Celebrating Tina Weymouth on her 74th birthday. —Ed.
How is it that sometimes, not always but just sometimes, the LP you swore your undying love for and allegiance to back in the day fails, after not having heard it for a long time, to set you on fire? It makes you feel like a turncoat.
Such is the case with Talking Heads’ seminal 1980 LP, Remain in Light. When it came out, I couldn’t find enough good things to say about it; it was flawless, an unparalleled work of synthetic Afrocentric genius, and I would have sworn under oath to the 1981 hearings of the U.S. Senate Commission on Un-American Influences on Rock’n’Roll to that effect. Now it fails to move me as it once did, and I’m left feeling like Benedict Arnold—a traitor to an album I once would have set off firecrackers in my pants for.
On Remain in Light, Talking Heads and co-conspirator Brian Eno eschewed the band’s heretofore twitchy new wave paranoia in favor of a liquid African-based sound that incorporated Byrne’s new stream-of-consciousness approach to writing lyrics, and it worked like gangbusters. Everyone I knew loved it and played it continuously. The hypnotic beats, the great percussion and insane guitars, the syncopated layers of backing vocalists, and David Byrne’s new and more ecstatic vocal delivery all contributed, as did Brian Eno’s far from negligible vision and musical and production skills, to create an album that was truly contagious.
On the LP, Byrne abandoned (for the most part) his characteristic deadpan irony for a potpourri of disparate influences: African rhythms, the fire and brimstone cadences of holy roller preachers, the studied speaking delivery of Nixon underling John Dean’s Watergate testimony (seriously!), and even the new-fangled rap of Kurtis Blow (seriously again!) Throw in a novel free-associative approach to the lyrics and what the Heads ended up with was an album that was radically different from their previous LP, 1979’s excellent Fear of Music.
The Northern Soul Scene was more than just one of the most fascinating “underground” musical subcultures to emerge from the UK in the mid-1960s—it was the Great Upside Down.
The scene was centered in Northern England and the Midlands in clubs with names like The Twisted Wheel, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, and the Golden Torch, and attracted youth dressed to the nines in Mod garb (although that would change) whose idea of heaven was dancing all night (thanks to the heavy intake of dexamyl tablets, or “blues”) to black American soul singles, the faster and heavier the better.
But the entire scene was built on an odd twist. The kids doing the dancing—and the DJs who ruled the roost—weren’t dancing to the latest hits. They snubbed their noses (for the most part) at the latest smash hits bearing the Motown label—their tastes ran to the rare and the obscure, and the result was a playlist heavy with also-rans, the no-names of the American soul and R&B industry. It was a scene that sought out and revered hard-to-find singles by artists who hadn’t made it. It was a scene, in short, that celebrated failure.
As the authors of 2000’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey noted, “Northern soul was the music made by hundreds of singers and bands who were copying the Detroit sound of Motown pop. Most of the records were complete failures in their own time and place… but in Northern England from the end of the 1960s through to its heyday in the middle 1970s, were exhumed and exalted.”
Remembering Rod Price in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.
Here’s an interesting historical tidbit: I was the geezer wot gave Foghat their name. It happened like this: we were all (the band and I) totally pissed in Rod “The Bottle” Price’s bedsit in manky Manchester, when “Lonesome Dave” Peverett rolled a J the size of John Holmes’ John Thomas and set it ablaze. It took some real hyperventilation-level huffing and puffing to get that monster going, and by this time Dave’s head was wreathed in a glorious crown of cannabis smoke, and I cried out, “Lonesome Dave’s sporting a Foghat!” And Bob’s your uncle, that’s exactly how it didn’t happen.
Anyway, I don’t know what you think about Foghat, and I don’t particularly care, because I love them. They may have been your bog-standard, no-frills British blooz and boogie rock band, all meat and potatoes but skimping a bit on the meat, but they had a great name and were likeable blokes and the punters loved them because they played an arse-walloping live set. What’s more they displayed a sense of humor, as proved by the cover of their finest LP, 1975’s Fool for the City, which depicts drummer Roger Earl fishing in a manhole in the middle of East 11th Street in New York City, looking as casual as if he were casting bait along Manchester’s own River Irk, which none other than Friedrich Engels described as “a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse.” All of which leads one to suspect that Earl had a better chance of catching a real, live fish in said sewer than he did back in grim and grimy old Manchester town.
I also have an abiding affection for Foghat because the band’s music features in the final scene of one of my all-time favorite films, Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult classic Dazed and Confused. To wit, when Mitch Kramer, who has just returned home at dawn after having undergone all the requisite initiation rites and rituals (drinking beer, smoking pot, throwing a bowling ball from a moving car) of seventies teenagehood, puts on his oversized headphones, it’s the great opening of “Slow Ride” that brings a beatific smile to his face. Linklater could have chosen any song from the mid-seventies to produce that smile, but he chose Foghat, which raises my estimation of both him and them.
Celebrating Joe Correro on his 78th birthday. —Ed.
Talk about your camouflage. On the surface Paul Revere & The Raiders were five smiling and well-groomed (at least by Fab Four mop top standards) young men tricked out in Revolutionary War garb complete with tricorn hats. They certainly didn’t look like long-haired sex fiends out to run off with your daughter to San Francisco where she’d die from an LSD overdose. They looked like The Monkees, and everybody knew The Monkees were safe as Milk Duds.
But 1967’s Greatest Hits (Expanded Edition) tells a different story. Boise, Idaho’s Paul Revere & The Raiders weren’t The Monkees. They were a garage rock band like The Seeds and The Standells, and if America’s parents had just listened to them they’d have packed their daughters off to the nearest nunnery and sent their sons off to military school the minute they found a copy of this baby in their rooms.
Most of the songs on the compilation come straight out of juvenile hall. The Rolling Stones comparisons are obvious–the Raiders follow the Stones’ career trajectory from scruffy R&B to subversive “Under My Thumb” pop, and vocalist Mark Lindsay comes off like an American Mick Jagger. But you also get The Who on “Just Like Me,” an intercontinental kissing cousin of “I Can’t Explain,” and some derivative Beach Boys on “Action.”
But what you mainly get is lip and a bad attitude. When Lindsay isn’t laying down the law with a shameless social climber (see garage rock masterpiece “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”) he’s snarling mad ‘cuz he’s been hearing rumors his girl’s been running around and he isn’t going to put up with it (see “Steppin’ Out”). Our boy has woman problems galore, and he’ll chew your ear off talking about them if you let him.
Celebrating Graham Parker on his 74th birthday. —Ed.
Some guys just can’t catch a break. Especially if their name is Graham Parker, who released four stellar albums from 1975 to 1979 and never came close to making the big time. Just how good was he in his prime? The English rocker’s first two LPs (1975’s Howlin’ Wind and 1976’s Heat Treatment) made the top five of TheVillage Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop poll. But has your average music fan heard his music? Not so much. The guy might as well be invisible.
Parker had his own suspicions about his failure to reach the big time, and it was Mercury Records, who in his opinion did nothing to promote his music. He laid out his argument in the scathing “Mercury Poisoning” with its lines, “I got Mercury poisoning/It’s fatal and it don’t get better/I got, Mercury poisoning/The best kept secret in the west, hey the west.” It’s a great song. It never made its way on to an LP. Parker’s new label, Arista Records, planned to release it as a single in 1979, but ultimately relegated it to a B-Side. Too risky to release–Parker could turn on you next.
Parker’s voice bears a distinct resemblance to that of Elvis Costello, but he doesn’t go in for Costello’s witty wordplay. Parker’s songs address everyday concerns in everyday language that Costello’s clever songs never do. Just check out “Local Girls” (don’t bother with ‘em) and “Saturday Nite Is Dead” (“I used to know a good place to go/But now it’s nothing like it was then”).
Parker had a crack backing band in the Rumour, who would go on to release three albums in their own right. Furthermore, ace guitarist Brinsley Schwarz has gone on to record six well-received solo albums, while rhythm guitarist Martin Belmont has released a neat dozen. Keyboard player Bob Andrews, drummer Steve Goulding, and bass player Andrew Bobnar rounded out the quintet, providing more than enough coloring and backbone to fuel the hard rockers and ample subtlety to add nuances the slow ones.
It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if a band’s first six albums bore you or annoy you by turn, and you’d sooner contract food poisoning than listen to them, you’re not going to turn on number seven and say, “Wow, these guys make a swell din!” In fact it’s a pretty good rule of thumb you’ll never turn on number seven at all. It’s called aversion therapy.
Yet such is the case with progressive rock stalwarts King Crimson and their 1974 LP Red. They’d been a thorn in my ear since their 1969 debut In the Court of the Crimson King, and I wasn’t alone—for every listener enthralled by the album (“a surreal work of force and originality” said a Rolling Stone reviewer at the time) there was another who heard it my way (Robert Christgau’s verdict: “ersatz shit.”)
My favorite take on the undeniably/unfortunately influential LP is worth quoting in full, if only because it always makes me laugh. Chuck Eddy: “A history of sixties rock: On March 6, 1959, a month and three days after The Day The Music Died, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller gathered up four violins and a cello and the Drifters and recorded “There Goes My Baby,” which begat Phil Spector, which begat Pet Sounds, which begat Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which begat Days of Future Passed, which begat this shit, which killed everything. But so what, it was already dead.”
After In the Court of the Crimson King the band proceeded to pile pretentious album upon pretentious album until what you had was a veritable Mt. Everest of pretentious albums with pretentious titles like In the Wake of Poseidon and Lark’s Tongue in Aspic upon which (on a clear day) you could actually LOOK DOWN on Emerson, Lake & Palmer. This was not a band anyone would think capable of rocking out, despite the fact that they’d served up a killer rock track (“20th Century Schizoid Man”) way back on their 1969 debut. Which proved they could do it, but obviously found it lowering. Their ambitions lay elsewhere. That’s the problem with art rock. You can take the rock out of the art rocker, and odds are he won’t even know it’s gone.
Celebrating Gary “Mani” Mounfield in advance of his 62nd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.
As a famous man (I think it was Geoffrey Chaucer) once said, time waits for no man. And in the case of Manchester’s The Stone Roses, the five long years that passed between this, their massively popular 1989 debut, and 1994’s Second Coming were fatal. Come Second Coming baggy pants and bucket hats were passe, and Britpop ruled England’s green and pleasant land.
Those five years may have been piddling compared to the 14 years that elapsed between Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident and Chinese Democracy, but those five years they were an eternity–during the same time span The Beatles went from Meet the Beatles to Abbey Road.
The Stone Roses’ half-decade of silence stemmed form a variety of issues, the most important of which was a protracted effort to sever ties with their record label, but it doesn’t much matter. In his poem “The Second Coming” (sound familiar?) William Butler Yeats foresaw a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born. The Stone Roses’ follow-up didn’t so much slouch towards the record stores as crawl, and by the time it arrived Engand’s notoriously fickle trend watchers had long since written them off.
None of which detracts from the fact that The Stone Roses is one killer LP. The album’s rave-friendly dance rhythms and hypnotic grooves would seem to put The Stone Roses in the same category as fellow Mancunians the Happy Mondays, but they took it the extra yard by fusing said dance rhythms with the Happy Daze psychedelic guitar sounds of the mid to late ‘60s. Like the Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses produced dance music, but they could rock the arenas as well.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre are alive and well—relatively speaking. That they’re around at all may come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the 2004 documentary Dig! It gave us a frontman, Anton Newcombe, at odds with the entire world. He brawled with his bandmates. He brawled with audiences. He brawled with record labels. He brawled with inanimate objects. And he had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and heroin that made his long-term tenure on planet Earth questionable at best.
Which was sad. The documentary is hilarious in parts (when Newcombe wasn’t saying things like “You broke my sitar, motherfucker!” he was proving he couldn’t roller skate), but his antics distracted from the fact he’s a massively talented musician (plays like 900 instruments or some such) whose retro-futuristic songs make most every other psychedelic revivalist out there look like a piker. And while his legendary proclivity for self-sabotage when it came to scoring record deals bordered on the downright perverse, what it really underscored was Newcombe’s absolute refusal to be bought—he’d sooner go to the devil than shake hands with him.
So it’s nice to know that Newcombe (who has long called Berlin home) has a wife and kids and his own record label and a band that tours regularly and plays to large audiences. The Brian Jonestown Massacre continues to release awe-inspiring albums, and Newcombe has also released a pair of very cool collaborative albums with Canadian singer-songwriter Tess Parks and an excellent album with side project L’Épée, whose other members include French film star Emmanuelle Seigner and The Limiñanas.
And all would be rosy were it not for a (hopefully one-time) setback into bad habits during an ill-fated 2023 tour of Australia, which was a classic case of deja vu all over again. Contentious throughout, the tour ended disastrously with Newcombe verbally abusing the audience before hitting BJM member Ryan Van Kriedt in the head with his guitar, leading to an onstage rugby scrum and the cancellation of the remainder of the tour. Ominous? Yes. Pathetic? Even more so. Watching a guy in his late fifties flee an enraged Van Kriedt is wrong on many fronts. But the band has a 2025 European tour scheduled, so let’s hope Newcombe (whose own comments lead me to think he was drinking again) has cleaned up his act.
Choosing your favorite Brian Jonestown Massacre album is not easy. People who say they all sound the same are dead wrong, because over the years Newcombe has dabbled in shoegaze (e.g., 1995’s Methodrone), country and folk rock (1996’s full-length Thank God for Mental Illness, and the 1999 EP “Bringing It All Back Home–Again”) and the more experimental sounds of 2008’s My Bloody Underground and other LPs. Most psychedelic revivalists mine one vein, and pretend the music died in 1967. Newcombe is well aware of what’s happening now, and he takes it all in and incorporates it into the BJM sound.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre is best known for its drone, but drone or not there’s some mysterious something that gives all of their songs a distinctive and unifying feel. It’s there in the great jangle rockers “Going to Hell” and “Wasting Away” from 1998’s Strung Out in Heaven every bit as much as it is on the urgent and driving drone rocker “It’s About Being Free Really” from 2022’s Fire Doesn’t Grow on Trees. Newcombe does a lot of different things, but there’s never any doubt you’re hearing Newcombe.
That said, if I had to pick ONE, at gunpoint say, I would have to go with the 2000 EP “Zero: Songs from the Album Bravery, Repetition and Noise.” I know what you’re thinking: why not just go with the album? I’ll tell you: that “Zero” was originally meant as a joke, meaning you wouldn’t find any songs from the album on the EP. In the end, three made it onto the EP (along with three others), and they’re three of the LP’s best. What’s more, “Zero” doesn’t include any of the songs from Bravery, Repetition and Noise that leave me cold (most prominently “Leave Nothing for Sancho,” “If I Love You,” “Stolen”). Most importantly, the songs on “Zero” have a unified sound; Bravery, Repetition and Noise is all over the place. It’s a good album. “Zero” is a great EP.
It’s worth noting that the Brian Jonestown Massacre is a big band—six guitarists big on this one, with keyboards and a guy (the legendary Joel Gion) whose only job is to stand on stage shaking a tambourine and/or maracas, looking impossibly cool. They play on a crowded stage, which makes the frayed nerves a bit easier to understand. But it also produces a bigger, fuller sound, and on “Zero” it tells. Neither Gion or guitarist Matt Hollywood, both of whom figure large in Dig!, are credited on “Zero,” although both return periodically. Newcombe may be an asshole, but he’s also a charmer. He must be, because despite the abuse he heaps on band members they can’t seem to stay away. Or maybe they just can’t resist his talent. Or they’re victims of rock ’n’ roll Stockholm syndrome.
“Zero” features only six songs, but all six are winners, and have a unified sound, and it’s that unity of sound that makes the EP so powerful. Opener “Let Me Stand Next to Your Flower” features a big bottom, a full sound, and a very psychedelic vibe—against a lovely melody (set, oddly enough, to a kind of march). Newcombe and another vocalist (the credits are vague) sing, “You’re just like that voice in my head/You’re making me wish I was dead” before getting down to the nitty gritty: “You’re like candy to me/You’re like candy to me/You’re like candy to me/And candy’s no good.” Or sometimes, “candy’s so good.” As is true of everything Newcombe does, duality reigns. Good, bad—they’re the same thing.
“Sailor” is a cover of a song by sixties garage band Cryan’ Shames, who gave us “Sugar and Spice.” Newcombe isn’t a covers guy; offhand, the only other BMJ cover I can think of is of Charles Manson’s “Arkansas.” Here, the BMJ takes a very good original and takes it Lennon/Beatles heights, except “heights” is the wrong word—the sea this sailor is sailing is an inward one. It’s all so dreamy, the melody’s divine, and the arrangement is intricate and perfect—doubly so when you consider how many moving parts are in play. This isn’t psychedelia revisited, it’s psychedelia perfected. Newcombe isn’t a mere mimic, revisiting old ground—at his best he’s a visionary looking to the past and the future at the same time, and I’m fully prepared to say this isn’t just one of the best retro-psychedelic songs ever committed to vinyl—it’s one of the best psychedelic songs out there period. And he did it without George Martin, probably in a couple of days, possibly while on heroin. Think about that.
The slow “Open Heart Surgery” (they’re all slow) features big drums, a lot of reverb on the guitar, and a dreamy organ, and features a lyric that is all love, which is one of the peculiarities of Newcombe’s character—despite the sociopathic behavior, and the “Keep Music Evil” message he’s been pushing since forever, Newcombe frequently sings about love, love, love: he even tells the subject of the song he wrote it to make her smile. To smile! Anton Newcombe! Like John Lennon (or scarier, Charles Manson) he’s a Janus-faced dichotomy, Woodstock and Altamont all at once. He sums this up perfectly in the “long version” of “Straight Up and Down” from 1996’s Take It from the Man!, which closes with a mash-up of “Hey Jude” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” Good and evil meet in Newcombe’s world, and the results are beautiful.
But the cynical part of him—the Altamont part of him—is apparent from the next song, “Whatever Hippie Bitch.” It’s just slightly sprightlier than the other fare, and has a harder kick. That said, there is absolutely nothing in the very basic lyrics to give meaning to that putdown of a title, which seems to have been a joke that just happened to fit the aggression of the song. Tambourine and organ hold the fort until the drums come kicking in, and after that it’s mainly Newcombe’s vocals (with a constant echo from somebody else) that do the heavy lifting.
Which is an illusion, of course. There’s a whole lot going on behind the scenes, and part of Newcombe’s gift is the ability to make the complex sound simple. People are always saying, “The guy can make an album all by himself!” Big whoop. Who can’t these days? What makes Newcombe special is his ability to write a song for lots of players and make you forget they’re there. This is no suite, no big Brian Wilson production number. But take one or two of the players out of the mix, and you’d have a lesser song. He’s writing stealth psychedelic chamber music and it’s (at least in part) the cause of the onstage mayhem—if one of the many musicians isn’t playing the part Newcombe hears in his head he lets them know it, often by giving them a good kick.
“If Love Is the Drug, Then I Want to O.D.” is more than just a clever title—it features a complex lyric about waiting for a lover, and within that lyric there’s a sly take on the old “took LSD and jumped off a roof thinking she could fly” saw. It mingles love, anger and sarcasm, the last best expressed by the chorus “You’re so, high/You’re so, high/You’re so, high/Why can’t you fly?” It’s about a lover falling, presumably into drug addiction, and Newcombe turns the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for My Man” on its head—she’s the user, but he’s HE’S waiting for HER. Flute and tambourine run throughout it, along with female backing vocals and a guitar echoing with reverb, and it has a vaguely VU feel to it.
The thirteen-minute “New Kind of Sick” is psychedelic futurism at its best. Slow, spacy, synthesized, and orchestrated, it drones its way into your mind while some harmonized vocals sing about robots and madness. This is Newcombe gone contemporary art rock, but it’s still every bit as psychedelic as Syd Barrett—he’s just using a different palette of sounds. Several minutes in a minimalist drone takes over completely, and the only thing you hear is the echo of an echo of a hum. It’s Newcombe meets Eno, except Newcombe didn’t need Eno. Is it frustrating, waiting out the seemingly interminable hum? For a guy like me, yes. This guy is happy when guitar and the tambourine come back in, plaintive, followed by an even more plaintive, lovely organ. I’ve read it described as Newcombe’s magnum opus. It’s not. But it’s proof that trying to put a label on the guy is sheer foolishness.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre seem destined to be remembered for on-stage fisticuffs as much as for their mind-bending music. A pity, but like it or not, the chaos is part of their appeal. And unless you’re a mental health professional, you’re bound to see the humor in it. I guess we’re all sick, but it’s funny. It distracts from the great music, but let’s face it—Dig! is a laugh riot.
How embedded is Dig! in popular culture? On the Thanksgiving 2005 episode of Gilmore Girls, lead Rory’s band Hep Alien reenacts a fight from the film. Anton Newcombe may not have liked it, but it’s hilarious. And just to make sure people got the message, BJM tambourine player Joel Gion, whose high spirits and almost supernatural good humor in the face of chaos made him the one person in Dig! you couldn’t help but love, makes a cameo as a new addition to Hep Alien. He stands back as the members of Hep Alien go at it, blase. He’s seen it all before. He knows how the story ends. Let’s hope he’s wrong.
Celebrating James “J.Y.” Young on his 75th birthday. —Ed.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Beware, for if you stare long enough into Styx’sThe Grand Illusion,The Grand Illusion will stare back into you.” Nietzsche had good reason to be fearful, for not only did Styx’s masterpiece ultimately drive him mad, it also happens to be the most addictive slice of “soft-core prog” (thank you, Philip) ever created. I myself was certain I hated it, but like Nietzsche I stared too long into it, and sure enough here I am, come not to bury The Grand Illusion but to praise it.
Chicago’s Styx came to be in 1972, but its members were playing together long before that under the name TW4. A lightweight ELP but with catchier melodies, far better guitar hooks, and fewer grandiose musical pretensions—no “symphonies” or 93-part songs ever came from these guys—Styx was gigantic from the late seventies to early eighties, scoring four consecutive multi-platinum albums, a feat never matched by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
Styx was your younger sibling band par excellence. While older sis Suzie sneered at Styx as a moronic shlock-rock band, younger brother Randy knew for a fact Styx could kick the asses of all those high-falutin’ progressive rock outfits like Yes and Gentle Giant Suzie thought were so sophisticated with one synthesizer tied behind its back. Styx was more fun to listen to while doing bong hits, too.
Styx recorded The Grand Illusion—their seventh studio album and the one that catapulted them to superstardom—in 1977. The album’s cover was the work of legendary psychedelic poster artists Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, while the band’s line-up at the time included Dennis DeYoung on keyboards, synthesizers, and vocals; Chuck Panozzo on bass guitar and vocals; John Panozzo on drums and vocals; Tommy Shaw on acoustic and electric guitars and vocals; and James Young on guitar, keyboards, and vocals. DeYoung handled the bulk of the songwriting duties, although Shaw and Young also contributed tunes.
When the legendary LA Roxy Theatre opened its doors on July 20, 1973, it was another legend who greeted the club’s first customers. Neil Young, who was then, as he put it, down in the ditch in the wake of the drug-related deaths of two close friends, played a triumphant bummer of a set with a band calling themselves the Stray Gators. And at long last the show (or three of them actually) are available in the form of 2018’s Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live.
The studio versions of the songs Neil plays on the live disc wouldn’t see the light of day until 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, but Young more or less runs through them all here, omitting only “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” (which was actually recorded live at the Fillmore East in 1970 with Crazy Horse guitarist and drug casualty and Danny Whitten and adding “Walk On” from 1974’s On the Beach.
On both the live and studio LPs Young sounds like a man trying to come to terms with the anguish he was feeling after the drug-related deaths of both Whitten and roadie pal Bruce Berry. Don’t let the Vegas-style stage patter Young engages in between songs on Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live fool you; Young was one hurting individual.
And it wasn’t just Neil who was feeling gloomy; America’s youth were suffering a collective bring down from the loss of the idealism that marked the psychedelic sixties. On both LPs Young puts paid to the crystal visions of the Age of Aquarius, and channels the pain and disillusionment of a generation of innocents ravaged by hard drugs, Altamont, and the Manson family.
The prog people were right! Turns out the greatest songs, the legendary songs, aren’t the simplest ones—simplicity is for losers! The greatest songs, and if anybody knew this Rush knew it, are the ones with sections! Multiple moving parts! Just look at the evidence. “Stairway to Heaven,” epic! “Hotel California,” stupendous! “MacArthur Park,” godly! And the same goes for “Layla,” “Free Bird,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and forget I said “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” It’s a nightmare.
One of the very best, by which I mean it’s definitely in the top five in not the top three if not the very best, is Paul McCartney & Wings’ 1974 smasheroo “Band on the Run.” Why, it’s even better than Sir Paul’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” which stickler for detail that I am I refuse to include on my list because let’s face it, it’s two songs separated by a slash, as is“Venus & Mars/Rock Show” for that matter. And that’s cheating.
The number three is the number to remember when it comes to “Band on the Run.” The song has three parts. Only three musicians (Paul, Linda McCartney, and Dennie Laine) were involved in its making. “Band on the Run” was McCartney’s third chart-topping American single. On the other hand, the song only went to number three on the UK charts (what’s wrong with those people?).
The song’s creation coincided with (and was perhaps in part inspired by) the three non-Johns in the Beatles’ escape from manager Allen Klein. Only three people in the entire world think it’s not the greatest thing ever. And finally, I listen to it three times a day, every day, because it’s been proven to keep the bowels regular and improve mental health. Oh, and it will open your third eye, guaranteed.
Celebrating Rickie Lee Jones on her 70th birthday. —Ed.
I’ve always had the same issue with Rickie Lee Jones as I do with Tom Waits; to wit, I can’t escape the sense that they’re beatniks escaped from a time capsule. There’s something atavistic about their sound; hearing it, it’s impossible to escape the eerie sensation that you’re sitting in a smoky and low-ceilinged Village club, the Kettle of Fish say, surrounded by beret-wearing hipsters in goatees, of the type who click their fingers instead of applaud.
That said, I’ve always preferred Jones, if only because she doesn’t have a patch of hair sprouting from her lower lip. No, the truth is I can’t really rationalize my life-long dislike of Waits; sure, he’s written lots of great songs, but that doesn’t mean I have to like him. I don’t have to like Jones either, but I do, from her groundbreaking debut to her latest release, 2012’s The Devil You Know, on which she sings like… well, like she just swallowed a shitload of ludes, which causes her to sing very slooowwwllly, which I like a lot. No more of the beatnik affectations. Her phrasing and sudden shifts in tone are idiosyncratic, to say the least, but she doesn’t sound as rebop as she does wasted, like she brought a quart of bourbon to the studio and drank it before she sang any of the songs on this album of noteworthy standards.
Jones’ career took off with the release of her 1979 self-titled debut, which featured dozens of top-notch LA sessions players—to say nothing of Dr. John on piano and Randy Newman on synthesizers—and included the great “Chuck E.’s in Love.” Buoyed by a highly touted performance on Saturday Night Live, she soon found herself on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and her beret quickly became more famous than Joni Mitchell’s beret, which no doubt pissed off Mitchell’s beret to no end.
And she would likely have become a superstar had she not drifted inexorably jazzwards, a move that she found creatively fulfilling but didn’t win her many pop fans. Henceforth she toiled in the jazz-pop wilderness, moving to Europe where she battled with writer’s block. But she continued to record, moving from more mainstream projects to more avant-garde efforts, none of them wildly successful but most of them critically praised.
Riley Puckett became the poster child of weird old American country music when Nick Tosches plastered his face on the cover of his groundbreaking 1985 book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n’Roll. Puckett’s an odd-looking bird, to say the least, which must be the reason Tosches used his photo, because Puckett himself warrants only two passing references in the book.
Puckett was blind, but looks cross-eyed. He has a dimpled chin, jowls, no lips to speak of, and what with his high forehead his facial features seem to have retreated to the center of his face. The effect is hard to describe. Perhaps Tosches thought he best personified that “twisted.” And there’s no denying that his photograph could have come straight out of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip.
But twisted isn’t the word that comes to me. He looks inscrutable, sphinxlike. It’s true that his eyes, one seemingly entranced by his nose and the other buried in the shadow cast by his brow, give him an otherworldly look. It doesn’t help that the book cover paints him in lurid colors, his face a sickly lime green, his hair, shirt collar and tie a bright pink. Tosches did Puckett a disservice, to an extent; in a photo I’ve seen of a younger Puckett he looks dapper, his hair pomaded—he’s almost movie star handsome. This Puckett, an older Puckett obviously, just looks lost in some kind of Depression-era fever dream.
Riley Puckett was born in Georgia in 1894, and early on was dubbed the “Bald Mountain Caruso.” This stemmed from the fact that he had a good voice, and didn’t sound as hillbilly as many of his country contemporaries. He was also an influential guitarist. He recorded a lot of music during his relatively short life, but he’s primarily remembered for being the first country singer to stand up on his hind legs in a recording studio and yodel, first in April 1924 to the song “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep,” then to “Sleep Baby Sleep” in 1927.
Celebrating Joni Mitchell on her 81st birthday. —Ed.
My great ambivalence about Joni Mitchell, she of the beret and the aloofly confessional lyrics, is best expressed by the critic Robert Christgau, who addressing her 2000 LP Both Sides Now wrote, “My favorite Joni story is that they tried to do a TV special on her and none of her old friends would pitch in. Even if it’s a dumb rumor or a damned lie, it’s a hell of a metaphor for someone who loves herself so much nobody else need bother, and yet another reason to scoff at her concept song cycle about the rise and fall of an affair. But after decades of pretentious pronouncements on art, jazz, and her own magnificence, this very if briefly great singer-songwriter proves herself a major interpretive singer.”
It’s no mystery Mitchell thinks very highly of herself, but it can be argued she has good reason. There has never been another folk-rock-jazz artist like her; she possesses a voice as clear as a bell and a mode of phrasing that is all her own, with which she sends her semi-confessional lyrics out into the world. That’s the good part, along with her remarkable songwriting skills. The bad part is that if her music sometimes reminds me of that of Steely Dan, it unfortunately lacks their sense of irony and humor.
But that’s just carping. Mitchell may be a prima donna with delusions of grandeur, to say nothing of jazz-lite and boho pretensions, but her music is beloved by many, and admired at a great distance by numerous other folks like yours truly. I mean, I love “Coyote” and “Raised on Robbery” and even “Free Man in Paris,” despite its beatnik affectations and the vocal contributions of those two horrible, horrible people, David Crosby and Graham Nash. (Okay, so only the former is horrible. Sorry, Graham.) Why, I even have a sneaking admiration for her failed 1979 homage to the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, which she kinda screwed up by recruiting members of that middling jazz-fusion band Weather Report as sidemen. But her early work terrifies me and her later work leaves me stone cold.
Ms. Mitchell was the official chronicler of life in Laurel Canyon as seen from a woman’s perspective in the early to mid-seventies, and her gimlet eye for the condemning detail is unsurpassed. And Lord knows Laurel Canyon deserved everything she dished out; not for nothing did Neil Young, a fellow Canadian, write “Revolution Blues,” which imagined a kind of dune buggy apocalypse Manson-style that would kill Laurel Canyon’s pampered and self-indulgent stars in their cars.
Remembering Gram Parsons, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.
You’ve got to hand it to Gram Parsons; the boy had chutzpah. No sooner had the relatively unknown 21-year-old joined The Byrds in February 1968 in the wake of the departure of David “I Am the Walrus” Crosby and Michael Clarke, he managed to talk the band, including leader Roger McGuinn, into scuttling McGuinn’s plans for an ambitious double album of the history of American popular music in favor of an album of straight-up country music, or country-rock if you insist, or “Cosmic American Music” as Parsons poetically termed it.
It must have been an audacious piece of salesmanship, for no rock band—much less a pop supergroup with the psychedelic bona fides of The Byrds—had ever attempted anything so potentially suicidal from a commercial standpoint. From “Eight Miles High” to “The Christian Life”? Longhairs playing pure country honk? Why, the idea was unthinkable, risible even, although The Byrds themselves had dabbled in country before and Bob Dylan himself would make the transition soon enough.
To add authenticity, The Byrds (McGuinn on acoustic guitar, banjo, and vocals; Chris Hillman on bass, mandolin, acoustic guitar, and vocals; Parsons on acoustic guitar, piano and organ, and vocals; and Kevin Kelley on drums) wrangled up a crew of mostly Nashville ringers, including legendary electric guitarist Clarence White (who would die tragically in 1973, hit by a drunken driver); John “Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry” Hartford on banjo, fiddle, and acoustic guitar; Lloyd Green and JayDee Maness on pedal steel guitar; Roy Husky on double bass; and Earl Poole Ball and Barry “Electric Flag” Goldberg on piano.
Parsons’ tenure as a Byrd turned out to be short-lived—he soon went on to form The Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hillman—and the Sweetheart sessions ended in controversy and chaos, with McGuinn (the original Lou Reed!) erasing Parsons’ vocals on three songs during post-production and rerecording them himself, leaving Parsons as lead vocalist on just three cuts. The ostensible reason for this varies from unresolved contractual questions about Parsons to McGuinn’s refusal to be upstaged by the unknown rich boy in his spiffy psychedelic-drug-and-pill-themed Nudie suit (which, in the interests of historical authenticity, he probably didn’t purchase until later.)
Such is the case with Talking Heads’ seminal 1980 LP, Remain in Light. When it came out, I couldn’t find enough good things to say about it; it was flawless, an unparalleled work of synthetic Afrocentric genius, and I would have sworn under oath to the 1981 hearings of the U.S. Senate Commission on Un-American Influences on Rock’n’Roll to that effect. Now it fails to move me as it once did, and I’m left feeling like Benedict Arnold—a traitor to an album I once would have set off firecrackers in my pants for.
But 1967’s Greatest Hits (Expanded Edition) tells a different story. Boise, Idaho’s Paul Revere & The Raiders weren’t The Monkees. They were a garage rock band like The Seeds and The Standells, and if America’s parents had just listened to them they’d have packed their daughters off to the nearest nunnery and sent their sons off to military school the minute they found a copy of this baby in their rooms.
Parker had his own suspicions about his failure to reach the big time, and it was Mercury Records, who in his opinion did nothing to promote his music. He laid out his argument in the scathing “Mercury Poisoning” with its lines, “I got Mercury poisoning/It’s fatal and it don’t get better/I got, Mercury poisoning/The best kept secret in the west, hey the west.” It’s a great song. It never made its way on to an LP. Parker’s new label, Arista Records, planned to release it as a single in 1979, but ultimately relegated it to a B-Side. Too risky to release–Parker could turn on you next.
Those five years may have been piddling compared to the 14 years that elapsed between Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident and Chinese Democracy, but those five years they were an eternity–during the same time span The Beatles went from Meet the Beatles to Abbey Road.
The studio versions of the songs Neil plays on the live disc wouldn’t see the light of day until 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, but Young more or less runs through them all here, omitting only “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” (which was actually recorded live at the Fillmore East in 1970 with Crazy Horse guitarist and drug casualty and Danny Whitten and adding “Walk On” from 1974’s On the Beach.
That said, I’ve always preferred Jones, if only because she doesn’t have a patch of hair sprouting from her lower lip. No, the truth is I can’t really rationalize my life-long dislike of Waits; sure, he’s written lots of great songs, but that doesn’t mean I have to like him. I don’t have to like Jones either, but I do, from her groundbreaking debut to her latest release, 2012’s The Devil You Know, on which she sings like… well, like she just swallowed a shitload of ludes, which causes her to sing very slooowwwllly, which I like a lot. No more of the beatnik affectations. Her phrasing and sudden shifts in tone are idiosyncratic, to say the least, but she doesn’t sound as rebop as she does wasted, like she brought a quart of bourbon to the studio and drank it before she sang any of the songs on this album of noteworthy standards.
It’s no mystery Mitchell thinks very highly of herself, but it can be argued she has good reason. There has never been another folk-rock-jazz artist like her; she possesses a voice as clear as a bell and a mode of phrasing that is all her own, with which she sends her semi-confessional lyrics out into the world. That’s the good part, along with her remarkable songwriting skills. The bad part is that if her music sometimes reminds me of that of Steely Dan, it unfortunately lacks their sense of irony and humor.
It must have been an audacious piece of salesmanship, for no rock band—much less a pop supergroup with the psychedelic bona fides of The Byrds—had ever attempted anything so potentially suicidal from a commercial standpoint. From “Eight Miles High” to “The Christian Life”? Longhairs playing pure country honk? Why, the idea was unthinkable, risible even, although The Byrds themselves had dabbled in country before and Bob Dylan himself would make the transition soon enough.
