The Billboard US top five from 1949:
Vaughn Monroe Orchestra - Ghost Riders In The Sky
Frankie Laine - That Lucky Old Sun
Vic Damone - You're Breaking My Heart
Perry Como - Some Enchanted Evening
Jimmy Wakely / Margaret Whiting - Slipping Around
Wow. This sounds like a whole different world, for me. The crooning! The schmaltz! The giant orchestras! Yikes!
I know "Ghost Riders..." and "Some Enchanted Evening". I think I've heard a different version of "Slipping Around", somewhere.
Let's watch Yo La Tengo do a song about actors:
And let's watch them do a Cat Stevens song:
And let's watch them do my second-favorite YLT song:
Woah. Didn't see that coming.
Once upon a time, in the magical era of 1975, there was a band called "Death", in a city called "Detroit". And Death was a punk band.
Now obviously, Death didn't look like what many people today think punk rockers looked like; anybody too young to have experienced it as it happened has been taught, by 20 years of 42-minute retrospectives on VH1 which endlessly recycle footage of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, that punk was the music of angry, fashion-minded, white kids from New York and London. But that's certainly not the whole story. And Death certainly played the music that we now call punk. Take a listen:
Punk, right?
Drag City has just released a CD of Death's 7-song album ...For The Whole World To See. I grabbed a copy out of curiosity, and sadly, it didn't grab me back - frankly, it's just not fantastic stuff. But it is interesting. You can hear bits of Hendrixy-psychedelic guitar, a touch of funk maybe here and there, and lots of that rough, loud proto-punk of the MC5 in the songs. And it's all rough and unpolished and DIY, and it was played by three guys who couldn't look any less the stereotype. Which is pretty cool all by itself.