MILBURN

“What Will You Do (When the Money Goes)?”

These Are the Facts

(Sheffield 2007)

These are the facts:

1. UK bands that really put the work into touring the USA gather crucial momentum that helps them survive the inevitable backlash from the UK media. Many go on to long and storied careers: Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones & U2 can start the list.
2. Back in the day, pretty much any UK rock band with a profile in the NME or Melody Maker was assured a US album release, just so long as they’d commit to six weeks of touring. The 80s were a particularly good time for this. Not everyone worked as hard as U2, but we got The Smiths, The Cure & The Jam over here because they agreed to show up.
3. That system started to break down in the late 90s. Few UK bands got that automatic release in the US, partly because American companies no longer thought a band that sold “only” 300,000 copies on the first album was worth the trouble.

Nowadays, there aren’t many commercial alternative radio stations in middle America and the kids won’t touch the kind of major label alt-rock that dominated the college radio charts back in the 80s. More and more rock bands on the UK charts never see a US release.

Which brings us to Milburn.

Milburn’s first two Mercury UK singles charted last year, but their album didn’t get a US release. No album release, no American tour.

Maybe Universal’s US companies heard Milburn’s Yorkshire accents and compared them to the Arctic Monkeys, whose first album hardly reached Maroon 5 heights over here.

Now Milburn has a new album and “What Will You Do?” is the first single.

I went to Sheffield in 2005 and produced their first Mercury single (watch the “Send in the Boys” video here), so I know the guys (Joe, Louis, Tom & Greeny) and how amazingly well they play.

“What Will You Do?” is deceptive; the melody sounds very English, like something John Barry would write for a James Bond theme, but Milburn hammers the track with a purposeful brutality few UK bands could pull off.

I don’t know which American radio format works for them; there’s a lyrical intelligence here that seems to rule out near-term rock or pop radio play. But put them on the road here and let them tour regularly for a couple of years and Milburn will deliver.

They’ve got the talent, they’ve already shown their commitment by touring endlessly since the day they signed to Mercury and they’re entertaining as hell when you meet them in person. This album will connect in Europe. If Universal’s paying attention, you’ll get a chance to hear it in America.

THE WILBURN BROTHERS, LORETTA LYNN & HAROLD MORRISON

“I’ll Fly Away”

(1960s)

PILGRIM JUBILEE SINGERS

“Testify”

1964

CHARLIE BURTON & THE CUTOUTS

“Breathe for Me, Presley”

Is That Charlie Burton…Or What?!?!

(Lincoln, NE 1982)

It doesn’t matter how many words Peter Guralnick or Greil Marcus write about Elvis, this song will always be the definitive account of what went down on August 16, 1977.

• Download: “Breathe for Me, Presley”

TAV FALCO - PANTHER BURNS

“Money Talks” & “Tina the Go-Go Queen”

Sugar Ditch Revisited EP

(Memphis 1985)

Tav Falco hopelessly blurs the line between conceptual artist and authentic bluesman. I honestly believes he doesn’t know the difference between “real” and “fake.”

Panther Burns was best known in the early ’80s as the band where Alex Chilton was hiding. Depending on your point of view, 1981’s Behind the Magnolia Curtain was either a brilliant deconstruction or completely disorganized. “LX” was a tiny, blurry photo on the album sleeve and, by 1984, he was rumored to be limiting personal appearances to a job either sweeping floors or doing the dishes at Jimmy’s in New Orleans.

Someone (read “me”) got the idea to invite Panther Burns to play the WHRB college radio benefit at the Rat in early 1984. Tav assured us that Alex was on board and would make the trip north for the show. This was to be Alex Chilton’s first Boston live appearance since….well, maybe since the Box Tops.

Tav arrives day of show with Jimmy Ripp in tow. This should have been an impressive addition to the Panther Burns. Jimmy was a world-class guitarist who was playing with Tom Verlaine and later earned some notoriety in Mick Jagger’s solo band. In fact, it was a disaster since the show had been advertised as “Tav Falco’s Panther Burns with ALEX CHILTON” with Alex’s name in enormous type in the Boston Phoenix.

Word got around and maybe a dozen people showed up for the gig. Crass, who booked the Rat, cut the guarantee in half and there was certainly no benefit cash for the radio station.

Tav was completely unfazed by all of this. I’ve always thought of him as the kind of nineteenth-century charlatan who would have performed miracles for the crowned heads of Europe. Everything he said would be a complete fabrication, but it wouldn’t matter as long as Tav convinced himself of whatever story he was selling that week.

We took Tav & Jimmy back to our dorms because they didn’t really have a place to stay. Through it all, Tav seemed to focus on the fact that he’d been booked by “Harvard,” as if that was institutional validation of his art project. If the average college radio station has only a marginal relationship with its school, multiply that by a million to understand how little WHRB had to do with Harvard University.

We did get a story about how Tav and Jim Dickinson broke into a Memphis studio (American?) and liberated sacred, unreleased Sir Mack Rice demos. Mack once had a hit with “Mustang Sally” but tales of his unreliability dwarfed anything Alex had yet inspired.

Tav promised that the songs were so great that they’d change the course of history.

The songs surfaced a year later on the Sugar Ditch Revisited EP, produced by James Luther Dickinson and featuring both Alex Chilton and the Memphis Horns.

Tav’s got only a passing acquaintance with the pocket and the amazing thing here is how the musicians adapt to his curious phrasing. It’s the Na-Na’s in “Tina the Go-Go Queen” that best explain it; Tav’s all over the place and his clumsiness manages to convey all the sweat and grease and diminished expectations that show up in all the best Memphis music.

It’s not very professional, but it’s very, very deep.

Mack Rice eventually recorded “Money Talks” on 2000’s This is What I Do, produced by Jon Tiven in a thoroughly polished and incredibly boring fashion.

• Download: “Money Talks”
• Download: “Tina the Go-Go Queen”

(New Rose Records ROSE 73)

JERRY LEE LEWIS

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Johnny Cash Tribute 2005

I received this package in today’s mail. Except it’s not really a package; it’s a glow stick shoved into a 1st Class Royal Mail prepaid letter envelope and mailed (awkwardly) from Manchester to Los Angeles. It’s a miracle that it arrived in one piece.

The glow stick is supposed to promote Tony Wilson’s In the City conference, coming up again this October.

What an outrageous and probably futile gesture, poorly executed (where are the padded mailers?) with absolutely no concern for what things actually cost. Yet it’s totally awesome and extremely punk rock.

That could be the epitaph for both Factory Records and the Haçienda night club. When word came that Tony Wilson had died this evening in Manchester, I thought today’s package could serve as an epitaph for him as well.

Tony wanted everyone to believe that Peter Saville’s original die-cut sleeve design for New Order’s “Blue Monday” 12″ was so expensive to produce that Factory actually lost money on each copy sold.

Whether it was true was irrelevant, the story made a point: art trumps commerce and business is just another venue for situationist spectacle. We should be so lucky that it were.

Here’s an interview from 1988:

THE EASYBEATS

“Something Wrong”

The longer version of this commercial doesn’t make their future look any better. I did remember that the song is by the Easybeats, a band that managed to be both the Beatles & the Stones for Australians.