No Turning Back Now – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts

A continuation of the previous two posts… i.e., the finale.

And here is where I witness most of the below at the time of original broadcast (or a similar video at the time), and there’s no turning back after that. I guess late night TV is probably not really the same as it used to be back in my preteen and teenage and babysitting days… but if it was like that now, and you had a child who liked music a lot and also was a night owl that never went to sleep early, they’d probably turn out like me. Scary.

Possibly the most monumental evening in Lynnster Musical History. Here, it’s all over now and there’s no turning back. It’s 1977. It was a late night of babysitting over at the home of a friend of the family. An 11-year-old Lynnster flips on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, as seen here, and things just really wouldn’t ever be the same again. R.I.P. Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny. Just as I first saw them, I give you the Ramones, 1977.

This should really be before the Ramones because this is not the broadcast where I saw Cheap Trick for the first time – that would have probably also been in 1977, and was also on Rock Concert. Nevertheless, this is close enough to the same time, and same era of severe and extreme Robin Zander crush which would last for a couple of decades at least. I kinda got too indie-cool for a while there in the late Eighties and early Nineties and didn’t listen to them much for maybe a decade, then in the latter part of the Nineties, got bit by the bug again and also saw them live for the third time in 20 years and it was awesome. Probably the only band besides the Gurus and The Replacements that I could sing every song off the first ten (or however many) albums backwards and in my sleep, easy. Cheap Trick, circa 1978:

So now, it’s 1979. This is not the broadcast I saw, but it’s close, and the same song of two I saw performed at the time. Probably 12 years old when I saw them, and had never seen anything quite like it before. I had a friend sleeping over who was watching with me, who was, like, “What the hell is THAT?”

I said, “I don’t know, but the guitars. Pay attention to the guitars. And the drums.”

And she said, “Who cares?” Well, me, for one.

Yes, they were whacked out, crazy stuff. And brilliant. This 1979 video of “Uncontrollable Urge” is unfortunately rather poor, but it’s the closest I could find to what I originally saw that night. Devo, 1979 (UPDATE 10/2009 – I’ve had to replace this with another video as the one that was here got taken off YouTube. This one’s from their Fridays appearance in 1980, with a little bit of a comedy lead-in. Sadly, once again, the SNL performance I wrote about that I actually saw in 1979 is yet another one being held hostage by NBC Universal and being kept from the YouTube public):

And here’s yet another of the very most monumental evenings ever. This one I did witness the broadcast live as a VERY impressionable 12 or 13 year old girl. I thought I’d never seen anything as wild as Devo, but this – I’d never seen anything quite like it. When, a minute or so into it and out of nowhere, Cindy Wilson screamed, “Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no limburger!” – chills ran down my spine. I was stunned.

And then I got unstunned and bought the cassette tape the very next day. And just wanted to BE Cindy Wilson after that, really. And how cool was it that they were from the Southeast, just like me?

Some people I guess would say oh, no, the important one’s “Rock Lobster” (which I seem to recall was also performed that night). But for me, it’s this one. The almighty B-52s, 1979 (UPDATE 10/2009 – yet another monumental performance that has been removed from YouTube thanks to NBC Universal. I have replaced it for the time being with this live performance of the same song from 1982):

This is out of order chronologically, but there was rarely an opportunity to see the Sex Pistols on TV, at least in this part of the country, when they were still together. I read all the music rags of the time and had read loads about them, but it must have taken two years to actually see them somewhere besides in photos in print, so even though this video is from 1977, it was probably 1979 or 1980 before I saw it, and the band was long gone and Sid was probably dead by the time I did. That lack of exposure for me at the time is probably why I love The Filth & the Fury DVD so much.

Yeah, there were better bands, but the Pistols are still a hugely important chapter in that period of music, and guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook went on to do some really great stuff later on, especially Steve with the Neurotic Outsiders was awesome. The Sex Pistols, 1977:

I think this is from 1980, and I also saw this on live broadcast. It kind of took a little while for The Clash to filter into semi-rural West Tennessee, as with a lot of other bands I eventually grew to love. RIP Joe. The Clash, around 1980:

This is actually not the first time I saw The Boomtown Rats, though I did see this broadcast as well and I think it was that same week or maybe a week later; in any case, it followed soon after. I initially saw them on Bandstand on a Saturday morning. I wouldn’t really call the Rats a major influence “overall”, but this album itself was a HUGE influence on me on its own. That was one of the greatest albums to come out of the New Wave-y early Eighties. They played this on both performances as well as the big hit of the time, which was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, of course. Sir Saint Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats, 1980 (UPDATE 10/2009 – the video I originally had here has been removed from YouTube, but this is even better – this is BOTH the performances from that evening, “Someone’s Looking at You” AND “I Don’t Like Mondays”):

Last but very much not least, Chrissie Hynde – another EXTREMELY important influence for me as a female. It took me a little while to get to the Pretenders because I didn’t like “Brass in Pocket”, but then the second album came out and I loved it. Went back and bought the first one and was, like, OMG, what have I missed?!?! Saw this one on live broadcast too, in 1981:

So there ya go. The formative years, and maybe explains a lot as to why I’m so musically psychotic/schizophrenic or whatever. Maybe it doesn’t. All I know is it’s there and it’s mine and that’s just me.

Toodles ’til after the weekend, I must go buy a car today and have a car payment again for the first time in years. Yikes.

Coming Into My Own – Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts

A continuation of the previous post…

Sometime in the early to mid-Seventies, I started working my way towards what was really going to be “my” music and the music that was going to do some serious influential damage (heh) from then on. I already had some definite opinions and likes and dislikes, but hadn’t really quite found my niche yet. I was still listening to a lot of current radio, watching a lot of American Bandstand and The Midnight Special and other music TV of the day, and still being a preteen and in elementary school, was at the time immersed in the usual bubblegum and teen idol stuff like most girls that age. I loved the Bay City Rollers, and no, I’m not too proud to admit that the first concert I ever attended was Shaun Cassidy, okay?

Throughout a lot of those years, Dick Clark and others often had music retrospective specials of all sorts on TV, and if one was on, we were usually watching it at my house. Nostalgia for the Fifties was kind of popular by then (a lot of that due to the TV show Happy Days being on at the time), and so a lot of the content of these music specials were already being referred to as “oldies”; thus I got to see a lot of, both old clips and current performances, of many of my parents’ favorites like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, et al.

As far as bands and artists from the British Invasion years, sure, I’d already had a lot of exposure, mostly thanks to the aunts who were teenagers in the Sixties. But in the midst of all the Beatlemania going on at their house, there was an awful lot I’d not really had proper introduction to.

And it turned out that many of those were the ones that extended and increased and fed my music addiction the most. In a HUGE way.

Again, much like the previous post, most of these clips were shot before I was born or soon after, so certainly none of them I witnessed at original broadcast. I picked up on all of these a decade or a little more after the fact, mostly when parts were shown during the various music retrospective specials as mentioned above. But I think with the exception of the Yardbirds video, these are all the same ones I initially saw that whet my whistle for more, and eventually led to all of these bands heavily influencing my tastes for years to come.

The Rolling Stones (You probably knew this was coming – much more a Stones girl than a Beatles girl):

The Kinks (OH yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. And much like the Stones, a hometown fave among my musician pals):

The Who (I should probably add here that I’ve seen Quadrophenia probably 200 times… and Tommy almost as much):

The Animals (as well as Eric Burdon and War, and whatever other variations can be had and heard):

The Yardbirds – and how often have you ever seen Jeff Beck playing an acoustic guitar?!?!?!!!! Which is why I picked this clip, but I had never seen it before now. And yep, that is Eric Clapton that you’ll see at about the 0:50 mark on the other side of the room from Jeff Beck, but if you blink you’ll miss him:

UPDATED: I gotta add this one ‘cos it’s my favorite:

Ah, but it wasn’t all about the British Invasion either. I bought my first Jefferson Airplane LP at ten years old, I think, and to this day, Jorma Kaukonen is a fave all-time guitar player of mine:

UPDATE 10/2009: In trying to replace missing videos on these posts, I realized I’d made another major omission back when I originally posted this over two years ago. Hard to find any decent real footage of The Doors on YouTube, but this one will do (however, they do have the first Ed Sullivan appearance on YouTube if you look for it – the infamous one where Jim sang “higher” when asked not to during “Light My Fire”, and you can clearly Robbie Krieger smirking in the background afterwards – but it’s official and there’s a commercial, so I decided against posting it and posting this one instead):

Next and final post in this brief series – there’s just no turning back from the thing of epic proportions that’s about to come. Don’t touch that dial.

Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts – The Beginning

Get a cup of coffee or your beverage of choice and prepare to sit a spell. We’re going to be a while here.

I pulled an all-nighter Thursday night working and had an hour or two to kill before starting the Friday workday, so I indulged a bit in a fave activity of hunting YouTube for music stuff I remember from the past but hadn’t seen in a while, or at least stuff from the same time period.

I started collecting some links and then, when I was finished, I looked at it all and just kinda went whoa. Completely accidentally, I had somehow managed to basically assemble all the pieces of the puzzle – or at least the major ones – of my lifelong addiction to music, which began as a very young child.

There are, of course, thousands of other associated pieces I haven’t collected here; virtually everything I have ever listened to helped to formulate my musical tastes and feed the addiction as an adult, certainly. One of my most beloved genres today, as an older adult, is Australian garage rock of the late Seventies and Eighties – but in the U.S., you didn’t hear or see most of that stuff back then, and I wasn’t introduced to a lot of it until the big boom of the Internet, years after the fact. But a lot of that old Aussie stuff was heavily influenced by both British and American punk rock, old British Invasion and American surf music, and the Motor City Sound in Detroit, so in a way, it was sort of all related to what I grew up with anyway.

But all these YouTube videos I have collected here in this and the next two posts – yeah, these are pretty much the very most major pieces that created the foundation of my music junkieness (and my own musicianship, occasionally) as a young adult through today.

In the final and third post, I have collected stuff I either witnessed on original broadcast or is from the same specific time period. The ones in this post and the next one, I obviously did not see at the time they were aired because as far as most of them are concerned, I wasn’t born yet (with the exception of the Raiders, in which case I might have just been born).

And most of this first group is way before my time, but it’s important I include them. I have often said that my biggest musical influence of all was my father, who was also sort of a music junkie in his time when rock & roll was still brand new. It was stuff from his collection I heard the most before I started making my own decisions about music (at three years old, heh). My dad had a tremendous stack of 45 RPM records and LPs and was a musician himself, as was my uncle, and my dad’s first cousin was a DJ on local radio for many years, and my mom’s a music fan as well.

I get it from all of them, but it was my father and I who were most alike in music junkieness of sorts. I just took it to the next level and eventually became way more deeply immersed in the addiction than he ever was. (And some might say far more out of control, given the amount of recorded music I have amassed and things I’ll do to see my favorites play live, like take off to L.A. or Chicago at the last minute.) ;)

Must start this off with The Man himself, Mr. Chuck Berry – blurry video, but this is my favorite. We had the original Chess CD in that stack of 45s, and it probably got played in my record player a decade and a half later as much as it did when my dad was a teenager (UPDATE 10/2009 – unfortunately, like many, this video got pulled from YouTube and the only replacement I found is just a sound recording with a single photo. Hopefully will be able to replace it with something better later if found).

My dad played piano as well as being a drummer, and monopolized the family piano as a teenager, learning how to play every single thing Little Richard ever did.

And I can’t very well write about my father and his monopolizing of the piano without a hat tip to Jerry Lee Lewis. I think we had every single he ever put out on the original Sun label in the Sixties on 45 AND a few 78s (!) as well. (I sold most on eBay a few years ago for a fair amount.)

Now, both my parents were Elvis fans, especially having both grown up in West Tennessee. In fact, my dad was such an Elvis fan and did such a good Elvis, he was picked to do Elvis in a high school musical presentation and was apparently legend for it ever after; last year, when I was having dinner with my dad’s cousin and his girlfriend (both of whom graduated with my father) and talking about that, the girlfriend leaned over the table towards me and said, “Oh, your dad WAS Elvis.” Dad’s cousin decried the fact that he had to sing “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday”, while my father got to be Elvis. Hee.

So Elvis was king, but somehow I missed the Elvis fan gene. See above on associated pieces of the puzzle of influences; certainly that’s an influence, and certainly Elvis influenced many of my later influences. I just always liked Jerry Lee better. And my dad could do a pretty good Jerry Lee, too.

My parents were both in college in Memphis in the early Sixties and frequently went out to see live music, so they got to see a lot of the Stax and similar legends perform live back in the day. So a little bit of that appreciation of Memphis soul rubbed off on me too (and is probably the only reason I still have any love left at all for this city I live in and city of my birth).

I give you the masters, Booker T. & The MGs, featuring the awesome guitar of Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, who can still often be found playing around here and down in the Tunica casinos today. If they look familiar to you for some other reason, it’s probably because you saw them in The Blues Brothers movie with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd years later.

And another personal favorite and this song will always mean Memphis to me as well as the previous one – Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn are featured in this video as well with Sam & Dave:

You may find it curious I have included these next two videos in this post. My aunts were teenagers when I was born and huge Beatles and Monkees fans – and later, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, etc. – so I get a lot of that from them and yeah, The Beatles are definitely a big influence for me, but I’m not including them in these posts because in truth, there are other groups from the same time that were really a more major influence on me. And goodness knows I love me some Monkees.

Anyway, we have more or less now established that my then-teenage aunts were boy crazy schoolgirls with mad crushes on various teen idols. Probably the only other band that they crushed on as much back then as The Beatles and The Monkees was Paul Revere and The Raiders. You might not know that the legendary hit songwriting team Boyce & Hart originally wrote “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” for the Raiders, who recorded what in my opinion is a better version of the song – which, of course, later became a huge hit for The Monkees.

Yeah, sure, the Raiders were big teen idols of the Sixties, thanks in part to appearing on the TV show Where the Action Is every day after school hours, and being not only cute, but goofily humorous. They were also excellent, excellent musicians; in the liner notes of Raiders anthology CD The Essential Ride (an excellent compilation that really showcases how good they were throughout their career), Letterman show bass player Will Lee hat tips longtime Raider Phil Volk as his inspiration for learning how to play bass.

Anyway, yeah, my teenage aunts had various Raiders posters pinned to their walls in worship and all their records, alongside John, Paul, George, and Ringo and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike, and god knows who all else.

But my dad had their first album – which, for me, that’s instant rock & roll cred right there. Practically from birth, I remember it playing in our home and playing often.

Point to note here – my dad didn’t buy a whole lot of “new” rock & roll in the Sixties. He bought later albums by the rock & rollers he grew up with like Elvis & Jerry Lee; both my parents were into folk & Dylan;  a handful of rock/pop like Creedence and Blood, Sweat & Tears;  but by the later part of the Sixties and thereafter, he pretty much stuck to country and latter-day albums of his favorites from the Fifties.

The fact that my father bought the first Raiders album when it came out (and quite possibly before his boy-crazy teenage sisters had even discovered them) is really rather stunning. I’m guessing that, as a drummer himself, he was somewhat drawn to Mike “Smitty” Smith’s drumming style, but I know there was something else beyond that for him to have picked that one album up, out of all the other thousands of rock records that came out that same year that he didn’t buy. Which makes me appreciate the Raiders even more – like I said, instant rock & roll cred for me right there.

Consequently, sharing the Raiders’ Essential Ride compilation with him on a long drive through Alabama and Mississippi in the early part of this decade was the last “musical moment” we shared together before he passed away, and really the only one we’d had in a very long time at that point.

To date, Paul Revere and The Raiders have yet to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It’s a downright shame.

These videos are both from 1966, so I was either born or almost at the time. This first video is really blurry and is also a lip-synched performance, but probably one of their earliest TV appearances and the song’s the only YouTube video I found from that first album (UPDATE 10/2009 – this video had been removed, but I was able to find a much better copy of the same performance):

This one’s a little later but is a better video and a live (or mostly live) performance (and be sure to check out the extremely young looking actor Michael Landon introducing them) (UPDATE 10/2009 - Well, like many, the video I referenced before has been removed and I couldn’t find another copy, but thanks to bassist Phil Volk’s son Brian, who uploaded this to YouTube, here they are on The Hollywood Palace show in late 1966. This is one of my favorite Raiders songs anyway, “The Great Airplane Strike”, so thanks, Brian, for uploading it!):

UPDATE 10/2009: I just found this video of a 1979 reunion show (which I remember watching when it was first on) with the original five Raiders – Mark Lindsay, Phil “Fang” Volk, Drake Levin, Mike “Smitty” Smith, and Paul Revere – which is just so much fun, I just had to include it. (RIP Drake & Smitty.)

Next post, I start coming into my own… stay tuned.