If I were to fire up my time-traveling DeLorean and go tell my 17-year-old self that one day he would more-or-less willingly attend a Depeche Mode concert, I can only imagine the poor kid would sit up sleepless at night wondering when the early-onset dementia was going to hit. Depeche Mode? Really? But… but they’re a New Wave band!

You see, back in the days when the kind of music you listened to actually mattered, I self-identified as a rocker. Not a metalhead, mind you — my tastes were never that extreme — but the stuff that most strongly resonated with me was almost exclusively guitar-based, and mostly of that simple, feel-good variety that’s all about cars and summer nights and breaking free of whatever’s holding you down, about illicit adventures and giving the finger to authority, and, most of all, it was about sex. It was rebellious and restless; it vibrated its way into your bones and affected you at a gut level… or, in the case of the really good stuff, a bit south of there. To this day, a good rock song can for three minutes and a few odd seconds make me feel mean, or masculine, or sexy, or simply like I want to mash the accelerator down a little harder and feel my car surge forward like nothing can stop us.

New Wave never did any of that for me.

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Briefly noted, yesterday was my main man Rick Springfield’s 60th birthday. Sixty. That’s only a couple years younger than my parents. Good thing I didn’t put that together when I was a teenager; the cognitive dissonance of my guitar hero being in the same general age group as my folks would no doubt have triggered some kind of mental breakdown. Of course, the similar age is easier to ignore when you consider that my parents have never looked anything like this:

Yeah, I hope I look that good in another 20 years. Hell, I wish I looked that good now…

I’ve been pondering something tonight… I like to alphabetize my music collection, but some bands make that difficult for me by naming themselves after the lead singer plus the backup group, e.g., Tommy James and the Shondells, Diana Ross and the Supremes, etc. So, should “singer + backup” names like Huey Lewis and the News go under “H” (treating the entire band name as a single unit) or “L,” as in “Lewis and the News, Huey,” which I believe is how the Library of Congress would probably do it?

Any of my Loyal Readers have any thoughts on this?

My buddy Mike sent word this morning that the new Cheap Trick album, appropriately titled The Latest, will be available soon in multiple formats, including — are you ready for this? — 8-track tape.

Yes, 8-track, that clunky lo-fi audio technology of the early 1970s that never sounded especially good even by the standards of the day. I’m sure everyone of, ahem, a certain age remembers how 8-tracks always tended to interrupt the songs (usually in the middle of the bridge or a cool guitar solo) with a harsh click-clack sound as the head changed from track to the next, and the way those brick-like cartridges got hotter than a microwaved Kwik-e-Mart burrito after only a couple of plays. I can’t imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for these things, unless it’s simply for the objects themselves, as artifacts of a simpler time; I’m definitely not aware of any kind of 8-track-o-phile community that actually enjoys the sound of 8-tracks, like the vinyl true believers who still prefer records to CDs. And yet this Cheap Trick offering is apparently not a joke. You can pre-order The Latest on 8-track here. (You can also get the album on LP or CD, depending on your preference. Oh, and I suppose there’ll be a downloadable version for the Damn Kids™, not that any of them would be listening to an old band like Cheap Trick anyhow.)

I’ve noted before that I’m not really a fan of Cheap Trick’s music, but I must admit this little stunt has greatly increased my respect for the band. It’s just so charmingly counterintuitive to offer a 2009 release on a 1973 format…

After last night’s grim entry, I figure we could use something a little more uplifting this morning. At least I could. So here’s a music video I’ve be meaning to post for a few days, a nifty version of one of my favorite songs, the old Leiber and Stoller chestnut “Stand by Me” as recorded by Jon Bon Jovi and an Iranian singer named Andy Madadian. I first spotted this over on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but it’s been making its way around the Interwebs, and I’m proud to do my part to spread it farther. There’s an intro on the clip by producer Don Was that explains what it’s all about; you can also listen to an NPR interview with Andy that gives a little more background.

And now for the music:

As Don Was says, the song isn’t available for sale anywhere, but if you like it, you can download a free MP3 here. I like it a lot myself; I’m frankly astounded by the flexibility of this song, how it can be performed in Farsi of all things and yet still work as well as when Ben E. King laid down the original version all the way back in 1961. They don’t call them classics for nothing, kids.

Hope we’re all feeling better now…

Have you ever experienced one of those early morning moments when you’re lightly dozing but conscious enough to realize that, somehow, during the night, everything about your environment has become magically perfect? The house is at just the right temperature and ambient light level; the sheets have been washed enough times to have achieved optimal softness, and they’re draping around you wonderfully, neither constricting nor exposing anything; and even the pillow — that accursed crap pillow you’ve never managed to beat into quite the right shape — has morphed into something that actually cradles your head instead of twisting it off on some awkward angle that leaves your neck stiff and achy all freaking day. It’s at those moments that you feel most restful and content. Even better, you know that if you let yourself drop back into full sleep, you’ll easily go for two more hours and awake fully refreshed for the first time in days or even weeks…

And then that damn cheap alarm clock starts up with its insistent, shrill beeping and you know it’s not going to stop bugging you no matter how many times you hit the snooze button and now your bladder is calling for attention, too, and you’ve got to get up because it’s Monday and you’ve got to get to the office and start the whole Sisyphean struggle all over again and the whole time you really want nothing more than to sleep and maybe do some blogging sometime after lunch…

I hate Mondays.

I encountered the following over at Scalzi’s Whatever and thought it was pretty cool. FYI, there’s no actual video here, only music played over a still image:

I normally don’t care for cover versions of songs I consider personal landmarks — which “Jump” definitely is for me; it’s an instant time portal back to one particular summer — for much the same reason that I resist movie remakes: I like what I like and, with few exceptions, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with still listening to or watching favorite older media. “Old” doesn’t equal “bad,” in my opinion. That said, a cover that’s well-done and drastically different from the original can sometimes make something that’s become intimately familiar seem exciting and fresh again. If nothing else in this case, I can finally understand all the lyrics that I’ve never managed to decipher in 25 years of listening to David Lee Roth’s slurry delivery.

Incidentally and for whatever it’s worth (not much, probably), I was really annoyed with the commenters over at the Whatever. One guy said “I didn’t think it was possible to make that song listenable,” and there were several other remarks along the lines of “lame 80s song,” “cheesy 80s song,” etc. I know I’m in the terminally unhip minority for continuing to enjoy the stuff I liked as a kid, but I just don’t understand where this kind of attitude comes from. Why does music that was once immensely popular have to be declared lame after a few years? Is it a backlash thing? Or snobby hipsters who can’t handle the idea of something appealing to a mass audience? Or is just the Damn Kids showing zero tolerance for anything that came out before they had breakfast yesterday?