Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Art Garfunkel in advance of his 83rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

It was blasted dastardly, the way Paul Simon gave poor Art Garfunkel the old heave-ho. Absolutely duplicitous. So duplicitous in fact that I coined a shiny new word for the sad fate that befell the kinky-haired half of the famous duo—he got Garfunkeled. The word is slowing entering the popular lexicon, and I plan to patent it and thereby grow filthy rich.

Because it’s the ideal word for all manner of occasions. Say your boyfriend should, without due warning, terminate your relationship. And say said abrupt news should fall upon your heart like a ton of Mick Jagger solo albums. You are left with two alternatives. You can shed bitter tears of the sort that wilt flowers. Or better by far, you can run to your friends and cry, “The sleazy bastard just Garfunkeled me!”

In any event, having been Garfunkeled following 1970’s Bridge over Troubled Water, Art of the magic golden Jewfro found himself at loose ends. I like to imagine, although it doesn’t fit the historical time line, that he spent many a dour hour sunk in the funk at the home of Jim Messina, the poor fellow who got Garfunkeled by Kenny Loggins. In reality Garfunkel did some acting, released 1973’s Angel Clare (for which he took much abuse for his treacly version of Randy Newman’s “Old Man”), and then followed Angel Clare with 1975’s Breakaway.

Breakaway is Garfunkel’s most successful LP and a soft rock classic. Garfunkel’s choirboy vocals can rankle, but on Breakaway he gathered up a bunch of songs that made effective use of those inimitable tenor pipes of his. He also dragooned every crack studio musician in the known world, to say nothing of such folks as David Crosby, Bill Payne, Graham Nash, Toni Tennille, and (erk!) Andrew Gold. Why even Garfunkeler-in-Chief Paul Simon reunited with the Garfunkeled one on “My Little Town.”

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Here’s a question for you. You have a really vivid nightmare about the end of the world. Upon waking do you a) hit the bong, b) give it a lousy Rotten Tomatoes score because the special effects were abysmally low budget or c) form a band that has made music so alien (literally!) they had to come up with a whole new genre to put it in (Zeuhl) featuring lyrics sung (or often spoken) in a language (Kobaïan) which literally nobody on the planet can understand because, hey, you just made it up on the spot?

Franch composer/singer/drummer Christian Vander went for the last option, and he went whole hog, forming a band called Magma in 1969 that came complete with its own mythology (mankind sets off from ravaged Planet Earth to Kobaïa, a planet where you can’t even hear Foghat, which sounds like hell to me). The death of John Coltrane also played a part in Vander’s existential crisis, and Vander (a modest fellow) figured he was the guy to fill the void Coltrane left behind. The result was Magma’s 1970 self-titled debut, which hardly fills the Coltrane hole but is bona fide listenable if very mechanistic jazz fusion with some truly wild playing. And some really annoying singing.

After that, however, things began to get truly weird. Magma’s 1971 follow-up 1001° Centigrades was a far less listener-friendly affair, with the jazz fusion slowly giving away to what sounds to me like bad intergalactic musical theater—less off-Broadway than off-Jupiter. Zeuhl is generally defined as a melting pot of jazz fusion, symphonic rock, and neoclassical music, but the jazz fusion was rapidly taking a back seat to Vander’s operatic pretensions. He had a grander vision than making Magma Kobaïa’s equivalent of Weather Report. He had Wagner (although oddly enough I’ve never heard the old anti-Semite cited as an influence) in his sights.

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Remembering Leslie West, born on this day in 1945. —Ed.

Leslie West is a heavy guy. He weighs like 1,000 lbs and plays heavy music and called his band Mountain because mountains are very heavy, and his song “Mississippi Queen” is so heavy it has to be carried from gig to gig in a specially made truck of the sort the U.S. Army uses to transport intercontinental ballistic missiles. And forget about vinyl. Mountain was so heavy they released their 1970 debut on concrete. It weighed 42 pounds and crushed a whole lot of record players.

Lots of folks dismissed Mountain (West on guitar and vocals, Felix Pappalardi on bass and vocals, Corky Laing on drums, and Steve Knight on keyboards) as Long Island’s answer to Cream, and on songs like “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” “For Yasgur’s Farm,” “The Laird,” and “Boys in the Band” the resemblance is striking. But on Climbing! Mountain escapes their Cream fetish to produce songs as humongous as the whale you keep expecting to show up in “Nantucket Sleighride,” except he never does.

Given Mountain’s reputation as the heaviest beast to ever slouch out of Long Island, Climbing! is far more diverse than you’d expect. Sure, you get some nifty Godzilla stomp along the lines of “Mississippi Queen.” But the band also flirts with acid-prog of the sort that won’t wreak havoc on your tweeters, and tosses in a couple of genre-benders that defy all known ethnomusicological definition. In short, Mountain was no one-trick mastodon.

The band’s division of vocal duties further lent diversity to Mountain’s sound. West’s rhino snort contrasts nicely with Pappalardi’s Jack Bruce, and the duo delegates lead vocal chores accordingly–West sings the speaker-busters, Pappalardi the more Cream-influenced tracks.

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Celebrating Julian Cope, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.

Rock and revolution have always made for odd bedfellows. The MC5 talked a good game, but did mostly nothing, which is more than you can say for The Clash, whose revolution consisted mostly of wearing camouflage pants. And what is one to make of Revolution Girl Style Now or that risible exercise in self-congratulatory futility, DC’s Revolution Summer? They all neglected Mao’s dictum that “Revolution grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and achieved nothing, and I bring all this up because Julian Cope, the so-called “Archdrude” and former front man of The Teardrop Explodes, has spent his recent albums musing about revolution.

Cope, whom I would call a Renaissance Man if Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu founded the Renaissance in question, has written numerous songs with revolutionary themes. But in Cope’s case, the question lies in whether he is endorsing revolution or critiquing it. Or whether he’s ambivalent on the issue, in the same way that John Lennon was when he sang both “count me in” and “out” in the slow version of “Revolution.” In some cases Cope seems to endorse violent revolution; in others, he seems to see it as a sort of organized suicide cult, an idea he co-opted from Black Panther ideologue Huey Newton, who entitled his 1973 autobiography Revolutionary Suicide.

In any event, Cope dedicates side one of his 2012 LP Psychedelic Revolution to Cuba’s revolutionary martyr to Che Guevara, and side two to Leila Khaled, the airplane hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So he obviously has some sympathy for the notion of violent revolution, but is he really advocating it? Or just playing revolutionary like the folks in the previous paragraph?

On Psychedelic Revolution Cope at some points seems to be saying that the revolution must be one of the mind, and in one song replaces Mao’s gun with a mass dosing of the population with LSD. He says lots more than that—he’s a chatty fellow, and infuriatingly knowledgeable—but in the end his beliefs are inscrutable, or perhaps simply too complex to communicate on a single LP.

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“Fuck Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” Banana Splits guitarist and band leader told an audience of kids at a meet & greet on the NBC TV lot in February 1969. The hippest talking dog in the country then added, “We could have called ourselves Fleagle, Drooper, Bingo & Snorky. But we’re not egomaniacal folk scrotums with cocaine noses. And frankly, we make better music.” Shouted a little girl from the audience, “Right on! Power to the cartoon people!”

Okay, so that never happened. Here’s the real skinny. For two seasons (from September 1968 to September 1970) NBC’s The Banana Splits Adventure Hour enthralled kids like me every Saturday morning. Its stars were four talking animals (not cartoon animals, guys in animal suits) who just happened to be in a rock and roll band, and whose Monkees-like slapstick antics crossed over into Three Stooges territory.

They were never as big as The Archies in the fictional bubblegum band sweepstakes, but to plenty (like me) they were far cooler precisely because they were animals, and more importantly they were WILD animals, who rode around in dune buggies (they called ‘em “banana buggies”) just like the Manson family and really rocked out on stage, with guitarists Fleagle and Drooper (a luded-out lion) doing this syncopated leg kick that was hipper than anything the MC5 was doing at the same time.

The line-up was completed by Bingo (oversized monkey with perpetual shit-eating grin) on drums and Snorky (freaky-looking elephant) on organ, although he plays bass on a period children’s lunchbox and tambourine on the cover of a Kellogg’s cereal-sponsored EP. And unlike the square-john Archies, who wouldn’t have known the difference between a postage stamp and a tab of Owsley LSD, the Splits were obviously freaks. Hippies. “Drug takers.”

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Released just three days before Lynyrd Skynyrd’s problem-plagued Convair 240 plowed into the trees of a Mississippi forest and buried itself in a swamp some sixty miles short of their destination in Baton Rouge on October 20, 1977, Street Survivors instantly become notorious due to its macabre-in-light-of-subsequent-events cover, which had the band engulfed in flames on a city street.

There were no flames at the crash site—the band’s seemingly cursed plane ran out of fuel, which is why it ended up busted into pieces in the mud outside tiny Gillsburg, Mississippi in the first place—but it didn’t matter. The flames were foreshadowing, as was Van Zant’s “morbid” (his word) “That Smell,” the eeriest song about death ever written by the band’s death-obsessed frontman and de facto dictator, who died in that Mississippi swamp along with guitarist Steve Gaines, Steve’s sister and backing vocalist Cassie, and several others.

I remember hearing the news of that plane crash, and I remember feeling real sorrow, because Lynyrd Skynyrd was a great band, one of the best rock and roll bands America ever produced, and one minute they were there and the next, finis. Go ahead, call me crazy, but if it were up to me America would declare October 20 National Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash Remembrance Day and you wouldn’t have to go to work and even if you don’t give a shit about Lynyrd Skynyrd and can’t even spell their name wouldn’t that be great?

None of this has anything to do with Street Survivors, which was quickly reissued with a cover sans flames and is one hell of a parting shot—Lynyrd Skynyrd’s strongest outing since 1974’s Second Helping. The two albums in between—1975’s aptly titled Nuthin’ Fancy and 1976’s Gimme Back My Bullets—were so-so affairs by Skynyrd standards, the result of a multitude of factors—chiefly road fatigue and insanely tight recording schedules that left the band to churn out new songs in a rush in the studio. Gimme Back My Bullets was recorded in seventeen days by a band that walked into the studio unprepared. Don’t try that at home, kids.

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Remembering Jim Seals, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

Seals & Crofts have moved into our house! It’s true! And here’s how it happened. Yesterday we got a knock on our door. I had no intention of opening it because most likely it was our crazy neighbor from across the street who’s been accusing our garden gnome of shitting on his lawn. Then I caught a whiff of jasmine and said to myself, “No way is it the legendary soft rock duo whose gossamer thin sound has enriched the lives of so many.”

But it was! Seals & Crofts in the flesh! And they were wondering if they could move in with us for a couple of days because times were tough and they were tired of living in a lean-to by the railroad tracks running past the lake of toxic sludge near the abandoned nuclear reactor.

And of course I said YES! Who wouldn’t? And they couldn’t express how grateful they were because everyone else had slammed their doors in their faces, including our neighbor from across the street who accused them of shitting on his lawn.

“How could anyone think that?” asked a perplexed Jim Seals. “In the bushes by the railroad tracks, sure. But that’s out of sheer necessity.”

“Where’s your stuff,” I asked. All they had with them were their acoustic guitars.

“We had to hock everything,” said Dash Crofts, “including our gold record for ‘Summer Breeze.’ I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the railroad hobo economy is in the tank.”

“Would you like to take a shower?” asked my wife. “You’re caked with coal dust and radioactive slime. And I’m catching the distinct aroma of urine.”

“That would be me,” said Seals. “And that shower would be much appreciated.”

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Celebrating Frank DiMino, born on this day in 1951. —Ed.

My favorite story about Angel, Washington, DC’s glammed-out, all-white spandex retort to Kiss, which seemed poised for superstardom in the mid-seventies (giant billboards on the Sunset Strip, selection by the readers of Circus magazine as the Best New Group of 1976, and tours of the great American arena circuit with the likes of Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Journey, and Rush) is pure Spinal Tap.

The band, with some major financial backing from Casablanca Records mogul Neil Bogart, had developed one of the most elaborate stage shows in rock, a fantasia of smoke, magic, and mirrors that led one wag to suggest that the band might be better off staying home and sending its props on the road. One gimmick involved the band appearing magically on stage one by one in puffs of smoke, to be introduced by the face on the giant Angel logo—which none other than Ian MacKaye pointed out to me is ambigrammatic, meaning it reads the same when turned upside down as when viewed normally—that served as the band’s backdrop.

One night, as Punky Meadows, Angel’s guitarist and the most androgynous pretty boy in a band full of androgynous pretty boys, told me: “Of course, all we were doing was coming up through trapdoors from beneath the stage. Well, one night, the big talking head introduces [drummer] Mickie Jones, and Mickie isn’t there. We’re looking at each like, ‘Where the fuck’s Mickie?’ Turns out his trapdoor got stuck. And all those stoned kids in the audience are going [Meadows sucks on an imaginary joint], ‘That’s really weird, man…'”

Angel was ahead of its time as a hair metal band, but while publicity photos featuring Meadows sporting hair the females of the era would have died for and a pout that put Scarlett Johansson’s to shame helped increase Angel’s popularity amongst certain sectors—predominantly teenage girls—it didn’t win them any points with critics.

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Remembering Dan McCafferty, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.

The Scottish clods o’ peat in this hard-working, hard-rocking man’s man band never won any originality awards, and weren’t exactly well-versed in the songwriting arts either, and given their high scunge factor, I doubt they’d even be allowed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as paying customers, much less as inductees.

They’re not going to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame anytime soon, either. Hell, they only hit two homers over the course of their long career, and their lifetime batting average is in the .233 range. Forget about Cooperstown; these guys would be lucky to earn a spot on the bench of the 1962 New York Mets.

But I’ll say this for ‘em–way back in 1975 every badass or wannabe badass in my home town was blaring Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog out of their car 8-track speakers, whether that car be a GTO or a rusted-out Ford Pinto. The title track–with its “Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch”–was a blast of pure unbridled belligerence and without a doubt the orneriest cut of the summer, hell the whole year probably. Alice Cooper may have put out “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” but that was play acting; Nazareth’s Dan McCafferty came on like the Real McCoy.

As for the album title, me and my buddies prided ourselves on knowing what it meant even though we’d never cracked a beer (much less suffered a hangover) in our lives–it made us feel adult, worldly even, just as that “Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch” made us feel tough, when in effect we were probably the wimpiest band of geeks to ever gingerly trod the halls of Littlestown High School, on the lookout for the real sons of bitches.

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It says something about the Generation Gap or lack thereof in Our Year of the Lord 1960 that when the larval version of The Sonics, who would go down in history as the founders of punk rock, came up short at practice, guitarist Larry Parypa’s mom would fill in on bass. We’ll never know if she helped influence their primal, pounding sound. I like to think she did.

Some five years and mucho line-up changes later The Sonics, a Tacoma, Washington quintet who look like nice wholesome boys on their album covers and most likely were just that, were in a recording studio in Seattle tearing the soundproofing off the walls and complaining to the sound engineers when the needle WASN’T in the red. Years later, The Stooges would go red too.

But here’s the thing. I can easily imagine—although I could be dead wrong—these guys retreating to the nearest pharmacy lunch counter after sessions to drink malted milks. With straws. The Sonics may be credited by many as punk’s originators, but they weren’t punks. They were just kids making an unholy din in a musical backwater, playing mostly well-known covers in place’s like Olympia’s Skateland and St. Mary’s Parish Hall, and their story is no different from the stories of so many other bands doing the same thing in rock ’n’ roll nowheres across the United States.

The Sonics had one regional hit and dreams of making the big time, but when they finally drove South in (I’m fantasizing here) a battered Beach Boys woodie station wagon with Bob Bennett’s drum kit roped to the roof to Hollywood the town ruined them, or rather they ruined themselves, because they had nothing to sell that anybody wanted (cover of “Money,” anybody?) and no choice really but to slicken up their sound and record the more restrained material that appeared on 1967’s Introducing the Sonics, which they hoped would get them radio play but didn’t. Later they’d dismiss it as “the worst garbage.”

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Some souls just weren’t made for this world. You can hear it in their voice, see it in their eyes—their shoulders simply aren’t strong enough to bear the weight of gravity, and their hearts are simply too tender, and they come and go from this our mortal coil leaving behind the sense, no matter how much they accomplished, that they were never here at all.

Such is the feeling I get from listening to guitarist/vocalist Rowland S. Howard, who obviously found life on this planet one long and painful trial. His 2009 masterpiece Pop Crimes makes reference to “this planet of perpetual sorrows,” on not one but two songs, which he must have felt was necessary to get his point—that living is a nightmare from which we cannot escape—across. But if Howard, who passed away very shortly after the release of Pop Crimes at age 50, harbored a bleak and Baudelairian view of existence, he didn’t let it stand in the way of making lots of great music with lots of different people.

His list of accomplishments is remarkably long, especially for someone who battled drug addiction for as long as he did. He began his career with Nick Cave in Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, went on to become a member of Crime & The City Solution, and finally founded Thee Immortal Souls before launching a solo career. Over the course of his too-short life he also worked with artists as diverse as Lydia Lunch, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Henry Rollins, not to mention numerous others.

His voice is fraught with pain and his unique reverb-drenched guitar sound was responsible, as his friend Kid Congo Powers told me, “for launching a gazillion bands.” The combination has a hypnotic effect, as demonstrated on his cover of Talk Talk’s propulsive “Life’s What You Make It,” which is basically one mesmeric groove, free of choruses and bridges and all that nonsense.

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Celebrating David Lee Roth, born on this day in 1954. —Ed.

So I was listening to the masterful and spiritually uplifting guitar artistry of John McLaughlin and thought, “You know what? I’d rather listen to Van Halen.” That’s the kind of spiritually evolved being I am. There is the cosmos, with its songs of devotion and birds of fire, and then there is the shirtless David Lee Roth. The fact that I prefer the latter is proof that I exist upon a lower class astral plane, in a double-wide trailer whose front yard is littered with empty beer cans.

Let me say this just to start: When it comes to Van Halen, I’m a 1984 guy. Hardcore fans call 1984 a sell-out. I deny they sold out. I would argue they sold up. But the fact is I’ve already written about 1984, so I’m writing about Van Halen’s kick-ass 1978 self-titled debut. It’s not 1/10th as funny as 1984–the biggest laugh riot of a metal LP this side of Kix’s first–but it rocks much harder and is a lot meaner to boot. Van Halen was the opening salvo of a band that was clearly hungry and just as clearly had something to prove.

It’s evident in every note Eddie Van Halen plays; you can hear it in David Lee Roth’s straight-from-the-crotch vocal swagger. Not all of its songs are winners–I might even go far as to say its B side sags–but the winners win big. Why, “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love” is so wonderful The Minutemen saw fit to cover it on Double Nickels on the Dime. When you’re the kind of band punk rockers love to hate but punk rockers still love your songs, you must be doing something right.

Van Halen was not universally beloved upon its release. The critics in particular were mean. Rolling Stone’s Charles M. Young opined, “In three years, Van Halen is going to be fat and self-indulgent and disgusting … follow[ing] Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin right into the toilet. In the meantime, they are likely to be a big deal.” Meanwhile, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, commenting about Van Halen’s status as a bar band, wrote, “The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier.” And you know what? He’s right. This music does belong on an aircraft carrier, provided everybody on said aircraft carrier is drunk, said aircraft carrier is driving erratically and well over the posted speed limit, and there’s a wet t-shirt contest being held on the flag bridge.

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Remembering Johnny Ramone, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

It’s easy to take this the Ramones’ landmark 1976 self-titled debut too seriously. Sure, it signaled a seismic shift in rock music, exploding like an M80 in the minds of every cretinous young thing who’d had it up to here with the pompous, bloated likes of ELP, Queen, and the Eagles. And sure, this baby is often celebrated as the first real punk rock LP.

But so far as declarations of war go, Ramones is a hilarious one. On it the most famous band to ever come out of Forest Hills, Queens state their demands (they wanna be your boyfriend and they wanna sniff some glue; they don’t wanna go down to the basement and they don’t wanna walk around with you), dabble with fascism (“I’m a Nazi schatze”), and beat on the brat with a baseball bat. The Ramones weren’t the first NYC band to give voice to the inchoate yearnings of teengenerates everywhere; the Dictators got there first with 1975’s Go Girl Crazy!, and they deserve their due.

But unlike Handsome Dick Manitoba and Company the Ramones got their yucks playing their songs at tempos that boggled the imagination; I saw the Ramones early on, without having ever heard a single note of their music, and the experience bordered on the traumatic.

The songs–which segued one into the other with nary a pause–went by at an insane, buzzsaw blur that night, obfuscating what is obvious to anyone who listens to the album now–that the Ramones mated their 160 beats per minute ferocity to an impeccable pop sense that gives many of these songs the loving feel of good bubblegum.

The Ramones won their rep by keeping their songs nasty, brutish and short. But their secret ingredient was melody; their songs are both catchy and likable, and that’s what makes Ramones sound as fresh today as it did the day it hit the streets.

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Celebrating John Mellencamp on his 73rd birthday. —Ed.

I’ve always liked John Mellencamp. Sure, I’ve been known to call him the poor man’s Bruce Springsteen, but I mean it as a compliment. I’m all for the poor man. Anyway, what I’ve always liked the most about the fellow who started out calling himself John Cougar is that he’s a curmudgeon. Mellencamp casts a gimlet eye at such things as Hope and the American Dream and smirks because he knows they fall short. He understands that our forefathers talked about the Pursuit of Happiness, but were wise enough to remain mum about the possibility of ever catching the slippery fucker. Mellencamp is no dreamer. He sees what he sees and he’s not happy about it.

Take “Jack and Diane.” You can call it hokum, a clichéd look at growing up horny in the heartland of America and all that, but its core message (“Oh yeah, life goes on/Long after the thrill of living is gone”) is as dark as anything dished out by the likes of Lou Reed or Bob Dylan. Mr. Mellencamp is most certainly not out to sell fairy tales.

On 1982’s Uh-Huh, Mellencamp cynically lets us know that we’ve all been sold a bill of goods that has landed us in cookie-cutter pink houses in the spiritually dead suburbs, that you can fight the law but will never win, that in the end you’ll trade in your dreams for a warmer place to sleep, and there ain’t no golden gates gonna swing open, not in this life. The last refers to “Golden Gates,” a truly beautiful and anthemic ode that almost contains a strain of hope, when Mellencamp sings, “Only promises I know to be true/Are promises made from the heart.”

But aside from “Golden Gates” and “Jackie O,” a love song and collaborative effort with John Prine that is sweet and slow and is driven by some wonderfully simple Holiday Inn lounge keyboards (or vibes, I’ll be damned if I can tell the difference), the LP is knock-down, stripped to the basics, gut-bucket rock ’n’r oll. And to make things even better, the songs never fail to boast catchy melodies.

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Some random thoughts on Journey’s 1981 blockbuster LP Escape:

1. Remember that final, 2007 episode of The Sopranos with the open ending that everybody hated, the one where Tony and family are sitting in the diner and you don’t know whether Tony gets whacked or not? Well, what pissed me off was not knowing whether Tony lived or died. What bugged me was that the booth jukebox was playing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Tony’s kid, a teen from the year 2007 who had never shown any symptoms of being a congenital idiot, never said “What is this shit?” Any normal rebellious teen male from the year 2007 would have said “What is this shit?” but Tony’s kid didn’t SAY shit. Ruined the entire episode for me.

2. I don’t think Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is shit. I USED to think it was shit, thought it was shit for decades, but then something horrible happened, I had a brain aneurysm or something, and now I love it. I love it! This has happened to me with other bands and other songs and maybe it’s a function of growing old and senile but believe me, it’s disturbing. I’ve always considered myself a person of taste, although I’ve also always liked Black Oak Arkansas and Foghat while despising the likes of Patti Smith and The Clash, so that’s debatable. But Journey? Journey is no grey area. When a person tells me they like Journey I give that person the stink eye and write that person out of the Book of Life. Journey is the enemy.

3. On a completely random note, Escape’s cover falls into the great Boston/Electric Light Orchestra tradition of album covers with spaceships on them escaping Earth because who doesn’t want to escape Earth, especially if you’re a teen and your parents are hard-ons and school may as well be Leavenworth and what’s the point of growing up anyway? To get a job? To go bald and get married and STOP smoking pot? Life HAS to be better in another galaxy!

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