Monthly Archives: June 2012

Greetings from Carlsbad, California!

In 1976 to celebrate our country’s Bicentenial, Americans loaded up RVs and hit the nation’s highways. Gas was less than fifty cents a gallon, so we all went “to look for America.” With Independence Day less than a week away, I figured us Sidels would pile into”Francine,” my 2009 Prius, and head out for a good old American road trip!

Today the Idelic Hour beams to you from a hundred miles south of Laurel Canyon. Carlsbad was originally settled in the late 1800s by a famous sea captain looking for a place to rest.

Fuck me, I can really relate to old Captain Frazier. 2012 feels like such a mad rush—we’ve all been burning the candle at both ends, so it’s time for me to take a week, relax, and have some family fun!

The inspiration for this week’s playlist comes from my trusty iPod set on random. “Public Animal # 9”, track 2, side B from Alice Cooper’s classic School’s Out album. Wow, it’s been a long time but if you grew up in the 70s, this album was an absolute essential. With no exception the disc was the first to hit my turntable every summer. (OK side B was seriously neglected but…)

I saw the word animal and I could not resist doing a playlist of songs about…well, you guessed it. Cats, bears, birds, dogs, giraffes, bugs, wolves, and freaks!

It’s kooky, it’s fun, it’s Idelic, it’s Summertime, and I’m off to Legoland. Let’s trip!

The Idelic Hit of the Week:
The Men – Open Your Heart

In part 2 of our interview with Lita Ford, she rattled off some of her favorite guitarists. That got us thinking — who is your guitar hero? 

TVD: Let’s talk about some of your biggest influences as a guitar player.

Lita: Richie Blackmore. Highway Star, I gotta say – everybody knows that album. That was a real big influence on me. I had Richie Blackmore posters hanging on my bedroom walls. He was just God as far as I was concerned.

I was a big fan of Tommy Iomi of Black Sabbath, who I later became engaged to, which was really wild. Their very first album was huge. I mean, I copped all his licks. Everything that guy played I learned from. And then I met him and I became engaged to him – it was really wild. What was wild about it was that it was the first band I’d seen play live. I’d never seen anybody before, so it was my first rock concert.

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Contrary to what’s sometimes published, the studio legacy of The Velvet Underground didn’t end with 1970’s Loaded. No, it culminated with what many consider to be an abomination, an offense in the annals of one of the greatest bands to ever transcend and redefine rock’s limitations. The record is 1973’s Squeeze, and despite music that’s inescapably lackluster there is a case to be made for bringing the album out of the shameful shadows that persist in shrouding its existence.

For many VU fans, Squeeze exists on the same plane as that uncle who’s been sent up the river for crimes that nobody in the family feels comfortable discussing. Other Velvets fanatics LLLOOOVVVE to talk about this understandably scarce LP, mostly because it helps to flesh out theories over what made the band so exceptional, speculations that often vary greatly from person to person. Because if The Velvet Underground are the ornery granddaddy of an often sorta suspect category known as “cult bands,” unlike many of the groups awarded with this stature there is no consensus on what is VU’s best LP, or for that matter what is even their finest era.

And this seems to have been a gradually evolving process. Around 1987, when I first began listening to the Velvets in earnest, the older heads with whom I spoke (almost always inside the welcoming walls of record stores), seeking guidance on this somewhat daunting entity, were essentially divided between which of the band’s first two records, The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light/White Heat, was best. This is to say that while surely considered valuable, the post-John Cale material was definitely esteemed as lesser.

But a new day was dawning. As the arrival of groups like The Wedding Present and Galaxie 500 made clear, a generation of young musicians had come of age subscribing to the notion that the music produced for the band’s self-titled third LP was the true apex of the Velvets’ achievement. This phenomenon was aided by VU and Another View, both compilations fairly fresh in the racks and often easier to obtain than the actual full-length studio records.

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Metal icon Lita Ford is on a roll. She’s back with her eighth studio album, Living Like a Runaway, an album that’s unmistakably Lita. It’s brash, guitar-driven hard rock, lots of F-you attitude, and unabashedly personal. Its release coincides with her massive “Rock of Ages” tour with Def Leppard and Poison, which will take Lita across the US this summer. When we chatted with Lita, we got the low-down on the new record, life on the road, who her guitar heroes are, and even the status of a possible Runaways reunion.

Part 1 of the TVD Interview can be found here.

What was it like to be a rock star when you were 16?

I took it seriously, even though some of the pictures were dressed kind of in shorts and… I still took it seriously. I took my music serious and I really wanted to become a better guitar player. I focused on my guitar playing and I did things to try to better myself as a guitar player. Like, I would plug straight into the amplifier rather than using effects, whereas nowadays, you’ve got pedal boards out the fuckin’ ass! It’s unbelievable how many pieces of equipment people use to play guitar! I just don’t get it. I’m very basic. I play with a wah-wah pedal and a delay and that’s it. I don’t even use a tuner – they just get in my way.

So, that was one of the things I focused on in the very beginning was just playing guitar. I heard horror stories about different bands where they’d plug into machines and machines would make noise. Back then, too, the pedals weren’t as evolved as today. And I didn’t want to be like that because I was a chick especially; I needed to be taken seriously as a guitar player.

Seems like it annoyed you that you’re lumped in with the “Top Female Guitarists” as opposed to just “Top Guitarists”?

Well, it does bug me because it’s like I got a different category because I’m a different sex. There wasn’t a category because Jimi Hendrix was black – he was just a guitar player. What the hell’s the difference? What do you need a penis for if you’re playing guitar? Are you gonna use it as a slide? I mean, really – what else could you do with it? [Laughs]

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