It's The Glen Campbell Show!

Every Sunday for the foreseeable future (which today is like, today), th' House O' Foam© will play host to your own Glen Campbell Show. Hoo boy! Swell music for a Sunday, or any other day you feel like slipping into those penny loafers and a lightweight V-neck sweater. But hey! You forgot the pants, you doofus! Run back inside before the neighbors call the cops.

The Season Premiere presents a coupling of his first and third albums, from '62 and '64 perspectively. If you gots the second (Too Late To Worry, Too Blue To Cry) and you feel like spinning a link out onto the placid surface of the internet, I'll be the first old trout to bite.

Campbell was all the things we want in a star - talented, modest, charming, and good looking. And whose voice would we rather listen to? Huh? Hoo-hah?

EDIT: FMF© House Marsupial, JJWombat, kindly adds a link to the missing second album [at left - Ed.] in the comments, and congratulates himself on his bat-like powers of hearing. More of this sort of thing, please!

Cagefight Saturday - Slayer vs. Astrud Gilberto

At first sight, this seems a cinch, right? A bet on Slayer is money in the bank. Their hometown of Huntington Park was awarded the California's Most Miserable City Award according to Business Insider, which rated it tenth overall in its nationwide census of America's Most Miserable Cities. But the band came together at the private Wilson School Of The Arts, named after celebrity Huntington resident Terry Wilson, stuntman and actor, noted for his role as Bill Hawks on the television series Wagon Train. An oasis of genteel middle-class culture where students read Proust and formed string quartets to play works by Fauré and Debussy, it was a blissful refuge for the four sensitive Catholic boys but poor preparation for their career in the wider world of Huntington Park, where their fern-decorated concerts were met with jeers and bottles of piss from a hostile and largely Hispanic audience. Forced into a change of approach, their evolution into the nation's prototypical Death Metal band was a surprise success.

Astrud Gilberto's upbringing is perhaps better known - her childhood years wrestling alligators at her father's Parque de Atracciones [Amusement Park - Ed.] in Quito was the subject of the made-for-TV biopic Astrud And The Alligators, starring Pia Zadora, with Wilf Brimley as her crusty yet lovable pop.

Study the form, and place your bets wisely!

Da Boids Is Da Woid, Part Da Toyd

Leave us discuss the cover first. This was Columbia's art department scoring their thyrd ace in a row for the Byrds. It's note-perfect. The first appearance - in eye-popping Psychocolor® - of that beautiful logo. Corporate house style required the tracklist on the cover, but like the previous albums, they add to rather than subtract from the overall composition. Okay, a couple of fillers in there, thanks to the band cleverly edging out their best songwriter over jealousy issues, but who's counting? It's the new Byrds album! Their thyrd in a year!

The album was gorgeously, imaginatively, sumptuously produced by Allen Stanton, Columbia's West Coast veep who'd signed the group in '64. Guy had smarts out th' ass and we ain't never hyrd of him. Keywyrds for this album (should you want to write a review) include drugs, uneven, transitional. Nuts to all that, right? What would we give for an album this swell appearing this week? If we clubbed together and ponied up everything we have, it still wouldn't happen. Never mind. We still got this.

This is the "complete" version, with fifty tracks of minty-fresh teen appeal. The FMF© Medal Of Foaminess® to the original Byrdmaniac who stitched this together in his mom's basement while she yelled at him to take out the trash and get a job. You did swell.

Rachel Maddow's Secret Passion Revealed!

TV's sultry, pouting Rachel Maddow is justly notorious for her shock-jock potty-mouthed Buns Out For Rachel show, where she gets her fingers in the batter of A-list celebrities such as Pia Zadora and Cher as they show off their skills with rolling-pin and piping bag. But few of her fans know of her secret passion for - no, not that, everyone knows about that - the steel guitar.

Yes! Nothing clouds her lovely eye quicker than the lonesome sound of the steel guitar! At a recent visit to Th' House O'Foam©, she pounced on my vinyl copy of Red Rhodes' Velvet Hammer In A Cowboy Band.

RM: Hot diggety dog! Excuse my language! I thought I had the only copy of this! Well, pinch my bustle and call me Betsy! Oh dear! Sorry for the profanity, Farq, but ... holler me up a hog if this ain't a regular barrel o'biscuits!
FMF©: Ixnay on the profatinay, Rache, we get dames in here. It sure is a swell album, ain't it though?
RM: Yeppers! Whoops -there I go again! 
FMF©: It's like a Nesmith album without the vocals. He produced it for his Countryside label, which never did much of anything else, apart from all the other fine album. Seen this?
[bends to shelf, revealing builder's butt-crack, extracts album]

RM: Well it's hayrides to horse pucky it's that supergroup steel album Nes put out on his Pacific Arts label!
FMF©: Right. You. Outside. I told you about the language already already. We run a hi-toned establishment here.
RM: Can I just meet Cody? I got her-
FMF©: OUT!
[FX: FIST BLOWS, GRUNTS OF PAIN etc]

Mystery Penguin

I guess it's just my rebellious outsider nature that makes the Bob Welch/Christine Perfect years my preferred Fleetwood Mac iteration. Get over it, as we edgy, in-your-face types like to say. Deal with it.

I saw th' Mac live in '69, during their Green Manalishi period, with Peter Green in full-on white-robed Jesus phase. Stunning. But their recorded legacy is, what? Take out Manalishi, Oh Well and [YOUR CHOICE HERE - Ed.] and you're left with a slew of adequately-played blues covers, a couple of pretty instrumentals The Shadows might have covered, and some dreadful rock n' roll pastiches from the nodding-head dash ornament of the group, Jeremy Spencer. Deal with it. Their best album (I suppose) is Then Play On, which should have been outstanding, but it's just sitting in. Dull, dull, dull. You can make it listenable by adding Manalishi and Oh Well, and then improve it further by trashing all the other tracks.

And the big globe-conquering hit machine of the Buckingham-Nicks years always left me cold. If there's a more irritating pair in the History Of Rock than Lindsey and Stevie I don't want to know (but Sparks give them a run for their money). Fleetwood Mac already had a superlative chick vocalist (woops! sorry, millennials!) in Christine Perfect. They didn't need the mystical yodels of a scarf-waving nuisance prancing about the stage. And enough already with the "pop genius" respect shown to knob-twiddling curlyhead Lindsey Graham (woops! - Buckingham). Sing me one fucking song he wrote. Just one. Okay, now one from his solo years. See? Let's move on, back to Bob Welch.

He was a weird one. Those Vegas sunglasses. I'm pretty sure it was his lyrical obsession lampooned by Zappa in Inca Roads. He believed in the Bermuda Triangle, and that Jimi Hendrix was buried at Stonehenge, and you shouldn't use those pine airfresheners in cars because they're made by the Illuminati. He believed in any old shit. But that doesn't concern us here. He had a curiously beguiling voice, never over-amped, and an absolutely golden way with a tune. Couple that with Ms Perfect's ever-underrated singing and composing chops, add one of the greatest rhythm sections in rock, and you have a fantastic band making fantastic records.

Here's a doubling of Mystery To Me and Penguin, with the crap kicked to the curb. It's what Tusk never was - a bunch of great songs from a great band.