The video below is a bootleg copy of The Smiths May 18,1985 performance at Paseo De Camoens in Madrid, Spain. This concert was originally recorded and broadcast on the Spanish television program Edad de Oro. Supposedly 300,000 people attended the concert which was held during the celebration of Madrid’s patron saint San Isidro.

Skip to the 1:45 mark to get to the music.

Set List:
01. William It Was Really Nothing
02. Nowhere Fast
03. I Want The One I Can’t Have
04. What She Said
05. How Soon Is Now?
06. Handsome Devil
07. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore
08. Shakespeare’s Sister
09. Rusholme Ruffians
10. The Headmaster Ritual
11. Hand In Glove
12. Still Ill
13. Meat Is Murder

Encore 1:
14. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
15. Miserable Lie

Encore 2:
16. Barbarism Begins At Home

Encore 3:
17. This Charming Man
18. You’ve Got Everything Now

All three episodes from the 2002 BBC documentary Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music have been kindly uploaded to Youtube, and you can watch them here now. The series, comprised of three hour long episodes, details the beginnings of the genre, from the invention of ska at the end of British rule in Jamaica, right up to the turn of the century.

This is the actual April 5, 1968 concert James Brown gave at the Boston Garden on the day following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jump ahead to to the 7:20 mark if you want to skip the introduction by MC Danny Ray.

According to the History Channel: 

On the morning after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were scrambling to prepare for an expected second straight night of violent unrest. Similar preparations were being made in cities across America, including in the nation’s capital, where armed units of the regular Army patrolled outside the White House and U.S. Capitol following President Johnson’s state-of-emergency declaration. But Boston would be nearly alone among America’s major cities in remaining quiet and calm that turbulent Friday night, thanks in large part to one of the least quiet and calm musical performers of all time. On the night of April 5, 1968, James Brown kept the peace in Boston by the sheer force of his music and his personal charisma.

Brown’s appearance that night at the Boston Garden had been scheduled for months, but it nearly didn’t happen. Following a long night of riots and fires in the predominantly black Roxbury and South End sections of the city, Boston’s young mayor, Kevin White, gave serious consideration to canceling an event that some feared would bring the same kind of violence into the city’s center. The racial component of those fears was very much on the surface of a city in which school integration and mandatory busing had played a major role in the recent mayoral election. Mayor White faced a politically impossible choice: anger black Bostonians by canceling Brown’s concert over transparently racial fears, or antagonize the law-and-order crowd by simply ignoring those fears. The idea that resolved the mayor’s dilemma came from a young, African American city councilman name Tom Atkins, who proposed going on with the concert, but finding a way to mount a free, live broadcast of the show in the hopes of keeping most Bostonians at home in front of their TV sets rather than on the streets.

Atkins and White convinced public television station WGBH to carry the concert on short notice, but convincing James Brown took some doing. Due to a non-compete agreement relating to an upcoming televised concert, Brown stood to lose roughly $60,000 if his Boston show were televised. Ever the savvy businessman, James Brown made his financial needs known to Mayor White, who made the very wise decision to meet them.

The broadcast of Brown’s concert had the exact effect it was intended to, as Boston saw less crime that night than would be expected on a perfectly normal Friday in April. There was a moment, however, when it appeared that the plan might backfire. As a handful of young, male fans—most, but not all of them black—began climbing on stage mid-concert, white Boston policemen began forcefully pushing them back. Sensing the volatility of the situation, Brown urged the cops to back away from the stage, then addressed the crowd. “Wait a minute, wait a minute now WAIT!” Brown said. “Step down, now, be a gentleman….Now I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people.”

Brown successfully restored order while keeping the police away from the crowd, and continued the successful peacekeeping concert in honor of the slain Dr. King on this day in 1968.

The Way We Were is a BBC Channel 4 tv program that looks back on certain aspects of recent British history. This episode released around 1985, hosted by the late Tony Wilson, features a compilation of live performances by bands that previously played on some of Wilson’s music shows of the late 70′s, like Granada TV’s So It Goes. Performances include Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, The Fall, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Penetration, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Tom Robinson, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke, XTC and Joy Division – many of them making their TV debuts.

Besides being a tv host Wilson was the music mogul behind some of Manchester’s most successful bands. He was the founder and manager of The Haçienda nightclub, and was one of the five co-founders of Factory Records, home of the Happy Mondays, Joy Division, and later New Order. He was also the manager of many bands, including A Certain Ratio and The Durutti Column.

He was portrayed by actor Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, and by Craig Parkinson in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 Ian Curtis biopic Control, both excellent films.

Warning: The sound and/or video quality is not always the greatest.

Kicking off with “Rockaway Beach” this is Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky – The Ramones performing live on the classic German TV show Musikladen, in a special recorded on September 13 1978, in Bremen.

Tracklist:
“Rockaway Beach”
“Teenage Lobotomy”
“Blitzkrieg Bop”
“I Don’t Want You”
“Go Mental”
“Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”
“You’re Gonna Kill that Girl”
“Don’t Come Close”
“I Don’t Care”
“She’s the One”
“Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”
“Havana Affair”
“Commando”
“Needles & Pins”
“Surfin’ Bird”
“Cretin Hop”
“Listen to My Heart”
“California Sun”
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”
“Pinhead”
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”

The Butthole Surfers live in concert, Mesa Arizona, July 1, 1996.

Some might only remember the Butthole Surfers as the creators of top 40 hits like “Pepper” and “Who Was in my Room Last Night?”, but before mainstream success they were the “most twisted and depraved acts ever to bubble up from the American underground.” (source)

TRACKS

Birds
Cough Syrup
Thermador
Pepper
Ulcer Breakout
Jingle of a Dog’s Collar
TV Star
Ah Ha
1401
Cherub
Cowboy Bob
X-Ray
Out of Vogue
Hey
Space
L.A.
The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave
Creep in the Cellar
Let’s Talk about Cars
Goofy’s Concern
Watlo
Who Was in My Room Last Night?

To set the mood for tomorrow’s 18th Street Fashion Show Summer in Spain I bring you Spanish pop singer Luz Casal’s “Piensa en mi”.

Luz Casal reached fame in the early 1980s and has remained an important figure in Spanish pop music since. She enjoyed great success with 1991′s “Piensa en mi” which was featured in Pedro Almodóvar’s Tacones Lejanos (High Heels).

Last night at dinner our web guy Scott Stewart drank a True Blonde Ale from Ska Brewery. The colorful can featuring the black and white checker pattern synonymous with the English 2-Tone ska revial of the late 1970′s made me remember how much I liked the band responsible for it, The Specials.

We’ve included the first three parts with links to remaining four parts of The Specials’ performing live at The Colchester Instituite in 1979. The performance was filmed by the BBC for the series “Rock Goes to College”.

Beware The Specials may induce skanking and moonstomping.

By the way, the beer was pretty good we hear.

Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6

Even if you don’t agree with Fugazi’s radical politics, militantly DIY attitude or provoked demeanor you can’t deny their ability to get white people dancing. This live performance appears to be in the band’s hometown of Washington D.C. – most likely at a protest against the first Gulf War. “Turnover” is the first track from Fugazi’s debut, now-classic album Repeater LP, which was released in 1990 on guitarist (blue stocking cap) Ian MacKaye’s Dischord Records. The CD version was bundled with the 3 Songs EP, thus the Repeater + 3 Songs title that appears in the album art below.

This week our kickball team (yes, we have a pretty intense kickball league here in Lawrence, KS) scrimmaged a team who call themselves the Harper Valley PTA. So I only thought it fitting…

Via Wikipedia:

“Harper Valley PTA” is a country song written by Tom T. Hall. It was a major hit single for country singer Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, and crossed over to the pop charts as well, eventually selling over six million copies as a single, making Riley the first woman ever to top the U.S. pop and country singles charts with the same song.

The song tells the story of a junior high girl (high school in the original) who is sent home with a note to her widowed single mother from the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) of the school decrying the mother’s scandalous behavior by small-town standards. The mother decides to speak to a meeting of the PTA where she addresses various episodes of misbehavior on the part of several of its members, concluding, “This is just a little Peyton Place / And you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.” The final line of the song sums up the action with the memorable line: “The day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA”

In an interview, Hall admitted his inspiration for the song was passing by the Harpeth Valley Elementary School in Bellevue, Tennessee, not far from his then-home in Franklin. He liked the sound of the name and decided to write a song using a similar place name. He also reportedly wrote the song about Olive Hill, Kentucky where Hall grew up.

The song was later the inspiration for a 1978 motion picture and a 1981 television series, both starring Barbara Eden, playing the heroine of the song, Stella Johnson.

Other songs on the album tell more about some of the people who are members of the Harper Valley P.T.A., including Mayor Harper and Widow Jones.

Jeannie C. Riley’s recording of the song won her a Grammy for the Best Country Vocal Performance, Female.

In the 1970s, Riley became a born-again Christian, and started to sing only gospel music; she renounced the song, and has not performed it since. She titled her 1980 autobiography From Harper Valley to the Mountain Top, and released a gospel album in 1981 with the same title.

The song made Riley the first woman to top both Billboard’s Hot 100 and the U.S. country single’s charts with the same song, a feat that would go unrepeated until Dolly Parton did so with “Nine to Five” in 1981.