The Black Keys Rev Up Their Bitchen "El Camino"

I resisted the furious charms of The Black Keys for way too long. I naively assumed that my guitar-drums blues revivalist duo needs were being more than adequately filled by the great White Stripes. 


But Jack and Meg White called it a day earlier this year, which freed me up to get into the Keys. 
And by the sound of the Keys' forthcoming record El Camino, escaping the shadow of the Stripes has freed them up as well.


El Camino comes out next Tuesday and it is already getting five-star reviews from the people who review things with stars. (Ironists will notice that the vehicle on the cover is not an El Camino but some sort of 80s minivan.)


The first single “Lonely Boy” is an instant classic will turn even a Tupperware Party into a bolt-the-doors rager. Just try and sit still while this tune is playing. Chances are you'll be shakin' your money maker sho'nuff like the dude in the video.

Guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney formed the Black Keys in Akron, Ohio (home of Chrissie Hynde) in 2001. After several well received records, they made it to the mainstream with their 2010 record Brothers. 


Brothers was one of 2010's very best discs, led by "Tighten Up," and "Howlin' for You," an overloaded, supercompressed blast of neo-blues with a touch of glam, supported by this brilliantly Tarantinonian video.  





Pre-order El Camino on iTunes here and you'll get "Lonely Boy" now.


Bonus clip: "Tighten Up" (also from Brothers) live on Late Show with David Letterman.



Get Brothers on iTunes here.

A-Ha's "Take On Me": A Video to Get Lost in (Literally)

26 years ago, the #1 song in the land was A-Ha's "Take on Me," amongst the bounciest, catchiest pieces of synth-pop ever to emerge from Norway.

Even more enduring than the song was the innovative video, which used a technique called rotoscoping to combine pencil-sketch animation with live-action. The video remains captivating to this day. So captivating in fact, that my good friend George Feinn once went through the looking glass as it were and into the video himself (I know because I was there).

In this Rock Turtleneck exclusive, George recounts the time when he took on "Take on Me" — and lost.

The first time I saw A-Ha's “Take on Me”  video was in the fall of 1985, in my friend Scott’s dorm room at the University of Connecticut. On Scott’s dresser was an old black & white TV the size of a small microwave. Like Vinnie Barbarino talking to a girl between classes, the set was always on. 

One evening five or six of us (including Rock Turtleneck's Steve Walsh) sat in Scott's room to watch the show Friday Night Videos. It was about 1:35 am.  An intoxicating mélange of smoke filled the air, and Cool Ranch Doritos filled our bellies.

A hauntingly melodic electronic drumbeat kicked in and I was instantly mesmerized. The action unfolded at a breakneck pace. A cartoon motorcycle racing champion falls in love with a woman in the "real" world. He catches her attention by winking to her from the pages of the book in which he lives and she agrees to join him in the comic book. Now that’s love.

Or so I thought. Suddenly, the man’s fellow bikers show up wielding monkey wrenches. I knew I had to help.  My buzz in full swing, I had an "a-ha" moment of my own — I was in the video, too. As the hero, heroine and I were being chased down the penciled hallways, I started screaming “Go left! No, right! No left!” I was in a video game-fever dream with no controls,  yelling at a TV in the middle of the night, with no escape in sight.

We rounded a corner, I turned around and there I was, back in Scott’s room, amongst my  friends, sweaty and disheveled. Like our two heroes, I'd miraculously managed to escape. 

To this day, I still long to transport myself back into that comic book every time I hear the song. And I play at least ten times a day.

Thank you, George for a touching anecdote.

George is far from the only person to be taken by "Take on Me," as this clip from The Family Guy so poignantly demonstrates. 

Explore the surprisingly large A-Ha oeuvre on iTunes here.

About a Kurt: Nirvana Unplugged in New York 18 Years Later

The late great Kurt Cobain has been on my mind and in my ears more than usual of late. 

Perhaps it was all the brouhaha over the 20th anniversary (!) of Nevermind. More likely, it was because of my absolutely uncanny resemblance to Kurt this past Halloween, when my wife and I dressed as members of the so-called 27 Club. (She was Amy Winehouse).

The Mrs. has a green cardigan identical to the one famously worn by Kurt on Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York set 18 years ago this month. Once I put it on, along with my “grunge” wig, "Hi, How Are You?" T-shirt and ripped Levi's, all I could say is “This song is on our first record. Most people don’t own it.”

“About a Girl,” was indeed on Nirvana’s first record, Bleach. But a lot more people own it now than in 1993. The album as a whole is more on the doom & gloom end of the grunge spectrum, with dropped-down guitar tunings and more emphasis on raw emotion than melody.

But “About a Girl” was the glaring exception. It's a total John Lennon homage and hinted at the pop genius to come on Nevermind. Cobain allegedly wrote it after spending four hours listening to Meet the Beatles and it captures the spirit of Lennon’s songs from that LP, particularly “Not a Second Time.”

Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York was released in the fall of 1994, about six months after Kurt blew his brains out. Like many Nirvana fans, I recognized its greatness immediately; a tape a friend made from the TV broadcast was in heavy rotation on my Walkman long before it was released officially.

In the opinion of Rock Turtleneck, it's the best Nirvana record, and the best record of the 1990s. Amazingly, the entire show was done in a single take, with no edits. So much for the Generation X slacker myth.

His mind-blowing, show-closing performance of Lead Belly’s “In the Pines” (here renamed “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”) is one of the greatest, most terrifying rock performances of all time.

Kurt’s legacy would have been much more two-dimensional were it not for Unplugged in New York.

  For it showed that more than being a quote-unquote grunge rocker, Kurt was an Aberdeen bluesman at heart who was only beginning to explore the extent of his talents. RIP.

Buy Nirvana's Unplugged in New York on iTunes here.

Happy 66th Birthday Neil Young

There's more to the picture than meets the eye.

11.11.11.: Happy Nigel Tufnel Day. It's One Louder

In addition to being Veteran's Day today, 11.11.11 is also Nigel Tufnel Day.

Rock Turtleneck readers know and worship Tufnel as one of the lead guitarists for Spinal Tap, the legendarily loud British rock band chronicled in Marty DiBergi's revealing 1984 documentary This is Spinal Tap.

In a key scene of the film, Tufnel takes DiBergi through his impressive collection of music gear. He is most proud of his stack of customized Marshall amplifiers, whose knobs, rather than going to the standard 10, go one louder, to 11. DiBergi seems flummoxed by the concept, but Tufnel's logic is impossible to dismiss:


"You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Eleven. Exactly. One louder."

Spinal Tap also included fellow visionary David St. Hubbins on lead guitar and Derek Smalls on bass, plus a seemingly endless procession of doomed drummers. The group enjoyed a brief mid-80s renaissance when their tune "Sex Farm" made the top 10 on the Japanese music charts. They're currently residing in the "Where are they Now?" file. 


For Rock Turtleneck's money, Tap was never better than  in their prog-metal magnum opus "Stonehenge," ("Where the Banshees live/And they do live well"). The legendarily disastrous performance captured here in This is Spinal Tap led to the temporary departure of their longtime manager Ian Faith.





Buy on iTunes:
This is Spinal Tap (film)
This is Spinal Tap (soundtrack)

Zo40: Led Zeppelin IV Forty Years Later

Two score ago today, Led Zeppelin released their fourth album. The record had no title, no song listing, no serial number and no mention of the gentlemen who recorded it. 

What it did have was the mightiest slab of blues-based hard rock and acoustic hobbit-folk to ever grace the ears of mortal man.


Led Zeppelin IV (aka ZoSo among many other names -- be sure to vote in the RT ZoSo poll in the upper righthand corner) is one of those records that is so ingrained iinto the DNA of the late baby-boomer, Gen- X crowd lhat it is hard to think of it objectively, to think of a record that was written, recorded, produced and released. It seems like it was handed down from the gods of rock, Ten Commandments style, from the hermit on the inner gatefold.

One afternoon, when I was in eighth or ninth grade, and was just starting to explore the classic rock canon, I went to the local record store and picked up ZoSo and Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Once I could drop the needle “Black Dog” or "Misty Mountain Hop" or "Purple Haze" anytime I wanted, instead of waiting for it to be played on WPLJ, the world was a more macho, slightly more satanic place.

Just as powerful as ZoSo's macho come-ons were the ballads, beautiful ones. “The Battle of Evermore” sounded like it was written in Stonehenge and featured lovely vocals by Sandy Denny who was in the English folk group Fairport Convention. And on Side 2 was “Going to California” a tribute to band hero Joni Mitchell (whose recent Blue LP had a tune called "California") that is the loveliest song they ever recorded.

The album closes with the mighty blues "When the Levee Breaks" which features perhaps the fiercest drum sound ever captured on tape. In the must-see 2007 guitar doc It Might Get Loud, Zep overlord Jimmy Page explains how he got the sound in Mick Jagger's country home, where ZoSo was recorded.

I forgot to mention the record contains "Stairway to Heaven," the most popular epic rock song of all time. The tune, which Rober Plant introduces here as a "song of hope" begs the musical question, Does anybody remember laughter?

If you haven’t given ZoSo a spin in a while, you should, because it is without question one of the most overpowering displays of sheer awesomeness ever recorded, right up there with Revolver, Hightway 61 Revisited, Who’s Next, Sticky Fingers, London Calling, Purple Rain and Slippery When Wet.



Buy on iTunes: Led Zeppelin IV/ZoSo

A Lotta Love from Neil Young and Nicolette Larson

For no reason in particular, I found myself starting the day listening to Neil Young's "Lotta Love," from his understated, underrated 1978 LP Comes a Time. It's one of his most heartfelt, melodic ballads, and that is saying something, as he has more of those than just about anyone. Here he is doing the tune in the acoustic portion of his film Rust Never Sleeps.

Like many of us, I first came to know "Lotta Love" via the version by Nicolette Larson, which was a huge hit in '78, making it to #6 on the charts. Larson was a backup singer on Comes A Time (recommended to Neil by Linda Ronstadt) and I imagine Neil threw her the tune as a thank-you.

Nic's version is very late-70s adult-contemporary, with a disco-fied string section and an overall production that owe much to the sound of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, especially Yvonne Eliman's "If I Can't Have You."

Neil Young wasn't really on my musical radar when Nicolette's version rocketed up the charts, and I'm not even sure when I realized that "Lotta Love" was a Neil Young song. It may have been in college. Sadly, Larson passed away in 1997.

Anyway, Comes a Time should be part of any Neil fan's music library. While it was a very popular record back in the day, it's turned into something of a hidden gem in the Neil catalog, overshadowed by towering classics like After the Gold Rush and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Comes a Time also contains "Look Out for My Love" - the only song I know of that mentions Daylight Savings Time. Maybe there was a reason for this post after all. Don't forget to set your clocks back!



Buy on iTunes:
Neil Young, Comes a Time
Nicolette Larson, Nicolette

R.E.M. Go Back to Where They Belong (Sort Of)

R.E.M. called it quits for good a couple months ago, but they are not quite done yet. On November 15, just in time for the holiday season they are releasing a career-spanning 40-song retrospective called Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage 1982-2011.

I believe the title of the record is from something Peter Buck said in an interview in Rolling Stone back in the 1980s. It's a nice mix of early classics like "Gardening at Night" and "Driver 8," megahits like "Losing My Religion" and "Man on the Moon" and well-chosen deep cuts like "Begin the Begin" and "New Test Leper."




 Part Lies also features three new songs, "A Month of Saturdays," "Hallelujah" (not the Leonard Cohen standard) and "We All Go Back to Where We Belong," which has already been turned into a video featuring different people of relative photogenicity standing around looking thoughtful, including the lovely Spiderman starlet Kirsten Dunst.



"We All Go Back to Where We Belong" is a pleasant tune in their EZ-listening Burt Bacharach mode, which is probably my least favorite R.E.M. mode. Personally, I wish they would bow out with something a little more rocking. "All the Best," from their last studio record, the mostly excellent Collapse Into Now, seems a much more fitting farewell. Musically it sounds like it could have been on Document, and the lyrics wryly allude to their 31 year-old work ethic and the fact that they are about to pack up the R.E.M. tent for good.

I'm in a part of your dreams
That you don't even understand
It's just like me to overstay my welcome, man
Let's sing it and rhyme
Let's give it one more time
Let's show the kids how to do it fine, fine, fine, fine

Here are R.E.M. giving "All the Best" one more time in Hansa Studios in Berlin, where they recorded Collapse Into Now. It's also where U2 recorded Achtung Baby in 1991 and David Bowie cut his famous 1970s "Berlin Trilogy" of "Heroes," Low and Lodger - all with Brian Eno.



R.E.M. on iTunes:
Buy Collapse Into Now here 
Pre-order Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage 1982-2011 here