Perfect Tens Dept. - Soft Machine Third

By the time Soft Machine stopped counting their albums, they stopped counting for anything much, becoming just another super-proficient jazz rock combo, losing the indefinably fluid quality that made them unique, even after line-up changes that would have crippled any other band.

Third was a monster of an album. Even the sleeve seemed somehow massive. A double album with only four tracks? Yow! What could that sound like!? Even in an era when side-long compositions weren't too rare, Third was pioneering, uncompromising, and out-bloody-rageous. It came with a gold price sticker on the front - I remember 39/11 but that's probably wrong [39/11 is around 23c US today - Ed.].

Flashback to the party to which [grammar - Ed.] I lugged my newly-purchased copy of Third, in the absence of a girlfriend (the two would prove to be incompatible). Anyway, you didn't take girlfriends to parties, you went to parties to get free drinks and impress girls with your toxic masculinity and deep knowledge of blues rock guitarists, then miss the last bus and walk home alone in the rain. What a time to be alive! Waiting for the ideal moment, I cued it up on the stereo only to discover there is never an ideal moment to cue up Third at a party. In my blissful ignorance, I thought the three minutes of tar pit anteater gargling that introduce the thrilling main theme of Facelift would be appreciated by teen revelers tiring of T Rex and Slade or whatever it was and I would get nods of respect from the guys and come-hither glances from the girls. My wrongness became immediately apparent. The scratch over that intro remained a useful reminder never to try that shit again.

In retrospect, maybe I should have played Moon In June, or Slightly All The Time. Or Out Bloody Rageous. Better I should have taken Motown Chartbusters, because Christine Williams was into Tamla, and I was desirous of getting into her pants. Anyway, joke's on her because I still hunker down in my headphones for the duration of Third and I bet she's entirely forgotten Motown Chartbusters and harbors to this day a secret regret she never let me get in her pants.

Here's the inner gatefold, showing my guys waiting for some girls to show up. Note groovy beverage table, Wyatt's groovy shirt, Ratledge's groovy shades.

"What time is it?" "Ten." What time you tell them?" "EIGHT FUCKING THIRTY for the fiftieth fucking time I told them HALF PAST EIGHT!" [pause] "Where are they then?" "I don't fucking know." "Fancy a pint?"

 

Third, as you may have guessed from the title of this piece - assuming you read that far - qualifies as a Perfect Ten because no part of it can be improved, including the cover. It is an astonishing piece of work. But because this is th' IoF©, where quantity is quality, I'm throwing in a bonus contemporary album of them at the Albert Hall - the first rock group to ever play at the prestigious BBC Proms (Promenade Concerts). Pearls were clutched.

 

Iconic cover by Isle O' Foam© Art Department o' Art Dept. That's a full-color photograph - London was like that in 1970.

Added to the deliverables, this here swell Cuneiform archival collection, from the Third era:.

 

Better Than The Beatles? YOU Decide!

Who needs three shoes? You do. Lensed for their Ignition comeback, 2012

The Shoes (that is, the individuals who constitute the band Shoes, no definite article) are all in their eighties now, except for founding member - well, they're all founding members - Gary Klebe, who will be ninety-four years young come September! Long-time residents of the Where Are They Now home for elderly power-poppers, they are unique in having released at least three first albums, the latest of which, Heads Or Tails, is actually the first, recorded in '74! I don't have this, so if you do, frisbee it over to th' Isle o' Foam©!

Extensively FoamFeatured© antecedently, (the) Shoes are arguably better than the Beatles! Hear me out! In addition to releasing three first albums, where the Fabs could manage only one:

👞 Still legally alive

👞 Never copied anyone else, covered show tunes, made a shit movie, or even a shit album

👞 Avoided marrying oriental scag pandas and finagling amputees

👞 Didn't write Maxwell's Silver Hammer

I rest my case, but th' IoF© is nothing if not a platform for diverse opinion, and if you're loopy enough to think The Beatles were a better band, light your tiki torch in the comments!

Today's freeloads pick up from where we left off, way back in May 2022, and represent the band's Imperial Period (which was and is still always) with five, maybe, fantastic platters! Details in comments!

IMPORTANT NOTE: For those of you feeling betrayed by the lack of Fab Four content:

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2021/06/beatlemania-dept-thirty-shades-of-gray.html

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2019/05/compleat-beetles.html

https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2021/04/hello-goodbye-george-martin-interview.html

Milty Nussbaum, Head Of A&R Musicor Records, Grants Exclusive Preview Of Musicor's Chartbound Sounds For '68! (Dept.)

Family man Nussbaum proudly displays photo of wife on desk! "Darling Myra is a constant source of inspiration!" gushes youthful A&R prexy.

Legacy Old School® FOAM-O-GRAPH© created thru in-house AD (Artificial Dumbness) by IoF© Art Department O' Art Dept. For educational purposes only. No - well not much - livestock was harmed during production. Kittens don't count, right?

Milty Nussbaum, Head of A&R at Musicor Records (Hackensack and Pork Bend), was kind enough to send us this exclusive Musicor promo package! Here's his covering letter:

 

Dear Music Business Partner

We at Musicor Records are proud of not only our much-envied repertoire of stars such as Gene Pitney, Ronnie Gann, B.J. Thomas, Dick Cramer, and Gene Pitney, but also our reputation for keeping up with the times, and sometimes being just that little bit ahead of them! Yes, when it comes to making the music scene "happen" with a capital M, there's Musicor, and there's everybody else! And this swingin' year of sixty-eight is no exeption!

I'm delighted to send you personaly three exiting teen-oriented albums hot off the presses by newly-talented Artistes that are sure to become household names! Yes, from the "outer sight" acid rock of The Federal Ducks, thru the psychedelic jugband sounds of The Paper Gardens to the challenging protest rock-folk of The Tingling Mothers, Musicor has its finger on the pulse of today's youth!

Your Friend in the Music Business:

Milton O. Nussbaum

Head of A&R, Musicor Records

 

Musicor - Making Music Happen: Today!

Those albums in full:

 

I've read internet claims from swivel-eyed loons that the Federal Duck and Paper Garden albums are lost masterpieces of psych, which of course they ain't. Federal Duck is seven or eight college kids flexing their privilege before getting jobs on Wall St. or shooting up in a box full of rags under an offramp. It's charitable to call it 2nd Tier Psych, but you need to hear it more than you need to hear the next Taylor Swift album. Paper Garden has its moments, and its charm, and qualifies as a period piece. The Tingling Mother's Circus boasts some real musicians who can actually play (including Elliott Randall, featured antecedently on the Yellow Peril album), some singers who can sing, and a cover of Yellow Submarine that will make you hurl hot chunks. These albums are pure Musicor, the Zircon in the tarnished tiara of the music business, and as such should be protected and nurtured in a caring environment such as yours. Milty Nussbaum - we salute you!

 

 

This post funded in part by Jack's Snacks n' Slacks™, Mengele Mall, Knucklebutter, MT.
 

Fallen Heroes Dept. - Steely Dan Gets Tin Worm

This pitcher is, like, a metaphor. A metaphor is like a simile.

 

Way back in, ooh, seventy-three or whatever, there was nobody cooler on the face of the planet than Steely Dan. Carrying a Dan album around marked you out as one of the hipster elite. Compared to their lawyer-level snark smarts and jazzbo academy chops, Little Feat were a bunch of body shop slackers, filling the back of the project Camaro with bong smoke. And the Doobie Brothers were hillbillies, eternally falling off the same porch. Th' Dan VIP Leisure Lounge was where the smart kids hung out, in our dreams, snorting lines of pure Bolivian snow off the tits of the Latina room maid. Snickering at the Secret Lodge humor that only the initiated understood. The shine of your Japan, the sparkle of your China! Every arcane Dan delight was enriched by the knowledge that their music went wayyy over the heads of the shmuck in the street. Those fugitive melodies? The collegiate use of language qua signs? That indescribable, ineffable, incommunicable Dan-ness hung on you like some mystic glowing lamasery tour laminate. If you knew, you knew. Like New Yorkers believe that a "New York thing" is some private privilege only understood in all its deliciousness by scaly-skinned loft lizards, Dan Man Fans peered out warily at the rest of the world and opted to stay inside, clamped under the headphones.

Case in point: the author [left, and gee fucking whiz - Ed.] - Dan Man Fan, counting down to ecstasy. I bought all the albums. Even after the muse of melody crept away into the night, me and my hip pals carried the sodium torch of th' Dan, basking in its cold glow. Meanwhile, the dumb straights were out partying and pretending to like Motown and getting laid. Hah! Joke's on them, right? Right?

I'm trying to remember the last time I - metaphorically - reached for a Dan album. Not that that's any measure of their worth - I'm also trying to remember what I came into the room for - but their appeal has atrophied to the point where memory drifts into forgetfulness. I still listen, with vein-pulsing pleasure - to Little Feat, and the Brothers Doobie, but if I'm going to have to choose a Dan album I might listen to today, it would be Becker's 18 Tracks Of Whack, which the quick-witted among you will have noted isn't even a Steely Dan record. And that would be because it's sincere and moving and mostly unironic and the jokes don't require a thesaurus to get. And if I chose just one Dan song to carry with me into the gilded eternity, it would be American Lovers, which they didn't even record, th' shmucks.

Today's Freeload™ is the oft-booted and variously-yclept Yellow Peril, as chock full o' good tunes as any album they released. I may even listen to it again. If I remember. And below is their best song, sung by the great Thomas Jefferson Kaye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other Mama

Sleeve job by IoF©

Michelle Phillips was the igloo snow queen to Cass Elliot's tiki cabin log fire. Her solo album came dressed in a sleeve [below left - Ed.] that she must have thought showed her sexy, sophisticated side, but the dull one-piece came over as sensible, even prudish. Carly Simon had set this particular benchmark a couple of years earlier with Playing Possum. The album was also called Victim Of Romance, and she never struck me as a victim of anything - certainly not romance. It was always Cass losing and breaking her big old heart. Michelle could look after herself.

She sang as good as she looked, and it's something of a mystery why her solo career didn't take off with this album, which is as unfailingly lovely as you'd want it to be. It got universally rave reviews, too. I put it down to the cheesy cover. But she had her acting career, and shrugged it off.

The deliverable is the usual IoF© cornycopium of bountiful largesse, including the album, plus the extra tracks on the limited re-release (a complete album in their own right), plus the rare missing tracks supplied by a Four Or Five Guy©. Yes, the sleeve uses a Mamas & Papas-era picture, but it expresses the essence of her appeal in a timeless way. Doncha think?

 

This post funded in part by The Gabriel Snubbers Timing Ass., Pismo Beach.