Shit
Ennio Morricone, age 91. One new fact I learned in an obit is that Stanley Kubrick had approached him to compose music for A Clockwork Orange. EM wanted to work with him but had a prior commitment to Sergio Leone.
This Is A Great Idea
Built to Spill plays Daniel Johnston. Available where you get music stuff.
Paul Collins Was In The Nerves
It’s true.
The Nerves lasted a short time and self-released one self-titled four-song EP in 1976, featuring the songs “Hanging on the Telephone” (Lee), “When You Find Out” (Case), “Give Me Some Time” (Lee), and “Working Too Hard” (Collins). In addition to being the drummer, Paul Collins was also the trio’s manager and did most of the bookings and promotion. The Nerves’ EP was distributed by independent Bomp! Records and officially re-released on CD and vinyl by Alive Records in 2008, followed by a second release of The Breakaways, an album of post-Nerves recordings made by Collins and Case prior to the formation of Collins’ group The Beat.
Despite their limited lifespan and discography, The Nerves remain notable for many reasons. They were the founding vanguard of the Los Angeles punk and pop scenes that eventually produced The Knack, The Beat and The Plimsouls. After The Nerves’ break-up, Case and Collins formed The Breakaways with Pat Stengl, a group that would have an even shorter lifespan than The Nerves. Thereafter, however, Case and Collins went on to front more notable groups, The Plimsouls (who had a Billboard Top 100 hit with “A Million Miles Away”) and The Beat, respectively. But perhaps the most notable legacy of the group is the song “Hanging on the Telephone”: Blondie later covered the song on their album Parallel Lines and turned it into a UK top 5 hit, and thanks to Blondie’s success, the song has become something of a standard, later re-done by groups as diverse as L7, Def Leppard, Cat Power (whose version was featured in Cingular commercials in 2006), and Hep Alien, Lane Kim’s fictional band on dramedy The Gilmore Girls. While it is likely some of these artists are unaware of the original Nerves version, others were also from Los Angeles and what was, at the time, its small underground music scene and would be able to reference the original. Blondie included a second Lee composition on Parallel Lines, “Will Anything Happen?” Lee also went on to write a hit for Paul Young, “Come Back and Stay”.
“Hanging on the Telephone” and “When You Find Out” were later released on a 1993 Rhino Records power-pop compilation, DIY: Come Out and Play – American Power Pop I (1975-1978), which Allmusic gave a five star review. The Nerves also appeared on the album’s cover. More recently, Rhino included an unreleased Nerves track, Case’s “One-Way Ticket”, on the 2005 compilation Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1995,[3] a sequel to their Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 compilations.
In 2008, Alive Records released One Way Ticket, a CD compilation of the remastered tracks of the Nerves’ original EP, along with demos and other previously unreleased material. Following the success of The Nerves’ CD reissue, Alive Records released The Breakaways, an album of post-Nerves recordings featuring Collins and Case prior to the formation of The Beat.
In 2011, the American rock band Green Day launched the American Idiot Broadway Musical Production. On any night that an original cast member left the show, they included a live rendition of the song “Walking Out On Love,” which was written by Paul Collins. The song was previously recorded by The Nerves, The Breakaways and The Beat. At the end of the musical’s run, The Paul Collins Beat joined Green Day on-stage for live performances in New York.
Shipping In Late July
In a just world, this guy should have been huge. I’ll be pre-ordering this shortly, the package which includes a 45 of the demo versions of “There She Goes” and “Walking Out On Love.”
After two long years of painstaking research and development, we present to you, the first major memoir covering the birth of DIY Power Pop, from Paul Collins. From it’s initial conception as a film script to it’s re-birth as a full-bore rock & roll revelation, this is one crazy story from beginning to end. Outlining the first National DIY cross-country tour by an unsigned band in 1977, and by default, creating the pathway for the true indie underground network of the 80s to take as a template. It wasn’t even a second thought for Collins and bandmates Peter Case and Jack Lee, but the underground rock & roll world is a better place for it. But until now, the real details of the origins of The Nerves, Breakaways, and The BEAT have eluded most of us, so with this tome of incredible survival stories from the trenches, Paul Collins opens up and reveals all the drama, victories and defeats with such an impassioned voice, you won’t be able to put it down. The coverage of the pre-Punk 1975 landscape of both LA and San Francisco is unmatched, and your mind will be BLOWN.
Featuring TONS of previously unseen photos, flyers and ephemera from the earliest days of The Nerves lineup as a FOUR PIECE, to the legal documents challenging The Paul Collins BEAT vs The English Beat, to the ill-fated Nerves reunion, and so much in between. Truly a smorgasbord of juicy details and revelatory discoveries await, balancing the failures with triumphs from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s, when Paul returned to the touring circuit. From literally renting out a space for the first documented Punk show in Los Angeles in March of 1977, to The Screamers story about buying a copy of The Nerves EP at the Capitol Records swap meet and smashing it to pieces- it’s all in there, along with so many more soon-to-be-legendary tales from the real trenches you don’t usually rise out from unscathed….
And here he is more recently. Fuck yeah!