Late: Is It Too Late

Squeeze: Is It Too Late

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Our narrator has burned bridges galore, stealing money out "her" purse, getting drunk and stupid, and only then realizing that he was in love. Is it too late to "unload that gun" and get into her favor? Unless our unnamed foil is a complete idiot, the answer is probably "yes", but honestly, with such gleeful delivery, such cheerfulness, such breakneck uptempo presentation, it hardly seems like he cares.

You've never heard Squeeze like this, in full-blown barrelhouse rockabilly mode. But then, hardly anyone has heard Frank, in part because the piano-led album was overall such a diverse departure from their signature sound, in part because a label change at the wrong time buried sales despite critical celebration, and in part because by the tail end of the eighties, their greatest hits were already an essential part of the classic rock canon, so boldly that very little of what happened afterwards made a difference to the world. Still, there's joy here, if you're up for the risk.

Late: Late For the Sky

Jackson Browne: Late For the Sky

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This week is for songs about being late. For much of the week, I suspect that that will mean late for an appointment or late for work. I have some songs I’m considering that would fit that way. But being late doesn’t have to mean that. For Jackson Browne in Late For the Sky, being late isn’t about arriving behind schedule; it’s about staying too long. Not all relationships are meant to be, and there can be a time when neither partner can bring themselves to break it off, but the relationship has been over for a while. I could go on, but Browne puts it far more eloquently than I could.

Late / 1991: Come Down In Time

Sting: Come Down In Time

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1991 Elton John/Bernie Taupin tribute album Two Rooms is a popstar throw-away, for the most part, though it has a few high points if you like Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Bush, Wilson Phillips and/or Sinead O'Connor. But I have a soft spot for Sting's smooth jazz period, and his short, bluesy pianobar take on Come Down In Time is well worth sharing. And the sparse ambiguity of the original lyrics here has always captivated me: is our narrator at fault for waiting to long, or did he come down in time after all, only to find that his planned rendezvous was never in the cards to begin with?

Oh, and if possible, I'd like to ask for a bonus point for posting a song that fits in all three of our most recent themes: Late, 1991, and Torch Songs.

1991: I Misunderstood

Richard Thompson: I Misunderstood

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I remember reading a review of Richard Thompson’s album Amnesia in 1988. I had never heard of him before, and here was this review that talked about this brilliant guitar player who could also write songs pretty well. Now, I knew all about brilliant guitar players. They were the guys who played these amazing solos, really ripped it up. The best ones never lost track of what song they were playing, always wandered far afield but found their way back. So, I put Amnesia on the turntable, and prepared to be transported. Didn’t happen. There really weren’t any solos. Sure he played loud, but Thompson never went anywhere. There were a couple of great quiet songs, but they had nothing to do with great guitar playing as I understood it then. So I was disappointed, and I resolved to regard the music of Richard Thompson with suspicion from then on.

Fast forward three years. Now it was 1991, and Richard Thompson had a new album out, Rumor and Sigh. More to the point, I was no longer an I, but rather part of a we, about to be married. We heard 1952 Vincent Black Lightning on the radio. Now that is a brilliant song, no doubt. But it’s also the only song like it on the album. Soon enough, we were hearing Feel So Good, Read About Love, and of course I Misunderstood as well. These were more like what I remembered, and I wasn’t that impressed at first. But my now-wife latched on to the lyrics. And Thompson is a wonderful writer. So, being in the same car, Thompson stayed on. And his music grew on me. And grew. Just like in Where the Wild Things Are.

So here’s how I see it now. Richard Thompson is indeed a great guitarist, but in ways I didn’t understand at first. His talent has as much to do with what he doesn’t play as what he does. His playing can carry a song, as it does on Vincent Black Lightning. But he can also pull back and be part of the band. And, when Thompson writes, he knows which approach will be better for the song. I thought I didn’t like him at first, but I misunderstood.

1991: Visual Kei

Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?

X Japan: Joker

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Buck-Tick: Sakura

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Luna Sea: Moon

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So far we've mostly talked about what Americans were up to in 1991, until David just highlighted a Swedish group in the last post. Many of you have asked me what the Japanese crowd were busy with that year. By "many," of course, I mean "none." Still, I remain convinced you lot are undoubtedly wondering about it, but an unusual shyness has come over you.

X Japan, the premier Visual Kei group, was at their peak. The term Visual Kei was somehow derived from one of X Japan's catch-phrases, "Psychedelic violence crime of visual shock." It is probably more accurately translated as, "Your parents are gonna have (Hello) kittens when they find out that you fangirl us." The tune here, "Joker," is from their 1991 CD, Jealousy. Have fun playing "guess the English words" with this song. It's a pretty straightforward speed-metal rocker and showcases Yoshiki's intense drumming style that led to neck surgery last year and a bunch of cancelled concerts. At the end of this month, X Japan will finally play their long-delayed US tour, hitting Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York City. You lucky stiffs!

Buck-Tick (from "bakuchiku", or firecracker), another mover and shaker in the VK scene, released their sixth major album that included Sakura (Cherry Blossom). This is not to be confused with the classic Sakura I posted during Public Domain week. I get all tongue-tied trying to express the awesomeness that is Atsushi Sakurai, their lead singer. I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so, if the fanvid on YouTube is anything to go by – it's set to Tom Jones' Sex Bomb.

Luna Sea makes for a nice end to our threesome. Moon is from their eponymous first album. They, too, are reuniting this fall with a "20th Anniversary World Tour Reboot -to the New Moon-", slated to show up in LA, Germany, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo in November. Luckily for Sugizo, one of Luna Sea's guitarists, this doesn't overlap with X Japan's tour – he's in both bands at the moment.

1991: Golden Age

Union Carbide Productions: Golden Age

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Union Carbide Production was a hellraising group of young men from Gothenburg, Sweden who quickly became known as the roudiest bunch in town, both for their chaotic live shows, but also for their arrogant attitude.

Early U.C.P. may have sounded a lot like The Stooges, but these were no thugs, junkies and petty criminals from Ann Arbor. These were snotty upper class kids with money to burn, straight outta da fancy suburban neighbourhoods. They talked in interviews about how much they loved playing tennis, spening obscene amounts of money, driving expensive cars their dads bought for them, and chilling in the tanning bed. And how they only played rock 'n' roll because their decadent livestyle was boring.

Throughout the gigs, frontman Ebbot Lundberg would insult the audience, especially during shows in America where he would spend more time talking about how fat and disgusting everyone was than actually singing. Wherever they went they got on everybody's nerve, just as intended.

It's interesting how punk rock was supposed to be provocative and against the grain, but once you provoke the punks and the rockers themselves and go against their grain, they couldn't hate you more if they tried. When they really should appreciate it. When punk and its aesthetics become generic and evolve into little more than rules you must follow in order to be punk... That's the moment the polar opposite becomes punk.

That's when you need spoiled rich kids telling crusty drunks with a mohawk living in a dumpster just how pathetic they are. Those who don't get that, don't know what punk was supposed to be in the first place.

U.C.P. knew this perfectly well and stopped playing raunchy Stooges rock the moment they realised that's what people expected them to do. Instead they mellowed out and embraced darker and more psychedelic sounds on the 2nd album, and by the third one (from which the song Golden Age is taken) they were downright folksy and Rolling Stones-y.

After recording their fourth album Swing in Chicago with Steve Albini (during which time they got a fan letters from everyone from Sonic Youth to Kurt Cobain), U.C.P. called it quits in 1993. Several members, including singer Ebbot Lundberg and guitarist Björn Olsson, would go on to form The Soundtrack Of Our Lives. Another excellent band worth your time.

1991: Big Sky Country

Chris Whitley: Big Sky Country

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We’ve heard from some of my fellow Star Makers that 1991 was a distracting year. Me, all I was doing was getting married. So I didn’t have time to watch videos on MTV all day, and find new music that way. MTV was moving away from music anyway, and they were also starting to feature music I didn’t like. I also had less time to read music magazines. So how was I to find music? In the first part of the year, what I did have was a lot of time in the car with my fiance. And after we got married, we still spent a lot of time in the car. We live close enough to Philadelphia to hear their radio stations, so we listened to a lot of WXPN from the University of Pennsylvania. Maybe you’ve heard of the station, because of a program that is now nationally syndicated: The World Café with David Dye. 1991 was the year that the World Café first went on the air.

It was on WXPN that I first heard Big Sky Country. There was no heavy beat, the synthesizers were subdued and joined by “real instruments”, the singer sounded like a human being rather than a processed electronic something… In short, the 80s were over, musically. Now I enjoyed much of the music of the 80s, but I was ready for something new. Big Sky Country had passion without screaming vocals or guitars. There was subtlety, and there was an instrument I had never heard before, the resonator guitar. This was my something new.

Chris Whitley was a late bloomer. In 1991, he was my age, 31. And this was his debut. In my married life, I have found it harder to keep track of an artist’s career than it used to be. So I lost track of Chris Whitley, and, in fact, I got this album long after the fact. In researching this post, I found out why I haven’t heard anything about Whitley recently. Lung cancer took him in 2005, at age 45. I hope his music does not get forgotten.