Brookswords

Pearl Harbor and the Explosions

One of our first nights out on the town after the birth of my firstborn, my wife and I went to a club in Berkeley to see Pearl Harbor & the Explosions, a New Wave/Punk group that was hot at the time. They had a song out called 'Drivin' that was a local hit in the Bay Area. It was sort of a theme song for me at the time, since I did a lot of driving in my job.

We got great seats near the stage. The night soon turned strange. For some reason, Pearl Harbor -- who at one time went by the stage name Pearl E. Gates -- began looking at me as she sang. I was pretty surprised & mystified by this. At one point I even looked behind me, to see if maybe there was someone she knew behind me. There was no one there. Her focus on me only increased as the night wore on.

My wife was at first annoyed by this, and then increasingly irritated -- when she wasn't away from our table, calling home to see how the baby was doing. (She'd do this about every 20 minutes.) She kept looking at me, accusingly, as if I was inviting this. I'd shrug my shoulders in response to her angry glances -- to no avail.

We drove home in silence. I tried bringing it up a few days later, jokingly, but that would only make her lapse into silence again.

I saw my now ex-wife a few months back at my son's wedding. We enjoyed talking to one another at the reception, but I think it's a good thing I didn't mention Pearl Harbor.

Here's Pearl Harbor singing 'Drivin' -- apparently from a cable access show in 1979 -- and then you can see her perform 'Fujiyama Mama', backed by The Clash. 'Fujiyama Mama' was a 1950's Rockabilly song, by Wanda Jackson--who has been dubbed both the Queen of Rock as well as the First Lady of Rockabilly. There's the Queen, with none other than the King, on the right, at the birth of their careers. In the midst of the Disco nightmare of the late 1970's, I loved how the New Wave/Punk movement revived the Rockabilly sound, like when Sid Vicious revived Eddie Cochran's 'Somethin' Else'. The final clip is the original 'Fujiyama Mama', sung by that spitfire Wanda Jackson. She's still rocking her tail off -- she played here in LA only a few months ago.

Somethin' Else

Here's an audio clip of  Eddie Cochran doing 'Somethin' Else'.  This 1959 song resurfaced, as I said in my last post, in popularity in the 1970's as it became a popular song to cover by bands in the early years of Punk Rock.  (It figured prominently in both the film and the soundtrack of Sid & Nancy.)  "Somethin' Else' is also now the very appropriate title of the best collection of Eddie Cochran's music.