Travis and I hung in the same crowd back in my old college days in the ‘Boro, and I have on my bookshelves a VHS copy of an early video comedy effort he and some mutual friends made back when they were still in high school, so it’s been a big kick to watch his progression to now becoming nationally known. I wrote here on the Zone a while back about how our initial meeting way back in 1987 didn’t go so well, but in recent years we have caught up and chatted off and on and a nicer and more pleasant guy you couldn’t meet, so I’m doubly thrilled for his success. It’s awesome when good things happen to good people.
The Red State Update bits (all of which can be found on YouTube and the guys’ site) are what’s made them so famous now, but I leave you with one of my favorite Travis and Jonathan bits, Travis and Satchel, which both makes me laugh and creeps me out a little ‘cos Satchel both looks and sounds a little bit like one of my older male relatives (and dummies kinda freak me out anyway). Enjoy…
I have another - and the hardest - one coming up in about a month, but today is the birthday of one of my most special and favorite and closest friends ever.
Once, we were the same age… well, except for me being three months older. Now I’m 41, but he’ll never be anything but 17. Permanently. Forever.
How almost a quarter of a century can pass pretty much in a blink of an eye, I’ll never really understand.
I saw this one live on broadcast TV as well in late 1977, while spending the night over at my friend Katie’s house. Not only an important event musically for me, but a classic moment that went down in rock & roll history (because of the false start on live TV). Elvis Costello, 1977:
And another event that, along the same lines as The B-52s and the Pretenders, was hugely important… unfortunately I can’t find any footage of what was the actual event where I saw them for the first time (which I believe was on Rock Concert in 1978), but this promo video is from the same time. And featuring one of the world’s greatest drummers in Clem Burke - which is not only my opinion, but the opinion of girl drummer extraordinaire Miss Jo Walker, Christopher & Jay W., and every other drummer I have ever knocked around with. Blondie, 1978:
If I get industrious again in the near future, maybe we’ll hit college days and my point-of-no-return assimilation into the indie scene. I’ll probably just skip high school - while I had some cool stuff like the first couple of U2 albums and some other stuff most people didn’t have in West Tennessee at the time (thank goodness for Night Tracks on TBS!), those days included a lot of Loverboy and .38 Special and Night Ranger and etc., and I don’t need to be reminded of that and neither do you. Ciao for now. ;)
A continuation of the previous two posts… i.e., the finale.
And here is where I witness most of the below at the time of original broadcast (or a similar video at the time), and there’s no turning back after that. I guess late night TV is probably not really the same as it used to be back in my preteen and teenage and babysitting days… but if it was like that now, and you had a child who liked music a lot and also was a night owl that never went to sleep early, they’d probably turn out like me. Scary.
Possibly the most monumental evening in Lynnster Musical History. Here, it’s all over now and there’s no turning back. It’s 1977. It was a late night of babysitting over at the home of a friend of the family. An 11-year-old Lynnster flips on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, as seen here, and things just really wouldn’t ever be the same again. I give you the Ramones. R.I.P. Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny.
This should really be before the Ramones because this is not the broadcast where I saw Cheap Trickfor the first time - that would have probably also been in 1977, and was also on Rock Concert. Nevertheless, this is close enough to the same time, and same era of severe and extreme Robin Zander crush which would last for a couple of decades at least. I kinda got too indie-cool for a while there in the late Eighties and early Nineties and didn’t listen to them much for maybe a decade, then in the latter part of the Nineties, got bit by the bug again and also saw them live for the third time in 20 years and it was awesome. Probably the only band besides the Gurus and The Replacements that I could sing every song off the first ten (or however many) albums backwards and in my sleep, easy. Cheap Trick, circa 1978:
So now, it’s 1979. This is not the broadcast I saw, but it’s close, and the same song of two I saw performed at the time. Probably 12 years old when I saw them, and had never seen anything quite like it before. I had a friend sleeping over who was watching with me, who was, like, “What the hell is THAT?”
I said, “I don’t know, but the guitars. Pay attention to the guitars. And the drums.”
And she said, “Who cares?” Well, me, for one.
Yes, they were whacked out, crazy stuff. And brilliant. This video is unfortunately rather poor, but it’s the closest I could find to what I originally saw that night. Devo, 1979:
And here’s yet another of the very most monumental evenings ever. This one I did witness the broadcast live as a VERY impressionable 12 or 13 year old girl. I thought I’d never seen anything as wild as Devo, but this - I’d never seen anything quite like it. When, a minute or so into it and out of nowhere, Cindy Wilson screamed, “Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no limburger!” - chills ran down my spine. I was stunned.
And then I got unstunned and bought the cassette tape the very next day. And just wanted to BE Cindy Wilson after that, really. And how cool was it that they were from the Southeast, just like me?
Some people I guess would say oh, no, the important one’s “Rock Lobster” (which I seem to recall was also performed that night). But for me, it’s this one. The almighty B-52s, 1979:
This is out of order chronologically, but there was rarely an opportunity to see the Sex Pistolson TV, at least in this part of the country when they were still together. I read all the music rags of the time and had read loads about them, but it must have taken two years to actually see them somewhere besides in photos in print, so even though this video is from 1977, it was probably 1979 or 1980 before I saw it, and the band was long gone and Sid was probably dead by the time I did. Yeah, there were better bands, but the Pistols are still a hugely important chapter in that period of music, and guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook went on to do some really great stuff later on. The Sex Pistols, 1977:
I think this is from 1980, and I also saw this on live broadcast. It kind of took a little while for The Clash to filter into semi-rural West Tennessee, as with a lot of other bands I eventually grew to love.
This is actually not the first time I saw The Boomtown Rats, though I did see this broadcast as well and I think it was that same week or maybe a week later; in any case, it followed soon after. I initially saw them on Bandstand on a Saturday morning. I wouldn’t really call the Rats a major influence “overall”, but this album itself was a HUGE influence on me on its own. That was one of the greatest albums to come out of the New Wave-y early Eighties. They played this on both performances as well as the big hit of the time, which was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, of course. Sir Saint Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats, 1980:
Last but very much not least, Chrissie Hynde - another EXTREMELY important influence for me as a female. It took me a little while to get to the Pretenders because I didn’t like “Brass in Pocket”, but then the second album came out and I loved it. Went back and bought the first one and was, like, OMG, what have I missed?!?! Saw this one on live broadcast too, in 1981:
So there ya go. The formative years, and maybe explains a lot as to why I’m so musically psychotic/schizophrenic or whatever. Maybe it doesn’t. All I know is it’s there and it’s mine and that’s just me.
Toodles ’til after the weekend, I must go buy a car today and have a car payment again for the first time in years. Yikes.
Sometime in the early to mid-Seventies, I started working my way towards what was really going to be “my” music and the music that was going to do some serious influential damage (heh) from then on. I already had some definite opinions and likes and dislikes, but hadn’t really quite found my niche yet. I was still listening to a lot of current radio, watching a lot of American Bandstand and The Midnight Special and other music TV of the day, and still being a preteen and in elementary school, was at the time immersed in the usual bubblegum and teen idol stuff like most girls that age. I loved the Bay City Rollers, and no, I’m not too proud to admit that the first concert I ever attended was Shaun Cassidy, okay?
Throughout a lot of those years, Dick Clark and others often had music retrospective specials of all sorts on TV, and if one was on, we were usually watching it at my house. Nostalgia for the Fifties was kind of popular by then (a lot of that due to the TV show Happy Days being on at the time), and so a lot of the content of these music specials were already being referred to as “oldies”; thus I got to see a lot of, both old clips and current performances, of many of my parents’ favorites like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, et al.
As far as bands and artists from the British Invasion years, sure, I’d already had a lot of exposure, mostly thanks to the aunts who were teenagers in the Sixties. But in the midst of all the Beatlemania going on at their house, there was an awful lot I’d not really had proper introduction to.
And it turned out that many of those were the ones that extended and increased and fed my music addiction the most. In a HUGE way.
Again, much like the previous post, most of these clips were shot before I was born or soon after, so certainly none of them I witnessed at original broadcast. I picked up on all of these a decade or a little more after the fact, mostly when parts were shown during the various music retrospective specials as mentioned above. But I think with the exception of the Yardbirds video, these are all the same ones I initially saw that whet my whistle for more, and eventually led to all of these bands heavily influencing my tastes for years to come.
The Rolling Stones (You probably knew this was coming - much more a Stones girl than a Beatles girl):
The Kinks (OH yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. And much like the Stones, a hometown fave among my musician pals):
The Who (I should probably add here that I’ve seen Quadrophenia probably 200 times… and Tommy almost as much):
The Animals (as well as Eric Burdon and War, and whatever other variations can be had and heard):
The Yardbirds - and how often have you ever seen Jeff Beck playing an acoustic guitar?!?!?!!!! Which is why I picked this clip, but I had never seen it before now:
UPDATED: I gotta add this one ‘cos it’s my favorite:
Ah, but it wasn’t all about the British Invasion either. I bought my first Jefferson Airplane LP at ten years old, I think, and to this day, Jorma Kaukonen is a fave all-time guitar player of mine:
Next and final post in this brief series - there’s just no turning back from the thing of epic proportions that’s about to come. Don’t touch that dial.
Get a cup of coffee or your beverage of choice and prepare to sit a spell. We’re going to be a while here.
I pulled an all-nighter Thursday night working and had an hour or two to kill before starting the Friday workday, so I indulged a bit in a fave activity of hunting YouTube for music stuff I remember from the past but hadn’t seen in a while, or at least stuff from the same time period.
I started collecting some links and then, when I was finished, I looked at it all and just kinda went whoa. Completely accidentally, I had somehow managed to basically assemble all the pieces of the puzzle - or at least the major ones - of my lifelong addiction to music, which began as a very young child.
There are, of course, thousands of other associated pieces I haven’t collected here; virtually everything I have ever listened to helped to formulate my musical tastes and feed the addiction as an adult, certainly. One of my most beloved genres today, as an older adult, is Australian garage rock of the late Seventies and Eighties - but in the U.S., you didn’t hear or see most of that stuff back then, and I wasn’t introduced to a lot of it until the big boom of the Internet, years after the fact. But a lot of that old Aussie stuff was heavily influenced by both British and American punk rock, old British Invasion and American surf music, and the Motor City Sound in Detroit, so in a way, it was sort of all related to what I grew up with anyway.
But all these YouTube videos I have collected here in this and the next two posts - yeah, these are pretty much the very most major pieces that created the foundation of my music junkieness (and my own musicianship, occasionally) as a young adult through today.
In the final and third post, I have collected stuff I either witnessed on original broadcast or is from the same specific time period. The ones in this post and the next one, I obviously did not see at the time they were aired because as far as most of them are concerned, I wasn’t born yet (with the exception of the Raiders, in which case I might have just been born).
And most of this first group is way before my time, but it’s important I include them. I have often said that my biggest musical influence of all was my father, who was also sort of a music junkie in his time when rock & roll was still brand new. It was stuff from his collection I heard the most before I started making my own decisions about music (at three years old, heh). My dad had a tremendous stack of 45 RPM records and LPs and was a musician himself, as was my uncle, and my dad’s first cousin was a DJ on local radio for many years, and my mom’s a music fan as well.
I get it from all of them, but it was my father and I who were most alike in music junkieness of sorts. I just took it to the next level and eventually became way more deeply immersed in the addiction than he ever was. (And some might say far more out of control, given the amount of recorded music I have amassed and things I’ll do to see my favorites play live, like take off to L.A. or Chicago at the last minute.) ;)
Must start this off with The Man himself, Mr. Chuck Berry - blurry video, but this is my favorite. We had the original Chess CD in that stack of 45s, and it probably got played in my record player a decade and a half later as much as it did when my dad was a teenager.
My dad played piano as well as being a drummer, and monopolized the family piano as a teenager, learning how to play every single thing Little Richard ever did.
And I can’t very well write about my father and his monopolizing of the piano without a hat tip to Jerry Lee Lewis. I think we had every single he ever put out on the original Sun label in the Sixties on 45 AND a few 78s (!) as well. (I sold most on eBay a few years ago for a fair amount.)
Now, both my parents were Elvis fans, especially having both grown up in West Tennessee. In fact, my dad was such an Elvis fan and did such a good Elvis, he was picked to do Elvis in a high school musical presentation and was apparently legend for it ever after; last year, when I was having dinner with my dad’s cousin and his girlfriend (both of whom graduated with my father) and talking about that, the girlfriend leaned over the table towards me and said, “Oh, your dad WAS Elvis.” Dad’s cousin decried the fact that he had to sing “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday”, while my father got to be Elvis. Hee.
So Elvis was king, but somehow I missed the Elvis fan gene. See above on associated pieces of the puzzle of influences; certainly that’s an influence, and certainly Elvis influenced many of my later influences. I just always liked Jerry Lee better. And my dad could do a pretty good Jerry Lee, too.
My parents were both in college in Memphis in the early Sixties and frequently went out to see live music, so they got to see a lot of the Stax and similar legends perform live back in the day. So a little bit of that appreciation of Memphis soul rubbed off on me too (and is probably the only reason I still have any love left at all for this city I live in and city of my birth).
I give you the masters, Booker T. & The MGs, featuring the awesome guitar of Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, who can still often be found playing around here and down in the Tunica casinos today. If they look familiar to you for some other reason, it’s probably because you saw them in The Blues Brothers movie with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd years later.
And another personal favorite and this song will always mean Memphis to me - Sam & Dave:
You may find it curious I have included these next two videos in this post. My aunts were teenagers when I was born and huge Beatles and Monkees fans - and later, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, etc. - so I get a lot of that from them and yeah, The Beatles are definitely a big influence for me, but I’m not including them in these posts because in truth, there are other groups from the same time that were really a more major influence on me. And goodness knows I love me some Monkees.
Anyway, we have more or less now established that my then-teenage aunts were boy crazy schoolgirls with mad crushes on various teen idols. Probably the only other band that they crushed on as much back then as The Beatles and The Monkees was Paul Revere and The Raiders. You might not know that the legendary hit songwriting team Boyce & Hart originally wrote “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” for the Raiders - which, of course, later became a huge hit for The Monkees.
Yeah, sure, the Raiders were big teen idols of the Sixties, thanks in part to appearing on the TV show Where the Action Is every day after school hours, and being not only cute, but goofily humorous. They were also excellent, excellent musicians; in the liner notes of Raiders anthology CD The Essential Ride (an excellent compilation that really showcases how good they were throughout their career), Letterman show bass player Will Lee hat tips longtime Raider Phil Volk as his inspiration for learning how to play bass.
Anyway, yeah, my teenage aunts had various Raiders posters pinned to their walls in worship and all their records, alongside John, Paul, George, and Ringo and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike, and god knows who all else.
But my dad had their first album - which, for me, that’s instant rock & roll cred right there. Practically from birth, I remember it playing in our home and playing often.
These are both from 1966, so I was either born or almost at the time. This first video is really blurry and is also a lip-synched performance, but probably one of their earliest TV appearances and the song’s the only YouTube video I found from that first album.
This one’s a little later but is a better video and a live (or mostly live) performance (and be sure to check out the extremely young looking actor Michael Landon introducing them):
Next post, I start coming into my own… stay tuned.
I was reading my hometown (one of them anyway) newspaper online yesterday, and I found myself curiously drawn to a picture in it of the lunchroom in my old junior high school (one of them anyway - I went to two, and only went to this one for my seventh grade year). I kept looking at it; finding it odd for some reason unbeknownst to me; then would go elsewhere, then back and look at the picture again.
Then it finally dawned on me why it kept bothering me and seemed so odd. It was because I spent my entire seventh grade year in that school without ever having set foot in that cafeteria.
Strange, huh? But it just so happened I had a class that year where it was allowed - and nearly everyone in the class took advantage of it - to spend our lunch period in that classroom instead, so pretty much all of us did. I always brought my lunch or didn’t eat lunch at all anyway, and I didn’t have any classes down in that section of the school where the cafeteria was anyway, so I managed to avoid ever setting foot on that part of the campus.
I’ve repeated the story many times (much as I was told many times) of how when my mother was pregnant with me and living in Memphis, she used to send my dad out for Krystals all the time.
And now, many (who’s counting?) decades later - Krystal Pizza.
Pregnancy craving satisfier or gastrointestinal Armageddon? Could be both.
Smiley and Jon were right! The Morningstar corn dogs are AWESOME. I had no reason to be concerned. They look, taste, and smell just like real corn dogs. Actually better, I think! This is a super find!
I have always kinda had issues with hot dogs anyway and sometimes, no matter what, I just can’t bring myself to eat them. There are probably still people at my hometown Sonic that, if I drove up right now, they’d say, “Oh, look, that’s one of those three girls who always ordered the regular cheese coney without the hot dog.” Seriously. (I wonder if my two friends that still live there still do that. I will have to ask them.)
Anyway, yes, I’ve had issues with eating hot dogs. And I try not to think about them too much when I do.
But now I don’t have to! These are great, great, great! Five bucks for a box of four, but I’ll take that over having to struggle psychologically in order to eat. The dipping in mustard ritual takes on a whole new level when you’re trying to overcome mind over matter. So heck yeah, I’ll happily pay five bucks for worry-free corn dog consuming. (Plus that’s still pretty cheap since it’s just me, and two or three meals’ worth since that’s all I’ll eat… rock!)
Somehow unintentionally I moved into a very ’80s portion of Radio Lynnster since I last posted, probably thanks to Jeffraham (who wants me to be the chick drummer for the Bangles) and Josie (who really is a chick drummer), who is following along at home and requested Adam Ant, though what I am currently playing is Adam & the Ants instead.
A while back, Newscoma mentioned something about having seen Adam Ant in Nashville and I think I failed to comment at the time. If it was Adam Ant with The Romantics opening at the new Opry in 1984, my friends and I were standing on the front row for most of the show, the girls all dressed in camouflage miniskirts with matching skinny ties that, for some unknown reason, we all had had made just for that occasion because we thought it would look cool. Dorks.
It was cold but clear when we walked into the show. When we walked out, snow and ice were everywhere and it took us four or five hours to get home because we had to drive so slow all the way back to West Tennessee.
OK, too much New Wave and neon flashback there - back to cooler stuff again.
