Tag: entertainment

The Donnas — American Teenage Rock ‘N’ Roll Machine

Just kids!

I popped Rush’s Feedback CD into the box right after this twenty-some minute blast. The source material is from a different era, but I can hear the two sets as though in conversation with each other. Rush was playing a set of cover songs from their youth: The Donnas wear their influences so much on their sleeves that you can spot many quotes, even though the record is a set of ten originals. I hear the Ramones here, of course, from the power-chord guitar, to the band naming themselves in a Ramones-like way, to the chant of “Rock! Rock! Rock ‘n’ Roll!” halfway through the very first track. I hear a very strong Joey Ramone influence in Donna A.’s singing, as well.

The whole record is infused with holler-backs to the Ramones, the Runaways, and even the New York Dolls. There are so many nods to other bands that it caused me to seek out Feedback, because at first blush, that’s the level of nostalgia this album exudes.

But this record is made by kids in their fledgling moment, a second album and possibly their first foray into a “real” studio, looking forward more than they are backward in time. That they’re stiff and a little awkward is testament to their youth, that they’re going at it full-force is testament to their ambition.

I have to admit, though, that it is a little bit jarring to hear a band so committed to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream™ at the very late date in which this album came into being. They seem sincere, though, not weighed down with post-modern irony. And the subject matter isn’t flights of fancy about them becoming huge stars, it’s about their daily — or rather nightly — existence. It’s about partying and playing music right where they are.

These kids’ honesty and immediacy is the saving grace of the project. Where Rush is escaping into a more innocent era, The Donnas are in their moment, living, not reliving, even as they hark back to their influences.

[ED]

Rush – Feedback

Rush’s covers ep.

Those Rush guys, on a knoll.

Cleaned the lens off my boom box and put The Donnas‘ American Teenage Rock ‘N’ Roll Machine, and then this. Rush covers eight songs from the late sixties here, from right at the birth of AOR, though everything on the record was released as a single by the originating bands. Ostensibly, these are things they played in their high school bands and early bar band days. It sure sounds like it. Rush had been a band for, like, forty years at the point when they made this record: what does forty years of international touring do for a band? What does a band that has been generating material prolifically for all of that time retain from its origins? Here’s Rush’s answer: everything’s intact and enhanced.

Just in this moment, I’m listening to the silence after a straight-up cover of Cream’s record of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, still lost in Alex’s record-finale wah wah guitar solo. I’m in awe: it’s fast, clean, and funky, unlike anything in modern rock.

I find that I wish they’d done a couple more songs, so that the final product could have the feel of an album. The sonics are very much of the time when the original singles were of-the-moment. The bands and songs for this record are The Who’s “The Seeker,” The Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” and “Shapes of Things,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and “Mr. Soul,” Cream’s “Crossroads,” Love’s “Seven and Seven Is,” and Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues.” Such a great, if short, list of tunes!

Still, I wish there was a Hendrix song on here, something off of Zeppelin I, or maybe a Vanilla Fudge track (my fantasy track would have been “My White Bicycle”) so that it had the feel of a full album.

What it does have, in spades, is the feeling of a band born in that time. I can just imagine them at a kegger at McGill University doing this exact set, making fiddy bucks and feeling good about it, and I can also imagine them dumping any one these tracks into a live set at any time during their run. This is a revisit of their early days as a cover band, and also a mark of how far they’ve come.

[ED]

Books I Like #9

At Home in the Heart of Appalachia by John O’Brien

Anchor Books New York 2001

Appalachia

Here’s a wonderful book-length personal essay that resonates with me on a number of levels. Although O’Brien never names it, it’s clear to me that he suffers with ADHD: all the hallmarks are there, and he frankly discusses some of those markers.

He writes about his home in West Virginia, about many different aspects of life there, with an astute eye and a gift for clear, beautiful prose. Ultimately, It’s a perfect marriage of person and environment, exploring how much of West Virginia is a part of who he is, and drawing the parallels back between his own life and how that is reflected in different aspects of what this place is.

It’s a beautiful book that I just happened to pick up at a Barnes and Noble once, but it has stuck with me. I point to it as an influence in my journey from an exclusively genre reader to someone who likes various sorts of nonfiction: history, biography, memoir, essay, and journalism.

Books I Like #7

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Little, Brown and Company, New York, Boston, London 1994, 1995

Nelson

More of a history than a memoir, Long Walk to Freedom is the man’s detailed account of his extraordinary life. He seems to have lived every sort of life a man could live within the span of the twentieth century. Born an indigenous Xhosa, he was taken from his tribe at the age of ten and educated as a tribal prince. Then he moved to Johannesburg and lived in Soweto township. He was a laborer during the day and walked into Johannesburg in the evenings to go to law school. He was the leader of the ANC, a revolutionary, a prisoner for over two and a half decades and a beloved head of state.

Here is the story of a man who was a pedestrian for pretty much his whole life, hence the title, and a monumental human being.

If only David O. Lean were still alive.

Books I Like #4

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

Little, Brown, & Co. Boston, New York, Toronto, London 1998

boys-of-my-youth

This was one of the books I was assigned to read in my MFA program, and I wrote a craft annotation of it. It’s a collection of brilliant memoir essays from many different stages of Beard’s life, each one more vivid and intimate than the last. My favorites were the one where she’s watching fireworks with her family as a child, and the one that’s written from the point of view of a coyote.

My own memoir work is similar, though when I go back to it, I will revise it into a single narrative.