The 1981 Listening Post - Gleaming Spires - Songs of the Spires

Gleaming Spires - Songs of the Spires 

#608

1981 Housekeeping

By Craig Fitzgerald

Gleaming Spires

Songs of the Spires

Genre: New Wave Pop

Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Highlights: 

Going Hey Hey

How to Get Girls Through Hypnotism

Talking in the Dark

(Ed.’s note: Special thanks to Craig for taking this one on even though it’s only available to stream on YouTube. I know that that can be a difficult way to listen to albums, especially if you are traveling and choosing to listen in your car.)

Gleaming Spires is something of an early 1980s supergroup, with Leslie Bohem and David Kendrick (who was Devo’s drummer from 1987 to 1991, and then again from 1996 to 2004), and Jim Goodwin and Bob Haag from Sparks. 

I thought I’d never heard of this band. It appears they’re one of the zillions of acts that had a good following in LA, thanks to its record label (Posh Boy) having a good relationship with Rodney Bingenheimer, and getting solid airplay on KROQ. 

If you want to listen to Gleaming Spires, your options are pretty limited. None of the band’s records were ever released on CD. “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?” appears on a ton of compilations. This album was re-released by Futurismo on 180-gram vinyl, but it’s gone now, so your only hope is to find it used somewhere. 

Allen had me listen to it on YouTube, but the playlist for the record doesn’t include the band’s most popular track, for some reason.

Turns out that I actually HAD heard of them, from the soundtrack from “The Last American Virgin.” 

Gleaming Spires’ “Are You Ready For the Sex Girls?” was the opener on the B-Side of the soundtrack, but unfortunately, it was overwhelmed by “Since You’re Gone” from the Cars and “I Know What Boys Like” from the Waitresses and “I Will Follow” from U2. Then, a couple of years later, it appeared AGAIN, this time in the more popular movie, but less popular soundtrack for “Revenge of the Nerds.” Those two inclusions alone must’ve bought houses for the band members. 

“Songs of the Spires” is the Spires’ first record. It’s ten tracks of lo-fi new wave pop that sounds like it was put together mostly on a Casio digital watch. That’s not a criticism at all. These are infectious songs from a very specific time period where mostly everything on the radio was guitar heavy. That trebley, tinny synthesizer must’ve felt like it came from another planet as it poured out of the lone dashboard speaker in a ’73 Firebird in 1981 Los Angeles. 

The lyrics in some of these songs are terrific. The best track on the LP is “Going Hey Hey.” You’ll end up humming the intro for the rest of the day, but the song hides some pretty powerful lyrics:

“It was nice to be reminded

That I didn't believe St. Nick

'Cause I recognized the kind hands

Of the stranger giving presents

To belong to a friend.

Leavin', yes, I can't take you, no.

But this time the cross upon my neck

Gives me part of you.

And when we return the spires will be the same, yeah.

But sadly you'll go your way and I'll go mine.”

This isn’t a record that’s going to change your life, by any stretch of the imagination. But if you’re interested in hearing what music nerds were into for six weeks in 1981, you’re going to want to listen to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sd4RePy9YM&list=PLlvn8uktX5Lud1SZXEpPRqEkx1MtcgesE

The 1981 Listening Post - The Gun Club - Fire of Love

 The Gun Club - Fire of Love

#383

By Craig Fitzgerald

August 31 1981

Gun Club

Fire of Love

Genre: LA Punk

Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Craig's Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Highlights:

Sex Beat

Preaching the Blues

She's Like Heroin To Me

Ghost on the Highway 

Back when I first got into rockabilly, I picked up a compilation from the Hootenanny car show/music festival in the late 1990s. For the next five years or so, that single compilation had an exponential effect on the music that I was listening to. I bought records from almost every band on it, and then figured out who was in those bands, and what other projects they were involved in, and who the musicians were that they were inspired by and it was like this never-ending family tree that just led to more and more great music at every turn. 

It's similar to how I discovered the Gun Club. 

 In the mid-2000s, I was doing a lot of reading up on the LA music scene of the late 1970s, and I'd watched stuff like X: The Unheard Music and Penelope Spheris's The Decline of Western Civilization, so I started to obsess a bit about the bands that came out of that time and place. I listened to everything I could from bands like the Blasters, X, the Go-Gos. And in the summer of 1985, I played the Repo Man soundtrack until the tape wore out. 

But the Gun Club was a band I wasn't too familiar with until probably 10 years ago. It might have been even later, after I'd read John Doe's excellent book, and maybe they were mentioned there. 

Regardless WHEN I first heard it, the first time I played it, it hit me like a ton of bricks. 

That opening track, holy shit. 

Sex Beat is exactly how rock and roll is supposed to sound. Anybody with even rudimentary guitar, bass, drumming or vocal skills could put a decent cover of that song together in a couple of hours. 

That's how this entire record is. These are exceedingly simple songs, played by people who barely knew how to play instruments. 

You always hear that kind of thing when famous musicians talk about their early days, but it's mostly bullshit. Pete Townshend was a hell of a banjo player long before the Who ever came along. 

But it's 100% true on this record, and you can hear it. 

Yeah, it's "punk," I guess, but it's more than that. Like The Blasters -- who got lumped into the punk scene, too -- this is American roots music. There are Robert Johnson covers just like on your favorite Led Zeppelin albums, but they hadn't been studying how blues music worked from the age of 10. This was played by people who had figured out the 1-4-5 chord progression like three weeks before. 

This is one- and two-chord Delta blues through a filthy, late-1970s LA filter. 

Jeffrey Lee Pierce said they made this record for $2,500 in 48 hours and man, it has that sense of immediacy to it. He hated this record after it came out, but judging by the rest of what this band, and then he as a solo artist put out, this is rightly the thing he should be remembered for.  From here on out, the Gun Club was an ever fluctuating collection of musicians that never could really get their shit together. I'm sure some of those gigs were great, and some were terrible, but this record is a knockout from start to finish. My only complaint is that there are a couple of 5:00-plus tracks here that could've been cut down to add other songs, but even those I can't complain about too much. For the Love of Ivy is killer, and it's about twice as long as most of the songs I love to listen to. 

If you listen to one thing on this record, make it Sex Beat. You'll find yourself singing it for the rest of your life.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3OrGW7wRB8dIZ8EYrAkkWW?si=iR6ya_CJSnW40eBxHOM5IA

The 1981 Listening Post - The English Beat - Wha'ppen

 The English Beat - Wha'ppen

#327

By Craig Fitzgerald

June 1981

The English Beat

Wha'ppen? 

Genre: Two-Tone Socially Conscious Ska/Punk/Dub

Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Highlights:

Doors of Your Heart

I Am Your Flag

Get-A-Job

This is the sophomore release from The Beat (The English Beat here, because we are dumb Americans). It’s definitely a more mid-tempo record than “I Just Can’t Stop It, which came out just a year before. It feels like a change in direction from the first album, and it’s a direction I don’t personally like as much as the more punk influenced record that came before it, but this is still a release from a band that was firing on every cylinder.

“What you listen to on your bus could dictate what your next album sounds like,” Ranking Roger said when this record came out. And the band was listening to a lot of West African music on that tour. He called this “the most relaxed Beat album. Californians and surfers, people like that – that album was made for them."

It definitely feels that way. This isn’t a record you put on to go out and get in a street fight. 

But the lyrics aren’t mellow, that’s for sure. The best track on the record is “I Am Your Flag”, and the writing does not screw around. This is a song released in times of rioting: 

Yes i'll be down your street again quite soon

And don't ignore me when i wave at you

For although i'm looking rather sad

I'm all you've ever really had

And when you're desperate, you will hold me

Hold me to that

Took your hat off in Wisconsin

Took your head in Vietnam

Just dying to become a man

Well i am your flag

“Cheated” is a “fuck you” letter to Rupert Murdoch:

a valentine from a politician

three pages of your dog's ambitions

the stabbed lover and the furious bunny

stare too long and your eyes go funny

yes i agree we're reading tissue paper but

we can talk about real things later

cheated cheated

win a greenhouse to warm your sex life

cheated cheated

i read about the victims crying all night

This is music for 2020, pally.

Here is my problem with this record, though: two or three songs in, they all kind of blend together. The tempos are similar, everything’s drenched in reverb and it’s hard to separate one song from another. 

It’s a good album, and I enjoyed listening to it, but I’m not sure I’d listen to it again.

https://open.spotify.com/album/45l9wCVaFLzTHNXK690Jbw?si=UGyZGIbBT8iaqXMChMtu6Q

The 1981 Listening Post - X - Wild Gift

 X - Wild Gift

#187

By Craig Fitzgerald

X

Wild Gift

Genre: LA Punk

Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 5 out of 5

Highlights:

The Once Over Twice

We’re Desperate

Universal Corner

In This House That I Call Home

Some Other Time

White Girl

Year 1

No band other than the Beatles churned out four records as perfect as X did in this short a span of time. 

Not U2. 

Not the Rolling Stones. 

Not The Who. 

Not the Ramones. 

Not The Clash. 

Maybe the Monkees, and I wouldn’t call those “perfect” records, because there were some forgettable loser tracks on every one of those albums. 

This is the second record in that unbroken chain of ideal rock and roll music, and depending on what day you ask, this one is my favorite, making it my favorite record of all 1981 in toto, and maybe my favorite record of the entire 1980s. It’s definitely the one that I play more than anything else. 

Los Angeles is a really good record, and it would’ve been easy for this band to fall into a sophomore slump, but there is NO TIME between the release of Los Angeles and Wild Gift. Los Angeles came out in April of 1980 and Wild Gift is recorded in March of ’81, with Ray Manzerek still working away at the knobs in the control room. In Penelope Spheris’s Decline of Western Civilization, which was released in December of 1980, the band plays “We’re Desperate” three months before they ever committed to it acetate. 

All of this is to say that you almost need to look at Los Angeles and Wild Gift as a double album. Loads of these songs were in the live catalog before they ever stepped inside a studio. This entire record sounds like a well-rehearsed assault from the opening track to “Year 1,” that unabashedly fun, chorus- and bridge-less 1:18 gasser at the end. 

Everything is bigger and louder and fuller on the next album Under the Big Black Sun. That’s a great record, too, with some of my favorite X songs of all time, but it definitely sounds more produced. This one still sounds like it was made by accident, as if someone just happened to have a really good set of mics at a particularly good set at The Masque. 

Billy Zoom is as good as he was ever going to be on this album. If you’re a guitar player, try playing the riff on “We’re Desperate.” You’ll BE desperate. Yes, Billy is a great lead player, but his ultimate skills are as a human metronome, and one of the best rhythm players and riff-maker-uppers of all time. It’s all on display here. If there was any guitar player I could play like, it would be him. The way he palm mutes these killer riffs during the lyrics in “Some Other Time,” and then just opens them up to let them ring at full volume in between makes me dizzy.

This is why this band works:

Any of John Doe or Exene Cervenka’s songs could easily slip into singer-songwriter/poetry slam territory: 

Beautiful walls are closing in

Looking at you, you're having a nightmare

Stumble over tombstone shoes

I reach to surround you

But it's too soon

But with Billy and DJ Bonebrake at the helm, “In This House That I Call Home” rattles down the tracks like the Yankee Cannonball at Canobie Lake. Yeah, fun, but you might get shot out into the parking lot at any moment, too.

And look at Side 2 here:

In This House That I Call Home

Some Other Time

White Girl

Beyond and Back

Back 2 The Base

When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch

Year 1

That’s a full album for anyone else. Not this band. You have to FLIP THE RECORD OVER to hear those songs. It’s an embarrassment of riches. 

But alas, this band is the Freaks and Geeks of 1980s rock and roll. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. Nobody else did. It spent five weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at 165 on in June. You can see why, though when it’s up against classics like “Mistaken Identity” by Kim Carnes, and “Long Distance Voyager” by the Moody Blues. 

What the fuck.

https://open.spotify.com/album/2ECSVdWu5RCvYqIRGA0pyR?si=SdlLhBShT-KyYGm_1Zlh_g

The 1981 Listening Post - Gang of Four - Solid Gold

 Gang of Four - Solid Gold

#108

By Craig Fitzgerald

March 9 1981

Gang of Four

Solid Gold

Genre: Post-punk

Allen’s rating: 2.5 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Highlights:

If I Could Keep It All For Myself

Outside the Trains Don't Run On Time

In the Ditch

I am at about a 30% hit ratio with the albums that Allen has assigned me, meaning that about 70% of those records so far have been records I've never listened to before. This is one of those. 

This is likely because in 1981, I was a 12 year old dipshit from the suburbs with no musical taste of my own. I had just discovered the Who, for Christ's sake, and I was busily listening to everything Pete Townshend wrote that I could get my hands on. 

Sure, people like that pain in the ass Luca Barnacles or Steve Caisse had this vast musical library when they were 12. Not me. I had Beatles and Monkees records, plus I bought a used copy of "Destroyer" that summer, the very first record I would buy with my own money.

Anyhoo, I've done my best to fill in the gaps, and this is one that had really escaped me. I have very, very little background with Gang of Four. The only song I know on this record is "If I Could Keep It All For Myself." I have no idea where I know this song from, but I know it. It was probably floating around in the ether circa 1985 and I just picked it up somewhere. 

I am sure that someone -- probably Luca Barnacles again -- will tell me "HOLY SHIT, YOU DUMMY, YOU SHOULD'VE SEEN THEM LIVE AT THE RAT." Ok, well, I was 12 and my mom wouldn't give me a ride in the ol' Citation so I could hang out in Kenmore Square in my pajamas. 

All I have is this record, and frankly, none of what I would imagine would have been a pretty loud, intense show comes through on this record. 

I'm sure I'm really supposed to like this, and I'm going to be a lot less cool for thinking it's rather soulless and repetitive.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3yKMclooo3MxSZQGLtFqfL?si=O2DURRXpQJG_fyq2BnSCTQ

The 1981 Listening Post - Crass - Penis Envy

Crass - Penis Envy 

#2

By Craig Fitzgerald

Crass

Penis Envy

Genre: Anarcho-punk

Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Highlights:

Beta Motel

Where Next Columbus?

“I've got 54321

I've got a red pair of high-heels on

Tumble me over, it doesn't take much

Tumble me over, tumble me, push

In my red high-heels I've no control

The rituals of repression are so old

You can do what you like, there'll be no reprisal

I'm yours, yes I'm yours, it's my means of survival”

That song was enough to get this band charged under Britain’s Obscene Publications Act, AND THEY LOST. 

The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but the lyrics of this song “Beta Motel” were judged “sexually provocative and obscene."

In 2020, this reads like a poem your Second Wave Feminist mom would write. 

It ain’t exactly “Wet Ass Pussy.”

The bottom line here is that "Penis Envy" isn’t a great record, but it’s an amazing example of how repressed society actually was in 1981. 

This record caused a sensation when it was released. It was banned in HMV, the British equivalent of Tower Records. I read this before I listened to the record, which is like listening to Pat Robertson discuss the movie “Cuties” before sitting down to actually watch it. I expected scandal. What I got was a bunch of French 13 year old girls acting like 13 year old girls. 

Anyway, I dug into this record and listened to every track twice. It is very basic punk, but through the lens of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre, the band’s dueling frontwomen. The songs all address feminist issues, and generally take a fat shit on male privilege, the institution of marriage and the way that women were still expected to act in the Thatcher/Reagan era. 

For that alone, it’s interesting. 

“Interesting,” I said. Not “good.” 

The bass is forward in the mix. You may not like that, but this is a punk record and that's the law. The guitar tones sound like like a Teisco plugged straight into a transistor radio, to the point that I thought something was wrong with my earbuds. Nope, it sounds like that on everything. 

Every song here ends up sounding the same, with two exceptions:

1. What the Fuck? is a six-minute, forty-three second masturbatory sound collage. I would like that time back. 

2. Our Wedding: It’s an unlisted track, and the story behind it is way better than the song itself. It was given away as a flexi-disc after the band placed an ad in a teen romance magazine. For the price of a stamp, you got a free record, with this sappy middle-of-the-road love song on it, ostensibly courtesy of Creative Recording And Sound Services (C.R.A.S.S.). HOLY SHIT, SUBVERSIVE.  That’s what got the attention of “News of the World,” which suggested that the title of the album was “too obscene to print,” which apparently meant that “penis” had no place filthying up a proper British tabloid.

There are a couple of highlights. I thought “Where Next Columbus?” was good, focusing on the great philosophers, scientists and religious leaders of the last 2000 years. "Poison in a Pretty Pill isn't bad." 

But these are all songs that are uniform in their sound, their pace and their message. Pick the opener and you’ve pretty much heard all it has to offer.

Side note: When Allen assigned this to me, he apologized, and then let me pick a record I liked from 1981. I still think I made out in the deal.

https://open.spotify.com/album/04mNlzyFbBbUYwqr1PySa3?si=qGnlr8h9SoW9sXol8XNywQ

The 1980 Listening Post - George Thorogood and the Destroyers - I'm Wanted

 George Thorogood and the Destroyers - I'm Wanted

#428

by Craig Fitzgerald

George Thorogood and the Destroyers 

I'm Wanted (aka "More George Thorogood and the Destroyers") 

Genre: Boogie Rock

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Allen’s Highlights:

Kids From Philly

Night Time

Craig’s Highlights:

I'm Wanted

Nighttime

House of Blue Lights

YOU THERE! ON THE COUCH! Do you enjoy the 1-4-5 chord progression, Willie Dixon guitar licks and cover songs played 23% faster and grittier than you've heard them before? THEN HAVE I GOT A DEAL FOR YOU. 

Look, this isn't some fucking Radiohead record that's going to challenge you in any way. You know exactly what this is: Boogie rock, played largely fast and loud. 

When I was in college, I had a good friend who loved the Byrds, CSNY, the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, and he hated George Thorogood. "He plays one lick. He can play it fast. He can play it slow. He can play it behind his head." 

All of this, of course, is absolutely true. But nobody gave Wilco Johnson any shit for doing EXACTLY the same thing with Dr. Feelgood.

Recorded just up the road from where I sit right now at Blue Jay Recording Studios in Carlisle, Massachusetts, this is a really fun collection of songs that -- if you like rock and roll at all -- you'll have a hard time not enjoying. 

Me, I like the fast songs. I'm Wanted is a ripper opening track. His cover of the Strangeloves' "Nighttime" is  even better than the J. Geils version, which the band put on "Love Stinks" earlier in 1980. "Tip On In" is great. "House of Blue Lights" is a punch in the face. 

I have less patience with the four-minute slow bluez jamz that sort of descend into 

"Blueshammer" parody.

This record is a year or so in front of 1982's "Bad to the Bone," which is exactly the same formula, but with more original songs. 

As people often say about the Fender Telecaster, George Thorogood is a one-trick pony, but it's a pretty fucking good trick.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PbBTetDsSM

The 1980 Listening Post - Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark - Organisation

 Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark - Organisation

#414

by Craig Fitzgerald

October 24 1980

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Organisation 

Genre: Cold Wave

Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Craig’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Highlights:

Enola Gay

Stanlow

It’s hard to take your own personal preferences out when you’re writing one of these reviews. This record, for example, is exactly the kind of music that had me running into the arms of Joey Ramone and Brian Setzer. 

I do still loathe this dial-up modem sound, and the sophomore year EN201 poetry overlaying it. I cringe at its monotony and lack of things I generally listen to music to hear, such as a bridge and a chorus.

But: This is not a record produced by TV popularity contest. It’s about as DIY as you can get, featuring the absolute minimum of instrumentation (although this is the record where the band hired a drummer instead of making do with a tape machine), and I grudgingly have to appreciate that.

It has its moments. “Enola Gay” is a good song and despite its bleak lyrics about the eponymous B-29, it’s a bright, snappy song that qualified as a hit in 1980.

The rest of the record is grim machine music for European teen boys (or those who wanted to be European teen boys) who hate their parents. The only other track that really stood out for me is — oddly — the MOST grim song on the record, “Stanlow.” As I listened to it, I thought it would be a good soundtrack to an early Terry Gilliam film. As it turns out, it’s about an oil refinery, so I wasn’t far off.

Of course, six years into the future, OMD would dump all this solemnity for an Astley-esque earworm, packed full of the song components that they so studiously avoided in this record.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3bouQtY9H1DP39yxqHuFf8?si=IfksBe8DT-e50CsUh4TlFA