Cheap Stratagems® Dept.

The nascent Cheap Stratagems Dept. series will feature selected antecedently FoamFeatured™ FoamFeatures©. The reasons are as many as they are spurious; to ensure passing freeloading grifters don't miss out, to give the nogood bums who just grabbed the links the first time around a chance to heed th' screed (in this case, "one of the most perceptive and sublime pieces of pop criticism ever published"*) but mainly to give me much-needed respite from the sheer lacerating keyboard hell of trying to think of something vaguely fresh every fucking day of the week. It makes sense on another level; most  - 86.3% according to some studies - of the greatest albums ever recorded have already been antecedently FoamFeatured©, and the supply is dwindling, so the Cheap Stratagems® Dept. will artificially lengthen the flowery path to internet oblivion.

These albums, recorded months apart, are generally considered disappointing endings to distinguished pop careers, almost footnotes. Although The Mamas & The Papas' People Like Us received a probably now forgotten boost from Sean O'Hagan a few years back (decades? I've lost count), and enjoys respect from the ever-perceptive Japanese pop community, it still resides in the where-are-they-now category for most. I neglected it for many years for the usual reasons. It limped out on a budget label in the UK (where I was residing at the time), had no hits, and the group were then terminally nothing to nobody. Move on, nothing to see here, right?

Fast-forward to sometime in the late eighties, when I was in Berlin trying to finish a horror movie screenplay for a German independent producer ("the paper plane must fall with more melancholy!!"), an experience as grim as you imagine. But he had interesting taste in music, and one of the albums I pulled from the pile was People Like Us. He didn't rate it highly, laughing mirthlessly at the notion it was a lost classic, but I was hooked, and have remained so. The boilerplate critical dismissal always mentions the back story of a band already broken up, the lack of true ensemble singing, the sidelining of Cass Elliot, and yadda yadda. Color me I don't care. It's a beautiful album, made by people incapable of turning in a cynical performance. Cool as a dawn breeze off the ocean. The only album this group could have made at that time, and reflecting the fractured times with crystal definition. The end of the sixties, dealing with the damage, and the uncertainty of what was to come, yet still managing to enjoy blueberries for breakfast.

Waterbeds In Trinidad was The Association's last album, barely scraping into the Billboard top two hundred. We can assume that the irony of the title in combination with the cover image was lost on most. Irony is never a good marketing hook. But its monochrome nostalgia has something in common with People Like Us, and the music shares that mature melancholy my producer missed in the fall of the paper plane. Again, it's a sheerly beautiful album made by seasoned professionals, and if we consider it a lesser work than, say, Cherish we're doing the band, and ourselves, a grievous mis-service. No more waterbeds in Trinidad for these guys. No more love-ins and dancing in the park. The Age Of Aquarius turned out to be a chill dawn breeze off the ocean, and the sixties were already a dream of a dream.

*Me, just now.