Music

Lisa Marr

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Longtime readers of this blog know of my musical obsession with Miss Marr’s music, e.g. here and here.

My favorite thing in all of creation is a woman singer with a great voice singing great catchy pop songs.

Lisa Marr is the best gal we’ve got these days in that category.

Of course, with the injustice we must expect in this fallen world, she is not nearly well enough known.

She just mentioned on her website that someone set up a new MySpace page for her, even though she is not a fan of MySpace. (I don’t understand MySpace, which makes things easy for me.) Anyway, the MySpace page has some good songs on it, as does this page from her website. The MySpace page has three videos, and there are more on this page as well.

If you are liking her stuff, I think the best albums are 4 AM, by the Lisa Marr Experiment; Funtown, by the Beards; the Spring Demo Collection by Miss Marr. These are all available off of her website. She has a somewhat convoluted back-catalog, which includes her entire early career with Cub (a great but nonetheless underrated band). I think Cub’s best album was Come Out, Come Out. But most of her stuff, with her various bands, is good, and some of it is stellar.

Jackie DeShannon: When You Walk In The Room

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The magnificent Jackie DeShannon. The greatest era for pop songs was the mid-60s, and I am willing to argue that the greatest pop song of the era was “When You Walk in the Room”, and Jackie DeShannon wrote it. That makes her in some sense the greatest of the greatest. (Of course, she only had a minor hit with it, but the Searchers had a good version of it that was a huge hit.)

Jackie is lip-syncing in this video. In fact, she almost starts lip-syncing too early, but just grins and then starts in the right place. Even lip-syncing, just look at how cool she is: very expressive, acting out the song. And even though she is surrounded by go-go dancers, she is her own go-go dancer at the same time, and seems to be having a grand time with the whole thing.

Frank Allen from the Searchers discusses Jackie and her music in this excellent article: “‘When You walk In The Room’ is still my favourite of our hits, and that’s not simply because it was my first record with the group � . It’s just that it is a stunningly good song with a strong melody and one of the best guitar riffs ever.” Right on.

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“An old refrain, it lingers on: l’amour, toujours, l’amour…”

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I did not love Roxy Music, but I did love their song “All I Want is You”. I heard it on WBCN in Boston back in the 70s. Rock songs are not usually romantic love songs. When they say “love” they mean “gettin’ it on”. But this one is that rarity, a romantic love song, and — unusually for the arch, idiosyncratic and somewhat abstract Roxy — a genuine rock song.

Via the unspeakably great You Tube, here is a live version of “All I Want is You”. Having listened to this about 20 times, I have decided to share the joy with the ChicagoBoyz community. The always dapper Bryan Ferry is fabulous in some kind of state trooper uniform. But he was no mere fashion plate. The man had the greatest enunciation in popular music. The band is in the pocket. These guys had the goods.

This one really took me back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10QSJUAkDgo&playnext=1&list=PLD14F4DE950D93E74

Here are two other Roxy Music gems from their golden era, Do the Strand and Virginia Plain.

And as curiosity/bonus for our beloved readers, here is the recently resurrected Mission of Burma, old and gnarly but still full of spit and vinegar, playing Roxy’s Editions of You with the guy from Dinosaur, Jr. on guitar. Roxy is part of the deep structure at this point. Which is a good thing. (Thanks to Carl Ortona for the Burma link.)

(Here’s a cool Bryan Ferry interview from 1972.)

Lyrics below the fold.

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Johnny Ramone, Phil Spector, The Ronettes, etc.

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I recently had a post up about The Ronettes, with a link to a killer You Tube video of the girls in all their glory. I mentioned in that post that my favorite records back as a teenager were The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia and The Ramones Leave Home — and The Best of the Ronettes.

Michael Blowhard is a huge YouTube junkie, like me, and he kindly linked to the Ronettes post. And as it happens he’s a Ramones fan, too. Today he has a Ramones post with much gabba gabba goodness.

In an off-blog conversation we talked about Phil Spector as a link between the Ramones and the Ronettes, and he asked me if I had loved the Ramones album Phil Spector produced. Michael suggested I post my response which, amounts to a hymn of praise to the greatness of Johnny Ramone — one of my heroes — which, in revised and expanded form, follows:

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