For this episode, we’re deep in the summer of 1987 and talking about an eclectic group of bands that were all at (or pretty close to) the height of their powers at the time: Black Flag, Nitzer Ebb and R.E.M.
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Episode 7 – July 1987 (138 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And welcome back to 120 months. It’s a deep dive into MTV’s 120 minutes, our all of our favorite video show from back in the day. We are going through starting in 1987.
And each month we explore a song that each of us chooses, a video, technically, that we each choose, and then we’ve got a mystery artist at the end. This one is a fun one for reasons that will make themselves evident as we get closer to that. But first, we have Mr. Keith Porterfield and Mr. Scott Mobley sitting alongside with their choices.
We’re going to start off this week with Scott. All right, so this week I chose TV Party by Black Flag. So just a little bit on Black Flag.
This band is formed in 1976. They are a southern California hardcore punk band. The founding member is Greg Jen.
He is their guy who founded the band. He is the only continuous member throughout a very long and storied career. And he’s also their primary songwriter and lyricist.
The rest of the band changes wildly throughout their career. So they record a few singles and EPs. They never record a proper album until 1981.
Original singer Keith Morris leaves the band and he goes on to form the circle jerks. He is replaced by a young fan of the band named Henry Rollins. And this is kind of when Black Flag becomes capital B Black Flag.
They record their debut album in 1981. It’s called damaged. Damaged is one of those albums that’s just considered a just a seminal record in punk and especially hardcore punk.
So it is 15 songs that last 34 minutes. It is currently on the Rolling Stone 500 greatest albums. It’s like 434.
Pitchfork has it number 25 on the greatest albums of the 80s. And I believe on Pitchforks list of the best punk albums of all time, it is number 3 behind the Ramon’s debut and Nevermind the Bullocks. So pretty good company.
But this album is not huge when it comes out. It’s, you know, it’s pretty small label, pretty small band, a type of music that’s not really taking hold of anybody yet. So it kind of disappears.
It is, like I said, 15 songs that is just blistering hardcore punk. It is loud, it is fast, it is angry. It is anti-authority.
And right in the middle of it is TV funny. The song we listened to this week. Don’t talk about anything else We don’t wanna know dedicated To our favorite show That’s incredible!
History blues! Dallas! Wednesday!
So, that’s not to say that TV party, you know, is just this throwaway goof in the middle of the album. It does have something to say about TV culture and mindlessness and things like that. It’s more the presentation of it.
It kind of sticks out as being a little bit different. Greg Jin has said that prior to damage coming out, Black Flag songs were a little more like this. Keith Morris is a little more lighthearted and goofy than Rollins.
So they had more satirical songs. You can kind of hear that when he goes on to do circle jerks. Rollins wanted them to be more angry and more political, which, I mean, if you know anything about Henry Rollins, that makes perfect sense.
This song is probably a holdover from that previous time. So over the course of Black Flag’s career, especially at this time, they record this song 3 different times. And they’re all noticeably different, but the changes are pretty much minor.
The main difference between the three is the names of the TV shows that they shout out throughout the songs. And I believe that’s probably improv, or at least it was improv at some point, and then they picked the ones they thought were the funniest and put them in. So the version of the song that appears on damaged is kind of harder, the grungier, it’s just a little bit faster, and kind of angrier than what I think this song needs to be, but it’s a good version of it.
In 82, about a year after damage comes out. They decide that this song is kind of gaining some ground, maybe it’s going to be a hit, whatever, and they record it again. This time they release it as what they call an EP.
However, it is just TV party on one side of a 45 and a couple other songs, 2 shorter songs on the on the other side. So, I don’t know. You can call it a 10 album box set if you want to, but that’s a single, but they call it the TV party EP.
So this version, they kind of amp up the hand claps a little bit. They amp up the silliness of it just a little bit. This is the version of the song that we watched the video for.
So, the video itself is kind of a mess. I do think it nails the spirit of the song and the band, but obviously it didn’t have a lot of money behind it, so it kind of is what it is. It looks like they just kind of filmed themselves drinking beer. know, it’s kind of a follow video.
It fits the song. So I just wanted to mention this because this is the version of the song that I really like. In 1983, they get asked to use this song for the soundtrack to the movie Repo Man, and probably due to something with the label, they are forced to record it again.
And this is where I think they kind of nail it. To be fair, I have a feeling that fans of this song probably have a favorite version of it, and I’m going to guess it’s the one you heard first. That’s certainly the case with me.
This version, however, is sped back up a little bit. It’s much cleaner, it’s produced better, and it really amps up the kind of the goofiness and silliness of the song, which is what I kind of like about it. So just a quick shout out to the Repo Man soundtrack before I move on.
As a starter pack for 80s punk music, you can do no better than the Repo Man soundtrack. It’s getting a little hard to find. But you can look up the playlist and kind of get all those tracks individually, but, you know, on this one soundtrack to this movie, you have suicidal tendencies, institutionalized, Iggy Pops, Repo Man, the Circle Jerks, acoustic version of when the shit hits the fan, which is fantastic.
Probably the most famous song from this soundtrack is the burning sensations, Pablo Picasso, which was a big, you know, alternative hit in the early 80s. A fear, let’s have a war is on here. Like, it’s just, it’s a great, if you’ve never been into Southern California hardcore from the early 80s, or punk in general from the early 80s, you can do no better than the Rebo Man soundtrack, so you might want to check that out.
But anyway, so like I said, this is there’s 3 different versions of this song. They’re not wildly different from each other, but I think everybody probably has a favorite. I will say that of the three, the version that is in this video is my least favorite of them, but it’s still good.
I think this is a fun little goofy song from a band that would go on to be sort of iconic in their in their genre. This is kind of them at the start of their career. So that’s a TV part of you by Black Flag.
So for me, this song is definitely a KTXT song. I had never heard it and never heard Black Flag until I came to KTXT. I love this song.
Loved it the minute I heard it, the 1st time I played it up at KTXT. It was one of those that, you know, when I had my DJ choice, it would occasionally come up because I loved it so much. And I don’t really know much else about Black Flag.
I just happened to really like this song because it’s funny. The video, man, I actually really liked the video. You kind of said, you know, you thought it was kind of a toss off a little bit, but I thought it was really fun.
Like, I love it. Just the guys hanging around and, you know, throwing beer cans at the TV and goofing off and all that. I also really liked the part where, you know, they’re going off and they’re talking about the different names of the TV shows and I made sure to write the TV shows down because it is a great 80s list of TV shows.
The 1st one that Henry Rollins yells at is that’s incredible, which I don’t know if anybody remembers that. I certainly do. It was like a precursor to kind of reality TV or some of these competition shows where people would come on and have weird acts they did or there’d be weird stories that they would tell and this kind of stuff.
Hill Street Blooms was on there. Dallas was on there. But my favorite was the show Quincy got name drop on there, which was like a like a police procedural back then.
And the guy that says every time in the video when he says, you know, they’re they’re shouting out which TV shows they like and they get to him and he says, Quincy, all the other guys throw beer cans at him. So, yeah, that was a funny moment in the video. Yeah, in the Repo Man version of this song, Quincy gets dropped in favor of the fall guy.
Well, you know what? I could take that. I like the fall guy too.
The differences between the versions. That’s really the main one is that they they kind of go with the TV shows that are popular at the moment they’re recording it. So, you know, there’s the 81 version 82 version, the 83 version, and they’re all just what was on TV at that time.
The Quincy thing struck me as particularly funny just because my folks used to watch that show. So like when he held Quincy, I was like, Quincy, I know Quincy. Anyway, yeah, I really liked it.
I liked the song. I like the video, like the whole thing. I’m also a big fan of, and I’m not as big a punk fan as you are, Scott, so I don’t know.
Maybe there’s a little more of this than I give it credit for being, but I really liked Greg Jen’s kind of lead guitar parts. They just kind of stab in and out of there. You know, while, you know, Rawlins will say his little vocal part, and then it’ll be a little stab of like kind of lead guitar, just a few notes, then, kind of thing, thrown in there, and those little stabby guitar come in throughout the entire thing.
I don’t, when I think of punk, I don’t really think of that as much as like as a lead guitar kind of genre of music, you know? And so I also really like that. So, yeah, I like this whole thing.
I thought it was fun. Video’s great, song’s great. And yeah, definitely took me back to the KTXT days.
Well, and you mentioned something that’s kind of interesting about Black Flag, is that, you know, this is a 5 piece band, which in hardcore punk at this time is very rare. And that’s the that’s the extra piece is that soloing guitar that you don’t hear in a lot of this music. It’s usually just, you know, kind of 3 chords and the truth.
They always had that sort of, you know, noodling guitar over a lot of their sounds, which was not common in this type of music at the time. I also think the baseline in this song is particularly noticeable too. You know, you don’t you don’t get a lot of that in hardcore.
And that the sort of noodling baseline is also a piece of this that you don’t hear a lot of and this kind of stuff. So, yeah. It’s, you know, I didn’t mean to really kind of slag on the video.
I just feel like it was. there were more than about 2 takes of that. They kind of got in a room and pointed cameras at themselves and had fun and that’s the video. But it does fit the song and the kind of the spirit of the band and the song pretty well.
Yeah, that video obviously cost like dozens of dollars to make, but it still turned out great. But yeah, that really guitar part. I really enjoyed that.
I thought that was like really kind of made them stick out, you know, above other punk bands or other punk things that I’ve heard. So my note on the video is, if you had told me there was a video for this song, which I didn’t know there was until we did this episode, I would have imagined it in my head and this matched it. This is exactly what I would have thought a black flag video from 1982. you say?
This is the 82 version, yeah. Yeah, it’s absolutely exactly what beer, the couch, the vibe, the way they shot it, like it is exactly how I would have imagined it. I also love how Rollins moshes into the room at the beginning.
Yeah, there’s some, they clearly have like a good sense of humor for, you know, for all that. And like, so I, yeah, I dig it. It’s enjoyable.
It’s obviously, like you said, it’s a $30, you know, handheld extravaganza, but it’s awesome. Uh, I was paying. I always pay particular attention to the to the TV shows that they mentioned anytime I hear this song because it always brings back memories and I laugh about it.
The one that I wrote down was Quincy. of all of them. For a couple of reasons. One, because I had the same experience of my parents watching it, and I remember sometimes I’d have to go to bed before it was over, and then I’d like ask them in the morning, like, what happened on Quincy?
Did you, you know, did you figure it out? But also, I think it’s really funny because Quincy is infamous for having the punk rock episode where, like, in the, at this time, that whole scene was kind of unknown to people like my parents. There’s an episode that involves a punk rocker who is, by far the villain of the story, by the way, spoiler alert.
Yeah, it was like they were really trying to like scare the parents off of letting your kids be punk rockers. I don’t know if Black Flag was aware of that. I don’t know if that episode had aired before or after this video was shot, but that’s, that struck me as particularly funny that they called out Quincy because, yeah, that is an extremely, I don’t want to say extremely famous because not a lot of people know about it now, but it’s a, it was kind of a well-known thing that, to Quincy went after punk rock.
They might have been aware of that. You know, they famously were on the list of the PMRC’s anti-parent bands. So… yeah.
Yeah. Well, and if you listen to if you listen to the album damage, the one that this song 1st appears on. It is solidly anti-parent.
That is a fair assessment of it. So my other note, and this is something, Scott, maybe you can help with, because I’ve always been curious about this in general. I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it with anybody.
So, uh, I didn’t discover Henry Rollins until later, when he was kind of in his more like spoken word phase, and then I started work backwards to Black Flag, but I never, I wasn’t huge into Black Flag in that scene. So I don’t know a ton about it. But when I heard this again, you know, it took me a 2nd.
I recognized, yeah, yeah, that is Henry Rollins. He has what I can only describe as the absolute classic Southern California hardcore punk voice and into… the icon of it, yeah. Is he is that?
Yeah, is he patient 0 for that? Because every other band that came after that had, like, uses his intonations and like almost like an accent. Yeah, 1st or…
I would say yes to that. short answer. There’s probably, you know, if you really go digging into the family tree stuff, you could probably find somebody else like that. But even this band, you know, their their their first lead singer was Keith Morris.
If you listen to him and the circle jerks, he is very much like the SoCal guy, he kind of has that Southern California accent. His delivery is much more sort of, you know, hey man, kind of kind of delivery. They bring in Rollins and that’s when Black Flag becomes Black Flag.
And it’s not, I think, only his his delivery and his intonation that becomes sort of a signature of this sound. It’s his look, that big throbbing neck and his, you know, his scream vocals and his big bulking body like hovering over the crowd in those pictures. That’s the iconic part of this.
So yes, I would say that if he’s not the 1st one to do it, he’s certainly the one that makes it a thing, I would say that’s fair. And this is 81, you know, that hardcore is just coming out at this point, you know? In fact, you know, damage is kind of considered the 1st hardcore punk studio album.
I’m sure there were others, but it’s the 1st real one that like made people stand up and notice this music. And so, yeah, to call Rollins, the kingpin of that, I think, is perfectly fair. So Rollins had the look for it.
Also, it helps that his resting facial expression appears to be, I’m about to tear your head off. And so he just looks like a mean dude. I think that’s a big part of that scene was the aggression of it.
And Rollins is the poster boy for that. Like he just, he looks like he is about to kill you at any moment, you know? And can you imagine, like, you watch old videos of hardcore shows from the early 80s, like, people jumping up on the stage and people throwing things at the band?
You think a lot of people did that with Rollins? You think a lot of people were picking fights with that dude? I doubt it.
Right, right. So it certainly makes the band more imposing as well when he’s standing in front of you. So along those lines, as we were discussing this, we came up with words like loud and aggressive and shouted and some other stuff.
So up next, Keith has some for us. to take us in a whole new direction. Well, you know, it is actually kind of a different direction, but we’ll get there. I did, in fact, pick a song for this week.
I will get there, but 1st off, it’s time for another edition of Old Time Story Hour with Unkey Keith. So today. No, anyway, we’ve got a I got a buddy here in town that every 4th of July, he throws a big 4th of July shindig, and, you know, good food, lawn games, fireworks after it gets dark.
It’s always a good time. So this past 4th we were over there, and I get in. I get there.
We go to the backyard and hanging out with everybody on the patio and he’s got this really great 80s mix playing. And so listen to 80s music. Turns out it is actually a guy named Dave Lane, who is a sports talk radio guy from Dallas.
He works at a sports talk station called the Ticket in Dallas. But once a year, the ticket turns this guy loose and he does a show that he calls the ticket 80s prom. And it is, like I said, a really good 80s show.
And you might think, you know, well, what does a sports talk radio guide know about 80s music? Well, it turns out everything. man this guy puts on a heck of a show. And you would think, you know, maybe it’s all top 40 stuff and you get some of that stuff, you get your Madonna and your Def Leppard and your prints, but man, you also get the cure and new order and the fix and a flock of seagulls and Gary Newman and just all kinds of stuff.
I mean, he is all over the place. I go in the Bunnyments, psychedelic furs. And this guy really, really knows his stuff.
I highly, highly recommend checking out the ticket 80s prom, and you can find the playlists on spot if I got a search for it as ticket 80s prom. I was able to find 3 of them. He’s been doing it for 6 years now.
And I found 3 of them pretty easily. So highly recommend it. This guy puts on a killer 80s show. a sponsor.
Not a sponsor, no, but I really do recommend checking this out. So anyway, we’re listening to the stuff and having fun. Everybody’s trying to be the 1st one to, you know, get the song, the title, the artist and all that kind of stuff.
And he gets to a block of electronic stuff that he’s doing. And I can’t remember what all was involved. I think, boy, by book of love, was one of them.
So we’re all, again, guessing all this. And suddenly, uh, this song comes on, you know, aggressive uh, electronic beats and nobody can get it. I didn’t know it either.
We’re all just kind of sitting there listening, and then the dude starts singing. I was like, oh, well, that’s an its rep. I mean, it’s got to be Nitra.
There’s no other way. No other band that sounds as a singer like this. So that’s it.
And so got another friend there. He’s got the deal on his phone where, you know, you can let it listen to the song and it’ll, you know, tell you who the artist in the song is. And sure enough, it was this song that was actually control I am by Nitzer.
So I’m feeling smug about the whole thing. I got one that everybody else missed or didn’t get. And then Dave comes on and he’s, you know, going through the songs he just played in that block and he gets to that song and he goes, and that was control.
I am by Knights or Ebb. I’m like, knights are ebb. Nights are ebb.
I’ve known about this band since 1990. You know, I bought Lightning Man, the single off of the album Showtime when it 1st came out. And so that was my 1st introduction to these guys.
And I’ve always called them Mitzreb, and we have discussed them and called them Mitzreb at the radio station at KTXT. We referred to them as Nitzer Eb. I have heard them called Nitzer Eb in Clubs.
And so I’m thinking, okay Dave, well, you put on a good show, but you finally made a mistake. This band is Nitzereb, but that’s okay. I’m a good show, so I’ll let you I’ll let you slip on that one.
But it’s nagging at me. So over the next day or two, I decide to get online and I start looking at looking for it. And sure enough, this band calls themselves Knights or Ebb.
I have been wrong about their name this entire time. They’ve even got a of Lavideo, like a little YouTube video or TikTok video in where they come on and each of the guys is like, hey, this is Bond from Knights or Eb. Yeah, this is Dave from Knights or Ebb.
And then the last guy, Douglas MacArthur comes on, or McCarthy, not Douglas MacArthur, but Douglas McCarthy comes on, and says, this is Douglas from Knights Reb, or, and he pauses for a 2nd, and then says, or Knits Reb. So they apparently are aware of the fact that almost everybody thinks their name is Nitzreb and are okay with that and, you know, are all right with it. But yeah, this band calls themselves Knights or Ebb, which was not something that I ever knew until this past 4th of July.
I listened to Dave Lane show. So today, that brings us all the way around to today where I’m going to talk about the song Murderous by Knights Are Out. With the pleasure Don’t be lazy.
With the pleasure again. Childoput ch Chop Dut Child your heart Up, up your heart, up. Natur Eb is a, uh, a British EBM band is how it was, uh, written in their, uh, their wiki bio.
I didn’t know what EBM was. It’s apparently electronic body music. That was not a genre that I knew existed, but okay, so they’re an EBM band.
I always think of them as just being kind of like electronic industrial. I mean, you know, just kind of a more aggressive kind of an industrial version of electronic. But they’re a British band.
Like I said, the name is Knights Reb, which doesn’t actually mean anything. They were just looking. They wanted to have a name that sounded German, I guess, because they were doing the kind of music that, you know, kind of German techno sound.
And so, uh, they were just stringing syllables together until they got something that they liked that sounded German and that was Knights or Eb. It’s essentially a couple of guys, Bon Harris and Douglas McCarthy are the main guys. There’s a guy named Dave Goodey, who’s a drummer and percussionist who was an original member of the band who has come back.
And they’ve also had a guy named Simon Granger that’s been with them on a couple of different occasions in his back with the band now. And then just a lot of other guys that have been in and out throughout the years, but it’s mainly the core of the band was mainly Douglas McCarthy and Bon Harris. They released 5 albums between 1987 and 1995.
The song murderous that we’re talking about today, came off the 1st one, which is called that total age. They broke up for a few years. They were on hiatus for about 10 years from the mid 90s to the mid-aughts, and then got back together and released another album in 2010, and that’s the last actual studio album they released, but they have still been doing live shows and playing live since then.
So they’re still around. Unfortunately, Douglas McCarthy passed away this year earlier this year from liver disease. And so Nicer Rep has continued to play, but Bon Harris has been doing vocals.
So Douglas McCarthy no longer with them. But he was the main vocalist for the band for, you know, most of their career, really until just recently. This song, uh, to me, is very much, uh, it’s a nitrep song.
I mean, it sounds just like them. It’s got the steady electronic bass part that goes all the way through in the back, a lot of percussion in it. And then just McCarthy’s vocal style was very unique.
I mean, it was all shouted, you know, kind of chanted vocals. He’s another one he sounds like, he sounds like Henry Rollins looks. Basically, when you listen to Knights Rep songs, really aggressive, kind of electronic music.
And so this song, when we were 1st looking at this, I was not sure that I’d have heard this song. I didn’t recognize the name murderous. After listening to it, I had definitely heard the song before.
I either just didn’t know that was the name or had forgotten. But it’s a really great song, very much what they do. If you like them, you’re going to like this song.
The video is pretty cool. There’s not a whole lot going on. It’s them, and then there’s just like some scenes interstitially cut in, and I don’t know what any of the stuff that comes in and out as supposed to mean.
There’s like a baby yet, a couple of different points. There’s a guy putting hand wraps on his hands like a fighter about before he puts the gloves on. But then it always goes back to the band.
And the one thing I really liked about this band. First off, I have to say that not having ever seen these guys before. I’d always heard their music, but I had never seen them.
I was expecting like, you know, bald headed guys with black leather outfits on, and that is not what these guys look like. They look like they basically just got done with the, you know, latest chapter meeting for Pi cap alpha on your college campus. I mean, it was not at all the look of the band that I was expecting.
But the cool thing that they did in this video was, is they took the guys, and it’s almost like a flip book, where they took a shot of one of the guys standing there and like, you know, holding a certain pose or whatever, and then brought another guy, one of the other band members in, and had him stand in the exact same spot doing the exact same pose, then brought the other guy in and did that, and then, like, did slow movements and took pictures of them to stack them up so that you could run them back to back, and it was like motion picture, like a flip book, even though there’s still photos. But as that’s going, as you get the, uh, the, uh, the motion through kind of the flip book process, you also get them interspersing the different guys uh, in and out. So it’s like different people, you know, in the same spot moving in and out as they move around and sing the song, lip sync the song and all that.
So the video not really stand out for any other reason, but I thought that was an incredibly cool effect that they did on that. And certainly kind of cool for that time back in the late 80s to have thought of something like that for a video. I thought was really interesting.
So great song, pretty good video. Check it out. The only other thing I will say about Knights or Eb is that if, like I said, this is a representative song.
If you like this, you’re going to like them. But don’t start here. If you’re gonna start with these guys, the place to start, in my opinion anyway, is also off the album that total age.
Start with joining the chant. Man, join in the chant is the Mitzreb song. Knights or Ex, excuse me, I knew I was going to do that at some point.
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure you guys remember that, how big we all were into joining the champ back in the day, but I remember here in Lubbock at KT. We were all going to tech and going to KTXT.
There was a little club used to be called the kitchen club that we would go hang out in, and man, whenever joining the chant came on, you know, anybody else that was on the dance floor, look out because our little crew lost their minds, when that song came on, it was literally dangerous to be on the dance floor with us when that song was on. So, uh, if you if you’ve never heard Knights or Eb, and you want to check them out, start with joining the chant, but then move on to this one. It’s a good one.
Uh, and it’s murderous by Knights or Eb. I meant to check this and then I forgot. I feel like I sent you guys a meme recently about this song, and it’s basically that, like, if you’ve never, like, popped around a dance floor the size of your, you know, your kitchen at 3 AM, yelling to this track, you know, were you really alive in the late 80s, early 90s, and that’s, that’s kind of, it’s kind of true.
Yeah, there’s something about joining the chant in particular when you’re young and and out and about, that’s the kind of song you want. So, yeah, you know, this might sound like I’m reading my notes from the last video, but I have to say, if you told me, Nitsur, I made it, excuse me, Nitsur, I’ve made a video, and asked me to imagine it in my head, again, this is pretty, pretty much what I would have thought. They don’t look exactly like I maybe would have pictured them.
And this is, I think, the 1st time I’ve seen him too, as a matter of fact. So they don’t, yeah, like the personnel maybe don’t look exactly like I would imagine, but the style of the video and the, and, I mean, the songs are what they are, right? It’s an electronic dance beat with this dude shouting, and I’m not sure how else to interpret that if you’re going to go ahead and do like anything approaching like a live or fake faux live video, which this is, for the most part, that’s going to be him running around shouting, and that’s what we get.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like, it’s, uh, you know, the video’s not going to win any awards, although I do like the effect that you mentioned is pretty cool. It’s nice that they, you know, were like, let’s try something here.
You know, yeah, I don’t have a ton on it. It was interesting that there are lines from this song that appear in joining the chant. And I’m not sure if that’s just because they repeat the lyrics or the whatever or if joining the Chance, you know, literally sampled those vocals and came back.
So that was something I wasn’t aware of that they did. And, you know, not that I have any kind of big problem with it or anything, but I don’t think I was familiar with the song because I feel like I would have remembered that. So, like, that made me think that maybe I hadn’t heard this song before, but then when I heard the that line, I was like, wait a minute.
And I was like, no, that’s from joining the chant. So that was kind of an interesting twist as well. But yeah, it was fun to see these guys for the 1st time.
Again, that was kind of, you know, I’ve mentioned that in the intros to the episodes in general about 120 minutes is that often was the 1st time you maybe got to see a particular band, what they look like because that just, it was just, there was no internet. There, you know, there weren’t really magazines necessarily that would have those bands in them. You know, those kinds of bands.
I mean, I guess there were maybe some zines if you knew where to look, but like for for me in Lubbock, for example. So this was, but this is kind of funny because here we are 30 some odd years later and now I’m watching that show to see bands that I still had never seen before. So that was that was cool.
And it is a very representative, Nitreb song, I would start with joining the chant as well, or I would suggest that, but this is kind of right down the pipe for them. And it definitely shows that they had a vibe and they went with it, but it was it was solid. Like they were always solid.
For me, first, I have to train my brain to say Knights are Eb. That’s gonna take a minute. Because I’ve been saying it’s right my entire life.
So, yeah, I kind of just, I agree with everything that Keith said about this. First of all, I don’t know what EBM is. I don’t really care if this is German industrial music and they can call it Viennese chamber music if they want to.
This is German Industrial at its finest. This is one of German Industrial signature bands. This song, to me, was, and I don’t think I knew this song.
And I had I had the total age back in the day. So I’ve heard it. But it just didn’t register right off, except that it sounds remarkably like joining the chant.
It’s just not quite as powerful as joining the chant. It’s like joining the chance younger, weaker brother or something. Um, it’s, but, you know, all the signature parts are there. got the funky little baseline.
It’s got the very anthemic sort of shout and repeat vocals, you know, these guys, I made fun of the cult a few weeks ago for being obsessed with fire. These guys are obsessed with gold, apparently. I hope they found their gold at some point.
This is a perfect example of this era’s German industrial music. If you like that stuff, you’ll like this. I kind of agree that you should start with joining the champ, that is a just a fantastic song that’s very, very signature of this style and this band.
Yeah, and as far as the video, these guys did not look like I thought they were going to, I mean, I did not have Pretty Boy in my, in my brain as what was going to pop up in this video, but that’s what’s there. I will say this, I saw these guys recently live and they do not look like that anymore. So now they they are looking sort of angry and a lot of leather and metal and stuff like that.
They came out looking like you thought they would look, I think. Yeah, that was the picture I had in my head. Yeah.
Now that, though, I’m not finding out that one of their founders has passed on, I’m not sure I saw him. It might just be the other guy touring around as Knights of Rep now. that I’m not 100% sure on. But yeah, this is this is a great song.
If you’re not into the, if you’ve never been into this kind of stuff and you’d like to. That total age by Knights of Eb is a wonderful album to start with. And this song will do you right.
But yeah, joining the chance is probably the way to go. Yeah, McCarthy didn’t pass away until this year, earlier this year. And in fact, this summer, it’s only has only been a few months.
So if you saw them any earlier than that, you probably… It was about a year ago when I saw it was… Yeah, it probably did.
Brought 242 on the same bill, which was exciting and fun. The other thing, um, you know, Mike, you mentioned the, uh, some of the lyrics being the same, uh, in the 2 songs, joining the chant and murderous. You know, that total age, the album covers got those 3 symbols on the left-hand side of it. reading about it.
It said that those symbols are supposed to represent certain phrases. One of them was muscle and hate. One of them was Force’s machine.
Both of those lyrics are in, joining the chant. can’t remember what the 3rd one was. But I thought that was interesting that apparently just those phrases or some of the phrases that they throw in there are, you know, important enough to them that they do include them in multiple songs and then also have like the imagery that’s supposed to represent those things. Um, you know, what what exactly is forces machine means or, you know, muscle and hate, who knows?
But yeah, that’s apparently those symbols are supposed to be representative of some of those lyrics that are in some of the songs, you know, on the album. So, yeah, not really surprising that those 2 songs might actually share some lyrics. Yeah, the line that I think caught me was, where is the youth?
Is that what he’s saying? Where is the youth? that’s the very 1st line of the of the song.
And that’s how I knew I’d heard it before. When it 1st came on, I was like, okay, maybe I know this one, maybe I don’t. And then he goes, where is the youth?
I was like, okay, yep, I know this one. So… All right.
So continuing our theme of loud, aggressive, shouty music. REM. Okay, so we really are going to go curveball on this one in terms of where we’ve been kind of sitting on the episode so far.
We’ll tone it down a bit. Bring it back a little bit. So, unsurprisingly, you knew I was going to run into REM eventually, and I only made it 7 episodes in, so we’re talking about July of 1987.
I don’t know if we mentioned that, by the way. This is July of 1987 is the month that we’re in. So, um, we’ve been looking at each playlist for 1987 and as we’ve been doing the show.
I think this song has been on almost all of them, which is interesting. They really were playing this, and so I’ve been skipping it and waiting. And then I was like, one reason is because it’s a cover, so it’s not necessarily an REM song that, you know, I would go out of my way to talk about.
But it kept popping up. We’ve talked about the squalls, nah, nah, nah, nah. That song was pulled from the documentary, Athens, inside and out, as is this video that has been playing, you know, for a while on 120 minutes at this point in 1987.
So the documentary keeps coming up and I think it might be one where like that’s kind of worth maybe doing an episode of bound at some point. So I, like I did with the squalls. I won’t go into a lot of detail about it, but again, if you are a fan of, Indie Rock and REM or Pylon or Love Tractor or the B 52s or all these bands that came out of Athens, Georgia, there is a great documentary that kind of documented that point in time.
It’s very much like a snapshot of that moment in time. So it’s not like a documentary told in, you know, in retrospective. It really is was more kind of made in the moment.
And that’s what makes it, I think, kind of more interesting to me. It also captured a lot of these bands playing. So, I mean, most a lot of the documentary is just live music being played by some of the bands that were kind of at the height of their powers at this time or on the way up, you know, in Athens.
And it also just gives you a sense of this college town that’s kind of out. It’s close to Atlanta, but it’s like an hour, hour and a half away. So middle of nowhere maybe is a little strong, but I mean, it is one of those like kind of backwoods college towns, but it is a very big college, and it drove this scene that produced, you know, some iconic bands and a whole passel of like lesser known, but also very, very, very good bands.
I think the focus that I guess I would put on this particular video, which is for all I have to do is Dream, which is a cover of the Everly Brothers song, from a video standpoint, is just knowing that that video is pulled from a documentary, you’re seeing this kind of moment in time in Athens, Georgia, you’re seeing REM perform in at what at that point was kind of like the show of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, which had been converted into a rehearsal space, and that actually was where REM played their very 1st live show together. So you’re kind of seeing them kind of return to their roots, but I mean, this is only a couple years after that for show. you know, this this isn’t like they’re coming back after 25 years, but that church no longer exists, but they did save the steeple.
So if you go to to Athens now, you can see like the steeple of the church and the parking lot of this apartment building, which got built when they tore the church down. So most of the video, you know, is either like these just snapshots from the documentary of some random people around Athens. Some of them aren’t so random.
They’re actually well known if you know what you’re looking for. But some of them are just kids around Athens. But for me, A, getting to CRM early in their career doing this song in that location is just kind of a cool little snapshot.
Also, it really highlights the singing prowess of Michael Stipe and Mike Middles together. I want you… Dream, dream, dream, dream.
I can make you mine taste your lips of wine anytime, night or day. Only trouble is she was on dreaming my life. All I have to do is dream is an Everly Brothers song, and the Everly Brothers are right up there at the top of the food chain in terms of duos or groups that you think of when you think of like amazing harmony.
Like they, that was their bread and butter. Those guys sounded absolutely always in sync, like just in days way before auto tune. Really, kind of in days before you did like 30 or 40 takes of something where, you know, you went in and you knocked something out in a couple takes.
I mean, those guys were just pitch perfect and the way their voices blended was really amazing. So it’s kind of daunting to take on one of their songs and particularly if you’re not going to take it like in a whole other direction and you’re going to try to do like a straight down the pipe cover of the song and and do the the, you know, the vocal harmonies together. I have to say, I wasn’t familiar with this, and so going into it, sometimes REM has a proclivity towards, you know, being a little off key.
Michael Stipe doesn’t always necessarily try to nail the vocal parts. Sometimes he’s more into the emotion of it or just kind of ragtag. Not this one, man.
They are in the pocket, instrumentally, as well, but if you didn’t already appreciate the vocals of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills and the way their voices blend, when they do want to do the harmonies that, you know, are strewn throughout their career and throughout their discography, if you weren’t already convinced at how amazing they work together and how much Mike Mills brings to the party. You know, Michael Stipe gets all of the glory for the most part, but Mike Mills is, as I think we may be, have mentioned another episode one of, if not one of the, if not the best, like, backup singer in the business, particularly for this style of band. So that was kind of my takeaway is, you know, you have a really nice, as you do with all these little clips that are pulled from this documentary, you have a nice snapshot of a moment in time in Athens that was happening, and it’s fun to see like the squalls or CRM in that moment.
But then also just REM absolutely knocking out this cover and you really see the talent that’s at the root of all of their success in this video, I think. So I agree, 1st of all, wholeheartedly, this is a beautiful song. I mean, the original song is obviously beautiful already.
But REM just does a fantastic job with this. My question is, I’ve seen this pop up on all these week to week, you know, 120 minutes playlist, and they always go with this song. I really think that MTV was trying to push this documentary at the time.
It’s the only real reason I can think of that you’re not playing, you know, REM has 2 or 3 albums out at this point, you know, and videos and stuff. And every week they played this song. And so I really think MTV was trying to push this movie.
You know, that’s probably why the squalls got on here. It’s probably why I love tractor got on here. They were trying to kind of help out this documentary that was and good for them because it’s a great dock and it’s it’s definitely worth seeing.
As far as the video, yeah, it’s just from the movie and there’s not much going on there, but man, this is just a young group of guys just nailing it. And it’s hard to describe it any better than that. It’s just a perfect cover of what it already is an already beautiful song.
You can hear everything they do right on display. And just a gorgeous song. I don’t know that other than having seen this movie many years ago.
I don’t know that I was that familiar with this one, you know? And I don’t think REM ever put this on an album, did they? You would know better than me.
Uh, no. Not that I’m aware of. I know they, I know like on some of the compilations that have come out over the years, a lot of their covers have come out on them and REM does good covers.
Like their their cover of femme fatale by Belvin Underground is fantastic. And, um, if you’ve never heard of it. I mean, they’ve got a whole album.
Yeah, if you’ve never heard their drunken cover of King of the Road. It’s pretty great too. But yeah, this they should have put this on an album.
Like, this is one of their one of their finer moments as a cover thing, and it’s just really, really great. I was kind of like avoiding this one because I didn’t know what it was going to be and I’d rather talk about an REM song that’s theirs and whatever, but man, I’m glad we finally got to this one. This was a really pleasant surprise.
It was really good. Yeah, I’m glad I finally went there and it’s funny you asked me that question because as we were doing this episode, or as I was doing the research for this episode, I realized like, I’m not, uh, much of like, I’m not like a completionist. I don’t always go seek out all the B sides.
I don’t always seek out like the interviews, the documentaries, and spoiler alert, I don’t always seek out some of the side projects and collaborations that some of my favorite bands do hint, hint, foreboding, foreshadowing. Being, I am a huge REM fan, but I maybe am not the best REM fan to ask questions about like their deep, deep, deep catalog, but I’m not aware of the song appearing anywhere else. You know, I said I avoided it for one reason or the other, but also, because, yeah, I was a little reticent to dive into it because I didn’t give REM credit for what they do best is when they really just want to buckle down and like knock a song out and kill it and they absolutely did.
And I owe them apology for even doubting them. Yeah, this is as good as it gets cover-wise, honestly. And I can see now why it got selected to be the, you know, the representative of this movie that they were obviously trying to help push.
Because REM in the movie also performs Swan Age from Live Church Pageant, which is also a beautiful song. I haven’t seen the movie in so long. I can’t remember if the version of the movie is really good or not, but, you know, when I started looking into this, I was like, well, why didn’t they put that song on 120 minutes?
you know, Light Church pageant is coming out soon and all this other stuff. You know, I’m not sure how all the timelines of that. But, you know, that would have been a good song to push, but then turning this one on, I was like, oh, okay, that’s why it’s just fantastic.
Yeah, you know, there’s not a whole lot I can add to that. You guys covered it pretty well. Um, yeah, just just gorgeous vocals, uh, vocal harmonies by Stipend Mills.
And, and taking a swing at an Everly Brothers song is is a little bold, and they did a really killer job of it. So, yeah, not a whole lot I can add. The only other thing I will say in watching this video is that, you know, it had been a long time since I had seen like an old REM video or old REM concert, all that, and I’d gotten used to bald Michael Stipe with the giant beard and just the older look, and just to see the youth on these guys, you know, when they’re in their early to mid 20s at this point, you kind of forget, you know, what it’s like when your favorite band, you age with them, and then you look back at them and you see them when they’re so young and you’re like, well, wait a minute, that’s not what these guys look like, is it?
And then you come to look in the mirror and you’re like, wait a minute, have I changed that much too? Michael Stipe with the long hair always throws me off. It always has.
He hasn’t had hair since the early 90s, so… Every time I see him with the long hair. I like, 0 yeah, earlier.
No, just just an absolutely gorgeous song, though. So, yeah, not like I said, I don’t have a whole lot to add to it, but yeah, check it out if you haven’t heard this. It is beautiful.
Yeah, I’m guessing maybe there are some REM fans who maybe aren’t, like, you know, like me, like the super deep completionists who maybe have not run across this because it isn’t like super widely available compared to, you know, most of their other stuff. So if you haven’t heard it, it’s, man, it’s fantastic. Okay, so if I haven’t foreshadowed enough, uh, or spoil it enough.
We have a mystery artist that, uh, this is probably the 1st time I feel a little ashamed a little like I probably should have already known who these people are and what they’re doing, but I didn’t. And, uh, I am admitting it right here on the podcast. So, Scott, tell us about it.
So a few episodes ago, I put a little disclaimer in front of our mystery song that I wanted to say that, um, we’re about to say that we’ve never heard of this band, and I have a feeling, um, that this band is somebody has heard of these guys. They’ve been around a long time and I have a lot of albums and when we get to like the guest vocalists and things like that. I think a lot of people probably have heard this band and we just haven’t.
Again, that is not a slag on the band. It is a slag on us. We should probably know more about stuff like this than we do, but here we are.
We didn’t know anything about this band. So we chose the song Boy, Parentheses Go. by the Golden Palominos for our mystery song this week. Take your trouble, boy, you get hand down cigarette.
There you go So just a little bit of background on this band. They are the brainchild of a man named Anton Fear. That is spelled F I E R.
And you could probably pronounce it fear or fire. I’m not sure which it is. Either way, it sounds like I’m saying a word that’s not FIER, but that’s how it’s spelled.
So Anton Fear. He is a producer, a drummer, a composer, and a ranger. He is, like I said, like I said, this is his baby, the Golden Palominos.
He’s really the only constant member through their entire career. They do have a couple of, they have a guitarist and a bassist, I believe, that were on a majority of their albums, but he is really the main guy. So this starts out.
The Golden Palomino start out as a project in New York in the early 80s. It was part of what they call the no wave movement. If you’re not familiar with that, it was basically sort of an anti-response to new wave and disco.
It was this music that was very unpolished, uses a lot of weird instruments, a lot of weird time signatures. It’s kind of noisy and messy. It never really takes off as a thing.
It does kind of spawn some interesting bands. No way, the most, like, I guess, popular person from that scene or as Lydia Lunch, and she was in a band that I’m only going to bring up because it’s one of my all-time favorite band names, but they were called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, which I just, that is, that is a top 5 band name for me of all time. Anyway, no wave doesn’t do much.
It’s kind of too weird for anybody, but it does spawn some interesting stuff. Sonic Youth is considered sort of an offspring of the no wave movement. So the Golden Palominos released their 1st album in 83, and it is definitely of that variety.
It’s kind of very experimental, kind of weird. But as they progress through their career, they delve into some alternative rock, country rock, alternative country, electronica. Fear says that each album is its own experiment.
So, if you listen to 2 different albums from these guys, you’re going to hear 2 totally different things. They very rarely sound the same from album to album. He says that’s because he has no attention span, which I kind of liked, but it does create this sort of epic revolving door of musicians.
Like, you barely very rarely hear the same person twice other than him on any given album, and that includes a vocalist. Okay, so this is their 2nd album. It comes out in 83 and it’s called Visions of Excess.
It’s got 4 different vocalists on it, 2 of which I we’re not familiar with. The 3rd is John Leiden, also known as Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. The 4th is Michael Snipe.
And there’s where our connection comes in right there. So, Stipe records the 1st 3 songs on the album. This is number one.
The 2nd one is called Clustering Train. Stype writes our co-writes both of those songs with fear. The 3rd one is a cover of a Moby Grape song called Omaha.
So, this one was definitely my favorite of those three. It was chosen to be the lead off single for this album. And it actually comes out in it is a single 85.
So REM’s a thing at this point, although not like a super huge thing yet. So the video for this song. Super vibey.
I couldn’t find any information on like who put this video together or anything, but I will say this. It reminded me a little bit of some of REM’s early videos and that it’s a lot of imagery and a lot of vibes, not a lot really going on. It also really reminded me of if you’ve ever seen tour film by REM.
There’s all these video loops going, our film loops going on behind them on the stage. They reminded me of that. Some of it is directly lifted from that.
Yeah, but is it? I mean, the Ferris wheel. That’s the one that caught my eye, I think, was the Ferris wheel.
So I wondered if Stipe had more input on this video than maybe, you know, it would lead you to think. So the interesting thing to me about this guy is that he’s one of those dudes that takes complete control of his projects, but this isn’t, this isn’t Trent Rezner or Prince, you know, he just hires the right people. It’s not him playing every instrument on every album and things like that.
This album, for example, has 7 different credited guitarists, several different keyboard players, obviously the 4 vocalists. So he’s not really like the do-it-yourself guy that he might seem like. He’s more of just like a great producer that knows how to put the right people in the studio to make the sounds he’s looking for.
Okay, so both during the time that the Palominos are a thing and after they wrap up and finish in 2012, he is involved in several other projects as well. There’s a bunch of them. The 2 that caught my eye were pair Ubu.
He was a drummer for them for a while, and the doves, he was in the doves for a little bit too. He was mainly a drummer for both of those, but he did some other instrumentation producing as well. So I listened to a lot of stuff from these guys.
I actually listened to most of it and I liked a lot of it, but I will say that it’s all so diverse and so different that it’s like you’re listening. If you listen to 6 of their albums, you’re going to hear 6 different bands pretty much. It’s not, there’s no flow from one thing to the next, and you can’t even really hear the progression.
Everything is almost like it’s complete, just independent thing. But I wanted to give a shout out to one of their albums. It came out in 94.
It’s called pure. It features a vocalist named Lori Carson. She was Fierce girlfriend at the time.
She wrote, uh, co-wrote the songs with him. It does all the vocals on that album. Most of them, I think there’s maybe 2 songs she’s not on.
If you’re a fan of alternative country music, and you’ve heard the name Patty Griffin, that’s who she reminds me of. She kind of has that sort of folky Americana country sound, beautiful voice, great lyricist, great songwriter. Of all their albums that I listened to, that was my favorite.
Anyway, this song, boy, go. I enjoyed quite a bit. My read on you guys been a little off lately, but when I listened to it, I kind of thought that you were going to like it.
So I’m curious to see what you guys thought. So that’s boy, go by the golden Palominos. I like the song okay.
I didn’t think it was great, and not something I wanted to listen to a lot, but I didn’t dislike it either. I did not do the deep dive on them that you did. So I didn’t listen to as much of their stuff or anything.
It is interesting to me to find out that fear drummed for the doves at one point because I’m actually a pretty big fan of the doves and I had no idea that he had worked with them at one point or another. So, yeah, that’s, you learn something new every day, as it turns out. I don’t have a whole lot to add on this.
I like the song, kind of the, you know, slower drony kind of song. The video, like you said, is mainly just kind of vibes and mental or images and that kind of thing. I will say at the very beginning of it.
Like within the 1st 30 seconds or so, there’s a scene, a couple of scenes of like, oh, big open fields with a big sky above them. And I don’t know if they used it in effect or if they just had a, you know, caught a particular, you know, quality of light when they were shooting or whatever it was, but it has a really like purplish tinge to it. And what popped into my head was something also musical, but completely different was, which was the sky was all purple.
There were people running everywhere. That was the immediate thing I thought of when I saw the purple sky on that video, the lyric from the print song. But yeah, I liked this, okay?
I don’t think I’m going to go do a deep dive on the golden Palominos or anything, but I did think the dude was really interesting. I like the fact that he kind of changes what he does from album to album and very rarely ever sounds the same. So, you know, maybe I’ll check them out a little more, but on the strength of this song, I can’t say it was something that made me, you know, just say, well, gosh, I’ve got to go hear some more golden Palominos.
It was fine, but it was not great. Or at least, you know, in my opinion anyway. I really liked it.
Yeah, I loved it. It was, I think if you told me it was an REM song. I don’t think I would maybe think it wasn’t.
I mean, it’s definitely, you know, going into it knowing it wasn’t an REM song, you could definitely hear kind of differences that you wouldn’t expect, right? But if going in blind, if you were just like, hey, they discovered this RM song that had been buried for 30 years and it came out tomorrow and you played this for me, I don’t think I would be like, oh, no, that’s not RM. Like, I don’t think it’s that different.
It’s a little more atmospheric, maybe. Yeah, yeah, it’s for sure. like, it’s fun to listen to. Yeah, but it has their sound for sure.
It does. It’s close enough that you could fool me. I think.
But going into it knowing that it wasn’t. It was fun to kind of think about, you know, an REM that takes like a darker, more atmospheric turn with some of their stuff and maybe, you know, takes even a harder turn from the jangle pop into into that. Um, maybe later in their career instead of making around the sun.
That’d be great. Sorry, that was that was a stray. There was no reason for that.
Sorry about that. And I’m curious, given that, given what you said about them kind of making, you know, a lot of different types of music, how they recorded what the recording process was for this in terms of their collaboration with Stype. Because, like, you know, REM did what a lot of bands do, which is that the instrumentalists go in and record, you know, essentially a scratch track or like a demo track that’s relatively close to what you might end appearing on the album.
And then they would give that to Michael Stipe, and he would pick the ones that he liked or that he was inspired by or whatever, and he would, you know, write a melody and lyrics over the top of it. I’m assuming this probably worked the same way. You know, that it’s more likely in a collaboration that it does work that way, obviously, because you may not even be in the studio at the same time or whatever.
But I’m wondering, you know, did they make these tracks and then say, hey, man, this sounds like something that Michael Snipe might be into or was it, hey, we got Michael Stipe for like 2 or 3 songs. Let’s make some some backing tracks that would work, you know, like who, I don’t know. It’s, I couldn’t find anything on that, because I kind of had the same thought, but I have a couple of different ways I think that could go.
I do think that it’s certainly possible because this guy’s sort of a studio dude that he laid down the tracks and then said, hey, Michael, you want to write lyrics to this or whatever. But the fact that they did 3 songs and one of them’s a cover leads me to believe they were in a studio screwing around. at some and all this maybe came out of it. Maybe things got polished, more re-recorded, you know, along the way, but just, just, it’s the cover song that throws me there, that, you know, you wouldn’t, I don’t think you’d go to Michael Stipe and go, hey, we’re going to do a cover song of this obscure Moby Grape song from 1966.
You want to do the vocals on it? It seems like something that happened organically, like in the studio. So I’m leaning more towards that, but like I said, you can’t find any information on it, so it’s hard to say.
All you really do find is that this guy, you know, likes to bring in different people. And, I mean, if you look at their work that’s obvious. But what his process is, I couldn’t really find much on.
It makes sense if it did happen that way, if they’re like, hey, we’ve got a couple days, let’s hang out in the studio. And just having Michael Stipe in there influence them in a direction that where they end up making something that, again, doesn’t sound a 1000000 miles away from an REM track. Um, and I don’t want to keep beating that point to death because like, it’s pretty obvious that Peter Buck isn’t on this track, right?
Like there’s the, some of the elements of RM that you’re used to are not there. And some of the things that RM generally doesn’t do, particularly at this point in their career, are there. And so, like, it is a very unique song.
And so it’s cool to hear Michael Stipe in a different atmosphere and in a different environment singing over, you know, with someone else and producing sauce, which he’s done a lot of in his career. And I, you know, I say that as someone who probably hasn’t dug into a lot of his collaborations. I have heard, you know, a fair number.
And this is actually one of my favorite, honestly, you know, this is certainly when Michael Stipe, again, was kind of right at the peak of his powers, and, you know, REM was about to really take over the world right after this, but he really nails it on this track. As always, I love his voice. I’m always kind of intrigued by his lyrics.
And it’s a good collaboration, like it works. They obviously gelled and were able to put together some pretty cool stuff. So, yeah, I give it 2 thumbs up for sure.
Did y’all know going into this, that Michael Stein was the vocalist on this song before you listen to it? Oh, no. Yeah, I didn’t.
And so I have gotten to where I, a couple of times when we’ve done these mystery song things. I’ve kind of pulled up the wiki page 1st or, you know, kind of, to find out. I have not done that the last few weeks, and that’s intentional.
I put the song on ice cold and try to let it surprise me and this definitely surprised me. I was like, because, you know, there’s no mistaking Michael Stein’s voice. So, you know, 3 syllables into that 1st lyric.
I like, damn it, this is Michael Sniper singing on this thing, you know? And we keep stumbling into this stuff, but, you know, there it was. That’s what’s funny to me about it, though, is that I listened to it, and you could have told me that it had somebody from a band that I liked in it, and I would not have known it was Michael Stipe.
I didn’t recognize his voice when I 1st listened to it. Really? Oh, wow. when you guys were talking about, you know, this doesn’t strike me as being a long way from REM.
REM is not a band that popped into my head even a little bit when I 1st heard this until I went and looked it up and saw that Michael Stipe was the vocalist and I went back and listened to it again. It was like, well, you know what? that is Michael Stipe.
That did not grab me as being the case. And RM is not a band. I would have thought of comparing these guys to just on the strength of hearing that one song and not knowing it was him.
I kind of agree with that part, that this, it kind of, I think maybe the reason it sounds like an REM song is because Michael Stipe is singing it, because it definitely doesn’t have like the feel of an REM song. But there’s a little bit of it there. I mean, because of the vocals and because of kind of, I think, his influence on it or whatever, it does, to me, it does sound like it could be an REM song, even though it, you know, it’s it’s ultimately not.
But, yeah, that is surprising to hear that you didn’t recognize that voice right away because I did. I mean, I, it wasn’t, he wasn’t done with the 1st sentence and I went, oh, Michael Snipe is singing this song. Yeah, I went in I went in totally cold.
I had actually just watched the REM. All I have to do is dream video. And so I think I wasn’t looking right at the screen at the moment.
And I assumed that I had accidentally, instead of going to the video I wanted to go to, had like hit next video and just gone to the next RM video. And it was like another RM song that I hadn’t heard. I was like, what?
and then I looked again. I was like, golden? No, golden Palominos, and it doesn’t say like featuring Michael’s diaper or anything in the title.
I was like, but yeah, it took me, I would say the 1st line. Yeah, maybe this into the 2nd line because the 1st line was like, wait a minute. And then the 2nd line was like, yo, yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s.
Musically, to me, it seems a lot more closer, or it seems a lot closer to the doves than it does to REM to me. Like this song I agree with that, too. Yeah, musically, it’s not very RM.
Because it doesn’t have any real, it doesn’t have that strummy guitar in it. That would have been RDM sound, especially at this time. And so, yeah, yeah, and it definitely is probably as closer to the doves.
That’s probably true. It was the vocals, I think, that really just, I went, oh, hey. Good fine though.
Yeah. Yeah, really good fun. Yeah, I dig it.
Once again, I mean, a solid week actually across the board. I was trying to think, like, TV party I was familiar with. We played that at KTXT, but I didn’t know the story of the 3 versions, and so now I got to go back and like check out all the TV shows that they mentioned, because that’s like my favorite part of all that.
Nitreb did not exactly surprise me with the music side of things. That was pretty much right down the pipe, but who knew they were pretty boys? I had no idea about that, so that was a nice surprise.
I can’t say I’m surprised by Michael Stipend, Michael Mills, vocal harmonies because I’ve talked about them and loved them for years, but wow, did they knock that cover out? I don’t know why that surprised me. I don’t know why I put that on and just went, wow, but I did.
I should have seen it coming. I just didn’t. don’t know. Yeah, so good.
I guess I just, yeah, I guess I thought they were gonna maybe do like a ragged version, which I don’t know why you would even do a ragged version of, like, in retrospect, of course they did what they did. And of course they killed it, but like, I was thinking, oh, it’ll be kind of more of just a little tossed off, kind of fun, you know, warming up before a show kind of thing. I think that’s what I thought too, that it was going to be more ragged is the right word.
I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be them screwing around with this song and it was not. they put the work in on that one. No, no absolutely great.
And then, yeah, totally blindsided by Golden Palominos, exposing my ignorance of Michael Stipes collaborations over the years. But a nice surprise. Yeah, again, I really enjoyed it.
I’m gonna dig it into them a little bit. I did check. We played Omaha on KTXT, apparently.
That’s the one Golden Palomino song that was on the KTX, right? So maybe we did cover, yeah. Yeah, interesting.
All right, so I hope you guys enjoyed it. Again, thanks to 120 minutes.org, the other website that compiles all this information about 120 minutes and helps you see all the all the songs that were played on a given month. So you can go there.
If you want to see everything that was played in July of 1987, it’s also a convenient way that has all the links to all the songs and videos that we talked about in the episode. Don’t forget about 35,000 watts, the story of college radio. We always mention all these bands that were on 120 minutes usually came from college radio or played on college radio.
That is a documentary about college radio that’s available right now on Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Tubi. So if you haven’t seen it yet. Or if you have, and you want to watch it again, I’m not.
I mean, I’m not your mom. If you want to watch it again, go for it. We appreciate it. 35,000watch.com or find it on your favorite video streaming service.
Once again, thanks to Scott Mobley and Keith Portfield. My name is Michael Millard. We’ll see you next time on 120 months.