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#1400: Klaxons – Totem on the Timeline

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There I was pouring my heart out a couple days ago about the last ever post by a band on the blog, but had I known that the same thing would be happening for Klaxons right after, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Yeah, it’s the last time you’ll see Klaxons on here too. But including today’s song, I only wrote about four of the group’s tracks. I don’t have as close a personal feeling towards them. But Klaxons were a big thing in their time. It’s something I must have said in the other Klaxons posts, but 2007, that was their year. They were the figureheads of the “new rave” scene that was happening. I remember NME being all over that, highlighting bands like Hadouken!, New Young Pony Club, CSS… and others. I wonder how they’re all doing. Klaxons’ debut Myths of the Near Future was the album everyone was waiting for, myself included, and before it was officially released, NME had the album as an exclusive on their website. I don’t think I ever said anything about that before, but the link is proof. Just have to select “Just albums” and click next, you’ll see ‘Klaxons’ eventually.

And that’s how I got to know ‘Totem on the Timeline’. By the time the album exclusive was up, I was well aware of tunes like ‘Atlantis to Interzone’, ‘Golden Skans’, and ‘Magick’. They’d all been singles in the months prior. Oh, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ too. The album begins with ‘Two Receivers’, which is all right, a nice start to everything. But ‘Totem…’ was the first album track that I really got into. The tune has a remarkably simple structure. The second verse is the same as the first, and otherwise it’s all chorus bar a bass guitar-driven instrumental section. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a surreal one. Apart from the refrains where the three vocalists sing about being in Club 18-30 and meeting a number of historical figures, whatever else they’re singing about is anyone’s guess. I don’t mind those kinds of songs. You know those ones that maybe go for more of a feel rather than relying on the substance. I can’t hate it. Maybe others would feel differently.

I guess what I like most about the song is it just sounds like all four members, raw, in a room playing it in one run-through. Maybe there’s a vocal overdub, probably that falsetto one, but I think that would be it. Probably the most straight-up rock tune on the first half of the album, with a little keyboard on top. I dig the ascending / descending guitar riff that the vocal melody almost follows too. Now, like I said earlier, because of the way ‘Totem…”s structured, once you’ve heard the first verse and chorus, you’ve more or less heard the rest of the track. To anyone who likes a little variety in their favourite songs, I’m just saying. But this is my blog. I can take a dense song from time to time. And other times, a repetitive number will do the trick. ‘Totem…’ ticks that box for me. So, thanks Klaxons. 2007 was definitely a time to be alive. Never did get round to listening to their second or third albums. I should get to them one of these days.

#1366: The Band – This Wheel’s on Fire

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Back in 2018, The Band’s 1968 debut album Music from Big Pink was reissued for its 50th anniversary with a whole new stereo mix, constructed by engineer and producer Bob Clearmountain. I liked The Band’s 1969 self-titled album by that point. I’d never listened through …Big Pink before. And I sort of knew it was meant to be an important album for the culture at the time of its release, ushering a movement of a return to straight rock-and-roll by bands in 1968 after the psychedelic times of 1967. There was no better time to discover what I was missing. And, you know, I thought ‘The Weight’ was cool, it’s like the centerpiece that also happens to be one of their best-known songs. ‘Chest Fever’ with those organ breaks. Mmm, it was good listening. But the two numbers that stood out to me, I can remember that first run-through so well, were ‘In a Station’ – the album’s third song – and ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, which comes a little later near its end.

A thing about The Band is, before they became known as their own entity outright, they were known for being Bob Dylan’s backing band during the 1966 tour where people were chastising him for “going electric” and supposedly spitting in the face of the folk movement. Dylan then had a motorcycle accident, retreated back to his home in Woodstock and made a ton of music with The Band in 1967. The results were released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Dylan and The Band recorded ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, which closes out that album with a slow, shuffling rhythm. As Band bass guitarist Rick Danko helped Dylan write the track, they more or less had the right to do their own version of the song. And they did, as you may have witnessed from the embedded YouTube video above. The Band take it much faster, with much more urgency. Danko provides the lead vocal, pianist Richard Manuel joins in on harmony in the second half of the verses, and then drummer Levon Helm joins in to complete the three-part for the culminating choruses.

I think it’s been said that this is the one track Dylan wrote that truly references his accident at any length, with the wheel rolling down the road obviously belonging to his motorcycle. But apart from that, it’s really anyone’s guess. The narrator in this song declares they and another person will meet again, but only if that other person is able to remember. This other person will request favours from the narrator, who doesn’t really want to do them. And “no man will come to [them] with another tale to tell”, maybe because either they’ll forget or share these tales with other people. Seems to me that this song is about someone untrustworthy and generally unreliable. It’s all a guess. When I first heard ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ and the chorus came in and finished, I thought to myself, “So this is who originally made that song.” I’d heard it years before as the theme song to the BBC show Absolutely Fabulous, which itself was a re-recording of the notable 1968 cover by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & the Trinity. My sister liked that show, it’s the only reason I would have known about it.

#1294: Ween – Strap on that jammypac

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You know those times at a live show when a band comes out and, to get the crowd pumped up, the guitarists will start strumming one chord vigorously with the bass guitarist following suit with one note on a string and the drummer laying into the cymbals before signalling a count that suitably falls into the rhythm of the opening number of the night? I feel like Foo Fighters do that kind of thing a lot of the time. They just come to me as an example. Well, Ween’s ‘Strap on that jammypac’ is a song where the music is based on those specific moments, except the actual song that’s supposed to begin right after never starts. ‘…jammypac’ is the opening number to Ween’s almighty sophomore album The Pod, released in September 1991. And what better way to get this unusual album going than with a track just as unusual in nature?

The ‘jammypac’ in the song’s title refers to the apparatus donned by the figure on the album’s cover, widely known by Ween fans as ‘Mean Ween’, whose name is Chris Williams and a good friend of both Gene and Dean Ween. This was supposedly used to aid in the huffing of Scotchgard that went on during the making of the album. But of course it’s well-known now that this activity was a story made up by the two members of the band, who actually became ill with mononucleosis during the sessions. There were probably plenty of other types of hallucinogens involved, though. Dean Ween sings this tune, sounding like a Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies type of character that I can’t recall the name of, sometimes coming in a little too early or much, much later than the music backing him. Goes to show the vocal take was probably done after the music was recorded.

Overall, I guess you can say this is a song of invitation. There’s no better place to put it on the album than at the very beginning. Dean Ween wants you to put this jammypac on and promises that he and the listener will have a good time together, but sprinkled in among this is a tale of a man who doesn’t get the required amount of food he needs cooked by his woman and can’t take the situation anymore. It also marks the start of the dozens of internal references that occur throughout the album, with the mention of a ‘van Winkle’ who’s also mentioned in fellow album cuts ‘Boing’ and ‘Molly’, before getting their own dedicated song in ‘Sketches of Winkle’. Despite the track, I think, being influenced by those live rock concert situations, it wasn’t played in a live setting by Ween until they were on tour for Chocolate and Cheese a few years later. Whenever they’ve played it live in more recent times, it’s usually the show’s opening tune. It goes down very, very well with the crowd.

#1272: Graham Coxon – Standing on My Own Again

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I know for sure that an official music video exists for this track. It’s just that it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube and seems to be wiped off the face of the internet. By seeing it what felt like every day for a period in 2006 on MTV2, I became very familiar with Graham Coxon’s ‘Standing on My Own Again’ very quickly. It was released as the first single from his then forthcoming album Love Travels at Illegal Speeds. As I write to you, I’m starting to wonder whether this was the first song by him that I had ever heard, or if it was ‘Freakin’ Out’. Maybe I answer that question in the post for that track. To keep things mysterious, I won’t go and find out. But I do know for sure that I didn’t know who Blur was, and so for a bit I just recognised Coxon as this solo artist who was just doing his thing. Doing it well too.

In Coxon’s words, the song builds a scene where the narrator’s standing on a grey and muddy beach looking out at a ship that’s sinking and likening its situation to a relationship where neither person involved are enjoying themselves anymore. You think of that and hear the lyrics, or read ’em, and it all makes perfect sense. It’s much better watching Coxon explain it all himself. Combine that with a charging performance led by striding guitars and a wailing vocal performance, it makes for some very cathartic listening. Coxon performs with what was his usual live band in the music video, but I didn’t find out until quite recently that in the studio he played all the instruments himself. I always knew him to be a great guitarist. He ain’t to shabby on the bass guitar and drums as well.

Yeah, listening to this song will always take me back to those days in 2006 when I was pretty much sitting in front of the TV all day watching music videos and seeing this song on a regular basis. I seem to remember this and ‘All These Things I Hate’ by Bullet for My Valentine were usually played within a video or two of each other. And looking at the Wiki pages for both songs, they were both released in February of that year. At least my memory’s still somewhat kicking. Love Travels at Illegal Speeds will be out for 20 years in 2026, so hopefully the videos for ‘Standing…’ and fellow single ‘You & I’ show their faces for the anniversary. Until then, here’s the making of the video for the former, just to show you I’m not going crazy about a magical video that may or may not be real.

#1269: They Might Be Giants – Stand on Your Own Head

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Nearing the end of They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln, the band’s second debut album released in the September of 1988, comes the song ‘Stand on Your Own Head’. Now, I’ve always thought it was a good one, and I’m sure there are a lot of Giants fans out there who feel the same way. You wouldn’t find it being regarded as a major highlight, but it’s appreciated all the same. My view, it gets a bit of a raw deal being sandwiched between two of the album’s most well-known tracks in ‘Shoehorn with Teeth’ and ‘Snowball in Hell’. I’d go for this one over the former any day, and maybe you could tell because I’m writing about ‘Stand…’ and haven’t done a post on ‘Shoehorn’.

This one here is another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell. I’ve come to think of the lyric as some kind of wordplay exercise, taking idioms and everyday phrases and then turning them upside down. Or “on their heads”, you might say. And you can go through it line by line. At least, almost. “I like people, they’re the ones who can’t stand”, I guess is a turn on “I hate people, they’re the ones I can’t stand”. It’s a bit of stretch on my part, seeing as that’s not really an everyday phrase. But what’s more obvious comes in the lyrics for the chorus, “Stand on your own head for a change/Give me some skin to call my own”, which calls to the “Stand on your own two feet” phrase and provides a combination of “give me some skin” and “a home to call my own”. And then there’s the “You’ve made my day, now you have to sleep in it” in the second verse, a reference to making a bed and lying in it. The other parts about smoke signals and suing for custody, I’ve still not been able to pin down. But they sound good nonetheless.

The main musical highlight in this tune is the prominent feature of the banjo, which is rarely used in any other They Might Be Giants song, if it even is at all. The band’s Wiki side credited its playing to John Linnell. I never thought much of it. I listened to a podcast one day that questioned whether this credit was correct. There are TMBG songs that have Linnell playing guitar and he isn’t all that proficient in that, so it did make me wonder whether the credit was true too. But then a few years ago, a TMBG live performance from 1988 was released on YouTube, and right there in the thumbnail was Linnell with banjo in hand alongside John Flansburgh. Though whether he’s playing the intricate part during the choruses is still up for question. If you were somewhat displeased with my own take on the song, luckily I found this track-by-track breakdown of Lincoln while writing this. Linnell’s recollection of the track might just be more useful than mine.