Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 10

This can't go on much longer

The week I was born, the Beatles were in the studio laying backwards-guitar overdubs onto “I’m Only Sleeping,” the Who were building the futuristic industrial soundscape of “Disguises,” and the Rolling Stones released their bold new single, “Paint It, Black.” Within a couple of months, the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet would release their avant-garde, free jazz debut Sound, and Dylan would unleash Blonde on Blonde. Et al. “Was 1966 pop music’s greatest year?” The Guardian once asked. I often wonder tha...

In the Crowd

Another of my regular gigs is Music Columnist for The Normal School magazine, for which I write two essays annually.

In my latest I wrote about loving music and live shows immeasurably, while having little to no desire myself to write or perform.

You can read it here. The archive of my Normal School music essays is here. Dig around if you’re so inclined. Thanks!

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Me, Mom, and Daddy, sittin' here in Queens

I just finished reading Stephen B. Armstrong’s lively book I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, which is chock full of the travails of filmmaking on the fly, low budget woes and eleventh hour inspirations, late ‘70s Hollywood stories, and plenty of Roger Corman hi jinx. The book sent me back to the Ramones records from that era, and in addition to being reminded of Dee Dee Ramone’s great soundtrack song from which Armstrong took his title, I was reminded, a...

Drivin' me wild

A month or so into the lockdown, as we were all reeling and vibing as if we’d been plunked down into a sci-fi flick, my friend Michael Newman invited me to appear on his Hinky Dinky Time with Uncle Michael podcast via WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio as a “Music From Shut-Ins” guest. I played and rapped about the last dozen or so 45 singles I’d bought via crate-digging before the brick-and-mortar stores all (temporarily, thankfully) shuttered.

The show was a blast. (You can listen to it here.) I tho...

Big deal, baby, I still feel like hell

I remember where I was when I learned that Johnny Thunders died. I was standing by the “record machine” in the Union Bar in Athens, Ohio, when future East Village scenester Debra Raffles Trizzini, nee Deb Tripodi, approached me with the news. Thunders was the Junkie Extraordinaire, the Beautiful Wasted Soul, rock and roll personified. Tripodi was wide-eyed with shock, and unsurprised. By 1991, I think we’d all been waiting for the news.

A few years before, I’d banged around Bethesda, Maryland in ...

Slipping in and out of phase

The best passages in Richard Hell’s essential autobiography I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, published in 2013, arrive as Hell pushes up against the limits of language to describe rock and roll. (His memories and writing about the seduction, bliss, and brutality of heroin addiction is also indelible, among the best I’ve read about the cultural/personal/sexual politics of drug addiction. Hell had a lot of fun, experienced a lot of agony, and got out.) Embedded among his startlingly-clear memor...

Kate Clover wants it now

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Watermelon, a Chicago band that self-describes as “super sour punk,” opened last night at Cobra Lounge. I noticed right away that the drummer was sporting a Hoodoo Gurus t-shirt. A good omen, I thought.

I was right. Watermelon—the drummer and two women with matching powder blue Mosrite guitars, shag haircuts, and skinny black jeans—blasted out a dozen or so three-chord rockers, all super-charged power riffs and hollered vocals. At one point, the bass player announce...

The world keeps on turning

In the introduction to 31 Songs, a gathering of essays about songs he loves, Nick Hornby writes about the nature of music writing. In 2001, Hornby staged a benefit show at the Hammersmith Palais in London; among the bands performing was Teenage Fanclub, who as it happened were rehearsing their tune “Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From” at the precise moment Hornby arrived at the venue. At the time, Hornby felt, quite naturally, that whenever he’d hear that song in the future he’d remember t...

What is a love song, anyway?

I think it sounded different than everything else, especially at the time it came out. It had this strummy, shuffly, almost swing sort of vibe to it. It wasn’t just clipped eighth notes like a lot of things were then. I think that had a lot to do with it.

That’s Steve Barton in 2015 talking about his band Translator’s “Everywhere that I’m Not,” at that point over thirty years old yet still as startling and invigorating as a sudden cool breeze. Barton has been asked time and again about the song a...

Goin' wherever you take me

I was introduced to the Chi-Lites’ transcendent “Stoned Out of my Mind” by the Jam, who included a cover of the song on a double 7” of their final single “Beat Surrender,” released in the U.K. in November of 1982. The Jam had recorded it a month or so before at Marcus Studios, and I’ve learned only recently in Dennis Munday’s book The Jam & Paul Weller: Shout to the Top that, in a highly uncharacteristic move, the band employed a drum machine on the track, “to underpin Rick [Buckler]’s brushes.”...