Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 8

Count them as they fall

The songs that Elvis Costello and the Attractions recorded in 1977 and 1978 feel as alive and dangerous now as when they were first let loose on a startled public. “No Action,” “This Year’s Girl,” “The Beat,” “Pump It Up,” “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea,” “Night Rally,” “Radio Radio,” “Tiny Steps” are at turns angry, submissive, challenging, and impotent—all in a day’s work. They incisively dramatize the wounded persona, so cuttingly articulate and prone to lashing out, that Costello perfected...

Chuck Berry in the dark

Sometime in the 1990s I was listening to a bootleg CD of the Beatles’ late-1966 recording sessions for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Buried deep in one take, I heard what sounded like a random Chuck Berry lick played by George Harrison, a lone formalist stay against the chaos that John Lennon was brewing in his deeply inward, trippy evocation of childhood. I smiled at this, as the band probably did, too. 1966 must’ve felt eons away from 1963, when the Beatles would bust out Berry’s “Roll Over Bee...

A long way from the valley

Back in 2010 I wrote a book about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. The album had come out when I was an impressionable teen, and decades later I still loved the record. I wondered what that meant. Does my affection for the album and the band sit somewhere between earnestness and irony? (You’ll have to read the book to find out!)

I wrestled with a similar question after the Knack popped up on shuffle while I was at the gym recently. Get the Knack was released in June 1979, one month before Highway to Hell...

Beep-beep'm-beep-beep, yeah

Writing about the Beatles anymore—that is, for the last few decades—feels a bit like enthusing to someone about, say, a gorgeous sunset. Everybody’s seen one, in just abut every medium, and no one “needs” to see another, let alone have one breathlessly described to them, and yet the transcendent, nameless joy and awe that a sunset might spark can feel as fresh and renewable as a surprising cool breeze—which everyone in history as also felt, and yet which can feel like a gift that, unbidden and c...

Here to spread the good word

Joel Gion was born in 1970, “the year that because of math killed ‘the 60s’.” So begins the first chapter in Gion’s knockabout memoir In The Jingle Jangle Jungle: Keeping Time with the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Moments later, we learn that his mother attended an Ike and Tina Turner concert in the late stages of her pregnancy with Gion. Several pages on, he remarks that the first Brian Jonestown Massacre flier he saw, before he was a member of the band, read “TAKE ACID NOW.” An obsession with the...

We were wild girls and boys

“Deadbeat Club” begins with a joke:

“Huh? Get a job?”
“What for?”
“I’m trying to think.”

Cindy Wilson, Kate Pierson, and Keith Strickland time the vaudeville-via-Georgia bit superbly; sold with heavy-lidded irony, it’s essentially the song’s count off. But the humor’s a bit of misdirection, too, as “Deadbeat Club,” one of the great singles of its era, traffics in bittersweetness, nostalgia, and grief.

In the early 80’s, I’d loved the B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster,” “Planet Claire,” “Private Idaho,” key song...

Freaks to the front

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—The Amyl and the Sniffers storm front is moving steadily across the country. In a calisthenic feat of booking, the Australian band is hopping off of their club and theater tour for a few dates, joining the Hives in support of Foo Fighters, but mainly they’re focusing on smaller joints, behind their new single “U Should Not be Doing That.” They skipped Chicago this time around, so without complaint I drove three hundred and fifty miles to catch them in a sold-out sh...

I dream a dream for you

I barely endured Probability and Statistics class in high school. I don’t have a feel for the likelihood that an artist who’s released thirty-two albums and a combination of forty singles and EPs in fewer than twenty years could have a signature song. Is it more or less likely given such a prolific output?

Whatever the odds, Ty Segall’s “Sleeper,” the title track of his 2013 release, has become to my ears his standard bearer, a song that captures his high-haunt acoustic mood and knack for writin...

They wrote a song, they played a show

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Last night at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, Steven McDonald of Redd Kross paused mid-story, vaguely distracted, a rare look of unease showing on his face. The ebullient, long-haired, high-kicking bass player/singer was a little bummed out. He described how the band had played St. Paul, Minnesota the night before, and how for them “the torch hand been passed” by Paul Stanley of KISS, the only spiritual Paul who really matters to McDonald and his brother, guitarist/singer...

Trying to take this all in

I wrote recently about Robyn Hitchcock’s wonderful new memoir 1967, which led me back to Hitchcock’s Soft Boys and solo work, which led me to Hitchcock’s 2019 collab with Andy Partridge of XTC—which reminded me of the piece below that I wrote about XTC’s “Senses Working Overtime,” one of the most remarkable singles of the 1980s. Some of you might’ve missed this the first time I posted it more than a year ago. That, and it’s sunny, pretty day in northern Illinois, so here’s the perfect to soundtr...