Free day, last of the year- OK, we all know that this has been the worst year of the century, good riddance 2020!… Let’s look foward to better things to come in 2021, Better Things by the Kinks is my pick for the RFL song on the last day of the year… Happy New Year!🍻🎉
A song about the future- Future/Now by the great MC5, from their excellent 3rd lp High Times. A song as true today as when it was written decades ago. Happy New Year!🍻
A Christmas song- Things Fall Apart by Cristina, a 1981 Christmas song that is touching, sad, sincere, tragic and sentimental. Definitely not the average Christmas song, but one of my favorites. Even sadder since Cristina passed away earlier this year from the COVID virus. Merry Christmas everyone, be safe!🎄
A song that mentions gifts or presents – No Gifts for Nazis by the Alice Bag Band… LA punk rock legend Alice Bag is back with a seasonal song that is somewhat thematically reminiscent of the Dead Kennedys Nazi punks fuck off… Not surprisingly, Santa has no tolerance for Nazis…
An artist that you think should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame- Definitely The Monkees, quintessential 60s hitmakers that have had tours and reunions all the way up to, and including, their 50th anniversary, and have continued (somewhat sporadically) to release great new music including their recent Good Times LP… The Monkees were the rock and roll entry point for millions of baby boomers, including me, launching a lifelong obsession with rock and roll. The band has been dogged by “they’re not a real band” BS because they started on a TV show. But as Micky dolenz once said, the fact that the Monkees started out as a TV show band and quickly became a real band would be the same thing as if William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy actually became real astronauts! On their first two albums they provided vocals, but by their third album they had successfully won control and played their instruments on records too. They did a US tour in ’67 to prove that they were a real band…and yet that first year or two is continually held against them by some, like the R&R HOF… LET THEM IN! This trippy song, Daily Nightly, was written by Michael Nesmith, and features excellent vocals by Micky Dolenz and was one of the first ever commercial uses of a Moog synthesizer on an album…
A song with the word heaven in the title – Heaven by the Talking Heads “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” When this song came out in 1979, a place where nothing ever happened did not sound like heaven to me… As I got older I could relate more and more to it. After this year, a place where nothing ever happens truly does sound like heaven to me… Let’s hope for a better year next year!
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