Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Elton John on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

“Ridicule,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the tribute paid to genius by mediocrities.” Such would seem to be the case with one Sir Elton Hercules John. Esteemed critic Robert Christgau once wrote him off as a “puling phony,” while Charles Shaar Murray dismissed him as “Elton Schmelton.” Even John understood he lacked respect, and jokingly told Murray, “I’m gonna become a rock’n’roll suicide, take my nasty out and piddle all over the front row, just to get rid of my staid old image.”

Elton never carried through on his threat, probably because he was too busy writing brilliant songs, more than I can count on my six hands even. Besides, who needs critical respect after scoring seven consecutive No. 1 albums in the U.S. between 1972 and 1975—a feat not even the Fab Four could beat? During those golden years, which extended from Honky Chateau to Rock of the Westies, John (in collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin) churned out hits like a one-man Brill Building, and many of them will still be around long after mankind is gone, leaving our groovy ape successors to do the Crocodile Rock.

John’s high-water mark as a songwriter was 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I consider it Elton’s masterpiece, even if The Evil One, Robert Christgau, dismissed it as “one more double album that would make a nifty single.” A concept album of sorts, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road takes a bittersweet look at a lost past, from its film stars to its dance crazes to its bovver boys in their braces and boots looking to mix it up on Saturday night.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about John’s unprecedented success is that he achieved it with Bernie Taupin—a mediocre lyricist at best, and the fourth place finisher in a 3rd grade poetry competition at worst—as a collaborator. Not only is Taupin the mook who wrote “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell/And there’s no one there to raise them/If you did,” it’s his lyrical DNA police found all over Starship’s “We Built This City,” a song so unfathomably dumb it makes Jon Anderson’s “A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace/And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace” sound like Shakespeare. That said, his lyrics on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are shockingly unterrible, and a few of them are actually quite good.

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Celebrating Patterson Hood, born on this day in 1964. —Ed.

Hot damn, I loves me some Drive-By Truckers. Anybody who’s ever seen ‘em knows they put on a kick-ass live show, and anybody who’s ever heard 2001’s Southern Rock Opera knows that it’s one of the most ambitious and brilliant concept albums ever recorded, period. And it includes one of the best love songs ever written to rock’n’roll, “Let There Be Rock,” which covers all the bases from Molly Hatchet to Bon Scott to Lynyrd Skynyrd and “The Boys Are Back in Town,” to say nothing of freaking out on acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert, an event that I include on my own rock’n’roll resume.

Since then they’ve continued to release strong album after strong album, and this despite personnel changes including the defections of both the multi-talented Jason Isbell and Shonna Tucker, she of the amazing voice. And have I mentioned they have impeccable taste in covers? Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Kiss, Tom T. Hall—why, they even cover Warren Zevon’s fiery “Play It All Night Long” and beat him, no sweat piss jizz or blood about it, at his own game.

Drive-By Truckers have always written smart songs, and many of them have been protest songs, on everything from the ruthless machinations of rapacious corporations to the murders of those four little black girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by the KKK in 1963 to the still very much alive specter of hate-monger George Wallace, but on their newly released LP American Band they go all out, tackling such hot button issues as police shootings of young black men, school massacres, and gun control in general.

Hardly what one would expect from a bunch of southern boys who sound very much like southern boys, but then again it was Lynyrd Skynyrd, those paragons of the Confederate flag-waving southland (and the chief characters in the cast of Southern Rock Opera) who had the chutzpah to condemn Saturday night specials. And who sang “Boo! Boo!” in reference to segretionist Alabama governor George Wallace while they were at it.

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Remembering Klaus Dinger, born on this day in 1946. —Ed.

I’ve always loved Neu!; theirs is the relentless and steady as she goes “motorik” sound of a BMW stolen by the outlaw Baader-Meinhof Gang speeding down the Autobahn, on their way to West Berlin to create mischief and mayhem.

Formed in 1971 in Düsseldorf by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, both of whom were former members of Kraftwerk, Neu! was one of the founders of Krautrock, utilizing the simplistic 4/4 motorik (i.e., “motor skill”) beat (which Dinger chose to label the “Apache beat”) to propel their songs while dispensing with all kinds of useless stuff like verses and choruses and the like. Meanwhile Rother accompanied Dinger’s drumming with a guitar-produced harmonic drone, utilizing a single chord upon which he would pile overdub upon overdub to emphasize timbral change.

Not that I know what any of that means, but I don’t have to, because I’m no musician but just a guy with ears, two of them to be exact, one of which works better than the other due to a tragic Q-tip accident. The important thing is that Neu! influenced everyone from David Bowie to John Lydon, to say nothing of Stereolab (natch) and even Oasis. The results of Neu!’s innovations were simultaneously lulling and exciting; theirs was the sound of minimal variation at high velocity.

Neu! ’75 followed 1972’s Neu! and 1973’s Neu! 2, and was significantly different from those records in so far as Dinger and Rother had begun to take divergent paths. In the end they compromised, with side one highlighting Rother’s ambient leanings and side two spotlighting Dinger’s more feral rock, which could almost be called proto-punk. The resulting LP is a Jekyll and Hyde proposition, but it works, in exactly the same way as David Bowie’s Neu!-influenced Low LP does.

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Remembering Vivian Stanshall, born on this date in 1943. —Ed.

I am tempted to call The Bonzo Dog Band (or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, take your pick) the greatest group in the history of rock. And this despite the fact that they only occasionally got around to playing what could be called a rock song. They were too far too busy cracking themselves up with their hilarious, brilliantly surreal, and utterly deranged wit. If Monty Python had turned to music full-time, they might—although I honestly doubt it—have been as funny as The Bonzo Dog Band.

The genre-hopping mobile insane asylum that was The Bonzo Dog Band might throw anything at you: trad jazz, oldies covers, bizarre street interviews with perplexed normals, and parodies, heaps of parodies—of thirties songs, music hall songs, fifties songs, blues songs, hard-rock songs, psychedelic songs—you name it. And they were excellent musicians—when they wanted to be—with a genius for arranging songs. Your average Bonzo tune may sound anarchic, but you can be certain it was put together with an exacting eye for detail, and every detail is in its right place.

There’s really no one to compare The Bonzo Dog Band with except Frank Zappa, and the comparison is a poor one. Zappa’s humor was sneering and juvenile; his Brit counterparts favored an intelligent and good-natured Dadaism. Just check out “The Intro and the Outro,” a parody of a band introduction that grows stranger and stranger as it goes on, with the announcer snazzily saying, “And looking very relaxed on vibes, Adolf Hitler… niiiice” and “Representing the flower people, Quasimodo, on bells.” No yellow snow here.

Formed in London in 1962 as a trad jazz band, The Bonzo Dog Band’s core line-up included the mad and brilliant Vivian “Ginger Geezer” Stanshall on trumpet and lead vocals; the equally demented Neil Innes on piano, guitar, and lead vocals; Rodney “Rhino” Desborough Slater on saxophone; Roger Ruskin Spear on tenor saxophone and assorted mad sound-producing contraptions, including the trouser press and “Theremin leg”; Dennis Cowan on drums and vocals; and the legendary “Legs” Larry Smith—the tap dancer extraordinaire who played one of rock’s few tap solos on Elton John’s “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”—on drums.

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Remembering Jerry Reed, born on this day in 1937. —Ed.

A guitar picker extraordinaire and redneck comedian whose songs could almost be called funky, the late Jerry “Alabama Wild Man” Reed is one of my favorite country artists. Me, I’d love him if he’d never cut anything but “East Bound and Down” (the theme song of Smokey and the Bandit!), “Amos Moses,” and “The Preacher and the Bear,” a hilarious tale of an unfortunate meeting in the woods between a preacher hunting on the Sabbath and a grizzly bear that ends with the preacher up a tree and praying to his Lord, “I mean/Look at how he’s lookin’ at me/Does the word ‘fast food’ mean anything to you, Lord?/Oh, he’s hairy/And he’s still thinkin’/And he’s lookin’ at me like I… smell good!”

The man’s usual mode was high-spirited, and he had a knack for what you could call novelty tunes, but he was also capable of singing about the more lugubrious aspects of life; you know, broken hearts and all that. But I much preferred him at his wildest and woolliest, as did Robert Christgau, who called him “a great crazy,” and said apropos his more saccharine tunes, “He couldn’t sell soap to a hippie’s mother” and “RCA should ban the ballad.” Me, I hadn’t listened to him for years when my girlfriend gave me a truly terrible ‘70s compilation CD redeemed only by R. Dean Taylor’s great “Indiana Wants Me” and Reed’s fantastic swamp tall tale, “Amos Moses,” which is one of the songs on the 2000 best-of compilation, Jerry Reed Visits Hit Row.

Fiddle-driven opener “East Bound and Down” is a bootlegger’s anthem and smooth as Jim Beam Single Barrel bourbon, and includes a great solo by Reed. It speeds along like an 18-wheeler on the run from Smokey, and if you think it’s a bit slick, well, all I can say is all those thirsty boys in Atlanta don’t agree. “Amos Moses” is a funky tune about a Cajun alligator poacher, mean as a snake on account of his old man, who used the young Moses as alligator bait. He’s got one arm on account of a hungry gator, most likely killed a sheriff trying to track him down in the bayou, and the only thing cooler than his biography are Reed’s righteous guitar picking and distinctive voice, which are as good old boy as you can get.

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Remembering Wilson Pickett, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

Hear ye hear ye: I am going to begin this review of Alabama native son Wilson Pickett’s 1969 LP Hey Jude by stating right off that the title cut is one of the most phenomenal songs ever recorded, and is in fact so great I would probably give this album an A even if every other song on it was a jingle for a cereal commercial.

Pickett, whom I consider the best screamer in the history of soul and R&B, if not rock too, lays into “Hey Jude” like somebody just chopped his foot off with a hatchet, while the horn section kicks ass and Duane Allman, who was just beginning his career as a session musician, tears off one of the most brilliant and in-your-face guitar solos you’ll ever hear. It’s a bravura performance, “Hey Jude,” and supernatural in its greatness, and if I die tomorrow I will die having heard a sound so pleasing to God that he decided (I’ve talked to him about this) to push the date of the Last Judgment back a hundred years or so.

Fortunately Pickett fills out the album with a bunch of other songs that, while they can’t (what could?) compare with “Hey Jude,” are excellent in their own right. His voice is a miracle, his screams make Joe Cocker sound like a pee wee leaguer, and in short he turns in a whole slew of superb performances, demonstrating his mastery of phrasing and the wild scream even on those songs (his unfortunate take on Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” the gospel-flavored but not very exciting “People Make the World,” and the funky but unhappily titled “Toe Hold”) that don’t quite measure up to the rest of the songs on the album.

Putting Pickett, Allman, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (the so-called Swampers), and some great horn players together in the studio was a stroke of genius on Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler’s part, and it paid off in a royal flush as the bunch of ‘em simply could not fail to turn an okay song into a great one.

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Robert Christgau once wrote, in the midst of a think piece about one of California’s chief 1970s exports, “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” I hate them too, but what’s more interesting is that I hate them while liking (or even loving) some of their music, which seems downright perverse. You’re supposed to LIKE the bands who make music that you like. That’s the natural order of things. The Eagles force you to do the unnatural, and doing the unnatural makes you uncomfortable.

If I had the same problem with the Red Hot Chili Peppers I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I’d jump off a bridge.

This is why 1978’s The Long Run is the perfect Eagles album. It’s their worst album, for sure, an abomination in fact, but at long last Eagle haters such as myself found their hatred of the Eagles themselves—and Glenn Frey and Don Henley in particular—in perfect alignment with their hatred of the Eagles’ music. I loved Hotel California, and talk about your cognitive dissonance—I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.

The Long Run I loathed, and I finally knew peace. It was easy to loathe The Long Run, because it’s a bad, bad album, full of songs that made it starkly apparent that the Eagles—the most arrogant and reptilian frozen noses in an LA scene full of arrogant and reptilian frozen noses—had finally run their long course.

There are several decent songs on The Long Run, but none of them come within Lear jet distance of their best work. I’m don’t listen to them. And there are songs on The Long Run that defy description. Throwaways like “Teenage Jail” and “The Disco Strangler” plumb abysses of utter suckitude that even the band’s biggest detractors never dreamed the Eagles had in them.

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Remembering Phil Lesh in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

How many Deadheads does it take to change a light bulb? Six hundred and one. One to score the acid, and the other six hundred to stare slackjawed at the dead bulb and say, “Looks lit to me, man.” I know, it’s a shitty joke, but there’s some truth in it. The chief problem with Deadheads has always been their lack of quality control. They see no difference between 1970’s brilliant American Beauty and 1978’s execrable Shakedown Street, and lack the discernment to recognize that the light of creative genius that illuminated the Grateful Dead at the dawn of the seventies had long since flickered out by the time Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995.

Drug burn-out was the culprit, that and the natural order of the rock creativity; virtually no one continues to make great album after great album—shit, by my accounting, even Bob Dylan did his best work between 1965 and 1967, and that’s if you count The Basement Tapes, which weren’t released until years later.

As for the Dead, I think they did their best work between 1969 and 1972, when they released the lackluster Wake of the Flood, which a true fan, Robert Christgau, described as “capturing that ruminative, seemingly aimless part of the concert when the boogiers nod out.” As for when their live concerts finally settled into equal parts boredom and cult worship, I have no opinion, although I will say that the three shows I saw in the eighties were perfunctory and the Dead appeared to wish they were somewhere else.

Ah, but at their best they were sublime. My personal favorite is 1970’s Workingman’s Dead, but that same year’s American Beauty is a close second. On both LPs the Dead abandoned their free-form extended jams (1969’s Live/Dead had two sides with one song on them, and one side with two songs on it) for real songs, and on both they proved that they had plenty of great four-minute songs in them. As for American Beauty, it was prettier than Workingman’s Dead—a folk-rock LP that eschewed the doom-laden songs on its predecessor for songs that were, for lack of a better phrase, sunnier and more pastoral.

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Celebrating Greg Norton, born on this day in 1959. —Ed.

Lookee here; I didn’t become the world’s foremost rock critic (in my mind, baby, in my mind!) by keeping my crackpot opinions to myself. No, I share them with everybody, because the way I look at it, why should I suffer for my art when you can do it for me?

Anyway, I’ve been listening to Minneapolis hardcore kings Hüsker Dü for the first time in several decades, and it is my infallible critical opinion that the trio of guitarist Bob Mould, drummer Grant Hart, and bassist Greg Norton (of the great handlebar mustache) commenced to go downhill the moment they ditched legendary SST record producer Spot—who got a bad rap, in my opinion, for his murky productions—in favor of handling the production duties themselves.

Sure, they cleaned up their sound and made it more pristine, but I loved Spot’s murk, because it lent every album he produced an aura of post-punk primitivism and disdain for the sparkling productions of every artist not part of the hardcore community. His was the DIY sound of the hardcore underground, and I am of the opinion that the three albums Hüsker Dü produced after giving poor Spot his walking papers (i.e., 1985’s Flip Your Wig, 1986’s Candy Apple Grey, and 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories) are polished to the point of sterility. Not for nothing did I stop listening to Hüsker Dü after their high-water mark, 1985’s Spot-produced New Day Rising, which was about the time they were poised to break through big time thanks to their heavy presence on college radio.

Me, I’m still attached to their “Metal Circus” EP, on which Hüsker Dü first began to differentiate themselves from hardcore’s fast and hard ethos. Nobody ever played it faster and harder than they did on their 1980 debut, the appropriately titled “Land Speed Record” EP, but by the time they released 1983’s “Metal Circus” they were introducing harmony and melody into their tunes, especially on the Grant Hart contributions, “It’s Not Funny Anymore” and “Diane.”

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Celebrating Tom Scholz, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Boston: Home of the Boston Tea Party! And Boston baked beans! But who gives a shit? Boston is first and foremost the home of Boston, the “corporate rock band” that sold like 80 billion copies of its first album, 1976’s eponymous Boston, thanks to its power pop melodies, Brad Delp’s histrionic vocals, band mastermind’s Tom Scholz’s big guitar, and a production job that was slick as jizz thanks to Scholz’s notorious perfectionism—he once made his drummer play the kick drum some 18,000 times because it “Just didn’t sound perfect”—which gave the album the luster and sheen of a fresh-off-the-line Lamborghini. I mean, this baby was so slick you could hardly hold onto it long enough to put it on your record player.

But it sounded great back in 1976, even though I can remember debating with friends over whether Scholz was playing an actual guitar or some synthesized approximation of such, that’s how good his guitar sounded. Me, I loved it when Boston came out, and it still makes me nostalgic because it was the first LP I ever got high to—with my friend Dave beneath the Littlestown Railroad Bridge, and on 8-track no less.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Boston’s debut is that, despite its reputation for over-production, it was actually recorded for several thousand dollars—a pittance in those days. This is largely because Scholz recorded the bulk of the album in his tiny home studio in Watertown, Massachusetts, sidestepping Epic, which wanted the LP to be recorded in a professional studio. In addition, he recorded the acoustic guitar parts with a $100 Yamaha guitar.

No matter what you think of the LP—within two years the albums sounded unbearably slick to my ears, and I wondered why I’d ever loved it—there is no denying genius of the sheer guitar histrionics and cool riff that make “More Than a Feeling” a staple of FM radio, or that chorus for god’s sake. Boston’s lyrics were never better than mediocre, although they touch on universal teen themes. On the hard-charging “Peace of Mind,” for example, Delp utters the trite lines, “People living in competition/All I want is my peace of mind,” but by god the words sound good coming out of his mouth, especially with Scholz’s guitar roaring behind him.

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Watching her, and listening to her, it’s easy to imagine that Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland is The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil all grown up. But still possessed. There’s the shrieking, the eerie laughter, the speaking in tongues. And the horrible noises she produces with her electric guitar. And those eyes! They’re too big and too empty. And the way her pupils seem to literally click from here to there in their sockets—scary. They’re horror movie doll’s eyes. You can’t take your eyes off her, because you’re afraid.

Hardly what you’d expect from a high school cheerleader and huge Rush fan (saw ‘em four times!) whose first gig was with her uncle in a band called the Neurotics, but then Manson right-hand-man Tex Watson was the captain of his high school football team and everybody’s favorite berserker Gibby Haynes was “Accounting Student of the Year” at Trinity University. It’s the normal ones you have to keep your eye on.

Bjelland formed several short-lived bands (including Pagan Babies with frenemy Courtney Love) before moving from Portland to Minneapolis in 1986, where she met Lori Barbero and told her that never having played drums before made her the ideal drummer—she had nothing to unlearn. Just add bass player, and presto, Babes in Toyland was born.

And thanks to Bjelland’s fractured, jagged punk songs, unhinged baby doll on fire vocals and slasher flick guitar, Babes in Toyland went on to produce three celebrated full-length LPs, play the festival circuits and somehow find themselves on a major label before breaking up in late 2001. The torch, it seemed, had been passed to Hole and Love, whose famously abrasive vocals sound downright prim when compared to Bjelland’s.

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What do I have to do to send you home in a UFO today? Now hear me out, dear buyer here at Area 51 Motors, because I know what you’re thinking—UFO was a very good English heavy metal band that put out some very good albums back in the seventies, but nowadays they’re a big name only in places outside our solar system.

And the best of them (1977’s Lights Out) isn’t even on the lot! I sold it to a Hawkwind fan who obviously had it confused with UFO’s rather desultory foray into space rock, 1971’s UFO 2: Flying. (Hey, this UFO salesmen can’t afford to have scruples—he’s got a wife and kids!)

But here’s the thing—for a couple of years in America’s bicentennial decade UFO, thanks in large part to the fancy fretmanship of wunderkind Hun guitarist and Scorpions defector Michael Schenker, produced some tasty and surprisingly melodic heavy metal that deserved better than it got. And what we’re looking at here (feel free to give the tires a kick) is my personal favorite, 1975’s Force It. As you can tell just by looking it’s cherry. Only one previous owner, a kindly little old lady who only drove it to Black Sabbath shows on black sabbath.

If you have a bathroom plumbing fetish, the shiny stainless steel fixtures on the cover are a real turn on, and if you’re more of a traditionalist there are also a couple of the members of Throbbing Gristle going at it hot and heavy amidst all the gleaming German steel and blinding white porcelain, although the powers that be in the US MADE THEM TRANSPARENT so if you bought the album in the states you basically got shafted by puritanism. But lucky for you, the baby you’re looking at is an import!

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Celebrating David Gilmour on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

I have a dream. It’s that someone will put out a LP of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here made out of sugar and heavily laced with LSD. That way you could lick it before turning it on, and hear the damn album the way it should be heard, while you’re peaking.

It would be appropriate; has any major band ever been as associated with acid as Pink Floyd? (Yeah. The Grateful Dead, dumbo.) But not even the Dead managed to put out LPs (like 1969’s Ummagumma) that I would ONLY listen to while I was on hallucinogens, because they were unlistenable to anyone on the uninitiated side of the doors of perception. That said, I’ve since put on Ummagumma and found its first side to be bearable and its second side to be complete and unadulterated bullshit (“Several Species of Small Furry Animals” or “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entertainment),” anyone?). And while my recollections are hazy, I have come to the conclusion that the guy in the dorm who owned it was so far out there he’d only play side two while tripping balls.

The Pink Floyd story is a familiar one. The band was formed in London in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright, with David Gilmour coming aboard in 1967, destined to be the substitute for Barrett, who despite the band’s success and his status as the band’s chief songwriter was coming unhinged.

After numerous legendary on-stage fiascos involving increasingly odd behavior on the part of Barrett—he might stand in the hot stage lights, crushed ludes melting in his hair, looking off into the distance with his arms dangling down, declining to play his guitar for the entire set—the band more or less decided to not pick him up for a gig, and just like that he was gone, although his living specter (he showed up, bald and bloated, at the Wish You Were Here sessions, and his evident madness left several of his former band mates in tears) would haunt the band and indeed inspire some of their best work.

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Remembering Chris Squire, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day, wondering out loud, “What is that awful sound?” And I have to tell them, “It’s the Yes album spinning on your turntable, dim bulb!”

That’s the intro I intended to use for what I figured would be a disparaging review of 1971’s The Yes Album. I’ve always been a big believer in the motto “Just Say No to Yes,” because the band has all the loathsome characteristics of your average “progressive” rock band. Castrato vocalist, check. Extraordinarily talented musicians who would sooner play some intricately difficult chord progression than just whomp you on the skull like Iggy and the Stooges, ditto. And fiendishly complex songs composed of like 10 intricately interwoven musical themes, present. But a terrible thing happened when I put The Yes Album on my turntable. Much to my surprise and dismay, I discovered I actually kinda like the fucker!

Me! Prog! Impossible! Implausible! Because prog-rock is the exclusive domain of skinny-armed guys (women hate prog, it’s what makes them superior to men) in ill-fitting t-shirts with scruffy beards who spend the bulk of their time tinkering with electrical gadgetry and watching Dr. Who, and who like their rock music in direct proportion to its distance from three-chord rock. They don’t want three chords, they want three hundred! Five hundred! One thousand! One million!

Let’s get one thing straight: when I say I like The Yes Album what I really mean to say is that I like portions of The Yes Album. Because Yes, like many other progressive groups, suffers from a collective form of attention deficit disorder the effect of which is to render them incapable of sticking to one musical idea for very long. No sooner do they fall into a cool groove before they move onto another section that isn’t half as great, and so on. Rare is the song (the two-parter “All Good People” fills the bill) where they open on a beguiling note and stick with it through the entire song.

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Celebrating Robyn Hitchcock on his 72nd birthday. —Ed.

The Soft Boys are one of those bands that failed commercially for lack of a straight-talking high school guidance counselor. Because a straight-talking high school guidance counselor could have sat Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberly Rew down and said, “Look boys, your desire to make psychedelic rock is laudable. But it’s 1976, everybody’s wearing safety pins through their noses and screaming about anarchy, and to be perfectly blunt lads your desire to make a go of it as acid rockers makes about as much sense as pursuing careers as lamplighters. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I have an employer here who is looking for a dependable rat catcher.”

Alas, they had no one, which is why their magnum opus, 1980’s Underwater Moonlight, sold approximately 18 copies. The Soft Boys were at the right place but at the wrong time, and as the Velvet Underground will gladly inform you, timing is everything.

Underwater Moonlight has gone on to become a neo-psychedelic masterpiece, but it hit the record stores well before everybody and his sister hopped aboard the paisley bandwagon just in time to enthrall a listening public looking for something completely different from post-punk. And by that time the Soft Boys were no more—the whimsical and eccentric Hitchcock having gone on to form Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, and Rew the commercially successful Katrina and the Waves.

The Soft Boys’ influences aren’t too hard to discern—The Beatles, The Byrds, Syd Barrett, and when it comes to sheer lyrical absurdity, the Bonzo Dog Band. But they are far more than the sum of these influences. Opening track “I Wanna Destroy You” is punk in attitude—less 1967 than 1976—but has a power pop heart, and is the catchiest anthem this side of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”

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