Sunday Synthpop Brunch: A Flock Of Seagulls

It was all about timing: the post-punk New Romantic movement, with its legion of bitchin’-haired snappy dressers practicing their best cod-Bowie croon, was uniquely suited to take advantage of the infant form of music video. While it wasn’t quite “money for nothing and chicks for free,” as was widely assumed, the lure of being in a band and being on T.V. (and, by extension, an instant fashion-plate to an impressionable audience of millions) proved irresistible to hundreds of struggling musicians in the U.K. at the time.

While being good-looking and/or seeking to draw the maximum possible attention to ones self was hardly a revolutionary idea in the music industry (even during this time), there existed a handful of bands that ran a bit wild with the style-centric angle of New Romanticism. Among this select clique, none achieved the level of fame (or infamy) reached by A Flock Of Seagulls, one of those unfortunate acts whose utterly bonkers visual aesthetic (two of the four original members worked as hairdressers for day jobs, which undoubtedly gave them a leg up on the competition in that department) almost completely overshadowed their music, at least as far as 95% of the record-buying public was concerned.

As with countless other groups of English origin, A Flock Of Seagulls was centered around two brothers, in this case Mike and Ali Score. The band started off in 1979 in Liverpool as a trio with Mike on the keyboards and vocals (and the occasional guitar) along with Ali on the drums and Mike's friend Frank Maudsley on bass. Realizing quickly that their sound needed to be “filled out” a bit, the band brought aboard guitarist Paul Reynolds after a few months of looking around for a suitable addition and then went about the usual business of writing songs, playing clubs and trying to land themselves a record contract.

One of the most striking aspects to A Flock Of Seagulls is that their music is really quite simple in construction, and executed with hardly any flashiness on behalf of the band. While the resulting clean, basic sound may well have been due to their limited abilities as players (I think it’s safe to say that there were no virtuosos in this lineup), it nevertheless made them stand out even more so from the rest of the emerging field, who tended to fill up the spaces in their music with sequenced arpeggios or extraneous electronic percussion effects. Rather than follow this lead, A Flock Of Seagulls chose to leave those spaces wide open, resulting in a sound that soared and conjured up visions of limitless night-time starscapes rather than fancy clothes and swanky night clubs.

Balancing their vast sonics with a pop songwriting standpoint, A Flock Of Seagulls came off as more of a synthrock band than many of their peers ever dared to be, and it was in this area of that Reynolds became the band’s secret weapon: some of his solos recalling the direct, yet celestial sound of David Gilmour (he also seems to share a bit of the latter’s love for delay and reverb effects). With such a stinging, distinctive tone layered onto atmospheric synth chords and a propulsive rhythm section topped off by the band’s “futuristic” stage appearance, the Flock soon became one of the first signings to the newly-created indie label Cocteau Records.

Not long after the (uneventful) release of their kinetic debut single “(It’s Not Me) Talking” in 1981, the Flock released a debut EP with production handled by ex-Be Bop Deluxe leader and Cocteau Records co-founder Bill Nelson. While this EP made no discernible impact on a commercial level, enough attention was garnered at dance clubs by the pogo-friendly single “Telecommunication” to start turning heads a bit higher up the music industry food chain, and within a few months, the boys found themselves signed to Jive Records and recording their debut album with ex-Gong bassist (and budding New Wave guru) Mike Howlett producing.

Most of the debut EP (including “Telecommunication”) made its way in re-recorded form to the combo’s full-length debut album, which was released in the spring of 1982. From the outset, A Flock Of Seagulls initially went nowhere as the band could not find any purchase at radio for the first single, the grandiose alien abduction epic “I Ran.” This problem was quickly solved by the content-starved MTV cable network, which at the time was voraciously adding just about anything thrown at it in order to fill up airtime. With “I Ran” now in the channel’s rotation, the band then set out on tour as the opening act for fellow U.K. pop lineup Squeeze.

Boiling forth from a doomy, ominous instrumental intro, “I Ran” was for most of America a real blast of fresh air in the increasingly soft/corporate rock-dominated climate of 1982. An imaginative use of aluminum foil and floor mirrors, the promotional videoclip for the song was certainly not a big budget piece in the mold of Duran Duran's “Hungry Like The Wolf,” but it contained enough direct iconic imagery to make it memorable (and of course we cannot go without another nod to Mike Score’s hair, the shape of which was now beginning to resemble that of a seagull in flight) and it soon became one of the most popular videos on the network. Between MTV exposure, resultant airplay from rock radio stations being bombed by listener requests to hear the song, and the band’s ongoing road work, “I Ran” began to build a good sized head of steam that finally got it into the Billboard Hot 100 by midsummer, with A Flock Of Seagulls nearly outpacing its performance on the albums chart.

Winning markets over one by one, “I Ran” took a long time to reach the national Top 10: initially charting in July of 1982, the song finally crested at No. 9 for a couple of weeks right at Halloween with A Flock Of Seagulls reaching the Top 10, selling 500,000 copies as well and staying listed on the album survey for a year.

While “I Ran” remains to this day the song they are best known for, A Flock Of Seagulls have some real gems buried away in their catalog, some of which, like their follow-up single “Space Age Love Song” and the Grammy-winning (!) surf-tinged instrumental "D.N.A." were in a similar melodious, epic vein as “I Ran.” A decent-sized follow-up hit, reaching the lower end of the Top 30 in February of 1983 (following a similarly lengthy climb as its predecessor), “Space Age Love Song” was a more outwardly emotional, even romantic piece that featured Reynolds’ guitar work effectively making the five-word choruses work in spectacular fashion.

By the spring of 1983, the band's follow-up album Listen was ready for release, and was presaged at radio and MTV by the single "Wishing," which is quite possibly the most affecting song in the band's canon. While it didn't glide quite as gracefully as their preceding singles (the drum sound here was far more robotic and mechanical in nature than what had come before), "Wishing" was a more hypnotic kind of work that was all about scale and austerity. It also featured a gorgeous, 2 1/2 minute instrumental coda with Reynolds' oddly-muted guitar presence emerging from the background like a pitched-down whalesong. While "Wishing" stalled disappointingly at the bottom of the U.S. Top 30 (a little below the peak of "Space Age Love Song"), it became the first and only of the band's singles to be embraced by their home country: reaching the Top 10 of the U.K. singles survey.

Those awaiting more of the same on the second Flock album were in for a bit of a surprise as Listen offered up a rather different listening experience than the debut. It wasn’t hard to identify that this was the same band or anything: that intoxicating sweep and sense of space was still there, but the feel of the music was colder, darker, and more overtly synth-driven than what had come before, which was fully the band's intent. A lot of this is likely due to the record being recorded in Germany in the studio owned by legendary Krautrock producer Conrad Planck (though Howlett was manning the boards again). Listening to other tracks like the failed second single "Nightmares," the bracing techno-rocker "Over The Border," or the chilling instrumental "The Last Flight Of Yuri Gagarin," it's easy to hear echoes of Neu! and Kraftwerk in the final mix.

That said, Listen remains to this day my favorite of the band’s records (and apparently the same goes for Mike and Ali Score, judging by the liner notes in the CD), possessing some pretty forlorn, spatial landscapes that admittedly lack obvious pop hooks, but not without a few hidden gems, one of the shiniest of which was the absolutely sublime electro-ballad “Transfer Affection.”

Listen was viewed as a commercial letdown in comparison to A Flock Of Seagulls, even though it reached to #16 on the album charts and was listed for five months, but it was on the 1984 album The Story Of A Young Heart that the wheels really started to come off. Listen may have been a alienating to those who wanted more of "I Ran," but The Story Of A Young Heart offered up more of the "classic" Flock sound, but a complete drag regardless. While the group appeared to be trying to reclaim lost ground in already-changing times, their charming shortcomings had started to become a bit glaring, particularly in the areas of songwriting and artistic growth. By switching back to their "classic" sound, A Flock Of Seagulls weren't at all rejuvenated, but instead sounded like they were running out of gas. Apparently the public agreed, as the The Story Of A Young Heart flamed out at #66 on the album chart, ten notches below the peak position on the Hot 100 of its one and only single “The More You Live, The More You Love.” Both album and single represented the last appearance of the Flock on the U.S. hit parade.

The next couple of years for the band weren’t pleasant for anyone involved as some pretty massive changes fundamentally altered the direction and sound of the band, the most damaging being the departure of Paul Reynolds. A bit of a fragile soul during the best of times, Reynolds apparently descended into serious drug and alcohol abuse as a result of stress and constant rigorous touring. By all accounts, Reynolds was a physical and mental wreck and leaving the band probably saved his life. At the time, however, the loss of his highly distinctive guitar work (a crucial part of Flock’s signature sound) really took the wind out of the band’s sails.

The magnitude of this loss became glaringly apparent (as did a few other things) when the band’s fourth album appeared in the spring of 1986. At the time, I never would have thought that a new Flock Of Seagulls album would make The Story Of A Young Heart sound like a Herculean achievement, but unfortunately no one was prepared for Dream Come True. Recorded in Philadelphia, co-produced by Mike Score and a guy named Wayne Braithwaite (who has also worked with the likes of, uh, Billy Ocean and Kenny G) and with a far different sound and approach than any of the albums preceding it, Dream Come True was a clunky, misguided disaster on just about every imaginable level, from the embarrassing, over-shellacked techno-funk production to the frankly hideous cover art. It was pretty obviously the endgame for A Flock Of Seagulls and they knew it, but what a shame that they had to release this album to figure it out.

Following the complete dissolution of the band in the wake of that fiasco, Mike Score laid low for a while and then, surprisingly, resurfaced in 1989 as A Flock Of Seagulls with an entirely new band installed around him. This new lineup would change regularly around Score over the years, with the odd single (“Magic”) or album (The Light At The End Of The World) to flog for a small group of remaining die-hard fans. Otherwise, one could convincingly argue that A Flock Of Seagulls got a jump on the competition one last time as they became, whether they like it or not, the first traveling 80s nostalgia show.


Buy The Best Of A Flock Of Seagulls from Amazon.com.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Taco

Very few biographical details exist anywhere about Taco Ockerse, so we'll cut to the chase fairly quickly: born in Indonesia (yet of Dutch descent) and raised in Germany, Ockerse studied theater and dance before making a name for himself around Hamburg as the frontman of the band Taco's Bizz.

Apparently, Taco Bizz's nightly setlist of re-imagined swing/crooner-era oldies performed in the swankest nightclubs in the city began to attract some record company attention, and Ockerse soon found himself recording a radically modern-ized solo cover of the Irving Berlin standard "Puttin' On The Ritz" (last made popular by Fred Astaire in 1946) for a single release at the end of 1981.

Astutely realizing the commercial potential in Ockerse's neo-retro schtick, RCA Records green-lighted an album to be created around "Puttin' On The Ritz," serving up a mixed bag of similarly-retooled Depression-era pop tunes from the Taco's Bizz repertiore alongside a few original songs. With Ockerse now simply billed as Taco, After Eight was released in Germany at the end of 1982.

About seven months later, the unexpected happened as "Puttin' On The Ritz" improbably managed to cross the ocean and became one of the biggest surprise hits of 1983 in the United States. While a nod for this breakout success is certainly due to rotation on then synth-crazed MTV, "Puttin' On The Ritz" was also a bona-fide radio and retail hit, reaching #4 for two weeks on the Hot 100 that September. A crisply recorded, vocoder-sprinkled work of charming robo-pop cheese (with a tap-dancing break midway through in an apparent nod to Astaire), "Puttin' On The Ritz" managed to sounded utterly unique on the radio despite the plethora of foreign synthwave acts swarming over American airwaves at the time.

In true "one-hit wonder" fashion, Taco seemed to vanish just as quickly as he had appeared. Despite After Eight climbing up to #23 on Billboard's album chart and ultimately selling half-a-million copies, Taco became persona non grata at Top 40 radio from the instant "Puttin' On The Ritz" slipped off of the hit parade. Another cover tune, "Cheek To Cheek" (which probably sounded too much like "Puttin' On The Ritz" for its own good) was worked by RCA as a follow-up single, but there was no interest whatsoever from the public and the song failed to list on any chart stateside. Ouch.

In a futile effort to reverse Taco's immediate decline of popularity in the U.S., a second album, Let's Face The Music, appeared in the summer of 1984. While the new album sported a noticeably slicker, funkier, and even more-polished sound (if that can be imagined) than After Eight, RCA quickly found that getting anyone to so much as look at a copy of Let's Face The Music was about as easy as trying to sell Christmas trees in April. Hell, the only way I knew there even was a second Taco album at the time was by catching the video for the slinky title cut on an episode of HBO's half-assed time-filler show Video Jukebox one afternoon that fall. Needless to say, I never saw it again.

So, what killed Taco's career so completely after one single that he never charted another record in the U.S. again? You might as well ask what kills the momentum of any one-hit wonder: the reasons are legion. In this case, however, I'll venture a couple of guesses ...

1) If you listened to the "Cheek To Cheek" mp3, you probably thought to yourself "hmmm, maybe this was a cute idea taken one song too far." Now imagine a whole album of that same idea. In the case of After Eight, at least 500,000 people picked up a copy (a pretty good haul for a full-length album by a flash-in-the-pan artist), and hardly any of them came back for seconds.

2) Pardon the pun, but the sheer novelty of "Puttin' On The Ritz" might have sated the public's appetite for Taco right then and there. I can vouch for this reason personally, as listening to "Puttin' On The Ritz" once in a blue moon during a radio station's "All Eighties Weekend" is goofy fun, but actually sitting down and listening to an entire Best Of Taco collection -- yes, these things actually exist -- can be a rather ... emasculating experience (and this is coming from someone who likes a lot of totally fey bands from the same time period, mind you). Without a doubt, this is some of the fruitiest electropop in the history of the medium.

Abandoning the U.S. market, Taco concentrated on the German market from that point forward, starting with 1985's Swing Classics In The Mood Of Glen Miller, and, it is said, recording the soundtrack to a movie called Whiz Kid. Incidentally, one of these albums sports a truly dreadful disco rendition of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" that is so awful I just had to share the pain ...

See, this is why the internet exists, friends: so you can learn absolutely useless trivia while listening to records no one ever wanted to hear twenty years ago, let alone now.

From sketchy information, it appears that there may have even been another album or so from Taco as the 80s wore to a close, as his Best-Of collection also features a disturbingly Stock-Aitken-Waterman-scented hunk of Limberger called "Got To Be Your Lover," which dates from 1988. There are also accounts of Ockerse dropping the robopop and trying out a more R&B-leaning style of music, but information on these latter albums is nonexistent (or written solely in German).

As far as what Ockerse is up to these days, all I have been able to glean from a scouring of the web (including the one and only website dedicated to his life and work) is that he still lives in Germany and is prone to performing music on the odd occasion ... but your guess is a good as mine as to whether "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" is still in the setlist.

Autumn Is Upon Us

Well, it's October again. Time for an indian summer (I think we're getting one starting yesterday as a matter of fact), and steadily, stealthily cooling evenings that drag you into winter without your realizing what is going on. Then, next thing you know, it's November first and freaking cold out and you realize that you'd better busy yourself winterizing the car and maybe start planning Christmas shopping expenses before too long. Damn it.

O.K., I jest a bit: I actually like October a lot...it's just too bad that November has to follow, you know?

As you might have guessed from all the pics here, I'm a big fan of October colors: it's the prettiest month of the year as long as the weather keeps from getting all gray, wet and blustery. October makes me think of caramel apples and funnel cakes and rickety carnival rides at the It's Better In Mentor fair (which usually happens in September, but was always the true benchmark of the beginning of autumn for me as a teenager) and also of standing around small fires to keep warm on cool, damp nights. Most of all, October always brings up fond memories of the old cider mill my family and I used to frequent every year around this time when we were living in Southfield, getting thick apple cider and hot cinnamon-tasting donuts that were absolutely delicious and always worth the trip (now is when I start thinking about jumping in the car and making the 3.5 hour trip to the northern suburbs of Detroit to get some more, heh heh).

October also makes me think of baseball and playoffs and the World Series, but this year finds me once again in the position of having no teams to root for, and only teams to root against, thanks to the Indians falling apart at exactly the wrong goddamn time of the season. Ah well, at least with this team, saying the words "maybe next year" doesn't have that hollow ring of "yeah, right" to it.


Sarah and I have now been in the condo for over a year now: that particular anniversary came and went unheralded at the end of last August. After a rather blistering summer, the weather has been absolutely perfect over the last few weeks, which means we have not been running the AC much at all, and that makes me a very happy camper.

While we're on the money subject, I am finally seeing the end of the tunnel in getting myself out from underneath the crushing load of my car's repair bills. By the end of this month, I should be able to clear Bill Week with a decent positive balance ... maybe even enough to take care of the two other problems that have sprung up since that godawful final week of July: an apparent coolant leak of undetermined severity and the similarly undetermined state of my rear brake system. Yay.

In better news, my work schedule has recently taken a delicious turn for the better. Brian's job working for that electrician guy apparently was an utter wash from Day One, and he was recently laid off. This doesn't come as a huge surprise as things he's said offhandedly over the last couple of months seemed to indicate that all was not quite working out as planned. What makes this news notable is that he now needs more hours to work and, as a result, I now have two day weekends (Sunday & Monday) for the time being. Weeeeoo!

I could get used to this real quick...


In other store news, things are moseying along alright in a business sense, though by "moseying" I mean we've just finished up an utterly flat September (missed the target figure by 93 stinkin' dollars, damn it). Our pace for the year is still comfortably ahead of target, and thus our magic number of half a mil is still within our sights, though it might involve an extra push at some point to achieve. Last year it was the week after Christmas that saved our asses, thanks to all the godawful snow days beforehand ... here's hoping we don't get pushed up against the wall the same way this year.

Of course, November will also bring about The Return Of Inspector Scene and a part of me is just breathless with ancticpation as to how this year's inspection sweep will pan out. I have my suspicions that the assertions I've heard to the effect of "don't worry, if he checked something last year, he won't check it again this year" may not hold a lot of water since nearly all of the work we did to the doors in this condo to make them close correctly has come rather undone over the last six months or so thanks to the gradual, imperceptible sinking of this place into landfill. Thus, a part of me thinks that we will certainly hear about the doors, and yet another part of me answers that with: "yeah, so what? What the hell can I do about it now?" Needless to say, you will certainly be reading updates on this should it come into play.


NP Depeche Mode Playing The Angel

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Amii Stewart

Amii Stewart may have one of the most recognizable smash hits of the Disco Era era to her name, but her career as a stateside Dancing Queen (or even Pop Singer) was a very short-lived affair.

Musically inclined from childhood, Stewart initially made a career for herself in the arena of dance/theater. Having taken dancing lessons after being taught to play the piano by her father, Stewart enrolled in "workshop" programs to hone her talents while still attending high school in her native Washington D.C.. Shortly after starting college, Stewart left school to work full-time with the D.C. Repertory Dance Company.

Working with the D.C.R.D.C. eventually let to other breaks, and Stewart began to make a name for herself internationally through her work as lead actress (and ultimately assistant director/choreographer) in the play Bubbling Brown Sugar which she performed in Miami, London and New York, followed by a role in the New York-staged Toby Time.

It was while in London working on Bubbling Brown Sugar, that Stewart laid down a few tracks on a lark with producer Barry Leng. Even though Stewart was a bit under the weather while auditioning, her powerful vocals must have convinced Leng that there was potential and she was offered a contract with Hansa Records. A handful of tracks were eventually recorded for future album release after her first single "You Really Touched My Heart" generated sufficient interest from the label for more material. Ariola Records, desperate for a lifesaving hit, optioned the release of Stewart's music in the American market, which at the time was fully in the sway of Disco Fever.

Working with another writer named Simon May (whose 1976 U.K. Top 10 single "Summer Of My Life" had also been a Leng production), Leng created some original songs for Stewart to sing, and began rearranging a smattering of oldie covers in a more contemporary musical vein. The first (and by far the most successful) of these covers selected for release was a rendition of Eddie Floyd's 1966 R&B classic "Knock On Wood."

While it's fair to say that Stewart's striking vocals would probably have drawn attention to this song no matter what the production style, this production was designed from the ground up to grab attention, which is exactly what it did. While Floyd's "Knock On Wood" was a midtempo bluesy number that simmered on the radio like a sultry July evening, the Leng-produced Amii Stewart version moved like a relentless freight train, indiscriminately mowing down everything in its path. Most importantly, "Knock On Wood" just sounded incredibly huge in a dance club, with its thundering beat, oddly-creaking synthesizer lines, laser-bright horn sections, insistent percussion effects, and ominous underlying bass hum all compressed together into an explosive mix that Jeff Lynne himself would have killed to create.

Released to radio in January of 1979, "Knock On Wood" went down a storm, ultimately reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week that April, and selling an estimated 8 million copies internationally, not to mention powering its attendant (and wisely similarly-titled) gold full-length album into the Top 20.

Seeking to capitalize on the runaway success of "Knock On Wood," another cover song from Stewart’s London sessions was selected to be the follow-up single. In retrospect, perhaps this was an ill-advised choice as the rocket-like momentum of Stewart's career vanished almost immediately when her cover of the seminal Doors smash "Light My Fire" (paired with a new song titled, er, "137 Disco Heaven" to create a medley, in effect) not only failed to match the success of its predecessor, but fell way short of the Top 40 as well, sputtering to #69 that summer. That being said, it bears mentioning that "Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven" did far better overseas: in fact, it actually placed a slot higher in the U.K. tallies than "Knock On Wood."

Things slipped even farther when Stewart's follow-up album, Paradise Bird failed to reach the Billboard's Top 200 album chart that Christmas, instead "peaking" at #207 on the magazine's Bubbling Under list. Despite the same production team and formula of orginal songs with a few re-imagined oldies as before, there were also no hits or even almost-hits from Paradise Bird, a lot of which was blamed on the impending collapse of Ariola Records, though it should also be pointed out in fairness to them that Hansa version of Paradise Bird wasn't exactly setting the surveys afire over in the U.K., either.

I'm Gonna Get Your Love (produced by noted cheese-dancepop maestro Narada Michael Walden) nearly got Stewart's career back on the upward track again, but ultimately could only generate one song of any impact whatsoever in the hybrid duet (think "prehistoric mash-up") of "My Guy / My Girl," recorded with the recently-late Johnny Bristol. While the two singers alternated songs in the "verses" and "choruses" to cute effect, the rest was a rather horrifically-overcooked mess and the song eventually became Stewart's second (and last) U.S. chart dud, barely cracking the Top 60 in the waning summer of 1980.

From that point onwards, Stewart never returned to the U.S. music charts, though she eventually found herself popular enough overseas that she was able to keep a career going on that level alone. Within a couple of years, she had reached the point that her Georgio Moroder-produced 1986 album Amii never even saw the light of day on these shores (nor have any of its follow-up projects with such luminaries as Ennio Morricone, for that matter). With the writing on the wall now too big to ignore, Stewart eventually left the United States for the rolling landscapes of Italy where her multi-faceted singing talents have yielded her an ongoing career that extends to the present day.


Buy The Best Of Amii Stewart: Knock On Wood here.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Korgis

James Warren and Andy Davis first worked together as members of the Beatle-esque U.K. cult outfit Stackridge -- one of those bands that seem to promise incredible things but only winds up in miserable debt from being too clever by half. Remarkably, while Stackridge never managed to chart in their homeland, a 1974 compilation album Pinafore Days managed to briefly surface at the bottom end of the Billboard albums chart in early 1975, "peaking" at #191.

Bassist Warren and drummer Davis had drifted apart even before the inglorious demise of Stackridge, and it took the ascension of the new wave movement four years later to get the Warren's creative energies sufficiently fired up to the point where he decided to contact his old band mate Davis by mail to discuss if a new collaboration was possible. Davis was interested in the idea, and the reunited duo began writing and recording in early 1979 under the name The Korgis (the lineup of which would eventually expand to include guitar player Stuart Gordon and keyboardist Phil Harrison).

The terms "new wave" and "quirky" have always gone hand-in-hand, but right from the release of their charmingly offbeat first single "Young 'N Russian," The Korgis initially seemed hell-bent on raising the bar in the oddball songwriting department. Furthering this tendency, the whole of their self-titled debut album played like a strange tug-of-war between two bands: one captivated by breezy, 60's pop-indebted harmonies straight out of The Hollies with a modern, synth-lined production sheen not unlike that of Supertramp (see "Dirty Postcards") and another interested in the fractured influences and slightly-screwy lyrical stylings of new wave.

What eventually gave The Korgis a commercial leg up on their competition at the time (hello, New Musik!) was Warren's multi-tracked, pop-friendly vocals (as heard on songs like "I Just Can't Help It") and retro-flavored songwriting style, which could be as unashamedly pop-leaning as any “mainstream” act of the time period when the occasion called. With that in mind, it didn't take long for success to start coming the way of The Korgis as the band's first hit single, the summery, sugar-sweet "If I Had You," made the Top 20 of the UK singles chart in the summer of 1979 (this track, incidentally, featured the accompaniment of future Depeche Mode / Recoil member Alan Wilder). Encouraged, The Korgis immediately set about work on their follow-up release, which appeared in shops the following year.

Dumb Waiters saw The Korgis in a far-more explicitly pop vein than their first album; with the band's more riskier tendencies pushed aside for the time being (though tracks like "Intimate" and "Silent Running" kept that tendency on a low simmer). The emphasis on accessible songwriting worked wonders on the band's career, as the album managed to break the UK Top 40 in the late summer. Ratcheting upwards the sweet quotient with such confections as "It's No Good Unless You Love Me," "If It's Alright With You Baby" and "Love Ain't Too Far Away" (not to mention the dancefloor-aimed "Drawn And Quartered"), The Korgis made a play for the public’s heartstrings and finally cooked up a worthy smash with the ballad "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime."

The centerpiece of Dumb Waiters' success, and the song that The Korgis will always be remembered for, "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" is one of those songs that exists outside of the standard pop plane: it sounds more like a four-minute contemplative swoon than anyone’s idea of a hit single. Floating almost lighter than air on delicate beds of shimmering synths like a highly-polished revision of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love," "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" propelled The Korgis into the Top 5 on their homeland's hit parade, while also giving them their one-and-only charted record in the U.S., as it reached the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 right at Christmas, 1980 (Dumb Waiters performed much more modestly on these shores, reaching #113 right around the same time).

Having finally tasted real success at last, The Korgis then found out just how quickly fortunes can turn around in the music business. "If It's Alright With You Baby" was chosen as the follow-up single to "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" and quickly crashed and burned at #56 later that summer, stopping their momentum on a dime. A third album, 1981’s Sticky George, which leaned more towards the 60's influences and away from the synth textures (without completely forsaking them), disappeared virtually on release, and ended The Korgis’ tenure with their label, Rialto Records. The band broke up soon afterwards with little fanfare.

Following the utter apathy that greeted the release of his 1986 solo album Burning Question (I guess he might as well have reformed Stackridge), James Warren elected to give The Korgis one more shot. With Davis back on board, “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” was re-recorded and released again in 1990 to hardly any notice at all outside of the nostalgia circuit, which is also the same response awarded to their reunion album, 1992’s This World’s For Everyone. Following that debacle, The Korgis disbanded again, this time apparently for good.

Buy The Best Of The Korgis from Amazon.com.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Furnace St.

On the occasions when I profiled local music during my short-lived stint as a professional writer, I always sought to be as encouraging to whatever bands I was covering as possible, whether I actually enjoyed their music or not (invariably, it was almost always "not"). It was towards the end of this writing career that I was presented with the debut CD by a local duo called Furnace St. and had a kind of instantaneous "YES!!" reaction to hearing it for the first time that was all-too rare to my jaded sensibilities back then.

It's difficult now to convey just how much of a joyous rush listening to Furnace St.'s music gave me back in October of 1998, since synthpop was stone-cold dead and much of the electronica movement that I had been fully swept up in over the last couple of years had begun to stagnate under the weight of bandwagon-jumping and jazz-leaning, epic pretentions. Thus, it was with great excitement that I heard in this band's work the sound of two people whose musical tastes practically mirrored my own and were just as keenly interested in the sounds of old analog synthesizers and despairing, yet undeniably pretty melodies.

Interviewing the duo for a short feature a couple of weeks later was a pleasure, as was seeing them perform live at a sparsely-attended weeknight show at Peabody's Down Under in February of 1999. Sadly, the eventual intrusion of (and massive changes brought forth by) life after my Scene / Spot period caused me to lose touch with the band (not to mention track of their career), though that irreplaceable debut CD has made many trips into my CD player in the years since.

It was while researching this post to see what Furnace St. has been up to over the last few years that I became aware that life had intruded on their plans as well: an announcement of the duo now being in a state of "indefinite hiatus" was a sad surprise, indeed. With that in mind, this post has become a tribute to these two people who have created some of the most interesting synth-pop/rock I've had the pleasure of hearing in the last decade.

The musical partnershhip that ultimately became Furnace St. started in earnest around 1994, shortly after Adam Boose and Lisa Jorgensen met while attending high school. The two young musicians shared a common musical interest in the dark, atmospheric sounds of such U.K. proto-Darkwave titans as New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Ultravox. These influences were quite apparent in Furnace St.'s musical palette, which combined forbidding, goth-like bass-guitar lines, evocative old-school synthesizers, pre-programmed rhythms, whispered vocals seemingly phoned in from another plane, and fiery, distorted guitar textures.

The first release to the public of any Furnace St. material was 1998's Neuromantic -- the same album I was talking about back in the opening paragraph. By turns hypnotic, beautiful, and abrasive, this was a "work in progress" collection of lean, feral demos bristling with future promise that had me ensnared right from the first play. Beautifully fusing the anguished self-loathing of then-modern industrial rock with the striking, eerie beauty of darkwave and the doomy ambience of early 80’s U.K. synthpop, Neuromantic was initially available on an extremely limited basis before being given a full-on release (in remastered and slightly-expanded form) in the spring of 2001.

Early in 2000, Furnace St. released their first "finished" album, Ladykiller. While not as immediately seductive to me as Neuromantic, Ladykiller sported a rougher, more muscular sound from the duo as Boose's guitars ate up more of the sonic picture and moved Jorgenson's synths more to the background. Ladykiller was also sonically fleshed out by a more detailed and professional studio gloss, giving the album far more impact on a visceral level than its comparatively-understated predecessor. The slam dunk track here for me was the simmering "Oceanview": a delicious slice of pure, simmering menace.

A third Furnace St. album, Headmusic, appeared in the summer of 2002, further ratcheting-up the power chords while still retaining the songwriting sensibilities of their two releases. Headmusic was then followed by People -- a collection of album tracks remixed by friends and colleagues of the duo just before Christmas of 2003.

Since the stopgap release of People, Furnace St. continued playing live shows through at least last summer, including a gig in Belfort, France (which is pretty amazing for a completely-unsigned Midwestern U.S. act when you think about it). When not playing various venues in Ohio and surrounding states, the duo spent their downtime working on their fourth album, Extroversion.

The plan initially had been for Furnace St. to release their surprisingly more pop-accessible (though no less challenging) new album on CD, as had been the case with their previous works. However, when the decision was made to take the band off the road and effectively out of existence for the time being, the duo elected to make Extroversion available in its entirety as a free download from their recently redesigned website, which also features some additional mp3s and a couple of performance videos (including a rather surprising cover of an old 80's Top 40 chestnut) from the band's 2002 incarnation which featured bassist/guitarist/vocalist and occasional co-writer Brian D. Taylor.

For those headed over to check out the band's site or their new album, please take a couple of minutes to drop Adam or Lisa a message and let 'em know what you think of their music. Here's hoping this indefinite hiatus doesn't necessarily spell the end of a talented partnership.

Disillusion

As perhaps the most widely-covered news event in four decades, September 11, 2001 was looked at endlessly and from nearly every conceivable angle as round-the-clock news coverage at all major networks literally stretched onwards for days. Once that 4-5 day period of nonstop coverage ended, I remember watching the news wrap-ups on CNN every night and listening to NPR in the car and in the computer room at home for a month or so afterwards as the political and cultural fallout of that day continued to drop from the skies (I should note here that this was also the last time to the present day that I have listened to the radio on anything approaching a regular basis).

With so many books, DVDs, and TV programming aimed at re-living or re-experiencing the event through one thematic lens or another, everyone remembers or observes September 11 differently. For me, this reflection has already changed considerably over the last four years. Initially, as I'm sure was (and still is) the case with many others, I remembered the surreal horror of the day, watching videos that re-created that disorienting sense of freefall and exponentially-rising anger that I felt watching the World Trade Center disintegrate and the Pentagon burn, then the intense sorrow at the stories of senseless loss and despair from the multitudes affected by it all.

Over time, though, my thoughts of September 11 began to focus instead on the weeks after instead of that day itself. It feels extremely weird to say it now, but I look back on that fearful, paranoid, shaken, uncertain span of months with a sense of bitter nostalgia for the way things were. No, I'm not talking about everyone being utterly freaked out and seeing Al Qaeda operatives everywhere they looked, but rather I find myself pining for the short time after September 11 when this country was not divided into two screaming halves, each one trying to force a sock in the mouth of the other once and for all. This was the last time, for better or worse, that we really were a nation united behind anything or anyone.

I realize that I tend to speak in sweeping numbers when talking about this subject, but there was a palpable change in individual people as well. Yes, there was outrage and sorrow in nearly every face, and the crackpots had (and continue to have) a field day with all of the grandiose conspiratorial opportunities offered up by the scale of these attacks, but there was also a new tendency at the store of people suddenly looking each other in the eyes when they spoke, with a note of warmth or concern that felt weirdly alien and yet unmistakably comforting. Without us ever having discussed doing so, Greg and I replaced the ubiquitous "have a good day" farewell with a more personalized "take care" and it seemed like everyone was more polite and considerate and kind to each other all at once. Hell, even MTV found itself a voice of compassion and care for one day, setting aside the mindless anomie and bling-bling in lieu of music of compassion and hope. Yes, all of this happened for all the wrong reasons, but it was a beautiful thing while it lasted.

So, what happened to this wonderful time when we actually all got along? In effect, we blew it. Or someone blew it, depending on your outlook ...

There is no denying whatsoever that the events of September 11 were anything less than an act of war: this was a conclusion that no one disagreed with. Despite being pandered to with one of the lamest, most stilted, most uncomforting speeches from our leadership later that evening, the nation rallied around the President to an extent unseen since at least the Gulf War in 1991, and probably even as far back as World War II. It helped immensely that after this faltering start, dear old W. set about earning his leadership stripes. Finally drawing up the kind of gravitas and stone-faced resolve the country sorely needed, W. pulled off the impossible and started to talk and act like "my President." It didn't hurt that he had a Cabinet full of veterans of previous administrations (read: the Gulf War), which certainly made me feel at the time like we were headed down the correct course.

Not knowing what was going to happen next, but grateful that someone had stepped in to take the steering wheel, America gave the President a political blank check: in effect, allowing him to do whatever he had to do, and we waited to be asked for whatever sacrifice was needed to accomplish the new goals of our new War On Terror ... and what's heartbreaking to remember is that at the time, we would have gladly made it. There was a lot of bloodlust and a shared thirst for revenge, to be certain, but on the other hand there was also a real desire to help out, as evidenced by the enormous amount of volunteers and monies collected for whatever relief fund asked for them. This time, to me, was the golden opportunity for the United States to really move forward together and take on this problem by the horns (neverminding that it was just about as useful a war as that against drugs or crime or whatever intangible Enemy Of Goodness you wish to insert here), look into alternate ways of obtaining energy, and show the world how strong and resolute we could be when the time came ... but that time never arrived.

Instead of being asked to do anything that involved any kind of shared sacrifice or effort whatsoever, we were told to shop and spend. I realize that no politician anywhere wants to be the one to say "hey, you need to cut back on your gasoline consumption, America. How about it?" but this was the one unprecedented chance W. would have had to do exactly that and not face a firestorm of scorn or cries for his head on a platter. But, I suppose, this was never going to happen in a country utterly beholden to gargantuan "special interests" and lobbies.

Don't worry about this problem, W. said with a pat on our collective noggins, we're taking care of it. It is not of your concern. Go back to your lives. Take an airplane flight. Go shopping. Go to sleep. Let me sign this Patriot Act to protect you from this ever happening again. Oh, and God bless America.

Right from the instant the above became the default war plan as far as the American Public was concerned, little alarm bells started to ring in my head. I knew that, in a sense, W. was absolutely right to beseech everyone to not to stop the American economy on a dime (domestic consumer spending powers a surprisingly large portion of this country's growth), but this compounded with the idea that life as we know it was going to keep on chugging along as if nothing at all had happened somehow felt all wrong. This new war was going to be background noise while we pressed on with our existence, and it was going to go on for months, years, decades, depending on you talked to about it. I won't even mention what book this instantly reminded me of, but I know I wasn't the only one wondering months later if the new creepily-monikered
"Homeland Security Department" shouldn't have instead been called the "Ministry Of Peace."

I had forgiven W. for that godawful speech on the evening of the 11th, (since Rudolph Giuliani was doing a far better job of playing Head Cheese that day), but being told in effect that it was my patriotic duty to whip out my credit card and get a plasma TV or an SUV and who knows what else felt perverse and insultingly condescending (I won't even get into the additional tax cuts offered shortly afterward as well). It also, I believe, began to dissipate that aura of "we're all in this together," though the true political/ideological battle lines wouldn't begin to show up until a year later when the saber rattling and preparations for the invasion of Iraq (under the disguise of waiting for diplomacy) began in earnest. By that point, we had come full circle again, not only with each other in this country, but with the rest of the world as well. That sense of loss, almost moreso than the loss of life on that awful day, has become for me the most haunting aspect of September 11.

As hopelessly simplistic, childish, and dramatic as it sounds, I want my old country back.

That Morning

Being the habitual late riser that I am, I was utterly dead to the world until I heard the news. I would have slept right on into the early afternoon and awakened to one hell of a surprise since I'd never have heard the phone ringing down the hall in the old apartment. However, Sarah had just come back from classes sometime around 10 A.M. and tried to rouse me from my slumber by telling me with great understatement: "hey....you might want to wake up. Some really weird things are happening."

That didn't exactly get me going. I barely moved, and mumbled a toneless "uhhh like what" out of the corner of my mouth.

"Well...someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."

Groggily, all I could muster was a noncommittal reply. "Huh. That sucks."

"Well...a few minutes later, another plane crashed into the other tower."

I didn't see that one coming. I opened my eyes and squinted at her in the bright light of morning. "What?"

Sarah then told me of the (erroneous, as it turned out) rumor of a car bombing at the State Department, then hit me with the haymaker punch: "And then, someone crashed another plane into the Pentagon."

That news did the trick, affecting me like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water onto the bed. We'd just gone from "terrorism" to out-and-out war. I sat up fast and aimed an unbelieving, incredulous stare at her. "WHAT?"

A bleary-eyed hustle down the hall from the bedroom to the living room followed, and I flipped around from CBS to NBC to ABC to Fox and to CNN ... all of them showing the twin towers steaming blackly away like giant steel chimneys, alternating with views of the stoved-in side of the Pentagon. It struck me at that instant that the Pentagon looked to be in far worse shape than the Trade Center, which I think was due to my having been in close proximity to the place during a weekend trip to Washington D.C. in 1994. In contrast, I haven't been in New York City since I was a kid, and I have very few memories of the place, and thus I had no real sense of scale to apply to what I was looking at in those pictures. My initial thought was that the Trade Center towers had been broadsided by a Cessna packed with C-4.

A few minutes later, whatever network I was watching at the time flipped to a rerun of the second plane going into the tower. I don't think my eyes bugged that wide or my jaw went that slack since the morning of the Challenger explosion. It wasn't the spectacular fireball that made my stomach feel like it had just dropped into my lap, but instead it was seeing the object that caused the explosion -- certainly not a Cessna or a Lear Jet.

"Holy shit..."

A couple of minutes later, the first tower went down right in front of my eyes. Like so many others, it was at first impossible to grasp that what I was seeing something happening in the Real World and not some summer action movie -- the scale of this just completely poleaxed me.

I think it was at some point in the utter fucking pandemonium after the first tower had come down that my brain suddenly kicked on again and began to process what I had just seen, and I heard myself splutter out: "Jesus Christ! Were there passengers on those planes?!"

As it turns out ... yes, there were.

Crisis Mismanagement

All of the music-related posts I once had archived here in I Am A Bug, were mirrored columns: all of them are actually intended for 45RPM, the mp3 blog run by my old friend and ex-Den co-worker Mike Beaumont. I mirrored these Sunday Synthpop Brunch posts in this forum merely to keep I Am A Bug active in the frequent times when I’m not in the mood to write outside of the 45RPM framework.

Crescent City Blues briefly explained why I was not submitting a regular column for this weekend (or the next, for that matter), but I deliberately shied away from going any further into the subject with my personal thoughts since 45RPM isn’t the place for them. This blog, however, is.

I try very hard not to let myself rant on politics, but it gets harder to avoid outrage lately, either due to the slow onset of fogeydom or perhaps the current cast of jokers inhabiting the White House. I am not a professional pundit and no one’s idea of an expert in this field, and so I try to avoid inflicting pure, annoyed venting on people. Making it even more frustrating to vent on this subject is that while I may not like The Way Things Are, I also have no constructive answers to these problems. Thus, I tend to look upon these rants as empty, self-indulgent wanks that do nothing but add to the already-deafening background noise of the internet.



Then along came the events of the last week, and … well, it’s pretty hard to find the words, isn’t it? I’m going to give it a try, regardless.

I haven't been this worked-up over the state of the U.S. gub'mint since that dreary, awful, soul-killing morning after Election Day last year. That was a pretty fucking terrible day, but even that had no comparison to the epic, needless suffering experienced by the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not just talking about the shame of New Orleans, either ... plenty of equally enraging stories of neglect and half-assed bureaucratic effort have come from Mississippi and Alabama as well, and I am pretty goddamned angry right now thinking about it (I think "downright furious" covers it better, actually). I am also embarrassed, ashamed, stunned, and (best of all for the intents of this post) increasingly vitriolic at the absolute clusterfuck that marked the official world premiere demonstration of the power of our wonderfully-integrated Department Of Homeland Security and FEMA. I gotta save some shout-outs for the Senate, and the White House too, since they worked with DHS and FEMA to create a "perfect storm" of haplessness in the face of a natural disaster that was the most gobsmacking display of organizational pratfalls, shameless, childlike deflection-of-blame and sheer clueless bungling that I have seen from this government in my lifetime.

What happened in New Orleans last week was "the anti-9/11," as coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks, in every possible fashion:

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

Jesus, what if this had happened instead to Manhattan? Norfolk? Washington D.C.? Kennebunkport? I can't be the only person who feels that if any of these places been hit instead of New Orleans, the level and speed of response would have been a very different story indeed. We already know what would have been the case had the damage been as terrible in Florida: FEMA (and even Our Fearless Leader) were on the scene the instant the storm(s) had finished passing through, walking the streets, cutting checks, helping Americans out, showing how much their government cared about their well-being. Of course, that was during an election year, in a state run by Our Leader's brother, and a territory that he absolutely, positively had to win in order to get re-elected, but I digress ...

I have long since grown calloused and immune to hearing out man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but when this extends to the government of the United States, I can't help but be staggered by it all. As if there was any doubt whatsoever with whom the priorities of this administration lay (re-election at all costs followed by the fortunes of the upper class, all other priorities rescinded), last week cleared them up beyond all doubt.

Much as it pains me to admit, you cannot lay the all of the blame for last week at the feet of the President. There, I said it. No, this was a failure on nearly every level of government from the Oval Office all the way down to the city of New Orleans itself. For a disaster that had been talked about for years (and over which Michael Brown, the absolutely-useless head of FEMA tells us that they had just practiced for last year), the various bureaucracies were behaving like freshly-guillotined chickens. Exactly what is the point of declaring an statewide emergency in multiple states a day and change before the hurricane makes landfall if nothing happens for days afterwards?

Listening to the likes of Trent Lott and Mary Landrieu prattle on during interviews like they had just won a fucking Oscar was absolutely fucking unreal (and thank God for anchors like Anderson Cooper who have cut these sanctimonious fucks off at the knees with a cold splash of reality when the occasion arose). Exactly where in the hell does this Government fly to when the city of Washington D.C. shuts down every August? New Zealand? Tahiti? Ganymede? Nowhere in this reality, apparently. For chrissakes, when even the likes of Shephard Smith at Fox News is left nearly speechless on-air wondering what in the samhell is going on (not to mention deliciously handing a slice of de-politicized reality to such putrid, insulated minor Antichrists as O'Reilly and Hannity), you know that things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

To her credit, Landrieu recently issued a press release indicating that Bush's arrival at a levee repair site in New Orleans was a sham. A fucking photo-op. Nothing more. What a surprise. Also, how very convenient that his arrival was on the very same day that the REAL help finally began to arrive in New Orleans at last. Coincidence, I'm sure.

So, the city of New Orleans and a giant swath of the Gulf Coast is effectively no more as I type this, and one wonders if this region will ever be what it once was. The question also remains of what will happen to the displaced and nearly-entirely destitute population which seemingly now inhabits every domed facility in the Deep South at this hour. Is there another patented Magic Bush Tax Cut in the offing to somehow make all of the reconstruction and the strain on the social services of states hosting the refugees come together?

If there is to be any silver lining in this whatsoever, it's that the opportunity exists at amazing cost to correct the mistakes of the past in rebuilding New Orleans, but an unbelievably, incalculaby huge cleanup will come first. The scale of this is just beyond me: The Big O, The Crescent City, The Big Easy, whatever you may call it is nothing more than a dessicated, filth-ridden, waterlogged city of the dead.

From the inactions and miscues we have seen all last week, it has become glaringly apparent that we have achieved absolutely nothing since September 11 in the areas of security and disaster relief. We can have aircraft carriers off of Banda Aceh in a day or so after a tsunami erases half of the city, but we can't shoehorn any National Guard troops in a major urban area in this country for 4-5 days after a hurricane that everyone saw coming two days before it hit. And how about this for a cherry on the sundae: we are more vulnerable to societal/administrative decay (and resultant anarchy) than we ever knew.

Happy Labor Day.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Baltimora

Like nearly all diabolical dancepop singles from Europe, "Tarzan Boy" is a tune that gets stuck in your head on infinite repeat as soon as you hear it, whether you like it or not. This singularly catchy/annoying quality created a worldwide sensation that not only charted in multiple territories, but also helped promote a couple of ultra-lame Hollywood movies, hawk mouthwash and even sell a gay-aimed energy drink. Not too shabby for a one-hit flash-in-the-pan, eh?

While most people watching the very cheaply-done "Tarzan Boy" video clip might have figured that Northern Ireland-born Jimmy McShane was in fact Baltimora, it turns out that McShane was actually a hired "face" lip-syncing the words: the actual singing (not to mention songwriting and production) was instead handled by noted Italo-disco figure Maurizio Bassi.

Sounding like some kind of weird fusion of A-Ha and The Tokens, Baltimora swept over Europe during the summer of 1985 before finding release stateside via EMI Records. The time it took for EMI to finally break "Tarzan Boy" in America resulted in the song earning a six month stay on the Hot 100, ultimately peaking at #13 in the early spring of 1986.

While "Tarzan Boy" might be an unapologetically vapid pop confection, it pales in silliness and sheer goofiness next to the similarly-styled (not to mention equally suggestive) "Woody Boogie," which was chosen as the follow-up single in Europe. While "Woody Boogie" somehow managed to make some waves overseas, the American market was instead serviced with Living In The Background's rather unmemorable title cut instead, which only managed a paltry 4 weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at #87 in April of 1986. A follow-up album, Key Key Karimba, was released a year later and managed to sell pretty well in Italy and nowhere else. Thus endeth Baltimora...until Hollywood intervened a few years later.

Considering how quintessentially 1980s the song sounded by that point, it's incredible that "Tarzan Boy" made a second run up the Hot 100 in the spring of 1993, climbing to back up to #51 thanks to its appearance in the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. No such resurgence occured when the song appeared again in a movie a few years later: this time in the best-forgotten 1997 Chris Farley caper Beverly Hills Ninja.

Having successfully gone Hollywood, Baltimora took to Madison Avenue next as the seemingly deathless "Tarzan Boy" managed to make millions of impressions nationwide one more time thanks it its use in a popular Listerine commercial, which featured the song playing (sans lead vocals) while a sprightly, computer-animated bottle of green minty mouthwash swung around on vines in some colorful digital jungle. Awesome.

In a much lesser known product campaign, "Tarzan Boy" also became the "official theme song" for an energy drink called Gay Fuel. To the best of my understanding, Gay Fuel is roughly analogous to Red Bull, only with far more aphrodisiac properties (it is supposedly fortified with natural herbal stimulants and immune system boosters) and the concoction is colored pink instead of yellow. No, I am not making this shit up.

Hardly any information is available anywhere (at least in un-mauled English) as to what Maurizio Bassi has been up to since his studio creation briefly took over the world. It is known that Bassi has since worked with megastar Eros Ramazzotti and the Italian disco groups Silver Pozzoli and Passengers (no relation to the U2/Brian Eno project of the same name), but aside from these projects, his life and fortunes remain a mystery.

Sadly, this is not the case for Baltimora's "face": Jimmy McShane died of AIDS on March 28, 1995. He was 37 years old.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Die Warzau

Made up of guitarist/synthesist/singer Van Christie and drummer/vocalist Jim Marcus, the Chicago synthwave act Die Warzau was initially signed to Fiction Records (longtime home to The Cure and distributed stateside via Mercury Records in this instance) largely on their envelope-pushing live reputation as a performance art group and also since their sound seemed to mesh with the sensibilities of the underground industrial scene starting to stir around in the clubs of the Windy City.

Following 1988's Disco Rigido, Die Warzau next surfaced on Atlantic Records in 1991 with Big Electric Metal Bass Face, a more streamlined release that found the duo moving away from the classic "industrial" sound towards a more dance-friendly and melodic sound, equal parts dance, funk, and pop with a "rock" lean to the sound and occasional interesting blasts of atmospherics in the mix. One could almost say that Die Warzau were set up to serve as the "bridge" between the industrial underground and the pop/rock mainstream. Alas, their timing wasn't quite right, and their album managed to find an underground audience over time but never broke beyond that level.

This intoxicating, sample-heavy formula was then perfected on the band's third album, Engine, which found a release on Chicago's world-famous Wax Trax! label in 1995, long after ex-label darlings Trent Reznor and Al Jourgensen had managed to bring industrial music into the mainstream at the major label level. For Die Warzau, Engine may not have been a platinum payday, but it definitely felt like they had come home: following their twin major label efforts, which were pretty much at total odds with the rest of the mainstream pack around them, Engine was a natural fit for a label like Wax Trax!, whose catalog almost certainly inspired a fair amount of the duo's earlier works.

It probably didn't hurt the finished product that the duo had also accrued a lot of production experience in the intervening years since Big Electric Metal Bass Face. For a while, the name Die Warzau became more synonymous with "remixing" and "special thanks to" credits than for their original music as they worked with such grassroots-level electro-rock luminaries as Sister Machine Gun, Machines Of Loving Grace, Pigface, Revenge, Gravity Kills and KMFDM (not to mention some even higher profile remix work for Björk).

Engine also contained what many consider to be Die Warzau's shining achievement: the hazy techno-rocker "All Good Girls," which became a remarkable success for the band at college radio and dance clubs. A great snapshot of the duo's rich palette of influences, "All Good Girls" was also prominently featured (along with a bevy of other Wax Trax! heavyweights) in the Jeff Goldblum horror film Hideaway, which didn't wind up being that much of a career break as the film failed to take flight with audiences despite rather eerie depictions of damnation and torment that set up the supernatural basis of the thriller.

Following nine years in the scrap pile of disbanded acts fed up with the record industry, Die Warzau suddenly reformed as a quartet (featuring new members Abel Garibaldi and Dan Evans) and issued a new album on a different Chicago label called Pulseblack Records in October of last year. Titled Convenience, the new album finds Die Warzau moving even farther away from their not-quite-industrial roots towards a sound more reminscent of Depeche Mode. There is also a revisitation of "All Good Girls" in the new album's closing track, "Shine," though no word as of yet as to whether it measures up to the original (Sadly, I don't have any mp3s available from this new album at the time of writing this article, though a song from this release is available for streaming at their MySpace page).

Life Can Be So Nice

A rare full-weekend off (complete with rawkin' thunderstorm line that marched through here as I started to write this) affords me the opportunity to say "HI!!!!" to everyone out there in the internets and also update this thing on recent life and stuff like that. A welcoming shout-out is also holla'd out to Mike Oberstar, whom I haven't seen in a looong time and who stopped in at the store over the last week for a nice chat.

First things first, the accursed car is running fine and dandy, thank you very much. That being said, there is one new issue to be reported as it now appears that the rear brakes may be in need of imminent maintenance (though not to the same degree as the front set). We'll just see about that. Really.

Thanks to said car, I'm still in "save money and pay off debts for a couple of months" mode, and I'll be tackling some sundry projects here and there to keep myself occupied for a bit. First and foremost of these new projects is the final relocation of all these goddamn boxes that have been sitting in this office since the day we moved in this condo (which is about a week and change short of a year ago now).

There is also the pressing need I feel to back up about 90 gigs worth of data from this computer as well, just in case of some catastrophic system failure that would leave me pretty well fucked if it happened, say, tomorrow. Backing up on that scale is, of course, a monstrously tedious task which is not made any easier by the never-ending stream of new stuff I keep grabbing off usenet (and lately courtesy of that amazing technological creation called Bit Torrent, though I've been having some system stability issues with that lately) not to mention my weekly sweeps of a few dozen mp3 blogs.

Another project that I'd like to tackle as I get some spare time is picking up some additional HTML skillz. Y'all might have noticed the explosion of pictures on this blog over the last couple of months, and I'm starting to get the hang of some other tricks of the trade here and there which, ultimately, points towards me joining the rest of the late Twentieth Century and creating an actual website with links and pictures and Goat knows what else. As of right now, this is all that I've put together...but I'll let y'all know if and when that changes.

While we're on that tip, I wouldn't mind tarting up this blog a bit as well since I think I'm starting to tire a bit with this template and a distinct lack of handy accoutrements that I have not figured out how to add to this page yet (i.e., links to other blogs and friends and et cetera). I'd also be interested someday in setting up a Google homepage ... but this all much farther down the line.

Last Sunday was a pretty good day all around as we headed downtown and spent a few hours in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with an old 'net friend, the one and only Dave Lynch (no, not the damned movie director), who was in town visiting. We hadn't seen Dave since we met for lunch at Hopkins Airport (with a swing over to Tower City for the "food" part) a couple of years ago easy, and we haven't been in the Rock Hall since the summer of 2001.

It was a blast to hang out with Dave again (though I wish the weather had been slightly more agreeable on that day) and it was fun to see some new displays and presentations at the Hall (though I can't say I was overly thrilled to see that the featured attraction this year is devoted to freakin' Tommy of all things). I really need sometime to just get down there at opening time and spend the entire day in the place, checking out everything as thoroughlly as possible and not feeling like time is running low (for whatever reason, we always seem to wind up being in a rush for one reason or another when we are down there and I keep thinking we missed something somewhere).

In an amusing new development, despite being neutered almost as soon as we brought him home, it looks like little Moe has discovered the joys of dry-humping Ghidorah's back. Even better yet, his preferred place for engaging in this happens to be in the bay window in full view of anyone who happens to be walking, driving or biking by. Beautiful.

Otherwise, things are going pretty fairly here during the times we aren't hosting amateur performances of Behind The Green Curtain for the neighbors. My job continues to go well, with this month looking so far like it'll be a bit more helpful towards attaining our new best-year-ever figure than July or June (which were rather flat). Sarah has a new job at Case which she started this past week and involves lab mice in many aspects -- not limited to working with them, monitoring them, breeding them, and eventually performing surgery on them. Insert "eewww" face here.

Speaking of my job, my friend (and ex Record Den co-worker) Dave Makatura has started hosting a whole bunch of Record Den pictures of varying vintage on the Other Pages section of his long-running website for the enjoyment of those interested. Some of these date back as far as 1982, and a few of them had me blanching in horror at clothes I only distantly recall and a haircut that I must have blocked from my memory for a decade...

Alright, it's off for now to enjoy the rest of my Saturday in one form or another. I think I might busy myself with one of the projects I mentioned above...or perhaps we may hang out with friends, or there are a couple of video games that I've picked up over the last couple of YEARS that I still haven't found the time to play, maybe some catching up on DVDs or the rest of the books I have yet to read...

Gads. Where did all the free time go?

NP Our Daughter's Wedding Digital Cowboy

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Eurythmics

The story goes that struggling musician David A. Stewart met Annie Lennox while she was waitressing in a London cafe in 1976 and was so immediately taken with her that the first words out of his mouth were "will you marry me?"

At the time, Lennox had already performed in various jazz and cabaret combos after dropping out of London's Royal Academy of Music, where she had been studying classical music. As a romance between the two quickly blossomed (despite Lennox refusing Stewart's marriage offer), Stewart decided to break up Longdancer, the folk act he had been involved with, and start up a new pop trio with his new girlfriend and fellow ex-Longdancer, guitarist Peet Coombes. While Lennox possessed a keening, evocative voice with a naturally soaring quality, she split her vocals in the new band with Coombes (the band's primary songwriter) and played some keyboards on the side. Calling themselves Catch, the trio issued a single in 1977 before beefing up their ranks by adding a bass player and drummer and then rechristened themselves as The Tourists.

The story of The Tourists isn't that dissimilar from that of many bands who taste success but can't quite make that jump to the next level of popularity for whatever reason. For The Tourists, success was earned over the course of their first albums and a fistful of singles chart incursions, most notably the twin top 10 songs: "So Good To Be Back Home Again" and a cover of the old Dusty Springfield chestnut "I Only Wanna Be With You" (a rather canny cover choice as the band tended to wear their overwhelmingly sixties pop/folk influence on their sleeves).

Following this breakthrough, however, things went downhill rather quickly when the third Tourists album (Luminous Basement ) failed to sell. Those ever-popular "creative tensions" surfaced between Stewart and Coombes, mainly over the direction of the band's music, which had taken a distinct turn away from the 60's pop aesthetic and towards a more modern, electronics-dusted sound. If the power struggle between Stewart and Coombes wasn't bad enough news, a myriad of external issues concerning everything from the band's management to record label woes to the tender mercies of the acid-blooded U.K. music press combined to bring about the end of the band in a matter of months. Perhaps worst of all, Lennox and Stewart's relationship fell apart at around this same time, though the ex-lovers (perhaps sensing they were onto something special) continued working together as a creative team after their romantic breakup.

Unsurprisingly, considering the direction flirted with on the last Tourists album, the new material recorded by Stewart and Lennox was far more experimental and far less "pop" in nature than that of their previous band. Most of the experimental nature of this work derived from Stewart's increasing fascination with synthesizers as the means to an end in lieu of guitars and "standard" pop instrumentation. RCA Records, who had picked up The Tourists just before their second album, was interested in the potential of the new duo (now called Eurythmics after a method of music instruction first demonstrated by Swiss educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1906), and kept them under contract, remaining their business home throughout the rest of their recording career, together and apart.

The first Eurythmics album, In The Garden, was released in the fall of 1981. Recorded by legendary producer Conny Plank (probably the pre-eminent experimental/"Krautrock" studio figure, best known for his work with pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Ultravox, Devo, Neu!, and had also supervised the final Tourists sessions), In The Garden was stark, rather charmless debut that offered up an interesting mix of styles and influences in a more avant-garde sound than The Tourists, but with no real breakout potential in any of the tracks, save for the single "Never Gonna Cry Again," which had slinked as "high" as No. 63 in the charts over the summer.

With In The Garden a no-show in the album rankings, Eurythmics hit the road in an attempt to get some kind of momentum happening. While a few backing musicians had been utilized in the studio to create the album, Stewart and Lennox performed strictly as a duo on this trek, with an extensive use of backing tapes and synthesizers (which I believe was the first time this kind of performance set-up with a duo had ever been attempted as this was a full year before the existence of the next great electropop duo, Yaz).

More songwriting followed quickly thereafter, though all three singles the duo released in 1982 failed to break the Top 50 (two of them never made the charts at all). About the only good news with these records was that they were all recorded at Stewart's own home studio which he had built to help keep down production costs (as ponying up continually for professional studio time would only compound the duo's worsening financial stituation). Despite the promise and quality of the new material, this was not a happy time for Eurythmics: the stresses of trying to make a living (and failing at each attempt) while trying to keep RCA from dropping them in the process was taking a tangible physical and psychological toll on the duo, with both members laid low at various times out of sheer exhaustion and frustration.

In February of 1983, however, the hard work and emotional toil invested in the second Eurythmics album began to pay off quite handsomely: in fact, that album became the work that changed their lives and fortunes forever. While Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) was on the surface a more polished and colder-sounding album than it's predecessor, this time around there were a handful of songs present that resonated strongly with the record-buying public. Timing was certainly a mitigating factor as well, as the "experimental" sounds Stewart had been working with over the previous couple of years had now become the hot new sound in pop music. Almost overnight, Eurythmics had achieved a critical mass, and their new album exploded worldwide over that synthpop-dominated summer.

While it would be doing a disservice to the arrestingly unique sound of the album's title cut to simply state that MTV airplay is what powered the song to the top of the U.S. singles charts, the influence of the channel on the band's immediate success in America cannot be denied. The surreal, bovine-filled videoclip for "Sweet Dreams" was a huge MTV favorite over that summer, and Lennox cut a stunning figure on TV, lip-syncing the song's lyrics while dressed in a pinstripe suit and tie, her close-cropped hair dyed brilliant orange/red (Stewart was content to sit on the sidelines, emotionlessly tapping away at a computer keyboard or playing a cello in a field). The "Sweet Dreams" video also kick-started a year long Bowie-esque flirtation with gender-bending on Lennox's part, as the singer used wigs and makeup to look almost completely different (and in one case, almost passably male) in all of the band's early videos.

It's worth noting that the million-selling "Sweet Dreams" was also the first of only two synthpop singles to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, the other being Michael Sembello's equally-robotronic fluke smash "Maniac" (which, funnily enough, was the song that succeeded Eurythmics at the summit). A follow-up single, "Love Is A Stranger" (one of the band's failed U.K. singles in late 1982), fell just shy of the U.S. Top 20 a couple of months later, a real shame since that song's sleek, dark, insistent pulse was just as unique-sounding on the radio as its predecessor.

While the duo's singles were winding down their chart runs, MTV aired Eurythmics: Live From Heaven, a concert shot at the London nightclub of the same name that showed the duo performing selections from Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) and In The Garden along with 3-piece backing band (and a troika of 80's-coiffed backing singers). A couple of promo videos appeared midway through the set in the form of "Love Is A Stranger" and a jaw-dropping, gospel-inflected rearrangement of "This City Never Sleeps" that knocks me off my feet to this day. I'd only had a beat-up VHS copy of this show to watch for years, and thus I was delighted recently to find out that this concert has been issued on DVD. Energetic, effortlessly cool and stuffed with songs that often sound superior to the studio versions, Live From Heaven cannot be recommended highly enough for anyone into the duo's early work. Fantastic stuff.

In the faster-paced release market that existed before the 1990s, the only way to follow a breakout year was to outdo yourself the following year, and Eurythmics proved themselves up to the task as the band's third album Touch appeared in early 1984. An instantaneous success, Touch gave the duo their first Top 10 placing in the Billboard album charts and sold over a million copies, buoyed by a trio of dizzyingly eclectic synthpop classics: the giddy, artifcial tropicalia of "Right By Your Side," the digitized torch song "Who's That Girl" and the breathtaking epic "Here Comes The Rain Again" (which remains one of the most beautiful singles in the electropop canon).

Since these were still the days when Billboard allowed what were essentially overpriced 12" singles to appear on their album charts, a Eurythmics dance EP (creatively titled Touchdance, wouldn't you know) surfaced in July of that year, containing vocal remixes and extended instrumentals of a couple of Touch album cuts, ostensibly for club play.

Even with their new album still riding the charts, Eurythmics kept to a punishing work ethic of touring, writing and recording with hardly any breaks -- trying to strike whilst the proverbial iron was still hot, perhaps. Even then, it came as a total surprise to fans when the announcement of a fourth Eurythmics album was made in the fall of 1984. A largely instrumental work that now sounds years ahead of its time, this new album was the intended soundtrack for Michael Radford's recreation of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 and instead became one of the great "lost albums" of that decade.

In an embarrasing turn of events, hardly any of the music on the album 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother) made it into the finished film. Apparently, Eurythmics were asked by Virgin Records (the movie's financier) to craft the soundtrack without Radford's consent or knowledge, and the director was furious when informed of the move since he had already commissioned a film score by composer Dominic Muldowney. Pronouncing the 1984 soundtrack album "too contemporary" to be used in his film, Radford ended up rejecting roughly 90% of the work and stuck with Muldowney's more traditional score instead. Ouch.

Making matters worse was that RCA didn't consider the soundtrack album a "proper" Eurythmics release and therefore didn't bother to give the record anywhere near the level of promotion enjoyed by Touch or Sweet Dreams. While enough diehard Eurythmics fans became aware of 1984 to drive it briefly into the bottom reaches of the Top 100 of the U.S. albums chart over the winter, the album didn't hang around very long afterward and was virtually forgotten by the general public within months.

That's not to say that RCA didn't at least try: two singles from 1984 were issued to radio, and both ran straight into a brick wall. The first, an uptempo pop-funk number called "Sexcrime" had some serious problems gaining airplay at pop stations thanks to its title and the word "sex" being machine-gunned at the listener throughout the song's running time (oh, heavens!). Edited versions of the song (which merely chopped off the opening few seconds of the track) were serviced to radio and MTV to alleviate the strain on delicate ears, but it was to no avail.

The haunting second single from 1984, "Julia," seemed to glide slowly by like an ocean liner and was quite possibly the doomiest sounding major label single released in 1985. It was a gorgeous track, comprised of little more than Lennox's vocoder-treated singing against a sparse, celestial bed of electronics, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing pradio rogrammers could easily sandwich between Wham! and Madonna. Oh well, it was their loss.

Following this commercial misfire, Eurythmics came back firing on all cylinders in the late spring of 1985 with their fifth album, Be Yourself Tonight. Representing the popular peak of the band as far as sales and singles were concerned, Be Yourself Tonight was also a big surprise for many people as the sound of the duo had changed dramatically in the short downtime between releases.

Save for Lennox's instantly identifiable vocals, the production aspects of the single "Would I Lie To You?" were different enough to make you wonder if this was indeed the same band that had just released "Julia" six months before. Rather than the expected icy washes of synthesizers and programmed percussion, Stewart and Lennox were now leaning strongly towards classic R&B as guitars, bass, live drums, and even a horn section took a far more prominent role in the band's sound.

The synths weren't all gone, though: the album's radiant follow-up hit "There Must Be An Angel" and the seductive fourth single "It's Alright" were both imbued with a more familiar electronic pulse, but from this point forward, the synth-heavy vestiges of the band's work disappeared from the airwaves (and largely from their albums as well). By the time album number six (Revenge) appeared in the summer of 1986, the guitars had pretty much taken over for good, and the duo had become one with the rock-fixated mainstream.