Singles Released This Week Years Ago

 

Another week with charted singles, pop and rock songs from various decades for your pleasure

1983: Rolling Stones

1973: Billy Joel

1955: The Platters

1972: Thin Lizzy

1983: Simple Minds

1965: Fontella Bass

1970: Led Zeppelin

1971: T. Rex

1971: Cilla Black

1964: Them

1989: Tears For Fears and Oleta Adams

1989: Finbe Young Cannibals

1968: Dusty Springfield

1972: Carly Simon

1972: Lou Reed

Xmas In February

 

Can't really believe that we have February now and left one month behind this year. Time is running and the day of my retirement will come soon. I searched for a song that contains February in it's title I found a song by Foo Fighters but decided to feature Lou Reed at this place. Xmas in February is from his 1989 classic New York - probably his best album in his late career. This album is full of great songs with great lyrics and one of those which I can listen from start to end.

Lou Reed - X-Mas In February

The Days Of Vine And Roses

 

Back then in 1982 popular music was ruled by electronic sounds and across the Atlantic ocean many bands returned to the guitar sound of the 60's/70's. Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Rain Parade and REM interpreted their musical history in a very new and great way. Another band that played in this league were The Dream Syndicate, formed in the early 80's in Los Angeles and set with their first albums trademarks in American alternative music. Steve Wynn was the mastermind of the band which combined the energy of punk with music inspired by CCR, Crazy Horse and yes, Bob Dylan because Tell Me When It's Over has a lot of fragments of Stuck Inside Of Mobile... Their first album is still one of those that I always come back to and at every time it is a great pleasure for me to listen to their guitar sound and Wynn's voice that is sometimes very close to Lou Reed.

The Dream Syndicate - Tell Me When It's Over

The Dream Syndicate - Definetely Clean

The Dream Syndicate - Halloween

My Mum Was Nico's Driver

 

A few days ago a song by a band I've never heard before came to my ears and never let me go since. HANN is a Manchester based indie-pop band and derived by the singers first name Hannah. I don't know if the story of the song is true but it is clever using name dropping in a good pop song. Of course nothing new and exciting but just another good song for the upcoming summer.

The brilliance of the song's lyrics is that I remembered Nico once again. Born in Germany as Christa Päffgen before the war she became a model and moved to New York where Andy Warhol got aware of her. He also was the one who introduced her to Velvet Underground where she got a member of. Although she couldn't sing her voice fitted together perfectly with the Velvet's sound. In 1967 she released her first solo album Chelsea Girl a little masterpiece by her. With the help of her bandmates Reed and Cale and Jackson Browne she created probably the blueprint of doom and gothic sounds that should became decades later famous. On 18 July 1988 Nico swings on her bike; dressed in black leather trousers and other heavy clothes, her emaciated body collapses in the shade at 40 degrees in Ibiza. The woman, who turned the head of many of the most desirable men of the 60s and also became an icon musically, leaves her life on a roadside in the bright sun of Spain. 

Nico - These Days

WIMP

Three sisters from San Fernando Valley, just behind Hollywood Hills, released and album that could be the soundtrack for this summer for me. Danielle, Estelle and Alana Haim celebrate on Women In Music Part III their own interpretation of today's Californian pop. It is an impressive record showing what they learned in almost 20 years in music. Mostly introverted songs somewhere between dark electro-pop and soft rock. They quote Lou Reed in Summer Girls featuring saxophone and doo-doo-doo or just let their voices speak in good songs.

Monday's Long Song

1974 Lou Reed released Rock 'n' Roll Animal one of the first albums I bought from my own money. It was before I realized that most of the songs originally were by the Velvet Underground. I was fascinated by Lou Reed's voice and the heavy sound of his band. Compared to the originals he destroys the beauty of his greatest songs by turning them into a cliché of heavy metal mutations. After a few albums by Reed which were always over-ambitious and like suits which were a few numbers too big he finally returned again as the old, animal and degenerated Velvet Underground singer as a real Rock 'n' Roll animal, unpredictable and wild.

Lou Reed - Heroin

Miss You

How does a good cover version go? Most cover versions are unnecessary. Are well suited as a B-side or as valuable one for a live concert. One can destroy the original on purpose, filter out only the essence and breathe own interesting mind into the song or try to come close possibly to the origin.

Carla Bruni is known before all things beside Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford or Claudia Schiffer as one of the great model models of the glamorous 90s years and as a wife of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. However, she makes long already also to music, successfully and anything but the worst one. Mostly is the gentle tastefully jazzy folk pop with acoustic guitar, for boutiques, lounges and Philippe Starck designed rooms. From time to time I listen to her songs and I can still enjoy them. I was surprised that she offered a new record filled with cover versions. She covered on French Touch songs by Depeche Mode, The Clash as well as songs by Lou Reed or The Rolling Stones. Miss You is from the RS era when they tried to take the disco-route. Carla Bruni charges the song with gentle grooving and Latin air, lays string player underneath and whispering cryptically. And, nevertheless, just then there a big art lies: to stay close to the original, besides, nevertheless, leave clearly own perfume and draw out of a 1000-fold heard song new puzzling magic.

New York

I'm sure that amongst all of your albums in your collection there are a few that are timeless and you grab them from time to time to listen with joy. Lou Reed's album New York from 1989 is one of them. I put this record on my turntable last week and was surprised that it didn't lost anything of fascination from almost 30 years ago. It was the first record after Blue Mask that was important in his later career. Not only for the music where he's going back to his roots of classic song tradition. He had a band that could play the classic rock and roll as well as songs with just picked guitar licks. More important for me was what Lou Reed had to say. It is a mosaic of what happened in New York these days and what was necessary to be changed. Although he points his finger on what went wrong it is not bearish and  the songs have an optimistic tone. It is amazing, listening to lyrics like these where he named America's torture probably the first time in a song:

They ordained the Trumps and then he got the mumps

And died being treated at Mt. Sinai

And my best friend Bill died from a poison pill

Some wired doctor prescribed for stress

Lou Reed - Romeo Had Juliette

Lou Reed - Halloween Parade

Lou Reed -There Is No Time

Lou Reed - I'm Sick Of You

Lou Reed - Hold On

Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go To The Party

For the start into the weekend, today a song by Courtney Barnett. She's an Australian based musician and released this year her first album Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit. It is one of these new records I grab when I don't know what kind of music I'm in the mood for. I like this record and the songs on it. Barnett, looking like a full member of skater gang plays songs that sound like a perfect mixture of grunge and folk. Sometimes her attitude reminds me to Patti Smith and the way she sings to Lou Reed but always in her very own style. Bluesy, surf-style bad-guitar folk.

New York

Lou Reed's output in the late 80s was fantastic. He made with Blue Mask a guitar-based record with a few great songs on it. And in 1989 he released his last masterpiece with New York. It's a bundle of great songs with lyrics you should listen to (if you didn't at least). It's his homage to the town he used to life and he loved - knowing the bad side of it. I remember when I drove home later at the evening from a business meeting and Alan Bangs (the very small version of John Peel in Germany) introduced this record. While driving I fell in love with this record and the day after I bought this record - and it was a very good decision. It's a record filled with recollections of his home town. Never heard a homage to his home town like tis before and after. The songs on this record are so full of power and political statements - and they are still actual. This record and the songs on it accompanied me for 25 years. And what can I say more to a record?

Lou Reed - Endless Cycle
Lou Reed - Hold On

Lou Reed 1942 - 2013

In the news I heard that Lou Reed died today. A half year ago he had a liver transplantation and I suppose that he didn't get well since them. I don't think that it is necessary to tell you about him, his life and work. For me he was a person that accompanied me for decades. I loved to hear his distinctive deadpan voice and the development of the so called Ostrich guitar. One more great artist left us forever.

R.I.P. Lou

Lou Reed - Temporary Thing

Cologne's local hero

Way back in the late 70s a lot of German musicians tried also to go other ways than playing mainstream, progress rock or jazz thing. Influenced by British and American punk and New Wave some of them have managed to combine these influences with their understanding of music. Some of them got well know in Germany riding the wave on the so called New German Wave others will be remembered by some insiders and never got more than local heroes.

One of them is Jürgen Zeltinger (called 'de plaat' what meas 'the bald'). He formed a band with Jaki Liebezeit (former drummer by CAN) and Arno Steffen (guitar, often hired for studio recordings or as a tour guitarist) to play some classic rock and also some standards. They played their first gig round carnival 1979 in a small club where they taped this concert for their first record. A guy in my local record store recommended me this record an I was astonished of this guys. I recognized, that they had really fun playing this concert. Probably the most unusual was that they started singing a classical German folk song that turned at the end into a punk version. 

Then they played 'Müngersdorfer Stadion' - the German version of the Ramones Rockaway Beach, sung in typical Cologne dialect so the rest of the nation had problems to understand. At least they covered Lou Reed and his 'Walk on the wild side' - also translated into their dialect. While Lou Reed has taken on transsexuality a a them, Zeltinger sings about an old prostitute who waits in vain for the whole evening to a suitor. Saw him live a couple of years later and had real fun on his show.

Zeltinger Band - Müngersdorfer Stadion

Zeltinger Band - Stüverhoff

Zeltinger Band - Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann

Halloween Parade

It might be the best song about losing your friends on AIDS. I remembered this while I watched a documentary about HIV infection from the start a long time ago and the nowadays possibilities to heal or at least to alleviate the effects of the disease. It's from Lou Reed's 1989 album New York, where he has written down his anger about his hometown and the land of the free.

There's a down town fairy singing out "Proud Mary"
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some Southern Queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the Badlands meet

This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you

There's a Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock
And some black Jamaican stud
There's five Cinderellas and some leather drags
I almost fell into my mug

There's a Crawford, Davis and a tacky Cary Grant
And some Homeboys lookin' for trouble down here from the Bronx

But there ain't no Hairy and no Virgin Mary
You won't hear those voices again
And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita
You'll never see those faces again

This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you

There's the Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers
And some crack team from Washington Heights
The boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D
A Tinkerbell in tights

This celebration somehow gets me down
Especially when I see you're not around

There's no Peter Pedantic saying things romantic
In Latin, Greek or Spic
There's no Three bananas or Brandy Alexander
dishing all their tricks

It's a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you've gone away

There's a girl from Soho with a teeshirt saying "I Blow"
She's with the "jive five 2 plus 3"
And the girls for pay dates are giving cut rates
Or else doing it for free

The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door
And I don't want to hear it anymore

No consolations please for feelin' funky
I got to get my head above my knees
But it makes me mad and mad makes me sad
And then I start to freeze

In the back of my mind I was afraid it might be true
In the back of my mind I was afraid that they meant you

The Halloween Parade
At the Halloween parade
At the Halloween parade
See you next year, at the Halloween parade

Lou Reed - Halloween Parade