Citizen Mom

Fix Your Mind On A Crystal Day

In the space of an hour, we've had Physical Graffiti, Rubber Soul and now Cosmo's Factory. Yr Mom's in the happy place. Maaaaan.
Enjoy your Friday.

'Cause We May Not Be The Young Ones Very Long

This is the fifth installment in my Friday Guest Blogger gig for XPN's 885 Most Memorable Musical Moments blog, with apologies for ditching last week.

It took a good five years after its  debut on BBC2 for "The Young Ones" to make it all the way across the pond, to where a kid in Philly could finally watch. And even then, it was work -- these were the days before the city had cable, necessitating a VCR deal with the kid who sat next to me in homeroom and got MTV at his house in Lafayette Hill.

But dammit, I'd been reading about the British comedy series for years in the import Smash Hits magazines I bought on South Street, and it was time to see what all the fuss was about.

The first episode I laid eyes on was "Demolition," in which the lads face eviction by the wrecking ball. They each respond according to what I would soon learn was their character's typical bent: Neil attempted suicide, Rick composed poetry, Vyvyan set about knocking the house down himself, and Mike tried to seduce the female bureaucrat who came to serve the eviction notice.

It was, without question, the most punk rock thing I'd ever seen. You can watch it here.

A few episodes later, Lemmy shows up.

See, there were musical guests, but the show proceeded around them. Sometimes, as in this turn by Madness, they're central to the plot (they're performing in a pub where Vyvyan runs into his long-lost mother, who's a barmaid there).

I mean, I grew up on "Monty Python's Flying Circus" reruns on Channel 12, and thought I had a pretty good grip on absurdist sketch comedy. "The Young Ones" had the abusurdist thing down cold, but the action took place in the present-day, real-life world, not within a sketch on a sound stage. I'm not sure exactly what could have prepared me for the show's overall mindset, which seemed to be that yes, life and the act of living is just that absurd and fucked up, and don't even bother trying to make sense of it all.

There was no Ministry of Silly Walks, but there might be a middle-class anarchist who worships Cliff Richard. No dead parrots, but a crazy landlord of sketchy Eastern European extraction. A special shout-out here for Alexei Sayle, who played a whole passel of different parts -- including, in one episode, Benito Mussolini singing Italy's Eurovision Song Contest entry, "Stupid Noises" -- but is most memorable as landlord Jerzy Balowsky, a sort of bald proto-Borat.

The episode "Nasty," in which the guys try to watch a porn video but end up being chased by a vampire posing as a South African driving instructor (Sayle) was maybe my favorite.  YES, we've got a video!

Somewhere in all this, The Damned appear to sing "Video Nasty." 

This is the kind of thing I could go on about all day, but the clips are all out there on YouTube for you to check out. This fall marks 25 years since "The Young Ones." Definitely a source of many memorable musical moments.

My Fickle Friend

This is the third of my Friday Guest Blogger offerings for the XPN 885 Most Memorable Music Moments Blog. Don't forget to submit your own moments!

Of all the people who inspired and encouraged my love of rock music, Sid Mark should probably get most of the credit, followed in a close second by one Francis Albert Sinatra, (very) late of Hoboken, N.J.
See, I grew up in one of those massive old Manayunk rowhouses, er, Victorian townhomes --  three stories, five bedrooms, wide marble steps out front, the whole thing. We were lucky enough to be on the end of a row, "semi-detached," they call it, with an open alleyway between us and the neighbor on one side. In a practical sense, this meant we had something most of our neighbors didn't: windows not just in the front and back, but all along the open side of the house as well.
In reality, at least for me,  what it meant is that there was no escape from Sid and Frank on weekend mornings. My Dad, being of the Big Band Generation, was -- and is -- a music lover and general radio-phile; he's pushing 80 now and still can't fall asleep without the radio playing softly in his ear. He says this is due to his years at Girard College, where he often ended the day listening to homesick newbies cry, or from his time in the Navy.
My theory? This is a guy who married and later had five daughters and only one son. I think he kept the radio on all the time to hear other male voices. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to Sid and Frank.
Because my bedroom was on the windowed side -- in the back of the house, above the kitchen -- and because those years at Girard and in the Navy had left ol' Dad an early riser, my weekend mornings began with two things: the Sounds of Sinatra and the smell of breakfast cooking. It's also the reason I wake up sometimes on Sunday morning singing  "Stardust."

Obviously, for a teenager in the '80s, this was unacceptable. It was one thing when we were in the car with Dad and he'd patiently endure a few songs on the rock stations my brother and I would put on before flipping back to WPEN or WWDB. It was another thing to have it wafting up into my room like a whiff of frying scrapple.

It didn't take me long to figure out I needed to fight music with music, which is how I found Breakfast With The Beatles, for one thing. My efforts to block out Frank's dulcet tones meant greater exploration of music I did like; my (unsuccessful) efforts to convince my Dad that rock music wasn't all noise made me want to prove him wrong by seeking out the good stuff.

All these years later, I'm sorry to say he's still largely unconvinced, though he will listen to the Beatles and some Springsteen if he's riding in my car and I'm in charge of the radio. Myself, I came around years ago, realizing that the Glen Millers and Frank Sinatras of the world are probably as responsible for the creation and evolution of rock music as Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

Soul Sistas, Rock Chicks And Punk Rock Girls

 

Welcome to my first turn as Guest Blogger for the XPN 885 Most Memorable Musical Moments Countdown, where today I offer some significant female musical moments, all of which  helped make me the rock and roll mami I am today.  No particular order, and some will be more, er, universal than others. But like the lady says, great moments are made of small ones. And a tip o' the bra to Michaela Majoun, who keeps it real for the rock broads every Friday.

* Patti Smith on SNL, '75: Gloucester County, represent! To my sisters, Terrie and Susan, who as my teenaged babysitters let me stay up way past my bedtime, I remain in your eternal debt..

* Chrissie Hynde in the "Brass in Pocket" video. Life handbook of the girl who's never  described as "You know, the pretty one."

* Tina Turner and her bad self, 1971: OK, so I wasn't born until '72 but my mother's been a Tina fan since way back in the day; imagining this stuff coming out of the TV screen and seeping into my developing brain does explain a lot, methinks.

* Though I can't give you an exact moment when Kim Deal became important to me, I estimate it as a few minutes after my friend Jason clapped his headphones on my ears and said something like, "Listen to this, they have a girl bassist."  Then I heard her sing. Even on record, you can hear that smile in her voice.

* I'm sure there's a post in me somewhere just about Rock Hotties of the 1970s, but The Wilson Sisters are for me the most significant. So if we're talking looking for the memorable moment here, consider it the one, long ago, when Ann was the hot one, her gorgeous howl the battle cry of brunettes everywhere. And holy drum solo!

* Any number of Memorable Moments surround Janis Joplin, but for me means one thing: WMMR in the 1970s.  Feel it, people.

* Yeah, yeah, the "official" memorable rock moment about Debbie Harry will be her "rap" with Fab 5 Freddy. However, if I wrote about that, I wouldn't get to tell you about when my best friend Laura got Parallel Lines and we made a disco in her Barbie Dream House and had our dolls  slamdance to this song. And really, how did you ever live before you knew that?

... and

OK, this last one is a guilty pleasure choice for me, but I need to include Suzi Quatro, aka Leather Tuscadero. Her appearances on "Happy Days" didn't make a lot of sense to me as a kid, until I found out later what a rock star she was in Europe. But even at the time, she was a badass. And is that really Paris Hilton's mom shaking her thang in back? The video quality's too crappy to really tell.