Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor

Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.

Wednesday Wadio: Happy Mondays “Jellybean”


in Musical, Wednesday Wadio

“It goes without saying that the only people who should be allowed to purchase Unkle Dysfunctional are those (like this writer) who own one copy of Pills n’ Thrills n’ Bellyaches for each room of their apartment.” – CokeMachineGlow.com

For the uninitiated, the Happy Mondays were one of the central bands of the late 80’s “Madchester” movement which also included Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, James and the Charlatans. The focal point of the ‘scene’ was the legendary Haçienda club, the colored history of which is available in excruciating detail on any number of sites. To the initiated, if you were already aware that the first Happy Mondays album in 14 years was released earlier this summer, you may well be wondering how it is, how Sean sounds and what it’s all about? As a lifelong fan of the group, who even got to see them in 1990 as a 16-year-old in Boston, I’ve listened to the album a big bunch of times and am here to lay it on you. I have thought of this at long length and can sum up my review in one sentence:

It’s better than I expected, but tragic due to the large number of good ideas hastily thrown together and wasted.

I haven’t bothered to look up the producer, but with more time spent and a different set of fingers twiddling the knobs, the mostly mediocre material could have easily comprised a legendary comeback of biblical proportions. And Sean Ryder was set for it – his cameo on the Gorillaz “Dare” last year made for the best song on an album of very good songs. His cohort Bez recently came back into the limelight after winning Celebrity Big Brother 5 and 50 thousand pounds along with it. Before I talk about the album’s highlight, let me first expound upon the tragedies – I owe it to my 16-year-old self.

Songs with great musical production have god-awful, chanty lyrics. I am thinking particularly of “Deviant” and “Cuntry Disco”. The music in Deviant is funky and wonderful, and I rap along to the chorus with delight every single time I hear it. But the verses, Sean mindlessly rhyming one word throughout – “She grabs it and stabs it and flabs it and…” make me feel like I’m playing some kind of drinking game. And losing. Deviants could have been an amazing song if someone had put the brakes on and said “Right… we’re on the verge here, but the versus sound worse than a Yoko Ono solo album being played backwards through a bullhorn.” Why, oh why, didn’t somebody say that! Give me a day alone with the masters and an unlicensed copy of Pro Tools and I’ll save the world.

The best tune on the record is without a doubt “Jellybean”, and it’s beyond cruel that it’s also the first. I remember driving around Burlington, singing the uber-catchy chorus after I’d heard it just once and wondering if I wasn’t about to experience something amazing – a solid Mondays album nearly 15 years after their last one sank an entire record label. But it “were all downhill from ‘ere” as they’d say in Manchester.

There’s no video as far as I could locate, but I found a decent clip of them performing it in Middlesbrough, England on May 26th of this year. I suppose even just one above average song on an album as unlikely as Unkle Dysfunctional is a pretty good average – so I’m featuring it on Wadio today and that makes me happy. A year ago I’d have bet a lot of money against it. Ecstasy money.

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A Vote for Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Vote for the Red Sox!


in , Sporty

My friend Joey’s mom is up for President of Red Sox Nation. You may have heard of her – she’s a very well known, Pulitzer Prize winning historical author – and a genuinely wonderful lady. She is up against a veritable who’s who of well-known Bostonians for the coveted position, and I’d like to do my part to whip up a little voter love. Here is Joey’s email to me today:

“Dear old mom has been nominated to serve as president of red sox nation. Now, Remy is also in the running and using his bully pulpit on NESN to sway all sorts of voters. We need you to vote for Doris, not just because she would make a stunning and capable chief executive but also to strike back at the Media Barons who think that the access they have into our homes should be equitable to access into our very hearts. Follow the link below to vote up to 10 times, vote for Doris, vote for liberty! Feel free to forward to all who love the Red Sox and freedom from media tyranny”:

Doris Kearns Goodwin will bring a level of intellectualism and historical analysis to the position that Sox fans will find refreshing and optimistic. To prepare for the future is to understand the past, after all. In addition to being able to statistically rattle off figures as well as any fan in the Nation, Doris can then tell you what people were wearing, eating, reading and how they were voting that year. It’s an honest and life-long love of the game coupled with one of the best insights into American History alive today. I, for one, would honestly like to see Doris in this position above all of the other candidates in the running. But don’t take my word for her forward-thinking and original spin on the position:

“If I were fortunate enough to be chosen president of Red Sox Nation, I would call upon my love of history to exorcise the tortured memories of the past that create a constant sense of dread in even the most loyal Sox fans. I would personally rewrite the history of 1978 to remove the story of the final months when our 14 game lead was catastrophically lost. I would encourage NESN to bury every clip of Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner in an underground vault. I would sponsor a special line of T-shirts emblazoned only with positive images – Ortiz pointing to the sky on reaching home, Papelbon pumping his fist on recording a save, Schilling’s bloody sock. Since I’ve never outgrown the superstition that the actions of fans influence the fortunes of our teams, I would do all that I could to transform the mood of Red Sox Nation from one fearing the worst, to one expecting the best, game after game, year after year.”

Doris is the perfect remedy for a Nation which more and more is being saturated by peripheral, fair-weather, nay-saying fans who dilute the legendary fan base as a whole. That’s not to say these folks should be banished. On the contrary – they should be educated, hardened and sent back out into battle as a true Fenway Phalanx ready to defend Boston from Yankee tyranny. Doris is the woman for the job, so please place your vote (up to 10 times) right now!

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Migration Fascination


in Pye in the Face

After – no kidding – 2 years of humming and hawing, DavePye.com has finally been migrated from the infantile Blogger to the almighty WordPress platform. The design you see today is not final, and the incredible functionality of WordPress will make this site more interactive and fun for the 13 readers I have managed to retain during this slow summer. It’s time for me to get this old clunker back on the road.

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Creative Outdoor Teenage Partying.


in Heartwarming, Reminiscent

There’s a Facebook group for my high school town, and someone added a “You Know You’re From Concord When…” thread a while ago. Obviously, the group is predominantly much-younger people, but I was curious and added my own point to the thread. You know you’re from Concord When: “Being told to meet your friends at ‘Eden’, ‘Boonyards’ or ‘Mayflower’ makes perfect sense to you.”

Someone from the class of 2004 emailed me today and asked me to elaborate, so I did. This email is extended a couple paragraphs for the sake of the blog and reprinted with express written permission from… myself.

All three were nicknames we had for secluded outdoor places around Concord where we used to “par-tay”. Eden was along the river and accessible from behind the strip mall just off Lowell road near the center where Stop n Shop used to be. I worked there for a summer until they found out I was Canadian and didn’t have my greencard yet. It’s still a grocery store but has a different name now. There was a narrow path that wound through the underbrush for a bit and came out on a nice public lawn on the riverside with a decent amount of tree cover overhead. You could also walk down to it from the bridge down Lowell road a bit.

Anyway, Eden was a huge cop magnet and we only used it as a last resort when nobody’s parents were out of town. My friend got arrested one night, fully cuffed and stuffed, for peeing on the fire after the po-po told us to put it out. “I don’t care how you do it, but put that fucking fire out!” Well, my pal got a night in the docks and an embarassing Concord Journal Police Log entry for his efforts. The worst part is, the Journal listed the charge as “indecent exposure”, with his real name and age. That could have meant a million different things, and I’m sure his grandparents enjoyed reading it over Sunday breakfast while envisioning him running through a local preschool with his pants around his ankles.

Boonyards was a field that accessible by an overgrown dirt road just over the Bedford town line on Bedford Street that extended out from the Concord center rotary. Technically it’s located on Hanscom airforce base which we learned the hard way one night when soldiers with M16s on jeeps showed up to break up our bonfire. I was off in the dark fiddling with a British exchange student and made an easy escape.

Mayflower was in West Concord technically, and you had to go through the back of Thoreau hills to get to it. I don’t think the police ever found it during my CCHS career, but we accidentally rolled a full keg down into someone’s backyard one enchanted evening. That attracted a lot of attention and I don’t think I ever returned.

Glad I could impart some history on my wee descendants. Concord was a strange place in the early 90’s era. When I got to college in 1992, it bored me to tears. I’ve had this conversation with dozens of my friends who had the same freshman year blues. We’d wonder why people in our dorm got so excited over a lame frat keg party, and the rest of the kids on our floor wouldn’t believe our high school stories. The classes of 89 and 91 especially – we’d already fucking done it all. We kept Mr. Kryple and Ms. DiCicco on antacids – that’s for sure. The outdoor spots were backups, and the tip of the iceberg. Good times.

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