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Tag: Jon Bon Jovi

Episode Thirty Five – Star Wars With Jon Bon, Ally McB, & Cliffy C

Published April 15, 2020

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“I don’t mean to imply that Star Wars was some sort of documentary about Ms. Flockhart and Jon Bon Jovi on the set of Ally McBeal”

In which Young Southpaw ponders why the Star Wars films didn’t have theme songs a la the James Bond franchise

Taking in The Indelicates, Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, The Ramones, KISS, Rocky IV, Def Leppard, Metallica, David Bowie, Cheers, Cliff Claven, Hoth, Empire Strikes Back, Shirley Bassey, and much more etc.

 

“So I’m doin another podcast, one where I interview artists I really dig, it’s called Etcetera ETC with Young Southpaw. You can find it at all the places ya know. And last week’s one was pretty eye-opening man. I interviewed The Indelicates, a band I’ve loved for a long time, and Simon Indelicate pointed something out… Now it’s weird man, like I’m not exactly sure his last name is Indelicate, I wouldn’t put money on it, especially against him. But that’s the name of the band and so the last name he uses I’m pretty sure. I mean this is the way things have gone since The Ramones, since the end of last century, or I guess the last fifth of last century, that album came in 1980 I think… But ya know, hey ho, let’s go with it…

But speaking of real names, there was that character in Tommy P’s Inherent Vice novel called Vincent Indelicato. And well I can’t say that I’m not sure that that’s his real last name cause he’s someone that Thomas Pynchon created so like… I don’t know, I mean, he’s obviously a fictional character, but it’s probably the fictional character’s real last name. There was no indication in Inherent Vice that he was, that this was an alias, or that he was even in a band. I mean I doubt he was even in The Indelicates. Man, I guess I missed a trick. That I should have asked The Indelicates have they ever had any fictional characters, by Thomas Pynchon or otherwise, in their band. And then like this guy would have been a bit of a rebel too, insisting on Indelicato while the rest of them are Indeli-cate ya know…

But anyway like Simon Indelicate ya know…aka……..Simon Indelicate… pointed out that Jovi, ya know Jon Bon… his first appearance on record was actually that Star Wars Christmas album that came out in 1980 ya know. Woah same year as The Ramones’ End Of A Century! I wonder what that’s implying. I mean centuries can be used to measure the distance ya know like for a long time ago in a etc ya know. But this got me thinking – why didn’t the Star Wars movies, ya know, like the Bond films, have theme tunes with like the popstars of the day on them? Woulda been rad! And huge for the music industry! I mean they wouldn’t have to have the Ramones do one, even though that’s probably what we all want! I mean they were on that Space Ghost Coast To Coast promoting their Acid Eaters covers album but we’d want original material, ya know! Like Rocket To Russia would be more appropriate especially if like after blowing up the Death Star the Ramones themselves – I mean I guess they’d have to be in the film now – so like they help the rebels blow up the Death Star then they take said rocket and go to the Soviet Union to fight Drago. I mean yeah it’d have to be like all four of them cause they’re like skinny guys living on junk food…

But ya know, like the Bond films, I think we’d want the theme songs to be done by a different band for each film. I mean Shirley Bassey, she’s a whole different story, can’t get enough of her. Imagine her covering Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough, for a Bond film no less! And besides ya know you can’t be poaching people who have already done Bond films. Though if that lead to a Star Wars film where James Bond himself was playing a lead role, that’d be pretty amazing!

So like who can we get?  It’s 1977, right? And yeah the John Williams theme tune is classic enough but who’s to say it wouldn’t have been an even bigger movie ya know if like KISS had been in it?! I mean that makes total sense too ya know. Ya got StarChild and Ace as the Spaceman and like Gene Simmons’ make-up coulda easily been like another Darth Vader type character! And then like Peter Criss – don’t you find it weird that with all the different planets they visited in those films you never see one cat! And like if KISS were in Star Wars, woulda saved us all from KISS Meets the Phantom Of The Park. Though I gotta say I do like the acoustic version of Beth from that film…

Then we’ll slate The Ramones in for Empire and then we got Jedi…

I mean 1983 was a killer year for music Would Return of the Jedi have been better if it had a soundtrack of Def Leppard, something from Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, and Metallica? Like the Imperial March is rad and all but imagine adding Seek & Destroy to the Empire’s theme music?!

And then of course I forgot all about why this is happening in the first place, gotta get ol’ Jon Bon himself involved!

I mean Jovi was an actor for a while, he was in Ally McBeal. In one of those high Boston office buildings too. I mean closer to space than here on Earth and ya know legal battles are kinda like wars ya know. I mean lawyers always seem so busy, I don’t know if they’d have time to go see a film called Moderately High When Compared To The Ground…Wars… And it would’ve had to have come out before Legal Eagles I think. Ya know if the Star Wars franchise stood a hope of surviving. But I mean this could be the New Hope they’re talkin about!

And like Calista Flockhart, that’s a name up there with Luke Skywalker! She was as, Jovi himself pointed out in Living On A Prayer, “halfway there”. I don’t mean to imply that Star Wars was some sort of documentary about Ms. Flockhart and Jon Bon Jovi on the set of Ally McBeal…

But wait a minute! Cliff Clavin from Cheers was in Empire Strikes Back! Makes sense too with him being a mailman and he’s in that scene on the ice planet Hoth, I mean Boston gets real cold in the winter! And ya know “neither snow nor rain not heat” etc. – snow is the very first one in the mail carrier’s motto! So like maybe he’s in the mail room at the Rebel Legal Office and he delivers some important maybe even the plans to yet another Death Star if they wanna keep harpin’ on that, delivers em to ol’ C Flock herself. Woah! Should Flock of Seagulls do her theme tune?! That’d be wild! But then like, would Jovi end up composing his own theme tune? I don’t know how I feel about that…

And like legally speaking, Simon Indelicate was the one who pointed this out to me in our interview, so it seems only appropriate that The Indelicates should soundtrack one of the films themselves…

But like they didn’t form until 2005, and I don’t even think in time for Revenge Of The Sith. Unless like, I mean if they were to remake the films now and have a subplot be about a band from the south of England time-travelling in order to get on the soundtrack of the very film we’re all watching! I mean it might be a bit more believable”

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Episode Five – Extreme Bon Jovi

Published October 23, 2018

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In which Young Southpaw gets confused by the titles of the Bon Jovi records, the bathtub one and the releases surrounding the bathtub one

Taking in My Chemical Romance, Steve Vai, Bruce Springsteen, New Jersey, Nick Rhodes, Randy Rhoads, Cynthia Rhodes, ‘Slippery When Wet’, Fugazi, Van Halen, the film Runaway, Ionescu, and much more.

“So today I’d like to, like to talk about the album titles of Mr. Jon Bon Jovi. Or the band Bon Jovi, of which Mr. Jon Bon Jovi is, well, an integral part I would say. Named after him. Unless he named the band after one of his ancestors also named Bon Jovi. Maybe, you never know. You really never know. I mean you could ask him but I have no way to contact the man. And you know, time is a flowin’ like all those waterfalls. Not over the edge hopefully. Just flowin’ on, ridin’ on as that mellow AC/DC song goes. But I mean I do get confused. I didn’t get too confused, but enough confused you know. I’m sure you can get confused by any bands album titles once you think of them for a very long time. Or even a few minutes as the case may be. I mean Public Image Ltd. is probably the only band that’s ever had an honest album title, you know. With Album, Cassette, or Compact Disc…whatever format you had it on. You know the one with Steve Vai, 1986, year of the Fire Tiger, you know, Joan Rivers all that. Well it just hit me, Steve Vai went from working with John Lydon to DLR in the course of a year. From punk rock to Roth rock as they say. And Album and Eat Em And Smile came out in the same year. That just blew my mind…

But yeah I mean what I wanted to talk about is – well gimme a minute to get over this whole album Eat Em And Smile thing…

Ok well then, let’s go. This one also came out in 1986. I’m talking about Slippery When Wet of course. I mean I get what they’re sayin’, believe me…I get it. It’s uh, it’s innuendo. But it’s also something you’d say about a road, you know, and I don’t think anybody named Rhodes played on that album. Imagine if Nick Rhodes and Randy Rhoads played on Slippery When Wet. And Cynthia Rhodes was the singer. I mean she was a singer, maybe still is, I don’t know. Be good to find out. Again I don’t have any way to contact her. But you know Dirty Dancin’ Flashdance coulda been called Dirty…Flash…vocals… But they weren’t called that. You know, those were not the names of those films. But it woulda been a wildly different sounding record if Slippery When Wet had been made like that. Heck, maybe even my favourite record of all time.

But once I started to think about it, it just started to bug me out, you know? Got my mind all bug buggin’ as they say, as I’ve said before. When something gets my mind all…bug buggin’, you know. But Slippery When Wet’s the big one outta all his confusing albums. I mean, I just don’t understand. And it’s on the front cover like that, is it some sorta warning? I mean who…who gets their records wet? They won’t play. Precisely because they’ll be slippery. It seems like common sense. I mean the jacket all damaged, you know. I suppose I mean maybe there was an epidemic in America at the time or maybe they heard it someplace else around the world, people just dippin’ their, takin their records with them in the bathtub. I mean I know I love Van Halen’s 1984 but even I could…afford to…put it down for a little while while I took a nice soak..you know? And then you got New Jersey, I mean that’s confus- I mean I get it. They’re from New Jersey, but then forever on after once people say they’re going to New Jersey they could just be talkin about going to listen to that Bon Jovi record. I think that’s my favorite one, it’s got Born To Be My Baby – Na Na etc you know. Not like that My Chemical Romance song – you know that crazy My Chemical Romance band, also from New Jersey I might add – but they had that song Na Na Na…and then a whole bunch more Na’s in parentheses, you know… From their Danger Days album – Double D! Well not like that comic by Steve Horry and Eddie Argos, but speakin of comics you got Grant Morrison in the video for Na Na Na etc. with all the Na’s. Well I think Bon Jovi says Na 11 times in each phrase and MCR has like 13 goin on, you know like that Blur album 13 and Teenage Fanclub had an album called 13 as well and I don’t remember any comparisons between the two in the music press at the time. And then Fugazi had that 13 Songs but that was really a compilation of the first two releases. And listening recently to Margin Walker, that second half of the 13 Songs, might very well be my favorite Fugazi album. Though I am fond of Repeater too. Not Repeater 2 that doesn’t exist, but Repeater also. And the funny thing is Glue Man is probably my favourite Fugazi song and it is the glue that holds together the two previous releases that make up 13 Songs. But I think that Teenage Fanclub album is also named 13 because it has 13 songs on it and I would love to hear Teenage Fanclub and that crazy Fugari band cover each other’s 13 albums. Then Bruce Springsteen’s got that Nebraska album you know, and he’s from New Jersey too! That’s utterly confusing as well. Was like ol Jon Bon tryin to set things right? Maybe they shoulda done a concept album dealin with all that. But then again we wouldn’t have had I’ll Be There For You, you know. And that one’s got that line ‘these five words I swear to you’. Well if you look close enough – well any way you look at it really – you’ll notice Born To Be My Baby is also 5 words. Hmmm? Well, you know… A lotta B’s in that title as well. 3 if you again look closely. But then you got Bad Medicine too. It’s like a plethora of b’s, a bee hive if you will. Some won’t. I do not know currently if I do. But you got ‘bad’ again like ‘you give love a bad name’ from the previous album, you know the bathtub one. And bathtub the word begins and ends with a B. And then you got, goin back in time to before the bathtub one, you got that crazy Fahrenheit one. I mean that’s, that’s inconceivable as to how much, how hot that would be. 7800 degrees it is, let’s be precise. And you’ll notice it’s a number evenly divided by 13, make of that what you will. But 7800 degrees Fahrenheit, the vinyl would melt, forget Slippery When Wet, you’d have to put it in the bathtub just to cool things down. And what if some kid thinks that’s the temperature you have to put in on the record player at. Remember this was 1985, cds weren’t, well cds would melt too! I mean the kid’s thinkin you gotta put this on at 7800 degrees Fahrenheit, well you couldn’t even get close enough to the record player. And then you had that first one with Runaway, you know.. And that was a film with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons and Cynthia Rhodes who you know I’m a big fan of. You know, Flashdance and Dirty Dancin’, I don’t remember her dancing in Runaway but I remember that was a big deal cause Gene Simmons didn’t have his make-up on, you know. And then Bon Jovi became an actor later on so there ya go. Both that Jovi album and the film were released in 1984, you know the year of Van Halen, but I don’t think either had anything to do with each other. But imagine if Cynthia Rhodes had been in the Hot For Teacher video. I mean how awesome would that have been?!

And then you got the Young Guns soundtrack or Young Guns II the number two not also but I guess you could use also or too as also if you were conversing about both films in the same sentence like I did but I didn’t mean it. And you got Blaze a Glory ‘shot down’ etc. you know. And then I lost track so I had to look this up on Wikipedia just to see if maybe their record titles started making more sense. But they didn’t need to make any more sense, it’s strange cause you figure once you establish yourself you can just do these crazy art installation album titles, you know. Livin’ On A Prayer, I mean prayers don’t have any physical substance to them. Unless he meant prairie all along. I mean they just confuse the heck outta me, but I ain’t never seen em. Maybe their live show is some sort of elaborate play that explains all this. That’d be cool, you know like maybe written by Ionescu you know, the Rumanian playright, The Rhinoceros, you know. Did you see that Gene Wilder film with Zero Mostel? I started watchin it earlier this year, I really wanna finish it. I was a bit tired that night but I dug the music and the mise en scene as-they-say-in…Paris, and all a France prolly, the whole French speakin’ world. And well even if you’re not in the French speakin’ world and people are still speakin’ French they could say it there too, you know. I mean why not?

Back in Boston there used to be this great bookstore called Avenue Victor Hugo. Not there anymore RIP. But I bought J.P. Donleavy’s Schultz there, first edition, orange cover, one of my favourite novels of all time. It was right across the street from Newbury Comics on Newbury street. The bookshop I mean, not the novel. That takes places in a fictional universe and anyway well Ally McBeal was set in Boston, you know. Like that band….Aerosmith… And Mr. Jon Bon Jovi speaking of his acting career well you know he McBeal’d it up. And the Bee Gees they had that song Massachusetts you know, not a whole album like New Jersey but I think I’ve proved my point.”

 

 

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