Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Brian Johnson on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

A very brief history lesson. First Attila was the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then Sir Lord Baltimore took over as the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then along came AC/DC to produce an electrical surge that brought down the hard rock power grid, settling the debate forever. Their ascendancy caused many a band to give up the ghost. Some sold their gear and returned to England to resume their careers as bricklayers. Others picked up dulcimers and went full folkie. I saw Deep Purple at a Greenwich Village folk club and their lute and bodhrán take on “Smoke on the Water”inspired some discerning fan with a flare gun to burn the place to the ground.

AC/DC played a primal, zero frills, straight ahead hard rock that led morons (like the younger me) to conclude their music was for dummies. Frank Zappa (my then idol) played cerebral brain music. AC/DC just punched you in the solar plexus. Theirs was gut music, like Iggy and the Stooges or a souped-up, oversexed early Black Sabbath.

And on 1980’s Back in Black—the band’s seventh studio LP—AC/DC forged its metal into a tool of sledgehammer simplicity. It was former Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson’s first LP with the band, Bon Scott having died from alcohol poisoning the previous February. The band recorded the LP in the Bahamas, where a diehard fan in the form of a crab scuttled across the studio floor. With his cheerleading the band recorded ten tracks that stripped hard rock to its essentials. Three chords, no poofter organ solos, just barf in your face music for the lads at the local.

You get a little dark stuff in the form of “Hell’s Bells,” are invited to have a drink with the lads, and get a lecture on how rock and roll isn’t poisoning the aural environment. But what you mostly get is not so subtle sexual innuendo that reveals Ted Nugent to be a loincloth feminist. This is 12-year-old stuff, but to be fair to the band, there’s nothing on Back in Black as pubescent as Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.”

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Television began life as a punk band—Richard Hell made sure of that. But Tom Verlaine soon tired of Hell’s determined amateurism and wildman antics (didn’t like him, you know, MOVING on stage) and so out went Hell, and as time passed Television became something very different. Twin guitars, lots of soloing, no “fuck rock ’n’ roll” nihilism—Television went from Dionysian to Apollonian, from raw and visceral to tight and (somehow) both wound up and ethereal. They weren’t America’s answer to the Sex Pistols—they were America’s answer to Wishbone Ash.

Television had a short but brilliant run—epochal debut (1977’s Marquee Moon), a second album that disappointed most but was at its best utterly sublime (1978’s Adventure), plus a live album that was released post-breakup (1982’s The Blow-Up) and an album they recorded after reforming briefly in the nineties (who cares). They weren’t a better to burn out than to fade away proposition—they succumbed to sheer fatigue and disappointing record sales, and went their separate ways with the usual “Why aren’t we stars, fuck this.”

Richard Hell had an interesting thing to say about the Tom Verlaine (then still Paul Miller) he’d first met at school in Delaware. He said Verlaine “…had this fundamental belief in his absolute inherent superiority to everyone else on this earth.” Such people tend to be control freaks, have delusions of grandeur and to be intolerant of the shortcomings of others, so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d end up a solo artist. Fellow Television guitarist Richard Lloyd’s drug problems, and the group’s failure to achieve commercial success mentioned above, didn’t help.

Verlaine didn’t let much time pass before he released his first solo album, 1979’s Tom Verlaine. It didn’t hurt that more than half of its songs—including the two best—dated back to Verlaine’s time in Television. Like Lou Reed, Verlaine didn’t walk away from his old band without taking a few mementos with him. Getting a fresh start is easier when you don’t have to make a fresh start.

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Remembering Richard Harris, born on this day in 1930. —Ed.

In which a Man Called Horse sings a Song Called Horseshit, and turns it into a megahit. If macho thespian Richard Harris seemed an unlikely singing star, Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” was an unlikely success, clocking in at around 7:30 minutes at a time when songs played on the radio rarely reached 4 minutes. But that’s not what really makes “MacArthur Park” such an oddity. It’s the bizarre lyrics, which raise questions galore, and the histrionic manner in which Harris sings them that make “MacArthur Park” a piece of kitsch so bad it’s great. Which is to say I may mock it, but I never tire of listening to it. It’s too fucking weird.

Famed songwriter Jimmy Webb has written hundreds of hits for dozens upon dozens of famous musicians, Glen Campbell being a prime recipient of Webb’s largesse. But the songs Webb wrote for Campbell were, well, songs, and not “MacArthur Park,” that fantastical overflow of deep thoughts expressed in the form of surrealistic imagery and incoherent similes. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Webb was on acid when he wrote it. Hell, maybe he was.

As I said before, the song raises questions, enormous existential questions, questions that call into doubt the very dichotomy between being and nothingness, the most important of which is who is the idiot that left the cake out in the rain in the first place? I mean, who leaves a cake sitting uncovered in a public park? If it hadn’t rained, the rats and squirrels would have gotten it.

And who bakes a green cake? And why can’t the cook find the recipe again? Women’s magazines, the Internet—recipes for green cake must be a dime a dozen. And why exactly did it take him so long to bake it? Was he using a children’s E.Z. Bake oven or something? And then there’s the line, “I recall the yellow cotton dress/Foaming like a wave/On the ground around your knees.” What, her legs stop at her knees?

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Remembering Marc Bolan, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Never got into T. Rex as a kid. I lived too deep in the sticks, and the only kid I know who owned a T. Rex record refused to tear off the cellophane shrink wrap and play the damn thing because that’s the way he was with all his stuff; he was saving it for posterity, or for somewhere down the line when it would fetch a pretty penny for being in mint condition. He’s probably a millionaire now. I thought he was a complete imbecile.

And the songs I heard after that struck me as a bit fey and simplistic; Marc Bolan truly was a dandy in the underworld, and I failed to get the whole “T. Rextasy” thing that swept England in the wake of 1971’s Electric Warrior.

Before that Bolan was an unreconstructed hippie, in a duo with the wonderfully named Steve Peregrin Took. Their acoustic-guitar-based material had a raga-like feel and ran towards lyrics about paisley unicorns leaping through peace symbols in the tie-dyed sky. But the two band mates had a falling out, and Bolan caught the glam wave, with a funky and more pop-oriented electrical guitar style and a flashier sartorial style. Indeed, he is credited with founding glam, after he appeared on Top of the Pops with a spots of glitter beneath his eyes. Superstardom followed, as little girls swooned and little boys prayed nightly for a pair of platform glitter boots to appear magically in the morning by their bed. Hit followed hit in a manner not seen since the Beatles, and it mattered not a nonce that Bolan and Took’s old hippie audience cried, “Sell out!”

Electric Warrior is generally credited as being the high-water mark of T. Rex’s career, although 1972 follow-up The Slider also wins big props from fans and critics. Electric Warrior was, as its title indicates, Bolan’s move towards an electric rock sound, with irresistible hooks and an almost child-like approach to melody. The journey begins with the shuffle funk of “Mambo Sun,” which highlights Bolan’s almost whispered vocal delivery and playful lyrics, and it’s good, infectious fun. Bolan stuck to the basics, with relatively simple grooves that might run the entire song, and it’s an exhilarating formula. Call it white glam funk.

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Generally, when musicians go into a studio and a car wreck breaks out, no one’s happy. Ears are injured. Listener ears, record executive ears, ears everywhere show up at emergency rooms in screaming ambulances to be treated, some for life-threatening injuries. It’s not good.

But what if, and it happens, the musician in question crashed the car on purpose? Such was the case with Alex Chilton and his 1979 debut solo LP Like Flies on Sherbert. Chilton, legendary teenage frontman of the Box Tops, co-chairman of power pop pioneers Big Star and notorious substance abuser, was no car wrecker. He knew how to put a record together. He was a student of songcraft. Wasted or no, he was a studio pro.

But in 1978 and 1979 he went into a pair of studios in Memphis, Tennessee and, inspired by the “Look ma, no hands!” lead of producer/musician Jim Dickinson, decided to make a mess. Not at first—it took a few happy accidents to convince him that deliberately crashing the car might just be the way to go. After that, “crazy and anarchic” (his words) were the order of the day.

Musicians don’t know the songs? So what? Nobody in the control room? No biggie. Instrument (a Minimoog in this instance) on the fritz? Use it. As for using the best and the brightest, forget about it. Chilton opted to let Dickinson play guitar for much of the record precisely because Dickinson was no guitarist. Remembers Dickinson: “Alex said, ‘You still play like you’re 14 years old.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I play bad.’ That’s what he wanted.”

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Celebrating Shaun Cassidy on his 66th birthday. —Ed.

If David Bowie was so weird, how come former teen hottie Shaun Cassidy’s cover of “Rebel Rebel” on his 1980 LP Wasp makes the Bowie original sound so … tame? Sure, Bowie’s half-pooch self on the cover of 1974’s Diamond Dogs is what you might call weird even though his dog dick’s been airbrushed out, but Shaun doesn’t have to resort to such gimmickry–he looks just like his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (as in WASP!) self on the cover of Wasp, although he seems understandably nervous cuz he’s got a stinging insect on his face.

Often derided as a last ditch effort to resuscitate Cassidy’s moribund career, Wasp was produced by Utopian Todd “I’ll produce something/anything” Rundgren, who might have turned the album into a New Wave Bubble Freak masterpiece. Unfortunately, Sir Wizard and True Star stopped short at “Rebel Rebel” (more about which later), and filled the rest of the LP with what are largely workman-like covers of largely pedestrian material.

Wasp includes three Utopia songs–exactly three more, if you do the math, than any sane listener wants to hear. None deviate much from the originals, which is to say they’re once, twice, three times redundant, which in corporate terms means they’d be given severance packages and shown the door. Except wait: the title track is fascinating indeed: Shaun shouts “Hey cowboy, didn’t you used to be a faggot bartender in the West End?” (the lyric sheet reads “packy back” but I know homophobia when I hear it ), then confuses New Wave with punk (“You’re looking mighty New Wave/I hardly recognize you with that shish kabob through your face.”) In short it’s a hoot, in large part because it betrays poor Todd’s complete ignorance of current events.

The other two Rundgren tracks are useless: on “Selfless Love” Cassidy gets his heart broken and threatens to jump off a mountain, which is a pretty selfless thing to do if you ask me. “Pretending” gives Shaun the chance to get all theatrical, and gives the impression he’s auditioning for a role in Cats.

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I think it was Mark Twain who wrote, “Bores, pretentious bores, performance artists”? On second thought, it was me. And despite what you might think, I didn’t have Yoko “Black Bag Job” Ono in mind when I wrote it—her thrashing around in a bag on stage was certainly pretentious, but it was also very entertaining comedy.

No, I was thinking of Laurie Anderson. I’d just finished listening to her 1982 (kinda sorta) debut LP Big Science, which established her as performance art’s answer to David Byrne, and I didn’t find it at all entertaining. The words I would use to describe Big Science are wooden, underwhelming and very, very tedious. And pretentious of course.

Big Science raises Big Questions, the biggest of which is why real human people, many of them presumably sane, would buy Big Science. A cynic by nature, I would suggest it had a lot to do with the cool “blinded by science” cover. It suggested that here was an interesting artist, visually arresting, MTV ready and cutting edge at the same time. Word of mouth undoubtedly played a part as well. But whose mouths are we talking about? The critics who lauded it played a role. But there were others as well. Music critics aren’t the only unscrupulous souls out there. I think my brother used to own a copy. I should ask him who fooled him into buying it.

Because Big Science is a novelty record, and a rather lame one. It’s also a comedy record of sorts, and even lamer in that respect. But mostly it’s a novelty record, and as such I have a hard time imagining anyone listening to it more than once or twice. I would like to think there isn’t a well-worn copy of Big Science in existence. But I’m sure I’m wrong about this, because there are a lot of easily bamboozled souls out there, just as there are people who think listening to Big Science makes them sophisticates. Or is good for them, a form of aural-intellectual vitamin.

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Remembering Linda McCartney, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

I finally got to see the comandante. It nearly killed me. Between the trigger-happy checkpoint guards, the high-speed ride in the bouncing wooden bed of a rickety pickup along the perilously narrow roads hanging precariously over the steep mountain gorges, and the 3-day trip upriver through alligator- and piranha-infested waters, with government troops occasionally firing upon us with AK-47s from the riverbank, I didn’t think I’d survive. But I finally arrived, having braved it all to get the STORY, the real lowdown from the general himself on the bloody revolution.

But if I thought he was as interested as I was in talking about the insurgency, I was dead wrong. The moment I entered his office he said, “Do you have it?” He was referring to my cost of admission for our tête-à-tête. “I do,” I said. He smiled. It was not a thing you would want to see. Some men smile, and it is a show of teeth. “Gimme,” he said greedily. So I handed it to him and he gazed at lovingly and said, “Amigo, Venus and Mars are alright tonight.”

Some people love sex, and some people love macaroni and cheese. The general loved two things: killing and Wings’ 1975 LP Venus and Mars. He pressed a button on his desk, and an adjutant in white gloves rushed in. “Put this on the turntable,” said the general, “and if you make so much as a shadow of a scratch, you will pay for it with your head.”

So instead of talking about the insurgency as I’d hoped, we listened to Venus and Mars. The general was rapt. No one knew how old he was (my guess: 110) or his origins (some said a patrician family, others that his mother had been a whore) or what he’d done before becoming the comandante (Proust scholar, said some, gun runner said others.) But I knew this; the bald and wrinkled old man with the great pair of big black mustaches, who looked like a character straight out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, loved Venus and Mars. And in the end I got my STORY, only it wasn’t the one I’d expected.

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Celebrating Bruce Springsteen on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

Most artist compilations serve a single purpose—to give the listener who doesn’t want to spring for more than one LP of a musician or band something to buy. This is not the case with 2016’s Chapter and Verse, which offers both casual and hardcore fans of the Boss two great reasons to shell out their hard-earned shekels.

First, it includes five previously unreleased tracks of Springsteen’s early work—two with the Castiles, one with Steel Mill, and two 1972 tracks one of which, “The Ballad of Jesse James,” is a flat-out triumph. Second, it offers up a couple of recent brilliant Springsteen tracks that offer a damn good reason for lapsed fans like yours truly to check out what he’s been up to since we tuned the poor fellow out. I’ll say right now that they establish him, along with the rare likes of Neil Young, as a musician whose work remains not just exciting but vital.

Springsteen himself chose the eighteen tracks that make up this cursory overview of his long career, and frankly the whole contraption would collapse for sheer lack of meat—a simple cut from most of his studio LPs simply isn’t enough—were it not for the unreleased early tracks, which date the whole back to 1966 when Springsteen was a member of a forgotten garage rock band called the Castiles. “Baby I” may not be a song for the ages but it generates pure raw-boned excitement, and that goes double for the Castiles’ live cover of Willie Dixon’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover,” which jumps and shouts to the sound of one great Farfisa organ.

Meanwhile, Steel Mill’s “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song)” is a guitar rave-up that reminds me of early Grand Funk Railroad at their best. “The Ballad of Jesse James,” which is credited to the Bruce Springsteen Band, features some truly ‘eavy guitar and one great piano, and on it Springsteen sounds like Springsteen and belts out the lyrics like his life depends on it. “Henry Boy,” on the other hand, features some fancy acoustic guitar work and would have sounded right at home on Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.

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At first nobody could figure out how they did it. How did a gaggle of English metalheads with symphonic tendencies manage to sneak up to Mt. Rushmore, replace the mugs of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the other guy whose name I can never remember with their own mugs, and do it in one night?

Then it came to me. They did it with their heavy music! After doing some serious investigative journalism I discovered the truth: they drove six hundred trucks with huge speakers on the back to the base of Mt. Rushmore and played their seminal 1970 metal opus In Rock at top volume and through precision design of each note on the album SOUND-CARVED their faces over the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the guy whose name I can never remember! And it only took them three plays!

All of which is to say that the guys in Deep Purple are heavy metal geniuses, and In Rock isn’t just a genre touchstone, it’s the greatest rock-blasting and precision sculpting tool ever invented! Sure, they’re still at the top of the National Park Service’s Most Wanted List, and lots of people now think George Washington looks like Ritchie Blackmore, but they sure got themselves a great album cover.

In Rock was Deep Purple’s fourth release, and the first studio album to feature the new Mark II line-up of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organ king Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice, and new acquisitions lead vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, both of whom they acquired from the New York Mets for former lead singer Rod Evans (who’d lost his fastball) and a couple of lousy draft picks, none of whom ever made the bigs. It was a real steal.

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Remembering Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

On which the late metal minimalist/ genius/ proud-to-be-a-lummox Lemmy Kilmister delivers the hard rock goods live in a couple of halls not including London’s Hammersmith Odeon. No sleep ‘til Hammersmith features Motörhead at their ferocious and pummeling best, and is the perfect corrective to the lyrical excesses, grand themes, and emphasis on musical virtuosity that characterized much of the metal then popular.

With the able assistance of “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar and backing vocals and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor on drums, Lemmy bangs out some tunes (most of them of unfashionably short length and unfashionably fast tempos), announces in DIY fashion that Motörhead is its own damn road crew, and demonstrates that his very hoarse bark has real bite.

Kilmister possessed not a whit of glamor and about as much charm, but that’s exactly what made him so lovable; he wasn’t good looking, his tonsils hardly made the little girls swoon, and when push came to shove he was the perfect antithesis of, say, Robert Plant. “No Class” is addressed to (or so I suspect) some anonymous groupie hanger-on, but Lemmy would no doubt have agreed it applied to him as well; he had about as much class as your average lorry driver, and never pretended to have better manners than your average lorry driver.

In short, you could relate to Lemmy Kilmister. He sang about all of the things you cared about, and said fuck it to the darkest depths of Mordor. He was a creature of the road and of the tedium and excesses that entailed, didn’t give a shit about Xanadu or hobbits, and didn’t want to write the next “Stairway to Heaven” either. He was down to earth, didn’t look like he placed a very high premium on personal hygiene, and probably would have come in handy in a bar fight. He’s as close as English music has ever come to producing an outlaw country musician.

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The penultimate track on Shaboozey’s 2024 LP Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going is “Drink Don’t Need No Mix.” He prefers his alcohol straight up, thank you very much. But his music is very much a mix, and a potent one at that—of country, hip hop and Americana.

Shaboozey isn’t a very happy drinker—this is one very down-in-the-mouth album, all heartbreak and regret and running from or to bad choices, and it makes perfect sense that its final track is called “Finally Over.” If it’s a kick you’re looking for, and drunken good times, you’d better hang on to smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”—most of the LP’s other songs are sobering experiences.

Shaboozey (given name Collins Obinna Chibueze) is a rapper, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, and record producer, and his musical influences go a long way to explaining his music. Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Pharrell, the Grateful Dead, Fela Kuti, and the Backstreet Boys are just the tip of the iceberg. His background in film is evident in his songs, which are cinematic indeed. He’s cited the films of Martin Scorsese as an influence, but the director that comes to mind when I listen to the LP is Sergio Leone. And when it comes to musical backdrops, Ennio Morricone is Shaboozey’s man. The territory Shaboozey roams in Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going is a mythologized American South and West, updated of course. The horse he rides is faster than a Dodge Viper SRT-10. And he rides the highway, not some dusty trail to Laramie.

There’s a sameness to these songs, a uniformity of musical tone and tempo and lyrical content that could lead to boredom but don’t, because the ultimate effect is cumulative—it’s like the songs (with the exception of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”) are nails Shaboozey’s using to nail down the lid of the coffin of his happiness. These horses don’t gallop, and they exist in an emotional realm without place names—other than “East of the Massanutten,” the Tennessee of “Horses & Hellcats” and the sheerly metaphorical Vegas of the song of the same name, I don’t think he ever tells us where he is or where he’s going. Someplace else, usually, it doesn’t matter where. Shaboozey is a man on the run from heartbreak, from the busted past, from himself. Let it burn, move on, repeat.

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Celebrating Lol Creme on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

Looking for some sophisticated English entertainment? Well put on the old school tie, break out the crumpets and watercress tea sandwiches, offer Viscount Basil Clement-Clawsey a cup of Earl Grey tea, and put 10cc’s Sheet Music on the gramophone. Then unstiffen your upper lip just long enough to say in your poshest English accent, “You’ll love this, old boy. They’re no Foghat, mind you. And by the way, you look quite dashing in your black silk stockings and whalebone corset.”

10cc were an English art pop band whose American success has been limited to two of their most traditional songs: 1975’s “I’m Not in Love,” which rose to No. 2 on the pop charts, and 1976’s “The Things We Do For Love,” which made its classy way to No. 5. Musically, 10cc’s closest American counterparts are Sparks, whose elegantly witty songs look at the world askew, and like 10cc have been rewarded by limited commercial success.

The difference between 10cc and Sparks is the former have a fuller sound and lusher vocals. 10cc is made up of a quartet of multi-instrumentalists and typically utilizes multiple vocalists on individual songs. Sparks is just Ron Mael on keyboards and brother Russell on vocals. The bands share a quirky sense of humor, but Sparks win the cleverness sweepstakes hands down. The trouble with Sparks is that, for all but diehard fans, a little of their music goes a very long way.

On their sophomore outing, 1974’s Sheet Music, 10cc bring another band to mind as well: Bachman Turner Overdrive. Just Kidding. I’m talking Queen. It’s there in the complex song structures (think “Bohemian Rhapsody”) and the vocals, which you can’t hear without thinking the Freddie Mercury of “Killer Queen.” And it’s hard not to detect the Bonzo Dog Band in their music as well, both in the absurdist lyrics and the odd musical touches—one rarely runs across a song (in this case “Somewhere in Hollywood”) that comes complete with tap dancing.

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You know who Southern man don’t need around, anyhow? If you guessed Neil Young, you’re wrong. The correct answer is Dixie Dregs, who thought it would be a swell idea to take Southern rock as the starting point for their fearless (and fear-inducing) forays into jazz fusion and progressive rock. I solely attribute their “contributions to music” as the reason the Confederate States of America lost the Civil War. Which I guess makes them heroes of a sort.

I’m no Southern man but I’m a Southern rock fan, and I’m here to tell you there are things that should not be. And Southern rock jazz fusion/progressive rock is one of them. Dixie Dregs—they came up with the name themselves, taking it right out of my mouth—were (ahem are, they’re still out there somewhere) like a deranged bartender. They threw Southern rock and jazz fusion and progressive rock in a shaker and the resulting drink would have made Ronnie Van Zant see red.

1979’s Night of the Living Dregs (the band’s third LP) is a hybrid too—the first side was recorded in the studio, the second at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Evidently the Swiss will listen to anybody and anything. And if the album’s any indication, they will like and applaud it. Not fighting a military battle in 500 years has obviously turned them into total degenerates.

Interesting line-up, though. Guitarist/songwriter Steve Morse would go on to do a brief stint in a past-their-prime Kansas before going on to do a very, very long stint with a post-Richie Blackmore, past-their prime Deep Purple. Bassist Andy West went on to play with the likes of Henry Kaiser and Little Feat’s Paul Barrere. He must be good, right? I’m not so sure. Mark Parrish, who plays keyboards, is not as ostentatious as their original keyboardist Stephen Davidowski, which is a relief.

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Remembering Craig MacGregor, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

In Yo La Tengo’s absolutely hilarious 1997 video for “Sugarcube,” a disgusted studio exec interested only in the bottom line (“Do you want my wife and kids to go hungry?”) sends the cowed trio to “Rock School,” where they’re taught the basics by a pipe-smoking, Kiss lookalike in a fright wig and leather shoulder wings. Amongst other necessary requirements for success (“If you want to write rock lyrics, you must learn about where the hobbits dwell”) their instructor writes the words “Foghat Principle” on the chalkboard and asks, “Does everyone remember the Foghat rule? Your fourth album should be double live.”

Not to be a nitpicker, but there’s a problem with this scenario. 1977’s Foghat Live was the English hard rock band’s seventh–not fourth–release, and it wasn’t a double album at all. A version of Foghat did get around to releasing a double live sequel in the form of 2007’s Foghat Live II, but they were pretenders to a man so it doesn’t count.

Foghat Mach I–whose members included the late great “Lonesome Dave” Peverett on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, the late Rod Price on lead/slide guitar, the late Nick Jameson on bass, and the very much alive and kick drumming Roger Earl on skins–served up blues based, arena-sized meat and potatoes hard rock for teen stoners whose idea of haute cuisine ran to Big Macs. The Foghat of Foghat Live is a blunt instrument–Grand Funk’s an art rock band in comparison. Troggs school primitives they weren’t, and they didn’t rely on sheer volume like Blue Cheer, but their thorazine blooz were a sign of things to come – “Slow Ride” could well be the world’s first grindcore song.

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