Something For Sunday Dept. - Alessi

Shamefully, weirdly, absurdly ignored by Allmusic, the Alessi brothers epitomise 'seventies L.A. pop. If you have issues (as we now have to call problems) with this, their first album from '77 is unlikely to win you over. If you're not horrified by the thought of a bunch of frankly lovely songs beautifully played and sung, click with confidence.

Listen: they wrote all the songs. Guileless, romantic, charming tunes, utterly untouched by irony or cynicism, with some truly memorable hooks. The brothers play keys and guitar well enough to share the studio with jazz guys earning a session buck - Hal Blaine, Jeff Porcaro, John Guerin, Tom Scott, Emil Richards, Victor Feldman. Arranged by Mike Melvoin, produced by Bones Howe, so you know this sounds good.

What, as Descartes once said, is there to like not? Well, inevitably given the year, there are hints of synth and maybe the occasional disco accent, but not nearly enough to make it a nuisance listen. Real musicians playing real charts. Oh Lori is the standout cut, a hit in Europe, unknown at home. Light as a feather, fresh as a summer's day, with an irresistible jazz lilt, it'll bring out the shimmy in the crustiest curmudgeon.

Whether your Sunday be spent watching Little League, finishing that watercolor of the lake at sunset, or simply sodomizing a passed-out stripper in a dumpster, the Alessi Brothers will bring a breath of summer to your day of rest!

The brothers have been FoamFeatured© antecedently, though not this album. That search field doohickey is your friend - or why not just stab the Rando Button until they show? Sunday will be over before you know!

Great Classics Of Literature Out Th' Ass Dept. - Saturday Crumbtacular!

Pictured above [above - Ed.] is swank new Reading Room at th' IoF© Library Of Books™! Oboy! An oasis of restrained good taste, this marvel of contemporary interior design is for the exclusive use of the Four Or Five Guys©! Open 60/60, 24/24, 30/30, 12/12 hike, the Reading Room Of Books features many new features featured for the first time on th' Isle O' Foam©!

Note new Librarian In Residence, toothsome Kandi Kreampie! Note dignified, cultured ambience, conducive to study! Note subdued lighting provided by World's Biggest Lava Lamp® and glitterball! Note liveried attendants keen to respond to your literary request!

More root beer from the chilled drinks globe? Another baloney n' Cheez Whiz© sub? Turning pages too irksome? Call for Kandi!

Today's study material - a bunch of swell comic books by troubled elderly genius Bob Crumb! Make your withdrawal from the comments and relax in th' Nylon n' Naugahyde© comfort of our new Reading Room Of Books!

Today's withdrawal made possible by some anonymous torrent uploader a few years back, and not you, Mr. MyBrand©!

Ptake A Ptrip With Ptarmigan And Ptapestry!

Canadia! O mighty land of snow and fir! Famed Quebec is your capital! Lumber your proud heritage! And psychedelic prog folk rock your music!

Across the snowy steppes of Canadia, from the smelt farms of the Yukon to the fjords of Winnipeg, ruddy-cheeked families huddle in their log cabins to listen to this type music on Radio Canadia, the national radio of Canadia!

Ptarmigan played at the opening ceremony of the Canadian World Ice Hockey Olympics in 1973, whilst Tapestry were the first Canadian act to tour the Galapagos Islands, where they are revered to this day.

The Ptarmigan album is from '74, Tapestry the year earlier, which is ... '73? You do the research, as they say. My work here is done. We got comics tomorrow!

You Always Dug The Guy Dept. - Spider John

 

Spider John is still out there! And he always was. Tell me there's a better cover than Spider Blues [left - Ed.].

Bob Dylan: "I dropped into the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a Beat coffeehouse. I was looking for players with kindred spirits. The first guy I met in Minneapolis was Spider John Koerner and he also had an accoustic guitar with him. Koerner was tall and thin with a look of perpetual amusement on his face. We hit it off right away. When he spoke he was soft spoken, but when he sang he became a field holler shouter. Koerner was an exciting singer, and we began playing a lot together." 

Spider John: "We were thinkers and drinkers and artists and players, and Dylan was one of us. He was another guy ..."

Spider John's star on the mural of the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue "might be the most prestigious public honor an artist can receive in Minneapolis," according to journalist Steve Marsh.

You always dug him.

Help H'wood Funnyman Leslie Nielsen Unblock His Back Passage! Dept.

Uh-oh! Looks like Leslie's back passage is totally blocked with crap! "I can't pass a damn thing! It's all stuck up there!" quips beloved star of T.V.'s Police Squad! Help free up his movements by retrieving the album what got put out in the trash by mistake!

If you think you recognise it, leave a clever clue in the comments to identify the discarded long-player! Don't name the furshlugginer record directly! A clue! Not the name of the elpee or the group! Yeesh!

EDIT: Psychfan renders Mr. Nielson a favor in the comments, leaving a swell clue for th' clueless!

Foam-O-Drome© Movie Premiere - Artemis 81

Currently viewable on YouTube [above - Ed.] or loaddownable from the comments, Artemis 81 is an odd one, and at three freaking hours a long one. There's an S.S.C. Advisory [Some Sting Content - Ed.] attached to it, but don't let that put you off. Like Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, he pulls it off through sheer ambition, rather than acting. 

Writer David Rudkin is an academic and literary heavyweight, so Artemis 81 is saturated with imagery and themes from the classics, mythology, and the occult. It's slow, currently unavailable in good quality anywhere, but - like Tarkovsky's Stalker, worth the time if you can find it, and the concentration if you can sustain it. The build to a hallucinogenic cathedral in a terrifying dream-city, familiar yet placeless, has an unforgettable intensity.

If you're looking for packaged meaning and clarity of narrative, you won't find it here, but seekers of the weird, the strange, the outré, the uncanny, the eerie, the bizarre, the other-worldly, and the totally fucking baked, should get a contact high to shadow their dreams for years.

Locked down? Here's an up key. Put an afternoon aside for it.

Something For Sunday: Montage

When The Left Banke split, leader Michael Brown went into the studio with four unknown musicians (who never did anything else) and cut this slice of vinyl heaven. Co-written with Bert Sommer and the Leftie's Tom Feher, Montage is often overlooked in a field dominated by Sagittarius, The Left Banke, and Millennium.

Recorded in '68 - the Great Year Of Things Like This - the dumbass record company - why the fuck were they on Laurie? - sat on it until summer '69, when nobody was much interested in '68 any more, and gave it possibly the worst sleeve design in the history of worst [below - Ed.].

Whether your Sabbath is spent cataloging your Hummel© figurine collection, baking muffins for the homeless, or simply beating off into panties lifted from your neighbor's laundry, Montage will make it that much sunnier!

Van Dyke Parks - Ratfink! Dept.

Van Dyke Parks has a celebrated career in music, but his earliest recording remains generally unknown. Put together as a side project with Gary Usher (then a bus boy at the Capitol building canteen) while studying at Berklee College Of Music, the Rods N' Ratfinks album [original cover at left - Ed.] was privately issued on VDP Records (at Parks' expense), and is today regarded, if at all, as a novelty teensploitation item.

Parks didn't want a credit, but co-wrote and arranged all the titles. Perhaps in such compositions as Fink Rod 409, with its interesting contrapuntal arrangement and hints of Americana, one can discern the genesis of his mature style.

Sensitivity Runs Amok Dept. - Tom Paxton

Tom Paxton's sincerity, social conscience, gentle satire, and collegiate romanticism haven't dated too well. But that's the fault of the times we live in, not his. If you can forgive him his coffee shop open mic voice, you'll find some timelessly beautiful songwriting here, benefiting from the full Elektra production missing from his folksy Ramblin' Boy days.

I bought The Things I Notice Now on release, back in my bedroom dreaming days, looking over the rooftops and wishing I was out there, over the horizon. Late in life, out there has become out here, and this music has the Kodachrome richness of nostalgia, a pleasure deeper than wine. But even if this is new to you, Paxton's old skills may yet move you through the fog of the times. What was good, is good.

 

Rhodes Scholar Makes Good Dept.

Kris Kristofferson and Rita Ritacoolidge first got together as a good-timey polka accordian duo working the Catskills borscht n' bris circuit. "We'd do uptempo numbers from the Kol Zimroh, stuff like that," laughs Ritacoolidge today from her Puget Sound smelt farm.

"Then I went solo for a while," adds Kristofferson between vape hits. "Some records, some movies." His movie roles include the unforgettable deaf-mute Lars Larsson in We Lost Our Snowshoes which garnered the Golden Seaswallow of Knökke award, and Professor Pajama in The National Film Board Of Canadia's The Land Of Wonderful Science.

Here's some albums what you should familiarise yerself with on account of inherent swellness.

Play "Who's Up My Back Passage?" With Body Positive Influencer Mrs. Myra Nussbaum! Dept.

The facts are undisputable. Much-loved Vegas icon Mrs. Myra Nussbaum was savagely beaten to death with an Engelbert Humperdinck CD during a botched Whack-A-Mole™ heist back at th' old House O' Foam©. Glamorous vagina-oil peddler Sting was arrested and convicted. The whole grisly tale plays out in past bulletins from th' House O' Foam©, should youse slack-assed bums ever work up th' vim n' pep to dig that deep.

And yet ...

Here she is again! Toothy prestidigitator Doug Henning [above, with Myra - Ed.] has mystically revived her earthly form to guest on our popular graveyard shift cable T.V. show, Who's Up My Back Passage?! You know the rules by now, so find your reading glasses (SPOILER - they're in the fridge, ya doofus) and join in the fun!

Back To Return To Vienna Revisited

It's called both Back To and Return To on the internet, but whichever way you go you arrive at one hell of an album. FoamFeatured© antecedently, it's the album Rick Nelson cut in '78 after Intakes. It was inexplicably shelved by Epic, after they'd ignored Intakes. So it never got a cover (the one above is a new one by me) nor possibly a track order.

I can't find musicians' credits, but it was produced by Al Kooper, so he's probably playing. There's a touch of funk, a hint of country, and it's a beautiful piece of work. Nelson always had impeccable taste, which is evident in his song choices (no originals here). It's very close in feel and effect to Lowell George's Thanks I'll Eat It Here, from the year before, which Nelson must have been listening to. If you love that album, and of course you do, you'll love this, too.

I can only guess that the suits were thinking of Nelson as a brand, not an artist. Worrying about "demographics" and other fictions only marketing people worry about. Look how he looks! With that voice and these songs it took a lot of work not to make a million bucks out of this one, but everybody lost - the definition of an Epic fail. He should have been with Warners.

Quelque Chose Pour Dimanche Dept. - St. Germain

Where were you as the century turned? Ludovic Navarre was in the studio, creating something that captured a time in flux and yet remained above it, a bubble of perfect sound that met with no resistance. Tourist was the soundtrack to what we hoped would be the movie of our lives. A travelogue of sorts, a journey a daydream might take you, dancing from a Parisian club to a Jamaican beach ... 

If you're locked down and out, here's the postcard you sent yourself twenty years ago. Wish you were here? There's nowhere else you can be - we're all tourists.

Latin Rock Transitions To Sanctified Funk - Or Not?

Go on, admit it. You didn't know that Graham Central Station evolved out of post-Santana conga-botherers Azteca. I didn't either, until Wikipedia told me so on the Graham Central Station page: 

"Graham Central Station's origins date from when Neal Schon formed the band Azteca in 1972 along with Larry Graham ..."

However, Wiki's Azteca page, which has no mention of Graham, is having none of it:

"Azteca was formed in 1972 by Coke Escovedo and his brother Pete Escovedo ..."

Well, gee whiz.

Whatever the answer to this perplexing conundrum, there's a bunch of swell genre-fluid music coming to lovely [YOUR AREA] today!

Explore The Roots Of Jazz Rock With Radio's Hy Averback! Dept.

You'll know Hy Averback from his early days as announcer for Bob Hope and Jack Benny. Less well-known is his short-lived 3D radio show Captain 3D's Radio Adventures In The Third Dimension [left - Ed.]. Perhaps you remember him helming T.V. shows Burke's Law and The Man From Uncle, before enjoying movie success in the sixties. But did you know he's an authority on jazz rock? That's right, subscribers! Hy granted F.M.F.© a poolside interview yesterday.

FT3 You brung some rekkids, right? Because frankly, Hy, a piece just about you ain't gonna crawl, leave alone fly. Nobody knows who you are, pally.

HA Ha ha! That's swell of you, Farq. Ever the gracious host! But yes, I thought the Four Or Five Guys© might be interested in some Larry Coryell.

FT3 I dunno. Does he try to sing?

HA Ha ha! Well, he does a bit of that. I admit it's not his strong point.

FT3 As a vocalist, he stinks. Right down there with Leo Kottke, another guitarist what should of shut his yap.

HA Ha ha! And fuck you! Very much. I don't need this shit. Take the fucking albums. No offence.

FT3 Ha ha!

Included in today's Jazzrock Jamboree© are Larry's first appearance on record, with Chico Hamilton (The Dealer), and a bunch of his swell solo stuff, some of which you have already, because that's the kind of Four Or Five Guy© you are.

Bob Ross Masterpiece Unveiled!

Artist-in-residence Bob Ross is shown here putting the final touches to his masterpiece, a full-color Art Painting to be on permanent display behind the bar at the Isle O' Foam© Tiki Hut & Business Center.

"Farq allowed me complete artistic freedom," Bob said yesterday from his studio high atop Mysterious Skull Rock, "so I tried to include as many of the wild and wacky residents as possible! That's Farq at right, of course, and a couple of freelance Marine Biologists in the center of the composition. The island Foamunculus© took the form of Howdy Doody for his sitting, and I managed to squeeze in the Ghost of Myra Nussbaum as a happy little detail there!"

How many arcane cultural signifiers can you spot, readers?

 

Play Some New! Dept.

You won't see much new material on th' I.O.F.©. I listen to a lot of new albums, mostly bailing because they're not as good as the artists who influenced them. I don't believe something is worth my time just because it's newly-recorded and adequately performed. New and young have ceased to be recommendations for anything, and anyway, the Sex Pistols still seem new to me - most of what happened after is a merciful blur. And I don't believe in giving away the work struggling artists hope to get paid for. But here's a rare exception. You'll have to squint at the cover [left - Ed.] for the names, because I don't want this piece to be a search result.

The title and the cover are two flavors of shit and do nobody any favors. From the review (yacht rock, Steely Dan, whatever magnets the clueless reviewer found on his fridge door) I expected the usual sloppy bunch of hipsters ironically ticking style boxes. There's only a couple of things you need know about this - it sounds like it's from the seventies, and it sounds swell. More? Ten songs, thirty-six minutes - an album. Musicality out th' ass. Every song has something to delight the ear and soothe the soul. And these guys can sing. I played it all the way through and immediately played it all the way through again. It's merited a place on my FoamPod©.

It may leave you meh, of course, but if you dig that first Average White Band album - and why th' bejasus wouldn't you? - this will make you very, very happy. Maybe enough to buy it.

EDIT: I'm in the process of establishing a lie that I've been a fan of these guys since 2015, when their first album [left - Ed.] came out, and have been waiting for the third since the second [below - Ed.] appeared in 2018. Both of these albums will be added to the load-downs to help you join me in the deceit. Any comments along the lines of the above will be given absolute credence.

 

The All Golden - Steve Young And Stone Country

Van Dyke Parks has said that the song The All Golden was written from the perspective of his friend Steve Young, who guested on Song Cycle. It's a seemingly unlikely connection; the Hollywood parlor academic Parks and the gritty outlaw Young, but a listen to Young's debut on the Stone Country album makes it clearer.

The album is stylistically fluid, drawing from diverse sources but sounding quintessentially American - in that sense, much like Song Cycle. Its refusal to conform to a specific genre didn't help sales or radio plays, but it's an exceptionally fine album, encapsulating the spirit of the late 'sixties with kaleidoscopic clarity.

Young's solo career albums focused his direction and his song-writing into something timeless. Even the titles seem mythic - Seven Bridges Road, Rock Salt & Nails, Lonesome Onry & Mean. But something had been lost - the very datedness of the Stone Country album makes it unrepeatable and precious.

There will always be guitar-slinging songwriters as long as there's a back porch to pick on, but there will never again be groups created and animated by the same energy that shaped the times back then.

This post made possible in part through the support of the Sitarswami Chakra Wax N' Lube Shop, Pork Bend, AZ.

Great Classics Of Literature Out Th' Ass Dept. - Little Nemo

Winsor McCay, genius. Today's Bumper Bag O'Books™ is a loo-ong run [1905-14 complete - Ed.] of his weekly comic pages for the New York Herald and New York World. I can't possibly do him justice here without copy-pasting from Wikipedia and pretending it's my own wise work, so click over there to enter the rabbit hole of McCay's imagination. He's never been matched as a graphic artist, and is quite the equal of (well, better than) much-lauded "fine" artists such as Hokusai, who never had to work in a narrative form or to a weekly deadline, over decades. His work is cinematic, mind-bending, and astonishingly beautiful.

A different world, when a newspaper publisher could be a patron of the arts with no agenda other than to make your day a better one (he was going to make money anyway).

Note: the PDFs are much sharper quality than the above scan.

Something For Sunday Dept. - Cody's Choice!

Older readers - private joke advisory - will have fond memories of Cody [left - Ed.], C.E.N. [Chief Executive Nailtician - Ed.] at th' Vegas House O'Foam©. She's been busy building a three-quarter-size replica of the Bradbury Building out of Q-Tips, but she interrupts her labors to host this week's Something For Sunday featurette! Take it away, Cody! 

"Today is a very special day, so I've chosen some very special music by a very special artist, Mr. Andy Gibb! Did you know he was one of the A's in top Norwegian pop group the ABBAs? I've learned so much here on Fabulous False Mammary Foam Island©!" 

So - whether your Sabbath be spent fashioning a pipe rack from that old narwhal tusk, restocking the den drinks globe with costly vintage beverages, or simply getting blown by a dwarf under the bar at Dinky Dave's Dwarf World™, Cody's choice of listening will make it all so much more relaxing! Happy listening!

Who's Up My Back Passage? Dept. - Glamordom's Betty Brosmer!

Older Readers may remember our popular long-running feature Who's In My Box? where we asked you at home to guess the album our guest celebrity guests hid in their box! But at least three or four of the Four Or Five Guys© are lazy-ass bums what couldn't be assed to join in. "I hate this game!" whined Hymie Kowznofski, Horsepucky Heights, CO. "I never know who is it!" complained Tanyette b'Idet out of Cracker County, MS. "Fuck dis shit!" snarled Tony "Little Tony" Fognacco, Gowanus, NY.

Ever mindful of making life easier for th' cheap grifters what wash up on the shores of fabled Fabulous False Memory Foam Island©, we've come up with a totally new game we're calling Who's Up My Back Passage? Oboy! The rules? Why, they're simplicity themselves. Itself. Whatever. They're contrived to be readily assimilated by even the meanest intelligence - and that's you, ya doofus! Simply take these two easy steps in the specified order:

1 Take a hinge at the cleverly disgused detail from the album cover seamlessly integrated into the above photo above [above - Ed.]!

2 Using your skill and judgement, ascertain the album from which it has been extrapolated, and the artiste responsible!

Today's inaugural celebrity is glamordom's Betty Brosmer. "Gee!" she vouchsafed yesterday from her duplex cabana here on th' Isle O'Foam©, "is it ever th' honor to be like th' first tomato which to give a glimpse up her back passage to!"

Ready? Let's play ... Who's Up My Back Passage!

Peripheral Television

Television live at the Bataclan, about twenty years ago, a lifetime, yesterday. By then a nostalgia act for old New Wavers, the band emerged to muted applause from the non-capacity crowd, there out of curiosity, vague familiarity. My friends, the usual black-dressed and hard-to-impress Parisians, slouched at the back with cigarettes and flat beer. Hungry for the beat - free my soul - I went to the front, pushed a place at the edge of the stage. Tom Verlaine was in signature menstrual mode, scowling and fiddling irritably with his guitar. Nothing was right. The band wasn't taking any notice - business as usual. Static and feedback from Verlaine - could have been his guitar or just his foul mood. Then the rhythm section kicked in, the latently great Billy Ficca and Fred Smith, a guy whose playing is unnoticeable as his name. And Richard Lloyd chimed in, and finally Tom Miller, the Sunny Hills School escapee, the pretentious one of the group, the missed-the-bus beat poet whose existential heartburn made everything work and anything possible.

I doubt they were capable of a bad, or even ordinary gig. They delivered. At the end, I crawled onstage to get Richard Lloyd's setlist. He untaped it from the floor for me, the sweetheart.

Here's some peripheral transmissions from one of the great zen art dude bands. The Revolution was a France-only freebie - you get what you pay for. Neon Hell is pre-TV. Arrow is the legendary bootleg, Live At The Academy a limited release.

T.V.'s Sid Slaw Explains Dept. - Where The King Crimsons Went Wrong!

T.V.'s Sid Slaw [left - Ed.] shot to fame as Fred MacMurray's stunt double for three seasons of N.B.C.'s The Nunkie Bupkiss Show ("I can't remember how many times I tripped over L'il Binkie's wagon!" he laughs today), but uses his off-camera time to point out where major stars of rock, pop n' roll went wrong.

"Take The King Crimsons, now. They could have been as big as The Moody Blues, but they did all that highbrow, difficult stuff that no dame in her right mind wants to get cosy to. And to make it big in this wonderful business we call show, you have to have what I call Dame Appeal - and let me tell you, pally - Sid Slaw speaks from experience!"

You know what, subscribers? T.V.'s Sid Slaw ain't whistlin' Dixie! So I asked Kreemé and Cody to come up with a dame-friendly Crimso album, drawing from the McDonald and Giles album on account there's not much Crimso stuff that doesn't give you gas, and the gals worked long into the night to come up with this here album. It's full of swell, dreamy tunes with no chafing, no unsightly residue, and no bitter aftertaste! Next time you're pitching woo at your main squeeze, slip this onto th' Victrola - she'll come across like the Staten Island Ferry!

Country Rock "Stiffened Marmoset Pelts" - Claim

I'm slipping this in quick (those were the days, eh?) between pressing social engagements today. I have to cut the ribbon at the Al's All-Nite Beanery© opening, and inspect the new showers at St. Velda's School For Wayward Girls (of which I am patron), and a bunch of other stuff.

If you don't know these albums, brother - are you ever in for a treat! Country Rock at its subtly spectacular finest. Take a swell bunch of songs, add the best musicians in the world, sing 'em with the voice of an angel - how come more people didn't do this? How hard can it be? (Those were the days, eh?) I prefer the first, but you don't give a good goddamn what I prefer, and nor should you. Hotcha!

Psychedelia Frae Bonnie Pscotland!

Scots hippie escaping to U.K. 1986. Photo: FMF© Art Department Dept.

Scotland is a mist-shrouded wilderness broken by reeking slums somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, where the raw wind blows icy rain up the men's skirts, and a greasy bag of rock-hard sheep's intestines is considered a delicacy. Small wonder that the Peace n' Love© thing never found its way up there. But decades later, a few brave souls ventured south into civilisation and cut these swell albums.

The Shamen clearly took drugs. Perhaps the wrong drugs - their later success as banging techno ravers ruined their music and reputation for the handful of psych fans who loved Drop (geddit?) and the attendant singles. Melodic, shimmering with Electric Prunes reverb, and propelled by unlikely surf-inflected drumming, this is one of the very few post-sixties [1987 - Ed.] albums to get this type of thing absolutely right

The cosmos turned. Generations came and went before Art Of The Memory Palace crawled across the border, blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight. In 2015, reviewers hadn't been born when the Paisley Undergound briefly shimmered the airwaves and had no reference points, the poor dears. "Psychedelia" was by then, and is now, a meaningless tag in a *cough* music scene *cough* consisting entirely of labels and sub-genres and references. But This Life Is But A Passing Dream is the real thing hidden in the crates of Pepsidelia. Where Drop shows its garage roots, TLIBAPD is swimmy, dreamy, slightly melancholic, and sounds as much 2015 as 1969, for better or worse. Sample song title: Sun-Blinded Capsule Memory Haze, which is exactly what it is.

Both these albums are authentic, as you'll recognise after a few seconds in. They're not camp recreations, hommages or pastiches. They don't use psychedelic cliché as  branding devices. That they were made (mostly) by skirt-wearing caber-tossing haggis-eaters is a small miracle.

THIS JUST IN: Th' Isle O' Foam© is pleased to announce this piece has garnered the prestigious Scottish Tourist Board Award for Services to National Heritage!