HOLLY RAMOS
YouTube has all or most of the songs by the band Fur (all audio-only). Their minor hit “Sex Drive” can be heard at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kHdxZZ9TVY . The opening track “Beautiful Wreck” (with slightly better audio quality) is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=arhXh6ZE84E . The slower “James Brown” is at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EGzqolXGs . There are also some great songs by Fur lead singer Holly Ramos that you could check out.
(June 2015)
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The above headline took my breath away when I first noticed it a few months ago on NBCNews.com: “This Oscar Winner Has the Most Supportive Wife Ever”. The wife in question is Holly Ramos, one of my Facebook friends as a result of this series of Under Appreciated Rock Band posts; and she was the bandleader in the UARB with the shortest name (Fur) coming at the end of the longest post (June 2013).
Holly Ramos had tipped off her Facebook friends that her husband Tom Cross was up for an Oscar for Film Editing, and I had my eyes open during the 2015 Oscar ceremonies. It might be my imagination, but I think I remember a flash of a few seconds toward that part of the crowd when I saw Holly reacting to the announcement of the winner. In his acceptance speech, Tom Cross thanked, among others, his wife Holly Ramos and their two children.
These great quotes are given in the piece on NBCNews.com, as taken from comments Holly Ramos had written on her blog before the Oscars that year: “‘This is being called the whitest Oscars ever. Tom Cross is half Asian,’ she wrote. ‘Represent, Tom Cross, represent!!’
“She also called her husband, ‘genuinely humble, gracious, kind and savvy’.
“‘Tom is so hard working and focused,’ Ramos wrote. ‘He worked in a video store in High School and knew he wanted to work in film his whole life. He has never done anything else.’”
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I knew that Holly Ramos had worked in film as well as music in my research for the post on her punk rock band Fur more than five years ago. In silent testimony to her acumen in the acting field, Holly appears in four different photographs on the cover and in the booklet and also on the Fur CD itself. By looking closely, you can tell that it is Holly in all four pictures, but her look is startlingly different in each of them.
Holly Ramos was one of the actors in a 2001 independent film that was the debut feature by Ilya Chaiken called Margarita Happy Hour. The Fur song “Sex Drive” was featured in the soundtrack for this film. The movie was nominated for a Prism Award; from Wikipedia: “The Annual Prism Awards honor the creative community for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction and mental health in entertainment programming.”
In fact, Holly Ramos had basically pulled an Orson Welles a few years later by writing, producing and starring in a short film in 2004 called The 100 Lovers of Jesus Reynolds; this film was also directed by Ilya Chaiken. For many years, the entry for this film on my website was at the top of the alphabetical list in the index that I at length completed around the middle of last year. There are three entries ahead of it now. I really should try to track down the indie films that Holly Ramos has been in; perhaps it is not an impossible mission.
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It is as though Holly Ramos and the other bandmembers in Fur boiled down the essence of what a punk rock band is all about when they recorded their album. Most people who are not fans probably imagine that the punk rock milieu is a very narrow spectrum of music; when actually, punk rock covers the range of popular music amazingly well – for example, I have many albums in my collection that are in the “cowpunk” subgenre, that is, punk stylings applied tocountry music. As I said when I put up the post in 2013, the lyrics in the songs by Fur are conversational, like something that you might overhear at a bar. Fur did not even bother to rhyme the lyrics as best I remember. They just sang them the way they felt them.
I have probably played the Fur CD 50 times at least. I could probably play the CD another 50 times, and never even begin to tire of hearing it.
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I am embarrassed to say how long it took me to order Holly Ramos’s debut solo CD Racehorse (2006). But I will never forget to my dying day the quote that I gave from the review of the album by Gisèle Grignon in my original UARB post (“strangulation-worthy overuse” – now that is a great turn of phrase!): “[Holly] Ramos’s voice, in all its glorious originality, cunningly textured lyrics, and irresistible magnetism is, (and if anyone out there is actually keeping track, I apologize for my by-now strangulation-worthy overuse of the following word) refreshing. It’s so unlike anything else out there today, that you will be forgiven for initially considering switching the channel or flipping through your musical options for something familiar, safe and Ovaltine comfy cozy.’”
But I have it now, and much as was true of the Fur CD, I fell in love with the album on its first spin. The above quote is a perfect description of Racehorse. The same conversational tone that is present on the Fur album is here as well, along with charming vocal flourishes that will be familiar to Fur fans. I have little doubt that I will rack up dozens of spins on this album as well – I’ve probably logged my first dozen plays already.
The love song that opens the CD, “Thinking About You” is from a woman unable to go through her daily routine, so enchanted is she with her beau: “I’m watching TV with dirty hair now / And thinking about you / Not doing my wash or washing dishes / Just thinking about you / It’s hard to get up / I keep calling that same old takeout menu / I’m eating with my eyes closed, lying in my bed / And thinking about you”.
A few verses in, a rock band joins in, and the punk edge that is in the background throughout the album becomes evident. The lyrics are sometimes stretched and other times slightly rushed, but Holly Ramos handles this easily without missing a beat.
As with Fur, there is one cover on the Racehorse album, a Ray Davies song that I was not previously familiar with called “Art Lover”, taken from the 1981 album by the Kinks, Give the People What They Want. The lines in this song if sung by a man would be more than a little unsettling, but the way Holly Ramos performs them (with no gender changes), they are merely quizzical: “Jogging in the park is my excuse / To look at all the little girls / I’m not a flasher in a rain coat / I’m not a dirty old man / I’m not gonna snatch you from your mother / I’m an art lover / Come to daddy.”
The other songs are written or at least co-written by Holly Ramos (there are no credits given in my copy of the CD), but some are echoes of other well-known songs: “Coal Miner’s Lullaby” has almost the same name as the Loretta Lynn classic “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, and “This Bird Has Flown” lifts the parenthetical phrase from the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. In this case, the song is about a real bird (as used in the Beatles song, “bird” is British slang for an attractive girl or woman): “One day I found a bird on my way / so one time I thought I’d make him mine / No longer wild but tame / I gave that bird a name / A dark night that bird would sing instead of fly / A sad song / I left the cage open now he’s gone / It came as no surprise / When I opened up my eyes / That this bird has flown.”
How exactly Holly Ramos performs her songs in such a compelling and heartfelt manner is difficult to understand, when the same kind of performance could just as easily be a snoozefest of the sort that is endured in an airport hotel lounge. Racehorse is not exactly an acoustical album, but the arrangements are unadorned in a manner that is scarcely ever encountered in the 21st Century when even understated arrangements are glaringly insistent. I’m sure hoping more albums from Holly Ramos will come my way.
(Year 9 Review)
