I've been commissioned to write a blog about one of my favorite Canadian bands. As someone who spent a year and a half in rural Iowa with no friends and a satellite dish, I spent many Mountain Dew-fueled hours watching Much Music with the VCR remote in hand hoping to tape videos by the likes of the Dream Warriors, Zumpano, Leonard Cohen, Trans-X, Lime, Skinny Puppy, Frontline Assembly, or Eric's Trip whilst adroitly changing the channel within microseconds of a Bootsauce song's opening notes.



But there was one band who, I don't think, ever got any airtime on Much and will not likely ever be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. That band is ...  Zit Remedy. They formed in 1985 and only recorded one song, "Everybody Wants Something" which they sold for 2 dollars (Canadian) which, echoing Peter Saville's costly New Order packaging for "Blue Monday," cost less than the blank tapes they were recorded on. There's a Zit Remedy website that does a good job of providing the biographical information for the seminal band. I will say that a bit of the information is wrong, or out of date. Anyone who keeps up with Degrassi knows that after Craig Manning's dad died, he formed a band Downtown Sasquatch with Spinner, Jimmy and Marco which practiced in... legendary Zit Remedy frontman Joey Jeremiah's garage. And he performed his song "What I Know" at the Degrassi Battle of the Bands as a sort of apology to Ashley Kerwin. So, obviously there's a lot of musical talent coming out of Degrassi. In fact, there's a wikipedia entry devoted to them.

1977: Crime & the City Solution formed in Sydney. It seems that almost from their inception they were cursed to never be spoken of without a mention of famous Australian Nick Cave. Their original line-up included vocalist Simon Bonney (the band's only permanent member), Don McLennan on drums, Harry Zanteni on guitar, Phil Kitchener on bass and Dave MacKinnon on soprano and tenor saxophones. Simon Bonney, whilst born in Australia proper, had grown up on a remote farm in Tasmania where his family grew wheat, barley and opium poppies before he moved to Sydney.

Shortly after their formation, Crime & the City Solution relocated to Melbourne and the line-up changed with Dan Wallace-Crabbe taking over guitar, Kim Beissel replacing Dave MacKinnon, Lindsay O'Meara handling bass and Chris Astley joining on keyboards. The band recorded a handful of demos and some live performances are available; the recordings are interesting. Simon Bonney's distinct, moaning vocals are immediately recognizable. The music sounds very much of its time- kind of a dark, brittle post-punk with saxophone that makes it sound vaguely Roxy Music. It's a bit raw but miles ahead of the contemporaneous Boys Next Door, who aside from their cover of the Young Charlatans "Shivers" were pretty awful. [Note: If you have the Young Charlatans' demos, please let me know]

The Boys Next Door, by their second album, 1980's Birthday Party, pursued (thankfully) a sound very different from the bland predecessor of the previous year, Door, Door. Now the band careened through a cacophonous terrain owing a lot to The Cramps while taking a bit from Crime & the City Solution's post-punk take on The Doors as well. The Boys Next Door moved to relocated to London, signed to the 4AD record label and got huge. Meanwhile, Crime & the City Solution remained silent. I'm tempted to make the analogy of the story of Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis but, to be fair, The Birthday Party were an amazing band with a lot of talent... and a lot of ego. Rowland S. Howard, The Birthday Party's guitarist and writer of some of the band's most amazing songs and Nick Cave disbanded the group in 1984.

  
The Flag of Australia                                             The Australian Aboriginal Flag        The Flag of Torres Strait Islanders




Australia was discovered about 45,000 years ago when they either walked or made short sea-crossings from Papua to the north in what is now the Torres Strait. In Australia they grew into diverse cultures with around 250 languages spoken by nations such as the Koori, Murri, Noongar, Yamatji, Wangkai, Nunga, Anagu, Yapa, Yolngu and Palawah who together may've numbered around 3 quarters of a million.  43,830 years later (give or take a few thousand) it was claimed, like a quarter of the planet, by the tiny, faraway island of Great Britain.



    Initially, it served as a penal colony set up at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788 which is why it's Australia Day today. 50% of the indigenous population died from smallpox within the following years. Massacres and land seizures reduced the indigenous population another 30%. Often the convicts sent to Australia were charged with minor offenses. In the 1850s, the Gold Rush began and with it, an Americanization of the language. For example, "bonanza" (borrowed from Spanish) became "bonzer." By 1827, Australian English was already diverging significantly from British English. Author Peter Cunningham noted a distinct vocabulary and a non-rhotic accent that owed heavily to Cockney. It is typically divided into three accents which owe less to region than UK English or US English.

Vietnamese New Wave

Are any of my readers out there Vietnamese? I have asked the experts here at Amoeba Hollywood about "Vietnamese New Wave" groups and no one seems even remotely familiar with any of them, with the exception of Chris Matthews, to whom "Modern Talking" sounds familiar ...

First of all, when people talk about Vietnamese New Wave they’re not talking about Vietnamese artists (although there is Thu Thuy, Lynda Trang Dai and supposedly a tieng viet cover of a Night Society song), but rather a movement that includes mostly German Hi-NRG or Eurobeat, Italo disco and English synthpop artists who acquired, through means that no one seems to understand (although it definitely involves mixtapes) massive popularity amongst Vietnamese in Cali, Texas and Canada (and maybe elsewhere).

And whilst there’ve been at least four or five documentarians who’ve explored the popularity of still supposedly strange popularity of Morrissey amongst Mexicans and Mexican/Americans, to my knowledge no one has yet delved into the mysterious “Vietnamese New Wave” movement in which (in addition to OMD, Pet Shop Boys and Gazebo's "I Like Chopin" four German performers, with no radio play, no MTV exposure, no Amazon recommendations, no local performances came, against all odds, to achieve stardom in the Vietnamese immigrant population.

To start with, the term “new wave” as used in music means many different things to different people. History records that Sire records head Seymour Stein was the first to borrow the term from the 1950s and 60s film movements from Europe to describe the bands that played at CBGB like Blondie and the Talking Heads. Before long it seemingly became applied to any band formed after 1976 and was applied to such musically dissimilar artists as Spandau Ballet, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, the Thompson Twins and definitely anyone with asymmetrical hair or 80s fashions regardless of their sound. By the late 80s, I don't remember anyone really using it anymore. "Alternative" had pretty much replaced it as the term for anything underground or bizarre (at least in Columbia, Missouri, where I was still living.) Anyway, in the context of Vietnamese New Wave, four performers loom large that are pretty much completely unknown by every non-Vietnamese I’ve talked to (except Lance Rock, below).

My spies have told me that season 1 of Newhart is going to be released in the winter of 2008. Of all the shows based around Bob Newhart (the others being The Bob Newhart Show (1961-1972), The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978),
Bob (1992-1993) and the bizarrely-named George & Leo (1997)) Newhart (1982-1980) remains my favorite. Dick Loudon (Newhart) is a writer from New York City who buys an inn in a rural Vermont town populated by colorful locals who exist to exasperate Dick. I like Bob Newhart in all of his roles which are essentially the same- a mild-mannered, stammering straight man. A bit like Droopy Dog (minus Droopy's explosions of anger and muscle). As David Hyde Pierce observed, "The only difference between Bob Newhart on stage and Bob Newhart offstage – is that there is no stage."

Trivia- the last two times that I flew, Julia Duffy was on the plane.