The Fortunate Old Son

 

Brian Wilson doesn't like being seen much. On-stage exposure has been a problem all his life, and album covers tell the same story. His first solo album had him anxiously edging out of shot. On the second his profile is reduced to a two-dimensional rubber stamp, much like the music. Excluding the scrap-album cutouts on the crap-album Gettin' In Over My Head, he doesn't appear at all on the covers of his next nine albums.

Unlike book jacket design, getting your mug on the cover of an album is the accepted way to go, and for good reasons. The alternatives are harder to pull off. Cover art should reflect the album in a memorable and striking way and albums, unlike books, don't always contain work that is unified in theme or tone. Brian got lucky with Orange Crate Art, but his other albums come dressed in motley.

The gig for packaging That Lucky Old Sun went to one Martin Venezky (me neither), who'd done a handful of hack-work classical albums. Maybe he was hanging in the lobby, or walked into the wrong room at the right time. Whatever, he turned in a marmalade label and they went with that. Wilson already had one citrus-adjacent album, so maybe they thought - nah. Nobody was doing much thinking. The result was yet another forgettable-at-best sleeve at a time when he could have got himself back in the public eye by showing up for the cover. It's not like he was anything but one handsome dude at the time, with a patrician head adorned by an enviable thick wave of hair. The photograph I've used [above - Ed.] is contemporary with the album, and look how he looks. Better than ever, you ax me. Great shirt, too. He's on top of the Capitol Tower, L.A. in the background, and the album's about L.A. and ... oh well.

That Lucky Old Sun (which I re-yclept Lucky Old Sun because there's a kind of play on spoken words there that Van Dyke might appreciate) is his finest solo album. It's almost unreasonably fantastic, high in Vitamin Bri and arrangements that evoke Smile without ever falling into pastiche [type of nut - Ed.]. Of course, some critics clutched their pearls in shock that he didn't sing like a teenager anymore, as if there's something wrong in singing like who you are (and he still sings prettier than most).

It's an album that gets better and richer and deeper over time, like the best of Wilson's work, bursting with energy and creativity and melodic/harmonic bliss. He had help from Scott Bennett, the Wondermints crew, and Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the evocative spoken interludes that tie the whole album together like an aural Lebowski rug. It's too easy to think of Wilson as something of a shadow-puppet - he was focused and authoritative in the studio, his natural home, and although he's a team player it's a work that could only have sprung from the heart of this fortunate son of L.A.

There are some who don't like this album because of its L.A.-centricity, because they don't like L.A. and what it represents. But Wilson is inseparable from his City of Angels, almost its personification. I spent a while there, when I had nowhere else to live, and I got to know it just a little, as deep as I wanted to get. It's a strange, haunted place, brittle, un-centered, and the sense of artificiality standing in for reality, of image being substance, can be overpowering. I stood in an empty Hollywood Bowl under that translucent blue sky, and knew that the emptiness was all there was, that the city was a crust of concrete at the ocean's edge, and this is what dreams are made on. The dreams will last longer, and Brian's will never die.

 

I've blister-packed Path Of Life, the "hidden album" added as extry trx to one edition of That Lucky Old Sun; ten tracks thematically bookended, including the Great Lost Single, What Love Can Do.

 

 

 

Binaural Beats, Tomatis Enhancement, 3D Placement Dept.

 

You know what to do.

Ric Carrott's Cocktail Jazz Dept. - Hubert Laws

When imagination fails - call for Foam-O-Graph©!

Older readers [Regis and Melvinia Older, Cuckville, MO - Ed.] will know Ric Carrott for his unforgettable portrayal of troubled teen Chuck Cunningham in the Happy Days pilot, but few will know of his passion for jazz, suavé style! The luxury cruise ship Leke-Prufe, where he hosts the popular "Carrott's Cocktail Jazz" radio show, dropped anchor off th' IoF© and we relaxed in th' Conversation Pit O' Sound™ whilst Kreemé served chambréd Cheez Whiz® n' Chocolate Body Mist™smoothies.

FT3 Yo, Chuckster! Wassup my man! [attempts high five, fails, pretends to swat fly] Damn these flies!

RC Do not call me Chuckster, Okay? Or Chuckie, Chuckie-boy, or Chuck.

FT3 Huh? So -

RC The name ... is Ric. No k. Ric Carrott. Double r, double t. Not like the vegetable. Stress on the second syllable, like this - Caah-rott. Ric Caah-rott. Try that for me.

FT3 Ric Caah-rott? Tell us about your ship-board radio show!

RC Happy Days bought me a one-way ticket to where-are-they-nowsville. Bitter? Am I fucking bitter? I put my fucking life, my entire being into creating that role and it's sayonara before the first season! Two more actors suffered the Curse Of Chuck before Richie's elder brother disappeared entirely, airbrushed out of Cunningham family photographs and never referred to again. Okay, maybe a self-harming, borderline psychotic rent boy didn't sit well in a family values sit-com, but excuse me? That was the entire point! Those stupid fucking cu-

FT3 Ri-ight! So! That Cocktail Jazz show! We're hearing it's a big succ-

RC Sure, I got work, I'm an actor. But producers thought of me as this nipple-pierced weirdo. I was cursed. Know who I blame? Potsie. Fucking Potsie. He hated that shower scene.

FT3 [laughs] I see you brung a couple albums which to share wit' th' Four Or Five Guys©! Always good to see some love for Hubert Laws!

RC Ralphie Malphie? Fuck him. Fuck him. Has he auditioned for Strindberg off-Broadway? Recorded motivational corporate video voice-overs for Baby Bernie's Famous Adult Pacifiers™? I think not!

[Kreemé leans in to whisper to FT3]

FT3 What's that, Kreemé? [leaps to feet, waving arms] TH' BARN IS ON FIRE?!? 

Luckily, subscribers, in his unseemly haste to skeedaddle, th' Chuckster left behind a swell brace o' longplaying elpees, to whit A Hero Is Just A Sambwidge, and Laws' Cause [pitchered abovely - Ed.]. Gee, do they ever make for relaxin' lissnin' of a Sabbath morn! Slip into your tassel loafers, Nehru shirt, Angel Flight© slax an' ree-lax! Fuck everything! You totally deserve this!

 

Psychfan's Trip O' Th' Week Dept. - Two From Tom Wilson

Wilson far left,  far out

 

By 1968 [Psychfan writes] record producer Tom Wilson had done an enormous amount to shape the counterculture. He had:

- Taken an acoustic track (Sounds of Silence) from a flop LP by Simon & Garfunkel, added an electric band and turned it into a hit, thereby re-creating S&G as a big name act and making a large contribution to the 1965 folk rock boom.

- Produced three early albums by Bob Dylan, including Bringing It All Back Home, as well as Dylan's next single Like A Rolling Stone.

- Produced the first two albums by The Velvet Underground.

- Produced the first two albums by Frank Zappa, as well as signing him to his first major label.

 

Some have attributed much of this to luck, being in the right place at the right time. I don't believe that anyone has that kind of luck and I attribute it to vision and talent. Wilson had been a jazz producer prior to the mid sixties and helped to shape some of the most innovative rock music being made at the time.

 

Here are two albums he produced in 1968, when he was spending just about all of his time producing psychedelic LPs, many by unknown bands.

One of those was the sole release by the psychedelic blues band Fear Itself, fronted by the recently deceased singer/guitarist Ellen McIlwaine. I don't have much to say about the production on this, which is pretty straightforward.  The music is a very good example of the genre and McIlwaine [with Tom, left - Ed.] makes an impression.

 

When Eric Burdon created a new version of the Animals that played psychedelic music he took a lot of crap from conservative rock critics who objected to his departure from the straight up Blues and R&B of his earlier work. I think that the psych LPs he made as Eric Burdon & the Animals were uneven at times, but he took a highly original approach to the genre and succeded more often than not at what he was attempting.

 

Tom Wilson had produced the last few albums by the original Animals and was a natural choice to continue with the new band. This one, The Twain Shall Meet, has the hit singles Monterey and Sky Pilot but rewards your attention throughout.

Up Close And Personal Dept.

 

The Accepted Rock Critic Line on Strictly Personal is "the album was ruined by Bob Krasnow's over-the-top production. He added phasing without consulting Van Vliet, who was justifiably furious. It has some value as a historical curiosity."

Well, no. There's also the story that Beefheart approved the mix, but changed his mind later, laying the blame on Bob. This sounds wayyy like him, as far as we know, but we know Jack Shit about any of this because we weren't there. So it looks like we'll have to form our own opinions without the benefit of critical acuity and Backstory Bullshit. Gee whiz.

This was the album that made Beefheart notorious in the UK, not the first, which was only bought by hip guys who drew band names in ballpoint on their Army Surplus school bags, our equivalent of jail ink. That was the internet back then. You'd check what names the cool kids were drawing on their bags and listen out for them on John Peel. I copied the Strictly Personal rubber stamp on mine, carrying the album around under my arm as a hipness signifier. One of the great room emptiers at parties, as I learned - or maybe that was just me - it held the illicit thrill of buying Oz magazine or sharing a lunchbreak joint behind the toilets. This was not for our parents. The gatefold picture was uniquely disturbing in the same way as the music - threatening, deadly serious, teetering on the edge of sanity. We'd all tumble over that edge with Trout Mask Replica, losing girlfriends in the process (mine was into Tamla; reconciliation was impossible without a NATO intervention - I also lost a girlfriend due to 2001, because I didn't speak to her during the entire movie - dames, huh?).

"Here's the thing" (as The Young People are saying) - absolutely nobody back then was throwing up their pale hands in horror at the production. Nobody knew what production was - we were too into the music to give much of a fuck. The whole album was totally mind-blowing, unlike anything we'd heard. Still is. Where Safe As Milk was based around recognisably structured songs, Strictly Personal owed nothing to song-writing craft, the music business as we knew it, or even the hippie demographic. If anything, it's anti-psychedelic, in a similar way to Frank Zappa, although abstract to his literal. Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones? He came to bury (and incinerate) the Brits, not to praise them.

That gatefold sleeve in full. Run for the hills!

 

The stumbling, howling intro to the first track, Ah Feel Like Ahcid, sets the tone - when that off-kilter railroad guitar comes in under the Captain's barnyard harp you know you're not in Kansas any more. This is authentically other - not self-consciously weird or "challenging", or even psychedelic. From Son House to the Trout House, this is ancestral music played sideways, skittering from the cracks, the rumble in the jungle, creaks in the attic, insect rattle and roll. A pre-Floydian heartbeat segués into the tarpit bass riff of Safe As Milk, time signatures tesselating, Van Vliet's vox schizo-stereo, and half way through the thing groans and rolls over, the Captain crooning I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird over squalls of slide guitar and John French battering his planetary drums, Thor-thundering and phased to stun. Trans-fucking-cendent.

The impact of Van Vliet's lyric writing isn't often credited. In the late 'sixties poetry - almost unbelievably - was still part of youth culture, in the tradition of the beats a decade earlier. The alternative press carried sprawling free-form odes, and paperbacks of contemporary poetry were popular items, often with beautiful psychedelic covers. I wasn't alone in carrying a notebook with copied-out poems and lyrics and koans and haiku. Incredible, right? Words were treasure. Words got you high. So anyway - someone showed me a Beefheart lyric in his notebook, saying that's poetry. The words, as they say, leapt off the page. Vivid, funny, and powerfully hallucinogenic. It was on Strictly Personal where Van Vliet freed his lyric muse, syllables sparking and popping:

Porcelain children see through white light so cracker bats, cheshire cats, named the dark the light the dark the day. Blue veins through gray felt tomorrows.

The whole album is unprecedented, in form and texture. A collapsing architecture of disarticulated chords and stub-your-toe beats tattoo your cerebral cortex. No compromise, no prisoners, no bullshit, and no sales. It is astonishing, in retrospect, that anyone thought it would fly off the racks with little or no radio play, but those were the times: risks might pay off, and nobody knew nuthin'.

Not only unprecedented, but impossible to Trout Mask replicate; this magic can never happen again. We live in tamed times, but listening to this, for those lucky enough not to have been born too late, sheds the intervening years like they never happened. Which, in a way, they haven't. Those coming fresh to it will have to bust out of the sterile salon of academic etiquette that is contemporary music culture, and lots of luck with that.

"On you, this looks good. Really."

As far as I know, Strictly Personal has avoided the remaster and reissue treatment - it remains an odd backwater even in the knotted swamps of Beefheart's music, where few think to go. The raw session tracks have seen many attempts at organisation and release (Mirror Man, I May Be Hungry, It Comes To You etc.) and are preferred by modern minds for their *cough* "purity". They ain't better or worse. They're different. Everything is different to Strictly Personal. It deserves better than to languish in the shadow of Trout Mask Replica (the one Rock Critics pretend to like, so we'll think they're groovy). It's one of the most wildly thrilling and genuinely avant-garde albums ever cut. What was far out, is far out.

I ain’t blue no more. Like heaven, like heaven ah said.