Roxy Music was famous for placing provocative models on their covers throughout the 70’s.  Playboy’s playmate of the year Marilyn Cole graced Stranded, the band’s third release (the first without art rocker Brian Eno).  The record went #1 in the UK and included the top twenty single “Street Life.”  This track opens the album with a building cascade of sound and features a jazzy piano interlude.  The band would have to wait another few years to break in the US with “Love is the Drug.”

Recommended by: Tony Fornaro

Liverpool, England is probably best known as the birthplace of The Beatles, but alternative rock fans of the ’80s would tell you that it was also the birthplace of Echo and The Bunnymen.  Today’s track, “The Yo Yo Man” comes from their album Ocean Rain, one of the band’s more popular albums which spawned hits like “The Killing Moon,” “Silver” and “Seven Seas.”  Demand for the band continues to grow since their inception in 1978, in fact they are one of the highly anticipated acts that will be performing at the Coachella music festival this upcoming weekend.

Recommended by: Jana Levin

Today’s catalog gem comes from the San Francisco band The Flamin’ Groovies. Fanzine publisher, music historian, and record label owner Greg Shaw was pivotal in The Groovies signing to Sire Records in 1976 and produced many of their great songs, including today’s track “Shake Some Action.” For those who did not catch this tune the first time around (when the album peaked at #142 on the pop charts in ‘76), you may remember its use in the 1995 classic Clueless.

Recommended by: Ann Kiuchi-DiPuccio

Apparently the job title “flight attendant” didn’t sit well with The Replacements, as they preferred the term “waitress in the sky”.  Recorded for their first major release Tim (shortly before Bob Stinson was kicked out of the band), this track captures the original lineup’s brazen songwriting abilities as well as their disdain for traveling coach.

Recommended by: Jana Levin

“But Not Tonight” was the original UK B-side of the single “Stripped” released in ‘86, however, the song was left off the UK album release of Black Celebration.  The U.S. label Sire Records had a little more faith in the song, using “But Not Tonight” in the soundtrack to the movie Modern Girls, as well as including it on the U.S. album release of Black Celebration.  As a result, the sides for the single were flipped with “But Not Tonight” ending up on the A-side and “Stripped” demoted to the B-side.

Recommended by: Jana Levin

Gone fishin’ this week. We supply the songs, you supply the blurb. Tell us what this song or album means to you.

Thirty years ago, in August 1979, Talking Heads released their brilliant third record, Fear Of Music. Enjoy the air.

Recommended by: Gone Fishin'

Gone fishin’ this week. We supply the songs, you supply the blurb. Tell us what this song or album means to you.

Yep, this month it’s the 25th anniversary of Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward.

Recommended by: Gone Fishin'

With the release of his first solo album, Morrissey had a lot to prove—mainly that he could be a compelling artist outside of The Smiths without Johnny Marr. In that respect, he was very successful with his first single, “Suedehead,” which charted higher in the U.K. than any of The Smiths’ singles. The sound of solo Morrissey isn’t that far removed from the last Smiths records, with his sardonic humor and slow, almost heavy vocal delivery. “I Know Very Well How I Got My Name” found the light of day as the B-side on the 7-inch single for “Suedehead.”  Morrissey, once again, assumes the oh-woe-is-me role, reflecting on a long-lost love, set to a sparse acoustic guitar with minimal arrangement from some strings and another guitar. It surfaces digitally for the first time as part of Rhino’s Digital 45 series, digital reissues of the original 45 rpm singles (A and B sides).

Recommended by: Gregg Ogorzelec

“Women in rock” were still a big enough novelty in 1980 that much of the Pretenders’ self-titled debut from that year was devoted to establishing Chrissie Hynde’s credentials as a “tough chick.” And while no-nonsense rockers like “Precious” remain exhilarating, it was the band’s ability to balance tough and tender that really made it special, so special. The first track on Pretenders to show this skill to full effect is “Up The Neck.” Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott barks out a riff that would’ve made The Buzzcocks proud before switching to a more lyrical mode to highlight Chrissie’s commanding vocal work, which shifts from sultry to salty without missing a beat.

Recommended by: John Hagelston

There was something wonderfully decadent about Spacehog’s opulent bombast, like Cheeto stains on a Queen Anne Wingback. Their glam-goosed sound swelled with a porcine ambition amplified to perfection by Royston Langdon’s supernova lungs and motel-velvet tongue. The group debuted in 1995 with Resident Alien and its immediate hit, “In The Meantime,” a song so aggressive in its ecstasy that if goosebumps form they leave lifelong scars. Sadly, however, it lacked enough stardust to generate much interest in a follow-up three years later, the brutally tart The Chinese Album. Oh, well—that leaves more glittery goops of sleaze for the rest of us, like “Mungo City,” the hand-o’er-heart anthem for a zonked metropolis. Slam your steins together and make your overblown brethren proud.

Recommended by: Cory Frye

It’s kind of weird that the Ramones would toss in a moment as tender as this one on the album that launched the American punk revolution. It was written by Tommy Ramone, the original drummer, but Joey’s vocals are what take it to another level, all starry-eyed yearning and vulnerability. If you switched the title to “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” it could be a great lost girl group classic, from the chiming Wall of Sound production to the minor chord that sweetens Joey’s vocal when he asks her, “Do you love me, babe? What do you say?” As Joey once noted, “The girls always like that one.” So did the Bay City Rollers, who wanted to cover it. But the Ramones said no. How punk is that?

Recommended by: Ed Masley

The four Oxford lads who made up Ride were barely out of their teens when they were declared saviors of British rock in 1990. With their first couple of releases for Creation Records, Ride jumped to the forefront of the “shoegazer” movement of maximum guitar sounds and minimal showmanship. Those initial EPs were collected in America as Smile, and though Ride would go on to make more polished recordings, these early sides still show best why so many jaws dropped when their records reached alternative radio. “Furthest Sense” throws listeners off balance with an atonal guitar riff before pummeling them with the rhythm section and luring them back with some strange but compelling vocal harmonies.

Recommended by: John Hagelston

David Byrne, with his nerd-on-a-short-fuse persona(lity) and sophisticated grasp of irony, specialized in introducing unusual subject matter into popular song. In “No Compassion” he adopts the voice of somebody who has decided to take charge of his life and who has consequently grown intolerant of people who wear their neuroses as badges of honor, a syndrome that one might assume is more pronounced today than it was back in the ’70s when this delightful number, with its sinuous, loping grooves and abrupt rhythmic shifts, appeared on the Talking Heads first album, Talking Heads: 77. Both musically and lyrically this band were ahead of their time. In fact, the term “compassion fatigue” didn’t even enter the vernacular until the ’80s.

Recommended by: John Tottenham

A veiled threat insinuated through a clenched smile, “Listening Wind,” the penultimate track on Talking Heads’ turbo-charged Afrofunk masterstroke Remain In Light, may appear misplaced among such incendiary, propulsive power-grooves as “Once In A Lifetime,” “Crosseyed And Painless,” and “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On).” Opening with the tick-tick-tocking of wooden drums, “Listening Wind” signals a secret message broadcast across a silent desert, its gently crying guitars and David Byrne’s haunted moan hinting at trouble just beyond the horizon. Even so, it’s a jolt to realize that the song is quietly sketching one man’s acts of terror (“Mojique plants devices in the free trade zone”), ignited by a venomous mix of imperialism and hopelessness. “Listening Wind” was written more than two decades prior to 9/11, yet Mojique’s hopeful, horrible dream to “drive them away, drive them away” now feels like a prophecy ignored.

Recommended by: Keith Gorman

It takes a brave man to step into the shoes of Tina Turner and reinvent one of her signature tunes, but Erasure’s Andy Bell, one of the few male divas in dance music, is up to the task. His dramatic vocal style brings plenty of soul and passion to every note he sings. On this track Vince Clarke doesn’t try to duplicate the original’s bombastic Phil Spector production; he instead opts for a simmering arrangement with a slightly Latin groove. Listen as Bell builds the tension slowly.

Recommended by: J. Poet

I was 18 years old, living over a thousand miles from home, when I wandered into an East Village record shop and picked up an old copy of Young Loud And Snotty by the Dead Boys. I’d never heard it before—I don’t even think I owned a turntable at the time—but it seemed like an album I’d want to have. When I finally got a record player, I listened to the first track, “Sonic Reducer,” over and over again. At first I didn’t give much thought to its bizarre sci-fi lyrics, but then it hit me: The song wasn’t about time machines or electronic dreams; it was about a kid like me, hanging out, listening to music, and fantasizing about being in a rock band.

Recommended by: Rob Hatch-Miller