The lineup that the Tibet House US put together for the 24th Annual Tibet House US Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall two nights ago was the kind of collection of noteworthy musical talents that was guaranteed to make a certain kind of discerning fan of rock music quiver with excitement. The program promised the following enticements:
 

Philip Glass
Nico Muhly
Matt Berning, Aaron Dessner, & Bryce Dessner of The National
Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham, & Tom Chapman of New Order
Iggy Pop
Robert Randolph
Patti Smith and her Band
Techung

With an invocation and closing by
Monks from the Drepung Gomang Monasteries

 
The evening would prove to have an impressive number of impromptu guests and collaborations not depicted here, including the surprise appearance of Sufjan Stevens, who sat in with The National; Nico Muhly playing together with Philip Glass; and a special gesture of tribute to recently departed Lou Reed from Patti Smith, who covered Reed’s classic “Perfect Day.”

But most exciting of all, perhaps, was Iggy Pop teaming up with three of the members of New Order (no Peter Hook, of course; Sumner was the only original member present) to play two of Joy Division’s most enduring songs, “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” As all dedicated Joy Division fans know, when Ian Curtis hanged himself on May 18, 1980, Iggy’s 1977 album The Idiot was spinning on the turntable just a few feet away.
 

 
Earlier in the evening, Sufjan Stevens joined The National for “I Need My Girl” and “This is the Last Time” off of 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me and “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” off of their 2010 album High Violet (video for which can be found here; scroll down) before Sufjan played two songs from The Planetarium, the somewhat proggy collaboration involving Muhly and the National’s Bryce Dessner from 2013. Then Nico Muhly and Philip Glass joined forces for “The Chase,” a track off of Glass’s 2004 soundtrack for Undertow.

When New Order’s time to perform arrived, they played “St. Anthony” before introducing Iggy, who joined the band for “Californian Grass,” off of New Order’s 2013 album Lost Sirens; Sumner said that the band had never played the song live before. The next two songs were the immortal Joy Division numbers “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

What follows are fan videos, but both the video and the audio are in fairly good shape. 

“Californian Grass”

 
“Transmission”

 
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” after the jump…

Mike Douglas and James Brown sing “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”

I missed the heyday of Mike Douglas, but watching this video, it’s easy to see how he was able to concoct such an enjoyable mid-afternoon chat brew every weekday. Douglas’ adoption of a groovy ‘70s-style six-petaled flower was an inspired touch, as it stamped him as the older, tie-wearing white dude who was down with the hippies and “Black is Beautiful” and funky music and all that. Douglas never seemed to mind much of anything, and his charmingly shambolic, super-easy going style helped create a talk show that’s waaaaay looser than anything you’d see today (outside of podcasts, of course).

The date on this video, very recently uploaded to YouTube and with just a smattering of views, is May 11, 1971. James Brown is introduced as co-host, and indeed Brown does hang around for the whole episode—he does three songs in all, and it must be said that he’s makes for a rather distracted co-host; he’s no Andy Richter up there. But who the hell cares, he wasn’t there for his ability to be subservient to Mike—he’s James Brown!!

His musical numbers bookend the program, starting with “I Cried” followed by, remarkably, a full-fledged duet of the old Dean Martin ditty “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”—Brown seems mildly poleaxed at the idea, and plays along only intermittently, but Douglas is seriously into it. It’s genuinely funny when Douglas tells him to “try to find the beat, James.” Also, who’d've guessed that Douglas does way more dancing than Brown?

In the interview portion we get an actress named Betsy Palmer, who later teaches Douglas and Brown how to make ham hocks and cabbage, although, as she admits, “it’s Czech more than anything,” certainly not super similar to the authentic soul food Brown is used to. Then, hilariously, Douglas tells the home viewer not to consult the Internet for the recipe but rather to write this address:
 

 
Brown caps off the hijinks with a terrific rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart”. (By the bye, the album he was promoting was Sho’ Is Funky Down Here.)

 
via Classic Television Showbiz

 
This genius, totally spot-on Neil Young parody, “Old Maid (Southern California Brings Me Down”) hails from the 1970s The National Lampoon Radio Hour (and was subsequently released on the Grammy-nominated Good-bye Pop album in 1975). You could probably play this for Neil Young himself and he’d have a hazy recollection of recording it!

Young is played here by Tony Scheuren a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who was once in a band called Chamaeleon Church with a young Chevy Chase and a cast member of National Lampoon’s off-Broadway musical “Lemmings.”
 

 
Here’s Scheuren’s wickedly, er, accurate James Taylor parody, “Methadone Maintenance Man”:
 

 
Hot on the heels of posting something about a former Spice Girl, I feel an obligation to, uh, spell out clearly that I ain’t no Rush fan lest you think that I have completely lost my everlovin’ mind. No, the notion of a trio of Canadian sci-fi geeks who love Ayn Rand is a total non-starter for me, and yet I still think you should watch this utterly wonderful clip posted over at the mighty Cherry Bombed:

Here’s a pretty incredible seven minute clip from 1973 documentary, Come On Children, featuring a 17 year old (and completely hot, lets face it), Alex Lifeson of Rush. The film interviewed a bunch of Toronto teens, then invited them to live on a farm for 10 weeks, in an attempt to get deeps inside the psyche of a gloomy suburban adolescent.

In this clip, Lifeson (who was already a father to his first son, Justin) tries to convince his Serbian emigrant parents that his plan to quit the 12 grade and play in a band full time, is the right decision. If you haven’t seen this film, or this footage, I’m not going to spoil it for you. It’s a must watch, period.

As much as I think Rush suck, this is one impassioned, articulate young man who knew at an early age what he wanted out of life. His parents seem pretty cool, too. That something like this—such an amazing record of his youth and of their family—exists is such a fantastic thing. This is classic.
 

Bonus clip: Alex Lifeson is kidnapped by The Trailer Park Boys

 
No, I’m not gonna call my love for The Spice Girls a “guilty pleasure,” nor will I claim to listen to them “ironically.” Likewise I’m not going to argue how brilliant they were and if you’d just give their music a chance that… although I do most certainly believe that they and the people around them produced truly great pop culture. They sold 80 million albums, made hundreds of millions of dollars and their live shows were seen by millions of fans the world over, so the matter has been more or less settled anyway. Their place in music history is what you might called “assured.”

But no, to advocate too strongly for the artistic merits of the Spice Girls—even though I could do that—would just get me in trouble with DM’s sniffy rock snob readership. When a post of anything Grateful Dead-related brings out the slobbering Jerry-haters, I should think anything boosting the aesthetic bonafides of Spice Girls would attract fire-breathing death threats (and that’s just from my rock snob wife).

I ain’t gonna lie to you, I’ve listened to the first two Spice Girls CDs hundreds of times. (Never in the house, though, always in the car…)

But this isn’t about The Spice Girls, it’s about the best solo album that one of them put out, Mel C’s Northern Star.

Although the album got virtually no traction whatsoever in America, Northern Star‘s hit singles “Never Be the Same Again” (featuring a rap from TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and produced by mega-hitmaker Rhett Lawrence), “If That Were Me,” “I Turn to You,” “Goin Down” and the title track were popular to the point where it was difficult to escape from them all over Europe circa 1999-2000, as anyone over the age of 25 today will probably recall. The Hex Hector remix of “I Turn To You” was a massive, massive dancefloor smash (and actually did get some attention from US DJs. Hex Hector won the 2000 Grammy as Remixer of the Year for this number.)

Every song on Northern Star was co-written by Melanie Chisholm and produced by such heavyweight namebrand talents as Rick Rubin, WIlliam Orbit, Marius de Vries, long-time Spice Girls collaborator Richard Stannard, Rick Nowels, Craig Armstrong and the aforementioned Rhett Lawrence. A serious team indeed and it paid off handsomely with the album selling in excess of four million copies.

So even though I have already taken shit for this one even before posting it (Yep, my wife just passed by the office and asked me “You’re not going to put douchebag dancefloor music on the blog, are you?”) there’s nothing to be ashamed of for loving pop music. Hey, it’s not like I’m arguing that this is the best album by a former Beatle or anything, but what Mel C offered on Northern Star was pure pop perfection.

Here’s the one that hooked me, “Goin’ Down.” She fucking crushes it. Dig that guitar riff!! Tell me this song would be out of place on a Garbage album. Doubt my word? Hit play.
 

 
More from Mel C after the jump…

 
Today we celebrate the 59th birthday of that great German singer Nina Hagen. Her cartoon-punkette-channeling-Marlene-Dietrich persona and the sort of high-bombast singing at which Germans seem to excel made her known in the English-speaking world for 1980s albums like the excellent NunSexMonkRock, Fearless and In Ekstase, but she was already known in her home of East Germany for tamer stuff. I can do no better at describing her early years—and the amazing story of how she got out of the GDR—than this DM post from 2011.

Since her ‘80s flirtation with English-language LPs, Hagen has made music primarily for European audiences. Here she is in a rare duet with that other incontestably Teutonic entertainer, Heino, performing a send-up of “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” from the 1953 Leslie Caron film Lili
 

 
WHY haven’t those two made albums together? I could listen to that. All. Day. Long.

Hagen remains 100% active, and it might surprise some readers to know that her last two albums have been gospel-tinged. She underwent a Protestant baptism in 2009, which informed Personal Jesus (yes, it includes a cover of the Depeche Mode song) and 2011s Volksbeat. Both are available for streaming.

We’ll end this birthday tribute to an admirably durable artist with an interesting A/B of her early and later years, via these two Rockpalast appearances, shot 21 years apart.
 

Nina Hagen Band, Rockpalast, 1978

Nina Hagen, Rockpalast, 1999

 
As there is precious little live footage of the pre-80s incarnations of King Crimson—Beat Club, the poor quality fragment from Hyde Park in 1969 and the Central Park 1974 clip, not much—this extended 29-minute set from France’s Melody television show is a treasure (even with all of those goofy video effects, in fact, I think they enhance it nicely).

The line-up is Bill Bruford, John Wetton, David Cross and Robert Fripp.

1 - Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part II
2 - The Night Watch
3 - Lament
4 - Starless

Larks’ Tongues here is frighteningly good.

The quality is great, but it’s even better on the deluxe 40th Anniversary Series edition of Red that came out in 2009. That release, with Steve Wilson’s insane 5.1 surround mix of the album (done with Robert Fripp’s participation), sounds like a jet plane lifting off inside your living room skull. Red happens to be one of the heaviest rock albums of all time. Crank it up loud enough and the sonic power of that album can blow you away like a feather in the wind. Most King Crimson albums I find to be a bit spotty (some of them are really spotty, in fact) but when they lock into a serious groove, like on Red’s unfuckingbelievable title cut, well it’s awe-inspiring.

If you haven’t heard the Steve Wilson 5.1 surround treatment of the classic King Crimson albums and you’ve got a 5.1 set up for TV and gaming, they are simply superb. I recommend starting with the first King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King, because it’s a great—indeed the perfect—place to start anyway, plus Wilson did such a crazy good job with it. Ditto with Lizard. Hell, I never even liked that album, but in Wilson’s mix the “rock band as symphony” aspect of the work is teased out nicely and envelops you like you’re standing inside of a large (and especially complex) audio equivalent of an Alexander Calder mobile.
 

 
The KLF were one of the more inventive techno outfits of the late 80s/early 90s. They referenced Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy and Doctor Who a lot; they fired guns (blanks) over an audience full of music industry bigwigs and deposited a dead sheep at the entrance to the after party; they burned a million pounds in public; and so on. They occasionally dressed up like ice cream cones.
 

The KLF dressed as ice cream cones with Tammy Wynette
 
One of the KLF’s biggest hits came in 1991 with “Ancient and Justified (Stand By The JAMs)” for which they recruited country music superstar Tammy Wynette. The song was another reference to Illuminatus!, which features a clandestine group called “The Justified Ancients of Mummu,” a name they also adopted for themselves; it hit #2 on the U.K. charts, making it as close as the pranksters would ever come to topping the pop charts.

According to Jimmy McDonough’s Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen, the collaboration brought its share of difficulties:
 

In September 1991, Tammy was the beneficiary of extraordinary good luck: an international pop hit that dropped into her lap from out of nowhere. The gift came by way of UK musicians Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, aka the KLF, a crackpot outfit known for dance hits and absurdist antics.

In early summer of that year, the duo were in a London studio trying to revive a track that had been kicking around in one form or another since a fragment appeared on their 1987 debut album in a song entitled “Hey, Hey We Are Not the Monkees.” Cauty wanted to replace the singer, randomly suggesting Tammy Wynette. Drummond, a fan of not only country but of Wynette, got on the phone and a week later was being picked up at the Nashville airport by none other than George Richey. “Driving a powder blue Jag,” Richey, recovering from open-heart surgery, sported “snakeskin boots, fresh-pressed jeans, a wet-look perm,” wrote Drummond. “I liked him.”

Bill met his idol back at First Lady Acres as he stepped into the First Lady’s pink beauty parlor. “Her fingers were being manicured by a young man as a woman teased her hair into some feathered concoction. Her free hand was flicking through the pages of Vogue.” Tammy had a question for her new friend. “‘Bill, you’re from Scotland? Can you tell me why I have such a large lesbian following there?’ I had no answer, but promised to look into it.”

Drummond was well aware of the inescapable pitfalls of the Tammy Wynette-KLF collision, which by its very nature was, as he described, “an evil and corrupt exchange … the young artist wanting to tap into the mythical status and credibility of the has-been, the has-been wanting some of that ‘I’m still contemporary, relevant, will do anything to get back into the charts’ stuff.” But that didn’t stop Bill from playing the number for Tammy on her white grand piano. Wynette gamely warbled along. “She couldn’t find the key, let alone get it in pitch,” worried Drummond.

Into a local studio they went later that night, Tammy attempting to lay down a vocal on a thunderous dance track that certainly featured no down-home fiddle (although there was steel guitar buried in the murk, along with a Jimi Hendrix riff), not to mention nonsensical lyrics about a place called Mu-Mu Land which contained the couplet: “They’re justified and ancient / and they drive an ice cream van.”

About as far out of her element as Mu-Mu Land was from Music City, Tammy was hopelessly adrift in this electronica wasteland. “She could not keep time with the track for more than four bars before speeding up or slowing down,” said Drummond. Richey entered the booth and attempted to coach her. “A complete disaster” was Bill’s pained appraisal. “How do you tell the voice you have worshipped for the past twenty years, one of the greatest singing voids of the twentieth century, a voice that defines a whole epoch of American culture, that it sounds like shit?”

Drummond whisked the track back to London and dumped the bad news on his partner, Jimmy. Cauty told him to relax—the latest digital technology they’d just purchased would allow them to take Tammy’s words and “stretch them, squeeze them, get them all in time.”

The spectacular, no expense spared promo video. Imagine such a anarchistic act as the KLF getting this kind of bread to make a video today…
 

 
Here’s the KLF and (via video linkup) Tammy Wynette on Top of the Pops. In a lower-third it’s explained that Drummond had declared the following Tuesday to be “No Music Day” so that you would be encouraged to reflect on just what it is you want from your music. (For their part, TOTP turned it into a John Cage joke.)
 

 
PJ Harvey showcased a selection of songs from her album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, along with some of her best known numbers, at the Benicassim Festival, Spain, in August 2001.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea won Harvey her first Mercury Award (her second was for Let England Shake in 2011), she is the only artist (so far) to have won the prize twice, and deservedly so—unlike some of the other winners….

Set List

01. “One Line”
02. “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore”
03. “Good Fortune”
04. “Man-Size”
05. “Rid of Me”
06. “Down by the Water”
07. “Big Exit”

Most recently, Ms. Harvey has been reading poetry at the British Library, and editing the BBC morning news show Today, but watching her performance at Benicassim makes me realize how quiet it’s been without PJ Harvey’s musical brilliance.
 

 
As a committed modern troubadour, Tom Waits has always used a lot of locations in his songwriting, but I wasn’t aware of just how many until I saw this map that some brilliant, wonderful person has painstakingly curated. Supposedly, it contains every location Tom Waits has ever sang (or narrated) about. As a Tom Waits completest who will always defend him, even when he’s blatantly imitating Captain Beefheart, I have been wracking my brain trying to find something they missed, but to no avail… yet.
 

 
However, as a Hoosier, I checked immediately to see if they got all the Indiana locations. Not only is my state accurately documented, they kept the misspelling from the album book. The song “First Kiss,” contains the line, “And when she got good and drunk, she would sing about Elkheart, Indiana, where the wind is strong, and folks mind their own business.” (It’s actually spelled “Elkhart.”)

Let’s take it home with, “I Wish I was in New Orleans,” live from Paris, 1979, shall we?