"Teas'n Pleas'n" by Dangerous Toys

I remember the day I saw Dangerous Toys for the first time. It was the summer of 1990. I had put on "Hard 60", MTV's 60 minutes of hard rock and metal every afternoon, to watch some of my favorite fist pounding videos. The "Teas'n Pleas'n" video came on and I was instantly hooked. The band looked like a fucked up version of Guns N' Roses. The band sounded like a fucked up version of Guns N' Roses. Hell the video even reminded me of a lesser version of the "Paradise City" video.

But it was awesome.

The sleazy breakdown. The gun cocking. Jason McMaster saying "man....I think I got the wroooooooong house!". Sleaze metal at it's finest.

My birthday soon approached and I asked my mother for their album. She took one look at the demonic jack in the box on the cover and promptly told me no, I would not be allowed to have such filth. But, sometime after my birthday, I was in a record store in Maine. I was eying the soundtrack to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie when my mother turned away. I quickly grabbed the Dangerous Toys album, slid it under the soundtrack, promptly gave both to the cashier, handed him my money, he bagged it up, and I was on my way. When my mother asked me what I bought, I showed her the turtles tape and left Dangerous Toys in the bag.

Damn, I was sneaky.

Download "Teas'n Pleas'n"

*bonus post* "Supernaut" by 1000 Homo DJs

Brad commenting made me think that I needed some college tales to tell.

So this one is quick and short. "Supernaut" is a cover of a Black Sabbath song that was one the "Nativity in Black" tribute album. It is by 1000 Homo DJs which was a Ministry side project.

I remember Brad and I arguing whether it was Al Jourgensen on vocals or if it was an uncredited Trent Reznor. We never came to a consensus.

Apparently, this song was available on many albums, EPs, and bootlegs, and even Trent and Al cannot agree on who sang on what.

download "Supernaut"

"Roll With It" by Steve Winwood

What can I say about this song?

It was the bane of my existence in 1988. That summer "Nothing But a Good Time" by Poison and "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard were ruling my universe. But one goddamn song was keeping my beloved pop metal from topping the charts. "Roll With It".

I didn't get it. Here was this old guy, who apparently had records since the 60's (trust me these days I know much more about Steve Winwood and have much more respect for the man) making this terrible, terrible adult contemporary music, and he was thwarting my favorite bands attempts at commanding the realm of Top 40.

All summer long.

It just wasn't fair. I mean, for fuck's sake, I believe his video was sepia toned and he was wearing fucking suspenders! FUCKING SUSPENDERS! (I haven't watched the video in about 20 years, so I could be completely wrong, but that's what I remember).

download "Roll With It"

"Beautiful Day" by U2 and "As Long As You're Loving Me" by Vitamin C

In 2001 I was dating this girl in Somerville. Somerville was close to where I worked in Cambridge, so I ended up just heading to her house after work most evenings during the week. She had a roommate, so in order to disguise the sounds of our sexual encounters from the roommate, my girlfriend would turn on the clock radio. She had no CD player in her room, and this was pre-iPod era, so every night I was over she would turn on the damn clock radio which was always on some local Top 40 station. And like clockwork, every single time we had sex, "Beautiful Day" by U2 and "As Long as You're Loving Me" by Vitamin C came on.

Every. Single. Time.

For months.

And it drove me crazy. But she refused to put on any other station. So I dealt with it, because it was really good sex.

download "Beautiful Day"
download "As Long As You're Loving Me"

"Drive" - by Deftones (bonus track from "Saturday Night Wrist")

So I was checking up on the Deftones new album yesterday on Wikipedia and happened to look through their discography. There I noticed in the "covers" section that they had covered "Drive" by the Cars. Apparently it was a bonus track if you bought all of "Saturday Night Wrist" from iTunes. Unable to purchase just the track alone from iTunes, I searched the music black market and behold, I found it.

And just like all of their other covers...shit is goooooood. Deftones do the best covers, because they make them their own. Even if they are performed rather faithfully to the original, the energy they bring to the songs is always magical. This song gives me the same chills that "No Ordinary Love" did the first time I heard it.

So yeah, no real story here. Just a rare track that I thought I'd share.

download "Drive"

"Chocolate Pudding" by the Mighty Mighty BossTones (from the album "Medium Rare")

I fell in love with the BossTones in 1993. My friend Darrin's pal John told me all about this wild band from Boston who did these insanely awesome shows. I was super curious. On a trip to Boston in the summer of 1993 with my Dad and brother, we stopped by a record store in Kenmore Square and I was excited to see the BossTones new EP, "Ska-core, the Devil, and More", prominently displayed. I took my last $7 and bought the CD, having never heard the band at all. I immediately fell in love with them.

Cut to the fall of 2003. I fell hard for a girl in my High School who was into punk and ska. She told me about this band from Monroe, CT, Spring Heeled Jack, who she knew I would love since I liked the BossTones. And she was quite right. I went on to see that particular band more times than any other in my life.

I was very happy to find out that December that Spring Heeled Jack and the BossTones were playing a show at The Sting in New Britain. I procured tickets for me, my brother, and his pal Andy, and we went on a cold snowy weekday night to see them. The show was awesome in every way and that was the night that I first heard the BossTones play "Chocolate Pudding".

By this time, I had all of the BossTones albums, so I was confused when I heard the crowd chanting for this song that I was sure was not on any of the albums. The band obliged the crowd, and the sax player, Johnny Vegas, came to the front of the stage to sing. Immediately it became a classic in my mind, and I saw why the crowd had been yearning for it.

To this day it is one of my favorite BossTones songs, and one of my favorite spring/summer jams to rock on a sunny day. The last time I saw the Bosstones, at the Hometown Throwdown in 2002, they played Chocolate Pudding and it was the first time I had heard them do it live since the mid nineties. It was certainly as magical as ever.

For years I had the song on a cassingle (I believe it was finally released as the B-Side to "Kinder Words" in 1994) and when the Napster age came around I acquired an MP3 of it, but it was nice to see it finally come to CD late last year when the reunited BossTones released their "Medium Rare" b-sides album.

download "Chocolate Pudding"

"No Soul" and "Shiksa (Girlfriend)" by Say Anything (from the album "In Defense of the Genre")

Say Anything is one of those bands that each album has 2 or 3 good songs on each album, and the rest is ok. Not bad, but just ok. But, goddamn, those 2 or 3 songs are always fucking hot tits!

So, there isn't any real story with these songs. I've read all of the articles on this band and Max Bemis, and although his bipolar disorder is interesting to read about, I guess I don't really care about how it relates to his band. Well, sure, it has to make a big impact on his songwriting, but part of me just doesn't care.

The album these songs are off of, "In Defense of the Genre", is a double album and really deserves my internal comparison to "Use Your Illusion I & 2". There's a whole lot of filler, and it could have been weaned down to make one awesome album, but instead is 2 discs of "meh".

But, let's get back to the fucking hot tits. "No Soul" and "Shiksa" are both awesome songs. Full of sunshiny spring and summer goodness.  They have both been in the "current hot mix" playlist on my iPod since I downloaded them last summer. So sit back and savor the goodness.

download "No Soul"

download "Shiksa (Girlfriend)"

"Godzilla" - by Blue Oyster Cult

Junior high is when my fever for music knowledge began. Those years I built upon the limited base of my elementary school years and seeked out whatever new sounds I could. In 1990, I was fully engulfed in rock and roll and all it's many faces. And, more specifically, at that time I had fallen deeply in love with heavy metal. But, mind you, I was still learning about about all of the bands, the history, and the subtleties of the genre.

Somewhere around this time, I was listening to WCCC around midnight to John  "Ozone" Osterlind, as I normally did when I could.  All of sudden came this song that floored me with it's heaviness. It was "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult. Now, mind you, I knew who this band was. I mean, who hasn;t heard "Don't Fear the Reaper" 1000 times by the time they are 12? And WCCC also played their secondary hit "Burnin' For You" all the time. But to me, these were all recent songs. Now I know they weren't new, but I don't think I realized that Reaper was from the 70's.

So, I hear "Godzilla" for the first time, and I thought it was a brand new song. I got really excited. I couldn't wait for my friends to get acquainted with it in the coming week so that we could talk about it. Hopefully they would be impressed that I heard it before them since I stayed up so late listening to "the Ozone". But, no. No one mentioned it. And it wasn't all over the radio.  Because, "Godzilla" was a song that had been released (as I later found out) in 1977. 

I was a little behind on that one.

But regardless, it was (and is) an awesome classic metal song. I 

mean, c'mon, what a fucking monster riff!

download "Godzilla"

Smoke of Fire - Little Bohemia (from the Album "This Sinking Ship")

Smoke or Fire started off as a Boston band named Jericho. In the spring of 2000, I was briefly dating this straight-edge girl and she took me to a Piebald show at Bill's Bar. I wasn't into Piebald, but Jericho and Hot Rod Circuit were 2 of the other bands on the bill and it was the first time I saw or heard either band. Fell in love with both. Jericho was (and I guess still is, since they moved back...) my favorite band in Boston.

By 2003, my band (Sometimes She Burns) had played a few shows with Jericho. I booked them to play this club in Somerville, the Pond I believe it was called. We added their friends in Boxingwater, and Salacious Crumb who we had done many shows with. The promoter added some shitty cow-punk band as well. I made them play first and they were not happy with me.

All in all, only about 40 people showed up to the show. The promoter was not happy. We didn't care. We ended up getting shitfaced with the Jericho and Boxingwater guys...mostly AFTER we played...by the time they both went on, they were hammered. Jericho were the last band to play and were so sloppy, but so awesome. I yelled in my drunken stupor "PLAY LITTLE BOHEMIA" at them. Joe, the singer, looked at me slightly confused, and eventually the band played it for me.

After the show, we had some more drinks with Joe and he asked me "Where did you ever hear Little Bohemia?". It wasn't on their album, and I had never heard them play this song live. I told him "there's a live MP3 of it on your website". He looked at me confused and said "Really?". And we laughed.

I really fell in love with that song though. Just a sweet song about drinking with your friends and listening to rock tunes. It's simply perfect.

I was very, very happy when they finally included a studio version of the song on last year's Fat Wreck Chords release "This Sinking Ship".

download "Little Bohemia"

Welcome

So, as of tonight, I'm throwing my hat into the ring. I have begun a music blog. I spent tonight going through a bunch of music blogs, noting how self important most of them are. How most push shitty and/or over-hyped bands (hello, Pissed Jeans. hello, Tapes N' Tapes. etc. etc. etc.).

My blog will serve the following purposes:

1) To talk about new music that catches my fancy. Note that I'm a cranky 31 year old, and I'm losing patience with new bands, so there won't be very many listed here.

2) The majority of this blog will delve into the story behind my iPod. See, I have spent the last 3 years collecting every piece of music that has impacted my life. positive or negative. majorly or insignificantly. There may be long rambling stories about a certain song or something as simple as "I remember hearing that when walking through Zayre with my mom in 1982".

That's it. So, I'm going to use this space for telling stories. About the music that I love. And Some that I loathe.

enjoy.

-Kyle Frenette