A huge hit at Dr. Dorsal's Deep Sea Discoteque (sic), this five-fathom fad bit the dust when astronomical litigation fees (stemming from an unexpected migration of tiger sharks onto the dancefloor) forced Dorsal to shutter his doors.

The Kirby Shuffle - He's just one man! But he busts moves like a whirlwind! There ain't no stoppin' him! He's like a one man rave!

The Hypno Hustle - This interesting attempt to mix disco and subliminal indoctrination might have made a bigger impact if the required modifications to the club's PA system weren't as prohibitively expensive. Blame the Latverian glitter ball embargo of 1977.

The Roly Poultry - Hyped as the successor to the Macarena and The Ketchup Song dance, the Roly Poultry fad died a quiet well-deserved death within hours of its debut. This has not, however, stopped lesser DJs or drunken great-uncles from occasionally trying to resuscitate the abomination on the wedding circuit.

The Jeffetty John - A sad reminder of the scene's creative bankruptcy, in which the moves of past crazes are awkwardly linked together and given a veneer of "shocking" edginess. Arguments regarding its popularity on the dance floor rarely take into the downward spiral of insularity that has gripped the subculture over the past two decades.

Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 Dances (from The Exciting Wilson Pickett, 1966) - The Hokey Pokey is Dance #231. The Taffy Pull is Dance #879. The Cabbage Patch is Dance #666.

Trans X - Safety Dance (from On My Own, 1988) - Changing hands from one Canadian synthpop act to another.

hip to be square

In response to yesterday's post, reader Dave L. of Springfield asked "Prexies?"

The etymology of the word is presumably tied to "prexy," a bygone slang term for a college president which ended up being applied to the high priesthood of Pat Boone fandom. The notion that "Mr. Nice" had a large, organized fan following may strike some of you as a really quaint and bizarre phenomenon, but keep in mind that a lot of what we think of the "Fifties" is a artificial construction of post facto nostalgia.

We tend to conflate eras with their associated "hip" fads and subcultures (greasers, hippies, punks, et cetera), creating a skewed image which fails to reflect the historical reality. My father graduated from high school in 1968 and my mother in 1969. A quick flip through either of their yearbooks fails to turn up a single example of freak or flower child, just page after page of neatly groomed lads and lassies at odds with the psychedelic popcult perception of the late 1960's.

Such things did exist, to be sure, but as fringe elements whose disproportionate cultural influence and mediagenic power color our collective historical mythology. It's reductive (as all shorthand is by definition) and it plays toward expected flavor rather than nuance...especially when the nuanced version is perceived to be tres unhip. There are far more people willing to boast about how they bought the original 12" pressing of "Blue Monday" back in the day than there are folks who'll cop to buying Toto IV, despite what the sales figures state. I'd much rather wallow in the warts'n'all version of the past than the rose-tinted and romanticized facsimile passed off as the genuine article.

Besides, who am I to lob stones at late 1950's Pat Boone fans and their byzantine organization? At least there was a manic sense of sincerity in their devotion, which feels quite refreshing in an age when the Hannah Montana and Camp Rock blocks are waging a relentless war for merchandised supremacy in the aisles of every superstore in the country. (The battle will not end until the last tube of hemorrhoid salve has been brought into licensed compliance.)

While the subject of Pat Boone fandom seems ideally suited for the Lilekian "Ha ha! Look how stupid these people were back then" school of mockery, I find it difficult to lob haughty cheap shots at targets that range from quite sad...


...to downright tragic...


See what I mean? Cruel mockery becomes redundant when dealing with those who get squishy whenever they hear "Love Letters in the Sand" or who celebrate their devotion to blandly innocuous pop music through verse...


Okay, that's just fucking creepy.

Ill Repute - Clean Cut American Kid (from Rodney on the ROQ, Vol. 3, 1982) - How about a little Nardcore, prexies?

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Little Demon (from Cow Fingers & Mosquito Pie, 1991) - I find this b-side to 1956's "I Put a Spell on You" serves as a nice vaccine against the ravages of pure strain Boonitis.

kids those days

The voice of white Protestant middle-class suburban youth, courtesy of Pat Boone #1 (September-October 1959):

Brought to you by Lucky Strikes!
By being a "teenager for life" does J.M.G. mean "I plan on living in my parents' house, working a part-time minimum wage service job, and suffering from wild mood swings until I die of old age?"

New experiences and challenges -- such as trying to sneak into your second floor bedroom at two in the morning while blitzed on lemon gin or trying to find a decent backroom abortionist after the football captain "forgot" to disengage on time.

"You'll appreciate your time you've spent in locked Mommy's Evil Clown Closet when you have kids of your own. In fact, you'll be calling Mommy for advice on how to inflict maximum emotional trauma through greasepainted nightmares after you've been saddled with the hellish fruit of boozy, unprotected, marital sex with an emotionally distant spouse. So suck it up -- God hates weaklings and whiners."

Pet hippo-what? Were the Prexies (as Boone's fans called themselves) ahead of the subcultual curve regarding hallucinogenic drug use?

"I had the most ginchy trip last night! The world turned into a giant Leavittown with not a trace of dirt or enthicity to be seen! Things turned a bit unpleasant, though, when I saw a little speck on my fingernail, and I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed in vain to remove it. When I snapped out of it, I was covered in blood and sitting on top of the corpses of my parents and siblings."

Ah, the joys of youth.

Eddie & The Hot Rods - Teenage Depression (from Teenage Depression, 1976) - They called it pub rock. I call it punk as fuck.

The Adverts - Bored Teenagers (from Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts, 1978) - Ever stood on the beach while a storm front came rolling in? The skies turn dark, the barometric pressure drops, and the air cools. The wind picks up, the waves turn nasty, and low rumbles of thunder can be heard in the distance. It's an awe-inspiring and occasionally terrifying experience.

That's how I feel whenever I listen to The Adverts' first album.

oh, brother

Today is my little brother Greg's 32nd birthday, and while I was hoping to do something more substantial to commemorate the event, I woke up this morning feeling -- to borrow a line from Withnail -- "like a pig shat in my head."

Sorry, kid. The 2000-word tribute to D-Man will have to wait until your next birthday. This time around, you'll just have to content yourself with the cutting edge comedy of Flexographic* Captain America. Take it away, Cap!

Poor bastard. He'll never know how much his routine stinks.

On to today's birthday musical selection, featuring a oft-played track from the Weiss siblings' younger days:

Anthrax - I'm the Man (from the I'm the Man EP, 1987) - It was much funnier when I was sixteen, but the same can be said for a lot of things. I still have a great deal of respect for Anthrax, as they were one of the few bands that broke away from the dour self-important posturing and stock musical template of the thrash metal scene back in the day.

*For those readers not up on comics history, Marvel and DC toyed with the flexographic printing process as a potential cost-cutting measure during the mid-1980s, but readers were less than enthusiastic with the extremely garish-looking and error-prone results.

rolling with the years

Pal Ken unearthed a pretty interesting musical meme, and because I have never been one to shy away from a quick and dirty source of content, I've decided to use it as the basis of today's post.

So here it is, an annotated list of the songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts on every March 13 since I emerged from the womb on that date in 1972. It's a countdown to the End Times which offers clear proof that "popular" does not necessarily equal "good."

1972 - "Without You" by Nilsson - And thus I entered this world bloody, screaming, and to the tune of calcium-leeching soft rock.

1973 - "Killing Me Softly with His Song" by Roberta Flack - Even soul was affected by the power of the 1970's.

1974 - "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks - Is it any wonder I took to punk rock as strongly as I did?

1975 - "Have You Never Been Mellow" by Olivia Newton-John - The de facto anthem for the Me Decade.

1976 - "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by The Four Seasons - Attempting to escape the malaise via fuzzy nostalgia.

1977 - "Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" by Barbra Streisand - Fuck you, record buying public of 1977.

1978 - "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" by Andy Gibb - And the effects of cocaine abuse are stronger than cardiac muscle.

1979 - "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor - Saturday Night Götterdämmerung!

1980 - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen - I can handle a little Mercury every now and again.

1981 - "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - "When the stars were right, They could plunge from the C&W chart to the Hot 100; but when the stars were wrong, They would remain in their own genre subdomain. But although They were no longer on Top 40 radio, They would never really pass from public consciousness..." - The Call of Cnt'ry'mu'zk

1982 - "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band - I've already discussed the personal significance of this song here.

1983 - "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson - It was a given that this musical journey was going to pass through Neverland at some point.

1984 - "Jump" by Van Halen - What fuck is a "record machine," anyhow? Apart from being a way to dodge coming up with a rhyme for "jukebox," that is.

1985 - "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon - Forget all the talk about Minor Threat and 7 Seconds, this here is the real font from which emo music sprung.

1986 - "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister - No, no.

1987 - "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi - I preferred the Swinging Erudites' version, "Livin' on My Hair."

1988 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley - Happy Sweet 16, Andrew! We chipped in and got you a rickroll!

1989 - "Lost in Your Eyes" by Debbie Gibson - That's Deborah Gibson now, thank you very much.

1990 - "Escapade" by Janet Jackson - Six of one...

1991 - "Someday" by Mariah Carey - ...and a half dozen of the other.

1992 - "To Be with You" by Mr. Big - Music to peak in high school by.

1993 - "Informer" by Snow - Truly the Falco of his times.

1994 - "The Sign" by Ace of Base - ABBA 2.0

1995 - "Take a Bow" by Madonna - ...and exit the stage, please, before things get any more embarrassing.

1996 - "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - Honoring the late Steve (Def Leppard) Clark and the late David (C+C Music Factory) Cole in the most insipid manner imaginable.

1997 - "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls - "What I really really want is to host bumpers for the Soap Opera Channel."

1998 - "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion - Never underestimate the purchasing power of teenage girls.

1999 - "Believe" by Cher - The auto-tune effect that launched a thousand shitty Eurodance tracks.

2000 - "Amazed" by Lonestar - Country-fried cheese.

2001 - "Stutter" by Joe featuring Mystikal - If 6 was 9 was a forgettable R&B hit.

2002 - "Ain't It Funny" by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule - No, not particularly.

2003 - "In Da Club" by 50 Cent - Ugh.

2004 - "Yeah!" by Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris - ...and Bella Abzug and Helmut Kohl and Madame Curie and Jim J. Bullock and that one dude at the gas station with the lazy eye.

2005 - "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent featuring Olivia - Ugh³.

2006 - "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt - Flattery will get you nowhere, James. My affections are not for sale to some next-gen James Taylor who yodels the word "beautiful" like he's just been kicked in the nads.

2007 - "This Is Why I'm Hot" by Mims - "I can sell a mill sell you nothing on the track." How refreshingly honest.

2008 - "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain - Honestly, this stuff exists solely for the purpose of being licensed into tinny-sounding ringtones, right?

When I embarked on this project, I had hoped that there would be at least a couple tracks in the list that even I wouldn't feel embarrassed posting. As it turned out, there was "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and not much else. (You may beg to differ, but mine is the hand that rests on the tiller.) So Queen it is then, along with an excellent acoustic cover of 1984's featured slice of pop rock bombast...

Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love (from The Game, 1980) - The greatest thing composed in a bathtub since Marat's Éloge de Montesquieu.

Aztec Camera - Jump (from a 1984 b-side; collected on The Best of Aztec Camera, 1999) - Maura once suggested that there was some kind of Dorian Gray relationship between Aztec Camera frontman Roddy Frame and Echo & The Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch, where McCulloch staved off the ravages of time by passing them on to Frame. If that was the case, the spell has apparently been reversed, as Roddy has been looking rather spry as of late, while poor Ian appears to be in the advanced stages of mummification.

Friday Night Fights: Fit to Be Tied

Hold onto your golden tiaras, ladies and gents, because this installment of the Donnybrook Cosmic features a widescreen dust up between the Amazons of Paradise Island and Eviless and her Saturnic Girls. (Great garage band name, that.)


It happened in the pages of Wonder Woman #28 (March-April 1948), in an epic tale best described as a Bayeux Tapestry of B&D sequences. While William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator, was never one to pass up the opportunity to depict his kink of choice in scripting the adventures of Princess Diana and company, he well and truly pulled out the stops in this long-form exploration of the many ways one could be bound, gagged, or otherwise physically restrained.

Here's the (much abridged) highlight reel:

Queen Hippolyte hog-tied!
Steve Trevor stripped to the waist and lashed to a post!
Wonder Woman used as a nautical ottoman!
The story also featured a number of Diana's most diabolic foes, organized by Eviless into the sinister Villainy Incorporated (VILI.N, presently trading at 37.54), and a shifty and dangerous lot they are...

...and to think Joss Whedon claimed Wonder Woman lacked a decent rogues' gallery. Pshaw, I say.

Our series of original/cover version pairings concludes with a glam rock masterpiece oozing with retro-futuristic decadence and its aggressively flat re-interpretation by a spin-off of Britpunk legends Blitz.

David Bowie - Suffragette City (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)

Rose of Victory - Suffragette City (from a 1983 single)

a date with the constabulary

The Equals - Police on My Back (from Greatest Hits, 1994) - The original 1968 version, featuring the talents of a young Eddy Grant (before he decided to cruise Electric Avenue as a solo artist).

The Clash - Police on My Back (from Sandinista! 1980) - The one flawless diamond in a six-sided pile of dross.

(Inspired by the works of Chris Sims, current Scion of the Arashikage Clan.)

fashions by Darwin

Today we're going to take a look at the prevailing biological fashions, circa 430 million years ago. The Ordovician-Silurian extinction event cleared the way for all sorts of wild and crazy adaptive styles which make excellent mockery material from our lofty present-day perspective with its pre-distressed skinny jeans, low-rise sweatpants, and ironic t-shirts.

It's great being a superior lifeform, isn't it?

Hey, look! It's a giant sea scorpion! Talk about overcompensation! This dude will rock you like a hurricane! (Trite popcult references make the blogosphere go 'round!)

Trilobites were hot stuff for a time, but so were pogs. Seriously. The three-lobed look with a segmented thorax? What intelligent designer came up with that idea?

Nice look, dude. Is it anime cosplay season already? This pioneer of piscine fashion is rather proud of his status as a vertebrae early-adopter. Too bad he can't tell if he wants to be a fish or a horseshoe crab. Sheesh, didn't they have Urban Outfitters stores in the Paleozoic Era?

This dashing pair of cephalaspis are sporting the "bone-plated jawless" look popular with the Silurian-Devonian fishy crowd. So what if it was a reflection of environment and evolutionary trends? The important thing is that it looks really goofy by current bio-aesthetic standards and is perfectly suited for facile snarkery.

These Silurian fashions make it really hard to tell the males and females of the various species apart, which makes me wonder what other kinds of "boning" was going on behind the secluded coral reefs. HAW HAW! (Remember, kids: It's not a real half-assed retro fashion post if it doesn't contain at least one casual or thinly-veiled homophobic joke.)

If I have seen further than others, it is because I am standing on my tippity-toes, peeking over the shoulders of clueless giants.

We've got another original version/cover version pairing today -- a double shot of new (and newer) wave pop from the City of Angels, where star-fucking is always in vogue. (Not that I'm making a statement by choosing this particular tune or anything, honest....)

Felony - The Fanatic (from The Fanatic, 1983)

The Checkers - The Fanatic (from Make a Move, 2003)

still one place to go

If you happen to be visiting this humble corner of the internet based on JC's words of high praise (made even more flattering by the fact that I consider The Vinyl Villain the platinum standard of music blogs), I'd like to apologize for not bringing my "A" game at the present time.

In a rare reversal of the Armagideon Time status quo, I have a backlog of workable post ideas, yet very little time to execute them because of things currently going on at the day job. I'm juggling the prep work for a move with my everyday responsibilities while trying not to crate up anything I might need for the same.

Things should settle down by Friday afternoon, but it's going to be low-content mode around here until that bridge is crossed.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just continue with the original version/cover version juxtaposition theme from yesterday, with a classic cut from The Doors (which the wife hates) and a punked up Ray Manzarek-produced cover by X (which the wife absolutely adores). It's all in the translation.

The Doors - Soul Kitchen (from The Doors, 1967)

X - Soul Kitchen (from Los Angeles, 1980)