Better Than I Remember Dept. - The Charlies

Original unused cover design featured, like, literally coolest F1 driver, like, ever. Literally.

My first impulse, back in whenever, was to boo these upstarts for appropriating the name of a very important, if not actually that enjoyable, West Coast band from the Acid Years (The Charlatans, in case you're having attention issues). It was like a new band calling themselves Country Joe And The Fish, as far as I was concerned. But that first single [Indian Rope, 1990 - Ed.] was pretty damn swell, I had to admit. Good enough to turn me into an Accredited Charlies Consumer, the kind of unthinking, cash-rich fan every band needs. Then real life interrupted for a few decades, as it will, and my fansomeness only reactivated a week or so back with the release of the Somethingieth Anniversary edish of Some Friendly, their funkified first album.

Rholonne Déodoranté

 

I didn't think time would be kind to it. But it sounds better than I remember. It's always a delight to listen to a real band with a proper rhythm section, and the drums n' bass are so deep in the pocket they're rattling your kneecaps [This is very good, Farq. I don't often compliment you, but this is exactly the kind of content the internet needs right now - Ed.]. Add some acid jazz Hammond B3 and guitar that leaves you wanting more, and they cook up a timeless funky stew that leans into psychedelia just enough to invoke the term. Tim Burgess had the looks and the presence, but his voice is that rather weedy English placeholder thing, nothing to make the hairs on the back of your neck bristle. The Ian Brown school of underachievement. And the songs tend to the unmemorable, unless you play them a lot, which you just might. Because the album is absolutely playable, all the way through, with just enough variation to keep a grin on your face as you essay some ill-advised dance moves.

 

I wish they'd been able to use the original cover (the Marlboro thing scuppered it), because James Hunt has exactly the cool swagger of the music, and there's maybe a resemblance to Burgess. But here it is, probably its first public appearance.

 

Fast forward thirty-five years ...

The Charlies redux. Thirty-five years of setbacks and calamities, deaths and disappointments. The melodies are stronger, Tim's voice has improved with age, gaining a little grit. The sound is lush and deep and wide, but the album never dips into the generic - there's care and skill and imagination in every beat, every note, and it's distinctly a Charlatans album - couldn't be anybody else.

The original cover is terrible, almost inevitably, a scruffy, half-thought out, almost cynical example of this-will-do-ism. They have form here. So here's an alternative I crayoned up which has some resonance with the title, without even knowing the back story. 

Richard Luttrell wrote this letter and left it at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. along with the photograph he'd kept.

"Dear Sir, For twenty two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never know... Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the way I was trained..."

In March 2000, Luttrell travelled to Vietnam to meet with the daughter of the man he met on the trail in Chu Lai. [PBS War Letters - Ed.]

Most album covers are missed opportunities, rushed afterthoughts. They have an incredible, undervalued reach. Listen to the last track on this terrific album, and think of that boy sent to kill strangers in a strange land. Still happening.

 

This post made possible by the magic of muscle memory. 

 

 

GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY! Jimmy Durante - Godfather Of Surf? Dept.

Say, fellows! Can you descry producer's credit, bottom left?

You'll know veteran comedian Jimmy Durante from previous visits to th' IoF© [here and here - Ed.], but did you know he has an important role in the development of surf music? As unlikely as this sounds, it's more unlikely that you did, given your lamentable education and lack of interest in the really important stuff, so I'll tells ya! Those of you with short-term memory skills undimmed by the passing of the years may remember the last piece to appear here a couple of days back, featuring Michael Lloyd's tragic descent into music biz success [Here's a link so you don't have to scroll and make your eyes go funny - Ed.]. During the course of my research I learned that Lloyd's Godfather was none other than Th' Shnozzola hisself, James Q. Durante! But wait! There's more! But first, take a hinge at this ultra-rare piece of movie memorabilia from the collection of the late Gene Siskel:

Only evidence that movie ever existed!

 

That was fun, wasn't it? Probably the most fun you're going to have all day, which is simultaneantly heartwarming and throat-slashingly pathetic. But back to 1963 or whenever it was. Lloyd was in the successful surfbeat combo The New Dimensions, what you ain't heared of because frankly you don't care that much about anything since your ex torched your trailer home with your Pokemon© collection still in it. But this band could actually play, looked spiffy, and got to support some major major acts, such as like f'rinstance the Beach Boys. Wow! Great Concert! And it was th' Shnozz what gifted the young Michael Lloyd with an actual Fender guitar, which was like giving him a Cadillac full of blondes in bikinis. Anyway, they wus dumb kids and signed a contract with a couple of feckless rubes just off the Azusa bus, ensuring no income from their three record albums, the first of which is today's FoamFeature™ Deliverable, and as far as I'm aware the only place you'll find it in this condition on the internet. It may be on SoulSuck, but so what. (Mildly interesting factoid: it was because of SoulSuck's frosty, insular, no-help attitude that I started this blog thing.)

It's surprisingly fantastic. There's some real production imagination added to musical skill making it a cut above most surfbeat albums. As it's on the dump-bin Sutton label, there are no credits (so musicians and composers lose their royalties), no band picture, and the producer's name - which really interests me - is illegibly small, bottom left front cover. William J. Something? Robert J. Whomever? He knew his stuff. It's in true stereo, not a standard thing back in '63 and totally unexpected on a no-budget label like Sutton. There's always something fun and imaginative happening in the arrangements and mix. And it's twenty - count 'em! - fun-packed minutes long! Hoo boy!

After cutting a couple more albums, with an ill-advised Hail Mary pass at soul, the band [left - Ed.] morphed into ... ta daa! ... dese guys:

... and let me tell you, it's a crushing disappointmink. They're basically a franks n' beans white blues band. Yes, they played on the Strip and were probably great fun to watch at Pandora's Box, and yes, they had top-line talent supporting them on the album - Bones Howe, Larry Knechtel, Hal Blaine, Mike Deasy, and ... Warren Zevon. And they were pretty good players and singers themselves (although Lloyd had moved on). But it's as exciting as waiting for dial-up in Uzbekhistan. There's a version of Smokestack Lightning that lasts until next Thursday and is nearly as crushingly wretched as Love's version on Da Capo, with a drum solo that will have you frantically climbing a tall building to jump off. I'm not uploading it, as a pubic cervix. The New Dimensions album is better in every way, except the cover. Perhaps. I should mention Art Guy, who was not the graphic designer but the drummer. The graphic designer was probably Drum Guy.

Cooling to my theme ...

This "evolution" of pop into rock is a clear illustration of what was lost. By '69, when the Smokestack Lightnin' album limped out, surf music was dead in the water - SWIDT? - and times were suddenly grim. The brief Technicolor burst of the Summer Of Love had faded into clouds of foreboding. Nobody was playing the ridiculously-named Surf n' Bongos album, or even remembered the group. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" may work sometimes, but not here, for what was gone was innocence, and that's gone forever in pop, evolving into today's AI shuffle of familiar elements. Doesn't matter if it's an algorithm or the more insidious human version, pop is a constant reshuffle of an old, old hand. In '63 The New Dimensions were a product of a scene (don't sneer, it's exactly the right word) that was exciting, fun, and fresh. Dick Dale and a few others were doing it already, but it was happening, right there and then, the product of a limited but intensely vivid youth culture with the money and the time to get it moving. There was no playbook, they weren't ticking boxes, they weren't playing within a tradition, but they were having as much fun as they knew how.

The Smokestack Lightnin' album is no fun at all. It's unfair to single it out, perhaps, there were hundreds of bands worldwide doing the same thing, grabbing at shreds of authenticity by appropriating black culture. Check out the seriousness of the cover shot. Po' boy caps, 'tache n' glasses ... not a surfboard or a smile in sight. I'm not a great fan of the real blues. It's not a question of musical quality or whatever, I can't feel it's speaking either for or to me. It's as distant, culturally speaking, as biergarten polka, and perhaps shamefully, as boring. But whiteboy blues bands I have even less time for. They have that late 'sixties, early 'seventies dreariness, a sense of hunkering down paranoid post-acid bleakness and death of dream that I remember all too clearly.

No, we can't be frugging to The New Dimensions supporting The Beach Boys in '63, but playing the record re-ignites a spark of innocence. The memory of it can be indiscernible from the real thing. What, me worry?

This post made possible by a heatwave that's keeping me indoors, chugging ice-cold water in front of a fan (one of my many lol haha).

Michael Lloyd's Descent Into Easy Listening Hell Dept.

Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley were not a likely partnership. Fowley wasn't looking for partners, only victims. There were plenty back on Sunset Strip in the 'sixties, where he was a towering, Svengali-like egomaniac with a talent for self-promotion and an insatiable appetite for the young girls who drifted onto the Strip with confused dreams of stardom or freedom or whatever.

“Look at who I am," he said, as if self-awareness was enough in itself, and somehow admirable, "I’m an uneducated, untalented, bad social skills, horrible intimacy skills, unattractive, horrifying, dark, cadaverous, too-tall presence.” Groovy. "Because I’m basically an asshole, a piece of shit, no one’s interested in going any further to see if there’s any depth of talent, character or intellect.” There wasn't - what you saw was what you got, a hippie Trump whose sucking tentacles of ambition never reached beyond LA, where his name appears like a sexually-transmitted rash across the music industry.

The classically-trained Michael Lloyd had his own band at Beverley Hills High School, and recorded some early surf singles with Mike Curb. He also had the talent, good looks, and charm denied to Fowley, who signed him to a publishing deal, finagled him into recording his desperate Love Is Alive And Well album and introduced him to rich-kid wannabe rock star and tambourine slapper Bob Markley, another Sunset Strip sex creep. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was the Markley-funded masterplan to get little girls into his bed. However good the records are, and they are, his explicit lyrical confessions - or bragging - make them nearly unlistenable. Yikes.

Lloyd, apparently, floated over all this gutter filth without being touched by it. He helmed the proto-punk psychploitation Psychotic Reaction by the un-group The Fire Escape, and cut the St. John Green album [here - Ed] with Fowley, both on cash-grab labels.

Story so far: fresh-faced rich kid gets suckered into Sleazy Street by show-biz vampires. How does this play out? Not well, obviously - a descent into drugs and cults, sordid sex and an ugly death, the tragic waste of an All American Boy, and a lesson for us all. Except, not.

In '68, Lloyd wrote, played on, produced and arranged two albums: The Smoke, and October Country. He penned very nearly all the songs, produced and arranged everything, and Fowley only got to write some sleevenotes, boo-fucking-hoo. His absence is like a ray of sunshine. The qualities that made Lloyd valuable to Fowley - talent, mostly - had gotten him noticed by music biz professionals. Each of these albums is a gem, and better considered, given his total involvement, as by Michael Lloyd.

October Country (a real band) were uncomfortable with the groovy LA scene, and all became propane salesmen, Jehova's Witnesses, industrial felt pressers and pet beauticians. The Smoke was another un-band, but the full sound is distinctly LA session finest, an only slightly sub-Brian Wilson pocket pop masterpiece. Why weren't they marketed as Michael Lloyd albums? I'm guessing he was too modest, not that interested in being a star, and considered them as side projects, like the Fire Escape and St. John Green albums. Just records.

And then things went weird.

In 1969, Mike Curb appointed Lloyd, then aged 20, as vice-president in charge of A&R at MGM. Twenty freaking years old. What were you doing at twenty? I can't remember, but I certainly wasn't cruising Sunset Boulevard in a soft top Camaro. Curb, squarer than a bathroom tile, was purging MGM of anything vaguely drug-related (including the Velvet Underground and The Mothers), and Lloyd moved seamlessly into high-end MOR, squeaky-teen pop, and major movie soundtracks, his psychedelic pside projects quickly forgotten. He's still alive and scarily youthful and charming, and Fowley is none of the above. But as is the way of these things, Fowley is still revered for being "a character", "chameleon-like", and even a "legend", while Lloyd is mostly forgotten by zeitgeist types, and happier that way. Today's deliverable bundles The Fire Escape (a great little album, against all the odds), a re-covered October Country, and The Smoke.

Mike in the middle, of the road

 

This post funded by Mike Curb's Hair Helmets© - "all the protection of a crash hat, all the style of Dick Clark!"

Explain The Title And Win The Album! Dept.

 

Bang!

Thirty Minutes Dept. - Sounds From Uranus!

This is what Uranus looks like! Actual photograph! Of Uranus!

 

This is yer actual gas music from Uranus! Captured by the zircon-encrusted antenna of NASA's deep space probe Voyager! It's what Lou Reed was trying for with Metal Machine Music, but much more interesting, varied, complex, listenable, and human - Now That's What I Call Minimalist Drone! You'll dig it to fall asleep to, or have blasting from the holodeck when unexpected guests drop by! Play it in the car on long road trips, and see where you wake up! Slowly pump it up as background noise at work while you deal with that irate customer! Trip out to it at the Waffle House™! It's the soundtrack to the far side of tomorrow, today!

 

This post made possible thru th' cooperation of the wacky geeks at NASA!