Pop!

I first heard about these guys when Tommy Stinson was on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast a few years ago.

He RAVED, and rightly so. Not sure what they’ve been up to lately.

How Bruce Thomas Came Up With That Glorious Bass Riff

As Thomas tells The Peverett Phile blargh …

The riff wasn’t totally spontaneous, it was sort of contrived [from riffs] I’d been listening to at the time. It’s kind of weird. If you listen to “The Price of Love” by the Everly Brothers, you’ll get the rhythmic pattern.

And if you listen to “You Gotta Lose” by Richard Hell & The Voidoids, you put those notes to the riff you get “Pump It Up.” It’s a hybrid riff.

Then I was left with a half a bar so I added “You Really Got Me,” which was one of the best songs ever written. So, that was it.

I love this shit. Everybody rips off somebody – some are just more creative about it than others.

Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story Of One Band And The Whole World

Thanks to Fat Elvis for bringing this to my attention. So far, so good.

NPR Best Book of 2017

Winner of the 2017 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism

“This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable

Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them.

Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up?

I Want You … To Want ME

Great song from a juggernaut of a band.

“I Want You to Want Me” is a song by the American rock band Cheap Trick from their second album In Color, released in September 1977. It was the first single released from that album, but it did not chart in the United States.

“I Want You to Want Me” was a number-one single in Japan. Its success in Japan, as well as the success of its preceding single “Clock Strikes Ten” paved the way for Cheap Trick’s concerts at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in April 1978 that were recorded for the group’s most popular album, Cheap Trick at Budokan. A live version of “I Want You to Want Me” from the album Cheap Trick at Budokan was released in 1979 and became their biggest selling single, reaching #7 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, representing sales of one million records. In Canada, it reached #2 in on the RPM national singles chart, remaining there for two weeks and was certified Gold for the sale of 5,000 singles in September 1979. It was also the band’s highest charting single in Britain, where it reached #29.