Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CCLXVIII--The Runaways: Cherry Bomb

Because of (mostly) Joan Jett and (a little) Lita Ford, I was familiar with The Runaways by name...and thanks to No Thanks! The 70's Punk Rebellion I am now familiar with their most successful tune, which becomes the second entry from that album to join the exalted (or not) ranks of Friday Night Jukebox...

The Runaways formed in 1975 in Los Angeles, and while their time together may have been short, they certainly made their mark.  Joan Jett, Lita Ford, Cherie Currie, Sandy West, and Jackie Fox would be the most famous incarnation of the band (there were a few replacements along the way) that would last until 1979.  During that time they released four studio albums, 1 live album, and in the years since, have released 8 compilation albums.   Their standing as the first all girl metal band is firmly entrenched, though the band had very little commercial success outside of Japan (Japan absolutely adored this week's featured tune and gave them a Beatlesque welcome to The Land of the Rising Sun--so many cool kids in Japan!).  After their break-up, Joan Jett had a great deal of success with several top ten hits, and eventually was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.  Lita Ford had a top ten hit with a duet with, of all people, Ozzy Osbourne.  The other members remained in music or left the music industry for other careers (Fox became a lawyer).  Sadly, Sandy West passed away in 2006 from complications from lung cancer.  Their influence on female bands and artists (including the Go-Go's Courtney Love, the Donnas, and White Flag), as well as on the punk and alternative movements, is widely acknowledged.

"Cherry Bomb" was released as a single in 1976 from the Runaways quite aptly named debut LP The Runaways.  Neither the album nor the single had much commercial success, though the single did make it to #106 (with a bullet!) on Billboard's "Bubbling Under" (the Hot 100) chart.

"Cherry Bomb" was originally written by Joan Jett as a vehicle for Cherie Curie to audition for the band's lead vocalist (the band didn't know the song Curie actually wanted to do--oh the joys of youth).  The song is your basic "I'm not Mommy and Daddy's little girl anymore" tune (none of The Runaways were out of their teens when the song was released), and Curie sings it with all the exuberance you would hope for from a liberated teen.  Ford (lead guitar) and Jett (rhythm guitar) play off each other well and produce a staccato effect (with help from West on drums) that gives "Cherry Bomb" the bad ass feel that the song's protagonist is projecting.  And when you throw in a catchy as all hell chorus, replete with a head banging stutter, we have a winner.  In the end it's a stellar piece of youthful exuberance, made all the more powerful by the fact that it's an all female rock band from a time when women were fighting like hell to be accepted into virtually every male dominated profession in America, including rock and roll musicians...and The Runaways succeeded quite nicely.

Lyric Sheet:  "Hello Daddy, hello Mom/I'm your ch ch ch ch ch cherry bomb..."

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee

Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CCXXII--Sweet: Ballroom Blitz

Dork Alert:  Me, my kid brother, and one his friends used to like cranking this week's tune really loud and playing air band in my family's living room.  Let me just say that whatever we lacked in talent (actually, we had none) we more than made up for with enthusiasm for the song.  Or not--time often plays tricks with the mind...

Sweet had a very convoluted (and not all that interesting) beginning before finally coming together in their most successful incarnation as a foursome in the early 70's (give or take).  They originally started out as bubble gum pop before they decided to rock the casbah like their musical heroes The Who (nnnnnoooottttt quite...).  They released their first album in 1971 and had some success in their native UK, but by the time their second album was released they were ready to move on from the top of the pops into glam rock.  They would have a fine run of success through the mid-1970's including fifteen top forty singles in the UK and four top ten singles here in the states.  Unfortunately for the band, their albums never sold quite as well as their singles and they were also unable to draw crowds when they headlined their tours (though they had some success as an opening act) and by the early eighties they were done releasing new material.  Over the course of their career Sweet released nine albums, and had a gold record here in the States and a gold and a silver in the U.K.  Sadly, lead singer Brian Connolly succumbed to the ravages of alcoholism (probably played a part in the band's lack of success after the 70's) in 1997 at the age of 51, and drummer Mick Tucker died of leukemia in 2002 at the age of 54.  The band still tours--guitarist Andy Scott performs with his version of the band in the U.K., while bassist Steve Priest has a version here in the U.S.A.  Not a bad gig if you can get it...

"Ballroom Blitz" was originally released as a single in the U.K. in 1973 where it reached #17 on the charts.  It was released here in America on their album Desolation Boulevard  in 1975 and re-released in England and it went on to reach #2 there, #5 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, and #1 in Canada (so many cool kids north of the border!).

Not So Fun Fact:  The album cover for Desolation Boulevard was photographed near the entrance of a Sunset Boulevard music club called The Central.  It would eventually become The Viper Room--which is where actor River Phoenix died of a drug overdose on Halloween in 1993.

In one of the more interesting origins for a song here on FNJ. Sweet wrote "Ballroom Blitz" about being driven off stage from a show in Scotland by a slew of bottles being thrown at them (there seems to be some question as to whether this was because the band had changed its musical persona or because it was four men on stage with long hair and eye-liner).  The song is quintessential 1970's rock--lots of electric guitar and prominent drumming with a smidge of bass line thrown in the obligatory instrumental break.   Connolly delivers vocals that convey the band's plight--note the beginning when he asks each band member if they'e ready to rock--and Steve Priest throws in some haunting spoken vocals that further enrich the story.  The song plays as an adrenaline rush of rock and roll gone out of control--and is a nice reminder that there were a hell of a lot of good tunes that came out of the 70's.  Or else that I was a lot younger then and had a lot more time to appreciate music...either way, it's cool.

Lyric Sheet:  "Are you ready, Steve?  Uh-huh/Andy? Yeah/Mick? Okay/Alright fellas, let's go..."

Enjoy (and note that these guys had to be an inspiration for eighties hair metal bands...):

Fuck Donald Trump,

emaycee

It took a Village (Voice)

It's alright, Ma, I'm only crying

I noted a couple of posts back in Friday Night Jukebox that I spent my formative years (ages 14-21) in the small (but completely uninteresting) town of Kokomo, IN.  Our newspaper there, The Kokomo Tribune, reflected the town itself and what many of its residents would consider an ideal America--Mom, baseball, apple pie, and hot dogs (not a caricature).  Somehow when I started college at the regional Indiana University campus there in Kokomo, I came across the New York City weekly The Village Voice.  

The big city newspaper in Kokomo was The Indianapolis Star, a conservative beacon in Indiana.  Television consisted of five channels--the big three (only ABC, NBC, and CBS existed back then), one local channel that showed nothing but reruns, and if the weather was just right (no clouds) you could sort of get the PBS station on the TV.  Radio was top forty out of the big city there in Chicago, and again, if the weather was just right, you could get one of them rock and roll FM stations out of Indianapolis.  There was no internet.

You can imagine what it was like, then, when I started subscribing to The Village Voice, an alternative weekly before there were alternative weeklies.  It introduced me to the punk movement and Neil Young (after a hella review of his Rust Never Sleeps LP) and the work of music critic Robert Christgau (whom I continue to have a love/hate relationship with to this day).  It taught me that not all people who were gay were in the closet.  That there were Americans who were a lot more liberal than that commie Jimmy Carter.  That there were a lot of people angry just like me at the state of America.  And that there was a lot more to America (both good and bad) than I had been taught in my high school history classes.

So it was with some sadness that I read this past week that The Village Voice is ceasing publication, though I'd quit subscribing sometime after my daughter was born (not a justifiable expense for a young family) roughly thirty-five years ago.  Not surprised--printed newspapers have pretty much become a quaint nod to our past, which I suppose is what this whole post is.

Give 'em credit, though--in a world that is still screaming for the coolness quotient, they scored a perfect ten on their final cover (Dylan saluting, as seen at the top of this post).

If you gotta go, as the saying goes, at least leave a beautiful corpse.

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee

Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CVII--Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: Stove by a Whale

Truth be told, other than "Stove by a Whale," I don't know jackshit  by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.  And while this is true to a certain extent with some of the other songs featured here on FNJ  ("Bittersweet" by the Hoodoo Gurus or "Stupid" by the Long Winters), I've at least heard the album it appeared on or another song or two by the band.  Not so, with Ted Leo--I know nothing.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists began in 1999 in Washington, D.C. and are still recording and touring to this day, though the only constant in the band is Ted Leo as the Pharmacists have gone through numerous incarnations.  They've released seven LPs. several EPs, and a handful of singles, and near as I can tell have never had one that anywhere near resembled a hit record.  Through their steady touring they've developed something of a loyal following, but if I had my guess, it would be that 99.9 percent of the people in the world have no idea there is such a band and probably never will.

All of which, once again, shows the magic that is pop music:  how often does some out of nowhere band or solo artist produce a song that you've heard by a fluke occurrence ("Stove by a Whale" came with another in a long list of assists from my daughter) and come to spend the rest of your life loving though with the plethora of music released each year and the constraints of time it's virtually a miracle it ever came to your ear?

Originally, I thought "Stove by a Whale" was an environmental song, some kind of comment on the pollution in our oceans (you know, someone had been on the beach or on a boat, and had seen a whale swimming with a discarded stove floating nearby), but, as is often the case, I was nowhere near right.  Stove, which is the past tense of "to stave" actually means to smash a hole into to something, and the reference comes from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (though it seems to have many other sources as well, as whaling was once quite the profession).  All of which is zero help in explaining the meaning of the song, which some have noted has something to do with some kind of personal liberation, but means fuck all for all I know.

Released on technically the band's first album (Leo had released an album before under that moniker, but it was actually a solo effort), The Tyranny of Distance (the title taken from a Split Enz song called "Six Months in a Leaky Boat"), "Stove by a Whale" is as 70's rock influenced as anything the White Stripes have ever done.  An eight minute and two second tour de force, the song starts with a throbbing pair of guitars that sound almost like dueling foghorns (sounds crazy, but it really works).  It then weaves its way into Leo's vocals which venture from a rant into a scream with a staccato delivery (again, crazy but it works).  The vocals end at about the four minute mark and the song cascades into the foghorn guitars before turning to a more traditional guitar solo that is layered with an hypnotic bass for the final four minutes.  I could see how the song would not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're looking for something a bit avant garde with a 70's sensibility, this is the song for you.

Liner notes:  "Not in what you hear, but feel, surreally thrust between/What accents mean and what you think they should..."  (Yeah, I have no idea, either, but it sounds really cool...)

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee