The Giant Panther

Want to know a great cover band? You may know them as The Foo Fighters, but they are one of the best cover bands around. I have copies of them doing Requiem by Killing Joke, Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty, I'm in Love With a German Film Star by The Passions, Born On The Bayou by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Have a Cigar by Pink Floyd. First of all, Dave Grohl and I could easily hang because he's got impeccable taste, but I love it when a perfectly fine successful rock & roll band has the nads to cover their heroes and pull it off. I love all of these original songs and I love The Foo Fighter covers. I'm going to try and do features on covers, a secret passion of mine, from now on as well. I'm loaded with those too. I am in constant search for these reworked nuggets.

I know I haven't been posting much lately and for that I am sorry. You see I'm one of those four million folks looking for work these days. I'm a high tech salesman by trade, but I might be flipping burgers soon if this keeps up. Plus, as every rotisserie baseball fan in the country knows, it is crunch time as we collectively prepare for the draft (or auction) this weekend. Come Monday it's play ball! The Final Four NCAA Championships are here and that means seamheads everywhere are back in business. Hope springs eternal or something. This is definitely the year right? Who knows? I won the whole 11 team league twice in going on 22 years now. Oh, I've got my five second place finishes, two third place finishes and four fourths (final money spot), but I've finished out of the money eight times now! 1996 and 2006 were my magical years, but I want my title back. I know you're bored to tears here, but wish me luck. If something else isn't going right maybe baseball can bring it back.

Regarding The Foo I've been stumbling on their covers, almost by the year, because who can afford CD singles in this market? That is where you will find most, if not all, of the aforementioned covers in question. This Pink Floyd cover I'm leaving you with is wicked. I love the Floyd to death and I love that Dave does too. This cover is completely respectful with a natural Foo Fighters overhaul. I love it. I hope you do too. You can find this on the 1999 Learn To Fly CD (Part I) Single. It really Kicks Out The Jams to coin a phrase. It Blows The Roof Off Tha Sucka. Blows Doors. Whatever. Talk soon!

I can remember seeing Jill Sobule warm up Del Amitri at an Allston, MA club known as Local 186 at the time, on March 31, 1995. Long time Bostonians will remember that hallowed ground as Bunratty's. This club was a fixture on the local Boston rock scene for decades when it all came crashing down on August 1, 1987 when a 23 year old bartender named Abel Harris was gunned down trying to calm down a Quincy, MA man named James Wallace who apparently was packing heat. I know this makes me sound unbelievably naive, but I don't know anybody who carries a gun. I hope I never do. If you believe Anderson Cooper and CNN these days the drug cartels are making inroads to a town near you. Just put that on the pile of things our newly crowned President has to tackle. So you want to be President huh? No thank you. I Wanna Blog, Yeah! You know things are bad when you are quoting Twisted Sister. Oiy. I gotta get a life. Oh, and life is the sentence Mr Wallace rightly received in case you are interested. It's a very sad story to be sure.

Regarding Bunratty's things were obviously never the same there. The club became another in a long line of clubs in Boston that either changed hands frequently or closed often to remodel and or reinvent itself. The space had been predominantly a rock & roll biker bar since the early 60's. A pool table, darts, cold drafts and Rock & Roll kind of place. Frank Zappa played there. So did Bruce Springsteen. Aerosmith. Get this; Frank Sinatra even played there. That is a rich history. The acts were toned down considerably after the shooting and, blaming the "fade" of the rock genre, Local 186 as it was now known, closed and reopened as the Wonder Bar in the early 90's featuring nightly Jazz. I don't want to offend, but sometimes I think it's no surprise that the word Jazz has multiple "Z's" in it. I'm sure the club does better now with it's open faced kitchen and a more well to do crowd in tow, but I wonder what would have happened without the tragedy. To be fair the best rock space around the Allston-Brighton area left is probably Harper's Ferry and they have to really mix it up to remain financially viable in this market. I saw Leslie West of Mountain fame there not four years ago or so and what a treat that was. That, my friends, was a good old fashioned butt kicking rock show. What an assault. West is one my blues guitar heroes no doubt. Mountain was so much more than Mississippi Queen. I trust some of you folks out there know this. Great band.

Know why I love blogging? Because I didn't come here to talk about the history of the edifice known as 186 Harvard Avenue in Allston at all! The truth is I came to admit that I am a pre 1977 Chicago fan. Whew! Glad I got that off my chest. Let the wisecracks begin. I used to subscribe to a magazine called Tracks which I thought was excellent at the time. The subscription morphed into Paste Magazine when Tracks went under so I'm not sure which magazine actually sent me the free CD that introduced me to the song I'm about to introduce to you. Classic Rock Magazine sends me a new one every month now too. Most of the time I never even get a chance to listen to them I'm embarrassed to say. I've got a massive collection and as I have noted previously I am in the process of digitizing this lumbering giant. There are only so many hours in any given day that you can sit correcting files so they all look uniform. I am a bit of a Grammar Nazi and I just can't deal with "01's" the way iTunes would have you accept them. I'm guessing I received the mixed artist CD with Cinnamon Park on it about five years ago now. The CD on which the song Cinnamon Park officially appears, Underdog Victorious, was released in September of 2004 so I'm guessing I received it around that time. I know I'll catch some flak for liking this song, but so what. I sometimes enjoy mash ups and sampling. I liken this single to Kid Rock's song last year mixing Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London called All Summer Long. Kid Rock is much reviled, but for some reason I don't mind him. Trailer park rock. It's very funny to me. I honestly feel like he's paying homage more than he is ripping these artists off to further his career. He's a look at me David Lee Roth type, but to each his own I say. Rock can always use more humor in my book. Sorry GP! I see you cringing! I can just feel some serious Giant Panther eye rolling about now...

OK, I know I'm running long here. The bottom line is when I first saw Jill Sobule I thought, eh, another singer songwriter. Let the record reflect though that Jill Sobule Kissed a Girl long before Katy Perry for what that's worth. When I got this CD and heard Cinnamon Park, which is a rearrangement of Chicago's Saturday in The Park (a song I still love with great fondness as a reminder of my youth) with her own twist, I liked it instantly. It's kitchy, nostalgic, a fun story and I really admired her for trying it. It's in my iPod like device and I always seem to cheer up or remember some fun Saturday in The Park, as it were, when I hear it. She's got a sexy voice and has built a nice career for herself in a challenging environment. Congrats Jilly Sue, you've been blogged. Hope you like it.

Kraftwerk. German for Power Station? I wonder if the 80's (barely) super group Power Station, who hung their initial thrust into the market on a cover of T-Rex's Bang a Gong (Get It On), knew this? I didn't until just now. I'm a huge T-Rex fan and I didn't even really mind Power Station's butchery of their most famous song, but was Kraftwerk part of that circus? I was 14 years of age when I first heard Autobahn on WPLJ-FM in New York City. Of course it was the edited version of the 22 minute plus opus Kraftwerk is probably most famous for, but it was enough to get the gist of it. I always wondered how the Japanese or the German folks could follow the lyrics of a U2 or Cheap Trick. Live at Budokan? How do these people understand the lyrics? Are records translated into different languages globally? These were questions I didn't bother with at 14, but I did understand that I could barely understand Techno pioneers Kraftwerk when they sang. 22 minutes to describe the feeling of not having a speed limit? OK, but can you at least give me something to go on here? I suppose not. It is kind of amazing to think that they actually sold records in the United States in the 70's when you think about it. We were a mere 30 years removed from the fall of Berlin when you think about it. Can you imagine the market for Iraqi rock (if such a thing exists) today? Me neither. You go Matisyahu...

Kraftwerk broke some SERIOUS ground and I didn't even realize it way back when. It's really pointless to say before Depeche Mode, before New Order, before name whatever band you want when it comes to the overall influence of Kraftwerk down through the years. It's kind of mind blowing actually. Dusseldorf is a town you only heard about on Hogan's Heroes for crying out loud. How did they span the globe and wind up on AOR radio in the early 70's? Go figure. I can't honestly say I was following their career with bated breath following Autobahn. I can say with authority that I just downloaded their entire catalogue the other day and have been soaking in the quirky repetitive rhythms and digging their whole ambiance. A friend of mine turned me onto Electric Cafe around 1987 and while I enjoyed the novelty of it all I didn't think all that much of it. This was strictly a European band after all. They were just a curiosity in the United States. Surely they had no real staying power. Wrong...

I'm not going to go long on Kraftwerk here. I will say that I really liked any number of their recordings and this one in particular. It's called Showroom Dummies from Trans-Europe Express. It might have four lyrics, but I don't care. I really love it. I hope you do too. I'm mixing up the medicine so look for me all over the map here soon. Best of luck to your bracket. I'm thinking UConn again, but I'm almost always wrong. Tried to fry an egg, broke the yolk no joke, Something's Gone Wrong Again...

In my never ending quest to unearth long forgotten and hard to find great tracks I present to you Hyacinth Girl by Winter Hours. This New Jersey band was a College Radio favorite in the mid 80's, but never rose above cult status. Their records are long out of print and it's tough to locate any of their few CDs without parting with an arm or a leg. The 1986 record on which Hyacinth Girl appears, Wait Till The Morning, has the dreaded "this item has been discontinued by the manufacturer (we still have those in this country?)" tag on its Amazon.com listing. This band is said to have been influenced by Buffalo Springfield and or The Byrds, but it sure sounds a lot like R.E.M. Unless you are Henry Rollins, that isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

Don't look for a Winter Hours reunion anytime soon though. Their lead singer with the Jim Morrison like voice, Joseph Marques Rodriguez, died in 2003 of an alleged overdose. Much like their New Jersey peers, The Feelies, they should have been much bigger than they ever were. But don't listen to me (ever!)...there is a 26 song tribute CD out called A Few Uneven Rhymes (if you can find it of course) with contributions by members of The Violent Femmes, Nada Surf and The Feelies. Not bad for a band that struggled to be heard at all right? They had a few minor singles other than Hyacinth Girl, but not many. Smoke Rings and Roadside Flowers come to mind, but if the legend is true the band sort of lost its spirit when a deal with Chrysalis Records fell apart towards the end of the 80's. You can find out more about what happened to them if you are interested by clicking on the link below, but suffice to say Hyacinth Girl is a masterpiece of a song any self respecting person walking around claiming to be an 80's expert should be all over.

As glorified as 80's music is it irks the hell out of me that songs like True by Spandau Ballet or I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow are considered representative of what was really good about that decade while songs like Hyacinth Girl are completely ignored. It blows my mind. Nobody knows better than I do that music is a subjective thing, but if I never heard Turning Japanese or countless throwaway tracks from that era ever again it wouldn't bother me one iota. Just don't try and separate me from songs like Hyacinth Girl or they'll be trouble. Put this is your iPod right now! Your friends will think you rock...because now you do...enjoy!

www.winterhours.com

OK, it's March 17th. St Patrick's Day. Or Evacuation Day. Or Whacking Day if you watch The Simpsons. It's green beer, parades, mass quantities of consumables, celebrating Irish heritage, hoping that girl you fancy sees you through beer goggles and slips up for a change. I get it. I'm 7/8 Irish and 1/8 French Canadian. It's kind of an odd combination I suppose, but it is what it is. I came to Boston in 1978 because I was, gulp, listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer while thumbing through the college catalogue my high school guidance counselor had given me and my friends. I saw, in order; Boston, Emerson College, and the ability to Major in Mass Communications. They had two radio stations! As a long time disciple of FM-Radio by the age of 18 I was very interested in becoming a DJ. Naturally that dream was crushed with all the others, but I'm not at all sure I made the connection at the time that Boston had one of the nation's premiere Irish populations. Today I think nothing of hearing a gorgeous Irish accent at one of the scores of Irish bars I have frequented over the years, but they are not the kind of places you frequent on days like today mind you. To paraphrase Yankee great Yogi Berra "Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded." I may want to celebrate being Irish today, but not at an Irish bar. It's a complete circus at these places on St Patrick's Day. Want to wait in line at The Black Rose in Faneuil Hall? Be my guest. Even if you paid the once a year cover to get in, you'd get no service and you'd literally have no place to stand. No tabs either unless you surrender your credit card. I don't have a problem doing that when I know I can get it back inside of half an hour. Maybe I should stay home today (not). It's like New Year's Eve and Marathon Day all rolled into one out there! And to think I came to talk about some music...

Irish rock artists have moved into the fore over the years. Way back in the 60's you would think of Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. Two absolute icons of Irish rock history. Their respective bands Them and Taste are still critically acclaimed to this very day and that was before they launched monster solo careers. In the 70's we tackled Thin Lizzy, The Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers and The Boomtown Rats. But one band nobody ever talks about any more from that era was a band called Horslips. Nobody can take away the Irish heritage of some of these bands, but Horslips was probably the first band to blend traditional Celtic music and out and out rock. The made great use of the flute a la rock legends Jethro Tull, but their music was in the context of what we would think of as basic Irish melodies. It's hard to tell if Horslips were ahead of their time or behind it.

One of the great things about going to college is that you get exposed to everyone else's tastes in music. I have a friend named Jefferson, who is 100% responsible for my exposure to Horslips whether he knows it or not. He grew up outside of Philadelphia, PA while I was a Jersey boy. That meant we had access to the same radio stations back in the day. WMMR and WYSP of the Philadelphia area and WNEW & WPLJ in the New York area. My little FM converter in my blood orange 1971 Ford Pinto gas tank explosion if you got hit from behind death mobile could barely draw the Philly stations. I had to drive northwest to get in even odd gas station lines in the late seventies and I'd sit there listening to the Philly stations and wait my turn. Jefferson came north with Philly staples like Genesis & King Crimson (progressive rock was huge in that area, but even as I listened to the late Alison Steele - the "Nightbird" at 10 PM every week night on WNEW in the 70's - barge onto the air to the sound of King Crimson's In The Court of The Crimson King I didn't understand how much I would come to love this genre). To make a long story longer Jefferson had a copy of a 1977 record called Aliens by Horslips. It had a cut on it called Second Avenue which I instantly took a shine too. The funny thing is after Horslips cobbled together a couple of greatest hits records Second Avenue wasn't among the tracks. The beauty of digital recreations of records is you can just slam your own personal bonus cut on any "comprehensive" greatest hits package and right a wrong out of the box. Slap the artwork on the file and add the sequential number and all is right with the world.

Irish music has of course gone wild since the 70's. A little known band called U2 surfaced nationally around 1980 and the rest is glorious history. I just LOVE the track "Magnificent" from No Line On The Horizon. The Edge is my one of my all time favorite guitarists. There is nobody like him and when he's got it going on it's magic. It's so simple and yet incredibly complicated. I can't even put it into words. After U2 in no particular order, chronologically or otherwise, came Clannad (a group many folks give credit for being the first to blend traditional Irish music and rock), The Pogues, Gary Moore of Thin Lizzy fame, Sinead O'Connor, My Bloody Valentine, The Cranberries, Damien Rice, The Thrills and Snow Patrol among others. All have made a name for themselves and Irish rock music. OK, I've definitely blathered on long enough, but I wanted to leave you with yet another obscure chestnut of my own personal rock trail. Horslips may not be a household name to many, but their Amazon page will tell you that they had enough of a fan base to release several albums and have a nice career. I really like Second Avenue and I hope you folks do too. Happy Whacking Day!

Horslips - Second Avenue.mp3 YSI

I have the overwhelming urge to post on my birthday so here it is. While I'm on the year 1985 I thought I would table yet another lost forgotten classic rock song. This one is called Looking For Lewis & Clark by The Long Ryders. Everyone has their "why wasn't this song HUGE?" list of songs in their library and this one is definitely on mine. I remember seeing them perform this song live at Bayside Expo Center in South Boston at WBCN's Rock & Roll Expo. I was working the show for the radio station and these guys were the special guests if memory serves. The Long Ryders were an alternative country rock band with at least two stellar tracks. The other one was called Gunslinger Man from their 1987 followup CD called Two Fisted Tales. I love these two songs. I can't think of one person in my 1000 friend/fellow music lovers orbit that loves these two songs as much as I do, but I never cared about that kind of thing. I'm grooving when one of these songs comes up on my iPod like device at the gym with the volume at 11. That usually inspires me to pick up the pace...

I'm not going to take up a lot of your time today explaining the context of my life when this song was popular, but suffice to say I was in love at the time. Somehow that enhances just about every song in your stratosphere during that snapshot in time doesn't it? I was 25 years old, indestructible and going places (in my mind). Yeah right he said. One of the reasons music resonates with me so very much is that it marks time like nothing else ever could for me. Even as my memory fades and as the "the older I get the better I was" mentality begins to take hold, I can think of a song like Looking For Lewis & Clark and remember the boundless optimism, even as a card carrying pessimist, I had once upon a time. Happy Birthday to Funk Superstar Sly Stone and Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria (and yes I'm saying it like Homer Simpson with the corresponding drool) as well as former President Andrew Jackson. Did you know that record album charts made their debut on March 15, 1945 in the U.S.? At least something is older than I am. Let's all rock along with The Long Ryders now. Put this is in your iPods! You can thank me later...

I'm tabling a tune that has survived my own test of time. Mars Need Guitars! was released in 1985 and I'm here to tell you that Bittersweet is as good as it gets, Classic/Alternative or whatever you want to call it. Anyone who owns this record knows that Death Defying, Like Wow-Wipe Out and Poison Pen are quality tunes, but Bittersweet rocks my world every single time. This single ranks with any eighties song you want to name. They later rose to fame as a result of their 1991 release Kinky featuring tremendous tracks like Miss Freelove '69 and A Place in The Sun. If you aren't aware of those two songs get on the stick. A Place in The Sun might just be my second favorite Hoodoo's offering. They have a handful of great singles like I Want You Back, Lelani, What's My Scene and Come Anytime, but Australia can be proud of this export based on Bittersweet as far as I'm concerned. It's a smokin' hot cut in my book.

I saw them a couple of times over the years, but I remember going to a show at then named Citi Club, an edifice recently removed from the Boston landscape in favor of The House of Blues, on October 5, 1991. I ran into lead singer Dave Faulkner at Axis, an adjoining club next door not ten minutes after he left the Citi Club stage. I complemented him on his performance and he thanked me as if I was somebody. His humility impressed me. We didn't share shots of Jaegermeister or anything, as was custom back in the day, but we did share A Nod, which as you know is as Good as a Wink To a Blind Horse according to Faces.

I only mention Jaeger because I once did a set of shots with former NBA wacko Dennis Rodman, then of the Detroit Pistons, at the fabled Boston sports bar Daisy Buchanan's in or about 1988. He had no nose ring or eyebrow decor at the time and was (relatively) barely tattooed by then, but Dennis and I shared a bit of humanity as he held the entire bottle of Jaegermeister the bartender should have never given him full custody of. I said "here's the to the best offensive rebounder in the NBA" and he thanked me, again as if I was somebody (which also impressed me), and we parted ways after consecutive belts. Funny, if I had a chance to play 25 Things on Facebook again I'd have mentioned this. My high arc homer off of Huey Lewis (of The News Fame) and or my between innings feeding of grounders to LH throwing 2B Joan Jett as a 1B for the WBCN Ballbusters doesn't seem to have the same resonance without my Dennis Rodman story now that I think about it. True Stories (hey, a Talking Heads reference!) all around however...

Anyway, I'm trying to do a shorter version of my usual run on story telling tonight so I'm leaving you with Bittersweet. No relation to the respectable Big Head Todd & The Monsters song. This song brings the heat like hot sake in my living room among some special friends. Hope you like it.

I have to apologize for my lack of posts lately, but I've been off doing other things. I'm not going to do a long post today (I know what you're thinking...he always says that and five paragraphs later...). I was reading the latest issue of Classic Rock Magazine at the gym yesterday and there was an article on Jimmy Page and the making of Led Zeppelin I that was pretty interesting. Most folks who credit Zeppelin for breaking heavy metal ground don't pay much mind to the allegations of plagiarism that have dogged the mighty Zep for four decades now. It's not going to keep them out of the Hall of Fame Mark McGwire/Rafael Palmeiro style obviously, but it's an interesting discussion. As it was reported in Classic Rock's April issue, Jake Holmes is apparently the true writer of the legendary Dazed and Confused track on Led Zeppelin I. If you have never heard of Jake Holmes join the club. I was a mere seven years of age in 1967 when The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes was released to little fanfare. Apparently Jimmy Page saw one of his shows and was mesmerized by the track thus changing the course of history.

Led Zeppelin I is littered with old blues numbers rearranged and borrowed. If you read the article there is a lot of interesting information about the origin of some of the tracks. The Willie Dixon stuff is clear and credited, but there were apparently some shenanigans regarding the crediting of songwriters on the rest of the tracks. Suffice to say Jake Holmes is still waiting for his first royalty check for Dazed and Confused. It was a different era when it came to crediting the original songwriters in those days. Some were under the impression that if you rearranged the song you could call it your own. Others figured the songs would never sell or be popular enough to warrant proper credit. Certainly no one really expected heretofore session man extraordinaire Jimmy Page to shake up the world. Zeppelin, of course, need not apologize for their stellar library, but since they clearly borrowed from blues greats (who, in fairness, borrowed from other uncredited and long forgotten deceased artists themselves, let alone each other) for their first three LPs it might be nice to do a little retroactive recognition of still living artists like Jake Holmes. He apparently got some bad information back in the day thinking he couldn't sue and Zeppelin would allegedly just like to keep a lid on their borrowed melodies. I could care less as a huge fan of theirs, but it's not like they need the dough. Long Jake Holme's version is pretty cool for clocking in under four minutes. Enjoy.