Everything old is old (but new, also) again!
...or how we all gotta Get Back sometimes.
I’ve probably touched on it before in previous ramblings, but a notable aspect of independent record stores in 2023 is how being a harbinger of next waves or the steward of obscure cool is still present, but to some degree displaced from its central roles. These days being the archivist of physical media and steward of the accepted genre canons available on physical media has pulled up to the entrance. Most exchanges of the “have you heard about…” variety happen quietly, near the backroom.
That is in part why it’s not particularly weird to have regulars who will open conversations with “My son and I went to the casino in Moncton to see Trooper over the weekend.” Now for the uninitiated, Trooper is a Canadian rock band that was formed in 1975 and great success through the 70s and early 80s, mainly off the back of three songs… "We're Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time)," "Raise a Little Hell," and "The Boys in the Bright White Sports Car…" all three of which still feature on classic rock rotation and have clogged an artery of the cultural zeitgeist ever since.
Other facts about Trooper: (1) They’ve not released a new album since 1991. (2) No one currently in the band has been a member since before 1996. (3) The two guys who formed the band, Ra McGuire and Brian Smith, retired from it in 2021. (4) Their lead guitarist is now their former guitar tech, and their singer is a “well-known West Coast singer named David Steele” who has worked with everyone from Mötley Crüe to Raffi. (5) Essentially Trooper is now a Trooper cover band.
What is especially interesting is that the customer who’d driven an hour and a half to see Trooper (with his son, a teenage boy who shares his enthusiasm for classic rock) is the one who confided to me all of the above facts. He mused about the logistics of calling yourself Trooper if your longest running member is a guy named Gogo who plays keyboards and harmonica (in fairness, there’s a harmonica break in “We’re Here for a Good Time” which is key to its success). Despite all of this insider information, seeing a band calling itself Trooper playing the hits of Trooper is worth a couple of hundred dollars to him.
The thing is… I kind of get it?
All of us carry the residue of our youthful ardor with us, and they to some degree inform our entertainment decisions in the present. For example… I love The Exorcist. I am the right age to have been well and truly f*cked up by the movie when I saw it on broadcast television in my early teens. It has remained one of my favourite films. In 2023 we have a movie called The Exorcist: Believer, co-written and directed by respected filmmaker David Gordon Green, who has made a few films I also hold quite dear. On the other hand David Gordon Green also made a new trilogy based on the original Halloween film by John Carpenter. Those films veered from interesting to quite disappointing as they progressed, and the bad taste left behind from this soured my anticipation for his treatment of a new Exorcist trilogy.
Despite all that I still fully intended to venture up to the multiplex and take in The Exorcist: Believer at some point in its opening week. However, living as we do in the internet age, I heard such dire pronouncements about the film I couldn’t bring myself to take a chance. A reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter put it this way: "Unlike Green's Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter." Another internet age side effect is now the film is available on streaming platforms, so I don’t even have to leave the house to see it. So have I watched it? No. Will I ever watch it? Yes. And probably soon.
Much like the draw a Trooper cover band calling itself Trooper, an Exorcist cover band calling itself The Exorcist : Believer might play a couple of the hits I’d get a rush from reliving, like calling up co-founder Ellen Burstyn for a couple of tracks, even if I have to suffer through a bunch of new tunes I’d never bother with otherwise.
The comparison isn’t perfect. Experiencing William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in its unadulterated form, either at home or occasionally in a theatre is still possible today, but a live band whose prime was decades ago can really only be approximated in a kind of diluted form. It’s taking a soft drug to remember the dangerous and often ecstatic rush of a harder one.
The mainstream music industry’s specialty is prescribing these soft drugs, often confusingly in a version of their original packaging. Two “contemporary” artifacts that have stirred up interest, not unexpectedly because of their name brand associations, are a new album by the Rolling Stones and a new “Last Song” by the Beatles. On the Stones front the album, Hackney Diamonds, has gotten across the board positive reviews and cracked the top ten of every country’s charts… except for Lithuania where it reached only number 68 behind 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ but ahead of Adele’s 21 (not sure what’s going on in Lithuanian… separate article, perhaps). Its accolades refer mostly to how much it sounds like “a classic Stones album,” and celebrates its powerful bench of guest stars including past and now deceased members of The Rolling Stones and fellow titans like Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney. Avengers assemble!
Paul McCartney also appears, of course, on “Now and Then” what is billed as The Last Beatles Song… a new track extracted from the amber of a demo recorded by John Lennon in 1970. Thanks to technology developed by Peter Jackson for his Beatles film Get Back, Lennon’s voice could be separated, enhanced, and pushed forward fifty plus years into Paul McCartney’s care. Responses to the recording vary from unsurprising gush over the rare opportunity to temporarily revive rock music’s greatest achievers, and quieter whispers about the timing coinciding with very expensive reissues (“newly expanded, remixed, and demixed”) of their Red and Blue greatest hits compilations.
Again, I recognize the biases of my own nostalgia. This newsletter and the podcast that has grown out of it mostly discusses either “the good old days” of indie rock or new releases that remind me of those. This week’s podcast, for example, is a look at a Run With Me, a new album by Bry Webb. The focus is on his twenty-five year history and how this album is his first in nearly a decade. It’s a great album, and Bry is a very talented artist, but there is also lots of brand new music to consider.
I guess what I’m saying is… psst, come here near the backroom of this article and check out this new album by Hotline TNT!!