Janis & Wings & Freddie & Music For The Heat Dome

 Yeah, no pleasuredome here, but Pitchfork makes a case for Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome. I have to say that "Relax" retains its power, even if you are not gay. It is infectious - high energy that actually could be glee.

Frankie arrived in a splash of scandal, pressurizing dancefloors with euphoric club mixes. With “The Power of Love,” they also insisted that sexual and spiritual ecstasies need not be mutually exclusive. Far from it—they feed each other. Slipping a fist into your beloved could be a more fervent act of love than slipping on a ring before God. Instances of mind-wiping abandon crystallize into the highest devotion: love unbound by time or space. Pleasure, from music or sex or both, didn’t trivialize true feeling. It bored a hole into the heart of it.

 

Pitchfork also explained what is Wing's One Hand Clapping. It has been turning up on YouTube. 

Riding high on the runaway success of 1973’s Band on the Run, McCartney and Wings set up shop in Abbey Road Studios for four days in August 1974 and let filmmaker David Litchfield document their every move as they whipped through a sprawling setlist of recent hits, upcoming singles, B-sides, neglected album cuts, off-the-cuff medleys, instrumental jams, songs that wouldn’t be officially released until the following decade, ’50s rockabilly covers, and even a few Fab Four favorites. The result was a documentary called One Hand Clapping, whose overriding concept wasn’t so much “get back” as “get born”—an opportunity to show skeptics that Wings weren’t merely McCartney’s appendages, but a blossoming group fueled by the same sort of collaborative camaraderie and derring-do that his previous band possessed a decade prior. Alas, like the 1969 project, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and it’s taken five decades for a definitive document of the moment to see the light.

Even if I think John Lennon is to be taken more seriously, and that Ringo is the one I would most like to hang out, and must confess George has surprised me, I have always listened to McCartney. I think I bought only one record back in the day, but I liked Wings. That the so-called classic rock stations play little of the band is one of my many complaints against that format. I think this may explain to me why McCartney attracts me, even as a guilty pleasure.

For all the charming moments contained within, you can understand why McCartney opted to scrap One Hand Clapping back in the day: It showcased an already outdated iteration of the group, and its loose, anything-goes spirit must’ve felt at odds with Wings’ growing reputation as an arena-rock powerhouse in the mid ’70s. But its reappearance in 2024 aligns perfectly with the current Macca moment, when younger generations of fans have reclaimed him as the patron saint of oddball indie auteurism. The McCartney we hear on One Hand Clapping isn’t so much the pop perfectionist of classic-rock legend as the merry prankster less concerned with pleasing the masses than amusing himself. 

‘She knew where she wanted to go – and just kept going’: the real Janis Joplin, by those closest to her

For Dave Getz, Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company bandmate, the musicianship of Joplin is too often overlooked amid these contradictions. Take her elemental voice: something she tirelessly tended to. “She was very serious as a singer, and she did evolve as a singer,” the band’s drummer, now 84 and still working as a visual artist, emphasises on a call from California.

Over the years, we’ve tended to focus instead on Joplin’s psychology, her pain and rejection – something that is all too common when it comes to discussing female artists, Getz argues. She might not have been in control of some aspects of her personal life, but the same can’t be said for her approach to music. According to Elliot Mazer, who did the mixing for Joplin and Big Brother’s 1968 album Cheap Thrills: “For two weeks, only Janis, myself, and the engineer would stay from two in the afternoon until seven in the evening,” he told her biographer. “Anything about her just having a good time and not working was just bullshit.” Michael pays tribute to his parents when it comes to this work ethic: “They taught her how to take care of herself. We grew up in hurricane country, so we were always prepared.”

 sch 6/23