Take Five: The past is never dead

Take it from good old Bill Faulkner: Thanks to YouTube, the past isn't even past. Everything old can be new again if you play some songs from my past that came back for one reason or another this week

“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.

This week is like a bit of a history lesson with music made while I was a toddler that didn’t see the light of day until now, things that excited me in high school and as a youngish professional, and a couple of things that required some recent reading before the the door to full appreciation was unlocked.

1. Robyn Hitchcock — ‘Winchester’

Robyn Hitchcock‘s recent memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, isn’t the best music book I’ve ever read — though it's up there — but it may be the most insightful. Most music memoirs give you some glimpse into an artist's muse or help to explain why they do what they do. Hitchcock decided to focus on the titular year, one that saw a veritable explosion of popular music that grabbed 17-year-old Hitchcock and didn't let go. It's the origin point for everything he has done as an artist, influenced by the Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd records he heard that year. All of this led me to his breakout album, Element of Light from 1986, and the song "Winchester." This was the name of Hitchcock's boarding school, the place where he heard these records and started to become the person he is today. Suddenly this lush ballad begins to make sense. It was always obviously about his younger days, but references to the "groovers" snoring takes on new meaning, as he reveals in the book that these were the people who got the music, who exposed him to these artists and were what he hoped to become. It's more than a reminiscence; it's a love letter made whole 40 years later.¹

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2. Passengers — ‘Miss Sarajevo’

I’m continuing to make my way through Brian Eno’s book, A Year with Swollen Appendices, and it has led me to the Passengers LP he made with U2 in 1995. The book, a journal of that year, finds Eno offering glimpses into the creative process, as well as the business decisions that led it to be released under the band name Passengers rather than as a U2 album. I listened to Original Soundtracks 1 and like it, and wondered why I had never bothered to listen when it was released. U2 was everything to me at one point, but by the mid-90s I had little interest. I suppose Rattle and Hum was the first blow, home to some decent songs and some cringe-worthy material. I know I didn’t even own Achtung Baby until a few years after its release. That and Zooropa pulled me back in a bit, but then Pop, which I bought and hated, finally severed the tie. I remember Passengers coming out and assuming it was pretentious crap without hearing a note. Pavarotti? No thanks. But now, listening for the first time, I hear plenty that at least intrigues and some that is sublime. Some of that is the evolution of my taste over the subsequent 30 years, my ears clearly more open to different sounds. Regardless, I can now appreciate “Miss Sarajevo,” Pavarotti and all.

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3. New Mendicants — ‘This Time’

INXS was a big band for my high school set. Someone bought The Swing, someone else picked up Listen Like Thieves, and as a result most of us had a Maxell XLII in the car tape deck with the former on one side and the latter on the other. I suppose the band's popularity eventually worked to its disadvantage in my mind, though not before Kick essentially soundtracked the summer after our senior year and we capped it off with a roadtrip to Omaha for a show. That was basically the end of me keeping up with the band, as my growing taste for grit and dissonance clashed with Michael Hutchence and Co's move toward superstardom. But I still revisit those early albums, with Listen Like Thieves in particular holding a place in my heart. A new 40th anniversary reissue² was in heavy rotation this week, but it is a cover of one of the album's songs that I'll share here. The oft-mentioned Joe Pernice had a duo with Teenage Fanclubber Norman Blake in the early teens, and fittingly enough, the two covered “This Time,” from INXS on an Australian tour EP. I suppose it was a legitimizing move in my mind, acknowledgment that there was musical merit there. A decade on from that, I'm less likely to need such validation, finally starting to worry less about what others might think, simply content to listen to things that make me happy. This week, that was INXS.

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4. Peach and Lee — ‘When I Get Home’

My ego took a blow a couple of weeks back when I visited a Milwaukee record store with friends before the Nick Cave show. One walked up with an album by the duo Peach and Lee. Everyone else knew what it was but I had no clue. I somehow had missed out on the news from late 2023 of an unearthed batch of classic power pop by an Iowa duo from Council Bluffs. I rectified that and have been listening obsessively ever since. Even my high schooler (who has inherited a healthy love of the Beatles) was perplexed when walking in on a listening session. How could this have gone unreleased for 50 years, he wondered. Arlis Peach and Larry Lee were childhood friends who happened to make beautiful pop records that actually live up to the comparisons to Badfinger, the Raspberries, and Dwight Twilley. One stab at success tanked (an RCA single featuring future Sparks drummer Hilly Michaels), and so these songs, recorded between 1965 and 1975, sat on a shelf. Thankfully, we now have a two-LP set that plays like a hits collection. “When I Get Home” a Beatlesque gem with wonderful harmonies, is my favorite at the moment.

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5. The Ponys — ‘Let’s Kill Ourselves’

Nothing like opening an aural time capsule and finding everything just as vibrant as you remembered. Such was the case when I cued up "Let's Kill Ourselves" by the Ponys from the band's 2004 debut, Laced With Romance. It's a visceral rush of a song, huge, phased power chords giving way to a sort of galloping rhythm as singer Jered Gummere sings, well, something, before that chorus comes in: "Sometimes I feel like killing myself/ Let's get together, we'll kill ourselves," which, of course, feels like a timely anthem two decades later. It's a resigned statement of pushing through, not a troubling cry for help. The first verse, actually, feels prophetic:

Emotionally drained
A black cloud is coming down to be my guide
And it will tell me things
About the facts of life and how to survive

At the time, this felt like the tail end of something that started at the turn of the millennium with the White Stripes, the Strokes and other guitar-centric bands making music seemingly plucked from another time. Today, it sounds very much of its own time. But the passing of time means we too often come back to something thanks to a nudge of bad news, as in this case with word that Ponys drummer Nathan Jerde has died. The band itself didn't last long, but while it did, it cranked out three good-to-great albums. If this catches your ear, you would do well to check them out.

1. Hitchcock released a companion album to the book, also titled 1967, where he covers songs from that year.

2. Just one of many things about this week that made me feel every bit of my age.