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.

Lynda Kay at Amoeba Records

Saw Alt-Country crooner Lynda Kay at Amoeba Records in Hollywood a couple days ago. She put on quite a show, wowing the crowd from the start when she walked onstage in a golden suit and under amazing hair--looking just as she does on the left. Kay was also tugging along a big ol' Gretsch--she's affiliated with that great ol' guitar company in a publicity campaign. Here's a clip from that show, followed by a clip of Kay singing a hot Rockabilly number, from a concert in another city. When she performed it at Amoeba, it brought the house down. Finally, there's her Gretsch video. She appears in very  different guises in these. At one moment, she's the reincarnation of Patsy Cline; at another, she's the still alive & well Wanda Jackson. But that's nothing--she used to perform an act where she changed costumes 8 times, as noted in this week's  LA Weekly--which chose her one of its "People of 2010", and to grace one if its 4 covers. The picture they used was a cropped black & white version of the picture above. (Where I pick up my Weekly, her cover wasn't the one that was in the bin, dang it!)