Truth be told, I had no idea who he was until he did Everyday People. Even then, I wasn’t sure; I has to listen for the song on the radio and call the DJ to figure out what his name was. In the years hence, I’ve always come back to Everyday People as the song that really defined who Robert Palmer was to my ears: much more funky, delicate and soulful than he was during the Looking For Clues period and far less heavy-handed than he became even later.

The Looking For Clues period was around the time I started spinning records in college bars, around the time I was 18 or 19 years old. I was still largely clueless about who Palmer was but the title cut from that album always went well with with the mix of punk and new wave that I spun during happy hours.

As the 80′s came to a close, it was almost impossible to not know who Robert Palmer was (or to avoid him if you chose to). You couldn’t swing a dead cat in any direction, as they used to say in my hometown, without bumping into something touched by Robert Palmer. As much as it was overplayed on the radio and on the MTV, Addicted To Love, when listened to with fresh ears, still has a crushing power and overt sexuality that comes pushing through the speakers. And it doesn’t really need to visuals of the mannequins air-guitaring along. There was an essence of Everyday People in spite of it’s heavy metal meets disco production.

These are the three best songs by Robert Palmer.

Robert Palmer – Every Kind Of People
Robert Palmer – Looking For Clues
Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love

Not long after, they found themselves co-writing Fidelity!, a song cycle about a romance between a younger man and an older woman (much like the duo, who have 30 years age difference between them).

Read more here and get it here.

Little Voice sold almost a million copies — pretty good these days — behind her major-league single, Love Song, which reportedly sold over 3 million legitimate downloads.

In what could be the freakiest rock and roll accident of all time, Edwards died after hay bale weighing over a ton rolled down a steep hill in southern England and crashed into his vehicle. It’s believed that Edwards served into another car as the bale struck his car.

Edward played cello with ELO from 1972 through 1975.

My ex-brother-in-law Steve was a  pretty fair horn player back in the late 60′s and early 70′s. That paid me some benefits in my musical education: I impressed my 7th grade music teacher quite readily with the knowledge of Bill Chase and Blood, Sweat And Tears I’d acquired through him.

Surprisingly, Sons of Champlin escaped Steve so it wasn’t until Bill Champlin scored a marginally successful single in the 1980′s that I heard him, though my good friend and fellow youthful DJ Phil LoCascio was all over that noise. (LoCascio is, by the way, the real original Dr. Phil, named as such long before that quack started beating up on people with Oprah. He’s still a radio guy, interviewing the stars at a station in Jersey.)

At any rate, I don’t usually drop more than 50 cents or a buck on a used album but, in this case, I dropped a whole $2 on Sons of Champlin’s Loosen Up Naturally.

Having said that, he’s released some stellar albums. I turned-on to Franti in 2001 when I was walking through the Union Square Virgin Megastore and heard Stay Human (for my money still his best). Yell Fire was almost immeasurably intense and All Rebel Rockers — not to be faulted for its popularity — was a fine effort.

For some who expect Sound of Sunshine to be an evolutionary step, there will be disappointment. One reviewer called it All Rebel Rockers, Part II — the sound of Franti in a holding pattern, waiting for inspiration. While it may not be all that repetitive, it is, indeed, a lateral move.

Having said that, the record is good. More important, whether he plays every song from the set live or none at all, it won’t matter. Franti is live music and that’s what will continue to pay the bills.

HERE.

According to the auction catalog, Lennon had the porcelain toilet replaced, and told builder John Hancock to “put some flowers in it or something.” Hancock reportedly stored the commode in his shed until his recent death.

The buyer wasn’t identified but it’s clear he’s flushed his money down the crapper.

The radio station where I work was sold to another company on Friday. That’s fine with me — like I had any say over the matter, anyway, right? — but I can live without the meetings. And I moved to a new house the same day.

Hence my absence for the past few weeks and, with my studio barely set up, I have little time to be writing this, late in the evening at that.

But I miss being here, so here’s a bit on Los Lobos. I’ve seen them play a few times and their shows have ranged from transcendent to too freekin’ loud. I prefer transcendent.

One Time One Night is such a beautiful story song, it needs no further justification. Saint Behind The Glass so beautifully evokes the dark quiet Roman Catholic Hispanic households that smell of incense and spicy food and The Neighborhood has that great sound that Mitchell Froom brought to the Wolves.

They are the three best songs by Los Lobos.

Arcade Fire

Directed by Chris Milk, who also did Kanye West’s All Falls Down and Gnarls Barkley’s Gone Daddy Gone, it’s truly web-based and interactive.

The piece, which apparently works best in Google Chrome begins by asking you to type in the address of your childhood home. From there a bunch of appear in pop-up windows mixed with satellite images of your neighborhood. Weird, huh?

Get out your Chrome and take a look here.

Among the bands that have been announced for the festival are DeVotchKa, Surfer Blood and Ghostface Killah, as well as Dominique Young Unique, Angus and Julia Stone and Langhorne Slim.

It’s a story we’ve grown quite familiar with in this first decade of the 21st century. You know, the one about the rich kids from upper Manhattan harboring aspirations of slumming it on the Lower East Side like the art ghetto legends they read about growing up. But unlike The Strokes, the Columbia University grads who made up the band Vampire Weekend, at the tender collective age of 23, know nothing of the area they have since staked their claim in, at least not in the literal sense. Rampant redevelopment has since chased off just about every adventurous club, record depot and bar (not to mention more than a few historic landmarks) that once dared to set up shop in the crime-infested blocks above Alphabet City.

Today, the once rat-and-needle-infested alleyways of the Bowery are sponsored by American Apparel and Norfolk, Ludlow and Orchard Streets have since been sanitized for the droves of spoiled brats from Buttfuck, Ohio whose parents bankroll their $2,000-a-month veal box on Avenue C where they snort K and read VICE until M.I.A. takes the stage at the Bowery Ballroom. I mean shit, even The Strokes themselves, whom many believe dropped the first hammer down on the crack that has since split the divide between the Lower East Side of yesterday and today, were playing residencies at Arlene’s Grocery back when they could still dip into the Lansky Lounge for a post-gig shot of Wild Turkey and then head next door to Ratners for a little late night borscht.

But Vampire Weekend, with all of its pre-press hype and blogger endorsements, have been poised to become the crowned princes of a section that has since become the embarrassing bane of just about every single person who has either lived or hung out there from the ‘60s up through the short months following 9/11. And for someone who was born and raised in New York and remembers the days when the hottest spot for lunch off East Houston was Yonah Schimmel’s Knishes and the only place to cop vinyl was King George’s sorely-missed Records Wanted, one cannot help but lump these latest loves of the hipster death cult alongside such other neighborhood travesties as the hated Blue Condominium, which assisted in the closing of the much-loved avant-garde performance space Tonic and the Duane Reade that sits like a fat greedy bastard on the ground where the once strangely beautiful gas station museum once stood. I mean, look at these fookin’ guys. That whole preppy thing that has critics wagging their little tongues, they wear rope belts and button-down shirts. I would’ve loved to have seen how many bottles and batteries they’d get thrown at them if they passed by CBGB during a hardcore matinee circa 1991 dressed like that (or even the Mars bar, which still remains a defiant testament to the days that used to be on the Bowery).

But then you put on Vampire Weekend’s debut album, and, as much as it might pain you to realize, all those sweeping generalizations and pre-game disdain you may have accrued with each stupid fluff piece you read about them in whatever music rags you waste your money on go right out the window.

Not since Talking Heads bowed out with their masterful 1988 swan song Naked has NYC been so dutifully represented by such a melodically robust collection as the 11 that comprise this eponymous redux of Vampire Weekend’s acclaimed Blue CD- demo. Rather than just blindly ape Liars or Echo and the Bunnymen or the Anthology of American Folk Music or whatever the flavor of the month is in Williamsburg this week, Vampire Weekend, now based in Brooklyn following their cumulative graduation from Columbia, pull their mojo from a variety of highly unlikely sources for kids so young. Most predominantly among those sources are the high life sounds of King Sunny Ade, the jangle-and-strum dalliance of The Feelies and yes, though you have probably read this in every other review of this album, the Afro-metro ascensions of Paul Simon’s Graceland and, perhaps even more so, Shaking the Tree-era Peter Gabriel. Hell, they even sing the former fox-headed Genesis frontman’s praises on the album primary single, the Chris Martin-endorsed Cape Cod Kwassa Kwa (though they quickly cancel it out by also bigging up the dreaded reggaeton in another verse of the song).

Sure, frontman Ezra Koenig’s lyrics reflect upon a life of privilege, where one can afford to argue to the case of the Oxford Comm while on the look out for a Mansard Roof with a girl named Bryn after reminiscing about summers on Cape Cod and overseas excursions to Dharamsala. But like Stephen Malkmus, his words drip with a kind of latent sarcasm that makes you feel as though he’s trying to take a little bit of the piss out of his silver spooned roots. And just when you think they are fully embracing their WASP-y heritage on songs like Campus and Walcott, who’s to say they aren’t just gladhanding the whole scene while stealthily dropping a simultaneous deuce right on its collective boat shoe (perhaps a poetic razz from frontman Koenig after being bitchslapped with the harsh reality of low income America after teaching middle schoolers in Bed-Stuy?)

As a matter of fact, who gives a damn what these guys are singing about anyway? Just listen to the music they are making, some of the happiest and most cohesively vibrant pop NYC has produced since Koch was in office (bonus authenticity points for staging a concert on the strange and remote Roosevelt Island in June of 2007). Hearing their wonderfully melodic fusion of purely white sentiments and positively black sensations gives one hope that, in spite of the roar of wrecking ball-welding cranes knocking down city history to make way for more condos to house culture-drowning denizens and the world-eating retail chains they frequent, good pop will overpower any din of corporate chaos, no matter how cacophonous it may be. Or how preppy the guys creating it may look, which reminds me: you’re right, Ezra  who really cares about an oxford comma, anyway? (Ron Hart, Pop Matters, 1/31/08)

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