Review: '501 Essential Albums of the '80s'

Late last year we got a swollen tome determined to canonize 501 albums from the 1990s. Alas, such a project was doomed to frustrate because by the 1990s pop music had wandered off into such disparate directions that simply enjoying nineties music in general signals a lack of personal taste instead of broadmindedness. In other words, anyone who'd go straight for the entry on Exile in Guyville could only suppress their barf reflex when seeing that Baby One More Time followed several pages later. In other other words, in attempting to please everyone the book seemed aimed at no one.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Elvis Costello's 'King of America'

By the mid-eighties, there was trouble in the Attractions, although Elvis Costello wasn't quite ready to lop "and the Attractions" from his album covers just yet. So he put out King of America, which could rightfully be deemed his first solo album since My Aim Is True, as The Costello Show, even though the Attractions do back him on "Suit of Lights". Elsewhere his support is the American studio-group he unfortunately christened the Confederates.

Review: '501 Essential Albums of the 90s: The Music Fan's Definitive Guide'

 

"This is a book that's designed to start arguments." That's the way editor Gary Graff begins 501 Essential Albums of the 90s: The Music Fan's Definitive Guide, and really, it's the only way it could begin. Graff knows as well as anyone who has yet to even crack the cover of a book of this sort that there are going to be painful omissions and a fair share of painful inclusions. Even though I've written a book along these lines and know the pitfalls of doing such a thing all too well, I still allowed my teeth to grind at the absence of anything by Grant Lee Buffalo, Suzanne Vega, Throwing Muses, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, Shudder to Think, and quite a few other artists that I feel any guide that calls itself "definitive" can't do without. I also gagged at the inclusions of objectively crappy artifacts from the likes of Brian Adams, Meatloaf, Sponge, Bush, Britney Spears, Korn, and...well...I can really go on and on and on on that account.

Review: 'The Wild World of Barney Bubbles'

Along with a scant handful of designers like Roger Dean and Hipgnosis, Barney Bubbles is that rare creator of LP jackets who is something of a household name among serious rock geeks. This is ironic considering that the man born Colin Fulcher was determined to protect his anonymity by working under a series of pseudonyms. Barney Bubbles, a name he devised as the operator of a light show at London's famed UFO club in the sixties, is just the most well known. He also worked as, among others, "Eric Stodge," "Jacuzzi Stallion," "Heeps Willard," and (a-hem) "Big Jobs, LTD." But the mark of any truly memorable designer is a memorable style, and under any name, a Barney Bubbles cover is instantly recognizable. His bold use of color, simple shapes in clever compositions, funny photos, and irresistible modernism informs his most iconic work for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury, Carlene Carter, and The Damned. Honestly, the colorfully chaotic sleeve he designed for Music for Pleasure is the main reason to own that record, which is not one of The Damned's best. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Joe Jackson's 'Body and Soul'

Joe Jackson started his career as a high-quality Elvis Costello clone, and like his fellow punk-adjacent, angry somewhat-young man, Jackson seemed to tire of rock and roll quickly to suffer a bit of an identity crisis. But while Costello was dithering with flaccid country covers that didn't suit his fiery style and ill-conceived gestures toward mainstream contemporary pop (complete with guest appearances by contemporary pop-superstar Darryl Hall), Jackson went in a much more interesting direction, rejecting any semblance of relevance to set off on the path that classical pop and jazz composers laid down fifty years earlier. Costello did experiment with this style a bit with compositions such as "Almost Blue" and "Shipbuilding", but he didn't commit to it the way Jackson did on his smash 1982 album, Night and Day, which yielded two elegant, adult pop hits: "Steppin' Out" (which went top-five in the U.S.) and "Breaking Us in Two".

Review: ''Sukita: Eternity"

The covers of albums such as Wish You Were Here and Nevermind are regarded as art because of their provocative and unusual compositions. However, with a photographer as focused as Masayoshi Sukita behind the camera, the simplest shot can become iconic. Take his work on the sleeve of David Bowie’s “Heroes”, which features nothing more than the artist chest up against a featureless backdrop. Yet the striking clarity of Sukita’s black and white and Bowie’s unnatural pose are as powerful and unforgettable as any flaming businessman or money-grubbing water baby.

Eternity presents the breadth of Sukita’s work in a halting package. Though they haven’t crossed into the culture the way his photos on the covers of “Heroes” and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot have, Sukita’s portraits of Marc Bolan (who, like Bowie and Pop, is the subject of an entire chapter), Klaus Nomi, Bryan Ferry, David Byrne, The B-52’s, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, Joe Strummer, and Elvis Costello punching himself in the face are also potent. Sukita may be at his most arresting when working with Yellow Magic Orchestra, who were up for having their faces painted or plastered with newsprint or propelled through the air amidst a flurry of cassette tapes. Such photos deliver all the striking character of Sukita’s work with Bowie and Iggy and the conceptual ingenuity of those Pink Floyd and Nirvana covers. 

Review: 'Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson’s Lost Photograph'

In 2005, guitar salesman Zeke Schein found an original photograph depicting a man he was convinced was Robert Johnson on ebay. He won the auction after bidding $3,100 (the actual sale price was $2,176.56), passed the photo around to various bluesmen and a forensics expert, and not only amassed evidence that his picture is most likely the real deal (though it remains officially unverified), but identified the photographer and the second man in the photo: Johnson’s traveling companion and collaborator, Johnny Shines. The discovery of the photo was significant because there had previously only been two known photos of the man who was arguably the key figure in blues—more because he wrote timeless songs and developed a complex guitar technique than because of any cheesy Faustian bargain myth.

Review: 'Punk Post Punk New Wave'

From the late seventies through the eighties, Michael Grecco photographed nearly every artist that mattered: The Clash, The Ramones, Talking Heads, The B-52s, Devo, Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Dead Kennedys, Lene Lovich, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joe Jackson, Buzzcocks, Nick Lowe, Madness, Adam Ant, and on and on. A new collection of his work, Punk Post Punk New Wave, is as much a testament to Grecco’s great taste in music as it is a display of his talent behind the lens.

Review: 'On Record 1978: Images, Interviews & Insights from the Year in Music'

Four decades ago, budding rock journalist G. Brown went to work for The Denver Post. Writing for a major daily paper, he got access to an incredible assortment of talent—everyone from The Who to Peter Tosh to Blondie to Black Sabbath to Talking Heads to The Clash to Parliament. Since he was working for The Denver Post and not, say, Punk or even Rolling Stone, Brown’s assignments also included pieces on Barry Manilow, Anne Murray, Chicago, Chuck Mangione, and the like, and his interview questions were apparently of the “So, can you tell me about your new album?” variety.

G. Brown’s new book On Record 1978: Images, Interviews & Insights from the Year in Music is kind of odd. It consists of utterly neutral, 300-word write ups on 200 of the artists he covered in 1978 peppered with quotations from period interviews and illustrated with a welter of B&W press photos. Consequently, On Record 1978 reads like a compilation of press releases. However, as you move from The Cars to Wings to ELO to Rod Stewart to the Bee Gees to Chaka Khan to Linda Ronstadt to ABBA and so on, the books morphs into a fairly pleasing nostalgia balm that basically manages to capture the spirit of 1978 in a shallow nut shell.  

And Now for No Other Reason Than They're Awesome, Here Are Psychobabble's 50 Favorite Album Covers of the Seventies!

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Joe Jackson's First Two Albums

Joe Jackson started his career as a blatant Elvis Costello clone, doing everything but copping Declan’s trademark specs when cooking up cynical, punky power poppers like “Happy Loving Couples” and “Fools in Love” and aggro-Anglo reggae like “Sunday Papers”. So what? Elvis is great and Look Sharp! and I’m the Man are too, and along with Armed Forces, they helped make 1979 a year of riches for nerdy, jilted angry young(ish) men.

Look Sharp! is the favorite Jackson LP, and it is indeed a fierce set with such signature bitter pills as “Is She Really Going out with Him?”, “Sunday Papers”, “One More Time”,  and the title track. I’m the Man is not as cluttered with hits, but for my money, it’s the better album because it’s where Jackson starts finding his own voice with an absence of songs that could spark copyright suits and because phenomenal bassist Graham Maby is so front-and-center. The title track is a hilarious and ferocious crap-culture critique, “Geraldine and John” is Jackson’s most underrated reggae splash, “The Band Wore Blue Shirts” and “Amateur Hour” are masterfully executed mood pieces, and “It’s Different for Girls” is his most incisive piece of sexual politicking, taking the atypical-for-1979 position that some women actually just want to get laid without all the romantic goo men demand.

Last year Intervention Records reissued Joe Jackson’s first two records on vinyl (as well as his fifth, Night and Day, which I did not receive for review purposes). Using a completely analog process, Kevin Gray mastered each album from safety copies of the original master tapes. Played against my original copy of I’m the Man, I can guarantee that it sounds totally authentic and particularly forceful in the low end and whenever Dave Houghton gives his snare drum what for. I didn’t already have Look Sharp! on vinyl, so I could not make a similar comparison, but I can confirm that it sounds warm and wonderful on Intervention’s new vinyl nevertheless.

Since Intervention uses heavyweight plastic inner sleeves for all their releases, I’m the Man has been upgraded to a gatefold with the lyrics and photos (can’t live without that shot of Maby in his mesh tanktop) printed inside the gatefold. Look Sharp! comes in a the same kind of slightly textured sleeve as its first UK pressing. These are vinyl reissues made with love… and not a trace of the delicious cynicism found within their grooves.

Review: 'Elvis Costello: Detour Live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall'

Elvis Costello is just too good of an all-around writer for his autobiography of last year, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, to be anything less than a good read, but it tends to get long-winded and skirt his most significant contribution: that incredible catalogue of songs.  Costello’s “Detour” performance series was more like the ideal presentation of Unfaithful Music. Like his book, the chronology of his storytelling is scattered and the ghost of his father looms over it all. Unlike that book, there was also a wealth of wonderful audio and judicious use of video to make those tales breathe.

As a new concert film expertly directed by Joss Crowley (who varies the angles and composition to prevent the image from becoming static) reveals, Costello and his crew put a lot of thought into the presentation of “Detour”. Although he did a good deal of the show solo, it never becomes samey because of how he mixes up his guitar sounds, how he takes occasional detours to the piano, and how he makes full use of his elaborate stage set up (which initially seems as though it could be a mere yet massive distraction). And just when our narrator seems as though he might be getting lonesome, he invites Rebecca and Megan Lovell of the duo Larkin Poe on stage for friendly support. Megan’s ceaselessly inventive stand-up lap steel work draws all the colors from Costello’s vivid songs.

And those songs! We get such a wonderful career-spanning selection that ranges from still-welcome warhorses such as “Red Shoes”, “Watching the Detectives” (in which he makes brilliant use of looping effects), “Alison” (grunged up with gnarly guitar), and “Watch Your Step” (a showstopper of whisper-to-scream dynamics) to several delightful obscurities (“Ghost Train”! “Blame It on Cain”! “Pads, Paws, and Claws”!). When he goes a cappella to astoundingly dramatic effect on “Jimmy Standing in the Rain”, it is clear that we are sitting in the lap of a master showman. When the screen suddenly swings to the past for a snatch of Ross McManus’s crazed performance of “If I Had a Hammer”, it’s clear that master showmanship is in Elvis’s genes.

Eagle Vision supplements its gorgeous new blu-ray release of Detour Live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall with four bonus tracks shot with (“Love Field”, “Brilliant Mistake”) and without (“Either Side of the Same Town”, “Ascension Day”) Larkin Poe.

Review: Elvis Costello's 'Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album'

Creating a soundtrack for a book is a pretty new concept, but its level of interactivity is downright old-fashioned, reminiscent of the days when you had to get off your ass to flip a record (I know, I know, those days are making a comeback of sorts) instead of just allowing Spotify to run on and on. Elvis Costello has always been an artist who demands full attention, so it’s appropriate that his highly anticipated, upcoming autobiography coincides with the release of Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album, a two disc, 38-track selection of songs personally picked by our budding writer to be played while reading choice passages of his book.

The fun game to play when hearing these songs without the book is figuring out where they fit into his story. The live, piano-and-voice version of “Accidents Will Happen” that opens the set must soundtrack Elvis’s witty, self-deprecating introductory statement. “Riot Act” might play over his account of his infamous drunken slur against Ray Charles. How about “I Want You” synching up with his romance with Cait O’Riordan or “Suit of Lights” underlining some significant moment with his dad or a Buddy Holly-esque demo of “Veronica” marking the moment he lost his grandma to Alzheimer’s… or maybe his momentous collaboration with Paul McCartney? 

Knowing the purpose of this compilation really underlines how often Elvis Costello has used his music to tell his own story, even as songs like “Shipbuilding” are more like editorials on current events. However, there are few of those kinds of things on here, and considering that “Ascension Day” sits dead center in the running, I’m guessing it is not intended to coincide with Hurricane Katrina. I’m also guessing that the early demo “I Can’t Turn It Off” is tacked to the end of the music for no other reason than to give fans something we’ve never heard before. Pretty good song, though. However, the previously unreleased collaboration with Kris Kristofferson and Rosanne Cash is the kind of adult contemporary dullness that Elvis has generally avoided at this late stage in his career.

Simply taken as a compilation of classic Costello, Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album is very cool, offering several “hits” (though not always in their most familiar versions) to draw in the novices  and a slew of deep cuts ripe for discovery outside the contexts and confines of their original LPs. Lesser tracks such as “I’m in the Mood Again” and “My Three Songs” take on deeper resonance and stand out better in this context too.

What really ties this CD to the book is “Sketches from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink”, a snippet of the man reading bits about McCartney, Lou Adler, and playing the Royal Albert Hall from his book. These readings will likely drive a lot of people to buy the audio book. Elvis’s reading voice is as expressive and masterfully calculated as his singing one!

1,100th Post: Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s!

Like, gag me with a spoonful of Mr. T cereal, my tubular valley Smurf! I’ve totally posted, like, 100 posts here on Psychobabble since my 1000^th post when I ran down my personal favorite 100 songs of the seventies. That means it’s, like, time to do the same for my 100 faves of the eighties! It’s gonna be non-stop Leon Neon references, Pee Wee Herman quotes, and close ups of Madonna’s navel as I bag your face through a massive mass of mint tunes! Where’s the beef? Probably somewhere in my 1,100^th post, Poindexter! So take a chill pill and bang your head to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s! Totally!

100. “Nasty” by The Damned

“Oh, you’ve got a video?” Only a total nerd would have answered this question in the negative in the eighties. There was nothing more awesome than going to the video store to rent some shitty movie from the horror section, but if you were English, that awesomeness hit a serious snag when professional prig Mary Whitehouse spearheaded the prosecution of 39 “video nasties,” including Flesh for Frankenstein, Driller Killer, and Cannibal Holocaust. As always, it was Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian, and the aptly named Captain Sensible who called for a little rationality amidst the witchhunt. They did so with three minutes of high-speed punk professing their romance with video nasties. That they recorded the track specifically for one of the best episodes of “The Young Ones” makes “Nasty” all the awesomer.

99. “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” by The Police

One of the neat surprises of Ghosts in the Machine is how proficient Sting is with a horn in his mouth. Throughout the record, he fattens out the core Police sound with overdubbed saxophone arrangements. The chart on “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” is particularly simple, but those two note blasts say more than a million over-bloated eighties saxophone solos. The songs message—mostly delivered in French—is equally fat-free: “No matter what I do, I’m still hungry for you.” That there is real lust.

98. “Automatic” by Prince and the Revolution

“Automatic” pretends to be a message of love, but I have a feeling it has something more akin to “Hungry for You” on its dirty mind. Like that Police song, “Automatic” derives its power from a mesmerizing beat, but it also builds a tangible world: the seventh circle of sex hell. Prince’s vision is kind of disturbing because of the explicit threats (“I’m going 2 have 2 torture U now”) and the robotic quality of it all (“A-u-t-o-matic”). Sexy, disturbing, futuristic, uncompromising. Prince in a nutshell.

97. “Kiss Off” by The Violent Femmes

Review: 'Elvis Is King: Costello’s My Aim Is True'

In my recent review of Pop Classics’ installment on “Twin Peaks”, I mentioned that the new series is yet another in the vein of mini-book lines like Continuum’s 33 1/3. With just the fourth Pop Classics entry, rock journalist Richard Crouse gets even deeper into 33 1/3’s action by devoting his book to a single album. He also shows that increasingly self-indulgent and unsatisfying long-running line how to do it. There’s no pretentious navel-gazing or “how do I fill 100 pages?” tangents in Elvis Is King: Costello’s My Aim Is True. Like that no-bullshit debut album released at the end of a decade infamous for its poses and pomposity, Crouse’s book says what’s necessary in fast, furious fashion, covering Costello’s musical upbringing, his debut’s recording, its marketing, its songs, and subsequent stage and TV support appearances. Never does he lapse into obnoxious and very un-Rock & Roll pseudo-academic blather. Basically, he does what we always want 33 1/3’s writers to do. This isn’t a perfect book— Crouse’s disdain for all Rock & Roll made before 1976 gets tiresome quickly, he relies a bit too much on quoting a limited number of sources (particularly Elvis’s own liner notes to the 2001 reissue of My Aim Is True), and like Andy Burns’s Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks, his very short book suffers a bit from bad timing, since it comes so close on the heels of Richard Balls’ thorough Stiff Records Story—but as a pocket making-of/history/analysis of one of the great freshman records, Elvis Is King satisfies. When was the last time you could say that about a 33 1/3 book?

Review: 'Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story'

The pop landscape had changed radically in the ten years leading up to 1976. With albums such as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s, The Beatles had officially done away with the single as pop’s primary medium, ushering in an era of often overly-serious long players, possibly elevating pop to high-art, possibly helping to erase some of its intrinsic fun. We all know what happened in the seventies with the rise of progressive rock, that favorite bugaboo of rock and roll purists. While I believe the ill effects and, well, crappiness of prog have been highly exaggerated (and I’ll admit, it has often been exaggerated by me here on Psychobabble for no other reason than making fun of prog— quite a bit of which I really dig— is fun), I also believe pop really did need a high colonic around ’76.

It got that with two major events: the arrival of calculatedly “dumb” punk rock and an even more calculating new record label that consciously established itself as everything mainstream rock no longer was. Founded by brilliant iconoclasts/wise asses Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera, Stiff Records took a great, big whiz on the seriousness and ponderousness of current rock by returning the focus to singles with humor that might have made Rick Wakeman hide under his spangled cape. This was the label that had the great bolshie yarblockos to adopt “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King!” as a slogan promoting Elvis Costello mere days after Presley bit the dust. Less controversially they issued an LP called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, which naturally contained forty minutes of total silence. Robinson and Riviera were also reverent record lovers who understood that their fellow geeks would drool over limited edition, colored vinyl, ingeniously designed (most notably by legendary house artist Barney Bubbles) packages. Every indie label worth its salt followed suit.

Robinson and Riviera knew well the benefits of publicity bad and good, but they also knew that artists who don’t don superhero costumes and play half-hour Hammond organ solos need nurturing and exposure too. Thus, Stiff became home to some of the best and truest artists of late-seventies/early eighties pop— Costello, Nick Lowe, The Damned, Madness, Lene Lovich, The Adverts, Devo, etc.—if only before they passed on to bigger labels.

Richard Balls’s new book Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story is half great because it serves as a series of biographies outlining the early careers of such significant artists and half great because it’s so fun to read about all the outrageousness of and surrounding Stiff. One of the book’s weirdest tales involves Virgin Records founder Richard Branson getting Devo baked so he could ambush them with a surprise request from Johnny Rotten. One of its funniest involves Rod Stewart sabotaging Lou Reed on Ian Dury’s behalf. Perhaps its most shocking revelation is recording engineer Bazza’s declaration that The Damned recorded their anarchic debut album as “well behaved young gentleman.” Now that’s outrageous!

Review: 'Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album'

Terry O’Neill photographed some of the most monumental movers and shakers of the twentieth century: JFK, Churchill, Mandella, Blair. That’s very nice for him, but what about the people who made us move and shake? Well, stand back, because this cat has shot The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Ray Davies, Led Zeppelin, Elvises Presley and Costello, Chuck Berry, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Springsteen, Bowie… I think you get the picture. You can get a slew of them in a new A (for AC/DC) to Z (for Zeppelin) collection of his most iconic and rarest pictures called Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album.

That title is actually slightly misleading because quite a few of the stars between its covers have nothing to do with rocking or rolling (there’s a big spread on Sinatra, who hated the genre). Don’t get too hung up on that because there’s plenty that fits the bill from O’Neill’s earliest swinging snaps of the Fabs, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, and some very, very young Stones through relatively recent artists such as Blur and Amy Winehouse. She’s the most recent one in the lot because O’Neill admits in his introduction that no one since her has had enough star power to ensnare his interest (I see what he means).

The interesting thing about O’Neill’s work is the way it often subverts our expectations. He’s the one who shot that famous picture of Ozzy in which the evil one looks like he just paid his one hundred bucks at Glamour Shots. He made Liza Minnelli look like Jagger. He made ol’ Lucifer Lips look like a cuddly bear all wrapped up in his fur-lined anorak. Ringo appears to be the lead Beatles as he leaps over the rest of the band in an extraordinary action shot I’d never seen before. He filmed hellion Marc Bolan in a very moving embrace with his infant son.

At other times, O’Neill captured the artists just as we expect them to be, whether it’s Sir Elton posing in his giant wardrobe of outrageous gear or Alice Cooper subverting that Bolan shot hilariously by applying fright makeup to a sleeping baby. Really, there is no unifying style or approach to perceive among the mass of photos in Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album. Color or black and white, candid or staged, funny or po-faced, action-packed or serene, bizarrely normal or normally bizarre, the photos in this big, big, big book really have one thing in common: big, big, big music stardom.

Ten Great Bruce Thomas Basslines

Bruce Thomas is a controversial guy in Elvis Costello-fan circles. Some have never forgiven him for portraying their hero as a whiny guy who sweats a lot in the semi- autobiographical novella The Big Wheel.  Elvis certainly hasn’t. Yet few Elvis fans would be stupid enough to dismiss Bruce Thomas as a musician, and as bass guitarists go, he deserves a place at the top with James Jamerson, John Entwistle, and Paul McCartney. Today, on his 65^th birthday, let’s take a listen to some of the lines that make Bruce one of pop’s most amazing bassmen (Bruce has done some fantastic work outside of The Attractions, particularly with Suzanne Vega on the great 99.9F°, but here I’ll just be focusing on his work behind Elvis).

1. “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” (1978)

Elvis Costello has always been more of a colorist than a lead guitarist. This often left Steve Nieve and Bruce Thomas responsible for the hook. In the case of the first single released as Elvis Costello and the Attractions, all three musicians supply memorable riffs, with Elvis jittering out triplets and Steve Nieve countering the amphetamine paranoia of that guitar riff with a languidly creepy descending line on his Vox Continental. Yet it is Bruce Thomas’s uncharacteristically simple reggae bassline that best catches the ear. His halting major triad riff pins down the verses, while his capricious slides give momentum to the bridge even as the overall dynamic remains constant.

2. “Pump It Up” (1978)

Bruce Thomas’s bass stands out on “Chelsea.” On “Pump It Up,” it practically is the song. Elvis’s Dylanesque rap, which droves of kids learned word-for-word as a sort of New Wave badge of honor (until it R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” took it’s place), is no small thing. However, all the melody flows from Bruce’s fingers. He squeezes in two totally distinct, totally memorable lines: the hopping riff of the verse and the three-note descent that supplies super-gravity between verses. His two-steps-forward/-one-step-back climb under the chorus is not as iconic as those other two riffs, but it’s the most technically spectacular bass work on the track.

3. “The Beat” (1978)

Review: ‘The Encyclopedia of New Wave’

I’ve consumed my share of colorfully illustrated books on punk, but they’ve always seemed a little wrong to me. Cheerily eulogizing the musical equivalent of a stick of dynamite up the sphincter kind of misses the point. The overtly commercial, style conscious New Wave, however, is ripe for that kind of overview, and Daniel Bukszpan’s Encyclopedia of New Wave is a doozy. Or maybe I should say “it’s a totally tubular tube of awesomeness that doesn’t make me want to gag myself with a spoon” or something. However you word it, The Encyclopedia of New Wave is a supremely entertaining retro trip through a pop-culture movement that seemed retro while it was happening, even though it was supposed to be, like, totally futuristic.

Bukszpan trots out hundreds of profiles on megastars like Madonna, credible artists like Elvis Costello, obscurities like Q-Feel (seriously… who?), and—errr—Robert Palmer. The profiles are brief but fairly informative. Above all else: They. Are. Hilarious. Bukszpan is a really, really, really funny guy. Consider this quote from his piece on Bananarama:

“The follow-up, Bananarama (1984), was another success, featuring the song “Cruel Summer,” which would appear in the epic Pat Morita film The Karate Kid, which was the moving story of a man getting his car waxed by a teenage boy.”

His profiles on Alphaville and Animotion also made me laugh out loud. Bukszpan must have written his profiles in order, because some of the comic inspiration evaporates as the book moves from A to Z. That still leaves us with a fun look at a diverse menagerie of one-hit, multi-hit, and no-hit wonders. Bukszpan sometimes interrupts his artist profiles with tangents on New Wave fashion, heart throbs, T.V., videos, and movies delivered with the same thrilling irreverence as the rest of the book. And if all those pesky words are too much for your coke-addled, Simon Le Bon-obsessed brain, The Encyclopedia of New Wave will still captivate you with its abundant photos and a design so dazzlingly colorful and awesomely garish you may need your Ray-Bans to view it.

Farewell, Levon Helm

In the autumn of 2009, I went to the Apollo Theater for a taping of Elvis Costello’s “Spectacle”. The guest line-up was probably the best ever to appear on his short-lived chat show. I’d seen Elvis live several times before, but had yet to see Nick Lowe, Richard Thompson, or Allen Toussaint. I was excited to see each of these artists, but not nearly as keyed up as I was to see one of my very favorite singers, Levon Helm. Unfortunately, Helm was having throat troubles that night and could barely speak, let alone sing. Yet, he was still in great humor, and sat behind his drum kit to do his talking through his slack-tuned skins, as he so often did on those amazing old Band records. Elvis would ask him a question, and Levon would change up his beat to indicate a “yes” or “no” response. It was a cute joke, but also a beautiful metaphor for the guy. The Band was a group of five great artists and uncommonly distinct individuals, but Levon’s voice always rose above everyone else’s whether he was singing or speaking through his unmistakably loose, funky drumming.

Very sadly, that voice fell silent today. Levon Helm died of throat cancer at the age of 71. Of course, as long as we still have his records, that voice will never really be silent.

Here are some of my favorite examples of the humor, heartbreak, and humanity of Levon Helm’s voice and equally expressive drumming: