We’re bringing back the Friday Factory Tune for the second to last Friday of 2011. With Christmas only two days away this week’s tune is a live performance of Santa Claus is Coming to Town by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Happy Friday to all of our readers!

On this day 120 years ago, the first movie — depending on how you define “movie” — was shown to a delegation from National Federation of Women’s Clubs in one of Thomas Edison’s workshops. As a Library of Congress article relates, the women viewed the prototype for the Kinetoscope.

The device was both a camera and a peep-hole viewer, and the film used was 18mm wide. According to David Robinson who describes the Kinetoscope in his book, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film, the film “ran horizontally between two spools, at continuous speed. A rapidly moving shutter gave intermittent exposures when the apparatus was used as a camera, and intermittent glimpses of the positive print when it was used as a viewer–when the spectator looked through the same aperture that housed the camera lens.”

William K.L. Dickson starred in the 3-second movie clip of him passing a hat in front of himself. The filming took place at the Photographic Building at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, N.J.

In honor of that historic moment, our Friday Factory Tune this week is The Kinks performing “Celluloid Heroes,” one of their last great songs before the band gave way to the lucrative bombast of “Low Budget.”

Here’s Dave and Ray Davies performing the song on Jay Leno’s show. Time’s running out, guys. You’ve already lost Pete Quaife. Bring the group back together!

UPDATE (8 a.m.): At Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling figures out what Thomas Edison would be inventing in today’s world. From The Super-Fun-Pak Comix edition.

Randy’s Newman’s “Lousiana 1927″ is the go-to song to commemorate Mississippi River flooding, and a great song it is. But it seems like there should be just as evocative music for the upstream communities afflicted by the river’s destructive power.

We need a song about the flooding of Mississippi County, Mo., after a levee was blown to save Cairo, Ill. The effects of the current flooding on Vicksburg, Miss., manufacturer LeTourneau Technologies could easily inspire a tune.

Maybe Memphis already does have its own flooding song, but if so, it’s not famous. (Mark Cohn, “Swimming in Memphis?”)

In any case, here’s a 1977 performance of Randy Newman and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

(continue reading…)

The modern slacker British response to “Get a Job.”

Ready, Art Brut?

From KEXP, our go-to station and Internet site for rock ‘n roll (along with KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” and WFMU).

Hat Tip, Jim and Greg at Sound Opinions, where Art Brut did an in-studio performance in May 2006. Excellent summer-time music, good-humored and raucous.

Via EconStories, “Fight of the Century, Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two.”

Johnny Cash and Ray Charles anticipated S&P’s critique of U.S. debt many years ago. “Busted” is an allegory!

The Johnny Cash Show broadcast so many good performances and guest artists. It’s hard to beat “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” And Derek the Dominoes! With Carl Perkins, even.

The spiritual, “Were You There?,” performed in 1962 by Johnny Cash with the Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters is, of course, a song of Good Friday and Easter.

And let’s close with June Carter Cash in 2002 performing with Johnny, “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.” Beautiful retrospective footage.

Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, addresses the spring meeting of the Metal Treating Institute today in Naples, Fla. The MTI’s webpage is: www.heattreatonline.com

Well, then, of course the Friday Factory Tune must be “Heat Treatment” by Graham Parker and the Rumor, a performance from the “Squeezing Out Sparks” tour.

Parker, who now lives in upstate New York, embarks on occasional solo tours. He’s at Jammin’ Java at the end of April. Saw him at the Black Cat a few years ago with a band touring behind “Don’t Tell Columbus.” Very, very good album. Still lively, not quite so ticked off as in the old days, and that’s OK.

Legendary rock/new wave bassist Mike Watt has an affinity for means of transportation.

That’s a live performance of “Big Train” from his 1995 album, “Ball-Hog or Tugboat?” There’s a music video to the song, too.

Watt was the bassist in the great Minutemen and later with Firehose, a fun band we saw in Fargo in the mid ’90s. In the last couple of years, he’s been touring with The Stooges. (Here’s a 1980 performance by The Minutemen, and the Firehose single, “Walking the Cow.”) The Minutemen embraced a low-tech, man-of-the-street, dare we say “blue collar’ approach toward performing and touring. Indeed, the documentary about The Minutemen is called “We Jam Econo.”

Which makes Watt the perfect guy to do a Kelley Blue Book video review of a 2008 Ford Econoline cargo van. He knows his vans. (continue reading…)

There’s a fine line between anthemic and boring, and Band of Horses dances along it in this performance from Later with Jools Holland.

Industrial processes are not mentioned, although the lyrics do refer to a snack machine. Anyway, pleasant enough song by one of those beard bands, and, it’s called “Factory.” That’s good enough for Friday Factory Tune.

Here’s an acoustic in-studio version of the tune. Band of Horses goes on tour of Southern states next week with Kings of Leon. Now, THAT’s a boring band.

In other Southern rock ‘n roll news, the Drive-By Truckers do rock, yes they do.

A middling tune from Queen, which we should have posted last week in time for the National Bike Summit. Darn.

There’s a topical connection anyway, that is, the induction into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame of Jac Holzman, the founder, chief executive officer and creative head of Elektra Records, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary. Holzman signed Queen in the United States, helping make the band a true worldwide phenomenon. We honor him for putting out the two Television albums. For “Friday Factory Tune” purposes, we note his involvement in numerous manufacturing enterprises over the years.

Sound Opinions, the rock ‘n roll talk show from Chicago, just had Holzman on the program for a very entertaining, interesting interview.