Talk shows have featured musical acts forever. For decades, presenters would present performers performing their new record.
But things have changed. Four things. The ABCD of talk show/pop music disruption.
Like a version
A good cover version can be a bouncy walk across a bowed wooden plank joining one musical island to another.
Biopic
There’s an elephant in the room.
And dwarfs with silver salvers of cocaine on their heads.
And a bored-looking singer with giddy boys and/or girls on each arm.
Because this is a rock and roll biopic, and it’s the rock and roll party scene.
And now for the weather
Number four in our common themes in song. Here is the weather.
Songfacts compiled a list of 350 songs about weather. If we cluster the songs around patterns of weather, the outlook is a bit grim.
Cars
The five most popular subjects in popular song are: 1. Love. 2. Unrequited love. 3. Cars. 4. The weather. 5. Patti Boyd.
Today we look at cars. Cars in song belong in a taxonomy from the very broad to the very specific.
Church
It’s the mid-70s and a small town in Texas has not seen rain for months. Crops are burning, earth is turning to dust.
In the small whitewashed church in the center of town, a congregation gathers and prays fervently for rain.
Overnight, the clouds gather and the rain comes. And it rains. And rains.
Weight Watchers
The Band had an embarrassment of Richards. Richard Manuel and Rick Danko were sublime singers. Throw in Levon Helm and you push the great Robbie Robertson down among the worst singers in the five-man group. Like Cristiano Ronaldo turning up for 5-a-side practice to find Pele, Maradona and Messi already warming up.
Takeoff
The problem with an enduring legacy is that you won’t be there to curate your immortality and you never know where your name will go.
Gap Year
As a Mormon, Jon Lamoreaux, a 6 foot 8 music nut and host of The Hustle podcast, served his mission in the early nineties. Two years without secular music, with his fingers in his ears and his nose pressed up against the window of the popular music candy store.
Chas and Dave and Eminem
One of the telegrams at my friend Denis’ wedding was from Charles Hodges and David Peacock. It was hastily written on a scrap of packaging from a new shirt, the only available piece of paper when best man James bumped into them in a London pub.
They were Chas and Dave, the creators of “Rockney”, a uniquely East End of London sound that made them stars in the 1980s.
Chas passed away this week and this contribution came out.
Continue reading “Chas and Dave and Eminem”