Operation Eggs Over Easy - The CIA's Shocking Role In The Birth Of Pub Rock

CIA chief Richard "Uncle Dick" Helms testifies before closed congressional hearing, 1972

Having been pivotal in the late 'sixties Youth Movement through the manufacture and supply of Hoffmann-grade LSD, the CIA soon turned its beady eye to the UK.

Operation Eggs Over Easy was to follow the Black Ops tradition of MK Ultra and Operation Paperclip. Berkeley coffee-house intellectuals Jack O'Hara and Austin de Lone were recruited and flown to London to infiltrate the "underground scene" by posing as a country rock act, reporting back through CIA agents embedded in the American Embassy, which paid for the band to tour universities in the UK (seen as hotspots of radical politics). The Agency also provided a base for the band - a house in London's leafy Kentish Town, wired for audio and video surveillance. "There were like wires and cameras on the fucking walls, all over the house," laughs Graham Parker today. "We were too stoned to give a fuck. I remember Nick [Lowe - Ed.] making faces and fart noises for the cameras. Happy times!"

Operation Eggs Over Easy's stroke of strategic brilliance lay in establishing a network of public houses as music venues; chat flowed as freely as beer at the gigs, giving the CIA a unique source of street-level data, soon winging its way back to Langley via the band's "cultural sponsors" the American Embassy.

The year-long operation complete, the band headed back to the USA, where it showed its street cred by supporting headliners such as The Eagles and Yes on stadium tours. They recorded a couple of pleasant, laid-back country-rock albums as tax write-offs (both mysteriously "vanishing" after zero promotion) which sound little like the bands that sprang from the lively London pub scene the CIA created.

CIA Chief "Uncle Dick" Helms [at left, left - Ed.]  feels up war criminal Henry Kissinger at London Embassy reception for band. "You like that, bubeleh?"

CIA's Alma Street "safe house" in London's leafy Kentish Town, where band entertain political subversives such as Nick Lowe (the CIA's role in failed US launch of Brinsley Schwartz is currently being researched) and Barry Richardson out of Bees Make Honey.

Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation meeting at Tally Ho public house in London's leafy Kentish Town, where Eggs Over Easy are house band. Jack O'Hara center left.

Band practice at Walter Annenburg (then US Ambassador) town house in London's leafy Belgravia. Note costly medieval tapestries, "hippie" toupées.

Both O'Hara and de Lone were contacted during research for this piece; both declined to comment.

Country Rock "Rained Eels On Orphans' Picnic" - Claim

It's been too long since we FoamFeatured™ this swell genre on th' IoF©. You don't care, because you're here for the Hair Metal, so you can click right out of this one.

Borderline were out of Woodstock, NY. I was at Woodstock with my pal Joel, only we missed the festival because it was the early 'nineties, so we went back to Long Eddy and had a Philly Steakwich, which I'm still digesting.

Ben Keith - him - played with them on their two albums from '73, '74. There's a bunch of swell music happening here, with contributions from Billy Mundi [YAY! - Ed.], Amos Garrett, Vassar Clements, and - surprisingly - David Sanborn and Randy Brecker. So why ain't you heard of these guys? Well, the first album crawled out of Pennsylvania on the poverty Avalanche label, with the obligatory shit cover, and the second didn't get released until Japanese Country Rock fans discovered it in 2001. So that's why.

For fans of this-type music such as I, this is damn near as good as it gets. Songs you can sing? Check. Swell playing? Check. A litle waltz-time wistfulness? Check. Clear harmonies and pedal steel? Check and checkmate. Sometimes this is all you need.

This piece funded in part by Myron and Irwin Veeblefetzer's Eggplant Planet™, Stinkhole,  ND.

The Fashion Plate And The Plumber's Mate Dept.

The link between these apparently diverse albums from Grace Jones and Joe Cocker is the band; Robbie Shakespeare on bass, Sly Dunbar on drums, Barry Reynolds and Mikey Chung on guitar, Wally Badarou on keys - the core of the Compass Point All Stars, house band at Chris Blackwell's Bahamas studio, where they were recorded. 

Nightclubbing was a huge, huge crossover hit in '81. Sheffield Steel, a few months later ... aaah ... not so much. It suffered from a wildly inappropriate title (the grim northern city meant little or nothing to a global audience, and had nothing to do with the music) and a wilfully foul cover. I've retitled and redesigned it, because this is how I rock, dudes, but it's your choice.

Grace was at home on an island in the sun, in the zeitgeist, on point. Joe was a transplant; a misfit in any age, looking forward and back, uncertain of his bearings. They're both terrific albums, and that Compass Point groove is fresh as ocean spray on a summer day.

EDIT: Some great links in the comments (although not to these albums, which everybody has, apparently), and a special mention for art58koen's share of Barry Reynold's I Scare Myself [left - Ed.] from both '82 and Compass Point.

"Shit-Stopper Drains And Crocodile Skis" - John Cooper Clarke

Three Or Four Guy© Nobby pops his IoF© cherry with this timely and provocative screed about a skinny twat from up north, where it's grim. Take it away, th' Nobster!

I wouldn't say [sez Nobby - Ed.] I'm big on poetry, but according to my gig diary (does anyone else keep one?), I have seen Ivor Cutler, Linton Kwesi Johnston and Alex O'Connor (who?) once apiece and JCC three times, so I guess he qualifies as my favourite poet, and definitely the funniest.

I first encountered him on the John Peel Show (where else) in late 1977. It was his debut ep on Rabid Records “Suspended Sentence”, just another diverse act that was on the go in the "Punk Years". If you listened regularly to Peel, like I did, you’d realise that there was a lot more going on than just bash it out 1234 punk, and JCC is a good example. Someone that had been around for a while but was then brought to prominence by the scene that developed around it. Here's a clip from Tony Wilson's Granada TV show from a pre punk 1976 featuring JCC  being interviewed whilst working in the stores at Salford Tech including some live performances:

My memory of  JCC is seeing him sauntering on to the stage in his black suit, looking like a 1966 Bob Dylan with his piled up hair and dark glasses on the thinnest pair of legs you’d ever seen, carrying his plastic carrier bag stuffed full of notebooks. He would get his rhythm going by chomping on chewing gum, and then he'd be off at a rate of knots, with his broad mancunian accent " As I was walking down Oxford Road, dressed in what they called the mode...." or .."Outside the takeaway, Saturday night, a bald adolescent asked me out for a fight, he was no bigger than a twopenny fart, a deft exponent of the martial arts." The danger of laughing at one line was that you would miss the next.

Here [left - Ed.] is a flyer where he was supported by Joy Division, fellow mancs that he was linked with a lot, from their early days as Warsaw and later with New Order, but he also did many gigs with The Clash, Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks.

Reading his autobiography "I Wanna Be Yours" it was apparent that most of his well known poems were written well before the punk era, “I Married A Monster from Outerspace” being written in the mid sixties. I was also amazed to find that his first paid gig was at Bernard Manning's cabaret club, where he auditioned with Salome Malone, the Queen of the Ritz, who, memorably ".. fell off her stiletto heels, and broke her fucking neck" which  got him the gig because it appealed to Mr Manning's memories of that club.

His influences  seem to have come from essentially the same places as the pop art brigade, i.e. commercial mass culture, TV and films of the '50s and '60s, although he makes special reference to Edgar Allan Poe and Mad Comics. His English teacher gets a chapter to himself, and it was he who taught him the importance of reading poetry out loud “if it doesn’t sound any good it’s because it isn’t any good”. Another influence he acknowledges is the poetry of Cassius Clay.

During his heyday in the late 70's everyone thought that his fast delivery came from speed but if was in fact heroin which led to him sharing a flat with Nico and disappearing from the scene in the 80’s. Looking for drugs on a visit to Holland, Nico rang up her supplier over there who came up with the goods. Years later JCC was watching a film about Chet Baker and recognised him as the dealer!

His recorded output aint that extensive - three proper lps, a live semi official lp, a 10" live lp and a couple of singles and even those include many duplications. The work is a mixture of live solo performances and studio recordings with  The Invisible Girls, featuring Martin Zero Hannet and Vinni Reilly, with guest appearances from Bill Nelson and Pete Shelley. I'm always torn between the two different treatments. The live stuff is how I remember him best, but the musical backing does provide some variety and the best of it is excellent e.g. Beasley Street.

Does his stuff translate to an international audience? You'll have to tell me. There's a lot of dialogue that relates to Manchester alone, never mind England. Beasley Street in particular evokes the English 1970's urban environment full of parochial references such as the title of this screed, which (I think) refers to narrow drainpipe trousers and winklepicker shoes, but how many of you would recognise that? And who now remembers Keith Joseph?

So to the downloads: After a great deal of arguing amongst myself (I've got a split personality and I hate both of them) I've taken the live 10" lp "Walking Back To Happiness" added some more live tracks and then  compiled a separate album with a few of the music ones. Each track has retained it's original album sleeve so you can tell where they came from. Also included is a BBC Radio 4 documentary, which probably gives you better coverage of his career than I've managed here.

Nobby earns not only the grudging respect of his confreres with this swell screed and sumptuous blister-pack of deliverables, but also his own Trading Card, soon to appear in the sidebar! Oboy!

From Calvin Klein™ Underwear To Psych-Pop - The Plasticland Story!

You'll know Plasticland as Milwaukee's Finest, because the term is synonymous, as Zion's Finest is with The Shoes, and Hackensack's Finest is with Cropduster [uh ... Ed.]. But they weren't always a trendy pop combo, no sirree! The guys first met on a modelling shoot for Calvin Klein™ underpants! 

"We were young and buff," laughs keyboardist extraordinaire Glenn Close today.

"Hard to believe!" laughs drummer extraordinaire John Malkovic today, "but we were first-call models for Calvin."

A shared love of 'sixties psychedelic music soon gave the hunky guys the idea of forming a band!

"And that's when we kissed goodbye to our looks, and careers as models," laughs bass-maestro Rod McKuen today.

Then - and now!

"The rock n' roll lifestyle soon took its toll," laughs rhythm guitarist extraordinaire John Malkovic today, "We weren't always as homely as Martha Stewart's couch!"

The band tried to disguise the ravages of the rock n' roll lifestyle by adopting Carnaby Street-style "mod" clothing, sunglasses and hats, but their days as poster boys were over. "We occasionally got side work modelling for hospital supplies manufacturers," laughs lead singer Rod McKuen today. "The MattressMaster© campaign was ours - but we were relying on our ability to deliver vintage psychedelic sounds in the signature Plasticland style music fans had come to love."

Just don't lump them in with the Paisley Underground scene! "Those guys had zero experience in underwear modelling!" laughs Glenn Close today. "Sure, Susanna Hoffs* tried in that movie, but, excuse me? Amateur hour much?"

*[left, reference only - Ed.]

The research, artwork and text for this piece were created with FOAM-E© state-of-the-art AI technology. "FOAM-E© For Th' Artificial Intelligentsia!"

Let's Play! Dept. - Who's Stuck Up Mrs. Myra Nussbaum's Crack?

Foam-O-Graph© Leading the way where others have followed!

It's been a while since th' IoF©'s beloved gender fluidity* icon Mrs. Myra Nussbaum hosted a game show! Older readers (cough) will remember her primetime ratings-busters like Help Mrs. Myra Nussbaum Clear Her Back Passage! Who's In Mrs. Myra Nussbaum's Muff? and the family values favorite Who's In Mrs. Myra Nussbaum's Clam? so leave us give the old doll a warm hand on her entrance! [FX - taped applause on loop - Ed.]

"A big furry grannytongue kissy-kiss to everyone out there in FoamLand™! Mrs. Myra here with more wholesome televisual entertainment! Today's show wants you, the Four Or Five Guy© scratching his balls, to identify the artistes stuck up my crack!"

Thanks, Mrs. M! Join interactive fun by leaving clew or hint in comment! Remember - don't name artistes/albums directly!

Today's grand prize is this wonderful project car [left, winner collects - Ed.], plus bonus prize of a glamorous night of love for one (1) at Pork Bend's romantic XXX Delite Auto Court! There's a special consolation prize of the featured albums for the dumbasses without clew one.

Please note that one of the acts is British. This is a shameless act of pandering to youse UK bums what are crap at recognising American albums. 

[*Mrs. Myra Nussbaum has gender-related fluid issues - Ed.]

"That's It! Stick It To 'Em! Tell Them How Avant Garde You Are!" Dept.

A request for a re-up of Tear The Top Right Off Your Million Dollar Head gave me an excuse to revisit it, and paste up some new sleeve art. I edited it a little, shortening the sound effect introduction, placing the mock-classical piece as an overture, replacing the frankly terrible-sounding live version of Circle Sky (both bass-heavy and shrill) with the original studio recording, and making many granular shifts too subtle for anyone but me to get excited about.

This all started years back, with my dissatisfaction with the movie soundtrack album, which I loved (owning three copies at a time when it was harder to locate than a rhinocerous clitoris) but felt needed work - the kind of work Jack Nicholson put into that dizzying sound collage (heard here in unique mind-blowing stereo). It needed to be more like the movie. It needed to be continuous, like a movie. Above all, it needed to be a puzzling, disorienting trip; not a bag of odds and ends. It took much more work than I anticipated, and I suspect some of the stuff I put in will never get out - trapped in the black box.

You can now play the album on an eternal loop, mirroring the structure of the movie - "and when you see the end in sight, the beginning might arrive." The theme of being trapped in a kind of Möbius Sunset Strip that twists through the movie is echoed even in the lyrics of the unused songs. "It's the end, the living end!" someone shouts at the beginning of California, as Peter sings "here I come, right back where I started from." Nesmith puts his characteristic spin on the Strip: "These things I think are new, I guess they're really old. It seems I've done 'em all before. Now I will go to someplace ... where things don't start just to end." That'll be Hollywood, mythical birthplace of the most fascinating and still misunderstood pop group. And Peter, who's always been the dummy, the idiot savant, sums up the frustration with Do I Have To Do This All Over Again, back on the wheel, stuck in the box ... puppets waking up from a dream - of being a boxer, a soldier, a musician, a suicide, a guru - into another dream ...

Although there are more songs on this version than the official release, it's a more intense listen, and it does justice to an intense movie; multi-layered, dreamlike, endlessly rich and deep. Fuck Kubrick. Grab your headphones and half an hour to yourself. Extra points for spotting the Firesign Theatre.

The James Joyce Connection

From an internet: "James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939) is considered a revolutionary masterpiece. Written over the course of nearly two decades, Joyce attempted to create a dreamlike state. Like the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, Joyce believed that history is cyclical. Finnegans Wake is modeled on this concept. The story is written in a circular structure with no beginning or end. In fact, the novel’s opening line is a fragment of a sentence from the novel’s closing line which was left unfinished. Due to the complicated and fluid nature of the novel, critics find it difficult to summarize the plot. The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories ..."

Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not. This concept can occur to, and be expressed artistically by, a bunch of super-smart Hollywood brats quite as well as any Literary Genius or 18c philostopher. "The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories", or, as Head puts it: "We hope you like our story, although there isn't one ... that is to say there's many ..." The protagonist in Finnegans Wake is referred to as HCE, which can be understood as Here Comes Everybody. In this Fractal Expansion the Head equivalent is Here We Come, or HWC. Here they come, and there they go.

Swim with the mermaids ...

Back cover supplied (above, struggling against white background) . 

Straight Outta Compton Dept.

John Compton is a name you should know, if you don't already, because it connects a string of superb albums; timeless music that defies categorisation.

Appaloosa (1969) was an Al Kooper discovery - he got them a deal with Columbia, produced and played on the album, added top-flight studio support, and wrote the slevenotes. John Compton wrote the songs, with Robin Batteau adding harmonies and string arrangements. It's a beautiful, unique album, but rock n' roll it ain't. This is haunted, creaky American Gothic, to be filed alongside Antecedently FoamFeatured© albums from Papa Nebo and Maxfield Parrish (which you maybe missed, ya doofus). 

In California (1970) features Compton & Batteau backed by First National Banders John London and John Ware. The melancholic atmosphere lingers like a haze (again, the cover gets it perfectly right), but a weirdly unsettling edge is still there - it's not like anyone was struggling for radio play.

To Luna (1973) was Compton flying solo. His most accessible music yet, but only 600 copies limped out on the two-album Ageless label. A lot of sweet acoustic guitar with Harvey Brooks and Billy Mundi doing their awesome rhythm section thing. Things loosen up into funky jams on the worthwhile bonus cuts, pointing the way to a future that never arrived.

Batteaux (1973 according to Discogs, '71 to Wiki) doesn't feature Compton at all, but the two Batteau brothers (hence the plural x - college education, folks!) and sessioners including John Guerin, Milt Holland and Tom Scott. The ghosts of Appaloosa are laid to rest in a summery, relaxed vibe and memorable hooks that set the brothers up for successful careers in music, although not, unfortunately, more albums as a duo. The folky feel lingers, but the lightness of mood is a long way from American Gothic. Just don't dismiss it, as some lazy critics have, as "Yacht Rock", that fakest of genres. Intelligence, artistry, and above all an uncompromising musicality, runs through all these albums like DNA.

A search for Papa Nebo and Maxfield Parrish may prove advantageous. That's the search box up over there ☞

Draftervoi Detenses The Present Dept.

Four Or Five Guy© Draftervoi buried this capsule in the Joni thread, which is already hundreds of years old, and it gets to be ceremoniously exhumed right here, on account which it's Kwality Screedage.

Draftervoi talking to us from the future, yestiddy!

I've got a marijuana dispensary [boasts Draftervoi - Ed.] on the next block, 6 TB of music...more music than I have lifetime left, I can order a disembodied computer voice to play hundreds of thousands more songs, watch almost any movie or television program on command, find any book and have it brought to me in 48 hours or less, fresh fruit is always in season, local restaurants feature worldwide cuisines delivered to my door in minutes, my car's engine will last 250,000 miles, there's clean drinking water everywhere I go, and toilets when I have to go, I own a laser and use it to tease the cat. I have a communicator that's better than Captain Kirk's; last week I facetimed with my daughter in Ciudad de México about her struggle to find a good Korean restaurant.

So...yeah, we don't have atomic powered vacuum cleaners (do you really want a nuclear pile in your closet?). We don't have flying cars (given the knuckleheads and drunks you see on the freeway, do you want them whizzing over your home in a ton of metal travelling at 150 miles an hour?). And we don't have vacations on Space Hilton at the Rings of Saturn.

Okay, that last one, I still want that. But most of "the Future" was just a bunch of bad past crap writ large, just with us having funny names like Zyxxyx and pointy shoulder pads on our silver lamé unisex bodysuits.

The present is friggin' AWESOME. If you were to time travel just a little bit, you'd find yourself kneedeep in open sewers and 100 year long wars to decide which inbred royal hillbilly family gets to rule. Most of my friends say, "Hey, let's visit Jolly Old Elizabethean England, maybe catch an original performance of the Lord Chamberlain's Men doing Hamlet at the Globe, it'll be a lark..." and they're dead of cholera a week later. Leeches don't actually do anything, but that's medicine before antibiotics for you.

No...the present is WONDERFUL.

Draftervoi operates The ClamShake Shack™concession at beautiful Visitor Waiting Area, FCI, Terminal Island, LA. "Walk-ins welcome!"

Vintage Neo-Psych Dept.

I mean, you're not going to do this, because youse is a lazy-ass bum, but if you wander barefoot about th' Isle O' Foam© you'll stumble across a few neo-psych albums, nestling in the undergrowth like tropical blooms transplanted by hand from the vast arid wastelands of contemporary music. They're precious because they get psychedelia right. It's not just a matter of adding an inept guitar solo over a Velvets one-chord strum, or dialing in some effects so the word "psychedelic" will turn up in a review of your soon-to-be-forgotten waxing.

Here's a couple of relatively recent (post-Plasticland) releases that sound right to me. The Virgineers date all the way back to 1999, and their influences are clearly The Dukes Of Stratosphear (who apparently had a side project called XTC?) and English tea-time lysergica. How Far Does Space Go? collects, as far as I know, their complete recordings, and at eighty minutes is a little too rich for one sitting. It's quality stuff - avoiding pastiche (as The Dukes did) while still soaking the blotter is a neat trick. Fab!

The Sufis, drawing from the same well as The Virgineers, made three albums - this is the first, from 2012 (the Summer of So What) which delivers the contact high cosmic truth-seekers demand of their audio entertainment. The other two didn't quite snap my synapses, but this is pretty damn authentic - ten Day-Glo™splashes of mind paint, clocking in at under half an hour. Groovy!

The covers are mine. I want The Virgineers on translucent Mylar©, and lenticular 3D for The Sufis. I'll get to Plasticland soon, I hope.

Tom Cruise's Tiki Bar O'Tunes™! - Dept.

 

Grand Opening of Tom's Tiki Bar O' Tunes™ captured on Foam-O-Graph© - where AI means Artificial Ignorance!

You'll know T.V.'s Tom from the long-running IoF© show Am I Going Out Of My Fucking Mind!?!? [answer his question here - Ed.]. Tom's exciting new initiative is Tom's Tiki Bar O'Tunes™! Leave us let the Grand Vizier Operating Thetanführer Level VII give us the skinny!

FT3 Tommyboy! Th' Gunster! How's it hangin'?

TC Wooo-hoooooo!!! I feel so ALIVE!!!!!!

FT3 Ri-ight! So - tell us a little about-

TC Life is just so freakin' WONDERFUL!!! Can't you see that? I'm so full of joy and love and light I could BOUNCE on a COUCH! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

FT3 Happy for ya! So-

TC (suddenly serious) You are clouded by Thetans. I see fifteen thousand eleven hundred and eighty-two Thetans occupying your face muscles alone. (produces contract) Sign here, and you will be Thetan-free for twenty-five billion years. There's a free steak knife set if you sign now!

FT3 (backing slowly away, avoiding eye contact) Rots o' ruck with the Tiki thing! Bye now!

Want to join in the glamor and H'wood razzmatazz of Tom's public opening? Sure you do! Maybe not so much if you're a dame. Tom invites you, the Four Or Five Guys©, to guess what he'll be spinning on th' Tiki Turntable tonite! Take a squint at above Foam-O-Graph© [above - Ed.] - if you think you know artiste/album, leave clew in comment!

EDIT: Tom's Tunes? Why, it's Brit hopeful Helen Watson with that none-more-eighties look. Her debut album Blue Slipper was the first recording session for Little Feat after Lowell's death, and produced by Glyn Johns in LA. The same team also recorded a follow-up, The Weather Inside, which I used to have on vinyl also too as well. Her career has been continuous to the present day, but she's something of a low flier, appreciated more by US musicians.

This post made plausible thru a bottle of Thailand's LEO Lager - th' beer o' the workin' stiff!

Godlike Genius Dept. - Blue Lawns

Here's a couple of sweet companions to familiar albums from Joni Mitchell. The Seeding Of Summer Lawns is an unusually intelligently produced bootleg. Hunter has been removed because it's from the Blue sessions, and is included on ...

Blue Highlights. A recent Record Store Day special, culled from Archives Vol. II. 

Thanks to Lupine Assassin.

Rolling Stone [a magazine - Ed.] said that Summer Lawns was "Uninspired ... insubstantial."

"Basically a West Coast Erica Jong. If that sounds peachy to you, enjoy." smirked Roberta Christgau, who opined that Blue was "an exciting, scary glimpse of a woman in a man's world." Just what is his problem?

TL-DR Dept. - "Yes, But What Do You Think Of The Singing?"

The title of this screed was Lowell George's reply when asked why there was so little bottleneck guitar on Thanks I'll Eat It Here, an album troubled not only by the break-up of Little Feat, but also a catalog of health problems related to obesity, back surgery, and of course prodigious drug abuse; heroin, cocaine, alcohol ... what you got? Thanks! I'll eat it here. But there's another possible reason for the delays and difficulties - chronic lack of self-confidence.

He knew his songwriting was a cake left out in the rain. He couldn't come up with enough material for a Little Feat album, leave alone a solo project. As a direct result of his reduced creativity, the other writers stepped up to fill the gap. I'm sure everybody would have been happy if Lowell continued to be the band's principal songwriter, so for him to blame Bill Payne's jazz-rock leanings for his dissatisfaction is disingenuous at best.

So, what do you want the boy to do? Can't you see it's breaking the child in two?

There was a lack of vision for the solo album, other than it was not to be a Little Feat album. Yet he covered a Little Feat tune and gave Neon Park the job of packaging it, whose style is joined at the hip with the band. Richie Hayward and Bill Payne both play on it (along with just about anybody else who could lift their face from a bowl of blow for long enough). He didn't have the confidence to cut the cord. That we got an album at all is something of a miracle. And he put a band together and started a tour and then he fell over and, for the first time, didn't get up again.

Over the years, more people have come to love this album for what it is than hate it for what it's not. It's Lowell George, singing as beautifully as ever, and maybe with a little more soul. Singing a bunch of songs which range from the ridiculous to the sublime.

The Ridiculous

Jimmy Webb, a songwriter almost without peer in Literate Pop, right up there with Paul Simon, contributes not only his worst song, but a song nearly as wretched as Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Himmler's Ring is the one song on the album everybody either hates or makes excuses for.

A sketch of a song. Ten tossed-off lines, rinse and repeat. It must have taken Webb as many minutes to write. The tone is obvious from the arrangement, but we have no idea what the song's about. Webb explains the joke: “It was a kind of a barbed wire affair with Himmler’s Ring, which I think was widely misunderstood by most people. It was a satire of a guy who collects Nazi war memorabilia. I thought that was a singular hook for a song.”

Well, yeah but no. Webb is no satirist. He's not Steely Dan. But why did Lowell include it? My guess is he asked Webb if he had something lying around, and maybe it would lighten the tone, or he was desperate to delay the tone arm on its spiral of doom to the label, and hey, it was an exclusive Jimmy Webb composition ... it had to be good, right? Right? But I'm tired of making excuses for it ("delightfully oddball", "Lowell goofing off as only he can" etc.). It doesn't sound right and it stinks and I'm never going to listen to it again. Fooey on it.

The Sublime

Twenty Million Things To Do is very possibly his finest song. He gives a co-writing credit to his eight year-old step-son, Jed Levy, who (according to Lowell) came up with the couplet "I've got twenty million things to do, but I'm only thinking of you" while fooling around with a tape recorder. A co-write in the loosest sense of the word, and a generous gift of royalties to his son-in-law.

But this isn't an album of his own compositions, which was the main reason for the disappointed reaction on release. Nor is it a showcase for his signature slide playing, another cause of chopfallen mien across the diaspora. It's all about the singing. In the blizzard of brilliance that was Little Feat, his singing tends to get overlooked.

He is a superb vocalist. And it's showcased here in a different context, on cover versions that would never have been considered for a band release, and just what is the problem here? It's unlikely anyone coming fresh to TIEIH would understand the shit flung at it by people who call themselves fans.

China White, which now heads up the album, was a victim of Lowell's inability to complete to his own satisfaction (although it sounds just fine to everybody else). After refusing to leave the studio for coke-fuelled days and nights without sleep, trying to nail the take, he had to be locked out of the building and told to go home. And it still, amazingly, didn't make the cut. A love/hate song to his addiction, it bleeds raw soul from every stretched-out, strung-out syllable.

I said blow away, blow away This cruel reality And keep me from its storm Suspicion has crept in, and ruined my life I'm messed up, and hassled, and worn

Well its pure indignation Just another sensation And I'd like to knock on that door But the boy he keeps on callin' for more Yes and my sweet China White She ain't here tonight And love has robbed me blind So cast away, cast away From this ball full of pain For it sinks beneath the waves Yes and my sweet China White She ain't here tonight Oh and love has robbed me blind Yes ahh sweet  Morphine has robbed me blind ...

I guess morphine sounds more poetic, more romantic, than heroin. It makes for a strong opening statement - confessional yet unrepentant. Not Little Feat, but pure Lowell George.

Cheek To Cheek has been dismissed by some critics as a lightweight pastiche. I don't hear that. Not only does co-writer Van Dyke Parks have a lot of respect and love for "this-type" music, but Lowell isn't camping it up. He's singing from the heart - yo soy amoroso! I suspect those sniping at the song might find it hard to believe that any American would want to sing Mexican music, which is for tourists. It's a beautiful song.

Lonesome Whistle, producer George Massenburg recalls, was recorded by Lowell in '75, as one of the first songs to be considered for the solo album. It got lost until his widow found it in a paper bag in their garage. Exactly who's playing - apart from Lowell - is unknown, but that sure ain't Richie Hayward, is it? The Hank Williams song sits perfectly in Lowell's idiosyncratic eclecticism - two words that should be seen together more frequently.

I've shuffled the running order to accommodate the additions, which helps to hear the album afresh, leaving in the sublime Heartache, the bonus cut from the recent re-issue. What we have lasts a generous 39 minutes, with six of the eleven songs written or co-written by Lowell, a higher proportion than some Feat albums. These changes, together with the eradication of Himmler's Ring, would seem to address most of the criticism the album still attracts from time to time.

The new album art features a South Central L.A. mural, which echoes the cover of that first Little Feat album, and I added Lowell looking from a window. It's not even pretending to be a better cover than Neon Park's masterpiece, but it will allow you to differentiate between this pimped-out version and the original.