New single from Everything Hits At Once: The Best of Spoon, coming July 26th.
Check it, yo.
Shit
Miss Violet Beauregarde, gone too soon.
Okay, Denise Nickerson.
Replacements At A Turning Point
Here’s a great 32-year-old article from SPIN’s archives, from around the time that I was getting into them. (Yes, I was late to the party and had to work my way back through the Twin/Tone albums.) The band had just parted ways with manager Pete Jesperson, fired lead guitarist Bob Stinson, and released one of their best albums, Pleased To Meet Me. Recorded right here in Memphis!
“When we started,” [Westerberg] says, pausing to sip from a midmorning Schmidt, “we definitely had a fear of success. We had a fear of everything. We were all very paranoid, and I think that goes hand in hand with the excessive drinking thing. We’d get drunk because we were basically scared shitless, and that snowballed into image. Now we’re a little more assured of what we’re doing. We’re not positive which way we’re going, but we think we know what mistakes lie ahead, and we’re trying to sidestep ‘em.”
Full article here.
Shit
LOVED him in The Larry Sanders Show.
Cheap Trick, Rock ‘n’ Roll Juggernaut
https://youtu.be/FQDc9loiFuk
Prime Cheap Trick, one of my great obsessions.
Winnipeg Gets It
As reported by The AV Club …
In most cities around the world, Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock opera-ish The Phantom Of The Paradise is a cult classic, appreciated mostly by self-proclaimed cinephiles with a taste for over-the-top strangeness. (As our own Ignatiy Vishnevetsky describes it in a piece recommending the film: “[Phantom Of The Paradise] represented the pinnacle of Brian De Palma’s undisciplined early excess: a smorgasbord of camp, Grand Guignol, and bird imagery that thumbed its metal beak at commercial considerations.”) In Winnipeg, Manitoba, however, it was a box-office sensation, and is still a pop-cultural touchstone on par with Star Wars.
This documentary premieres on July 12, and you can bet your bastard ass I’ll be seeing it as soon as possible.
Full article here.
Another Fucking Watch
This time I fell for the Vostok Amphibia, a ridiculously affordable Russian diver. Watch the video for a little history – it’s fascinating stuff. There seem to be hundreds of styles to choose from on this site. Here’s mine.
Oh! For you trivia-obsessed bastards, this is the watch that Steve Zissou’s crew wore in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, only it was this dial …
The Last One With Connery
Enjoy this making-of documentary for Diamonds Are Forever.
Informative!
Shit
Vulture remembers.
It Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This
Wiki-Wiki-Wikipedia provides a little history and significance.
“Teenage Kicks” was the debut single for Northern Irish punk rock/new wave band The Undertones. Written in the summer of 1977 by the band’s principal songwriter, John O’Neill, the song was recorded on 15 June 1978 and initially released that September upon independent Belfast record label Good Vibrations, before the band—at the time unobligated to any record label—signed to Sire Records on 2 October 1978. Sire Records subsequently obtained all copyrights to the material released upon the Teenage Kicks EP and the song was re-released as a standard vinyl single upon Sire’s own label on 14 October that year, reaching number 31 in the UK Singles Chart two weeks after its release.
Upon first hearing “Teenage Kicks” in September 1978, BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel is reported to have burst into tears, and readily admitted to still being reduced to tears upon hearing the song in interviews granted to journalists up until his death. To judge songs he had heard for the first time as to worthiness of airplay upon his show, Peel often rated new bands’ songs with a series of asterisks, with each song judged upon a scale of one to five asterisks: Peel was so taken by “Teenage Kicks”, he awarded the song 28 stars. On one occasion, he is known to have played the song twice in a row, with the explanation given to his audience being, “It doesn’t get much better than this.”
In a 2001 interview given to The Guardian, Peel stated that apart from his name, the only words he wished to be engraved upon his gravestone were the opening lyrics to “Teenage Kicks”: “Teenage dreams so hard to beat.”
In February 2008, a headstone engraved with these words was placed on his grave in the Suffolk village of Great Finborough.
