The Needle Drops Strike Back! Plus, Glass-Beagle and The Easybeats

"We're (still) getting too old for this sh*t."

Photo by David Miller for Glass-Beagle (IG: @madlabphoto)

It’s OG Brian minding the store again. Seems like I’m the one who has a lot of time on his hands lately. I won’t get into the reasons why, but you can probably figure it out by reading the news (is that still a thing?).

Anyway, I’ll keep the intro brief because we’ve got a lot to get to, there’s no real overarching theme this time out, and the format is a bit different. I discuss a somewhat new EP from an up-and-coming Chicago indie rock band. I revisit a flawed yet interesting ‘60s garage pop-rock album while discussing my entry into the world of vinyl. And I premiere the long-awaited sequel to our 2023 feature on movie needle drops, inspired in part by the best revolution-themed film of the year.

Enjoy this bit of music writing potpourri. And viva la revolución!

New Album (actually, EP): Early Riser by Glass-Beagle. Where do I begin? No, seriously. I don’t have a lot to work with here. So where do I begin?

How about I start with the basics? Glass-Beagle are a band from Chicago. A new band. Really new. Not like “been playing together for two months” new. But still new. They released their first EP, Spring Sword Chatter, in 2024. Their latest EP, Early Riser, came out in May of this year.

Most importantly, they’re a really good band. One worth watching as their audience grows.

Glass-Beagle play a mix of rock, country, folk, and power pop. Yes, a combination like that is catnip for me. No, I haven’t completely discounted the possibility that they and their sound were created in a lab solely for my enjoyment (and yeah, I realize that a quip like this may land differently given that we now live in a world that features AI bands and pop singers).

The six tracks on Early Riser are a blast. Opener “Killed by Candle Canoeing” emphasizes the power pop side of the band with just the right amount of lo-fi fuzz, mixing in harmonic ‘70s-style vocals. The title track amps up the band’s country influences, from the acoustic rhythm guitar to the pedal steel twang to the opening lyrics (“Big rig driver, it’s not your fault / For coming up short when it all goes wrong”). “Bushed” combines introspective lyrics (“No one should ever have to walk alone”) with an upbeat tune that sounds reminiscent of early Jayhawks.

Glass-Beagle are perhaps their most offbeat on Early Riser with “Train Song.” Steven Hyden gave their music the requisite comparison to Wilco, and I’d argue that “Train Song” is the best example of their music representing a bridge from Being There to Summerteeth. “Large Star” appropriately shows the band’s #1 Record/Radio City influences, so much that I genuinely hope that the song’s title is a knowing, tongue-in-cheek nod. Finally, “2009 Toyota Sienna” is a rocking ode to good times in a minivan over Isolation Drills-era GBV guitars (“What a time it was / What a day it was / With you and I climbing to the sky / In our 2009 Toyota Sienna”).

The cool thing about discovering a band like Glass-Beagle at this stage is that, based on the quality of what they’ve done so far, their future could go in any number of directions. Like many other acts, they could be short-lived but well-loved in their time, becoming prime “remember some guys” fodder down the line in a good way. They could become fully enmeshed into the Chicago indie scene, becoming developing a steady devoted following and becoming Midwestern indie rock icons. Or they could keep ascending via online support and word of mouth until, through the confluence of skill, luck and timing, they become the next indie rock breakthrough a la Tame Impala or Geese, the latest mass obsession.

A side note to Geese fans. I tried. I really, really, REALLY tried. I just can’t get into them. You know the concept of a punchable face? To me, Cameron Winter’s voice is what a punchable face sounds like (except Jesse Watters – his punchable face sounds exactly like Jesse Watters). So I’ll stay on the sidelines while you have your moment, Geese fans. And I’ll happily continue to stay out of the discourse when they release their version of The Slow Rush a few years from now.

Anyway, check out Glass-Beagle’s Early Riser and see how high they can climb, with or without their Toyota Sienna. (Brian)

Album being rediscovered (at least 10 years old): Vigil by The Easybeats. About a year ago I finally took the plunge and bought a new turntable. For a long time, I had multiple reasons for refraining from doing so. For example, space and logistics. Our house isn’t that big, and to maximize both space and enjoyment, the turntable would need to be in one room while the speaker(s) would need to be in another. Also while I’m no audiophile, I was skeptical about combining vinyl with wireless speakers. Would listening to records over Bluetooth make the entire endeavor worth it, or would the experience be just a more cumbersome version of playing music via a streaming service? And of course, another reason was money. I wasn’t planning to go high-end for the initial outlay for equipment, but I was aware of how inflated the vinyl market was and knew once I was in, I would be all in.

After doing some research and getting recommendations from friends, I solved most of the early concerns with a solid mid-level Bluetooth turntable and quality bookshelf speaker. And yes, even my unsophisticated ear can hear the difference between streaming music and the LPs via Bluetooth – the crackling of the record between songs, the uncompressed sound. As for the cost of buying records, well, I learned a few things over the past year, both from my own purchases and from talking to a few record store owners.

For one thing, I learned that buying classic hip hop albums is a dicey proposition. There are very few quality used records for sale, and the reissues are way overpriced (I recently saw a reissue of Liquid Swords for $45). I was, however, able to get a good price on Illmatic and once splurged on a reissue of The Low End Theory. I learned that reissues of some of my favorite ‘90s indie bands – Pavement, Guided by Voices, Silver Jews, Superchunk, anything Dischord – are among the more reasonably priced, and some enjoyable surprises can be found in the used soundtracks section (one of my favorite listens both aesthetically and musically has been the soundtrack to The Harder They Come).

I also learned that, when it comes to the value of records, I know nothing. When my parents recently downsized and moved into an apartment, I was given my father’s record collection and it contained some true gems – original pressings of Exile on Main St., Abbey Road, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Pearl, Pendulum. Also a few that I knew I would rarely, if ever, listen to but would be interesting to have, most notably Stephen Stills’ 1970 self-titled album (the album cover that has him playing acoustic guitar in the snow next to a toy giraffe, with a back cover showing him riding a horse wearing… I guess a Los Angeles Rams jersey?). Anyway, during one record-buying trip, I saw a section of the store called “Rare Used – Min. $50.” The most prominent record on display? Yup, that 1970 Stephen Stills album. Again, I know nothing.

I developed a few rules about buying used records. Obviously one is price-related. I don’t employ a hard cap. It’s more like the definition of obscenity – if it’s too expensive, I know it when I see it. I try to lean toward used albums from the pre-CD era (speaking of which, if anyone has a recommendation for a Bluetooth CD player that doesn’t look like an updated Discman, a full-on bookshelf system, or an overqualified alarm clock, please let me know; I have boxes of CDs dying to be played). And I’m not wedded to finding records just from my favorite artists. If I find album that looks like it would be cool to own (again, I know it when I see it) I grab it. That last rule is how I came into possession of Vigil, the fifth studio album by The Easybeats.

Quick refresher on The Easybeats. Australian rock band formed in 1964. Their biggest hit was the 1966 single “Friday On My Mind” (later included on their fourth album, 1967’s Good Friday, which was then re-titled Friday On My Mind for North American release) a Beatles-esque classic largely considered the first Australian rock song to be an international smash, charting in both the U.S. and the U.K. The band released six albums between 1965 and 1970, but didn’t match the chart success of “Friday On My Mind” during their initial run. Kind of like The Wonders/Oneders, but real and Australian.

Vigil was released in 1968 and was re-titled Falling Off the Edge of the World for North American release (notice a pattern?). The only song to make a dent in pop culture was the opening track, “Good Times.” A Nuggets-style pop-rock party jam that is easily the best song on the album and squarely in the pantheon of “should have been” hit songs, “Good Times” was written by Easybeats guitarists Harry Vanda and George Young (the latter of whom was older brother to Angus and Malcolm, and both of whom went on to produce the first six AC/DC albums). There is also a story floating around the interwebs, likely apocryphal, about Paul McCartney hearing “Good Times” on BBC radio and having his mind blown.

(“Good Times” is also notable for spawning an all-time ‘80s cover from an all-time ‘80s movie featuring an all-time “what the actual fuck was wrong with that decade?” scene. As someone who was a pre-teen and teen in that decade, it wasn’t until later, with the benefit of hindsight, that I realized with dead solid certainty that the answer to that question was “cocaine.”)

As for the rest of Vigil, it’s easy to understand why it didn’t connect with critics or the public at the time. The Easybeats were at their best when playing upbeat garage pop-rock, and while Vigil contains some moments of that beyond “Good Times,” none of them reach the level of that track or “Friday On My Mind.” “See Saw” is a bouncy piano-based pub rocker. “Sha La La” starts off promising, with a bass line that likely influenced everyone from Joe Jackson to Jack White. It also has a great beat and cool Kingsmen-inspired guitar chords, but lead singer Stevie Wright’s goofy vocals and unnecessary Laugh-In keyboard and horn effects undermine the effort. Vigil contains three covers, two of which – The Chambers Brothers’ “I Can’t Stand It” and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” – are fun interpretations. The third, Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack,” was a lethargic swing and miss.

Too much of Vigil is dour. “Falling Off the Edge of the World” is depressingly downbeat. The song basically sounds like its title. Some bands can make that work, but that kind of sound was not in The Easybeats’ wheelhouse. Same for the dull “The Music Goes Round My Head” and “Hello, How Are You?” And “Fancy Seeing You Here” sounds like it was written five minutes before recording.

At least some of the other misfires on Vigil are interesting experiments that could have worked. “What in the World” is a promising R&B-influenced tune but the vocals don’t match the music. “Come in You’ll Get Pneumonia” starts off sounding like the band felt the need to make a grand orchestral statement. But remove the pretentious opening 30 seconds and you get a fun pop-rock jam ostensibly about a rain-soaked night in which the singer opens his door to find his ex standing there. The lyrics? Well, let’s say they made some choices (“Don’t make yourself at home here / You know you ain’t staying / And tell her where to reach you / Come and get you in the morning / And not to bring a preacher”). Hoo-boy, another round of edits might have helped.

“Land of Make Believe” is pleasantly absurd and a prelude to Spinal Tap (I’m sure The Easybeats also hoped to be the hottest sound across the Atlantic since Mrs. Murphy’s chowder). “We All Live Happily” is chaotic in a good way, but goes just a bit too far. There are at least three different songs in its four-minute runtime, and if they stuck to the track’s basic structure it could have been really good. Like a lot of bands, The Easybeats probably heard Sgt. Pepper and thought they could or should do something like that. Well, they couldn’t, they shouldn’t have, and they didn’t.

It’s clear that I don’t look back at Vigil as an overlooked gem. It has one song that is a true overlooked classic, a couple of good secondary tracks, and a couple of good covers. The rest is a mixed bag. So why do I think it’s cool that I own it? Some parts of that mixed bag contain good elements. Those elements can be skipped on a streaming service, but it’s harder to do with an LP. It’s an artifact of the late ‘60s, when smaller bands were still figuring out how to respond to what heavy hitters like The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones were doing.

Sure, The Easybeats could have written an entire album that sounded like “Good Times” or “See Saw.” But I’d argue that Vigil is more interesting as a modest failure than it would have been by sticking to the band’s formula. If that isn’t worth $11 from the used bin, I don’t know what is. (Brian)

Album (um, songs) being rediscovered (at least 10 years old… mostly): Two years ago, I wrote up a list of some personal favorite movie needle drops. As Hollywood has made clear over the years, every good idea needs to be either beaten into the ground or recycled into endless reboots, so I’m finally back with Needle Drops 2: The Sequel! That’s right, another partial, incomplete list of 10 great needle drops, with the only rules being no concert movies, and no overused songs like “Gimme Shelter” (I sort of break this second rule early on, but I have a really good reason).

I was inspired to reboot this idea after seeing the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another. The film has been (warning: don’t click links if you haven’t seen the movie and want to avoid spoilers) dominating pop culture conversation lately, a positive development for an art form that has experienced creative and commercial challenges, particularly over the past decade. Without getting too far into the movie’s politics (which I believe are more complex than most people have publicly acknowledged) and issues of representation in art (which, while I have opinions on this, for multiple reasons I do not believe I am the right person to opine about it) I thought the movie was terrific. As someone who is generally knowledgeable about movies but doesn’t see absolutely everything, One Battle After Another and Sinners were easily the two best movies I’ve seen this year.

Anyway, PTA is a master (pun intended) of the needle drop. He’s good at finding eclectic crate-digging tracks and obvious, on-the-nose songs that still manage to cause an emotional response rather than eye-rolls. So it’s no surprise that a song from this latest movie prompted me to revisit this idea. It’s a song we all know, one that fits into the latter category of PTA needle drops. And as I note below it’s been used prominently before (in a film I also cited on my first list, but for a different track) so it probably violates my “Gimme Shelter” rule. So feel free to criticize my inability to follow rules in the comments, or just suggest any songs that should have been included. But alas, we’re starting with…

(1) “American Girl” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (One Battle After Another / Fast Times at Ridgemont High): Let’s start with the obvious – this song kicks ass. And I’m going to be careful here, because I don’t want to spoil One Battle After Another for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. The song just barely makes the cut as a needle drop, with that familiar exhilarating guitar chord intro starting over the movie’s last minute or so, and then the rest of the song continuing into the end credits. But man, does it help tie up the movie in the end. For me, it helped to create feelings of hope, optimism, concern, doubt, and resignation all at once. Similar feelings can occur on, say, the first day of high school, like when Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy tried to navigate the halls of Ridgemont High for the first time while “American Girl” played over the chaos. Want further connective tissue? Sean Penn is in both films and his latest role couldn’t be further from Jeff Spicoli. PTA’s movie gets bonus music points for Jonny Greenwood’s score and for using Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (in a humorous way) as a key element throughout the film. Side note: “American Girl” was also used prominently in The Silence of the Lambs, but given what happened to this character later, I think we’ll just move on.

(2) “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by The Delfonics (Jackie Brown): Get cornered by a random film bro at a party and odds are good that he (yes, it’s always a “he”) might argue that JB is QT’s best work. I wouldn’t go that far, but Jackie Brown is a fucking fantastic movie. The scene in Jackie’s apartment where she introduces Max Cherry to The Delfonics is the moment when he falls for her. As do we, watching Pam Grier extoll the virtues of vinyl, run her fingers through her hair, and light a dart. Tarantino has long been known for matching disregarded or lesser known (to American audiences, anyway) actors to the exact right part. He’s equally skilled at identifying forgotten songs and linking them forever to specific scenes. As someone who was 25 and tuned into music discourse when Jackie Brown was released, I’m confident in saying no one under 50 was talking about The Delfonics at the time, but we certainly were after seeing it (much like how Stealers Wheel were culturally irrelevant before us normies caught up with Reservoir Dogs after multiple theater viewings of Pulp Fiction).

(3) “The Man In Me” by Bob Dylan (The Big Lebowski): Hey! A white guy in his 50s who likes Dylan and The Big Lebowski. Get as excited as I was when showing this movie to my oldest kids (who actually liked it). Seriously though, similar to The Delfonics, in 1990 Dylan was coming off his ‘80s run (which despite some recent appreciation I still maintain was fairly poor) and wasn’t really considered relevant to the moment, which is why this song – from 1970’s New Morning, a very good transitional album between the oddness of Self Portrait and the ‘70s run that started with Planet Waves – fit the film’s hallucination sequence. Dylan’s post-Time Out of Mind comeback included winning a best original song Oscar for “Things Have Changed” from the thoroughly underrated Wonder Boys.

(We’re already over 900 words and only 3 songs in. Time to speed it up.)

(4) “Lost at Birth” by Public Enemy (Pineapple Express): Peak propulsive PE soundtracking arguably the funniest part of the movie. Any scene with Danny McBride is gold. Another one that my college-age boys loved (notice a theme?). The trailer notably used M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” to great effect but it wasn’t in the film. Speaking of which…

(5) “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. (This is the End): Seth, Danny & Co. engage in several levels of meta self-parody here. The real actors righted a real wrong by putting the song in a real movie in which it soundtracks a fictional trailer for a fictional sequel to a real movie made by fictional versions of those real actors. Got it? The film isn’t as clever as that might sound but it’s funny as hell (pun intended) and also popular with the college-age boys. I could have gone with the scene from Slumdog Millionaire but that’s a little less fun. Speaking of less fun…

(6) “The Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles (Platoon): Soldiers finding a moment of joy and levity while experiencing hell. Pre-crazy Charlie Sheen’s character joins Willem Dafoe’s group of disaffected draftees, getting high and counting down the days until their respective tours end. Essentially choosing the angel over the devil. This was the scene I regretted not including on my original list.

(7) “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” by Talking Heads (Wall Street): Another from Oliver Stone. I’ve been told that, for Millenials, this is the Talking Heads song. And with over 358 million streams on Spotify (second only to “Psycho Killer”) it’s easy to believe. Me personally, I’ve always been more of a “Girlfriend is Better” or “Life During Wartime” guy. It’s still a great song, but maybe I’d hold it in higher esteem if, in my mind, I didn’t link it as much to Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah playing house in their tacky ‘80s Reaganite yuppie greed-fueled co-op as I did to the performance in Stop Making Sense (although David Byrne’s lamp-dancing is unforgettable).

(8) “Got Me Wrong” by Alice in Chains (Clerks): We’ve got a grunge band going acoustic, we’ve got Kevin Smith’s lo-fi debut film, we’ve got sarcastic Temple of Doom references, and we’ve got people dropping off and waiting to rent VHS tapes. Does it get any more 1994 than that? If I’m being completely honest, the song from Clerks that really stands out for me is Soul Asylum’s “Can’t Even Tell.” This was just my clever way to sneak in two songs from one of my favorite movies. I’m sure you didn’t appreciate my ruse.

(9) “Puerto Rico” by Eddie Palmieri & the Salsa Orchestra (Highest 2 Lowest): Closing out this list with a couple of more recent movies. The first is the latest from Spike Lee. Without giving anything away, a key action scene in the film occurs during New York’s Puerto Rico Day Parade, and it features a typically great performance from NYC Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri, who died at age 88 about 10 days before the movie premiered. A fitting tribute indeed, having Palmieri’s music score one of the most important scenes of the movie. I wasn’t able to find a YouTube clip, so you’ll have to settle for the soundtrack recording (plus, if I linked to the full scene, it really would spoil a lot from a movie released two months ago).

(10)“I Lied to You” by Miles Caton (Sinners): A polarizing scene in what was, as I said way back at the start, one of my two favorite films this year. Some loved this scene, others criticized it. Count me among the former. Miles Caton – a singer who learned to play guitar for this movie, his first acting role – plays Sammie/Preacher Boy, a blues prodigy whose performance of this song is able to “pierce the veil between life and death…conjuring spirits from the past and the future.” The idea being that Preacher Boy’s playing was so transcendent that it summoned the vampires. The blues are central to this story, and everything in the film either built up to or emanated from this scene. No significant spoilers here, but if you haven’t seen Sinners yet (it was released six months ago) don’t click the link, go find the biggest screen available, and watch the movie. (Brian)