The hottest rumor I've heard in awhile is that Pinhead Gunpowder is doing a mini-tour of California next month. I can't get a confirmation anywhere but I'm hearing Berkeley, L.A., Orange County and maybe San Diego. They play so infrequently that when they do play, people fly in from all over the world. We first covered them here at the LNMC in May of 2006 and again last July-- a cover of Joni Mitchell's classic "Big Yellow Taxi." What a version!!
They have a hot new song, "Life During Wartime," their own composition, not the Talking Heads one. The acoustic version kicks ass but here's the rocked out one that sounds a lot like... you know who. You do, right?
The weather gets really really nice outside, I look for happy tunes. Here's one, followed by the much darker "Give Me Back My Name." (This is a lovely video but there isn't an embeddable one available without vacuum cleaner ads at the beginning. No time to think about what to tell him, indeed.) From their Little Creatures album.
Open music thread: what are you listening to this evening?
It's David Byrne of the Talking Heads' 57th birthday today. This is a great performance of one of my favorite Heads songs with some synchronized dance moves thrown in.
Talking Heads were an arty party new wave band, right? Yeah, but they did an incredible song about civil insurrection in the U.S. long before Bush and Cheney legitimized the concept. "Life During Wartime" was originally a song from the 1979 release Fear of Music but 4 years later, after Talking Heads became a favorite of Dead Heads everywhere, it came out as a live single from Stop Making Sense.
Biblical scholars know the concept of the Jezebel spirit as reference to women, usually painted ones, who supposedly lead weak men astray. Fundamentalist preachers often refer to the Jezebel spirit when they want to cast aspersions on any woman with whom they disagree. In 1981 Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno (formerly of Roxy Music) recorded a groundbreaking album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which featured the underground hit, "The Jezebel Spirit."
There was definitely a time when my favorite music was what was then called "industrial." At the time I worked at Sire Records as general manager and we had one of the greatest of the industrial bands, Ministry. Ironically, when Seymour Stein signed them he had only heard a kind of proto-disco song they did called "Every Day is Halloween" and when he realized they weren't going to do more songs like that he fled from the project and left them to me. Long after disavowing "Halloween," I think they were the first industrial band to go gold. Seymour was so happy that he was amenable when I suggested we sign a whole industrial label, Zoth Ommog, based in Frankfurt in Germany.
You can imagine when I showed up at Warner Bros with a band from that deal called Armageddon Dildos-- one guy from Hannover (Dirk) and one guy from Sweden (Uwe). Although they went on to gain some acclaim with their brilliant cover of Morrissey's "Every Day Is Like Sunday" the following year, their first big breakthrough came from their 1993 release HOMICIDAL DOLLS and the single "Homicidal Maniac."
Tonight's contest is for a very rare promo-only 2 CD set, a package that was put together for a party to celebrate my retirement from Warner Bros. It was never sold and only 500 were ever pressed. It includes some rare tracks not otherwise available and among the artists on the discs are the aforementioned Ministry, Morrissey and Armageddon Dildos, as well as Ramones, Green Day, Body Count, Talking Heads, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Wilco, Enya, Depeche Mode, Lou Reed, Enya, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell... To win it listen to that Armageddon Dildos tune and write us a paragraph telling as an appropriate time to play that song in a public setting-- and why.Email downwithtyranny@aol.com with your entry.
