BAYMI Dept.

Betcha wish you blinked, right?

 

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.