First Cut Is The Deepest Dept. - Television, Ramones, Patti Smith

Noo Yawk, 1975. Yikes?

A recent flurry of page hits for the first in this series [here - Ed.] inspired me - too strong a word - to pen this sequel, late at night though it be. The wind howled through the shadowed stones, banging the moldering shutters, as if in warning. I lit a guttering tallow candle and made my way to my study, high in the ruined tower of this age-old house above the Miskatonic. Shiveringly, I cut a new quill, uncorked the inkwell, and arranged a blotter on the escritoire. As I bent to my task the rats chattered hideously in the rotten wainscotting, as if mocking my literary pretension. The cursed rats! Ever louder! Ever closer! Must ... finish ...  must ... *bonk*.

Television's first album was a stunning achievement on release, and remains, along with epic presingle Johnny Jewel, some kind of apogee [is this the right word? - Ed.] of guitar rock. Yayy! It's a Perfect Ten, with no evident failings anywhere. There are those who defend Adventure, the second album (as I once did), but it's really a stance that requires clinical denial and results in a cognitively dissonant stress head. It's okay, I guess, and that's truthfully the best we can say about it. The third album? I bought it, along with a few other hopeless punters, and tried to convince myself it was worth listening to again. Just different, right? But also duller and weaker, even less interesting than Adventure. Meh. They should have stopped after the first, and the world would be a better place.

The Ramones got universally ecstatic reviews for the first album, because it's a genius-level zeitgeist statement, a work of art, a fantastically perfect idea manifested in a perfect way. Whatever you think of the music (it always sounded a bit thin to me) it established Th' Brudders as a global brand. How could they follow that? Who cares? They needn't have bothered, but the formula was good for more sales across a series of rinse-and-repeat albums. And t-shirts. You're going to tell me yebbut Rocket To Russia is pretty good, thinking that I'm interested in your opinion, a mistake. They should have quit after the first, or become a jam band.

Patti Smith, darling of NY Loft Society, shook things up in an entirely good way with Horses, but insisted on hanging around for a ballsaching series of "challenging" albums that are used to illustrate the concept of diminishing returns at music biz conferences. Yes, Easter had the hit Because I Stole This From Bruce Springsteen, but she could have locked the stable door after Horses bolted. To give her her due, she's nearly as good a poet as Rod McKuen, although not as accomplished as Jim Carroll, another alumnus of the New York School Of Scag, or Elliott Murphy. But Horses has kept its impact untouched by the passing decades - true bottled lightning.

This post funded in part by IANYTYWU "It's A New York Thing, You Wouldn't Understand", a non-profit organisation.

Joes' Garbage Dept.

Russell Brand, yesterday

Zappa's leftovers are tastier morsels than most artists' main meals. Way back in 2004, grizzled, near-blind Zappa archivist Joe Travers was cruelly whipped by the elderly Gail Zappa [below - Ed.], furious she wasn't seeing any new Zappa albums at her local Target. 

Still bleeding from the sting of her lash, Joe hastily cobbled together three barrel-scraping exercises, Joe's Domage, Joe's Corsage, and Joe's Xmasage, had some sleeves run out by Dave at Kinkos, and stuffed them into the racks himself. Result: job kept, Gail escorted from Target screeching "My husband, bitches! Eat my fucking panty-hose!"

 

 

THIS JUST IN!!!!

 Joe's Menage and Joe's Camouflage added in separate link!!! YOU DO NOT DESERVE THIS!

Note: The "garbage" in the title to this piece is pronounced gar-baahj for conceptual continuity. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

This post co-funded by Widows Of Famous Rock Stars™. See them at this year's CPAC!

Swagger And Strut Dept. - Aerosmith

Girls just wanna have fun, boys just wanna sulk

Aerosmith took a lot of flak for being dumb Rolling Stone knock-offs. Two things wrong with this: they don't sound like the Stones, and they're dumb like The Ramones are dumb. If you don't grab your air guitar three seconds into any Aerosmith song, rock n' roll may not be your thing. That's okay. Tedeschi Trucks are there for you.

Their first four albums vary only in the number of hits they contain, from zero (Get Your Wings) to a shitload (Rocks), but they all sound exactly like rock n' roll should sound; deceptively simple. If you lend an ear to the arrangements - yup, these songs are all craftsman built - you'll hear surprises and neat tricks you might not expect from a bunch of dumb Stones wannabes.

Associations with Hair Bands, Metal, Glam, and Hard Rock are off the mark. Aerosmith is 100% proof pure rock music, and at their best as great as it gets. Drums that sound like drums, guitars everywhere, riffing and soloing, bass crunching, and vocals that never degrade into that grunty vein-popping thing.

Deliverables: first four albums. Self-titled first album with really nice extra track, Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, and Rocks. An absolute fucking blast, a feast.

StealthLink© embedded into post for community wellness.

 

This post autoclaved with an alembic donated by Alchemy Al's All-Aluminum Alembics, Alabaster, AL

Tedeschi Trucks Must Die! Dept.

 

Real human art or AI? Dreadful either way

I wanted to like this album. I've always wanted to like Tedeschi Trucks. What harm do they do? None. They bring wholesome rock n' roll entertainment to many, many good people - media and IT consultants, mostly, wellness mentors, realtors, barristas, craft beer entrepreneurs, bitcoin traders. A Prius with oat milk lattés in the cooler. The TTB's festival gigs have extended families literally standing up with excitement across the USA, and getting home in time for bed. What am I, the Grinch at Christmas?

Not being able to join in the fun at their gigs, I've dutifully listened to their albums hoping to hear something, like songwriting, to convince me they're worth my time. They perform a lot of covers, which is not only a respectful nod to those great musicians who went before them but also an admission they have trouble coming up with material. Sooner or later - preferably sooner - they had to come up with their own Layla or Dark Star or Ramblin' Man. They just can't. I'm sure their fans can tell the songs apart, but to anyone outside that blessed circle they've made no impact at all.

It's not a question of competence. They have competence out the ass. Trucks is a fine guitarist, if *cough* a little lacking in charisma and on-stage dynamism. To the point that it's hard to see if he's even up there - you're thinking that the potato in Target duds is a guitar tech, tuning up. Tedeschi has a winning voice, and she's sexy in a kind of Walton's Mountain way. Amish schoolmarm sexy. Not too much of a threat to Mom out there keeping an eye on hubby! Neither of them could write a hit at gunpoint. There are, at last count, thirty-seven musicians in the band. Some of them have to stay in the tour bus because there's no room on stage. Excuse me, but Jimi Hendrix was three guys, and one of those couldn't play. The Who? Four, and one of those just swung a mic. They set everything on fire, made the sound of planets colliding ...

Oh dear.

When this album was touted as their song album - heavy on hooks, light on noodling - I pulled on a pair of freshly-laundered pre-aged Levi's (made in China) and my original collector's item Official Revelator Tour Shirt (made in China), swung my TTB ball cap (made in China) backward and settled in for some good old-fashioned rock n' roll. Spoiler - not.

Take a hinge at that cover. It's either AI or a real human artist painting exactly like AI. Whatever. But there's some significance here - the TTB are real humans who sound exactly like AI. The songs have that generic, flat, sterile, faultlessly competent, no-surprises-here sound. They slide on by in an agreeable and entirely unmemorable mid-tempo snooze, never breaking out into the excitement zone. Never making your neck hairs bristle or your palms sweat. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, a fine, responsible married couple who are also the two most joyless fucks in showbiz.

Let's worry less about machines doing human stuff and worry more about humans doing human stuff. Taking risks, having a laugh, getting angry. 

This post written somewhere between resignation and annoyance.

TV's Pamela Anderson BLASTS Cheap-Ass Sleeve Design! Dept.

Watch out, cheap-ass sleeve designers! Pammie's got YOU in her sights!

You'll know TV's Pam Anderson from her iconic role as Corabeth Godsey in long-running NBC series Best Little Whorehouse On The Prairie, but did you know she's a keen collector of sixties psychedelia and garage music?

Tommy Lee Godsey, yestiddy!

 

 

Pammie jet-skied over to th' IoF© yestiddy to wax passionate anent her pet gripe; bootleg-quality sleeves for otherwise notable re-issues! We relaxed poolside whilst Kreemé [left - couldn't source Kreemé pic - will this do? - Ed.] served her signature bin-water and crocodile smegma smoothies!

 

 

FT3 Heyyyy! Pammie baby! Long time no see!

PA Too long, Farq! [sighs yearningly]

FT3 You must put me behind you, sweetpants!

PA That was always my favorite position [flutters eyelashes seductively]

FT3 So what's got your dander up this time, Pamster?

PA Ooh! Well, Farq, it's this here archival release of famed Bay Area psych-punk pioneers The Oxford Circles! Take a hinge at this cheap-ass sleeve design! [left - Ed.]

FT3 Yikes! My eyes hurt!

PA I mean, this is like, an important group, featuring members of the Blue Cheers and the Kaks! It's a top-quality historic live recording, plus their rare single as a bonus! You'd of thunk they'd of did better than this asswipe piece a shit bootleg shit!

FT3 Why, it's a disgrace!

PA [suggestively] So I have a favor to ax, Farq ...

FT3 Which I just had me lunch, Pamsie. Egg n' onion semmitch. It's not sittin' right [eases up butt cheek hopefully].

PA Could you just whip out your ... crayons and do me a nice sleeve design?

FT3 [chuckles modestly] Why, I'd be delighted! You just go relax with Kreemé in the hot tub, and I'll be done in a hour or so! Nuthin' I like more than a sleeve job!

PA Just like old times!

Sleeve job by IoF© Art Department O' Art Dept.

 

 

This post posted in a transparent attempt to get more page views for a swell deliverable! Incidentally, this is one of my funnier pieces. Go ahead, yok it up, ya cheap ingrate. I'm giving this stuff away! Why, you lousy bums, for two cents I'd ... I'd ...

 

 

 

 

From Rave-Up To Freak Out Dept. - The Butterfield Blues Band

Chick backing singers were big back then

 

The first rock band to stretch out with live improv was The Yardbirds [not above, have patience - Ed.]. They weren't the first to play US-style RnB, that would probably be Alexis Korner and some fat middle-aged bloke in glasses called Cyril, but it's a stretch to call them a rock group. Or interesting. So probably the Stones. 

But the Yardies [left - Ed.] were having a Rave-Up, as they called it, back in early '64, lifting audiences into a frenzy through improvisation (or playing what the fuck they felt like) rather than just turning up and trying to sound like the records. This was a seismic shift in rock music performance. I have no time for Clapton Cancelers. He's a fantastic and important guitarist and a fine songwriter, so shut up. You should extend him the forgiveness rightly given the old blues guys themselves, who weren't exactly bothered by wokeness. He was the first British rock musician to whip the audience into a froth with an improvised guitar solo, and later, the first to use a Les Paul, creating the sound of hard rock. The Kinks had already built the structure with 'You Really Got Me', in (guess when) '64. Where do Yer Beatles fit in? They don't.

On the other side of the world, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were extending the possibilities of rock guitar by having Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop in the same band. Yikes. Dylan witnessed how their electricity knocked folkies off their chairs at Newport, and got them to back him the next day. Yup. Not The Band.

Their first album [left - Ed.] appeared in '65, an authentic blast of Chicago blues from a rock band format. We need to talk about the cover. Note black dudes, the rhythm section from Howlin' Wolf's touring band. Black and white in the same band back then was pretty unusual. They're pictured standing in front of what looks like a head shop. Incense, herbs, oils ... quacks like a duck, right? But the internet is insistent that the first head shop appeared in '66, one whole year later. Hmm ... The Butterfield Blues Band sure were ahead of their time! A head, geddit?? It's like a play on words! Fuck you. And there's the font, which looks unremarkable today. The Beatles are sometimes credited with the first psychedelic lettering on an album cover (Rubber Soul), but the artist has denied any connection with or knowledge of the nascent psychedelic scene - the letters look like rubber, duh. Here, the great Elektra house designer Harvey S. Williams - carve his name with pride - uses the first recognisably psychedelic font that inspired Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso (and everyone else), two years before the Summer of Love. Does this matter? Of course it does.

But it's their second album from '66 I want to talk about [above top, and about time. I'll be in the bar if you need me, so don't. - Ed.], because it took The Yardbird's improvisational initiative and set a template for rock guitar performance (and, uh, jam bands) ever since. It's a groundbreaking and massively enjoyable album that often gets overlooked. Unlike the Stones' perfunctory eleven minute 'Goin' Home' in the same year - they were never a jam band - the 'East-West' title song is a thirteen minute, dynamically-structured improvisation featuring the raga-influenced playing we associate with '67. And no drum solo. It's totally groovy and far out. There's also a funkified version of the Monkees' 'Mary, Mary' which sounds entirely natural, a jazzy eight minute work-out of 'Work Song', the achingly soulful 'Never Say No', and, of course, some fine Chicago blues greased by Butterfield's raucous harp blowing. There's a live-in-the-studio feel and the whole album sounds as vivid as the day it was recorded.

What happened to relegate this great band to the where-are-they-now file? After a faultless and viscerally exciting couple of years, the PBBB squandered everything through dizzying lineup changes and entirely losing the plot. They went from authentically, unconsciously, psychedelic to Hallmark Hippie in the space of a few months, playing a song called Love March at Woodstock, ffs, adding horns, losing impetus. Blues rock was a global phenom, dominated by Cream, who not only did the extended live improv but had punchy, memorable and exciting hit singles that had nothing to do with the blues. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were yesterday's mashed potato, mostly unrecognised at the time and mostly forgotten since.

Today's deliverables catch them at their prime: the pre-first album recordings, a nifty soundtrack album featuring rare cuts, the first album, and 'East-West'.

 

This post inspired by a random appearance of 'East-West' on the Shuffle-O-Meter© on the road to Sakhorn Nakhon, which isn't pronounced like Foghorn Leghorn.

It's Time To Play The Music Dept.

 

Yes, by the third album the band was on the ropes. Kermit in rehab, Miss Piggy doing time in the Pork Bend Correctional Facility ... the years on the road had taken their toll. "It wasn't even us on the third album," Kermit rues today. "It was a contractual obligation thing, put together without our knowledge. I didn't get a cent from it. None of us did."

Eventually, the band got their act together. Made movies, more TV shows. Garnered an entire new audience as well as welcoming back what was left of their old one. "We're older but wiser," Kermit laughs from his Winnebago on the set of Muppet Yo' Mama. "Sure, we each have our own management, entourage, fitness trainers, wellness mentors, and once the cameras stop rolling we head for our homes and families. But occasionally I spin that first album, and yeah, I miss those days. We were punk before punk was a thing! I'm proud of that."

 

My thanks to Kermit The Frog for making time for me!

Randy Randomguy's Rusty Refrigerator O' Randomness! Dept.

LEGACY FOAM-O-GRAPH© COURTESY SMUTSONIAN INSTITUTE® - How many Objects Of Appalling Significance do you recognise, readers?

Older readers, which is you, may remember a regliar FoamFeature™ featuring Toxic Male Gazer Randy Randomguy? Or not. Anyway, Randy wants you to list your first ten, or whatever - first one or seven hundred and fifty-three would be jake because NOBODY CARES - songs on your listening device of choice set to shuffle.

Some of youse bums is too dumb to handle the technology, so you can join in the fun by listing the first ten songs you can remember. Or five, whatever. They don't have to be songs. First ten numbers from one to ten, anything. Just engage with the narrative here, okay?

Ed. [left - Ed.] sez: "Farq goes the extra mile to create wholesome content for you lousy freeloading bums, so the least you can do is help his internet initiative go viral by adding a comment, right? How hard can that be? I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FRANKIE FUCKNOSE!"

Well, no, the least you can do is nothing. You're good at that. But it will leave an aching void in your life; a sense of incompletion and underachievement that will cause you untold distress in the final moments of your life. "Oh noes!" you will croak, strapped to a gurney in a grimy service corridor of the Twilight Home as the Grim Reaper strides toward you, "I wish I'd joined in that random song list game on th' IoF©! NURSE! Is it too la- *kaffkaffkaff*" BONK.

Be a come-with guy. Cross the Rainbow Bridge with a light step.

Here's my top ten Rando songs as thrown up by Musicolet™ on a Samsung© entry-level device:

Dormant Love - The Shoes

See It Through - The Charlatans

Junkie Girl - Walter Becker

Ooh Mama Ooh - Moby Grape

Motherly Love - Frank Zappa

Heart Like An Open Book - Michael Franks

Born At The Right Tome - Paul Simon

Quelle Folie - The Sneakers

Back To You - The Flock

Jazz: Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold - The Bonzos

No surprises there, then. Primo lamestream Dad Rock, cut thick, the way you like it.

April Fool Dept.

 

The Fool's only album remains their first and last. To be fair, they weren't musicians first, or even much at all. They were acid-etched rainbow-eyed harbingers of the Aquarian Apocalypse, and the effect they had on Bakelite Britain, all brown ale and fag-ash, was explosive and over almost before it happened, like the Apple Boutique, like a dream.

The music's infinitely better than you might expect, if you're expecting something quite dreadful, and beautifully produced by Graham Nash. Yes, there's finger cymbals and recorders, bagpipes and minstrelsy, and groovy sounds abound, but it's at least as good as The Incredible String Band and/or Doctor Strangely Strange, better than Black Oak Arkansas, and if you let it float into your mind on a cascading breeze of yesterday's unicorns, you'll be a better person. Allmusic gives it four stars, which seems a little mean.

Light a joss stick. Tie a scarf to your tambourine.

 

This post funded in part by Wacky Wobblehead's Wildebeest World, Walla Walla, WA

 

 

 

 

 

Math Rock Just Doesn't Add Up Dept. - Automatic Fine Tuning

I like this album (which almost inevitably I "had on vinyl back in the day") more than I should. It goes against so much of what I hold dear - the values of the traditional family fireside; crumpets oozing melted butter, Children's Hour on the wireless, the drone of the Spitfires overhead, the crack of willow against leather on the village green, snorting blow off a hooker's tit in a roadhouse toilet on Christmas Eve ...

It's challenging, except not. It should be challenging. One rigorously composed thirty-minute instrumental split over two sides, a shorter instrumental named after the flowers your Grandmama liked to steal from the crematorium on her way home from the off-licence, and a slightly grunty attempt at a hit single, the only vocals on the album. Twin guitars playing relatively complex pseudo-classical themes and taking breaks for ripping nostril-hair shred solos. It's relentless. I mean, I should hate it, but it slips through very pleasurably.

 

AFT may be an early example of Math Rock before Math Rock sucked all the fun out of it. Which brings me to Angine de Poitrine [Fr. Chest Fever - Ed.] with their challenging microtonal noodling and playfully dada-esque image [above - Ed]. They're undoubtedly clever, but it all revolves around counting off patterns, not my cracker salt, and I can't help thinking they need Captain Beefheart doing his thing in the foreground. 

 

 

 

This post funded in part by Babs Tabs n'Crabs, Pork Bend, OH

 

 

Hicks From The Sticks Dept.

Dan Hicks. Winner of Okayest Dude award six years running. Swell musician, songwriter, great pinochle player. Inventor of Pickleball®, and First Cowboy On The Moon. What more need be said? He was the most talented original Charlatan (a pretty low bar), and pioneered the use of oleomargarine in contract flooring. His portrait, by Leonard Nimoy, hangs in the Vatican. September 3rd has been named Dan Hicks day in Spitoon County, Colorado. He owned the world's largest private collection of Oil Rigs, and kept axolotls.

But enough of this dry historical encomium. The important thing is, fun. 

 

This post encouraged by the interest of 4/5g© D, CA

It's Th' Zorn Zone! Dept.

 

This just in! ZornStock© will be held this year at the Groban Supply Co. lot in leafy downtown Burnside, Chicago!

Zorn, left, and Mrs. Myra Nussbaum approve location, yestiddy!

 

"It's really the dream ZornStock© venue!" gushed the challenging saxophone stylist yesterday. "The dystopian æsthetic will lend post-holocaust feels to the première of my Missa Novus Ordo Depressivus, which lasts just short of two days if we live that long!"

Longtime collaborator and Event Hostess Mrs. Myra Nussbaum agrees! "I'm cooking some of my world famous Schnitzengrüben Patties whilst doing interpretive dance!"

The Kronos Quartet have been booked as support, and wacky funster Fred Frith will be forcing kids to inflate imaginary balloon animals in the Tots' Tent! Tickets are still available, so pre-order now to avoid disappointment!

 

THIS JUST IN!!!! It's been a bit of a drought for Zorn fans over the last few days, but at last he has a new album out! SING ME NOW ASLEEP is recommended for everyone suffering with unexpected guests who can't take a hint.

 

PHEW!!! Another day, another Zorn album! Today's is ALEA ACTA EST, one of the most demanding and compositionally dense works in John Zorn’s already massive catalog, it continues his late-career focus on chamber-jazz hybrids that blur the line between composition and improvisation [IT SAYS HERE].

 

This post autoclaved in the burning fiery brain fever of hot season Siam! 

 

 

 

Better Than I Remember Dept. - The Charlies

Original unused cover design featured, like, literally coolest F1 driver, like, ever. Literally.

My first impulse, back in whenever, was to boo these upstarts for appropriating the name of a very important, if not actually that enjoyable, West Coast band from the Acid Years (The Charlatans, in case you're having attention issues). It was like a new band calling themselves Country Joe And The Fish, as far as I was concerned. But that first single [Indian Rope, 1990 - Ed.] was pretty damn swell, I had to admit. Good enough to turn me into an Accredited Charlies Consumer, the kind of unthinking, cash-rich fan every band needs. Then real life interrupted for a few decades, as it will, and my fansomeness only reactivated a week or so back with the release of the Somethingieth Anniversary edish of Some Friendly, their funkified first album.

Rholonne Déodoranté

 

I didn't think time would be kind to it. But it sounds better than I remember. It's always a delight to listen to a real band with a proper rhythm section, and the drums n' bass are so deep in the pocket they're rattling your kneecaps [This is very good, Farq. I don't often compliment you, but this is exactly the kind of content the internet needs right now - Ed.]. Add some acid jazz Hammond B3 and guitar that leaves you wanting more, and they cook up a timeless funky stew that leans into psychedelia just enough to invoke the term. Tim Burgess had the looks and the presence, but his voice is that rather weedy English placeholder thing, nothing to make the hairs on the back of your neck bristle. The Ian Brown school of underachievement. And the songs tend to the unmemorable, unless you play them a lot, which you just might. Because the album is absolutely playable, all the way through, with just enough variation to keep a grin on your face as you essay some ill-advised dance moves.

 

I wish they'd been able to use the original cover (the Marlboro thing scuppered it), because James Hunt has exactly the cool swagger of the music, and there's maybe a resemblance to Burgess. But here it is, probably its first public appearance.

 

Fast forward thirty-five years ...

The Charlies redux. Thirty-five years of setbacks and calamities, deaths and disappointments. The melodies are stronger, Tim's voice has improved with age, gaining a little grit. The sound is lush and deep and wide, but the album never dips into the generic - there's care and skill and imagination in every beat, every note, and it's distinctly a Charlatans album - couldn't be anybody else.

The original cover is terrible, almost inevitably, a scruffy, half-thought out, almost cynical example of this-will-do-ism. They have form here. So here's an alternative I crayoned up which has some resonance with the title, without even knowing the back story. 

Richard Luttrell wrote this letter and left it at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. along with the photograph he'd kept.

"Dear Sir, For twenty two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never know... Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the way I was trained..."

In March 2000, Luttrell travelled to Vietnam to meet with the daughter of the man he met on the trail in Chu Lai. [PBS War Letters - Ed.]

Most album covers are missed opportunities, rushed afterthoughts. They have an incredible, undervalued reach. Listen to the last track on this terrific album, and think of that boy sent to kill strangers in a strange land. Still happening.

 

This post made possible by the magic of muscle memory. 

 

 

GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY! Jimmy Durante - Godfather Of Surf? Dept.

Say, fellows! Can you descry producer's credit, bottom left?

You'll know veteran comedian Jimmy Durante from previous visits to th' IoF© [here and here - Ed.], but did you know he has an important role in the development of surf music? As unlikely as this sounds, it's more unlikely that you did, given your lamentable education and lack of interest in the really important stuff, so I'll tells ya! Those of you with short-term memory skills undimmed by the passing of the years may remember the last piece to appear here a couple of days back, featuring Michael Lloyd's tragic descent into music biz success [Here's a link so you don't have to scroll and make your eyes go funny - Ed.]. During the course of my research I learned that Lloyd's Godfather was none other than Th' Shnozzola hisself, James Q. Durante! But wait! There's more! But first, take a hinge at this ultra-rare piece of movie memorabilia from the collection of the late Gene Siskel:

Only evidence that movie ever existed!

 

That was fun, wasn't it? Probably the most fun you're going to have all day, which is simultaneantly heartwarming and throat-slashingly pathetic. But back to 1963 or whenever it was. Lloyd was in the successful surfbeat combo The New Dimensions, what you ain't heared of because frankly you don't care that much about anything since your ex torched your trailer home with your Pokemon© collection still in it. But this band could actually play, looked spiffy, and got to support some major major acts, such as like f'rinstance the Beach Boys. Wow! Great Concert! And it was th' Shnozz what gifted the young Michael Lloyd with an actual Fender guitar, which was like giving him a Cadillac full of blondes in bikinis. Anyway, they wus dumb kids and signed a contract with a couple of feckless rubes just off the Azusa bus, ensuring no income from their three record albums, the first of which is today's FoamFeature™ Deliverable, and as far as I'm aware the only place you'll find it in this condition on the internet. It may be on SoulSuck, but so what. (Mildly interesting factoid: it was because of SoulSuck's frosty, insular, no-help attitude that I started this blog thing.)

It's surprisingly fantastic. There's some real production imagination added to musical skill making it a cut above most surfbeat albums. As it's on the dump-bin Sutton label, there are no credits (so musicians and composers lose their royalties), no band picture, and the producer's name - which really interests me - is illegibly small, bottom left front cover. William J. Something? Robert J. Whomever? He knew his stuff. It's in true stereo, not a standard thing back in '63 and totally unexpected on a no-budget label like Sutton. There's always something fun and imaginative happening in the arrangements and mix. And it's twenty - count 'em! - fun-packed minutes long! Hoo boy!

After cutting a couple more albums, with an ill-advised Hail Mary pass at soul, the band [left - Ed.] morphed into ... ta daa! ... dese guys:

... and let me tell you, it's a crushing disappointmink. They're basically a franks n' beans white blues band. Yes, they played on the Strip and were probably great fun to watch at Pandora's Box, and yes, they had top-line talent supporting them on the album - Bones Howe, Larry Knechtel, Hal Blaine, Mike Deasy, and ... Warren Zevon. And they were pretty good players and singers themselves (although Lloyd had moved on). But it's as exciting as waiting for dial-up in Uzbekhistan. There's a version of Smokestack Lightning that lasts until next Thursday and is nearly as crushingly wretched as Love's version on Da Capo, with a drum solo that will have you frantically climbing a tall building to jump off. I'm not uploading it, as a pubic cervix. The New Dimensions album is better in every way, except the cover. Perhaps. I should mention Art Guy, who was not the graphic designer but the drummer. The graphic designer was probably Drum Guy.

Cooling to my theme ...

This "evolution" of pop into rock is a clear illustration of what was lost. By '69, when the Smokestack Lightnin' album limped out, surf music was dead in the water - SWIDT? - and times were suddenly grim. The brief Technicolor burst of the Summer Of Love had faded into clouds of foreboding. Nobody was playing the ridiculously-named Surf n' Bongos album, or even remembered the group. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" may work sometimes, but not here, for what was gone was innocence, and that's gone forever in pop, evolving into today's AI shuffle of familiar elements. Doesn't matter if it's an algorithm or the more insidious human version, pop is a constant reshuffle of an old, old hand. In '63 The New Dimensions were a product of a scene (don't sneer, it's exactly the right word) that was exciting, fun, and fresh. Dick Dale and a few others were doing it already, but it was happening, right there and then, the product of a limited but intensely vivid youth culture with the money and the time to get it moving. There was no playbook, they weren't ticking boxes, they weren't playing within a tradition, but they were having as much fun as they knew how.

The Smokestack Lightnin' album is no fun at all. It's unfair to single it out, perhaps, there were hundreds of bands worldwide doing the same thing, grabbing at shreds of authenticity by appropriating black culture. Check out the seriousness of the cover shot. Po' boy caps, 'tache n' glasses ... not a surfboard or a smile in sight. I'm not a great fan of the real blues. It's not a question of musical quality or whatever, I can't feel it's speaking either for or to me. It's as distant, culturally speaking, as biergarten polka, and perhaps shamefully, as boring. But whiteboy blues bands I have even less time for. They have that late 'sixties, early 'seventies dreariness, a sense of hunkering down paranoid post-acid bleakness and death of dream that I remember all too clearly.

No, we can't be frugging to The New Dimensions supporting The Beach Boys in '63, but playing the record re-ignites a spark of innocence. The memory of it can be indiscernible from the real thing. What, me worry?

This post made possible by a heatwave that's keeping me indoors, chugging ice-cold water in front of a fan (one of my many lol haha).

Michael Lloyd's Descent Into Easy Listening Hell Dept.

Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley were not a likely partnership. Fowley wasn't looking for partners, only victims. There were plenty back on Sunset Strip in the 'sixties, where he was a towering, Svengali-like egomaniac with a talent for self-promotion and an insatiable appetite for the young girls who drifted onto the Strip with confused dreams of stardom or freedom or whatever.

“Look at who I am," he said, as if self-awareness was enough in itself, and somehow admirable, "I’m an uneducated, untalented, bad social skills, horrible intimacy skills, unattractive, horrifying, dark, cadaverous, too-tall presence.” Groovy. "Because I’m basically an asshole, a piece of shit, no one’s interested in going any further to see if there’s any depth of talent, character or intellect.” There wasn't - what you saw was what you got, a hippie Trump whose sucking tentacles of ambition never reached beyond LA, where his name appears like a sexually-transmitted rash across the music industry.

The classically-trained Michael Lloyd had his own band at Beverley Hills High School, and recorded some early surf singles with Mike Curb. He also had the talent, good looks, and charm denied to Fowley, who signed him to a publishing deal, finagled him into recording his desperate Love Is Alive And Well album and introduced him to rich-kid wannabe rock star and tambourine slapper Bob Markley, another Sunset Strip sex creep. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was the Markley-funded masterplan to get little girls into his bed. However good the records are, and they are, his explicit lyrical confessions - or bragging - make them nearly unlistenable. Yikes.

Lloyd, apparently, floated over all this gutter filth without being touched by it. He helmed the proto-punk psychploitation Psychotic Reaction by the un-group The Fire Escape, and cut the St. John Green album [here - Ed] with Fowley, both on cash-grab labels.

Story so far: fresh-faced rich kid gets suckered into Sleazy Street by show-biz vampires. How does this play out? Not well, obviously - a descent into drugs and cults, sordid sex and an ugly death, the tragic waste of an All American Boy, and a lesson for us all. Except, not.

In '68, Lloyd wrote, played on, produced and arranged two albums: The Smoke, and October Country. He penned very nearly all the songs, produced and arranged everything, and Fowley only got to write some sleevenotes, boo-fucking-hoo. His absence is like a ray of sunshine. The qualities that made Lloyd valuable to Fowley - talent, mostly - had gotten him noticed by music biz professionals. Each of these albums is a gem, and better considered, given his total involvement, as by Michael Lloyd.

October Country (a real band) were uncomfortable with the groovy LA scene, and all became propane salesmen, Jehova's Witnesses, industrial felt pressers and pet beauticians. The Smoke was another un-band, but the full sound is distinctly LA session finest, an only slightly sub-Brian Wilson pocket pop masterpiece. Why weren't they marketed as Michael Lloyd albums? I'm guessing he was too modest, not that interested in being a star, and considered them as side projects, like the Fire Escape and St. John Green albums. Just records.

And then things went weird.

In 1969, Mike Curb appointed Lloyd, then aged 20, as vice-president in charge of A&R at MGM. Twenty freaking years old. What were you doing at twenty? I can't remember, but I certainly wasn't cruising Sunset Boulevard in a soft top Camaro. Curb, squarer than a bathroom tile, was purging MGM of anything vaguely drug-related (including the Velvet Underground and The Mothers), and Lloyd moved seamlessly into high-end MOR, squeaky-teen pop, and major movie soundtracks, his psychedelic pside projects quickly forgotten. He's still alive and scarily youthful and charming, and Fowley is none of the above. But as is the way of these things, Fowley is still revered for being "a character", "chameleon-like", and even a "legend", while Lloyd is mostly forgotten by zeitgeist types, and happier that way. Today's deliverable bundles The Fire Escape (a great little album, against all the odds), a re-covered October Country, and The Smoke.

Mike in the middle, of the road

 

This post funded by Mike Curb's Hair Helmets© - "all the protection of a crash hat, all the style of Dick Clark!"

Explain The Title And Win The Album! Dept.

 

Bang!

Thirty Minutes Dept. - Sounds From Uranus!

This is what Uranus looks like! Actual photograph! Of Uranus!

 

This is yer actual gas music from Uranus! Captured by the zircon-encrusted antenna of NASA's deep space probe Voyager! It's what Lou Reed was trying for with Metal Machine Music, but much more interesting, varied, complex, listenable, and human - Now That's What I Call Minimalist Drone! You'll dig it to fall asleep to, or have blasting from the holodeck when unexpected guests drop by! Play it in the car on long road trips, and see where you wake up! Slowly pump it up as background noise at work while you deal with that irate customer! Trip out to it at the Waffle House™! It's the soundtrack to the far side of tomorrow, today!

 

This post made possible thru th' cooperation of the wacky geeks at NASA!

It's Da Boids! Dept.

"Complete" version of Ballad Of Easy Rider, under its original title. Thirty tracks. From 1969, with Peter Fonda as Jim-Roger McGuinn, and Dennis Hopper as David Crosby. I was so dumb/stoned when I saw this I thought it was really real, but the realest thing about it was Jack Nicholson's performance. There's acting, there's movie acting, and there's Jack.

Original screed here.

And here's what Sony Japan did:

  ... and ze Frrrrainch version (e-hon e-hon e-hon):