A-Ha! A fresh view

If you are familiar with the authors on this website, you will notice that alot of the blogs are about the 1980’s. To teenagers today, the eighties was a complicated time– filled with change, baby formula, and first words (mine were all four verses of Elton John’s Rocket Man).

Since most teenagers didn’t experience the eighties, it is viewed by many of the members of Generation Y as a decade filled with Pac-Man, bad hair, and ugly shirts. But thanks to Family Guy, a popular show created by televisionary Seth MacFarlane, teens today are getting a little dose of the eighties once more– this time without the Gerber.

 In 1986, the music video for A-Ha’s single, ‘Take On Me’ was nominated for an MTV Music Video award– and for good reason. The movie version of ‘Take On Me,’ featuring a special type of animation known as "roto-scoping," was a smash hit the US and UK alike, and quickly made A-Ha one of the most popular bands of the 1980’s.

It has been more then twenty years since ‘Take On Me’ was popular, but it only took a fifty-second segment on Family Guy to bring it all back, providing you old-timers with a healthy bit of nostalgia and us youngsters with yet another punchy Family Guy gem.

Take a look

Chris Griffen Meets A-Ha!

Chew on that. It’s delicious.

Until Next Time:

Alex E.

 

Chris Griffin Meets A-Ha!

Dream Lake Ukelele Band

Dream Lake Ukulele Band is a Lost in the Grooves exclusive. Click to sample the music or purchase.

Dream Lake Ukulele Band
Dream Lake Ukulele Band
(Crest, 1976)

What do you get when you cross twenty-seven ukuleles, a Little Marcy record, and the Langley Schools Music Project? The result is a bizarre hybrid called the Dream Lake Ukulele Band, a Florida school group whose performances are documented on Crest Records, a New York vanity label. The back cover shows twenty-seven grade school aged students, all wearing white shirts and red vests, the boys also wearing neckties. Sound boring? Not when every kid is smiling and holding a ukulele.

The lead-off, “There’s So Many, Many Ways,” is one of the more charming Christian songs around, but I’m sure my opinion is altered by the sheer innocent joy of twenty-seven children’s voices singing in harmony while strumming their ukuleles. That spirit changes a bit though, when the songs veer off into the Bicentennial patriotic songs that fill the rest of Side 1. Such lyrics as "My Sunday school teacher loves me when I am never late" preceded by "God loves when I learn to shoot the gun" makes one wish that the band director would have been cool enough to be teaching the kids David Bowie songs.

Fortunately, Side 2 has the perfect antidote, for that is where the children present and sing their own original compositions. Compiled under headings such as "Wish Songs," "Name Songs," and "Music Songs," each features a progression of five to ten kids strumming and singing solo. These aren’t loud bratty kids singing "Tomorrow" at the top of their lungs, but more often small waif-like girls singing with very timid voices.  My heart melts whenever I hear one girl who sings, "I am Mary, I like to play the ukulele" or another girl whose verse starts by saying her parents are always busy, and then proceeds with "Daddy is a band director, Mommy is a piano teacher, I love them." This record is listed as being Volume Seven, which definitely makes me wish that I also had volumes One through Six. (Vern Stolz, from the book Lost in the Grooves)

Are you a member of the Dream Lake Ukelele Band? If so, please contact us! 

GOTTA Take That One Last Ride

Several of the inimitably esteemed recording artistes I had the pleasure of becoming Lost In The Grooves with have recently made grand new releases available to discriminating listeners and/or readers out there in what remains of the real world.  Yes of course there’s head Kink Ray’s LONG-awaited so-low album (which sounds not too bad at all to what’s left of these ears), but what truly is exciting me this week is Sundazed’s full-color re-release of that last “real” Jan and Dean long-player, Popsicle.

In truth a hasty grab-bag of hits, misses, and miscellania circa ’62 thru ’66 cobbled together to, um, commemorate Captain Jan Berry’s recent near-fatal car crash, the Popsicle album actually provides just as wild and crazy a ride as yer typical J&D LP ever would (e.g.: Side Four of The Jan & Dean Anthology Album, anyone?!!) as it veers madly from the ridiculous (“One-Piece Topless Bathing Suit,” perhaps the funniest Sloan/Barri composition this side of “Eve Of Destruction”) to the sublime (Jan’s tongue-possibly-deep-within-cheek “Norwegian Wood”) and THEN some (a fully half-an-album’s worth of selections with either “Summer” or “Surf” in the song-titles themselves: “She’s My Summer Girl” has long been a quite guilty pleasure-o-mine, you know, while J&D’s “Summer Means Fun” more than hangs ten against the Fantastic Baggys’ near-identical version, I’ll have YOU know).

So as Jan lay hovering next to death in nearby UCLA Medical Center, and his until-then hapless cohort Dean “The Boy Blunder” scoured the vaults to fulfill the duo’s contractual commitment to Liberty Records, “Popsicle” the song — originally appearing as “Popsicle Truck” on the November ’63 Drag City album — crept to the mid-twenties on the sales charts (I can distinctly remember it jumping from my childhood six-transistors as that fateful Summer of 66 was about to arrive), providing a sticky-sweet if tragically premature capper to the initial career of our most fave pop duo this side of Don & Phil.  But Popsicle the ALBUM is in retrospect as fine a place as any to immediately reacquaint oneself with the majesty and true mondo-magic which was, and forever shall be, Jan Berry and Dean O. Torrence …until Sundazed gets very round to re-issuing their beyond-classic Jan & Dean Meet Batman, that is !!       

Best of Suckdog (Drugs are Nice/Rape GG)

Best of Suckdog (a compilation of tracks from Drugs are Nice/Rape GG) is a Lost in the Groove exclusive. Click to sample the music or purchase.

Suckdog
Drugs are Nice
(self-released, 1989)
 
Forget the hilarious GTOs. Forget even the mighty Shaggs. Suckdog (which isn’t really a band on this record, just a gathering of drug-addled friends conducted like an alley-cat orchestra by Lisa “Suckdog” Carver and her friend Rachel Johnson) captures adolescent female adrenaline-fueled angst and aggression like no recording artist I’ve heard before or since.

This is not a record for the squeamish; in fact, I have used it myself (in one of my most prankish moments) to disturb and annoy random passersby by shooting its screams and hoots down to street level from a safe rooftop perch (dare I say “sonic terrorism”?). If you want to hear the raw, primal energy of raging puberty, you won’t get any closer than this LP. It manages to create a sonic landscape which is scary, funny, outrageous, and poignant all at the same time, much as Ms. Carver’s later output in the small press world (which includes Rollerderby magazine and several underappreciated books) did with words and images.

It is not by mere happenstance that Spin magazine proclaimed this record “one of the top hundred records of the eighties.” Drugs are Nice certainly changed my life, as did seeing Ms. Carver perform a semi-nude roller skating opera with minimalist indie-rocker Bill “Smog” Callahan and French noise guru Costes in 1990. What makes the world of Suckdog work so well is that it never descends into pretension, or anything other than pure geeky life in its most frightening, silly, ridiculous extremes. And that, for me, is the best kind of art. (Russ Forster)

End of the Trail

Costes’ End of the Trail is a Lost in the Grooves exclusive. Click to sample the music or purchase.

Costes
End of the Trail
(Self-released, 1992)

Costes is the ultimate DIY rocker of the French Underground. He’s vile, prolific, poignant, crazy, unlistenable, pop. End of the Trail is the seventh of his releases and his third album to be recorded in English. While some would argue that Lung Farts is an equal masterpiece, End is a nineteen-song homage to his breakup with indie icon Lisa Suckdog Carver, and a more moving love letter has never been recorded. Splatters of filth and sonic mess hide the sentimentality, but the beauty shines through, triumphantly sad beneath layers of disgust and ugly noise. A classical sonnet will dissolve into layered muddle punctuated by overblown vocals, only to be reduced a moment later to a vulnerable whimper as a multitude of schizophrenic emotions battle for dominance. Costes plays, sings, manipulates, produces and destroys every track in utter solitude, shining through on borderline narcissistic tracks like “King of Rock’N Roll, Sort Of” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Souvenir on a CD Player.” His music is from necessity; he cannot help himself. It is the document of modern humanity as representative of his era’s id as Gainsbourg was of his.

Lauded by the likes of Thurston Moore and the odd rock journalist, Costes remains virtually unknown, even in his own country, a special gem without genre. (Costes has claimed Daniel Johnston and GG Allin as musical kin, though he resembles neither.) He has been shunned, sued and attacked for his uncompromisingly viscous aesthetic. Still, at the time of this writing he has over thirty recordings to his credit and he shows no signs of slowing. (Bengala)