Ya know, I never know what blogs I write that people will actually read. I think that if I do something by The Stones or Neil Young, people will find it and maybe read it. Then I do something like The Slickee Boys or Jacobites, and I get a ton of hits from all over the world. I really don't get it. Then again, even when I have a blog entry more read than another one it still means almost no one on the planet has read it. So I think I'll just keep doing it the way I have been and if I have time, and I'm thinking about a record all day, I'll write about that one.
With The Tubes - Remote Control album I wasn't so much thinking about this album all day, but how odd I always thought it was that I knew people that liked The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, but couldn't stand The Tubes. I really kind of don't get that. I always thought that if I had the chance to see both of those bands in like a co-headlining thing I'd have paid pretty much anything they asked. I saw The Tubes and I never saw Alex, and I'll tell you some time how much I liked seeing them. For now, I'm gonna stick with what I was thinking all day.
The Tubes should have been bigger. I don't know why they weren't. My friends and I loved them. I went to a school where they were really popular. I mean, everyone knew who they were. Even this album, Remote Control, was a constant at parties all over town. I liked that after some stupid fucking Ted Nugent album was over I could put on something like this and everyone liked it. So where was the rest of the country? Why weren't these guys huge?
By the time they got to Remote Control, they had Todd Rundgren producing, and I think he went a long way to making sure that Remote Control sounded like a modern, major label release. They always sounded pretty good, but Todd is good at making a big sound huge. If there was anything The Tubes needed it was the hugeness of their live show to translate onto vinyl. I think they succeeded here. It gets some Todd signature backing vocals here and there, but the record still sounds like The Tubes.
In 1979 when this came out, I was pretty sure that TV was evil, and that bands like The Tubes that were pointing out just how really horrible TV really is would maybe be able to help change things for the better. Here's one of those bands that I thought was going to change the way things were, but all it did is eventually show my idealistic young self that as much as it seemed like it was changing my life, Rock N' Roll was never going to change the world and make it better. It was just going to be another way for rich people to print money. Man, that sucked when I really finally understood that.
I have a friend who had an old Nova he bought from the old lady across the street. It was a blue 4 door, early 70's. It was rotted from the bottom of the door panels about a quarter of the way up the doors and fenders. It looked like someone dipped it in acid or something. We couldn't put any speakers in the doors because they'd get wet, but we got a decent sounding stereo in there in spite of the challenges. The damned thing only had like 25.000 miles on it, but man, was it rusty!
We used to drive around and listen to Remote Control all the time. I think we listened to side one most of the time, because everyone really liked the title track, and Prime Time, which is kind of a derivative of Don't Touch Me There, their first brush with chart success. The one two punch of opener Remote Control going into TV Is King was a pretty strong way to kick off an album, and it was hard to argue when someone wanted to hear that side of the album again.
Side two has strong tracks, too. Where my friends liked the opening songs on side one, and the hit single, I still to this day think my two favorite songs are Only the Strong Survive and Telecide. I especially love Telecide. It's one of my all time favorite Tubes songs. It starts off really fast and it's got a wailing guitar solo. I guess there's just not that much more that I need to make me happy!
I bought this a couple years ago. I think I got it at a record show. It's in really nice shape, with a nice, clean cover and the record is nice and flat. It was probably only two or three dollars and I can't think of a better thing to spend the price of a coke and a bag of chips on.
