Author Archives: Josh Lewellen

Needle Drop: The Victims, “Television Addict”

If a band’s legend is to rest on a single and, for the most part, a single alone, you’d be hard-pressed to name a better one than the Australian rock & roll salvo that is the Victims’ “Television Addict.” Released independently circa 1978 alongside the succinctly titled and similarly great EP “No Thanks to the Human Turd,” the single, despite a heinously minuscule number of pressings (a thousand to be exact, which accounts for the four-digit starting prices often seen for the original wax), came across as a shockwave to the local music scene and gradually spread in music lore throughout the country.

Heading what was to become the Perth rock-garage-punk renaissance, the Victims were an extension of the earliest signs of punk to arise in the city, as two of its three members hailed from Perth’s first legitimate rock & roll band, the Geeks. There’s certainly an argument to be made (and one I’d willingly take up) for this genuine middle-of-nowhere setting being the preeminent rock city in the whole damn hemisphere. The output of homegrown bands such as the one in question here, the Manakins, the Scientists, and the Orphans, all seemingly linked by one common member or another, readily attests to that claim.

In retrospect, the Victims served as a veritable springboard for future pursuits, with the aftermath of the group’s disbandment marking a fairly prompt turnaround from said commercial dearth for the two most prominent Victims. The chief architects behind this single, lead singer and guitarist Dave Faulkner and drummer James Baker, would eventually form one of the great power pop outfits, the Hoodoo Gurus, in the following decade, and Baker would play the part of the mercenary for a who’s who of Aussie rock & roll powerhouses, taking up the kit as well as writing for the early-period Scientists, the Dubrovniks, and supergroup the Beasts of Bourbon.

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Rick Allen:
The TVD Interview

With both an art exhibit and a North American spring tour on the horizon, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen remains hard at work as ever. Allen brings his latest collection of work entitled “Rick Allen: Drums for Peace” to both Wentworth Galleries in the Washington, DC metro area on Saturday, February 18 with special appearances at the Wentworth Gallery in Bethesda, Maryland from 12:00PM–3:00PM and in McLean, Virginia from 6:00PM–9:00PM.

In addition, a portion of the proceeds from each sale will be donated back to Project Resiliency’s Warrior Resiliency Program sponsored by Allens’s charity the Raven Drum Foundation, and each purchaser will also receive a limited-edition, hand-signed Commemorative Purple Heart piece.

We caught up with Rick to discuss his new exhibition, the intersection between his art and music, and some of the bands and concerts that spurred him to take up the kit in the first place.

First off, the upcoming “Angels and Icons” art exhibit, that’s on February 18th. How long have you been laying the foundation for this event?

Actually, we changed out the “Angels & Icons” to “Drums for Peace.” It’s just the climate at the moment. Everybody needs to chill, y’know? I just wanted to put a slightly different emphasis on my intention. It’s a strange time we live in, so I want to do as much as I can to bring awareness to the fact that there needs to be more dialogue.

And it’s great you’re going that route. So you’ve done a number of exhibits in the past, I’m assuming?

Yeah, I’ve done tons of them. Whenever I get a chance to, when I’m off the road, I’ll go out and visit various galleries. Wentworth has a bunch of galleries throughout the country, so it makes it really convenient in terms of being able to organize art shows. They’ve been very kind to me.

I imagine the overlap between art and music must be pretty hectic. Have you been able to distribute a fair amount of time to painting, and photography, and other visual arts over the years, or has it only become more manageable in, say, recent years?

Basically when I’m out on the road, I’ll be planning out things that I want to do or taking inspirations from places I visit, things that I see, people, and just relating things to my own experience. For the past two weeks, I’ve just been spending a couple of hours in the art studio putting all those ideas into practice. It is pretty hectic, but the one nice thing is I feel as though any kind of creativity, like what you do for instance, if you’re artistically inclined in one area, I feel like it’s interchangeable.

Playing music and doing art, I basically go to the same place in myself. I find myself in the moment. That to me is one of the most valuable things, being able to just be in the moment and not thinking about what went before or what I’m going to have for dinner. It’s really a hyper-focused state where I just start drooling and the work comes out, whether that be musically or artistically. So it’s just another avenue to explore and build my creativity.

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Needle Drop: The Remains, “Hang on Sloopy”

“They were how you told a stranger about Rock ’n’ Roll.”
Jon Landau, Crawdaddy, January, 1967

Not all mid-’60s garage rock bands were created equal. More specifically, not all mid-’60s garage rock bands were Boston’s in-house firebrands, The Remains. Name-checked by future hometown legends the Real Kids, covered by Aussie pub rock lords the Sunnyboys, and the subject of a nigh-unfindable documentary narrated by Peter Wolf, The Remains may be the ultimate band’s band.

Formed in ’64 and fronted by lead howler/songwriter/guitarist Barry Tashian—who, in one of rock ’n’ roll’s more bewildering plot twists, spent the better part of the last forty-five years either playing on Emmylou Harris albums or roaming the land as one-half of the spousal bluegrass duo Barry & Holly Tashian—the band hunkered down in Boston’s most raucous club, the Rat. Melding a raw R&B sound with the frenzied side of the British Invasion, The Remains established themselves as a live act hailed by all witnesses as the greatest to ever do it, quickly drawing nightly sellout, and overflow, crowds to the rave-up haven.

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TVD Video Premiere: Johnson & McAuley, “Illuminated Dream”

“It was always a fantasy of mine to make the ‘ultimate ’80s video’ (and by video, I meant VIDEO). Plus, I really wanted to learn how to do stop motion animation like INXS’s ‘Need You Tonight.’ (It took me 3 full days to do those few seconds.) When my animation buddies Steve and John Loter agreed to parody MC Skat Kat, it was the blue-screen cherry on top of the neon lit sundae of my dreams.”
Bleu

Formed as a natural extension of past collaborations, Johnson & McAuley serves as the latest concoction of hit songwriter/producer Bleu and indie singer-songwriter Alexz Johnson. Having first become acquainted back in 2005 via a mutual record label (Sony), the two artists worked together on a number of projects over the past decade, with Alexz appearing on the 2015 track, “Bottom of My Heart,” from Bleu’s fifth solo album To Hell With You, and Bleu co-writing “Thank You For Breaking My Heart” on Johnson’s “Heart” EP.

Equal parts Dare-era Human League and When in Rome (whose definitive single “The Promise” lent itself well to an excellent reworking by the pair), Johnson & McAuley’s first single “Illuminated Dream” distills many of the finer elements of the New Wave tradition, which is to say that Bleu and Alexz have undergone a staggering metamorphosis from their respective power pop and acoustic backgrounds.

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Needle Drop: Sonic’s Rendezvous Band,
“City Slang”

Barreling forth from the ashes of Detroit’s primo guitar-whirling outfits, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, a supergroup by definition, remains among music’s most perplexing enigmas. With the MC5’s rhythm guitar doyen turned lead maven Fred “Sonic” Smith (or “the best,” according to Lenny Kaye) and the Rationals’ soul mover Scott Morgan at the helm, along with a Stooge manning the drums, the band fortified itself within Ann Arbor’s Second Chance, the hallowed refuge for the high voltage that would come to be known, fittingly, as Sonic’s Rendezvous.

Though they immediately displayed a penchant for rock ‘n’ roll at its most incendiary, pioneering a guitar-laden wall of sound that remains wholly singular, the group remained entrenched in the Ann Arbor circuit from 1974 until its dissolution in 1980, sometimes accompanying Fred’s wife, one Patti Smith, or, in another case, backing Iggy Pop on a brief European tour in the summer of ’78. All the while, the band’s reputation remained confined to this innermost circle of Detroit’s rock acolytes.

Over halfway through the group’s duration, the result of SRB’s lone studio session emerged, a double-sided single containing both a stutter that shames Roger Daltrey and perhaps the most unrelenting dual guitar blitzkrieg known to conscious life. In 1978, Orchidé Records unveiled “City Slang” with hardly an ounce of promotion, leaving its reputation in local hands and ears.

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