appendix to I Love Distortion - Nick Lowe (Bonus Video Friday)

This month's installment of I Love Distortion (a rock & roll novel in 12 chapters) is finished, but won't run until May 29th, for reasons which will become obvious at that point.  So I've decided to use May's Bonus Friday Videos to illustrate what the band detailed in that story kinda/sorta/vaguely sounded like.  (I have no actual tapes of the band because they went off a bridge into the Scioto River as detailed in the April edition of I Love Distortion, blog entry April 13th, 2013.)  (No, wait, it's an imaginary band in a fictional story, so how could I have ever had tapes?)

Allow me to let Sean Richter take over.......

Nick Lowe was a truly major influence on my songwriting & bandleading in 1978.  As much as I idolized Bruce Springsteen, there was no way musically or financially I was going to be able to keep a seven-piece band with keyboards & a sax together on the West Side of Columbus.  And as much as I loved Lou Reed, my man from N.Y.C. was just a little too dour for the way I was feeling at the time.  I was a boy in love.

I think I've implied in I Love Distortion that my 1978 assemblage was a punk band, but in reality and in restrospect we were really just a fast, loud, hard rock & roll band playing three-minute songs with a take-no-prisoners attitude and no residual safety pins & garbage bags punk dress-up aspect.  (Plus we knew how to tune our guitars.)  Looking back, though, anything in 1978 that wasn't country-rock, prog-rock or metal/corporate-rock was labeled punk and/or New Wave by the media.  In the early going AC/DC, Cheap Trick and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were all thought of and viewed as "punk."  And really, how do you lump The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Jonathan Richman, Blondie, The Patti Smith Group, The Cars, The Dictators and Talking Heads all into the same movement?  (Not to mention Television, The Dwight Twilley Band, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Shoes and Pere Ubu.)

Anyway, here's what we sounded like when I sang lead.  (Next Bonus Friday Video; what we sounded like when Nicole sang lead.) - Sean Richter



inspirational verse; "And in the air there was after-shave lotion /

In the wake of a snake-hipped Persian" - Nick Lowe, 1976

inspirational verse; "Daylight, do not descend / I don't ever want the night to end /
I want to carry on and on and on and on and on /

I feel so right it's wrong; it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong" - Nick Lowe, 1976

© 2013 Ricki C.