(Evidently this had nothing to do with Outer Space Monroe’s signature tune was “Racing With the Moon,” which was released in 1941 and became a million seller-by 1952. There was another recording, this by Vaughn Monroe and the Moon Men. He and his Death Valley Rangers recorded “Riders in the Sky,” which was then covered by an array of other musicians.įor example, there was Burl Ives, whose version spent six weeks on the Billboard chart in 1949, peaking at 21. In 1948 Stan Jones, who had received a master’s degree in zoology from University of California-Berkeley, a rodeo competitor, actor, singer, songwriter, and one-time National Park Service employee in Death Valley, wrote a cowboy song about ghost riders in the sky. And every time I watch it, I see and hear something new. But it’s almost as if it’s a movie, not a memory, playing in my head. Sure, it still brings me back to that kiddie pool in the middle of the quad were college kids were experimenting with new ideas and stumbling along the way. I think it’s because it still sounds revelatory. I don’t know what any of that means, but it was a vibe.Īnd so thirty years on I still listen to Check Your Head a lot and unlike other albums of that time, it doesn’t fill me with much nostalgia. I didn’t quite realize (let alone appreciate) at the time, but it was a time of creative explosions where the weird was valued and applied as a hue to our post-adolescent awakening. It was a pu-pu platter of clothes, music, art, film…everything. We were borrowing clothes from our dads’ closets and pairing up wide collars with Pumas. That’s some meta shit and it was what we were all doing in some way. Rather than sampling groovy tracks from obscure 70s soundtracks, they were creating their own. And it was the B-Boys stretching as musicians with fewer samples and much more contribution of musical tracks from Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA. It has everything: Hip-hop, punk, jazz, funk, inside jokes. There is no better soundtrack for the cultural collision of the early 90s than Check Your Head, itself a collision of sounds, ideas, vibes, culture. But good is good and greatness transcends. Alternative and hip-hop were subversive, the whole point was to side-step the mainstream. This was the era when worlds were colliding–uncomfortably, sometimes. I mean…that’s what we were supposed to be. The alternative was about to become the mainstream.Īt the time, I was derisive.
So it was no surprise we were blasting the latest Beastie Boys album, but what struck me was when some bros rolled up in an orange Jeep Wrangler with the rag-top removed and “Pass the Mic” at full volume. The pool’s name was Tony and we were very clearly the cool kids on campus, even though I wasn’t even enrolled. I was visiting my friends at Kalamazoo College where Jake Brown was on campus for a summer session and we were all lazing around the kiddie pool we’d set up to get through the midwest humidity. I remember clearly when this album hit me–and it was at least a month or two after I bought it at Crazy Larry’s, the video/music shop where I worked in Grand Rapids. Released on Apwith relative quiet, it was the sneaker album of the summer of ‘92 and raised the bar for both alternative music and hip hop and obliterated the lines between in the process. Nevermind ( sic) what you’ve heard, this is the most important album of the 90s. She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.” Jarmusch says, “As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true. Chan Marshall has a similar ability to make her covers her own and to write original songs that seem like they could be interpretations of classics.Īnd now beloved indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has directed the video for Cat Power’s latest single. MacGowan has always written material that sounds like it’s been around forever, like he’s plucked timeless material out of the ether. It was a thrill to find a Clancy Brothers record in the 99-cent bin, and their version of “ Whiskey You’re the Devil” made great mixtape fodder, especially followed up by the Pogues’ “Streams of Whiskey” (a Shane MacGowan original, it turns out).
I assumed most of the material was punked up versions of Irish standards. With no liner notes, I had no idea which songs were originals and which were traditional. I originally heard the Pogues on tapes that a friend had dubbed for me.