Mission Statement: to do very little, for very few, for not very long. Disappointing the easily pleased since 1819. Not as good as it used to be from Day One. History is Bunk - PT Barnum. Artificially Intelligent before it was fashionable. Fat camp for the mind! Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. The Shock of the Old! Often bettered, never imitated.
These guys are neighbors of mine here in fragrant downtown Las Vegas, NV. I knew they'd been trying for the longest time to have a family, but when they gave birth to a baby tiger I was as surprised as they were.
I kept my distance when I visited the proud new Pop n' Dad down at The Mamie Van Doren Memorial Veterinarian Hospital. Those claws can be sharp! (And I didn't trust the tiger cub, either).
If you have more information - even made-up shit - on these albums then please do feel free to make a comment. If you have any Siegfried N' Roy stories, also too.
If there's one album that sums up the spirit of sixties pop - and by extension the sixties - it may be this one. Once Upon A Dream wouldn't be the first choice of many, because it's perceived as a minor Pepper clone, or embarrassingly naive, or pretentious over-reaching, or way past its sell-by date, or simply because it's by The Rascals (seriously?). Well, yeah. If you want to go that route, you can file it under charming period piece or whatever and move on. Which I did for many years. It seemed all of the above; the sound of a pop group punching over its weight, trying to cover all the bases without reaching one. Enough sporting metaphors already. But for reasons I can't explain, repeated plays have revealed what a gorgeous piece of work this is. Here's a quote from a very informative Allmusic review: "It's an under-celebrated masterpiece of the psychedelic era and belongs next to Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's on the shelf, because it is easily as sophisticated, and once heard in its entirety, can never be forgotten." He's right, and I join the ranks of believers who love this album as much as those sixties benchmarks.
So why is it under-celebrated, under-rated, and under the radar? Why doesn't it ever make the Top Fifty Greatest Pop Albums This Week You Must Hear Before You Die lists? Why am I asking you? Me, I don't have a clue. But I think it may be because of its stylistic range. An entire album could have been recorded in the style of any one of these songs - even the OTT soundtrack swell of My Hawaii - and been a success. There's everything sixties in here, from blue-eyed soul to sitar bliss-outs, and it's all too much. But in a good way, without the slightest taint of irony or cleverness; the album is saturated with the spirit of hope and peace and love, and not without a certain sweet melancholy. Once Upon A Dream - remember? Back when there was one? It's still here - listen.
Check out this seemingly unexceptional cover. Hard to see now what was so unusual about it at the time, but it was the use of empty space above their heads, with the bodies "bleeding off" the bottom edge. This was almost a Blue Note approach to design - almost, because a jazz album would never have featured the musicians sitting on their asses sulking and pouting (probably). And that typography is sensational. Once again, this is a swell fan-compiled collection of (allegedly) all the tracks associated with the recording of this album. Thirty-eight of 'em. I haven't forensically examined this, and I'm not a Byrds archivist, so if there are omissions and errors, I apologise. This was the last album Gene Clark was wholly involved in, because the rest of the girls bitched about his greater earnings from his more successful songwriting. David Crosby was throwing hissy fits that his own material and selections weren't being used. And everyone was simply livid about Jim-Roger McGuinn's close relationship with Terry Melcher. Show-biz kids, huh?
I was reading a review of Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits, and was struck by this: "[they] suffered endless
persecution from the British government because of their wild ideas." Oh really? Pardon my mirth. The idea of this privileged bunch of middle-class nuisances toying with the "shocking" edge of the avant-garde being endlessly persecuted by anybody but music lovers is laughable - and not in a funny way. And if they really wanted a "wild idea", how about this? Write a fucking song. But no; the Throbs were/are too busy deconstructing and being ironic and polemical on our asses to debase themselves to show-biz levels of professionalism. Which brings me to Nara Leão. There's a fantastic story behind this album - about real persecution - that I'm too lazy to paraphrase, and it's too long to copy-paste. Being the in-demand swell that you are, you probably don't have the time to read it, but you can at least listen to the album. It's not Throbbing Gristle, but hey ...
The pattern from pop to prog/rock was well established by 1969 - groups seeking peer respect, album sales, and exotic tour riders all made the shift from goofing around to dire prognostication. Case in point: Ford Theatre. Except - uniquely - they went against the grain, fashion, and their best interests by starting out doomy and paranoid on their first album ('68's Trilogy For The Masses) and dialing it all back for the decidedly friskier Time Changes a year later, when this kind of thing was beginning to look sexy. Trilogy - with a superbly paranoid cover designed by (it says here) Frissi Titsworth - uh-huh - betrays little of the Bosstown roots they were keen to distance themselves from. It could well be a concept album - the concept being who's staring at me? I don't feel so great. But the music is melodic, powerful, haunting, and beautifully constructed. It's over-serious, of course, and the brow-knitting vocals ensured no singles bothered the charts. Produced by Bob Thiele.
Mel Brown's 1967 Chicken Fat on Impulse (and where else would it be) is a swell soundtrack album to a heist movie that never got made. Go-Go music for Cheetah swingers, blasting from convertibles cruising The Strip. Brown was a pretty wild guitarist, and ate up just about every influence, spitting it out in crazy bursts that are gone before you've had time to realise what he just did. He's a showboater with the chops to pull it off, and a joy to hear. Music to Frug to.
George Benson'sGiblet Gravy, from '68, is a very different kettle of meat, getting left on the plate by tedious jazzbo purists even this early in his career. What they didn't understand was Benson was always a bigger star than the academic limitations of jazz could hold. Every album that veered away from what critics considered his roots (the arrogance!) throughout his career got a kicking. Like he cared. A superhumanly talented vocalist, instrumentalist, and a true star, every note he played and sang is in tune with what he wanted to do. Prime cuts.
From camping it upwith The Teddybear's Picnic to becoming heritage music curators on a par with the Smithsonian is quite a leap, but the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band made it. The earliest line-up, in 1965, included Jackson Browne, who bailed for a solo career before the first album. Chris Darrow passed in and out before Uncle Charlie, which was when perseverance (and talent) started to pay off.
It's impossible to overstate these guys' importance, which is strangely counterbalanced by their relative lack of fame.
They'd passed through the core American music genres; jugband, bluegrass, folk, pop, country, blues, rock n' roll, before curating (and for once, the word is used correctly) the epochal Will The Circle Remain Unbroken; that rare thing, a precious historical document that's also a lot of fun. It was a project that was only possible because the NGDB approached Nashville with respect and humility - qualities that have a bearing on their low showbiz presence.
Since then, a little bland AOR, and a slight return to the roots they never left, but here's their early œuvre[French - egg - Ed.], sounding fresh and timeless and fun and beautiful all at the same time.
Who knew that UK progrock combos The Caravans, The Soft Machines, and The Pink Floyds were inspired by two obscure US acts to relocate to the sleepy British village of Canterbury and develop a thriving music scene? Not you, that's who.
These guys were big in the UK provinces back when folk clubs were the places to eye up the local broads, roll herbal smokes in licorice Rizlas, nurse a warm half pint through the entire evening, and enjoy some superlative music.
At the same club - usually above a pub, or in the back room - you'd catch national talents like Bert Jansch on sleeping-in-the-van tours, but it was the core of local acts that kept the places going. Davey Graham's Anji was the gateway party piece for the solo picker, generally drowned out by conversation.
Dando Shaft were different - a full band of virtuoso players, fronted by the comely Polly Bolton, a vocalist of the class of Jacqui McShee, who at least stood up some of the time, unlike the others, who opted for the sedentary Pentangle-style look. Sitting down was a thing for folkies back then, and maybe still is.
They scored a deal with Neon for their first album, moving up to the parent label RCA for their third, Lantaloon, just before the inevitable internal forces split them up. As a bonus, the teeth-gratingly unlistenable Sun Clog Dance, an
ill-advised tilt at commerciality, is not included in this otherwise
worthwhile assemblage. The band reformed sans la Bolton for Kingdom in 1977. I suspect they may have stood up at gigs, too.
Perky, toothsome Doug Henning (TV's Mr. Magic) is justly famed for his acts of prestidigitation, legerdemain, and mastery of the Black Arts. But at the start of his career, his invocation of the demons Alastor and Belphegor at a children's party, and the subsequent bloody deaths, led to a different kind of spell [LOL - Ed.] in the state pen, where learned to make balloon animals and developed a passion for vintage Australian psychedelia. On regaining his freedom by floating over the prison walls while high on Jimson Weed, he vowed to eschew the Black Arts and devoted himself to becoming a professional stage magician, stunning audiences world-wide with his tricks, his hair, and his skinny dungarees.
I interviewed him on the stoop of his swank Camden, NJ, tarpaper "tiny home", overlooking the tire recycling compound, the acrid stench of burning rubber crimping my nostril hairs.
Pausing only to pick up the CD, grab his wallet, and his phone, and a souvenir snowstorm paperweight from Hawaii, and a lamp, and a Thermos, I made my excuses and left. In the VIP lounge at Camden's lush Transit Center [right - Ed.], I set fire to a Lucky and squinted through the smoke at Henning's wristwatch, which I had also disappeared. "And that's magic, pally! Oops - did I say that out loud?"
One of our regular contributors, a Mr. Anonymous, left an anonymous comment on our recent Byrds piece: "Thanks for this," he writes, under the cloak of anonimity, "but I noticed a couple of the tracks that are supposed
to be mono are actually stereo. Bells of Rhymney and Spanish Harlem
Incident."
Rosemary Clooney - wotta dame! But few know the sophisticated shantoozie was raised by marmosets after a dirigible crash in remote Peckerwood County, GA. Yes, it was deep in the mangrove swamps that little Rosie first learned to sing, her voice charming the forest fauna which gathered about her feet; gators and whippoorwills, snipe and jackalopes alike entranced by her husky, sensual tones. A remark by Uncle Morty Marmoset - "Say, Rosie - you oughta be singin' for them swells in th' big city!" - inspired her to pack her meager belongings into a couple of steamer trunks and catch the Super Chief to Los Angeles, where a chance meeting with Duke Ellington on the station platform ("I sang The March Of The Marmosets for him") led to a successful audition and the recording of this here album, and gee, is it ever swell! [Citation needed - Ed.]
Change, recorded by the reformed band, minus Hale, is an altogether different kettle of ballgames. The radical shift from their trademark sunshine pop confused any remaining fans still waiting for a new album, and gave their label and the radio stations problems. It didn't sell, has never seen a CD release, and remains a hidden masterpiece of the genre, with a challenging song selection, perfect production (aided by Jerry Yester and Fairport's Richard Thompson, yet), and their signature seasoned harmonies. There's also a real depth of emotion missing in most country rock - the elegiac I Wish We'd All Been Ready carries a real gut punch.
There's an amateurish-looking twilight album I'm not sure I want to hear (2009's ominously-titled Back Home Americana Vol. 1), but Change is not only a surprising swansong, it's one of the great albums of the genre.
(This rip is salted by a gourmet sprinkling of authentic vinyl crackles for your enhanced listening pleasure)
Deep in the endless pine forests of Finland, an obscure cult grew around a ruined church. Legend had it that the very earth was soaked in the blood of babies sacrificed to Väinämöinenguðmundsdóttir, the God Of Despair. Self-proclaimed leaders of the cult, Paul Chastain and Ric Menck, both from myth-shrouded Providence, Rhode Island, brought with them a copy of the Necronomicon said to have belonged to H.P. Lovecraft. Strange rituals took place in that church, with hymns to Väinämöinenguðmundsdóttir specially composed by Chastain and Menck. The ruined building mysteriously burned down, with Chastain and Menck the only survivors. They have understandably remained tight-lipped about those events, but released the hymnal - played backwards - under the name Choo Choo Train. Listening to this music now, one can only wonder at the unspeakable horrors that took place in far-off Finland. Certainly, Chastain and Menck aren't talking. All they will say is, "don't play Choo Choo Train backwards, if you value your sanity, and wish the portal between universes to remain closed." With that urgent caveat - enjoy!
