Farrah, Sky, and Michael
I know people often bring up how the deaths of famous people seem to come up in threes, but today was ridiculous. And all three of the people who passed today were pop culture mile markers in my own lifetime.
Farrah Fawcett’s passing at 62 after battling cancer – and a mere day or two after it was announced that her and longtime partner Ryan McNeal were going to marry (they’d been a common-law couple for a couple of decades) – is a sad but not surprising passing. Her cancer battle had been public for some time; a network TV special on her cancer battle also served in part to cast more light on America’s desperately-overdue-for-an-overhaul health care system when part of that special depicted her seeing treatment in Europe for her cancer.
When I was younger, I used to watch Charlie’s Angels during its first-run status on ABC. If I recall correctly, Farrah only remained on Charlie’s Angels for their first season (her character did recur in a later season, but I’d stopped watching by then). Her famous poster from that period (said to have sold 12 million copies) has long become iconic, as is the hairstyle she popularized in the series. She also managed to strengthen her acting cred in her post-Angels career by appearing in roles that were a far cry from her TV character: most notably, the off-Broadway play Extremities (1982) and the anti-domestic abuse TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). Extremities in particular is cited as the role that gave Farrah serious credibility as a dramatic actress, making the choice to have her reprise the role for a 1986 motion picture a no-brainer.
The second passing of today was that of early garage-punk icon Sky Saxon, leader of the legendary 60’s rock group The Seeds, of “Pushing Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” fame. Both songs were minor Top 40 hits in their day, but both songs have gone on to be considered garage-punk classics, a designation that began when “Pushing Too Hard” was tapped to be one of the songs included on the now-classic compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, and both songs have been covered by many punk groups, including the Ramones and early California hardcore punks The Klan, in the 80’s and beyond.
Saxon himself, after being aligned for much of the 70’s with a religious sect/commune called the Source Family (their leader, Father Yod, is said to have given Sky the moniker Sunlight, which stuck almost permanently for the rest of his life), spent the rest of his career working both with various reformations of The Seeds and with other pickup groups. More recently, Saxon had collaborated with Billy Corgan on some new material and would later appear in the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Superchrist”. Saxon had recently moved to Austin, TX, initially after only intending to stay briefly for some performances. He had checked into an Austin hospital with a suspected infection of his internal organs, but succumbed to whatever was ailing him not long after being admitted. He was 63.
And then, there is the most shocking death of the three.
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REVIEW: WE ARE THE FALLEN “Bury Me Alive” (single)
WE ARE THE FALLEN
“Bury Me Alive” (single)
(self-released)
Available as a digital file through wearethefallen.com
(other outlets may be forthcoming)
One band that my fiancee and I have witnessed a couple of times in concert was Evanesence, a band that we had found some common ground on early in our relationship. By the time we had witnessed the band live – once during their co-headlining stint on the 2007 Family Values Tour, later that year during their own headlining tour. But it wasn’t the same Evanescence that had recorded their breakthrough album Fallen or even their 2006 studio follow-up The Open Door. A year into touring behind Fallen, band co-founder and main composer Ben Moody left the group abruptly; weeks before Ev began their FVT stint, lead singer Amy Lee fired guitarist John LeCompt, leading drummer Rocky Gray to leave himself in disgust. While The Open Door was a decent album, the succeeding post-LeCompt/Gray tour was Evanesence in name only – it was really the Amy Lee Show, and the second of the two shows we witnessed that year was more memorable for Lee’s rather ridiculous stage outfit (which resembled a huge red Swiffer) than for the performance itself.
Since his departure, Moody busied himself with a variety of songwriting and producing jobs, while LeCompt and Gray collaborated in a band called Machina. That was until last Thursday when a USA Today article revealed that the three former Ev’s had reconvened with former American Idle (sorry, that’s how I always spell it here at TGML) contestant Carly Smithson. To make a long story short, a few rehearsals later, the new band – initially called just The Fallen until another band with that name cried fowl the day after the USA Today article decided to hit the ground running with a game plan meant to both satisfy hardcore fans of the collective’s previous projects and build/maintain interest in the band itself – a gradual releasing of recorded material every few weeks, interspersed with touring and eventually to a release of a physical album with some material not previously issued online.
The demand for the band’s first single proved to be overwheling to the band – so much so that copies of the mp3 single didn’t start to come out until Tuesday afternoon, almost 24 hours after the band opened up their site for signups.
Is it worth the wait and the hype? Yep. Comparisons to Fallen-era Evanescence are tempting to do, hard to avoid, and more than justified. After all, given that 3/5 of this band was also 3/5 of Evanescence when that band’s aforementioned breakthrough album was recorded and toured behind, it should be no surprise that We Are The Fallen sounds like that era of Ev. The reuniting of Moody with LeCompt and Gray reinforces who the actual creative force behind Evanescence was (Amy Lee’s version of the band on The Open Door notwithstanding), and Carly Smithson proves to be a more full-bodied vocalist with a wider range than Ms. Lee. To sum it up: Past recorded accomplishments notwithstanding, this is how Evanescence should have sounded in the first fucking place.
MORNING MUSUME IN AMERICA: So Far, So Good… Now What?
In a few weeks, Morning Musume are going to make their American debut at Anime Expo in Los Angeles. As of the schedule I saw this weekend, it seems odd that what should be capping off the festival – their debut US concert performance – is actually occurring at 2:30 in the afternoon on the second day of the convention.
OK, what next?
Almost a year and a half after I wrote my first column on getting Morning Musume to America, one reader recently relocated the column and commented on how much “fun” it was to re-read the article now, given the present circumstances.
So far we have:
- Morning Musume performing in Los Angeles.
- The first Morning Musume titles to see physical release in America – Platinum 9 Disc and the follow-up single “Shouganai Yuma Oibito”.
- Up-Front Works and their present American licensee, JapanFiles.com, working on tie-ins to the appearance and Anime Expo in general, including an OPV contest.
- An official MySpace page (Given how many “unofficial” MoMusu MySpace pages have come and gone over the years, what took UFA so goddamned long with that?!?)
And with those, come the caveats:
- So far, the physical CD releases have only been available from JapanFiles.com’s own retail site. A search of Amazon.com and CDUniverse.com only turns up import editions of everything.
- No other appearances have been scheduled in this country for the band – but it’s still early in the game here. (Yes, Virginia, even my caveats have caveats.)
- What was previously available on US iTunes up until JapanFiles.com got the American rights to much of the Hello! Project back catalog is not presently there, save for All Singles Complete. Platinum 9 Disc and more recent singles have turned up there the same time as in Japan and on JapanFiles.com since then, though.
So, Morning Musume comes here, plays their hearts out, has a successful show, and goes back to Japan Sunday night or Monday morning. What next?
GROOVE MUSIC LIFE VIDEO: Washed-Up Butt-Metal Singers Are So Fucking Stupid…
From last night’s Tony Awards… which also begs the question as to why these has-beens were invited to lip-sync to a twenty-year-old recording of themselves in the first place:
Cue that kid from The Simpsons pointing and saying “Ha-ha!”.
Those Are Big Shoes To Fill, Pt. 2
So far, Tsunku’s plans for a new Mini Moni lineup are taking a more interesting shape. This morning, he announced who the leader of the third-gen lineup of the revived band is going to be:
Qian Lin, better known to us all as 8th-gen Morning Musume member LinLin. (If anyone has noticed, I’ve more often than not referred to Lin and her fellow “Panda Musume” Li Chun [JunJun] by their real names here and at Stuck In A Pagoda.) Throwing Lin into the mix is a good choice – she fills both the senior MoMusu member role held in the original lineup by Mari Yaguchi and the “international presence” role held throughout the band’s original existence by Mika Todd. And, by nice coincidence, LinLin also plays guitar – something Mika Todd also knew very well:
In a more personal yet somewhat related note, writing has been rather sporadic for me, period, the last few days (this blog post is the first thing I’ve seriously written since Friday night!), and most of my energy has been directed at completing the novel that the original MiniMoni itself inspired. I intend to make up for that big time this month. Thanks for hanging in there, friends.
