Mike Patton, best known as the front man for the metal band Faith No More, and lesser know as the front man to the already weird Mr. bungle, did a really great album of Italian pop covers from the 50s and 60s Mondo Cane in the original Italian. Definitely a weird choice even for him. But really really well done!
This Guy. Clearly has some talent, but also can be responsible for the worst caterwaul of shit you’ve ever heard. He’s a real enigma.
A real talented weirdo. And a real weirdo of a talent.
I’d like to see what Mike, Maynard (Tool/Perfect Circle) and Christopher Guest could cook up together.
Might be music. Might be a Nobel Peace Prize plan for World-wide Famine Relief. Might be Scat-Porn.
I’d contribute to a Kickstarter to make this happen.
I saw that tour last year and it was pretty amazing. I’d seen PSB before, but not since 1999, and I was looking forward to seeing New Order for the first time. Tennant and Lowe blew the roof off the joint, and while New Order had some transcendent moments (thousands of fans singing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” while images of Ian Curtis flashed on the screen), they seemed a bit off…out of tune and with some fluffed lines.
I was a kid during Neil Young’s “Not Neil Young” '80s period and the first song I ever heard of his was “Sample and hold.” My dad had a VHS recording of one of his concerts or an HBO special… or something during his short hair vocoder days. So I thought Neil was this cool '80s futuristic dude. Later (not much later) of course I became acquainted with Harvest and CSNY and Buffalo Springfield and everything else before, in between, and since, Still, this whole long-haired hippie flannel godfather of grunge Neil image that came about a decade later didn’t fit with how I knew him.
One of my favorite songs by the Who is Blue, Red, and Grey - a song they never performed onstage and sounds entirely unlike anything else the band ever recorded. It’s just Pete Townshend singing and playing the ukulele, with a brass section performed by John Entwistle in the background. It’s a folksy little song about finding the beauty that exists in everything and everyone, and it always gets me a little misty-eyed.
Roger Daltrey used to perform it as the closing number at his solo concerts, and described it as his favorite Who song that they never did live.
I’d heard CSNY on the Woodstock soundtrack, but I think the first actual Neil Young track I heard played on MuchMusic back in the day was “This Note’s For You,” from his brassy blues album, which I guess was one last bizarre foray. He’d kind of returned to doing “Neil Young Music” with Landing on Water and Life as he ran out his Geffen contract, then for his first album back at Reprise he of course dropped the Bluenotes disc (now easily available in the “take it off our hands for $3.99” rack in most used CD stores) before finally cutting the shit, making Freedom and getting back to business.
Back in the “In The Attic” days, Pete performed it solo several times. This one is from a show at Joe’s Pub (with a typical Townshend aside thrown in, just as you would expect)
If you were a fan of Be Bop Deluxe, it would be nigh on impossible to keep up with Bill Nelson’s solo output, something like 150 albums worth.
As I mentioned, I saw Roger Daltrey do it live once to close a solo concert. He introduced it by telling us his “theory” that the Who never played it live because Pete wouldn’t have been able to windmill a ukulele except by lightly flicking his wrist around in circles. “People might have thought he was gay! Not that that rumour wasn’t already out there.”