Goodnight Gracie

Renascent

2012-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

Without explaining myself, and for reasons I myself cannot even comprehend, I am going to begin this whole experience of writing about music again. It has been quite some time and I’m not sure how I’ll do it, I just know I want to.

I don’t think I’ll do any of that second-rate historical style, which is how I began this blog. And I can’t imagine I will use the same tone about things I don’t particularly care for.

Two thanksgivings ago me and a friend got drunk and fought about music. We almost came to blows over whether or not “Losing My Religion” sucked or not. I thought it did, he thought I was being an ass; and he was right.

I have for too long believed that if something was popular or well-regarded that meant I could hate it and say the most vile things about it and the people who created it; and perhaps even more insanely, I thought somehow that made me a more interesting person.

I bought a record for the first time in a long time.

I will post something about it on Sunday.

B.

Untangling “Perfect Day"

2010-05-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

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I have always found the narrative to this song strange. It is called “Perfect Day,” and it describes what would be a very small, almost homely day in which the narrator—obviously out of place in such a situation—sees as a transcendent experience.

Instrumentally though, the song is bluish and melancholy with its minor-chord piano, its strings, and its horns. Similarly, the last lines of the chorus and the coda are odd, throwing the song into a kind of bizarre and schizophrenic confusion. This uncanny element though, is what elevates it beyond its purported humble and quotidian leanings.

Take the first verse—"Just a perfect day, drink sangria in the park. And then later, when it gets dark, we go home. Just a perfect day, feed animals in the zoo. Then later a movie too, and then home."

These are very small moments—very romantic, and in the urban sense, naturalistic. The green space of the park mixed with the “animals in the zoo.” It’s an obvious bucolic veneration of nature above unnatural urban space. Again, this is a very romantic conceit—I would love to have someone to drink sangria in the park with. And then the evening is capped off in the most conventional of ways, with a “movie…and then home.”

Then the chorus tells us that the perfection of such an experience is necessarily connected to the presence of a certain individual, something I think we all have felt: "Oh it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you. Oh such a perfect day." But then the confusion sets in—"You just keep me hanging on, you just keep me hanging on." These last lines are where the confusion really commences.

Why, after such a perfect day is the narrator felt to be kept hanging on? And why is the song delivered in the present tense, when obviously this transgression at the end of the chorus would lead us to believe that the perfect day ought to be in the past?

Obviously, the transcendence of such a day is intimately entwined with the person who it is spent with. But to end the chorus with the lament: "You just keep me hanging on," intimates that something melancholy is afoot.

That the perfection of the day stems from its difference from what is the normal experience of the narrator is key—he sings "You make me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good." That he is experiencing the perfect is obvious in the fleeting character of it, which has passed. In this way, it seems as if—tense aside—it is a song written from the point of view of the past. Though he sings it in the present tense, it is really meant to represent what has passed, and that the shock and trauma of the now is present in what has passed.

This song would be easy to unlock and boring if it was written in the past tense. If we transform the first verse from the present to the past tense, see how morose it becomes: "It was just a perfect day, we drank sangria in the park. And then later, when it got dark, we went home. It was just a perfect day, fed animals in the zoo. Then later we saw a movie too, and then went home."

Obviously it loses the poetry, but gains infinitely in melancholy. There is no mystery why. The past tense is the tense of loss, of death, of what has passed and cannot be reclaimed. The interesting part is that the song was written in the present tense but mixed with the strange menace of the coda: "You’re gonna reap just what you sow" four times.

Why this threatening coda? I think the more obvious question is why would such a melancholy minor-chord song—it has, I think, an am, dm, c#m, and f#m in it—be called “Perfect Day?” It is an obviously sad song, written in the elegiac style of a lament.

The answer I think is in this blurring of time, the idea that the song as it is narrated actually takes place in, whether it is real or imagined, the past. The coda is the present—"You’re gonna reap just what you sow." This statement comes only from the lips and pens of those who are wronged. One does not reap the good from what goodness they sowed; it is the voice of vengeance.

What is fascinating about this song then, is that it drags the past into the present, and the present into the past—which is, I think, the way most of us think, for the past is always with us. How else do we account for the strange temporal slippage of the chorus: "It's just a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you?" The present is obviously much more wide ranging and important in most of our minds, it is the heavier of the two. But the past is the deep source of melancholia that we all draw from which informs the present.

Why the song is so affecting though, is how quick, and with such hidden violence, it moves from transcendence to vengeance. From “you made me forget myself,” to “you’re gonna reap just what you sow.” There is no transitory reason for such a shift, it just moves, like life, from love to hate, from necessity to vengeance. It is irrational, melancholy, and sadly, true.

Beyond all this though, is another, more depressing reading. And that is the one that shows the confusion that is always with us when we are in the presence of a barely-known other. Those moments when we think we have embarked upon something together, and are in some sense deeply communicative. But really we are leagues away from each other. That terrible moment of misunderstanding can account for the slippage that is represented in this song. There is that terribly embarrassing moment when we believe an experience to be one thing, but to the other it is nothing. Between where one finds the sublime and the other the quotidian, may be the most melancholy space of all.

b.

(The Ressurection of) Notes From Underground

2010-05-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try this again...

“Piazza, New York Catcher,” Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, 2003

I was planning on writing a long piece about this song, but it’s on hold because it just wasn’t going well. I used to think it was kind of a throwaway song, but I’ve grown quite fond of it. It reminds me of San Francisco, and it’s tangentially about baseball—my favorite diversion behind rock and roll. I can’t imagine writing a song with the refrain, “Rooney, Man U striker are you straight or are you gay,” but perhaps Stuart Murdoch likes baseball much more than I like soccer. I can’t think of another band titling a song similarly besides perhaps the Television Personalities. The lyrics are actually quite hard to untangle, the bit about “I will be your Ferdinand, and you my wayward girl,” is very strange, conjuring up images of the fifteenth century king of Spain and his daughter Joanna the Mad. It’s a very sweet song though, and if you, like me, ever become homesick or nostalgic for San Francisco’s filthy streets, it’s a nice melancholy complement.

“Lights are Changing,” The Bevis Frond, Triptych, 1988.

What a great fucking song. Although I try not to use these kinds of tropes, the Bevis Frond does close the circle between the Byrds and Guided by Voices, it’s not really a surprise that this song ended up being collected on the Children of Nuggets box set. It has the same cadence as the Byrds version of Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” but there’s none of that lacy twelve-string delicateness. It’s not exquisite or baroque, it’s just got more muscle than that. Mary Lou Lord does a preposterous cover that should be run from at all costs.

“Possession,” Elvis Costello, Get Happy, 1980

Oh, Declan…I can’t think of a larger figure who is more underrated than Elvis Costello. No one would say Dylan is underrated—if anything, he’s overrated—no one would say that Lou Reed, or Leonard Cohen, or the Stones, or the Beatles, or Michael Jackson, or the Who, or the Kinks, or any of that kind of shit is underrated. But Elvis Costello is huge, I know this because I remember my dad having an Elvis Costello tape (My Aim is True) when I was a kid, and if my dad had it, it was huge. He’s most likely a better songwriter than all those mentioned above, for his articulation of all the intense and terrible emotions that we go through in trying and failing at falling in love is surpassed by no one. If you have any doubts, listen to “Indoor Fireworks,” and “I Want You.” “Possession,” from 1980’s Get Happy, a kind of Stax-influenced record is not even the best track on it, that would be “New Amsterdam.” But with its relentless piano/organ hook, it’s impossible to put away. Plus Get Happy has twenty tracks on it—more bang for your buck than practically any other record.

“I Don’t Want Nobody, I Want You,” The Boyfriends, I’m in Love Today 7”, 1978

I actually just heard this song today, and this band is a bit of a mystery. I was trolling through youtube and came across it. From what I was able to gather, the Boyfriends—not to be confused with the American Boyfriends (more on that below)—was a band started by Pat Collier, the bassist of the Vibrators. They produced three singles and then disbanded. To me, that’s kind of the perfect story for a band, only singles, only a handful, and then disappear. “I Don’t Want Nobody, I Want You,” is not nearly as slick sounding as the Vibrators. It’s not as filthy or loose as the New York Dolls, but it is totally imprecise in the same kind of way. It does have these cute, touching lyrics enfolded into a kind of tough-sounding percussive punk song, and I’m not sure what I’ll think about it tomorrow, but I love it today.

P.S.: I got my information from here:
http://powerpopcriminals.blogspot.com/2007/06/boyfriends-1978-here-are-boyfriends-not.html

“Jealousy,” The Poppees, Jealousy/She’s Got It, I don’t know 1976

This song is insanely good. This is as good as power pop gets in its total revivalist phase, by which I mean not Big Star or the other bands who tried updating sixties pop into new and present forms, but those who just re-did the sixties. I don’t want that to sound insulting, because it’s just a straight fucking pop masterpiece. I first heard this band on a Bomp comp. The song was “If She Cries,” which is another hit, a song that is up there with the Records’ “Starry Eyes,” or the less corny moments of the Raspberries. But “Jealousy” is something different altogether. It’s big, from the floor tom intro to the hand claps. It’s definitely a better Beatles rip than anything done by either the Rutles, the Knickerbockers, or Barry and the Remains. I could listen to this song on repeat forever. Oh, and they shared members with a U.S. band called the Boyfriends, not the U.K. band mentioned above.

Thoughts Upon the Death of Alex Chilton

2010-03-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking—of course—of Alex Chilton lately. Death is a terribly unfortunate thing, particularly for the deceased. But for us, the ones left behind in their wake, it’s still an awful thing to grapple with. I never met Alex Chilton. I only idolized him. I wasn’t kin or friend, in that I have no true right to mourn, and I’m sure I am not mourning in the same type of way, for my mourning is for a time, a time that has passed.

Alex Chilton’s death makes me mourn for myself, or more to the point, for my former self, the self that could invest so much time and emotion, so much feeling in a figure I could never possibly know. I had only child-like love for a batch of strange forlorn ballads, some of which spoke to me in a lyrical way, others, in a kind of misfit language; a silly piglatin-like language that was ugly and brutal in its insistence on being unaccepted.

For the dislocated, Alex Chilton’s music—post-Big Star—was like a series of prideful anthems, unfinished, unadulterated, rough, and completely distant. There was no genius to Alex Chilton, no brilliance, save for his complete disregard for genius and brilliance. And that ethic stood against failure. To listen to Alex Chilton is not to regard expression as success or failure, but only expression. Was it pure? I have no idea. Did he give his all? I doubt it. But in those vibrations, those distorted moments between what is inside and how to represent it, he created ages, epochs of uncontrollable bliss for me and my kind who hate the expected and the boring gloss of rock and roll’s dumb course.

Big Star was different. In the Alex/Chris iteration of Big Star there was what most people see as a shimmering beauty to that music; and they’re not wrong, it did shimmer, it was beautiful. I don’t want to tie all that beauty up with the third Big Star album and what he did after. It’s just not fair to Alex Chilton or to Chris Bell, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens (I could care less for this new version of the band).

When I heard the third record I never knew guitar music could be that way. I didn’t know a voice could move so much freight, I didn’t know you could use the term “Holocaust” in such a way. I can’t listen to that song now without weeping. But for who? For Alex? For who he must have been weeping for when he wrote that wreckage of a ballad? Or for myself? Who, as a young man fell full-force in love with that song. Now I am older and I might be that thing to weep over.

I wrote about this album as a younger man and used certain adjectives that I now shrink from: "harrowing" first among them. No adjective can capture “you’re a wasted face, you’re a sad-eyed lie, you’re a holocaust.” There’s just no word to do that song justice. It needs no words, no criticism, it’s analysis is inborn, and it creeps into your own bones, and the words are like lead in your veins as you realize that he’s speaking to you.

I only saw Alex Chilton perform once. It was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in, perhaps 2001. He was small and very thin with black trousers and a brown coat. He played, what seemed to me—and I know a little about guitars but very little—a Gibson ES-150, the same as Charlie Christian. I don’t think it had that dramatic cut-away, but I can’t really recall. It had “jazz” written all over it. It was big, hollow-bodied and beautiful. I wanted it. I was shocked because I only imagined him playing fenders for some reason, but time had passed. He drank cola from a pint glass with a black straw, I couldn’t tell if there was something stronger in it, but to me he seemed sobered.

He played two Big Star songs: “Don’t Lie To Me,” and “In the Street,” neither of which I really cared for. He was touring for, I believe, a record called—in the U.K. at any rate—Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy—a very strange but alluring title, but alas, kind of silly. He was great, but of course he was, he was Alex Chilton, the one man besides my father who I told myself I would mourn in death.

I once recorded a version of “Blue Moon” from the third album. I always loved that song. Now I barely record music. I do here and there, but I don’t like I used to, not when I was obsessed. I tried my hand at Holocaust, but I couldn’t do the walk from C to Am or something like that, but “Blue Moon” was easy and I absolutely loved trying my hand at meeting Alex Chilton in his misery, but of course I was a miserable failure at it.

I, and I may be alone in this, always loved “O, Dana,” why, I only sort of know. It opened in a kind of chaos of guitar strings, trembling highs bleating from a place of normality—in fact the song is quite normal. But it always captured a kind of truth about men and their relationships with each other, even if in throwaway.

Like every song on that album, it sounds as if it was recorded surreptitiously by drunk fellows on stolen equipment with no lights, but in an intense, terrible moonlight. There is a lot of hard to follow mush-mouth lyrics, but he definitely begins with the bizarre, “I’d rather shoot a woman than a man.” And the second verse begins with the “I’m forevermore fighting with Steven, we do our (something like) goo, goo, koos.” But as I fought tooth and nail with every masculine friend I’ve had, I always thought in terms of this song—always wondering how Alex dealt with Chris Bell’s absence. Wondering if he cared, and particularly, if I should care.

But now I so selfishly, and so unsympathetically weep for myself, not for Alex. I hear “Feel” and I can only weep for that boy laying in a small bed with a disc forever playing—it wasn’t a record that night—and as it revolved, “Feel” came back on, awoke me like an alarm that said “here you are in a moment that you will never get back, a moment that like an origin you will remember, but you will never feel again.” I lay there crushed against someone else, never even thinking about the future, but the future is our burden, always sneaking up on us, fooling us, killing us.

I am guilty because I don’t mourn Alex Chilton, I only mourn my tiny self awaiting records that used to come in the mail, always brown and choked with smoke. Now, I await no records, and I listen and only think about those painful places in the past when I intensely cared for something so small as records coming in the mail, playing on the small stereo throughout the night, when I had something like currency greener than money—to talk of records with authority.

Now I can only remember what it felt like, and that remembrance brings tears, but they’re not for Alex, they’re for myself. But I wish he didn’t die and I didn’t have to weep over “Give me Another Chance.”

Still, and I mean this, Rest in Peace Alex Chilton. I wouldn’t have known myself without you.

The Wedding Present in Germany

2008-12-10T22:21:00.000-08:00

"Dare" Live - it is after "Dalliance."

The Pastels, Orange Juice, The Wipers, Galaxie 500, and: Will I Ever Write Again

2008-09-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

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It has been rather a long time. I would love to do the podcast again, but I have moved away and have no microphone. I have been listening to music but not at all writing about it.

Perhaps no one will ever read this.

I have been listening to many things, but I don’t want to print what I wrote about The Wedding Present.

I have been very heavily into The Pastels, The Wipers, Galaxie 500 and Orange Juice. I have also recently discovered Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped, which I think is basically winning and fun, and totally undifficult. I may write more about that album in the future, if I ever write about music again.

I will take them in order. The Pastels. I remember getting hold of a few Pastels records many years ago and liking them quite a lot. I fear that I am regressing in some strange way, retreating into nostalgia; and it is not much of a stretch when you consider the simplicity and the immediacy of a group like the Pastels. There is an obvious childishness that peeks out, but they are also a bit like how you envisioned the Ramones or the Lurkers—neanderthal, poppy, and fuzzed out, but the Pastels seem to pull that aesthetic off while the Ramones in some strange way disappoint. Too punk I imagine, they buzz and punch like a fist, but the Pastels shake in a way that is much more uncontrolled. I have been listening to Sittin’ Pretty and Truckload of Trouble (a collection of singles). My favorites: “Holy Moly,” and “Million Tears.”

The Wipers came from almost nowhere for me. I have read about them and when I first listened to them they seemed overwrought—if you can believe it, I like my punk subtle. But in the end, I found most of Over the Edge and Is This Real to be infectious. It wasn’t anything like anger or rage that came over the speaker, nothing as childish as that, but there was a kind of hyper-fury and intensity that when streamlined into a really angular style pop music the hair was made to stand on end.

I have recently moved into a kind of monastic cell. It is quite small and I don’t have a lot of things. I don’t have my records, but I have been listening to music. I find that I don’t listen to music close anymore. I am, like many people, a prisoner to melody and the speed by which a group can burrow its sound into your brain. Galaxie 500 though, weighed down by Dean Wareham’s lugubrious and small voice still manages, by the magic of simplistic guitar wizardry, a pop music heaven. They of course take the third Velvets album as a template, further drown it in reverb and sorrow, and record everything with a sense of overly romanticized distance. Along with My Bloody Valentine, they are perhaps the consistently best-produced band of their era. For one who has tried recording music, the simplicity of their strategy makes you weep. “Parking Lot” from the album Today is brilliant, and so is a song called “Walking Song.”

And on to Orange Juice, an admittedly foolish name. I took a long time in warming up to this group. A few songs helped to turn me. One was “Rip It Up,” a completely silly disco-esque track that is a kind of bastard that shares the blood of the Buzzcocks and Blondie. The song though that totally sold me was “Blue Boy,” an early single of theirs on Postcard. It is a brilliant pitch, somewhere between twee and post-punk, but taking neither seriously. They are not for the serious-minded. Orange Juice is fun when rhythmic and simple, beyond that I can not vouch for them.

I would love to come back with some great story.

B.

Drinking Wine In The Cold/Getting Back

2007-11-29T18:50:00.000-08:00

Something Short
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Well before I had to give up the blog and the podcast to concentrate on completing PhD. applications and research into western vigilantism in the twentieth century, I had been working on a thing about the Wedding Present’s Seamonsters record. That is still not complete, but I have gotten a few messages—a few meaning two, but it still warms me—to continue posting. And though it was not my intention to take this long of a break, I thought I’d bullshit about what I have been listening to, and when I get my microphone back, I will do a podcast. I do have tickets to see Jonathan Richman soon and I plan to write a thing or two about his show.

“Dare,” The Wedding Present, Seamonsters, 1991-I used to listen to this album continuously when I was living for a summer in this really crummy, boxy, mostly depressing apartment in Rohnert Park. Although I never intended to have happen what happened—It happened. If you’ve ever heard this song, you’ll understand how these type things happen; the way things turn confusing and morally ambiguous when you’re lonely during the hot and sweaty summer months. It’s all very nerve wracking. But thankfully it’s all over and those times are long gone.

“Once Upon a Time,” Sonny Sharrock, Ask the Ages, 1991-The closing track on an album that featured both Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones—probably one of the best two or three drummers ever—and though I don’t intend to write about jazz, which I know very little about, Sharrock was a guitar player and this album bleeds into the kind of theatrical atmospherics propagated by groups like Mogwai believe it or not. And while I won’t get dopey about guitar playing, Sharrock is well nigh brilliant while restrained or overblown.

“The Lady Came From Baltimore,” Scott Walker, Scott, 1967-This was originally a Tim Hardin song, and while Joan Baez, John Stewart (not the comedian, who’d rather be called Jon), Johnny Cash—who did a funny arrangement with obtrusive Hammond organ plonking—Bobby Darin, Ronnie Hawkins, and Rick Nelson all took a shot at it, Walker’s is the most fab; if only because it appears like a leather cowboy on the arch-Baroque Scott album, which sounds like the kind of thing which would have been produced by the team of Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle and Nick Cave.

“Face Like Summer,” Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, The Blue Trees, 2000-I remember being obsessively drunk, sloppy, wandering around in the dark and the like…when I finally got myself in doors I listened to this song, and then kept pushing the needle back listening to it over and over. When I’m in the right mood, I don’t think I have ever heard a better band making music after the year of my birth—if I’m in that rustic mood mind you, which isn’t always.

More soon, I promise...

b.

On Hiatus

2007-09-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

Goodnight-Gracie is sadly on hiatus. Thanks to those of you who ever bothered to look at this. Please return, though I know not when.

b

Goodnight Gracie Podcast #8-Girls! Girls! Girls!

2007-09-08T19:14:00.000-07:00

Laura Nyro-One of my favorite Girls! Girls! Girls!

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Please click here for the:

Girls! Girls! Girls! Podcast

1. Brand New Life-The Young Marble Giants
2. G.F.S.-Slant 6
3. (You Tell Me?) From the tour split with Rocket Ship-Henry's Dress
4. My One and Only Jimmy Boy-The Girlfriends
5. Opportunity-The Jewels
6. Do I Love You-The Ronettes
7. Qui Peut Dire-Francoise Hardy
8. Wedding Bell Blues-Laura Nyro
9. Diamond Day-Vashti Bunyan
10. For All This-Holly Golightly
11. Afterhours-Moe Tucker (The Velvet Underground)

b.

The Modern Lovers-The Modern Lovers, 1976

2007-09-08T01:43:00.000-07:00

The Modern Lovers
The Modern Lovers
1976
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Recently I went with my girlfriend and her parents to the Castro Theater for a screening of Victor Sjostrom’s 1921 surrealist film The Phantom Carriage; called Körkarlen in the original Swedish. The real reason we went was because Jonathan Richman was providing the score and I had never seen him in the flesh—unless you count the time I saw him dawdling in the bowels of the Civic Center BART station near the escalator. When Mr. Richman and his merry band of musicians took to the stage, a feminine voice came screaming down from the balcony: “We love you Jonathan!” Even though deep down inside I agreed with the sentiment I felt a bit embarrassed. Mr. Richman though, took it in a kind of stride that showed he was used to such adulation—he stood up, turned toward the crowd and elegantly bowed. And to that I could not help but think, “we do love you Jonathan.”

Like any young record collector or underground music acolyte, I sought out the Modern Lovers’ 1976 debut that almost every pundit promised to be a bridge between the Velvets and late Seventies punk. As proof, almost all of them wrote, and still sometimes do, about how the Sex Pistols covered “Roadrunner,” as if that should be a source of pride to the Modern Lovers. I don’t know, I have had this record for ten years and it seems light years from the black-leather, skin-popping cool posturing of the Velvets, and the glue-sniffing bluster and Cro-Magnon lightning of the Ramones. To me there was no real synthesis to speak of.

Jonathan Richman is famously from Massachusetts—a fact that he clamored on about incessantly on his early records. After finishing school, young Jonathan, a serious Velvets devotee, went to New York and crashed on Steve Sesnick’s—the Velvet Underground manager that John Cale called “a snake”—couch. After some time Richman, perhaps another casualty of the Big City meat-grinder moved back to Boston and formed the Modern Lovers along with future Real Kid John Felice and future Cars drummer David Robinson.

Felice, a rather endearing songwriter himself who was not nearly quite as precious, perhaps felt squeezed by Richman’s tight control and departed. Bassist Ernie Brooks and organ player—future Talking Head—Jerry Harrison joined with Richman and Robinson to form the classic Modern Lovers line up that was recorded in the early seventies by John Cale among others.

The Modern Lovers debut LP first appeared in 1976, but was recorded years before, by many hands in many places, and cobbled together later. “Roadrunner,” “Astral Plane,” “Old World,” “Pablo Picasso,” “She Cracked,” and “Someone I Care About” were all recorded by John Cale for Warner Brothers when he worked as a staff producer. “Dignified and Old,” “Girl Friend,” and “Modern World” were recorded as demos for A&M; “Hospital” seemed to be recorded by the group at Intermedia Studios in Boston, MA, and Kim Fowley, wanting a piece of Jonathan’s action recorded “I’m Straight,” and “Government Center” back in California. I can’t think of more essential music produced in such a slapdash and mediocre manner, aside from perhaps the work of early blues and folk masters who were recorded with a lonesome microphone in the middle of a bleak and dusty field.

“Roadrunner” opens the first Modern Lovers album with a kind of boisterous and aggressive hustle that pitched its tent not far from the Velvets’ camp, but lyrically—maybe more to the point—vocally, it was in a different universe altogether. Anyone who has heard Jonathan Richman can instantly identify his thick nasal whine, which makes him sound as if he has some hideous and perpetual cold. Lou Reed for his part had a voice that sounded quite nasally, but the kind that existed in deference to Dylan; Richman’s on the other hand sounds as if he ripped it from some thick-throated child.

Essentially there are two aspects of the Modern Lovers debut album that make it a kind of classic—Jerry Harrison’s blunt and minimal organ work, which seemed to prefigure the Krautrock revolution in American and British rock music, and Jonathan Richman’s elegantly detailed and highly esoteric lyrical sensibility that to this day has been unequaled. The rest is merely boilerplate.

On his first record, Richman had yet to develop his latter day child-like lyrical persona that marked most of his career after shaking free from the original Modern Lovers, but even so he showed flashes of his future coy infantilism streaked with a deep understanding of human interaction. For some reason though, it would be the last time that he would truly plumb the depths of darker and less innocent emotions.

When I was younger—and perhaps that is a key—“Hospital” and “I’m Straight” were my favorites. Since then I have graduated to Richman’s less troubling, more trifling tales, but those two songs reveal an intelligent and profoundly candid peek into the life of a lonely mind as it engages with a deeply insular world. “Hospital” opens with a simple farfisa figure and the stark words “When you get out, of the hospital, let me back into your life, I can’t stand what you do, I’m in love with your eyes.” It is a watershed lyric, a brilliant sentence that reveals a truth about human failure on two levels. It is about the compulsive love for someone who is compulsively not in love with you. Cynics unfortunatley call this type of love "unrequited."

On his debut, Richman created a creed that abhorred drugs, drink, and cheap meaningless sex, but somehow made way for an asshole artist like Pablo Picasso. It was a tour-de-force of individualism that no one at the time was willing to follow, but now stands as a monument to secular clean living. It’s theme song is “I’m Straight,” a brilliant conversational portrait of a villain called “hippie Johnny,” someone who is “always stoned…never straight,” and Richman wants to “take his place.” But of course, like in most of his songs, Jonathan comes off like a stalker who cannot really convince one of his many loves that he is worthy of their affection; and for this, we do love Jonathan, or at least follow his every move.

b.

Goodnight Gracie Podcast #7-Before There Was Beatles

2007-09-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

My Hero-
The flawed but brilliant Chuck Berry

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What I tried to do was pick all songs from before 1963, the year the Beatles released their first record Please Please Me. Of course they were around before 1963, but they did not make their godzilla-like mark until then. Until next week. Please click here for the:

Before There Was Beatles Podcast

1. Back in the USA-Chuck Berry
2. Matchbox-Carl Perkins
3. Certainly All-Guitar Slim
4. Slow Down-Larry Williams
5. Don't You Just Know It-Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns
6. Lipstick On Your Collar-Connie Francis
7. Teenage Love-Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers
8. Pledging My Love-Johnny Ace
9. I Love You So-The Chantells
10. Two Faces Have I-Lou Christie
11. Let's Dace-Chris Montez
12. Cathy's Clown-The Everly Brothers

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Goodnight Gracie Podcast #6-The Rise of the Instruments

2007-08-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the world of Takeshi Terauchi and other masters of instruments

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Quiet Surf-The Mermen
Pet Sounds-The Beach Boys
And I Love Her-Chet Atkins
Noue Buschi-Takeshi Terauchi & Bunnys
Sombre Reptiles-Brian Eno
Drum Song-Jackie Mitoo
Egyptian Reggae-Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
Snapshots of Nairobi-The Homosexuals
Superstar Watcher-Yo La Tengo
Sketch for Summer-The Durutti Column
Last Night-The Mar-Keys

Click here for the:

first ever all-instrumental Goodnight-Gracie Podcast

Bedhead, Transaction de Novo, 1998

2007-08-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

Bedhead
Transaction de Novo
1998
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This is the newest record I have tried writing extensively about. Usually preferring the crucible of time to vet the bands I discuss, I will however, throw caution to the wind and simply infer that Bedhead will survive the vicissitudes, trends, and changing attitudes of history, and be considered something of a great, if somewhat obscure band.

Before I start in earnest there are two terms, which I find distasteful on almost aesthetic grounds, that I refuse to use in describing Bedhead: “post-rock” and “slowcore,” which are both ill-considered subgenres that do nothing more than muddle things. Bedhead were simply minimalists, not unlike Steve Reich in his early days, playing simple and controlled melodies off each other in staid syncopation, only doing so in an instrumentally rock format; like the Velvets circa their third record, Bedhead could sound as fragile and brittle as a folk band, or as compressed and streamlined as a bullet fired from a gun.

Bedhead was the brainchild of two North-Texas brothers named Kadane, one called Matt and the other Bubba. According to the Touch & Go website, the young brothers experimented with stringed instruments, and by that I think they meant violins, violas, and/or cellos, but I suppose they could have meant guitars, bass-guitars, and pianos. The brothers took on extra members and evolved into a band that featured the novelty of three electric guitar players—a novelty that I wish were repeated more, given the textural possibilities.

I was introduced to this band by a lanky red headed young man named Adam who, like me, attended Sonoma State University in the mid Nineties. He liked a host of bands that I had never heard of then—Pram, Eggs, Labradford, Slowdive; I even spied an Old Dirty Bastard disc in his collection.

All the trademarks that made Transaction de Novo a classic were apparent early on in the gestation of Bedhead: repeated melodies, simple, evenhanded drumming, laconic, almost mumbled vocals that bore just the slightest hint of melody, and the slow, meticulous build of simple guitar chords, angular lines, and other more percussive dalliances that made each song sound how an inverted triangle looked, only subtler. The production though was not where it would be in 1998 though.

Bedhead’s first record—1994’s WhatFunLifeWas on Trance Syndicate sounded not unlike their first EP, which was released the same year and was recorded with one microphone in one take in a Dallas church. This single microphone technique provides spacious surface area, but no depth; and despite the fact that WhatFunLifeWas was recorded to a 16-track tape machine, it sounds very similar to the two-track mixer approach used on the 4-Song EP, which is to say a bit flat and undynamic. And though I would be the first to admit to having an affinity for under produced music, material as textural and subtle as that produced by Bedhead demands a certain amount of dynamism not easily captured in their earliest efforts.

After having proved themselves Joy Division acolytes by recording the frenetic “Disorder” in half time for their 4-Song EP, they paid a similar if not as explicit debt to the Velvet Underground with “To the Ground,” a song on WhatFunLifeWas which bears more than a passing sonic, if not lyrical—the esoteric lyrics are, on the surface, about the unseemly death of a cockroach but I am sure there is a deeper meaning that I failed to grasp—resemblance to “That’s the Story of My Life.”

Most of WhatFunLifeWas though is made up of hushed, twisting and interlocking electric guitars, and like the song “Foaming Love” is more reminiscent of folk than even Dylan after he plugged in, replete with the simple two-beat bleating of a tambourine. Much of it though tritely builds toward forced crescendos, a habit they would grow out of as their latter day songs climaxed naturally, or not at all, which bore a hallmark of maturity.

Their next album, Beheaded, was produced by the group and takes a step toward the cavernous, ultra-disciplined guitar minimalism of Transaction de Novo, while adhering to their rigorously slow pace that made everything sound as somber as a black hat. Songs such as “Withdraw” “Smoke,” and “Roman Candle” utilized the theretofore only experimented with slide guitar that bears the guitarists’ Texas roots and points to a kind of kindred association with artists such as Will Oldham and Simon Joyner, which is rarely mentioned because Bedhead avoided the bonds of neo-country pretensions; still though, it is not a far leap.

Bedhead generally gets lumped in with Mogwai, who are neither disciplined or austere, and nearly never as stately; and Low which is probably a comparison that they will find themselves running from forever because the similarities are sometimes striking—sparseness, reverential sense of quiet, and a measured, deliberate vocal style. Though I have not seen it mentioned much, they sound a great deal like Galaxie 500, and nothing like, which I have seen, Spaceman 3.

Working within a kind of bi-year framework that saw a record released in 1994 and 1996, Bedhead released their masterpiece Transaction de Novo in 1998. Where their earlier efforts merged into a kind of subtle and unhurried malaise of unemotional vocals that bordered on the histrionic, and anachronistically quiet electric guitars that forever built toward some finite outcome of meaningfulness, their final album took disciplined control of the quiet space with an almost Catholic sense of organized asceticism.

Transaction de Novo opens with the skeletally bass-heavy “Exhume,” which personally is a title I would steer clear of if I was not trying on lyrics for a death-metal band—especially if like Bedhead, I was using a glockenspiel. The song is so low it vibrates and croaks with the heaviness of Matt Kadane’s frog voice, weighted down with something like remorse as he utters his one stanza—“Half sunk in the mud with one eye showing, a cracked smile and hair still growing. Your hands miles apart as if they'd never met, you were the happiest I'd seen you yet.” Not really the stuff of legend, but lyrics rarely point toward musical acumen.

Lyrics had always acted as a lesser component of Bedhead’s studio-built monuments, almost as if they were used as a block against being an instrumental band. Their first single, “Bedside Table,” which appears on their first record sounds as if, with a little more guitar playfulness, it could be a surf song by the Mermen or another such band imbued with the same kind of arch languidness before erupting into controlled sonic chaos. Lyrically though it’s a bit meta, and like “Exhume,” impossibly brief: “what I was just reading about someone deciding to quit speaking began to dissolve into my lap as the words gave up their attempts at meaning.” Personally, I don’t like lyrics to be confusing or in need of some sort of Rosetta stone to decipher the meaning, but I understand that I am particularly literal about such things.

Transaction de Novo showed a band at the height of its powers, lyrically it was actually sad instead of just taking on the hallmarks of sadness—namely a lyrical slow-voiced crawl. The second song, “More Than Ever,” is also built upon the thick bones of the bass guitar (possibly two), but utilizes their signature curling web like guitars, and a lonely bass/snare march to create a backdrop of somber regret for Matt Kadane’s plaintive moral searching: “But I won't change it and neither will you, when what seemed the appropriate are now the wrong things to do. If in every act there's something good, I haven't done all the good things I could.”

Two other songs stand out—one the magnificent “Forgetting” which is as conventional as Bedhead had ever sounded, with a heavy dose of slide guitar, and even a guitar solo; and “Extramundane” which sounds almost like pop, and must have had their fans tapping their converse sneakers and bobbing their heads at one of their few shows. The one misstep is the unfortunately titled “Psychosomatica,” which sounds to me a bit like Unwound in the worse way.

Transaction de Novo was one of the last great records of the nineties from one of the last bands to actually try representing the time in which they worked without trying to sound like something that could have been recorded twenty to thirty years before. Bedhead turned their noses up at rock’s cocky swaggering and muscular virtuosity and used an architectural sense of space and melody to create something boldly majestic. Transaction de Novo was special because it showed a band that had a real ethos—a religiously minimalist zeal for simple contrasting melodies coupled with a sense of open, almost lonely space that at times they refused to fill, displaying a keen discipline rarely seen in such a decadent business as creating rock and roll music.

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Goodnight Gracie Podcast #5-1976: The Year of my Birth

2007-08-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Modern Lovers-Bicentennial Rock

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Please don't be scared off by the first song.

Click here for:

Podcast #5-1976

Love Rollercoaster-The Ohio Players
I Want More-Can
Livin' Thing-Electric Light Orchestra
Had to Phone Ya-The Beach Boys
You Tore Me Down-The Flamin' Groovies
Government Center-The Modern Lovers
When You Find Out-The Nerves
Judy is a Punk-The Ramones
Cherry Bomb-The Runaways
The Boys Are Back in Town-Thin Lizzy

ps: I'd actually like to make a correction and at the same time point out a bit of rather embarrassing irony. I mentioned that "Government Center" was on the John Cale-produced first Modern Lovers album. That is somewhat untrue. After doing a bit of digging for a future bit of prose i plan to do on the Modern Lovers, I found that only six songs on the first Modern Lovers album were produced by Cale, and "Government Center"-at least the version I played-was actually produced by that pervert Kim Fowley in 1973, and appear on the 1986 reissue that i have. So there you go. Sorry.

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Notes From Underground-Twice As Much, The Field Mice, Lou Christie, Emitt Rhodes, Brenton Wood

2007-08-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

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1. “You Should Be Ashamed”-Emitt Rhodes, Emitt Rhodes, 1970-After doing time in LA area garage pop acts the Palace Guard and the Merry-Go-Round—both of which are collected on the Nuggets box set—as a drummer, multi-instrumentalist, and lead vocalist, Rhodes eschewed the problems and drama of band mates and recorded his self-titled debut by himself, even doing all the myriad harmonies. “You Should Be Ashamed,” along with the rest of the record, owes a tremendous debt to the Beatles—his bouncing, melancholy piano and rich voice is evocative of McCartney during the rupture and his turn as a solo artist, but I think the constant linking of Rhodes to McCartney is unfair.

2. “Two Faces Have I”-Lou Christie, Two Faces Have I Single on Columbia Records, 1963-Lou Christie backed-up by the immortal Tammys shows off his startlingly high upper register as he belts out the chorus in an almost cartoon-like falsetto. Born Luigi Sacco in Moon Township outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylavania Christie promptly made the move to New York as a young man and scored a hit “The Gypsy Cried,” which he followed with "Two Faces Have I," which I think is better than much of what the Four Seasons did, if only because it doesn’t sound so hyper managed; it’s coarse the way rock and roll was intended to be.

3. “The Coldest Night of the Year”-Twice as Much (feat. Vashti Bunyan), That’s All, 1968-I came across this one on the same Immediate comp that featured the Nico song “I’m Not Sayin’.” After some minor digging—and I still may be wrong—the song billed as “Twice as Much” by Vashti Bunyan is really by another Immediate band called Twice As Much which featured a young Vashti Bunyan on vocals. This is very different from Bunyan’s stellar 1970 folk record Just Another Diamond Day, her breathy vocals are similar, but the music is breezy folk pop not sounding unlike the Walker Brothers with its washed out acoustic guitars and sleigh bells.

4. “If You Need Someone”-The Field Mice, Where’d You Learn to Kiss That Way, 1998-Twee to the max, the Field Mice were the best example of what a Sarah Records band should sound like—liltingly sensitive vocals, softly strummed guitars, and simple beats, all executed crisply and economically with a supposed guileless preciousness that often fuels the ire of their and twee's detractors. For some reason many bands like this reside across the Atlantic: The Pastels, Heavenly, and Boyracer, I think it all has something to do with Morrissey. The Field Mice had a tendency to get a little too cute with things like sequencers and drum machines to their detriment. The compilation—Where’d You Learn to Kiss That Way—is out of print and kind of pricey, but if you find it you should snap it up.

5. "The Oogum Boogum Song"-Brenton Wood, The Oogum Boogum Song Single on Double Shot Records, 1967. Mostly known as a low-rider song, like Billy Stewart's "Sitting in the Park," and Rosie & the Originals' "Angel Baby," I first heard "The Oogum Boogum Song" on Alex Chilton's most recent record Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy, censoriously renamed Set for American audiences. Wood spends the song basically describing a knockout that is for some reason wearing a trench coat: "When you wear those big earrings, long hair, and things, You got style, girl, that sure is wild, And you wear that cute trench coat, And you're standing there posing, You got soul, you got too much soul."

b

Goodnight Gracie Podcast #4-A Brief Retrospective of L. Hazlewood

2007-08-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

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Lee Hazlewood-Poet, Bum, Disc Jockey, Record Producer, SMU Med Student, Svengali, Gram Parsons Ball-Breaker, Impossibly Mustachioed Memory.

Click here for a

Lee Hazlewood Retrospective

Lee Hazlewood Podcast Playlist

The Lonely One-Duane Eddy
Jackson-Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra
The Cheat-Jarvis Cocker & Richard Hawley
Pray Them Bars Away-Lee Hazlewood
Night Before-Lee Hazlewood
My Elusive Dreams-Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra
Son of a Gun-Lee Hazlewood
Sand-Lee Hazlewood & Suzi Jane Hokum

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Lee Hazlewood, RIP

2007-08-07T16:20:00.001-07:00

Lee Hazlewood, RIP
7.9.29-8.4.07

Scratch that instrumental podcast stuff, Sunday's entry will be Total Lee.

Goodnight-Gracie Podcast #3 Donovan vs. Dylan

2007-08-06T21:18:00.001-07:00

Donovan

& Dylan (with his booze on the table)

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Here is the belated third podcast

Next Sunday's podcast will delve into the world of instrumental rock, more or less. I am working on a few prose things that will be posted within the week. Until then, please enjoy the wonderful world of Zimmerman and Leitch.

Donovan Vs. Dylan Podcast Playlist

Jersey Thursday-Donovan
Positively Fourth Street-Bob Dylan
Wear Your Love Like Heaven-Donovan
I Want You-Bob Dylan
Hurdy Gurdy Man-Donovan
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go-Bob Dylan
Catch the Wind-Donovan
I Threw It All Away-Bob Dylan
Atlantis-Donovan

bye bye.

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Goodnight-Gracie Podcast #2-Red, Hot & Country

2007-07-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

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Click on Link Below

Goodnight-Gracie Podcast #2-Red, Hot & Country

Red Hot & Country Podcast Playlist

Alone & Forsaken-Hank Williams
Funny How Time Slips Away-Wanda Jackson
The Price of the Bottle-The Louvin Brothers
If I Were a Carpenter-Johnny & June Carter Cash
Agnes Queen of Sorrow-"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy"
Tulsa County-The Byrds
Burning Bridges-Connie Smith
Waiting Around to Die-Townes Van Zandt
Nine Times Blue-MIchael Nesmith & The First National Band
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain-Willie Nelson

Dexy's Midnight Runners-Don't Stand Me Down, 1985

2007-07-28T00:52:00.000-07:00

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Kevin Rowland, the singer and principal songwriter behind Dexy’s Midnight Runners, seemed a man fraught with contradictions that on the group’s third and final album—Don’t Stand Me Down—came bubbling to the fore. Rowland, an ethnic Irishman born and raised in Birmingham, England who named his band for a psycho-stimulant, while at the same time alienated band members with a temperance policy that banned drink and drugs, dressed up in opulent Brooks Brothers attire while promoting an album that seethed with an almost pathological hatred for the British upper class. Contradictions though, are often the fuel of bright and brilliant progress.

Don’t Stand Me Down is a sprawling epic; a mass of half-thoughts and a tangle of reminisces, regret, and long whispery dialogues; it is a tour de force of minimal pop, Memphis soul, Irish folk, and political rabble rousing. It is a treatise on love, the artifice of memory, and the burning, fleeting flame of youth as it moves hurriedly toward being forever extinguished. It is spectacular in its messiness, its pugnaciousness, its maturity, and its failure to make a commercial dent; and on that last count it is a famous and incomprehensibly brilliant flop.

Like many a commercial failure, Don’t Stand Me Down, has a muddled and chaotic past. After having conquered the UK and America—“Come on Eileen” shot to number one in the spring of 1983 giving Americans a brief respite between “Billy Jean” and “Beat It” as Billboard Hot 100 singles—with the rollicking Irish folk-pop mega seller Too-Rye-Aye, the group was poised to stay atop the commercial tidal wave. But Rowland’s brash sense of perfectionism coupled with crippling self-doubt caused the recording of the follow-up to drag on for years. It was not until the end of 1985 that Don’t Stand Me Down was finally released and to make matters worse, Rowland refused to release a single.

A desertion by short sighted pop fans perhaps confused by yet another image make-over, critical savagery, and Rowland’s initial refusal to promote the record, together with ultra-expensive recording sessions—the album was recorded in Montreaux, London, Reading, Hertfordshire, and New York with a host of session musicians—rendered Don’t Stand Me Down the Cleopatra of records. Fans are meant to be like sheep herded from one musical pen to the next, but why critics failed to grasp the brilliance of the record is a mystery.

The opener, “Kevin Rowland’s 13th Time,” apparently about Rowland being arrested for the thirteenth time, sets the acidulous tone with Rowland holding court and telling “jokes”—“You ever hear the one about the um, the middle class idiots who sorta spend all their time analyzing their own emotions, and writin’ bullshit poetry you know, that we’re supposed to read? (Laughter) I mean, as if we’re fuckin’ interested.” Rowland peppers the album with like-minded conversational jabs and asides meant to skewer the British upper classes, which seem to stem from an almost militant Pro-Irish sentiment and a masked sense of self-recrimination.

The record though is almost like a beautiful box filled with ornate straw that protects a perfect pop epic, which lolls lovingly almost decadently in the womb-like middle. This chill-inducing epic, called “This is What She’s Like” clocks in at nearly twelve and a half minutes with its many leitmotifs, codas, and bridges; it is a confluence of Memphis horns, Irish-folk banjos and fiddles, nods to British Music Hall,love-worship, and clear-eyed pop.

Abandoning the usual rhetorical nature of the pop song, “This is What She’s Like” is essentially a protracted and sometimes maddeningly frustrating conversation in which Rowland tries explaining to his constant foil, banjo/guitar player Billy Adams what she is like by what she is not. For example: “You’re familiar with the scum from Notting Hill and Moseley, The C.N.D.? Sure. They describe nice things as wonderful. She never would say that, she’s totally different in every way.” Like most of the songs on the album, it is thick with the aforementioned class warfare.

There is also a rather interesting—some may say troubling—aspect of Don’t Stand Me Down, which is a penchant the band shows for aping influences. The most famous example of this is a song called “One of Those Things,” in which a copyright case by the late Warren Zevon was successfully prosecuted against Rowland and the group for its uncomfortable closeness to Mr. Zevon’s 1978 hit “Werewolves of London.” Also, the song “My National Pride,” a lilting, contryesque song replete with pedal steel reminds me in the beginning of Bobby Vinton’s “Mr. Lonely,” before being accented with grafted bum bum bum's lifted straight from Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” Finally on Rowland’s defiantly upbeat yet mournful ode to his youth “Reminisce (Part 2)” he name checks the 5th Dimensions’ “Wedding Bell Blues” and the Kinks’ “Lola” before singing the refrain from Jimmy Ruffin’s “I’ll Say Forever My Love.” In a way Rowland sometimes turns the record into a jigsaw puzzle of workable and explicit influences.

Don’t Stand me Down is an uncompromising document that some would say depicts a band at their most arrogant and bombastic. It certainly marked the beginning of the end for the band as a whole and a cocaine-fueled downward spiral for Rowland. The record has taken on a mythic status in which critics have hailed it as a “lost classic” or a “buried treasure.” It has been re-issued twice, once by Alan McGee’s Creation label; and then later on EMI, Rowland was enlisted to re-cut it, in which he remastered the record, added the opener, “Kevin Rowland’ Thirteenth Time,” and changed the name of “Knowledge of Beauty” to “My National Pride,” and “Listen to This” to “I Love You (Listen to This).”

The album is oftentimes wantonly self-indulgent and in places overlong. It is written in a piquant hand that is sometimes unnecessarily cruel. The barbs are so full of redundant venom though that it seems as if they reflect Rowland’s own sense of self-loathing than his hatred for others. It is like the boy whose mean streak is meant to mask a crippling sense of self-doubt; and in that way, Rowland’s cruelty is endearing. But really, Don't Stand me Down conveys a brilliance and a hardness that goes beyond conventional ideologies. Rowland's burning, zealot-like agenda makesa kind of sense wrapped in his pure-pop smarts and his feeling for confrontation.

On his last Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Kevin Rowland seems almost out of his mind with love and hate, yet still perfectly in tune and totally engaged with his most treasured influences making Don't Stand me Down one of the most beautifully off-kilter pop albums to emerge in the last thirty years.

b.

Goodnight-Gracie Podcast #1-Flummoxed and in Error

2007-07-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

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I decided to do a weekly podcast which will be posted henceforth on Sundays. I have not worked out the intricacies of posting or hosting podcasts so for a while this will be a bit rough, and jury-rigged; a bit by the skin of my teeth. If you have any questions, corrections, ideas, or requests for the podcasts, I can be reached by email at sunsuperman@yahoo.com. After today's, each podcast will have a theme, starting with next week's country podcast. They are short, so give a listen. This one has no central theme. Please click on the link below.

Goodnight-Gracie Podcast #1-Flummoxed and in Error

Podcast #1 Playlist

Lookin' For Boys-The Pin-Ups
Egyptian Shumba-The Tammys
He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss)-The Crystals
The Red Door-The Aisler's Set
Sister Ann-The Gories
Jack the Ripper-Link Wray
Like Flies on Sherbert-Alex Chilton
Believe What You Say-Rick Nelson
If Only You Were Lonely-The Replacements

b

The Velvet Underground-The Velvet Underground, 1969

2007-07-15T22:15:00.000-07:00

The Velvets Forgotten Third Record—an Exquisite and Subdued Guitar Masterpiece
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As the Sixties drew to an untidy close, The Velvet Underground released their third and penultimate album, which was elegantly self-titled. 1969 was a considerable year for records that saw the release of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin, Tommy James and the Shondells’ Cellophane Symphony, Dusty Springfield’s landmark Dusty in Memphis, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester’s creepy and weird Farewell Aldebaran, Skip Spence’s ghostly Oar, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and of course, Abbey Road.

The Velvets though trumped them all with their delicate masterpiece of sparse novelistic beauty, which acted as a silent—given that no one cared about this album when it was released—triumph for Lou Reed and a stunning rebuke of John Cale and the caustic and harsh decadence of their 1968 entry White Light/White Heat. The fact that Reed could erect such a monument of fragile grace out of the ashes of the Cale rupture is a triumph of vision.

The cover, seeming no less iconic now than the Warhol banana that marked their first record, is an ashy photograph of the group: Sterling Morrison, with his page-boy haircut and funny moustache looks as if he is stubbing out a cigarette, Lou Reed, dressed daintily in a sweater, holds up a magazine, Moe Tucker sits cross legged, giving Lou a quixotic look, and poor Doug Yule lurks in the shadows, shunted practically off the couch and separated from his compatriots by a large standing ashtray.

The photograph was taken by a Warhol denizen called Billy Name and looks like the kind of thing you may find among your parents’ things—not looking at all like it was taken at the Factory. After the holocaust of noise that was White Light/White Heat, Billy Name’s sweet and intimate family portrait of the new Velvets indicated that deep changes were afoot.

The first Velvet Underground record, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a very cool and knowing album crammed with lyrics that range from gritty street talk and stream-of-consciousness jabber to pulpy sexual nonsense; blunt, minimal guitar work; repetitive drumming; proto-goth posturing; John Cale’s viola; Nico’s ugly Teutonic croon; and Lou Reed’s nasally, Dylanesque drawl. It was a very tough and seemingly uncompromising document, which was totally at odds with the world of American music at the time, whether it was pop, rock, garage, folk, psyche, or avant-classical, even within the crucible of New York City.

The album, blessed by Andy Warhol, has pretty much made the Velvets’ reputation as obscene punk pioneers and arty farty New York anti-hippies, but it is flawed, being unfocused, incoherent and sounding sometimes like an uncontrolled experiment. It has darkly classic moments, some excellent songs—"I’m Waiting For the Man," "Sunday Morning," and the Nico songs are all well-written and rendered, but to be truthful it may have been better if Lou Reed had sung them.

In the end Andy Warhol and actual producer Tom Wilson made it into a schizophrenic bastard by shoehorning in the unwanted Nico. And I like Nico very much, her album, Chelsea Girl with Reed, Cale, and other contributions from her conquests, is a brilliant footnote in the larger Velvets’ story, but her presence on the Velvet Underground’s first album signifies compromise in the midst of an otherwise uncompromising moment in American music history and by extension, a band at war with itself.

After having gotten rid of Nico and Andy Warhol, the Velvets recorded White Light/White Heat, and entered full-headed into a scuzzy seemly morass of drugs, transsexuals, the dead, and almost dead, all spit through the conduit of harsh mind-splitting guitar squalor. Other naïfs had composed paeans that floated upon clouds of weed smoke or fantastical lysergic journeys through the inner-mind, but the Velvets eschewed that kid stuff in favor of the reckless twin-pursuits of amphetamines and heroin; the nihilism promised in the Velvet Underground’s first record had bore rank fruit.

White Light/White Heat’s centerpiece is the squalid, epic blues poem, "Sister Ray," a seventeen minute three-chord juggernaut of sloppy guitars, pounding, loose-skinned drums and John Cale’s squealing and unmercifully over-driven organ. While Reed’s other overdrawn ode to drugs, "Heroin" is ultra-personal and very serious in an adolescently sincere way, "Sister Ray" is an impressionistic tale of a drug den populated by characters such as Miss Rayon, Rosie, Doug, Sally, the murderous, lascivious Cecil, and a soldier shot dead, that showed Reed’s growth and confidence as a writer and prefigured his crowning achievement as a solo-artist—"Street Hassle."

If The Velvet Underground & Nico sounded like a band at war with itself, White Light/White Heat was pure cannibalism, and when it was over, the Velvets had shed yet another member as the rigid and classically trained Cale left—perhaps forced out by the increasingly megalomaniacal Reed—to pursue a quixotic career as producer, performer, and shepherd of the coming New York punk movement.

The book on the Velvets seems to be that the first two albums—The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat—best the last two—The Velvet Underground and Loaded—because the first two are ostensibly difficult proto-punk records anchored by Cale’s bleak artistic vision and were unlike anything else, while the last two are pop records written and recorded in an attempt to sell out.

There are of course many issues at play within this scenario, the first being the departure of the difficult Cale and the arrival of the pliable Doug Yule. Also, after the Velvets broke with Warhol, Reed hired a manager called Steve Sesnick who Cale called “a snake,” and who by all accounts was just that, given that after Reed left the band, Sesnick tried dispersing all the songwriting credits from Loaded to Yule, even going so far as to put a photograph of Yule all alone at a piano on the back cover, as if it was his, and not the band’s album.

This reading of history may be true in terms of Loaded, because Reed, Yule, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Moe Tucker were all trying to score hits. Their third record though, seems to have no pretensions toward bearing hits. Loaded, with its garish cover of pink weed smoke wafting up from an underground entrance, which must have made Reed wretch and Cale laugh in disdain, was a commercial failure. But not for lack of trying—it was, so to speak, quite "loaded" with hits. The third album though, was too claustrophobic, too sparse in places, too dense in others; and though not as difficult as their earlier work, it was still just too complex to appeal to a mass audience.

On The Velvet Underground, Reed’s schoolboy infatuation with drug culture is largely absent—or at least submerged—which allowed him to replace his grim, realist fantasies with a poetic web of relationships, conversations, and sideways pleas for direction that flew in the face of the empty nihilism of White Light/White Heat. It is the Velvets’ most mature record, with its mesh of brittle guitars, so fragile and understated that when coupled with swaths of church organ revealed a breathless requiem quality that went hand in hand with Reed’s lyrical motif of faith.

Unlike their first two efforts, the Velvets’ third record has no real centerpiece, no "Heroin" or "Sister Ray." Its opening track, "Candy Says," was written for/about a Long Island boy named James Lawrence Slattery who liked to, what was called at the time, cross-dress, and who came to identify as a female, before becoming a Warhollian superstar under the moniker Candy Darling.

The opening line, “Candy Says, I’ve come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world,” shows a deft, world-weary empathy that Reed would show for the rest of his career, but never had before. With its gently plucked electric guitar, brushed drums, softly hushed bass, and Doug Yule’s whispering croon, "Candy Says" was like a lullaby, setting a soft tone, that was easily placid enough to calm the nerves of the up tightest of children.

Even though the tone of "Candy Says" would be wisely revisited, the Velvets exploded the shivery mood with the buoyantly nonsensical "What Goes On," before slipping headlong into a sometimes cold, but very exploratory conversation—or perhaps one way monologue—between Margeurita and Tom, called "Some Kinda Love," which continued Reed’s fascination with naming his characters. Reed’s snake like vocals slither playfully between the choppy, tone-bending guitar, which recalls a kind of urban folk-blues made tangible partly by Maureen Tucker’s always-primal junk tub drums that drone machine-like toward the end, failing to ever change. No fills, no frills, no muss, no fuss.

A quick note on Maureen Tucker—In almost every other rock band, the drummer along with the bassist establish a skeletal time-keeping rhythm that the guitarists, keyboardists and other players hang on to. Not so with the Velvets. Tucker was not there just to keep time, instead she stood like a small wizened child over her kit, replete with upturned bass drum and she banged along with mallets, creating a kind of heavy-thudded percussive universe that stood alongside all the other imaginative skill-sets that made the Velvet Underground the most progressive (in a forward looking way, not in the way that means to shoehorn neoclassicism into rock structures) rock band of the sixties.

"Pale Blue Eyes" revisits the quiet terrain of "Candy Says," without being as claustrophobic. In fact it may be one of the most spacious songs the Velvets would ever record, with its barely audible church organ, wide open chords, tambourine and ever-present lead guitar that shifts deftly between gentle folk-picking and soft, angular lines.

Reed, who has always tried to reconcile his twin-fascinations with poetry and novelistic realism with varying degrees of success, composed a masterpiece with the the almost apologetic "Pale Blue Eyes." His fascination with faith, or some approximation thereof, is on display if not as explicitly addressed as it is in "Jesus" and "I’m Beginning to See the Light." In a moment of guilt-soaked romanticism that recalls Graham Greene in its nearly joyless pathos, Reed sings, “It was good what we did yesterday. And I'd do it once again. The fact that you are married, only proves, you're my best friend. But it's truly, truly a sin.”

Lou Reed destroys the gospel notion of being caught in the midst of a Jesus-loving epiphany with the glorious, perfect "I’m Set Free" as he states, “I’m set free, to find a new illusion.” Faith is just a dream. Tucker shines, wielding her hammer-like mallets and "I’m Set Free" displays, what I believe to be the most dramatic and effecting guitar solo that I have ever heard. Everything but Tucker’s drums drop low in the mix, the rhythm guitar switches to the right channel and the lead guitar, flooded with reverb gracefully skates along toward a climax of quiet cymbals.

For the first time, the Velvet Underground had constructed a coherent record, a document with a unity of purpose, where each part interlocked and engaged with the next in an intricate and meaningful way. Unlike their earlier efforts, this record did not denote the tone of saber rattling. Thematically, it was not led by the collar by drugs and sex; sonically it was not once abrasive or irrational, it was quietly, soberly majestic. The unwavering agendas had been sunken, and for the first time the Velvet Underground did not sound like a band at war with itself.

If I were to poll myself once a year for ten years, this album would be number one on my list six times probably. If I had my druthers, I would cut the overlong and artistically decadent "Murder Mystery" out, because it sounds a bit like run of the mill sixties psyche experimentalism. "After Hours," sounding as if it were written in an era of bathtub gin and bobbed hair, may be one of the best closing songs on any record. It was Moe Tucker’s first shot at a lead vocal and she did much better with it than Ringo did on the Buck Owens classic "Act Naturally."

In the end, I think it may be helpful to view the Velvets in four discreet phases instead of two. The first album was influenced by, not only the presence of Nico and the guiding hand of Warhol, but also minimalist composer La Monte Young. The second conveys a certain sense of liberty, as the band got free of Warhol and Nico, but it is also alienating in its nihilistic rage. The third is again marked by a sense of liberation, this time from Cale’s high-art shackles and the dread of nihilism, which furthered a true attempt at introspection by Reed that shows an engagement with a higher power. And the last phase is a kind of crass attempt to cash in on their potential that was ultimately a commercial failure but a songwriting success.

Loaded-Era Velvets-Garish?

b.

The Go-Betweens, My Past, and Two of the Best Songs

2007-07-02T21:26:00.000-07:00

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When I was 16, I went to a new school and made friends with a boy my age that liked the Smiths. Well, to be honest, he seemed to like Morrissey and then in retrograde the Smiths. We both read Morrissey and Marr-The Severed Alliance—which was probably the only non school-related book I read in high school, and bought Smiths records on vinyl even though neither of us had the means to play them. This boy and the Smiths helped to save me from the perils of the then burgeoning modern rock radio.

Now I hardly listen to the Smiths except for the occasional nostalgia jag, but I have sought out their echoes wherever I could find them, most notably in the Go-Betweens. To be fair, the Go-Betweens were Australian-born contemporaries of the Smiths who should not be reduced to an echo, but I came to them by way of attempting to fill a Smiths-sized hole rendered by over listening.

There is an obvious similarity between the two groups, but perhaps the echo is only faint. The Go-Betweens had two lyricists—Grant McLennan and Robert Forster—as sophisticated and idiosyncratic as Morrissey, and where Johnny Marr displayed the Smiths’ musical ambitiousness stylistically, the Go-Betweens exhibited an elegant, eclectic classicism.

Lyrically, the Smiths spoke explicitly to adolescent frustration; so much so that it seemed as if Morrissey was not only tortured, but a kind of lyrically gifted Peter Pan whose solipsism appealed to sensitive and self-centered teenagers who engaged primarily with their own dark feelings. The Go-Betweens however, who wrote no less about the disappointment of not getting what they wanted, utilized a richer, more adult lyrical palette.

The Go-Betweens over the course of their career garnered absolutely no chart attention, making them the kind of band that I have been naturally drawn to. Unlike say, the Homosexuals who hung upon the skeleton of pop the rags of contrarianism, sloppiness, and obtuseness, the Go-Betweens crafted a version of refined pop that bested the efforts of their more mainstream contemporaries like U2, the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen. But sadly—for them—they made no commercial dent, subsisting only on the crumbs of critical acclaim.

I came upon them from, I think, a review in Magnet, but I can’t remember. The first thing I heard was Bellavista Terrace, and I warmed to it slowly. Though the fourteen-song disc has been generally derided, there is not a bad effort on it, and for a few dollars it is a treasure of an introduction. In a way, I entered through its back door, through the two closing tracks: Spring Rain and Dive For Your Memory, which I liked the most.

Spring Rain opened their 1986 album, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, with a kind of gaping joyfulness that had theretofore been somewhat avoided. With its breezy multitude of guitars and reverentially nostalgic lyrics—“Dressed in a white shirt, with my hair combed straight,” and “Driving my first car, my elbows in the breeze”—Robert Forster and the Go-Betweens crafted an almost winsome, past-obsessed song that though bittersweet, shook the bones with its primal pop spirit.

Dive for Your Memory closed the Go-Betweens final album, 16 Lovers Lane (not counting their late nineties second act) an elegiac farewell from one of the finest pop bands to ever emerge from Australia or otherwise.

Their final track is a bit spare, with a four-chord repeating acousitc guitar figure augmented by atmospheric organ and reverb-thick plonks of electric guitar percolations; it’s saddest moment occurs in the opening stanza, a blast of doleful regret: “If the cliffs were any closer, if the water wasn’t so bad, I’d dive for your memory, On the rocks and the sand.”

For those of us who have let friendships and other relationships go by the wayside because of stubbornness and blind fits of raging pride, it is a bitter mouthful—and a fitting end to a wonderful lyrical partnership.

b.

Notes From Underground

2007-07-01T22:14:00.000-07:00

I have taken a kind of leave from writing about music. I was working on a bit of personal history that I have wisely put away for a while. I have also fancied myself a story writer, and maybe one day it will be in my cards, but today—no. Also, I have been recording music, but that has proven to be a depressing enterprise. I have been reading. I quickly dispatched with Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, but then failed to get through Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson-attempted in anticipation of an 1820-1860 U.S. History Seminar I will be taking. Summer though, is a bad time to ponder Andrew Jackson and his hostility for paper money.

Music has been slowly coming back to me. I have been listening constantly to Hallelujah in the original Cohen, which is lyrically a perfect song. Unfortunately, it suffers from the overblown production of its time. The Cohen version though does not succumb to the forced mawkishness of Rufus Wainright’s piano version or Jeff Buckley’s overdrawn guitar rendition, both of which people seem to love.

Speaking of the Wainright-McGarrigle brood, I have also been listening to Loudon Wainright who has emerged as Judd Apatow’s stock father-like fool, first on the sitcom Undeclared—which I have been watching—and then as the gynecologist in absentia in the film Knocked Up. My favorite of his has been The Swimming Song from his 1973 album Attempted Moustache. The Swimming Song is a kind of beautiful and innocent, half-funny and unguarded metaphor of a song, the likes of which you don’t see these days.

Listening to Jarvis Cocker on eternally baffled Terry Gross’ show Fresh Air was funny and a bit uncomfortable—it was a bit like listening to your mom flail about trying an interview. I realize that I was grumpy about his show, but I think his album is quite good. If I hadn’t been so damn drunk, I might have enjoyed him more at the Fillmore—but probably not, because of all those douche bags. Black Magic though is the high water mark on his album, a song that sounds explicitly like Crimson and Clover, but has entered into my mind with more than a whiff of Tommy James’ dumbly biblical Sweet Cherry Wine.

I also have flashed back to high school and sought out a Material Issue song called Valerie’s Dancing from when I was about fifteen. They are not the most interesting band in the world, but they came from the great power pop burg of Chicago, and though they will never rank among Illinois greats like Cheap Trick or the Shoes, they represent a nice chart moment for the genre in the awkward and rebellious early nineties.

b.

Egyptian Shumba-The Tammys

2007-05-19T21:49:00.001-07:00

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I had been bored, drinking, and watching Red River on public television with the sound off. John Wayne with his big shifting haunches sauntered across the screen looking not unlike a badly hidden transvestite was pitted against his Oedipal foil, the gaunt-faced Montgomery Clift. I did not much like the movie so I put music on.

A song came on that I had never heard before. It sounded vaguely like French pop with its scatter-brained, circus clarinet and its heavy-footed thudding drums. French pop though, is almost always impeccably recorded, and this was mixed so far out of balance that the vocals were so loud and in front of the music, as to almost blossom into distorted fuzz. The trio punctuated their lines with shimmy shimmies, and delivered their lines in English: “Last night I dreamed I was on the Nile, Dancing with you Egyptian Style.”

The first verse magically collapsed into an entropic chaos of blood curdling feminine screams and jungle howls that reminded me of an Alex Chilton breakdown or a Guitar Slim freaked out solo; Judy Henske came to mind, as did Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Skip Spence, and possibly Little Richard.

It was almost deranged in its off the rails goofy magic. I am in love with the Tammys.

b

Jarvis Cocker-The Fillmore, Sometime in April

2007-05-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

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I had not seen a show since Clinic, in maybe 2005 sometime. I thought that I would wait until Alex Chilton toured again but it was not to be.

The Fillmore is a nightmare, I used to hate it when I smoked because it was a cock tease of a place that you could not go in and out of and of course you could not smoke. But I quit and now it was just stuffed with pricks and pimply teenagers and old guys in leather and over made up girls who leave their puffy lipstick stains on their plastic cups of vodka tonic. The same tired-ass scene.

The opening band was called Honeycut and they did not have a drummer, just a douche-bag who banged his hands all over a little rectangular box that made drum sounds. It was not cool in an experimental way-it was total crap. It made me want to throw up. The singer broke out in a harmonica solo and I screamed at the top of my lungs for someone to drag him off by his hair, but they were allowed to finish up.

My girlfriend got the Jarvis Cocker album from her brother on Christmas and I listened to it a bit, but there are really only two good songs, one he played for the encore and the other he played earlier. No Pulp songs, which was kind of a drag, because that new album is a bit flat, and Pulp was his baby, so it would have been fine, but he let that ghost lie.

“Don’t Let him Waste Your Time” was the encore song, and it is a good pop song, sounding a bit like Pulp, but the best song is the Tommy James and the Shondells rip—“Black Magic.” His band sounded fine, there was lots of dry ice and he did a myriad of kicks and made lots of anti-American political jokes that the crowd showed its appreciation for with fawning, throaty yowls.

I left the place drunk and feeling mean. The whole crowd spilled down those god-awful stairs, which made me wonder about the hippies who must have fallen down those fuckers, all high and blasted out of their minds on acid. Geary Street was like a swap meet of assholes and I waited for the people I arrived with. The rich ones tried hailing cabs, the young ones stood in the light, laughing, happy, pretty and stupid, and the rest of us took the bus.

b.

PS: I will start back up in about two weeks.

Notes From Underground—Guided By Voices

2007-04-19T22:53:00.001-07:00

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(This will be my last musical post for a while. I know there are about four souls who give a shit. I have a bit of academia to catch up with, and sadly it has nothing to do with GBV or rock and roll. Please check in periodically, as I have no plan to abandon my sad pursuit. Anyhow, thanks to those who looked...)
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In my last post—a gushing reassessment of Guided By Voices in general and Alien Lanes specifically—I somehow forgot to mention a single song. Separating the wheat from the chaff is nearly an impossible task on an album that is as full of bonafide rock hits as Alien Lanes is, but I’ll try and whittle.

Quickly, here is the chaff: “Ex-Supermodel,” which is accompanied by the sound of an awful snore, a total failure of insolent and beer-drunk decadence.

There is filler, but it is all quick and bracing, and “Alright” is an ideal closing track—instrumental and anthemic.

Here are several of the best.

“Closer You Are”-With an album that is this close to you, the mythical favorite song seems to be in a constant state of rotation. Lately, this has been mine. I was doing laundry and walking back down the Jones Street hill singing: “You play the heavy/it’s a real slick movie move/‘Stoned at the Alamo Tonight’/ the closer you are/the quicker it hits ya-ah-ah,” and I wondered how good a movie Stoned at the Alamo Tonight would be.

“Game Of Pricks”-This may be one of the best songs that Robert Pollard ever wrote, but how could you tell? He’s only written a thousand good ones. “Game of Pricks” taught me how to play C#m on the guitar, a chord I never used again.

“Chicken Blows”-The implicit Beatles reference on the album, and a stellar example of how good strings work in pop music, no matter how crudely recorded. Plus, I have never heard such a sublime harmony triggered by such a seemingly sophomoric lyric: “I’m not here/to drink all the beer/in the fridge…” But as is sometimes the case with stream-of-conscious types—first glances can be deceiving.

“My Valuable Hunting Knife”-After years of listening to this song, I cannot tell if there is a bass and a guitar or just multiple guitars. There is an echoey snare that may or may not be produced by a machine. It is stunning though, how they could construct such pure pop bliss out of scraps and largely fragmentary sounds.

“My Son Cool”-Not that Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand are so different, but this is the type of song that would have sounded at home on the latter, with like minded punk(ish)/wall of sound gems, “Smothered in Hugs” and “Echoes Myron.” “My Son Cool” also references the one Ron Howard movie that does not suck…besides Splash.

“Blimps Go 90”-Yet another example of strings being handsomely incorporated into GBV’s almost junk yard sound; and this song introduced me to Gentleman Jack—the premium brand of Jack Daniels whisky, which I still can not afford to drink.

“A Good Flying Bird”-Sometimes in my head, I picture the relationship between Tobin Sprout and Robert Pollard as vaguely reminiscent of that of Lennon and McCartney, but there is a danger in referencing that relationship, and an impulse in many to make that comparison, even when it is not apt. Tobin Sprout seemed to be an obvious unequal partner, but, as songwriters, they were so different. Tobin Sprout seemed to crave a simplicity that Robert Pollard appeared to abhor. Tobin Sprout never engaged in the same lyrical esoterica or musical fist-pumping that Pollard gloried in; his songs were catchy, extremely succinct, and terribly brief (“A Good Flying Bird” clocks in at just over one minute). His spate of solo albums paint a slightly different portrait, but his work with GBV is terribly economic, poppy and beautifully to the point.

b.

Guided By Voices-Alien Lanes, 1995

2007-04-04T22:56:00.000-07:00

Guided By Voices
Alien Lanes
1995

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Not much is said anymore of Guided By Voices. I am aware that they have broken up; the chatter though, had been just so incessant. Now that the dust has settled, and many have moved on to those more current, I think it is time to celebrate a band that was the most economic, prolific, durable and fortified of the rock thoroughbreds.

There was perhaps, never a band whose sound was so affirmed by their recording technique, and whose recording technique did so much for the egalitarianism of their musical age. The logic there may seem unsettled, but while it has been famously said (and perhaps too many times) that each person who heard the Velvet Underground went out and started a band, in the case of Guided By Voices, it can be put, just as hyperbolically, that everyone who heard a Guided By Voices record (before 1996) went out and recorded one them self; or at the very least, tried.

Guided By Voices was proof—in the age of major label hegemony—that one need not be David Geffen or Butch Vig to shepherd a (perhaps the) signature record of your generation. And possibly that will be their legacy; instead of the many thousand anthems, songs, fragments and other musical detritus that they recorded and released over two decades with the endurance of a long distance runner and the mindset of a sprinter.

They were amateurs with the type of tendencies that made them seminal rock radicals and critical darlings. I should say that their amateurism ceased at the quality of their basement recording—Robert Pollard, and to a lesser extent, Tobin Sprout, were brilliant, oftentimes devastating songwriters, and their band was top-notch. Though Pollard and Sprout were deadly with a melody, lyrically it was a scattershot affair, and the truth be told, I would need a year to comb through Pollard’s brain-fried lyrics to decipher his Labatt’s-influenced meanings.

They pointed the way down a DIY path where the ends seemed to always justify the means. To be sure, many acts over the years breathlessly recorded themselves in hopes of breaking through the glass ceiling of major label stardom, but few hung on to the handmade ethos for so long—Alien Lanes was GBV’s eighth album. They did so with a flourish of Dylanesque stamina, along with a like-minded lack of shame that would produce so much cobra-quick greatness, so much good feeling, and also, so much beery-eyed meaninglessness.

So what of this recording technique? They recorded on 4-track tape, with a limited coterie of confederates, trained only in the knotted-guitar chord frustration of the often vexing experience of small-scale recording in the privacy of a cramped bunker. For those who warmed their ears on The Beatles and George Martin’s limited multi-track bliss though, this was decidedly different.

To those uninitiated with modern day self-recording—with what the prevailing scribes termed “lo-fi”—Guided By Voices could sound a bit rough, and at times almost poor. Alien Lanes though, was an upgrade on the slapdash, but flawlessly written hazy pop encyclopedia, that was Bee Thousand.

After all the good feelings and copy that trailed in Bee Thousand's wake, Guided By Voices seemed to take their next album a bit more seriously; and it remains one of the quintessential examples of 4-track recording.

Alien Lanes is a swift flash of rock’s long history—garage, British invasion, power pop, psych, folk nonsense, punk, and post-punk—buoyed by the seemingly everpresent humming buzz of an ungrounded chord. It was a brilliant compendium of musical high water marks and rock impressionism; and they all the while demonstrated a staggering ability to sound salient while looking toward rock’s rich past without donning the Nehru coat of revivalism.

Sadly, Alien Lanes was the last of Guided By Voices’ home-recorded albums. Robert Pollard and his rotating cast of associates continued recording at the speed of sound, hitting the mark often (Waved Out (solo), Mag Earwhig!, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department (with guitarist Doug Gillard)), and also producing their fair share of messes.

Though they/Robert Pollard bounced from the ignominy of self-recording to the center of Ric Okasek’s glass box, they/he would never again capture the immediacy, the brevity, or the laconic raw nerve that made Alien Lanes one of the last great albums of the Twentieth Century—a record that sounded as if it could tell the long and labyrinthine history of rock and roll in the space of 28 well paced shocks.

To the last of the great rock thoroughbreds.

b.

No Guitars in '77-The Beach Boys Dreamy Love You, The Yin to the Yang of Suicide’s Nightmarish Debut

2007-03-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

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1977 saw the release of debuts by The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Wire, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Television, Chic, and Cheap Trick. Paul McCartney hid behind the strange guise of Percy Thrillington, David Bowie released both Low and Heroes, The Ramones left home, Jonathan Richman whimsically turned his back on punk, Kraftwerk gave us Trans-Europe Express, and Pink Floyd released Animals.

In a year that was a veritable groundswell for rock and roll’s off-kilter byproducts, nothing could quite match the left field, polar, and incongruent-nature of the year’s two most minimal synth pop entries—The Beach Boys Love You, and Suicide, by Suicide.

The Seventies were an unkind decade to America’s greatest pop group. They opened the decade with Sunflower and Surf’s Up, two—not perfect—but very good albums. But then the bottom fell out—Carl and the Passions-So Tough, Holland, and 15 Big Ones; all, save for the latter, barely utilized the Beach Boys’ resident genius, Brian Wilson whose tenuous grasp on sanity had been slipping.

For the most part, the Beach Boys spent the decade sinking into a warm and comfortable bath-like rehashing of their Sixties glory, marked by steady touring and the commercial success of their repackaged greatest hits effort Endless Summer.

Though 15 Big Ones was marketed as the Beach Boys’ comeback effort replete with a sad appearance on Saturday Night Live that saw Brian Wilson in a sand box, the Beach Boys did not truly re-emerge until the next year with The Beach Boys Love You, a remarkable effort that in one breath looked back to the Beach Boys heady past, and in the other to the minimal synth-pop of the future. Love You was a striking return to form.

Far away from The Beach Boys’ sunny home base in Southern California, on the lower east side of Manhattan, two complicated and confrontational artists spent the first part of the decade honing a minimal and spare punk sound that was almost dystopic in its sparseness and cavalier in its disuse of punk’s tools of trade: the guitar, the bass, and the drum kit. The nascent genre had barely been established and Suicide were already blazing new and adroit inroads.

In a way though, it seems slightly disingenuous to label Suicide a punk band. They evolved slightly on the outside of that milieu, even though there are many touchstones in their history that would suggest otherwise. It seemed as though the sounds they made came from a different place, partly rooted somewhere in the distant fifties, but also in a bizarre electronic future that had yet to be fully explored. This is perhaps not the best place to make that argument, so suffice it to say, Suicide did come of musical age along with many of New York’s finest arbiters of punk.

Suicide was formed in 1970 by a sculptor named Alan Vega (nee Bermowitz), and an electric jazz pianist called Martin Rev (nee—the particularly apt—Reverby). There were others who wielded more germane rock and roll instruments, but they drifted away from the project. The core remained intact, but it was not until Rev found a used drum machine that Suicide really began to take familiar shape.

Suicide recorded their debut album in 4 hours for former New York Dolls manager Marty Thau’s Red Star Label, effectively giving us two things to thank him for. Craig Leon and Thau helmed the short session lending an amazingly dense and reverb-heavy quality to the instrumentally Spartan album. It is not clear if the actors realized the gravity of their accomplishment.

Meanwhile on the shores of the vast Pacific Ocean, the Beach Boys were also most likely unaware of the triumph that they achieved with the overwhelmingly minimalist Love You. It remains a strange echo of Beach Boydom, for it eschewed the usual vocal/musical sophistication that had marked their records since the transcendent Pet Sounds. Even the middling Seventies entries, though muddily recorded, relied on sophistication and virtuosity. Love You though, was almost crude in its use of, oftentimes ragged sounding voices and deceptively simple synth-driven melodies.

It seems as if the critics too were a bit confused on how to approach the strange album. The famous Village Voice critic Robert Christgau had these backhanded and yet weirdly hyperbolic words to say about their (though his critique is explicitly of Brian Wilson) effort:

“Painfully crackpot and painfully sung, but also inspired, not least because it calls forth forbidden emotions. For a surrogate teenager to bare his growing pains so guilelessly was exciting, or at least charming; for an avowed adult to expose an almost childish naiveté is embarrassing, but also cathartic; and for a rock and roll hero to compose a verbally and musically irresistible paean to Johnny Carson is an act of shamanism pure and simple.”

Christgau’s review though, seems to adequately and articulately sum up the ambiguity that this album continues to elicit.

Critics in general seemed to have gravitated toward the bizarre “Johnny Carson,” a song about the famous comedian and talk show host that, during the mid seventies was at the height of his powers. It is far from being the stand out track on the record though. "Johnny Carson" does however, neatly encapsulate the album’s strengths and weaknesses in one fell swoop—it is a microcosm of their ability to reconfigure, in a timely way, the Beach Boys, but at the same time be a bit of a generational joke.

Thirty years later the album is still odd, and I don’t think that it has found its rightful place in the canon of American music. The Beach Boys Love You is, for the most part, a departure from what the Beach Boys had done, but at the same time it is still wholly reminiscent of what they had always done.

The choice—the departure—was in instrumentation, not the naïve lyrics, which is what critics have doggedly focused on. The real hook of this album is that in their weird way, while trying to reclaim some lost pop terrain, they stumbled upon a new world and it reaffirmed their genius, no matter how kooky or straight sounding they were.

Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics” who was almost deferential to the Beach Boys legend, even at their most manic, became ultra-serious and downright cranky in the face of Suicide’s threatening and “lurid” debut:

“A friend who loves this record offers the attractive theoretical defense that it unites the two strains of "new wave" rock minimalism--neoclassy synthesizer and three-chord barrage. So maybe it will prove popular among theoreticians. For the rest of us, though, there are little problems like lyrics that reduce serious politics to rhetoric, singing that makes rhetoric sound lurid...”

The comment about the seriousness of Suicide’s lyrics in a rhetorical/political sense may revolve around the album’s centerpiece—the disturbing tale of “Frankie Teardrop.” Or possibly, Christgau was irritated with Suicide’s treatment of Che Guevara in the song “Che”: “He’s wearin’ a red star, he’s smokin’ a cigar, when he died, the whole world lied, said he was a saint, but I know he ain’t.” That somehow, does not seem right either.

For the most part though, the album has been considered a minimalist classic that staked out a peculiar middle ground that lay somewhere between sneering fifties rock and roll and synth-heavy punk nihilism. Their songs were built around Martin Rev’s pulsing, reverb-heavy and rigidly structured farfisa and drum machine figures that depended heavily on repetition and echo, almost to a point of monotony. Rev’s synthesizer arrangements were augmented by singer and lyricist, Alan Vega’s vocal blasts and sprays of impressionistic and malevolent yowls. Their strengths were perfectly matched.

Whereas the critics clung to the Beach Boys’ “Johnny Carson,” in the case of Suicide they gravitated toward the bleak, depressing, and overlong “Frankie Teardrop.” There is no other song on the record that is as boring as their ten and a half minute opus to infanticide, among other things.

Their gift though was in matching Vega’s sometimes Gene Vincent styled, hiccupping vocals with likeminded themes and their futuristic musical analogues like the bubbly “Johnny” and the comic book inspired synth-punk classic “Ghost Rider.”

Suicide was a triumph and an inspiration to generations of synth-heavy pop and punk. Their threads lead to such bands as Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and Metal Urbain among countless others.

Most famously the album was an influence on Bruce Springsteen’s mindset while recording Nebraska; perhaps as influential as the misadventures of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. The album’s impact is still being felt in the many and sometimes-redundant electro-clash bands that keep surfacing.

These two albums—The Beach Boys Love You and Suicide—are a funny match, but their similarities are undeniable. That they came from two such unlikely sources only proves the strange and serendipitous nature of music. The Beach Boys were at a strange commercial apex—based largely on their past legend—but they produced a document that, at times, sounded like the past electronically regurgitated. In reality though, it was perfectly placed and wonderfully nuanced; prefiguring bands like Stereolab and The High Llamas.

Neither Suicide nor The Beach Boys invented synth-pop, but in their own differing ways, they did much to advance the agenda in the age of punk, disco, and guitar-based rock. These records are two curiosities that depict the shift and evolutionary quality of music, particularly rock and roll in it’s new age.

Notes From Underground—Skeeter Davis, Left Banke, The Nerves, The Feelies and Spaceman 3

2007-03-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

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1. “Let Me Get Close To You”-Skeeter Davis, Let Me Get Close To You, (1964)-Born Mary Penick, Skeeter Davis started out as half of a country vocal duo with Betty Jack Davis called The Davis Sisters. Davis had a career that would mostly be considered country, but for a while in the Sixties she released some pop albums with a fair amount of help from Brill Building heavyweights Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who penned Davis hits “Let Me Get Close to You” and “I Can’t Stay Mad at You,” the latter of which sounds suspiciously like Neil Sedaka’s 1962 hit “Breaking up is Hard to Do.” Alex Chilton did a faithful rendition of “Let Me Get Close to You” on his 1987 High Priest album.

2. “She May Call You up Tonight”-The Left Banke, Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina, (1967)-This song fits a weird musical archetype that I use to group some different artists, I call it Linus and Lucy Pop after the great Vince Guaraldi song. Belle and Sebastian are the strongest latter day proponents of this style, which is typified by “Seeing Other People.” The songs are usually of the smart, crisp, mid-tempo piano pop variety.

3. “When You Find Out”-The Nerves, The Nerves EP, (1976)-One of the best bands to have never “made it,” and by that I mean to, at the very least, record a proper album. Though, as I mentioned in an earlier post, when they broke up, Paul Collins formed The Beat, Peter Case formed The Plimsouls, and Jack Lee recorded a solo album called Jack Lee’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1, so, in a sense, they made it, just not together. The Nerves EP has 4 great songs, the best of which were “Hangin’ on the Telephone” covered famously by Blondie and “When You Find Out” which is lean, angular power pop that is both jittery and truculent. Neither here nor there, but this song always seemed to remind me of early solo Van Morrison.

4. “The High Road”-The Feelies, The Good Earth, (1986)- The Feelies are a bit of a mystery to me. I like Crazy Rhythms, but not as much as most. I think their real crowning achievement is The Good Earth—a mature pop album with a unity of purpose that embraces both the jangle of power pop and the discipline of minimalism. And if you are predisposed to do so, it is infectious enough that dancing to it would not be out of the realm of possibility. I read somewhere that The Feelies sounded “as if the Velvets had begotten a Grateful Dead,” which is way off the mark. The Velvets part: true. The Dead: no way. I see what the author was getting at, and that is that The Feelies had a propensity for guitar solos, but the soloing the Feelies did is not even in the same universe as The Dead, and lest there be confusion, that is a good thing. The Feelies solos were very smart and discreet, and the interplay was wonderfully simple, that is to say: no wanking.

5. “Call the Doctor”-Spacemen 3, The Perfect Prescription, (1987)-Yet another band whose existence was dependant on Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Like the Feelies, Spacemen 3 used a Velvets-inspired minimal framework to display their revivalist tendencies. Where The Feelies embraced the jangle of power pop, Spacemen 3 instead mined the rich territory of sixties-style psychedelia. It works because a lot of sixties psychedelia was inclined to be loose and unfurled, tending to lose the listener in a haze of noodling guitars and swirling organs. Some may argue that the repetition they utilized made their brand of psychedelia more boring, I would disagree, but the crowds did not flock to the store or the concert halls for Spacemen 3; they did though, to a higher degree, for J. Spaceman’s more exciting project, Spiritualized. Lyrically “Call the Doctor” is a kind of “Street Hassle” inspired bit of novelistic drug nonsense, but the music is the reason to listen to Spacemen 3. Use headphones.

b.

Thoughts on Rock and Roll in the Seventies-Punk and Power Pop (Part II), My Holy Trinity of Power Pop

2007-03-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

The Flamin' Groovies in
their velvet suits

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One was from San Francisco, another came from Memphis, Tennessee, and the other was from Cleveland, Ohio. And by the time the late sixties drew to a dark and foreboding close, they had very little in common aside from an affinity for rock and roll, and a revulsion to it’s widening array of structures, sounds, and forms.

They were all, in a term, rock-classicists, and in their own varying ways practitioners of a dying art form. Though they all lovingly looked toward the past, they would be no mere copyists and not yet revivalists. In fact all three were innovators whose narrow path would soon widen but by that time neither would be on it anymore.

When the following decade came to yet another worrisome close, two of the bands were miserably shattered, and the other was mounting a slow descent into the shadows. For a while in the seventies however, they were all three blazing one of the last trails for guitar-based pop and represented a musical high water mark in American Music. Most of it though, fell on the deaf and unknowing ears of a listening populace in the throes of a cultural recession.

The Flamin’ Groovies, Big Star and The Raspberries were directly rooted in the fertile soil of American rock and roll in the sixties. The Flamin’ Groovies—power pop’s elder statesmen—had been a famously unwelcome fixture in San Francisco throughout the mid to late sixties. In 1968, while the boho-hippies were eating acid and noodling endlessly on their guitars, The Groovies released a backward looking roots-rock record Supersnazz.

Alex Chilton, guitarist, vocalist and co-founder of Memphis’ Big Star, had been the babyish singer for blue-eyed soul bubble-gummers The Boxtops, and the whole of The Raspberries, aside from lead singer Eric Carmen (who was in a group called Cyrus Erie) had played in a legendary Cleveland garage group called The Choir.

By the time the seventies were in its dark twilight, these iconoclasts had barely scratched the surface and were on the fade. Though American power pop would soon have its day on the charts (Cheap Trick, The Knack, The Romantics), in the early to mid seventies these three bands made very few commercial ripples aside from the relatively small blast of billboard love The Raspberries conjured for their first single, “Go All the Way.” (The Raspberries charted 7 singles, but only “Go All the Way” climbed higher than 16 on the Billboard Chart). They still though, in my eyes, remain the holy trinity of Power Pop.

The Flamin’ Groovies chronologically came together first as a band, but the truth is a bit murkier. The Groovies in their early incarnation were for the most part a rootsy, bluesy proto-punk band under the auspicious leadership of Roy Loney. Once he left to pursue a solo career, The Groovies wandered and drifted for years, before regrouping across the Atlantic under the tutelage of ex-Love Sculpture and future Rockpile guitarist Dave Edmunds.

After a handful of years of fine-tuning their signature new sound—that nodded toward the garage-rock revivalism that would soon be in full bloom, while at the same time, incorporating swaths of luminous Beatlesque harmonic structures and guitar-punk ferocity—The Flamin’ Groovies, under the helm of producer Dave Edmunds released the classic Shake Some Action LP in 1976 on Sire Records. The same label that signed The Ramones.

Though the Flamin’ Groovies place in the power pop triumvirate may be disputed by jealous and majoritarian Badfinger fans—who, incidentally think that four good songs (“Come and Get It,” “No Matter What,” “Without You,” and “Day After Day”) a great career make—they certainly could not dispute the validity of a Memphis quartet who turned rock on its head in the early seventies; only to find that no one was listening.

While The Flamin’ Groovies were a workingman’s band that happened to be remarkable and voluminous songwriters, Big Star were technicians who sweated out a rock and roll transformation in the studio, groping for the perfect sound, while hardly ever touring.

In 1970, an increasingly precocious Alex Chilton became frustrated with his stultifying role in The Box Tops and quit the band to record a clutch of demos at Ardent studios in Memphis, Tennessee that he intended as a solo album.

Though Chilton’s hoped for solo record never came to proper fruition, (Ardent Records eventually released these recordings in 1996 under the title 1970) Chilton became acquainted with future band mate, songwriting and sparring partner, who hung out in a state of pseudo apprenticeship at the studio: Chris Bell.

Over the late winter of 1971, and early 1972, Big Star recorded the phenomenally influential #1 Record at Ardent; a classic that effortlessly combined Beatlesque pop, Memphis soul, youthful restlessness and country melancholia but was a spectacular commercial failure.

By the end of the year, terribly depressed and upset over both the failure of his record to sell, and the insalubrious business practices of Stax Records (Ardent’s parent company), not to mention creeping frustration over the extra attention the extroverted Alex Chilton received, Bell left the band in a state of suicidal despair.

Northeast of Memphis, in Cleveland, Ohio, a decidedly blue-collar town on the shores of Lake Erie, The Raspberries emerged just as the portentousness of the seventies began to become palpable.

Out of the ashes of two of Cleveland’s favorite local rock bands—the aforementioned Choir, and lead singer Eric Carmen’s outfit, Cyrus Erie—rose The Raspberries, a bunch of oversexed boys in flashy white suits, who were one part Who-power, one part angelic Beach Boys harmonic structure, and one part lascivious, high-kicking theatrics. A potent combo—they were power pop indeed.

The Raspberries were surprisingly virtuosic, and could pleasantly shift sounds, evidenced by the Latin-tinged “Come Around and See Me,” and the mid-tempo pop ballad “Last Dance” that morphs strange and effortlessly into country hoedown mode, before quickly turning back. They were strongest though at visceral and plaintively sexual songs like “Go All the Way” and the spine-tingling “Tonight.”

In April of 1975 The Raspberries broke up, and Lead singer Eric Carmen pursued a solo career that could be characterized as either syrupy or vomit inducing. Like almost every band that felt they did not receive their just deserts, the Raspberries reformed as old men. The results were unspectacular and Eric Carmen wisely declined.

After recording a handful of songs in Europe, Chris Bell returned to Memphis, Tennessee to help manage his father’s fast food chain. Two days after Christmas 1978, Chris Bell’s Triumph slammed into a light pole, killing him instantly. His solo recordings are collected on the majestic I Am The Cosmos.

Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel and Jody Stephens recorded a second Big Star record, the brilliant and more muscular Radio City. Then Chilton and Stephens along with a host of Memphis players recorded a weirdly sad and strange third Big Star album. This third effort is spotty at times, but Third/Sister Lovers remains a cult masterpiece nonetheless.

Chilton has gone on to an odd and sometimes baffling career as a sometimes rock deconstructionist, and at other times a pop-fluff interpreter. He broke my heart and put an inferior version of Big Star together after seeming like the last guy on earth who would do such a thing.

The Flamin’ Groovies released two more power pop albums before the seventies closed and then began to slide into obscurity. They continued to work and released a record in 1992 with frightening cover art but a few pop gems. It had the unfortunate title of Rock Juice.

I know it may seem hypocritical to accept the latter-day work of The Groovies while rejecting the others, but in a way it seems different. They were a working band from a different era, and they didn’t continually insult their own work the way Alex Chilton did in reference to his Big Star material.

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On July 4, 1976—the two hundred year anniversary of America's declaration of independence from the British and the subsequent militaristic British invasion—another invasion was occurring in reverse. At the Roundhouse in London, two American rock and roll bands were planting the seeds of future revolt. John Lydon, Michael Jones, and Paul Simonon were all in attendance, but The Clash and Sex Pistols had yet to form. That night The Ramones opened for label mates The Flamin’ Groovies.

The rest is history.

A frighteningly skinny Joey Ramone outside the Roundhouse Theater

b

Notes From Underground-Zimmerman, Yo La Tengo, Declan MacManus, Robert Wyatt, and Any Trouble

2007-03-09T00:48:00.001-08:00

I am in the midst of putting the finishing touches on my bit about power pop. But in the meantime, here are more notes.

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1. “I Threw it All Away”-Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline (1969)-Though I’m not a fan of the frog voice, this is a surprisingly remorseful and stately song from the characteristically prickly Dylan, who six years before released the unremittingly spiteful “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Not to say that a songwriter cannot sway from pole to pole, especially given the six year swing, but sometimes it seems as if Dylan would grow out of the grumpiness that characterized songs like his wounded-pride classic “Positively 4th Street.” Perhaps he did not need to “grow out” of such angry brilliance? I suppose though for all the grown-up literary gravitas of “Tangled up in Blue” he could still summon the angry meanness for a crabby entry like “Idiot Wind.”

2. “The Whole of the Law”-Yo La Tengo, Painful, (1993)-Yo La Tengo did a wonderful cover of the aforementioned Dylan song, so I thought that I would revisit another one of their fine covers, this one of an Only Ones song. Yes, them again. For one, Yo La Tengo ditched the sax, which incidentally, is a lesson I wish all rock bands would have learned since after, say, 1957: The Saxophone is intrusive! OK, The Coasters can do it, but please David Bowie, you should have put the saxophone down, it does not sound good. For some very strange reason the punk generation brought the horn back into pop music and for that, among other reasons, they should be spanked.

3. “I Want You”-Elvis Costello, Blood and Chocolate, (1986)-One of the most uncomfortable and brutally sad songs ever recorded. If anyone could write wounded pride better than Zimmerman it was MacManus. I once was drinking and listening to records with a dear friend and we were trying to outdo each other—who could play the saddest song. A silly game that appeals only to the sad and the lame I know, but we attempted it. I played this song and thought that I won. Then he played “Mother” by John Lennon…the bastard.

4. “Sea Song”-Robert Wyatt, Rock Bottom, (1974)-The covers are bedeviling me. Robert Wyatt did a stunning, shall I say, better, version of Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding,” but I’d rather focus on this bit of Canterbury weirdness that to me, sounds strangely like the Television Personalities on a Schoenberg kick. And though I go back and forth over the importance of context in music criticism—this is the first record Wyatt recorded after falling from a fifth story window, which paralyzed him.

5. “Yesterday's Love”-Any Trouble, Where Are All the Nice Girls?, (1980)-Back to Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus and Stiff Records. So first, let me get it out: this band is "heavily indebted" to Elvis Costello. The glasses, the Fender Jazzmaster? With that being said, this is a frighteningly good song, but it still is a rip. Next on the chopping block: The Jags.

b.

Top 100 (20-11)

2007-03-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

...and...the...beat...goes...on...

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20. "Come Dancing" (3:57)-The Kinks, State of Confusion, (1983)-I fell in love with this song as I was buying beer and whisky at the local Rite Aid drug store on the corner of Bush and Larkin streets in San Francisco. The song is a total incongruence of nostalgia and calypso shot through with a blissful and gone-too-fast moment of punk guitars. Brilliant, even if it came so damn late.

19. "Close" (4:46)-The Bevis Frond, The Auntie Winnie Album, (1988)-The Bevis Frond were a band that I had always read about, and always assumed that they would be psyche-guitar face-melters which many writers make them out to be. Instead, they are more like a stripped-down Guided By Voices, a Dylanesque guitar-pop band, replete with the overbearing simplicity of early folk-rock.

18. "Chivalry" (4:03)-The Mekons, Fear and Whisky, (1985)-Utterly regardless of their standing within the punk, rock, alt-country categories, "Fear and Whisky" is an amazing accomplishment of, I don't know, I guess...songwriting. There is a fair amount of violin, synthesizers, narrative, testosterone and vocal embellishment. In a way, it is so much, that it’s identity is stretched out, but never the less, it is a masterful entry.

17. "Certainly All" (1:58)-Guitar Slim, B-Side to the Feeling Sad Single on the Jim Bullet Label, (1952)-I used to work in a book store in Berkeley and there was a compact disc of Guitar Slim that we would listen to. I was an instant convert. I would not call my self a blues enthusiast, but it obviously has its place. I think what I like so much about him is his endearingly sloppy and visceral guitar leads.

16. "California" (3:13)-The Aislers Set, Terrible Things Happen, (1998)-When I was eighteen or nineteen I used to like a band called Henry’s Dress. They were a trio with two singers, one male and one female. When the guy would sing and play guitar, the girl played drums and vice versa. I thought that was a pretty neat trick for some reason. They broke up like all bands do, save for the Rolling Stones, and this is/was the girl’s new band. I felt like I kind of outgrew that stuff, but last year I rediscovered it. The song is very delicate and reverb-surfy, very pleasing if you like sixties music, particularly girl groups.

15. "But I Ain't Got You" (2:12)-The Remains, The Remains, (1965)-They could have been huge. They opened for The Beatles at Shea Stadium. The Beatles! This is not their best song, but it is a well-written bit of downbeat bluesy rock that I listened to compulsively last year.

14. "Both Sides Now" (3:13)-Judy Collins, Wildflowers, (1967)-Folk pop to the max. The lyrics are a bit too much, just look at the first verse: “Rows and floes of angel hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feather canyons everywhere, I’ve looked at clouds that way.” I just assume leave lyrics about ice cream castles on the cutting room floor, but I suppose I should blame Joni Mitchell, she wrote it. Judy Collins seems to be the less thoughtful, more pop-oriented version of Mitchell, but she is deadly with a melody. Her voice gives me chills and I just can’t help it.

13. "Billy is a Runaway" (2:27)-Iggy Pop, New Values, (1979)-Clearly not the best of James Osterberg, but not as bad as you think.

12. “Better Off Dead” (2:07)-The Wipers, Better Off Dead Single on Trap Records, (1979)-For the most part, I have never been a fan of west coast punk. No Black Flag, no Weirdos, no Germs, no Avengers, no Flipper. Not even Bad Religion or NOFX, or Green Day. But I kept reading and reading about Portland’s Wipers and finally listened to them and they are fine at moments, a bit heavy handed at others, and on “Better Off Dead” they are close to perfect.

11. "Besame Mucho" (2:10)-The Ventures-This was hard to research. I found a compact disc that came out in 1995 with this version on it, but it was probably recorded before 1965. I have always liked guitar instrumentals and probably no one does them as good as The Ventures. “Perfidia” is nice, but so is this. Maybe you will like the “Batman Theme.” The Ventures are full of surprises, some totally expected, some not.

Notes From Underground-The Vibrators, The Only Ones, The Homosexuals, Tav Falco & The Beat

2007-03-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

Here's one more. I was bored today.
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1. “Whips & Furs,”-The Vibrators, Pure Mania, (1977)-I don’t want to point the finger here, but “Whips and Furs” and “Another Girl, Another Planet” sound practically identical. The record Pure Mania was released in 1977, The Only Ones in 1978. “Another Girl” is the better song, being almost perfect, but The Vibrators are more concise, with less guitar theatrics. A mystery.

2. “Baby’s Got a Gun”-The Only Ones, Remains (1984)-Another album of odds, ends, demos, scraps and unfinished bits. I have tried to put these songs in a kind of chronological order, but I am unsure of when many of these songs were actually recorded. It makes sense though to put this song next, because in the last I mentioned The Only Ones. “Baby’s Got a Gun” is too great of a song to be stuck on some odds and sods album, but the story of The Only Ones is one of true musical inequality. It just is not fair. Strangely, their last album shares a title with this song, but the song does not appear on the record.

3. “Snapshots Of Nairobi,”-The Homosexuals, The Homosexuals' Record (1984, recorded in 1978)-Possibly my favorite band name. A band of contrarians that purposely avoided success (not that they would have found it if they sought it); The Homosexuals were one of the more challenging of the dissonant punk noise groups, drawing similarities to bands like The Pop Group and The Birthday Party, without the self-conscious disco beat-orientation of the former or the monster movie eclecticism of the latter.

4. “Snake Drive”-Tav Falco's Panther Burns, Behind The Magnolia Curtain (1981)-Three minutes of loose, creeping, deconstructed, reverb-drenched instrumental boogie blues from Guatavo Falco’s Memphis blues and rock revivalist group that featured Alex Chilton on guitar and drums.

5. “I Will Say No”-The Beat, The Kids Are the Same (1981)-Besides writing one of the greatest songs, despite getting very little credit (“Hangin’ On The Telephone”), Boston’s The Nerves splintered and produced two of the better L.A. power pop bands: The Plimsouls and Paul Collins’ Beat. Though The Kids are the Same does not match the pure and concise ferocity of The Beat’s debut LP, it still has infectiously hip-shaking songs like “I Will Say No.”

b.

Notes From Underground-The Denims, Anne Briggs, The Flamin Groovies, Roky Erickson & The Heartbreakers

2007-03-02T12:02:00.001-08:00

This is a new weekly column that I will attempt to do, chronicling songs that are not overexposed, or exposed at all for that matter. It will be similar to the Top 100, but with only five songs instead of ten.

Here are the first five:
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1. “I'm Your Man,” The Denims, Essential Pebbles Volume 2 (Mid to Late Sixties)-Basically a Queens, New York version of The Zombies. They are collected with a score of other bands that are, for the most part completely unknown, on The Essential Pebbles Collection Volume Two, which collects bands even more obscure than Volume One. The good news is that this double disc is cheap and has 55 tracks; some of which are recorded straight from the old forty-fives, so there are some scratches and pops. I don’t mind it, but most people would.

2. “Willie O'Winsbury”-Anne Briggs, Anne Briggs, 1971-Along with Vashti Bunyan and Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs was one of the most angelic of Britain’s female folk singers. With a beatific and nigh perfect voice and a style that virtually launched the female traditional folk movement, the anxious Briggs hated the sound of her recorded voice and retired at the age of 27.

3. “Have You Seen My Baby?”-The Flamin' Groovies, Teenage Head (1971)-Before Cyril Jordan would take the reins and reinvent The Flamin’ Groovies as the greatest power pop band ever; Roy Loney drove this hard rocking proto-punk band. If you ever wanted to hear a song written by Randy Newman sound like it was recorded by The Stooges, here’s your chance.

4. “I Have Always Been Here Before,” Roky Erickson, Gremlins Have Pictures (1986)-The former leader of Texas’ influential psychedelic band The 13th Floor Elevators famously underwent shock treatment and a regiment of the antipsychotic drug thorazine after pleading insanity to possession of marijuana; and it shows in his solo material. Gremlins Have Pictures is a collection of musical scraps that the king of underworld rock and folk recorded between 1975 and 1982. “I Have Always Been Here Before” is a direct antecedent of Robert Pollard’s fried-brain folk style and a bittersweet lament on a man’s wasted life.

5. “One Track Mind”-Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, L.A.M.F Revisited (1984, Recorded in 1977)-Written by Walter Lure and Jerry Nolan, “One Track Mind” perfectly illustrates the evolution of the slapdash, loose and languid proto-punk of Thunders’ first band, The New York Dolls, to his second, the quicker-paced, but just as unruly (pure-punk) Heartbreakers.

b.

Thoughts on Rock and Roll in the Seventies-Punk and Power Pop (Part I)

2007-02-24T11:08:00.005-08:00

The Punk Originators

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Much like garage rock, power pop is one of the most fluid and hard to define musical genres in music. No one has yet to really define it, and that may be because like punk and its early, narrow and short-lived forebear glam-rock, both of which have more slightly tangible boundaries, it is part of rock and roll’s third generation. That is to say it came of age in the seventies, a very confusing and musically messy decade.

The true genesis of Rock and Roll lies with Chuck Berry—both rock’s Creator and Adam. Then came the girl groups, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Byrds and the American underground garage movement, and its British counterpart. And in the seventies came the great rupture and the subsequent untidy flowering of all rock’s subgenres.

That is all excruciatingly reductive, but it spells out rock’s explosive beginnings, the origins that would lead to the fracturing of rock’s still feral potency in the seventies. This feral potency did not register in all of rock and roll’s third-generation forms—there was showy prog-rock, trite country-rock, ham fisted traditional rock, and of course disco which brought with it the thrill of dancing and drugs. Neither of these genres were particularly feral or potent, but all of which were strong enough to elicit varying degrees of mass commercial appeal.

There were still of course seventies iconoclasts that were either an ill fit for genre classification or were just holdovers from the sixties—The Rolling Stones, Wings, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, the resilient Bob Dylan, John Lennon, David Bowie, the superstar Minimalists and the German Kraut-Rockers. But to me, the disco decade will historically be known for the rise of rock’s twin progeny—power pop and punk.

The feral potency first revealed itself as a conduit in the late sixties, most noticeably in the proto-punk groups, The Velvet Underground, the MC5 and The Stooges. All three of which were direct antecedents of punk’s first wave. This initial wave of proto-punk bands however, were not nearly as influential to the less aggressive power poppers that dotted the American and British landscapes as the seventies began to draw to a close. They looked mainly to the British beat groups who had begun crafting more muscular harmonic guitar pop—late-era Beatles, The Hollies, The Kinks and The Who (the latter two came out of the box fairly muscular).

Punk has almost historically been described as a social movement but I find it more helpful to see it, like power pop, as a musical movement. This conflation occurs because of the historically fluid musical crosscurrent that ran between the United States and the UK. Punk, created and named in the States, had its zenith in Great Britain where it gained commercial traction, mainly because of economic and social volatility and the relative geographic compactness of the country. In the wide-open spaces of America, punk was like a fascinating urban abnormality—a fetish that could hold your gaze, but could never become the commercially viable product that it did in Britain.

In fact, many think falsely that punk had as its original sin, an overt fascination with politics or radicalism. It is true that in America the MC5 were explicitly political, with their White Panther Party ties and appearance at the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, but they were an early anomaly.

The real bridge between the original proto-punk bands and punk’s first wave were the bizarrely theatrical and exhibitionistic, yet apolitical New York Dolls. The lines are easily drawn: first, like The Velvets, The Sonics, The Ronettes and T. Rex, The New York Dolls were key early influences on the original punk band, The Ramones, and second, Malcolm McLaren—prior to famously cobbling together and managing the punk rock version of the Monkees, The Sex Pistols—handled the last few Dolls shows.

The New York Dolls did seem obsessed with sexual and gender politics in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it would be a mistake to consider them overtly political. And in the case of the Ramones, if sniffing glue was a political issue, then they’d be political, but it is not. One may argue that The Dead Boys were politicized in a way, insofar as their fascination with the shock-value of swastikas was concerned, but they were mostly just a bunch of dummies from Cleveland who wanted to be scandalous. Politics was an obvious element of punk that came later, mainly when the British got a hold of it.

Power Pop shunned the nihilistic feeling of dread and frustration that formed punk’s alienated ethos. Instead, it mined the richly naïve romanticism of rock’s early practitioners. Whereas punk may have channeled Chuck Berry’s guitar aesthetic (with Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders as primary conduits), power pop adopted his “School Days” lyrical style. Alex Chilton took that early sixties rock-naiveté, made famous by Berry, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and fused it with a youthful restlessness (explicitly name checking The Stones) but never approaching the futuristic bleakness that the punk rabble would one day predict, on Big Star’s delicate acoustic ramble “Thirteen.”

Where punk would later turn awkward, shameful, angry and guarded, power pop was unabashed and unashamed, no matter how much like The Beatles it sounded, no matter how close to bubble gum it was. Punk set itself up as the antithesis to the sunny pop of The Beatles, and the mania it had one day inspired and the legend it had spawned. Joe Strummer sang in 1979, in the ultimate generational throw down: “London calling, now don't look to us Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.”

Of course, the ironic part was that John Lennon had already thrown the first and heaviest shovelful of dirt on Beatlemania’s fresh corpse eight years earlier when he uttered the crushing words: “I don't believe in kings, I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles,” in his beautiful apostatizing lament “God.”

Power Pop on the other hand seemed to be in awe of the exuberance of sixties harmonic-pop. Even if it didn’t share with its forebears a love of traditional folk or blues-based rock, it was fairly musically virtuosic (unlike punk) and conventional where lyrics were concerned. Power pop was slightly skewed but it never truly challenged in the same way the Cain-like Punk did.

Punk shared an immediacy and rebelliousness with rock, but created a generational rift initially with its harsh and reductive minimalism, and then later with its radical rhetoric and revolutionary exhortations. Though Power Pop could become lascivious (it was in fact all about girls) it was for the most part easier to embrace, but like punk in the beginning, it was a commercial dead end.

By turning the punk origins story on its head, one can see a strange dichotomy in Power Pop’s own beginnings. The first power pop band is arguably Badfinger—a British group whose first album was released in 1970. Though the passage between mid to late sixties British music and power pop is murky, Badfinger probably best represents the genre’s beginning. Like punk’s explosive sojourn across the Atlantic in reverse, it would take three American bands to take ringing, muscular guitar pop to its apex by infusing that early British template with a pastiche of American influences.
b.

The Best Power Pop Band Ever?

Next: Part 2, The Holy Trinity-The Flamin' Groovies, Big Star, and The Raspberries.

Top 100 (30-21)

2007-02-24T00:07:00.001-08:00

I almost forgot I was still doing this.
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30. Funny Little Frog (3:08)-Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit, (2006)-The second and last of my songs that were actually released last year. I have had a kind of love/hate relationship with this band since, what seemed to me at the time, their first album came out—If You’re Feeling Sinister (their first album, Tigermilk had gone out of print). I don’t know how many people remember, but If You’re Feeling Sinister was a big deal, and sometimes if you are not in on the initial wave, you feel like a phony jumping on the band-wagon, and I couldn’t have that, so I kept Belle & Sebastian at arms length. Anyway to make a long story short, I purchased their third album for a pittance and liked the first track "It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career" (not so much now) and warmed up to them. I think their last two albums have been great, fairly grown-up and proper sounding pop albums; and I am glad that the Donovan/Nick Drake influence has been mostly chucked.

29. Eve of Destruction (1:22)-Johnny Thunders, Hurt Me, (1984)-And now, on to the second P.F. Sloan song. Johnny Thunders tears through this peacenik screed, which acts as a primer on many of the causes that had bounded the sixties counter-culture together: domestic racism, Vietnam, Middle East brutalities and Nuclear Armageddon. It seems a strange turn for the very un-taciturn Thunders: this is the guy who so successfully conflated Chuck Berry’s guitar aesthetics with heroin culture and wrote a called an album "Too Much Junkie Business."

28. Dub Magnificent (3:32)-King Tubby, The Roots of Dub, (1974)-More Reggae, or, maybe more to the point Jamaican music, and in this case, dub. For the uninitiated, dub is essentially instrumental reggae with lots of spacey and echoey delay. Tubby, born Osborne Ruddock, was a Kingston-area electronic repairman, who started out fixing sound system speakers that were set up on street corners that were damaged, oftentimes through the thuggish and competitive violence executed by rival sound system owners. As a disc-cutter at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle Studio, Ruddock began to pull the vocals off tracks, highlighted the low-end bass and the drums with spidery echo, dropping other instrumental tracks in and out, and in the process he invented a new genre.

27. Drinkin' My Life Away (5:57)-Hasil Adkins, Drinkin' My Life Away (2003)-Adkins was a one-man hillbilly band that was beautifully naive enough, as a young boy, to think that the music he heard on the radio was all played by one person. A lot of his output is a bit tough to get through, and is only for the true believers. Adkins was not totally unlike a loonier Link Wray with some of the most creepy lyrics that I have ever heard. Drinkin’ My Life Away is played fairly straight, a bit out of tune and very long, but very sad. Of course he recorded it as an old man, just a few years before his death from complications after being run over by an all terrain vehicle.

26. Don't Talk About Us (2:35)-Someloves, B-Side to the It’s My Time Single on Citadel, (1986)-Marvelous guitar pop from that phenomenal Do the Pop collection of Australian punk. Like the Buzzcocks, but even more fun and without a hint of sexual politics.

25. Don't Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby) (2:47)-The Cookies, Don't Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby) Single on Dimension, (1964)-I could have done a little bit better research. This is one of two songs, just on this segment of the list written by Carole King. The Cookies have a strange history, that started in the fifties, before they were transformed into The Raelettes, by, yes, Ray Charles, and then into a wonderful Brill Building vocal trio in the early sixties, scoring a hit with Chains, and Don’t Say Nothing Bad (About my Baby).

24. Don't Let Go (3:29)-The Barracudas, Drop Out, (1981)-The Barracudas were a London-based power pop band (with a pronounced punk strain) that was founded by Canadian expatriate Jeremy Gluck. The Barracudas were one of the first bands to try their hands at true sixties revivalism, but to their credit they somewhat failed. With a band like the Chesterfield Kings, it is sometimes hard to differentiate between a song of theirs and a song that was actually recorded in the sixties. The Barracudas were too much a product of their time musically.

23. Didn't Tell the Man (2:56)-The Hitmen, Didn’t Tell the Man Single on WEA, (1979)-Yet another song from the Do the Pop compilation. If I haven’t said it yet, if you like New York Dollsesque punk or tough power pop you should get this double disc. You can probably get it cheap. This is probably the best song on the comp, very much like Radio Birdman (which is the case with almost every Australian punk band), but a bit softer.

22. Darling, Lets Have Another Baby (2:36)-Thee Headcoats, Brother Is Dead ... But Fly Is Gone! (1998)-I was originally very excited to find a P.F. Sloan connection early in this endeavor, but now the novelty has worn off. The most exciting of course was the Fleetwood Mac—Earl Vince and the Valiants ruse. Well, now that I know Billy Childish was in Mickey and the Milkshakes this makes two appearances. I use to live with a friend of mine and he liked this band, I got into Holly Golightly, but not this band so much, though I did like the cover they did of The Ramones song called "Pinhead." Anyway, I bought a bunch of their records this year and this may not be my favorite of the bunch, but it is close.

21. Crying In The Rain (1:53)-Carole King, Crying In The Rain Single on Atlantic Records, (1963)-I always thought, great songwriter but kind of a corny singer. I mean, I just remember listening to the big songs off Tapestry in the car as a little kid and now it just sounds real dated. Dated in the worse seventies kind of way. This sixties stuff is phenomenal though, especially this song, very stripped, so stripped that the great songwriting shows through, no piano-funk fluff to get lost in.

Nikki Sudden, Dave Kusworth: Jacobites, The Ragged School, 1986

2007-02-15T20:47:00.000-08:00

Nikki Sudden & Dave Kusworth: Jacobites
The Ragged School
1986

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Last Sunday evening I tortured myself by watching the Grammys. Mainstream rock and roll must really be dead if the best they could do is wheel out the Red Hot Chili Peppers who stumbled through some excruciating and dated sounding rap rock. And it would have been bad enough to sit through The Eagles playing Eagles songs, but when I had to sit through Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flatts doing Eagles songs badly and watch Smokey Robinson perform in women’s lingerie—well, let’s just say I was cleaning up the vomit for days.

Anyway, that’s all neither here nor there. I do, however macabre as it may sound, enjoy the In Memoriam segment, and as I was watching on Sunday night I had forgotten that the gods were cruel enough to take both Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett away in the same year. It brought to mind also the strange death of an Englishman born Adrian Nicolas Godley, known to a scant few music fans as Nikki Sudden. I stood there mesmerized, inexplicably waiting to see Nikki Sudden’s tousled Ron Wood-esque mop of hair, but of course he did not show up on the screen—an obvious credit to Sudden’s wonderfully strange legacy.

Ostensibly, Sudden died from complications having to do with drugs after playing a show in New York (he was only 49), though the cause of death is still not known. He left in his wake one of the most maddeningly diverse discographies, made up of both his bands—the seminal noisy and precocious post-punk combo, The Swell Maps and the leather and lace Dylanesque troubadours, The Jacobites—and his many disparate solo albums.

The Ragged School is not a proper album, in that it was put together for American audiences by Peter Jesperson’s Twin/Tone label, a la the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today. Ragged School is made up mainly of the Jacobites first album, which was self-titled, and the subsequent Robespierre’s Velvet Basement, both of which were reissued with reams of bonus tracks by Secretly Canadian (as is Ragged School, but I am reviewing the original twelve track album on Twin/Tone; the Secretly Canadian reissue has 22 tracks).

The only songs which do not appear on either of those first two albums are “Bethlehem Castle,” which was a holdover from Nikki Sudden’s solo album, The Bible Belt, and Nikki Sudden’s brief instrumental dalliance “Cheapside,” which appears solely on The Ragged School.

After the Swell Maps disbanded in the early eighties, Nikki Sudden went on to record two solo albums: Waiting on Egypt (1982) and The Bible Belt (1983). I remember when I was younger, I had asked someone whose opinion I respected what he thought of Nikki Sudden and he replied that he only liked his first two solo albums. Of course those were the hardest to find before they were reissued, and I naturally assumed that they were like the two matching pieces of the Nikki Sudden Holy Grail.

Well I bought the reissues and they’re fine, but they don’t match the work Sudden did with Dave Kusworth, his delicate foil and fellow Jacobite. The Jacobites albums mark the creative zenith of both Kusworth and Sudden’s (post-Swell Maps) careers.

The one misstep on the album is unfortunately its opener, the overlong “Big Store,” which sounds like “Cortez the Killer” without the guitar histrionics, which means it is languid, slow, and for the most part, a little bit boring. The good news is, once you’re through with it, the rest of the album is nigh flawless.

The second track is one of Kusworth’s and if they were competing song for song, Kusworth would have the early lead. “It’ll All End up Tears” perfectly fits one of the Jacobites’ templates: fragile and delicately intertwining acoustic guitars, reverb, and subtly distributed Casio keyboards. The next song, “Hurt me More,” which they share the songwriting credit on, is more of the same—though they add a slide guitar solo, salt and sugar harmonies and a lonely marching snare beat.

Side One closes with the epic “Son of a French Nobleman,” which introduces another musical theme that Sudden and Kusworth are fond of—the slow build. Though the Jacobites were not the first to do this, it is still odd to hear rock music built on the same repeating four-chord verse in perpetuity in lieu of the typical verse chorus verse structure. Instead of changing the chords, they slowly add more instrumentation as the song lazily moves, a little chord organ, then synthesizer, drums, tambourine, maracas, backing vocals, etc.

Speaking of themes, if you are wondering why this unabashedly Byronic duo chose to name their band after bloodthirsty French Libertarians, you are not alone. I have no idea. My guess is though—and one look at them will prove this—they both look to varying degrees like Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and by extension, Rod Stewart. So it stands to reason that they probably romanticized that Rolling Stones tax-exile period when they recorded Exile on Main Street in the South of France.

They sound not totally unlike the Rolling Stones too, though not quite as accomplished as musicians, and only if the Rolling Stones lasted from Beggars Banquet through Goats Head Soup—their best period. The Jacobites’ influences aren’t hewn totally to that Stones mentality. Though they are surely fans of The Faces and T. Rex, there is obvious threads of Dylan, Neil Young, Gene Clark, The Velvet Underground, American Country and Western and a heavy indebtedness to traditional British Folk.

Side Two of Ragged School starts with one of the two best songs on the album, “Ambulance Station,” another four-chord, sad and delicate slow burn, highlighted by Sudden’s sadly wistful lyrics: “so you pull your shoes apart, make a bridge across your heart, she threw it all, threw it all away.” Three tracks later is probably the best song the duo ever recorded, and one of the only few songs on the album to feature an electric guitar—“Pin Your Heart To Me.” With it’s Nikki-sung verse, and Dave-sung chorus it is their decidedly less sophisticated and certainly more fun version of “A Day in the Life.”

Sadly the Jacobites broke up the same year that Ragged School appeared stateside. Nikki Sudden put out many solo albums, the best of which were the phenomenal Texas, and the severely depressing dulcimer-inflected Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is not about pirates. Dave Kusworth also put out his fair share of albums; the only one I can attest for is The Bounty Hunters, which is also the name of his band. It is pretty good. They reformed earlier in the decade with uneven results. Dave Kusworth is still with us. Nikki died on March 26, 2006 in New York after playing a show with Evan Dando. He will be missed.

Nikki is the one on the left. R.I.P.

b.

The Gories, I Know You Fine But How You Doin', 1990

2007-02-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

The Gories
I Know You Fine But How You Doin'
1990
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One of the great (and lesser known) musical travesties is that The Gories—the best bass-less garage band to ever come out of Detroit and maybe anywhere—have been critically buried by a clownish, image-obsessed, meticulously-managed duo who mainly sound like a neutered Led Zeppelin that also eschew the bass-guitar and have a girl drummer. I will not name them, but you must know which gruesome twosome I speak of.

Detroit is obviously known for its numerous bands and musical groups, but rock and roll-wise, I’d rather it be for The Gories, (or) The Stooges, Nick and the Jaguars, Ted Nugent, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the MC 5, or even Bob Seger for crying out loud; just not that other band.

The Gories formed in 1986—a trio of obscure motor-city trash rockers that included guitarists Mick Collins, Dan Kroha, and drummer Margaret Ann (Peggy) O’Neill. They had done time in local acts such as, “the Wire-inspired” yet Jesus and Mary Chain-named, Floor Tasters, the U-Boats, the On-Set and Darkest Hours.

Armed with Fender guitars, Vox amps, a fuxx-box and a stripped down drum-kit, The Gories were armed to the teeth and prepared to churn out some of the most filthy, fuzzy, immediate and effecting garage-punk to ever be spewed from a speaker since…well, since Ike Turner’s amp fell from a moving car, or when Link Wray or Dave Davies slashed their amps, depending on which apocryphal story you choose to believe.

After a slew of singles and one beautifully realized yet chaotic album The Gories went to Memphis, Tennessee in 1990 to record an album at Easley Recording. The man they enlisted to helm the record was none other than Alex Chilton, formerly of the Boxtops, Big Star and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns—an avowed rock deconstructionist who had produced the Cramps psychobilly classic, Songs the Lord Taught us.

Though I have become recently wary of superlatives, I Know You Fine But How You Doin’ is close to perfect and should be legitimately placed above all other revivalist garage records. Another minor travesty is that the people at Rhino had the stones to put out The Children of Nuggets box and ignore the Gories. In the land of the garage revisionists—The Gories are king.

I Know You Fine opens with a lyrically poetic and antiquated sounding DJ’s shout-out from days passed: "This here’s the Gories from Detroit; hot of the press. It’s gonna jump on you baby and it’s gonna stay in your dress. Here it comes!" And then the first song, “Hey Hey, We’re the Gories,” scratches along, playfully aping, you guessed it, The Monkees. The slightly lascivious “You Make it Move” follows, buoyed by a fuzzy, livewire guitar line and the primal, repetitive thud of what sounds like a disabused oil drum.

Though it seems almost absurd to say, The Gories seemed to have cleaned up their sound on this record. Their first record House Rockin’ is bone raw, rustbelt trash rock which is almost sinister in it’s lack of control. Though it’s still a marvelous record; for I Know You Fine, they seemed to have built on that unhinged chaos, creating a slightly more coherent effort.

Coherency is one of The Gories’ strong suits. Trying to hold such disparate influences together—Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, Link Wray, Bo Diddley, Suicide, Joy Division, The Sonics, in a slight way, Hendrix and voodoo—could make for a messy affair, but The Gories are masters at holding many contrasting sounds together at once.

The album is top to bottom nearly flawless sly and impish garage punk, shot through with minimalist deconstructionism and is built perfectly around the flinty, abrasive and subtly textured twin guitars of Collins and Kroha. O’Neil is the minimalist foil that drives each song—try finding another band, aside from perhaps Neu!, with a drummer who so thoroughly disregards the practice of doing "fills" and makes practically no rhythmic changes.

There are four stand out songs: The impeccably literate “Thunderbird ESQ,” a song about a guy wedded more to his fortified wine than his female companion, “Smashed,” about, well you can probably figure it out, the desperate “View From Here,” and, probably their most famous song, which is not saying much, “Nitroglycerine,” a particularly sweaty song, essentially about having sex and fighting.

The Gories put out one more album, the aptly titled Outta Here (1992), and then broke up. Mick Collins is in the band The Dirtbombs and Dan Kroha is in the creepy-looking Demolition Doll Rods. If you think that you are a fan of garage, and don’t have all three of their albums you should buy them today and worry about the appropriate self-flagellation later.

I mean this with all due respect—The Gories are to, that other band, what the Beatles are to Bad Finger. And that is no lie.

b.

Is Born To Run the Best Song Ever Written?

2007-02-07T11:37:00.000-08:00

Born to Run Single on Columbia Records
Bruce Springsteen
1975

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Sometimes it is hard to imagine that there was a time when Bruce Springsteen actually meant anything. That there was really a time when he stood, at least in the abstract for something; especially something musically significant. I know he is a rich liberal that many politicians on the left like to solicit donations from. I know he is a slightly less aggravating American version of the patronizing and overtly political U2 frontman Bono. But how long has it been since musically, sonically, and historically that Bruce Springsteen has been relevant?

Sure, he stood up to the modern world, hitched up his jeans and asked: 57 Channels (and Nothin’ on)? But for the most part, to younger generations he is the progenitor of a misunderstood, yet explicitly inward-looking, mid-American ethos—characterized by his album Born in the U.S.A.—an ethos that is now championed by car-commercial patriots like Toby Keith and (unfortunately) John Mellencamp.

Bruce Springsteen though, has authored albums that stand alone in the American canon: the defiantly lonely Nebraska, the messy, spoilt-broth masterpiece The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and the singularly thrilling Born to Run—a magical love letter to the (often vehicular) romance of a dirt-poor, greasy and romantic youth which has, as it’s title track, the spine tingling piece de resistance of the Springsteen catalogue: the magnificent Born to Run.

Greil Marcus famously said that Born to Run was a ’57 Chevy that ran on melted Crystals records. And obviously Springsteen had sixties hot rod muscle on his mind, as he brilliantly conflated the Phil Spector-inspired Wall of Sound with James Dean-mumbled sensitivity and a Dylanesque scope of Americana, making Born to Run a sonically intense epic reading of a mythic and lost American youth.

Today though, Springsteen is bloated, happy and well-heeled; a brand name and a corporate entity unto himself. He is not that lean and hungry boy that he once was. With his oversized hat, youthful scraggly beard, and tank top, he seemed such an outsider. He was just another gauche kid from New Jersey. Now, with his rich and paunchy tucked-in middle section and pasty fiftyish face he is The Boss (of what, I do not know).

He was though once a hungry and beautiful kid, the impoverished New Jersey street poet as Dickensian wastrel; and a kinder, gentler version of the intensely crabby Bob Dylan. Springsteen was also a telecaster-wielding conductor of an East Coast rock orchestra that was as tight a live act that ever sweated over a crowded throng, and he only canceled shows when he was so worn out that he was reduced to vomiting blood. Bruce Springsteen was once the real thing.

Born to Run starts with a minimally epic and iconic opening. Mixing in a simple saxophone run and bare-bones glockenspiel-sounding keyboard, the band wastes little time getting to the meat of Springsteen’s grim narrative:

"In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run"

The song is beautifully literate, a kind of sweeping and inglorious tale informed by the kind of depression-era songs and novels made famous by Woodie Guthrie and Edward Anderson; stories about beautiful small town, or country losers just trying to hold on to something. And it is about cars—or as Bruce Springsteen, so beautifully puts them: suicide machines; and for the futurist-minded: hemi-powered drones.

Though I am not a fan of Clarence Clemmons, his seventeen-second-sax solo is seamless, a bit busy but not at all out of place or incongruous like the saxophone can often be in rock and roll after say Exile on Main Street.

After Springsteen delivers the fatalistically romantic line “I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss,” the song lurches into its iconic breakdown, perhaps the most famous of all breakdowns for it seems as if it will never end. And then, the barely audible but spine-tingling nonetheless: “1, 2, 3, 4,” is uttered, followed by the last stanza of his nihilistically romantic hot-rod fantasy:

"The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide
Together Wendy we’ll live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I don’t know when we’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go and well walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run."

Both Lyrically and sonically, Born to Run is a masterpiece; it is the most economical four and a half minutes of rock and roll that I will ever hear. Like any great writer, Springsteen created an alternate universe, in this case an almost futuristic past, narrowly drawn, but beautifully rendered.

I don’t know what the best song ever written is, nobody does. Perhaps it’s The Rolling Stones' Little T & A, or Guided By Voices’ Peep Hole, or The Beatles’ I’m Only Sleeping. Maybe it's Chuck Berry’s Memphis, or The Ronettes’ Do I Love You?, or The Flamin’ Groovies’ You Tore me Down, perhaps The Kinks’ Come Dancing, or 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. I suppose that those songs represent just an ultra-slim fraction of the candidates. Born to Run though has to be, at the very least, considered one of the greatest songs ever written and recorded. It is a miraculous thing of beauty that gives one the chills upon each listen.

tramps like us indeed,

b.

Please read this post by an amateur satirist jerk who didn't bother to read the last paragraph of this article before he decided to get cute. Feel free to leave him a message.

Top 100 (Songs 40-31)

2007-02-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

I am almost, almost to the end.
_____________________________________________________

40. I Cannot Find Her (2:33)-The Chesterfield Kings, Stop, (1985)-I am a sucker for desperate-sounding, jangly, acoustic twelve-string guitar ballads. The Chesterfield Kings though, are generally known for more Stonesy and aggressive garage songs, but on I Cannot Find Her, they let their sweet and sensitive lovelorn side shine through.

Chesterfield Kings 99th Floor Video.

39. I Can Never Tell (2:44)-The Crawdaddys, 5X4 EP on Voxx Records, (1980)-Yet another entry from the Children of Nuggets compilation. The Crawdaddys were an L.A. area beat revival group who, like the Beatles, Stones and Yardbirds before them, were enamored with American Blues artists…they came along, about 15 years too late though. So instead of adulation they got a life of crushing obscurity

38. I Adore Him (2:46)-The Angels, I Adore Him Single on Smash Records, (1963)-These Jersey girls delivered one of the archetypal girl-group songs when they released My Boyfriend’s Back in 1963. The former doo-wop group who had a hit in 1961 with Till, got tough when Patty Santiglia replaced Linda Jansen and they submitted to the Spector-lite songwriting-producing team of Feldman-Goldstein-Gottehrer. The Angels recorded My Boyfriend’s Back originally as a demo for the queens of tuff-girl pop The Shangri-La’s, but their managers decided to keep it for themselves and the rest is history. A friend of mine burned the Girl Groups Sounds Lost and Found (One Kiss can Lead to Another) box for me which compiles some fairly obscure (now) girl group songs, which is how I came across this lesser known gem from the same year.

37. Hit That B*&!# (2:47)-The Monarchs, Heads Up 7” on Estrus Records (1995, recorded in 1993)-Over two and a half minutes of two-chord, minimal, caveman trash rock from a band that I would imagine not many people have ever heard of. I bought this single when I still actually thumbed through the new seven-inch records. I also used to have a record by another Estrus band called The Mortals, which was markedly worse. The Monarchs put out two other singles on Bulb Records, and an album on the German label Pin-up. All of which is sadly very hard to find.

36. Greetings To The New Brunette (3:30)-Billy Bragg, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry (1986)-I once had an album of his called Workers Playtime because when I was about 16, I was obsessed with The Smiths and heard that Johnny Marr had played guitar on Billy Bragg records, so I ended up with that weird blend of socialist dogma, Woody Guthrieisms and bad eighties reverbed guitar. It was clear I was not ready for Billy Bragg. Years ago I bought those records he did of Woody Guthrie material with Wilco, which are marvelous, but I had never really bothered to listen to his own work. This year though I finally gave it a shot, and though Talking With the Taxman About Poetry still has unfortunate sounding guitar (Mr. Marr plays nicely, but it sounds very dated), it has many strong songs, including this romantic song of young proletarian love.

35. Girl of My Dreams (4:09)-Bram Tchaikovsky, Strange Man, Changed Man, (1979)-Peter Bramall left The Motors—a kind of low-rent ELO type band that wrote some good songs: Dancing The Night Away, Airport, That’s What John Said—because of a lack of creative influence, and under his unfortunately ambitious nom-de-plume, Bram Tchaikovsky recorded a single Sarah Smiles, that led him to a solo career. Girl of My Dreams is bar none the best thing he ever did, because it is one of the best power pop songs ever. Barrowing heavily from Pete Townsend for the intro and chorus and sounding as perfect as anything The Flamin’ Groovies or Big Star did, Girl of My Dreams is a power pop classic.

34. Girl After Girl (2:04)-The Fevers, Gaan Daar Waar De Meisjes Zijn, (2002)-The Fevers are a Dutch band that sound like The Real Kids and vaguely like The Ramones—a kind of half garage, half power pop band. Girl After Girl is an Elvis song, which is a bit startling to figure out, because it sounds like pitch perfect power pop, tailor made for a trio. I figured this out by doing research for the bit I wrote on Alex Chilton who also does this song (quite differently) on Like Flies on Sherbert.

33. Get Yourself Together (3:05)-Caesars, Get Yourself Together single on Scepter, (1967)-I know practically nothing about this band. I was quite taken with the Small Faces song of the same title, and while trying to download it I ended up with this unknown soul gem. (I could not find a picture of any kind of this band).

32. Gentle On My Mind (3:00)-Glen Campbell, Gentle on My Mind, (1967)-Gentle On My Mind, along with By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Galveston, form a holy trio of Campbell songs, only in the case of Gentle On My Mind, it was written by John Hartford and not Jimmy Webb. Sounding not unlike Harry Nilsson’s version of Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’, Gentle On My Mind is the type of song that is most effecting while looking out the window of a moving car.

31. G. F. S. (1:52)-Slant 6, Inzombia, (1995)-Wow, I had to go back to my formative years for this one. I hadn’t really listened to this record in a long while, but this year I kind of reacquainted myself with bands like Heavenly, Henry’s Dress and Slant 6. When I was twenty all my friends liked this band. I think I mostly thought they were pretty, or at least neat looking (though not on the cover of Inzombia so much) and they seemed to be kind of like empty-headed Dischord punk royalty, and along with The Nation of Ulysses and The Make-Up, I decided I did not want to like it anymore, so I put the records in a box in a closet and forgot about them. Well, in the case of those Ian Svenonius bands I probably was correct but upon my new acquaintance, I found Slant 6 infectious in a lean and poppy garage sort of way, without sounding at all cute or twee.

Yip/Jump Music: Summer 1983, Daniel Johnston, 1983

2007-01-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

Daniel Johnston
Yip/Jump Music: Summer 1983
1983

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Daniel Johnston was born in 1961 in Sacramento, California to Christian fundamentalist parents. When Johnston was still a young boy, his parents moved the family to New Cumberland, West Virginia, when the father, an engineer, was offered a job with Quaker State. As a young man, Daniel Johnston originally attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, but had to transfer to Kent State because creeping emotional and mental problems that would continue to dog him for the rest of his life began to surface.

His parents, feeling that Johnston was an ill fit for college suggested he quit school. In 1983 he moved to Houston Texas, to live with his brother, where he worked at the six flags theme park Astroworld. In the basement of his brother’s Houston house, Johnston kept a chord organ—a wheezing keyed instrument that uses air blown through reeds to make sound—an exceptionally out of tune guitar and a tape recorder. With barely anything else, Daniel Johnston created his classic album of love lost, pain, confusion, innocence, The Beatles, salvation and hero worship with an inelegant and brutally messy grace that is scarcely heard in popular music—Yip/Jump Music.

The songs themselves are somewhat arresting and more than a little confusing upon first listen. The first song on the album, "Chord Organ Blues" is literally banged out on a chord organ and is a kind of churlish sounding boogie woogie, driven by Johnston’s feverish and percussive, locomotive slamming of the keys. One would be forgiven, if at first, they did not know what to make of the juvenile and simple scrawl of a song. I would imagine that some might even find Johnston’s work to be a case of the emperor wearing no clothes. Though I would forgive that thought initially, hopefully by the time one sifted through the entire album, and listened closely to its final track "I Remember Painfully," one would jettison such wrongheaded notions.

"I Remember Painfully" is a savagely sad and hyper-literary song that defies all songwriting logic, it is a classic and excruciatingly destructive ballad written in a sad and innocently angry hand: “And I remember you at the funeral shaking hands and hanging coats. And I remember you standing pregnant at the art room. It was weird, but what is it now, it’s pain.” And then: “When I saw you at the department store I said, “Have a nice baby.” You were standing happy. I left you with that smile on your face. Years later I was hitchhiking and that mortician picked me up. Then he said to me, he said ‘good luck.’” Yip/Jump Music is Johnston’s most lucid and well-written work, before his psychosis bloomed and his lyrics became increasingly (more) childlike, biblically oriented and weirdly psychedelic.

Much has been made of Johnston’s mental illness. Besides for perhaps his music, his lunacy has formed the greatest bulk of the singer/songwriter’s myth and renown. Like other, somewhat similar, artists—Skip Spence, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett—some of Johnston’s fans subscribe to a kind of cult of mental illness, meaning that many seem to ascribe a certain amount of credibility to Johnston’s creative output (he has also become a popular visual artist) because of his long history of mental troubles. It seems as if some have made him into a chaste vessel of truth and purity for having a history of psychosis. Johnston seems to have, over the course of his life and career also become a kind of damaged trinket or ornament for celebrities; a badge of legitimacy (or a shirt, as it were) to wear.

I would hope that people would take Johnston’s music for what it is worth, not because he has spent great portions of his life deranged and in some cases quite destructive. Mental illness is no great claim to artistic legitimacy—there are far more great songwriters who have managed to get by without being institutionalized than the other way around. Johnston is a singular talent though, managing to make something quite breathtaking out of musical detritus and a very strong, vividly emotional lyrical style. Yip/Jump Music is a triumph of simplicity, heart and shockingly proficient and unique songwriting. If poor recording technique, ramshackle instrumentation and deficient musicianship are not attractive to you though, and you are still curious about Johnston, I would start with his major label debut, 1994’s Fun, which is a more proper affair.

b.

Top 100 (Songs 50-41)

2007-01-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

And the hits keep coming, and coming, and coming...(for the uninitiated, these songs represent a top 100 of songs that I recently "got into" as it were. Most of them I have heard before and failed to be swayed by their greatness, some are totally new to me).

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50. Johnny Too Bad (3:11)-The Slickers, The Harder They Come (OST), (1972)-I have not yet written about my rather new affection for reggae music. Though it is not fair to be embarrassed by a rather new love affair, reggae has always been a problematic genre. Anyone who has ever spent any time, after say, 1990, in a college dormitory, has been exposed to Bob Marley’s Legend album which has kept legions of pot smoking youths enthralled for decades. Though I spent a fair amount of time watching dorky ska bands in high school, my knowledge of reggae was rather limited, and wholly tainted by the likes of corny bands like Big Mountain and UB40. I, like many others spent a fair amount of time pissing on the genre without ever knowing what was really there. I bought the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, at the Community Thrift Store on Seventeenth Street in San Francisco because it had Pressure Drop, which the Clash covered, and it kind of sat on the shelf, forever gathering dust. After hearing a dub song on a boom box at work and spying a King Tubby disc on the desk, I was hooked. I scoured my records for reggae, and the rest is, as they say, history.

49. Into Your Arms (2:45)-The Lemonheads, Come on Feel the Lemonheads, (1993)-My newfound good feelings that surround this song are very hard to characterize. Recently I read a review in the newspaper of a new Lemonheads record. I downloaded some old songs and listened. I remembered most of the old stuff, like It’s a Shame About Ray, and the Simon and Garfunkel cover, but most of it was not very good. This song reminded me of drinking Dr. Pepper and watching alternative nation on television so it made me feel good.

48. I'm Only What You Want Me To Be (2:46)-The Flamin' Groovies, Rock Juice, (1992)-The last Flamin’ Groovies album of original material is a pretty uneven affair with regrettable cover art, but with some major highlights, including a cover of Brian Hyland’s Sealed With a Kiss, and two Cyril Jordan originals, I’m Only What You Want Me to Be and Way Over my Head. Not on a par with their greatest albums, but still amazingly good for being produced so late in their (Cyril Jordan, George Alexander) careers.

47. I'm Not Sayin' (2:50)-Nico, I’m Not Sayin’ single on Immediate Records, (1965)-Recorded before Nico joined The Velvet Underground but after she was in La Dolce Vita and bore Alain Delon an unwanted son. Gordon Lightfoot wrote I’m Not Sayin’, and it was backed with The Last Mile. Jimmy Page produced and both him and Brian Jones handled the guitars.

Watch the video.

46. I'd Rather You Leave Me (2:12)-The Choir, The Choir EP on Bomp Records, (1975; probably recorded in 1967)-The Choir was essentially The Raspberries in the sixties without Eric Carmen. The Cleveland, Ohio natives were originally called The Mods but after recording their first single in Chicago, they switched to The Choir. (FYI: When doing a google search on The Choir, add a band member’s name like Wally Bryson or Dave Smalley, otherwise you’ll end up with a million pages of a scary Christian group). Their first single, It’s Cold Outside is a minor garage classic collected on both the Pebbles and Nuggets comps. They never released a proper album, but most of their songs are collected on a Sundazed release from 1994 called Choir Practice.

45. I.R.T. (2:12)-Snatch, I.R.T. single on Bomp Records, (1977)-.I.R.T. was originally meant as a demo, an off the cuff song about perverts riding on the New York subway built on a messy tangle of Dollsish punk guitars and tough-girl brassiness. Snatch was a duo (Judy Nylon and Patty Palladin)—a couple of American expatriate punks living in London who recorded their songs in Judy Nylon’s flat. Greg Shaw released their first single, and in 1980 Fetish Records released their only album Shopping for Clothes fleshed out with a pianist, and former New York Doll and Heartbreaker Jerry Nolan on drums.

44. I Won't Hurt You (2:24)-West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Part One, (1966)-A beautiful lullaby of a pop song built around the percussive sound of a beating heart. They were kind of rich-kid psyche-posers from LA that embraced many genres. Some of their output is good, some is not, but they are not terribly well respected.

43. Help You Ann (2:31)-The Lyres, Lyres on Fire, (1984)-Formed from the ashes of farfisa organ grinder Jeff Connolly’s first band DMZ, The Lyres were a Boston institution. Along with the Barracudas, The Lyres were one of the very best of the neo-garage bands that began to pop up in the late seventies and early eighties that eschewed contemporary punk, preferring a kind of garage-punk impressionism based on sixties acts such as ? and the Mysterians, The Seeds, The Outsiders, and The 13th Floor Elevators.

42. I Know I'm Not Wrong (3:05)-Fleetwood Mac, Tusk, (1979)-Fleetwood Mac’s White Album, Tusk is a nervy and fractured double album which has the sound of a band coming apart at the seems. I have never been much of a fan of Fleetwood Mac (yet two of their songs are on this list, go figure?) but Tusk has a handful of songs that I find particularly appealing in a skewed pop sort of way, mainly the Lindsay Buckingham ones, like I Know I’m Not Wrong and the morose Save me a Place.

41. I Feel Much Better (3:56)-The Small Faces, B-Side to Tin Soldier Single on Immediate Records, (1967)-The best band on Rollinig Stones Manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s label Immediate. The Small Faces were a powerhouse who were close to being on a par with The Kinks and were probably better than The Who (stayed together too long and produced too much crap). While not being one of their best songs, I Feel Much Better may be one of their strangest, from the chipmunk-voiced back up vocals, to its bracing and punchy proto-metal coda, it is an odd yet satisfying bit of B-Side fluff.

Watch the whimsical video for Get Yourself Together.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo-The Byrds, 1968

2007-01-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

The Byrds
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
1968

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After the fractious and harrowing recording sessions for Notorious Byrd Brothers—the Byrds' most challenging and eclectic effort to date—the group was reduced to just two members, father-guitarist Roger McGuinn and his chief-lieutenant, the stalwart mandolin player-cum-bassist, Chris Hillman. The Byrds lineup had been in flux since Gene Clark, their primary songwriter, co-founder and sometimes lead vocalist, left the group in 1966. He was re-enlisted again in 1967, between the unceremonious dumping of guitarist-vocalist David Crosby, and the departure of longtime drummer Michael Clarke.

After a matter of weeks, Gene Clark left the band yet again and in 1968 McGuinn and Hillman were in search of third and fourth members, both still remarkably wedded to the idea of The Byrds. What they ended up with was Hillman’s cousin, drummer Kevin Kelley, and somewhat extraordinarily, a 22-year old Floridian and one-semester Harvard theologian who was equally obsessed with country music and rock and roll named Gram Parsons. Parsons was a country singer-songwriter who had (somewhat illegally) recently bolted the Lee Hazlewood-controlled International Submarine Band. Though he nearly tore The Byrds apart, Parsons helped them to redefine country music, and incredibly, make it relevant again. Sweetheart of the Rodeo was his one and only contribution to The Byrds legacy.

The Byrds began their formation in 1964 in Los Angeles, when the Tipton, Missouri-native and former New Christy Minstrel, Gene Clark enlisted Chicagoan, Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn—a veteran of local folk groups like The Limelighters and grunt worker for Bobby Darin—in a new folk duo. Third vocalist and guitarist, David Crosby, bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke subsequently joined the two, rounding out the original quintet. After a false start, (they released a single entitled "Please Let Me Love You" as the Beefeaters in 1964), they lucked into a demo of a Bob Dylan song called "Mr. Tambourine Man," which after making slight compositional, and earth-shaking musical changes, they promptly recorded it and released their version before Dylan. The iconic "Mr. Tambourine Man," sounding more like The Beatles and The Beach Boys than Bob Dylan, went to #1 on the Billboard Chart and not only launched The Byrds but defined a brand new movement in popular music: folk-rock.

1965 saw the release of The Byrds second single, another Bob Dylan cover, a heavily truncated version of "All I Really Want To Do" which had as a B-side the far stronger Gene Clark original, a bitter and brilliant pop gem titled "I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better." Clark was increasingly becoming the primary songwriter (along with, in a de facto sort of way, Bob Dylan). On the website Byrdwatcher, Tim Connors wrote that of the 23 songs on the first two Byrds albums, “six are Dylan covers, seven are covers of songs by other writers, and eight are written by Clark. Of those eight, two—probably the two weakest—were co-written with McGuinn, who also wrote one other song alone and one with Crosby. Clark was also the primary author of the band's pièce de resistance, 'Eight Miles High.'” Clark was not long for The Byrds though.

In 1966, after a nervous breakdown on a New York to Los Angeles flight in which Clark (who had been increasingly self-medicating in response to his fear of flying) insisted on being let off the airplane, he left the band. Gene Clark knew he would be unable to meet the obligations of touring with The Byrds, but to be sure there were other underlying tensions between Clark and McGuinn. The Byrds would never enjoy the commercial success of their early Gene Clark-era albums, seeing each release sliding further and further down the charts. 1968’s Notorious Byrd Brothers peaked at #47, their worst showing yet; it’s main single, "Goin’ Back," peaked at #89. Their next album, though an instant classic would do precipitously worse.

After the fracturing of The Byrds due to the recording of Notorious Byrd Brothers, they tried to make a go of it as a trio at first: McGuinn, Hillman and Kevin Kelley on drums. They were frustrated though, because they could not get what McGuinn referred to as that “Byrds Sound” without a second guitarist (McGuinn has also intimated that he wanted the fourth member to also double as a jazz pianist). As the story goes, in 1968, after a chance meeting in a bank, Chris Hillman invited the 22-year-old Parsons to “try out” for The Byrds.

The idea now, seems ludicrous—to invite a young, cocksure, and damaged country singer-songwriter to join an already established but commercially sliding band that had made their name from covering Bob Dylan songs so that they sounded like The Beatles, who had been increasingly trying to distance themselves from their hemmed-in formula—but it is exactly what happened. What makes the sequence of events even more incomparable though is the fact that they hired Parsons, who was not a jazz pianist nor a traditional lead guitarist, in hopes of reclaiming their long sought after “Byrds sound.” Gram Parsons though, more than anybody, helped to burn that sound to the ground and in its place he helped to build a semi-traditional Bakersfield-via-Nashville country sound, replete with banjo, steel guitar, mandolin and piano. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is far closer to traditional country than it is to traditional rock. It is, for all intents and purposes, a country album.

Roger McGuinn’s original vision as a follow up to Notorious Byrd Brothers was an ambitious but cumbersome-sounding attempt at a concept album that “would...canvass the history of American popular music, beginning with early string band music and moving into bluegrass, country music, jazz, rock, and electronic music.” Hillman, the lapsed bluegrass mandolin player and Parsons the young hot shot country-rocker persuaded McGuinn to ditch the “trajectory-of-popular-music” idea and focus on country and western music. The result of which was Sweetheart of the Rodeo, produced by the former hotrod/surf songwriter and The Byrds’ favorite knob-twiddler, Gary Usher, in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Byrds however, were unable to give up on Dylan’s prolific stream of songs, opening and closing the album with obscure covers, both from Side 4 of The Basement Tapes, ("You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere" and "Nothing was Delivered"), both of which were sung by McGuinn in which he improved upon the rather sanguine, yet messy Dylan versions. Aside from two dazzling originals (both by Parsons)—the classic "One Hundred Years from Now," the only song to vaguely traverse rock territory on the album, and the bittersweet ode to a lost childhood that most likely never existed, "Hickory Wind"—Sweetheart is chock full of traditional country and folk covers.

The one major misstep on the album is Roger McGuinn’s cruel and disrespectful faux-twang on the Charles and Ira Louvin-penned gospel-country classic "The Christian Life." Chris Hillman’s stab at "I am a Pilgrim" is a much more forthright attempt at respecting the material they chose to use. McGuinn makes up for his crassness with a pitch-perfect version of the idealized, depression-era gem, "Pretty Boy Floyd," about the famous Okie outlaw, written by Woody Guthrie, the most famous idolater of Okies east of Steinbeck. The latter two songs evoke the traditionalism of their eras, as they are fleshed out with banjos, mandolins, violins and an upright bass.

Not surprisingly, Sweetheart of the Rodeo garnered The Byrds their worst chart showing—#77 in the U.S. and it was the first Byrds album that failed to chart in the UK. In April of 1968, The Byrds toured England and were hosted by The Rolling Stones who knew The Byrds (in this case Hillman and McGuinn) through tours in the past. Guitarist Keith Richards famously took in Gram Parsons, and the two irascible and troublemaking songwriters bonded over country music (and probably intravenous drugs as well).

The Byrds had scheduled a tour of Apartheid-era South Africa, and as the story goes, Parsons consulted his new friend Richards on the ethical nature of touring the officially racist nation. Richards said flatly that he would never embark on a tour of that region. On the eve of The Byrds tour of South Africa, Parsons pulled out, citing an aversion to the country’s racist policies; McGuinn and Hillman promptly fired Parsons. Almost no one believes that deep-held anti-racist beliefs played a part in his decision. Gram Parsons would become the Stones' country-guide, helping them to navigate the vast history of country music.

Parsons famously arranged the country version of the Stones’ single "Honky Tonk Women," entitled "Country Honk" (on the album, Let it Bleed) and inspired the bulk of their country-tinged output. The Rolling Stones, more than the Byrds (and I know this will inspire argument) were responsible for country-rock—listen to Beggars Banquet, and every album after that through Some Girls. Parsons inspired the bulk of that.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo is famous for being Parsons’ first major foray into the whole milieu of Country Rock; the segment of rock history that he gets the lions share of credit for. It is not as if he does not deserve it, because he took it by force, almost like a con artist he faked his way in to the Byrds, hijacked the band and recreated them in his image. Quickly bored, he abandoned the group and put his own together and became an icon. Once free from the Jim McGuinn-created restraints and insistence on covering Dylan tunes, Parsons embraced Stax-style soul, coupled it with his traditional country and formed a band that is the most influential of all country-rock bands—The Flying Burrito Brothers (with Hillman on Bass).

After the shenanigans of Hillman and Parsons, Roger McGuinn put a chokehold on The Byrds and put them on a path of commercial relevancy again, especially with the fantastic Ballad of Easy Rider album. McGuinn forever kept within a hairsbreadth of country but never embraced it with the Parsonsesque fervor that helped to create Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

The Rootless Parsons recorded two classic albums with The Flying Burrito Brothers, and two albums on his own before dying from an overdose of morphine on September 19, 1973.

b.

Top 100 (Songs 60-51)

2007-01-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

It is hard to believe I am only through half of these songs. 100 is a long long time.

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60. Never Never Go (2:05)-The Chills, The Lost EP, (1985)-This Dunedin, New Zealand band came on the heels of some of their heroes, The Clean and The Enemy. The Chills were essentially Martin Phillips and a rotating cast of players that churned out skewed pop that was a bit sweeter in nature and more well produced than their kindred spirits, The Clean. Never Never Go is a bit rough edged, but still has the kind of cute and cloying quality that marked the later punkier English twee groups like Tallulah Gosh, Heavenly and Boy Racer.

59. My Elusive Dreams (3:12)-Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, Nancy & Lee, (1968)-One of the more unlikely partnerships in music history. Hazlewood was a kind of off-beat, wandering hobo of a songwriter, part Edgar Lee Masters, part Roger Miller and Nancy Sinatra was a true music blue-blood; both though, had a flare for the dramatic which provided for an endearing and magical interplay between the two as a vocal duo. I would like to say that neither of them did better work apart, but it would probably be untrue considering Lee Hazlewood’s remarkably long and varied career as a composer, songwriter, producer, performer and label owner. Sinatra and Hazlewood both worked best within the framework of novelistic, story songs which Hazlewood had a knack for writing (Sand, Some Velvet Morning), but he did not pen this weepy country classic, it was written by Curly Putman and Billy Sherill.

58. Mr. Tough (4:05)-Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, (2006)-The first song on this list to actually be released in 2006. Despite the overlong and obtuse title, Yo La Tengo’s 2006 entry is a pitch-perfect return to form, on a par with their greatest efforts, Painful, Electr-O-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. On Mr. Tough, a characteristically uncharacteristic bit of piano and horn funk that finds Ira Kaplan in a comfortable falsetto, Yo La Tengo get back to the blissful eclecticism that has defined some of their finer moments.

57. Margaret (3:20)-Kevin Ayers, Whatevershebringswesing, (1970)-One of rock’s most peculiar and capricious iconoclasts, Ayers has forever flown under the radar. With his deep-toned and sonorous voice caught somewhere between John Cale and Leonard Cohen, Ayers seemed born to interpret the melancholy, which he seemed to rarely do, favoring a looser kind of off the cuff lyricism. Margaret though, almost wades into the waters of melancholia, but only almost.

56. Mag Wheels (2:16) Gary Usher-In my rabid hunger for surf instrumentals, I came across this hotrod classic made famous by Dick Dale, but penned by Gary Usher, most famous for his work with the Beach Boys (writing credit on 409 and In My Room) and as producer for The Byrds (Notorious Byrd Brothers, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, among others).

55. London Girl (3:16)-The Pogues, Poguetry in Motion, (1986)-Much ink has been spilled in favor of The Pogues—their history, their eclectic wont to blend punk with Irish traditionalism and Shane MacGowan’s crippling addictions. I once put my quarters in a dive-bar jukebox and played The Pogues song, A Rainy Night in Soho, only to be rebuffed, completely shocked that there was such a people immune to The Pogues irresistible charm. London Girl could possibly be, all hyperbole aside, the best pop song ever written. At the very least, the best pop song with the accordion as its musical centerpiece.

54. Let's Face It (3:50)-999, High Energy Plan, (1979)-Let’s Face It is one in a long line of British punk songs from the seventies on this list. 999 were a more pop-centric punk band in the vein of The Buzzcocks and The Vibrators—all were clearly more obsessed with cheeky sexuality than politics which made them all infinitely more fun than their more serious peers.

53. Let’s Dance (2:28)-Chris Montez, Let’s Dance Single on Monogram Records, (1962)-An infectious, organ-fueled archetypal teen pop stomper that would prefigure ? and the Mysterians, Elton John, The Ramones, and The Clean, all acts that barrow from this 1962 top ten hit from one of Hawthorne High’s most famous alumni.

52. Last Night (2:39)-The Scientists, Last Night Single on White Rider Records, (1979)-The Scientists were a kind of lo-fi and influential, Perth-based, Australian psyche-punk band that were more Radio Birdman than Birthday Party. Last Night is basically a sweaty punk song about having sex.

51. La Plus Belle Pour Aller Danser (2:29)-Sylvie Vartan, Sylvie A Nashville, (1964)-Though Sylvie Vartan sung mainly en français, she was born in Iskretz, Bulgaria in 1944, immigrating to Paris with her family in 1952. After helping her brother—the RCA producer Eddie Vartan—out of a jam by singing an uncredited duet with Eddie Jordan called Panne d'essence which would be released as a Jordan B-side, Sylvie was deemed worthy of a contract, and eventually an unlikely recording trip to Nashville, Tennessee. Thus it was in America that a Bulgarian-cum-French yé-yé chanteuse recorded this classic song penned by a Frenchman of Armenian descent who was also a movie star (Charles Aznavour), with all the requisite Nashville strings and brass; though, no appearance at the Grand Ole Opry was scheduled. Truth be told, I was quite surprised that this album was cut with Elvis’ band, proving how hard it is to cut through the Gallic iciness of French Pop.

Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos, 1992 (Recorded in 1974)

2007-01-12T10:22:00.000-08:00

Chris Bell
I Am The Cosmos
1992 (Recorded in 1974)
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Chris Bell, the founder of the legendary Memphis power pop band Big Star, was, along with Alex Chilton, the principal songwriter of the group’s debut album, the cheeky and optimistically titled #1 Record (1972). Bell, described as almost suicidally depressed, left the group he started later that same year. In the lore of Big Star’s fractious demise, Chris Bell—a young man torn by his intense religious feelings and the subsequent guilt caused by his homosexuality and drug abuse—often plays the complicated and saintly Abel to Chilton’s destructive Cain.

Bell was the son of a successful local restauranter, and grew up in the advantaged, predominantly white neighborhood of Germantown in Memphis, Tennessee. School friend and later band mate of both Bell and Chilton, Richard Rosebrough described his and Bell’s upbringing thusly to Mojo’s Barney Hoskyns: “Our scene was Memphis prep: snotty-nosed, spoiled-brat Germantown kids.” During the late-sixties, while Chilton, the son of a local jazz musician, was cutting his teeth as the lead singer for local blue-eyed soul hit-makers, The Boxtops, Bell was performing live in local Anglophilic acts such as The Jynx, Rock City and Ice Water and recording intermittently at John Fry’s Ardent Studios.

In 1970, Chilton, fed up with his role in The Box Tops quit the band and recorded a clutch of demos at Ardent studios that he intended as a solo album. Though the record never came to proper fruition, (Ardent Records eventually released these recordings in 1996 under the title 1970) Chilton became acquainted with his future band mates. Over the late winter of 1971, and early 1972, Big Star recorded the phenomenally influential #1 Record at Ardent; a classic that effortlessly combined Beatlesque pop, Memphis soul, youthful restlessness and country melancholia but was a spectacular commercial failure. By the end of the year, terribly depressed and upset over both the failure of his record to sell, and the insalubrious business practices of Stax Records (Ardent’s parent company), not to mention creeping frustration over the extra attention the extroverted Alex Chilton received, Bell left the band.

Bell’s depression and drug use only worsened, and in the summer of 1974, after multiple suicide attempts, his brother David took him to Europe where the two wandered, wealthy-minstrel style throughout the old world; with Bell playing in both English pubs and French castles. The dreamlike self-financed vanity project became even more fantastical, as Geoff Emerick, an engineer on the later Beatles albums mixed the sessions at George Martin’s Air Studios in London. Unfortunately upon his return stateside, Bell’s dreams turned hopelessly bitter as record companies roundly rejected the material (which would make up the lions share of I Am the Cosmos, released subsequently by Rykodisc in 1992). Bell was forced to work for his father’s successful chain of fast food restaurants, his music career all but dead.

I Am the Cosmos is not a proper album, and should not be judged as such. Cosmos is more a de facto album; a collection of Bell’s post-Big Star work recorded at both Chateau d’Heurville in France (during his and David’s sojourn) and at Ardent in Memphis. The Memphis material was recorded with Jody Stephens and they were even joined by the wayward Chilton on the stunningly gorgeous and country-tinged You and Your Sister, perhaps the best thing Bell ever wrote. But because of the fractured nature of these sessions there is an uneven quality to the “record,” and apparently, when mixing the tapes, the preternaturally unsure Bell wore out the tapes by habitually remixing tracks, leaving them with a “blurred” quality. That being said, I Am the Cosmos is a triumph of introspective, faith-based, and effecting songwriting, Anglophilic guitar work, requisite Memphis soul, and even gospel. It is a record that is hampered only slightly by certain timely, stylistic defects like the funky frog-like bass playing on Fight at the Table. All in all, I Am the Cosmos comes closer to capturing the sensibility of #1 Record more than anything Chilton would ever do.

Throughout Bell’s life as a writer, he seemed to be obsessed with the twin themes of religious salvation and the bitterness of romantic desperation. The opener on #1 Record is the sulky Feel, a sparkling, bluesy and desperate two-stanza rant that starts with the line; “woman, what are you doin’, you’re drivin’ me to ruin,” and ends with the bitter and melancholy, “you just ain't been trying,  it's getting very near the end, I feel like I'm dying,  I feel like I'm dying.” The album also contains the religious fable The Ballad of El Goodo (“It gets so hard in times like now to hold on,  but guns they wait to be stuck by, at my side is God”), and Try Again, which has the quality of a fraught bed-time prayer:

Lord, I've been trying to be what I should. Lord, I've been trying to do what I could, but each time it gets a little harder, I feel the pain. But I'll Try again. Lord, I've been trying to be understood, and Lord, I've been trying to do as you would.

Bell’s work on I Am the Cosmos is no different—he evenly splits his themes between Jesus and loneliness. The title track is an obvious paean to his fragile mental state: “don't know what's going on inside, so every night I tell myself ‘I am the cosmos, I am the wind’ But that don't get you back again.” The loneliness and anxiety of Bell’s psychological desperation is as palpable as any thing ever written in a rock and roll song. The two best songs on Cosmos though, aside from the exquisitely spare You and Your Sister, are lovely examples of Bell’s affinity for, and obsession with, Jesus and what he has to offer—Look Up, a delicate and uplifting, almost hopeful song played primarily on acoustic guitar and mellotron, and the ballsy-rocker, I Got Kinda Lost which is perhaps better than anything he did as a member of Big Star.

Bell being a tragic and sadly sympathetic character was an incongruous and obscure rock figure. Lacking the confidence of the most bellicose and average of songwriters, he never was given the opportunity to do what it seemed he was intended to do. Another aspect of his obvious incongruity was his deeply felt religious feelings, which I think had somewhat slightly less to do with salvation, for the nature of salvation has more to do with the afterlife. Bell seemed to be grasping for a kind of framework or theory or meaning of life on earth; a simple key to getting through his own life’s worst torments.

In 1978, The dB’s Chris Stamey, a Big Star acolyte, released the single I Am the Cosmos b/w You and Your Sister on his micro-indie label, Car Records. At the time, Chris Bell was excited and feeling his life moving in the right direction and with what must have been a feeling of vindication, he put a band together, hoping to make another go at it. Early in the morning though, two days after Christmas day, 1978, Chris Bell’s tiny Triumph smashed into a tree and killing him instantly.

R.I.P. Chris Bell: January 12, 1951-December 27, 1978

b.

Top 100 (Songs 70-61)

2007-01-09T11:45:00.000-08:00

Another in the continuing series of my recent favorite tracks.

70. Quiet Surf (2:49)-The Mermen, The Mermen At The Haunted House, (1994)-The Mermen sometime sound as sublime as I would imagine Galaxie 500 to be as a surf instrumental band. If only wishes came true— than no more songs about writing poems on a dog biscuit. That was mean, I like Galaxie 500, just not Dean Wareham’s lyrics all the time; thankfully, The Mermen had none, which is sometimes how I wish it always was. Lyrics often get in the way of a good song.

69. Qui Peut Dire (2:06)-Francoise Hardy, Ma Jeunesse Fout Le Camp, (1967)-This iconic and beautiful Gallic chanteuse wrote her own material, including this beautiful windswept entry buoyed by requisite sixties reverb and a gentle slide-guitar motif that recalls the cloud-strewn sky above the sea. I speak no French, so I have absolutely no idea what she is talking about though.

Francoise Hardy on French Television doing Qui Peut Dire.

68. Popcorn (2:05)-The Upsetters, Eastwood Rides Again, (1970)-Essentially Lee “Scratch” Perry’s house band, named after his 1968 hit The Upsetter. On Popcorn, the Upsetters, sounding not unlike the JB’s, pound out about two minutes of pure Lee Perry-penned sweaty funk that eschews both reggae influences, and the Ennio Morricone influence promised by the title and cover art.

67. Police Story (2:11)-The Partisans, Police Story Single on No Future, (1981)-This obscure and militant second generation punk band with the leftist-rebel name, and obsessive NWA-ish negative feelings toward law and order, formed in 1979 and was immediately accepted into London’s thriving punk and Oi! scene in the late eighties, based mainly on this single. Police Story is a frighteningly raw and breakneck punk anthem detailing police brutality perpetrated against the fictional James Kelly: “James Kelly told us  of the shit that went on in the cell of his; broke his ribs told him not to speak, said you're drunk now on your feet; into the van Kelly did go; never seen again now everybody knows; James Kelly you're dead."

66. Pledging My Love (2:31)-Johnny Ace, Pledging My Love Single on Duke Records, (1954)-Born John Marshall Alexander Jr., Johnny Ace, the Memphis-based blues pianist/vocalist died unceremoniously backstage at the Houston City Auditorium, early on Christmas Day in 1954. Between sets at a show in Houston, the drunken Ace, allegedly began playing with a gun backstage, pointing it first at his girlfriend and pulling the trigger; then at her friend, and again pulling the trigger; then finally he put the gun to his own temple and pulled the trigger, killing himself. This ugly end, may have been the result of foul play, as some have intimated that Don D. Robey, Peacock Records owner and founder, may have pulled the trigger, but both Robey and Big Momma Thornton, both present at Ace’s death, have denied this outcome. Pledging My Love is a magnificent ballad, and even more melancholy after knowing the truth.

65. Please Don’t Tell My Baby (1:45)-Mickey & The Milkshakes, Showcase, (1984)-Billy Childish’s second outfit, put together after his first group, The Pop Rivets broke up, was a rough edged neo-garage band, that was a proponent of what was termed The Medway Sound; Medway being an area of North Kent, England. The Medway Sound was a part of a larger Medway collective of artists and poets including Childish, Sexton Ming, Charles Thomson, Bill Lewis, Rob Earl and Miriam Carney.

64. Pabst Blue Ribbon (2:42)-Untamed Youth, Some Kinda Fun, (1988)-This Missouri revisionist-surf rock combo, took their name from a 1957 Mamie Van Doren, Eddie Cochrane movie. Pabst Blue Ribbon is a surfy frat-rock instrumental that moves along on a tide of farfisa organ and the iconic sound of a beer can being opened.

63. Noue Bushi (2:16)-Takeshi Terauchi and Bunnys, This Is Terauchi Bushi, (1967)-Takeshi Terauchi, the virtuosic guitarist of The Bunny’s was part of a larger movement in Japan called Eleki—a hybrid Japanese-English word for Electric, as in guitars. What set this movement on its course was a 1962 tour of Japan by the Ventures, which sent Japanese youth into a frenzy, and almost every teen bought an electric guitar (in 1965, Japanese manufacturers produced 760,000 guitars!). Takeshi Terauchi’s style is very much like The Ventures but with much more flare and élan, and with obvious indigenous influences.

62. No Love Now (2:55)-Vic Godard, Long Term Side-Effect, (1999)-Vic Godard, a veteran of the initial London punk scene in London released, as a member of the band Subway Sect, his first single in 1978—the almost Siouxsie and the Banshees-like Nobody’s Scared. Their second single, Ambition, debuted after their manager fired the whole band aside from Godard, and is a jittery keyboard-fueled pop song that is much better than their first effort. The late eighties saw Godard blazing a whole new path away from punk and towards jazzy standards. The failure of his album T.R.O.U.B.L.E caused him to quit music altogether and take a job as a postman. Probably finding the monotony of postal work too taxing, Godard returned to songwriting in the early nineties. No Love Now, from Godard’s late era musical grab-bag, Long Term Side-Effect, recorded more than twenty years after his first single, is perhaps even more jittery than his early work. Getting by on hand claps and feverish accordion, No Love Now represents a striking return to form, and much better than anything you would hear from members of the Sex Pistols around the same time.

61. Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face (2:01)-The Monks, Bad Habits, (1979)-Not to be confused with the cranky sixties garage band made up of American GI’s stationed in Germany. These British Monks were yet another joke band—English “trad-rockers” masquerading as punks. The thing is though, they did a pretty good job, especially with frothy sophomoric pop, like Nice Legs, a rather mean-spirited song that is somewhat justified by it’s last line. Bad Habits is a great bit of Stiff-sounding punk, not unlike early Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, or Wreckless Eric, only fraudulent.

The Monks do Nice Legs Shame About Her Face on Top of the Pops

Like Flies on Sherbert, 1979, Alex Chilton

2007-01-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

Like Flies on Sherbert
1979
Alex Chilton
_____________________________________________________

I once read something along the lines that aside from Rod Stewart, no one had betrayed their talent more than Alex Chilton. The fact that Alex Chilton’s career has not followed the neat path laid out for him, after scoring a few hits as lead singer for the Boxtops and garnering overwhelming critical sycophancy for the first two Big Star albums, has lead many critics to deride Chilton’s post-Big Star output. Chilton’s later works—his uncommon and seemingly whimsical covers of Volare and The Oogum Boogum Song for instance—have done more to disappoint critics and Big Star fans than Like Flies on Sherbert, but to be sure, Flies’ wanton, fractious and ultimate destruction of the Big Star myth has ruffled more than a few feathers. Mark Jordan of The Memphis Flyer referred to the fact that the album has “among Chiltonites…taken on the status of a cult masterpiece,” as “largely [being] a case of the emperor wearing no clothes. Ultimately, [falling] well short of that mark.” Jordan, like many conservative listeners misses the point of Like Flies on Sherbert—it is not about the quality of composition or songsmanship, or (obviously) musicianship; it is a document, a punctuation mark in Chilton’s career (a semicolon rather than a period), a statement of purpose and a musical ethos. It is a masterwork of petulant defiance and the final widening of the gulf between (what Chilton thought of as) Chris Bell’s Beatles-paint-by-numbers songwriting style and Chilton’s catch-as-catch-can musical obstinacy.

The first time that I saw the name Alex Chilton, it was as the producer of The Cramps albums Gravest Hits and Songs the Lord Taught Us, and also The Gories phenomenal I Know You Fine But How You Doin’ record on Crypt. All of which were grim forebodings of what Chilton would become as the seventies wound down. In 1997 I checked out a book from the downtown San Francisco Public Library called The Spin Alternative Record Guide, which besides it’s name and it’s sponsor was an indispensable text in my musical education. Among the bands I discovered between those pages were The Young Marble Giants, Nikki Sudden, The Swell Maps, Richard and Linda Thompson, Wire, The Modern Lovers, The Stooges, and most germane to this essay, Big Star.

Some time later, perhaps a matter of months, I ran across a reissued copy of Radio City on Big Beat at a record shop in Berkeley that specialized in imports. I took it home, listened to it, and did not really care for it, save for maybe I’m in Love With a Girl, which sounded like Elliot Smith to me. At the time, I was too young and in to all things twee and feminine sounding, especially Heavenly and things of that nature (oh, how people change!). I put it away and did not listen to it much for about a year. I remember looking at the cover though, and trying to figure out which one was Alex Chilton—the singer of Cry Like a Baby and The Letter—not knowing he was the short one on the right pointing at the viewer. I eventually warmed up to both Big Star albums, and soon got to the point where I could tell, like with The Beatles, the difference between lead vocalists, that is to say, when it was Alex, and when it was Chris Bell doing the singing (#1 Record only). It was not long before I began searching for Chilton’s solo material, and Bell’s lone solo work, the Geoff Emerick-mixed scattershot masterpiece, I am the Cosmos (which I will review in my next entry).

The Original release of Flies was a 500 record run on the local Peabody label. It was recorded at Sam Phillips Studios in 1978, over what must have been a number of boozy, druggy and chaotic sessions. Jim Dickinson produced, which is to say that he let Chilton run roughshod like a child, a fact that shows in the almost uncontrolled and unfocused nature of the output. All Music Guide’s David Cleary had this to say of Flies sound quality: “Sadly, this release is a dreadful disappointment. Production values are among the worst this reviewer has ever heard: sound quality is terrible, instrumental balances are careless and haphazard, and some selections even begin with recording start-up sound.” Again, the overwrought, cynical and mean conservatism shows through in the banal observations of a rather conventional critic.

Many reviewers unfortunately refuse to see a record on its own terms. Like Flies on Sherbert is a cathartic blast of rock impressionism and an obvious example of not only the deconstruction of the Big Star myth, but of rock and roll in general. The album is a collection of originals and obscure covers (save for the lamentable opener, KC and the Sunshine Band’s Boogie Shoes) like Elvis Presley’s Girl after Girl, Ernest Tubb’s Waltz Across Texas, and the Jimmy Newman-penned swamp-country classic Alligator Man.

Cleary is correct in assessing that precision is not really what Chilton and company were after here, but in calling it dreadful or terrible is more an indictment of him as a listener than Chilton and Dickinson as architects of the album’s sound. There is a primal essence in each track, and a trashy devolution at work here; a kind of catch-as-catch-can innocent brilliance that sets the listener on a collision course with an audacious musical wreck. Chilton’s originals too, are strong, including the brilliant My Rival, a shambling mess of a song about jealousy and rejection that would not sound out of place on an early Pavement record. The title track is the final nail in the coffin of Chilton’s boy-band past, a deconstruction of sixties pop, rendered perhaps unlistenable, in a bad acid kind of way to some, by Jim Dickinson’s reliance on effects laden keyboards and piano.

Chilton and Dickinson obviously never intended to record a conventional album and, more to the point, probably never intended to record a classic of rock deconstructionism either, but their instincts, starting with the Big Star Third/Sister Lovers album began to blaze a path toward that eventual end. It’s not the kind of thing that one could go on doing forever, because once you tear it down, you can never build it back up again; you can not go home again. And to that end, I am sure Chilton has disowned this record, like he disowned the Big Star records before. But it doesn’t really matter if David Cleary or even Chilton himself like the album, it is a document that is out there in the ether. It has been re-issued many times, and is a touchstone for many fans. Like Flies on Sherbert is an album of immense depth, that, I think should be viewed like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, and Skip Spence’s Oar; as albums that are documents of a time and a place, records that embody an essence of emotional immediacy and represent a certain skewed mentality at a given time.

b.

Top 100 (Songs 80-71)

2007-01-08T13:59:00.001-08:00

This is another in a continuing series on my favorite songs this year. I know that none so far actually were released this year, but, hey...nobody's perfect.

80. Strangers When We Meet (3:47)-The Smithereens, Especially for You, (1986)-A workingman’s power-pop group from New York who liked to wear tight jeans and look eighties faux-tough in leather motorcycle jackets. Not really in the same league as 20/20, The Beat, or The Nerves, but Strangers When We Meet, is a rather lyrically dense song about infidelity that has a bittersweet, novelistic quality that those other bands just could not muster. The Smithereens were a very soft-edged and un-cool kind of band, but in a sweet and guileless way, like Marshall Crenshaw or The Toms.

79. Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight (2:41) Fleetwood Mac as Earl Vince & The Valiants (1969), B-Side to Man of the World Single on Immediate Records-This song is a special case because has made a real monkey out of me. I have to go back a bit. About eight months ago I was flipping through the used compact discs at Rasputin Records, and I came across a few disassociated discs from the Immediate Records Singles Collection, of which I only purchased Volume 1. It had The Small Faces, Vashti Bunyan, Nico, P.P. Arnold, The Poets, The McCoys, Fleetwood Mac, and others. The thing is though; I really don’t like Fleetwood Mac. Honestly. OK, it’s true, I do have a soft spot for Tusk and some of the other Fleetwood Mac over-produced AOR anthems, but I’m certainly not one of those guitar freaks that has a big hard on for Peter Green, just listen to Man of the World, it’s a putrid and maudlin wankfest. I must not have read the liner-notes though, because when I did the research on Earl Vince and the Valiants, I found out the truth, that, like the XTC/Dukes of Stratosphear ruse, E.V.& The Valiants are another genre-induced joke band, and, as in the other case, they are better than the real thing. I must admit, some of the good will I felt toward this song has somewhat diminished by finding out the truth, but it still is a great song, and it detailed the picturesque image of blood on the dance floor long before M.J.

78. Skyway (2:06)-The Replacements, Pleased To Meet Me, (1986)-A very sweet song, from a band (or at the very least, a principal songwriter) that proved it could grow up if it wanted to. A very well-written album with three classic songs on it: besides the bare-acoustic Skyway, there is also the song about the man and the myth, Alex Chilton and the anthemic Can’t Hardly Wait. Alex Chilton’s producer of choice, Jim Dickinson—the man who did something like producing on Chilton’s Third /Sister Lovers album and Like Flies on Sherbert—was tapped to produce Pleased to Meet Me in Memphis, but he just, sadly, gets in the way, adding all kinds of corny, eighties sounding reverb that makes this a good candidate for the Naked treatment that Paul McCartney used to expunge Phil Spector’s soul from Let it Be.

77. Sister Golden Hair (3:19)-America, Hearts, (1975)-Not something that I expected to like, but sometimes you don’t pick the song, it picks you. I really would never buy an America album, but this is just one of those radio-ready type songs that cheaply comes to you through the oftentimes powerful conduit of childhood memories. America really are only a half-rung above the Eagles, which is to say, the bottom. Sister Golden Hair though, is a gorgeous bouncy bit of country-tinged AOR fluff that is just really easy to listen to, unlike their more silly and famous offerings, Ventura Highway and A Horse With no Name, which make me want to vomit.

76. Simple Love (original version) (3:40)-The Saints, Paralytic Tonight, Dublin Tomorrow EP, (1980)-Besides Children of Nuggets, another favorite compilation of mine that I heard for the first time this year, was Do the Pop—a collection of songs from Australian punk bands, the most famous of which were The Saints. Personally, I like Radio Birdman better, but The Saints are more a part of that ’77 class of punk bands. Simple Love is the kind of deceptive song that starts off with a rather slow-building and pedestrian first verse, that lurches into an absolutely perfect hand-clapped chorus; a phenomenal mid-tempo punk song.

75. She Lied (1:59)-The Mummies, Never Been Caught (1992)-This is almost two minutes of pure garage filth. Usually I don’t like bands that dress alike, but if you are going to do it, dressing like mummies is preferable to dressing like members of a barbershop quartet. The Mummies were a total prehistoric mess of a trash band, whose production values were nonexistent. I once read a review, in which the writer said that they sounded as if they were recorded on equipment from the forties, which is a kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but if (good) sound quality is something that you require from your listening experience, steer clear of The Mummies.

74. Shadow (2:29)-The Lurkers, Fulham Fallout (1978)-Along with the Miracle Workers and The Oblivians, The Lurkers are a new favorite band of mine. They are a group, to my eternal shame, that I had not heard prior to 2006 (proof that, even when you think you know everything about music, you know absolutely nothing). Shadow is a total dumb-assed rock masterpiece, replete with the most unimaginative drumbeat ever committed to tape. It is a beautiful example of the kind of minimal punk songwriting made famous by the Ramones, the kind of song that even in its monotony is terribly effecting.

73. Rumble (2:28)-Link Wray & His Ray Men, Single on Cadence Records (1958)-The king of fuzz; the king of scuzz; the king of the surf guitar. Dick Dale with his histrionic and eastern-influenced guitar style should bow before the most famous student of Hambone the circus guitarist. Rumble is mid-tempo fuzzy (Link slashed his amp way before Dave Davies) genius; a punk song before punk thought that it had to be fast.

72. Romeo And The Lonely Girl (3:56)-Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak (1976)-Perhaps because recently, The Boys are Back in Town has been used as a shill for Capital One credit cards, I have gravitated toward this other Springsteenesque novelistic entry from Jailbreak. A good bit cornier (how about this for the first line of a chorus: oh-hoh Poor Romeo, sitting’ out on his own-eo…), Romeo and the Lonely Girl is still a grand story-song in Phil Lynott’s allegorical style.

71. Ram Jam (2:41)-Jackie Mitoo & The Soul Venders-In so far as reggae, dub, dance hall, ska and all that other stuff is concerned, I am no expert (save for my seventeenth and eighteenth years when I was all about third-generation ska), so I won’t pretend to be. I did however, come across Mitoo while perusing what is possibly the greatest issue of Mojo Magazine ever pressed, issue # 75 (February, 2000). That February Mojo ran a list of cult heroes, one of which was the reggae and ska-pioneering organist, Jackie Mitoo.

b.

Blues Run the Game, 1965, Jackson C. Frank

2007-01-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Blues Run the Game
Jackson C. Frank
1965
__________________________________________________________
Jackson C. Frank was a brilliant and largely unknown folk tragedian whose life was, not surprisingly, an intensely heartbreaking mess, dotted with the kind of accidental and self-made disasters that conspired to make the last half of his time on earth extremely difficult. Perhaps the most harrowing episode that Frank lived through occurred in 1954, when the wooden annex that housed music classrooms at his school in Cheektowaga, New York caught fire, causing the eleven year old Frank to spend seven months in the hospital, terribly burned and irrevocably scarred. The fire had disastrous physical effects on the young Frank but the insurance settlement he garnered upon turning twenty-one, afforded him the opportunity to live fast and free; and to record this indelible folk classic. "Blues Run the Game" is a study in beauty, economy and the trans-Atlantic fluidity of the Anglo-American folk tradition—a criminally under-appreciated effort that has been knocking on the door of legend for some time.

By 1964, the youthful Frank along with friend—and future Steppenwolf leader—John Kay, were running about the northeast, making a stir in Frank’s newly purchased Jaguar, and trying to spend the insurance settlement as fast as they could. Frank, ever the automobile enthusiast, boarded the Queen Elizabeth in late spring, 1965, heading for England to acquire British cars. On board he wrote the title track of "Blues Run the Game." Frank’s signature song, a wistful paean to wandering and drinking, is perhaps most exacting in it’s description of the futility of life: “living is a gamble, baby, loving's much the same, wherever I have played, wherever I throw those dice, wherever I have played, the blues have run the game.” It is an extremely mature and beautifully realized effort for a young man of 22. Frank’s materialistic quest was disturbed by his desire to write and perform folk music in what he described as “Swinging London.” The outgoing American had no trouble making contacts and soon was befriended by two other young Americans, who, like Frank were also folksingers; their names were Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Within a year, Frank would record "Blues Run The Game," his first and only album, at the CBS Studio on New Bond Street in London. Frank’s new friend, Paul Simon was behind the board producing. To alleviate his embarrassment, Frank recorded the entire album shrouded from view by a bed sheet.

American and British folk music have similar and very fluid traditions, but by the Sixties much of American folk music was of two main categories: that which was light and breezy, often preformed by corny trios in matching, pressed outfits, and that which was serious and oftentimes political and performed by Benzedrine addicts in New York coffee houses. Simon and Garfunkel would eventually manage to straddle that vast gulf with the type of élan that translated in to heavy record sales, but in 1965 the duo were in England, establishing an Anglophilic-tradition based bulwark against the scrubbed Kingston folk crassness that would dog them, having yet to record their masterwork, "The Sounds of Silence." In the same year, the man most associated with the American folk tradition after 1960, Bob Dylan, formerly known as Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing Minnesota, was also doing his time across the pond. Dylan, a tousle-haired boy of 24 and already a myth, was crisscrossing the island with his documentarian D.A. Pennebaker in tow, famously making a petulant ass of himself.

The English folksingers though, were a more serious lot, and not prone to the clean-cut goofiness of that particularly American strain of folk music. They were so serious in fact that they had as their de facto clown-prince, a diminutive and solemn Glaswegian named Donovan Leitch, who, in America would be cruelly known as Dylan’s acquiescing foil, and had not yet advocated the smoking of banana peels. Most of this lot engaged in an almost faith-based traditionalism, something that was largely unknown in American music—among them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Roy Harper, Sandy Denny, the angel-voiced Anne Briggs and slightly later, The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, and the remarkable Vashti Bunyan. The weirdly eccentric guitarist John Fahey practiced the closest approximation of tradition-based folk music in America, which had any impact during this era. Even among the most serious American folk practitioners, the distinctly American sound, and by extension relative modernity of the blues, folk’s earthier cousin, almost always filtered down to the artists work, especially in the case of Fahey, and inevitably in Frank's, who was the most British-sounding of the sixties, American folk masters. The British traditionalists however, seemed to have wanted to erase all musical traces of modernity, they left the blues to their famous brethren, the rock and roll practicioners. Frank’s own ill-at ease blues moment is titled, "Here Come the Blues," and is easily the weakest entry, a standard kind of guitar-walking blues with uninspired lyrics.

Frank fit rather awkwardly into this framework of folk artists, and perhaps that is why his work, though lauded by critics and famous fans alike, has never caught on with the vast amount of people who have afforded those who become legendary their status. In the cases of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, two extremely talented but self-absorbed songwriters, longevity has been the key (both having written as many bad songs as good ones). Frank, like many other artists, was never afforded the opportunity to be profligate about his talents, he could not waste them on albums that detailed being born again for instance. In fact Frank never recorded another album, the rest of his discography is a collection of song fragments and scraps; "Blues Run the Game" is his lone musical legacy.

The rest of Jackson Frank’s life was a downward spiral. As a man about town in London, and well-respected folk artist, Frank was living a dream that would soon dry up, a life that he could never recapture. Frank, a former beaux of Sandy Denny, (who recorded a version of his stunning "Milk and Honey"), returned to America and took up with a fashion model in Woodstock, New York, a home base shared by Bob Dylan. After the death of his child though, Frank fell in to a deep depression, the depths of which he would never truly recover. An immensely tragic figure, Frank suffered through tests that even Lot was spared—he was institutionalized intermittently for psychological problems that included schizophrenia (which was erroneously diagnosed); he was rendered bloated and dazed from thyroid medication; he lost sight in one eye as the victim of a random drive-by shooting; slept for a time on the streets of New York City after taking a bus there, seemingly on a quest to reacquaint himself with his former friend and producer, Paul Simon, and then for years lived in a decrepit Bronx housing project. Frank was helped along in his later years by an angel of mercy, a folk fan named Jim Abbot who helped him move back to Woodstock, and get a backlog of royalty payments. But by then, his dreams were all shattered.

By 1965 though, Frank had produced a beautifully realized album, and to him, what must have seemed like a dream. Like Paul Simon, he too could bridge the gap between the fluid British and American folk traditions, only better and with more passion than the often-bloodless Simon. "Blues Run the Game," and the magnificent "Milk and Honey" are the albums true standouts, but "Kimbie," "Yellow Walls," "Dialogue" and "You Never Wanted Me" are all extremely affecting. There is no question that Jackson C. Frank, like Skip Spence and Roky Erickson was an artist of immeasurable quality who was beaten, left for dead, and almost allowed to slip past us completely. Almost.

b

Top 100 (Songs 90-81)

2007-01-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

Top 100 Continued...
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90. Vampiro (2:14)-Satan's Pilgrims, Creature Feature (1998)- I was sad to learn that this band ceases to exist. My first brush with them took place more than ten years ago as I was beginning my musical education by collecting labels, like so many other dopes. Bellingham’s Estrus was an early favorite. I foolishly abandoned the sixties revivalist label in search of all things modern. Now though, infinitely more discriminating when it comes to music, I have re-embraced what as a nineteen-year old I threw aside. I was most happy to see that the Satan’s Pilgrims remained totally uncommitted to all things modern to the end, embracing monster movies, surf-rock, and sixties revivalism in equal parts, making their demise lamentable.

89. Under Heavy Fire (3:45)-John Stewart, Wires From The Bunker (2000, recorded between 1983-1985)-This is something that, as of a year ago, I would not expect to be so fond of. John Stewart was originally a part of the sixties folk-machine that produced so many groups—or trios rather—in the vein of The Kingston Trio; a group he was to one day join. Stewart though, as a solo artist, would have the goods to trump many of the other pretenders to the folk-throne. Stewart, the workingman’s savior of the genre, was the former guitar-playing member of The Cumberland Three, who cut his teeth on songs that waved the Americanized folk-flag of the Civil War; honorably, or perhaps cowardly, taking on both sides—Civil War Almanac vol. 1, The Yankees and Civil War Almanac vol. 2, The Rebels. The San Diegans must have been confused. Not wanting to go on forever, I would like to draw some conclusions from Stewart’s work after he shook the dust of The Cumberland Three, and The Kingston Trio from his boots. His discography is long and spotty, dotted with what I can best be describe as a fair share of crap. The album Wires from the Bunker though, is a lost classic, (the interval between the recording date and the release date is 15 years, yes there is a story there, and it is tackled with aplomb in it’s review on the allmusic website) has hidden gems. Under Heavy Fire being one, in fact, for me, it was just the first song that I came across, but there are other gems including, Liddy Buck, and It Might As Well Be Love, both reminiscent of Tusk- era, Lindsay Buckingham.

88. Trains (3:07)-The Nashville Ramblers, Children Of Nuggets: Second Psychedelic Era 1976-1996, Disc 1 (Originally released in 1986)-Another of the Children of Nuggets entries, this song starts out nice, with its chiming Byrdsish guitar style and the reverb-drenched sixties, garage, Choir-style sunny pop, but then the song lurches into a stunning, and unforgettably perfect Beatlesque chorus, followed by an enigmatic twelve-string electric guitar break. Trains is a perfect example of the eighties, garage revivalism that is handily compiled on the Children of Nuggets box. The Nashville Ramblers were obviously well studied connoisseurs of the Hard Day’s Night-Mr. Tambourine nexus of sixties jangle pop. Other than that, I don’t know much about the band. Trains is also on the Bomp compilation, The Roots of Power Pop.

Watch the video.

87. Thrown Away (3:31)-Stranglers, The Meninblack (1981)-I have had the album, The Singles (The UA Years) for some time, but I kind of stuck to my favorite guns, (Get a) Grip (On Yourself), Golden Brown, Peaches. Then I kind of stumbled on to this one, and it has turned out to be the kind of brilliant, stripped down electro-pop minimalism that Stephin Merritt made his name off of, only without the dog-voiced literary hysterics.

86. There's An End (3:36)-Holly Golightly, Truly She Is None Other (2003)-For a time, I lived off a song of hers called, For All This, on the album Painted On. I was living alone for the first time in a long time, and always drinking and, despite the build up, generally making a decent go of it; but at the same time being drunk and depressed at 4 in the morning and listening to that song never failed to have an effect on me, and to this day, the song gives me the chill of the past. Anyhow, I have doggedly stuck to her since. I generally don’t like to make recommendations, but if there is anyone who has any kind of affinity for this artist, the album Painted On is matchless. Anyhow. I could have easily gone with her version with The Greenhornes of There’s an End, that appeared on the Broken Flowers OST, but, the truth be told, I heard that in late 2005. This edition brings the tempo up, but might be a bit too wide open; too stripped down. It’s still, just a magnificent song, but suffers a bit from the openness.

85. The Train From Kansas City (3:20)-The Shangri-Las, The Shangri-Las ’65 (1965)-A virtual girl-group juke box—the best of the Brill Building girl groups. The Shangri-Las were possibly the greatest of all the girl groups, the only competition being the Ronettes or the Shirelles, and if you grew up on the radio, perhaps the Supremes. This is one of their best songs, and it’s from the pens of a pair of great writers: Jeff Barry and Elle Greenwich, but the “composer” of their best stuff was their producer, George “Shadow” Morton, who has a credit on Leader of the Pack, and the sole credit on Shadow (Walking in the Sand) and their greatest song Give Him a Great Big Kiss, which are, bar none there two best songs. Train from Kansas City opens with a kind of pulsing piano figure, ostensibly reminiscent of a train, before the tambourine gives way to the drum kit and the rest of Shadow Morton’s Spectoresque wall of sound.

84. The Sad Skinhead (2:36) Faust, Faust IV (1973)-The Sad Skinhead has a kind of Eno-ish feel, the kind of song that would probably not sound out of place on the idiosyncratic Here Come the Warm Jets. It does sound somewhat out of place on Faust’s own album however, being a pop song and all, played fairly straight, albeit with some rhythmic nuances, including (possibly) a marimba (a xylophone? Definitely not a glockenspiel, a vibraphone perhaps) and a Russo-folk, polka-bass rhythm; the kind that Eastern European-influenced bands such as Gogol Bordello utilize as part of a somewhat wider movement, referred to, and I almost hesitate to write it, because it’s existence proves that the taxonomy of rock and roll has gone too far: gypsy-punk. The Sad Skinhead being essentially a straight song (no avant-garde tendencies) makes it an unsuitable example of their work. The label moneymen though and A&R types, probably wished that Faust had produced more songs like this, instead of the long-winded and obtuse, yet still enjoyable, Krautrock.

83. The Rain, The Park & Other Things (3:01)-The Cowsills, The Cowsills (1967)-A singing family that included mother and children; the inspiration for the television show/musical group, The Partridge Family. This is an unabashed bubblegum gem, replete with the beatific harmonies that can only come from children in different stages of their youth. More will be forthcoming in a future essay, In Defense of Bubblegum, a celebration of The Cowsills, The Partridge Family, The Archies, The Baycity Rollers, and don’t worry 1910 Fruitgum Company fans, I shan’t forget your favorite sons.

Watch the video.

82. Take Me For What I'm Worth (2:38)-The Searchers, Take Me For What I’m Worth (1965)-The first of two songs written by PF Sloan in my top 100, I’d have to do more research but he may be the only scribe to notch two slots on my list, since I made a conscious decision to forego using two songs preformed by the same group. Worry not, there will be nary a sign of Johnny Rivers and the garish Secret Agent Man on this list. This was the last of the Searchers’ top twenty hits, and the album marked the beginning of the end for the band that started, like so many other British groups, as a skiffle combo in the late fifties. Not really a great band, the only other song of theirs that I’d care to listen to is their version of the Sonny Bono-penned classic, Needles and Pins, which is better than the Ramones’ stab, the Herman’s Hermits’ and Gary Lewis and the Playboys. I have yet to hear the Deftones interpretation, if anyone has though, please compare and then comment.

81. Sunday You Need Love (2:38)-The Oblivians, Soul Food (1995)-There’s nothing I detest more in music criticism than the pervasive habit of using food metaphors, a favorite of which is the term southern-fried, which is invariably used in reference to all genres of music that are produced south of the Mason-Dixon line. It is ubiquitous when you read anything about the Oblivians, (it’s a pity they had to title their album Soul Food, it doesn’t really help my cause). The Oblivians just don’t sound southern-fried (what does?), there is just a hint of hillbilly to them, but so, so small that this album often sounds as if it could have been produced in Detroit, or even New York (what doesn’t?).

b.

The Third Testament, 1969, Godz

2006-12-29T13:17:00.002-08:00

Godz
The Third Testament
1969
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As a warning, I would be skeptical of anyone who actually professed any affinity whatsoever for The Godz. Be as mindful of bullshit, as you would be when discussing Captain Beefheart’s, Troutmask Replica, or any song by the Shaggs, with self-professed fans; these are the hallmarks of those who are determined to become the architect of their own tastes. That being said, be on your guard, because I like them, well, I half-like them. Also, there is a very frustrating aspect of both researching this band, and downloading their songs—another band that is also named The Godz with a z, but they can only be described as butt-rock to the max, so there should be no confusion among them and the New York-based, ESP-Disk, avant-folk group I am presently reviewing, but they make things messy. Beware.

Now that I let the avant-folk term out of the bag, I should probably start by defining the term and by extension, The Godz, by what they are not. Usually, before reviewing an album, I type the bands name in to google, and inevitably end up reading the wikipedia entry on them. I would never say that wikipedia is ahistorical— half of it is copy and pasted from the online Encyclopedia Britannica (make of that, what you will)—but when it comes to something, as marginalized as a weirdo sixties band with a fascination with atonality, things can become problematic. First, the person called them a garage band, which, without going into the untidy nature of that classification, I want to make it clear that The Godz are not a garage band. Second, the person laid out an extremely vague argument hinged upon the conceit that The Godz were more influential to “late punk” than the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, thus making them a proto-punk band. Proto-punk is a fine term, it is self-explanatory but musically undescriptive; the term late punk however is completely unclear. Anyhow, the point is that the entry fully muddled the question of classification as it relates to The Godz; mainly because the terms garage band, and proto-punk inspire crisp albeit reductive visions of something quite different than what The Godz are; perhaps visions of beat-based guitar rock, you know, with a drummer. That is not the case, so I have attached the avant-folk label to them, which may or may not give one a quick and easy touchstone of what The Godz sound like. So I’ll try and explain.

First off, The Godz do not, in any way, inspire trust; they sound as if their whole existence was an elaborate con, a trick, a rotten deception. At their core is the total rejection of pop music, and possibly a total rejection of the idea that music is something to be enjoyed by the listener. To them, it is not intended to engender the type of reflexive good feeling that most popular music is designed to do. The music they produced varies between the moderately unlistenable to the totally unlistenable. There are obvious undertones of sixties counter-culture posturing—the desire for excessive chaos in an increasingly chaotic world, but that is a political judgment that may or may not hold; they were clearly however, rock deconstructionists, a folk, and by extension, less menacing version of Pussy Galore 15 years earlier, sans the scuzz. Despite all these misgivings though, there is a visceral quality that comes out in the harsh decadence of their atonal squalor. The trick is though, knowing whether there is something distinctive about their atonality, or if it is just that atonality in general is the burdensome desire of a crooked mind.

The Third Testament, the third offering of The Godz is a schizophrenic affair split between two templates. On the one hand there are songs like "Eeh Ooh," that are unseemly and incoherent affairs of messy noise and faux Eastern chants, and on the other there are simple folk-blues numbers that compositionally, could be described as childlike, if not lyrically. The album’s opener is the unremittingly discordant "Ruby Red", an example of the latter template; a song that seems, to be written about a woman called upon in a state of lonely despair. Lyrically, the song, like many others, is a mystery of tangled ideas, half-thoughts and the usual trite myths of co-dependence. This one though, is accompanied by the most ploddingly played and significantly out of tune guitar ever to be put on tape. There are others like this, "Down By the River," "Neet Street," and "Walking Guitar Blues" among them. These, last three are played on a guitar that sounds somewhat more in tune, but come off like subtle rebukes of the wandering-folkie ideal, perhaps the easy shot, Donovan, or perhaps even the moving target, Dylan.

I suppose I have not fully defined avant-folk. Some may prefer the term psych-folk, and that would probably work in this context also, but psych-folk does not describe the urge to irritate that marks The Third Testament. There are folk trademarks to The Godz' music, most explicitly, the presence of an acoustic guitar, a relative lack of percussion instruments, reliance on eastern sounding musical devices and American blues elements; and implicitly, an adherence to the poetic. These aspects are mostly superficial. The overarching framework is built upon the twin avant-garde impulses to both push barriers and to chronically annoy the audience, particularly those of conservative musical mentalities—those most invested in the structural soundness of American songwriting. The Godz though, being perhaps con artists, may have reduced the avant-garde nature of their music to the level of superficiality by making a joke of it, making this album, in a way, worthless, but in another way, an elaborate reproach of the myth of the difficult nature of the artistic. My guess is though, that they took their noise quite seriously.

b

The Pictorial Jackson Review, 1988, Felt

2006-12-26T23:31:00.002-08:00

Felt
The Pictorial Jackson Review
1988
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I first heard of Felt, in the spring of 1995, when as I was reading, maybe the Trouser Press Record Guide, I came across a review of a favorite band of mine at the time. The reviewer—and I can’t remember if they were referring to the band’s debut E.P. or the band in general—referred to them as sounding like Unsane covering Felt. I was simple then, and ran to the local record shop and bought an Unsane record (which I absolutely hated, not to mention it had a blood-strewn front grill of a car on the cover), but never could find anything by Felt. In hindsight, the reference was wholly inappropriate but it stuck in my mind long enough until, one day, I finally came across something by Felt, (Poem of the River, 1987), and I liked it enough to get excited, when at Jerry’s Records, I was faced with the prospect of purchasing the album in question—The Pictorial Jackson Review—for four dollars. I let it sit amongst all the other gold, silt and garbage that I found at Jerry’s until we moved back west and I rediscovered it about three years ago. It has been a staple since, so long as the turntable has been in working order; which is not always.

To start, I must confess one over-arching prejudice I have against this album: if your name is neither Jimmy Smith, nor James Taylor (The Prisoners), you ought not make a Hammond B3 organ your weapon of choice. It is not that Martin Duffy is not a very proficient organist, it is just that the instrument is unsubtle and too overpowering for this type of music—so much so that it oftentimes becomes the focal point, which is not what I imagine the band had intended. That being said, this record has a beautifully realized Side 1, that is a quick study in how enjoyable British music used to be before the Nineties Britpop revolution poisoned much of the tiny island’s well. (Side 2-is devoted to two Martin Duffy organ-studies, one of which is over-long and corny in a bad jazz kind of way, reminding me of how David Bowie let Brian Eno run roughshod over Side 2 of Low). The first side however, is comprised of 8 tracks that owe much, much more to Lou Reed, The Velvets, Booker T. Jones, and perhaps Robert Zimmerman, than to the group’s supposed namesake, Thomas Miller, who himself took his nom-de-plume from the French poet, Paul Verlaine.

With all that muscle-flexing behind me, I’d like to start by skipping over the appealing opener and getting right to the second song, Ivory Past, with it’s brief introduction of dueling down-tempo and meandering California-style guitars that abruptly give way to the more forceful and sophisticated verse, colored feverish with Duffy’s swirling organ and vocalist Lawrence Hayward’s studied Lou Reed (Dylanesque?) pungent, nasal monotone (a point I can't help but belabor). Hayward’s delivery though, is a small part of a greater and contiguous whole. Perhaps one of the most comforting aspects of this album is the way in which each song is similar, and has analogous aspects; sounding as if they were conceived, written, recorded, and mixed in a short and intense burst. This is not to be meant as a slight, the songs are configured as part of a greater whole, but they are composed to be different. The distinction lies in the sound, not the structure of each individual composition.

For the most part, each song is constructed on a lean and oftentimes, busy bass line (depending on the mood, obviously); plucked guitar figures; Martin Duffy’s aforementioned feverish organ; Hayward’s interlocking Bob Dylan-Lou Reed vocal delivery, and the kind of beautiful, bare-bones and minimal production (by Joe Foster, “quickly” on eight track) that eschews all the musical ephemera, frills, effects, and studio-gadgetry, that would conspire to kill music in the following decade. It is marked by a certain amount of sixties revivalism that colors much of British Music after 1990, it does not however, slavishly adhere to the template of the Beatles-Stones-Kinks-Who oligarchy of rock royalty influences, in fact, those influences are absent (in so far as any British pop group could distance themselves from the Beatles). The sum total is something to be celebrated, something that, though not perfect or wholly original, is a late-period, moody, rock masterwork; a study in sound and technique that was, in hindsight, like a dying musical ethos that soon would be swept away to the extreme musical fringes where it would be revived a short-time later by bands as widely dispersed as late-era Unrest, Air Miami, Henry's Dress, (and possibly the whole of the Slumberland Records catalogue), the lesser-twee moments of Heavenly, the Field Mice (ditto for Sarah Records) and most notably (and surely not on the musical fringe), Belle and Sebastian.

In the end because of my habit of overstatement, I have not given due credit to the other standout songs—Until the Fools get Wise, How Spook Got her Man, and, (I have to mention it) the Street Hassle-era Lou Reedesque-titled, Don’t Die on my Doorstep.

b.

Top 100 (Songs 100-91)

2006-12-21T17:48:00.000-08:00

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I think, for the time being, I would like to abandon genre distinctions and garage-this and garage-that, and would like to embark on an ambitious journey through this past year. All of the end-of-the-year best of lists that I’ve been looking at in the local free weeklies, (The Guardian, The SF Weekly, and inexplicably, The Onion), have made me nostalgic for the time when I actually had something salient to say about contemporary music, and in turn, was able to rank all the new albums from best to tenth-best, or fiftieth-best, or one-hundredth best. I purchased only one record that came out this year—Yo La Tengo; and I have most of the Strokes album on my computer, which has a nifty nod to Barry Manilow’s, Mandy, and the new Belle and Sebastian album, which is good. But instead of ranking those albums, I have compiled my top songs from this year, 98 of them were recorded before this year though. The majority of them I had heard before 2006, but failed to “get into” them or worse, just didn’t like them, or just didn’t pay close attention to them. In some cases though, they are on albums that I purchased this year or are songs that I had never heard prior to this year. Nevertheless, they make up the core of what I have been listening to over the course of this year. I’ve alphabetized the songs and then inverted them, because ranking one hundred songs in some qualitative way is a much too subtle and taxing task. Here are the first (or is it last) ten. I will disperse them in groups of ten over the next couple of months.
*
100. Young Turks (5:00)-Rod Stewart, Tonight I’m Yours (1981)-This really is an amazing song, driven by a slick, percolating, brand-spanking new synth-pop beat, that fully characterized an artist who was never going to be comfortable in the dust-bin of history. Though, to be sure, Rod the Mod had never been on the vanguard—despite a career that stretched back to 1964, and included seminal moments, including such nuggets as, Stay With Me, Maggie May, You Wear it Well, Handbags and Gladrags, and perhaps his greatest moment, Reason to Believe—Stewart seemed to always lag behind better known British acts such as the Rolling Stones and David Bowie. By 1981, all of the above had shown their age, and were desperate to hang on, rearranging their styles, which was a tactic that often left the music stale and hopeless sounding (and let’s face it, it was time even then for them to tend the garden on their estates). Stewart though, managed a mini-masterpiece of modern-era precision and narrative brilliance. Unfortunately, the album as a whole, fails to rise up to the quality of its popular single.

Watch the video.

99. You’ll Know Why (3:08)-Miracle Workers, Inside Out (1985)-As a preface, I should explain that many of the songs on this list were found on The Children of Nuggets box set. I have tried to list each song in context of its album to place it in its right year. If I were ranking songs, this would be one of my easy favorites. With it’s short, crisp and brittle guitar lines, extra dose of reverb, tambourine over-indulgence, and bruised hearted, finger-pointing anger, it is an understated neo-garage tour de force, fit snugly inside the punk framework. When I first heard it, I kind of immediately connected it to Guided By Voices’ She Wants to Know, which has the same type of disjointed and fractured guitar figure.

98. (You're) Safe In Your Sleep (From This Girl) (2:31)-My Bloody Valentine, Ecstasy & Wine (1989)-It has been a long time since a friend of mine spent what seemed like an obscene amount of money on this record in an eBay auction. Though I was a fan of Loveless (I had a tape of it in, maybe1995) I was not prepared to, after becoming a literate music fan, accept them as the producers of one of the best albums ever recorded. Anyway, I think I always have had an aversion to them, perhaps it’s the over-eagerness of their acolytes, fans and writers alike, to overdo Kevin Shields’ guitar thing, but when I finally got around to listening to this album, I realized that it was a kind of minor jangle-pop miracle, all thin and trebly, and much more palatable for me these days, than the overdone and mushy, guitar histrionics that Shields displayed on their final two albums.

97. You Must Have Crossed My Mind (2:50)-The Toms, The Toms (1979)-A kind of quirky and interesting power-pop moment that went fairly unnoticed in a long and well-chronicled history. Basically one guy named Tom Marolda, recorded all the instruments and vocals on this 1979 album of sweet, mid-tempo dumb-guy-seems-to-fall-for-every-girl- kind of pop. Not terribly literate or adventurous, but in the case of this standout track, Marolda manages the kind of infectiousness so central to the genre.

96. You Cheated, You Lied (2:09)-Ronnie Hawkins, Mr. Dynamo (1960)-This is an interesting down-tempo entry from the man known as Mr. Dynamo, for being a kind of intense rockabilly wild-man. He made his name in Canada, but got his start in his native Arkansas, moving North after failing to garner a spot on the Sun Records label. His original backing band, the Hawks, went on to back up Bob Dylan and become The Band. This is basically a standard bare bones, slow-dance, hand-on-the-ass, Elvis/Roy Orbison knock-off, with some nice touches, including some appealing Jordanaires-style bah-bah-bahs, twangy and supple guitar work and Joe Meek-like otherworldly organ.

95. Yeah Yeah Yeah (1:19)-The Vibrators, Pure Mania (1977)-The shortest entry on my list, the song consists, basically, of a chorus in which singer, Ian Carnochan, shouts throatily—yeah, yeah, yeah, with some attempt at verses. Along with garage, and surf, punk was the genre that I especially clung to this year, and though I had collected my share of bands in the past, I finally went a bit deeper this year and discovered a fair amount of new ones, including, The Lurkers, The Partisans, The Cockney Rejects, and The U.K. Subs. A friend described the Vibrators to me, as like The Undertones, which isn’t really quite right, because The Undertones are mainly semi-literate in a razor-sharp British sitcom sort of way, while the Vibrators are more like a nuts and bolts, dumbed-down version of Pink Flag-era Wire.

94. Wrong Side of the Moon (2:25)-Squeeze, Argy Bargy (1980)-This is another one of my new favorite tracks from this year, and possibly one of the most intensely infectious songs that I have ever heard. I had heard Squeeze as a kid—Tempted, Black Coffee in Bed, Pulling Mussels from the Shell; my stepfather had a greatest hits, but they always seemed kind of boring and hyper-adult. Early this year though, I got a copy of Argy Bargy for cheap on a trip to Monterey and listened to it to death. Top to bottom, the album is superb, but Wrong Side of the Moon is truly a pure-pop masterpiece.

93. Wild Weekend (2:13)-The Lively Ones, Surf Drums (1963)-Surf-music was a high priority this year, mainly because my girlfriend introduced me to a Japanese guitarist called Takeshi Terauchi, whom I will discuss later. The Lively Ones are a very standard band in the surf canon, along with Dick Dale and the Ventures. I never really paid any attention to the genre, except for maybe a fleeting interest when Pulp Fiction came out which had all that surf stuff on its soundtrack. Wild Weekend is a sort of mid-tempo, frat rock style instrumental in the vein of the Champs’ Tequila. Very standard and nice meticulous reverbed-out guitar solos alternating with just slightly dirty sounding sax solos.

92. What's Your Sign Girl (4:38)-Alex Chilton, A Man Called Destruction (1985)-Alex Chilton is quite possibly the only musical hero that I have. I am a Big Star junkie, but I also think Like Flies on Sherbert might be one of the greatest albums ever recorded; and I know I’m in the minority; and I am not being contrarian. There is a kind of logic to the album, especially in light of the third Big Star record; the difference being though, that one sounds fun, while the other can be rather depressing. All of that is neither here nor there though. I actually heard this song about 5 years ago at the Club Café in Pittsburgh, when my girlfriend and I lived there and we saw Alex Chilton, which was the—bar none—best show that I have ever seen. I’m not crazy about this album, but What’s Your Sign Girl is a pitch-perfect neo-Chilton entry, filled with all the interesting and angular, jazzy guitar lines he’s so fond of now, and seventies style lyrical foolishness. I’ve never heard the original that was first recorded by Barry White protégé, Danny Pearson in 1978.

91. Vanishing Girl (2:30)-The Dukes Of Stratosphear, Psonic Psunspot (1987)-I have never been one of those people who adore XTC. I think it is because as a fifteen year old, I was riding around in a car going somewhere and the song Dear God came on the radio, and even then I knew it was just too sincere. Now though, I know it was a bit cruel too. I could care less for evangelical types, and I’m not sticking up for the true believers, or the false ones, Catholics or Christians, which I am none of. But strictly taking in to account the hierarchy of the big issues—by 1986, hadn’t the enlightenment hashed this all out, and if not the enlightenment hadn’t Nietzsche, and if not Nietzsche, Sartre? And if not Sartre, hadn’t the secularization of the vast majority of western culture been enough, that you don’t, in 1986, have to kick poor god around? It is just a bad song, but one ought not judge a band by one bad song. What if I judged the Beatles, based on The Long and Winding Road? But even more to the point, what if I judged XTC based on their alter egos—The Dukes of Stratosphear—much better.

The Shadows of Knight, Pebbles, et al.

2006-12-13T11:26:00.000-08:00

Gee-El-O-Are-I-Ay
1966

Various Artists
Pebbles—Volume 2
1979
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I think possibly, my last entry was a bit too contextual and not musically descriptive enough. I focused on a garage aspect of the Rolling Stones, or rather, a strangling of that aspect by their own musical evolution, and then their eventual downfall (which had nothing whatsoever to do with garage).

Now I’d like to focus on some of the other bands from that period that possibly exemplify the genre a little better than the scatter-shot and pop-sensible Rolling Stones. I’d also like to preface the following by noting that there are about a million people who have written eloquently and not so eloquently on the subject of garage. There are also about a million more connoisseurs, collectors and sick, rabid fans whose spend-thriftiness is legend in terms of procuring rare garage records and singles—I am not one of those people. I have a very good working knowledge of the standard bands and if the truth be told, I probably would rather listen to the neo-garage revivalist groups of the late seventies and early eighties (The Barracudas, The Lyres, The Chesterfield Kings) who embraced garage through a seventies punk filter, instead of through the standard Chicago-style blues filter that informed countless sixties garage bands including British monsters like The Stones, The Yardbirds, and The Kinks. So that being said, ladies and gentlemen…The Shadows of Knight.
*
The Shadows of Knight, probably more than any other American band typify that garage by Chicago blues filter I mentioned earlier. First, they were from Chicago, but were hot for British R&B-style acts like the Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Irish hard-core R&B masters, Them, led by a young and puerile Van Morrison. Secondly, in Brian Hogg’s liner-notes, they said as much themselves, putting it this way: “The Stones, Animals and Yardbirds took the Chicago Blues and gave it an English interpretation. We’ve taken the English version of the blues and re-added a Chicago touch.”

Once you drop the needle on the record and listen to Jim Sohns vocal on the opener, the Morrison-penned Gloria, one can’t help but wonder just why this version has spawned such a mythic quality. Where Morrison’s staccato, over-sexed snarl pulses menacingly throughout the original, Sohns’ thin and high-pitched voice sounds less like a mannish boy and more like a whitish one (which, I know, he is). The truth is though, that Them’s version, which was dripping with sex, was shelved stateside because, well, it was dripping with sex. Sohn and company were urged to record the banned song—sans the provocative line “she comes up to my room” with the line “she calls out my name” in it’s stead—by their manager, a bit Chicago music player named Bill Traut. Even though, it’s been said that the group did not like this “clean” change, they did not protest the relative, perhaps regional fame of having a smash hit in the top ten Billboard national chart.

The flipside of The Shadows’ initial single of Gloria was the originally-penned and brief, Dark Side, which made it on their subsequent album and prefigures a Hendrix-by-way-of-the-Byrds-like languidity without the guitar histrionics. The standout track though, is Bad Little Woman—a cover, written by another Irish band, Belfast’s The Wheels. The Shadows’ version eschews the short, quick, clipped guitar and quick-pulsed freakbeat style of The Wheels’ version, for a more raw and fuzzy punk style. Sohns’ vocal is reduced to a lower more confident and arresting rasp that fits the song’s explicit nature perfectly. Whereas on Gloria, the Shadows had to clean up Van Morrison’s libidinous songwriting, they play it up on Bad Little Woman (the title alone nixes the idea of any Bill Traut-inspired subterfuge), slowly cow belling their way into the sonic lull of the first verse, before launching into a quicker-tempoed chorus and then with a moan, climaxing into a perfectly controlled cacophony before coming back down into the second verse; then repeating the process. Bad Little Woman more than makes up for the PG rating they put on Van Morrison’s masterpiece, Gloria.
*
There are countless other Garage Bands, from the famous (13th Floor Elevators, The Chocolate Watch Band, The Remains), to the not so famous (The Dovers, The Choir, Randy Alvey and Green Fuz), the latter of which are collected on Volume 2 of the original Pebbles collection, a kind of lesser known cousin of the ubiquitous Nuggets. There is some crossover to be sure: the Dovers’, What Am I Going to Do, and the Choir’s, It’s Cold Outside. These two tracks stand out, but neither of them are what one would call garage punk. Which brings me, rather late in the game, to defining my terms.

There is garage, garage-rock, and garage-punk. I don’t think I need to get embroiled in the etymological beginnings concerning cheap Montgomery Ward guitars and suburban garages, but there are some subtle differences within this stratified genre. Garage and garage-rock are kind of similar umbrella terms that take into account a host of initial sixties bands whose aesthetic is generally marked by a degree of amateurish production, especially when compared with more popular groups. (This conceit is mainly an American one. Simply put, because of the relative smallness of the United Kingdom and it’s cultural fertility, their garage-style bands generally recorded on top of the line equipment and in nice studios. In America though, you hear stories of storefronts and a producer recording on a single microphone, which is pointed at a band as it plays). So within this garage umbrella you have bands that wrote primarily pop songs, like The Choir, The Dovers, and The Knickerbockers, and then there are bands that exemplify the idea of garage-punk—a subgenre that is marked by a certain rawness, which exposes itself both lyrically (sexuality, nihilism) and musically (fuzzy, guitar driven, sometimes quick tempoed, sometimes slow and sexual). The band that is probably most associated with garage-punk, is the Sonics, a band that was recorded about as poorly as anyone this side of Hasil Adkins, but still managed to become supremely influential.

I have went on way too long, but I’d like to highlight some standout tracks on Volume 2 of the Pebbles collection, one of which is The Road’s, frenetic and fuzz guitar-driven, You Rub Me The Wrong Way—which is built on a shameless rip-off of The Contours Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance). Another song of note is the strange and creepy Green Fuz by Randy Alvey and Green Fuz, which sounds eerily like Kurt Cobain, a hopelessly out of tune guitar and maybe a percussionist working on the bottom of a trash can, where, as it were, it sounds like the song was recorded. But if you, like me have an affinity for terrible and rotten amateur home recording, it will surely satisfy.
*
Go to this link to get a look at the Shadows of Knight ca. sometime in the recent past:
http://www.shadowsofknight.com/

b.

Mixtape
Garage (proto and otherwise)-side
1. The Shadows of Knight-Bad Little Woman
2. Them-Gloria
3. Charlie Feathers-Rain
4. Eddie Cochrane-She’s Something Else
5. The Flamin’ Groovies-Jumpin’ in the Night
6. The Rumors-Hold Me Now
7. The Sonics-Have Love Will Travel
8. The Gants-Wonder
9. The Remains-But I Ain’t Got You
10. The Road-You Rub Me the Wrong Way
Neo-garage-side
11. The Barracudas-I Can’t Pretend
12. The Lyres-She Pays the Rent
13. The Chesterfield Kings-Stop
14. The Droogs-Ahead of My Time
15. The Gories-Thunderbird ESQ
16. Alex Chilton-She’s the One That’s Got it
17. The Monarchs-Hit That Bitch
18. Holly Golightly-For All This
19. Thee Headcoats-Darling Let’s Have Another Baby
20. Spacemen 3-Hey Man

december's children (and everybody's), 1965, The Rolling Stones

2006-12-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

The Rolling Stones
december’s children (and everybody’s)
1965
__________________________________________________________

The Rolling Stones’ fourth entry of 1965 is perhaps the best of their early oeuvre, though most would, while making a good case, argue for the following year’s Aftermath. I’ve just always thought it was overrated—it has its good bits though, but it lacks the benzedrine-fast chaos that’s on display in december’s opener, a cover of Larry Williams’ She Said Yeah. It is this habit of sort of sloppily racing through certain types of songs that helped to, not only, define the Rolling Stones’ early period, and mark the major artistic rift between them and the meticulous Beatles, but also helped to define the garage-punk revolution that began to stew in the mid to late sixties that would mutate into the more smooth and reductive form of punk that arose little more than a decade later. Not that december’s children is bursting with the type of snarl displayed on that opening track, in fact the serene outweighs the punk (which is represented solely by She Said Yeah) but it’s a raw example of the nervous energy that marked the sixties garage-punk ethos. Sadly, it is probably the last manifestation of this ethos by the Rolling Stones, for the rest of the album, though mostly brilliant in it’s own regard, is a parade of mid-tempo and half-sad songs in that wistful Jaggeresque way. On Aftermath and in to the future, the Rolling Stones’ sinister energy would reveal itself in a less chaotic musical way and be displayed in more lyrical forms (Paint it Black, Sympathy for the Devil, and Brown Sugar), with of course, certain exceptions. The era of the Stones being a garage band would be forever left to the past by 1966.

I would grade four more tracks as 4’s (on a scale of 1-4): The Singer Not The Song; it’s main hit, the ubiquitous Get Off Of My Cloud, the quasi-symphonic, As Tears Go By, and the relatively unknown Blue Turns to Grey. The middle tracks, most listeners of the radio, particularly Rolling Stones fans, should be quite familiar with, the others are less well known. In fact I came to both of them through other sources. In the case of The Singer Not The Song, I heard it on a rather over-priced re-issued Alex Chilton double-seven inch, about seven years ago. Though Alex Chilton does a good job of butchering it (even the Stones’ version can be a tough listen for a vocal purist), the song is, however, the kind of crisp, semi-morbid pop song that you wish Paul Simon could manage without letting his addiction for over-wrought literary imagery get in the way. In the case of Blue Turns to Grey-which until about a year ago, I was convinced was a Flamin’ Groovies original because I downloaded it and had no liner notes to consult-is marked by the same type of boy-girl wistfulness that I mentioned earlier. (I should footnote that it had been quite some time since I have been in to the Stones early period, and what re-kindled all this interest in these old records was a silly Stones versus Beatles argument I had with a friend and since then I have listened to this album to death, particularly these 4 songs mentioned in this paragraph-hence the Rolling Stones/Flamin' Groovies confusion as of about a year ago).

*
It is important, I think, to stress the Rolling Stones as a band that should be separated into epochs. It is a popular practice to demarcate the Rolling Stones epochs by dint of who was the lead guitarist, a la the Brian Jones-era, the Mick Taylor-era, and the Ron Wood-era. I don’t think this is very helpful though, because Mick Taylor plays on so few albums, he does however, play on some of their best. Though I would argue that the demarcation lines should not be fixed, there are certain albums that mark turning points. These albums would be Aftermath, Beggars Banquet, and Sticky Fingers; then after a desultory period which followed Exile on Main Street they launched a rather brilliant three year, last-gasp period of quality work, which includes their last three albums of note: Some Girls, Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. The eighties and nineties work is spotty at best, and at worst trivial, embarrassing, greedy, revulsion inspiring, meaningless.
*
The reason I think december’s children, is such an important album is that it marked the end of the Rolling Stones first incarnation—the bluesy dilettantes who wore leather pants; when they were Brian Jones, unafraid to play a cheap-o Harmony Rocket instead of a Thunderbird or, even worse, a sitar; Keith, looking boyishly innocent, and still like a human. They were all still boys, at least they seemed to be in hindsight; they had yet to become greasy and bloated with the pomp of fame; they had yet to become Brian, wrinkle-faced and foreboding, slowly pissing away No Expectations and his life at that lame Rock and Roll Circus; they had yet to inspire strange and prurient rumors of mars bars; they had yet to become the quixotic, irresponsible rock gods who inspired the bedlam at Altamont; they had yet to become Mick strutting in that most peculiar and silly way; they had yet to become the savage icons that, while producing some of the most important music ever to enter the rock canon, seemed to be revolting people that would one day become everything that is wrong with rock and roll, so long after-as young men-being everything that was right about it.

The present state of the Rolling Stones proves more than anything else that rock is truly dead.

b.

Mixtape
1. The Rolling Stones-She Said Yeah
2. Magic Sam-Days in Jail
3. Ike and Tina Turner-I can’t Believe What You Say
4. The Blues Magoos-She’s Coming Home
5. The Chocolate Watch Band-Let’s Talk About Girls
6. The Poets-That’s the Way It’s Got To Be
7. The Wheels-Bad Little Woman
8. Them-Here Comes The Night
9. Sam The Sham and the Pharaohs-Little Red Riding Hood
10. Holly Golightly-Run Cold
11. Irma Thomas-Wish Someone Would Care
12. Marianne Faithful-As Tears Go By
13. Johnny Thunders-Play with Fire
14. The New York Dolls-Personality Crisis
15. The Stooges-Loose
16. T. Rex-The Motivator
17. The Sorrows-You’ve Got What I Want
18. My Rival-Alex Chilton
19. Guitar Slim-The Things That I Used To Do
20. Larry Williams-She Said Yeah