Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 2

Here are a few (more) of my favorite B-sides

Here’s Part 2 of my ongoing trawl through my 45s for some favorite flip sides. (Part 1 ran last December.) As with the last batch, I limited myself to songs that did not appear on an album, save for a later reissues or compilations. Most of these records were “lovingly handled” before I ever got hold of them, but that’s part of the fun.

“What’s more heroic than the survival of the B-side?” I asked back in December.

Ever since RCA released the first 45 rpm single in 1949, the flip side to the “plu...

Life is timeless, days are long

The Jam released their eighth single, “When You’re Young,” in August of 1979. Written and recorded a few months after Paul Weller turned twenty-one, the blistering song offered a complaint, if you could catch up to it, that the massive energy with which the young are dosed wears off far too soon, colorful wildness tamed into gray dreariness.

“In the city there’s a thousand faces all shining bright,” Weller barked in the Jam’s debut single, in 1977, “And those golden faces are under 25.” Weller w...

To tell the truth

The English band Silverhead fell apart in the mid-1970s after releasing two studio albums—their self-titled debut in 1972, and 16 and Savaged a year later, both issued on Deep Purple’s label Purple Records—neither of which performed well commercially. Silverhead toured internationally, yet never stuck on the radio, and as history tells the story, they will forever be considered a should've-made-it-big band associated with the dated Glam movement. (Work on a follow-up to 16 and Savaged was scratc...

Rev it up

I lived in Athens, Ohio from 1988 to 1995, an era during which email would arrive and internet message boards would thrive, and yet Athens felt disconnected from it all. A small town in the foothills of Appalachian Mountains, Athens kept alive a ‘60s and ‘70s spirit on its streets, front porches, and bars. Music, when it did arrive, came from jukeboxes stuffed with classic rock, and from townie bar bands, several of renown, that kept alive a folk music/Americana vibe. Occasional out-of-town indi...

Here today, gone tomorrow

“I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made eleven albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made twelve albums that sound exactly the same.”

That’s Angus Young, waggishly owning up to AC/DC’s ironclad fidelity to their sound. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear a casual fan of the Ramones accuse them of the same homogeneity. The Ramones had an image to which they were stubbornly faithful to the end, and their first three albums—their landmark self-titled debut (1976), Leave Home (1977),...

Gonna leave for a while

My wife Amy and I recently spent some time in Venice Beach and Santa Barbara, California. As a culture, we all enjoy easier access to music while traveling than ever before, yet I find my relationship to tunes estranged when I’m on the road. I’ve just published a book about how music soundtracks our lives. Yet, while traveling, I’m oddly disconnected.

Take off…. I’ve written here and here at No Such Thing As Was about listening to music while (literally) flying, that detached soundscape that can...

Adolescent clowning, grown-up reckoning

I caught the Dogmatics once or twice in the mid-1980s in Washington D.C., marveling at the barreling energy and loud grins that they brought with them down I-95 from Boston. Guitarist/singers Jerry Lehane and Peter O’Halloran, bassist Paul O’Halloran, and drummer Tom Long played rock and roll that threatened to fall apart with each measure, rollicking, good-natured, broken-string slop that wasn’t absent of hooks, craft, or sentiment. The guys were fun, and droll as hell in their songs and onstag...

Old troubles new again

I don’t know that anyone really needs to add to what’s already been written about the sounds produced in the Stax Studio, yet then I hear a song like “Ole Man Trouble” I feel the urge. The lead track on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul album was cut in Memphis, Tennessee on July 27, 1965 with old hands Booker T. Jones on organ, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, and Al Jackson on drums; Wayne Jackson and Gene “Bowlegs” Miller added trumpet, Andrew Love and Floyd...

On the other side of town...

Songwriter and singer John Prine, who died in 2020, made a long, knotty career by enlivening the stories he sang with a fiction writer’s eye for the details of ordinary folk leading ordinary lives. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens: when slightly turned, those ordinary folk become metaphors. Born roughly a decade after Prine, Dave Alvin has in his lengthy career mined similar terrain, on which men and women stumble, looking for love, a calling, or a reason.

I first heard Alvin’s “Wanda and Duane” in ...

Complicated and beautiful

Ty Segall writes songs that are deeply personal yet oblique, as if he’s transcribing his dreams, or soundtracking the emotional resonances that he wakes up with. Many of his songs, even the fuzz-drenched, deafeningly noisy ones, give the impression of dwelling inside of the singer, where it’s quiet. Asked recently what he’d do if he weren’t playing music, Segall responded, “I would go back to school and study philosophy.” (He added, “and not be able to get a job.”) That makes sense to me. Segall...