Just Don't Call It A Playlist! Dept. - The Beatles

The Beatles Aloha album includes all the songs they issued in '68 that didn't appear on official Beatles albums. Aloha means both hello and goodbye. It's a complete, cohesive and unissued album from the aching void between Pepper and the White Album.

It doesn't include Magical Mystery Tour ep tracks because that's a Beatles-created side project. It does include tracks from Yellow Submarine and the US Magical Mystery Tour album, because these were label-led marketing projects to which the band only contributed signatures on a contract.

All these songs bundled together make for a perfect 37 minute album, programmed naturally into two sides. Play this after Pepper, and see if you don't agree it's a stronger piece of work. It sounds and flows like it was conceived and recorded as an album. The band at the top of their game (and I'm not the world's greatest Beatles fan). Packed with hits, too, which is more than can be said for the albums to either side of it.

I'm kind of surprised that, as far as I know, this rather obvious project hasn't occurred to anybody else (if it has, I missed it). Imagine it as a vinyl release. It would generate millions and BILLIONS of bucks and rekindle excitement for the band's back catalog, before they're all dead. It could be remixed by Giles Martin, and they could use the contemporary Richard Avedon portraits. Why haven't they? They haven't thought of it. Never occurred to anybody in the Beatles camp that there is a huge fucking 1968-shaped hole in their album discography. Incredible, really, and everybody's loss.

Here's a lo-res back cover, using the Avedon portrait that was thrown away in the gatefold to the crappy 'Love Songs' cash-in. Paul was originally off to the left. I had to beef up the color and contrast to Paul's psychedelic mugshot on the front, because Avedon deliberately bleached it out to have less impact than the others. Not his favorite Beatle!

I've shilled this album before, but perhaps inventing a whimsically humorous story around it did it no favors, so this is for those who missed it or didn't understand what it was. This download is a tad improved on the previous - it's "unbanded" - continuous play, closely edited, and tagged so the individual songs don't get confused with versions you already have. And the very welcome new fade to Hey Jude has been smoothed out. Also included is The Compleat Pepper, so with these two non-existent albums you have a complete Technicolor portrait of them in 67/68, when they wus fab.

The Myra Nussbaum Memorial Lectures Dept. - Why The Blues Music Is Shit

Mrs Nussbaum invites you into her lovely home, yesterday! Note tasteful Siegheil & Roy memorial statue, youthful ward Clynt readying for bikini wax session! 

Editorial note: previously, Mrs Nussbaum has made award-winningly persuasive cases for Why Classical Music Is Shit, and Why Jazz Music Is Shit. Such is her unquestioned authority, a tearful Zubin Mehta of The Los Angeles Philharmonics snapped his baton in half after her takedown, sobbing "I can never wave this stupid stick at a bunch of fiddle-scraping penguins again." After exhaustive research and consultation with the finest musicologists, Mrs Nussbaum now presents her devastating critique of yet another sacrosanct musical genre, The Blues Music.
(Although we are honored by her patronage, Mrs Nussbaum's opinions are her own and do not necessarily represent Fabulous False Memory Foam Island©, its subsidiary companies, shareholders, or creditors. Take it away, Mrs Myra!)

"Thank you, my esteemed friend Farquhar Throckmorton III! Yes, the Blues Music is shit, and I'm here to tell you why! It's just a bunch of old bums complaining and whining, and I had enough of that with my late husband Melvin may he rot in hell bless his soul. My fuggin' bursitis, these fuggin' accountants, those New York fuggin' Mets, your fuggin' charge account, yadda-yadda ... with the kvetching, enough already! So the last thing I want to hear while Clynt attends to a woman's intimate needs is my baby done left me, lawdy I'm broke and drunk, got no shoes grunted over an out-of-tune guitar! Who wants to listen to some self-pitying toothless bum groaning on about how he can't get it up no more?!? Oh, excuse me, boo-fuggin'-hoo! Do you hear me complaining about my life?  My message to you? Cheer up or shut up!

And that just about wraps it up! Any questions? You, at the back, sir?"

This post crowd-funded by Millennial Snowflakes For More Kittens.org

Perfect Tens Dept. - Strange Days

A Perfect Ten is awarded to albums with no weakness, including the cover and the title. Which disqualifies Pet Sounds! Crazy system, I know. I don't make the rules. Strange Days is note perfect, from the cover to the spindle hole.

 

THE COVER

Art directed by the great Harvey S. Williams, who was responsible for the Elektra house style, which included the use of the Rockwell font. There may have been a pun in there? The photograph, by the equally great Joel Brodsky, has some futzery happening - note building at end of alley, repetition and slicing and change of scale. What the actual? Don't think about this, because it will drive you nuts. I had to undergo weeks of counseling.

Sniffen Court, 36th St, between Lexington and Third, yesterday. No, you can't afford to live here. You can't afford to know anyone who can afford to live here. You can't even afford to look through the gates. G'wan, beat it, ya bum!

 

Jimbo didn't want his mugshot, or the band's, on the cover. Pretty extraordinary, really. If you were a sultry Dionysian sex god (that if is doing a lot of heavy lifting) you'd want your picture on the cover. Brodsky suggested Fellini-esque strangeness, and the band went for it. The Short People are twin actors, the juggler is Brodsky's assistant, the trumpet player a passing cab driver (hat - driver's own), the weightlifter a bouncer, and only the acrobats are professional performers. The hippie chick, I can reveal, is Velda Kowznofski, and her phone number is BIGELOW 472-1906.

 

DIEGETIC

You'd of thunk that would be enough to bestow significance on what is one of the greatest album covers, like, literally, ever, but there's more! It's very likely the first example of diegetic design on an album cover. And we're going to take a hinge at that word diegetic, because you don't know (or care much) about what it means. It's probably the first time it's been used in the context of rock music album cover analysis. You can look it up, practice it in front of a mirror, and casually drop it into the conversation with your lowlife pals at the dog track.

The name and photos of the band, and the title of the album, appear in posters on the walls. So - not on the cover at all! This, as well as being diegetic, is unprecedented awesomeness.

 

CHARIVARI

Your second Snob Vocab du jour! It behooves you to look the fucking word up, because if I tell you, it'll pass straight through like that Chipotle burrito you floated on a keg of Coors last nite.

Charivari, or the later US variant Shivaree, is exactly what's going on here, and it's perfect.

 

THE MUSIC

You know how highly this album is rated. You may even rate it highly yourself, although, fascinatingly, a little lower than YOUR FAVORITE HERE. It was recorded on a sumptuous 8-track console, like those in-car tape players [Eh? - Ed.], and unlike the live-in-the-studio approach of the debut, used the sophisticated production facilities available at LA's prestigious Sunset Sound to achieve a consistent, although shifting, mood of strangeness, like no other album before it. The cover and the music act in perfect symbiosisness. Symbioctivity. Whatever. Unlike The Soft Parade, the studio never gets in the way of the music. Everything is a whole, ya dig? It's like this, uh, whole thing, man. Beautiful. Oh wow.

 

 

This post funded in part by the Eschewal Of Obfuscation Society, Pork Bend, AK. My thanks to Zebedee Veeblefetzer.

 

TV's Sir David Of Attenborough Centenary! Dept.

Cover Art © IoF© Art Department Of Art® Dept. All Rights Reserved (and some of the lefts)

Lord Attenborough gets his ton! Happy Birthday!

You'll know TV's Sir Attenborough from his award-winning kids' puppet shows such as like We Fucked Up Our Beautiful Planet And All The Elephants Are Dying, but did you know he was hemp enthusiasts The Small Faces' go-to guy for recreational pharmacy? That's right, subscribers! Leave us lissen in as Sir Attenborough reveals shocking truth via Foam-O-Fone©!

The Nice, high above the fertile tundra, yestiddy

FMF Sir Attenborough! Looking cool there! Which is where?

SA Here, five thousand feet above the fertile tundra of -

FMF Right, right! So what's with this Small Faces story?

SA Ah! I am honoured to be the inspiration for their chart-topping disc, Here Comes The Nice! Back in Swingin' London, one was very much the globetrotter, bringing back treasures galore from exotic lands, steamer trunks bursting with rare herbal remedies! So of course one shared one's bounty, being a nice chap, and that was how muggins here became known as The Nice!

FMF And you have an album for us?

SA Indeed I do! It's an unissued compilation of their, shall we say, jazz cigarette tunes? Andy [Andrew Loog Oldham - Ed.] put it together before the whole thing went pear-shaped. And a very evocative Gerry Mankowitz photograph on the front. Gerry [Gered Mankovitz - Ed.] and I were oft to be seen getting off our heads at the Roundhouse [The Roundhouse - Ed.]! (laughs) He came up with the name for this long-playing LP, incidentally, during one of our famous "sessions"!

FMF Maryon Park? Any clues?

SA The lads in the group liked elliptical titles, something a little more imaginative, and this is no exception. Perhaps you might quiz th' Four Or Five Guys©? Maybe one of them might come up with an explanation!

FMF Uh ... yeah. Or likely not, probably. I doubt they read this far. Some of 'em can't even. But thanks for sharing this with us, and drop by th' Isle any time! It's a copacetic microcosm of microclimatical nanoculture!

SA (laughs) Shall I bring my - steamer trunk?

FMF (laughs) That would be swell, Sir Nice!

SA (laughs) 

FMF (laughs) 

Oright, oright, you've 'ad your fun, settle down, settle down ...

I *cough* curated this because in their appropriately short lifespan The Small Faces made music that expressed the times better than just about anybody, their super-smashing pop hits as slyly subversive as they were memorable. Steve Marriott is possibly the greatest male vocalist the UK ever produced, with a staggering emotional range, and deceptively accomplished technique grounded in his drama studies and acting experience [←original critical aperçu - Ed.]. He's always bang in the middle of the note, and he inhabits the song using phrasing and inflection in a way that seems natural and unthinking but is pure - and brilliant - technique. The Artful Dodger knew what he was doing with every note he sang. Shame he squandered his great gift in a life of squalid excess, ain't it?

So why this album again? I wanted the definitive, cohesive, pop-psych masterclass minus the overwrought stuff, omitting the knees-up sing-alongs, and without the Hammond-heavy club groovers. Ogden's Nut Gone Flake gets a lot of love, but the Stanley Unwin story-telling gets old very quickly, and side one's a little ragged. Autumn Stone is at once too much and not enough, and sounds like what it is, a bit of a barrel-scrape. So this, then. I've paced the hits so they don't dominate, and maybe they sound fresher in a new context. 

That tracklist in full:

Become Like You/Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire/Here Comes The Nice/Just Passing/Show Me The Way/I'm Only Dreaming/Green Circles/Itchycoo Park/Donkey Rides, A Penny, A Glass/The Universal/Call It Something Nice/The Autumn Stone

Why isn't [YOUR CHOICE HERE] included? Because reasons. Like other similarly humble exercises in improving on artists' original brilliance here on th' IoF©, this is above all a playable album with a flow to it, at listenable length, with more thought behind it than playlists or bonus tracks editions or completist archival sets. You'll dig it on account which it's swell.

This post homologated thru our sponsors: Pearl Necklaces By Dirty Sanchez™, Beverly Hills, LA.

 

This piece Certified IoF© Greatest Hit!

ZZ Top - Everything You Want PLUS! Nothing You Need Dept.

Is this you?

The CD Era was a time of wonders. I disposed of most of my disposable income buying CD duplicates of my vinyl collection, which had already disposed of most of my disposable income. Why? Because I was a damn fool, in retrospect. But I wasn't alone in being duped into stacking up the nasty, sharp-edged items of office equipment with their stupid "jewel boxes" and flimsy illegible "inserts" and functionally ugly "label designs". I think I hated the damn things from the start but went on buying them because I was earning stupid money and had a Hugo Boss suit and a company Peugeot 1.9 GTI. Make stupid money, buy stupid stuff! I never felt so alive! New albums became obligatory CD purchases as vinyl dried up. And then the music industry suckered us into buying CD duplicates of music we already had on CD. Remastered with extra tracks! Limited edition miniature card sleeves! Oboyoboyoboy! TAKE MY MONEY!! Never mind that the vast majority of the "bonus" tracks were demo, live and alternate versions that did nothing to enhance the album, I wanted them! BOX SETS!! Gimme two, so I can keep one sealed!

Airbrush, cursed forerunner of AI

Talking of box sets, what we have here is one of the worst examples of Sucker CD ever issued, a remixed set of the first six ZZ Top albums [left - Ed.]. This might - just - have been a valid exercise if the remixes hadn't replaced the original mixes, which you couldn't buy anymore. It got a righteous kicking from those sharp-eared enough to notice it deserved one. As egregious as Zappa's '84 butchery of Money/Lumpy, the remix was an attempt to sound contemporary. In that, it's entirely successful, because in '87 contemporary music sounded like shit. Inevitably, there's now a critical reassessment along the lines of "it's just different". Er ... so was Zappa's '84 Money/Lumpy twofer.

 

 

Kustom sleeve, only at IoF©!

Rhino (we're supposed to type "the good people at" in front of that, but I refuse, because I'm a rebel, me) eventually made up for it with a box of original mixes, Chrome, Smoke & BBQ in '03. The Four Or Five Guys© are encouraged to make their own minds up as to which they prefer. I'd suggest comparing the two versions of Tush initially, and if you think the Six Pack version is better, that's fine. All opinions are equally respected and welcome, and we are nothing if not a broad church. Just never, never, paddle your coracle over to th' IoF© ever, ever again.

 

 

 

Note ZZ Top fan, bottom right. When you finish eyeing her chest puppies.

 

This post scrimshawed on a narwhal's tusk by a Esquimeau as part of th' IoF©'s cultural appropriation outreach program. Write for details.