Mac Gayden

 

Mac Gayden died last year. There was always something otherworldly about him, and now he's gone there ahead of us. He could bring out the exotic, the otherness, in a banjo. Listen to the opening instrumental, Queen Anne's Lace. In his hands it was the primeval instrument, as natural as birdsong, a long way from the hootenanny. Then it's Rising Sun, haunted by his slide playing, his voice straight from the heart, and the wordless ooohs that shiver your nerve endings. There's textures in Mac's music you don't hear anywhere else, that impossibly yearning guitar, and his distinctive voice, the leap into falsetto that carries you with it.

McGavock Gayden is an insanely rare album. Recorded in Nashville, only released in the UK. They did it proud with a nice and suitably enigmatic gatefold, but it barely made the shelves before being forgotten. I think Mac made it briefly available as a CDROM, but it never got a re-release, somebody lost the tapes. Brilliantly produced - layer upon layer - by Bob Johnston, it sounds like a heavenly host, but it's mostly just him, some help with backing vox, and Kenny Buttrey on drums. Look it up on Allmusic if you want to see the impact it made.

It's been on th' IoF© before, but only in a crackly vinyl rip, the best anybody could find at that point. So when my pal Andy sent me this pristine rip, it was like hearing the album for the first time. It's not lots of things; not Americana, not folk, not country and/or western, not rock or folk-rock, not prog, nor any other file-under. Songs stretch out and wander where they will, regardless of market potential. It's a very long album, fifty minutes, with no hint of a hit single, and not a note wasted.

He'd make two other superb albums in the seventies, before ducking out of whatever spotlight managed to find him, a respected session guitarist and performer. But it's those three albums, McGavock Gayden, Skyboat, and Hymn To The Seeker, that'll find new fans as long as there's music in the air and hearts to hear it.

Pass it around.

Thanks to Andy!

Omen And Illiad - The Zombies

This is a rethink of an album featured here a couple of times. A reshuffle, cuts, and surgical razorblade edits. Voilà. This is as sweet as I can make it. If the mood or the production didn't quite fit, it didn't make the cut. The album runs a little short, eleven songs, but better that than too long, a common failing of this type of exercise. This is consistent quality all the way through, with no compromises in the name of completeness or "authenticity".

You can play this right after Odessey & Oracle and you will not be disappointed!

A note about the title: I mis-spelled Iliad to mirror the mis-spelling of Odyssey

Perfect Pop Now! Dept. - The Lemon Twigs

Cleveland Jeff has a nice write-up of the new Lemon Twigs album, which had mysteriously passed me by. However, after spending a frustrating week-end going blind trying to find a StealthLink© over at Like Dancing About Architecture, I decided to make the album available to th' Four Or Five Guys© in a special edition. Why is it special? Because, like last time, I've gone the extra yard for them and replaced their dull, stoopid cover with something that doesn't look like an Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark album. I like to think the new design [above - Ed.] taps into that whole Saturday Morning TV vibe.

Their previous album [left, whoopsie, I mean, like, above - Ed.] got a drooling review here, which I can't now find. Perhaps I dreamed it? So here it is again, for possibly the first time! They're both absolutely primo First Tier harmony pop albums, with incredibly hooky songs, sparkling production, and I can't recommend them too highly, and now they have great covers, they get the coveted Perfect Ten award!

You certainly won't regret downloading today's Deliverables O' Excellence™!

THIS JUST IN!

From 2020, and surprisingly fun.

This post fluffed and folded by Lucy Lastic's Laundromax de Luxe©, LA

Just Don't Call It A Playlist! Dept. - The Beatles

The Beatles Aloha album includes all the songs they issued in '68 that didn't appear on official Beatles albums. Aloha means both hello and goodbye. It's a complete, cohesive and unissued album from the aching void between Pepper and the White Album.

It doesn't include Magical Mystery Tour ep tracks because that's a Beatles-created side project. It does include tracks from Yellow Submarine and the US Magical Mystery Tour album, because these were label-led marketing projects to which the band only contributed signatures on a contract.

All these songs bundled together make for a perfect 37 minute album, programmed naturally into two sides. Play this after Pepper, and see if you don't agree it's a stronger piece of work. It sounds and flows like it was conceived and recorded as an album. The band at the top of their game (and I'm not the world's greatest Beatles fan). Packed with hits, too, which is more than can be said for the albums to either side of it.

I'm kind of surprised that, as far as I know, this rather obvious project hasn't occurred to anybody else (if it has, I missed it). Imagine it as a vinyl release. It would generate millions and BILLIONS of bucks and rekindle excitement for the band's back catalog, before they're all dead. It could be remixed by Giles Martin, and they could use the contemporary Richard Avedon portraits. Why haven't they? They haven't thought of it. Never occurred to anybody in the Beatles camp that there is a huge fucking 1968-shaped hole in their album discography. Incredible, really, and everybody's loss.

Here's a lo-res back cover, using the Avedon portrait that was thrown away in the gatefold to the crappy 'Love Songs' cash-in. Paul was originally off to the left. I had to beef up the color and contrast to Paul's psychedelic mugshot on the front, because Avedon deliberately bleached it out to have less impact than the others. Not his favorite Beatle!

I've shilled this album before, but perhaps inventing a whimsically humorous story around it did it no favors, so this is for those who missed it or didn't understand what it was. This download is a tad improved on the previous - it's "unbanded" - continuous play, closely edited, and tagged so the individual songs don't get confused with versions you already have. And the very welcome new fade to Hey Jude has been smoothed out. Also included is The Compleat Pepper, so with these two non-existent albums you have a complete Technicolor portrait of them in 67/68, when they wus fab.

The Myra Nussbaum Memorial Lectures Dept. - Why The Blues Music Is Shit

Mrs Nussbaum invites you into her lovely home, yesterday! Note tasteful Siegheil & Roy memorial statue, youthful ward Clynt readying for bikini wax session! 

Editorial note: previously, Mrs Nussbaum has made award-winningly persuasive cases for Why Classical Music Is Shit, and Why Jazz Music Is Shit. Such is her unquestioned authority, a tearful Zubin Mehta of The Los Angeles Philharmonics snapped his baton in half after her takedown, sobbing "I can never wave this stupid stick at a bunch of fiddle-scraping penguins again." After exhaustive research and consultation with the finest musicologists, Mrs Nussbaum now presents her devastating critique of yet another sacrosanct musical genre, The Blues Music.
(Although we are honored by her patronage, Mrs Nussbaum's opinions are her own and do not necessarily represent Fabulous False Memory Foam Island©, its subsidiary companies, shareholders, or creditors. Take it away, Mrs Myra!)

"Thank you, my esteemed friend Farquhar Throckmorton III! Yes, the Blues Music is shit, and I'm here to tell you why! It's just a bunch of old bums complaining and whining, and I had enough of that with my late husband Melvin may he rot in hell bless his soul. My fuggin' bursitis, these fuggin' accountants, those New York fuggin' Mets, your fuggin' charge account, yadda-yadda ... with the kvetching, enough already! So the last thing I want to hear while Clynt attends to a woman's intimate needs is my baby done left me, lawdy I'm broke and drunk, got no shoes grunted over an out-of-tune guitar! Who wants to listen to some self-pitying toothless bum groaning on about how he can't get it up no more?!? Oh, excuse me, boo-fuggin'-hoo! Do you hear me complaining about my life?  My message to you? Cheer up or shut up!

And that just about wraps it up! Any questions? You, at the back, sir?"

This post crowd-funded by Millennial Snowflakes For More Kittens.org

Perfect Tens Dept. - Strange Days

A Perfect Ten is awarded to albums with no weakness, including the cover and the title. Which disqualifies Pet Sounds! Crazy system, I know. I don't make the rules. Strange Days is note perfect, from the cover to the spindle hole.

 

THE COVER

Art directed by the great Harvey S. Williams, who was responsible for the Elektra house style, which included the use of the Rockwell font. There may have been a pun in there? The photograph, by the equally great Joel Brodsky, has some futzery happening - note building at end of alley, repetition and slicing and change of scale. What the actual? Don't think about this, because it will drive you nuts. I had to undergo weeks of counseling.

Sniffen Court, 36th St, between Lexington and Third, yesterday. No, you can't afford to live here. You can't afford to know anyone who can afford to live here. You can't even afford to look through the gates. G'wan, beat it, ya bum!

 

Jimbo didn't want his mugshot, or the band's, on the cover. Pretty extraordinary, really. If you were a sultry Dionysian sex god (that if is doing a lot of heavy lifting) you'd want your picture on the cover. Brodsky suggested Fellini-esque strangeness, and the band went for it. The Short People are twin actors, the juggler is Brodsky's assistant, the trumpet player a passing cab driver (hat - driver's own), the weightlifter a bouncer, and only the acrobats are professional performers. The hippie chick, I can reveal, is Velda Kowznofski, and her phone number is BIGELOW 472-1906.

 

DIEGETIC

You'd of thunk that would be enough to bestow significance on what is one of the greatest album covers, like, literally, ever, but there's more! It's very likely the first example of diegetic design on an album cover. And we're going to take a hinge at that word diegetic, because you don't know (or care much) about what it means. It's probably the first time it's been used in the context of rock music album cover analysis. You can look it up, practice it in front of a mirror, and casually drop it into the conversation with your lowlife pals at the dog track.

The name and photos of the band, and the title of the album, appear in posters on the walls. So - not on the cover at all! This, as well as being diegetic, is unprecedented awesomeness.

 

CHARIVARI

Your second Snob Vocab du jour! It behooves you to look the fucking word up, because if I tell you, it'll pass straight through like that Chipotle burrito you floated on a keg of Coors last nite.

Charivari, or the later US variant Shivaree, is exactly what's going on here, and it's perfect.

 

THE MUSIC

You know how highly this album is rated. You may even rate it highly yourself, although, fascinatingly, a little lower than YOUR FAVORITE HERE. It was recorded on a sumptuous 8-track console, like those in-car tape players [Eh? - Ed.], and unlike the live-in-the-studio approach of the debut, used the sophisticated production facilities available at LA's prestigious Sunset Sound to achieve a consistent, although shifting, mood of strangeness, like no other album before it. The cover and the music act in perfect symbiosisness. Symbioctivity. Whatever. Unlike The Soft Parade, the studio never gets in the way of the music. Everything is a whole, ya dig? It's like this, uh, whole thing, man. Beautiful. Oh wow.

 

 

This post funded in part by the Eschewal Of Obfuscation Society, Pork Bend, AK. My thanks to Zebedee Veeblefetzer.

 

TV's Sir David Of Attenborough Centenary! Dept.

Cover Art © IoF© Art Department Of Art® Dept. All Rights Reserved (and some of the lefts)

Lord Attenborough gets his ton! Happy Birthday!

You'll know TV's Sir Attenborough from his award-winning kids' puppet shows such as like We Fucked Up Our Beautiful Planet And All The Elephants Are Dying, but did you know he was hemp enthusiasts The Small Faces' go-to guy for recreational pharmacy? That's right, subscribers! Leave us lissen in as Sir Attenborough reveals shocking truth via Foam-O-Fone©!

The Nice, high above the fertile tundra, yestiddy

FMF Sir Attenborough! Looking cool there! Which is where?

SA Here, five thousand feet above the fertile tundra of -

FMF Right, right! So what's with this Small Faces story?

SA Ah! I am honoured to be the inspiration for their chart-topping disc, Here Comes The Nice! Back in Swingin' London, one was very much the globetrotter, bringing back treasures galore from exotic lands, steamer trunks bursting with rare herbal remedies! So of course one shared one's bounty, being a nice chap, and that was how muggins here became known as The Nice!

FMF And you have an album for us?

SA Indeed I do! It's an unissued compilation of their, shall we say, jazz cigarette tunes? Andy [Andrew Loog Oldham - Ed.] put it together before the whole thing went pear-shaped. And a very evocative Gerry Mankowitz photograph on the front. Gerry [Gered Mankovitz - Ed.] and I were oft to be seen getting off our heads at the Roundhouse [The Roundhouse - Ed.]! (laughs) He came up with the name for this long-playing LP, incidentally, during one of our famous "sessions"!

FMF Maryon Park? Any clues?

SA The lads in the group liked elliptical titles, something a little more imaginative, and this is no exception. Perhaps you might quiz th' Four Or Five Guys©? Maybe one of them might come up with an explanation!

FMF Uh ... yeah. Or likely not, probably. I doubt they read this far. Some of 'em can't even. But thanks for sharing this with us, and drop by th' Isle any time! It's a copacetic microcosm of microclimatical nanoculture!

SA (laughs) Shall I bring my - steamer trunk?

FMF (laughs) That would be swell, Sir Nice!

SA (laughs) 

FMF (laughs) 

Oright, oright, you've 'ad your fun, settle down, settle down ...

I *cough* curated this because in their appropriately short lifespan The Small Faces made music that expressed the times better than just about anybody, their super-smashing pop hits as slyly subversive as they were memorable. Steve Marriott is possibly the greatest male vocalist the UK ever produced, with a staggering emotional range, and deceptively accomplished technique grounded in his drama studies and acting experience [←original critical aperçu - Ed.]. He's always bang in the middle of the note, and he inhabits the song using phrasing and inflection in a way that seems natural and unthinking but is pure - and brilliant - technique. The Artful Dodger knew what he was doing with every note he sang. Shame he squandered his great gift in a life of squalid excess, ain't it?

So why this album again? I wanted the definitive, cohesive, pop-psych masterclass minus the overwrought stuff, omitting the knees-up sing-alongs, and without the Hammond-heavy club groovers. Ogden's Nut Gone Flake gets a lot of love, but the Stanley Unwin story-telling gets old very quickly, and side one's a little ragged. Autumn Stone is at once too much and not enough, and sounds like what it is, a bit of a barrel-scrape. So this, then. I've paced the hits so they don't dominate, and maybe they sound fresher in a new context. 

That tracklist in full:

Become Like You/Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire/Here Comes The Nice/Just Passing/Show Me The Way/I'm Only Dreaming/Green Circles/Itchycoo Park/Donkey Rides, A Penny, A Glass/The Universal/Call It Something Nice/The Autumn Stone

Why isn't [YOUR CHOICE HERE] included? Because reasons. Like other similarly humble exercises in improving on artists' original brilliance here on th' IoF©, this is above all a playable album with a flow to it, at listenable length, with more thought behind it than playlists or bonus tracks editions or completist archival sets. You'll dig it on account which it's swell.

This post homologated thru our sponsors: Pearl Necklaces By Dirty Sanchez™, Beverly Hills, LA.

 

This piece Certified IoF© Greatest Hit!

ZZ Top - Everything You Want PLUS! Nothing You Need Dept.

Is this you?

The CD Era was a time of wonders. I disposed of most of my disposable income buying CD duplicates of my vinyl collection, which had already disposed of most of my disposable income. Why? Because I was a damn fool, in retrospect. But I wasn't alone in being duped into stacking up the nasty, sharp-edged items of office equipment with their stupid "jewel boxes" and flimsy illegible "inserts" and functionally ugly "label designs". I think I hated the damn things from the start but went on buying them because I was earning stupid money and had a Hugo Boss suit and a company Peugeot 1.9 GTI. Make stupid money, buy stupid stuff! I never felt so alive! New albums became obligatory CD purchases as vinyl dried up. And then the music industry suckered us into buying CD duplicates of music we already had on CD. Remastered with extra tracks! Limited edition miniature card sleeves! Oboyoboyoboy! TAKE MY MONEY!! Never mind that the vast majority of the "bonus" tracks were demo, live and alternate versions that did nothing to enhance the album, I wanted them! BOX SETS!! Gimme two, so I can keep one sealed!

Airbrush, cursed forerunner of AI

Talking of box sets, what we have here is one of the worst examples of Sucker CD ever issued, a remixed set of the first six ZZ Top albums [left - Ed.]. This might - just - have been a valid exercise if the remixes hadn't replaced the original mixes, which you couldn't buy anymore. It got a righteous kicking from those sharp-eared enough to notice it deserved one. As egregious as Zappa's '84 butchery of Money/Lumpy, the remix was an attempt to sound contemporary. In that, it's entirely successful, because in '87 contemporary music sounded like shit. Inevitably, there's now a critical reassessment along the lines of "it's just different". Er ... so was Zappa's '84 Money/Lumpy twofer.

 

 

Kustom sleeve, only at IoF©!

Rhino (we're supposed to type "the good people at" in front of that, but I refuse, because I'm a rebel, me) eventually made up for it with a box of original mixes, Chrome, Smoke & BBQ in '03. The Four Or Five Guys© are encouraged to make their own minds up as to which they prefer. I'd suggest comparing the two versions of Tush initially, and if you think the Six Pack version is better, that's fine. All opinions are equally respected and welcome, and we are nothing if not a broad church. Just never, never, paddle your coracle over to th' IoF© ever, ever again.

 

 

 

Note ZZ Top fan, bottom right. When you finish eyeing her chest puppies.

 

This post scrimshawed on a narwhal's tusk by a Esquimeau as part of th' IoF©'s cultural appropriation outreach program. Write for details.

The Swellest Band In The Whole Darn World Dept.

Show me a more perfecter group shot. You can't.

Little Feat's first album was inspired by Exile On Main Street, and best listened to with that in mind. Incredible to think that it was recorded just two years before the Stones' masterpiece. It's had a frankly fahbulous dahling makeover, which you need more than groceries right now. There's a remastered version, because of course there is, but the second disc holds the juicy stuff. A steaming slewage of alternate versions and outtakes, and thank the Baby Jesus no live tracks. They constitute a genuine alternative album, in no way inferior (except in the sense of not being quite as good). And a shitload of guitar!

See? They're, like, rocking winter duds? But it's summer in LA! HAW! Joke's on them, right?

 

It's been a real pleasure revisiting this album - it tends to be less played than their other Lowell era records, and it shouldn't be. File under: much better than I remembered it. Included in today's Deliverable O' Excellence™ at no extra cost is the band's previous incarnation as The Factory, their unreleased album Demonstration Not For Sale on Uni with the original cover. Everything @ a sparkling 193mHz for total audio satisfaction! What a time to be alive!

This post hewn from the living rock with a fork.

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

Well, great in this case is a little bit of a stretch. Let's settle for pretty damn good. Johnny Almond was no Tubby Hayes, but he was no slouch, either. Plus, he could play a bunch of other stuff, keys, flute, vibes, whatever. The first JAMM album, Patent Pending, was bought by many hippies in '69 tempted by jazz but knowing fuck all about it. Like me. It's a brilliantly entertaining album, too pop to be jazz, too jazz to be pop. There's some sweet psych touches, a little Mexican samba, a bit of free jazz (for which the listener pays, like always), some groovy funk, and a lot of it sounds like the soundtrack to a Swingin' London movie, which is no bad thing. Think black turtlenecks, dolly birds in miniskirts ... 

The followup in the following year was recorded in the US and A with an entirely different lineup, including Joe Pass. All the pop influences and experimentation are gone, but it's a fine straight jazz album, although does anybody need to hear (or play) Perdido again? I seem to remember Ralph Gleason writing some snootily patronising sleeve notes along the lines of "can't cut it with the big boys, maybe next time", but as he could only play a Remington portable he can shut his yap, right? Again, a nice illustration on the cover, very Pop Art. You'll dig it.

Almond moved on to John Mayall for The Turning Point album, and thence [grammar - Ed.] to Mark-Almond. Interesting guy, shame there aren't more like him.

Somethin' Fer Sunday Dept. - Charlie Rouse

Let Foam-O-Graph© live your life for you!

Back when th' IoF© was the hip place to hang, Sundays were the time to rock the Daks, a pastel cardigan, Penny Loafers, and kick back on the patio with a Daiquiri and some cocktail jazz on th' Consolette™. Like, Populuxe, daddy-o!

Today we honor that tradition by featuring a fine album by Charlie Rouse, who played sax with Thelonious Monk but here falls back into his Sunday slacks and delivers nine smuthely swingin' sides, ably abetted by [discogs rsrch musicians pse ed]. 

This album, recorded in [ed?] goes some way to disproving the commonly-held notion that all jazz is shit. It's swell, and you'll dig it! Also, it'll make a change from Davis and John.

 

Free! With every download - this swell Art cover! Yours to keep whatever you decide!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.