Dean Christakos« Amusing Moment in the Annals of Comics | Main | Stuff You Can't Make Up »
August 7, 2005
45s that Time Forgot
In an earlier entry, I claimed that I would start recording a few select obscure 45s in my collection. So, today, we begin with... "singles that time forgot"-- our first entry being Spacemaid's "Do you Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio"
(apologies: due to recording problems, there is a slight buzz on this mp3)
This took a while for me to track down, because I was intrigued... I was in a phase where I was looking for a lot of covers by punk bands of songs I liked, and here I discovered covers of punk songs by other bands (of which there are many good examples, including this very song by Kiss, on the We're a Happy Family Ramones tribute album), and the song was played by a female-fronted band, so there were two gimicks which immediately appealed to me. Then there's the pink vinyl-- I'm a sucker for the "color vinyl" gimick. So it would seem all good, but to give you an idea about how utterly forgetful this single is, it has become a "45 that time forgot" despite having been released only in 1996.
For some background, Spacemaid was an early 90s grunge band who went the pop-route. They have an album "Supercool" which you can still get as an import on which this song appears. Apparently in 1997, they had a top 20 single, "Baby Come On." Spacemaid was never heard from again.
Somehow, they got Joey Ramone to do a voice introduction, intoning "Hey kids, do you remember rock and roll radio?" at the start of the song (maybe he figured it would be great to give some aspiring rockers a hand), and it goes downhill from there. First, they decided to play with the original lyrics, which at first might be interesting, I thought, except that it gets botched. The first set of lines "Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go" gets replaced with "I hear rock'n'roll radio, let's go" which is irritating not just because the "I hear" part is implied in the original, and thus redundant, but also because the line is (as in the original) repeated 4 times, compounding the irritation. Also, as you might remember, the original single came out in 1979, and the original lyrics contain the lines "It's the end, the end of the 70's / It's the end, the end of the century," and I wondered how Spacemaid would handle these lines, seeing as how it came out in 1996, which was not only no longer the 70's, but also much closer to the end of the century. What did we end up with? The anticlimactic cop-out of "It's the end, the end of the century / It's the end, the end of the century." Yes, the band just decided to repeat the same line twice.
Finally, the cover itself adds nothing. There's nothing interesting here. At least the Kiss cover of the song is surprising. Spacemaid, by contrast, "plays it straight" when doing this cover, and I found no compelling reason to listen to this version as opposed to the original.
Wait... I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Dean, what about the B Side? Couldn't this single just have been a 'loss leader' to suck people in and get them exposed to Spacemaid's original work?" Well, it turns out that both sides of the single are the same. There is no "B-Side."
It's an interesting looking 45 with an intriguing premise, but all that hunting around for it resulted only in snark fodder.
Posted by Dean at August 7, 2005 2:10 PM
Comments
[edited]
Seems like you were disapointed, but it seems that Joey was'nt. The parent company of Spacemaid's record company had something to do with European ditribution for The ramones. When Joey heard the track he got intouch with our record company (Big Star) and asked if he could sing on it. So thats how we all came together.
Posted by: chris black at October 4, 2005 10:51 AM