A post about Badfinger.

Having declared my hate for obvious, punny headlines and ledes, I’m gonna skip trying to come up with a clever title for this.

I wasn’t going to write anything about last night’s free concert featuring Badfinger at the Levitt Pavilion in Bethlehem. But I think now I will, if for no other reason than to help me remember it.

Some bullet points, then:

– Pretty good show; I’d give it a solid B-plus.

– Veteran Joey Molland and his new mates played the five big hits commonly associated with Badfinger*, as well as a bunch of deep cuts that weren’t insanely memorable but weren’t embarrassing either.

*In order of appearance, they were “Baby Blue” (they opened with it); “Come And Get It;” “Day After Day;” “Without You” and “No Matter What” (the main set closer).

– I’m fairly certain Molland didn’t sing lead on any of the band’s original big hits. (The late Pete Ham, who wrote most of them, also sang lead on most of them.)

Thankfully, Molland has a strong enough voice to do the job capably. Rarely if at all did I think, “Hey, that’s not the same guy.”

– As part of his between-song banter, Molland playfully gave someone in the audience the bird. The frontman of Badfinger giving someone the (bad) finger would have made a great photo; alas, I missed it.

– At another point, referencing the chain restaurant next door to Levitt Pavilion, Molland declared in his Liverpudlian accent: “We’re all goin’ to Pairkins later.”

I wondered if anyone in the audience decided to follow the band over there and buy them dinner, or pester them with questions about what George Harrison was really like.

My money’s on the guy I spotted wearing the “Badfinger 1990 World Tour” T-shirt. Heck, for that kind of long-term loyalty, I think maybe Molland and company should buy him a short stack.

– Molland handed some of the deep cuts over to keyboardist Steve Wozny and bass player Mark Healey to sing. Not sure if that was to save his voice, or to preserve the image of a collaborative band.

– On some of the songs sung by Healey, Molland sang backing vocals standing off to one side of the mic, not directly behind it.

That raised thoughts of his deceased bandmates more than any other part of the show. It looked for a moment like Molland was leaving space on the other side of the mic in case Tom Evans should decide to drop by.

(The truth, I’m sure, is less romantic. I’m guessing that maybe you sing backup vocals into the side of the mic because it won’t pick you up as strongly, and there’s less of a chance you’ll overpower the lead singer. Or, maybe Molland was trying to maintain eye contact with Healey. Those are  just guesses; I have certainly never been employed to sing.)

– They drew what I thought was a surprisingly good crowd, filling up the lawn.

I had sorta thought that only a few middle-aged, nerdy pop obsessives (my kind of people) would show up. Badfinger’s fame was relatively short-lived, after all, and this version of the band has only one original member.

But I guess there are still a lot of people who remember Badfinger’s hits fondly, or who dug the use of “Baby Blue” in the final episode of “Breaking Bad” and decided it was worth seeing the band behind the song.

This show was also part of a summer-long series of free concerts, and there may be people who turn out every Saturday night just to see what’s cracking. Which, now that I think of it, is not the worst idea in the world.

– “No Matter What” is a terrific song, and for some reason I felt particularly gladdened to hear it played by one of its original performers — more so than any of the other hits of the night.

Some shows have one or two songs that stand above the rest and remind you why you went. “No Matter What” was my got-what-I-came-for moment — which was convenient, as it was the last song of the main set, and thus allowed me to skip the encore.

(I overheard a little bit of the encore on my way out. Left to his own devices, Molland seems to prefer straight-ahead Chuck Berry-derived rock to crisp British-style pop, and this was more of the former. It might have been hot but, again, I’d got what I came for.)

– I also used the voice-memo function on my iPhone 4S to record about a minute’s worth of “No Matter What,” just because I was there and I could.

Without any frills — no external mic, no mic stand, just held at one’s waist — those things make surprisingly listenable live recordings. Not pro-quality, of course, but better and crisper than a lot of bootlegs I’ve heard in my time.

I’m not going to make a habit out of surreptitiously taping live shows; it doesn’t seem right.

But if I were a performing artist, I would hate the iPhone.

It’s already impossible to make a living selling studio recordings. Now, every single person in the crowd has the wherewithal to take the show home with them, and it’s virtually impossible to stop.

The ghosts of Saturday.

I finally got to go into Martin Tower today.

My three regular readers might remember Martin Tower from this November 2012 post, which is still one of the most popular things I’ve ever posted here.

Martin Tower is the tallest building in the Lehigh Valley. It was the headquarters of Bethlehem Steel Corp. from 1972 until sometime in the early 2000s, when the Steel went bankrupt and closed up shop.

For the most part, the property has been empty ever since. Nowadays it comes to life only two weeks each summer as a satellite parking lot for Musikfest, Bethlehem’s annual music festival.

The tower and its low-slung two-story annex sit locked and moldering, waiting for some economic-development equivalent of a prince’s kiss to bring them back to life — or, more likely, for a wrecker’s implosion to erase them.

The building isn’t open to the public. But the Lehigh Valley’s tourism organization talked the current owners into opening up the grounds and first floor today for an InstaMeet.

Apparently, an InstaMeet is a public gathering where people take pix and post them on Instagram, and everyone looks at each other’s pictures. I don’t use Instagram but I went anyway, armed with my Kodak point-and-shoot. (Kodak and the Steel have a few things in common, I think, so it seemed like an appropriate camera to use.)

Even in decay, Martin Tower retains some of the gravitas it once had as the headquarters of a major American corporation.

As I walked around, I couldn’t help but think of my own workplace — also a Fortune 500 company whose headquarters tower building is locally well-known.

My company’s doing OK right now, as far as I know. But the people who staffed Martin Tower probably felt that way too, once. In their welcoming first-floor entrance, I saw our welcoming first-floor entrance; in their empty conference room, I saw our full one.

I wished for a couple of minutes that I could truck everyone from my company over to Martin Tower.

We could all walk around the first floor for a while in silence, reflecting on how little it takes to get from where we are to where they are, and what we have to do to steer clear.

It would be a team-building exercise better than any ever cooked up by some jargon-spewing consultant.

(I’m even thinking of making one of my Martin Tower pictures the background on my work monitor, replacing this picture. An ever-present reminder to keep my eye on the ball wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.)

Speaking of pictures, you probably want to see those more than you want to read any more of my words.

So here’s what the aging, more-or-less-abandoned headquarters of a former Fortune 500 company looks like:

Not sure what was learned at the Learning Center. Boarded-up windows and overgrown funk are common around the annex.

These windows in the annex wish passers-by happy holidays year-round. Or at least they would if there were any passers-by.

“TO ENTER OR EGRESS BLDG. … STATE NAME, SYMBOL AND NUMBER.” God bless corporate America in all its pomposity.

Another view of the annex.

The trees on the heavily landscaped property are doing wonderfully in the absence of human companionship.

In the lobby.

To think the titans of industry once discussed their golf games, their wayward sons and their secretaries’ curves in this very space.

A foam cake sits waiting for gaiety.

A fair amount of space on the first floor was once given over to corporate libraries, apparently. The shelves are bare now.

In the library. Those are dead bugs. Loads and loads of ’em.

Also in the library. It’s safe to assume that’s asbestos.

Exterior graffiti, as seen from the interior.

Denuded trees at the end of one hallway. The sign on the doors says something like, “Doors must remain closed due to cold air draft from unheated annex.”

Turn around at the door that must stay closed, and this is what you see. The high ceilings and open wood give you some idea of the design flavor of the first floor.

A woman in the men’s room? The Steel bigwigs would have had a conniption over that. Alas, they don’t get a say any more. (The bathroom was totally dark; my flash revealed it to be boringly regular. Not a gilded tap or Italian-marble loo in sight.)

Some of my fellow explorers. The Steel’s old boys wouldn’t have appreciated guys in baseball caps leaning against their polished wood, either.

More of my fellow travelers. Note peeling ceiling-paint.

I don’t remember what I&SM stands for (guessing the S and M are “steel manufacturing?”) This is the January 1990 issue.

No decaying rodent carcasses, but I did find this former balloon. Forensic testing failed to reveal how long it had been dead.

Another library shot, with a ghost in the stacks.

The stopped clock behind the receptionist’s desk (which is still stocked with visitor passes and an old Gateway desktop computer, among other things.)

Outside the main entrance, a teenage girl was posing for a glamor shot atop the old Steel I-beam logo. Just another reminder that the things held sacred in times of success become only curiosities after failure.

There’s no “I” in Bethlehem Steel. There’s not much of anything else in Bethlehem Steel nowadays, either.

The Kubrickian monolith in full.

From the Valley: “The 4 Walls,” The 4 Walls.

Another in an occasional series of reviews of recent releases by Lehigh Valley performers.

I haven’t written many From the Valley posts lately. In part, that’s because I just haven’t crossed paths with much new music that floated my boat.

There’s loads of lo-fi punky folk, and grindcore and metalcore, and experimental noise. It’s not all bad, but I’ve been feeling lately like I’ve heard it before and didn’t have much new to say.

It took The 4 Walls to break me out of the four walls of writer’s block, with a swaggering five-song EP released online earlier this month.

The 4 Walls — they’re three guys from Bethlehem — play simple, chunky, rootsy punk with a bite.

Not punk as in hard, loud, fast blow-you-over stuff, but punk as in blues-tinged post-Stooges crunch that makes up in attitude what it lacks in speed.

Guitarist, pianist and vocalist John Sears has a voice that lands somewhere between Iggy Pop and Billy Idol, particularly on the low end. It’s pretty much the perfect instrument to deliver lyrics like, “Sex and drugs and rock and roll / I’ll be a dead man before it takes its toll.”

(I’m still trying to figure out if “Eat Me Alive”‘s lyrical couplet “If I had a dime for every time I ran out of gas / I’d have money for gas” is simple no-sweat tossed-off genius, or just stoopid. You could ask that question of a lot of great punk lyrics.)

The 4 Walls sing about the usual subjects — predatory women, paying dues, that kind of thing — over familiar grungy riffs. There’s also an instrumental, “Time Bomb,” that sounds like it’s still waiting for some words.

It appears that the band did the recording itself, and it sounds quite good for a self-production — nice and crisp.

I note that the band has shows in New York City and Philadelphia coming up, which suggests that it’s a little more serious than your average Lehigh Valley knockabouts.

And finally, I see that the band quotes Bon Scott on its Facebook page, which maybe also gives you some idea where its loyalties lie in terms of no-frills prowly rock n’ roll.

I could stand a little more variation in some of their songs, but by and large, The 4 Walls provide a nice rock n’ roll jolt. I suggest bolting down a couple cups of coffee (maybe a cigarette, too, if your tastes run that way) and checking them out. They make it just a little harder to go back to the basement folk-punk and grindcore.

The 4 Walls’ self-titled EP is available as a $5 download here.

From the Valley: Sunday Guts, “Wet Salvos.”

The latest in my occasional series of music reviews spotlighting releases by Lehigh Valley-based bands.

NOTE: The original version of this post repeatedly and egregiously misspelled Billy Kilgannon’s last name. It’s fixed now. My apologies for the error.

When last I crossed paths with Bethlehem-based pop band Sunday Guts, I was praising them for the catchy guitar-based pop of their Leave It Go EP, while also taking a few unsolicited and subjective digs at frontman Billy Kilgannon’s voice.

The band is back with a new EP that finds it going down a different stylistic avenue, one that I think fits Kilgannon’s style a little better.

The three songs on Wet Salvos find Kilgannon landing with both feet in an ’80s-style synth-pop setting … not entirely dispensing with the guitars, but pushing them into the background.

I am somewhat ill-positioned to evaluate Sunday Guts’ new turn because I didn’t like that style of music much the first time around. I spent the Eighties as a staunch defender of electric guitars. (See previous post.)

Still, I enjoyed this limited dose of electropop. I can easily imagine Wet Salvos’ uptempo first tracks, “Truthman Who?” and “Fun-A-Me,” playing over a club sound system.

The latter song has an especially catchy bridge featuring splashy synths, vocal harmonies and a typically Sunday Guts obscure lyric (“Looks like we’re ready to go  / Get on your radio  / Gather in the yard / In your uniform.”)

Closing song “Your Golden Age,” while still kitted out in the brash sounds of Eighties synthology, is a little more pensive and thoughtful: “Follow me, and we’ll break the bread and promises, I’m sure.”

Kilgannon’s guitar comes to the fore on the last song, draping it with some uber-’80s ringing, echoed licks that break up the keyboard textures nicely.

Wet Salvos leaves a couple questions of interest unanswered:

– It went up on Bandcamp a week or three ago, but its release date is posted as “01 February 2014.” Does that mean this is just a teaser for a longer upcoming album?

– Is the synth-based sound the future of Sunday Guts? Will the band go back to its earlier sound? Or, will it throw us yet another curveball, and make the next EP reggaeton or Afrobeat or something?

– What the hell does “Wet Salvos” mean, anyway? I went so far as to feed the phrase into the Internet Anagram Server to see if it rearranged to anything meaningful. “Two Slaves”? “Vestal Sow”? “Steal Vows”? “Waves Lost”? I dunno.

Make of it all what you will, anyway; but give it a listen. So far, these guys have yet to take a path that hasn’t been worth following.

Wet Salvos is available here as a name-your-own-price Bandcamp download.

From the Valley: Back to the Action, “Get It.”

Another installment of the ongoing From the Valley series of local music reviews, featuring Lehigh Valley-based bands.

Here’s the good news about Get It, the new EP by Bethlehem quintet Back to the Action:

It’s professional-quality pop-punk, equal to anything you’d hear on the radio, or in movies aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds, or in the varied other pop-culture outlets where melodic-but-slamming music turns up these days.

And now the bad news (and yeah, you can guess where I’m going):

It’s professional-quality pop-punk, equal to anything you’d hear on the radio, or in movies aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds, or in the varied other pop-culture outlets where melodic-but-slamming music turns up these days.

Pop-punk, at least to my jaded old ears, is one-dimensional and predictable music, no matter who’s playing it, and no matter whether it’s being filtered through the Disney Channel or a college radio station at midnight.

Song after song, pop-punk rests on the same incessant, interchangeable, unsubtle bed of power-chord guitar — choked and stuttery in the verses, big and ripping on the choruses.

(Even the tone of the guitars barely seems to change from song to song, band to band. It’s as if every guitarist in the 18-to-34 demographic was issued the exact same gear.)

And then there’s the vocals. There’s a certain vocal timbre and range that represents the Perfect (dare I say Cliched?) Pop-Punk Lead Singer Voice.

Those gifted with a Perfect Pop-Punk Lead Singer Voice inevitably use it to double- and triple-track themselves singing about elation (“Hey you (hey you) / Get up, I wanna let you know that I love you tonight”) or alienation (“You had me tied into a knot inside my own mind.”) 

Back to the Action’s singer has one of Those Voices, in spades. You’ll know it the instant you hear it. And he does with it exactly what you’d anticipate he would do with it, if you’ve ever heard any pop-punk.

If you like this kind of music, you’ll probably dig it. If you don’t, you’ll probably wonder why you should give these guys any more of your attention than you’ve given any other band in their genre.

For myself, I don’t have much of an answer to that.

The guys in Back to the Action have pretty good chops. Check out all the tempo shifts in opener “Say Goodbye,” for instance.

If they figured out a way to put those skills into the service of a sound that was recognizably theirs, I’d rave about it.

And maybe they will yet.

I suspect the best thing that could happen to these guys (and yes, I am passing an unsolicited generational judgment … but why stop now?) would be for all five of them to fall in love with some rough-hewn, idiosyncratic album — Tonight’s the Night, or The Basement Tapes, or some more recent equivalent — and soak themselves in it for a couple of months, and emerge from the brine making music that doesn’t sound like everybody else.

Until then, we’ve got the good news/bad news story of a band that — in terms of musical development, if not sales — has climbed about as far as it can go on its particular woodpile.

Back to the Action’s “Get It” is available for download on Bandcamp, for $5 or more. The band is also playing Dec. 7 at Planet Trog in Whitehall.

From The Valley: Off-White, “What Goes On Upstairs.”

Another in an ongoing series of reviews of online releases by Lehigh Valley-based bands.

I couldn’t tell for sure whether the band Off-White comes from Bethlehem, Pa., or some other Bethlehem. They’re sparing with their biographical info, and a Google search didn’t turn up much.

But I figure a song title like “Absinthe or Pierogies” could only have come from a Lehigh Valley band; and that earned Off-White’s new album, What Goes On Upstairs, a free pass onto this blog.

What Goes On Upstairs is seven tracks — four of them shorter than two minutes in length — of energetic guitar-based instrumental music borrowing equally from prog, pop and punk. (They describe themselves as “free range rock indie punk,” of which make what you will.)

Some songs, like “Absinthe or Pierogies” and “James Bonsai,” land somewhere between the Ventures and the Ramones, which is an agreeable enough place to be — especially if you’re in and out in two minutes.

(“James Bonsai” also lends the inspiration of its title to the album cover. Took me a second to figure it out. Crafty.)

“Klowns” features a deceptively jolly riff that moves into a heavier, more ominous refrain. If you use your imagination, it could stand as a pretty good aural depiction of an evil clown on the march, floppy shoes kicking up dust. And it only runs 1:21 long, so if clowns freak you out, at least they don’t hang around long.

When the songs get longer, the results vary. “Shelves” mixes boingy-surfy reverb guitar with an anthemic Alex Lifeson-ish repeating riff.  At four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, it seems a little repetitious and overlong next to the material surrounding it.

“Bazooka” (which runs 2:55) is spirited enough, but feels a little derivative, with a main riff distinctly reminiscent of Black Album-era Metallica.

Things end on a promising note, with closer “Colfax Bunny” (3:46 long) offering enough variation and creativity to show these guys can hold a song together for more than two minutes.

So there you have it. Fuzz, reverb, melody, energy and (almost) no words to get in the way.

I prefer their short and trashy to their long and involved — or, to put it another way, their pierogies over their absinthe. But you can’t really fault them (whoever they are) for keeping a foot in both camps.

That’s about all for tonight; I’m going on upstairs.

Off-White’s “What Goes On Upstairs” is available as a name-your-own-price download here.

From the Valley: “Summer 2013,” the Coven.

The latest in a series of reviews of Lehigh Valley-area online music releases.

Somewhere in south Bethlehem, there’s a house that’s going to live a long time in the memories of the people lucky enough to know where it is.

Its inhabitants call it the Coven. And it’s hosting shows all summer by independent bands from the Lehigh Valley and beyond.

(At least, this is what I’ve deduced from the interwebs. It could be an elaborate fiction meant to trip up outsiders like me — like that fake list of Seattle grunge slang the New York Times fell for back in ’92. Yes, perhaps they will be swingin’ on the flippity-flop down at the Coven this summer.)

Anyway, this past week, the folks involved in the Coven posted a 12-song compilation of the bands slated to play there, like a postcard from the happening. (The weather is beautiful; the tunes are bitchin’; wish you were here.)

So what’s on the menu?

– The first three songs (by Frameworks, Voyage in Coma and Dead Gods) make it clear that there’s gonna be a fair amount of raw-throated shrieking going on at the Coven this summer.

I wrote in my last post that I personally don’t like that style of singing; and in the last two days, my opinion hasn’t changed.

Still, the songs’ instrumental touches kept me listening.

Voyage in Coma’s “Predation” melts down at one point, sailing almost beyond key and pitch into a riptide of thrashing instrumental energy. It only lasts 10 seconds, but it’s great while it’s there.

And Frameworks’ “Old Chokes” adds a mournful-sounding, horn-toned keyboard line and sleigh bells into the mix, with positive results.

– It’s probably no great surprise that the poppier tunes grabbed me more than the thrash did.

Ringing pop — some hard, some soft — is well-represented on the Coven’s playlist, with Prawn’s college-rocky “Praxis,” Tiny Teeth’s pop-punk “Shapes” and the Infected Flies’ “Astro Pastro Zoom” all carrying the banner in memorable ways.

“Astro Pastro Zoom” (no, I don’t know what it means either) is my pick hit among the more melodic tracks, combining Hammond organ, a laid-back-to-the-point-of-jazzy rhythm section, and charming schoolboy lyrics. (Is “I could use a fairy-tale specialist / To help defeat the trolls of Santiago” the lyric of the year?)

– Actually, I take that back. The Tallboys’ “Manhattan & Driggs” is my favorite tune here — an eighty-second acoustic strum-along driven by a rowdy, scuffling snare-drum rhythm that’s implied as much as it is heard.

(“We go outside / We share a smoke / We ruin our throats / With everything we do” is another great line — one of those tossed-off bits that is either subtly profound, or says absolutely nothing. The best kinds of lyrics, those are.)

– A couple singer-songwriter types are scheduled to drop by the Coven as well.

Most notable among them are Alison Lutz, whose love lament “On My Back” I would have liked just fine except for my aversion to ukuleles, and Marco Polio’s “The Struggle,” a firsthand description of — mental illness? drug addiction? general failure to thrive? — distinguished by its singer’s unsettled Lou-Reed-meets-Fred-Schneider vocal quirks.

I can’t direct you to the Coven; you’ll have to do your own research. But I can tell you, based on this mix, that it sounds like a good time.

The Coven’s Summer 2013 mix album is available as a free download here.

Howlin’ wind.

Of all the shows I’ve seen, my favorite remains Neil Young and Crazy Horse at the old hockey rink in Buffalo, on the Arc/Weld tour of 1991.

Neil and the Horse played sloppily and louder than Christ, which is the only way they know. But underneath the energy was a strength and fire that had little to do with volume, and a wisdom built on 20-plus years of marvelous songwriting. Age met spirit, and the results were explosive.

Tonight’s show by Graham Parker and the Rumour at Bethlehem’s Musikfest Cafe wasn’t quite as earthshaking as Neil and the Horse were, all those years ago.

But it was very, very, very good, and another potent reminder of what can happen when experience, spirit and smarts come together on equal footing.

Which is a good thing … because when you’re Graham Parker and the Rumour, it ain’t just about hitting the right notes.

The albums the British singer-songwriter and his band recorded between 1976 and 1980 crackled with energy, emotion and soul — not “soul” in a literal-minded, let’s-make-this-sound-just-like-Otis-Redding way, but soul nonetheless.

(Not for nothing is their best-known album called Squeezing Out Sparks, nor one of their rallying-cry signature tunes called “Passion Is No Ordinary Word.”)

For a reunion tour to work, it would have to be about something besides the box office. It would have to embrace the power of the past, and summon it  in the present.

Parker and his five-man backing band ain’t getting rich off this tour: I guesstimate the Musikfest Cafe holds 500 people, and it wasn’t sold out.

But if this first show of the tour is any indication, they’re more than fulfilling the artistic part of the equation. The two-hour show abounded with energy, good humor, and a commitment to putting across a classic set list of songs with wit and emotion intact.

Parker and company played at least four songs from last year’s reunion album, Three Chords Good — one of them, the sardonic “Last Bookstore in Town” (complete with kazoo solo), for the first time onstage.

From the sound of it, the new songs hold their own with the classics. One, “A Lie Gets Halfway ‘Round the World,” featured Parker riffing on the local color: “Bethlehem, the Steel City … they replaced steel with plastic … and that sucks.”

Of course, it’s easy to riff about steel when a former Bethlehem Steel plant looms behind your stage.

The classics, meanwhile, are in good hands. “Discovering Japan” and “Howlin’ Wind” and “Local Girls” and “Watch The Moon Come Down” and “Lady Doctor” and “Soul Shoes” (which got a stomping honky-tonk take as the final encore) and, yes, “Passion Is No Ordinary Word” felt strong and biting, familiar without being rote.

“Howlin’ Wind,” in particular, had an ominous strut, just a tiny bit different from the record, that makes me wish they were still playing it and I were still listening to it. This short clip (which could stand a fade-in, fade-out, and other sweetening I don’t have time to give it) conveys a tiny, tiny bit of it:

Oh, yeah — late in the show, just when I’d forgotten how very much I wanted them to play “Stupefaction,” they played it, and it was brilliant, as scornful and fed-up as it was in 1980.

The 30 years between the original breakup of the Rumour and Three Chords Good got their due too, with the band rocking through a selection of tunes they didn’t originally play on, but did justice to anyway. (I now have a whole bunch of Graham Parker albums I know I need to catch up on.)

Parker and the Rumour will be on tour in the Northeast for the next three weeks or so, playing such humble venues as The Met in Pawtucket, R.I. (Did I mention they’re not getting rich?)

If you can catch ’em, do it. If you can’t, cross your fingers and hope that the band’s rediscovered rock n’ roll soul is enough to keep it together for a while longer.

Squeezing out sparks.

Forgot to mention: I bought a ticket Friday to see Graham Parker and the Rumour on April 5.

They’ll be playing the Musikfest Cafe, a small club-like venue that’s part of the same rehabilitated former Bethlehem Steel complex where I saw Shonen Knife last summer.

This one’s a bit of a flyer for me. I have three of Parker’s albums from the 1970s, like them quite a bit, and imagine I could easily get to like the guy’s entire career if I got to know it.

But, I’ve still never taken the step to really get to know it.

Maybe this show will motivate me to do that.

In the meantime, here are a couple of choice clips that capture Parker’s brand of snarling soul-influenced pop-rock.

Live on “Fridays,” circa 1980-81, singing a song I often sing to myself on my way to work:

And here’s the New Wave-y first track from the “Squeezing Out Sparks” LP:

A modest proposal.

No, it’s not really purple.

The property: Martin Tower, 1170 8th Avenue, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The history: Former headquarters of Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Opened in 1972, just in time for the Steel’s prolonged and fatal tailspin. Famously designed in a cross shape to create more corner offices for mid- to upper-level managers.

The challenge: Vacant since sometime around 2004. No immediate viable options for reuse. Interior layouts said to be impractical. Asbestos also an issue. Currently being plundered for scrap metal.
But: Status as tallest building in the Lehigh Valley argues against demolition, as does close link to cherished industrial heritage.

The solution …

The American Museum of Corporate History, a cutting-edge historical destination summarizing Americans’ complicated relationships with their biggest employers — while also offering a unique, fastidiously detailed you-are-there recreation of the daily life of corporate fat cats, Seventies-style.

The rationale: Americans’ longstanding love-hate relationships with major corporations provide a rich trove of shared emotion and experience that deserves to be explored. And the potential pool of visitors is practically limitless: Who hasn’t spent time working for a corporation, or had a close friend or family member who has?

As for the historical recreation, “Mad Men” (just to name one example) proves Americans are fascinated by what happens at the junction of money, power, conspicuous consumption and pre-PC morality. At the recreation, visitors will step right into the pampered, hubris-cushioned world of an American corporate boardroom circa 1975.

The funding: Requiring every Fortune 500 company in America to ante up $50,000 would provide an instant kitty of $25 million for renovation and construction, with private donations adding to that total.

Funding for ongoing operations could be raised through modest admission fees, as well as levying a small surcharge on every personal sale of stock by a current or former Fortune 500 corporate officer.

The displays, floor by floor:

Floors 1-2: A sweeping two-floor entrance, highlighted by a massive abstract sculpture (titled “This Is An Exciting Time for the Company”) showing an engineer filling out a hard-copy vacation request. Visitors stop at the original, authentic Bethlehem Steel guard booths to get the lanyard granting them access to the museum. (The lanyard, of course, features an off-center, yellow-tinted, sickly-looking photo of the visitor.)

Floor 3: Interactive displays on the roots of the American corporation and the growth of regional, national and international mega-employers. Where did American corporate culture come from and who shaped its growth?

Floor 4: The little guy enters the picture. A floor full of displays on the average American corporate employee’s daily life and interaction with his or her employer, spotlighting the question: “Just what do we owe the company in return for health coverage, a dividend, and/or a roof over our heads?” (In an attempt to avoid cliche and cast a fresh eye, not a single Dilbert cartoon will be featured on this floor.)

Floor 5: A rotating series of up-close-and-personal displays on American corporate icons, from John D. Rockefeller to Jack Welch and beyond. Bethlehem’s own Lee Iacocca is a hands-down lock for one of the inaugural displays when the museum opens.

Floor 6: This being Bethlehem Steel’s old building, Floor 6 features extensive displays on the rise and fall of this most definitively American company.

Floor 7: The centerpiece of the whole museum — the executive suite/boardroom reconstruction. Think of it like Williamsburg, Jamestown or Olde Sturbridge Village, except set in 1975 corporate America.
Visitors move from office to office interacting with actors who portray fictional but realistic characters, including the chainsmoking, snappish CEO …
… the vice president of engineering whose racism only comes out when he drinks, which is often …
… the insecure, recently promoted youngest senior manager who knows the Japanese are about to eat the company’s lunch …
… and the thirtysomething secretary growing worried about her legs.

(To add verisimilitude, by the way, the parking spaces closest to the front door will be filled by lovingly restored ’74 Lincoln Continentals, while a scattering of Chevy Vegas will be seeded throughout the more distant spots in a silent tribute to America’s corporate foot soldiers.)

The cigarette smoke, the leather chairs, the office putting greens, the coarse jokes, the long lunches, the rotary phones, the newspapers open to the stock page — it’s all here, and it’s all real.

As an added bonus, one lucky crowd of visitors per day will get to see some unfortunate middle manager get dressed down, fired and escorted out of the building. Didn’t see it this visit? Better come back!

Floor 8: A good-sized theater that will host multi-day conferences featuring speeches by academics and corporate types, as well as dramatic readings from old annual reports. It can also be rented out for annual meetings.

Floor 9: The Memorial Roll. This floor will be stripped down to its outer walls, which will be covered by used computer punch cards — with each card bearing the name of a major American employer that has gone bankrupt or been bought out. Burly ex-shop foremen and fleece-clad retired human resources managers mingle together as they gently rub their fingertips over the list of hallowed names.

Floor 10: The gift shop. Popular items include stuffed mice wearing T-shirts that say “I WON THE RAT RACE” … a leather boardroom chair in which the visitor can have his or her picture taken … and gag notepaper pads that look like expense reports.

Floors 11-18: At first these will remain vacant; the elevators simply won’t stop there. As the museum gains popularity, these floors will be refurbished and rented to companies that understand the sheer meta/ironic/recursive awesomeness of having the American Museum of Corporate History as their office address.

Floor 19: See below.

Floors 20-21: The Golden Parachute Grill, a lavish steakhouse serving martinis and hand-cut Angus beef aged in a meat locker on the 19th floor. Those who prefer to nurse their girlish figures can choose the Secretary’s Special — cottage cheese and TAB.

The problem: Solved. You’re welcome.