Saving the best for last: I suppose if I Love Distortion ever got made into a movie I would want Nick Lowe & Dave Edmunds singing "I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock & Roll)" to play over the opening credits. I don't think it's gonna really come as a surprise to anyone who's reading it - since the story is essentially told in flashback - that Distortion is not gonna end well for the protagonist, and "I Knew The Bride" pretty neatly sums up the story. And what could possibly be better than a Chuck Berry tune that Chuck Berry forgot to write to open a rock & roll movie?
inspirational verse;
"I can see her now, drinkin' with the boys / Breakin' their hearts like they were toys /
She used to do The Pony, she used to do The Stroll / I knew the bride when she used to rock & roll /
I knew the bride when she used to rock & roll" - Nick Lowe, 1977
Very few people know EXACTLY what they were doing 35 years ago today. I do. I was seeing Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Nick Lowe & Rockpile and Mink DeVille live in Cincinnati, Ohio, on a gorgeous spring night and penning the review reproduced below.
It's the best piece of rock & roll journalism I ever had published. The magazine in question was called Focus, a local Columbus music rag. Up to that point I had been publishing my own punk fanzine, Teenage Rampage, which, let's say, had a very limited press run & circulation. If 300 people saw any one issue, I'd have been ecstatic, and surprised. Focus - on the other hand - was hugely popular, free, and EVERYBODY in Columbus who was into music picked it up and read it. By May 1978 my punk purist edge was gone, long gone. I didn't want be a punk-rock music writer, I wanted to be a rock & roll music writer. (Plus I wanted to hype the band I had going right at that moment - Ricki & The West Side Rockers.)
The editor of Focus at that point was a young woman named Kathy Reed. She was great; she was 20-something, smart, funny, pretty, wore glasses and she KNEW HOW TO GET THINGS DONE. (Unlike later Focus editors I worked for.) I had done little reviews here & there that she had printed as letters to the editor but I wanted a shot at a byline review; hence the Costello/Lowe/Deville triple bill. I went up to the paper's offices and proposed the following to Ms. Reed: She could send the resident punk & New Wave critics of Focus - Tony Rubin & Fred Brockman, by name - to cover the show and I'd pay my own way, write my own review and she could run whichever one was better.
Kathy laughed at my impertinence there in the office - she had been reading Teenage Rampage, I think she expected some safety-pin & Mohawk punk-rocker when I turned up rather than the long-haired West Sider I was (see photo below) - but we shook on the deal.
I wrote some of the review before my buddies and I even got to the show, finished it in the car on the way home from Cincinnati and had the review double-spaced typed and ready to go on Kathy's desk the next afternoon.
Rubin & Brockman never stood a chance.
(employ your zoom feature, friends & neighbors)
Ricki C., sometime in May, 1978
(blogger's note: I just found this video of an Elvis Costello & the Attractions show from the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey; May 5th, 1978, 12 days before the show I witnessed. Enjoy.)
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
