Jukebox Heroes

Remember jukeboxes? The only place I see them now are Waffle House and the occasional bar, but they used to be as much a part of the landscape as pinball machines, pay telephones, and other stuff that’s gone the way of the dinosaur. Jukeboxes, especially the original ones that had the giant ring of 45 rpm singles in them, were cool to watch, and when I find one I’m still drawn to checking out what’s in them. Waffle House ones have actual original Waffle House songs plus the kind of classic country, rock, and semi-current pop you’d expect.

The jukebox inspired many songwriters over the years–here’s a list of my favorite jukebox-related songs. If you have others, add yours in the comments.

“Jukebox Hero”, Foreigner: classic rock referencing a rock classic, the jukebox, as the ideal career destination. Now, this would be written as “American Idol Hero”, probably.

“I Love Rock and Roll,” Joan Jett & the Blackhearts: I used to know every word of this song by heart and I even remember singing it as a kid at a party my parents were having.

“Please Mr. Please”, Olivia Newton-John: From her early country phase, this one made people look for B-17 on jukeboxes for years. A great example of the jukebox as an active part of someone’s relationship, or breakup in this case.

“Wild Night”, Van Morrison: “And the jukebox roars out just like thunder,” goes the line in this one…Van the man knew how magical a great jukebox could be.

“Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” Alan Jackson: A late entry chronologically but a great chorus and a typically country turn of phrase in this pro-country anthem.

“Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” Mark Chesnutt: Country music’s full of jukebox-related songs, but this is the only one I know of where the juke is destroyed in the process.

For pictures of some classic jukeboxes and other great memorabilia, check out this California retailer, Brooks Novelty.

The Connells Revisited

Ran across some Connells videos (while I was looking in vain for one of fellow NC band Dillon Fence’s “Frances”) and hearing some of those songs reminded me how much I liked the band’s music, especially their first couple of albums, including their best, Boylan Heights.

While they sound much like many other jangly Brit-influenced college radio darlings of the late 80s (The Reivers, Dreams So Real, Dumptruck, etc.), with the friends I circulated with, they were about one rung above Hootie & The Blowfish on the ladder of coolness. Most of this attitude, I’m convinced now, was due to their popularity among the frat and sorority crowd, who packed every show I attended back then.

Listening to the almost Celtic-sounding, majestic tones of “Over There,” or the insistently poppy chorus of “Scotty’s Lament” now, the only thing that matters is that these are great songs.

Mandy Moore, v 2.0

Is it just me, or is Mandy Moore the only one of those teen-pop artists to actually grow up sane? She has been more about making movies than music lately, but a new album is coming out May 26th called Amanda Leigh, which I’m assuming is her given name. The single already out is a great slice of pop with attitude: “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week.”

Kill The Music: A Novel

Kill The Music
By Michael G. Plumides

The author of this book would like you to believe it’s about issues of censorship and freedom of speech, and there is a story line that concerns a club being shut down due to an “obscene” performance, but that’s not the real subject addressed in Kill The Music. No, what’s really going on here is more about the author than anything else—thankfully, he’s a pretty entertaining storyteller, in the same way that guy you knew from college can still tell great stories about when he was in school twenty years ago as if the events transpired only last week.

Michael Plumides was a cocky asshole when I first met him and I doubt he’s changed much since. The problem with branding him a jerk, however, is that he was pretty good at whatever he chose to do; whether it was picking up beautiful college girls or playing disc jockey at WUSC (or, much later, getting a law degree). We were both student DJs there in the late 1980s, the time and setting of the first section of this book. Plumides’ two years at USC is explored in some detail, with the high point being stories of interviewing Lemmy from Motorhead and Dave Mustaine from Megadeth.

Plumides manages to convey vividly some of the petty political atmosphere surrounding the USC radio station at the time, though he’s changed most of the names that he criticizes for various offenses against him. He’s properly congratulatory of the station, though, for its then very influential standing in the world of college radio, and he manages to drop enough familiar names (Mark Bryan of Hootie & the Blowfish, Art Boerke, Danielle Howle, and others) to make it interesting for anyone who was around in those days. (Full disclosure–He even worked my name into one of the minor plot line stories, though it is just part of a list of people who were at a particular party.)

The scenes set in Charlotte at the 4808 Club which Plumides owned for several years are less revealing and more geared toward getting to the point of the book, the censorship debates of that time which gave us Tipper Gore and the PMRC. The central event of this half of the book is the GWAR concert that gets the club shut down, but it’s not necessarily the best part. Plumides manages to convey some of the anxiety of being a club owner—will people come out to see the bands, can I pay rent this month, will the fire marshal shut me down if too many people show up, etc., and he also reveals a bit of his own growing up in the process.

It is this personal passage into adulthood that makes the story line meaningful in some sense other than letting people know how cool he thinks he was in college or pontificating about censorship issues, and that means people other than his former USC classmates might want to read this, too.

Southern Harmony and a Musical Restoration

The following is from the online edition of today’s Columbia Free Times:

Issue #22.15 :: 04/15/2009 – 04/21/2009
Southern Harmony and Musical Restoration

The Restoration at New Brookland Tavern

BY KEVIN OLIVER

As a first generation Southerner, I’ve always been able to view both the history and current events of the region in a perspective unbiased by any family legacy or long-held local civic pride. That’s a point of view not available to local Columbia musician and lifelong South Carolinian Daniel Machado, whose new project The Restoration aims to present through music a historically accurate yet fictitious account of a Lexington family, but his excitement about the musical results shows more than a little Southern pride when he speaks of his goals for the end product. Fans of Machado’s previous work, both solo and with the band Guitar Show, might not have anticipated this new direction, but he says it reflects where he truly wants to be as an artist right now.
“I was very grateful for the response Themes in American Friction received,” Machado says. “However, early into recording the album, I had begun to feel an unpleasant dissatisfaction as a songwriter as I watched a growing separation between the kind of music I’d been making and the kind of music I wanted to make.”
That discouragement almost led Machado to scuttle the album.
“I actually decided to scrap it about a third of the way through,” he says. “I felt that I had backed myself into a very small corner that only allowed me to explore a fraction of my musical interests. To be candid, I began to feel that I had been writing music for 1996, and I realized that my ‘90s influences had somehow dominated my own music.”
Machado, of course, eventually finished that album (Full disclosure: It showed up on my Top Local Albums list last year), but his course was about to change.
“I felt enough closure from my past work after that to disengage from the active band process and allow myself to recede into full creative mode,” Machado says. “I began to revisit my former musical loves: the Mozart I fell in love with in second grade; the Hank Williams Sr. I performed in my fifth grade talent show; the bluegrass standards I played with my high school orchestra.”
This immersion into his musical past opened up new creative avenues for Machado.
“As I enjoyed myself as a listener, I allowed myself to experiment as a writer, and what I ended up with was a batch of new songs that became immensely therapeutic to me,” he says. “I showed them to Adam Corbett [of Guitar Show], and together we started arranging full band renditions, trying out different instruments and bringing in other musicians such as Lauren Garner, Sharon Gnanashekar and Eddie Lord to add their touches.”
What started out as therapy quickly blossomed into something more.
“Before we knew it we had a band that we were giddily excited about,” Machado says. “We tried the band out at a New Music Night at New Brookland Tavern, and I realized that I really wanted to put my full efforts into this new band, even if it meant letting go of my rock ‘n’ roll band for a while.”
Machado’s collaborator in Guitar Show and now The Restoration, Adam Corbett, is blunt when asked about the differences between the two bands.
“It felt like, regardless of our intentions, the sound we got with Guitar Show could be summed up by naming any two popular bands, like ‘Weezer and Queen had a baby,’” Corbett says. “With The Restoration, I at least wanted to attempt to create a more complex sound that might be harder to peg. Including multi-instrumentalists like Eddie, Lauren and Sharon, we’re able to wear multiple hats and trade instruments to fit the requirements of each song.”
Back to that part about the Lexington family history now — according to Machado, it’s all about context and setting the stage, so to speak, for the new songs.
”I’ve made a very conscious attempt to establish a setting for my new songs,” he says. “With Guitar Show I had denied myself, the music and the narrative a cultural identity, mainly because I was embarrassed to be associated with the South and its complicated and often embarrassing social history and present-day controversies.”
The historical fiction of the new songs gives Machado some cover, though he says there is plenty of precedent in being critical of the South in works of art.
“Southern authors such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor were searing critics of the South despite being loyalists,” he says. “So I decided to finally claim my role as a lifelong Southerner with The Restoration by acknowledging both the beauty and evils of my home as fearlessly as possible.”
The story that The Restoration focuses on takes place between the late 1800s and the 1940s in Lexington, S.C, using the fictional Vale family to discuss many issues that are still relevant today.
“Removed from a present-day context, I hope to use a sort of historical fiction to write about the kind of philosophical fundamentals that unite many Southerners,” Machado says. “[Things such as] deep connections to nature and the land and strong family ties.” He also touches on some of the less traditional values of racism, sexism and religion throughout the songs, lending them a realistic air regardless of when the stories take place.
All of this would only be so much erudite navel-gazing if the music weren’t so darn interesting. Machado’s Guitar Show band might have been rehashed ‘90s rock, but he knew how to write a decent melody and harmony, and those talents translate effortlessly to the new material. If anything, Machado sounds “unfettered and alive,” as Joni Mitchell once sang, and though he’s a free man in South Carolina, not Paris, Machado is intent on making the most of this new musical direction he’s charting.
“We use banjo, violin, piano, and other classical and roots instruments in an attempt to capture the essence of the South,” Machado says. “The classical side of our sound references the European influence one would have found in Charleston or Savannah, and by merging the two sides I’m attempting to reflect the amalgamation of social classes, races, and cultures that make up the Old and New South and the complexities of the relationships between them.”
If it all sounds too complicated and like one might need a musicology textbook or a history lesson to follow along, rest assured that the songs stand alone as enjoyable, rootsy folk-pop with some inventive and entertaining arrangements. Adam Corbett explains the changes in the music he and Daniel Machado have been making this way:
“Personally, I was just ready to put the distortion pedals to rest,” he says. “The old sound was rock, but I don’t think the new sound is any less intense. And, if anything, we are allowing ourselves a broader spectrum of sounds to work with.”

The Restoration plays Friday night at the New Brookland Tavern; The Fire Tonight, The Fossil Record, Transmission Fields and Liesl Downey open. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is $5 ($7 under 21). Call 791-4413 or visit newbrooklandtavern.com for more information.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2009

I’m not one to dwell on the memorialization or institutionalization of rock music, an art form that after all was built on rebellion, bucking the norm, and otherwise not fitting in to the establishment, but this year’s class of inductees offers a nice cross section of talented groups and individuals, most of whom had at least some effect on at least their part of the music world. Metallica, Run DMC, Little Anthony & the Imperials, Bobby Womack, and Jeff Beck have little in common with each other, but individually they’re among the giants…Metallica for their continued influence on metal and hard rock, Run DMC for their trailblazing efforts in fusing hip-hop and rock, Bobby Womack for a long career as a performer and writer in soul and R&B that in turn influenced many rock artists. Jeff Beck is one of a handful of truly great guitar players in rock, period, from his Yardbirds days to his solo work, and even Little Anthony, who might be considered a bit of an anomaly here, was an influential part of the early 50’s rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop scene.

Rock And Roll Hall of Fame & Museum Website

The biggest appeal to these induction ceremonies is the performances that accompany the pomp and circumstance. Here’s the all-star jam session from last night’s broadcast that included Metallica with Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, and Flea,among others on a song made famous by the Yardbirds:

Here’s Eminem’s induction speech for Run DMC, where he shows an amazing amount of respect in giving them props:

And just for good measure, here’s a clip of my favorite Bobby Womack tune, from 1972: