Tag Archives: my ipod

#1134: The Clash – Rock the Casbah

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The Clash, The Clash, The Clash. Now, I appreciate the band and their influence and I understand why people would be a huge, huge fans of their music. I did revisit the London Calling album some months ago and did think that it was where Pete Doherty and Carl Barât got their whole shtick from for their Libertines stuff. Seemed so obvious while listening through it. But for me, The Clash are a group that I’ve never caught the fever over to start worshipping them. They do have some great songs, though. In fact, here’s one right now. ‘Rock the Casbah’. At least, in my opinion, it is. As one of the band’s most well-known singles, some may think it’s overplayed and they’ve heard it too much. I’m not one of those people.

Unlike the majority of Clash songs where songwriting duo Joe Strummer and Mick Jones would create the music and then continue to develop the songs with the rest of the band, ‘Rock the Casbah’ was brought into the studio almost completely finished by drummer Topper Headon. He had a piano idea in mind for some time. When one day he came into the studio and found no one there, he recorded the drums, bass guitar and piano. Strummer, Jones and regular bassist Paul Simonon came in and were impressed with what Headon had got down. After not-so-subtly rejecting Headon’s original lyrics for the track, Strummer wrote his own – detailing an ongoing situation where a king calls a ban on Western music, much to his people’s annoyance. They go ahead and play it anyway, because they just don’t care. We’re meant to imagine that this is all happening in the Middle East somewhere, most likely Iran, hence the mentions of ‘ragas’, ‘minarets’ the ‘Sharif’ and so on and so forth.

I think it was after seeing the video a few times on MTV2, or some other music video channel, that I thought the song was cool enough to add to the personal library. Upon finding out how the song was made, I always thought it was wrong how the bass guitar was mixed so low in the version that ended up on Combat Rock. Luckily, the mix used when it was reissued some years later (and in the music video above) altered that choice and pushed it forward. How Strummer sings “The Sheikh he drive his CADILLAAAC” makes me chuckle. He really hacks out the “cadillac”. You can hear a digital wristwatch alarm at one point during the track. I don’t have much else to day. I enjoy this one a lot. A shame that Topper Headon wasn’t able to enjoy the success the song he made got. He left the band before the song was released because of a slight addiction to heroin and had to witness the music video the band filmed without him with another drummer in his place.

#1133: Blink-182 – The Rock Show

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I’ve never listened to Blink-182’s 2001 album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket in full. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything if I never did. But I may be being a bit too harsh. I’m sure it has its fans, but the album being sandwiched in between what are considered to be the band’s best works with Enema of the State in ’99 and the self-titled/untitled album arriving in 2003 has built up this preconceived idea in my head that the whole record probably wouldn’t be as good. ‘Happy Holidays, You Bastard’ is a regular at the Christmas parties I have with friends. I’m pretty indifferent to it. And I’ll be one to say that ‘Anthem’ is way better than ‘Anthem Part Two’. So we’re off to a good start.

‘The Rock Show’ is a song that can be found on the album, however, and is one that’s been around in my life for a long, long time. Maybe even since 2001. I have a memory of watching the video on TV, even before I was consciously looking for music of its type. It was probably on The Box or something. My sister laughed at the scene where Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus buy a box of doves from a store and free them from their captivity. It wasn’t until years later, after finding out who Blink-182 actually were and getting into their music, that they were the group who made that song about falling in love with the girl at the rock show. The track, mainly written by bassist Mark Hoppus but credited to the entire band, was released as Take Off’s… first single.

The track is a tale of young love. Very pop-punk oriented. A boy meets a girl on the Warped Tour, they’re both into each other, they tell their parents they going to move Las Vegas… and by the song’s bridge it seems that some time’s passed and the relationship has ended, but it doesn’t stop the narrator remembering those good times as he stares at her picture on the wall and waits for a phone call that never arrives. I never realised that there was a line that was a nod to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, but it’s there, that’s quite neat, actually. It’s a tight performance by Hoppus, DeLonge and Travis Barker, energetic and very cathartic with those cymbal crashes on the “Fell in love/She said what/She’s so cool” moments in the choruses. The whole track just seems like a brief snapshot in time when things in America seemed to be carefree before another event in 2001 happened and messed everything up.

#1132: The Who – The Rock

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And here we are again. Another last song from an album that’ll be written about on here, but certainly not the last you’ll see from the band. Out of the 17 songs from The Who’s Quadrophenia, I’ve talked about ten of them, with ‘The Rock’ bringing it to a total of 11. Without looking back in those posts, I’m sure that I’ve mentioned in nearly all of them how the album is my favourite of the band’s. And I guess through that sentence, I’ve done it again. But it really is fantastic though. Was a teenager myself when I first heard it, and even though the story revolves around a character whose scene was very much of its time and place, the thoughts and feelings expressed in the lyrics are pretty much universal. Plus, the music’s top-notch. ‘The Rock’ arrives as the album’s penultimate track and the second instrumental song on there after the title track which appears earlier.

I prefer ‘The Rock’ to the ‘Quadrophenia’ song and always have done. They do almost mirror each other in terms of their structure, but the former comes at a climactic point in the album’s story, and as a result the music was made to be that little more intense. It’s here that the album’s protagonist Jimmy steals a boat and uses it to sail to a rock overlooking the sea, which is the rock referred to in the title, acting as the transitional piece between him having an almighty drug-fuelled rampage in ‘Doctor Jimmy’ and screaming for salvation in the album’s final track. Utilising the four musical themes established in the album that represent the individual members of the band, the instrumental is split into four/five sections. I’m telling you, it’s better to listen to than to read about, so maybe I won’t go through them all. Leave it to you to discover.

The best one however is clearly the ‘Helpless Dancer’ section that begins at 2:45, with Townshend’s guitar mirroring the vocal melody of that song while Keith Moon thrashes some serious thundering drum rolls on top. The vocoder-affected ‘Love Reign o’er Me’ refrain that pops in near the end is quite neat too. The track finishes with an explosive crash and the sound of thunder and rain, leading perfectly into the record’s closer. What amazed me, when the deluxe edition of the album was reissued in 2011, was finding out that the final version of the track was essentially ripped straight from Pete Townshend’s demo recording of it with John Entwistle and Keith Moon adding their respective bass guitar and drums on top. I don’t know, it just floored me. Goes to show that Townshend really was on something during the making of the record. And to think it’s not in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear book I have. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

#1131: The Futureheads – Robot

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While it’s not the last song you’ll be seeing from The Futureheads on here, ‘Robot’ is definitely the last representative from the band’s 2004 debut that’ll get its own dedicated post. Me and that self-titled album go a long way back. It’s a story I told in the very first post of this series, which boils down to ‘my mum got it for me at Tesco’. I knew of ‘Decent Days and Nights’, and ‘Hounds of Love’ had probably been out as a single at that point. I can’t remember, it’s all so long ago. But when I saw that CD on the shelf, I do feel like I sort of grabbed at it without any hesitation. Whatever was in that small pea-brain of mine told me that it was an album worth having.

It was. I still have that same copy sitting on the shelf in my room. The ring holding the CD in the case is busted, and was from the day I got it, but it was the music that counted at the end of the day. If you don’t know The Futureheads, they were a part of the big post-punk revival boom that was going on in the mid-2000s. What I think set them apart from a lot of those other groups were their knack for some glorious harmonies and fantastic countermelodies, all while still delivering some chunky, raw performances. The album’s first track ‘Le Garage’ introduces all this, and it carries on in follow-up ‘Robot’. The track’s only two minutes long, but they manage to pack all the goodness in there.

The meaning behind ‘Robot’ is quite simple. It’s from the perspective of a robot, who knows what they are, what they’re programmed to do, knows how long they live for. This robot seems to be happy with this existence, in service to the human race. That is until the song’s final moments where it begins to question why it doesn’t have a mind, begins to malfunction and then stops working. At least that’s what I get from the looping riff and sudden stop that close out the track. I enjoy this one quite a bit. As the album’s second track, it keeps the momentum of the record’s opening moments rolling. It’s only two minutes long too, so nothing to dwell upon, you know? Just a few verses and choruses and then it’s done and onto the next one. I’ll always appreciate this album. Don’t think it got better than it for the band, but there are still a couple tracks from albums that followed that I can always get behind. Those are for days far from now.

#1130: Red Hot Chili Peppers – Road Trippin’

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Alongside 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Californication from 1999 is seen to be the cream de la cream* within the band’s discography. The album marked the first return of guitarist John Frusciante, who, after leaving the band initially in ’92, had spent nearly the rest of the decade getting as low as he could on an almighty drug binge that shockingly didn’t kill him. After coming out of rehab and having to change his approach to guitar playing, the chemistry between he, Flea, Chad Smith and Anthony Kiedis was rekindled and the “classic” lineup created what was considered by critics and fans to be a return to form after the band’s previous album One Hot Minute (which isn’t all that bad anyway.)

If you were to ask me what I thought about the album, I’d say it’s very front loaded (with four of its first eight songs being singles) and the whole second half is rather forgettable. It’s actually one of those albums in need of a remaster too because the loudness and clipping that happens on some songs is kind of ridiculous. But hey, that’s just me. Well, I say the whole half. I don’t mean it. There’s penultimate track ‘Right on Time’ which is a hectic freak-out. But the song that follows that, and closes out the entire album, is the finisher – today’s track – ‘Road Trippin’, a mainly acoustic number with no percussion accompanying, but instead an organ-generated string section that adds a sense of drama and fullness to the proceedings.

The track is an account by Anthony Kiedis of a road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway that he, Frusciante and Flea embarked on following the return of the guitarist. Drummer Chad Smith didn’t join them, hence the “two favourite allies” lyric, though that doesn’t stop people from jokingly referring to the exclusion. Like I said before, it’s unlike a lot of RHCP tracks ’cause it’s one for the acoustic guitars. Frusciante’s on one, Flea’s on an acoustic bass. Doesn’t stop them from locking in together and playing some sweet melodies that weave and play off one another. Kiedis’s lyrics, usually mocked and made a meme out of, are actually quite beautiful here, almost poetic, and Frusciante’s harmonies only heighten the feel-good sensations. It could have just been those three alone on here, and I feel it would have worked just as well. Luckily, the synthesized “strings” don’t sound so fake that you realise it’s not an actual string section. There are plenty of other songs that fail that task.

*I know it’s ‘crème de la crème’, just some dry humour.