Along with IKEA furniture, ABBA is probably Sweden’s greatest export. Even considering the amount of cheap press board furniture that I personally have purchased, I’d still have to wonder if it was the pop group or the furniture behemoth that has raked in more money over the years. ABBA are, after The Beatles, the #2 best-selling pop group of all time. And don’t forget Mama Mia! That alone has generated approx $2.7 billion dollars since its West End debut in 1999.

Consider how much money these four people, especially the two songwriters, have generated for their country in tax revues. It’s extraordinary. I recall watching one ABBA documentary—it was years ago, I don’t remember which one—where Benny Andersson was asked (by an American interviewer, natch) about all the money they were making. The young man smiled politely and acknowledged his great wealth and then the guy turned into a smartass and asked him about being overtaxed in a socialist country. Andersson’s eyes flashed in anger—to a certain degree, this jerk was implying he was a sucker to live in the country of his birth!—and he replied something along the lines of being proud to be able to pay that much in taxes to Sweden because it allowed him to live in a just society. And besides that, how much money does he need? Seen from the perspective of a Swede, I would imagine ABBA are more than just musical heroes, they’re the folks who personally picked up the tab for a hell of a lot of stuff.

In any case, I started to poke around YouTube looking for some ABBA to listen to—I’ve been in an ABBA mood lately, you?—and I noticed that ABBA must’ve made a TV special just about every damned time they got off a plane during their career. There is a seemingly endless number of ABBA specials taped in Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, America, England, etc, etc, etc.

They often follow a formula that seems particularly smart when viewed from a manager’s perspective of wringing the most from his charges, but with a minimal effort from them. Many of the shows start off with a jet landing in ____, looking out the window of a taxi or limo footage, a press event of some sort and then on to the show. Every itch is scratched with continuous and very strategic motion. They are moved from place to place and camera crews follow them. (One program saw them lip-syncing on the plane!) Aside from the really spectacular ones taped in the US or Britain, this is what they did and they did it in Poland and in Paris and they did it, like I was saying, in every darned place. And it was pretty formulaic. “The group is going to be going from here to here at this time. You can tag along. They will lip-sync in your studio for no more than five hours starting at this time. The concert is happening then. Take what you get and get whatever you can” seems to be the implied agreement. Back then no one had to worry about the Japanese TV special being too much like the Swiss one, but comparing them on YouTube today it seems pretty obvious how many of them came to be so similar.

ABBA worked hard for their money. That much is pretty clear.

ABBA in Switzerland, 1979

 
This one is simply fantastic (and so awkward!) ABBA in Poland, October 1976

 
More after the jump…
 

 
“Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more
The Bloody Red Baron was rollin’ out the score
Eighty men died tryin’ to end that spree
Of the Bloody Red Baron of Germany.”

The Royal Guardsmen from Ocala, Florida, were a bubblegum rock group best known for two novelty records about Snoopy’s exploits in World War One as he battled “The Red Baron” (Manfred von Richthofen).

“Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” and “Snoopy’s Christmas” were almost guaranteed to be in any home with both kids and a record player in the sixties and seventies. Both songs were practically inescapable at ice skating rinks during the era as well.

“Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” reached #2 on the Billboard charts in December of 1966 and sold over a million copies before dropping out of the chart four months later. There was also an album of Snoopy and Red Baron-themed songs and skits. Snoopy & His Friends was not really a concept album so much as an attempt to cash in with increasingly witless versions of the same goofy formula. The Royal Guardsmen even had a “Snoopy” song on their second album. Probably tired of singing about the adventures of a flying cartoon beagle, the Royal Guardsmen disbanded in 1969. They reformed again in 2006 for “Snoopy vs. Osama.”

God help me I know every word and every note of these tunes… Here’s footage of the group playing both of their smashes. You’ll note that their tepid “choreography” includes half-hearted goose-stepping.
 

 
I climbed on board the hype train last weekend to catch Boston’s much talked-about Guerilla Toss on tour, and a funny thing happened. I was chatting with a high epopt of a certain national music magazine who and which shall remain here nameless, and we were both massively unimpressed with the band we were seeing. The grooves were tepid, the singer’s stage presence was awkwardly immature, and the whole band looked like a deadhead’s armpit sweat under a microscope. We chalked the whole experience up as a victory for some truly gifted publicist somewhere, and my pal bailed in a jaded, mild huff. I expressed my disappointment to another friend, who said “Yeah, I wish they would get off the stage so Guerilla Toss could play already.”

OOOOOH, FUUUUUUUUUUUCK… We tenured sitting-in-judgement-on-indie-music professionals had wrongly taken a weak-sauce opening band for the headliner - a terrible, terrible mistake, as it turned out, for no effort to find my friend and get him back to the club before Guerilla Toss played was of any use, and he missed one of the single most electrifying shows of the year.

If one were lazy it would be really easy to lump GT in with the “dance punk” dead end of ten years ago, but no, this is something else. They owe much more to similarly excoriating, female-fronted Boston bands like Big Bear than to the likes of The Rapture. The impact of their music felt like getting fisted by Melt Banana with Gang Gang Dance for lube. They were at once kinetic, visceral, hypnotic, and unforgettable. I typically hate it when a band wears out its welcome live, but GT’s set that night was WAY too short, and I don’t know that it COULD have been too long. Convulsive grooves fell apart and rebuilt themselves by the second, and singer Kassie Carlson’s engaging wail compelled attention like a Dresden air raid siren. Check out the first two tracks from their new EP Gay Disco:
 

 
They didn’t have copies of that EP at the show - I picked up some of their other stuff - but digital is already available via Amazon, iTunes and eMusic. Per their label, NNA Tapes, vinyl ships next week. Meanwhile, enjoy the video for “Drip Decay,” posted to YouTube by the band’s drummer Peter Negroponte, and have a cautious gander at their admirably eye-bleedy web site.
 

 
The patience that John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” asks of us and the apparent absurdity it entails—these things instill a desire to either lampoon it or (on the other hand) wax philosophical. I’ll resist both temptations and simply invite you to hit play (there’s a couple minutes of footage of the musicians gathering before the piece begins).
 

 
As a special bonus, here’s the Nic Cage version:

 
This brief clip from 2009 appeared on the BBC1 magazine program The One Show. John Lydon took part in a recurring series in which prominent Britons visit the residences in which they grew up. Lydon/Rotten lived at 6 Acres Estate in Finsbury Park, London, between the ages of 11 and 20.

The onetime scourge of all right-thinking people notes the improved appointments and fixtures in the humble flat; reminisces about Sid the hamster, who bit the finger of the young John Simon Ritchie, thus ensuring himself a place in the annals of hamster history; and points out the corner of the kitchen where he wrote, “in one go,” one of the most famous songs of the twentieth century—“God Save the Queen.” 
 

 
Take solace, younger readers suffering under totally unfair music volume restrictions, the neighbors both upstairs and downstairs detested the Beefheart and reggae Lydon liked to play.  Lydon appears to be quite emotionally affected by the visit, noting that the memories from all different times are “fairly flooding my head right now—and it’s not a pleasant feeling,” followed up with a classic Lydon cackle of displacement. Back in the studio with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, Lydon again professes to be choked up by the footage. (Adding to this is the fact that his father had died in that housing estate only one year earlier.) 
 
Lydon on The One Show, December 4, 2009:

 
You can see the same apartment in Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury—in this clip we get some home footage of Lydon’s mum Eileen around the 5:45 mark, joined by two of Lydon’s younger brothers, Martin and Bobby, around the 7:50 mark:
 

Jemima Proust, 1969

The rock and roll scene in Great Britain in the mid- to late 1970s produced so many indelible and arresting characters, but for my money, not a one of ‘em beats the great, dearly departed Ian Dury. He was always an odd figure in the new wave/punk scene, doggedly doing his own thing while the likes of Elvis Costello and John Lydon received greater acclaim and adulation—and hell, let’s even say deservedly so. I’m can’t come close to classifying his music, it’s pub rock/disco/punk/dancehall with a good dollop of who knows?

Whatever it was, it was irrevocably Ian Dury and it was irrevocably, irredeemably, unapologetically, unpretentiously, and very specifically British.

How a squinty little geezer like Dury could create music that was so compellingly, and simultaneously, funky/inert, expressive/stiff, joyous/crabby will always be an impenetrable mystery to me, but heaven knows I do adore it, especially his diverse and thumping first album New Boots and Panties!!.
 

Night Boy, 1966
 
If you’ve ever looked carefully at his album covers and other associated imagery, it’s always had a strong visual sense, so it was both a surprise and not a surprise that for several years in the 1960s, Dury studied at the Royal College of Art—and his paintings were damn good. I’m not an art expert by any stretch; it fits comfortably in the Pop Art idiom, which was all the rage at the time.

You won’t be surprised to hear that while Dury was at the Royal College of Art, he studied under the esteemed British Pop Art practitioner Peter Blake, who among other things collaborated with Jann Haworth to design the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover—eh, pretty good, what else is on your résumé? You can see traces of Blake’s mentorship all over Dury’s work (click here for a comparison); Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns are other obvious influences. (Blake designed the cover for Dury’s New Boots and Panties!! as well.)

Perhaps this is why Dury’s comment on his own art career was, “I got good enough to realize I wasn’t going to be very good.” Dury’s probably right, he was probably too derivative to succeed in the art world, but as far as I’m concerned, his paintings are pretty darn impressive anyway. And, as was ever the case with Dury, there’s something enduringly British about his works.

Just this past summer, his alma mater the Royal College of Art hosted an exhibition of Dury’s works under the title “More Than Fair: Paintings, Drawings and Artworks, 1961–1972.”
 

Lee Marvin, 1968
 
According to his daughter Jemima (note the use of that name in Dury’s painting above), who helped curate the exhibition last summer, Dury reminisced about his days at art school as follows:
 

I met Betty, my late first wife, at the Royal College of Art. She was at Newport College of Art. Her dad went to the Royal College of Art in the thirties. Getting into the RCA was the only thing I’ve aspired to in my life. I spent two years trying to get in. It’s the only achievement I’ve ever felt, a bit like going to the university of your choice. I’m really pleased I went there, I’m proud of it. I wouldn’t have been able to learn about how to live as a person doing what they want to do if I hadn’t gone there, allowing your determination and output to control the way things go - my nine and my five.

We’ve got more of Dury’s fine paintings below, but if you haven’t heard Dury’s music and are wondering what all the fuss is about, check out “Wake Up and Make Love with Me,” the opening track of New Boots and Panties!!, which in my view is simply one of the weirdest and greatest disco tracks ever released:
 

 
But you also have to see Dury in action to appreciate him. Here’s the video for “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick,” complete with an unforgettable double sax solo!
 

 
Click on the link to see more of Dury’s youthful art…..

 
Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil) contains fly-on-the-wall footage of The Rolling Stones in the studio during the 1968 Beggar’s Banquet recording sessions that yielded one of their most famous numbers, “Sympathy for the Devil.” The Stones footage is intercut with set pieces for his camera by Maoist-types and (apparent) Black Panthers who kidnap and kill a group of white women. A feminist is interrogated and at one point there is a reading from Mein Kampf in a bookshop and the customers walk out “Sieg Heiling.” It’s a mess, even by Godardian standards.

The bits with The Stones aside, One Plus One is a terribly boring film. I saw it in a London art-house cinema when I was seventeen and had I been, oh, I don’t know eighteen, I probably would have had the presence of mind to simply walk out. It’s not just a little boring, it’s an epic snoozefest (I should point out that I tend to love pretentious art films with Situationist elements, this one… not so much).

Godard stated many times throughout his long career his belief that Western culture needed to be destroyed, but he felt this could only be achieved by the rejection of intellectualism:

“There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual”

Well, sure, but you can’t exactly go around boring people to death, either! There’s nothing revolutionary about being a bore, JLG…

One Plus One was such a financial disaster—it flopped even in France—that Iain Quarrier, the film’s producer, retitled it Sympathy for the Devil and added the completed song at the end. When Godard found out about this, he punched Quarrier in the face.

Amusingly, a DVD of this film was given away free with the purchase of a Sunday Times newspaper in Britain in 2006. I wonder what the average Sunday Times reader who bothered to pop the disc into their DVD player thought about Godard’s decidedly radical film?

Below, all the best bits and none of the nonsensical parts from Godard’s One Plus One
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
OK, right up front, this 2007 video of Rocket From The Tombs/Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome teaching the viewer how to play the immortal “Sonic Reducer,” the lead off track to their classic debut Young Loud & Snotty, turns out to be an ad for Gibson guitars. This prompts two questions.

First: Why does an instructional video need to exist for a song that every punk kid figures out how to play within days of getting his or her first electric guitar?

Second: Did Gibson actually think this would entice anyone to spend $800 on an instrument? (Before you go getting any ideas, the featured guitar is discontinued.)

I suspect this was made for the same reason I’m posting it. Because as glorious as it is every single time some kid figures this song out on his or her own and has that “A HA—I can do this!” moment, there’s nothing—NOTHING—like hearing this most elemental of rock riffs brought to life by its maestro. Enjoy.
 

 
On their 1992 debut album Gordon, the easygoing and likable Canadian band Barenaked Ladies made the fourth track a catchy little ditty called “Brian Wilson.” It’s a song about aimlessness and inactivity and the pointless cycle of routine that the musically inclined sometimes find themselves in. The central character of the song wonders if he’s in a “creative drought” as he listens to the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile and visits his favorite record store. The song includes a reference to Brian Wilson’s notorious therapist Eugene Landy, who for several years more or less took over Wilson’s life.

The song is obviously a heartfelt homage, but it’s also a public act of empathy directed at a man whose fans the world over knew was living in a haunted world of pain and confusion.

Here are a few representative lines from the song:

I had a dream
That I was three hundred pounds
And though I was very heavy
I floated ‘til I couldn’t see the ground
I floated ‘til I couldn’t see the ground
Somebody help me,
I couldn’t see the ground
Somebody help me because I’m

Lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did
Well I am
Lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did

On 2000’s Live at the Roxy Theatre, Wilson graciously acknowledged the gesture by playing a brief chunk of the song, specifically the fourth verse and the chorus—the chorus was performed by the backup singers. Wilson replaces the word guitar with piano in the line “Playing my guitar and building castles in the sun and singing ‘Fun, Fun, Fun.’” Here, have a listen:
 

 
Intriguingly, the very next song in the Roxy set is “Til I Die,” the final track off of Wilson’s 1995 album I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times. One wonders if Wilson wasn’t pointedly stringing those two song titles together…..

As yet, I have not uncovered any recordings of Yoko Ono covering “Be My Yoko Ono,” which is the fifth track off of Gordon. 

For comparison’s sake, here’s the video for the Barenaked Ladies version of “Brian Wilson”: 
 

 
As longtime DM readers are by now probably pretty well-aware, I’m a huge Tim and Eric fan. I’ve seen ‘em live, I bought all the DVDs (even the early material sold on their website) and apparently I’m one of the few people who thought Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie was piss-yourself funny (Everyone knows that you can’t trust the tastes of the general public, even if Netflix stars do tend to mostly be correct, but I digress…)

When the publicist for Some Things Never Stay The Same, the sophomore effort from Tim Heidecker and Davin Wood, contacted me about the album, I said “Yes, please” and then I thought “Hey, wait a minute, Tim Heidecker has a serious band??” Like most of you, for me, the idea of a comic doing music brings to mind not necessarily the great “Weird Al” Yankovic, or even Steve Martin, but Eddie Murphy’s hack 80s shit like “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time.”

My fears were completely unfounded. Some Things Never Stay The Same is a really, really good album. It completely won me over. The songs are as catchy as anything heard on 70s AM radio. Hear them one time and you’ll be humming them to yourself soon afterwards. With the assistance of guests like Aimee Mann, Eric Johnson (The Shins, Fruit Bats) and others, Heidecker & Wood have, um, “seriously” managed to put together one of the most fun albums of 2013. I said “fun” not “funny.” There’s a difference, but I’ll let Tim explain exactly what they’re up to.

Richard Metzger: In the press materials, it says that you and Davin Wood wanted to record an homage to 70s singer/songwriters like Warren Zevon and Harry Nilsson. “Cocaine,” the lead-off track refers to just the sort of creative fuel rock stars liked to ingest back then. Did you guys snort up a massive amount of blow before you wrote that song? I ask because I can’t imagine that you were inspired to write that by eating a lot of pancakes, because otherwise you’d have just written a paean to flapjacks. Am I off base here?

Tim Heidecker: You are off base. Really off base. It’s disappointing that this is your first question. a dreaded JOKE question. I really admire this blog and visit it daily, so it was really dispiriting to to find the first question so corny and LOUSY! My gosh what a way to get things started….. Boy.

Anyway, I’ve never done cocaine in my life - for real. Never had the interest and frankly the anti-cocaine propaganda surrounding me in the ‘80s really frightened me into staying away from it. the song idea popped into my head as songs normally do—out of thin air—the words and melody fitting together nicely… me playing around with the chords from “Werewolves of London” playing them backwards… Then I thought it’d be funny to write a really positive song about cocaine—no down side—almost from the perspective of someone in their honeymoon period with the drug before the dark side of it shows up.  Even the bridge, which is usually a good place to go “but there’s another side to this story,” keeps things positive.

RM: Hey, calm down, that was a totally legit question. I think you’re just being overly sensitive about being a comic making “serious” music, Tim. Just go with it. You’re among friends here. I’d imagine that a lot of our readers probably, you know, love cocaine.

But speaking of serious music, how did you rope in Aimee Mann for the project? I respect her so much as a musician that I actually buy her CDs, I don’t even download ‘em. Really.

Tim Heidecker: Fine! I’m COOL! Let’s try and steer this thing back on track… Aimee and I go way back. Not really. Is six years way back? I became friends with her through my wife, which was nice. She didn’t start out as a “SHOW BIZ FRIEND”—just a nice person that my wife would go feed squirrels with. She didn’t know my work, and frankly I think a lot of it grosses her out!  I don’t blame her! But we’re good buds and we’re always looking for stuff to do together. I had the idea for her to sing on a few songs and called her up—she was over in my garage that afternoon and there you go.

RM: I remember when she was on Awesome Show! Is Aimee Mann herself a “serious” musician who wants to be funny?

Tim Heidecker: I find a lot of musicians gravitate towards comedy and vice versa—I think it has more to do with the stuff in our brains that made us get into “show business” than how we neatly fit into our categories we’ve lined up into. I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually as I understand it can be confusing or “bad business” to jump in and out of comedy/music/drama/ballet or whatever it may be, but I bet a lot of people didn’t start out knowing exactly where they’d fit and just went with the first thing that really clicked and paid the bills. Hence, Russell Crowe’s band and all the rest.

RM: Davin Wood and you did most of the music for Awesome Show! together, right?

Tim Heidecker: Yes sir that’s right. Eric of course also throws in his ideas and little jingle ideas as well—I made a lot of the music for “Casey and His Brother” and David Liebe Hart’s songs—a lot of the low fi/super crappy stuff as I taught myself home recording… One I’m proud of is a little song called “Live with my Dad”—the MIDI horns are just… yuck.

All the GOOD sounding stuff came from either us singing Davin a little melody or sending him a little demo and giving him a genre to work in or giving him the idea and letting him build the song—revisions and notes, etc… It’s weird—he lives in Echo Park but we’re on different schedules so almost all our work on the show was done over email and phone calls.

RM: It’s quite a leap from the Casiotone, vocoder and keytar sound of the Tim and Eric soundtrack to the “analog” Laurel Canyon sound on the album. You do a great Bob Dylan, a pretty good Warren Zevon, there’s that ditty boosting Scientology in the style of The Kinks that you did and there’s the music from the show which is all over the place… You’re like the Rich Little of alt comedy and it seems like you could probably mimic practically any musical style you wanted to, so at what point did you and Davin think, “Hey, let’s do this...” and commit to the Canyon sound?

Tim Heidecker: No one wants to be the Rich Little of ANYTHING, but thank you nonetheless.  I think we want the songs to work together as albums and it’s stronger to keep the style somewhat consistent.  That said, I think we kind of branched out into a few different styles on this record: “Sunday Man” and “On Your Own” are kind of Pink Floyd-style space rockers.
 

 
RM: I really like “Getaway Man.” The lyrics to that one are straight up Randy Newman, who I love. It’s wonderfully silly, but well-played, and so affectionate, I must say. You do Randy Newman as well as he does. What inspired that story? A bank robbery? A clingy girlfriend? Both?

Tim Heidecker: Oh man, I don’t remember. Maybe having just seen Drive? I adore Randy Newman and got a bit obsessed a few years ago. If you’re reading this and saying “Whaaaa?” I suggest you go back and check out Sail Away and Good Old Boys two records that I could listen to every day of the week. Anyways, I think the song gets a little silly in the second verse and was pretty happy with the line “Evening Sun,” which sounds like something but really isn’t! I like when that happens—fun word play that sounds right in the song but upon further investigation is nonsense. The song gets a lot of Springsteen comparisons, too, and thats because we did the trick of playing a high piano note coupled with the glockenspiel. It’s a recipe for insta-Boss.

RM: I like the soulful horns on that one, too. Production value! Sounds expensive.

Tim Heidecker: Yea! We brought in real live human beings to play on this record!  Davin really is the master of dialing in the MIDI to sound really great but we had new some players who were game so we had them over to my garage and built those parts.

RM: Okay, last question: What’s the next musical genre you two will take on with the next Heidecker & Wood project?

Tim Heidecker: Who knows? I have piles of songs in various stages of completion. Some country flavored (but I think Ween already cornered that idea). Probably more of the same. Hopefully we get better. I think a priority would be to do the next record a little more “live in the studio” with some really good players - I was listening to the reissue of Moondance and it was striking to hear that although the songs are all different there’s a consistent arrangement to each of them—it’s really just some guys in a room playing these songs. I think that’d be fun to do.

Some Things Never Stay The Same is out now via Little Record Company. Below, a high-spirited performance of “Cocaine” at Largo in Los Angeles on April 27, 2011.