From Th' IoF© Library O' Books Dept. - We Gots Literature Out Th' Ass!

Say, fellows! Do you read, like, books? I know, I know, you can barely get through a blog post without blacking out, but here's some books, anyway. If you've heard about books and think you might be, you know, "book curious", you may like to sample the experience - in perfect safety and privacy - with one of these. Nobody's watching you. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to judge you either way.

JUST  IN:

By request, my first novel to remain unpublished. It's also, inevitably, my best. It's absolutely adult, in the sense of a grown-up book for grown-ups, and "informed" by events in my life. A shitstorm of mad sex and inconsiderate behavior. Unfortunately the non-performance of my previous novels hung a KEEP AWAY sign round my neck, and I was on the cusp of becoming Male, Pale, and Stale. Neither I nor City Of Starless Night answers the demographic requirements of the Annas, Carolinas, Emmas, Joannas, Tabithas, Arabellas and Sashas at any agency in the world. The cover design is something I did, because I could. You'd pick this off the shelf, right? Publishers are the dumbest of fucks.

 

It's A Beautiful, Beautiful Day

It sure is.

For anyone outside San Francisco, It's A Beautiful Day created their unforgettable impact with the cover of their first album. Unashamedly nostalgic, and not at all psychedelic, it crystalised the feelings and the hopes of the late 'sixties. Music impressario and thieving son-of-a-bitch Matthew Katz came up with the name. He would drag the group (and Moby Grape, and Jefferson Airplane) through the courts for decades, trying to wring every last cent out of claimed rights and preventing re-releases. He died last year, too late. So forget him this way, with It's A Beautiful Day.

George Hunter (The Charlatans founder) designed the cover, and the painting is by Kent Hollister, based on - well, okay, copying - Charles Courtney Curran's Woman On The Top Of A Mountain [left - Ed.]. Looks to me like he painted directly over a print, extending the sky. His slightly coarser brushwork and more saturated palette improves on the chocolate box insipidity of the original. The hand-drawn typography is adapted from period advertising, and the use of the old Columbia logo was a deliberately nostalgic touch. Hunter and Hollister also created the cover for Quicksilver's Happy Trails.

So before we even get to listen to the music, we have all these disparate influences coming together in unlikely synchronicity to produce a work of art that transcends its sources to become genuinely iconic. How could the music live up to that promise?

It does. And at the heart of it is David LaFlamme, who died just weeks before his nemesis Katz, and died as he lived; loved. He formed IABD in the summer of '67 (when else?) with his wife Linda, after an apprenticeship gigging with Garcia, Joplin, and the strange Orkustra [here - Ed.]. After a go-nowhere first single, Love For You, Katz abducted them to Seattle, to "polish their act" at his low rent concert hall. It was midwinter, a universe away from the Summer of Love, and Katz held the band virtual prisoners in a freezing attic. LaFlamme, as ever, accentuated the positive:

"Where the White Bird thing came from - we were like caged birds in that attic. We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable. We were just barely getting by on a very small food allowance provided to us. It was quite an experience, but it was very creative in a way ..."

White bird must fly, she will die ... That yearning for freedom would perhaps never have been expressed so soulfully were it not for Katz's grifting. So we have him to thank, perversely, for their signature song. On their return to San Francisco, the band built a fervent following in live performance, the name becoming a regular feature on the psychedelic posters of the era. Rock violinists were then as now thin on the ground (and the ground is pretty arid these days), but LaFlamme also had the compositional chops to go with the virtuosity. Katz finagled them a Columbia recording contract weighted heavily in his favor, and White Bird made its first appearance on record. LaFlamme wrote, and co-wrote with wife Linda, all the songs on the album, and his classical/zigeuner melodic gift is everywhere.

White Bird was a hit single on the West Coast, and the album did well, keeping Columbia happy. Marrying Maiden did even better, although the atmosphere of the first was lost. The last track is a heartbreaking elegy to a summer already passed into myth:

Do you remember the sun? He remembers you.

You can forget what you came into the room for, but don't forget this. It's a beautiful, beautiful day.

 

 

THIS JUST IN!

 

One Buck Guy kindly donates a hen's teeth recording of IABD demo'ing four tunes at the Avalon Ballroom in 1968. Impeccably recorded, there are three songs from the first album, including a stretched Bulgaria, and the rare Countryside. I've crayoned up a sleeve [above - Ed.] and the mini-album - thirty three precious minutes - is available in the comments.

 

 

 

 

 

"Making The Moodies Look Like Motorhead" Dept. - UK Kaleidoscope

The difference between US and UK psychedelic music is nowhere more glaring than a face-off between the two Kaleidoscopes. From English Whimsydelia™ to West Coast wig-outs, these two bands occupied different pots of Acapulco Gold at each end of the lysergic rainbow. The US version has long been resident on th' IoF©, so it's time to dose up from Mr. Dodgson's Patent Drink Me bottle (probably laudanum).

Their first album, Tangerine Dream (whence the Teutonic synth boffins got their name), was a kind of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn lite. So light as to be almost weightless. It gets a lot of love, because it set the Gold Standard for Whimsydelia™. It's very much a period piece, like Nirvana's Simon Simopath of the same year, without the charm. Or the hits. Still, it shifted enough copies to garner them a second album from Fontana.

 

 

Faintly Blowing  [above - Ed.] is worth it for the epic title track, which floats like dandelion seeds on a hot summer day. It shimmers and buzzes with an air of faerie magic, and nothing else on the album comes close to its sleepy pastoral beauty. This really does out-pastoral the Floyd at their pastoraliest. The Three O'Clock must have been influenced by it when they recorded the lovely As Real As Real. It sold less than the first - '69 was a strange year, and Faintly Blowing was left blowing faintly in the wind.

When these guys are good, they're very good indeed, and it was just tough breaks that prevented the Fairfield Parlour album from being a breakthrough hit in 1970.  They'd renamed themselves, anxious to burn the kaftans, but threw away what slender following they'd built without winning a new one. Fairfield Parlour was perhaps too close to Fairport Convention, and too far from memorable. And a little old lady (LOL) cover is never going to fly off the rock/pop shelves. Damn shame, as it's their strongest release, full of great tunes, emotive singing, and superb production. Touches of psychedelia remain, but this a dawn of the 'seventies album through and through, and it should have fed off the huge Moody Blues audience.

White Faced Lady was shelved for decades due to label incompetence. It's a double concept album, with the visually impaired Peter Daltrey apparently embracing a woman's corpse on the cover, and I've yet to get into it because it's a double concept album, with Peter Daltrey apparently embracing a woman's corpse on the cover. Let me know how you get on.

 

 

At no extra cost to you, Mr. and Mrs. Musiclover of Yourtown USA,  we offer this swell long-playing bonus LP record of radio sessions Absolutely Free!

This post autoclaved by Andy's Autoclave, Perineum, CO.

Perfect Tens Dept. - Blue

Joni, anticipatin' another nite of romantic knob stuff wit' yrs. truly!

 

You will argue, in that unpleasant adenoidal whine you have, that this is an altogether too, too populist choice, and Ms. Mitchell recorded other Perfect Tens only truly appreciated by the cognoscenti [Italian: gear sniffers - Ed.] such as like yer swell self. You may have a point, but go make it somewhere else [like the comments, f'rinstance - Ed.].

The magic that Mitchell worked with Blue was to make guys think she was singing to them, about them (th' saps!) and chicks think she was confiding in them, gal to gal. Listening to Blue is a startlingly intimate experience - there's no distance between her and you. It's not just her spare, and brilliant, production, it's the quality of her singing. Her previous album, Ladies Of The Canyon, was beautiful in the sense of hippie beautiful, her voice still girlish, skipping into cute falsetto. The cover [not at left - Ed,] was a clue - an unfinished page from a coloring book. Incomplete, half way there.

Needing a break from messed-up relationships, she vacationed on a Greek island, fucked a redneck on the beach, and came home a deeper person. I can't bring myself to say became a woman, because I don't have a Stetson and a back porch handy. The timbre [Fr. wood - Ed.] of her voice changed, her internal vision was clearer, and her lyrics hid nothing at all. Again, the cover is a clue; Joni sexing up the mic in super-saturated blue, singing eyes closed, just for you. There's no room for a Big Yellow Taxi in the confessional.

She inhabits her songs rather than performs them. Raw like silk, wild like honey - melody lines wind into unexpected shapes that would defeat less gifted singers, and she's always bang in the middle of the note. There's a chamber music restraint to the arrangements - this is basically a live album, and Joni's front and center. Blue created a naked intimacy that she never recaptured. But she never tried. She's an artist, she don't look back.

 

This post funded in part by your pals at th' pool hall. who will be contacting you about your contribution.

Burt Reynolds' Guide To Neo-Psychedelia Dept. - Levitation Room

 

Hauntingly lifelike Foam-O-Graph© invites YOU to share an exotic beverage with Burt in our tasteful Tiki Bar!

You'll know brawny Burt from his iconic roles in The Pudding Boys II, and Heidi's Hawaiian Holiday, but did you know he's an expert on neo-psych albums?! Burt waxed loquacious anent his musical passion as we relaxed poolside, whilst Kreemé served her signature Whelkfoot n' Livebait Smoothies!

FT3 Bertie-baybeeee!!! High five, my man! Thanx for dropping by th' Isle O' Foam©!

BR Always an honor and a privilege to kick back with my favorite humor-based music blog writer!

FT3 I like to think of myself more as a content creator, actually.

BR Well, fuck you in your pretentious pink ass, Farq!

FT3 (laughs) Ha ha! Tell me, you still smacking Loni Anderson [left - Ed.] around?

BR She still alive?

FT3 (laughs) Ha ha! Unlike you, pally!

BR (laughs) Ha ha! Fuck you, Farq!

(Monkee-style romp as we tussle goodnaturedly around the pool, unaware of any homoerotic subtext)

FT3 (breathlessly) So, which albums you brung for th' Four Or Five Guys© today, Bertram?

BR Well, it's these guys Levitation Room. They got, like ... uh ... I think I have to help Kreemé with the, the, whatever she does back there ...

 

You know those whiz lines left by the Tasmanian Devil? That's what we're looking at right now. 

 

 

Sacred Cows And The Elephant In The Room Dept. - The Velvet Underground

I like Loaded, for all the reasons the band didn't. It's a good album. And the first album is worth an occasional spin on the Consolette autochange. But you probably have a few thousand good albums, none of which form part of a revered œuvre from a band on a huge fuck-off pedestal in the hallowed hall of rock and roll. There's Lou, in his eyeglasses with the patented flip-up lenses, looking down on us with that serious artist expression we're always suckered by. Lordy, we love a serious, suffering artist.

It's a popular belief -  popular in the sense of clung to by a few rocktellectuals - that Lou mastered the craft of writing Brill Building pop (so hey, respect) before maturing into the transgressive artiste who changed the course of music history. Yes, it is said, he could toss off pop hits but chose to follow his artistic muse. Well, it wasn't the actual Brill Building - this was no-budget dump-bin Pickwick Records (yes, that Pickwick Records). Being a "staff writer" there carried as much cachet as being staff writer for a fortune cookie company. Have you actually heard these early pocket masterpieces of pop? They are, uh, well, a bit shit. And they weren't hits for anybody, not even The Beachnuts. If they had been, Pickwick would have kept him on the payroll and the course of music would have continued unchanged.

Anyway, he met fellow struggling intellectuals John Cale and Angus MacLise at Pickwick and they formed a band which got picked up (ask yourself why - you'll probably get the right answer) by commercial illustrator turned avant-garde artiste Andy Warhol. Are we seeing a pattern here? MacLise quit the band because principles which the others gave a shit about, so they hired Mo Tucker, about whom never a bad word is whispered because a) androgynous woman in man's world b) brave minimalist style c) stood up at kit, and most importantly d) was in Velvet Underground. Warhol inducted catwalk scag valkyrie and Nazi sympathiser Nico into the band, because of the all-important cool ethic, and she was like a breath of dry ice. But she made John Cale's unlistenable spoken word pieces and viola scraping sound almost like fun. It's testament to the grip Warhol had on the band's balls that they let Nico share the stage with them. Did the Stones make Anita Pallenberg, their own Wagnerian smack vampire, a member of the band?

Warhol, a huge talent (his early album and book covers showed a genius for penmanship, but he was never going to get rich and famous from that) and master manipulator, knew exactly what he was doing. That's his name on the first album cover. It's an Andy Warhol album, part of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia Pop Art project. The PRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL headline on the back doesn't mean he sat at the mixing desk in his headphones - he always got someone else to do the actual work. It means the band was his product. Both band and impresario benefited from the partnership. Warhol was a boldface celebrity in New York, and everything he did was news - more, it was art. The band were perceived as intellectuals using the medium of rock and roll to make art. They were above the vulgar commerce of the Brill Building. Not for them the crass banality of the hit single! Unless, of course, Reed learned how to write one. But heroin be the death of me, it's my life and it's my wife set out their stall nicely.

The most influential band in rock n' roll history? That quote about only five thousand people buying a Velvets album but every one of them forming a band is pretty clever. They couldn't play all that well, just barely well enough, and when they turned their amps down ("volume as art") their inherent feebleness was all too apparent. The third album has the sonic impact of somebody tapping a cereal box with a pencil. Listen to Loaded and imagine the quantum improvement if played by LA session musicians. There's an actual rock album in there struggling to get out, and this is why they didn't like it. They couldn't play it.

Their unique spin was to camouflage their unmusicality behind the avant-garde art stuff - noise, lyrical shock value, look - the primitive music was inherent to their stance. Anyone can strum a couple of amplified chords over a basic beat for an hour or so. Wear black, wear shades, not smile. And just about anyone did. Easy! Kids saw the Velvets and thought, hey, I can do dis awready! I don't gots to loin nuttin'! Which was the basic appeal of rock n' roll anyway, so nothing new there. But influence is not inspiration. Anyone can be influenced by anything, but inspiring people is something else entirely, and it's never about taking an easy option.

Reed had songwriting chops, but the appeal of the Velvets wasn't in their songs. It was their cool stance, the stark image. And the drugs. This wasn't The Lovin' Spoonful, this was bad time music, and the party drug of choice was heroin. Reed's under-acknowledged achievement was to make heroin, the dumbest, messiest, nastiest fucking thing you can do to yourself, cool. And because he looked like somebody in control, he made it seem controllable. He never came even close to saying, don't do this shit, it'll fuck you right up, and in the absence of that direct message, any claims that he was subtly and poetically expressing his disapproval of heroin are pretty hard to substantiate.  He even made the degrading act of waiting for his dealer into a twisted love song. White Light/White Heat was a refreshing change of subject - it's a paean to meth, hillbilly heroin. Many musicians sacrifice their careers and lives to heroin, it's an old, old story. But Lou Reed made it aspirational, part of the NY boho look, a fashion statement.

The rise of the Velvets represented a shift in New York pop culture, from the open mics of Bleecker Street to the invitation-only loft parties and gallery openings of a self-appointed elite of talentless scag-monkey scam artists and pox-raddled whores. Street-level rock and pop thrived anyway, much of it echoing the Velvet Underground's smack-head chic. But Reed's position as idol, as icon, as pioneering artiste and pop intellectual, was carved in Chinese rock, or rather into the arms of those under the glamor of his spell.

He finally got clean in the 'eighties, embracing Eastern philosophy and Tai Chi, a discipline popular among Central Park mystics. Good for him. I don't know if he wrote any songs about the benefits of his new lifestyle, or used his celebrity and experience to help heroin and meth addicts, but the damage was done. When rock critics today pay the required homage to the great man's work and the influence of the Velvet Underground, they ignore the emaciated elephant in the room, bristling with dirty syringes. 

 

I apologise in advance for this piece. It started out as something else, but the more drivel I read about Andy And His Pals the more angry I became. My advice - skip it.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life Dept. - The Monkees

Listen To The Band, long out of print, remains the best (and best-sounding) overview of pop's most misunderstood - and least understood - band. Their covert agenda? Have some fun. Dance, laugh. Was it not Descartes who said "if life seems jolly rotten, there's something you've forgotten, and that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing. When you're feeling in the dumps, don't be silly, chumps! Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing!"

Listen to the band! It's Saturday morning, sunshine coming through the windows and you're lacing up your favorite sneakers. the whole wide world at your feet.

This post made necessary thru necessity. Stay groovy.

Is Anyone Listening Any More? Dept. - Jefferson Airplane

Paul, Jack, Signe, Spencer, Marty, and Skip. Frontloaded with talent, love, and hope. Photo: Morton Beebe

I was getting my Ford Rental P.O.S. gassed up somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, and the gas jockey recognised The Mamas And The Papas' People Like Us on the tape player. "Underrated album," he said. "Surprised you have it." I told him I was surprised he knew it, what with him not being born when it was released, and we fell to talking. Our agreed stance was that San Francisco hippie music had not stood the test of time as well as the more professional studio product coming out of L.A. This would be in '98, because I'd just staggered from the Cinerama Dome where I'd fallen asleep during The Big Lebowski, a much-loved and quoted (well, "it really tied the room together" and "the Dude abides") movie that left me, and still leaves me, bored and puzzled by its appeal. Yes, we all love Jeff Bridges, by George, and some of us like John Goodman, who's agreeably fat and growly but cannot actually act. At all. But yeesh ... anyway. My gas jockey friend made a face when I asked if he liked the Airplane, conceding that Grace Slick was a piece of work.

That rug really ties the room together. Photo: John Olsen

The Quicksilver piece drew a heartening response, but there seemed to be some sort of consensus that they peaked with the first two albums, which still hold a full charge and are very much worth listening to. Jefferson Airplane are similar. Ish. Except they have at least three Imperial Period albums if you count Pointed Head, which I do, and a couple of Bony-Fido chart smashes, which was always beyond Quicksilver's pay grade. Does anyone outside this small circle of friends still listen to th' Airplane? Young people? Anybody know any young people into this-type music? Is this wonderment going to die with us? Does it matter? Why am I asking you? Hoo hah?

"Underrated first album" syndrome, shared with folk-rockers Fairport Convention, who also exchanged their first singer for the second breakthrough album. If the Airplane had only recorded this, it'd still get four stars for its strong original material, and unprecedented, spectacular, bass playing.

 

 

 

Force of nature Grace Slick brought two songs from her previous group and lit up everything like a white-hot sun, at least for a while. Who says you can't have it all?

 

 

 

 

 

The burnout begins here; that third album lack of direction, and a perverse refusal to cut a hit meant side-lining Balin, the guy who started it all.

 

 

 

 

 

There's a seemingly limitless supply of live Airplane, but this is as exciting as it gets. You had to be there? If you were, you have your memories, and if you weren't, it's an exploding ticket to Be Here Now. The iconic cover has that "excess all areas" Beggars Banquet vibe; the dance became decadence as cocaine and heroin poisoned the 'sixties.

 

 

 

 

This post homologated by Hometown Homer's Homogeneous Homologation Holistics, Happy Hollow, NH.

 

 

The Grumpy One's Shining Hour

"I am just a garden gnome on the lawn of life."

 

George Harrison's first album is not only the finest work by a solo Beetle, a bar not as high as some would argue, it's an astonishing album by any standard. Ignoring the perhaps over-generous third disc of jamming, there's not a bad track on it. Nor an even ordinary one.

It was unaffordable for many on release, me included, but I picked it up second-hand soon after. The thing is, and hear me out, I don't remember anyone whining about Phil Spector's production back then. It was a massive album, and sounded that way. The kind of massive that wouldn't be heard again until Born To Run. You weren't meant to hear individual instruments in clinical separation, you were meant to be overwhelmed. And everyone was.

The Grumpy One said "I didn't have many tunes on Beatles records, so doing an album like All Things Must Pass was like going to the bathroom and letting it out" And it was good shit. 

So why and wherefore is this appearing on th' IoF©? Because this is the original vinyl mix, which is strangely hard to find these days. Not only that, it's pbthal's needledrop (if you know, you know). Not only that, I am rendering a pubic cervix by offering both flac - no, really, it should be available, consarn it - and the Baby Jesus Bitrate of @192, for th' jes' plain folks sudge as like I. Om shanti, bitches!

An unnecessary note on the title: All Things Must Pass has a nicely philosophical and comforting ring to it, and we can imagine it intoned by the lamasery abbot as we genuflect before him. Let Abe Lincoln tell the story: "It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: and this, too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" This iteration of the phrase is preferable to Harrison's tombstone dogmatism. All Things Must Pass? Things are already passing, dude. There's a paradox at work here: In the future, this thing must pass into the past, which is like the present. I prefer the beautiful phrase (which I got from a Shpongle record) nothing lasts, but nothing is lost, quoted in the blog header, which is the entrance to a very spectacular wormhole.

 

This post made plausible thru a nice cup of homegrown cannabis tea this morning, as I watch the cranes - they're birds, ya doofus - feeding in the pool behind my house, with the ecstatic What Is My Life blasting from my cheap-ass speakers. Life is swell, and I hope yours is too.

Unhear And Unsee Dept. - Another Thirty Minutes Of Songs Nobody Should Have To Listen To Again IMPORTANT UPDATE!

 

Note balanced composition. Note harmonious color palette. Note integration of text.

The first volume of this timely and provocative curatorial initiative drew a response only slightly less fervent than for any post with a pitcher of Susanna Hoffs, such was its impactfulness!

Like before, it's you, the ordinary Four Or Five Guy© out there, perhaps slouching at a Home Computer in yer underwear, or sneaking a look at your phone during a high-powered executive board meeting, what will determine the content of this bold new curatorial initiative!

Last time around, it was Classic Standards what got fed into the wood chipper! This time, it's the worst, cringiest, most unlistenably wretched dreck from Big Name Acts!

I'll repeat this requirement in the comments, because not that many of you have the attention span to read the "OP" as the youngsters are calling it.

THIS JUST IN!

In something of a coup for th' IoF©, NASA has chosen this very special curatorial initiative to be included in the Digitized Global Cultural Archive on board the first rocket mission to Uranus! Executive Curatorial Custodian Beatrice "Bunty" Bulle-Daique [left - Ed.] sez:

"This is shooting straight to Uranus, Farq!"

 

 

 

 

 Link in th' comments, people!