EASTER LISTENING
What We are Listening to this Easter
Everyone celebrates holidays in their own special way. It may be classical tradition or family heritage. We celebrate the same way every time… through music. Here’s a quick list of what we having flowing through the headphones on Easter.
#1 Patti Smith- Easter (album) – In 1977 Jimmy Iovine went knocking on Bruce Springsteen’s door, asking about a certain unused track lingering in his archive. He wanted Patti Smith to have it. The story goes that Patti was hesitant to even give it a listen. She wanted to write the record in its entirety with her band. One night, while waiting for a late-night phone call from someone she was romantically involved with, she decided to listen to the cassette that she had been handed, “…and the words just tumbled out of me,” she told Zig Zag Magazine later. The album Easter bloomed from here.
“To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.” -Patti Smith
#2 Depeche Mode- “Personal Jesus” (song) – Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore was apparently shrouded in Elvis Presley culture when he created “Personal Jesus,” the lead single from the band’s seventh studio album, Violator (1989). Gore was inspired by reading the novel Elvis and Me, written by Priscilla Presley. One of my personal favorite books and now a movie called Priscilla.
Gore explains “Personal Jesus” in 1990 to SPIN magazine, “It’s a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It’s about how Elvis Presley was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody’s heart is like a god in some way, and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?”
#3 Black Sabbath- Heaven and Hell (album) – Released on April 25, 1980, Heaven And Hell was the first album that Black Sabbath made after Ozzy was fired and then replaced by Ronnie James Dio. And for Dio, the man widely regarded as the greatest heavy metal singer that ever lived, this album was one of his greatest achievements. In 1979, Ozzy actualy began recording the album with the band in Los Angeles. However, after a difficult and counterproductive period of chemical-inflamed mayhem, the lads in Sabbath gave their frontman the boot. Heaven and Hell is still revered by metal fans as one of the best Black Sabbath albums of all time.
#4 Jesus and Mary Chain (band) – Almost 30 years ago The Jesus and Mary Chain hit us with the album, Psychocandy which was what we now refer to as, shoegaze. They were inspired by The Velvet Underground to start making music. It’s classic sixties smooth beat pop drumming and cool melodies drowning in a sea of guitar feedback. As frontman Jim Reid said once about their sound “ [it’s] as if the Shangri-Las were backed up by a noise band.” If the Velvet Underground gave the Jesus and Mary Chain dark, distorted hope, their Scottish summer noir left the door open for bands like My Bloody Valentine.
#5 The Jesus Lizard (band) – The Jesus Lizard emerged in the early 1990’s, out of Texas, as a leading noise rock band in the independent underground music scene. During the first part of the decade, the band turned out a series of small batch records filled with scratchy (in a good way) guitar-driven pseudo-industrial noise. They quickly gained popularity and positivity in autonomic music publications and achieved heavy college-radio play. By the mid-’90s, the group’s following had grown large enough to convince a major label, Capitol Records, to sign the band.
