There goes one of my boyhood crushes.
RIP
Simeon Coxe, age 82.
Found this video sometime after I posted about these guys last spring or whenever it was:
I’d never heard of The United States of America before seeing this.
Razzle In My Pocket
This hilarious encounter between a young London ragamuffin and a moralizing shopowner sort of comes off like 1970’s Charles Dickens . Still cracks me up after 40+ years.
More Pretenders
You all know this song, so I’m not sure why I’m posting this, other than it’s always seemed to me to be somewhat underrated. Yeah, it appears on “best of” compilations, and MTV did air this video some, but I don’t remember ever hearing it on the radio. It’s a great song, with brilliant guitar parts throughout, and a badass lead break at the end. Do I wish I’d seen them live? Hell yeah. Sadly, half of this line-up would be dead within a couple of years.
Dansylvania
If you film bats upside down, you get a goth club, of course.
But wait, there’s more!
While we’re revisiting great covers…this one achieves the impossible by being better than the Kinks’ original, in my opinion. I doubt anyone else has ever bested the Kinks. Another Nick Lowe production.
I call the one on the far right.
Shit
Ok, maybe none of you bastards care about this, but you may find it interesting anyway. Leon Fleisher died of cancer two days ago at age 83. By age 30, maybe earlier, he was arguably the best pianist the U.S. has ever produced if you consider overall musicianship as well as technical perfection (he had both, but others have equaled or come close in the latter). As a pupil of Artur Schnabel, he was in a direct student/teacher line to Beethoven.
Unfortunately the 1950’s, when he came of age, was a real pressure cooker for a group of young American pianists who were given the acronym, OYAPS (Outstaning Young American Pianists). This was the height of the cold war, and there was huge pressure on them to be cultural ambassadors. They were expected to be powerful and precise, like Vladimir Horowitz, and to show uppity Europeans and especially Russia, a land of super-human pianists, that the U.S. was artistically on par with anyone (never mind we’d already proved that with jazz and emerging rock & roll, but those were treated as an embarrassent). As a result, Fleisher and the other OYAPS pushed themselves to the point of serious physical injury or emotional distress. By his mid-thirties, Fleisher’s right hand was useless for the piano due to an insane practice and performance schedule. After recovering from serious depression, he had a second career as a conductor, a much idolized teacher and an occasional performer of the limited one-handed repertoire. Miraculously, in the 90’s he underwent experimental botox injections which returned his hand to service. By the early 2000’s he was back in action, maybe not as much of a techincal powerhouse, but as good or maybe better artistically.
I was lucky to see him in a stunning recital in ’09. I also got to meet him briefly and get an autograph. For someone so lionized, he was very approachable and seemed down-to-earth. Resquiescat in pace.
Exhibit B
Makerbot recently posted a Terry Bozzio video. Here is further support for what research has proven time and again: that non-sociopathic drummers use their spare time to acquire too many drums, which they then overplay. In some ways the above video is a more disturbing example. For where Mr. Bozzio employed instruments in a range of pitches (therefore demonstrating some higher-order thinking), this character for some reason has about 50 of the same crash cymbal, and seems intent on hitting them all. A drummer with only basic skills could do the same thing with two. WTF?