Monthly Archives: June 2014

“I was very, very late getting into owning vinyl records. I always loved music and had a ton of tapes as a kid (and later on, compact discs), but I moved quite frequently as a teenager and in to my early twenties…so much so that owning any sort of possession (especially something as heavy as vinyl) just wasn’t in the cards.”

“The first piece of vinyl I ever owned was way before I even had a record player to play it on. Even at 16 I was a “collector” of sorts, and owned everything by Babes In Toyland on cassette, CD, and vinyl. I had rare singles, Japanese and European releases with different artwork and multiple copies of the same albums in several formats. They were a big inspiration to me as a female interested in playing music.

In the last few years I have developed a love for scouring local record stores when on the road. One of my favourite finds were two releases on my dad’s record label from back in the ’70s by an artist named “Bim” which he also managed. They’re so rare, he doesn’t even have a copy! Ha! I found them randomly in Richmond, Virginia of all places, even though his label and the artist were both Canadian.

I completed the collection while in Calgary a few years ago, and to this day I have almost everything my dad ever released. That makes me very happy and proud.

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An epic rainstorm raged outside as Nicole Atkins ducked into Washington, DC’s Som Records, dripping wet and apologetic for showing up late. But after all of thirty seconds, she shed her vintage cape, looked around, and started reminiscing about her previous visit to Som and the possibilities on the shelves that day.

It was the end of April, and the 35-year-old singer-songwriter was on tour promoting her newest studio album, February’s Slow Phaser. Later in the night, she would take the stage at DC’s Rock and Roll Hotel, but for now, she was content to roam the store, pulling out records that were familiar—rooting around for Peter Gabriel—and snagging a couple purely for their intrigue. The Nina Hagen LP she bought became the inspiration for her crazy-bold eyeliner later in the night.

Atkins was clear and concise when talking about the making of Slow Phaser. After moving from New York City back to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, close to where she grew up, she used the extra cash saved on rent to travel and visit friends in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the UK. Travel stoked her inspiration, which was also furthered through collaboration with Jim Sclavunos of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. She finished the record in Sweden, where she again worked with producer Tore Johannsson, who also produced the critically acclaimed Neptune City, her first full-length album.

During the making of Slow Phaser, Atkins lived in Sweden for a month and a half in the dead of winter, in a tiny town with no bars or young people and a dearth of English speakers. Her closest friend became a 70-year-old Greek woman who fed Atkins feta while they listened to Neptune City—perhaps not the most typical process for putting an album together. (But at least she was in Sweden where “the biggest scumbag at 7-11 will be hottest guy you’ve ever seen.”)

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Gordon Lightfoot! Troubadour of the Carefree Highway! Golden God! Epitome of Canadian Cool! What with the head-to-toe denim and the manly-man mustache and the head of curly golden ringlets right down to, I was going to say the man-sandals he’s sporting on the cover of 1974’s Sundown, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. You can’t hop a freight train in man-sandals. It’s unseemly. Anyway, Gordon Lightfoot is not just another “singer-songwriter” he’s (I repeat) an honest-to-god troubadour, living and loving and losing and turning it all to account in his songs, which hurt like the phantom memory of your true home, the home you’ve never had, the home you’ll never have.

None of this is a joke. I love Gordon Lightfoot. He’s a philosopher bard of the lonely road, Alberta bound and cold on the shoulder of the highway, thumb up in the early morning rain. Life is tough, an unending tutorial in the art of lowered expectations. “Sometimes,” he sings, “I think it’s a shame when I get feeling better when I’m feeling no pain.” He’s seen the summer side of life and known rainy day people and thanked his lucky stars the watchman was gone when the train pulled into the station, come to carry his bones away, two engines, twenty-one coaches long.

What can I say? Bob Dylan said it better than I ever could when he remarked that upon hearing a Gordon Lightfoot song, he hoped “it would last forever.” Lightfoot, who was born in 1938, has been hailed as Canada’s greatest songwriter, and as a “national treasure” by none other than Robbie Robertson, and everyone from Elvis to The Replacements to Nico has covered his songs. He spent his early years playing with the obscure likes of The Swinging Eight and the Gino Silvi singers before making a name for himself as a folkie in Toronto’s coffee houses.

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Come 1975, David Bowie was in very, very precarious shape. As a famous man (me) once said, Death is the icing on the birthday cake of Life, and Bowie was scooping off the icing with his fingers and licking them clean. Extremely paranoid, frazzled, and down to 17 pounds–due largely to his phenomenal intake of cocaine, which would have sufficed to wire Liechtenstein, and a diet that consisted solely of peppers and milk–Bowie was obsessed with the Black Arts, Naziism and fascism, and a hodgepodge of esoteric spiritual practices, and was convinced that someone, the ghost of Aleister Crowley or his future “Prancing in the Streets” duet partner Mick Jagger perhaps, was stealing his sperm.

You would think it a good time for rock’s greatest vampire–I don’t know whether anyone was really stealing his sperm, but he certainly stole his fair share of ideas from Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, the Krautrockers, etc.–to make a beeline for rehab, or at the very least the nearest Burger King (peppers and milk?) Instead he went into an LA studio–a town about which he would later say, “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth”–and recorded Station to Station, one of the very best LPs of his career. Which is a miracle, especially when one takes into consideration Bowie’s claim of having virtually no recollection of making it.

Not only did Bowie create a new album, his tenth, he created a new persona–The Thin White Duke–to go with it. Bowie had learned from Ziggy Stardust–or perhaps his stint as a mime–to always hide behind a mask. He’d killed off glam-bam-thank-you-ma’am alien Ziggy Stardust before making Station to Station’s predecessor Young Americans, perhaps because the Zigster’s surname was filched by the opportunistic hack Alvin Stardust and Bowie didn’t want anyone thinking they were family. But he evidently felt naked singing Young Americans’ “plastic soul” as an anonymous plastic soul man, and figured it was high time he became somebody else.

In any event, The Thin White Duke was a suave, amoral, and aristocratic creature, mad perhaps but always elegantly attired in a tuxedo vest and crisp white shirt with his former spiky flame-hued do slicked back, and never to be seen without a pack of Gitanes. Bowie himself described The Thin White Duke as “a nasty character indeed.”

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“Ever since my first rite of musical passage, it sits there with its enigma, mystery, and pretty colors…vinyl. To some, those virtues may be replaced by guilt, nostalgia. To the particularly modern and cold—completely impractical. My vinyl experience reads like an underground Disney movie.”

“What do you mean? Well let me present you a vinyl history of my life: A Love Story.

“Love at first sight” and “innocently saccharine” best describe my love of records. My first experience of playing The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” 45 over and over again at my grandparents’ house felt like it was the craziest, rock-n-roll amazing thing I could ever hear. I can’t even remember what the B-side was because I was so enamored. It was just a complete fantasy world to me, which was more interesting than pretty much anything else that had ever existed.

My parents’ record collection was fair game, a small window into their past life as not being mum and dad. They also had a really cool collection. Every Australian household for some reason had a copy of Carol King’s Tapestry and at least one ABBA album. I liked these, but not as much as Aretha Now. I always thought Aretha looked so pretty on that cover—I played that album over and over, by myself, like an insane person in my bedroom. I still love that album.

My father had allowed me to take the record player because he listened to CDs now and I would compete with his sound (usually Dire Straits at that point in his life or Mozart or Chopin) with his old record collection.

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To soak up Vanilla Fudge’s talent as song-interpreters the best route is their eponymous ’67 debut. A further understanding of them as a singles act is most appropriately gleaned through the Rhino compilation Psychedelic Sundae. If an immersion into the multifaceted positives and negatives of these trailblazing late-‘60s hard rockers’ everyday reality is what one wants however, then one should look into the contents of Near the Beginning.

There’s no question Vanilla Fudge are an important band. “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the group’s reading of a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune originally by The Supremes, is a vital evolutionary brick in the hard rock megastructure, and it stands as a one-song distillation of nearly everything that was good and potentially less than stellar about this hard-touring New York quartet.

There are two versions of the Fudge’s recording, a just shy of three-minute single edit and the take found on their debut; that one’s over twice as long, and this duality is to an extent indicative of the group’s creative problems. It’s far from that simple though, and their somewhat brief and highly eventful initial existence provides a consistently interesting story, if one that’s only sporadically fruitful in musical terms.

Vanilla Fudge’s beginnings are in The Electric Pigeons, the soul cover unit featuring organist/lead vocalist Mark Stein and bassist Tim Bogert. They soon acquired guitarist Vince Martell and drummer Carmine Appice, and after hooking up with Shangri La’s producer Shadow Morton, they changed names and focused attentions on the studio.

The first effort turned out to be the best, but it was also a problematic record. Those soul roots were still showing; in fact, they never went away, flaring up rather flagrantly later in their tenure, but on Vanilla Fudge, it’s not a decisive detraction. It’s true that “People Get Ready” (and the first album is composed entirely of covers) is no great shakes, but “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” is one of the better R&B lifts in ‘60s rock precisely because it displays a disinterest in mimicry (a real issue with NYC bands of the era) to instead hone a variation on a then new sound.

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MARK SWARTZ FOR TVD | That’s my six-word memoir. Allow me to elaborate. In my 20s, I lived for jazz—specifically, the jazz avant-garde that flourished between 1959 (the year Mingus Ah Um was released) and 1970, the year Albert Ayler committed suicide). My tastes also encompassed the seeds of this renaissance as well as its latter-day echoes.

My free time was spent hunting for Ornette Coleman LPs in places like Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart and reading books like Graham Lock’s Forces in Motion. Unlike any other period in my life, I listened to music without doing anything else. Positioned between two speakers, I’d sit there, without a book, magazine, or laptop (which didn’t exist), absorbing the rhythms and timbres.

This actually happened: Ann Arbor, 1991. I come home with Spy vs. Spy, John Zorn’s Ornette Coleman tribute album, put it on the turntable, and took a seat. Two tracks in, my nose starts to bleed. Correlation is not causation, but still.

What majestic names my heroes had! Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton. Was there, perhaps, a touch of reverse racism to my reverence? Undoubtedly, the blackness of these geniuses provoked the fear, guilt, and ignorance I felt toward a group of people with whom I had practically no social interaction. Myths of soulfulness and rhythmic genius fed my ardor, but I was not unaware of the irony of a privileged white guy grooving alone to the sound of black America.

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Somebody really ought to tell Wolf People that living in the past is like basting your dick in marinade—totally pointless. There’s not much to be done with a well-basted penis, but neither is there much to be achieved by slavishly imitating, mimicking, copying, studiously and reverently reproducing, or aping—pick the words you like best—the music of your parents or grandparents. There’s a word for that, and the word is jazz. Yet this is what Wolf People, a very talented bunch of Brits, are doing with such late-sixties’ mainstays as Cream, Jethro Tull, and Fairport Convention.

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well sure, if by imitation you’re talking about incorporating elements of a beloved band or era into a contemporary framework, as The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Wooden Shjips, and The People’s Temple do at their best. (At their worst, they’re no better than Wolf People.) But flattery becomes sycophancy—and true originality goes out the window—when a band anachronistically attempts to recapture, down to the dot above the “i” in Jethro Tull, the sounds of a by-gone era. It’s like the difference between painting clever imitations of Diego Velázquez, as any hack could do, and using his paintings as a jumping-off point for something completely new, a la Francis Bacon.

So why am I even bothering with Wolf People? Well, in part to illustrate the dangers of blind adoration degenerating into blatant mimicry. But also in part because, despite Wolf People’s at times risible fetishization and apery of late sixties English psychedelic blues and folk rock, I actually sort of like them. They amuse me. It can be fun listening to guys in 2014 try to time-warp themselves back to 1969. Plus they really kick out the jams on guitar. I mean, these guys can set the frets on fire. That may not sound like a whole lot to bring to the table, but I’ll take Wolf People over Vampire Weekend, who simply annoy me, or Foo Fighters, who are so generic they should come in a white can bearing nothing but the words Alternative Rock, any day.

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“One of my earliest memories is really vivid—sitting in a sun filled room flicking through my dad’s massive record collection and being allowed to listen to them on his treasured record player. I was transfixed with how everything started with a crackle and suddenly music burst to life from this weird black spinning disc. I didn’t know how it worked, but appreciated all that it did and the sounds that came from this crazy machine.”

“One of my most memorable presents ever was this record player / tape deck that I received when I was about 12. I would steal dad’s records and play them over and over—favourite 33s were Sergeant Pepper, the White Album, Revolver, and Rubber Soul by the Beatles and Through the Past Darkly by the Stones. To this day I still have the latter record, as I appropriated it from my dad (with his subliminal permission!) when I left home.

Although vinyl had largely been replaced by cassettes when I was growing up, I spent my pocket money and time from the age of 10 to 16 in old record shops in the town I grew up in (Exeter), buying vintage 45s—old Elvis, Stones, Beatles, and Troggs records. As part of this record/tape deck there was a microphone and I started recording myself singing over vinyl instrumental B-sides—which usually involved swearing—recording the songs on tape and playing it all back to my unimpressed mum.

It’s kind of how I started writing music I guess, and years down the line I’m still swearing on records and she is still equally unimpressed—but let’s leave that for future psychologist conversations.

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In 1979 a four-piece called The Killer Bees put out a 45 on Limp Records. Roughly 35 years later that 7-inch, rare and pricey in original form, has been faultlessly reissued by the Windian label. To rank “Buzz’n the Town” as an essential purchase might be overstating the situation, but not by much, for its two songs withstand the test of time with panache, succeeding on energy and clarity of vision as they deliver an inspired reminder of the no-nonsense basics residing at the root of the punk impulse.

During the final three tumultuous years of the 1970s, a whole lot of punk was captured on vinyl. A fair percentage of this surge was issued or distributed by large companies looking to capitalize on a new development in the pop/rock landscape, though as a sound/movement born mainly through social upheaval (while based upon solid historical rudiments) it just as frequently arrived in the retail bins either via upstart independents or enterprising bands taking shared destiny into collective hands and self-releasing to the masses.

A wildly varied phenomenon almost instantaneously, ‘70s punk was in fact so diverse that those trying to get a grip on its essence from the outside could find it a mixed-up and even contradictory experience, which it indeed sometimes was. By extension, any attempt to truncate the glorious messiness of punk’s eruption into a handful of consensus classics is a mistake, and if the selection is limited to or dominated by big label material (especially LPs) the endeavor becomes additionally sketchy.

But as said, the majors did spray out a substantial torrent of the ‘70s gush, often with hardly a clue over exactly what it was they were releasing. This is perhaps why such a high ratio of quality does reside in the punk output of the big(ger) businesses; if those assorted executives and their underlings would’ve had a notion what they were handling they probably would’ve dropped it like flaming spuds.

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Y’know, we’re sent pitches all the time from bands or PR folks with some vinyl-centric themed giveaway, and while many do indeed hit our sweet spot, there’s something about artist Michael Nielsen’s hand screened posters that feel a little like home. In fact, they’re for your home—and we’ve got 2 to give away.

“Over several years of diggin’ deep, I had developed an affinity for the variety of stickers on LP covers. I’m not going to front, for me it made sifting through all the crap a little more entertaining. They seemed to give a unique look back at how records were once marketed, with cheaply made stickers using archaic printing techniques, mass-produced, and slapped on the front of the album luring the consumer in with “SUPER BUY” or “ADULT XXX LP” or simply the attraction of a lesser price.

I first became inspired to create this piece when, all in the span of about a week, I dug up a large amount of rare vinyl gems for a few bucks each at a thrift store including an original undocumented LP label variation (which I came to find out was the actual first pressing) of Skull Snaps rare self-titled soul classic as well as the infamous Douglass High School’s Black Experience album, to name a couple.

Many of them were still in shrink and many had these curious pieces of sticker ephemera still intact. My obsession had spawned, and continues to this day. I had pulled and compiled many of my favorites, be it the trashy condition or simply the label preference, for this print.

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Some moves are so cool, so fucking, fucking cool, that you can hardly fucking believe how fucking cool they are, they’re so fucking cool. Such was the case with Andy Kim, the Canadian pop star and Neil Diamond doppelganger whose single “Rock Me Gently” topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1974. Then, in 1976, despite the fact that his career was flourishing, Kim vanished. As in disappeared, poof!, off the face of the earth. But since we still had Neil Diamond, who had the same face and the same hair, as well as Barry Manilow, who had the same hair and the same taste in awful suits, and both were bigger stars anyhow, hardly anybody noticed.

Then in 1980 a new figure emerged on the Canadian pop scene, one bearing the simultaneously mysterious and ludicrous name of Baron Longfellow. Is that the coolest fucking name in the world or what? Nowadays a name like that wouldn’t so much as raise eyebrows, but in 1980? In 1980 people took notice, because a name like Baron Longfellow was completely unthinkable.

Then it came out—as it was bound to, as even the most cursory glance at the swarthy Lothario with the abundant head of black hair in the white disco suit on the cover of Baron Longfellow’s eponymous debut was enough to give the game away—that Longfellow was none other than Andy Kim.

Who for some unfathomable reason had decided he no longer wanted to be Andy Kim, but rather a guy with a name that made him sound like the mad scion of a royal family, who drinks Brompkin’s Cocktail (i.e., a variable amount of morphine, 10 mg of cocaine, 2.5 ml of 98% ethyl alcohol, 5 mL of syrup BP and a variable amount of chloroform water, given to terminally ill patients in excruciating pain) from a human skull for breakfast and holds fantastical Sadian orgies in the perpetual twilight of the ancient velvet tapestry-bedecked rooms of his moated castle nestled amongst the werewolf-infested Verruckteberg Mountains.

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