The Beastie Boys - "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" (spotlight)

Ok, so I always knew that the title of "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" was probably a nod to Motorhead's 1981 live LP "No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith".  Slayer's Kerry King providing the guitar solo that cements the metal/rap crossover.  But last night I noticed something in NSTB that has eluded me since 1986: stuck in between the 2nd and 3rd stanzas (at 1:33 in the video) is a one-off lyrical break not used elsewhere in the song:

Another plane - another train
Another bottle in the brain
Another girl - another fight
Another drive all night

How did I miss this?  One of my favorite Motorhead songs is their 1980 song "(We Are) The Road Crew" (from the classic "Ace of Spades" LP), where the lyrics are primarily a long list of "Another this, another that":

Another town, another place,
Another girl, another face,
Another truck, another race,
I'm eating junk, feeling bad,
Another night, I'm going mad,
My woman's leaving, I feel sad,
But I just love the life I lead,
Another beer is what I need,
Another gig my ears bleed,
We Are The Road Crew

I always knew the Beasties were clever, but this is excellent.  Why did it take me some 27 years to catch this?

The Beastie Boys: "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" (full lyrics)
Motorhead: "(We Are) The Road Crew" (studio version, full lyrics), 2005 live instrumental version

Pink Floyd - "Live At Pompeii" (concert)

I own well-worn copies on VHS and DVD, but at work I've recently been playing Youtube versions of Pink Floyd's 1972 concert film "Live at Pompeii" in the background.  I've already covered the similar but far more rare "An Hour With Pink Floyd (KQED)" from 1970.  The latter was never commercially released and is regularly purged from Youtube, while the former concert film is still commercially available and also easy to find on Youtube.  Go figure.

This is an historically important film, showing the group on the cusp of their 1973 watershed, "Dark Side of the Moon".  But I just recently discovered that the interstitial studio footage of the band composing songs for DSOTM was 1) faked, and 2) added for the 1974 re-release of the film.  It is this 1974 version that I have on VHS. 

Somewhat unfortunately, the 2003 DVD version is the "director's cut", and nicely demonstrates that more is not always better.  The songs are the same, but director Adrian Maben has added all kinds of unnecessary of additional space and planetary stock footage.  I get it, "Pink Floyd == Space Music".  But one of the strengths of the original film is Pompeii as a character, almost a fifth member of Pink Floyd.  The long tracking shots of the empty Amphitheatre, the mosaics, volcanic imagery, all help to establish the film's feel, and the director's cut undermines the beautiful (albeit sometimes modishly incorporated) imagery.  Fortunately the 1974 version is an option on the DVD; the 2003 version is to be avoided.

Enough complaining about directorial revisionism -- Maben does deserve credit for making a concert film without an audience (has this been done since?) as well as not attempting to hide the small army of staff supporting the AV gear.  Replacing the audience with staff and infrastructure and playing to an empty Amphitheatre somehow captures the desolation of Pompeii.  The songs are split between 1968 and 1971, with only "Controls" and "Careful" appearing on the "An Hour With Pink Floyd (KQED)".

1. "Intro Song"
2. "Echoes, Part 1" (from Meddle, 1971)
3. "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" (from Point Me At The Sky, B-side, 1968)
4. "A Saucerful of Secrets" (from A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968)
5. "One of These Days I'm Going to Cut You into Little Pieces" (from Meddle, 1971)
6. "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" (from A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968)
7. "Mademoiselle Nobs" (from Meddle, 1971)
8. "Echoes, Part 2" (from Meddle, 1971)

Rather than linking to individual songs, all versions uploaded to Youtube in their entirety:

Live At Pompeii: 1972 Version
Live At Pompeii: 1974 Version
Live At Popmeii: 2003 Version

Bonus Links:

From the DVD, an interview with Adrian Maben: part 1, part 2, part 3.

And finally, you can't mention "Live at Pompeii" and not mention the Beastie Boys "Gratitude", in which the entire video is a love letter to "Live at Pompeii".

The Beastie Boys - "The Mix-Up" (LP Review)

Remember listening to "Ill Communication" and "Check Your Head" and thinking "wow, those instrumental fuzzy/funk/fusion/faux-soundtrack jams sure are cool; they should do a whole LP of them"?  The Beastie Boys sort of delivered that with 1996's "The In Sound From Way Out" but that was a just a collection of instrumentals from IC and CYH with a couple of b-sides thrown in.  It wasn't until 2007 when The Beastie Boys finally gave us "The Mix-Up", an LP consisting of entirely of new instrumentals. 

To be honest, the wait was kind of a disappointment.  "The Mix-Up" is not bad, but somehow it is missing the magic hinted at in the earlier LPs.  Is it because the songs themselves aren't as inspired?  Did they wait too long to do this project -- would this have sounded more fresh in 1997 rather than 2007?  Or do the instrumentals simply sound better when juxtaposed with the Beastie's hip-hop (and occasionally punk) tracks?  I will say "The Mix-Up" is better than the similarly-themed 1995 "solo" LP "Mark's Keyboard Repair" from Money Mark, the unofficial fourth Beastie who also appears here.

I think the LP got a pass in many reviews when it came out because the Beasties were elder statesmen by then and we were happy to have anything new from them.  Here's a 2007 track-by-track review from someone who loved the LP, but I'm more inclined to agree with the Pitchfork review.  This isn't a bad LP, but it isn't essential either: just 12 mostly interchangeable background listening tracks that would not have generated much buzz if the name "Beastie Boys" wasn't on the LP cover.  On the other hand, I'm not sure they were trying to make a grand statement either: there is kind of a "just another funky weekend in the Beastie garage" feel to the LP.  With the death of MCA in 2012, presumably The Beastie Boys discography is complete (modulo some unreleased material that might eventually be released) so you have to enjoy what you have.

Standout tracks: none.

Skip 'em tracks: none.

Full LP: YouTube, Grooveshark

Final score: 6/10