(Wang Chung - synonymous with the 80s no matter how you look at it)

Heading into familiar territory this week - taking a break from the new and unfamiliar and giving MySpace a rest. This week it's a return to the 1970's and 80's. Some of it has been over-exposed and some of it hasn't. Most all of it gets classified as "guilty pleasure" - there, I've said it. I'll be putting up favorites.

Tonight it's Wang Chung's Dance Hall Days. I am partial to this band because I did two videos with them and they were great to work with. In a business where musicians can be downright ungrateful that you're making them look good, Wang Chung were always good sports about the whole thing and completely professional even at five in the morning. And if you've ever worked on Music Videos you know they can be grueling affairs, lasting 18-26 hours at a stretch and listening to the same track as much as a hundred times in the course of the shoot and usually at the threshold of pain every time.

But Dance Hall Days brings up good memories and I wanted to start the week off on a good note. You may have different frames of reference in mind - nobody has the same set of memories about anything. But at least this one is catchy and has a beat to it.

Get ready.

(Working Week - Jazz/Funk/Fusion to a Post-punk crowd - all things were possible)

A set from the 1985 Glastonbury Festival tonight featuring Jazz/Funk/Fusion/Dance combo Working Week, consisting of Simon Booth, Larry Stabbins and Juliet Roberts. This was a period of the 80s when music was flying in every direction and it made for some great live sets. Working Week got started as the outgrowth of another band Weekend in 1983 and this set features tracks from their first album for Virgin Records Working Nights. A great band that went separate ways after a while, but made some great music in the process.

Something nice and funky for a Saturday night.

(Split Enz 1974 - Iggy Pop proclaimed them the future of Rock n' Roll - if only it were so)

Another dose of Split Enz tonight (I ran another post some months back). This time from a series of demo sessions just prior to their signing with Mushroom Records and the recording of the first album Mental Notes. Sadly, this lineup wouldn't last too much past 1977 after the band completed their first U.S. tour (a truly memorable one, as someone who was there can attest). But they continued on, honing and perfecting their sound and evolving into one of the more popular bands from "down under" during the 70s and 80s.

This track, Malmsbury Villa, never made it to an album and stayed only as a demo. Too bad. But even the demo is pretty sensational.

Perfect Monday night music.

(Roddy Frame - Aztec Camera - made the 80s worth listening to)

Getting into a 1980s frame of mind tonight - Aztec Camera from their first album High Land, Hard Rain - the opening track, and a favorite, Oblivious. Strangely, Aztec Camera really never caught on in the States. Only doing modest sales and occasional airplay. The only reason I can think of is the flood of albums and new bands coming out of the UK at the time caused a lot of worthy music to get lost in the shuffle. The early 80s saw a gradual shift from Punk to New Wave with Indie coming in through the back door. Once again, radio stations were also going through the shift, with less independent stations on the air and the growth of the corporate mergers - loosely translated: less experimenting and breaking of new acts and more concentration on the tried and true and the highly commercial acts (i.e. Madonna). Not to mention the introduction of MTV nationwide.

It was an interesting period of transition for the music business. But as is often the case, a lot of good music went unnoticed and it was frustrating not only for the bands, but for the audience as well.

Seems to still be that way.

(The Stone Roses - Suddenly, music got jettisoned out of the doldrums)

I can't believe it's been 20 years since The Stone Roses released their first album. Up until that time music was going through a period of ennui. The 80s were coming to a close and things were getting a little complacent, musically. The Reagan Years could have something to do with it. MTV was busy converting the taste of most mainstream music into who was pretty and who was not - and that determined who would get a video made and who would languish in musical limbo. Radio saw the writing on the wall and playlists became tightly regimented, as corporate takeovers and mergers made freeform a thing of the past.

But then things took a brisk change. Seattle started pumping out Grunge and the UK started pumping out Madchester. And music suddenly took a turn for the better and The Stone Roses appeared.

As movements go, this one didn't last all that long. But it's presence and influence have been felt even to this day. And the first Stone Roses album, from which this cut This Is The One, is featured tonight, has become a classic, and is still fresh twenty years later.

You know you're on to something when you can make it sound timeless without much effort. And The Stone Roses are timeless.

(Telephone - huge in Europe. Over here? Well . . . )

I recently ran across a French Radio station online (Oui FM, which you should check out) that plays some fascinating stuff - old and new - French and non-French. During one of their sets they slipped in Dure Limite by the French punk/post-punk/new wave/hard rock group Telephone. They were enormous in France and throughout Europe in the late 1970s up to 1986, when they disbanded and went separate ways. They hardly made a dent in the States (again, that language thing), but I remembered the band pretty well, having been familiar with them since their first album, but I really hadn't played anything by them, or heard anything about them until the other day when Dure Limite came on. Not a massive seller at the time, it was produced by Bob Ezrin, who was responsible for a lot of memorable albums in the 70s - Doctor John and Peter Gabriel are two that come to mind. According to a website, the band did reunite in 2003. But what has happened since then is a mystery.

Still, it's nice to be reminded of the not-so-obvious 80s every once in a while.

(Dr. Walter Heller - tried to save Reagan from himself - didn't work)

With word about the latest recession being "over", I was reminded about the last time we had a deep recession in the 1980s and how we all became familiar with the phrases "Reaganomics", Supply-Side and Voodoo-Economics.

Back in the 80s there was 10% unemployment (on paper) and it felt like it lasted forever. Former Kennedy and Johnson Economic adviser Dr. Walter Heller had a few observations to make when he was interviewed on Face The Nation in 1982.

Dr. Walter Heller: “Had the Carter program, and unfortunately it was rather forgettable, but had the Carter program been enacted, we would be in much better shape today. People seem to forget that Carter, in October of the last year of his presidency proposed a tax program that made just excellent sense. It was much smaller than the President’s program, and it concentrated more of its tax cuts, and this is what people forget, on the supply side, so to speak, on true stimulus of government investment. Instead of having enormous deficits that scare the public and Wall Street, we would have had much more moderate deficits, we’d be much better off today.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20 but it's interesting to speculate what might have happened had the Carter program been enacted.

But no, The Great Communicator had a better idea . . or so he said.

(The Jags in 1979 - Catchy and hook-laden, but not sustainable)

A bit of late 70s UK Power-Pop this time. The Jags were one of the mainstays of KROQ here in L.A. around 1979. Not really considered Punk or New Wave, but not really mainstream either - sort of falling into that miscellaneous category that just sounded good, played catchy memorable songs but didn't last more than a couple albums. They broke up in 1982.

There were a lot of those kinds of bands from the late 70s to early 80s, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They were not destined to change your life, but rather go along with it and provide the soundtrack to places, times and people.

Here is a live concert, recorded by the BBC at their Paris Theatre in London in 1979. A lot of familiar material.

And for some reason, I remembered exactly where I was when I first heard each of those songs.

(Flop in 1993 - Sony was clueless)

Another fine example of a band, after years of struggling, gets signed to a major label who releases their album to weak initial sales and then dumps them like a bad habit a few months later.

Sound familiar? It's what major labels do, especially the past twenty or so years when it stopped being about music and artists and cultivating talent in favor of profit-and-loss statements and bottom lines.

Flop were a combination punk/pop/grunge band that came out of the Seattle area in the early 90s. They had a good local following and a few singles and eps put out by indie labels.

Since Seattle became something of a mecca for all things grunge (with the astounding success of Nirvana) in the early 90s, every major label sent A&R people to scour the streets, clubs and rehearsal rooms in search of the next Kurt Cobain.

Sony found Flop and signed them for their 550 imprint and teamed them with Martin Rushent to co-produce. The results became their second album Whenever You're Ready, a turbo-charged package of 17 cuts of which this track Woolworth is one of them.

It's a great album - loud, fast and out of control. Like a lot of albums should be, but sadly aren't.

Unfortunately, after the Sony debacle there was a personnel change and they recorded one more album for another indie label before calling it quits.

It does however beg the question that if Sony/Epic were an actual record company, would they still have gotten the same fate?

One never knows.

(UB-40 - One of the plus sides to the 80s)

UB40. From the Little Baggariddim album. "Don't Break My Heart" - it sounds like it's got Sunday night written all over it.

If you don't consider the politics, the 80s weren't so bad after all.