Far Out There: Character Soundtracks - Avi

Okay, I mentioned in May’s blog that I’d had her soundtrack more or less worked out YEARS before any of the Little Rich Boys showed up, even though she’d had way less screen time than them. Obviously, this implies that the four boys have soundtracks as well, but that they’re still nowhere near as fine-tuned as the other characters. This is indeed the case, (since I wouldn’t bring it up otherwise) but out of the four, I think Avi’s the closest to being “right.” I’m still fiddling with it, to the point that I added a few songs right in the middle of typing this out, but the other three are still VERY formless and undergoing major revisions at my slightest whim. The fact that I’ve got Avi’s MOSTLY locked down is enough for Little Boy Blue to go next.

So, what does Avi listen to? Well, he’s clearly one of the most sassy, exuberant, preening, well-choreographed, domineering, flamboyant, and LOUD characters in all of Far Out There, so obviously his favorite is… well, actually, from the description I just gave, the ACTUAL most obvious choice would be a collection of Broadway showtunes. However, I love myself too much to ever force that nails-on-chalkboard misery into my own brain, so I won’t be making a playlist full of THAT. The second most fabulous choice, then, is Glam Rock.

Right way, I need to explain to anyone unaware that I am NOT talking about 80s Hair Metal here, although crazy hair and makeup are definitely involved. I’m talking about SEVENTIES Glam Rock… and I also have to immediately specify the difference between Glam and Glitter Rock. Glitter is the bubblegummy proto-punk that the especially persistent of you might remember from Tax’s soundtrack way back when; stuff like Sweet or Slade. While “real” Glam does borrow a certain amount of intentional crudeness and swagger from Glitter’s foundational recipe, it removes most of the intentional disposable-ity and sprinkles on some HEAPING HELPINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANT PRETENTIOUSNESS. This is the sound of David Bowie at the coked-up heights of Ziggy Stardust lunacy, somehow managing to be arty theatricality and artless gutter trash at the same time. Above all else, it’s music that shrilly shrieks out “EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME!” and I can’t think of a better fit for Avi.

After the way I name-dropped him earlier, there’s no prize for guessing that David Bowie shows up a few times on Avi’s soundtrack, though you might be surprised to find that only one of the three songs present is actually from Ziggy Stardust, and it’s not the title track. They do serve as nice introductions to the three strands of Glam Rock intertwined throughout Avi’s soundtrack: the theatrical/artsy weirdness, the big almost-but-not-quite heavy metal, and the lean punchy Rolling Stones-esque rock. That last group is nicely represented by Bowie’s one Ziggy track here, “Suffragette City.” For a song written to be sung by a spaceman dressed in sequins with Muppet hair, “Sufferagette City” has all the cocksure strut of a song to start bar fights to. That punchy confidence, or at least the illusion thereof, is a bit part of why I think Avi would love this stuff, even beyond the audacious outfits.

Continuing with that thin, slashing guitar riffing sound is the whole playlist’s kickoff track: “Billy Mars” by Vodka Collins, which also fulfills my One Japanese Band Per Soundtrack quota. You probably wouldn’t have guessed that at first, as “Billy Mars” was both written and sung by the very caucasian Alan Merrill. However, before forming The Arrows and recording the pre-Joan Jett version of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Merrill had a career as Token Gaijin Performer in Japan, eventually forming Vodka Collins with members of groups like The Tempters and The Spiders. Legend has it that the band was one of Bowie’s inspirations for Ziggy Stardust, and seeing as how “Billy Mars” is all about a sleazy androgynous rock star, I can understand where people get that.

And speaking of Bowie’s inspirations, we also have a track by Lou Reed. No, nothing off of Transformer or Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, that’d be too easy. Instead, Reed is represented by a song that, to my knowledge, has yet to be officially released anywhere: “My Name Is Mok” from Rock & Rule. While obviously a Villain Song, I think Avi either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care about the weirdness of liking the blatantly self-aggrandizing lyrics. That, and it’s just a really awesome rock song with a fantastic beat. And speaking of fantastic beats, we’ve also got a “Sweet Sweet Heart” by Despair, who really really REALLY wanted to be Lou Reed before changing their minds and name and becoming early punk pioneers The Vibrators. “Sweet Sweet Heart” would be re-recorded by The Vibrators, but I think the blatant Reed imitation of the original is way better, and definitely suits Avi’s try-hard personality in a more meta sense.

And speaking of trying hard… wait, no, I’ve used that segue too much already, and that’s Not the part I should lead with on this next one. The next song is “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” by Elton John. Generations of post-Lion King would scoff ay the notion of Elton John being present on the same list as the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie… because that’s totally ridiculous. But “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” is a bit of a ridiculous thing for the guy who wrote “Your Song” to record in the first place. A trashy, high-energy ode to getting drunk and smashing up some dive bar, “Saturday Night” tries so dang hard to sound tough and streetwise that it comes out the other side again leaving anything remotely resembling reality far behind. And again, Avi tries so hard to make himself the center of attention that this bespectacled dweeb trying to pass himself off as a brutish brawler would probably evoke a stranger sense of connection than Avi would care to admit.

Now, I’ll just acknowledge right now that the “groups” I’ve split this soundtrack into are a bit arbitrary, and in a number of cases it’s more about attitude than strict musical structure. That said, now we’re into the “artsy/theatrical” side of Glam Rock… he said, as if there’s a non-theatrical from of Glam Rock; but you know what I mean. Our second David Bowie track is “Panic in Detroit” off of Aladdin Sane, which at its base is just a Soul melody set to a Bo Diddly beat, but gets WAY weirder in the details. Between the apocalyptic lyrics, thin arrangements, and FREAKY gobs and gobs of overdubs, the whole things turns into a downright creepy bit of performance art. With a single exception that’ll come up shortly, “Panic In Detroit” is the darkest song on Avi’s soundtrack, and could arguably be a bit too much for the kid, but we’ve seen that Avi is one of the lesser fraidicats of the group, so I think he could get past it to bask in Bowie’s flamboyant audaciousness.

And speaking of THAT (aww dang it, I did it again), we have “Good Times” by Jobriath. Something of a footnote these days, Jobriath really REALLY wanted to be the American David Bowie, but really didn't have the pipes or the material to pull it off. “Good Times” is a bit like the happier reprise of “Panic in Detroit;” none of the apocalyptic eeriness, but all of the coked-up bizarro world white boy R&B. Honestly, it sounds as much like the sort of thing of Montreal would have done in Kevin Barnes’ most Prince-worshiping moods as anything Bowie-related. But every one of those names means “theatrical” in one form or another, so the song definitely belongs here.

Turning down the more explicitly artsy side of theatrical art, we have “Violin” by Kate Bush. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I only learned this song even existed because somebody used it in a My Little Pony music video, thanks to it sounding a lot like Rarity. That’s not embarrassing because I’m ashamed of my horrifying Brony past or anything, but because anybody who claims to like peak-era David Bowie & all this theatrical stuff has no excuse to know as little about Kate Bush as I do. Rock and Roll really is an unfair boys-only club. “Violin” is much more of a hard rock song than a lot of Bush’s better known tracks, but that just makes it fit all the better of a fit for this playlist. And somehow, it just feels like that a kid like Avi would like a rock song that involves indignantly shouting “WHAT THE DEVIL?”

As long as we’re being all artsy-fartsy, let’s talk about “Baby’s On Fire” by Brian Eno, easily the creepiest song on this soundtrack. Much like “Panic In Detroit,” the melody at the heart of the whole thing is perfectly conventional, bordering on some 50’s novelty tune. But WOW do the layers of shrieking sound effects and Eno’s crazy person delivery make this sound like the opening number to a stage show where somebody actually gets killed for real at the end. To get away from the creepiness but retaining both the showiness and also Brian Eno, we have Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain.” Once again, we have a song here that, at its core, is just a basic four on the floor rock song. A different arrangement could easily have dropped “Virginia Plain” up with the T. Rex-style stompers we started with. Instead, it goes full-on arthouse performance piece thanks to Brian Eno’s wacky layers of sound effects and Brian Ferry singing like a space alien attempting to impersonate a human with nothing but bad ‘50s lounge singers as source material. That mental image of trying hard over a fundamental misunderstanding alone just screams “Avi” to me.

It also provides me with a nice segue to the other side of this whole “theatrical” section, the full unabashed camp. I’ll tell you right now that I was VERY close to including “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show here, and while it ultimately seemed a little too obvious, that 70s-version-of-the-50s nostalgia still comes through on several of the campier tracks here. They’ve got nothing on 10cc’s “Rubber Bullets” though, even if 10cc are another really odd choice for a Glam Rock soundtrack (another of their songs ”I’m Not In Love” was just on Claire’s slick & smooth, Steely Dan playlist). The thin, shrieking guitar distortion throughout makes the song a natural fit with the Glam-ier tracks here, and 10cc’s musical satire made quite a few references to the 50s, or in this case Doo Wop as filtered through The Beach Boys, which puts them all the more in line with that Rocky Horror showtune feel.

Speaking of showtunes, let’s have another slightly odd artist to show up in this context; The Kinks. Ray Davies wrote a whole mess of either full-on musicals or at least soundtracks TO musicals in the 70s, many of which aren’t remembered all that fondly. For the most part, I kind of agree (I’m not even a big fan of Arthur, one of the officially designated “good ones”) but I do have a real soft spot for Schoolboys in Disgrace, which just so happens to be their transition OUT of that concept album period and back to plain old rock songs. Ironically, the track off Schoolboys in Disgrace that pops up on Avi’s soundtrack is one of the ones that still hearkens back to the big production number trend: “The First Time We Fall In Love.” A full on ‘50s parody, the first half of “The First Time We Fall In Love” starts off as a 3/4 ballad, with Ray Davies doing a deliberately goofy low croon that would make even Brian Ferry tell him to knock it off. Halfway through, the lyrics switch from saccharine pop romanticism to a more cynical look at love, with the music following suit into a faster 4/4 arrangement that’s fairly punk-ish, yet retains the doo woop chorus even at that new pace. The whole thing is so exhaustingly energetic and over-produced that I wear you can actually HEAR the jazz hands by the end of it. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of high-powered showboating Avi would appreciate.

And now we have the final batch of my ill-conceived attempt to break Avi’s soundtrack into group: the Heavy Metal tracks. Too hard hitting to fit in with the campy stuff, but too big and elaborate to fit in with the gritty, streetwise stuff; this is the dawn of what would eventually come to be known as Arena Rock, but still with that thin guitar fuzz and flamboyant aesthetic that is unmistakably Glam. Obviously, our third and final Bowie song sets the template for this last bit, “The Width Of A Circle” off of the often over-looked The Man Who Sold The World. That whole album manages to sound almost exactly like Ziggy Stardust while simultaneously sounding almost completely different, with bid ol’ Led Zeppelin jams and Prog Rock complexity where Ziggy’s campy dance hall aspects would later go. I can see why it wasn’t as successful as Bowie’s subsequent few albums, as good a guitar player as Mick Ronson was, I don’t think The Spiders From Mars were ever really cut out for the kind of raw, jam-heavy music attempted here. Still, when Bowie could provide a song structure that was strong enough for them to work within, the results could be pretty great, and “The Width Of A Circle” is REALLY great. Half Black Sabbath but in a major key, half Uriah Heep shuffle, and with big Wagnerian riff throughout, this is an EPIC song. And I don’t just mean the fact that it’s over eight minutes, either.

But if you’re talking about “big” and “epic,” you can’t not talk about Queen, and we’ve got one of the Queen songs that just about everybody everywhere knows… sort of. Queen’s entry on Avi’s soundtrack is “We Will Rock You (Fast)” and that parenthetical note makes all the difference. We’ve all head the “stomp stomp CLAP stomp stomp CLAP” version of “We Will Rock You,” but despite what decades of sporting events would have you believe, Queen quickly learned that it could be an acoustical nightmare to perform properly. Thus, they also worked out a full band rock version that removed the crowd percussion entirely, one that was live oddity for decades until a BBC studio version was official released a few years ago. Now, make no mistake, the “stomp stomp CLAP” version is a million times better and more iconic, but I do kind of like the “Fast” version better. It’s just another extra-fast classic rock song, somewhere in between Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” and Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” but I like both those songs too, so this version totally works for me. What’s more, this arrangement actually has the band harmonizing rather than just chanting in unison, which I’m always a fan of. And finally, that extra bit of slashing guitar velocity gives the “We Will Rock You (Fast)” an extra dollop of sass on top of all the strutting and posturing; and if there’s one thing Avi likes, it’s being sassy.

And oh man, if you want a song with sass, I give you “Heavy Metal Kids” by Todd Rundgren. The title honestly might give you a false impression of what to expect on this one, as the sound in general is closer to what we’d classify as old school hard rock than “Metal,” even by the looser, Glammier standards we’re using here. Between the fat, rubbery bass, big up-front organ and echo all over everything, “Heavy Metal Kids” would slip right into a classic rock playlist between Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” and Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies.” It sounds like a rock band parody that’d be written for The Muppet Show, but in a good way. Also, the lyrics, describing the titular Heavy Metal Kid, sound more like what would become the stereotypical PUNK than what we now think of as a metalhead. Either way, a song about the inner thoughts of a disaffected teenager written by a guy rapidly approaching thirty is kind of funny, but Rundgren seems to be pushing the silliness of it on purpose. I don’t think many people whole write about wanting to be reincarnated as an M4 Sherman tank and not have their tongues at least slightly in their cheek. Well, Avi might. Again, along with the general shared aesthetics of showy theatrics and really compressed guitars, Avi would subconsciously identify with any song that’s trying waaay too hard.

And finally, we follow up “Heavy Metal Kids” with the final track on both this blog and Avi’s soundtrack as a whole: “Rock‘n Roll Man” by… Heavy Metal Kids. No, there’s absolutely no relation. As far as I know, both the band and the song are named after a William S Burroughs reference. And yes, I TOTALLY put the two next to each other on purpose, how could I turn that down? But it’s not all silly buggery with the names, “Rock’n Roll Man” is also a really great way to close any setlist. The verses are yet another stomping, high speed Glam rocker, with all the usual walls of fuzz guitars and strangled vocals, but it’s the chorus where “Rock’n Roll Man” attains true showstopper status. Stepping back to half tempo and adding some extra layers of vocal harmonies, the chorus is nothing short of a hymn to the transcendent glory of Rock and Roll itself. Half lighters-in-the-air power ballad, half gospel choir, this is what would happen if somebody produced a Broadway musical adaptation of a KISS concert. It’s a crime that “Rock’n Roll Man” wasn’t featured on the Almost Famous soundtrack, because it’s exactly the sort of song to have playing in the background when you’re standing on a roof, stoned out of your gourd, screaming “I AM A GOLDEN GOD!” That is to say, it’s a song a demands attention, and if we’ve established nothing else here, it’s that Avi is a kid of ravenously craves attention.

(As far as these playlists go, Avi’s wasn’t all that hard to put together, but I DID make it really frustrating for myself. With Glam Rock being… what it is, a playlist of videos consisting entirely of still shots of album covers seemed like a real waste. This is one of those genres where the visual is just as important as the audio, so I really tried to find as many videos with live performance footage as I could, provided that the audio was still reasonably close to the studio recording. As this list is full of British artists from the 70s, I thought that clips of them lip-syncing on TV shows wouldn’t be too hard to find… and boy was I wrong. I guess I was a bit spoiled by all the bubblegum Glitter bands on Tax’s soundtrack, because I found VERY few usable performance clips here. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious. No mainstream pop music show was going to have David Bowie mime all eight minutes of “The With Of A Circle” after all. But still, some bits were especially aggravating. Namely, I found a very high quality clip of Kate Bush doing “Violin” that would have been perfect to use… except, in one of the most baffling decisions I’ve ever seen, the clip COMPLETELY REMOVED THE VIOLIN TRACK. Aside from the obvious issue of that LITERALLY BEING THE NAME OF THE SONG, it’s also the song’s central riff, rendering the whole thing empty and incomplete-sounding. I have NO idea what genius made that mixing decision but it pretty much ruined the video for me. Speaking of ruining things, I also had a heck of a time finding a usable clip of 10cc performing “Rubber Bullets” on Top of The Pops. There’s, like, two dozen postings of the video, but nearly all of them cut close to two minutes out of the song. Even the “long” version I eventually found leaves out the final solo. For shame. Oh, and while we’re talking about Top of the Pops, I kind of cheated a bit with the video of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain.” By TOTP standards, the clip is unexpectedly live, with some on-site instruments and Brian Ferry’s live vocals over the pre-recorded backing track. Nothing’s really missing from the studio version, but it is noticeably different, so I wanted to make notice of it. I should also acknowledge that the version of “My Name Is Mok” as featured in Rock & Rule isn’t the “whole” song; the unreleased master copy has twice as many verses as the one I used here. But that’s just the thing, the “full” version has never been officially released, and the leaked copies that do exist sound like crap. And, quite frankly, I think the movie version has all the good bits, so I don’t feel bad about only using it. Continuing with the theme of leaving out bad bits, I think the fan posting of Todd Rundgren’s “Heavy Metal Kids” is actually better than the official one, as the album version has a few second of ear-shattering tape rewinding before the song actually starts. Be glad you’ve been spared that needless noise. Finally, I must confess that I WAS defeated in my attempts to find an unrestricted version of a song again. “Good Times” by Jobriath just doesn’t seem to exist on YouTube outside of the official YouTube Music posting, so anyone trying to listen to this playlist from… *checks list of blocked countries* Greenland or The Netherlands or …Svalbard and Jan Mayen? I tell ya, half the time invested in making these YouTube playlists is actually just me looking up these little territories I’ve never heard of before. So many rabbit holes to fall down. But yeah, that one is block in some regions, though not as many as I would have feared. It seems like places like Australia, Russia, and Japan are turning up on the restricted list less and less, at least on the stuff I’ve been checking. That’s nice. Oh, and just because I couldn’t find anyplace else to mention it, searching for YouTube clips is the only reason I now know that The Who did a cover of “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting,” and WOW does that song make a lot more sense coming out Roger Daltry than it does Elton John.)

Avi's YouTube Playlist