Forgotten Superheroes Dept. - Captain Nice

Captain Nice was a ... oh, fooey on dis writin' game. Look it up yerself, ya lazy schnook. I ain't here fer yer edification. Freeload is Episode One, in glorious Blur-O-Vision™ and CrapColor®, but you're lucky to get that, you whining ingrate. This can be a weekly feature, should youse bums be desirous.

 

Post made possible by an unswerving devotion to US pop culture of the 'sixties.

Gina Lollobrigida's Scottish Folk-Rock Nightmare! Dept.

La Lollo, "on set" at Scotland's famed Gorbals Castle - roll 'em! Action!

Gentlemen of a certain age, and skeevy geriatrics such as like you, will remember "La Lollo" [above - Ed.] with wistful fondness, from an age when dames wus dames and us guys wus just a buncha chumps wit' us tongue hangin' out. But did you know she nearly joined a contemporary Scottish folk music group?

Let La Lollo tell the tale!

"We were filming Haggis - Italian Style! in the wonderful English Highlands, with all the wonderful actors, like Lord James Robertson Justice and Sir Gordon Robertson Jackson. I am autographing to the musicians who make the wonderful tradition music for the banquet scene, and they propose I am making a record with them! I had a natural, how you say, feeling? For the proud Scottish culture. The Scottish and the Italians are so much alike! Italians are beautiful, passionate, live life to the full. We have the best food and cars and buildings and art in the world, and the best and most beautiful cities and countryside and beaches, and ice cream and sunshine. The Scots have ... they ... well, they are ... anyway ... unfortunately, we must to return to Roma! I was heartbreaking! But I will never forget my weekend filming in your wonderful country and the wonderful friends I made there!"

 

 

Bread Love And Dreams, the banquet scene musicians, attempted to exploit their brief association with the sultry sex bomb from Sienna in trade advertisements [above - Ed.], but swift legal action prevented further use of her name and/or image in any context and for any purpose whatsoever. "Feck tha' bitch," said vocalist Angie Davis at the time, "she needs us muir tha' we need heer."

The band retaliated by removing (Theme From) Haggis - Italian Style! from their album, although it appeared briefly on the import-only soundtrack recording [below - Ed.].

Sadly, Bread Love And Dreams are currently residing in the where are they now category, although they doggedly released three swell albums before taking up full time sporran farming and alcoholism in the Outer Hebrides. 

 

If you like albums, you'll like these. Fireside and candle listening. Skin one up, listen to the rain against the window. References - ISB, the Strangelies, Pentangle ...

This post made possible by an insane amount of technology wedded to an almost supernatural yet fundamentally misguided intelligence, and don't kid yourself.

 

Win One Million Dollars PLUS Boiled Ham Dinner In This Grand Competition!

 

What do these albums have in common? The lucky Four Or Five Guy© who, in the opinion of the judges, gets the most complete and correct answer will win ONE MILLION DOLLARS* - tax free! PLUS a swell boiled ham dinner with all the trimmings! Oboy! Some fun, huh?

 

*Offer void where prohibited by local law or just plain good sense on my part

The Right Stuff Dept. - Paul Simon

A carousel horse's one trick is to go round and around ...

One Trick Pony didn't sell too well, and there are various theories as to why; a sense of more-of-the-same disappointment after the five year wait since Still Crazy, material not up to par, and a sense of him not keeping up with the times (the eighties! a whole new vital decade in pop!), yadda yadda. All of which is just so much hornswoggling flapdoodle, if you'll pardon the salty vernacular. The lesser status granted the album has nothing to do with the music.

It's the association with the film of the same name, a vanity project seen by nobody but projectionists. But even more toxic than the taint of "side project/not real album" is the cover [left - Ed.], which we need to study before consigning it to the Furnace of Forgetfulness™. An obviously airbrushed shot of the great man pretending to be a young rock star - you know, acting. Imagine him going through the movie stills with the art director; "I like this one. I look young, a street punk, kinda vulnerable. Are you getting a young Pacino vibe from this?" It's an exercise in fakery. We all know Simon doesn't and didn't look like that. The shouting typography and floating silver discs work hard to shift our focus, but we know a sidewalk oyster when we step on one.

The insensate human tragedy of this is it's a quietly wonderful album, one of his better solo outings. It's a band album, and that band is basically the awesome Stuff, who graced Joe Cocker's Stingray. Their subtly virtuosic [is this even a word? - Ed.] funk is the perfect setting for Simon's voice. It's also something of a guitarist's Summit Meeting - Eric Gale, Hugh McCracken, Hiram Bullock, Jeff Mironov, and Joe Beck all strut their very considerable stuff. It's gawjuss, dammit!

The album works perfectly without any references to Simon's misguided fantasy. He should of lissen to me an' forgot his lousy one trick horseshit movie. But dat's his problem. Haw! Too late now, pally!

 

 

This post sponsored in part by Orange-U-Tang© "The real fruit-style drink that's 100% sweetener!"

Zappa Recovered Dept.

 

Wotta guy. Wotta guy. Wotta guy.

Zappa's late 'seventies tri-ology, intended to comprise in part or whole the aborted multi-disc set Lather, was issued as three spiffy standalone albums in disappointing sleeves. There's nothing wrong with Gary Panter's primitive technique, but it's an ill fit for Zappa's music. Cal Schenkel's genius artwork for that early and perfect run of albums was was considered, composed, and always on the money. Panter's punk graphics are immediate, raw (SWIDT), and oddly dislikeable. So I spent some happy hours - nearly three - coming up with replacements I prefer. I've given them a series look and copied a certain photo library's watermark style, as a kind of barely amusing in-joke. One of the images is a composite - guess which! Or not!

You probably already have the albums in some form, but if you don't, ax in a comment! 

 

 

Fascist Theocracy? He got that right. And he was right about it starting with Reagan. Zappa would have been righteously appalled at America's supine embrace of the New Order, the feebleness of its resistance at every level. For fuck's sake, America. It's not like you couldn't see it coming, not like you weren't told.

This post sponsored in part by Al Banian's Bunion Buster - available wherever footcare products are sold! (Butane not included)

 

 

Crawlspace Collectables Dept. - Little Feat

"HEY!! MISTER BUSINESS MAN!! Weather it be that new PAMPHLET, a must-read Windshield Flyer, or afordible Corporate Identity Logo, let th' IoF© Department o' Art™ Art Department Dept. be your one "stop shop" for all your graphic Design solutions! Call for a Portfolio presentation and FREE Holiday Inn-style pocket protector*!"

Adam Weishaupt, Founder IOFDOAADD [Left - Ed.]

 

When this first got posted way back in RSRCH DATE PSE ED [No - Ed.], it got a little lost in a FeatFlurry™. It deserves its own post and something in the way of elucidatory exegesis, seein' as how I left it up to youse bums last time, which was in retrospect a grievous mistake, on account which the subtle irony of the title got lost.

What we have here is a post-Lowell collection most of which could have skidded sideways onto a primo Feat album without causing conniption fits (and all of which is way better than Dog Races). It's subtitled The Best Of The Shaun Murphy Years, see - yet there are no Shaun Murphy songs on it!

*pause* 

She makes a peripheral appearance as a swell back-up singer, but she's otherwise been kicked to the curb to no appreciable detrimental effect. The band needed a fat blues shouter (of any sex or body mass, I'm nothing if not inclusive, so quit yer woke whining) like SUITABLE SIMILE HERE PSE ED. [How about "blow it out yer ass, Farq?" - Ed.], and this one was foisted on the rhythm section without prior discussion or approval. Barrere and Payne just pulled the tarp off and said voilà! Our new singer! Gee whiz.

They didn't need a new singer at all after Lowell registered his dissatisfaction with the band's new direction by being dead. They didn't need dull boy bible-sniffer Craig Fuller either. They should have had confidence in what they had and what they could do, which was ample and beaucoup. Granting Fred Tackett EMBED SUITABLE IMAGE AT LEFT PSE ED [I quit, and fuck you - Ed.] full membership privileges was necessary and right and enough.

If you kind of wandered away to the bar during the all-too brief fifteen years Shaun was onstage, you can wander back. Thrill anew to some First Tier Feat that maybe got lost in the shuffle. I guarantee you won't want to lift the tone arm at any point while this (unfeasibly long) elpee album is spinning on th' Consolette. By turns thrilling, weird, adventurous, beautiful, and funky as a back seat bong water douche, Jackalope Jesus should be part of any serious collection of anything.

 

Or, you know, listen to Shaun Murphy! Nobody cares!

 

 

This post sponsored by Lou's Lousy Louse Lounge, Louisville, KY "Liquor In The Front, Poker In The Back!"

(*WHILE STOCKS LAST)

 

Thirty Minutes Dept. - Cheetah Beat!

There's nothing obscure or unique about any of this, and there's no complicated edits or immersivity or whatever - it's just straight mainstream pop, some massive hits. But there's an overall mood of thumping great beats and giddy optimism, and you might find it a swell soundtrack to the shit/shave/shower trifecta, or Hoovering or whatever token gestures you make toward the housework. Definitely not headphone music - turn it up until the kids complain!

 

This post funded in part by Francene's Frug Factory, Knucklebutter, OH. "Ask for our senior's rebate package!"

Crawlspace Collectables Dept. - John Hartford

 

By request, eight by the late and great J.H.

 

Have a weekend! 

 

 

"I Am Not A Fag Hag" Avers Society Dame (Dept.)

Baby Jane oversees clearance of prime tract investment, yestiddy!

You'll know Baby Jane Holzer as Palm Beach Heiress, Park Avenue Show Pony, and Andy Warhol Arm Candy, but did you know her favorite waste of time is thumbing thru boxes of old albums in thrift stores? We axed her to bring a treasured collectable with her during her fact-finding visit to th' IoF© to assess its viability in her real estate portfolio! We chatted poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Kreemé served her signature knob cheese blintzes and shots of sandwich ham water!

FT3 Heyyyy Baby baby! Lookin' swell!

BJH [looking around with thinly-veiled expression of disgust] Yeeuch. This place.

FT3 I always admire how you never got yer schnozz fixed. Real strength of character, carrying that hooter around. Those rumors of you being a Factory Fag Hag - any substance to th' innuendo?

BJH I'd have to raze everything. We're talking Ground Zero. Beachfront property in Yemen is sexier.

FT3 Did you actually, like, literally do anything except inherit zillions of dollars and spray your hair and hang off Andy Warhol like a garbage man off a truck? Are you a man?

BJH I'm going to be honest. I can't see th' Isle O' Foam© featuring in my portfolio anytime soon.

FT3 Didja brung a yalbum?

BJH Oh, yeah ... The Cryan Shames, A Scratch In The Sky. Massively underrated.

FT3 Yay! From Illinois, too. Like the antecedently FoamFeatured™ Shoes and th' Buckinghams!

 

[interview drowned out by sound of Holzer's helicopter powering up]

 

 

Great British Tenor Players, Nope, You Read That Right Dept.

Tubby Hayes? Who he? Hoo hah? And he's a Brit? Can't play for shit, right?

Unlikely as it may seem Hayes was a truly great tenor player. Ronnie Scott (showrunner of the UK's most important jazz club - take a wild geuss what it was called) said: "This little boy came up, not much bigger than his tenor sax. Rather patronisingly I suggested a number and off he went. He scared me to death".

One of the very few UK players to hold his own in the US and A, Hayes cut some iconic classic sides [NB jazzbo terms "cut" and "sides" - Ed.] with American superstars, like this here album. You really, really, don't have to be a serious collector of jazz records - or anything - to enjoy this swell album. It's full of energy and happiness and swings like a donkey's nuts. Give Davis [Miles - Ed.] and John [Coltrane - Ed.] a rest for a while. Spin this on th' Consolette next time unexpected guests drop by! Roll back the rug and strut whatever stuff you can muster after a lifetime of debauchery and excess!

This post sponsored in part by MrDave's Fishhead Incinerator Family Fun Center, Pismo Beach, CA

 

Perfect Tens Dept. - Soft Machine Third

By the time Soft Machine stopped counting their albums, they stopped counting for anything much, becoming just another super-proficient jazz rock combo, losing the indefinably fluid quality that made them unique, even after line-up changes that would have crippled any other band.

Third was a monster of an album. Even the sleeve seemed somehow massive. A double album with only four tracks? Yow! What could that sound like!? Even in an era when side-long compositions weren't too rare, Third was pioneering, uncompromising, and out-bloody-rageous. It came with a gold price sticker on the front - I remember 39/11 but that's probably wrong [39/11 is around 23c US today - Ed.].

Flashback to the party to which [grammar - Ed.] I lugged my newly-purchased copy of Third, in the absence of a girlfriend (the two would prove to be incompatible). Anyway, you didn't take girlfriends to parties, you went to parties to get free drinks and impress girls with your toxic masculinity and deep knowledge of blues rock guitarists, then miss the last bus and walk home alone in the rain. What a time to be alive! Waiting for the ideal moment, I cued it up on the stereo only to discover there is never an ideal moment to cue up Third at a party. In my blissful ignorance, I thought the three minutes of tar pit anteater gargling that introduce the thrilling main theme of Facelift would be appreciated by teen revelers tiring of T Rex and Slade or whatever it was and I would get nods of respect from the guys and come-hither glances from the girls. My wrongness became immediately apparent. The scratch over that intro remained a useful reminder never to try that shit again.

In retrospect, maybe I should have played Moon In June, or Slightly All The Time. Or Out Bloody Rageous. Better I should have taken Motown Chartbusters, because Christine Williams was into Tamla, and I was desirous of getting into her pants. Anyway, joke's on her because I still hunker down in my headphones for the duration of Third and I bet she's entirely forgotten Motown Chartbusters and harbors to this day a secret regret she never let me get in her pants.

Here's the inner gatefold, showing my guys waiting for some girls to show up. Note groovy beverage table, Wyatt's groovy shirt, Ratledge's groovy shades.

"What time is it?" "Ten." What time you tell them?" "EIGHT FUCKING THIRTY for the fiftieth fucking time I told them HALF PAST EIGHT!" [pause] "Where are they then?" "I don't fucking know." "Fancy a pint?"

 

Third, as you may have guessed from the title of this piece - assuming you read that far - qualifies as a Perfect Ten because no part of it can be improved, including the cover. It is an astonishing piece of work. But because this is th' IoF©, where quantity is quality, I'm throwing in a bonus contemporary album of them at the Albert Hall - the first rock group to ever play at the prestigious BBC Proms (Promenade Concerts). Pearls were clutched.

 

Iconic cover by Isle O' Foam© Art Department o' Art Dept. That's a full-color photograph - London was like that in 1970.

Added to the deliverables, this here swell Cuneiform archival collection, from the Third era:.

 

Better Than The Beatles? YOU Decide!

Who needs three shoes? You do. Lensed for their Ignition comeback, 2012

The Shoes (that is, the individuals who constitute the band Shoes, no definite article) are all in their eighties now, except for founding member - well, they're all founding members - Gary Klebe, who will be ninety-four years young come September! Long-time residents of the Where Are They Now home for elderly power-poppers, they are unique in having released at least three first albums, the latest of which, Heads Or Tails, is actually the first, recorded in '74! I don't have this, so if you do, frisbee it over to th' Isle o' Foam©!

Extensively FoamFeatured© antecedently, (the) Shoes are arguably better than the Beatles! Hear me out! In addition to releasing three first albums, where the Fabs could manage only one:

👞 Still legally alive

👞 Never copied anyone else, covered show tunes, made a shit movie, or even a shit album

👞 Avoided marrying oriental scag pandas and finagling amputees

👞 Didn't write Maxwell's Silver Hammer

I rest my case, but th' IoF© is nothing if not a platform for diverse opinion, and if you're loopy enough to think The Beatles were a better band, light your tiki torch in the comments!

Today's freeloads pick up from where we left off, way back in May 2022, and represent the band's Imperial Period (which was and is still always) with five, maybe, fantastic platters! Details in comments!

IMPORTANT NOTE: For those of you feeling betrayed by the lack of Fab Four content:

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2021/06/beatlemania-dept-thirty-shades-of-gray.html

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2019/05/compleat-beetles.html

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2021/04/hello-goodbye-george-martin-interview.html

Milty Nussbaum, Head Of A&R Musicor Records, Grants Exclusive Preview Of Musicor's Chartbound Sounds For '68! (Dept.)

Family man Nussbaum proudly displays photo of wife on desk! "Darling Myra is a constant source of inspiration!" gushes youthful A&R prexy.

Legacy Old School® FOAM-O-GRAPH© created thru in-house AD (Artificial Dumbness) by IoF© Art Department O' Art Dept. For educational purposes only. No - well not much - livestock was harmed during production. Kittens don't count, right?

Milty Nussbaum, Head of A&R at Musicor Records (Hackensack and Pork Bend), was kind enough to send us this exclusive Musicor promo package! Here's his covering letter:

 

Dear Music Business Partner

We at Musicor Records are proud of not only our much-envied repertoire of stars such as Gene Pitney, Ronnie Gann, B.J. Thomas, Dick Cramer, and Gene Pitney, but also our reputation for keeping up with the times, and sometimes being just that little bit ahead of them! Yes, when it comes to making the music scene "happen" with a capital M, there's Musicor, and there's everybody else! And this swingin' year of sixty-eight is no exeption!

I'm delighted to send you personaly three exiting teen-oriented albums hot off the presses by newly-talented Artistes that are sure to become household names! Yes, from the "outer sight" acid rock of The Federal Ducks, thru the psychedelic jugband sounds of The Paper Gardens to the challenging protest rock-folk of The Tingling Mothers, Musicor has its finger on the pulse of today's youth!

Your Friend in the Music Business:

Milton O. Nussbaum

Head of A&R, Musicor Records

 

Musicor - Making Music Happen: Today!

Those albums in full:

 

I've read internet claims from swivel-eyed loons that the Federal Duck and Paper Garden albums are lost masterpieces of psych, which of course they ain't. Federal Duck is seven or eight college kids flexing their privilege before getting jobs on Wall St. or shooting up in a box full of rags under an offramp. It's charitable to call it 2nd Tier Psych, but you need to hear it more than you need to hear the next Taylor Swift album. Paper Garden has its moments, and its charm, and qualifies as a period piece. The Tingling Mother's Circus boasts some real musicians who can actually play (including Elliott Randall, featured antecedently on the Yellow Peril album), some singers who can sing, and a cover of Yellow Submarine that will make you hurl hot chunks. These albums are pure Musicor, the Zircon in the tarnished tiara of the music business, and as such should be protected and nurtured in a caring environment such as yours. Milty Nussbaum - we salute you!

 

 

This post funded in part by Jack's Snacks n' Slacks™, Mengele Mall, Knucklebutter, MT.
 

Fallen Heroes Dept. - Steely Dan Gets Tin Worm

This pitcher is, like, a metaphor. A metaphor is like a simile.

 

Way back in, ooh, seventy-three or whatever, there was nobody cooler on the face of the planet than Steely Dan. Carrying a Dan album around marked you out as one of the hipster elite. Compared to their lawyer-level snark smarts and jazzbo academy chops, Little Feat were a bunch of body shop slackers, filling the back of the project Camaro with bong smoke. And the Doobie Brothers were hillbillies, eternally falling off the same porch. Th' Dan VIP Leisure Lounge was where the smart kids hung out, in our dreams, snorting lines of pure Bolivian snow off the tits of the Latina room maid. Snickering at the Secret Lodge humor that only the initiated understood. The shine of your Japan, the sparkle of your China! Every arcane Dan delight was enriched by the knowledge that their music went wayyy over the heads of the shmuck in the street. Those fugitive melodies? The collegiate use of language qua signs? That indescribable, ineffable, incommunicable Dan-ness hung on you like some mystic glowing lamasery tour laminate. If you knew, you knew. Like New Yorkers believe that a "New York thing" is some private privilege only understood in all its deliciousness by scaly-skinned loft lizards, Dan Man Fans peered out warily at the rest of the world and opted to stay inside, clamped under the headphones.

Case in point: the author [left, and gee fucking whiz - Ed.] - Dan Man Fan, counting down to ecstasy. I bought all the albums. Even after the muse of melody crept away into the night, me and my hip pals carried the sodium torch of th' Dan, basking in its cold glow. Meanwhile, the dumb straights were out partying and pretending to like Motown and getting laid. Hah! Joke's on them, right? Right?

I'm trying to remember the last time I - metaphorically - reached for a Dan album. Not that that's any measure of their worth - I'm also trying to remember what I came into the room for - but their appeal has atrophied to the point where memory drifts into forgetfulness. I still listen, with vein-pulsing pleasure - to Little Feat, and the Brothers Doobie, but if I'm going to have to choose a Dan album I might listen to today, it would be Becker's 18 Tracks Of Whack, which the quick-witted among you will have noted isn't even a Steely Dan record. And that would be because it's sincere and moving and mostly unironic and the jokes don't require a thesaurus to get. And if I chose just one Dan song to carry with me into the gilded eternity, it would be American Lovers, which they didn't even record, th' shmucks.

Today's Freeload™ is the oft-booted and variously-yclept Yellow Peril, as chock full o' good tunes as any album they released. I may even listen to it again. If I remember. And below is their best song, sung by the great Thomas Jefferson Kaye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other Mama

Sleeve job by IoF©

Michelle Phillips was the igloo snow queen to Cass Elliot's tiki cabin log fire. Her solo album came dressed in a sleeve [below left - Ed.] that she must have thought showed her sexy, sophisticated side, but the dull one-piece came over as sensible, even prudish. Carly Simon had set this particular benchmark a couple of years earlier with Playing Possum. The album was also called Victim Of Romance, and she never struck me as a victim of anything - certainly not romance. It was always Cass losing and breaking her big old heart. Michelle could look after herself.

She sang as good as she looked, and it's something of a mystery why her solo career didn't take off with this album, which is as unfailingly lovely as you'd want it to be. It got universally rave reviews, too. I put it down to the cheesy cover. But she had her acting career, and shrugged it off.

The deliverable is the usual IoF© cornycopium of bountiful largesse, including the album, plus the extra tracks on the limited re-release (a complete album in their own right), plus the rare missing tracks supplied by a Four Or Five Guy©. Yes, the sleeve uses a Mamas & Papas-era picture, but it expresses the essence of her appeal in a timeless way. Doncha think?

 

This post funded in part by The Gabriel Snubbers Timing Ass., Pismo Beach.