BAYMI Dept.

Betcha wish you blinked, right?

 

Tedeschi Trucks Must Die! Dept.

 

Real human art or AI? Dreadful either way

I wanted to like this album. I've always wanted to like Tedeschi Trucks. What harm do they do? None. They bring wholesome rock n' roll entertainment to many, many good people - media and IT consultants, mostly, wellness mentors, realtors, barristas, craft beer entrepreneurs, bitcoin traders. A Prius with oat milk lattés in the cooler. The TTB's festival gigs have extended families literally standing up with excitement across the USA, and getting home in time for bed. What am I, the Grinch at Christmas?

Not being able to join in the fun at their gigs, I've dutifully listened to their albums hoping to hear something, like songwriting, to convince me they're worth my time. They perform a lot of covers, which is not only a respectful nod to those great musicians who went before them but also an admission they have trouble coming up with material. Sooner or later - preferably sooner - they had to come up with their own Layla or Dark Star or Ramblin' Man. They just can't. I'm sure their fans can tell the songs apart, but to anyone outside that blessed circle they've made no impact at all.

It's not a question of competence. They have competence out the ass. Trucks is a fine guitarist, if *cough* a little lacking in charisma and on-stage dynamism. To the point that it's hard to see if he's even up there - you're thinking that the potato in Target duds is a guitar tech, tuning up. Tedeschi has a winning voice, and she's sexy in a kind of Walton's Mountain way. Amish schoolmarm sexy. Not too much of a threat to Mom out there keeping an eye on hubby! Neither of them could write a hit at gunpoint. There are, at last count, thirty-seven musicians in the band. Some of them have to stay in the tour bus because there's no room on stage. Excuse me, but Jimi Hendrix was three guys, and one of those couldn't play. The Who? Four, and one of those just swung a mic. They set everything on fire, made the sound of planets colliding ...

Oh dear.

When this album was touted as their song album - heavy on hooks, light on noodling - I pulled on a pair of freshly-laundered pre-aged Levi's (made in China) and my original collector's item Official Revelator Tour Shirt (made in China), swung my TTB ball cap (made in China) backward and settled in for some good old-fashioned rock n' roll. Spoiler - not.

Take a hinge at that cover. It's either AI or a real human artist painting exactly like AI. Whatever. But there's some significance here - the TTB are real humans who sound exactly like AI. The songs have that generic, flat, sterile, faultlessly competent, no-surprises-here sound. They slide on by in an agreeable and entirely unmemorable mid-tempo snooze, never breaking out into the excitement zone. Never making your neck hairs bristle or your palms sweat. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, a fine, responsible married couple who are also the two most joyless fucks in showbiz.

Let's worry less about machines doing human stuff and worry more about humans doing human stuff. Taking risks, having a laugh, getting angry. 

This post written somewhere between resignation and annoyance.

TV's Pamela Anderson BLASTS Cheap-Ass Sleeve Design! Dept.

Watch out, cheap-ass sleeve designers! Pammie's got YOU in her sights!

You'll know TV's Pam Anderson from her iconic role as Corabeth Godsey in long-running NBC series Best Little Whorehouse On The Prairie, but did you know she's a keen collector of sixties psychedelia and garage music?

Tommy Lee Godsey, yestiddy!

 

 

Pammie jet-skied over to th' IoF© yestiddy to wax passionate anent her pet gripe; bootleg-quality sleeves for otherwise notable re-issues! We relaxed poolside whilst Kreemé [left - couldn't source Kreemé pic - will this do? - Ed.] served her signature bin-water and crocodile smegma smoothies!

 

 

FT3 Heyyyy! Pammie baby! Long time no see!

PA Too long, Farq! [sighs yearningly]

FT3 You must put me behind you, sweetpants!

PA That was always my favorite position [flutters eyelashes seductively]

FT3 So what's got your dander up this time, Pamster?

PA Ooh! Well, Farq, it's this here archival release of famed Bay Area psych-punk pioneers The Oxford Circles! Take a hinge at this cheap-ass sleeve design! [left - Ed.]

FT3 Yikes! My eyes hurt!

PA I mean, this is like, an important group, featuring members of the Blue Cheers and the Kaks! It's a top-quality historic live recording, plus their rare single as a bonus! You'd of thunk they'd of did better than this asswipe piece a shit bootleg shit!

FT3 Why, it's a disgrace!

PA [suggestively] So I have a favor to ax, Farq ...

FT3 Which I just had me lunch, Pamsie. Egg n' onion semmitch. It's not sittin' right [eases up butt cheek hopefully].

PA Could you just whip out your ... crayons and do me a nice sleeve design?

FT3 [chuckles modestly] Why, I'd be delighted! You just go relax with Kreemé in the hot tub, and I'll be done in a hour or so! Nuthin' I like more than a sleeve job!

PA Just like old times!

Sleeve job by IoF© Art Department O' Art Dept.

 

 

This post posted in a transparent attempt to get more page views for a swell deliverable! Incidentally, this is one of my funnier pieces. Go ahead, yok it up, ya cheap ingrate. I'm giving this stuff away! Why, you lousy bums, for two cents I'd ... I'd ...

 

 

 

 

From Rave-Up To Freak Out Dept. - The Butterfield Blues Band

Chick backing singers were big back then

 

The first rock band to stretch out with live improv was The Yardbirds [not above, have patience - Ed.]. They weren't the first to play US-style RnB, that would probably be Alexis Korner and some fat middle-aged bloke in glasses called Cyril, but it's a stretch to call them a rock group. Or interesting. So probably the Stones. 

But the Yardies [left - Ed.] were having a Rave-Up, as they called it, back in early '64, lifting audiences into a frenzy through improvisation (or playing what the fuck they felt like) rather than just turning up and trying to sound like the records. This was a seismic shift in rock music performance. I have no time for Clapton Cancelers. He's a fantastic and important guitarist and a fine songwriter, so shut up. You should extend him the forgiveness rightly given the old blues guys themselves, who weren't exactly bothered by wokeness. He was the first British rock musician to whip the audience into a froth with an improvised guitar solo, and later, the first to use a Les Paul, creating the sound of hard rock. The Kinks had already built the structure with 'You Really Got Me', in (guess when) '64. Where do Yer Beatles fit in? They don't.

On the other side of the world, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were extending the possibilities of rock guitar by having Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop in the same band. Yikes. Dylan witnessed how their electricity knocked folkies off their chairs at Newport, and got them to back him the next day. Yup. Not The Band.

Their first album [left - Ed.] appeared in '65, an authentic blast of Chicago blues from a rock band format. We need to talk about the cover. Note black dudes, the rhythm section from Howlin' Wolf's touring band. Black and white in the same band back then was pretty unusual. They're pictured standing in front of what looks like a head shop. Incense, herbs, oils ... quacks like a duck, right? But the internet is insistent that the first head shop appeared in '66, one whole year later. Hmm ... The Butterfield Blues Band sure were ahead of their time! A head, geddit?? It's like a play on words! Fuck you. And there's the font, which looks unremarkable today. The Beatles are sometimes credited with the first psychedelic lettering on an album cover (Rubber Soul), but the artist has denied any connection with or knowledge of the nascent psychedelic scene - the letters look like rubber, duh. Here, the great Elektra house designer Harvey S. Williams - carve his name with pride - uses the first recognisably psychedelic font that inspired Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso (and everyone else), two years before the Summer of Love. Does this matter? Of course it does.

But it's their second album from '66 I want to talk about [above top, and about time. I'll be in the bar if you need me, so don't. - Ed.], because it took The Yardbird's improvisational initiative and set a template for rock guitar performance (and, uh, jam bands) ever since. It's a groundbreaking and massively enjoyable album that often gets overlooked. Unlike the Stones' perfunctory eleven minute 'Goin' Home' in the same year - they were never a jam band - the 'East-West' title song is a thirteen minute, dynamically-structured improvisation featuring the raga-influenced playing we associate with '67. And no drum solo. It's totally groovy and far out. There's also a funkified version of the Monkees' 'Mary, Mary' which sounds entirely natural, a jazzy eight minute work-out of 'Work Song', the achingly soulful 'Never Say No', and, of course, some fine Chicago blues greased by Butterfield's raucous harp blowing. There's a live-in-the-studio feel and the whole album sounds as vivid as the day it was recorded.

What happened to relegate this great band to the where-are-they-now file? After a faultless and viscerally exciting couple of years, the PBBB squandered everything through dizzying lineup changes and entirely losing the plot. They went from authentically, unconsciously, psychedelic to Hallmark Hippie in the space of a few months, playing a song called Love March at Woodstock, ffs, adding horns, losing impetus. Blues rock was a global phenom, dominated by Cream, who not only did the extended live improv but had punchy, memorable and exciting hit singles that had nothing to do with the blues. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were yesterday's mashed potato, mostly unrecognised at the time and mostly forgotten since.

Today's deliverables catch them at their prime: the pre-first album recordings, a nifty soundtrack album featuring rare cuts, the first album, and 'East-West'.

 

This post inspired by a random appearance of 'East-West' on the Shuffle-O-Meter© on the road to Sakhorn Nakhon, which isn't pronounced like Foghorn Leghorn.

It's Time To Play The Music Dept.

 

Yes, by the third album the band was on the ropes. Kermit in rehab, Miss Piggy doing time in the Pork Bend Correctional Facility ... the years on the road had taken their toll. "It wasn't even us on the third album," Kermit rues today. "It was a contractual obligation thing, put together without our knowledge. I didn't get a cent from it. None of us did."

Eventually, the band got their act together. Made movies, more TV shows. Garnered an entire new audience as well as welcoming back what was left of their old one. "We're older but wiser," Kermit laughs from his Winnebago on the set of Muppet Yo' Mama. "Sure, we each have our own management, entourage, fitness trainers, wellness mentors, and once the cameras stop rolling we head for our homes and families. But occasionally I spin that first album, and yeah, I miss those days. We were punk before punk was a thing! I'm proud of that."

 

My thanks to Kermit The Frog for making time for me!