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Friday, July 22, 2005
 
RED LIGHTS
The Marbles
Ork : 1976
Reissued on The Great N.Y. Singles Scene
ROIR : 1992
[Out of Print]

WESTERN STAR
Frank Black & The Catholics
Pistolero
SpinArt : 1999
[Buy It]

SO YOU WANT TO BE A ROCK AND ROLL STAR
The Byrds
Younger Than Yesterday
Columbia : 1967
[Buy It]

SIX-SIXTY-SIX
Frank Black & The Catholics
Frank Black & The Catholics
SpinArt : 1998
[Buy It]

ROCK AND ROLL FRIEND
Robert Forster
Warm Nights
Beggars Banquet : 1999
[Buy It]

We Americans love people, places, concepts, and things: Cars and kids, Cleveland, and the 7th-inning stretch. In Moistworks' Astoria bureau, we love American music the way other Americans love the American flag. We love American music so much that four of the five songs we've posted today are by American bands, with an Australian thrown in, in part, because Australians love American music at least as much as we do. We love American music because the first thing we ran into during a visit to Australia was an Elvis impersonator. And we love Australia because Melbourne, in particular, is a moist and welcoming place, where the restaurants are better and cheaper than American restaurants and the water swirls in other directions.

Australian or not, today's songs have one thing in common: They, too, are love songs - though not necessarily of the marrying kind. And so, with stars in our eyes and dollar signs in lieu of bullet points, we present:

$ Red Lights

in which one singer moves a block down from another and jumps quickly (singer #1 does) from a "voice in the stairwell" who "makes the girls cry" to a "dressed up" Elvis-type who's "shakin' at the knees" and putting crowds "in a rage." The guy, who's "better than big" and "bigger than wow," always has "red, red, red, red lights in his eyes," and midway through the song, singer #2 offers to "sell my mother/for a chance to play guitar in his band." ("We're still playin' all the old songs - in the garage," he explains. "But it's just a mirage," he admits.) As for the chorus - my girlfriend and I used to drive around Queens, singing it at the top of our lungs. To top that off, Moistworks has it on good authority that William Vollman set "Red Lights" on permanent repeat whilst working through galley proofs of The Atlas.

$ Western Star

Moistworks can provide you with recorded conversations that prove "Western Star" to be one of Sam Lipsyte's favorite Frank Black tracks - and if that doesn't seal the deal, it also gets Moistworks' own stamp of approval. We can't help noticing that a lot of Black's lyrics are variations on themes that Long Islander Lou Reed limned in his own, epic "Candy Says": The shape-shifting of "Caribou" ("This human form/Where I was born/I will repent"); the Marbles-like dream-projection of "Western Star" - all signs that, like a lot of us, Black would feel a lot more comfortable in someone else's skin. As for the chorus - apparently, Black pronounced Bowie's name this way when he himself was an actual kid (a state of affairs we have difficulty imagining for two entirely unrelated reasons).

$ So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star

The Byrds shift into mariachi mode for this tres of-the-moment anti-Monkees tract, which doubles as a somewhat dated variation on a few of the subjects you'll find explored above. "So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star" made an especially deep impression on West German novelist Gunther Grass, who had this to say about it: "Das Byrds gab den Weißen ihren Körper zurück!" As for the chorus - it's pretty unremarkable, n'est pas?

$ Six-Sixty-Six

In the midst of the war/He offered us peace
And he came like a lover/From out of the east
With the face of an angel and the heart of a beast
His intentions were six-sixty-six

He walked up to the temple/With gold in his hands
And he bought off the priests/And propositioned the land
And the world was his harlot/And laid in the sand
While the band played six-sixty-six

We served at his table/And slept on the floor
But he starved us and beat us/And nailed us to the door
Well, I'm ready to die/I can't take any more
And I'm sick of his lies and his tricks

He told us he loved us/But that was a lie
There was blood in his pockets/And death in his eyes
Well, my number is up/And I'm willing to die
If the band will play six
If the band will play six-sixty
If the band will play six-sixty-six


$ Rock & Roll Friend

What Robert Forster's cover of his own Go-Between's song has in common with Frank Black's aforementioned cover of Larry Norman's "Six-Sixty-Six" is that listening to either one'll make you question Jonathan Safran Foer's injunction that "no kinds of love/are better than others." Here, Robert Forster puts himself in the shoes of his own, abandoned lover: "I have my use/I used to have a lot more," s/he sings. When Franklin Bruno's band, Nothing Painted Blue, covered this song, Bruno changed the "angry" in

Ancient, angry motions now
All lovers have to do their laps


to an "urgent." Moistworks likes the change, and wishes you all an urgent weekend.

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