Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Remembering David Crosby in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

Few bands have produced such blissful music, or music that so well fit the spirit of its time as The Byrds. Theirs was a bright and shining sound, filled with shimmering optimism and jingle-jangle hope, and they made the transition to the psychedelic age as well as anybody. Indeed, their 1966 LP Fifth Dimension is an acid rock landmark, and I listen to it whenever I want to pretend I’m tripping.

Speaking of pretending, let’s play a game of make believe, shall we? The year is 1966, and we’re just removing the plastic shrink-wrap from a virgin copy of Fifth Dimension. Let’s say we’re at my pad. It’s not bad so far as hippie crash pads go. Please don’t touch the lava lamp. I just bought the album, you brought the pot, and that redolent example of fetid man reek over there in the filthy poncho and crud-encrusted beard is the hippie who brought the acid, which is the only reason we invited him to our little listening party in the first place.

Really, no one wants him around. Not with his long staring silences, sudden bouts of insane cackling provoked by nothing going on around him, and rather scary habit of carrying a long and wicked-looking blade in a buckskin sheath. He uses it to kill squirrels, which along with the acorns he stole from the squirrels and purloined packets of McDonald’s ketchup constitute his entire diet. Do you have any idea how quick you have to be to seize and slit the throat of your typically twitchy squirrel? It’s too horrifying to contemplate. He reaches into his pocket and says, “Anybody want some delicious squirrel jerky?”

You and I both shudder and politely refuse, and then we put the LP on. The opening track “FD (Fifth Dimension)” instantly transports us to a higher astral plane where giant birds of phantasmagorical plumage perform dizzying acrobatics above the pulsating crystal abodes of the perfect ones. Or something like that.

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I like to play hard to get. You know, listen to an album for a while before I ask it out on a date. Sure, there are exceedingly rare exceptions—thunderbolts of instantaneous amour that make me lose my composure and babble on about how wonderful an album is, and how I want to take it home to meet my family, and go out and surreptitiously shop around for a ring. This was what happened the first time I heard John Cale’s 1973 LP Paris 1919.

The Welsh Cale will forever be chiefly remembered for his work with The Velvet Underground, but he was playing experimental music—you know, the usual, like an 18-hour piano marathon of a piece by Erik Satie—with the likes of John Cage and La Monte Young before he joined the Velvets, and has recorded in a mad variety of styles since then. I’m loath to call any one a genius, because I prefer to reserve the title for myself, but for John Cale I’ll make an exception. He’s put out many an amazing and influential record—and produced just as many for other artists—and you never know what he’ll do next.

Take Paris 1919. The LPs that bookend it—namely 1974’s harder rocking Fear and 1971’s more experimental and classically-oriented The Academy in Peril—don’t bear the slightest resemblance to Paris 1919, or to one another for that matter. I love both albums for their unpredictability, but most people, myself included, consider Paris 1919 Cale’s masterpiece. The reason why is simple—it’s chockablock with sublime and lovely songs that you’re guaranteed to fall in love with, just as I did.

Cale may have quit The Velvet Underground because he didn’t share Lou Reed’s ambition to become a pop star at any price, but that doesn’t mean Cale was uninterested in exploring pop’s outer suburbs. Paris 1919 is proof positive that Cale had a pop side as well—he simply dressed it up and presto, instant baroque pop. Or art rock, although I’m hesitant to describe Paris 1919 as such because the LP includes only one tune that even vaguely resembles rock, namely “Macbeth.”

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Celebrating Ian Anderson in advance of his 77th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Sometimes you amaze yourself. Or perhaps I should say stupefy, dumbfound, perplex, befuddle, mystify, outrage, and downright disgust yourself. Such was the case when I recently ran over a “little person” in an abortive attempt to pass the D.C. driver’s test. I never saw him; in my defense, he was a very little little person. More like a half-little person. And such was also the case when I decided to review Jethro Tull’s Stand Up, solely as a joke and a chance to pan defenseless Englishman Ian Anderson, who for some inexplicable reason stands poised on one leg while playing the flute, like a hippie flamingo.

Only to discover, horror of horrors, I actually like the damn thing. Who was it that said, “He came to mock but remained to pray”? Because I’ve always considered Jethro Tull, despite a handful of songs I truly like, ridiculous, due largely to Anderson’s flute, an instrument (in my humble opinion) suitable only for tossing out the window. What’s more, Jethtro Tull always struck me as fairly dim. I clearly remember thinking, when they put out 1972’s Thick as a Brick, that it wasn’t the brightest move, touting one’s low IQ on one’s own album cover.

I picked 1969’s Stand Up for the historically important reason that it has a song called “Fat Man” on it. A Facebook friend gave me the idea, and I fully intend to unfriend her. A short history: Jethro Tull (they filched their name from a pioneer of the English Agricultural Revolution) was formed in 1967 as a blues-rock outfit in Luton, Bedfordshire, a town once famed for hat-making. The concrete hat was invented there, and the resulting epidemic of neck injuries very quickly put an end to hat-making in Luton.

Tull’s debut This Was—which includes jazz flute horror “Serenade to a Cuckoo”—came out in 1968, at which point original guitarist Mick Abrahams split to form Blodwyn Pig, balking at Anderson’s decision to expand the band’s sound to incorporate Celtic, folk, and classical influences. (Fun fact: Black Sabb’s Tommy Iommi briefly replaced Abrahams, until Anderson settled on the courtly Martin Lancelot Barre. Fun fact #2: Yes’ Steve Howe flunked the audition!)

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I watched a documentary about Nick Drake last week. It featured a bunch of folkie types spouting all kinds of flamdoodle about what made Drake’s guitar playing so unique. I’m sure many members of the musical fraternity found this technical brouhaha illuminating, but seeing as how I’m a guy who has difficulty distinguishing an acoustic guitar from a tuba, the documentary’s cumulative effect was to render me insensible.

I admit to never having much listened to Nick Drake, mostly because he sounded to me like an oh so sensitive soul singing about so sensitive stuff expressly designed to make my hardened heart cringe. In fact the only Drake song I’d ever heard before listening to Pink Moon was its title track, which Volkswagen used in an ad a while back. I really liked the song, even if I thought its opening line went, “I saw it written in the soy sauce.”

But seeing as how my girlfriend is always telling me what a poetic genius and doomed romantic figure Drake is, I finally broke down and gave his third and final LP, 1972’s Pink Moon, a listen. And turns out I love it, despite the fact that it’s the work of an oh so sensitive soul singing about oh so sensitive stuff designed to make my hardened heart cringe. Just goes to show you it’s impossible to know if you like something until you’ve actually listened to it. Which may sound like Philosophy 101 to you, but comes as something of a revelation to me.

Pink Moon followed on the heels on 1971’s lavishly orchestrated Bryter Layter, and its failure to make a dent on the pop charts led a disheartened Drake to say to hell with it and strip things down to voice, guitar and piano. The results are stark, in large part because Drake chose to work with a palette limited to varying shades of grey. And unlike Bryter Layter, Pink Moon is an intensely private affair. A writer for Melody Maker complained that the music on Pink Moon “hides from you,” which is precisely what I love about it. What I hear when I listen to Pink Moon is Nick Drake playing to an audience of Nick Drake, making you, the listener, an eavesdropper.

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Celebrating Viv Prince in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

Mention England’s The Pretty Things, and most people will immediately direct your attention to 1968’s S.F. Sorrow, one of Western Civilization’s first rock operas (it preceded The Who’s Tommy by six months). Me, I prefer the band’s earlier, hard-driving R&B songs like “Rosalyn,” “Midnight to Six Man,” and “L.S.D.”

The pre-S.F. Sorrow Pretty Things specialized in a frenetic raunch-n-roll that split the difference between the Rolling Stones and Them. Powered by Phil May’s feral vocals and May’s stab to the heart guitar, the band’s sound was gritty as a mouthful of gravel, and you can hear them (as well as the band’s later psychedelic material) on 2017’s double LP Greatest Hits. Its 25 songs track the band from its R&B and blues-based early years through 1970’s Parachute, and make clear that Pretty Things were key players in the history of English rock ’n’ roll.

The 1964-66 Pretty Things were every bit the bad boys the Stones and The Who were, and quickly won a reputation for sowing chaos wherever they went. May claimed to have the longest hair in the UK; drummer Viv Prince’s mad behavior anticipated those of Keith Moon (and finally got hims sacked from the band). The band’s penchant for mayhem culminated in a 1965 stint in New Zealand, where they provoked as much outrage (and bad publicity) as The Who would later.

The early Pretty Things are best remembered for the 1964 song “Rosalyn,” which David Bowie covered on his 1973 LP Pinups. Bowie’s version reproduces the song’s primitive Bo Diddley beat, but Bowie’s vocals are positively enervated next to May’s Dionysian alley cat yowl. Ditto Pretty Thing’s 1964 hit “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Their version is furious, harmonica-fueled thing, and May goes at it in a full-throttle snarl. Bowie reproduces the song’s anarchic energy, but his singing’s prim, thin, mannered. It’s a case of savage vs. fop, and the savage wins hands down.

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Celebrating Rikki Rockett in advance of his birthdate tomorrow.
—Ed.

I finished this review only to discover–much to my chagrin-that I wrote one 3 years ago. Just more proof, as any were needed, that I have the memory of a house fly. In any event, this new review is 150 times better than the old one. Besides, all self-respecting music critics should return to this hair metal masterpiece every couple of years. It’s that great.

Judging by the Punky Meadows look-alike on the cover of their 1986 debut and the twin sister of Gene Simmons on their second, these Mechanicsburg chest waxers couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be Angel or Kiss, so they went ahead and bested both of ‘em. Glam metal idols in the days before Kurt Cobain placed former hairdresser Rikki Rockett’s skyscraper ‘do on the endangered species list, Poison packed enough hair to stuff a mattress into their metal and by so doing lubed the loins of a million girls itching to steal their makeup.

Had Poison been nothing more than a pretty pooch they’d have gone the way of Cats in Boots, and poor C.C. DeVille would have had to scuttle back to Three Mile Island with his poison blue Flying V guitar beneath his legs. But Poison had the skills to pay their thousand dollar spandex bills, and come Open Up and Say… Ahh! only Guns ‘N’ Roses had more powder in their pistol.

Counterintuitive as it sounds, there was an innocence to Poison’s twist on L.A. sleaze; unlike those moody social Darwinists Guns ‘N’ Roses (welcome to the jungle!), Poison believed in the power of positive partying. No appetite for destruction for these hair teasers; like Def Leppard, all they wanted was for you to pour some sugar on ‘em and lick it off.

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Remembering Adam Yauch, born on this day in 1964. —Ed.

Well here it is: the album that changed everything–for the better! The fiery shot of hip hop fired across the bow of rock’n’roll that succeeded (spectacularly!) by swiping its most monstrous riffs from rock’n’roll itself, and its brash, crass, and hilarious attitude from punk.

As I remember it, 1988’s Licensed to Ill did the impossible by converting predominantly white hardcore punks and rockers to an almost exclusively black musical genre (hip hop) OVERNIGHT. I recall attending a party being thrown by a couple of Johnny Thunders wannabes at a roach-infested crash pad in Philly, and lo and behold all every sneering personality crisis in attendance wanted to do was jump joyously around to Licensed to Ill until the morning hours.

Do you think it’s easy to instantaneously win hearts and minds? To turn cynical hive-minded hardcore kids (just like the Beasties when they started out) into the kinds of responsible world citizens who immediately rushed out to buy Public Enemy’s black-consciousness-expanding It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back after a single playing of “No Sleep till Brooklyn”? Licensed to Ill was the boldest blow for race mixing this side of P-Funk. Or Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka even. Or Public Enemy for that matter. True, even the most cursory glance at Kid Rock should be enough to tell you this remarkable phenomenon had its downside (God Save Us From Vanilla Ice!) but STILL.

But Licensed to Ill was more than just a remarkable blow for instant integration. The Beastie Boys muscled their way to the front of the bus on the basis of sheer bravado and a snotty sense of New Yawk humor not heard since the Dictators released the great Go Girl Crazy! Mike D., MCA, and Ad-Rock were that crazy kid down the block who lived to get high, liked to egg cop cars, and had that insane stash of Hustler magazines. And who thought everything was funny; hell, he even laughed while he was PUKING.

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Which is crazier: that trapped-in-time studio shut-in/guitar gizmo inventor Tom Scholz spent six years obsessively tinkering on this antique-on-arrival slab of arena rock atavism, kinda like a guy perfecting the telegraph in the age of rotary phones? Or the fact that said obsessively tinkered-over slab of arena rock atavism went to Number One on the Billboard Charts? Despite the fact that it’s a immaculately lacquered, lovingly polished dud?

Scholz invented a whole new genre—let’s call it technological power pop—with Boston’s eponymous American Bicentennial Year debut, and if you were a wholesome American kid living in a small town it was mind-blowing, a futuristic adventure in high-fi whose cover seemed to foretell exactly where music was headed—namely into space on a guitar-shaped rocket ship with a snow globe on top, inside of which could be found the entire city of Boston.

Boston was sonically streamlined, supermodel-airbrushed, and sounded like a multi-billion dollar product of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I was stunned to discover years later that it only took several thousand dollars to produce. In fact, a rumor went round in my teen social circle that Scholz had to place a sticker on the album saying the guitars were real, because they sounded so like they’d been produced by robots or synthesizers or guys in Level 4 biocontainment suits. That said, I’ve never seen said sticker and I suspect it was just urban legend.

Boston was, we thought, the future of rock, but by the time 1978’s Don’t Look Back came out punk and new wave had changed everything and everyone I knew was humming “Turning Japanese.” Don’t Look Back did just that—it was a glossy AOR representative of an extinct species, and to make matters worse only the title track lived up to the standard of the three songs that made up side one of band’s debut.

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Celebrating Garth Hudson on his 87th birthday. —Ed.

Part of what makes The Band so fascinating is they served two very different roles in rock history—first as the backing band that produced a hurricane of sound behind Bob Dylan during his epochal (and polarizing) 1966 tour, then as the purveyors of a totally original fusion of country, rock, R&B, folk, and soul music that would ultimately be labeled “Americana.” A unique designation given that The Band’s members—with the exception of drummer/ vocalist/ and mandolin player Levon Helm, an Arkansas boy—all hailed from Canada.

And Robbie Robertson—who passed away on August 9, 2023—was their leader, a role he assumed both because he became the band’s chief (and in time almost sole) songwriter and had the energy and organizational skills a laid-back Helm (the group’s original leader) constitutionally lacked. Robertson, a young Toronto guitar whiz of Native American/Canadian descent—Dylan once called him “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness”—was every bit as contradictory a figure as The Band itself.

He was a Canadian who created American myths, and wrote songs so tightly wound they left little room for him to show off his guitar chops. And he became a case study in the fickle nature of musical genius—after writing the immortal songs on The Band’s first two albums—1968’s seminal Music from Big Pink and 1969’s The Band—his creative wellspring slowed to a trickle; The Band’s subsequent studio albums became increasingly spotty affairs as Robertson went from writing great story songs to stilted and didactic lectures on the loss of the America of his imagining. There are great songs on the later albums, but there are far more forgettable ones.

The Band was a powerful musical outfit—its players were uniformly crack musicians who’d honed their skills touring with Arkansas rockabilly and country legend Ronnie Hawkins, who’d decided he’d sooner be a big fish in Toronto and points north than a small fry in his native America. And they boasted three incredible vocalists in piano player and sometimes drummer Richard Manuel, drummer and mandolin player Levon Helm, and bass player Rick Danko.

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It’s a small paradox that four black men (not kids) who began their musical career in a Washington, DC jazz fusion band called Mind Power, and who were in the thrall of a second-rate self-help book called Think and Grow Rich by some fraud and grifter named Napoleon Hill, and who by the time they put out their first album (a cassette actually) were already engaged in an internecine struggle over whether they should become a reggae band, should have become one of the two founding fathers of hardcore, along with LA’s Black Flag. But nothing in this world makes sense—chickens have wings, but the only thing they’re good for is eating.

Like Black Flag, Bad Brains changed everything. They took punk rock and speeded it up, setting land speed records that wouldn’t even be broken by Hüsker Dü’s 1982 Bonneville Salt Flats fast live album, Land Speed Record. And because they’d honed their chops playing jazz fusion and had it together in a way that flew in the face of punk rock’s “play live three days before you’ve picked up your instruments” aesthetic, and despite the fact that their “Positive Mental Attitude” shtick flew in the face of punk negativism and hostility, they mesmerized everyone who saw them play live because they played aggressive music at approximately 9,000 mph while vocalist H.R. (aka Paul Hudson) hurled himself about stage while speed-rapping in an eerie nasal bark/wail that made you think the guy was crazy, which in the end wasn’t far from the truth. Brian Eno may or may not have said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” That’s called hyperbole. When it came to seeing the Bad Brains play live, it comes closer to gospel truth.

But here’s the thing about their eponymous 1980 debut, which is also known as The Yellow Tape or Attitude: The ROIR Sessions—while it’s an astounding recording of an astounding band, I can’t listen to it without wishing I’d been there to see them do their thing live. In fact I never listen to it at all, because I know in my bones that seeing them live was everything. As Robert Christgau pointed out, and if could say it better I would, “great punk bands give up more than a salubrious blur.” And that’s all you hear on Bad Brains—a blur, with H.R.’s incantatory vocals serving as just another instrument because it’s virtually impossible to understand a word he’s singing.

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Remembering Jerry Garcia, born on this date in 1942. —Ed.

The Grateful Dead: God invented ‘em at the same time he invented the sloth. They were renowned for their shambolic jams, lethargic grooves, and endless noodling—when I saw them I saw ‘em with Bob Dylan in 1987, they played a version of “Joey” that lasted longer than The War of Jenkin’s Ear. One critic wrote of the show I attended, “Pity anyone who actually sat through [it]… with a clear head.” Well, my head was about as clear as stained glass, and it didn’t much matter. There simply aren’t enough narcotics in the world to make “Drums and Space” anything but torture. I’d have asked for my money back if I hadn’t seen, with my own eyes, an acid casualty try to snort a Birkenstock.

Truth is, I saw the Grateful Dead decades too late. Because it’s a cold hard fact that the Dead were a spent force in the studio by the mid-70s, and definitely dead in the water by the time they released those twin abominations, 1977’s Terrapin Station and 1978’s Shakedown Street. Even their famed live shows went downhill—Donna Godchaux, anyone?—as they cycled through keyboardists the way Spın̈al Tap went through drummers and Jerry Garcia gradually dedicated more and more time to his various pharmaceutical side projects.

Still, theirs is a fascinating history. The Grateful Dead began their career playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, and through their connection with Merry Prankster Neil Cassady bridged the Beat Movement of the Fifties and the Hippie Culture of the Sixties. The early Dead played a psychedelic soup of the blues and acid-trip-length explorations of inner space, but by the late sixties had tightened things up to become a stellar, if notoriously erratic and self-indulgent, live act. I love large chunks of 1969’s live Grateful Dead (which the band wanted to call Skull Fuck) and Europe ’72, but my favorite Grateful Dead albums were both released in 1970—namely, those two studio masterpieces, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

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Celebrating Jeffrey Hammond on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Despite their much-vaunted reputation for producing ambitious concept albums of enormous heft, Jethro Tull are bearable only as a singles band. Sure, Tull’s 1971 concept album Aqualung is a classic, but I’d sooner be hit with a brick than listen to the following year’s concept album Thick as a Brick, and the only passionate feelings I can summon up for 1973’s concept album A Passion Play (yes, they hit the trifecta!) can be summed up with the words “Turn it off.” But “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Living in the Past”? Count me in!

Ian Anderson has always been an entertaining and exasperating crank—stand him on one leg like a deranged flamingo and hand him a flute and he will tie your mind into sailors’ knots with his folk-rock swoops, loops, and other assorted paradiddle, that is when he isn’t spouting folksy wisdom and moralistic sermons of the sort you’d expect from the stewed Diogenes permanently welded to the end stool in your local pub.

I disagree with The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who wrote of old flamingo leg “Ian Anderson is one of those people who attracts admirers by means of a principled arrogance that has no relation to his actual talents or accomplishments” for the simple reason that Anderson is talented—he has simply misused his talent for evil. Thick as a Brick is ample proof of this fact.

But it takes a real genius to fritter away all of one’s talent, and Anderson isn’t that sort of real genius. Seemingly despite himself he has produced songs that don’t happen to be almost forty-four minutes long. And I’m talking pithy and unique songs, the best of which made seventies FM radio a happier place. But eccentric that he is he didn’t manage to come up with enough radio-ready classics to fill a greatest hits compilation, which is at least in part what makes 1976’s M.U. – The Best of Jethro Tull so interesting.

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I can imagine a planet whose inhabitants listen only to AC/DC. The same cannot be said for Television, Iggy Pop, Harry Chapin, The Cars, Canned Heat, The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, The Swans, T. Rex, U2, The Indigo Girls, The Supremes, The Clash, Joan Jett, The White Stripes, Wilco, Green Day, Jethro Tull, or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I can imagine a planet whose inhabitants listen only to Barry Manilow, but I don’t want to.

Aussie brutalists with filthy minds and even filthier riffs, AC/DC only knew how to do one thing, and they did it with puritanical austerity; they make the Ramones sound positively baroque. When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, and like any simple (but anything but dumb) tool AC/DC knew their function—during their tenure on this planet they kept it missionary position simple, pounding out primal riff after primal riff, album after album, year after year, decade after decade, with nary a synthesizer, ballad (power or otherwise), concept album, string section, or abortive disco move to sully their bad reputation (although they used bagpipes once!).

They kept things as basic as an electric chair, and theirs has been the preferred method of execution for generations of metalheads savvy enough to understand that songs with more than three chords in them (are you paying attention, Rush and Metallica?) are wastes of perfectly good chords. The things don’t grow on trees, you know. There are only 4,083 of them, and if you play them all music’s finished! AC/DC were musical conservationists, and one rock’s biggest contributors to the Save the Chords Foundation.

Only one thing changed in AC/DC’s long, drunken tour bus ride on the highway to hell’s bells. I’m talking, of course, about Bon Scott’s booze-related death on February 19, 1980. Scott was the personification of rock ’n’ roll—no matter what he was singing about it came out sounding like a dirty joke, and you got the idea he had to have his tonsils into the car mechanic’s every six weeks to have them degreased.

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Celebrating Mick Jagger on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

I’ve been down in the dumps of late; the suicide of a friend, the death of another friend I dearly loved, and a bad case of the blues have all pretty much brought me to my knees. I feel beat down, fucked over, and broken up, and life sure does have a way of tarnishing your eyelids, doesn’t it?

Where to turn in times like these? When you’ve got a foot in the grave and your head in the oven? Exile on Main Street, naturally. It’s as beat down an LP as ever you’ll hear; Mick, Keith and Company are torn and frayed and have shit on their shoes and the whole album sounds like it was recorded in a sub-basement of Hell.

And yet. The Rolling Stones’ 1972 bruised and battered masterpiece (and high-water mark) somehow manages to rise above the bad vibes and general miasma of death and dissolution that surrounded the band at the time. Nothing–not drug busts, the death of Brian Jones, Altamont, tax exile, or Keith Richards’ slide toward junkiedom–could stop the Stones from turning Exile on Main Street into a celebration of hope and soul survival.

And this despite the fact that the album is the aural equivalent of the La Brea tar pits. Mick Jagger has never stopped carping about Exile’s notoriously sludgy mix, but the murk doesn’t just work–it’s part and parcel of the double album’s greatness. You have to trudge through shit to get to the Promised Land, and if you scrape the shit off these songs, well, you find diamonds. “Turd on the Run” anyone?

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Put aside for a moment the critical praise that has been heaped upon this late sixties experimental electronics psychedelic folk-rock music group and their one and only album over the decades and listen to me: The United States of America suck. 1968’s The United States of America is a diabolical slog and war crime, released just ten days before that other war crime the My Lai Massacre, and comparisons can be made. It also happens to be one of the approximately 485 discs from 2005’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die you’ll be lucky NOT to hear before you die. Indeed it could well be—if you have a heart condition or good taste—the LAST album you hear before you die.

How to describe the album? Well, it’s well nigh impossible, but let’s just call it The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as conceived by minor Fluxus composer/ ethnomusicologist/ social satirist/ member in good standing of the Communist Party USA/ electronics tinkerer Joseph Byrd and vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz, who worked in musical theater production and once sang in a vocal group with that other Fluxus legend, Art Garfunkel. Along with a cast of avant garde sympathizers, one of whom plays the electric violin and ring modulator but none of whom condescend to play the electric guitar. A former member of Canned Heat was involved early on. But he wisely asked himself why he would want to go from Canned Heat to an even worse band and promptly made himself scarce.

A few of the songs on The United States of America are relatively straightforward, but the big production numbers are infernal machines complete with lyrics every bit as smug and condescending as those of Frank Zappa. It’s not an edifying combination. The only positive thing to to be said about The United States of America is it includes brief flashes of hard-driving dissonance reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. But they’re few and fleeting, and too often buried in songs best left to those who enjoy being flogged by sound collages.

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