Alby's Latest Posts
Song of the Day 9/12: Toots and the Maytals, “Do the Reggay”
Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, the Jamaican vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who gave reggae music its name and wrote some of its classic tunes, including “Pressure Drop” and “Monkey Man,” died yesterday, apparently of complications of COVID-19. He was 78. The Maytals, led by Hibbert’s powerful voice, were already a popular vocal group when they released “Do the […]
Song of the Day 9/11: Kool & the Gang, “Jungle Boogie”
Ronald Bell, later Khalis Bayyan, a co-founder of Kool & the Gang who co-wrote most of their biggest hits, died this week, age 68, at his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The band he and his younger brother, Robert “Kool” Bell, started as teenagers cycled through many musical styles over the years, from jazz […]
Song of the Day 9/10: Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, “Do You Want to Know a Secret”
Bob Woodward is coming under fire for recording Trump back in March, when he was publicly downplaying COVID-19, saying that the new coronavirus was “deadly” and worse than the flu — and then sitting on the recordings until now, the better to flog his latest tome. If you want to know the rest of the […]
Song of the Day 9/9: Randy Newman, “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)”
Randy Newman’s “Good Old Boys,” his controversial 1974 concept album sung from the viewpoint of a Southern everyman named Johnny Cutler, was put together over many months and included a couple of songs that preceded the project. This one, though, was a late addition to the LP, which was released when the first Arab oil […]
Song of the Day 9/8: Gary U.S. Bonds, “Out of Work”
For 11.5 million Americans, Labor Day wasn’t a day off — they have no job to go back to. Bruce Springsteen wrote this song for Bonds during the singer’s early-80s comeback, which corresponded with the Reagan Recession. Bonds hadn’t had a hit since 1962 until he hooked up with Springsteen in 1981, when his album […]
Song of the Day 9/7: Huey Lewis and the News, “Workin’ for a Living”
For those too young to have lived through their heyday, at least as music fans, Huey Lewis and the News were sort of the Hootie and the Blowfish of their generation — upbeat, major-chord mainstream rock shorn of any rough edges, with enough melody to hum along with and enough energy to be a good-time […]
Song of the Day 9/6: Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Three Little Birds”
Like every other Democrat, I’m worried about how much damage Trump can do before he’s shitcanned for good, but for just this weekend, fuck it. The weather’s great, Trumpers are sinking their boats out of incompetence, and now the Turd Reich is even pissing off the military. I’m not gonna worry about a thing.
Song of the Day 9/4: The Cure, “The Last Day of Summer”
Summer unofficially ends this weekend, and if it feels weird it might be because, except for the hot weather, it hasn’t felt much like summer at all — no graduation parties, no beach vacations, no Fourth of July fireworks, a fragment of a baseball season. Still, it’s just about over now, and who better to […]
Song of the Day 9/2: Bowling for Soup, “1985”
Now that Antifa’s secret weapon, soup, has been uncovered by ace detective Donald Trump, it’s time to reveal where we got the idea: from Bowling for Soup, the Texas-based band that hit its peak in the early ’00s with “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” and this pop-punk sendup of the music of their childhood […]
Song of the Day 9/1: The Sanford-Townsend Band, “Smoke From a Distant Fire”
It’s wildfire season again in California, and smoke reaching the jet stream is creating spectacular sunsets across the Midwestern and Mountain states. Some of it has even reached Delaware, which brings us to this blue-eyed soul classic, which reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1977. Ed Sanford and Johnny Townsend were both keyboard […]
Song of the Day 8/31: Big Country, “In a Big Country”
Remember when this Scottish band hit the shores of our much bigger country? MTV was young and this video was in heavy rotation, boosting the song to No. 3 on the rock chart and No. 17 on the Hot 100. Guitarists Bruce Watson and group founder Stuart Adamson got their guitars to sound like bagpipes […]
Song of the Day 8/30: Yes, “America”
Recorded around the same time as the band’s “Fragile” LP, released in 1971, their 10-minute deconstruction of the Simon and Garfunkel classic was left off the album, but surfaced the next year on an Atlantic Records sampler of its various artists, where it incongruously followed John Prine’s “Sam Stone.” Guitarist Steve Howe, who had just […]
Song of the Day 8/28: The Beatles, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”
The title phrase was the headline of an article in the NRA magazine The American Rifleman belonging to George Martin that John Lennon found laying around the Abbey Road studios. Lennon said he reaction was immediate. “I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.” […]
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